"Nastiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be elucidated by a comparison with houses: the delights of adulterous love by comparison with a house whose walls glitter outwardly like sea shells, or like transparent stones, called selenites, of a gold color; whereas in the apartments within the walls, are all kinds of filth and nastiness: but the delights of conjugial love may be compared to a house, the walls of which are refulgent as with sterling gold, and the apartments within are resplendent as with cabinets ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... of his model had done by him. Spenser was, as Milton called him, a "sage and serious poet"; he would be the last to take offence if we draw from him a moral not without its use now that Priapus is trying to persuade us that pose and drapery will make him as good as Urania. Better far the naked nastiness; the more covert the indecency, the more it shocks. Poor old god of gardens! Innocent as a clownish symbol, he is simply disgusting as an ideal of art. In the last century, they set him up in Beatrice recalls her Germany and ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... across the Gasse at our opposite neighbour, as he dandles his baby about, and occasionally takes a spoonful or two of some pale slimy nastiness that looks like DEAD PORRIDGE, if you can take the conception. These two are his only occupations. All day long you can hear him singing over the brat when he is not eating; or see him eating when he is not keeping ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with fragrance of rich incense, diffused from as many censers; its little life, deriving feeble nutriment from what has long been dead. Everywhere, some fragment of ruin suggesting the magnificence of a former epoch; everywhere, moreover, a Cross,—and nastiness at the foot of it. As the sum of all, there are recollections that kindle the soul, and a gloom and languor that depress it beyond any depth of melancholic sentiment that can be ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Companions playing at Tables; and there game away Rings, Hats, Cloaks and Swords, &c. and then ply one another so close with whole bumpers of Sack and old Hock, that they are worse then senceless beasts, feeling and groping of the very Walls, and tumbling and wallowing to and fro in their own nastiness. And esteem it to be a Championlike action if one can but make the t'other dead drunk by his voracity of sucking in most. As if they intended hereby to become ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... freedom, an' dat's all dis po' white trash is gwine to do for ye—stuffin' yo' head wid lies, an' yo' mouf wid a wad o' nastiness. Now go 'long an' ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... eight to twelve and fourteen years, were in the habit of collecting together in barns and other secluded places, and in a state of nudity imitating the "Black Crook" with all possible additional nastiness. Horrified at such a monstrous evil, he hastened to inform the parents of the corruption in their midst. Imagine his astonishment when he was met with an indifferent laugh and the response, "Pooh! it's only natural; perfectly harmless; just like little pigs!" As though pigs ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... mechanical ventilation could be employed with the greatest benefit. A powerful air-propeller fixed at the end of a system of horizontal flues under the floors of the hot rooms, and running so as to exhaust, would do away with all the objectionable odours and nastiness of many baths. ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop
... seemed to him that his heart stood still. Nasty! He had never dreamed it. He had not meant it. The whole sketch stood before him in letters of fire, and in such blaze of illumination he sought vainly for nastiness. Then his heart began to beat again. He was ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... stone-paved streets of the other, which remind one somewhat of Malta. In the days of Salis-Marschlins this city possessed only 18,000 inhabitants, and "outdid even the customary Italian filth, being hardly passable on account of the excessive nastiness and stink." It is now scrupulously clean—so absurdly clean, that it has quite ceased to be picturesque. Not that its buildings are particularly attractive to me; none, that is, save the antique "Trinita" ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... No: nastiness has no particular nationality: and you will find a great deal of it, of all nationalities, on the frontier between France and Italy. I do not see that Monte Carlo provides much cause for indignation, beyond the tir aux ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... from his Detached Thoughts, Letters, 1898, i. 192, note). There was another point of unlikeness, which he does not mention. Byron, on the passion of love, does not "make for morality," but he eschews nastiness. The loves of Don Juan and Haidee are chaste as snow compared with the unspeakable philanderings of the elderly Jean Jacques and the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... of the conveniences of common sewers to carry off the dirt and dregs that must necessarily accumulate in large cities, yet it enjoys one important advantage, which is rarely found in capitals out of England: no kind of filth or nastiness, creating offensive smells is thrown out into the streets, a piece of cleanliness that perhaps may be attributed rather to the scarcity and value of manure, than to the exertions of the police officers. Each family ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... same period Swift wrote: "The families of farmers who pay great rents, live in filth and nastiness, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... rudeness and nastiness of these cartoons and others that followed. Luther is supposed to have furnished the rhymes and descriptive matter which accompanied them. Lather is also cited as uttering most repulsive and scurrilous sentiments about ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... said Nat, grinning viciously. "That's your nastiness; but it don't tease me. I'm sorry for you, Samson. What a pass for a respectable Dee to come to, only you never was respectable. But there's an end to all things. Made ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... all the lanes, the cobble stones only showing here and there above the universal black puddle. Yet the air is not foul and many a broad street by the Basso Porto in Naples smells far worse. The keen high atmosphere of the Calabrian mountains is a mighty purifier of nastiness, and perhaps the pig is not to be despised after all, as sanitary engineer, scavenger ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... a paper we see a grand ethical discussion, and in another the droppings of most accursed nastiness. Oh! you cannot by all your religion, in one column, atone for one of your abominations in another! I am rejoiced that some of our papers have addressed those who have proposed to compensate them for bad use ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... a "bad man" who surpassed the rest of his fellows in using foul language. Roosevelt, who loathed obscenity as he did any other form of filth, tired of this bad man's talk and told him very calmly that he liked him but not his nastiness. Instead of drawing his gun, as the bystanders thought he would do, Jim looked sheepish, acknowledging the charge, and changed his tone. He remained a loyal friend of his corrector. Cattle-thieves and horse-thieves ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... banishment. There is not unfrequently a display of one of the proprietor's children in a part requiring "infant innocence;" and as our ideas of that angelic state are associated principally with pudding heads and dirty faces, the performance is generally got through with a nastiness approaching to nicety. But it is time to make our escape from the Bower, and we therefore leave them to get through the "Chough and Crow"—which is often the wind-up, because it admits of a good deal of growling—in our absence. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... it appears that persons attentive to the cleanliness of their bodies and habitations are, in general, more healthy, and less subject to disease, than those who live in filth and nastiness; and it is further remarked, that cleanliness carries with it, throughout all the branches of domestic administration, habits of order and arrangement, which are the chief means and first elements ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... Ashe, "we'll have enough coin to venture into fresh fields. My word, but we do earn this money. It's the nastiness I object to, not the work. I shan't forget this first hundred dollars I've earned by the sweat of my ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... misfortune, or rather a Disease in Malt Drinks, occasioned by divers Means, as the Nastiness of the Utensils, putting the Worts too thick together in the Backs or Cooler, Brewing too often and soon one after another, and sometimes by bad Malts and Waters, and the Liquors taken in wrong Heats, being of such pernicious Consequence ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... mushroom is not so sweet or so toothsome as a small one. A 'monstrous mushroom,' even to those who like mushrooms, is coarse and less tasty. Now the gleam of hope lies in the circumstance that Mr. Chesterton knows the fine gradations of niceness (or nastiness) that distinguish mushrooms of one size from mushrooms of another. As a rule, if you get to know a thing, you get to like it. Mr. Chesterton is coming to know mushrooms. He will soon be ordering them for breakfast. He may even come, like certain tribes mentioned in the Encyclopaedia, ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... somnambulist will out. He decries the carnal combat of the prize-ring, and compels the red animal to spiritual combat. The poisoned lie, the nasty, gossiping tongue, the brutality of the unkind epigram, the business and social nastiness and treachery of to-day—these are the thrusts and scratches of the red animal when the somnambulist is in charge. They are not the upper cuts and short arm jabs and jolts and slugging blows of the spirit. ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... even what we came here for. For there are no longer any spectacles in the world. Now I, for instance, have seen bull-fights in Seville, Madrid and Marseilles—an exhibition which does not evoke anything save loathing. I have also seen boxing and wrestling nastiness and brutality. I also happened to participate in a tiger hunt, at which I sat under a baldachin on the back of a big, wise white elephant ... in a word, you all know this well yourselves. And out of all my ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... excitements..I do not affirm," says Dr. Cuyler, "that every popular play is immoral, and every attendant is on a scent for sensualities. But the theater is a concrete institution, it must be judged in the gross and to a tremendous extent it is only a gilded nastiness. It unsexes womanhood by putting her publicly in male attire—too often in no ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... well-kept teeth, gleaming regularly under a little black waxed mustache betrayed no trace of betel-nut or other nastiness, and neither his fine features nor his eyes suggested vice of the sort that often undermines ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... spirit within him; something that struggled there like the genie in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman. He felt a sudden zest of life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable splendor. When the soprano soloist came on Paul forgot even the nastiness of his teacher's being there and gave himself up to the peculiar stimulus such personages always had for him. The soloist chanced to be a German woman, by no means in her first youth, and the mother of many children; but she wore an elaborate gown and a tiara, and above all she had that ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... was such a scene as you seldom see, and never want to. Nastiness beyond account, and chaos run loose in the midst of the nastiness. There were not a great many of the negroes; but by way of making what there were understand that they were free, Vaughan had had their hand-cuffs and ankle-cuffs knocked off, and, ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... its exterior to please the eye. The city is separated from the palace by masses of clay. The filth and bones of beasts which have been killed, heaped upon one another, serve, to use the expression, as a girdle to the capital. These pyramids of nastiness are ever to be found within the city. They prevail even on the tops of the houses, and keep out the very light of day. The sun, which beats upon these hills of filth, exhales the putrefaction from them. The houses, ill built, resemble hogsties, and are very ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... lies clean washed, like that other syren of the opposite coast, who coaxed Ulysses and his men, some years ago—not, indeed, to come on board, but the contrary. But when her deck is all soot and nastiness, when she has quartered her vermin on her passengers, and goes gurgling along, as if she had an Empyema under her pleura costalis; when she pitches into the waves, as if to punish them, and tramples on their crests, as if to crush them under her keel, why ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... not true, for I know—one of the auction-room porters told me—that Mr Dempster used to keep two men-clerks in his office, till they both discharged themselves because they would not put up with what the porter called "his nastiness." Then ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... force of meditation, profound study, minute care, impregnable patience, your desire is realised: you have extracted from your apparatus an albuminous slime, easily corruptible and stinking like the devil at the end of a few days: in short, a nastiness. What are you going to ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... officers on board a certain ship did not always eat preserved asparagus while the men had not even a bean. I fear that he had been put up to this business by Mr. Quintus Slide, and that he made himself nasty. There was, however, so much nastiness of the kind going, that his little effort made no great difference. The conservative members of the Committee, on whose side of the House the inquiry had originated, did not scruple to lay all manner of charges to officers whom, were they themselves ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... you," retorted young Haight. "There's something revolting in the idea that it's necessary a young girl should be instructed in that sort of nastiness." ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... he said, setting the gourd down with a gasp, "if nastiness is any proof of virtue your medicine ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... shillings a year of our present money for his house in Channel Row;[*] yet labor and provisons, and consequently houses, were only about a third of the present price. Erasmus ascribes the frequent plagues in England to the nastiness, and dirt, and slovenly habits among the people. "The floors," says he, "are commonly of clay, strewed with rushes, under which lies unmolested an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments, bones, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... life, yet nobody could be more heartily convinced of the beauty and value of those solid domestic instincts on which human happiness must chiefly depend. Put Fielding beside the modern would-be satirists who make society—especially French society[17]—a mere sink of nastiness, or beside the more virtuous persons whose favourite affectation is simplicity, and who labour most spasmodically to be masculine, and his native vigour, his massive common-sense, his wholesome views of men and ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the floor. Its face was uppermost. The guests were unutterably shocked to observe that its expression had changed from the mysterious but fascinating smile to a vulgar, sordid, bestial grin, which cast a cold shadow of moral nastiness into every heart. The transformation was accompanied by a ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay |
