"Wretchedness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sank on to the divan. "So the knowledge of my disgrace is no longer confined to myself!" he exclaimed. "A stranger's eye has penetrated the depths of misery I have fallen into! The secret of my wretchedness and shame ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... edifying, exhorting, and teaching a nation suffering the pangs, and threatened with the spiritual stagnation, of exile; of proclaiming that the glories of the past prefigured a future of equal brilliancy, and that the very wretchedness of the present was part of the divine plan outlined in the Bible. If the simile is accurate that likens the Halacha to the ramparts about Israel's sanctuary, which every Jew was ready to defend with his last drop of blood, then the Haggada must seem "flowery mazes, of exotic ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... little Master Misery began complaining. His head ached and he could not open his eyes, and he did not like the weather, and the children were crying, and there was no food in the house. He asked the peasant to come with him to the tavern again and forget all this wretchedness in a drink. ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... left the doctor's? What had he gained by it but misery and wretchedness. Bob had turned out one of the most contemptible cowards that ever stepped. He had proved to be a miserable tyrannical bully when they were alone; and in the face of danger a wretched cur; while now ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... man's physical wants and adaptations that manifest the wisdom that belongs to God; also, that it would have been the work of a demon to create man with these wants, like so many empty vessels, without any provision to satisfy or fill them. Without those supplies our suffering would be great and our wretchedness unendurable. Is there no liability to mental suffering? Are there no spiritual wants consequent upon ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... with the electors, who were thronging towards the town in great numbers and all variety of manner, group, and costume, some on foot, some on horseback, and some on cars; the gayest show of holiday attire contrasting with the every-day rags of wretchedness; the fresh cheek of health and beauty making gaunt misery look more appalling, and the elastic step of vigorous youth outstripping the tardy pace of feeble age. Pedestrians were hurrying on in detachments of five or six—the equestrians in companies ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... that a thing to love or pity?—Nay!— Yet He did stoop, on me, His hand to lay; Touched my dark eyes, and lo! the light was mine; Ope'd my dull ears to harmony divine; Showed me my rags, my wretchedness, my grief, My deadly sickness, and then gave relief; Paid my full ransom-price, warmed, cleansed, and red, And clothed in spotless raiment, me He led Forth from the dungeon of impurity, To the pure air of heaven, made whole, set free! Henceforth my all in life or death is ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... of moral degradation, such as I hardly ever heard of, and it is no wonder, when a great part of the community is plunged into such a condition (and we may fairly suppose that there is a gradually mounting scale, with every degree of wretchedness up to the wealth and splendour which glitter on the surface of society), that there should be so many who are ripe for any desperate scheme of revolution. At Sunderland they say there are houses ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... nor Tatsu would yield an inch, and between them, like a white flower between stones, little Ume-ko was crushed. A new and threatening trouble was that of poverty. Tatsu would not paint; Kano, in his wretchedness ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... I visited this hospital, in which, however, I did not remain long; the wretchedness and uncleanliness which I observed speedily driving me away. Saint James, indeed, is the grand lazar-house for all the rest of Galicia, which accounts for the prodigious number of horrible objects to be seen in its streets, who have ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... shoes, your homes are desolate, there are no schools and no social life. Year follows year in dreary monotone, and you finally die, and your neighbors thrust you underground and have an end of you. Misery and wretchedness fill the measure of your days, ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... written in connection with Mr. Alexander H. Everett's reply to it, printed in London and Boston in 1822. The doctrine was a convenient one, for it relieved the directors of affairs from the charge of causing, or suffering, the poverty and wretchedness by which they ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... watched the magnificent ball his eyes grew dim at the thought of the social tragedy which it symbolized, of his own poverty and of the deeper wretchedness of scores to whom he had been trying to minister. He was fighting to keep his courage up, but the longer he watched the barbaric, sensual display of wealth sweeping before him, the deeper his ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... all that is most private," Toff answered; "my poor master is wasting away in unrelieved wretchedness and suspense. Something must be done for him. Oh, dear and good sir, help me in this most miserable state of things! Tell me the ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... at this hour, in the lowest depth of wretchedness. I have but one consolation, that no life can endure this agony long. After being carried from garrison to garrison, with my eyes shocked and my feelings tortured by the sights and sufferings of war, I am at last consigned to the hands of the being whom on earth I most dread and abhor. Montrecour ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... intense repulsion, which had begun to oppress and torture his heart while he was on his way to the old woman, had by now reached such a pitch and had taken such a definite form that he did not know what to do with himself to escape from his wretchedness. He walked along the pavement like a drunken man, regardless of the passers-by, and jostling against them, and only came to his senses when he was in the next street. Looking round, he noticed that he was standing close to a tavern which was entered by steps leading from the pavement ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... absurdity, which makes infinite goodness the eternal source of infinite misery, there is wisdom in the Manichaean doctrine of two conflicting principles, holding a divided dominion over the universe, and contending, one for the production of the universal degradation and wretchedness, the other, for the purity and bliss of all intellectual and ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... Madrid with her father, which caused him so much joy that I had fears lest it derange his understanding. But a cloud came over his joy when she told him that such was the surveillance she was under that her life seemed a mere continuation of wretchedness. And while she still declared her love was unchanged, she artfully added that her father had so modified his opinions of foreigners as to press a suit between her and a Spanish Count, of whom it was said that he possessed ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... made any man rich, but his mind. He that can order himself to the law of Nature is not only without the sense but the fear of poverty. O, but to strike blind the people with our wealth and pomp is the thing! What a wretchedness is this, to thrust all our riches outward, and be beggars within; to contemplate nothing but the little, vile, and sordid things of the world; not the great, noble, and precious! We serve our avarice, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... weak, and wrong of sex for doing any valiance, long I lay by my father's body, wringing out my wretchedness. Thirst and famine now had flown into the opposite extreme; I seemed to loathe the thought of water, and the smell of food would have made me sick. I opened my father's knapsack, and a pang of new misery seized me. There lay nearly all his rations, which ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... yet be set to rights, all—unless, unless Gertrude—Oh, why should there arise this new and terrible complication? Gertrude with her youth and beauty and enthusiasm—why must she be drawn into the wretchedness? ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... with the finest forests. The continual fair weather which attended this part of our navigation, made all these beautiful landscapes appear to the greatest advantage; and the pleasure of contemplating a great variety of rich sceneries, made us some amends for the wretchedness of our diet, which at present consisted of no ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... the following November, for relief from violent nervous pains; and near the close of the Stowey period, in May, 1798, when the vagaries of Lloyd, the estrangement from Lamb, domestic anxiety, and physical suffering had reduced him to a state of extreme nervous wretchedness, he again took refuge in opiates, of which "Kubla Khan" is partly the result. He returned from Germany in 1799, worked for a while on a newspaper in London and on a translation of Schiller's "Wallenstein," ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... thou couldst tell, A tale like this of a day spent well, If thy kind hand has aided distress, And thou pity hast felt for wretchedness; ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... "interested in the Labour movement" and in some strange way, some whim probably, had taken to this working girl who in her plain black dress queened them all. He looked round the room and hated it. To his sickened soul its beauty blasphemed the lot of the toilers, insulted the wretchedness, the foulness, the hideousness, that he had seen this very day, that he had known and struggled against, all unconsciously, throughout his wayward life. And Geisner, Geisner at whom Nellie was looking ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... not be spared the want and wretchedness of war; these are particularly useful in shattering its energy and subduing its will.—GENERAL v. HARTMANN, D.R., ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... does not marvel at its weakness, and the more it perceives its wretchedness, the more it abandons itself to God, and seeks to remain near to Him, knowing how deeply it needs His help. God's own word to us is, "I will instruct thee, and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine ...
— A Short Method Of Prayer And Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... Forces in the great caverns of evil beneath society; in the hideous degradation, squalor, wretchedness and destitution, vices and crimes that reek and simmer in the darkness in that populace below the people, of great cities. There disinterestedness vanishes, every one howls, searches, gropes, and gnaws for himself. Ideas are ignored, and of progress there is no thought. This populace ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... have expected from me a more detailed and copious account of the manners, customs, superstitions, and prejudices of this secluded and singular people; but it must not be forgotten, that the wretchedness of my situation among them afforded me but few opportunities of collecting information. Some particulars, however, might be added in this place; but being equally applicable to the Negroes of the southward, they will appear in a ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... through glasses, and heard his sharp, persistent voice which rasped their nerves. His muddy skin, with its sickly tones of green and yellow, expressed the jaundice of his balked ambition, his perpetual disappointments and his hidden wretchedness. He could talk and argue; he was well-informed and shrewd, and was not without smartness and metaphor. Accustomed to look at everything from the standpoint of his own success, he was well fitted for a politician. A man who shrinks from ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... or Red Devil; the term may mean both), and family and followers, twelve persons in all, visited the office. His personal appearance, and that of his family, bespoke wretchedness, and appeared to give force to his strong complaints against the traders who visit Ottowa Lake and the headwaters of Chippewa River of the Mississippi. He observed that the prices they are compelled to pay are extortionate, that their lands are quite destitute of the larger animals, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... relief one feature, which is often found in these cases, and which is allowed far too little weight in distributing the blame between the parties: to this I wish to solicit the reader's attention. During the hours of this never-to-be-forgotten night of wretchedness and anxiety, my friend's reflection was naturally forced upon the causes which had produced it. In the world's judgment, he was aware that he himself, as the one charged with the most weighty responsibility, (those who depended upon ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Having been the sire of a king and a king myself, O Sanjaya, how shall I pass my days as a slave obedient to the commands of Pandu's son! Having laid my commands over the whole Earth and having stayed over the heads of all, O Sanjaya, how shall I live now as a slave in wretchedness? How shall I be able, O Sanjaya, to endure the words of Bhima who hath single-handed slain a full hundred sons of mine? The words of the high-souled Vidura have come to be realised! Alas, my son, O Sanjaya, did not listen to those ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... crowded ways of life Where sound the cries of race and clan, In haunts of wretchedness and need, On shadowed threshold dark with fears, And paths where hide the lures ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... up his position, the home was broken up, the wife went out to work, the children are scattered—in short, a home, which we are told is the foundation of our society, is broken up, and there is misery and wretchedness all around—and all for the lack ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... children, too, was a great obstacle to Pestalozzi's success. Many of them were the offspring of beggars and outlaws and had long been inured to wretchedness and vice; others had seen better days, and, oppressed by disappointment and suffering, had lost all disposition to exert themselves; while a few, who were from the higher classes of society, had been spoiled by indulgence and luxury, and were now conceited, petulant, and full of scornful ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... into life-long slavery for nothing but that one advance of two hundred pounds. He had saved himself from the penalty of his dishonesty, however, by that sacrifice; and would, no doubt, hold his daughter's misery lightly enough, even if poverty were added to the wretchedness of ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... desire I had to please Thee, the tears I shed, the manifold pains I underwent, the labors I sustained, and the little fruit I reaped from them, moved Thee with compassion. This was the state of my soul when Thy goodness, surpassing all my vileness and infidelities, and abounding in proportion to my wretchedness, granted me in a moment, what all my own efforts could never procure. Beholding me rowing with laborious toil, the breath of Thy divine operations turned in my favor, and carried me full sail over ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... in the heart of our dominions, and not merely Pomerania, but the Mark and the duchy of Prussia would have been overrun-by his warlike hordes. But on my journey hither I have witnessed the misery and unspeakable wretchedness of our land, and asked myself with heavy, sorrowing heart what would have become of our unhappy country in times of war if neutrality could reduce it to such poverty and plunge it in such want and suffering. And then I was forced to acknowledge that Count ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... dear Jeanie Morrison, Since we were sinder'd young, I 've never seen your face, nor heard The music o' your tongue; But I could hug all wretchedness, And happy could I die, Did I but ken your heart still dream'd ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... cared only for her country, not for a part of it. She fought not for Orleans, or Anjou, or Britanny, or Lorraine, but for France. In fact, she made France a nation again. Before she appeared everywhere was murder, revenge, robbery, burning of towns, slaughter of peaceful people, wretchedness, and despair. It was to redeem France from this ruin that Joan came, just when, in 1429, the English were besieging Orleans. Had they taken the strong city of Orleans, they could have overrun all southern and central France, ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... son had fled from the battle, cutting the tablecloth in two between himself and the unhappy youth. Like that stern baron's countenance was that with which my mother sat at the head of the dinner-table, and we conversed by jerks about whatever we least cared for, as if we could hide our wretchedness from Peter. When the children appeared each gave Clarence the shyest of kisses, and they sat demurely on their chairs on either side of my father to eat their almonds and raisins, after which we went upstairs, and there was the usual ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... death Caroline assumed the management of that bankrupt establishment. The funeral expenses were unpaid, and Auguste's pupils had been frightened away by the shock of successive disasters and the general atmosphere of wretchedness that pervaded the house. Auguste himself was writing a symphonic poem, Icarus, dedicated to the memory of his son. Caroline was barely twenty when she was called upon to face this tangle of difficulties, ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... expect to live, then? Are you always to be a burden on me and your sister? I wonder that you've no shame. Your cousin Roger is right. I will quit London altogether, and leave you to your own wretchedness.' ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... the prison who remembered the bonds of those within. With leaping heart he called before his mind the vast multitudes in all ages who so fettered through life—men bound by poverty and hedged in by ignorance; men baffled and beaten in life's fierce battle, bearing burdens of want and wretchedness, and by the heroism of the past he urged all men everywhere to fulfill that law of sympathy that makes hard tasks easy and heavy burdens light. Let the broad shoulders stoop to lift the load with weakness; let the wise ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... this, the Oriental nations have been led to prepare a drug from hemp, which they make use of in the same way as opium, and with almost similar results—for it produces a drowsy ecstatic feeling, always followed by a reaction of wretchedness. This drug is known by the Turks, Persians, and Hindoos, under a variety of names, such as "bang," "haschish," "chinab," "ganga," and others; but under any name it is a bad article to deal in, either for the health of the body or ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... others became blinded by the snow, others again were exhausted by hunger. Several of these unhappy men were unavoidably left behind; others lay down to perish, near a warm spring which had melted the snow around, from extremity of fatigue and sheer wretchedness, though the enemy were close upon the rear. It was in vain that Xenophon, who commanded the rear-guard, employed his earnest exhortations, prayers, and threats, to induce them to move forward. The sufferers, miserable and motionless, answered only by entreating him to kill ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... great difficulty in keeping his way, and regretted that he had not hired a servant knowing the country before leaving the army. He generally, however, was able to obtain a guide from village to village. The loneliness of the way, the wretchedness of the people, the absence of the brightness and comfort so characteristic of English life, made the journey an oppressive one, and Harry was glad when, five days after leaving Dublin, he approached the end of his ride. Upon this ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... they who account blessed the man unto whom these things are given, declared him happy, whose life was so fortunate, and whose death so honorable; and they thought that he very much had pleased the Lord. But the other man was a beggar, who having lived all his life in wretchedness and in poverty, went the way of all flesh. And his body long time lay without the ministry of the funeral rites, unburied, and mangled by the birds of prey; and at length was it dragged by the feet into a pit-hole, ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... uneasy wind blowing PAR RAFALES off the sea (or 'EN RAFALES' should it be? or what?). As I got down near the beach a poor woman, oldish, and seemingly, lately at least, respectable, followed me and made signs. She was drenched to the skin, and looked wretched below wretchedness. You know, I did not like to look back at her; it seemed as if she might misunderstand and be terribly hurt and slighted; so I stood at the end of the street - there was no one else within sight in the wet - and lifted up my hand very high with some money in it. I heard her steps draw heavily ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... windows pursuing their business, or lounge about, watching passengers to obtain charity. Thus their faces and necks are always of a copper color, and, at an advanced age, more dusky still; so that, for the anatomy and coloring of witches, a painter needs look no further. Their wretchedness is strongly contrasted by the gaiety of the higher classes. The military, who, I suppose, as usual in France, hold the first place, appear in all possible variety of keeping and costume, with their well-proportioned figures, clean apparel, decided gait, martial air, and whiskered faces. ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... may be passed, and what they may produce, requires a better head than mine even to guess at; but certainly my present situation seems to promise nothing beside woe and misery.—But hold a little, says I, and let me clearly state my own wretchedness. I am here, it is true; but for any good I have ever done or any advantage I have reaped in other places, I am as well here as anywhere. I have no present want of food or unjust or cruel enemy to annoy ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... town that should adorn these lovely plains, however, exhibits, upon a nearer approach, misery; the more mortifying, as it is less expected by a spectator, who requires at least some days experience to convince him that the squallid scenes of wretchedness and dirt in which he is obliged to pass the night, will prove more than equivalent to the pleasures he has enjoyed in the day-time, derived from an appearance of elegance and wealth—elegance, the work of Nature, not of man; and opulence, the immediate ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... little town, all orchards and gardens and winding hilly streets smothered in trees. And the dreary wretchedness of its back entrance, as it might be called, was all the more painful in contrast. Willow Lane, this miserable little street was named; but Angus McRae had long termed it, in his secret heart, the Jericho Road. ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... him again that trip, but on my next (I had a six months' charter) I went up to the store. Ten yards away from the door Blake's scolding met my ears, and when I came in he gave me a glance of utter wretchedness; Egstrom, all smiles, advanced, extending a large bony hand. "Glad to see you, captain. . . . Sssh. . . . Been thinking you were about due back here. What did you say, sir? . . . Sssh. . . . Oh! him! He has left us. Come into the ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... which she presumes to ridicule, and contemn, for every semblance of truth or energy which she displays. We know that the most she can do, is to find men blind and leave them so; and to lead them still farther astray, in a labyrinth of vice, delusion, and wretchedness. This is incontrovertibly evident, both from past and present experience; and we may defy her most eloquent advocates to produce a single instance in which she has enlightened or reformed mankind. If, as is often asserted, she is able to guide us in the path of ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... lot that I want, everything but a feeling I've somehow always believed ought to exist, ought to be mutual. Part of me wants to shut my eyes and jump. Part of me wants to hang back. I can't stand this thing I've got into and see no way of getting out of. Yet I dread starting a new train of wretchedness. ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... her memoirs she speaks of him with the greatest affection. She makes constant reference to his "good heart"'; and says that his faults 'were more those of temper than of nature.' Nor could all the misery and wretchedness of her home life dull the brightness of her intellect. What would have made others morbid, made her satirical. Instead of weeping over her own personal tragedies, she laughs at the general comedy of life. Here, for instance, is her description of Peter the Great and his ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... whole Irish race. "It was not tyranny," he cried, "but negligence; it was not the intrusion of English authority, but the absence of all authority; it was that very leaving Ireland to herself which she demands so passionately that was the cause of her wretchedness." After that it was hopeless to expect that he would have an impartial hearing. Every Irishman understood that the lecturer was an enemy, and was prepared not to read for instruction, but to look out for mistakes. An article in The New York Tribune, which spoke of Froude with ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... class. Of the other classes, the great nobles or magnates owned the land, lived in luxury, selfishly looked out for their own interests, and jealously played politics, while the mass of the nation were degraded into a state of serfdom and wretchedness that would be difficult to parallel elsewhere in Europe. With a grasping, haughty nobility on one hand, and an oppressed, ignorant peasantry on the other, social solidarity, the best guarantee of ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... seeing the pensive looks of her mistress, and knowing the wretchedness of her heart, determined to give her mistress what she most desired. By the aid of Governale, the squire of Sir Tristram, they poured the philtre into the wine of Isoude and Sir Tristram as they were about to sit ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... it clear to the merchant that Finn was an aristocrat in all his habits. And now the merchant was anxious to get to his much-deferred breakfast, always a rather late function in that house; and the Master had no wish to prolong a situation of unmitigated wretchedness to himself. ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... not know how it happened, but in her wretchedness the girl swayed toward me ever so slightly. My arms went round her protectingly. For an instant her body came to me in sweet surrender, the soft curves of her supple figure relaxed in weariness. Then she ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... have "tasted that he is gracious"; if we look back with horror and transport upon the wretchedness and the wrath which we have escaped, with what anxiety shall we not hasten to the aid of our fellow men, who are sitting in "the region and shadow of death." What zeal will be too ardent, what labor too persevering, what sacrifice too costly, if, by any means, we may tell them of Jesus, and the resurrection, ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... to any one, this child from nowhere, but was solely and entirely her own work. Lovely and untouched she came to him in her abandonment, as though she were sent by the good angel of poverty to quicken his heart. Beautiful and pure of heart she had grown up out of wretchedness as though out of happiness itself, and where in the world should he rest his head, that was wearied to death, but on the heart of her who to him was ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... to one knee before it, and a swarm of flies zooned angrily away. He put out his hand, but he was afraid to touch, and he only added panic to the bird's wretchedness. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... neighborhoods and families were divided, and both armies marched and fought,—is touched by the graphic pen of a woman, Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis, who saw and felt a part of it: "The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute. Even on the border, your farm was a waste, all your horses or cows were seized by one army or the other, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... kept doggedly on, hugging the shore very closely, going in and out of every bay, and visiting almost every island, yet never seeing a single human being. We were apparently still many hundreds of miles away from our destination. To add to the wretchedness of the situation, my poor Yamba, who had been so devoted, so hardy, and so contented, at length began to manifest symptoms of illness, and complained gently of the weariness of it all. "You are looking," she would say, "for a place that does not exist. You are looking for friends of ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... are harsh, but they indicate an internal wretchedness, which I own, affects me. Surely this young man must be involved in misfortunes of no common nature but I cannot imagine what can induce him to remain with this unfeeling family, where he is, most unworthily, despised ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... poverty, Christ should hold up a state of poverty as desirable. We read in Matthew v. 3, "Blessed are the poor in spirit" and it is contended that it is poverty only of spirit which Christ blesses; if so, he blesses the source of much wretchedness, for poor-spirited people get trampled down, and are a misery to themselves and a burden to those about them. If, however, we turn to Luke vi. 20, we find the declaration: "Blessed are ye poor," addressed directly to his Apostles, who were anything but ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... it comes down, sending pedestrians who have grown indifferent to shell-fire to huddle under cover, adding to the wretchedness of life in trench or bombproof as nothing else can. And the Doctor, biting hard upon the worn stem of the old briar-root, as he goes swinging along through the hissing deluge with his chin upon his breast and his fierce eyes sullenly fixed upon the goal ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... and shaken the empire of reason; and when at last he abandons himself to the guidance of a power which his firmer nature had long resisted, the impression of the spectator is, that his mind has yielded in the struggle, and that, in the desperate hope of obtaining relief from present wretchedness, he is about to commit the most horrible crimes, by obeying the suggestions of a spirit, which he more than suspects to be employed only to tempt him on to perdition. No description can possibly do justice to the manner in which this situation ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... course of time, when their sufferings in Hell come to an end, they take birth in the order of humanity, in families that are entirely destitute of wealth. Always suffering from hunger and thirst, excluded from all decent society, hopeless of ever enjoying good things, they lead lives of great wretchedness. Born in families that are destitute of all articles of enjoyment, these men never succeed in enjoying the good things of the world. Indeed, O goddess, it is through their acts that persons become wretched and poor. There are others who are full of arrogance and pride caused by the possession ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... love for Shelley; and the tale of Harriet has already been told. Therefore there is nothing absolutely improbable in Medwin's story, especially when we remember what Hogg half-humorously tells us about Shelley's attraction for women in London. At any rate, the excessive wretchedness of the lyrics written at Naples can hardly be accounted for by the "constant and poignant physical sufferings" of which Mrs. Shelley speaks, since these were habitual with him. She was herself, moreover under the impression that he was concealing ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... Arabian impostor. This was seen especially in the blessings that came to her through the institution of Christian marriage, while others groaned under the debasing influence of a sensual polygamy. The wretchedness this occasioned is a topic too large and too painful to dwell upon here. But the wide gulf that separated the two classes was clearly seen, when on her Sabbath the missionary could speak to the Nestorian of her Saviour ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... grossest proletariat. Deeming themselves not wanted in the churches, his converts set up a separate and more militant organization. In 1879 the Army invaded America, landing at Philadelphia, where, as in the Old Country and in other American cities, pitiable sin and wretchedness grovelled in obscurity. In 1894 there were in the United States 539 corps and 1,953 officers, and in the whole world 3,200 corps and 10,788 officers. Without proposing any programme of social or political reform, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Gilbert done, Ernest arose and began to speak. He began in a low voice, haltingly and modestly, and with an air of evident embarrassment. He spoke of his birth in the working class, and of the sordidness and wretchedness of his environment, where flesh and spirit were alike starved and tormented. He described his ambitions and ideals, and his conception of the paradise wherein lived the people of the upper classes. ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... revised version of Yankeedom, with milk and rum. Rum was, forsooth, a very decent devil, if judged by the exalted character of the company it kept. It stood high on the rungs of the social ladder and pulled and pushed men from it by thousands to wretchedness and ruin. So flagrant and universal was the drinking customs of Boston then that dealers offered on the commons during holidays, without let or hindrance, the drunkard's glass to the crowds thronging by extemporized booths and bars. Shocking as was ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... misery till there was no longer time to prepare breakfast, and he had to hasten off to school after a mouthful of dry bread which choked him. There had been moments when his strength failed, and he found his eyes filling with tears of wretchedness. To face the hideous drudgery of the day's teaching often cost him more than it had cost many men to face the scaffold. The hours between nine and one, the hours between half-past two and five, Waymark cursed them minute by minute, as their awful length ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... spending their money needlessly. However such sinful tricks may be allowed to prosper in the case of a man of the world, in the case of a child of God they will not prosper, except God allow them to do so in the way of chastisement, whilst leanness and wretchedness are brought into the soul. I knew a case of this kind where it was the whole bent of the mind of a professed believer to obtain such "good salesmen," and where even a Jew was kept outside the shop, walking up and down, to induce persons to come in and buy; and yet that same ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... defiance. She meditated continually how the incubus could be shaken off her life—how she could be freed from this hateful bond to a being whom she at once despised as an imbecile, and dreaded as an inquisitor. For a long while she lived in the hope that my evident wretchedness would drive me to the commission of suicide; but suicide was not in my nature. I was too completely swayed by the sense that I was in the grasp of unknown forces, to believe in my power of self-release. Towards my own destiny I had become entirely passive; for my one ardent desire had ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... be found painfully replete with accounts of the ruin and wretchedness produced by recent earthquakes, of unparalleled severity, in the Republics of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. The diplomatic agents and naval officers of the United States who were present in those countries ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... special labour it had to endure: long days in hot railway cars; hurry and worry at every performance; no seclusion, no time for study; no time to acknowledge headache or weariness; a score of little humiliations and wrongs; a constant irritability at Roland's apparent indifference to her wretchedness and apparent satisfaction with the company and life into which he was thrown. The men, indeed, all seemed satisfied. They had cigars to smoke, and they told stories and played cards, and so beguiled the weary hours of travel. The women were headachy and tired; they soon threw aside their paper ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... striving to swallow the lump that would rise to his throat. He had a sense of infinite wretchedness and loneliness. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... in a mighty army, identified in principles and interests. Here was the principle of the Church—association for reciprocated strength; they were thus taught the inevitable result of the indulgence of the vice. The missionaries of temperance went through the country contrasting the wretchedness and the degradation and the filth of drunkenness with the domestic comfort, and the health, and the regular employment of those who were masters of themselves. So far as men believed this, and gave up the tyranny of the present for ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... siding while the Boers entrained with their horses on a long line of waggons which had just come up, and which started on its way south as soon as they were on board. Then the emigrant tram crawled on again. There was another night of wretchedness, and in the morning they arrived at Volksrust, the frontier town. Here they were again closely searched for arms, and what provisions remained among them were commandeered, or as the emigrants called it, stolen. However, they knew that their troubles were now ...
— With Buller in Natal - A Born Leader • G. A. Henty
... expected that the first revelation of that glance would contain something of grief, wretchedness, remorse. The fisherman's countenance wore a shadow of annoyance, but it was expressive, above all, of a ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... had not kept me in the dark, but consulted me, as any other Christian would, the course of events would have been wholly changed, and the wretchedness and disgrace that fell on this house been spared to it," ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... was a man of forty; but his hair was tinged with gray, and grief and wretchedness had worn heavy lines in his face. As he sat in the library this September afternoon, looking up at the portrait on the wall, he seemed almost an old man. The room was wide and high, with tall oaken bookcases ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... they ended their days in close captivity, and had leisure to ponder on the grievousness of their crimes. The wicked wife, in the absence of her husband, continued in her sinful ways even more than before, and at last died in wretchedness. ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... children sold by heathen parents destitute of natural affection, kidnapped villagers, and captives taken in war, the greater part of them born in hereditary bondage. The circumstances under which they were consigned to the slave-ship evince the wretchedness of their condition in their native country, where they were the victims of idolatry, barbarism, and war. The negroes imported were usually between the ages of fourteen and thirty, two-thirds of them being males. The new negro, just transferred from the wilds ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... in the place where he was confined. When was this imprisonment to be at an end? Though innocent, he had been cast into wretchedness and solitude—that was his fate. How things had been ordained for him in this world, he had now time to think over. Why had he been thus treated—his portion made so hard to bear? Well, this would be revealed "in that other life" which assuredly awaits all. In the humble cottage that belief ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... Sheriff—I have been Lord Mayor—and the three great eras of my existence were the year of my shrievalty, the year of my mayoralty, and the year after it. Until I had passed through this ordeal I had no conception of the extremes of happiness and wretchedness to which a human being may be carried, nor ever believed that society presented to its members an eminence so exalted as that which I once touched, or imagined a fall so great as that which I experienced. I came originally ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... the latter includes the former. You may renounce the outward world, and isolate yourself in a cave or in the depths of a forest, but you will take all your selfishness with you, and unless you renounce that, great indeed will be your wretchedness and deep your delusion. You may remain just where you are, performing all your duties, and yet renounce the world, the inward enemy. To be in the world and yet not of the world is the highest perfection, the most blessed peace, ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... true history of your unbroken, ancient, and unsullied line! But I like this jolly fellow in the green riding jacket; he drank and hunted with the nobles, and employed the peasants to run down the tall deer with the hounds. Indeed, the ignorance, stupidity, and wretchedness of the serf were the strength of the noble, and give convincing ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... been long impending; and if we would further inquire how a hitherto harmless usage, which like many others had but served to keep up superstition, could degenerate into so serious a disease, we must take into account the unusual excitement of men's minds and the consequences of wretchedness and want. The bowels, which in many were debilitated by hunger and bad food, were precisely the parts which in most cases were attacked with excruciating pain, and the tympanitic state of the intestines points out to the intelligent physician an origin of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... happened that the subjects of their criminal acts were weighty enough to sustain an energetic inquiry. Hence their reputation became worse than scandalous: the mingled infamy of their calling, and the houseless condition of wretchedness which had made it worth their acceptance, combined to overwhelm them with public scorn; and this public abhorrence, which at any rate awaited them, mere desperation led them too often to countenance ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... thunder than live like this. I'm young and strong, and I've a filthy crooked hunchback for a husband, worse than Dyudya himself, curse him! When I was a girl, I hadn't bread to eat, or a shoe to my foot, and to get away from that wretchedness I was tempted by Alyoshka's money, and got caught like a fish in a net, and I'd rather have a viper for my bedfellow than that scurvy Alyoshka. And what's your life? It makes me sick to look at it. Your Fyodor sent you packing from ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... fire, to turn our spinning-wheels—and,—ARE WE YET CLOTHED? Are not the streets of the capitals of Europe foul with sale of cast clouts and rotten rags? Is not the beauty of your sweet children left in wretchedness of disgrace, while, with better honour, nature clothes the brood of the bird in its nest, and the suckling of the wolf in her den? And does not every winter's snow robe what you have not robed, and shroud what ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... and full of wretchedness, And fears to die? famine is in thy cheeks, Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes."—Beaut. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... metaphor in the new command against 'being of doubtful mind.' The word so rendered means to be lifted on high, and thence to be tossed from height to depth, as a ship in a storm. So it paints the wretchedness of anxiety as ever shuttlecocked about between hopes and fears, sometimes up on the crest of a vain dream of good, sometimes down in the trough of an imaginary evil. We are sure to be thus the sport of our own fancies, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... dreadful night away; and the first faint rays of morning, struggling through the narrow aperture in the wall, revealed an appalling sight. Men made hideous and inhuman by vice and wretchedness lay stretched amid the filth and dampness of that dungeon, glaring at each other with savage eyes. And soon the awful discovery was made, that one of their number had, during the night, been frozen to death! Yes—there, beneath the bunk, cold and ghastly, lay ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... over, as it is queerly called, Clara was not. Her individuality as a woman was a thing he had to bow to. It was impossible to roll her up in the sex and bestow a kick on the travelling bundle. Hence he loved her, though she hurt him. Hence his wretchedness, and but for the hearty sincerity of his faith in the Self he loved likewise and more, he would ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... drug of wretchedness, she loses for a moment the single vision of her rival: it were good to have all the old man's treasures, for the joy of dealing death around her at that hateful Court where each knows of ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... really frightened. "My dear girls," she said, "it was a very imprudent thing to do. Why, Galusha Pennypacker is half insane, people think. A dreadful old miser, who lives in filth and wretchedness, while he has plenty of money hidden away,—at least people say he has. Why, it terrifies me to think of your going ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... and in the disorders that followed his death, barbarism increased again. The convents alone kept up any remnants of culture; but as the fury of the Northmen was chiefly directed to them, numbers had been destroyed, and there was more ignorance and wretchedness than at any other time. In the duchy of Aquitaine, much more of the old Roman civilization survived, both among the cities and the nobility; and the Normans, newly settled in the north, had brought with them the vigour of their race. They had taken up such dead or dying culture ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge |
