"Depravity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... others has been cold and chaste as ice. How strange that in Him purity had an irresistible fascination, so that the corruptest and wickedest felt drawn unto Him, and "depravity itself bowed down and wept in the presence of divinity." What all-forgiving love, what all-cleansing love, in one who by a mere look could dissolve in repentant tears men long hardened by vice and crime! What an atmosphere of power He must have carried, that by one beam from His ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... profession, namely to contribute some work of permanent value to its literature." At that early period a discriminating critic bears testimony, "that his piety, pure, deep, tender, serene and warm, took hold of positive principles of light and beneficence, not the negative ones of darkness and depravity, and—himself a child of light—he preached the religion ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... through ignorance, as is often the case. The Brahmins represent that murder, robbery, deception and every other form of crime and vice may be committed in the worship of their gods. They teach that the gods themselves are guilty of the most hideous depravity, and that the sacrifice of wives, children, brothers, sisters and friends to convenience or expediency for selfish ends is justifiable. Indeed, the British government has been compelled to interfere and prohibit the sacrifice of human life to propitiate ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... coalitions" of all manner of crimes and vices in the subsequent "highway school"—the gradual development of every unnatural tendency in the youthful Jack Sheppard (another immor-t-al work by the author of the afore-lauded comedy)—the celebration, by a classic chaunt, of his reaching the pinnacle of depravity; this was the ne plus ultra of dramatic invention. Robbers and murderers began to be treated, after the Catholic fashion, with extreme unction; audiences were intoxicated with the new drop; sympathy became epidemic; everybody was bewildered and improved; and nobody ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... the house, as usual, turned the conversation upon the subject of politics. She inveighed with much warmth against the effeminacy and depravity of the modern times. We were slaves, and we deserved to be so. In almost every country there now appeared a king, that puppet pageant, that monster in creation, miserable itself, a combination of every vice, and invented for the curse of human kind. "Where ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... protection. So do me the favour to go with me to the land of Islam, where thou shalt look upon many a lion-hearted prince and know who I am." His speech angered her and she said to him, "By the virtue of the Messiah, thou art keen of wit with me! But I see now what depravity is in thy heart and how thou allowest thyself to say a thing that proves thee a traitor. How should I do what thou sayest, when I know that, if I came to thy King Omar ben Ennuman, I should never win free of him? For he has not the like of me among his women nor in his palace, all lord of Baghdad ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... of the world can only mean the world as a whole, compared with which the unredeemed will be so few and insignificant and evidently beyond the reach of redemption by their own act of rejecting it and hardening themselves against it, and by descending into such depths of demoniacal depravity that they will ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... the last resort, depended the most precious interests of every English subject, was at liberty to decide judicial questions on other than judicial grounds, and to withhold from a suitor what was admitted to be his legal right, on account of the depravity of his moral character. That the supreme Court of Appeal ought not to be suffered to exercise arbitrary power, under the forms of ordinary justice, was strongly felt by the ablest men in the House of Commons, and by none more strongly than by Somers. With him, and with those who reasoned ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... who never told a lie, or never confessed one, will be shocked at these revelations of my childish depravity. What proof has he, he will cry, that I am not lying on every page of this chronicle, if, by my own confession, my childhood was spent in a maze of lies and dreams? I shall say to the saint, when I am challenged, that the proof of my conversion to veracity is engraven in ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... the package to find therein a quantity of bound sheets. He selected one of the pamphlets at random and examined it with a sigh. "Drink and Depravity," he read. "Pots of beer cost many a tear. Be warned in ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... revolving in their pugnacious minds some fell scheme of destruction. Outside are several camels tied to their respective pack-saddles, which have been taken off and laid on the ground. Before retiring for the night, it occurs to my mind that the total depravity of a goat's appetite bodes ill for the welfare of my saddle, and that, everything considered, the bicycle could, perhaps, be placed safer on the ground; in addition to regarding the saddle as a particularly toothsome ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... rattling volleys. Miss Vincent's discovery, in the past school-days, of Selina Collett's 'wicked complicity in a clandestine correspondence' had memorably chastened the girl, who vowed at the time when her schoolmistress, using the rod of Johnsonian English for the purpose, exposed the depravity of her sinfulness, that she would never again be guilty of a like offence. Her dear and lovely Countess of Ormont, for whom she then uncomplainingly suffered, who deigned now to call her friend, had spoken the kind good-bye, and left the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... well! I must perforce content myself with that miniature of you as "Madam," in your lavender brocade, with the feathers in your powdered hair, and the row on row of pearls about your throat. Very stately and dignified you look there; and yet, Great-grandmother Dorris, I can see the spice of "innate depravity," as I doubt not your grave pastor would have called it, and catch a glimpse of the quick temper and warm heart in those bright eyes and that ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... known it happen in our own country, where the follies of the French are adopted and exhibited in the most aukward imitation: but the general prevalence of those preposterous modes, is a plain proof that there is a general want of taste, and a general depravity of nature. I shall not pretend to describe the particulars of a French lady's dress. These you are much better acquainted with than I can pretend to be: but this I will be bold to affirm, that France is the general reservoir ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... present educators, who constantly have on their tongues such words as evolution, individuality, and natural tendencies, but do not heed the new commandments in which they say they believe. They continue to educate as if they believed still in the natural depravity of man, in original sin, which may be bridled, tamed, suppressed, but not changed. The new belief is really equivalent to Goethe's thoughts given above, i.e., that almost every fault is but a hard shell ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... of April, 1872, contains the following bitter criticisms of the new double bridge:—"With Blackfriars Bridge," says the writer, "we find the public thoroughly well pleased, though the design is really a wonder of depravity. Polished granite columns of amazing thickness, with carved capitals of stupendous weight, all made to give shop-room for an apple-woman, or a convenient platform for a suicide. The parapet is a fiddle-faddle of pretty cast-iron arcading, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... by picturing his wife's wrath; whereupon the adroit scamp replied that he knew what that would be, and had taken the precaution to have his hair cut short, so that she could not get a grip on it. Martyn could no more have chuckled over this depravity than he could have chuckled over the fallen angels; but Saint Teresa could have laughed outright, her wonderful, merry, infectious laugh; and have then proceeded to plead, to scold, to threaten, to persuade, until ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... Southern brethren to the horrors of St. Bartholomew,—that they would hold their peace about the body of Cuffee dancing to the music of the cart-whip, provided only they could save the soul of Sambo alive by presenting him a pamphlet, which he could not read, on the depravity of the double-shuffle,—that they would consent to be fellow-members in the Tract Society with him who sold their fellow-members in Christ on the auction-block, if he agreed with them in condemning Transubstantiation, (and it would not be difficult for a gentleman who ignored ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... led to his father's successful later career, was impossible in an island half the size of the Isle of Wight, and the man grew to his surroundings. A soul ready to accept the impress of every stamp of depravity in the mint of vice was soon well beyond the reach of any possible redemption in contact with the moral vileness of the prisons on what was, but for their contamination, one of the loveliest ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... ascetic; came to Constantinople, and became a pupil of Chrysostom, who ordained him; founded two monasteries in Marseilles; opposed the extreme views of Augustine in regard to grace and free-will, and human depravity; and not being able to go the length of Pelaganism, adopted SEMI-PELAGIANISM, q. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Adam, whose servant she would rather be than reign of Christendom. The English cardinal remonstrated with the pope that this love for one, in the heart of a woman who was the joy of all, was an infamous depravity, and that he ought with a brief in partibus, to annul this marriage, which robbed the fashionable world of its principal attraction. But the love of this poor woman, who had confessed the miseries of her life, was ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... quarreling with the bridge that brings so many across the gulf of ignorance. Yet the newspaper, like the book, is to be read sparingly, and with judgment. It is to be used, not abused. I call that an abuse which squanders the precious and unreturning hours over long chronicles of depravity. The murders, the suicides, the executions, the divorces, the criminal trials, are each and all so like one another that it is only a wanton waste of time to read them. The morbid style in which social disorders of all kinds are ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... until at sixty-eight he became a suicide. If eight hundred years did not make antediluvians any better, but only made them worse, the ages of eternity could have no effect except prolongation of depravity. ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... what was the capacity of endurance of the human frame. I begin to suspect we are of nearer kin to the Salamander than our pride will allow; and since Devils only are admitted to nether fire, I begin to lapse into the credence of total depravity!! Reflect upon my deplorable condition! As Shelley's body, when lifeless, was caused to disappear in flames and smoke, so may mine before its tenant is departed. Was it not prophetic that on Sunday afternoon the following lines came to me ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... Half-breeds; men born of Indian women by white fathers. This race has much of the depravity of civilisation without ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the rearward part of certain men; and what a royal ecstatic felicity there sometimes is in indisputable survey of the same. He rises to the heights of Anti-Biblical profanity, quoting Moses on the Hill of Vision; sinks to the bottomless of human or ultra-human depravity, quoting King Nicomedes's experiences on Caesar (happily known only to the learned); and, in brief, recognizes that there is, on occasion, considerable beauty in that quarter of the human figure, when it turns on you opportunely. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... aliens now congregating in our large cities to those parts of the United States where they can secure employment without displacing others by working for a less wage, and where the conditions of existence do not tend to the fostering of disease, depravity, and resistance to the social and political security of the country, is urged. The Bureau is convinced that no feature of the immigration question so insistently demands public attention and effective action. The evil to be ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... nothing but a radical cure will free him from that torture; the cure is to realize that our seeming virtues are often not virtues at all. We must sacrifice our fancied virtues, if we would escape from the horrid sense of utter depravity that arises from our vices. A man puts to himself the question: How is it possible that at one moment I should be sympathetic and kind, should strive to compass the happiness of my fellow-beings, should take a generous interest in public ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... gets nervous, what we call hysterical, and then that girl will begin to play all sorts of pranks,—to lie and cheat, perhaps, in the most unaccountable way, so that she might seem to a minister a good example of total depravity. We don't see her in that light. We give her iron and valerian, and get her on horseback, if we can, and so expect to make her will come all right again. By-and-by we are called in to see an old baby, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... once said to a man who advocated the doctrine of total depravity: "The ground for my rejection of all responsibility for belief is the acknowledged necessitated nature of belief. Show me," said he, "that it is not necessitated, and I am answered. When you show me that it is controlled by a will, equally necessitated, I am not answered. If a necessitated faculty ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... a rose-coloured mist of fine words,—such an emasculated gospel is not a message of life, but has the answer of death within itself. That in the past, in a doctrine such as that of man's total depravity, the fact of sin has been over-emphasised, may be readily granted; but in the present all the symptoms indicate that the peril we have to meet is its under-emphasis. Against this whole tendency we must resolutely re-assert the Christian standpoint and attitude. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... seem mostly to have come. His world is all in and through the world of men and women, but no man or woman can get into it any more than if it were a world of invisible beings. It has its own ideals and superstitions, and these are often of a ferocity, a depravity, scarcely credible in after-life. It is a great pity that fathers and mothers cannot penetrate that world; but they cannot, and it is only by accident that they can catch some glimpse of what goes on in it. No doubt ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... in fact, even made them believable. It was a case where a young girl had been assassinated for the sake of her trifling ornaments, things not worth a laborer's day's wages in America. This thing could have been done in many other countries, but hardly with the cold business-like depravity, absence of fear, absence of caution, destitution of the sense of horror, repentance, remorse, exhibited in this case. Elsewhere the murderer would have done his crime secretly, by night, and without witnesses; his fears ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was an exceptional case, though unhappily not unique and not infrequent, indeed; but that very exceptionalness, her tinge of education, her previous life might, one would have thought, have killed her at the first step on that revolting path. What held her up—surely not depravity? All that infamy had obviously only touched her mechanically, not one drop of real depravity had penetrated to her heart; he saw that. He saw through her as she ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... returned from London with the loss of his lawsuit. Justice was with him, but the law was against him. He found Scythrop in a mood most sympathetically tragic; and they vied with each other in enlivening their cups by lamenting the depravity of this degenerate age, and occasionally interspersing divers grim jokes about graves, worms, and epitaphs. Mr Glowry's friends, whom we have mentioned in the first chapter, availed themselves of his return to pay him a simultaneous visit. At the same time arrived Scythrop's ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... But it was not upon this overthrow we stopped to look. It was upon something that mingled with it, dominated it, and made of this chaos only a setting to awful death. Janet's face, in all its natural hideousness and depravity, looked up from the floor beside this heap; and farther on, lay the twisted figure of him they called Hector, with something more than the seams of greedy longing round his wide-staring eyes and icy temples. Two in this room! and on the threshold of the one beyond a moaning third, who ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... two divisions of inmates; the one in which the discipline is more rigid is called the retenue. Those placed here are generally between fourteen and twenty-one years of age, although occasionally a child of precocious depravity is met with, who has to be separated from those under less restriction even at ten years of age. The disciplinaire is the division of milder restraint. The twenty-five or twenty-six places in each of the two divisions are ordinarily applied ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... according to the feelings of our nature, if care is not taken to prevent its occurrence. There is a cruelty, a more than cruelty, in parents bringing up their children with ideas which seldom can be realised, and rendering their future lives a pilgrimage of misery and discontent, if not of depravity. ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... of whom they have cognizance—not God, since God is so infinite that He is not within their ken—but one who is nearer God and to that extent represents God. This is the Christ Spirit. His special care is the earth. He came down upon it at a time of great earthly depravity—a time when the world was almost as wicked as it is now, in order to give the people the lesson of an ideal life. Then he returned to his own high station, having left an example which is still occasionally followed. ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... exhibit honestly and clearly the natural workings of the human heart, and diffuse through the mass of our fellow-creatures a practical assurance that piety, justice, and charity form the only sure groundwork of a people's glory and happiness; while religious and moral depravity in a nation, no less than in an individual, leads, (tardily it may be and remotely, but by ultimate and inevitable ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... powerful influence on the passions, and produces happy effects upon the human heart and mind when cultivated moderately: but when it becomes the general prevailing passion of a nation, or, as it were, gets dominion over them, it unquestionably produces not effeminacy merely, but a hateful depravity of manners. Whether the unexampled depravation of the modern Italians has been caused by their passionate devotion to music, or their passionate devotion to music by their monstrous depravity shall ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... eternity. This passion legitimately indulged to the glory of God is one of the most sacred, holy and pure. Since it is the highest and noblest of all the faculties of our being, its abuse must be the very lowest and unclean in the depravity of man. ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... onanist ... not of the putrid veins of gluttons or rumdrinkers ... not peculation or cunning or betrayal or murder ... no serpentine poison of those that seduce women ... not the foolish yielding of women ... not prostitution ... not of any depravity of young men ... not of the attainment of gain by discreditable means ... not any nastiness of appetite ... not any harshness of officers to men or judges to prisoners or fathers to sons or sons to fathers or of husbands to wives or bosses ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... greater depravity, never a more dangerous corruption, never a blacker soul serve to the accomplishment of a project of higher morality, or of a more equitable end; ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... The room smelt close and unwholesome; the walls were dirt-discoloured; and the ceiling blackened. There was an old smoky bust over the mantel-shelf, and a dusty clock above the dock—the only thing present, that seemed to go on as it ought; for depravity, or poverty, or an habitual acquaintance with both, had left a taint on all the animate matter, hardly less unpleasant than the thick greasy scum on every inanimate object that ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... starving, and stole a loaf of bread to save their lives, there would have been a stir about it, and a pile of policemen from here to the corner, to 'enforce the law,' and they'd have talked in all the churches, about the depravity of the poor in these cities, and then sent another thousand or two to the heathens. The Lord only knows what the world's a ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... have heard the particulars of my history. You will do me the justice to believe that I have been reduced to my present unfortunate position, more through the influence of circumstances, than on account of any natural depravity.—True, I am now what is termed a woman of the town—but still I am not entirely destitute of delicacy or refinement of feeling. I am an admirer of it in others. My parents I have never seen, since the day I quitted their house; but I have heard ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... town, each of a doleful nature and each indicating an evident depravity in a citizen of Plainton, were related by Miss Shott, and ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... land, so as to make it evident to any but a perverted intellect, that Christianity is the source of what we most prize in civilization itself, and that without it the nations can only reach a certain level, and will then, from the law of depravity, decline and fall like Greece, Asia Minor, and Rome. If we had no Christianity, we should be compelled, so far as history teaches us lessons, to adopt the theory of Buckle and his school, of the necessary progress and decline of nations—the moving round, like systems of philosophy, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... secure and the stork unmolested in her nest; till the praetorian [Sempronius], the inventor, first taught you [to eat them]. Therefore, if any one were to give it out that roasted cormorants are delicious, the Roman youth, teachable in depravity, would acquiesce, ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... the round of violent and exhausting dissipations, and as his senses flagged he spurred them with all sorts of stimulants. Meanwhile he observed himself curiously ; the result in his poems is an impression of peculiarly wilful depravity. They reflect his physical and mental experience, are always without sobriety, often lacking in sanity. The title, les Fleurs du mal, is both appropriate and suggestive; they invite no epithets so much ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... and again refused to shudder at its melodramatic atrocities. Wedekind wore at that time the mask Mephistophelian, and his admirers, for he had many from the beginning, delighted in what they called his spiritual depravity—forgetting that the two qualities cannot be blended. Now, while I have termed Frank Wedekind the naughty boy of the modern German drama, I by no means place him among those spirits like Goethe's Mephisto, who perpetually deny. On the contrary, he is one of the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... autumn of 1841; the crime itself is of the previous year or season. "Brutal savages, degraded Irish," mutters the idle reader of Newspapers; hardly lingering on this incident. Yet it is an incident worth lingering on; the depravity, savagery and degraded Irishism being never so well admitted. In the British land, a human Mother and Father, of white skin and professing the Christian religion, had done this thing; they, with their Irishism and necessity ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... the good working of their system; which meant that the negroes were quiet, the mulattoes kept under, and the crops promising; but under this "good working" there were the heart-burnings of the men of colour, the woes and the depravity of the slaves, and the domestic fears and discomforts of the masters, arising from this depravity. Now, when there was no oppression and no slavery, the simple system of justice was truly "working well"; not only in ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... and history have endowed a nation, may be dissipated when, on the one hand, the rulers prove selfish, frivolous, and unequal to the responsibilities which a great past places on their shoulders, and when, on the other hand, the nation acquiesces in the depravity of its governors. In his opening lines the speaker lays emphasis on the possibilities of greatness with which the natural physical conditions of the country and its political and military traditions have ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... is less celebrated than the Popish plot is rather the fault of the historians than of Fuller, who did all that man could do to secure an eminent place among villains. Every person well read in history must have observed that depravity has its temporary modes, which come in and go out like modes of dress and upholstery. It may be doubted whether, in our country, any man ever before the year 1678 invented and related on oath a circumstantial history, altogether fictitious, of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... try the prisoner, and requested the whole court to act as jury. It was a very sad case of youthful depravity—the criminal had carefully kept this one book, 'Somebody's Arithmetic,' or 'Mangnall's Questions,' to gloat over in secret; and even now was not at all penitent, but declared, when asked what he had to say for himself, that it was 'stupid, and a bore,' to play games all day long, ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... steeled by perils and endurance, calm, sagacious, resolute, grave even to severity, a valiant and redoubted soldier, Coligny looked abroad on the gathering storm and read its danger in advance. He saw a strange depravity of manners; bribery and violence overriding justice; discontented nobles, and peasants ground down with taxes. In the midst of this rottenness, the Calvinistic churches, patient and stern, were fast gathering to themselves the better life of the ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... his natural depravity—did not much care. So callous and indifferent did he become that he ceased to be hurt when the boys called him "Carrots." In fact he laughed. And as he no longer objected when he was called "Carrots" the boys dropped that name, and the shortest ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... imbedded in the corruption, or alloyed with the pride, of the world, betoken His original agency, and His long-suffering presence. Even where there is habitual rebellion against Him, or profound far-spreading social depravity, still the undercurrent, or the heroic outburst, of natural virtue, as well as the yearnings of the heart after what it has not, and its presentiment of its true remedies, are to be ascribed to the Author of all good. Anticipations or reminiscences of His glory haunt the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... heard it given as an instance of the frightful depravity of a certain tribe in the Pacific that they had no word in their language to express the idea of virtue. The assertion was unfounded; but were it otherwise, it might be met by stating that their language is almost ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... remarkable confession of the late Leonidas Parker, which appeared in your issue of the 13th ultimo, has given rise to a series of disturbances in this neighborhood, which, for romantic interest and downright depravity, have seldom been surpassed, even in California. Before proceeding to relate in detail the late transactions, allow me to remark that the wonderful narrative of Parker excited throughout this county sentiments of the most profound and contradictory character. I, for ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... humble parents, in a remote county of England. Their occupations were such as usually fall to the lot of peasants, and they had no portion to give me, but an education free from the usual sources of depravity, and the inheritance, long since lost by their unfortunate progeny! of an honest fame. I was taught the rudiments of no science, except reading, writing, and arithmetic. But I had an inquisitive mind, and ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... relations. That amidst the general surrender of its upper classes in former times to levity, "and something more," there were many exceptions of family happiness and purity, is as certain as that human nature, in its worst state of depravity, will ever assert its better tendencies, and give indications of the ethereal source from which it has sprung. But, that the prevailing tone of those who ought to have given the tone to others, was long of the most lax ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... found, if not original sin, at least vegetable total depravity in my garden; and it was there before I went into it. It is the bunch-, or joint-, or snake-grass,—whatever it is called. As I do not know the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did in ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... has been to attempt to show the numerical relation which poverty, misery, and depravity bear to regular earnings and comparative comfort, and to describe the general conditions under which each ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... act like that before," cried Mollie irritably. "I'd like to give the person that wrote about the 'depravity of inanimate things' a medal. The old tire's got a mean disposition, ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... Oh, the depravity of society in these days, and oh, the unpleasantness of setting these things down! But, on the other hand, what a comfort it is to think that men as base as Brassfield are so rare that you and I, my boy, have probably never met a specimen. And if you ever find, my love, that any person in whom ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... I am afraid, elapse before we get rid of Wych Street. It is full of quaint old Tudor houses, with tall gables, carved porches, and lattice-casements; but the picturesque appearance of these tenements compensates but ill for their being mainly dens of vice and depravity, inhabited by the vilest offscourings of the enormous city. Next to Napoli senza sole, Wych Street, Drury Lane, is, morally and physically, about the shadiest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... walls; and the death of the general removed every restraint of discipline from an army which consisted of three independent nations, the Italians, the Spaniards, and the Germans. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the manners of Italy exhibited a remarkable scene of the depravity of mankind. They united the sanguinary crimes that prevail in an unsettled state of society, with the polished vices which spring from the abuse of art and luxury; and the loose adventurers, who had violated every prejudice of patriotism and superstition ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... disposition and improving his character. He had been proud, and haughty, and domineering before. He became humble, docile, and considerate now. Faults of character that are superficial, resulting from the force of circumstances and peculiarities of temptation, rather than from innate depravity of heart, are easily and readily burned off in the fire of affliction, while the same severe ordeal seems only to indurate the more hopelessly those propensities which lie deeply seated in an ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... century than they had been before. Charles V. was the most powerful sovereign whom Europe had seen since the days of Charlemagne, and the papal see had recovered by diplomatic intrigue much of the influence which it had lost by moral depravity. Let us think, then, of these two ancient powers: the Emperor with his armies, recruited in Austria, Spain, Naples, Sicily, and Burgundy, and with his treasures brought from Mexico and Peru; and the Pope ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... usually begin their downward course in youth. The germ of wickedness is then planted. Time only matures what is thus begun. Those trivial things which you suffer to pass without a rebuke, constitute the germ of all their future depravity. The wickedness of youth differs from that of mature age rather in degree than in kind. The character of the man may often be read in the conduct of the child. Thus bad government originates in overlooking the faults of children, or in wrong views of their conduct. The deeds of childhood ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... hell of limited duration, which the priests only had the power to abridge; and this grace they sold, first to the living, then to the kinsmen and friends of the dead.[63] Now it was surely more worthy of a belief in the natural depravity than in the natural perfectibility of the sons of Adam, thus to assume without parley or proviso a base mercenariness on the one hand, and grovelling terror on the other, as the origin of a doctrine ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the intellect, or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucination. It is often difficult to distinguish this form of mania from the moral depravity which we associate with the ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... continues to do in the East to the present day. To be a Christian is to be a dog; to be a Jew is to be a dog; an infidel is a dog; and to be known as "a Jew's dog," or "a dead dog," is to have sunk to the lowest depths of depravity in the eyes ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... 11th and 12th of the Second of Samuel. Many workings of heart, as this psalm showeth, this poor man had, so soon as conviction did fall upon his spirit. One while he cries for mercy, then he confesses his heinous offences, then he bewails the depravity of his nature; sometimes he cries out to be washed and sanctified, and then again he is afraid that God will cast him away from his presence, and take his Holy Spirit utterly from him. And thus he goes on till he comes to the text, and there he stayeth his mind, finding in himself that heart ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... practical extinction in this country save in the mountain fastnesses of Wales and the craggy moors of Yorkshire. I also learn that its extended wings measure thirty-six inches on an average. I must decline to provide an asylum for such an extensive mass of depravity." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... bit of profanity by saying that when a boy he had ploughed new ground, and the plough caught in the roots, and the horses balked, and his feet were torn with splinters and thorns, and the handles of the plough kicked and hurt him, until depravity was developed. The lady said she would pray for his forgiveness, if he never would do so any more, and he promised, and I am told he did not keep ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... of the famous Runjeet Singh, when the sacred waters of the Ganges received the ashes of the greatest of the Sikhs, it is impossible for language to exaggerate the anarchy, the depravity, the misery of the Punjaub. Tigers, and wolves, and apes, have been the successors of the "Old Lion." The predominant spirit of that energetic and sagacious ruler bridled the licentious turbulence which for the last ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... extract last given we can gather that, notwithstanding the opposition of some, and the frightful depravity of all, Mr. Duncan seemed to be gaining the ear of the people just in proportion as he advanced in fluency of speech in their mother tongue. And during the following year, 1859, not a few tokens for good were granted him. In some parts of the camp open drunkenness ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... with him as we have with Byron's Corsair. When he stalks across the serious stage and rages and fumes and wipes his bloody sword, we are inclined to smile or to yawn. As for the villain Franz, with his abysmal depravity, and Amalia, with her witless sentimentalism, we find it hard to take them seriously; they do not produce a good illusion. And then the whole style of the piece, the violent and ribald language, the savage action, the rant and swagger, the shooting and stabbing,—all this seems at first ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Charles VI., surnamed the Well Beloved, was King of France during the most disastrous period of its history. He ascended the throne in 1380, when only thirteen years of age. In 1385 he married Isabella of Bavaria, who was equally remarkable for her beauty and her depravity. The unfortunate king was subject to fits of insanity, which lasted for several months at a time. On the 21st October, 1422, seven years after the battle of Agincourt, Charles VI. ended his unhappy life at the age of 55, having reigned 42 years. Lewis the Dauphin ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... Doctor Softly by my side, keeping his face well in view at the window—to canvass for patients, in the character of my father's hopeful successor. Never have I been so ill at ease in prison, as I was in that carriage. I have felt more at home in the dock (such is the natural depravity and perversity of my disposition) than ever I felt in the drawing-rooms of my father's distinguished patrons and respectable friends. Nor did my miseries end with the morning calls. I was commanded to attend all dinner-parties, and to make myself agreeable ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... the prominent character. But how impossible it is by any force of genius to create a sustained attractive interest for such a groundwork, and how the mind wearies of, and shrinks from, the more than painful interest, the [Greek: miseton], of utter depravity,—Fielding himself felt and endeavoured to mitigate and remedy by the (on all other principles) far too large a proportion, and too quick recurrence, of the interposed chapters of moral reflection, like the chorus in the Greek tragedy,—admirable specimens ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... very remote, with a sigh. "If I could only know just what the feelings of a murderer really were for five minutes, I could out-Shakespeare Shakespeare in that play. But I shall have to trust to the fall of man, and the general depravity of human nature, I suppose. After all, there's the potentiality of every kind of man in every man. If you've known what it is to hate, you've known what ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... iniquity is presupposed by his curse. If he were to be punished on account of the guilt of the father,—a guilt in which he had no share,—then indeed no delay would have been necessary. To this view we are farther led by what is reported in Genesis concerning the moral depravity of Sodom and Gomorrah, which, in the development of the sinful germ inherent in the race, had outrun all others, and were, therefore, before all others, overtaken by punishment. (To this view we are further led by what is reported in Genesis concerning the moral depravity of Sodom and Gomorrah, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... world, they were not of it. It was to them, all vanity and vexation of spirit. They attended their chapel, their love feasts, their class-meetings, their prayer meetings, and their revival meetings, where they would lament over the wickedness and depravity of human nature, where they would "speak their experience," tell of their temptations, pray for the conversion of the world, and sing their hymns, such as the following, which was a ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... stand it unhurt, untouched! It is wonderful!—yet natural as it is wonderful! After all, there are people in the world, whose opinions and feelings are tainted by an habitual acquaintance with the evil side of society, though in action and intention they remain right; and who, without the real depravity of heart and malignity of intention of Iago, judge as he does of the character and productions ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... tainted heritage which, like some avenging nemesis, through the action of an inexorable law, surely follows the unfortunate offspring of lordling fathers, who are born as the very dregs from twenty generations of the vice and depravity of ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... piece of Parian marble, or a scratch upon a mirror, which streak or twist baffles our effort to make ourselves righteous. I am not going, if I can help it, to exaggerate the facts of the case. The Christian teaching of what is unfortunately called total depravity is not that there is no good in anybody, but that there is a diffused evil in everybody which affects in different degrees and in different ways all a man's nature. And that is no mere doctrine of the New Testament, but it is a transcript from the experience ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Depraved within limits, a little; for excess, you know, is wearisome. You ought not to vegetate, my dear; you ought not to live like every one else, but to get the full savour of life, and a slight flavour of depravity is the sauce of life. Revel among flowers of intoxicating fragrance, breathe the perfume of musk, eat hashish, and best of all, love, love, love . . . . To begin with, in your place I would set up seven lovers—one for each day of the week; and one I ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... me, had, in compliance with the advice and direction of her husband, not only ceased to instruct, but had set her face against my being instructed by any one else. It is due, however, to my mistress to say of her, that she did not adopt this course of treatment immediately. She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as though I ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... her and listening to her the man beside her could not believe that depravity of any sort or degree entered into the girl's nature, yet he wanted to believe that she had not been virtuous, for otherwise his task was less a sinecure—the Hon. Morison was ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Suetonius, equally with the masterly pencil of Tacitus, may convince us of the cruel depravity of Nero or Tiberius: But what a difference of sentiment! While the former coldly relates the facts; and the latter sets before our eyes the venerable figures of a Soranus and a Thrasea, intrepid in their fate, and only moved by the melting sorrows of their friends and kindred. What sympathy ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... and the little hills of East Windsor, Meadville, and Fairfax, like lambs. However divinity-schools may refuse to "skip" in unison, and may butt and batter each other about the doctrine and origin of human depravity, all will join devoutly in the credo, I believe in the total depravity of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... forget my emotions when, on quitting the city, I caught a glimpse of that gloomy and stupendous granite pile which looms up in the midst of grandeur and magnificence, an awful monitor to human depravity. Well does it become its chill, funereal name. Shadows deeper than the darkness of the grave hang within its huge Egyptian columns. Corruption more loathsome than the mouldering remains of mortality dwells ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... over puzzling cases—cases of fraud, of mischief-making, of ignorant evil-doing, of inherited tendencies, physical, mental, and moral— and sometimes it will seem as if the whole human creation were incurably ailing, and the doctrine of total depravity will take on alarming probability. But at this point some sound, smiling, active boy or girl comes in with a cheerful greeting, and pessimism retires into the background. And all this reminds me of one more quality which the children's librarian must have—a sense of ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... though very few were essentially "bad." When, however, they did happen to be "bad," they were very bad indeed. And these lead-pencil inscriptions they left behind them were the frightful testimony of their innate depravity. ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... the Fathers" (1896). A volume of delightful historical essays, including one on "The Political Depravity of the Fathers." ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... studios, nor from any familiarity with the private lives of the painters of the Italian Renaissance, which show, if anything does, that one may possess a fine and rigorous conscience as an artist, yet lapse into any irregularity or descend to any depravity as a man. But Dr. Gowdy ignored all this. Art—the contemplation of it, the practice of it—worked toward the building up of character, and promoted all that was noblest in ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... but sin is a reproach to any people." All attempts to correct the depravity of man, to stay the headlong propensity to vice, to abate the madness of ambition, will be found deplorably inefficient, unless we apply the restrictions and the tremendous sanctions of religion. A profound regard ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... general to weary of his fierce struggle with the peasantry, and to put up for sale his property at Aigues, which became the prey of Gaubertin, Rigou and Soudry. Bonnebault was squint-eyed and his physical appearance did not belie his depravity. [The Peasantry.] ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... and depravity certainly occur here as well as all the world over, but the edicts of the colonial Government are well calculated to prevent them, and the British planter, except here and there one, feels for the wrongs done to a poor ill-treated slave, and ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... belonged to that class of white people at the South to whom the better class owed little duty or regard. It was not so strange that they should slander that man. He could understand, too, how it was that they attributed to the colored people such incredible depravity, such capacity for evil, such impossible designs, as well as the reason why they invented for every Northern man that came among them with ideas different from their own a fictitious ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... his eyes. Devil take it all! was he still dreaming? A subtle odour came wafting from the rustling silk of her attire, a breath of depravity, as though hailing from the corrupt life of some big city; a bewildering, insinuating atmosphere, that had of a sudden overpowered the delicious freshness of ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... over him like a breeze from the tropics. The tale turned him to stone. Sister Claire undoubtedly drew upon her imagination and her reading for the facts, since it rarely falls to the lot of one woman to sound all the depths of depravity. Louis had little nonsense in his character. At first his horror urged him to fly from the place, but whenever the tale aroused this feeling in him, the cunning creature broke forth into a strain of penitence so sweet and touching that he had not the heart to desert her. At the last she fell upon ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... imprudence respecting character. I have no objection to prefer prodigality to avarice, in some few instances; but I appeal to your observation, if you have not met, and often met, with the same disingenuousness, the same hollow-hearted insincerity, and disintegritive depravity of principle, in the hackneyed victims of profusion, as in the unfeeling children of parsimony. I have every possible reverence for the much-talked-of world beyond the grave, and I wish that which piety believes, and virtue deserves, may be all matter of fact. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... evidence against his countrymen was diligently spread by all enemies of his country, especially in England and the Netherlands, while Protestant controversialists quoted him against popery, and in the conduct of the conquerors the evidences of the Catholic depravity. ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... was shocked at the depravity of the people, settlers as well as natives; for the former had imported the vices without the restraints of civilization, and the latter had only been too apt to imitate their bad example. Passing along the streets of the city, sounding his handbell as he went, he implored the people ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... trifling and partial it might appear at first, soon became serious and general. A melancholy instance of the depravity of human nature; as it shews, that neither the laws nor religion of any country, however excellent the forms of each, are sufficient to bind the consciences of some; but that there are always men, of every age, country, and persuasion, who are ready to sacrifice their dearest principles ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... other part of the world. "It seems never to have entered into the heads of the Hindu legislators," said Sir William Jones long since (Works, vol. ii, p. 311), "that anything natural could be offensively obscene, a singularity which pervades all their writings, but is no proof of the depravity of their morals." The sexual act has often had a religious significance in India, and the minutest details of the sexual life and its variations are discussed in Indian erotic treatises in a spirit of gravity, while nowhere else have the anatomical and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... answer the charred ruins of Nineveh. After 600 years of opportunity, dead. Israelitish Kingdom, stand up! After 250 years of miraculous vicissitude, and Divine intervention, and heroic achievement, and appalling depravity, dead. Phoenicia, stand up! After inventing the alphabet and giving it to the world, and sending out her merchant caravans to Central Asia in one direction, and her navigators into the Atlantic Ocean in ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various |
