"Malign" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... suddenly have fallen into the blackest crimes. So it is no less difficult to understand how public opinion should turn against them as it did, and how all Europe should set itself to disgrace and despoil, to malign and execrate, those who had so long been its favorites and its champions. It is not easy to understand this, and it is painful to read the story in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... about," he exclaimed. "You have attempted to malign me to the king. Remember I possess the most powerful fetish in ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... very important tax to the Government, bringing as it does over a billion a year, and a place to put this load is not to be found easily. The income tax does not have so malign an effect, for it comes to a great extent from the individual and not from business. The present method of income tax, however, has some weaknesses. The same levy is made upon earned incomes as upon those that are unearned. The tax on earned incomes tends ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... had anything to do with the health of this remote planet, or with the mildness of its seasons? In this we have a clue to the origin of that astrological jargon about planetary aspects being propitious or malign. Philosophers are even yet too prone to wrap themselves in their mantle of academic lore, and despise the knowledge of the ancients, while there is reason to believe that the world once possessed a true insight into the structure of the solar system. As war became the occupation of mankind, ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... on the day in the winter woods, she suppressed the word for another—"I never admired you so much. I'm going to make a confession. What you say you felt toward Claude is what I've often felt myself in—in glimpses. God knows I don't say that to malign him. I shouldn't say it at all if it were not to point out that you wouldn't have done him any more harm—not when it came to the act—than I myself. Would ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... author, or a seedy artist, or a college president with frayed coat-sleeves, has more standing in society and has more paragraphs written about him in the papers than many a millionaire. This is due, perhaps, to the malign influence of money-getting and to the benign effect of purely intellectual pursuits. As a rule every great success in the money world means the failure and misery of hundreds of antagonists. Every success in the world of intellect and character is an aid and ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... the packet. As he read his face assumed so malign and fierce an aspect that I had little difficulty in persuading myself of the truth of the stories of savage cruelty that I had heard of him. When he had finished he set down the paper, and asked ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... anything could be more stupid than a book-critic, it would be a preface. But, thank heaven, there is not. In saying this, I refer to a particular critic; for I would not, for the sake of a tenth edition, malign in such a wholesale manner those capital good fellows of the press—those verbal accoucheurs who are so pleasantly officious at the birth of each new genius. Not I. ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... that the spot where two mingle their streams is sacred, endowed with strange properties of evocation and of purification. Such spots go to the making of history and ruling of individual lives; but whether their influence is not more often malign than beneficent may be, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... he seen the things that leaped upon Chet—but he knew! Never again could any man tell Spud O'Malley that the Moon was a lifeless globe ... and he knew that the life was of a form monstrous and horrible and malign! ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... At their next meeting he bitterly reproached the rash white man for his indiscretion; "nor could I," adds Mr. Oldfield, "induce him by any means to utter the awful sound of a dead man's name, for by so doing he would have placed himself in the power of the malign spirits." Among the aborigines of Victoria the dead were very rarely spoken of, and then never by their names; they were referred to in a subdued voice as "the lost one" or "the poor fellow that is no more." To speak of them by name ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Tancredi loved Clorinda. Meeting her in battle, he stood her blows defenseless; for Clorinda was an Amazon, reduced by Tasso's gentle genius to womanhood from the proportions of Marfisa. Finally, with heart surcharged with love for her, he has to cross his sword in deadly duel with this lady. Malign stars rule the hour: he knows not who she is: misadventure makes her, instead of him, the victim of their encounter. With her last breath she demands baptism—the good Tasso, so it seems, could not send ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... nor love-songs prevailed. The young woman, for some reason untold, was deaf to his entreaties, and the rejection of this his best affection fell on him with a malign influence, just as he was setting his face to learn a trade which he hoped would enable ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... dire (So rankt by Moslem hate and ire) Of all the rebel Sons of Fire; Of whose malign, tremendous power The Arabs at their mid-watch hour Such tales of fearful wonder tell That each affrighted sentinel Pulls down his cowl upon his eyes, Lest HAFED in the midst should rise! A man, they say, of monstrous birth, A mingled race of flame and earth, Sprung from those old, enchanted ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... we put on in self-defence. One man conquers fear of danger only to fall a prey to fear of public opinion; another succumbs to superstitious fear, while a third, steadfast against all these, comes under the thraldom of the most insidious and malign of all forms of fear—the ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... her defloration by one of a host of aerial spirits, and that the wound thus inflicted is repeated afterwards every month by the same ghostly agency.[70] For a like reason, probably, the Baganda imagine that a woman who does not menstruate exerts a malign influence on gardens and makes them barren[71] if she works in them. For not being herself fertilized by a spirit, how can she fertilize ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... blind conceit, All heedless of the hearts beneath your feet, Fling falsehoods as a sower scatters grain And, for security, invoke disdain. Sir, there are laws that men of sense observe, No matter whence they come nor whom they serve— The laws of courtesy; and these forbid You to malign, as recently you did, As servant of another State, a State Wherein your duties all are concentrate; Branding its Ministers as rogues—in short, ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... skies of the East; and that he was kept in perpetual agitation by the fair ones who would cast themselves athwart his path, throwing themselves at his head when not at his feet. Vainly did he distort himself, give himself out to the public as a true "Childe Harold," malign himself; his friends knew that his heart was overflowing with tenderness, and they could not thus be duped. If he had wished to cull some flowers idly, for the sake of scattering their leaves to the breeze, as youth so often does, this sort of amusement would have been difficult for him, for ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... strongly to enforce it (here follows a characteristic illustration.) To those who call Saperdion the Empousa, he shows her in a Kimberic robe;[43] in other words, he exposes her charms more fully than she does it herself, the better to convict those who malign them." ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... like the ram of a battleship, came surging along toward the Roosevelt, and we were obliged to shift our position. Before the ship was secured, she was again threatened by the same floe, which seemed to be endowed with malign intelligence and to follow us like a bloodhound. We retired to still another position, and secured the vessel and finally the threatening floe passed onwards to ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... and even asked the Commander how he had lost his eye! It is said that at this point of the conversation Master Peleg produced from about his person divers small trinkets, kickshaws, and newfangled trifles, and even forced some of them upon his host. It is further alleged that under the malign influence of Peleg and several glasses of aguardiente, the Commander lost somewhat of his decorum, and behaved in a manner unseemly for one in his position, reciting high-flown Spanish poetry, and even piping in a thin, high voice divers madrigals ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... fragments of their various experiences with the Belgian the truth concerning the malign activities of Albert Werper became apparent. Only Lady Greystoke found aught to praise in the conduct of the man, and it was difficult even for her to reconcile his many heinous acts with this one evidence of chivalry ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... did Neal make upon the misfortune of having none to wish him ill; and what rendered this hardship doubly oppressive, was the unlucky fact that no exertions of his, however offensive, could procure him a single foe. In vain did lie insult, abuse, and malign all his acquaintances. In vain did he father upon them all the rascality and villany he could think of; he lied against them with a force and originality that would have made many a modern novelist blush for want of invention—but all to no purpose. The world for once became astonishingly Christian; ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... deeper than either of these, and the name of it was a degrading fear of consequences—of punishment. With a most hearty loathing for the lower depths of baseness uncovered by craven fear, one may be none the less a helpless victim of a certain ruthless and malign ferocity to which it is likely to give birth. Sitting with my back propped against the windlass and the newly purchased rifle across my knees, I found that cowardice, like other base passions, may suddenly develop an infection. With nerves twittering and muscles ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... 'Don't malign your parents, old fellow. They gave you a brain inferior to that of few men. You will never meet a ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... age in seven years more. Then, if you are in the same mind—and I am sure you will not change—you, being your own master, can do freely as you will. In the meantime, to secure, so far as I can, my dear Janet against any malign stroke of fortune, I have given orders to my factor to remit semi-annually to Janet one full half of such income as may be derived in any form from my estate of Croom. It is, I am sorry to say, heavily mortgaged; but of such as is—or may be, free from such charge as ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... said the rector, "and sterling coin, I'll warrant, however much you may malign yourself." He was too nervous to ask a direct question about his son's success. "We have been very dull without you. Lettice is counting on your help to break in her ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... taken place during that night. It coincided with that hardship, or with that mastery of life." But a child can suffer and can triumph as a man or a woman, yet remain a child. Like man and woman it can hate, envy, malign, cheat, lie, tyrannize; or bless, cheer, defend, drop its pitying tears, pour out its heroic spirit. Love alone among the passions parts the two eternities of a lifetime. The instant it is born, the child which was its ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... hardly have been strong enough to withstand her. But she could not keep her tongue from speaking evil of his wife. From the moment in which he had called Mary an angel, it was necessary to her comfort to malign the angel. She did not quite know the man, or the nature of men generally. A man, if his mind be given that way, may perhaps with safety whisper into a woman's ear that her husband is untrue to her. Such an accusation may serve his purpose. But the woman, on her side, should hold her peace about ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... constant struggle in him between love and intellectual honesty, and it had filled her with a dumb irritation and misery indescribable. Do what she would, wrestle with herself as she would, there was constantly emerging in her now a note of anger, not with Robert, but, as it were, with those malign forces of which ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Electress, despite her tender love for her only son, constantly endeavors to keep him away, and to prolong his stay at The Hague. I always thought until now that it was on my account. I thought that the Electress believed me to have evil and malign intentions with regard to the Electoral Prince, and for that reason alone was opposed to her son's return. But now I see into it; she is for this Palatinate marriage, she wishes by that means to bind her son ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... soft creature suddenly raging like a storm, to which, in its various wild incidents, war is constantly likened in Homer; the effects of delicate youth and of tempest blending, in Ares, into one expression, not without that cruelty which mingles also, like the influence of some malign fate upon him, with the finer [266] characteristics of Achilles, who is a kind of merely human double of Ares. And in Homer's impressions of war the same elements are blent,—the delicacy, the beauty ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... to all these theories is that contained in the book itself. Surely no one has read Don Quixote with profit to himself who has been unable to see that the hero is not one whom the author desired to revile or to malign. Never was a satire like this, which leaves us full of love and sympathy for the object. And why cannot we believe the author when he avers that never did his humble pen stoop to satire? He meant, of course, the satire of persons as distinguished from the reprehension and the ridicule of human ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... enshrine. Yet thou repaidst me with constraint, rigour and perfidy, To which no lover might himself on any wise resign. How many a bidder unto love, a secret-craving wight, How many a swain, complaining, saith of destiny malign, "How many a cup with bitterness o'erflowing have I quaffed! I make my moan of woes, whereat it boots not to repine." Quoth thou, "The goodliest of things is patience and its use: Its practice still mankind doth guide to all that's fair and ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... boss, and the bosslet, the heeler—the men who are "it"—all are there exercising the real power, the power that independently of charters and elections decides what shall happen. I don't wish to have this regarded as necessarily malign. It seems so now because we put our faith in the ideal arrangements which it disturbs. But if we could come to face it squarely—to see that that is what sovereignty is—that if we are to use human power for human purposes ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... elements of that little, but how heroic, nation that in a high day of old staked its very life to free itself from every entanglement that had darkened the fortunes of the older nations and set up a new standard here, that men of such origins and such free choices of allegiance would ever turn in malign reaction against the Government and people who had welcomed and nurtured them and seek to make this proud country once more a hotbed of European passion. A little while ago such a thing would have seemed incredible. Because it was incredible we made no preparation for it. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... profit thereby. With the practical operation of this system we are all familiar. We see the results of its work in every phase of our political life—in municipal, state and national affairs. We encounter its malign influence every time an effort is made to secure any adequate regulation of railways, to protect the people against the extortion of the trusts, or to make the great privileged industries of the country bear their just share of ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... dips the airy visitor into the "rank water." The butterfly finds no charm in the gloomy place and flies away, which less ethereal wanderers might likewise be fain to do. Now and then the stillness that reigned over that home of malign things was broken by the sound of a boat-horn on a lumber raft floating ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... no human creature could be more abhorrent, more incredibly odious of aspect, than Amos Brierwood as he sat there, his red, brutish face redder still with a malign pleasure, his malicious eyes gloating over the rolls of money which he drew from a pocket-book stolen from some waylaid traveler, snapping his fingers in exultation when the amount of ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... "authorities" as he unfolded the Scriptures. Suddenly the service was interrupted by the cries of a man who was possessed by an unclean spirit. Jesus rebuked the demon and compelled him to come out of the man. There can be little doubt that the evil spirit which Jesus thus controlled was an actual malign being who controlled the poor sufferer whom Jesus graciously relieved; yet such an "unclean spirit" is a type of the demoniac power of envy and of lust and of anger, and of the whole host of debasing passions from which ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... working-man to distraction because her neighbour's front room possesses a more expensive carpet, of a sprucer pattern than her own. Clerks have suffered acutely from your stings, and actresses have spent many a sleepless night under your malign influence. You have tortured Dukes on the peaks of gracious splendour where they sit enthroned as far above common mortals as they ought to be above the common feeling of envy; and you have caused even ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 11, 1891 • Various
... journey down below. No, not Chimaera's fiery breath, Nor Gyas, could he rise again, Shall part us; Justice, strong as death, So wills it; so the Fates ordain. Whether 'twas Libra saw me born Or angry Scorpio, lord malign Of natal hour, or Capricorn, The tyrant of the western brine, Our planets sure with concord strange Are blended. You by Jove's blest power Were snatch'd from out the baleful range Of Saturn, and the evil hour Was stay'd, when rapturous benches full Three times the auspicious thunder peal'd; ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... stroke. O, fatal dower of beauty that was thine, Aurelia! Could I say that, had I maintained my firm resolve of a few days' date, and fixed my heart and inclination where they were due— towards the loving bosom and welcoming arms of my Virginia—this new shame had come upon me? Alas, what malign influence drew thee, lady, to Siena, to rekindle my flame, to melt my conjugal desires, to betray me into the old passion, to draw me into the old despair? Thus I bitterly questioned myself as, guarded on either hand by mounted men, I descended the silent street on the ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... point, like a diagram in a lesson in perspective. Over-head, as he looked up through this rift in the wood, shone great golden stars looking unfamiliar and grouped in strange constellations. He was sure they were arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance. The wood on either side was full of singular noises, among which—once, twice, and again—he distinctly heard whispers in ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... "going on" among the young people to which he wanted a clew. But to men of Mr. Deane's stamp, what goes on among the young people is as extraneous to the real business of life as what goes on among the birds and butterflies, until it can be shown to have a malign bearing on monetary affairs. And in this case the bearing appeared to ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... pupil, in appearance, and had betaken himself more than ever to solitude and study. The other was the continued prosperity and rugged independence of Nimbus, who was regarded as a peculiarly "sassy nigger." To the malign influence of these two was attributed every difference of opinion between employer and employee, and every impropriety of conduct on the part of the freedmen of Horsford. Eliab was regarded as a wicked spirit who devised ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... cabalist,— Can your lurking thought surprise, And interpret your device.... Heralds high before him run; He has ushers many a one; He spreads his welcome where he goes, And touches all things with his rose. All things wait for and divine him,— How shall I dare to malign him? 448 EMERSON: Daem. and Celes., ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... against the German people who are its instruments; and would result in abandoning the newborn Russia to the intrigue, the manifold subtle interference, and the certain counter-revolution which would be attempted by all the malign influences to which the German Government has of late accustomed the world. Can peace be based upon a restitution of its power or upon any word of honor it could pledge in a treaty of ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... short-lived soever he be in comparison with the world through which he passes, yet no less through time Fate dries up the holy springs, and the mighty cities of old days are undecipherable under the green turf;[18] it is the only wisdom to acquiesce in the forces, however ignorant or malign in their working, that listen to no protest and admit no appeal, that no force can affect, no subtlety elude, no calculation ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... ease, as usual in all company, and seemed to cause prodigious laughter as he told his adventures to the younger folk at the bottom of the board. Dark and malign as his demeanour usually was, yet he could affect a light and airy character ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... full of incidents of the kind: incidents which are trifling beyond mention in the beginning, but which malign circumstance distorts and magnifies till they set nations daggers-drawn at each other's throats. Two students lured a "freshman" to their room and there invited him to drink a marvelous compound the beginnings of which were ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... on the rock-plateau, where gleamed in the hot sun marble palaces, a more malign influence was at work. Dandhu Panth, the adopted son of the Peshwa, had come back from Oxford, and the English believed he had been changed ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... helplessness and apprehension. Of course she thought the idea utterly fantastic, but Jim and her mother appeared to believe it, and her own notions of the city's wickedness were so vivid that anything seemed possible. Certainly some malign influence seemed to be deliberately at work against her, and a thousand disagreeable incidents, once she took time to reflect upon them, bore out her suspicions. She was half minded to run ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... apparently without principle as without shame, nothing was too much! And then think of the same woman protecting the virtuous philosopher Arnauld, when he was denounced and condemned; and from motives which her worst enemies could not malign, secreting him in her house, unknown even to her own servants—preparing his food herself, watching for his safety, and at length saving him. Her tenderness, her patience, her discretion, her disinterested benevolence, not only defied danger, (that were little ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... hidden and wait but the wand of divination to be revealed. In a thousand similar ways are the actions and the motives of the Irish understood by those who are careless of them; or worse, misrepresented by those whose interest, and too often business, it is to malign them. ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... to me excellently and most impartially done. The older histories are not well written: they are apt to be sensational and chauvinistic in tone, and to encourage a somewhat cheap and blusterous order of patriotism; but that they commonly malign character or misrepresent events I cannot discover. They are perhaps a little too much inclined to make "insolent" the inseparable epithet of the British soldier; but there is no reason to doubt that in many cases it was amply merited. I have not come across the ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... dangers, all met and borne that they might live. There were others who cared not if their tears were seen. There was no one there who did not vow that it would go hard with him if ever man ventured to malign Billy Ray in his presence; but there was no one there who dreamed that even while daring death to save them the man whose praise was on every lip stood bitterly in need of friends, that blackest calumny, that lowest intrigue, had conspired to pull ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... slave—aye, as a brute and a beast of burden—is Christianity, since where it is not dominant she is so treated, yet there are women who will so far forget themselves and forget their God that they will go and hear lecturers malign Christianity and scoff at the most sacred things of the soul. A good woman, over-persuaded by her husband, may go once to hear such a tirade against the Christian religion, not fully knowing what she is going to hear; but she ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... grown sadder day by day under the influence of some hidden trouble; among all the faces round the table, his was the most woe-begone. There was no longer any doubt. Goriot was an elderly libertine, whose eyes had only been preserved by the skill of the physician from the malign influence of the remedies necessitated by the state of his health. The disgusting color of his hair was a result of his excesses and of the drugs which he had taken that he might continue his career. The poor old man's mental ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... vacancies in the school catalogue never again filled. Even a Board of Educational Examiners, proceeding to Cheyenne, were taken prisoners, and obliged to answer questions they themselves had proposed, amidst horrible tortures. By degrees these atrocities were traced to the malign influence of a new chief of the tribe. As yet little was known of him but through his baleful appellations, "Young Man who Goes for his Teacher," and "He Lifts the Hair of the School Marm." He was said to be small and exceedingly youthful in appearance. Indeed, his earlier appellative, "He Wipes ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... potentate—some Prester John or old Assaracus—a few years back it would have been the part of Moipu to play the hero and the host, and his young men would have accompanied and adorned the various celebrations as the acknowledged leaders of society. And now, by a malign vicissitude of fortune, Moipu must sit in his house quite unobserved; and his young men could but look in at the door while their rivals feasted. Perhaps M. Grevy felt a touch of bitterness towards his successor when he beheld him figure on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Torn rode the grim, gray, old man, silent and taciturn; nursing his deep hatred in the depths of his malign brain. ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... limited and even trivial inquiry, with little of the heroic or the romantic in it; but it was none the less carried to the finest point by our impassioned young men. Nick suspected Nash of exaggerating his encouragement in order to play a malign trick on the political world at whose expense it was his fond fancy to divert himself—without indeed making that organisation perceptibly totter—and reminded him that his present accusation of immorality was strangely inconsistent with the wanton ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... sleeping-car, each iteration and reiteration growing in dreadful realism, until it was he himself who grappled in deadly contest with the murderer, and the latter in turn became a monster whose hot breath stifled him, whose malign, demoniacal glance seemed to sear his eyeballs like living fire. Over and over, with failing strength, he waged the unequal contest, striving at last with a legion of hideous forms. Then, as the clouds grew still more ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... or malign disposition, an effeminate disposition; an hard inexorable disposition, a wild inhuman disposition, a sheepish disposition, a childish disposition; a blockish, a false, a scurril, a fraudulent, a tyrannical: ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... not care; more, God's lightnings sear the eyeballs of virtue, tall and fair as angelhood,—this is our agonized estimate betimes, and we are troubled lest, unwittingly and unwillingly, we malign God. To an explanation of this fiery tangle of adversity the drama of Job sets itself. How ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... by the childish simplicity of the little people, and by some unknown forces which I had only to understand to overcome; but there was an altogether new element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks—a something inhuman and malign. Instinctively I loathed them. Before, I had felt as a man might feel who had fallen into a pit: my concern was with the pit and how to get out of it. Now I felt like a beast in a trap, whose enemy would come ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the malignant party, who make nothing of the godly magistrates or their mother church and land, but curse, malign, oppose as much as they could, and are oppressors, monstrous tyrants, mankind beasts, or beastly men. The subject of their cruelty is the godly afflicted man. They eat up all and will not leave the bones, as the ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... held on the Witwatersrand. Every precaution was taken to insure him a good welcome, or, at least, to avoid any of those signs which would indicate that Johannesburg likes President Kruger no more than he likes Johannesburg; and even those who were most conscious of the President's malign influence did all in their power to make the visit a success, believing themselves to be in duty bound to make any effort, even at the sacrifice of personal sympathies and opinions, to turn the current of feeling and to work for a peaceful settlement of the difficulties ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... to take them; but his manner was so threatening and imperious that she again concealed them on her person. As they came out together, Roger, with hat drawn over his eyes, gave them a glance which fixed the malign features of the man and the frightened, guilty visage of the girl on his memory. They regarded him suspiciously, but, as he went on without looking back, they evidently thought him ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... learned Partridge could as well Creep in the dark from leathern cell, And in his fancy fly as far To peep upon a twinkling star. Besides, he could confound the spheres, And set the planets by the ears; To show his skill, he Mars could join To Venus in aspect malign; Then call in Mercury for aid, And cure the wounds that Venus made. Great scholars have in Lucian read, When Philip King of Greece was dead His soul and spirit did divide, And each part took a different side; One rose ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... searched that lovely face to read what malign influence kept her from opening her ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... descendants. They confided in prognostics, and believed in the influence of particular times and seasons; and at Christmastide they derived peculiar pleasure from their belief in the immunity of the season from malign influences—a belief which descended to Elizabethan days, and is referred to ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... one had no reason, no sense. They were baulked in their malign intentions, and this man, Maitre Ranulph Delagarde, was the cause of it—that was all they knew. A stone was thrown at Delagarde as he stood in the doorway, but ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... The ash-strewn cities radiant late with arts Extinct this day; bath, circus, theatre Mosaic-paved; the Roman halls defaced; The Christian altars crushed. That last of wrongs The vanquished punished with malign revenge: Never had British priest to Saxon preached; And when that cry was heard, 'The Saxon King Edwin hath bowed to Christ,' on Cambrian hills Nor man nor woman smiled. They had not lacked The timely warning. From his Kentish shores Augustine stretched to them paternal hands: Later, ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... dost thou dare Malign my husband thus? I have known his life From his own lips, and heard no word ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... the Benmore rink before dinner, and for sure a dance after, rounded off this young lady's normal day during the Simla season. But if pleasure-loving, capricious, and reckless, she scraped through the ordeal of Simla gossip without incurring scandal. She was such a frank, honest girl, that malign tongues might assail her indeed, but ineffectually. And she had given proof that she knew how to take care of herself, although her only protectress was a perfectly inoffensive mother. On the occasion of the Prince of Wales's visit to Lahore, had she not boxed the ears of a ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... fair notice to any malign power that might be waiting to blast him. After a fitting interval, he joined his brother and ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... time for further prognostication; a second warder was at the door, beckoning impatiently, and Richard rose at once. The dull faces of the rest were all raised toward him with a malign aspect; they feared that some good news was come for him, that they were about to lose a companion in misfortune. Only one held out his hand, with a "Good luck to you, young gentleman; though I never see you again, I shall ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... for a fearful portent—a superstition which Cicero also mentions. He dare not sit on a tomb, because it would be assisting at his own funeral. He purifies endlessly his house, saying that Hecate—that is, the moon—has exercised some malign influence on it; and many other purifications he observes, of which I shall only say that they are by their nature plainly, like the last, meant as preservatives against unseen malarias or contagions, possible or impossible. He assists every month with his ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... glasses, as he and the sergeant accompanied Hardcastle to the veranda, while Tyler took charge of the three horses. The fame of Cairns had travelled before him to Rosanna, but none had been prepared for a figure so weird or for a countenance so forbidding and malign. His manners were equally uncouth. He shook his bent head to decline refreshment; he pointedly ignored a generalization of Hardcastle's about the crime; and when he spoke, it was in a gratuitously ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... trusting to time and reflection for a remedy. "The immediate peril," Mr. Buchanan informed the country, "arises from the fact that the long-continued agitation in the free States has at length produced its malign influence on the slaves, and inspired them with vague notions of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar. The feeling of peace at home has given place to apprehensions of servile insurrections, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... made an effort to follow the process by which a weak woman and a weaker man, ignorant of the forces struggling within them and susceptible to malign influences from without, through terrible mistakes and bitter failure, at length reach the heights ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... not like his cousin much, for he used to bother him with bad jokes; but a strange malign instinct made him add ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... middle of the night in the course of his dreams, Je tiens Jean Jacques Rousseau, with extreme vehemence—which words, in spite of the horribly sardonic tone of the dreamer, he interpreted favourably at the time, but which later event proved to have been full of malign significance.[366] (8) Rousseau constantly found Hume eyeing him with a glance of sinister and diabolic import that filled him with an astonishing disquietude, though he did his best to combat it. On one of these occasions he ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... malign of all these dangers today is disregard and disobedience of law. Crime is increasing. Confidence in rigid and speedy justice is decreasing. I am not prepared to believe that this indicates any decay in the moral fiber of the American people. I am not prepared to believe that it indicates an impotence ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... versatility and address. What a baneful and degrading state of things! And how natural that, while it lasts, France should be full of a people without a position, without a calling, who do not know what to do with themselves, but are none the less eager to envy and malign every one who does.... ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... mincemeat for Christmas, when in stalked Mrs. Headley to offer her counsel and aid—but this was lost in a volley of barking from the long-backed, bandy-legged, turnspit dog, which was awaiting its turn at the wheel, and which ran forward, yapping with malign intentions towards the dame's ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and fearful the power of an appetite which cannot only enslave and curse the man over which it gains control, but send its malign influence down to the second and third and fourth generations, sometimes to ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... interest his look had excited in me, and I have observed him more particularly and found out more about him. Sometimes, after a long night's watching, he looks so pale and worn, that one would think the cold moonlight had stricken him with some malign effluence such as it is fabled to send upon those who sleep in it. At such times he seems more like one who has come from a planet farther away from the sun than our earth, than like one of us terrestrial creatures. ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... intemperate and ill-judged speech was instantly reported to Sully, who, rising indignantly from his seat, approached the Queen and audibly informed her that he considered it his duty to remark that, as in order to render her favourable to the demand of his son, M. de Villeroy had not scrupled to malign the Protestants, but had designated them as more dangerous enemies to herself and to the state than those who were labouring to further the interests of Spain, he only entreated her to afford to his denial the same weight as that which she attached to the assertion of the State ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... simulate. But, above all, he exulted in that supreme stroke of the imagination given by the second mate when, at parting, he said he believed he would go down and sleep on board the vessel. In view of this, the State's Prison theory almost appeared a malign and ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... Character is the stuff that she works in, and she deals with it more subtly than Thackeray. With him the tragedy is produced by the pressure of society and its false standards upon the individual; with her, by the malign influence of individuals upon one another. She watches "the stealthy convergence of human fates," the intersection at various angles of the planes of character, the power {279} that the lower nature has to thwart, stupefy, or corrupt the higher, which has become entangled ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... disastrous influences, the teachings of "free love;" the baneful influence of spiritualism, so called; the fascinations of the demi-monde; the poverty of thousands of women who, but for desperate temptations, would be pure—all these malign influences are sapping the foundations of the family state. Meantime, many intelligent and benevolent persons imagine that the grand remedy for the heavy evils that oppress our sex is to introduce woman to political power and office, ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... from Virgil to Milton, from Scott to Moliere, who attains success. When you are accused of being a plagiarist, and shewn up in double columns, you may be pretty sure that all this counsel has been wasted on you, and that you have failed to fail, after all. Otherwise nobody would envy and malign you, and garble your book, and print quotations from it which you did not write, all in the sacred cause ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... your hand was laid upon mine 'Twas in painful dread that I grasped it, For some hesitation malign, Made tremble the ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... found you, the acknowledged queen of American actresses, I would do it. But I am helpless. I shall not speak or write to you again till I can come with some gift in my hand—some recompense for your losses through me. I have been a malign influence in your life. I am in mad despair when I think of you playing to cold and empty houses. I am going back to the West to do sash factories and wheat elevators; these are my metier. You are the one to grant pardon; I am the malefactor. I am taking myself out of your world. ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... those things I was to escape at last unhelped, but I want you to understand particularly these phases through which I passed; it falls to many and it may fall to you to pass through such a period of darkness and malign obsession. Make the groove only a little deeper, a little more unclimbable, make the temperament a little less sanguine, and suicide stares you in the face. And things worse than suicide, that suicide of self-respect which turns ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... flows Of neutrals, kill-times, sleeps, indifferencies. So twixt each morn and night rise salient heaps: Some cross with but a zigzag, jaded pace From meal to meal: some with convulsive leaps Shake the green tussocks of malign disgrace: And some advance by system and deep art O'er vantages of wealth, place, learning, tact. But thou within thyself, dear manifold heart, Dost bind all epochs in one dainty Fact. Oh, sweet, my pretty sum of history, I leapt the breadth of Time ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... broke the charm of perfect stillness. Ever and anon they passed under the lee of some island, and the heavy air grew full of idle night-sweetness; the waning moon with all its sad and alien power hung low,—dun, malign, and distant, a coppery blotch on the rich darkness of heaven. They floated slowly, still; now and then she dipped a hand into the cool current; now and then he drew in his oars, and, bending forward, dipped his hand with hers. The stars retreated in a pallid veil that dimmed ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... kinds of sour and biting foods and sharp mineral waters, which are the sworn enemies of any sebaceous condition. And now that she was nineteen, almost at the further boundary of the marrying age, and slimmer than ever before, he rejoiced greatly, for he had accomplished his deep and malign purpose, and laid a heavy burden of sorrow ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... that the trial was altogether an absurdity. The People's Banner, setting at defiance with an admirable audacity all the facts as given in the Commissioners' report, declared that there was not one tittle of evidence against Mr. Browborough, and hinted that the trial had been got up by the malign influence of that doer of all evil, Phineas Finn. But men who knew better what was going on in the world than did Mr. Quintus Slide, were well aware that such assertions as these were both unavailing and unnecessary. Mr. Browborough was believed to be quite safe; but ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... as well as faults; perhaps more of the latter than the former; but there were some mollifying circumstances to be taken into the account in the summing up of his character. His natural love of money had been stimulated and intensified by the malign influence of his wife. She was miserly when he married her. To keep what she had, and get what she could, was her ruling passion; besides which she had a passion for ruling. And often, when her husband's gentler ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... there rose to public prominence in the western country a man whose influence upon it was destined to be malign in intention rather than in actual fact. James Wilkinson, by birth a Marylander, came to Kentucky in 1784. He had done his duty respectably as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, for he possessed sufficient courage and capacity to ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... of the winds and waves, and attends specially on births. In one story, however, he appears rather in the character of a morose wood-demon with very undesirable family connections than as a god. This is very probably due to missionary efforts to malign his character and discredit his worship. However, there is a class of magicians who are called Wind-sorcerers, and witches often invoke the aid of the Mother of ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... not go to bed as soon as the evening's work was over, as she would have done at ordinary times. To counteract the malign spell which she imagined poor Eustacia to be working, the boy's mother busied herself with a ghastly invention of superstition, calculated to bring powerlessness, atrophy, and annihilation on any human being against ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... two explorers personally appealed to the Court of France; but there the monopolists were all-powerful, and justice was denied. They tried to induce some of the fishing fleet off Cape Breton to venture to the North Sea; but there the monopolists' malign influence was again felt. They were accused of having broken the laws of Quebec. Zechariah Gillam, a sea captain of Boston, who chanced to be at Port Royal, offered them his vessel for a voyage to Hudson Bay; but when the {114} doughty captain came to ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... burst of malign laughter she slammed her door, and from a window sideways watched ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... been at some pains to attach to themselves. The sultan, therefore, could still count on general support from the population of his empire's heart, and had at his disposal the resources of a country which no administration, however improvident or malign, has ever been ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... Then it wasn't—" A light of malign intelligence shone in his eyes. "Well, I haven't got anything against ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... Mephistopheles, there are a few independent themes which portray the malign influence of the spirit of Evil—the movement is marked Allegro vivace ironico!—but most of the material is a transformation of the Faust themes which are here burlesqued, parodied; as if all the noble aspirations of ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... Vivian's envenomed spirit breathed and moved. Without the influence of such a home, if I had succeeded in the conduct that probity enjoined towards those in whose house I was a trusted guest, I do not think I could have resisted the contagion of that malign and morbid bitterness against fate and the world which love, thwarted by fortune, is too inclined of itself to conceive, and in the expression of which Vivian was not without the eloquence that belongs to earnestness, whether in truth or falsehood. But, somehow ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... de Saturno con Marte tan desvaratado en costa brava, adopting de Lollis's text following the suggestion of the contemporary Italian translation. According to the doctrines of astrology the influence of Saturn was malign. "When Saturn is in the first degree of Aries, and any other Planet in the first degree of Libra, they being now an hundred and eighty degrees each from other, are said to be in Opposition: A bad Aspect." William Lilly, Christian Astrology ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... they gleamed and shone in the sun like living gems; of rich and luscious fruits to be had for the mere trouble of plucking; of fireflies spangling the velvet darkness with their fairy lamps; and of the gentle Indians who—at least when not brought under the malign influence of the cruel Spaniard—regarded white men as gods; all these appealed with singular force and fascination to Stukely, who sat listening breathlessly and with glowing eyes to everything that the two ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... "a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign his opponents and to glorify himself,"—one of the most exaggerated and ridiculous charges that was ever made against a public man of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... idlers in a pot-house malign the woman out of whose land they get the very crust they eat. (covers her face with her hands and sits on garden seat) How hard! ...
— The Squire - An Original Comedy in Three Acts • Arthur W. Pinero |
