"Abhorrent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tilt with reeds for which they were so renowned, for it was still the custom of the knights of either nation to mingle in these courteous and chivalrous contests during the intervals of war. When they learnt, however, that he was come to demand the tribute so abhorrent to the ears of the fiery monarch, they observed that it well required a warrior of his apparent nerve to execute ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... Longworth Street came from time to time to her counter in the perfumery and soap department—and urged her to "stop making a fool of yourself and come get good money for your looks before you lose 'em drudging behind a counter." The idea grew less abhorrent, took on allurement as the degradation of tenement life ate out respect for conventional restraints—for modesty, for virtue, for cleanness of speech, and the rest. More and more boldly Kate was announcing that she wasn't going to ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... the years from 1898 to 1901 were shadowed by the South African war. The din of battle was in our ears only to a less degree than in those of our kinsmen in the mother country. War has always been abhorrent to me, and there was the additional objection to my mind in the case of the South African war in that it was altogether unjustified. Froude's chapters on South Africa had impressed me on the publication of his book "Oceana," after ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... man, he lives in daily fear of exposure and shame. At the age of forty-two, in the maturity of his manhood, he meets the woman who conquers his heart, his imagination, who compels his faith by making other women abhorrent to him, who allures and maddens with the certainty of her power to make good his ideal of her. He cannot marry her; that animal on the bed is capable of ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... "Remember, Razumov, that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action. Don't rail! Leave off.... I don't know how it is, but there are moments when you are abhorrent to me...." ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... but I felt none the less that Lord Linchmere was acting rather scurvily towards me. He wished to convert me into a passive tool, like the blackthorn in his hand. With his sensitive disposition I could imagine, however, that scandal would be abhorrent to him, and I realized that he would not take me into his confidence until no other course was open to him. I must trust to my own eyes and ears to solve the mystery, but I had every confidence that I should not trust ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... by the candle—a faint ululation barely detaching itself from silence, straying after a time into the silence again. At first it was like the grief of a woman heard at a great distance. But the sound, while it gained no strength, forced on them more and more an abhorrent sense of intimacy. This crying from an infinite distance filled the room, seemed finally to have its source in the room itself. After it had sobbed thinly into nothing, its pulsations continued to sigh in Bobby's ears. They seemed timed to the ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... excuse for the members of the Weldon Institute. They had been attacked in their own house. To these enthusiasts for "lighter than air" a no less enthusiast for "heavier than air" had said things absolutely abhorrent. And at the moment they were about to treat him as he deserved, ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... universe. Yes, devotion, not to individuals but to the social ideal of brotherhood, sustains me still. Oh, what a magnificent example is to be found in Jesus and in the poor. That righteous aristocrat, showing by His abhorrent task the infinite obligation of altruistic duty, and teaching, above all, that no return of gratitude should be demanded. . . . To my experience of men and things I owe this tranquillity of expecting nothing from any one. Thus duty takes an abstract ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... of the bully rid me of my tormentor; he immediately assaulted Henley, and I hastened away from two beings so almost equally abhorrent, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... it may truly be said to be in many respects repulsive. There are usually odours in such a camp which are repellent to the nose, dishes that are disgusting to the taste, sights that are disagreeable to the eyes, sounds that are abhorrent to the ear, and habits that are uncongenial ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... which only souls tuned to such unison and so subtly trained could fully comprehend and rightly estimate. This gentle peace, thus joyfully presaged, is to be won by the submission of an inchoate State to a form of government subjecting its inhabitants to institutions abhorrent to their souls and fatal to their prosperity, forced upon them at the point of the bowie-knife and the muzzle of the revolver by hordes of sordid barbarians from a hostile soil, their natural and necessary enemies. And the sweet harbinger of this blessed peace, the halcyon which broods over ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... men, to protest against such notions, standing near the throne, polluting the ear of majesty! 'That God and nature put into our hands!' I know not what idea that lord may entertain of God and nature; but I know that such abominable principles are equally abhorrent to religion and humanity. What! attribute the sacred sanction of God and nature to the massacres of the Indian scalping-knife—to the cannibal savage, torturing, murdering, roasting, and eating—literally, my lords, eating—the mangled ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... seeing a tiger caress its keeper, if the cruel means by which the fiercest of beasts is taught all the servility of a fawning spaniel, did not recur every instant to my mind; and it is not much less abhorrent to my nature, to see a venerable lion jumping over a stick, than it would be to behold a hoary philosopher forced by some cruel tyrant to spend his days in whipping a top, or playing with a rattle. Every thing to me loses its charm when it is ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... piece is furnished with a tangible beginning, middle, and ending. The wide stretches of time which the old Spanish and English and all modern dramas cover, and their frequent transitions from place to place, were impossible and abhorrent to him. ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... was never a word to my lord. The family had looked on, wondering at our economies. They had lamented, I have no doubt, that my patron had become so great a miser—a fault always despicable, but in the young abhorrent, and Mr. Henry was not yet thirty years of age. Still, he had managed the business of Durrisdeer almost from a boy; and they bore with these changes in a silence as proud and bitter as his own, until the coping-stone ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Osborn's misdirected, restless activity and the lower parts of the town were in a dreadful state. Mrs. Nugent talked to Albinia, and she urged it in vain. To come out of his study, examine felons, contend with the Admiral, and to meet all the world at the quarter sessions, was abhorrent to him, and he silenced her ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... me like the shaking of the flood-gates placed by the Divine Creator between the unprepared soul and the unseen world. Then—the subjection of the will and vital powers of one individual to those of another, to the extent of the apparent solution of the very identity, is abhorrent from me. And then (as to the expediency of the matter, and to prove how far believers may be carried) there is even now a religious sect at Cheltenham, of persons who call themselves advocates of the 'third revelation,' and profess ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... shopping expedition, throwing in the additional allurement of a cinematograph theatre and the prospect of light refreshment. As Cyprian was not yet eighteen she hoped he might not have reached that stage in masculine development when parcel-carrying is looked on as a thing abhorrent. ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... tale will answer you, my boy," said Paganel: "One day a missionary was reproving a cannibal for the horrible custom, so abhorrent to God's laws, of eating human flesh! 'And beside,' said he, 'it must be so nasty!' 'Oh, father,' said the savage, looking greedily at the missionary, 'say that God forbids it! That is a reason for what ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... make this view prevail generally. We artists are merely one of bourgeoisie's luxuries in paying for which they will outbid each other. If you were right, how would an opera like Walkuere be possible which deals with things the exposure of which is absolutely abhorrent to the public. Yet when I sing the part of Siegmund, the most solicitous mothers will not hesitate to bring in their thirteen or fourteen year old daughters. And indeed, as I am standing on the stage, I know for certain that not one person in the audience ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... as liking a country life—for I take it that you mean to remove to the real suburban countryside, and not to one of those abominable and abhorrent deserts of paved streets laid out at right angles, and all supplied with sewers and electric light wires and water-mains before the first lonely house escapes from the house-pattern books to tempt the city dweller out to that ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... were sooner or later to sleep, was far away, and for the third time we were driven to chocolate. It was a loathsome business eating the remaining morsels of our supply, and we felt that the very name of the food would in future be abhorrent to us. The night had become unfriendly, the Pass a Via Dolorosa, and the last drop was poured into our cup of misery at ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... a remedy, society must recognize the terrible lesson taught by the innumerable centuries of infanticide and foeticide. If these abhorrent practices could have been ended by punishment and suppression, they would have ceased long ago. But to continue suppression and punishment, and let the matter rest there, is only to miss the lesson—only to permit conditions to go from bad ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... Cassier. No tear of affection would moisten the icy shroud, but, in sympathy for the hapless child stained with his blood, whose crime was condoned in the provocation caused, the world has cast its abhorrent curse on the ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... fact of the great value of the southern slaves—which, according to your estimation, is not less than "twelve hundred millions of dollars." I will adopt your estimate, and thus spare myself from going into the abhorrent calculation of the worth in dollars and cents of immortal man—of the worth of "the image of God." I thank you for your virtual admission, that this wealth is grasped with a tenacity proportioned to its vast amount. Many of the wisest and best men of the North have been led into the belief that ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... went, withered leaves overhead, and withered leaves to make a carpet for our fret, she told me in her own way more or less what I have set down, even to her brother's self-seeking share in the transaction that she dubbed hideous and abhorrent. ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... their separate origin the process of union was slow. The source of most of their trouble in their infancy was the grasping policy of Massachusetts. Next to heretics in the bosom of the commonwealth heretic neighbors were especially abhorrent. When in 1640 the magistrates of Connecticut and New Haven addressed a joint letter to the general court of Massachusetts, and the citizens of Aquidneck ventured to join in it, Massachusetts arrogantly excluded the representation of ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... man, no doubt, who called himself a "Gnostic" was but a sorry rogue; many another was but a student of the letter, not of the life; many another was but a spiritual swashbuckler, pompous in his demeanour and cryptic in his utterance; some, led by an abhorrent fantasy, may have wandered along the path that goes to the Venus-berg and have striven to lisp a formula that would transform the earth into Gehenna rather than into Heaven. But, beside this mass of imposture, of folly, of elegant idleness and of corruption, the a rebours of a spiritual ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... just now from the leper settlement of Molokai, playing croquet with seven leper girls, sitting and yarning with old, blind, leper beachcombers in the hospital, sickened with the spectacle of abhorrent suffering and deformation amongst the patients, touched to the heart by the sight of lovely and effective virtues in their helpers: no stranger time have I ever had, nor any so moving. I do not think it a little thing to be deaf, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is honest, kind, generous,—it will serve the future, and is not unprofitable at present. It is different from that pursued by those who would, through the instrumentality of bad laws, enforce ignorance. Nay, to her there is something abhorrent in using the Word of God as an excuse for the existence of slavery. Her system is practicable, enlightening first, and then enforcing that which gives encouragement to the inert faculties of our nature. Punishments were scarcely known upon her plantation; ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... than he the capacity of the crowd to feed on pure fun, and no one could discriminate more clearly than he the fitness, temper, and mental appetite of the constituents of his evening assemblies. The prosiness of an ordinary Mechanics' Institute lecture was to him simply abhorrent; the learned platitudes of a professed lecturer were to him, to use one of his own phrases, "worse than poison." To make people laugh was to be his primary endeavour. If in so making them laugh he could also cause ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... arm, protested that I had given a proof of very noble devotion in rushing back for an old man into that black water. Ough! He shuddered. He had given himself up—por Dios! He hinted that, at his age, he could not have cared much for life; but then, drowning in the sea was a death abhorrent to an old Christian. You died brutally—without absolution, and unable, even, to think of your sins. He had had his mouth filled with horrid, bitter sand, too. Tfui! He gave me a thousand thanks. But these English were wonderful in their way.... Ah! ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Dunstan, or a St. Gengulphus, more previously expectable than a St. Abraham, a St. David, a St. Elisha, or a St. Gehazi? I answer, from the idea of idolatry, so adapted to the Gentile mind, and so abhorrent from the Jewish. Martyred Abel, however well respected, has never reached the honours of a niche beside the altar. Jephtha's daughter, for all her mourned virginity, was never paraded, (that I wot of,) for any other ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... theirs, were naturally surprised and offended at a line of argument, novel, and, as it appeared to them, wanton, which threw the whole controversy into confusion, stultified my former principles, and substituted, as they would consider, a sort of methodistic self-contemplation, especially abhorrent both to my nature and to my past professions, for the plain and honest tokens, as they were commonly received, of a divine mission in the Anglican Church. They could not tell whither I was going; ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... example of intellectual gravity beyond redemption, a man with opinions such as cannot be held "without grave personal sin on his part" (as was once said of Mill by W.G. Ward), the representative in his single person of rationalism, materialism, atheism, or if there be any more abhorrent "ism"—in token of which as late as 1892 an absurd zealot at the headquarters of the Salvation Army crowned an abusive letter to him at Eastbourne by the statement, "I hear you have a local reputation as ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... creature could be more abhorrent, more incredibly odious of aspect, than Amos Brierwood as he sat there, his red, brutish face redder still with a malign pleasure, his malicious eyes gloating over the rolls of money which he drew from a pocket-book ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... her? Haven't I been raving about her for days? Haven't you vowed she belonged to the type abhorrent to you? Haven't I had to endure your reflections on my sanity because of the adjectives I've employed to describe her attractions? Haven't you been laughing at your own mother and myself ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Abolitionist. He regarded slavery as a gigantic system of complicated evils, at war with all the known laws of civilized society; inimical to the fundamental principles of political economy; destructive to republican institutions; hateful in the sight of God, and ever abhorrent to all honest men. He hated slavery. He hated truckling, obsequious, cringing hypocrites. He put his feelings into vigorous English, and keyed his deeds and actions to the sublime notes of charity that ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... claimed justly, that he had produced, out of many strange elements, something which has a place apart in English poetry. Death's Jest-Book is perhaps the most morbid poem in our literature. There is not a page without its sad, grotesque, gay, or abhorrent imagery of the tomb. A slave cannot say that a lady is asleep without turning it into a parable ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... From the insensate mail, its fellow warrior? And have I brought home with me Victory, And with her, hand in hand, firm-footed Peace, 160 Her countenance twice lighted up with glory, As if I had charmed a goddess down from Heaven? But these will flee abhorrent from the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... greatness and littleness of the France of the end of last century, everything which will make up the greatness and littleness of France, the glories and weaknesses which the world must love, to the end of time; all these things were abhorrent to Alfieri; and Alfieri, when once he disliked a person or a thing, justly or unjustly, could only increase but never diminish his dislike. Let us look at this matter, which is instructive to all persons ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... the doctrine of man having no free will, he must acknowledge his utter insignificance, for then no one is cleverer or better than his neighbour; this must be always abhorrent to the flesh. 'Have not I done this or that?' 'Had I naught to do with it?' For my part, I can give myself no credit for anything I ever did; and further, I credit no man with talents, &c. &c., in anything he may have ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... the Sun to cry his curses against Mung, crying: "O Mung! whose hand is against the Sun, whom men abhor but worship because they fear thee, here stands and speaks a man who fears thee not. Assassin lord of murder and dark things, abhorrent, merciless, make thou the sign of Mung against me when thou wilt, but until silence settles upon my lips, because of the sign of Mung, I will curse Mung to his face." And the people in the street below would gaze up with wonder towards Yun-Ilara, who had no fear of ...
— The Gods of Pegana • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... in poverty and wretchedness a people struggled; men walked to and fro in tattered garments, colored like unto their moral and physical degradation. But they heeded it not, and were careless because no one cared for them. There is no slavery so abhorrent as that of the menial who has no thought beyond the narrow sphere of his servitude, and the little pleasure which his light heart may transitorily enjoy. Here men saw no vitality in the hand that ruled: hence they maudled through that deadening scum of ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... I smoked like an Indian summer ere I entered the Neversink, so abhorrent was this sumptuary law that I altogether abandoned the luxury rather than enslave it to a time and a place. Herein did I not right, Ancient and Honourable Old Guard of ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... propositions worked out on the model of a mathematical text-book, and yet in his eyes perfectly consistent with an acceptance of the orthodox dogmas which repose upon traditional authority. This attitude of mind, so intelligible on this side of the Channel, was utterly abhorrent to Rousseau's logical instincts. Englishmen were content to keep their abstract theories for the closet or the lecture-room, and dropped them as soon as they were in the pulpit or in Parliament. Rousseau could give no quarter to any doctrine which could not be fitted into a symmetrical ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... believed tha the whole duty of man consisted in loving the army regulations, and in keeping their commandments. The best part of all virtue was to observe them to the letter; the most abhorrent form of vice, to violate or ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... incapacity. To forefend their beloved land, now doubly sanctified by the blood of her devoted sons who had fallen in the struggle to maintain her liberties and preserve her property, it behooved every true Southron to stand firm against the abhorrent tide of radicalism, to maintain the supremacy and purity of his all-pervading, all-conquering race, and to resist by every available means the threatened domination of an inferior and degraded people, who were set to rule ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... which is operative is indicated by the phrase that an international agreement on an economic and financial basis might be of value to China herself. The mere suggestion that such a thing is possible is abhorrent to many, especially to radicals. There seems to be something sinister in it. So it is worth explaining how and why it might be so. In the first place, it would obviously terminate the particularistic grabbing for "leased" territory, concessions and spheres of influence which has so damaged China. ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... suit the popular fancy. In India, as in all other countries, the priesthood have given the people that which they asked for, and the result is that many forms of churchly ceremonialism, and forms of worship, maintain which are abhorrent and repulsive to Western ideas. But we of the West are not entirely free from this fault, as one may see if he examines some of the religious conceptions and ceremonies common among ignorant people in remote parts of our land. Certain ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely perfect; and if some of them be abhorrent to our idea of fitness. We need not marvel at the sting of the bee causing the bee's own death; at drones being produced in such vast numbers for one single act, and with the great majority slaughtered by their sterile ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... regard this cultivation of it as profession and career enough for us, had he but betrayed more interest in our mastery of any art or craft. It was not certainly that the profession of virtue would have been anything less than abhorrent to him, but that, singular though the circumstance, there were times when he might have struck us as having after all more patience with it than with this, that or the other more technical thrifty scheme. Of the beauty of his dissimulated anxiety and tenderness on these and ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... the movement for the emancipation of woman, do not see the necessity for such a radical change. Influenced by their privileged social standing, they see in the more far-reaching working-women's movement dangers, not infrequently abhorrent aims, which they feel constrained to ignore, eventually even to resist. The class-antagonism, that in the general social movement rages between the capitalist and the working class, and which, with the ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... which in other races of humanity lies away in the mists of the ages behind the kitchen middens and the Cambrian rocks. My own opinion in this matter is that the earlier courting methods of the Igalwa involved a certain amount of effort on the man's part, a thing abhorrent to an Igalwa. It necessitated his dressing himself up, and likely enough fighting that impudent scoundrel who was engaged in courting her too; and above all serenading her at night on the native harp, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... of high ideals with a deeply religious fervour, never sinning and then repenting as Nelson was habitually doing. Physical punishment of his men was abhorrent to him, and although he enforced stern discipline on his crew, they worshipped him. "I cannot understand," he said, "the religion of an officer who can pray all one day and flog his men all the next." ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... fairly deny that some points in Mr. Tennyson's early, if not in his later, manner must have been highly and rightly disgustful to a critic who, like Lockhart, was above all things masculine and abhorrent of "gush." In the third, it is, unfortunately, not given to all critics to admire all styles alike. Let those to whom it is given thank God therefor; but let them, at the same time, remember that they are as much bound to accept whatever ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... and there on the profession of Faith Islamitan, proclaiming the Unity, they shrieked "Woe!" and "Ruin!" and besought succour of the Patriarchs of the Monasteries. Then fell they to calling upon John and Mary and the Cross abhorrent and stayed their hands from slaughter, whilst King Afridun went up to consult King Hardub of Greece, for the two Kings stood one at the head of each wing, right and left. Now there was with them also a famous cavalier, Lawiya highs, who commanded ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... of Zola himself, and my admiration of his epic greatness? About his material there is no disputing among people of our Puritanic tradition. It is simply abhorrent, but when you have once granted him his material for his own use, it is idle and foolish to deny his power. Every literary theory of mine was contrary to him when I took up 'L'Assommoir,' though unconsciously I had always been as much of a realist as I could, but ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... degradation there was no plea either of expediency or of a right secured by conquest. The extinction of what still ranked as a great royal house was accomplished by chicane, was due to a boundless ambition, and was rendered utterly abhorrent to all divine-right dynasties by the specious pretext of reform under which it was accomplished. This ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... "whether they were needed, or whether they were not," to the delight and admiration of the Irish staff. For pure extravagance, for pure pagan delight in extravagance, the Irishman and woman are hard to beat. The very warmth and generosity of their nature makes it abhorrent to them to stint in any direction, which is one reason, out of many, for the prevailing poverty ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... him. Indeed, even when less strongly moved, the sullen eye of this official expressed a malevolence of purpose which made men shudder to meet his glance; and the thrill of the young Scot was the deeper and more abhorrent, that he seemed to himself still to feel on his shoulders the grasp of the two death doing functionaries of this ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... remembered, too, that the opinion of the Critics on the Hearth is always volunteered (indeed, one would as soon think of asking for it as for a loan from the Sultan of Turkey), and in nine cases out of ten it is unfavourable. One has no objection to their praise, nor to any amount of it; what is so abhorrent is their advice, and still more their disapproval. It is like throwing 'half a brick' at you, which, utterly valueless in itself, still hurts you when it hits you. And the worst of it is that, apart from their rubbishy opinions, one likes these people; they are one's friends ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... inhuman in that white calm, and those abstracted eyes. His coat was already open, and the negro's great black paw flew up to his neck and tore his shirt down to the waist. And at the sound of that r-r-rip, and at the abhorrent touch of those coarse fingers, this man about town, this finished product of the nineteenth century, dropped his life-traditions and became a savage facing ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... least should not tell me so. I did not know then the virulence of the malady which had fallen on me. I did not know then that, because of you, other men would be abhorrent to me. I thought that I was as easy-hearted as you have ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... in him the spirit of the rebel. To be forbid a thing, with him, was to do it instantly. He refused all the service a Freshman should do. At table he took a malignant delight in demanding loudly second and third helps of the abhorrent prunes—long after he had come to feel the universal antagonism. He would not wake Butsey in the morning, fill his basin or arrange his shoes. He would run no errands. He refused to say sir or doff his hat to his superiors in the morning; and, being ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... on; nor to tell everything that we cannot help knowing. Idle curiosity and mischievous gossip result from the direction of our thirst for knowledge toward trifling and unworthy objects. There is great virtue in minding one's own business. The tell-tale is abhorrent even to the least developed moral sensibility. The gossip, the busybody, the scandalmonger is the worst pest that infests the average town and village. These mischief-makers take a grain of circumstantial evidence, mix with it ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... formation of political parties on lines akin to those which existed in the period before 1787. Behind Jefferson and Madison were rallying all the colonial-minded voters, to whom government was at best an evil and to whom, under any circumstances, strong authority and elaborate finance were utterly abhorrent. Around Hamilton gathered the men whose interests lay in building up a genuine, powerful, national government—the merchants, shipowners, moneyed men and creditors generally in the northern ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... we would reach the point where it should be our duty to accept the responsibility of the dominant American power, and accomplish manifest Destiny by adding Cuba and Porto Rico to our dominion, has for half a century been the familiar understanding of American citizens. Spain, by her abhorrent system, personified in Weyler, and illustrated in the murderous blowing up of the Maine with a mine, has forced this duty upon us; and though we made war unprepared, the good work is going on, and the finish of the fight will be the relegation of Spain, whose colonial ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... illos, qui Christian! vocantur, fidem suam e parabolis petiisse. Hi tamen interdum talia faciunt, qualia qui vere philosophantur. Nam quod mortem contemnunt, id quidem omnes ante oculos habemus; item quod verecundia quadam ducti ab usu rerum venerearum abhorrent. Sunt enim inter eos feminae et viri, qui per totam vitam a concubitu abstinuerint; sunt etiam qui in animis regendis coercendisque et in accerrimo honestatis studio eo progressi sint, ut nihil cedant vere philosophantibus." Christians, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... noble idea, but he did not find it realised in the Churches of his day. Sacerdotalism, even in its mildest forms, was abhorrent to him. During his manhood he never entered a church door, a fact which is a source of deep pain to many of his most enthusiastic biographers. Once only did Kant take his place in the procession which made its way to the cathedral on an especial day in the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... must be found for opposing anything and everything which would tend to indicate the possibility of intelligent life existing upon any other planet than the earth; although it is difficult to understand why such a possibility should be so abhorrent. It is a view that does not commend itself to me, but I need not ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... could not bring himself to encourage it then. The idea of "looking after dead men's shoes" was abhorrent to his mind, especially when the man whose death he contemplated had been so trusted to him as had been Sir Louis Scatcherd. He could not speak of the event, even to the squire, as being possible. So he kept his peace from day ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... said, "it is a thousand pities that you cannot come to Havana with me. The quality of being always virtuous—it is abhorrent, tres chere; correct it, if possible. And the garret cries out for us!" she said, turning away, with the straight line between her eyes that meant mischief, as Margaret had already learned. She turned to Peggy, who stood in some alarm, not knowing whether the old ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... had given to one of her minions a large tract of country and several thousands of peasants as property, it very justly provoked indignation and abhorrence in those who heard it. But if we compare the mode practised in England, with that which appears to us so abhorrent in Russia, it will be found to amount to very near the same ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... of fortune at their own risk. But they were very polite; they begged pardon when they knocked their scabbards against the consul's furniture, at the door they each made him a magnificent obeisance, said "Servus!" in their great voices, and were shown out by the old Marina, abhorrent of their uniforms and doubtful of the consul's political sympathies. Only yesterday she had called him up at an unwonted hour to receive the visit of a courtly gentleman who addressed him as Monsieur le Ministre, and offered him at a bargain ten thousand ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... appreciate Chesterton's sociology. "You see, I was brought up to think that it was quite right for the poor to have their teeth brushed by officials." This is undoubtedly the normal Socialistic outlook and the outlook most abhorrent to Chesterton. "The philanthropist," he once said, "is not a brother; he is a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... not. There was no time during the rebellion when I did not think, and often say, that the South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... painful corroboration. He chivalrously took sides at once with the unhappy Alice; no matter how shrewish the absconding wife might be, only a brute of a husband would fling such a message at her head. Archie hated discord; the very thought of it was abhorrent. He had never had a care in his life beyond his health, and quarrels of every sort he left to underbred people with evil tempers. Here was a furious lunatic telegraphing his wife of the severance of the most sacred ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... Here, the fantastic ends of the roots of shrubs from which they were made were cut into a grotesque triumvirate of legs and feet; here a black snake, spotted and coloured to represent the horrid reptile, made you fancy its ugly coils already twisting in abhorrent folds about your hands and arms. There was no end to the old man's imaginative freaks in this department, his wares bearing a proportionate price to the dignity of the location from which ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... adverse, counter, opposed; repugnant, incompatible, contradictory, retroactive, antagonistic, conflicting, abhorrent, inconsistent; perverse, wayward, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... there was nothing abhorrent to Aguinaldo and the men about him in beginning a war by the murder of the commanding general on the ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... betterment and a new hope. The evil was the result of the silence itself. Free speech and public discussion alone can remove the misery and cleanse the social life. The parents must know, and the teachers must know, and the boys must know, and the girls must know, if the abhorrent ills ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... of the libertine, illtreated his delicate little wife. She herself could not understand marriage without genuine affection on both sides. Any such intimate relation as the marriage tie involved must surely be repellent and abhorrent to any self-respecting woman unless love were there ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... she exclaimed. "Friends! There is no creature living that I loathe as I do you! No matter what the danger may be, I will speak the truth; tell you how utterly abhorrent you are to me, and brave ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... in the patient Griselda type of woman, in the woman who submits to gross and long continued ill treatment, any more than I believe in a man who tamely submits to wrongful aggression. No wrong-doing is so abhorrent as wrong-doing by a man toward the wife and the children who should arouse every tender feeling in his nature. Selfishness toward them, lack of tenderness toward them, lack of consideration for them, above all, brutality in any form toward them, should arouse the heartiest scorn and indignation ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... hypodermics, anesthetics, antisepsis and clinic thermometers, charts and diets, was utterly mysterious and abhorrent, and her healthy distaste for them amused Emily, and gave Emily a good reason for discussing ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... so often marked the frontier line of New England and New York with fire and blood. It is one of the most unhappy of the results of that savage warfare that in the minds of the communities that suffered from it the Jesuit missionary came to be looked upon as accessory to these abhorrent crimes. Deeply is it to be lamented that men with such eminent claims on our admiration and reverence should not be triumphantly clear of all suspicion of such complicity. We gladly concede the claim[28:2] that the proof of the complicity is ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... tradition had been turned to the exclusive advantage of the Jewish race, to the Rabbis, who had, moreover, constituted themselves the sole guardians within this nation of the said tradition, the manner of its fulfilment was necessarily abhorrent. Instead of a resplendent Messiah who should be presented by them to the people, a Saviour was born amongst the people themselves and brought to Jerusalem to be presented to the Lord; a Saviour moreover who, ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... the most remarkable phenomenon among them all. It may be well to specify some of the points that are peculiarly his own. One of them is the great simplicity of the structure of his mind. With an incomparable eye for the world around him in all things, great and small, he is abhorrent of everything speculative and abstract, and what may be called philosophies have no place in his works, almost the solitary exception being that he employs thought as an illustration of the rapidity of the journey of a deity. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... of the period show that the outcry against the concentration of capital was furious. Men believed that it threatened society with a form of tyranny more abhorrent than it had ever endured. They believed that the great corporations were preparing for them the yoke of a baser servitude than had ever been imposed on the race, servitude not to men but to soulless machines incapable of any motive but ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... experience, so idle that a day of no work made no difference to them. Their indolence, the effect of their enervating climate, was well-nigh invincible; they preferred hunger to trouble, and withal their customs were abhorrent to Christian morality. Most islets of the South Seas have much the same experience. The people, taken on their best side, show themselves gentle and intelligent, and their chiefs are dignified gentlemen; but there is a horrible background of ferocity and barbarism—often ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... lost on Congress. The United States representative must not adopt the customs as to dress of the effete monarchies of the old world. To send an Ambassador instead of a Minister was to show a most undemocratic deference to titles, abhorrent to every good republican. There had been several attempts to make a change in this matter, always unsuccessful, until ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... the moment's impulse, she would have risen and left the room, and though better counsel prevailed, she could not control the spice of temper which made the cherry-pie abhorrent. ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... they will not be reasoned nor frightened out of it; and if the North tries coercion, there will be war. I don't say this defiantly, but sadly, and merely because I want you to know the truth. War is abhorrent to my feelings,—especially a war with our own brethren: and then we are so ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... th' insensate frenzied part, Ah, why should I such scenes outlive Scenes so abhorrent to my heart! 'Tis ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Christian or a man of no creed; whether the crime be committed in political strife or industrial warfare; whether it be an act hired by a rich man or performed by a poor man; whether it be committed under the pretence of preserving order or the pretence of obtaining liberty. It is equally abhorrent in the eyes of all decent men, and, in the long run, equally damaging to the very cause to which the assassin ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... with horror the crumbling of the house of life—with horror, but also with a torturing pity. And then because compassion lives in me, I can at last separate between the sinner and his sin. The sin remains abhorrent, but I cannot hate the sinner. I see him as one who has fallen in a bad cause, but his wounds cry so loud for pity that I forget the moral treason that has brought him to a battle-field so ignominious ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... they were probably lost,—I thought of this dear, sweet old lady, and my heart rose in rebellion. She was certainly the best Christian I knew, and the idea that she should be punished for saying her prayers in the Presbyterian Church was abhorrent to me. I made up my mind that, if she was to be lost, I would be lost with her; and soon, under the influence of thoughts like these, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... cried the squire; "let me give you—this is more underdone;" holding between blade and fork in middle air abhorrent fragment of scarlet, shaking its gory ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his translation in 1859; and although it attracted no public attention, it is certainly possible that Browning saw it. He would have enjoyed its melodious beauty, but the philosophy of the poem would have been to him detestable and abhorrent. Much is made there of the Potter, meaning blind destiny: and the moral is, "Drink! the Past gone, seize To-day!" Browning explicitly rejects and scorns this teaching: it is propounded by fools for ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... capable of understanding him; what was that saying about entertaining angels unawares? London! Grizel had more than sufficient money to take two there, and once in London, a wonder such as himself was bound to do wondrous things. Now that he thought of it, to become a minister was abhorrent to him; to preach would be rather nice, oh, what things he should say (he began to make them up, and they were so grand that he almost wept), but to be good after the sermon was over, always to be good (even when Elspeth was out of the way), never to think queer unsayable things, never to say Stroke, ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... warning came too late, for at that very moment Ned had thrown a picture, frame and all, into the box that Dorothy had started to pack the tea set in. There was a crash, and even the reckless girls paused, for the sound of broken china is as abhorrent to any girl as is the bell ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... a jolly rambling old town, to our billet in a suburban villa on the Rebais road. The Division was marching past in the very best of spirits. We, who were very tired, endeavoured to make ourselves comfortable—we were then blanketless—on the abhorrent surface of a narrow ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... locks, some shouted out their favorite war-songs around the table, which was covered with the spoils of churches, and at their head sat the wild, long-haired chieftain, who was a few years later driven away by his own followers for his excesses,—the whole scene was all that was abhorrent to a pure, devout, and faithful nature, most full of terror to a woman. Yet there, in her strength, stood the peasant maiden, her heart full of trust and pity, her looks full of the power that is given by fearlessness of them ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... with no greater resistance? Why are the soldiers of Christ so sleepy and indifferent? Because they have so little real connection with Christ; because they are so destitute of His Spirit. Sin is not to them repulsive and abhorrent, as it was to their Master. They do not meet it, as did Christ, with decisive and determined resistance. They do not realize the exceeding evil and malignity of sin, and they are blinded both to the character and the power of the prince of darkness. There is little enmity ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... for this stern prophecy. The reasons are that the good old Israelitish virtue of brotherliness is dying away, that oppression and injustice are rampant (ii. 6-8, iii. 9, 10, iv. 1, v. 11, 12, viii. 4-6), and that rites are practised in the name of religion which are abhorrent to Yahweh, because they either have no moral meaning at all, and are mere forms (v. 21-23), or else, jndged from Amos's purified point of view, are absolutely immoral (ii. 7; cf. viii. 14). On the details of the captivity Amos preserves a mysterious vagueness. The fact, however, he puts forward ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... whispers, and Ringfield told her in four short and to him abhorrent words. "He said—you ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... was almost gone. 'Oh! I beg your pardon,' she faltered. She could not exculpate herself, she saw it looked like an idle, almost like an indecorous trick, unkind, everything abhorrent to her and to him, especially in the present state of things. His eyes were on her, his head bent towards her; he waited for an answer. 'I beg your pardon,' was ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... naturalized productions from another land. Nor ought we marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely perfect, as in the case even of the human eye; or if some of them be abhorrent to our ideas of fitness. We need not marvel at the sting of the bee, when used against an enemy, causing the bee's own death; at drones being produced in such great numbers for one single act, and being then ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... glimmer of interest in woman's rights at this time, Susan started off on a lecture tour of her own, determined to make people understand that this war, so abhorrent to her, must be fought for the Negroes' freedom. "I cannot feel easy in my conscience to be dumb in an hour like this," she explained to Lydia, adding, "It is so easy to feel your power for public work slipping ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... him the thought to put an end to this maddening grief, by violence to period this miserable existence. But always he cast from him the horrible thought. He was not a coward, and the cowardice of suicide was abhorrent to him. Poverty he might leave her, but not the legacy of a suicide. If only it might be God's kindly will to let him die, once this abominable bargain was consummated! Death is the seal of silence; it locks alike the lips of the living and the dead. And she might live in ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... contrary, what they asked was for its more rigorous enforcement. That Catholics should be suffered under whatever pains and penalties to preserve their faith and worship in a Protestant Commonwealth was abhorrent to them. Nor was Puritan opinion more tolerant to the Protestant sectaries who were beginning to find the State Church too narrow for their enthusiasm. Elizabeth herself could not feel a bitterer abhorrence of the "Brownists" (as they ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... of waste was abhorrent. I rebelled. I tried to show the guards a score or so of more efficient ways. I was reported. I was given the dungeon and the starvation of light and food. I emerged and tried to work in the chaos of inefficiency of ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... to Pagan masters was abhorrent to the later empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not because slavery in itself was condemned, but because it was a sort of treason to civilization to force men away from Civilization ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... as he was, had lost all his intrepidity in this golgotha, this place of skulls; the very scent of which, knowing whence it proceeded, was abhorrent. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... Revolution, when that horrid hell burnt with its most lurid flame. In such a state of things, to be accused is to be condemned—to protect the innocent is to be guilty; and what perhaps is the worst effect, even men of better nature, to whom their own deeds are abhorrent, are goaded by terror to be forward and emulous in deeds of guilt and violence. The scenes of lawless violence which have been acted in some portions of our country, rare and restricted as they have been, have done more to tarnish its ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... which proved to be singularly ill chosen. The right to hold slaves as property in the Territories had lately, to the infinite joy of the South, been declared by the Supreme Court to be guaranteed by the Constitution; and now Douglas had the audacity to repeat that notion of his, so abhorrent to all friends of slavery,—that this invaluable right could be made practically worthless by unfriendly local legislation, or even by the negative hostility of withholding friendly legislation! From the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... have kept us in the mud of Earth forever, if it could. Reason took us out to the wider universe. Instinct tells me that those out there are my people. Reason tells me that you—" he looked at Bregg, "—who are abhorrent to me, who would make my skin creep if I touched you, you who go by reason—that you are my real people. Instinct made a hell of Earth for millennia—I say we ought to leave it behind us there in the mud and not let it make ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse men's minds asleep, and none but the wolf and the murderer is abroad. This was the time when lady Macbeth waked to plot the murder of the king. She would not have undertaken a deed so abhorrent to her sex, but that she feared her husband's nature, that it was too full of the milk of human kindness, to do a contrived murder. She knew him to be ambitious, but withal to be scrupulous, and not yet prepared for that height ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... I am back again on p. 85! the last chapter demanding an entire revision, which accordingly it is to get. And where my mail is to come in, God knows! This forced, violent, alembicated style is most abhorrent to me; it can't be helped; the note was struck years ago on the Janet Nicoll, and has to be maintained somehow; and I can only hope the intrinsic horror and pathos, and a kind of fierce glow of colour there is to it, and the surely remarkable wealth ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... easier to digest raw. A few, on the advice of their doctors, eat minced raw flesh, raw beef juice and even fresh warm blood. Such practice is abhorrent to every person of refinement. Cooking lessens the offensive appearance and qualities of flesh and changes the flavour; thorough cooking also destroys any parasites that may be present. Raw flesh is more stimulating to the animal passions, and excites ferocity in both man and ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... did approach me; but it was with the air of men providing against a danger particularly remote, their half-hearted speeches serving only to fix them in my memory as belonging to a class, especially abhorrent to me—the class, I mean, of those who would run at once with ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... or any of them, I should have been an execrable and detestable villain, and I should have merited the scorn of every man and woman in the universe: but, even then, even if I had been guilty of all these horrible and unnatural deeds, it would, even under these abhorrent circumstances, have been base in the extreme in the doubled-faced, black-hearted villains of the Courier, the dull Post and the mock Times to attack me in the way they have repeatedly done about my wife; because there are not three such abandoned ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... only have been used in the captured arms for which they were suited. I heard occasionally that the enemy did use explosive balls, and others prepared so as to leave a copper ring in the wound, but it was always spoken of as an atrocity beneath knighthood and abhorrent to civilization. The slander is only one of many instances in which our enemy have committed or attempted crimes of which our people and their Government were incapable, and then magnified the guilt by accusing us of the offences they ...
— A Refutation of the Charges Made against the Confederate States of America of Having Authorized the Use of Explosive and Poisoned Musket and Rifle Balls during the Late Civil War of 1861-65 • Horace Edwin Hayden
... converts be made to order by constraint, motives of self-interest, or by baptizing them en bloc? What else but deepest aversion and mistrust could a religion inspire which is professed and taught by a people who practise spoliation, murder, and other descriptions of wickedness abhorrent even to a savage mind? The aborigines would daily behold their own land and possessions enjoyed by usurpers and "would be teachers," who subjected them besides to slavery and abject misery. Could the religion of ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... Ramsey, in this first bereavement of her life, sleep was as abhorrent as if her brother's burial were already at hand. Grief was good, for grief was love. Sleep was heartlessness. Moreover, in sleep, only in sleep, there was no growth. Of course, that was not true; only yesterday and the day before she had grown consciously between ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... he had a kind of devouring passion, he treated her with great brutality, till she acquired sufficient finesse to subjugate him. Is it then surprising that a very desirable woman, with a sanguine constitution, should shrink, abhorrent, from his embraces; or that an empty mind should be employed only to vary the pleasures which emasculated her Circean court? And, added to this, the histories of the Julias and Messalinas of antiquity convincingly prove ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... hateful despotic monarchy, and the ascendancy of a bigoted and superstitious church, these oppressions were far preferable to the levelling and loathsome tyranny of socialism, in any of the forms in which it presented itself in England, France, or Germany. Whatever was abhorrent to the natural sense of justice, and the dear claims of kindred, was propagated by socialism; and which the socialists, whether called Owenites, St. Simonians, or red republicans, were ready by force to establish. Enlightened ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... it entailed. He soon began to perspire freely, too freely; nevertheless, there was no glow to his body; he could think only of easy-chairs and warm stoves. He wondered what ailed him. Nothing could be more abhorrent than this, he told himself. Health was a valuable thing, no doubt, and he agreed that no price was too high to pay for it—no price, perhaps, except dull, uninteresting exercise of this sort. He was upon the ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... But there may be exceptions, and the present case is without doubt one.—Suppose there was no law of society to restrain you from murdering your own father, what think you? If either of you should please to take it into your head to perpetrate such a villainous act, so abhorrent to the will of the society, would you not be restrained? And is the Liberty of your Country of less importance than the life of your father! But what is most astonishing is, that some two or three persons of very little consequence in themselves, have Dared openly ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... royal prerogative of selecting in her mate just those qualities that pleased her for transmission to future generations and eliminating others distasteful to her. If so, she is still engaged in this work as much as ever, and in his dull, slow way man feels that her presence enforces her standards, abhorrent though it would be to him to compromise in one iota his masculinity. Most plays and games in which both sexes participate have some of the advantages with some of the disadvantages of coeducation. Where both are partners rather than antagonists, there is less eviration. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... on the other side of day, that haven of safety and apparent innocence—his bed. One visitor had come: at any moment another might follow and be more obstinate. To have done the deed, and yet not to reap the profit, would be too abhorrent a failure. The money, that was now Markheim's concern; and as a means ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... gone on ahead to Canada about six months in advance of her, she felt that she had strong ties in the goodly land. Every day she remained in bondage, the cords bound her more tightly, and "weeks seemed like months, and months like years," so abhorrent had the peculiar institution become to her in every particular. In this state of mind, she saw no other way, than by submitting to be secreted, until an opportunity should offer, via the Underground ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... bending his brow suddenly upon the Mexican herder, "remember, now—in three days!" He continued the sentence by a comprehensive sweep of the hand from that spot out through the western pass, favored each of the three Chihuahuanos with an abhorrent scowl, and rode slowly away down ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... abhorrent to Gray, thus became inevitable, though apparently not contemplated by Gray himself. The private success of the poem was greater than he had anticipated, and in February of 1751 he was horrified to receive a letter from the editor of a young and undistinguished periodical, "The Magazine of Magazines," ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... though she approached her hand to something nauseous and abhorrent, Ann reached out and withdrew one of the torn sheets of paper and stared at it. It was covered with repeated copyings of a single name—sometimes the whole name, sometimes only one or other of the initial letters to it. And the ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... That the Rabbis borrowed this God-idea and the expression "Our Father which is in Heaven" from Christianity is untenable, for, as Herford (Pharisaism, 120 et seq.) points out, such borrowing would have been abhorrent to them. This expression was undoubtedly current long before and during the time of Jesus, and it represented a conception of the divine acceptable to both the Rabbis and Jesus. The Rabbis had no quarrel with Christianity on this score, but did not admit the "sonship" of ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text
... ears, and the sun shone more cheerfully than it had done for years. Amidst all her new joys, Emily very often thought of her beloved Indian parents, Towandahoc and Ponawtan, and longed to see them again; but Indian life, as developed in the village, was abhorrent to her very soul, and here she enjoyed all the freedom and communion with nature she had once so highly prized, with society, and advantages for mental cultivation she was now at an age to appreciate. All were delighted to teach the docile and intelligent girl, ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... nobiscum mittere. Volebat tamen, vt credimus, quod nos id ab eo peteremus. Sed cm vnus de Tartaris nostris, qui senior erat, nos ad hoc petendum hortaretur, nobis quidem, vt venirent, ne quaquam bonum videbatur. [Sidenote: Legate abhorrent Tartarorum ad Christianos legatione.] Ideque respondimus ei, qud non erat nostrum petere, sed si sponte ipse Imperator mitteret eos, libenter eos secur conduceremus, Domino adiuuante. Nobis autem ob plures causas vt venirent, non ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... you see fit," The Laird answered. He longed to evade the issue—he realized that Daney was crowding him always, setting traps for him, driving him relentlessly toward a reconciliation that was abhorrent to him. "I have no objection. She cannot afford the expense of a Seattle hospital, I daresay, and I do not ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... sickening monotony of repetition. The words, too, were gabbled over in a manner anything but impressive. He was such a downright enemy to form, as substituted for religion, that any dash of untruth or unreality was abhorrent to him. When the last sounds died away in the cathedral we came out again into the cloisters, and sauntered about until the shadows fell over the beautiful enclosure. We were hospitably entreated, and listened ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Brahmin, son of a well-paid Government servant, and incarcerated for forgery and theft, was his most annoying persecutor. He was at great pains to expectorate and murmur "Hubshi" in accents of abhorrent contempt, whenever Moussa Isa chanced between ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... been held up in abhorrence as a vice; but it is rather a passion strongly implanted by nature, and abhorrent from the dreadful effects produced by its overpowering influence, than a vice per se. Life itself is a lottery, and the best part of our life is passed in gambling. It is difficult to draw the line between gambling ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... His wife had received a handsome outfit from her father, at the time of her marriage; but she was destined to see one article of furniture after another seized to pay the military fines, which were alike abhorrent to her heart and her conscience. Among these articles, was a looking glass, of an unusually large and clear plate, which was valuable as property, and dear to her as a bridal gift from her parents. She could not see it carried off by the officer, to meet the expenses of military reviews, without ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... wind is Abbe Maury; Ciceronian pathetic is Cazales. Keen-trenchant, on the other side, glitters a young Barnave; abhorrent of sophistry; sheering, like keen Damascus sabre, all sophistry asunder,—reckless what else he sheer with it. Simple seemest thou, O solid Dutch-built Petion; if solid, surely dull. Nor lifegiving in that tone of thine, livelier polemical Rabaut. With ineffable serenity sniffs great Sieyes, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... for two terms. The storekeeper had been hard at work for some time with no visible success, for the Farrington family with their high-flown ideas were much disliked by the quiet, humble-minded folk of Glendow. The idea, therefore, of him being Ifteir representative was at first abhorrent to most of the people. But this new ruse of Farrington's was proving most successful. The Fletchers drew with them all the loud-talking and undesirable element of Glendow. This Farrington well knew, and by espousing their cause he was greatly strengthening ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... convinced that the pernicious system of fostering monopolies that has been instituted in this country can have but one result, the undermining of our popular institutions, and in their place the substitution of moneyed Plutocracy. This result is abhorrent to every ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... Francesca virtuously, as she plaited her hair, "and there is no spectacle so abhorrent to every sense as a narrow-minded man who cannot see anything outside of his own country. But he is awfully good-looking,—I will say that for him: and if you don't explain me to Lady Baird, I will write to Mr. Beresford about the earl. There was no bickering there; ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... him, and pitying me? Where was the explanation of her incomprehensible apathy when my name was twice pronounced in her hearing? Why had she left us, as if the bare idea of remaining in our company was abhorrent to her? The foremost interest of my life was now the interest of penetrating these mysteries. Walk? I was in such a fever of expectation that I felt as if I could have walked to the world's end, if I could only keep my husband by my side, and ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... languid way, liked the Duke of Hereward better than any one else in the whole world except her mother, but she did not like him in the character of a husband. The idea of marriage even with him was abhorrent to her. In her first surprise and dismay at the announcement of the duke's proposal for her hand, and her father's acceptance of that proposal, she betrayed all the unconquerable antipathy she felt to the contemplated marriage; but in vain she wept and pleaded to be left in peace; ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... breath. 'This spirit tender' is the 'quickening life' of the renascent year; or briefly the Spring. By 'the leprous corpse' Shelley may mean, not the corpse of an actual leper, but any corpse in a loathsome state of decay. Even so abhorrent an object avails to fertilize the soil, and thus promotes the growth of ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... the admiration from the bride and remained the central figure of the picture. Her portrait by Sargent had been the sensation of the Salon when he had been a grubby-faced boy with his nose in a Latin grammar. An unusual situation was abhorrent to him. That he should marry an older woman, one, moreover, who had gained her public in a field to which he had not gained admission, was doubly distasteful by reason of his deference to the conventional. ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... prostitution to alleged importation, to the growth of the cadet system, or similar causes, is highly superficial. I have already referred to the former. As to the cadet system, abhorrent as it is, we must not ignore the fact that it is essentially a phase of modern prostitution,—a phase accentuated by suppression and graft, resulting from sporadic ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... unconverted brain can see the least of sense in this doctrine; that it is abhorrent to all who have not been the recipients of a "new heart;" that only the perfectly good can justify the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... mystic fire, we shall find many things of the early world, which now seem grotesque and unlovely to our eyes, growing full of shadowy and magnificent suggestion. Things that were distant and strange, things abhorrent, the blazing dragons, winged serpents and oceans of fire which affrighted us, are seen as the portals through which the imagination enters a more beautiful, radiant world. The powers we dared not raise our eyes to—heroes, ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... exclaimed her husband in an aggrieved tone, "it is incomprehensible that you should have such a total disregard for the delicacy of my constitution,—especially when you know that the very odor of the stable is abhorrent to my olfactory senses. Atalanta has quarters provided for her at the Vernon Livery, and one of the grooms has orders to bring the carriage to the door at ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... would marry and go away," said Corona to whom the very name of Del Ferice was abhorrent, and who detested Donna Tullia almost as heartily. Corona was a very good and noble woman, but she was very far from that saintly superiority which forgets to resent injuries. Her passions were eminently human, and very strong. She ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... the constitutional control which the barons regarded as their right. In the same way the unlimited franchises of the lords of the Welsh march, the almost regal authority which the treaty of Shrewsbury gave to the Prince of Wales, the rejection of his claims as feudal overlord of Scotland, were abhorrent to his autocratic disposition. True son of the Church though he was, he was the bitter foe of ecclesiastical claims which, constantly encroaching beyond their own sphere, denied kings ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... plump into the situation her mother had imagined and encouraged. She blushed at the collision with it, and became a very allegory of innocence confronted with abhorrent evil. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... conceive an aversion to, take a dislike to. excite hatred, provoke hatred &c. n.; be hateful &c. adj.; stink in the nostrils; estrange, alienate, repel, set against, sow dissension, set by the ears, envenom, incense, irritate, rile; horrify &c. 830; roil. Adj. hating &c. v.; abhorrent; averse from &c. (disliking) 867; set against. bitter &c. (acrimonious) 895 implacable &c. (revengeful) 919. unloved, unbeloved, unlamented, undeplored, unmourned[obs3], uncared for, unendeared[obs3], un-valued; disliked &c. 867. crossed in love, forsaken, rejected, lovelorn, jilted. obnoxious, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the numerous instances of divergence from their assumed standard, by representing them as cases in which the perceptions are unhealthy. Some particular mode of conduct or feeling is affirmed to be unnatural; why? because it is abhorrent to the universal and natural sentiments of mankind. Finding no such sentiment in yourself, you question the fact; and the answer is (if your antagonist is polite), that you are an exception, a peculiar case. But neither ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill |
