"Hideousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... showing itself to her in this experience, as seen through the lens of a quickened imagination, in all its hideousness. Never had she experienced such a sense of loneliness. Never had she realized so forcibly that she was without father and mother, without kin in a foreign country, without a true home and abiding-place. Never had it been brought home to her with such keen pain that ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... know that he was lusting after false delights. Now, kneeling in his cell, before the image of that holy cross on which hung, as in a balance, the ransom of the world, Paphnutius began to think of Thais, because Thais was a sin to him, and he meditated long, according to ascetic rules, on the fearful hideousness of the carnal delights with which this woman had inspired him in the days of his sin and ignorance. After some hours of meditation the image of Thais appeared to him clearly and distinctly. He saw her again, as he had ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... hear the Band of the Academy pounding out a quick-step, and catch a glimpse of the long line of midshipmen passing in review, before some notable. The "custard and cream" of the chapel dome obtruded itself in all its hideousness; the long reach of Bancroft Hall glowed white in the sun; the library with its clock—the former, by some peculiar idea, placed at the farthest point from the dormitory, and the latter where the midshipmen cannot see it—dominated the opposite end of the grounds. ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... the amethysts to be reset; and of course she would wish it to be done in an artistic manner. Otherwise, as Mr. Cabochon judiciously says, why have the stones reset at all? Better wear them in all their present hideousness.' ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... whole was the flayed caricature of a man done so cunningly that through the abortive hideousness of its outlines, its human character ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... and puissant genius, revolted against the absurd theories of the privileged: he overwhelmed them with his terrible eloquence, whilst adjuring them to renounce their abuseful and obsolete rights; he scared them by his forceful and striking hideousness. "Generous friends of peace," said he, addressing the two upper orders, "I hereby appeal to your honor! Nobles of Provence, the eyes of Europe are upon you, weigh well your answer! Ye men of God, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... a hideous monster. Draw near to God if you would see sin's awful hideousness. Unlike most other things, the farther you are away from sin the more clearly you can see ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... "sense for beauty"—to adore it, and, as far as we could, to imitate it. Contrariwise, he taught us to shun and eschew what was hideous, to make war upon it, and to be on our guard against its contaminating influence. And this teaching he applied alike to hideousness in character, sight, and sound—to "watchful jealousy" and rancour and uncleanness; to the "dismal Mapperly Hills," and the "uncomeliness of Margate," the "squalid streets of Bethnal Green," and "Coles' Truss Manufactory standing where it ought ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... hear the signals of the bugle nor see the manoeuvring of the guns. Of course, even to this part a superior actress like Miss Neilson can impart a certain dignity and interest which would be lacking in an inferior performer. She strikes a certain horror to the spectator by the very hideousness of her terror displayed. It is natural that a young girl about to be laid out alive in a tomb should be tormented with fearful imaginings; but then that young girl cherishes an all-pervading love for a living ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest, peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... adornments were some rude engravings of our naval victories in the War of 1812, together with the Tennessee State House, and a Hudson River steamer, and a colored, life-size lithograph of General Taylor, with an honest hideousness of aspect, occupying the place of honor above the mantel-piece. On the top of a bookcase stood a fierce and terrible bust of General Jackson, pilloried in a military collar which rose above his ears, and frowning forth immitigably at any Englishman who might happen to cross the threshold. ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ability to repeat one line of a song. Indian women. Extreme beauty of their limbs; slender ankles and statuesque feet; haggardness of expression and ugliness of features. Girl of sixteen, a "wildwood Cleopatra," an exception to the general hideousness. The California Indian not the Indian of the Leatherstocking tales. A stop at the Buckeye Rancho. Start for Pleasant Valley Rancho. The trail again lost. Camping out for the night. Growling bears. Arrive at Pleasant Valley Rancho. Flea-haunted shanty. Beauty of the wilderness. ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... character—perhaps it would be more strictly accurate to say, the change in her state of mind—is both inevitable, and the opposite of the development we traced in Macbeth. When the murder has been done, the discovery of its hideousness, first reflected in the faces of her guests, comes to Lady Macbeth with the shock of a sudden disclosure, and at once her nature begins to sink. The first intimation of the change is given when, in the scene of the discovery, she faints.[229] When ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... replied the Master, "than might have been expected from your conduct. It is too true, our vices steal upon us in forms outwardly as fair as those of the demons whom the superstitious represent as intriguing with the human race, and are not discovered in their native hideousness until we have clasped them in ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... gladden the eyes of those who had desired to smother all thought of the Infinite, of Eternity and of God in the minds of those to whom they had nothing to offer in return. A threat of death yesterday, misery, starvation and squalor! all the hideousness of a destroying anarchy, that had nothing to give save a national fete, a tinsel goddess, some shallow laughter and momentary intoxication, a travesty of clothes and of religion and a dance on the ashes ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... which they had filed out, and there came upon him in the dying daylight a terrible moment, such as all uncontrolled natures must at times know. A sense of the futility of all things, a knowledge that life has lost its taste, the hideousness of ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... must breathe the free air of liberty some time, and "confinement to camp" was a punishment for crime. So we compromised by strolling the city streets with our military hats and boots, with the army greatcoats seeking to hide the blue hideousness of our dungarees. Some of us sought to be unconscious of the foot or two of blue cloth showing beneath the greatcoat, and these were times when we envied the little chap enveloped in a greatcoat that hung down as low as his boots. We received at this time the nickname "Keystone soldiers," ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... What can be more depressing than the darkness in which a house is kept shrouded, while the dead body is awaiting sepulture? What more repellent than the sweeping robes of lustreless crape, and the purposed hideousness of the heavy cap in which the widow laments the "deliverance" of her husband "from the burden of the flesh"? What more revolting than the artificially long faces of the undertaker's men, the drooping ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... of her very select school. The social ambitions of the wealthy Mrs. Hawley-Crowles threw wide the portals of the world to Carmen, and she entered, wide-eyed and wondering. Nor did she return until the deepest recesses of the human mind had revealed to her their abysmal hideousness, their ghastly emptiness of reality, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... sought there was none. I should have had the matter out there and then, searching the place to its extremity; but I had not been at my work ten minutes when I knew that I was watched. A man, dressed as a rough sailor, and remarkable for the hideousness of his face and a curious malformation of one tooth, lurked behind the heaps of sea lumber, and followed me from point to point. I did not care to have any altercation, so I left the matter there; but, being determined to probe the mystery ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... lived in Paris, Naples, or wandered to and fro. Then she came home, and I plunged into the heart of Asia. After two years I returned to Paris, and gave myself up to every species of dissipation. I drank, gambled, and my midnight carousals would sicken your soul were I to paint all their hideousness. You have read in the Scriptures of persons possessed of devils? A savage, mocking, tearing devil held me in bondage. I sold myself to my Mephistopheles on condition that my revenge might be complete. I hated the whole world with an intolerable, ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... which I was not acquainted, I followed them, and came out on the Khitroff market-place. On the market-place, women both old and young, of the same description, in tattered cloaks and jackets of various shapes, in ragged shoes and overshoes, and equally unconcerned, notwithstanding the hideousness of their attire, sat, bargained for something, strolled about, and scolded. There were not many people in the market itself. Evidently market-hours were over, and the majority of the people were ascending the rise beyond the market and through the place, all ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... what we call the Miracles and the Portents! It is thus that, for some three years to come, we are to contemplate France, in this final Third Volume of our History. Sansculottism reigning in all its grandeur and in all its hideousness: the Gospel (God's Message) of Man's Rights, Man's mights or strengths, once more preached irrefragably abroad; along with this, and still louder for the time, and fearfullest Devil's-Message of Man's weaknesses and sins;—and all on such ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... pipe and draw in its fumes. Her system was so well prepared for it by the poisons she had drunk that she had satisfactory results from the outset. And she entered upon the happiest period of her life thus far. All the hideousness of her profession disappeared under the gorgeous draperies of the imagination. Opium's magic transformed the vile, the obscene, into the lofty, the romantic, the exalted. The world she had been accustomed to regard as real ceased ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... reconciled to the country, and I daily feel my attachment to it strengthening. The very stumps that appeared so odious, through long custom, seem to lose some of their hideousness; the eye becomes familiarized even with objects the most displeasing till they cease to be observed. Some century hence how different will this spot appear! I can picture it to my imagination with fertile fields and groves of trees planted by the hand of taste;—all ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... say, however, that, on the score of gallantry, Poinsinet was never quite convinced of the hideousness of his appearance. He had a number of adventures, accordingly, with the ladies, but strange to say, the husbands or fathers were always interrupting him. On one occasion he was made to pass the night ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... information of the attributes of this strange being, which he gave with an elegance as much out of the common as his figure, Mr Darcy following with the story of its acquisition by his uncle, Mr Lorenzo Darcy. We all drew near to examine the carvings, the hideousness of the image precluding admiration; and Mrs Brandon was gratified, as she told me, to find her protege ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... in his mind, and mysterious crimes, and a lust for the knowledge that was arcane. Oliver Haddo was attracted by all that was unusual, deformed, and monstrous, by the pictures that represented the hideousness of man or that reminded you of his mortality. He summoned before Margaret the whole array of Ribera's ghoulish dwarfs, with their cunning smile, the insane light of their eyes, and their malice: he dwelt with a horrible fascination upon their malformations, the humped backs, the ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... on them, and then You started back in horror to survey The wondrous hideousness of those small men, Whose colour was not black, nor white, nor grey, But an extraneous mixture, which no pen Can trace, although perhaps the pencil may; They were mis-shapen pigmies, deaf and dumb— Monsters, who cost ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... splitting hairs on the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of slavery. Perhaps it did good. It certainly did the men good. It was an education to them, and exciting to their audiences. Mr. Douglass's forte was in oratory; in exposing the hideousness of slavery and the wrongs of his race. Mr. Ward—a protege of Gerrit Smith's—was scholarly, thoughtful, logical, and eloquent. Mr. Douglass was generally worsted in debate, but always triumphant ...
— 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
... frescoed on the wall behind affect to disclose the mausoleum, by lifting a frescoed curtain, but deceive no one who cares to consider how impossible it would be for them to perform this service, and caper so ignobly as they do at the same time. In fact this tomb of Ariosto shocks with its hideousness and levity. It stood formerly in the Church of San Benedetto, where it was erected shortly after the poet's death, and it was brought to the Library by the French, when they turned the church into a barracks for their troops. The poet's dust, therefore, rests here, where the worm, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... orioles began to scream and scold as before. Their enemy this time was a huge moccason, one of the most venomous of serpents. 'It was one of the largest of its species; and its great flat head, protruding sockets, and sparkling eyes, added to the hideousness of its appearance. Every now and then, as it advanced, it threw out its forked tongue, which, moist with poisonous saliva, flashed under the sunbeam like jets of fire. It was crawling directly for the tree ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... stirred a muscle, and Terry afterward insisted that he did not wink his eyes, so motionless was he. The same scowl added hideousness to the painted face, and it was easy to understand that his meditations were of any thing but ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... The apostles' heads are among the truest and noblest. The countenances of his Madonnas are full of ineffable sweetness and pathos. 'At the same time he analysed the monstrous and misshapen, and has left us caricatures in which he seems to have gloated over hideousness half human, half brute. He altered and retouched without ceasing, always deferring the conclusion of the task which he executed with untiring labour and ceaseless dissatisfaction.' The wonder is not that he should have left so ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... deliberately lift up, suspend, and keep dangling in the air for the contempt of the public that auburn wig which was presumed by its wearer to be simular of native curls. The ugliness of that death's head which by this means was suddenly exposed to daylight, the hideousness of that grinning skull so abruptly revealed, may be imagined by poets. Neither was the affair easily redressed: the wig swung buoyantly in the playful breezes: to catch it was hard, to release ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... your story to yourself," he wrote, "laying all hideousness utterly bare, reserving nothing. Banish the idea of the audience and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... strange that my opinion of the world should differ somewhat from that entertained by the speculative author of "The Light of Asia." In brief Sir Edwin knows all about the beauty, wealth and success which make earth a Paradise for the few; I something of that hideousness, poverty and despair that make it a Purgatory for the many. That world to which Sir Edwin belongs, and which he contemplates so approvingly, is but the gold-leaf on the graven image, the bright foam on the bosom of a bottomless sea, a verdant crust cast over a chaos of fierce despair,—which ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... combination of circumstances which had united the beautiful woman to so ugly a man, they had enquired about the cause of this remarkable phenomenon. They would then have heard a strange tale which might have deterred them from finding in Molnar's hideousness encouragement to pursue his ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... cannot have escaped the observation of the most superficial traveller of rank, that, at the Court of St. Cloud, want of morals is not atoned for by good breeding or good manners. The hideousness of vice, the pretensions of ambition, the vanity of rank, the pride of favour, and the shame of venality do not wear here that delicate veil, that gloss of virtue, which, in other Courts, lessens the deformity ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... its perfection! and with wanton looks That speak the burning language of desire, It seems to woo its loathsome follower,— Yet ever from his foul embraces flies. And on his brow his name is written, "Lust!" Dismiss the spectre, for it blasts my sight, And sears my brain with its dark hideousness! ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... around its precipices, veiling the sweet suggestion of distant sea and happier hills that should be visible, the horror of this view is aggravated. Breaking here and there, the billows of mist disclose forlorn tracts of jet-black desolation, wicked, unutterable, hateful in their hideousness, with patches of smutty snow above, and downward-rolling volumes of murky smoke. Shakspere, when he imagined the damned spirits confined to 'thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice,' divined the nature ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the degraded position of a felon, but not, he was sorry to say, of a common felon. The circumstances, my lord, and gentlemen of the jury, which have brought the prisoner before you this day, involve a long catalogue of crimes that as far transcend, in the hideousness of their guilt, the offences of a common felon as his rank and position in life do that of the humblest villain who ever stood before ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the water she brought him in a forest-leaf, and the ancient and half-putrid chunk of roast pig, could redeem in the slightest the grotesque hideousness of her. When he had eaten weakly for a space, he closed his eyes in order not to see her, although again and again she poked them open to peer at the blue of them. Then had come the sound. Nearer, much nearer, he knew it to be; and he knew equally ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... extortioner—that was the truth, the truth that he would not let himself recognize. Her depredations probably had much wider scope than he guessed. He must save her from herself; he must somehow reach the submerged personality and awaken it to the hideousness of that other, the soulless, heartless automaton that schemed and executed crimes with mechanical exactitude. He took a long breath of determination, and again grinned at the farce he was playing for his own benefit. Through repetition ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... church with a feeling of dissatisfaction. He had expected that this, his first service in England after ten years, would have carried him back to the days when he knew nothing of the Tree of Knowledge; but, instead of that, it had made no appeal to him. Its poetry was destroyed by the hideousness of the surroundings; whilst even the glorious words of the Benediction seemed but a perfunctory dismissal, giving the congregation leave to hasten away to the heavy dinners which were awaiting ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... painter answered trembling, that he had never seen him with his eyes, never having gone down alive into Hell, like Messer Dante Alighieri; but that, in depicting him as he had done, he was for expressing in visible lines and colours the hideousness ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... him; there seemed to be no doubt about that. He despised himself; his offence, stripped by her of all extenuation, appeared to him in its own naked hideousness; and ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... see other trenches later on, French and English. But only along the inundation was there that curious combination of beauty and hideousness, of rippling water with the moonlight across it in a silver path, and in that water things that had ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... blindly and recklessly, under the sway and thrall of that terrific and overpowering temptation. And then there leapt in my mind a glimmer of returning consciousness: a glimmer that grew rapidly to be a blazing light in which I saw revealed the hideousness of the thing I did. I tore myself away from her in that second of revulsion and hurled her from me, fiercely and violently, so that, staggering to the seat from which she had risen, she fell into it ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... cubs of the batrachian family are known (irrespective of sex) as Pollywogs, and are the meanest of all the reptile race except the radical Scaliwags. They are all heads and tails, and then, not the toss of a copper to choose between the two ends, as regards hideousness. The manner in which the tails are gradually developed into legs is very curious, but, as this is not a Caudal lecture, it is unnecessary ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... coffin, "the soul that once inhabited this body is now in hell." He would be denounced as a brutal savage. Now and then a minister at a funeral has been brave enough and unmannerly enough to express his doctrine in all its hideousness of hate. I was told that in Chicago, many years ago, a young man, member of a volunteer fire company, was killed by the falling of a wall, and at the very moment the wall struck him he was uttering a curse. He was a brave and splendid man. An orthodox minister ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... wrench herself free, two rabbits bolted, and hell broke loose. One would not have thought that the great calm evening under its stooping sky, the peaceful, omniscient trees, the grave, contented colours, could have tolerated such hideousness. The women and children shrieked with the best, and Hazel stood alone—the single representative, in a callous world, of God. Or was the world His representative, and she something alien, a dissentient ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... Palais de Justice of about the dawn of the seventeenth century, is a revelation, in its atmosphere of sleepy evening quiet, to those who rub their eyes with wonder, and find it hard to credit that London, "with its unutterable, external hideousness," was actually left behind them only that very morning, and is actually at present not two hundred miles distant. Furnes, in short, is an epitome, and I think a very charming one, of all that is most characteristic in Flanders; and not the less charming because here the strong currents ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... deed, every sacred tear, will be thrown into the balance of heresy with every dear delight of poetry and art, of woods and waters, of dawns and sunsets; with every grace of childhood and glory of man and womanhood. And every suppressed doubt of the hideousness of the universe will sink deep and ferment in darkness, and persecution will sit on every natural safety valve till at last the pent forces will swell and crack the sterile soil, and there will be an explosion that shall send a pillar of living fire towards the heavens of brass. The clerics ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... offer me anything in it as a present, whether I could find something that would not actually disgrace me. I never could. He evidently felt the same way. The Wilsons make a great to-do about the house having been entered, and tell you how he must have been frightened away,—frightened away by the hideousness of their things! Those woolly paintings on wood, and the black satin parasol that turns out ...
— The Burglar and the Blizzard • Alice Duer Miller
... thought itself called to liberate the world, and with them the whole people, trembled before these few tyrants, who, elevated from the dust by the power of accidents more than by that of genius, displayed a hideousness never yet beheld. "The whole people was in fearful excitement by anger, by fear, and love of liberty; and the terrorists, grasping at the terrible as the only means of salvation, manifested hereby the fever convulsions of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... its row of lofty sunflower stalks, now dead and dry, in front, with its rain-water barrel by the side of the low door, and its ash-barrel by the fence. In this cabin lived alone the old and shriveled hag whose hideousness gave her a reputation for almost supernatural knowledge. She was at once doctress and newspaper. She collected and disseminated medicinal herbs and personal gossip. She was in every regard indispensable to the intellectual ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... impression had been made upon him by the Memoirs of Teresa Constantia Phipps, in which there is an account of vexatious legal proceedings as to the heroine's marriage. He appears to have first read this book in 1759. Then, he says, the 'Demon of Chicane appeared to me in all his hideousness. I vowed war against him. My vow has been accomplished!'[212] Bentham thus went to the bar as a 'bear to the stake.' He diverged in more than one direction. He studied chemistry under Fordyce (1736-1802), ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... shudder, as there came back to him many a memory of lofty pitying words, with which he had gently drawn aside the cloak of seemliness wherein some sinner had sought to wrap his sin. His dream of the perfect joint-life, what was it but a sham tribute to decency, a threadbare garment for the hideousness of naked passion? Had he taught himself to contemplate such a life, and shaped himself for it, it might be a worthy life—not the highest, but good for men who were not made for saints. But as it was, it seemed to ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... religion of humanity—of good and generous deeds. For many centuries the church had painted virtue so ugly, sour and cold that vice was regarded as beautiful. Voltaire taught the beauty of the useful, the hatefulness and hideousness of superstition. He was not the greatest of poets, or of dramatists, but he was the greatest man of his time, the greatest friend of freedom, and the deadliest foe of superstition. He wrote the best French plays—but they were ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... of always wearing a thick and impervious veil, by which, according to his followers, he covered the dazzling splendour of his countenance, which was so great that no mortal could behold it and live, but that, according to his enemies, only served to conceal the hideousness of his features, too monstrously deformed to be contemplated without horror. One of his miracles, which seems the most to have been insisted on, was that he nightly, for a considerable space of time, caused an orb, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... itself no desideratum. A city that should be a bazaar of all possible architectures, adding a multitude of new inventions to samples of every historical style, might have a certain interest; yet carnival can hardly be enjoyed all the year round and there is a certain latent hideousness in masquerades in spite of their glitter. Not only are the effects juxtaposed incongruous, but each apart is usually shallow and absurd. A perruque cannot bring back courtly manners, and a style of architecture, when revived, is never quite genuine; adaptations ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... silken garments of the lost poet Ssema Hsiangju, of a thousand years before—that is, of the silken garments of his rich emotion and adventures. China somehow has understood this deep connexion between man and Nature; and that it is human thought molds the beauty and richness, or hideousness and sterility of the world. Are the mountains noble? They store the grandeur and aspirations of eighteen millions of years of mankind. Are the deserts desolate and terrible? It was man made the deserts: not with his hands, but with his thought. Man is ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the waist and kissing her, when she had come to him with a case of conscience, had so confused him in her presence as to make him answer her wildly, not because he was really tempted to the wickedness, but because he realized so vividly the hideousness of the impossible temptation. In some such sort he now trembled before old Hilbrook, thinking how dreadful it would be if he were suddenly to begin undoing the work of faith in him, and putting back in its place the doubts which he had uprooted before. In a swift series of dramatic ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... of modest shame: their very voices half belied their sex,—harsh and deep and hoarse, their laughter loud and dissonant. Some amongst them were not destitute of a certain beauty, but it was a beauty of feature with a common hideousness of expression,—an expression at once cunning, bold, callous, licentious. Womanless through the worst vices of woman, passionless through the premature waste of passion, they stood between the sexes like foul and monstrous anomalies, made up and fashioned from the rank depravities ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a picture of a different kind, and if the melancholy Jaques, or any other gentleman with a foible for thinking in a wood; had been there, methinks he had moralized very prettily on the hideousness of hate and the beauty of the sentiment it had interrupted so fiercely. But it escaped this sort of comment for about eight years. Well, all this woke the bairns; the lights dazzled them, the people scared them. Each hid a little face on ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... finally relegated to the attic. In the same way most of us have belongings that have "always been there" or perhaps "treasures" that we love for some association, which are probably as bad as can be, to which habit has blinded us, though we would not have to be told of their hideousness were they seen by us in the house ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... was no comparison. How could one compare his beautiful coat with the smooth and naked hideousness of Tarzan's bare hide? Who could see beauty in the stingy nose of the Tarmangani after looking at Taug's broad nostrils? And Tarzan's eyes! Hideous things, showing white about them, and entirely unrimmed with red. Taug knew that his own blood-shot ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... expression; her features were small and pinched, her hair, which was of inky blackness, fell on her shoulders in long, straight locks, without a ripple or a wave in them. She looked like an elf, but still this elfish little creature was redeemed from the hideousness which else might have been her doom by eyes of the most wonderful brilliancy. Large, luminous, potent eyes—intensely black, and deep as the depths of ocean, they seemed to fill her whole face; and in moments of excitement they could light up with ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... a time when the sordidness inseparable from a death in a civilised country made of everything a hideousness, and he was aware of a rising tide of irritability in himself that he found it difficult to keep within the decorous bounds of the subdued aspect required from a newly-made widower. Later, after the funeral was over and life at the Manor had somewhat settled down ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... and passion? You point me to brilliant windows and gay apartments; to sparkling glasses, and shining heaps, and shapes of painted shame. "These," you say, "are the forms which the Tempter assumes. Under smiling features and fair garlands, he hides at first that hideousness which in due time is revealed to his victims. From the lighted vestibules which open so easily to the touch, and where all seems only a coronation of youthful pleasure and natural joy, the feet of men slide downward into those abysses which are hidden from the public ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... of a goddess, and that without degradation! Such majestic creatures cannot be sullied. The gods bathe themselves pure in light; and this goddess who came to him knew what she was doing. She was not ignorant of the incarnate hideousness of Gwynplaine. She had seen the mask which was his face; and that mask had not caused her to draw back. Gwynplaine ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the soul or hinder the operations of it, but rather help and much increase it.' There, Camp, poor old man, don't start—it's nothing worse than me. I wonder if the elaborate pains which have been taken through generations of your ancestors to breed you into your existing and very royal hideousness—your flattened nose and perpetual grin, for instance—do help and much increase ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... envy of her rivals to such a degree that all other women of taste in her tribe did the same, and from that day to this, in almost every country in the world, it has been accounted a shame for any respectable woman to show her face in public in the hideousness of naked ears. This discovery of its capabilities gave a new value to the ear, and a large, roomy one became an asset in the marriage market. I have seen a pretty little damsel of Sind with fourteen jingling silver things hanging at regular intervals from the outside ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... men picturing the evils of the factory system. Comparisons were made between the old and the new, in which the hideousness of the new was etched in biting phrase. Some tried to turn the dial backward and revive the cottage industries, as did Ruskin a little later. "A Dream of John Ball" was anticipated, and many sighed for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... morality. As a child he is not brought up.... From the dawn of intelligence his own will is his law. There is no right and no wrong to him.... No dread of punishment restrains him from any act that boyish fun or fury may prompt. No lessons inculcating the beauty and sure reward of goodness or the hideousness and certain punishment of vice are ever wasted on him. The men by whom he is surrounded, and to whom he looks as models for his future life, are great and renowned just in proportion to their ferocity, to the scalps they have taken, or the thefts they have committed. ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... it. Harrie belongs to a type of humanity beyond awakening to a realization of moral degeneracy; a type that believes so confidently in the divine right of class privilege that it believes little else. Harrie's failure to appreciate the hideousness of certain recent experiences has made them all the more keenly felt by his brother. I have rarely seen a man suffer as the latter has suffered in the past few days, but ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... contact with its details. The indescribable atrocities practised on the slaves, the deplorable sapping of even respectable principles in owners of both sexes—all these stood forth in their ineffable hideousness before the uncorrupted gaze of the moral heroes, sons of Britain and America, and also of other countries, who, buckling on the armour of civilization and right, fought for the vindication of them both, through every stern vicissitude, and ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... real Giton, Tryphaena was moved to tears, and then for the first time she gave the boy a real love-kiss. I was overjoyed, now that the lad was restored to his own handsome self, but I hid my own face all the more assiduously, realizing that I was disfigured by no ordinary hideousness since not even Lycas would bestow a word upon me. The maid rescued me from this misfortune finally, however, and calling me aside, she decked me out with a head of hair which was none the less becoming; my face shone more radiantly still, as a matter of fact, for ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... bits of sea-weed, or any other stuff within his reach, and paddles about his tank self-satisfied and ridiculous. Women must and will trim, as spiders spin webs, and bees make honeycombs. They even trim bathing-dresses: one would think that nothing could redeem them from their hideousness. But they obey a law of their being. The special aptitudes of the lower animals are brought into play when no other reason can be given than the necessity for discharging an accumulation of the inward energy,—a saying of the physico-psychologists that is verified ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... upon the pillows in the final stage of dissolution, and his broad forehead was already damp with the sweat of his last agony. Cagliostro surveyed the dying tribune with emotion, for in the very hideousness of his countenance there was a subtle and indefinable fascination. The gigantic stature which had so often awed the tumults of the National Assembly was prostrate. The voice, whose brazen tones had sounded like a trumpet over the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... missionary and Wampum graciously, but his people scowled and looked menacingly at the sight of "The Black Coat," then continued their dancing. The great Delaware idol was there in all its hideousness, life size, in the form of a woman, and carved from one solid block of wood, then painted and stained the Indian copper color. It stood on a slight elevation in the centre of the big log "church," grotesque and repulsive ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... reeds such uncouth and unnatural sounds as would have saddened the gayest and appalled the most intrepid. Could this be the far-famed Mississippi, or was it not rather old Avernus? It was hideous indeed—but hideousness refined into sublimity, filling the soul with a sentiment of grandeur. Nothing daunted, the adventurers kept steadily on their course. They knew that through those dismal portals they were to arrive at the most magnificent country in the world; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... There are facts which modern fastidiousness justly enough commands to he wrapped around with graceful drapery before they shall have audience. But do we not commit a trespass against virtue, when we demand the same soft disguises to drape facts whose disguise is the worst immorality, whose naked hideousness is the only decency, which must be seen disgusting to warrant their being seen at all? So Mr. Beecher has been censured for irreverence, when what was called his irreverence has seemed to us but the tenderness engendered of close connection. Cannot one live so near to God as that His greatness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... seek for the scenes which made Constable a painter, but down in the quiet hollow a mile and a half to the eastward on the banks of his much-loved Stour, and around the paternal mill of Flatford, not improved as is the one at Dedham into hideousness, but remaining much as it was in the artist's day. Both mills were the property of Golding Constable, witnessed thereto in the latter, the initials G.C., carved in irregular characters deep in the huge mill scales, still legible beneath the dust of a century, as enduring almost as the ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... weeks she had not seen him and during that time for her the sun had ceased to shine. She had counted each hour until his return and she could not waste the precious moments now that he had really come. The djinns and devils in the garden might present themselves in all their hideousness if it so pleased them but tonight she was heedless of them. She had eyes for nothing but the man she worshipped. Even in his silent moods she was content. It was enough to feel his arms about her, to hear his heart beating rhythmically beneath ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... the lamp and trimmed it, the light fell strongly upon his features, and revealed all their hideousness. No visage, except that of Osmond Mounchensey, could be more appalling than this person's, and the mutilation was in both cases the same. It is needless to say it was Mompesson. His habiliments were sordid; and his beard and hair, grizzled ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... natural evil of the human mind, and not the supernatural agency in the story of its development, that makes Macbeth so terrible; it is the hideousness of a wicked soul, into which enter more foul ingredients than are held in the witches' caldron of abominations, that makes the play so tremendous. I wish we had read that great work together. How ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... in the book to the privileged young woman of India; she shows the possibilities, and yet you will see in it something of the black shadow cast by that religion which holds no place for the redemption of woman. If you could see it in its hideousness which the author can only hint at, you would say as two American college girls said after a tour through India, "We cannot endure it. Don't take us to another temple. We never dreamed that anything under the guise of religion ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... persistently, the vision rises before him of the physical terrors of death—the hideousness of its approaches, the loathsomeness of its corruptions; in vain he smiles, in vain he weeps; the grim imagination will not leave him. In the midst of his wildest debauches, he suddenly remembers the horrible features of decaying age; he ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... be, and Edmund felt all its hideousness, he felt every moment more and more convinced that it was the only safe way. He had suffered too much already to venture willingly back into the torture-chamber from which he had just escaped, even if he could safely have regained its shelter—in itself no mean feat; and at the bare ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... one comfort, however, in the very hideousness of our statues. The fear of what the sculptors will do for them after they are gone may deter those who are careful of their memories from talking themselves into greatness. It is plain that Mr. Caleb Cushing has begun to feel a wholesome dread ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... different aspect of the garden. I, naked among the coral and the plants, must have looked to them like a frightful demon, white and without scales, a horrible devil-fish, my arms and legs glabrous tentacles, and the lunette and spears adding to my hideousness and foul menace. I know that was the impression I made on the rainbow-fish, for they fled within the caves, and only by peeping in through the glass could I see them to drive the spear into them. These slender spears were a dozen feet of light, tough wood, two of them with single iron points ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt? .. With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only arises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... incomprehensible were his two great enemies," should so completely fail to reach even the unmoral perfection which he assigned as the highest attainable. Professing himself the special apostle of the beautiful in art, he nevertheless forces upon us continually the most loathsome hideousness and the most debasing and unbeautiful horror. This passionate, unhelmed, errant search for beauty was in fact not so much a normal and intelligent desire, as an attempt to escape from interior discord; and it was the discord which found expression, accordingly, instead of the sense of beauty,—except ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... even regret the loss of her son's throne, if it led to the real happiness of the country." She was taken back to her cell. The next day the four judges of the tribunal took their seats in the court. Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, a man whose greed of blood stamped him with an especial hideousness, even in those days of universal barbarity, took his seat before them; and eleven men, the greater part of whom had been carefully picked from the very dregs of the people—journeymen carpenters, tailors, blacksmiths, and discharged ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... tranquillities of the tropical sea, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... free, deeming anything so ugly well worthy of life, if such could find sustenance among his fellows and win a mate for himself somewhere in this world. But he, for all his hideousness and unseemly mien, is not the vampire; the blood-sucking bat has won a mantle of deceit from the hands of Nature—a garb that gives him a modest and not unpleasing appearance, and makes it a difficult matter to distinguish him from his guileless ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... trains, and half an hour's delay, at Manchester, then on through Lancashire civilization, through fumes and evil smells and expanses of grey-built hideousness, as far ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... started on a journey. We were going home. That was enough to wreathe the skies with glory, and fill the world with sweetness and light. The wintry sun had something of geniality and warmth, the landscape lost some of its repulsiveness, the dreary palmettos had less of that hideousness which made us regard them as very fitting emblems of treason. We even began to feel a little good-humored contempt for our hateful little Brats of guards, and to reflect how much vicious education and surroundings were to be held responsible for ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... in all its blinding suddenness and appalling hideousness,—a smoking ruin where had been the stately mansion of his lord; blank windows grinning at him like dead, open eyes; the garden of his dreams desecrated, its wall shattered, lying open, naked and despoiled, before the world. At the tinge of smoke which hovered like the breath of death above ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... after my journeys back and forth between Boston and Cambridge. I have not the least notion where I went or what I saw, but I suppose that it was up and down the ugly east and west avenues, then lying open to the eye in all the hideousness now partly concealed by the elevated roads, and that I found them very stately and handsome. Indeed, New York was really handsomer then than it is now, when it has so many more pieces of beautiful architecture, for at that day the skyscrapers ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... yet more ghastly by the rows of glistening teeth which protruded from between the lips, while the sockets of the eyes—filled with oval bits of mother-of-pearl shell, with a black spot in the centre—heightened the hideousness of its aspect. ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... like the Nonconformist, one of the religious organisations of this country, was a short time ago giving an account of the crowd at Epsom on the Derby day, and of all the vice and hideousness which was to be seen in that crowd; and then the writer turned suddenly round upon Professor Huxley, and asked him how he proposed to cure all this vice and hideousness without religion. I confess I felt disposed to ask the asker this ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... turned gradually into self-governing communities, in which the producers could decide all questions of methods, conditions, hours of work, and so forth, there would be an almost boundless change for the better: grime and noise might be nearly eliminated, the hideousness of industrial regions might be turned into beauty, the interest in the scientific aspects of production might become diffused among all producers with any native intelligence, and something of the artist's joy in creation might inspire ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... can free human nature from the obligation of trying to come to its best at all these points. The real unum necessarium for us is to come to our best at all points. Instead of our "one thing needful," justifying in us vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence,—our [176] vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence, are really so many touchstones which try our one thing needful, and which prove that in the state, at any rate, in which we ourselves have it, ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... not really been due to the majority of the public developing a very fine taste in such matters. It has been chiefly due to the fact that the craftsmen of things so appreciated the pleasure of making what was beautiful, and woke to such a vivid consciousness of the hideousness and vulgarity of what the public had previously wanted, that they simply starved the public out. It would be quite impossible at the present moment to furnish a room as rooms were furnished a few years ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... beside me, and I impulsively threw my arms around her neck and sobbed forth my troubles in a string. How there was no good in the world, no use for me there, no one loved me or ever could on account of my hideousness. ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... though it's a pretty good imitation; it's only a camel cursing and snarling with all his might while his owner piles a few bushels' weight on his back. He doesn't really mind it, but it is the immemorial custom of camels to protest with hideousness and confused noise, and if he didn't do it his trade union would ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... America—at least, "Out West"—everyone practically is his own guide, and the nouveau riche spends his money strictly in accordance with his own standard of taste. The result is often as appalling in its hideousness as it is startling in its costliness. On the other hand I am bound to state that I have known American men of great wealth whose simplicity of type could hardly be paralleled in England (except, perchance, within the Society of Friends). They do ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... thrashing, by the way) that excused itself under cover of being a bribe for sight of a mirror interdicted by the implacable Kiomi. I wanted to have a look at my face. Now that the familiar scenes were beginning to wear their original features to me, my dread of personal hideousness was distressing, though Eveleen declared the bad blood in my cheeks and eyes 'had been sucked by pounds of red meat.' I wondered, whether if I stood up and walked to either one of the three great halls lying in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... shrug she turned away and shut the door. She sat down on the edge of her bed, very still. In that little passage of wits she had won, she could win in many such; but the full hideousness of things had come to her. Lies! lies! That was to be her life! That; or to say farewell to all she now cared for, to cause despair not only in herself, but in her lover, and—for what? In order that her body might remain at the disposal of that man in the next room—her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of bale: Uncoiling monstrous into street on street Paven with perils, teeming with mischance, Where man and beast go blindfold and in dread, Working with oaths and threats and faltering feet Somewhither in the hideousness ahead; Working through wicked airs and deadly dews That make the laden robber grin askance At the good places in his black romance, And the poor, loitering harlot rather choose Go pinched and pined to bed Than lurk and shiver and curse her ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... occasionally comes across small colonies of lepers, who, being compelled to isolate themselves from their fellows, have taken up their abode in rude hovels or caves by the road-side, and sally forth in all their hideousness to beset the traveller with piteous cries for assistance. Some of these poor lepers are loathsome in appearance to the last degree; their scanty coverings of rags and tatters conceals nothing of the ravages of their ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... bad boy is delineated true to his bad nature, and is made to speak and act naturally, which never fails to awaken a touch of sympathy in beings equally prone to err. I again repeat that few minds (if any) exist than can find beauty in deformity, or aught to admire in the hideousness of vice. ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... it was not upon this overthrow we stopped to look. It was upon something that mingled with it, dominated it and made of this chaos only a setting to awful death. Janet's face, in all its natural hideousness and depravity, looked up from the floor beside this heap; and farther on, the twisted figure of him they called Hector, with something more than the seams of greedy longing round his wide, staring eyes and icy temples. ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... Heaven knew what would happen to the town, the temper of those whom he was leaving being what it was. Yet if he remained, it would simply mean that his own and Hagthorpe's crews would join in the saturnalia and increase the hideousness of events now inevitable. Unable to reach a decision, his own men and Hagthorpe's took the matter off his hands, eager to give chase to Rivarol. Not only was a dastardly cheat to be punished but an enormous treasure to be ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... for this country, I think it with a kind of dull surprise as I look out over the naked hideousness of the land, men can be found to fight. What is it to be a child of the veldt, and never to have known any other life except the life of these plains? It is to reproduce in your own nature the main features of this extraordinary scenery. Here is a life of absolute ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... cases, which are mere ugly faggots, we find others just as often of exquisite beauty and composed entirely of tiny shells. Do they come from the same workshop? It takes very convincing proofs to make us believe this. Here is order with its charm, there disorder with its hideousness; on the one hand a dainty mosaic of shells, on the other a clumsy heap of sticks. And yet it is all produced by ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... old fellow," said Anscombe earnestly, "you don't really mean to go off and leave me in this hideousness? I haven't bothered much up to the present because I was sure that you would find a way out, which would be nothing to a man of your intellect and experience. I mean it honestly, I ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... between him and the Solitary was one of mutual misfortune. Sorrow was the ligament that united them. For years had he known Holden, but it was only within a short time, namely, since an awakened conscience (so he judged, himself) had revealed to him his own hideousness, that he had been attracted to the Solitary. Should Holden recover his son, should his heart expand once more to admit worldly joys, would it not be closed to him? As he once felt indifference towards ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... for this weakness before the salesman, and yet, year by year he had been cheated in the same way. For the first time, however, he saw his clothing in all its hideousness. Those cruel girls and grinning boys had shown him that clothes made the man, even in a western school. The worst part of it was that he had been humiliated by a girl and there was no redress. His strength of limb ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... accounting for its presence, the appearance of the figure was in itself sufficiently appalling. It was above the ordinary stature, and was enveloped in a long black cloak, while a tall, conical black cap, which added to its height, and increased the hideousness of its ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... pronounced as it is written; and whose force and frankness strike you with a special charm after the ha-haing of the Florentines, the sonorousness of the Romans and the sing-song of the Neapolitans; to say nothing of the hideousness of the Genoese and the chaos of the Sicilians; that city of kindly ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... you are!" cried Frank, and he lifted his stick, and called sharply to a large black and white bull-dog that paddled about on its bow legs, saliva dripping from its huge jaws, looking in its hideousness like something rare and exquisite from Japan. He dismissed the porter and the carriage, which he had hailed with an arrogant wave of his stick. He was tall and he was thin. His trousers were extremely elegant, a light cloth, black and white check, hung on his legs ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... loving-kindness to us until we look at it from the depth of the darkness of our own sin. The stars are seen from the bottom of the well. The loving-kindness of God becomes wonderful when we think of the sort of people on whom it has been lavished. And my evil is never apprehended in its true hideousness until I have set it black and ugly, but searched through and through, and revealed in every deformed outline, and in every hideous lineament, by the light against which I see it. You must take both in order ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... genius to infuse new life into the worn-out theme. Cynicism was the great means of eloquence of the middle ages, and with cynicism Degas has rendered the nude again an artistic possibility. What Mr. Horsley or the British matron would say it is difficult to guess. Perhaps the hideousness depicted by M. Degas would frighten them more than the sensuality which they condemn in Sir Frederick Leighton. But, be this as it may, it is certain that the great, fat, short-legged creature, who in her humble and touching ugliness passes a chemise over her lumpy shoulders, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... in Normandy, is a hideous seaport; but its hideousness was almost turned to beauty, on that golden afternoon, by the bright French atmosphere, which can do for bad scenery what French cookery does for bad meat. The royal and imperial roads of France are as despotically straight as those of the Roman Empire. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... consider the source of Ham's sin, its hideousness first appears in its true light. One never becomes an adulterer or commits murder until he has first cast out of his heart the fear of God. A pupil does not rebel against his teacher unless he has first lost due reverence for that teacher. The fourteenth Psalm, verse 2, says ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... preceding conversation had taken place had been assumed on his part. For the last few weeks evil dreams had tortured his sleep and cast their shadow upon his waking hours. They had ever increased in reality, in intensity and in hideousness. Even now he could see the long, tapering fingers that every night were groping in the windings of his brain. It was a well-formed, manicured hand that seemed to reach under his skull, carefully feeling its way through the myriad convolutions ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... evil spirits were supposed to be cast out by the presence of an innocent child or a pure virgin, so the ugly shapes that sometimes tempt us by assuming fair disguises will be shown in their native hideousness when confronted with a heart filled with the love ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... hideousness, And speak off half a dozen dang'rous words, How they might hurt their enemies, if they durst; ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... it, comprehended instantly the effect it had produced upon the girl's over-wrought nerves. Some clever hand had been at work upon the photograph, retouching it, changing its lovely expression, until the portrait, instead of being a thing of beauty, grinned up at him in frightful hideousness. The blank, sightless eyes, the haggard cheeks, the thin wasted lips, the protruding and jagged teeth, all created an impression shocking beyond belief. And yet, the result had been obtained by the addition of but a few simple lines ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... fair images, and paid great sums to famous sculptors for such adornment of their sanctuaries. Perhaps it was human enough, for to those mobs beauty had long been associated with oppression. Yet how painful to picture those golden marbles, in all their immortal fairness, confronted with the hideousness of those fanatic ill-smelling multitudes. Wonderful religionists, forsooth, that thus break with foolish hands and trample with swinish hoofs the sacred vessels of ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... that followed, out there in the primitive, Paul thought of the hideousness of life as he saw it now, with a loathing that time seemed only to increase. He pictured Opal—his love—as the wife of that old French libertine, till his soul revolted at the very thought. Such a thing was ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous |
