"Opulence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to show the shanty to youngsters,' said Mr. Holt, as he turned from pushing back the shutter, 'that they may see what they have to expect. From such a start as this we Canadians have all waked up into opulence—that is, the hardworking share of us; and there's room enough for tens of thousands to do the same off in ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... few lying speeches," she answered, "and Tom Allonby taught me the worth of all such commerce." There was a smile upon her lips, sister to that which Clytemnestra may have flaunted in welcome of that old Emperor Agamemnon, come in gory opulence from the sack of Troy Town. "I gave it—" Her voice rose here to a despairing wail. "Ah, go, before I lay my curse upon you, son of Thomas Allonby! But do you kiss me first, for you have just his lying mouth. So, that is better! And now go, ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom which foresees and intends the opulence to which it gives rise; it is rather the gradual result of the propensity, in human nature, to barter and exchange one thing for another. The power of exchanging their respective produce makes it possible for one man to produce ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... in one of the shades of American Beauty, which she so much affected, and which were admirably suited to her, giving depth and opulence, the rich restfulness of color to her too sharply defined and restless beauty. Upon her breast was her silver butterfly and the enameled chains were ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... danger had been considerable, he was prohibited from trying such experiments with me. On the centre of the lawn stood my eldest surviving sister, Mary, and my brother William. Round him, attracted (as ever) by his inexhaustible opulence of thought and fun, stood, laughing and dancing, my youngest sister, a second Jane, and my youngest brother Henry, a posthumous child, feeble, and in his nurse's arms, but on this morning showing signs of unusual animation and of sympathy with the glorious promise ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... her mother's brother, and a number of elated New York relatives came to the Belgian capital, shedding their American opulence as the sun throws out its light. The skill of a general was required to direct, manage and control the pageant of the sixteenth. Thousands of dollars were tossed into the cauldron of social ambition by the lavish mother, who, from behind an army of lieutenants, ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... magnitude of his debauches, in opulence of murders, and that's all. It's a fact. Read Michelet. You will see that the princes of this epoch were redoubtable butchers. There was a sire de Giac who poisoned his wife, put her astride of his horse and rode at breakneck speed for five leagues, until she died. There was another, ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... lady Feng, "my eldest uncle say that things were in such a state, and how couldn't I believe? but what surprises me is how it ever happened that this family attained such opulence and honour!" ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... order and freedom, sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished no example; how our country, from a state of ignominious vassalage, rapidly rose to the place of umpire among European powers; how her opulence and her martial glory grew together; how, by wise and resolute good faith, was gradually established a public credit fruitful of marvels which to the statesmen of any former age would have seemed incredible; how a gigantic commerce gave birth to a ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... commerce and navigation the Etruscans were indebted for their opulence and consequent magnificence; their destruction was owing to the defects of their political system. There were twelve Tuscan cities united in a federative alliance. Between the Mac'ra and Arnus were, Pi'sae, Pisa; Floren'tia, Florence; ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... him, knocked speechless by this great beaker of bounty that had rolled in upon the flat expanse of our afternoon. Mr. Pegg, in his shiny top hat and neat Prince Albert moved away in the ruddy November sunlight as in a halo of opulence. Never before had we appreciated the princely turn of his toes beneath their drab spats, the flash of his twirled walking-stick. We resolved to keep him in mind. He was a neighbour worth having. Angel even suggested certain time-honoured ditties ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... little sympathy with the dreamy romanticism which found such splendid exponents, while he was yet in his early youth, in Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt. Imagination in its higher functions he seemed to lack. A certain opulence and picturesqueness of fancy united in his artistic being with an intelligence both lucid and penetrating, and a sense of form and symmetry almost Greek in its fastidiousness. The sweet, vague, passionate aspiration^, the sensibility that quivers with every breath ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... never expected then to learn, that the everlasting laws of righteousness were to give way to imaginary, political, and commercial expediency; and that thousands of our fellow-creatures were to be reduced to wretchedness, that individuals might enjoy opulence, or ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... life is living The love-heart of the year; And the pagan meadow-lark and I Can nothing find to fear. We build our simple homes For opulence of rest Among the hills and the meadow grass, And ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... this, further, it came over him that he hadn't been prepared and that his wretched appearance must show it. He wasn't fit to receive a visit—any visit; a flush for his felt misery, in the light of her opulence, broke out in his lean cheeks. But if he coloured he sat as he was—she should at least, as a visitor, be satisfied. His eyes only, at last, turned from her and resumed a little their gaze at the sea. That, however, didn't relieve him, and he perpetrated in the course of another ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... that gala day was a glorious evening. Rich and warm and beautiful, self-indulgent nature had swaddled herself about in barbaric bands of colour, a drowsy opulence of green and scarlet, soft-toned amber and pale, veiled azure. It was an hour when the senses riot in carnival, when colour sings and sound seems pink and gold, when light is fragrant and flowers emit ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... money, and the increase of our opulence, might form, says Johnson, a curious subject of research. In the reign of Edward the Sixth, Latimer mentions it as a proof of his father's prosperity, that though but a yeoman, he gave his daughters five pounds each for their ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Society with the clubs of France, read Priestley's adherence to their opinions. 5th, What the French is with regard to religious toleration, and with regard to, 1. Religion,—2. Civil happiness,—3. Virtue, order, and real liberty,—4. Commercial opulence,—5. National defence. In proof of the fifth proposition, read the representation of the French minister of the Home Department, and the report of the committee ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the pile. A great sigh of indrawn breaths swept through the crowd. The North had never known a bet like this—it meant a fortune. Here was a tale for one's grandchildren—that a man should win opulence in an evening, then lose it in one deal. This final bet represented more than many of them had ever seen a one time before. Its fate ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... altogether. Nothing at all was said about the "great round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen lolling at the doors and tumbling into the streets in their apoplectic opulence." Nothing about the ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars, and "winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe." ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... Priory, we are told in the Neustria Pia[24], that it was anciently of much opulence, and that a Queen of France contributed largely to the endowment of the house. Many men of eminence, particularly three of the Talbot family, were buried within its walls. Peter Megissier, a prior of Longueville, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... proportion taxes to wealth? Yesterday I had two hundred oxen, to-day I have sixty, to-morrow I shall have a hundred. Clunic has three cows, but they are thin; Nicclu has only two, but they are fat. Which is the richer, Clunic or Nicclu? The signs of opulence are deceitful. What is certain is that everyone eats and drinks. Tax people according to what they consume. That would be wisdom and it ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... paper on the subject), the means by which Britain may now, on the most distant voyages, preserve numbers of her intrepid sons, her mariners; who, braving every danger, have so liberally contributed to the fame, to the opulence, and to the maritime empire, of their country?"—An acknowledgement so judicious finds a response in every breast that knows how to estimate the value of human life and happiness, and will not fail ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... fastidious as Bromfield should patronize a place so dingy and so rough as this. At the end of one room was a marble mantelpiece above which there was a defaced, gilt-frame mirror. The chandeliers, the chairs, the wall-paper, all suggested the same note of one-time opulence worn ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... what I should have said. As I am not an inventive liar, I could only smile feebly. I am never at my ease with Aunt Jessica. I am not the kind of person to afford her entertainment. I do not belong to her world of opulence, and if even I desired it, which the gods forbid, my means would not enable me to make the necessary display. My uncle, thinking to retrieve the fallen fortunes of the title, amassed enormous wealth as a company ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... subpremi. Oppressor tirano, subpremanto. Opprobrium malnobleco, malgloro. Optics optiko. Optical optika. Optician optikisto. Optimism optimismo. Optimist optimisto. Option elekto—ajxo. Opulence ricxeco. Opulent ricxa. Opusculum libreto, brosxuro. Or aux. Oracle orakolo. Oral vocxa, parola. Orange orangxo. Orange (colour) orangxkolora. Orangery orangxerio. Oration parolado. Orator oratoro, parolisto. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... prolonged stare to the portrait of Heyst's father, that severe profile ignoring the vanities of this earth. His eyes gleamed sideways at the heavy silver candlesticks—signs of opulence. He prowled as a stray cat entering a strange place might have done, for if Ricardo had not Wang's miraculous gift of materializing and vanishing, rather than coming and going, he could be nearly as noiseless in his less ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... above that witnessed in any other country. Their land, with less labour, yields a greater usufruct than other land; they get more money for their industry; they jingle more coin in their pockets than other peoples. But it is a grievous error to mistake that superior opulence for a sign of money-hunger, for they actually hold money very lightly, and spend a great deal more of it than any other race of men and with far less thought of values. The normal French family, it is often said, ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... through all his manners reign: Though poor, luxurious; though submissive, vain; Though grave, yet trifling; zealous, yet untrue; And ev'n in penance planning sins anew. 130 All evils here contaminate the mind That opulence departed leaves behind; For wealth was theirs,[16] not far removed the date When commerce proudly nourished through the state, At her command the palace learnt to rise,[17] 135 Again the long-fallen column sought the skies,[18] The canvas glowed, beyond e'en nature warm,[19] The pregnant quarry ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... half-an-hour by fast car. She liked its spacious lawns and its terraced Italian garden—they were so admirable for garden parties and open-air theatricals. She liked the useless size of the house—it ministered to her love of opulence. ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... the optimist finds the "very rich," with but few exceptions, amiable, generous, and kindly, often regretting that poorer friends will allow their wealth to bar them off, wishing often that their opulence need not shut them off from the little dinners, the homely hospitality, the small gifts, the sincere courtesies of those whose means are moderate, The cheerful people who are not dismayed by the superior magnificence ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... and very naturally presumed, that the injuries which they had suffered, and the dangers which they still apprehended from his most inveterate enemy, would secure the fidelity of a party already considerable by their numbers and opulence. Even the conduct of Maxentius towards the bishops of Rome and Carthage may be considered as the proof of his toleration, since it is probable that the most orthodox princes would adopt the same measures with regard to their established clergy. Marcellus, the former of these prelates, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... through the saving influence of his faith, approving himself in the sight of all [224] an ideal judge, even according to the highest conception; because John Howard, opulent and free to enjoy his opulence and repose, was drawn thereby throughout the whole continent of Europe in quest of the hidden miseries that torture those whom the law has shut out, in dungeons, from the light and sympathy of the world; because Thomas Clarkson, animated by the spirit of its teachings, consecrated wealth, ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... refinement. It was the first time she had ever entered its gates, although, in a measure, she was entitled to look upon it as her own home. Perhaps never so much as now she realized what a deep gulf lay between her husband's family and herself. This was a world she had never known—a world of opulence and luxury. She did not know how she had summoned up courage enough to come. Yet there was no time to be lost. Immediate action was necessary. Howard must have the best lawyers that money could procure. Judge Brewster had been deaf to her entreaties. ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... The stress of mind engendered by the alternating of these themes of suffering would have rendered life an unbearable burden to John, had he not found anchorage in an invincible belief in God, a belief which set in stormily for the pomp and opulence of Catholic ceremonial, for the solemn Gothic arch and the jewelled joy of painted panes, for the grace and the elegance and the ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... native language, and, finding that I understood him, he commenced talking with astonishing volubility. In the space of five minutes he informed me that, having a desire to see the world, he had run away from his friends, who were people of opulence at Madrid, and that he did not intend to return until he had travelled through various countries. I told him that if what he said was true, he had done a very wicked and foolish action; wicked, because he must have overwhelmed those with grief whom he was bound to honour ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... on Kenoza fall, Her autumn leaves by Saltonstall; No lavished gold can richer make Her opulence of hill ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... sufficiently celebrated in Orleans, a city where, in general, we should be puzzled to say why he came to pass his days of penitence. Provincial debauches, petits-maitres of six hundred livres a year, shared the fragments of his opulence. ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... thirty-six feet, lofty and elegant, and singularly well designed. The sleeping apartments above are executed upon a scale equally luxurious and regardless of expense. Externally, the building must ever remain a monument of the splendor which, as far as opulence is concerned, places some of our merchants on a footing almost with royalty itself, and a glance at the interior will be a privilege eagerly sought ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Contrasted faults through all his manner reign; Though poor, luxurious; though submissive, vain; Though grave, yet trifling; zealous, yet untrue; And e'en in penance planning sins anew. 130 All evils here contaminate the mind, That opulence departed leaves behind; For wealth was theirs, not far remov'd the date, When commerce proudly flourish'd through the state; At her command the palace learn'd to rise, 135 Again the long-fall'n column sought the skies; The canvas glow'd beyond e'en Nature warm, The pregnant quarry teem'd with ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... intellect was such a high-flyer; in pagan times he would have believed in ridiculous divinities rather than set himself up as an atheist. He did not believe that excess of knowledge gives firmness to the judgment, and he remarks that the opulence of learned men often leads to more errors than the poverty of those who depend on the native virtues of instinct and experience. He has phrases which seem meant to condemn the mechanical emptiness of the modern German system ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... respite—the temptation was irresistible. And he really liked the kind uncomplicated Hickses. A wholesome honesty and simplicity breathed through all their opulence, as if the rich trappings of their present life still exhaled the fragrance of their native prairies. The mere fact of being with such people was like a purifying bath. When the yacht touched at Naples he agreed ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... The Sowing of the Seed Old Clothes High Noon Obstacles Thought Force Opulence Eternity Morning Influences The Philosophy of Happiness A Worn Out Creed Common Sense Literature Optimism Preparation Dividends Royalty Heredity Invincibility Faces The Object of Life Wisdom Self-Conquest The Important Trifles ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... is, no doubt, a fine country,—finer than ever under the present reign. The more magnificent the Court is, the more uneasy do I become. Wealth and opulence are needed there; and to your family I never figured as a Croesus. By dint of order and thrift, we shall ere long have satisfactorily settled our affairs; and I promise you that our stay in the Provinces shall last no longer ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... are not brought immediately under our notice. That these funds were not however adequate to his style of living is plain: Perhaps his train may be considered only as incumbrances, which the pride of family and the habit of former opulence might have brought upon his present poverty: I do not mean absolute poverty, but call it so as relative to his expence. To have "but seven groats and two-pence in his purse" and a page to bear it, is truly ridiculous; and it is for that reason we become so familiar with ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... something about all that I saw which seemed to intimate that I was rather in the abode of a decayed gentleman, who clung to a few of the forms and observances of former rank, than in that of a common peasant, raised above his fellows by comparative opulence. ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... commercial interests. The citizens copy after the State, and regard wealth, pomp, and luxury as the great goods of life. Such a nation creates wealth rapidly, and distributes it badly. Thence the two extremes, of monstrous opulence and monstrous misery; all the enjoyment to a few, all the privations to the rest, that is to say, to the people; Privilege, Exception, Monopoly, Feudality, springing up from Labor itself: a false and dangerous situation, which, making Labor ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... with her prizes, sighted the southern end of Zanzibar. As she ran along the western shore, the flat-roofed buildings, like palaces with numerous windows, gave the place an appearance of considerable opulence and magnificence. On either side of the city stretched away a low coast-line of glittering sand, above which could be seen cocoanut palms, raising their lofty heads at intervals, while the country, gradually rising ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... Towns-refused to advance money for the pay of the French troops. The men were absolutely destitute. I declared that it was urgent to put an end to this state of things. The Hanse towns had been reduced from opulence to misery by taxation and exactions, and were no longer able to provide ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... reasoning citizen would not refer the starving people to the taxes, to the ill-gotten gains of the princes, as the source of their poverty? German princes and German distress! In other words, the taxes on which the princes live in opulence and which the people pay with the sweat of their blood! What inexhaustible ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... III. being Stadtholder of Holland) the Dutch discovered this island. The enterprise of that people had raised them to the zenith of their power: unless by England, they were unrivalled in nautical science and commercial opulence. More for the purposes of trade than the acquisition of knowledge, they were anxious to discover unknown countries, and to conceal the information they possessed from the ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... they shall die miserable, and shall be forgotten; and there shall never arise a novelist great enough to make live in art that eternal spirit of devotion, disinterestedness, and aspiration, which in each generation incarnates itself in one heroic soul. Better wast thou than those who stepped to opulence and fame upon thee fallen; better, loftier-minded, purer; thy destiny was to fall that others might rise upon thee, thou wert one of the noble legion of the conquered; let praise be given to the conquered, for with them lies the brunt of victory. Child of the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... She was tastefully dressed, as she had always been, a certain style of languorous silken deshabille which she was wont to affect in better health now became her paler cheek and feverishly brilliant eyes. There was the same opulence of lace and ornament, and, whether by accident or design, clasped around the slight wrist of her extended hand was a bracelet which he remembered had swept away the ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... financial company had brought about a crisis on the Bourse. The news of the inability of Wermant, the 'agent de change', to meet his engagements, had completed the downfall of M. de Nailles. Not only death, but ruin, had entered that house, where, a few hours before, luxury and opulence had ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... volumes. Seneca seems to me to be out of humour, when, speaking of the conflagration, he bestows his censures both on the library itself, and the eulogium made on it by Livy, who styles it an illustrious monument of the opulence of the Egyptian kings, and of their judicious attention to the improvement of the sciences. Seneca, instead of allowing it to be such, would have it considered only as a work resulting from the pride and vanity of those ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... perceiving no sign of disaster, shrugged its shoulders. Irish members had taught the House of Commons how to talk for twenty-four hours without a pause. The wages of the agricultural labourer had sprung into the air and leaped over the twelve shilling bar into regions of opulence. Moody and Sankey had found and conquered England for Christ. Landseer and Livingstone had died, and the provinces could not decide whether "Dignity and Impudence" or the penetration of Africa was the more interesting feat. Herbert ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... economy, thrifty, prudent, just, and eminently conscientious; of Portia one can only think as of a creature born in the very lap of luxury and nursed in the midst of sunny magnificence, whose very element was elegant opulence and refined splendor, and by whose cradle Fortune herself stood godmother. She seems like a perfect rose, blooming in a precious vase of gold and gems and exquisite workmanship. Camiola's contemptuous rebuff of her insolent courtier lover; her ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... stuff in him. It's undeniable, indeed. It strikes us, however, that he has more imagery than verity, more colour than form. He will learn to be less arbitrary in the use of his figures—of which the opulence is so striking—and attain, as he ripens, more clearness of outline and depth of intention. Meanwhile none but a poet could write this, and ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... you could do a great deal of good with a hundred pounds. If you will set this gentleman's mind at ease by taking his pound, I will give the other ninety-nine [Bill, astounded by such opulence, instinctively touches his cap]. ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... connecting himself with several others of similar pursuit, they took a genteel house in a respectable part of the town, and dividing themselves into classes of masters, clerks, out-riders, shopmen, porters, and servants, and thus making a show of opulence, they easily obtained credit, and laid in goods of every kind, which they sent into the country and sold, or bartered for other commodities; these commodities they brought up to London, and sold for ready money, generally taking in exchange double the quantity, and paying for the same with notes ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... consecrating a book, from which he said we should derive immense riches. We should then ask the demons to discover to us the various treasures with which the earth abounds, which would raise us to opulence and power; but that those love-affairs were mere follies from which no good could be expected. I made answer, that I would readily have accepted his proposal if I had understood Latin. He assured me that ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... as regarded the object. Honest hard work, and some cunning in the method of his eloquence, had at first sufficed him. He was not called upon to have, or at any rate to state, any marked political tenets. But no man can rise to great note as a lawyer without a party. Opulence without note would by no means have ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Hacienda del Venado. The proprietor, Don Augustin Pena, was a man of great opulence. In addition to a rich gold mine which he worked, at no great distance off, he was the owner of countless herds of horses, mules, and cattle, that in a half-wild state roamed over the vast savannahs and forests that constituted ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... looked at it now, in the sparse light from the bedside lamp, with a fresh interest in its significance. He saw with new understanding the conventionalism of the pose—hip thrust out, arm akimbo, shoulder cocked—contrasted against the dark vivacity of the face and all the pulsing opulence of the flesh. It was an epic, an epic of the savage triumphant against civilization, of the spirit victorious ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... better and truer to life than the last; and winding up with snatching away their work from the young ladies' not unwilling hands, and piling it in heaps on the floor around him, he sat himself in the middle with an armful hugged close and an air of comically mingled resignation and opulence, and announced himself as "a photo from life of ye destitute ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... left him to dwell over their little talk, but most of all he recurred again and again to the sight of her with her arms about the child, kneeling on the sand and looking off to the east, to that far east that might, if it would, with its opulence, save ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... per hour; or six and twenty dollars for every minute that flew. Thus the usual track of supposition was thoroughly broken up. Men knew not what to imagine. There were some who even conceived that Mr. Ellison would divest himself of at least one-half of his fortune, as of utterly superfluous opulence—enriching whole troops of his relatives by division of his superabundance. To the nearest of these he did, in fact, abandon the very unusual wealth which was his own ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... lapped in material comfort only intensified his spiritual pangs. The Tancreds were rich, and their wealth was not of to-day or yesterday; they had the dim golden tone, the deep opulence of centuries. And they were generous, they gave him of their best; so that, besides being bored, he had the additional discomfort of feeling himself a bit of a brute. As he lay awake night after night in his luxurious bed he wondered how he ever got there, ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... lived in opulence and splendour, even to an extreme old age. He had several losses in his trade, according to the chance of things which are depending on the sea; but his friends continually relieved him in his necessities, and gave him wherewithal to set up again. At length, being one day at a great ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... those who hold wealth in esteem—and understand by this word, not the opulence of the few, but the comfort, the well-being, the security, the independence, the instruction, the ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... them described in front of him a large semicircle, and, all in a line, they advanced at the same time. The two Parisians admired their arms, and felt smitten with an almost religious veneration for the opulence of the soil. Then they proceeded to inspect some of the ploughed lands. The twilight was falling, and the crows swooped down ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... sources of an opulence which we must do Raleigh the credit to say was expended not on debauchery or display, but in the most enlightened efforts to extend the field of English commercial enterprise beyond the Atlantic. We need not suppose ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... obedience. It taught men, as Hall has said, that true liberty smothers the voice of kings, dispels the mists of superstition, and by its magic touch kindles the rays of genius, the enthusiasm of poetry, the flame of eloquence, pours into our laps opulence and art, and embellishes life with innumerable institutions and improvements which make it one grand theatre of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... good deal of pains on that point. I can by no calculation justify myself in placing the number below two millions of inhabitants of our own European blood and color, besides at least five hundred thousand others, who form no inconsiderable part of the strength and opulence of the whole. This, Sir, is, I believe, about the true number. There is no occasion to exaggerate where plain truth is of so much weight and importance. But whether I put the present numbers too ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... caught the fever of speculation, and expected to get on in the world by the omission of some of the regular processes which have been appointed from of old. And examples were not wanting to encourage him. He saw people, all around him, poor yesterday, rich to-day, who had come into sudden opulence by some means which they could not have classified among any of the regular occupations of life. A war would give such a fellow a career and very likely fame. He might have been a "railroad man," or a politician, or a land speculator, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... people of sufficient opulence to contract for so vast a fishery, the Company might undertake it themselves; three or four gun-boats would be necessary to protect the fishermen; and a small fort should be erected at Tambisan or Tawi Tawi. But it is necessary to observe, the Sulo people do not practice diving at all, as is the ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... the princess by a respectful silence due to her name, which is one of those that all men honor, to her misfortunes, which they ceased to discuss, and to her beauty, the only thing she saved of her departed opulence. Society, of which she had once been the ornament, was thankful to her for having, as it were, taken the veil, and cloistered herself in her own home. This act of good taste was for her, more than for any other woman, an immense sacrifice. Great deeds are always ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... hope decayed, and there increased in proportion that feverish agony of anticipation with which a man, educated in a sense of consequence, and possessed of opulence,the supporter of an ancient name, and the father of two promising children,foresaw the hour approaching which should deprive him of all the splendour which time had made familiarly necessary to him, and send him forth into the world to ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... doctor, after a moment's pause, "that it is wise or right in a girl like Dora Bannister, accustomed to fine living, good society, and an atmosphere of opulence, to allow a poor man like Ralph Haverley to fall in love with her? And he will do it, just as sure as the ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... Campbell; "we will hope for the best; we are as much under his protection here in the wilderness, as we were at Wexton Park; we were just as liable to all the ills which flesh is heir to when we were living in opulence and luxury as we are now in this log-house; but we are, I thank God, not so liable in our present position to forget Him, who so bountifully provides for us and in His wisdom ordereth all our ways. Most truly has ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... was a Monsieur PICHON; who, on being taken prisoner by the English, at the capture of Louisburg in 1758, resided a long time in England under the name of TYRREL, and lived in circumstances of respectability and even of opulence. There—whether on the dispersion of the libraries of our Meads, Foulkes', and Rawlinsons, I know not—he made his collection; took his books over with him to Jersey, where he died in 1780: and bequeathed them, about 3000 in number, to his native ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... after a taste of freedom, of power and opulence, here she was back in practically the same position and rapidly developing the same mental attitude towards those more affluent and, therefore, more socially important than herself. Mrs. Toomey's thoughts were much the color of the ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... his house with statues and pictures, and extended a generous patronage to the painters. He was a collector of books, and, as Crabbe and less conspicuous men discovered, a helpful friend to their writers. Guests were ever welcome at his board; the opulence of his mind and the fervid copiousness of his talk naturally made the guests of such a man very numerous. Non invideo equidem, miror magis, was Johnson's good-natured remark, when he was taken over his friend's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the Golden Peninsula," there spreads before the Englishman a space of nearly a million and a quarter of square miles, inhabited by about one hundred and thirty-four millions of souls, with a sea-coast of immense extent, washed by two oceans, and bordering on vast countries of hitherto unexplored opulence. The resources of Birmah, Siam, and the Eastern Archipelago, have been scarcely touched by the hand of man. Savage governments, savage nations, and savage indolence, have left those countries almost in a state of nature; yet it is within the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... courtly manners was here centered. Even the houses were more imposing than elsewhere throughout the country. They were usually well constructed of stone or brick with either thatched or slated roofs. They were supplied with barns bursting with the opulence of the fields. The countryside round about was teeming with fatness. Indeed, in all the colonies no other place was so replete with affluence ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... astonishment will vanish. With the prospect before him of a prolonged stay in Gaul with Caesar, Quintus might doubtless have borrowed to any extent; and in fact with Caesar's help—the proceeds of the Gallic wars—both brothers found themselves in opulence. The Civil War, and the repayment of his debts to Caesar, nearly ruined Marcus towards the end of his life, but nothing prevented his contriving to find money for any object on which he had set his heart; when in his grief for the loss of his daughter he wishes to buy suburban ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... was the son of another Sir Thomas Nobody, whereas two or three antiquarians can incontestably prove that he was the son of Sir John Nobody, and nephew of the above. To me, I confess, he appears distinguished scarcely more by the splendor of his imagination than by the opulence of his knowledge, and the imperial command which he possesses over it. But, in truth, the accuracy or otherwise of history, when it is at all remote, is a matter in which I feel less interest than ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... of the Hanseatic League was chiefly in iron and the precious metals; among them were armourers, watch-makers, and goldsmiths. In the Stahlhof, called in English the Steelyard, and which the founders themselves had designated the Palace of Steel, was to be noted a certain opulence and pursuit of comfort which is to be found in all ages. After having finished their business, the merchants formed a social circle of their own. They had a festival-hall of their own, and they ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... wince at the sound of her voice in the room. He'd say things to her; not often, but just enough to see how far he could go. He was afraid of going too far. He wasn't prepared to give up the comfort of Lena's house, the opulence and peace. There wasn't one of Lena's wines he could have turned his back on. After all, when she worried him he could keep himself locked up in the ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... be sure, one could not say, as the horse-dealer Marx did, that the surroundings reminded one of a count's estate; on the other hand, in whatever direction one looked there was an atmosphere of peasant prosperity and opulence which could not but call out to the hungriest stranger: Here you can eat your fill; the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... long to write an ode And magnify his name, The man of honor, on the road To opulence and fame, On whom was never aid ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... the broad stone steps and stood within the doorway. I was certainly much surprised at what I saw. There was a rude magnificence about this house such as I had never expected to find in the South Sea Islands. Nay, though I am not unacquainted with the abodes of opulence at home, and have been a favoured guest of some of our merchant princes (including Messrs. Bunton, the eminent haberdashers, whose light is so generously bestowed on our Connection), I admit that I had never looked on a more spacious reception-room, furnished, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... do not know us gibe at us and throw our sins in our teeth. But this mightiest of democracies is at last awakening, is casting out the evil genii of opulence, is girding on its sword for the great work. Soldier of freedom, thou camest to us in the time of our greatest need. "Now," thou saidst, "is precisely the moment to serve your cause." Symbol of the united democracies of the world, symbol of a union which will make the earth safe for its peoples, ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... had found many dwellings of the peasantry tidy and neat enough, displaying at any rate more opulence than we are accustomed to find with this class of people; but I had seen none to compete ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... incomes. Then came a world shortage of tonnage and immediately coastwise freights soared skyward. The big schooners of the Palmer fleet began to reap fabulous dividends and their masters shared in the unexpected opulence. Besides their primage they owned shares in their vessels, a thirty-second or so, and presently their settlement at the end of a voyage coastwise amounted to an income of a thousand dollars a month. They earned this money, and the managing owners cheerfully paid them, for there had been lean years ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... that a man of romantic taste, a "Man of Feeling," will be better pleased with the poverty, but intelligent minds of the peasantry in Ayrshire (peasantry they are all below the justice of peace) than the opulence of a club of Merse farmers, when at the same time, he considers the vandalism of their plough-folks, &c. I carry this idea so far, that an unenclosed, half improven country is to me actually more agreeable, and gives me more pleasure as a ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... this age in beauty or in art; Nothing is wrought to-day that shall endure, For earth's adornment, through long centuries Not ours the fervid worship of a God That wastes its splendid opulence on glass, Leaving but hate, to give it mortal kin. Yet great this age: its mighty work is man Knowing himself, the universal life. And great our faith, which shows itself in works For human freedom and for racial ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... spectacles. As for the music, we may be certain that in the beginning it followed the lines laid down in the "Orfeo." It rested first on the basis of the frottola, but when the elegant and gracious madrigal provided an art form better suited to the opulence of the decorative features of the embryonic lyric drama, the madrigal became the dominating element in the music. Together with it we find in time the dance slowly assuming that shape which eventually became the foundation ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... said he, "this poor young man, coming from opulence, no doubt, a dear English home, to die here for no end, one of the first-fruits of a bloody war,—so much privately sacrificed. But let him rest, Septimius. I am sorry that he fell by your hand, though it involves no shadow of a crime. But death is a thing ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... humour, he caught a glimpse of two Roman knights; he had them arrested and confiscated their property. Then returning to the gaming table, he exultingly exclaimed that he had never made a better throw!(31) On another occasion, after having condemned to death several Gauls of great opulence, he immediately went back to his gambling companions and said:—'I pity you when I see you lose a few sestertii, whilst, with a stroke of the pen, I have just won six ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... methods. Her lines are at times involved and turgid and almost cryptic, but she shows an originality which does not depend upon eccentricities. In her "Before the Feast of Shushan" she displays an opulence, the love of which has long been charged against the Negro as one of his naive and childish traits, but which in art may infuse a much needed color, warmth and spirit ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... individual with whom the professors come in contact, form the character of the new philosophy. Setting up for an unsocial independence, this their hero of vanity refuses the just price of common labor, as well as the tribute which opulence owes to genius, and which, when paid, honors the giver and the receiver, and then pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... arrival; but had then been unable to see anything. Now her eyes were in requisition. Here there was even more attention paid to comfort and appearances than in the dining-room. In the simplest possible manner; but somebody had been at work there who knew that elegance is attainable without the help of opulence; and that eye and hand can do what money cannot. Eye and hand had been busy everywhere. Very pretty and soft native mats were on the floor; the windows were shaded with East Indian jalousies; and not only personal convenience ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... where a confluence of many millions of human beings is brought together under the mixed influences of devotion and commercial business, and, dispersing as rapidly as it has been evoked, the crowd "dislimns and leaves not a wrack behind." But fairs and general enterprise and opulence are not coeval: neither do they flourish in an age of iron roads and steam-carriages. In fact, they were the results of the inconvenience attendant upon travelling. It was once easier for goods to come to customers than for customers to leave their homes in search ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... Pair said; and there indeed he touched a salient point. His people were dead; his father had been a younger son; he had no money of his own. But his father's elder brother, a squire in Hampshire, made him rather a liberal allowance,—something like six hundred a year, I believe, which was opulence in the Latin Quarter. Now, the squire had been aware of Pair's relation with Godelinette from its inception, and had not disapproved. On his visits to Paris he had dined with them, given them dinners, and treated her with the utmost complaisance. But ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... the coach being already full. On this very first day of his arrival, he perceived between the English and the people among whom he had hitherto lived, such essential difference in customs, appearance, and way of living, as inspired him with high notions of that British freedom, opulence, and convenience, on which he had often heard his mother expatiate. On the road, he feasted his eyesight with the verdant hills covered with flocks of sheep, the fruitful vales parcelled out into ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... the timid, they said there would be no coercion. To the ambitious, they spoke of military glory, and the formation of a vast slave empire, to include Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies. The merchants were assured that Charleston would be a free port, rivaling New York in its trade and opulence. ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... home little she was cruelly flogged, so she says, and occasionally she deviated into the truth. A kind lady, the Marquise de Boulainvilliers, investigated her story, found it true, and took up the Valois orphans. The wicked mother went back to Bar-sur-Aube, which Jeanne was to dazzle with her opulence, after she got possession ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... pride, nor during the anxieties of improvident distress. No nation ever had, or will have, the power of suddenly developing, under the pressure of necessity, faculties it had neglected when it was at ease; nor of teaching itself in poverty, the skill to produce, what it has never, in opulence, had the ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... projecting but intelligent eyes, clothed in a new suit, wearing an enormous black pearl in his necktie and a diamond ring on his finger; the very ideal of Mammon in every detail of his person and of his carefully advertised opulence. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... competing aspirants for repute. Some such effect, in the way of leisurely manners and carriage, etc., follows from simple persistent abstention from work, even where the subject does not take thought of the matter and studiously acquire an air of leisurely opulence and mastery. Especially does it seem to be true that a life of leisure in this way persisted in through several generations will leave a persistent, ascertainable effect in the conformation of the person, and still more in his habitual bearing and demeanour. But all ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... evening toilettes during the summer were considered immoral; but by degrees, as time tooled in its irresistible modernities, they gradually fell into the habit of wearing out their winter party gowns at the evening diversions of the country season. Burlingame, that borough of concentrated opulence founded in the early nineties as a fashionable colony, began its career with a certain amount of simplicity; but its millions increased to tens of millions; and what in heaven's name, as Mrs. Clement Hunter, a leader and an individual, once remarked, is the use of having ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... up! a fountain! an aqueduct! are these acquisitions to brag of? Cast your eye upon the magistrate under whose ministry you boast these precious improvements. Behold the despicable creature, raised all at once from dirt to opulence; from the lowest obscurity to the highest honors. Have not some of these upstarts built private houses and seats, vying with the most sumptuous of our public palaces? And how have their fortunes and their power increased, but as the commonwealth has ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick |
