"Weakling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to divert it from the path of destiny into so futile an effort as hooking up a mere bit of fuss, feathers and fallals. You might just as well hitch up a pair of thoroughbred elephants to a milk wagon. It will do, as Adam says, for the Mollycoddle and the meticulous weakling, but never for a real man worthy of the name. But after all that is no reason why woman should be shorn of one of her chief glories, and I totally disagree with him in his condemnation of all clothes just because some of them are conceived in foolishness. Dresses can be made to button up ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... reading can give, and never receive the great benefit that is ours for the taking. If we let our arms rest idle for a long time, they become weak and useless; if a boy takes no exercise he cannot expect to be a strong man. So, if he reads nothing that makes him exert his mind, he becomes a weakling in intellect and never feels the pure delight that the man has who can read in a masterful ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... way which amounted to barbarous ferocity. Sons, being of the privileged side of humanity, might occasionally disobey with impunity, but woe to the poor girl who dared set up a will of her own. A man who could not compel obedience from his daughter was looked upon as a poor weakling, and contempt was his portion in the eyes of his fellow-men—in the eyes of his fellow-brutes, I should like ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... to figure it out after this manner, but there must be considerable chance that matters would not work so smoothly. For one thing it must be considered that Oswald Kearns was no weakling, but a more or less athletic figure, accustomed to feats of strength and agility beyond the measure of an ordinary man. Then, too, he was known to be irrational, even to the length of being considered ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... can, in the telling, be equally life-like and equally alluring to the reader. But what of the writer? Among his literary family is there not one nearer his heart than all the rest—his dream-child? It may be the stoutest of the breed or it may be the weakling; it may be the first-born, it often is the Benjamin. Fathers in the flesh know this secret tenderness. Many a child and many a book is brooded over with a special love even before its birth.—Loved thus, for no grace or merit of its own, this ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... fought him, as any jungle she might fight, with tooth and nail. The man found her no easy prey. In that slender, young body, beneath the rounded curves and the fine, soft skin, lay the muscles of a young lioness. But Malbihn was no weakling. His character and appearance were brutal, nor did they belie his brawn. He was of giant stature and of giant strength. Slowly he forced the girl back upon the ground, striking her in the face when she hurt him badly either with teeth or nails. Meriem ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... beat of a drum and the shouts of the crowd, rising and falling with the wind, I felt a little sad, that the age, in its advancing refinement, is setting itself against these old-fashioned merry-makings, and shrinking like a weakling from all out-of-doors festivals, on the plea of their being disorderly, but in reality because they are believed to be vulgar. They come down to us from rough old days; but they are relics of a time when life, if rough, was at least kind and hearty. We admire that life on the stage, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... weakling—and never have been. My experience in the hard life of the inner world has turned my thews to steel. Even such giants as Ghak the Hairy One have praised my strength; but to it is added another ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in one who should be strong. Even bad men he admires, if they are strong—not for their badness, but for their strength. Mistaken men he loves in spite of their mistakes—if only they be not weaklings. There is no place anywhere in the Dean's philosophy of life for a weakling. I heard him tell a man once—nor shall I ever forget it—"You had better die like a man, sir, than live like a ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... himself no concern about power; he prefers a mean and low estate, and also denies himself many pleasures dear to nature to avoid losing the money which he has gained. But at this rate he does not even attain to independence—a weakling void of strength, vexed by distresses, mean and despised, and buried in obscurity. He, again, who thirsts alone for power squanders his wealth, despises pleasure, and thinks fame and rank alike worthless ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... cutting your way through them, were I not with you. Yet this is not beyond remedy. I had sincerely hoped to prove of service when I usurped the slave's place in the boat; instead, I am an encumbrance, a weakling whom you must protect at the risk of your own lives. Fortunately it is not yet too late to leave you free; it cannot be many miles back to New Orleans, and the current would bear me swiftly downward. I have loyal friends in the town to hide the daughter of Lafreniere, ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... face—a typical soldier of the United States Army, and such as he, the prisoner inside might have become in time. Our house is separated from the guardhouse by a little park only, and I could plainly see the whole thing—the strong man and the weakling. ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... which in another might perhaps have been lulled by the news of her death, began to burn on my conscience with greater intensity than ever. I abused myself as a coward, a weakling, an adulterer, for something that no man on earth would ever have imputed to me ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... type, that! He must be pretty strong!" he thought, with the genuine admiration of the weakling for the athlete. In fact, he began to speak to Sanine but the latter, leaning against the window- sill, was looking out at the garden. Volochine stopped short; the very sound of his ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... alive in his soul. As long as the Swede spoke, he could not help wavering between repugnance and admiration, and he kept asking himself whether this man was really the sort of person that Arthur Stoss had described him to be, no gentleman, a weakling, ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... the face of the man rescued from a living grave. He dashed them away impatiently with a shaking hand. "I used to be as game as other men, young man, and now you see what a weakling I am. Don't judge me too hard. Happiness is a harder thing to stand than pain or grief. They've tried to break my spirit many a time and they couldn't, but you've done it now ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... conflicting emotions of Locke, Eva, Paul, and Zita was being enacted the two partners in the library were disputing hot and heavy. As they argued, almost it seemed as if Balcom's very face limned his thoughts—that he desired Brent out of the way, as a weakling in whom he had discovered some traces of conscience which, to Balcom, ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... portals With the hands and words of magic; But his hands had lost their cunning, And his magic gone to others. Thereupon the ancient minstrel Quick returning, heavy-hearted, To his native halls and hamlets, Thus addressed his brother-heroes: "Woman, he without his weapons, With no implements, a weakling! Sun and Moon have I discovered, But I could not force the Portals Leading to their rocky cavern In the copper bearing mountain. Spake the reckless Lemminkainen "O thou ancient Wainamoinen, Why was I not taken with thee To become, thy war-companion? Would have been of goodly service, Would ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... should take mine, and he said the dearest things a man could say to a woman—how the stress of the situation last night had forced from him an avowal of his love for me. "I never meant to tell you, my sweet lady," he said. "I am no weakling, I hope, to go snivelling over what is not for me; and when I comprehended you were married, on the Lusitania, I just faced up the situation and vowed ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... as well as he was able, but to no avail. Timotheus was simple and he was clumsy, but he was no weakling. Maguffin led the horse back into the stable, spread his litter, and replaced the bridle on the wall. Then he came out quite unruffled, and asked Timotheus if he would like him to use his new boots on the prisoner, ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... have sent her servants in our pain, If she have fought with Death and dulled his sword, If she have given back our sick again And to the breast the weakling lips restored, Is it a little thing that she has wrought? Then Life and Death and Motherhood ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... his efforts, he never produces anything but a half-dead child. The talented actor animates, nurses, consolidates, fortifies and clothes it, suggests the proper gestures and attitudes, infuses his own health and strength into this weakling, gives it blood and, so to speak, makes it live. The playwright contributes the soul, it is true; but, the soul being intangible, it is only a pitiable gift so far as the dramatic art ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... die at sea sometime, anyhow. Well, suppose they did squeeze his gullet up there on a scaffold! He would be dying like a sailor with good boards under his feet. And they would know they were garroting a man, and not a weakling! ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... matter," he urged. "You are making me out a miserable weakling indeed when you think I ambled off toward perdition just because you dared me ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... intense, and he walked the streets with pallid face and downcast eyes. The coarser-grained men with whom he was thrown in contact had no conception of the mental tortures he suffered, and their rude jests stung him to the quick. He despised himself as a weakling and a coward, but he did not get more than a transient victory over his enemy. The spark had struck a sensitive organization, and the fire of hell, smothered for the time, would blaze out again. He was ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... tilth and habits of the spot, What every region yields, and what denies. Here blithelier springs the corn, and here the grape, There earth is green with tender growth of trees And grass unbidden. See how from Tmolus comes The saffron's fragrance, ivory from Ind, From Saba's weakling sons their frankincense, Iron from the naked Chalybs, castor rank From Pontus, from Epirus the prize-palms O' the mares of Elis. Such the eternal bond And such the laws by Nature's hand imposed On clime and clime, e'er since the primal dawn When old Deucalion on the unpeopled ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... God! for three long years I have been looking forward to his return as the time of vengeance and retribution, and now that son is here, and what do I find in him? A son weakly obedient to his father, a submissive admirer of Count Schwarzenberg, a weakling who longs not at all for honor and influence, who is glad that he has not to govern and work, but that others must govern and work for him! Alas! I am a poor mother, and much to be pitied, for in vain have I hoped that my son would assist me ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... whether to demand a full pardon or only a mild sentence for the man who had wounded the "King of kings," the son of the sovereign. Moreover, the quiet Caesarion, still subject to his tutor, had not understood how to win the favour of the Ephebi. The weakling never appeared in the Palaestra, which even the great Mark Antony did not disdain to visit. The latter had more than once given the youths assembled there proofs of his giant strength, and his son Antyllus also frequently shared their exercises. Dion had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Youth a slap in the face. They were so earnest, these boys, they wanted so much to go. "I am sixteen but large for my age," said one; and another, "Seventeen but large and healthy." "I am as strong at least as the average boy of my size," said an evident weakling. "Not afraid of any kind of work," was what many said, while one in particular, to lure me no doubt by inexpensiveness, wrote: "I can pay my way to the Pacific coast, so that part would probably be acceptable to you." "Going around ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... general run of husbands," said Irene, thinking at the same time how immeasurably superior Mr. Emerson was to this weakling, and despising him in her heart for submitting to be ruled by a woman. Thus nature and true perception spoke in her, even while she was seeking to blind herself ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... river-bank, lived under the care of experienced parents ever ready and resolute in their defence, and became as shy and furtive as the wood-mice dwelling in the hollows of the hedge beside the pond, they were not always favoured by fortune. The weakling of the family died of disease; another of the youngsters, foraging alone in the wood, was killed by a bloodthirsty weasel; while a third, diving to pick up a root of water-weed, was caught by the neck in the fork of a submerged ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fate—it was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of the weakling, from "resignation"... There was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast—for we had not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... I'm a weakling because I come from off-world. Realize though, that this is also my strength. I can see things that are hidden from you by long association. You know, the old business of not being able to see the forest for the trees in the way." Kerk nodded ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... of six feet; but his shoulders—naturally well set—sagged with the weariness of excessive physical indulgence; while the sunken chest, the emaciated limbs, and the dejected posture of his misused body made him in appearance, at least, a wretched weakling. His clothing—of good material and well tailored—was disgustingly soiled and neglected;—the shoes thickly coated with dried mud, and the once-white shirt, slovenly unfastened at the throat, ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... are born to obey, to be "hewers of wood and drawers of water." The Slav is born a slave to be controlled by the Germans. The Serbian is born a serf to be controlled by the Austrians. The Bohemian is an outcast. The Pole is a drunkard. The Celt is a weakling. The Anglo-Saxon is a mercenary. The Russian is a Tatar ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... do not think it is to indulge myself that I manage Master Harry in this peculiar fashion," he said. "The fact is, he is a very peculiar child, and may turn out a genius or a weakling, just as he is managed. At least so it appears to me at present. May I ask where you left the work ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... that the Assyrian is not a mere weakling: he can play his part well enough if he gets a good chance. It needs an Archic and Strategic Man to ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... Violante had been wedded, in the flower of her youth, to an Advocate of the Parlement, a man of a harsh temper and sorely set on the arraignment and punishing of unfortunate prisoners. For the rest, he was of sickly habit and a weakling, of such a sort he seemed more fit to give pain to folks outside his doors than pleasure to his wife within. The old fellow thought more of his blue bags than of his better half, though these were far otherwise shapen, being bulgy and fat and formless. But the ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... Drunkard and weakling as he was, Selim had his ambitions. He wished to signalise his reign by some great conquest, such as had added lustre to the rule of his father; and in consequence he laid claim to the island of Cyprus, then belonging to Venice, The Venetians, ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... man of the people he saw and found him shouting, him he drave with his sceptre and chode him with loud words: "Good sir, sit still and hearken to the words of others that are thy betters; but thou art no warrior, and a weakling, never reckoned whether in battle or in council. In no wise can we Achaians all be kings here. A multitude of masters is no good thing; let there be one master, one king, to whom the son of crooked-counselling Kronos hath granted ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... ironically? What plea does the author make for all childhood? Does the portrait of the child seem real or exaggerated? Does the author place the blame for such conditions as made this child an unhappy weakling? Compare this portrait ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... their God. There is no God. There is nature. Up to the place where man puts on trousers it's a battle of thews and teeth. And nature never intended pants to mark the line where she changes the order of things. And the servile, weakling, groveling, charitable, cowardly philosophy of Christ—it doesn't fool me, Henry. I'm a pagan and I want the advantage of all the force, all the power, that nature gave me, to live life as a dangerous, exhilarating experience. I shall live life to the full—live it hard—live ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... days in Germany the elector was always an archbishop. Our bishops now are a weakling lot. With no army to back their edicts the people smile at their proclamations, try on their shovel hats, and laugh at their gaiters. Or if they be Methodist bishops, who are only make-believe bishops, having slipped the cable that bound ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... friends at court. In his two legitimate sons, Adler and Max (he has a host of illegitimate ones), the family temperament is modified, though in Max, who perpetuates the race, the modification is not radical. Adler is a weakling of enormous vanity, silent and moody, and addicted to the pleasures of the table. Max, on the other hand, is a man of inexhaustible vitality, violent like his father, but possessed of a gift of speech and a tremendous voice ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... could get off this most accursed vessel of thine. Or if you would wish to have your turn, then I would thank you if you would lend me a hand over the side, for indeed I am but a useless weight upon your deck. Little did I think that Samkin Aylward could be turned into a weakling by an hour of salt water. Alas the day that ever my foot wandered from the ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and famished and mean of mind and wretched, a weakling in body and a dullard in soul; and though he lay there emaciated and gasping, a skeleton almost, moveless, half given over to dust and decay—what did ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... Aruna had been goaded to the brink of surrender; till her brother grew impatient and spurned her as a weakling. Yet her ordeal had been sharper than his own. For him, mere moral suasion and threats of ostracism. For her, the immemorial methods of the Inside; forbidden by Sir Lakshman, but secretly applied, when flagrant obstinacy demanded drastic measures. ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... move away. They depended on him. Unless he could save it their fight was lost. To her he was a prophet of the better civilization that would some day rise on the ruins of an Individualism grown topheavy. But he was neither a dreamer nor a weakling. His idealism was sane and practical, and he would fight to the last ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... tough, was very evil. He sneered. He stole. He bullied. He was a drunkard and a person without cleanliness of speech. Tim, the hatter, was a loud-talking weakling, under Pete's domination. Tim wore a dirty rubber collar without a tie, and his soul was ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... saloons of the little villages and amused them selves by running amuck and shooting up the town. These men, and indeed nearly all of the pioneers, held the man from the civilized East, the "tenderfoot," in scorn. They took it for granted that he was a weakling, that he had soft ideas of life and was stuck-up or affected. Now Roosevelt saw that in order to win their trust and respect, he must show himself equal to their tasks, a true comrade, who accepted their code of courage and honor. The fact that he wore spectacles ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... the Tlahuicos, marrying among themselves, had greatly increased in numbers; and so far from remaining a weakling race, the had become, by reason of their frugal mode of living and of the wholesome, hearty labor in which they constantly were engaged, exceptionally hale and strong; the weak and crippled among them being mainly those who each year, because of such infirmities, were added ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... the right of succession, and the disadvantage and danger of having a tyrant or a weakling rule, just because he happened to be the son of the previous ruler, led men to elect their rulers. There are to-day states like Russia where the hereditary monarch is the ruler: states like the United States where all rulers are elected by the people; and states like ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... The dull, meek droning of a drab-coat seer; Leaving the sport of Presidents and Kings, Where men for dice each titled gambler flings, To meet alternate on the Seine and Thames, For tea and gossip, like old country dames No! let the cravens plead the weakling's cant, Let Cobden cipher, and let Vincent rant, Let Sturge preach peace to democratic throngs, And Burritt, stammering through his hundred tongues, Repeat, in all, his ghostly lessons o'er, Timed to the pauses of the battery's ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... sat glaring at the table, the smoke of his pipe clouding the still air of the neat kitchen. He knew he was facing a critical moment in their lives. He saw dimly that he had, for his own interests, gone a shade too far. Eve was not a weakling, she was a woman of distinct character, and even in his dull, besotted way he detected at last that note of rebellion underlying her appeal. Suddenly he looked up and smiled. But it was not altogether a pleasant smile. It was against his inclination, and was ready to vanish ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... performed so suddenly, so adroitly, it made the Mexican such a weakling, so like a tumbled tenpin, that the shrill jabbering hushed. Gale knew this ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... would indifferently laugh off the idea that ownership of a dog could mean returned health to her little son. Upon Frank Wiley III Miss Beaver felt no reliance could be placed; he was an uxorious weakling. Her unfounded hope rested on old Mr. Wiley alone; old Mr. Wiley whose firm mouth and implacable dark eyes made her feel that he, and he alone, held the key to the situation. That he had realized young Frank's need and had filled it, albeit in secret, gave her ...
— Old Mr. Wiley • Fanny Greye La Spina
... respects. In the first place, he should have chosen his doctor. A good, brisk, confident man who 'knows his own mind' is the sort of person who would have suited him; a man who would have jumped at a diagnosis and stuck to it; or else an ignorant weakling of alcoholic tendencies. It was shockingly bad luck to run against a cautious scientific practitioner like my learned friend. Then, of course, all this secrecy was sheer tomfoolery, exactly calculated to put a careful man on ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... know I can never be anything to you but a sort of puling weakling, who must be nursed, and petted, and cared for. I know," he went on, his words coming with a rush in the height of his protesting passion, "if your thoughts, your secret thoughts and feelings, were put into words, I know ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... I would urge laymen like myself to shun that weak-kneed manikin, the low proteid diet, and unite with me in a long strong pull to get him and others like him out of the rut in which that sorry weakling ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... nor the tragedy of Pisa, hinder their advent, for I shall see Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici proclaimed Gonfaloniere of the city. Then they will troop by more splendid than princes, the universal bankers, lords of Florence: Cosimo the hard old man, Pater Patriae, the greatest of his race; Piero, the weakling; Lorenzo il Magnifico, tyrant and artist; and over his shoulder I shall see the devilish, sensual face of Savonarola. And there will go by Giuliano, the lover of Simonetta; Piero the exile; Giovanni the mighty pope, Leo X; Giulio the son of Guiliano, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... leaping. After they had enjoyed looking at the games, Laodamas, a son of Alkinoos, said to his friends: "Let us ask the stranger to take part in the games. His strong arms and legs and powerful neck show that he is no weakling. Nor has he lost his youthful vigor after all his hardships, although nothing tires a man so much as being tossed ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... competition from which only the cleanest and sweetest and best come forth first. She saw the battle indeed, but did not understand the meaning of it any more than the rest of the world which, in the words of the weakling Barren, beneath the emblems of a false humanity, keeps its weeds under hot-house glasses and, out of mercy to futile individuals, does terribly wrong its communities. Our cleansing processes are only valuable so far as they go hand in ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... character, therefore, is one of strength and depth. Even now no Jew in fiction is ever a weakling or a trifler. In whatever light he is presented, a Shylock of Shakespeare, an Isaac of Scott, a Nathan of Lessing, a Sidonia of Disraeli—revengeful, avaricious, bigoted, benevolent, magnificent, talented—he is always a character of striking power and intensity. The ancient type of ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... squalled, the melancholy noises of the street, were passed unheeded by. His distracted powers rallied home; he was concentrate, his own man again, the hero of his musing mind. For, like all weak men of a vivid fancy, he was constantly framing dramas of which he was the towering lord. The weakling who never "downed" men in reality was always "downing" them in thought. His imaginary triumphs consoled him for his actual rebuffs. As he walked in a tipsy dream, he was "standing up" to somebody, ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... time and in the right frame of mind man is capable of stoic endurances that excite wonder and admiration. Mr Pickering was no weakling. He had once upset his automobile in a ditch, and had waited for twenty minutes until help came to relieve a broken arm, and he had done it without a murmur. But on the present occasion there was a difference. His mind was not adjusted for the occurrence. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... quiet-looking brown animal was evidently on the best of terms with Poppet. By daylight Tibble looked even more sallow, lean, and sickly, and Stephen could not help saying to the serving-man nearest to him, "Can such a weakling verily be ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... more dangerous to the unwary because they are few and unexpected, and no one can tell where they lie, just below the surface. Many a brave enterprise has gone to pieces upon the stupid, unforeseen obstinacy of a despised weakling. ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... beloved!" replied Jean-Christophe. "Forgive me, but your weakling fear enrages me. How can you ask whether I shall cease to love you! For me to live is to love you. Death is powerless against my love. You yourself could do nothing if you wished to destroy it. Even if you betrayed me, even if you rent my heart, I should die with a blessing upon you for the ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... this stone the Weakling. The boy you had last summer couldn't lift it high enough to let the damp ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... no scruples, and preached none. He preached only revolt, and in that revolt defiance of all existing laws. He had no religion; Christ to him was a pitiful weakling, a historic victim of the same system that still crucified those who fought the established order. In his new world there would be no churches and no laws. He advocated bloodshed, arson, sabotage of all sorts, as a means ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... stuttered utterance, tremulous waiting, minor wailing! The mind and the soul must be as quick and definite and certain as the body. Nor was the spirit made alone for immortal dreaming. Like the flesh, it must strive and toil. It must be workaday as well as idle day. She could understand a weakling singing sweetly and even greatly, and in so far she could love him for his sweetness and greatness; but her love would have fuller measure were he strong of body as well. She believed she was just. She gave the flesh ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... I am! Tarrano the weakling!" He leaped from the couch and began pacing the room. "Tarrano the weakling! To what depths ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... young. Her latest birth, This weakling man, my craft shall girth With cunning strength. Him I will take, And in stern arts my scholar make. This smoking reed, in which hold The empyrean spark, shall mould Rock and hard steel to use of man: He shall be as a god to plan And forge all things to his desire ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... what lengths would he not go for her sake? Sure of winning her love, yes, he would become great, rise purified from the slough of loose living. He had never killed a man dishonorably; he had won his duels by strength and dexterity alone. He had never taken an advantage of a weakling; for many a man had insulted him and still walked the earth, suffering only the slight inconvenience of a bandaged arm or a tender cheek, and a fortnight or so in bed. Conde had once said of him ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... the man. "Dammit! Then come in!" And to this invitation he added blasphemy in Peter's own tongue that made his heart turn sour. It was the useless, raving blasphemy of a weakling. It was the man as Peter had known him of old. But a little worse. He still wore what remained of his Marconi uniform, tattered, grease-stained coat and trousers, with the ragged white and blue emblems of the steamship line by which he had been employed before ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... while he watched the guide making preparations for the mountain burial, pictured the poor weakling tramping for hundreds of miles through rugged forest-land, doubtless with aching knee-joints and feet, that he might make upon his own skin justice for the skins which he had stolen, and so, in the only way he knew, square things with his wronged chum. And the city man thought, ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... can not be doone without great perill and daunger / that such a weakling shuld vse an vnfaithfull Master / I thincke that he shuld abstayn ...
— A Treatise of the Cohabitation Of the Faithful with the Unfaithful • Peter Martyr
... linguistic poverty. If we lack the ability to bend words to our use, it is from laziness, not from scruple. We desire to speak competently, but without affectation. We know that if our diction rises to this dual standard, it silently distinguishes us from the sluggard, the weakling, and the upstart. For such diction is not to be had on sudden notice, like a tailor-made suit. Nor can it, like such a suit, deceive anybody as to our true status. A man's utterance reveals what he is. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... fit to rule. It granted intelligence where there was no intelligence. It presumed ability where there was not the slightest trace of any. It gave the idiot the same political standing as the wise man, the crackpot the same political opportunity as the man of well-grounded common sense, the weakling the same voice as the strong man. It was government by ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... inquiringly toward Cavendish, but the survey brought with it no encouragement. The man meant well, no doubt, and would fight valiantly on occasion; he was no coward, no weakling—equally clear his was not the stuff from which leaders are made. There was uncertainty in his eyes, a lack of force in his face which told the story. Whatever was decided upon, or accomplished, must be by her volition; she could trust him to obey, but that was all. Her body straightened ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... ever hear him rail upon any of these young men that lean on rails and roll their eyes under ladies' windows?" said the Prince. "Old Leopold Dessauer is even now no weakling. I warrant he could draw a good sword yet upon occasion. Anything more lovely than his riposte ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... other condemned men in the chamber. Since he had been there Murray had seen three taken out to their fate; one gone mad and fighting like a wolf caught in a trap; one, no less mad, offering up a sanctimonious lip-service to Heaven; the third, a weakling, collapsed and strapped to a board. He wondered with what credit to himself his own heart, foot, and face would meet his punishment; for this was his evening. He thought it ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... to the cradle as soon as my cousin was out of sight. Cold, deadly fury possessed and filled me, casting out fear of consequences and routing the weakling conscience engendered and nourished by parental counsel. I plucked Rozillah from her downy bed and bore her into the air, cuffing her polished red cheeks soundly on the way. Then I stripped off her gay raiment ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... meanest kind of a thief I've ever known. I've read your story in the newspaper, and so has the old man who saved your rotten life. We know you for the lying braggart that you are. You made yourself out a hero when you were a weakling ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... England (1307-1327), son of the preceding; was first Prince of Wales, being born at Carnarvon; being a weakling was governed by favourites, Gaveston and the Spencers, whose influence, as foreigners and unpatriotic, offended the barons, who rose against him; in 1314 Scotland rose in arms under Bruce, and an ill-fated expedition under him ended in the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... continued the shrewd Hugh, well knowing that by making an individual appeal he would be more apt to receive a favorable response, because it goes against the average boy's pride to be accounted a weakling, or one addicted to believing old wives' fairy stories of goblins, ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... six in the brood. Five were hardy little fellows that made the water boil behind them as they scurried across the lake. But the sixth was a weakling. He had been hurt, by a hawk perhaps, or a big trout, or a mink; or he had swallowed a bone; or maybe he was just a weak little fellow with no accounting for it. Whenever the brood were startled, he struggled ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... to sacrifice their own lives, if need be, for their country's sake, they demanded equal willingness of sacrifice from every officer and man under their authority, having no mercy whatever for the slacker or the weakling. ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... Here as a weakling in irons, Here as a weanling in bands, As a prey that the stake-net environs, Our life that we looked for stands; And the man-child naked and dear, Democracy, turns on us here Eyes ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... nought but a mean, pitiful blackguard? You, the trusted agent of this poor, misused gentleman, are you not planning in your black heart how you shall rob him of that which, if he is a man at all, must be more to him than his liberty, or even his honour? Shame on you for a miserable weakling! Have done with these philanderings and keep your covenants like a gentleman—or, at least, an ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... lived. They christened him Josiah, and he took for surname the maiden name of his mother, Bonnithorne. He was a weakling, and had no love of boyish sports; but he excelled in scholarship. In spite of these tendencies, he was apprenticed to a butcher when the time came to remove him from school. An accident transferred him to the office of a solicitor, and he was articled. Ten years later he succeeded to ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... declaring this to be, in his case, a silly waste of effort. Such an attitude very naturally aroused resentment among the other men; it was not long before they began to grumble at the liberty allowed this headstrong weakling. But upon the occasion of the very first fight this ill-will disappeared as if by magic, for, although Branch deliberately disobeyed orders, he nevertheless displayed such amazing audacity in the face of the enemy, ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... before it has seemed to him that he has heard the voice of mankind's arch-enemy speaking with Saxham's mouth, he discerns at this moment, reflected in Saxham's, the face of the primal murderer. And being, as well as a sincere and simple-hearted clergyman, something of a weakling, he ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... to understand. He has never been willing to admit that I am a weakling, and refuses to see that my days are numbered in Woodford. I've been trying to get up courage enough to write him about myself, but I can't do it—yet." And then, as if fearing he had said too much, he added: "But don't say anything to ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... notions of independence, they suffered from famine, Indians, and yellow fever. They finally repurchased their lands, and upon the cessation of the border war gained some strength; but Gallipolis was never more than a weakling until Americans and Germans came in and put it ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... times, when no Lord Ashley had as yet arisen to open the door of the workman's prison-house and set the children free, this poor child had been shut up from six in the morning till six at night in the fetid atmosphere of a cotton-mill. God knows what the economic value of such a weakling's labour may have been! One would think that a South Carolina planter would have been wiser than to work his "stock" at such an age. Be this as it may, my friend had passed through this terrible apprenticeship to toil—always hungry, always tired; and had not only survived it, but emerged from it ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... an undersized man, a weakling, and likely to break down and give trouble anyway. His ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... the case of some grave and ponderous weakling, who has nothing really in him, and yet who creaks, and groans, and labors, and toils, to get under way, until our sympathy with his painful effort leads us so to rejoice over his final delivery that we have lost all power or disposition ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... event, Edgar, act as your conscience dictates. There is always much to be said for both sides of any question, and it cannot but be so in this. I wish to lay no stress on you in any way. You cannot make a good monk out of a man who longs to be a man-at-arms, nor a warrior of a weakling who longs for the ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... boots fit to tramp miry country roads. With her fresh complexion and red hair, and a large frame instinct with vitality, she looked aggressively healthy, and Lambert with his failing life felt quite a weakling beside ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... tribe whose immemorial custom it is that the women do all the work, the Siwash girl was strong as an ox, and nearly as bovine in temperament and movements. She could lift with ease a weight that taxed Stella's strength, and Stella Benton was no weakling, either. It was therefore a part of Katy's routine to keep water pails filled from the creek and the wood box supplied, in addition to washing dishes and carrying food to the table. Katy slighted these various tasks occasionally. She needed oversight, continual admonition, to get any ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... His heart beat so violently that the veins in his throat swelled and threatened to burst. But he was no weakling. He summoned all his will. He must act, and act ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... was his niece Mariana, another Austrian archduchess, but this marriage was a vain hope so far as his earthly happiness was concerned. The wished-for son was born, and duly christened Charles, but he was ever a weakling; and when the father died in 1665, preceding Maria de Agreda to the tomb by a few months only, the government was left in charge of Mariana as regent, and all Spain was soon in a turmoil as the result of the countless intrigues which were now being begun by foreign powers who hoped to dominate ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... molest this camp will be molested in his turn, I promise you," laughed Harry. "I'm no weakling, so run right along, Holmesy. Even if serious trouble should arise, I ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... her type never could have been his wife, and that, in the second place, it was not the man who was to blame, nor the woman so much, as Sharpe himself. Indeed, Bobby somehow gained the impression that the others flouted and despised Sharpe and held him as a weakling. ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... Delights in talking of her only son, My gallant father, long since dead and gone. 'Ah, but he was the lad!' She says, and sighs, and looks at me askance. How well I read the meaning of that glance - 'Poor son of such a dad; Poor weakling, dull and sad.' I could, but would not tell her bitter truth About ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... little virtue in what I do, since on the whole I prefer that prospect and am willing to take the risk of being hurried from an evil world. Hearken," he added, with a change of tone and gesture. "You think me a fool and a weakling; a dreamer also, you, the clear-eyed, hard-brained stateswoman who look to the glittering gain of the moment for which you are ready to pay in blood, and guess nothing of what lies beyond. I am none of these things, except, perchance, ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... haughtily but in his heart he carried an odd misgiving that burned and spread like a slow fire, consuming his pride. Scott had withstood him, Scott the weakling, and in so doing had made him aware of a strength ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... moral weakling, he knew. Everybody in the Wolf River section knew it. Hamlin was lazy and shiftless, seemingly contented to drift along in an aimless way, regardless of what happened to him. There was at Hamlin's feet some ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Cypris for help and not on the mighty strength of Enyalius? And do ye look to doves and hawks to save yourselves from contests? Away with you, take thought not for deeds of war, but by supplication to beguile weakling girls." ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius |
