"Baseness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the exercise of charity, in the love of their neighbour, in endeavouring to promote the happiness of all they had to do with, and in the pursuit of what is just and right and good as the general bent of their mind and end of their life; and that doing an action of baseness or cruelty would be as great violence to their self, as much breaking in upon their nature, as any external force. Persons of this character would add, if they might be heard, that they consider themselves ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... But, perhaps, with a view to a school of discipline and of moral fortitude, it might be a more salutary prayer, "Give me riches and poverty, and afterwards neither." For the transitional state between riches and poverty will teach a lesson both as to the baseness and the goodness of human nature, and will impress that lesson with a searching force, such as no borrowed experience ever can approach. Most probable it is that Shakspeare drew some of his powerful scenes in the Timon of Athens, those which exhibit ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... people; because, when the customs of uncivilized nations, and the uncivilized customs which disgrace our own colonies, are become so familiar as to be permitted amongst us with impunity, we ourselves must insensibly degenerate to the same degree of baseness with those from whom such bad customs were derived; and may, too soon, have the mortification to see the hateful extremes of tyranny and slavery ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet
... sacred an engagement as marriage with one man, with a stronger affection for another, of how calm and innocent a nature soever that affection may be, is a degree of baseness of which my ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... I had deemed a man of men Faulty, as great men are, but with no taint Of baseness,—with those faults that shew the saint Of after days, perhaps,—wert even then When first I loved thee but a spreading tree Whose leaves shewed not ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... to hazard fame, Heauens haue lent thee meanes to scape thine ill, If thou abide, as true as is thy name, So truly shall thy fault, thy death fulfill: And as to loue the life for vertues flame, Is the iust act of a true noble will, So to contemne it, and her helps exclude, Is baseness, rashness, and no Fortitude. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... real John Bull, heavy, good-natured lumberer as he is, was never worse represented than in this journal which bore his name, but had little of his kindly spirit. Hook was its originator, and for a long time its main supporter. Scurrility, scandal, libel, baseness of all kinds formed the fuel with which it blazed, and the wit, bitter, unflinching, unsparing, which puffed the flame up, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... my own miserable mind. But in these supplementary memoirs, wherein I pledged myself to extenuate nothing more that I might have to tell of Raffles, it is only fair that I should make as clean a breast of my own baseness. It was I, then, and I alone, who outraged natural sentiment, and trampled the expiring embers of elementary decency, by proposing and planning the raid upon my ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... Lewis waited on Major Grant and in the interview between them, after having bestowed on him some abusive epithets, challenged him to the field. Grant declined to accept the invitation; and Lewis, after spitting in his face in the presence of several of the French officers, left him to reflect on his baseness. ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... done will be very likely to conceal from you the true cause of his disaster, and if you know the cause you may perhaps be able to reclaim him. If he has any sense of honour left in him, and of what is due to you, he will seek your pardon for his baseness, and you will have a hold on him afterwards which you would not have if you were in ignorance of what has happened. For him I do not care a straw, but for you I feel deeply, and I believe that my frankness with you, although ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... thy superhuman power Needs no assistance from an arm like mine; But grateful as I am for this great service, I cannot leave thee now, and shrink from peril, That would be baseness which ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... every maiden, who was distinguished by intellect, virtue, valour, beauty, without respect to rank or birth; and rejecting in turn, from its own ranks, each of its own children who fell below some lofty standard, and showed by weakliness, dulness, or baseness, incapacity for the post of guiding and elevating their fellow-citizens. Thus would arise a true aristocracy; a governing body of the really most worthy—the most highly organised in body and in mind—perpetually recruited from below: from ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... power to a handful of wealthy men—and especially to the one most wealthy and unscrupulous among them—whose wealth is an accident of speculation, whose origins are repulsive, and whose characters have, as a rule, the weakness and baseness developed by this sort of adventures. There are, among such gutter-snipes, thousands whose luck ends in the native gutter, half a dozen whose luck lands them into millions, one or two at most who, on the top of such a career go crazy with the ambition of the parvenu and propose to direct the ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... night indignation had seized Lucy. After reading accounts of the case in half a dozen papers she could not doubt that her father was justly condemned, and she was horrified at the baseness of the crime. His letters to the poor woman he had robbed, were read in court, and Lucy flushed as she thought of them. They were a tissue of lies, hypocritical and shameless. Lucy remembered the question she had put ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... happiness, and while he smiled at her, all the Furies were tearing at his heart. Indeed, to give some idea of the depths of doubt, despair, and incredulity in which the boy was groveling; he who so clung to life—the life which the angel had made so fair—who so loved it, that he would have stooped to baseness merely to live; he, the pleasure-loving scapegrace, the degenerate d'Esgrignon, had even taken out his pistols, had gone so far as to think of suicide. He who would never have brooked the appearance of an insult was abusing ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... "Treasure Island" and then imprisons a tramp is a hypocrite; the squire who is proud of English colonists and indulgent to English schoolboys, but cruel to English poachers, is drawing near that deep place wherein all liars have their part. But our point here is that the baseness is in the idea of bewildering the tramp; of leaving him no place for repentance. It is quite true, of course, that in the days of slavery or of serfdom the needy were fenced by yet fiercer penalties ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... country. Construct your representative system as you will, these men will always be sycophants. If you give power to Marylebone, they will fawn on the householders of Marylebone. If you leave power to Gatton, they will fawn on the proprietor of Gatton. I can see no reason for believing that their baseness will be more mischievous in the former case than ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... so—an act of baseness, a crime of some sort, may be the beginning, the first cause, of a man's salvation. It pulls him up, wakes his conscience. Aghast at what he has done, he reflects, repents, reforms. That is a comforting circumstance, a token ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... which legitimates the baseness of to-day by the baseness of yesterday, a school which explains every cry of the serf against the knout as rebellious, once the knout becomes a prescriptive, a derivative, a historical knout, a school to which history only shows itself a posteriori, like the God of Israel to his servant Moses, ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... inconsistent with John's statement that the supper proper was ended before the washing of feet was performed; the act does not appear to have been so unusual as to cause surprize. To many it has appeared plausible, that because of his utter baseness Judas would not be permitted to participate with the other apostles in the holy ordinance of the Sacrament; others infer that he was allowed to partake, as a possible means of moving him to abandon his evil purpose even at that late hour, or of filling his cup of iniquity to overflowing. The writer's ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... at your indignation, my dear!' said Mrs. Gibson. 'It is just what I should have felt at your age. But one learns the baseness of human nature with advancing years. I was wrong, though, to undeceive you so early—but depend upon it, the thought I alluded to has ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... prevent any one?) a worthless and profligate scoundrel; there are some doubts as to the reality of his being a son of James, which doubts are probably unfounded, the grand proof of his legitimacy being the thorough baseness of his character. It was said of his father that he could speak well, and it may be said of him that he could write well, the only thing he could do which was worth doing, always supposing that there is any merit in being ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the conquest of Naples with complacency, and that its measures were directed so as designedly not to prevent the French from overrunning it. That cabinet was assuredly capable of any folly, and of any baseness; and it is not improbable that at this time, calculating upon the success of the new coalition, it indulged a dream of adding extensively to its former Italian possessions; and, therefore, left the few remaining powers of Italy to be ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... which deprived me of the hard-won earnings of years of ingenious industry was brought about by the baseness of a man who was concerned with me in purchasing drugs for exportation to the Confederate States. Unluckily, I was obliged to employ as my agent a long-legged sea-captain from Maine. With his aid, I invested in this enterprise about six thousand dollars, which I reasonably hoped ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... for this remark. But there are wrongs which are not punishable by the law, being too small and undefinable for its cognizance. It is the bad faith which enters into contracts, and deceives the honest purchaser, or dupes the confiding vendor; the baseness which conspires to wink down credit; the avarice which greedily takes advantage of poverty, or the craft which converts it into a weapon of fraud; the scandal which sets neighbor against neighbor; the fretful harshness which clouds the ...
— Reflections on the Operation of the Present System of Education, 1853 • Christopher C. Andrews
... and treacherous, without showing what he has done, might justly be termed idle abuse. But to go through all his actions and convict him in detail, will take, as it happens, but a short time, and is expedient, I think, for two reasons: first, that his baseness may appear in its true light; secondly, that they, whose terror imagines Philip to be invincible, may see he has run through all the artifices by which he rose to greatness, and his career is just come to an end. I myself, men of Athens, should most assuredly have regarded Philip as an object ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... learne, that a Good Prince gouerned by evill ministers is as dangerous as if he were evill himselfe. By Otho, that the fortune of a rash man is Torrenti similis, which rises at an instant, and falles in a moment. By Vitellius, that he that hath no vertue can neuer be happie: for by his own baseness he will loose all, which either fortune, or other mens labours have cast upon him. By Vespasian, that in civill tumults an advised patience, and opportunitie well taken are the onely weapons of advantage. In them ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... most trusted councillor and medium of communication with the English. Raja Ram Nath, whom we saw accompanying the prince in his escape from Dehli, continued about him; but the chief favourite was an illiterate ruffian called by the title Hissam-ud-daulah, who stooped to any baseness whereby he could please the self-indulgent monarch by pandering to his lowest pursuits. The duties of the office of Vazir were delegated by Shujaa to his son Saadat Ali, who afterwards succeeded ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... questions of the war, and have, I hope, said enough to show that we have no reason to blush for our soldiers, but only for those of their fellow-countrymen who have traduced them. But there are a number of opponents of the war who have never descended to such baseness, and who honestly hold that the war might have been avoided, and also that we might, after it broke out, have found some terms which the Boers could accept. At their back they have all those amiable and goodhearted idealists who have not examined the question very critically, ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the souvenir he had evoked was a rather skillfully contrived piece of baseness; for by the remembrance of his own fete he, for the first time, perceived its inferiority compared with that of Fouquet. Colbert received back again at Vaux what Fouquet had given him at Fontainebleau, and, as a good financier, returned it with the best possible interest. Having ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... dark intrigue and base agents. There were designs against King William that were no more honourable than the ambushes of cut-throats and footpads. 'Tis humiliating to think that a great prince, possessor of a great and sacred right, and upholder of a great cause, should have stooped to such baseness of assassination and treasons as are proved by the unfortunate King James's own warrant and sign-manual given to his supporters in this country. What he and they called levying war was, in truth, no better than instigating murder. The noble Prince of Orange burst magnanimously through those feeble ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... moved from Marseilles to Aix escorted by a retinue of 200 carriages. Elected in both places by the Third Estate, he came to Versailles hoping to repair his fortune. There it was soon apparent that he possessed powers of mind equal to the baseness of his conduct. He is described by Malouet as the only man who perceived from the first where the Revolution was tending; and his enemy Mounier avows that he never met a more intelligent politician. He was always ready to speak, and always vigorous and adroit. His renowned ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... guardian of my childhood, My second mother, shuts her heart against me! Well, I have won from her what most imports The present need, this secret of the dungeon Known only to herself.—A Moor! a Sorcerer! No, I have faith, that nature ne'er permitted Baseness to wear a form so noble. True, I doubt not, that Ordonio had suborned him To act some part in some unholy fraud; As little doubt, that for some unknown purpose He hath baffled his suborner, terror-struck him, And ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... consults no interest but its own in the management of government, and which will never make a concession to the manufacturers or the merchants of the North, unless it be to purchase some new act of baseness, or bind them in some new chains of servility.—But have you inquired whether that flood of paper is necessary? We frankly tell you that we do not believe it is; we believe that a better system is possible,—to be brought about, not by greater restrictions on banking, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the favor of Butler, than his attentions to Mrs. Wentworth changed to that of unmanly presumption, and at last he had the baseness to make proposals at once dishonorable to her as a lady of virtue and position in society, and disgraceful to him as a man. These propositions were accompanied by a threat to have her turned out ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... Demoiselles de Bienfilatre, l'Affichage celeste, la Machine a gloire, and le Plus beau diner du monde, betrayed a singularly inventive and keenly bantering mind. The whole order of contemporary and utilitarian ideas, the whole commercialized baseness of the age were glorified in stories whose poignant irony ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... excuse open to him for his presence in Benton's sordid halls. And he had to bear as best he could the baseness of his associates; of course, women had free run of all ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... commenced reproaching him in an indignant tone of voice, with the baseness of his conduct, and his insatiate ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... challenged him in single combat. "It is now more than ever," said he, "clear to my mind how great a commander our Aemilius Paulus is, when I see he was able to perform such famous and great exploits with an army so full of sedition and baseness; nor can I sufficiently wonder, that a people that seemed to glory in the triumphs over Illyrians and Ligurians, should now through envy refuse to see the Macedonian king led alive, and all the glory of Philip and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... matter! do we not still sacrifice all those baser feelings to the imaginary model? and we still feed our hearts on the virtues we attribute to the beloved, we still withdraw ourselves from the baseness of human nature. What lover is there who would not give his life for his mistress? What gross and sensual passion is there in a man who is willing to die? We scoff at the knights of old; they knew the meaning of love; we know nothing but debauchery. ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... signature many times—soon I shall be able to make it exactly like her own hand. And I shall tell her, my lady, that he would have deceived her, that I overheard him love-making to another girl— that I discovered his falsehood—his baseness—and that he fled in his shame from the county. Yes, yes, we will dupe them both.' "In this fashion she chattered and muttered feverishly for some minutes, till I grew alarmed, and taking her by the shoulders, tried to shake ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... took in reflecting on the respect he paid her, made her unmindful of what she owed Melanthe: the many obligations she had received from her, and the friendship she had for her in return, made her think she ought to acquaint her with the baseness of the count de Bellfleur, in order to prevent an affection which she found she had already too much indulged from influencing her to grant him any farther favours; but this she knew was a very critical point ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... physiognomy of the gaping scavenger to the doctor, who stood stupefied. "As for Caroline Crochard!—she may die of hunger and thirst, hearing the heartrending shrieks of her starving children, and convinced of the baseness of the man she loves. I will not give a sou to rescue her; and because you have helped her, I will see ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... him credit for the deepest craft and wisdom. All this had been prepared by him, they said. His flight was a ruse, his pusillanimity was prudence; he had made the Tartars their own destroyers, without risking the fate of Russia in a battle; and what had just been condemned as dastard baseness was ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... with delay, danger or extreme discomfort. Hence a special meaning of baseness in ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... ever growing and spreading throughout the world. And before him arose, too, the image of Seraphine, the temptress, opening her perfumed arms to him and carrying him off to the same existence of pleasure and baseness ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... his duty to the public. Seduction thus failing of its ends, calumny, menaces, and the height of power were made use of against him. They lost the effect proposed, but had that, which the show of baseness and violence ever produce on a mind truly virtuous. They increased his honest firmness, because they manifested, that the times required more than ordinary exertions of manliness. In consequence of this conduct, Mr. Adams obtained the highest honours which a virtuous man can receive from the ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... story in grim earnest, and arguing some farcical fantasy as if it was a serious proposition of law or logic. Nothing funnier can be imagined than the discomfiture of a story-teller who has fondly thought to tickle the great man's fancy by an anecdote which depends for its point upon some trait of baseness, cynicism, or sharp practice. He finds his tale received in dead silence, looks up wonderingly for an explanation, and finds that what was intended to amuse has only disgusted. Mr. Browning once told Mr. Gladstone a highly characteristic story of Disraelitish duplicity, and for all reply ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... possessions. The landowners, truly or falsely, declared that, "for the most part, they received no more rent than they were wont to receive," "yet, paying for everything, they provided thrice as much by reason of the baseness of the money."[634] It was calculated that the annual proceeds of the subsidy would be no more than L140,000;[635] and even this the House of Commons declared that the country would not bear for more than one year. They did not choose perhaps to leave the queen ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... degrade themselves, by employing one of our generals, whose talents, even before we knew his treachery, we held in light estimation: abilities must, in truth, be rare in New York. But whilst speaking of baseness, Colonel Laurens will tell you of the fine embassy sent by General Clinton to some mutinous soldiers. He will describe to you also the details of that mutiny; the means employed to arrest it with the Pennsylvanians, ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... were, were less painful than those of which I am conscious to-day. With the tenderness and pity which caused them was mingled something of their own divine sweetness. Now, on the contrary, my grief has the baseness and bitterness of an evil desire. My soul is desolate and the tears in my eyes are like an ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... [1] in his little Book wherein he lays down Maxims for a Man's advancing himself at Court, advises his Reader to associate himself with the Fortunate, and to shun the Company of the Unfortunate; which, notwithstanding the Baseness of the Precept to an honest Mind, may have something useful in it for those who push their Interest in the World. It is certain a great Part of what we call good or ill Fortune, rises out of right or wrong Measures, and Schemes of Life. When I hear a Man complain of his being ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... gone unpunished? Has virtue ever failed of its reward? Your novelist is of all autocrats the most zealous of right and wrong. Villain may through two-thirds of his career enjoy his wicked pleasures, exceedingly prosper despite his baseness; but ever above him the cold eye of his judge keeps watch, and in the end he is apportioned the most horrible deserts that any could wish. Virtue may by the gods be hounded and harried till the reader's heart ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... embarrassing guest of Louis XV., and a guest of whom the victorious English were continually requiring the ignominious dismissal; until, wearied by the indifference to all hints and orders to free France from his compromising presence, the Court of Versailles had descended to the incredible baseness of having the Prince kidnapped as he was going to the opera, bound hand and foot, carried like a thief to the fortress of Vincennes, and then conducted to the frontier like a suspected though unconvicted swindler, or other ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... an American, (whose Thursday evening receptions we well know, attended by some of the most illustrious French and foreign residents in the metropolis,) to accompany him on a tour of inspection to the Gobelins, and had afterwards been guilty of the unexampled baseness of leaving the coupe he had employed standing, unpaid, at the door of a certain house in the Rue Racine, whilst he escaped by a private passage into the Rue de la Harpe, and so forth, and so forth. I saw it all. I blushed, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... of such a man, wondered Mr. Caryll. If he were equipped with wit enough to apprehend the baseness of his conduct, he would be easily understood and it would be easy to despise him. But Mr. Caryll perceived that he was dealing with one who never probed into the deeps of anything—himself and his own conduct least of all—and ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... with the hounds; and Sir Walter's own servant Cotterell had done no less. Amongst them they had "cozened the great cozener"—to use Stukeley's own cynical expression. Even so, it was only on his trial that Sir Walter plumbed the full depth of Stukeley's baseness; for it was only then he learnt that his kinsman had been armed by a warrant of immunity to assist his projects of escape, so that he might the more effectively incriminate and betray him; and Sir Walter discovered also that the ship in which he had landed, ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... I feel no grief nor fear: Why tell me of this good man's virtues high? Shame for my baseness touches me more near; What can this king do to ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... new manhood came a finer comprehension of his baseness to Katrine, and an emphasized doubt as to whether she ever could forgive the miserable selfishness ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... hath mashed also the last liquor (and set the second to cool by the first), she letteth it run, and then seetheth it again with a pound and a half of new hops, or peradventure two pounds, as she seeth cause by the goodness or baseness of the hops, and, when it hath sodden, in summer two hours, and in winter an hour and a half, she striketh it also, and reserveth it unto mixture with the rest when time doth serve therefore. Finally, when she setteth her drink together, she ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... his domestic relations. If he has been charitable before, he becomes more so now. Men's weaknesses he looks upon as human frailties, until time and sense teach him that frailties have degenerated into positive perversity of character and baseness of heart. He will condemn ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... hopeless. People of free countries will not tolerate a fiction which teaches that in the end evil is triumphant and virtue is wretched. Want of hope means either distrust of God or a belief in the essential baseness of man or both. It teaches men to be base. It makes a country base. A world wherein there is no hope is a world where there is no virtue. The contrast between the teacher of hope and the teacher of despair is to be found in the pessimism of Carlyle and the serene cheerfulness of Emerson. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... suppose that this is because I have the slightest doubt as to the impression which may be made by pointing out the gross faults and omissions, the weakness, and baseness, and shuffling, and stupidity, that mark this Treaty even beyond the Preliminaries that led to it. But I think people do not want to be convinced of this; that they will not take it kindly, but rather otherwise, to have it forced upon their ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... by an unsurpassed and most pernicious baseness, Gallus ventured on adopting a course of fearful wickedness, which indeed Gallienus, to his own exceeding infamy, is said formerly to have tried at Rome; and, taking with him a few followers secretly armed, ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... father. He had been traced to London, where he had sold out of the funds the small share of money which he had inherited after his father's death, and he had been seen on the deck of a packet bound for France later on the same day. Beyond this nothing was known about him. In what the alleged baseness of his behavior had consisted none of his brothers and sisters could tell me. My father had refused to pain them by going into particulars, not only at the time of his brother's disappearance, but afterward, whenever the subject was mentioned. George ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... lover and Lady Mabel. Lady Mary had said that she thought her brother was in love with Lady Mabel. Could it be possible? In her own land she had heard absurd stories,—stories which seemed to her to be absurd,—of the treachery of lords and countesses, of the baseness of aristocrats, of the iniquities of high life in London. But her father had told her that, go where she might, she would find people in the main to be very like each other. It had seemed to her that nothing ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... which is learned in the school of the world. Such accomplishments the most frivolous and empty may possess. Too often they are employed by the artful as a snare; too often affected by the hard and unfeeling as a cover to the baseness of their minds. We cannot, at the same time, avoid observing the homage, which, even in such instances, the world is constrained to pay to virtue. In order to render society agreeable, it is found necessary to assume somewhat that may at least carry its appearance. ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... the baseness of the mere weighing of such a choice; but he was engulfed in his overmastering egotism; his sense of obligation was dulled by the supreme selfishness of a lifetime, of a lifetime of unbridled temper and appetite, of a swaggering self-esteem which the remorseless operation ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the doctor—"I only know that God has created me of warm blood and nerves, yes, indeed! If organic tissue is capable of life it must react to every stimulus. And I do! To pain I respond with tears and outcries, to baseness with indignation, to filth with loathing. To my mind, that is just what is called life. The lower the organism, the less sensitive it is, and the more feebly it reacts to stimulus; and the higher it is, the more responsively and vigorously it reacts to reality. How is it you ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... innocent as a child, in deed and thought, of the baseness hinted at in this letter, he felt that he was looking guilty. Astonishment and indignation kindled in his eyes; but a flush of shame mounted at the same time to his cheeks. Marcus had often said, that if he were tapped on the shoulder in the street, and charged with a petty theft, he would ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... carries away, after reading Nietzsche, is the impression of "distinction," of remoteness from "vulgar brutality," from "sensual baseness," from the clumsy compromises of the world. It may not last, this Zarathustrian mood. It lasts with some of us an hour; with some of us a day—with a few of us a handful of years! But while it lasts, it is a rare and high experience. As from an ice-bound promontory stretching ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... none that fears The wagging of an ass's ears, Although a wolfish case he wears. Detraction is but baseness varlet And apes are apes, though clothed ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... who flies into a rage at the least intimation that he will accept the gift which has been made him, spends most of his time in asserting his independence, and the firm resolution which he has made to owe nothing to the generosity of the man he has treated with such unquestionable baseness. Juliet keeps very quiet, but from the glimpse I caught of her this afternoon at her casement, I judge that the turn of affairs has had a very enlivening effect upon her beauty. Her eyes fairly sparkled as she saw me; and with something like her old joyous abandonment of manner, ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... woman in question to bring Before her own face, were a flattering thing, But we think thy father's baseness,' quoth they, 'Might by thy beauty ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... ragtime tune, and something about it hurts us. After ten bars we find out what and why. It is the theme of the gods cheapened and degraded. Music is of all the arts the directest epitome of life. Not a noble thing in it that cannot, it would seem, with just a turn or two, be turned to baseness. ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker
... idealism, chivalry, and faith in the old honor; the Hungarian nationality was also the only one which had conquered its conquerors by its virtues, its persistence in its hopes, its courage, its contempt of all baseness, its extraordinary heroism, and had finally imposed its law upon Austria, bearing away the old empire as on the croup of its horse toward the vast plains of liberty. The ideal would, therefore, have its moments of victory: an entire people proved ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... immediate justice to my kinsman. Let that cowardly scoundrel repeat and prove his accusation of Teodore, face to face! You, senores, shall stand judges. Every thing shall be fair. To-night, my boy shall be found guilty or purged of the baseness imputed to him; and, moreover, I apprise you now, that if he is innocent, I shall to-morrow restore him to liberty. His voluntary return was a voucher of honesty; and I doubt whether there is a clever man among you who does not agree with ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... shows that your proud nation has no flattering opinion of us," Franklin answered. "We, who are the injured parties, have not the baseness to entertain it. You will forgive me for reminding you that the King's paternal solicitude has been rather trying. It has burned our defenseless towns in mid-winter; if has incited the savages to massacre our farmers' in the back country; it has driven ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... at him the crumpled letter. Then in a few broken words he told him, what was scarcely needed, that the manager had tricked his mother into leaving the country, and had then left her stranded without a penny to live upon. The baseness of it all came as a shock, even on the top of their knowledge of the man's ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... is call'd Cowardice, and to take an affront Baseness, and Meanness of Spirit; to refuse fighting, and putting Life at a Cast on the Point of a Sword, a Practice forbid by the Laws of God and of all good Government, is yet call'd Cowardice; and a Man is bound to die duelling, or live and be ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... agitated; but he often inquired after the safety of his friends and the officers of his staff, and he did not even in this moment forget to recommend those whose merit had given them claims to promotion. When life was nearly extinct, with an unsubdued spirit, as if anticipating the baseness of his posthumous calumniators, he exclaimed, "I hope the people of England will be satisfied! I hope my country will do me justice!" In a few minutes afterwards he died; and his corpse, wrapped in a military ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... desperate effort to recover him; and he was the more fixed in this determination, because the horse was intended as a gift to Eveline on her recovery, in case she did recover, and, also, because, as he believed, the detection of the culprit would expose the baseness of her lover to his daughter, and cause her to discard him at once from her thoughts.—Full of these thoughts, he offered a handsome reward for the horse, and a very large one for the apprehension ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... that none such had been found in the royal residence. For Tarautas had either destroyed the majority of those containing any accusation or had returned them to the senders themselves, as I have stated, [Footnote: The passage to which Dio refers is lost.] to the end that no proof of his baseness should be left. But he did reveal the names of three senators whom, from what he had himself discovered, he deemed to be especially deserving of hatred. These were Manilius and Julius, and moreover Sulpicius Arrhenianus, who had blackmailed, among others, ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... had not heard whether it had been delivered. My mother commanded the infamous wretch to be strangled, and the corpse to be thrown into the same place as that of the old woman, but she did not make public the vizier's baseness, hoping that he would reform. He, however, continued every day to send a female domestic, and my mother to treat her in the same way as the others till the sultan's return; but my mother, not wishing to destroy ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... that the looking-glass was the barrier which prevented our coming to close quarters, and that my adversary had entrenched himself behind it in the most cowardly manner. Determined that he should not profit by his baseness, I cleverly walked round behind the glass, intending to seize him and give him a thorough shaking; but there I found nothing! I dashed to the front once more; there he stood as fierce as ever. Again ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... your guiltier head Shall our intolerable self-disdain Wreak suddenly its anger and its pain; For manifest in that disastrous light We shall discern the right And do it, tardily.—O ye who lead, Take heed! Blindness we may forgive, but baseness ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... seemed that God had always gone out, and would only come home to keep His promise to appear at the moment of consecration, and that He would retire immediately afterwards, despising these edifices which have not been built expressly for Him, since by the baseness of their form they might be put to any profane use, since above all they do not bring Him, in default of sanctity, the only gift which might please Him, the gift of art which He has lent to man, and which allows Him to see Himself in the abridged restitution of His ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... Sheapard was sometime look'd upon to be such, as in those Fabulous times was not alltogether unbecomeing the Dignity of a Heroe, or the Divinity of a God: which consideration if it cannot be of force enough to procure excellence, yet certainly it may secure it from the imputation of baseness, since it was sometime lookt upon as fit for the greatest ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... I told you, Sir, (And told the truth) what danger would flye after; And though an Enemy, I satisfied you He was a Roman, and the top of Honour; And howsoever this might please Great Caesar, I told ye that the foulness of his Death, The impious baseness— ...
— The False One • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... most warmly approved; and he was tempted by personal dislike to attach himself to men whose object was to reimpose upon his country a new tyranny of Sylla. His character had given respectability to a cause which, if left to its proper defenders, would have appeared in its natural baseness, and thus on him rested the responsibility for the color of justice in which it was disguised. That after all which had passed he should be compelled to accept his pardon at Caesar's hands was an indignity to which he could not submit, and before the conqueror could ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... debt, and on being compelled by the court to pay me, reproached me with being a villainous miser? I could tell you more such like cases; and these things have made me hard and insensible to emotion when I have to deal with folly and baseness. Nay, more—I could tell you of the many bitter tears I have wiped away, and of the many prayers which have gone up to Heaven for me and my Angela, but you would only regard it as empty boasting, and ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Waterhouse, who tells me, that whereas my Lord Fleetwood should have answered to the Parliament to-day, he wrote a letter and desired a little more time, he being a great way out of town. And how that he is quite ashamed of himself, and confesses how he had deserved this, for his baseness to his brother. And that he is like to pay part of the money, paid out of the Exchequer during the Committee of Safety, out of his own purse again, which I am glad of. Home and to bed, leaving my wife ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... from mental and physical anaemia—a generation devoted to the "chiselled phrase," to accumulated "documents," to microscopic porings over human baseness, to minute and disgustful records of what in humanity is least human—may readily bring these unregarded and railing accusations. Like one of the great and good-humoured Giants of Rabelais, you may hear the murmurs from afar, and smile with disdain. To you, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... exceedingly tender of Harry Arnold's feelings, notwithstanding his agency in your ruin, that you would not have him reminded of his original baseness—or rather his dishonesty in not paying you in money, according to your understanding with him, for ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... the Reformation should coolly express his opinion that the King would probably refuse liberty of conscience to the Netherlanders, but would, no doubt, permit heretics to go into banishment. "Perhaps, after we have gone into exile," added Saint Aldegonde, almost with baseness, "God may give us an opportunity of doing such good service to the King, that he will lend us a more favorable ear, and, peradventure, permit ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... so long a time." Danby was so unwilling to engage in this negotiation, that the king, to satisfy him, subjoined with his own hand these words: "This letter is writ by my order. C. R." Montague, who revealed this secret correspondence, had even the baseness to sell his base treachery at a high price to the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... "How good a knight are you, and how ill default do you make in another way! No knight, methinketh, is there in the world that would have refused me save only you. This cometh of your folly, and your outrage, and your baseness of heart! The griffons have not done my will in that they have not slain you or strangled you as you slept, and, so I thought that they would have power to slay you, I would make them come to slay you now. But the devil hath put so much knighthood into you that scarce any man may have protection ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... end of this perfidious Prince was come. He fell sick at a French town; and his conscience terribly reproaching him with his baseness, he sent messengers to the King his father, imploring him to come and see him, and to forgive him for the last time on his bed of death. The generous King, who had a royal and forgiving mind towards his children always, would have gone; but this Prince ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... him. What is worse, he intrigues with Tyrone about bringing over an army of Irish Papists to help him against the Queen, and this at the very time that his sole claim to popularity rests on his being the leader of the Puritans. A man must have been very far gone, either in baseness or in hatred, who represents Raleigh to James as dangerous to the commonweal on account of his great power in the west of England and Jersey, 'places fit for the Spaniard to land in.' Cobham, as Warden of the Cinque Ports, is included in his slander; and both he and Raleigh will ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... would be sheer folly for us to ask him to hunt us up again. He never comes back! Our most desperate effort could revive barely the shadow of him. You let him escape. Well, you must weep for your loss, just as I had to weep for your baseness ... Besides, you don't realize the situation we are in now! Don't you remember what we talked about on our first night there in the moonlight? 'The arrogant month of May, the young warrior in an armor of flowers, seeks out his beloved, Youth.' Well, where is ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... government on earth turned sneak-thief; collecting pennies on stolen property, and pocketing them with a greasy and libidinous leer; going into partnership with foreign thieves to rob its own children; and when the child escapes the foreigner, descending to the abysmal baseness of hanging on and robbing the infant all alone by itself! Dear sir, this is not any more respectable than for a father to collect toll on the forced prostitution of his own daughter; in fact it is the same thing. Upon these terms, what is a U. S. custom house but a "fence?" That is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... weaknesses, your meannesses in detail. One thing I might have told him, which I left out—the fact that you are no gentleman, not even bourgeois—a mere peasant clown. He would not have let you measure swords with him if he had known the baseness of your ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... exhibition of baseness, my solicitor came to me and told me that he had had an interview with the Attorney-General, and that he had authorized him to say, that if I would enter into bonds and give securities to keep the peace, he would not ask me to ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... friends, and I wish to heaven you may know it in the manner I desire, for your own good." "Mother," replied Abou Hassan, "I am persuaded of the truth of what you say, but shall be more certain of a fact which concerns me so nearly, when I shall have informed myself fully of their baseness and insensibility." Abou Hassan went immediately to his friends, whom he found at home; represented to them the great need he was in, and begged of them to assist him. He promised to give bonds to pay them the money they might lend ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... we behold? Wendell Phillips has shivered the English language all to pieces in attempts to describe the baseness and utter worthlessness of the Republican party. The president has sold "the poisonous porridge called his soul," to Virginia rebels and New York and Pennsylvania aristocrats and bondholders, and yet Mr. Phillips persists ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... believe in the baseness of the woman he had trusted. Again and again he went over the same ground, trying to find some lurking circumstance, no matter how unlikely in its nature, which should explain and ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... something of relief even to be undone by a man of honour, rather than by a scoundrel; but here the greatest disappointment was on his side, for he had really spent a great deal of money, deluded by this madam the procuress; and it was very remarkable on what poor terms he proceeded. First the baseness of the creature herself is to be observed, who, for the getting 100 herself, could be content to let him spend three or four more, though perhaps it was all he had in the world, and more than all; when she had not the least ground, more than a little tea-table chat, ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... left an orphan and nameless. I was utterly alone in the world. I had not a creature to love me, and I knew that I must never dare to love anyone. Left to myself, I cursed the whole world and its prejudices and baseness." ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... whom the age For baseness of the spirit scorns, Saint Priest, who every album's page With blunted pencil-point adorns. Another tribune of the ball Hung like a print against the wall, Pink as Palm Sunday cherubim,(84) Motionless, mute, tight-laced and trim. The traveller, bird of passage he, Stiff, overstarched ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... and maintain the rights of our own individuality against every human combination, let us not forget to caution all who are disposed to waver that there is a cowardice which is criminal, and a longing for rest which it is baseness to indulge. God help him, over whose dead soul in his living body must be uttered the sad supplication, Requiescat ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... failed to realize the promise of his earlier days. He struck the record note for baseness. But Paul was being prepared by blood inheritance and scholarly training. Under the touch of the Master's own hand he became the Church's greatest leader in its life-mission. If Judas struck the lowest note, Paul ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... brutal invasions by a foreign enemy, as when the French overran and desolated the Palatinate; or of buccaneering and piratical enterprise by the Spaniards and Portuguese; or of the fighting of savages or of the Don Cossacks—in none of these records, I aver, can you find so much wanton baseness and beast-like bloodthirstiness as these native-born Tories showed toward us. Mankind has not been capable of more utter cruelty and wickedness than were in their hearts. Beside them the lowest painted heathen in their train was a Christian, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... faster on others who may or may not have been my friends—or did he imagine he had found in me a Massey to be moulded and manipulated into the service of the crown, or a Corridon to have cowardice and cupidity made the incentives to his baseness. I only wonder how the interview ended as it did; but I knew I was a prisoner, and self-respect preserved my patience and secured his safety. Great, my lords, as have been my humiliation in prison, hard and heart-breaking as have been the ordeals through ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... for his judgment. He cannot be immoral unless he is untrue. To make us pity his characters when they are vile, or love them when they are noxious, to invent excuses for them in situations where they cannot be excused, to leave us satisfied when their baseness has been unbetrayed, to make us wonder if after all the exception is not greater than the rule—in a single word, to lie about his characters—this is, for the fiction-writer, the ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... was shaken by Madame de Fontanges, and overthrown by Madame de Maintenon; but her haughtiness, her caprices, had already alienated the King. He had not, however, such rivals as mine; it is true, their baseness is my security. I have, in general, little to fear but casual infidelities, and the chance that they may not all be sufficiently transitory for my safety. The King likes variety, but he is also bound by habit; he fears eclats, and detests manoeuvring women. The little Marechale (de Mirepoix) ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... little porringer: Of me she shall not win renown: For the baseness of its nature shall have ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... tempted thither, most of them by fashion, a few perhaps by a feeble love of beauty, and only desirous to bring their own standard of comforts with them. The world seemed out of joint; the radical ugliness and baseness of man an insult to the purity ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... travel and other amusements can do something, and such words as 'diversion' and 'distraction' embalm the truth that the chief virtue of many pleasures is to divert or distract our minds from painful thoughts. Pascal considered this a sign of the misery and the baseness of our nature, and he describes as a deplorable spectacle a man who rose from his bed weighed down with anxiety and grave sorrow, and who could for a time forget it all in the passionate excitement of ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... be poison to me,—unless you were here to make me feel that they were yours also as well as mine. If you mean to insist on the severity of your order, you will have to get rid of me altogether. I shall then have come across two men of which I do not know whether to wonder most at the baseness of the one or the cruelty of the other. In that case I can only return to my mother. In that case you will not, I think, care much what may become of me; but as I shall still bear your name, it is, I suppose, proper that you should know where I ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... convinced of his baseness, I could not dispense with his services; and had no other resource but to give him a serious admonition, and desire him to return to his duty; after endeavouring to work upon his fears by an assurance, that I would ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... price sett upon the bages sent last yeare being 20 lb. which was so much money out of purse here, there was returned 66 lb. of tobacco only, and that of the worst and basest, so that fraight and shrinkage reconed together with the baseness of the comoditie there was not one half returned, which injury the company is sensible of as they demand restitution, which accordingly must be had of them that took uppon them the dispose of them the rather that no man may mistake himself, in accomptinge ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... these faces are commonplace, with bourgeois cunning written on the heavy features; one is bluff, another stolid, a third bloated, a fourth stately. The sculptors have dealt fairly with all, and not one has the lineaments of utter baseness. To Cristoforo Solari's statues of Lodovico Sforza and his wife, Beatrice d'Este, the palm of excellence in art and of historical interest must be awarded. Sculpture has rarely been more dignified and true to life than here. The woman with her short clustering curls, the man ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... of humour at ... don't you suffer my lady to huff me every day as if I were her dog, or had no more concern with you—I declare I won't bear it and she shan't think to huff me. For aught I know I am as agreeable as she; and though she dares not take any notice of your baseness to her, you shan't think ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... only a short time had elapsed, along with the shame which you incurred and the treatment which you received—treatment such as no people in the world ever before experienced at the hands of those whom they went to assist—there came the recognition by all of you of the baseness of those who had urged you to this course, and of the excellence of my own advice. {6} Again, men of Athens, I observed that Neoptolemus[n] the actor, who was allowed freedom of movement everywhere ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... as it is commonly called, happened on the 8th of November, 1520. Of this almost unparalleled act of baseness and cruelty, Vertot (p. 113, 114, 115, Amst. ed.) gives the following account, from Zigler, who was an eye-witness, and many other authors of credit. The pretext for this execution was the demolishing ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... the same breath he remits the heavy penalty. Truly he is "an unhurtful opposite" [Footnote: The critics are at variance over this ending, and, indeed, over the whole play. Coleridge says that "our feelings of justice are grossly wounded in Angelo's escape"; for "cruelty with lust and damnable baseness cannot be forgiven." Mr. Swinburne, too, regrets the miscarriage of justice; the play to him is a tragedy, and should end tragically with the punishment of the "autotype of the huge national vice of England." Perhaps, however, Puritan hypocrisy ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... enshrined and surrounded by good repute. Those who administer their power in any other way are not only not magnified by sites and edifices of worship, though these be the choicest in all the cities, but erect for themselves therein mute detractors which become trophies of their baseness, memorials of their injustice. And the longer these last, the more steadfastly does the ill-repute of such sovereigns abide. [-36-] Therefore if you desire to become in very truth immortal, act in this way; and further, reverence the Divine ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... has unlearned the laws, the manners, and the usages of his country. He believes in rough and ready justice, in fights in the open street; he relies on the abuses of power, and worse still, on the venality and crouching baseness of all men. He is the merchant who thinks that everything can be bought at a price—even the votes of the electors, even the conscience of ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... me.—In what part of my mind or conduct have you found that baseness, which entitles you to treat me with ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... honour of the Stag. And you, my lords, what do you think about it? Can you make any objection? If any one wishes to protest, let him straightway speak his mind. I am King, and must keep my word and must not permit any baseness, falsity, or arrogance. I must maintain truth and righteousness. It is the business of a loyal king to support the law, truth, faith, and justice. I would not in any wise commit a disloyal deed or wrong to either weak or strong. It is not meet that any one should ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... his own guilt and the infinite goodness of his Master at the same time. The one produced penitence; the other, hope. But, when Judas hanged himself, he did not go into eternal punishment, but into temporal. He saw his own baseness and his own folly; but he did not see God's love. If he had seen God's love and Christ's pardoning mercy, together with his sin, he would not have hanged himself; but, like Peter, he would have repented, and gone forth ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... position. His was not one of those contemptible natures which have no reverence because they have no aspiration, which think themselves fine because they acknowledge nothing superior to their own essential baseness. To Gibbie every man was better than himself. It was for him a sudden and strange descent—from the region of poetry and closest intercourse with the strong and gracious and vital simplicities of Nature, human and ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... I take you?" he said, trying to smile, when Addy stretched out his arms—ready, with the usual baseness of infancy, to give up his Uncle Seth at once, now there was some rarer patronage ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... several hundred square miles of alkali. For the new-made husband the joke soon died. In the immediate weeks that came upon him he tasted a bitterness worse than in all his life before, and learned also how deep the woman, when once she begins, can sink beneath the man in baseness. That was a knowledge of which he had lived innocent until this time. But he carried his outward self serenely, so that citizens in Cheyenne who saw the cow-puncher with his bride argued shrewdly that men of that sort liked women of that sort; and before the strain had ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... her! Clarke must have done them. He's capable of anything, but I don't, I won't believe such baseness ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... in return, I publish yours to the world," she suggested, coolly; "brand you with baseness? What then, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... a story of utter baseness. From St. Louis to Springvale Mrs. O'Meara's escort was more like a lover than a friend and business director of her affairs. This land was an Osage reservation then. O'Meara's half-section claim was west of here. The home he built was that little stone cabin ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... God's part of them faded and became extinct, being mixed again and again, and effaced by the prevalent mortality; and the human nature at last exceeded, they then became unable to endure the courses of fortune; and fell into shapelessness of life, and baseness in the sight of him who could see, having lost everything that was fairest of their honour; while to the blind hearts which could not discern the true life, tending to happiness, it seemed that they were then chiefly noble and happy, being filled with all iniquity of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the letter over. He was the letter; that letter was his shameful human nature; and worse, it was the human nature of the whole wide world. On the same point, or on some other point, every human being was as base as he. Such baseness is the inalienable birth-stain of human life. His poem was no pretty imagining, but the eternal, implacable truth. It were better that human life should cease. Until this moment he had only half understood its awful, its terrifying truth.... It were better ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... distinguished French judge, and the author of some important works on crime, acted as the examining magistrate in the case of Vitalis and Marie Boyer. He thus sums up his impression of the two criminals: "Here is an instance of how greed and baseness on the one side, lust and jealousy on the other, bring about by degrees a change in the characters of criminals, and, after some hesitation, the suggestion and accomplishment of parricide, Is it necessary to seek an explanation ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... she would. Every abode of sin in London was open to her for what he cared. But what should she do? It seemed to her to be incredible that so great a wrong should befall her, and that the man should escape from her and be free from punishment,—unless she chose to own the baseness of her own position by prosecuting him for bigamy. The Murrays were not very generous in their succour, as the old man had been much blamed for giving his daughter to one of whom all the world knew nothing but evil. One Murray had fired two shots on her behalf, in ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... houses, with no character but their exceeding shapeliness, and the comely external utterance that they make of their internal comfort. Now the others are, as I have said, both furtive and bedevilled; they are sly and grotesque; they combine their sort of feverish grandeur with their sort of secretive baseness, after the manner of a Charles the Ninth. They are peopled for me with persons of the same fashion. Dwarfs and sinister people in cloaks are about them; and I seem to divine crypts, and, as I said, trap-doors. O God ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... friends with bays to crown thy poesy. No, here the gall lies;—we, that know what stuff Thy very heart is made of, know the stalk On which thy learning grows, and can give life To thy one dying baseness; yet must we Dance anticks on your paper. But were thy warp'd soul put in a new mould, I'd wear thee as a jewel ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... magistrate, they could not command their grief; but broke forth into bitter reproaches. They had been sacrificed, they exclaimed, they had been shamefully betrayed; but a time would come when Antwerp would pay dearly enough for this baseness. Still more bitter were the complaints of the Lutheran clergy, whom the magistrate himself had invited into the country to preach against the Calvinists. Under the delusive representation that the king was not unfavorable to their religion they had been seduced into a combination ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of treachery and cowardice fill you with disgust as it does myself? Does not your soul shrink with dismay at the infamy we behold everywhere at the present time? Oh, I know your heart is noble and pure, and despises the baseness which is now the master of the world. Let us, therefore, escape from it. Come, dearest, come! I have two pistols at my rooms. They are loaded, and will not fail us. A pressure of my finger—and we are free! Say one word, and I will bring them—say, my Camilla, ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... I know the thoughts of all men's hearts, and discern their manhood or their baseness. And from the souls of clay I turn away, and they are blest, but not by me. They fatten at ease, like sheep in the pasture, and eat what they did not sow, like oxen in the stall. They grow and spread, like the gourd along the ground; but, like the gourd, they give no shade ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... sufficient incentives and temptations to aspire to higher intellectuality, and to experience the sentiments of authoritative self-control, of silence, and of solitude. Asceticism and Puritanism are almost indispensable means of educating and ennobling a race which seeks to rise above its hereditary baseness and work itself upwards to future supremacy. And finally, to ordinary men, to the majority of the people, who exist for service and general utility, and are only so far entitled to exist, religion gives invaluable ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... might be saved." Christ himself says, "Man, who made me a judge, or a divider over you?" And in another place, "The Son of man came not to judge, but be judged himself." In his first coming, he comes from high majesty to baseness and humility; he came from his Father's glory to shame and ignominy; he came from a palace to a crib; from the seat of his majesty to a tree; he came like a Lamb to be slain, and as a Saviour to save sinners: ...
— The Pulpit Of The Reformation, Nos. 1, 2 and 3. • John Welch, Bishop Latimer and John Knox
... honestly, and honestly will I die. By fair application and long industry my wealth has been obtained; and it shall never justly be said, that the reputation of my latter days was stained with acts of baseness and meanness. I have notified and procured a meeting of the creditors, and have laid the matters before them. Some appeared favourable to me; others insinuated that we were all connected in fraudulent designs, to swindle our creditors. This I repelled ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... whose attacks there is naught to fear. And these vagabond comets and shooting stars and stellar nebulae, do they not make up a prodigious panorama? What are our romances in comparison with the History of Nature? Soaring toward the Infinite, we purify our souls from all the baseness of this world, we strive to ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... were glad to see him go, but his old companions with whom he had shared so many dangers and privations were filled with grief. "He ever hated baseness, sloth, pride and indignity," said one of them. "He never allowed more for himself than for his soldiers with him. Upon no danger would he send them where he would not lead them himself. He would never ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... which he could never entirely suppress, reminded one of a bird of prey unable to face the light, and the lines of his face, the hooked nose, and the thin, constantly quivering, drawn-in lips suggested a mixture of boldness and baseness, of cunning and sincerity. But there is no book which can instruct one to read the human countenance correctly; and some special circumstance must have roused the suspicions of these four persons so much as to cause them to make these observations, and they were not as usual deceived ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... State, because they were the prophets of unreality. But he was thinking of a kind of man very different from the men whom we call poets. He thought of the poet as a man who served a patron, and tried to gloze over his patron's tyranny and baseness, under false terms of glory and majesty; or else he thought of dramatists, and considered them to be men who for the sake of credit and money played skilfully upon the sentimental emotions of ordinary people; and he fought shy of the writers who used tragic passions ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... base thought has been unuttered, many a sneaking vote withheld, through the fear inspired by the rebuking presence of one noble man." As a rule, pure grit, character, has the right of way. In the presence of men permeated with grit and sound in character, meanness and baseness slink out of sight. Mean men are uncomfortable, dishonesty trembles, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Familiarity, Fascination, Command, Dogmatism, Combativeness, Aggressiveness, Secretiveness, Avarice, Stolidity, Force, Rivalry, Profligacy, or Lawless Impulse, Irritability, Baseness, Destructiveness, Hatred, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... poetry must be that which expresses not only the richest but the healthiest nature. Disease means an absence or a want of balance of certain faculties, and therefore leads to false reasoning or emotional discord. The defect of character betrays itself in some erroneous mode of thought or baseness of sentiment. And since morality means obedience to those rules which are most essential to the spiritual health, vicious feeling indicates some morbid tendency, and is so far destructive of the poetical faculty. An immoral sentiment is the sign either of a false judgment of the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... admiration to the point where it should bear down the lingering counsels of expediency. The task was not an easy one; but neither was it easy, in her long sleepless nights, to face the thought of what George Dorset was so clearly ready to offer. Baseness for baseness, she hated the other least: there were even moments when a marriage with Rosedale seemed the only honourable solution of her difficulties. She did not indeed let her imagination range beyond the day of plighting: after that everything faded into a haze of material well-being, ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... All the time the Northman was speaking the commanding officer had been aware of an inward voice, a grave murmur in the depth of his very own self, telling another tale, as if on purpose to keep alive in him his indignation and his anger with that baseness of greed or of mere outlook which lies often at the ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... nameless slander deftly shows: What she had made the pupil of her art, None know—but that high Soul secured the heart,[rx] And panted for the truth it could not hear, With longing breast and undeluded ear. 20 Foiled was perversion by that youthful mind,[ry] Which Flattery fooled not, Baseness could not blind, Deceit infect not, near Contagion soil, Indulgence weaken, nor Example spoil,[rz] Nor mastered Science tempt her to look down On humbler talents with a pitying frown, Nor Genius swell, nor Beauty render vain, Nor Envy ruffle to retaliate pain,[sa] Nor Fortune ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... was Henry VI. of England, the baby king, doomed already to expiate sins that were not his, by the saddest life and reign. The French historians whimsically but perhaps not unnaturally, have the air of putting down this baseness on Philip's part, and on that of his contemporaries in general, to the score of the English, which is hard measure, seeing that the treachery of a Frenchman could in no way be attributed to the other nation of which he was the natural enemy, or at least, antagonist. ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... can only fear—indeed, I had almost said hope—that her wits are something impaired. What think you of her telling a gentleman who had acted in a most noble and honourable manner—exactly as a gentleman should do—that she could not have believed him capable of such baseness? and she cried ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... immediately sent some of his crew on board the Perry galley, who effectually made themselves masters thereof, and as Upton said, used him and the rest of the persons they found on board with great inhumanity and baseness, a thing very common amongst those wretches. Upton also insisted that as to himself, one of the pirate's crew ran up to him as soon as they came on board and with a cutlass in his hand, said with an oath, You old son of a bitch, I know you and you shall go ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... light; When o'er his head in silence that reposes Some kindred soul shall come to drop a tear; Then will his last cold pillow turn to roses, Which thou hadst planted with the thorn severe; Then will thy baseness stand confess'd, and all Will curse the ungenerous fate, that bade ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... but hated the traitor; but it is the general feeling of all who have occasion for wicked men's service, as people have for the poison of venomous beasts; they are glad of them while they are of use, and abhor their baseness when it is over. And so then did Tatius behave towards Tarpeia, for he commanded the Sabines, in regard to their contract, not to refuse her the least part of what they wore on their left arms; and he himself first ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... and satirists like Thackeray, who equal him in keenness of observation, are not behind him in verity of report, while surpassing him often in pictorial effect,—but who bring to the picture out of themselves only a noble indignation against baseness. They contemn; he uses. They cry, "Fie!" upon unclean substances; he ploughs the offence into the soil, and sows wheat over it. They see the world as it is; he sees it, and through it. They probe sores; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... are painful, and their labour Delight in them sets off:[418-1] some kinds of baseness[418-2] Are nobly undergone; and most poor matters Point to rich ends. This my mean task would be As heavy to me as 'tis odious, but The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead, And makes my labours pleasures:[418-3] O, she is Ten times more gentle than her ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... by profession knows a trick worth any two of these: but it is curious to observe the community of baseness, and the comparative innocence of awkwardness and inexperience, which at once connote the species and denote the specimens of the later and ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... precisely parallel nature in both countries. A simple difference in the names of men and of places would be all that would appear or exist. Every noble and every mean and every mixed exhibition of character,—every act of munificence and of baseness,—every narrative of thrilling or romantic interest,—every instance and example of popular delusion, humbug, man-worship, breach of trust, domestic infelicity, and of cunning or astounding depravity and hypocrisy,—every religious, social, and political excitement,—every panic,—and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various |
