"Rottenness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... good; I can now rest in the full enjoyment of my labor and be satisfied." But when he does reach the end, when every pleasure tried, every beauty of surrounding created, and he expects to eat the fruit of his work, instantly his mouth is filled with rottenness and decay. "Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do; and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit; and there was no profit under the sun." Thus he groans ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... cure for rottenness." He was so beside himself with pain that he forgot that she was a woman, ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... you think that four years' insanity is going to prove the remedy?" Vane laughed cynically. "Except that there are a few million less men to carry on the rottenness"— ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... little to laugh over. For the very rottenness of the service was due to the miserable and servile Ministry and Parliament of his Majesty, by means of which instruments he was forcing the colonies to the wall. Verily, that was a time when the greatness of England hung in the balance! How little I suspected that the young ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... act of setting foot at its entrance, the trap opened, and the world of the living heard no more of him. I examined some of the earth found in the pit below this trap; it was a compost of common earth, rottenness, ashes, and human hair, fetid to the smell, and horrible to the sight and to the ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... attention from their own grievances, and to draw them away from their Socialistic clubs and conventions, to the contemplation of a parade of Royal state and splendour. The careful student of History cannot fail to note that whenever the rottenness and inadequacy of a Government are most apparent, great 'shows' and Royal ceremonials are always resorted to, in order to divert the minds of the people from the bitter consideration of a deficient Exchequer and a diminishing ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... their rather material views of morals, but they are frank. There may be mental prigs among them, but there are no moral prigs. In both England and America we suffer from a certain morbid ethical daintiness. There is a ripeness of moral fastidiousness that is often difficult to distinguish from rottenness. It is part of the feminism of America, born of our prosperity, for not one of these fastidious moralists is not a rich man, and ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... inward and moral stage of sentiment. It is part of the general system of purgation and cleansing which one feels one's self in need of, in order to be in right relations to one's deity. For him who confesses, shams are over and realities have begun; he has exteriorized his rottenness. If he has not actually got rid of it, he at least no longer smears it over with a hypocritical show of virtue—he lives at least upon a basis of veracity. The complete decay of the practice of confession in Anglo-Saxon communities ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... are the worst enemies in every way that good women can have. If there were any virtue in vice, if black were white or even speckled, doubtless the supreme book of morals, the guide of the race, would have some word in praise of moral rottenness—some few lines in prose or verse in laudation of lewd women. But the whole Bible keeps the distinction sharp and clear between black and white, between ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... vegetation can flourish, and above which, with the rapid growth of the ever-growing nuisance, no living thing will breathe with impunity. Look at our scientific machinery, which has destroyed domestic manufacture, which has substituted rottenness for strength in the thing made, and physical degradation in crowded towns for healthy and comfortable country life in the makers. The day would fail, if I should attempt to enumerate the evils which science has inflicted ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... overthrown by the Revolution, it seemed to be dead. But, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, behold it springing up again spontaneously, in one direct, new, strong and active jet and higher than the old one, free of the excrescences, rottenness and parasites which, under the ancient regime, disfigured and discolored it. No more compulsory vows, no "frocked" younger sons "to make an elder," no girls immured from infancy, kept in the convent throughout their youth, led ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Allies for carrying on the war. The Bulgarian people had made up their minds to do the lion's share of the work and to have the lion's share of the spoils, for the Bulgarian people knew the state of corruption and rottenness to which the Turkish nation had come. When I reached Sofia, the Bulgarians told me they were going to be in Constantinople three weeks after the declaration of war. That was the view that they took of the possibilities of the ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... here that I made my start, Labret—here that I delivered my first speech as though for a joke; here it was that I first began to hate the dogs who sat amongst us with all their fine clothes and perfumes and rottenness ... and I am very glad indeed, my good Labret, that you, too, should see just for once the place from which your great friend raised himself. (In another tone.) I say, Prosper, supposing the ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... which they hold in their hand, they cross with a triumphant step the threshold of death. . . . "Eternal Life"—the thought of immortality—how the human soul has been obsessed by it, particularly in the periods marked by its greatest strivings! The tame submission to the belief that the rottenness of the grave is the end of all is characteristic of ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... him on to his ruin. At the expiration of ten years, Venus had a head on her shoulders, and he had almost lost his own. There had been years of disease among the cattle, insects in the turnips, and rottenness in the heart of his mangels; his expenses had become enormous, the Inspector of Nuisances had complained of the state of the drains round and about his farm, his oxen had strayed, two bulls had got loose and had maimed several ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand
... up more speedily than a badly-made road. Every season is its enemy and works for its destruction. Fierce heat and intensest cold both strive for its undoing. And "the way of the ungodly" is an appallingly bad road. There is rottenness in its foundations, and there is built into it "wood, and hay, and stubble," How can it stand? "The Spirit of the Lord breatheth upon it," and it is surely brought to nought. All the forces of holiness are pledged to its destruction, and they shall pick it to pieces, and shall scatter its elements ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... ear-rings for wanton women! And they shall get themselves a new name, but the angel of ignominy, with the fiery brand, shall know them, and their heart shall be the tomb of dead desires that turn their life to rottenness." ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... that more sermons with equal plain speaking would do good. It may be that the conservatism, not to say the Phariseeism, of the modern church requires a John the Baptist to pierce it to the core, and expose its inner rottenness. The church that does not welcome the poor man and his family with just as much heartiness, sincerity and kindly sympathy as it does the rich man and his family is certainly not worthy of the great Teacher who spoke of the great difficulty the rich man has ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... I was about to get the supreme rottenness, the supreme filth, the mixture of such foul products brewing poison, when the greed was beginning to irritate, in its folly hastening to seize whatever came to hand, like an old woman caught in a conflagration, ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... greed, lewdness and incapacity of Richelieu and Dubois, of Pompadour and du Barry. When {15} the effluvious corpse of Louis XV was hastily smuggled from Versailles to the Cathedral of St. Denis in 1774, that seemed to mark the final dissolution into rottenness of the Bourbon-Versailles regime. That regime already stank in the nostrils of public opinion, a new force which for half a century past had been making rapid progress ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... "The very rottenness of the Country became an attraction for Friedrich; and henceforth West-Preussen was, what hitherto Silesia had been, his favorite child; which, with infinite care, like that of an anxious loving mother, he washed, brushed, new-dressed, and forced to go to school and into orderly habits, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... adherent of it than I am. You have suffered in one way and I in another from the falsehood and rottenness of present-day Society, but you do not hate it more utterly than I do, and you would not go to greater lengths than I would to destroy it. Yours is a hatred of emotion, and mine is a hatred of reason. I have proved that, ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... pierce beneath the surface of professions and will be undazzled by the most stupendous miracles, and beneath the eloquent words of many a preacher and the wonderful works of many a so-called Christian philanthropist, will see the hidden rottenness that they never saw, and, tearing down the veil, will reveal men at the last ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... for riches, being ignorant of their true function; self-indulgence and moral rottenness follow wealth; because of the abuse of the power which wealth brings, we are taught that it is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... point to every pious person as a Dorcas, who presents a singular fertility of some of the noblest graces; but of all it may be said, "the root of the matter is found in them," and "their root shall not be rottenness, nor their ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... society, and, if carried to the extreme, has always proved ruinous to the state. Although the immense extent of the Roman empire may be asserted as the ultimate cause of its downfall, still that downfall was most certainly accelerated by the rottenness at the core, the system of patrons and clients having thrown all the wealth into the hands of a few. Are we not rapidly advancing to this state in England? The landholders are almost at the mercy of the fundholders, who, in fifty years' time, will probably have possession ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... all counsel, all redress, But that which ends all counsel, true redress, Death, death. O amiable lovely death! Thou odoriferous stench! sound rottenness! Arise forth from the couch of lasting night, Thou hate and terror to prosperity, And I will kiss thy detestable bones; And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows; And ring these fingers with thy household worms; ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... story went on to relate how Medcroft, implacable leader of the opposition to the "grafters," suddenly had appeared before the committee with the most astounding figures and facts to support his charges of rottenness on the part of the "clique"; his unexpected descent upon the scene had thrown the opposing leaders into a panic; every one had been led to believe that he was sojourning in the east. As a matter of fact, ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... been gentlemen who could well appreciate the motive of that refusal; but it was only considered a new evidence that she was indifferent to her conjugal duties, and wanting in that respect which Christopher North had told her she owed a husband's memory, though his crimes were foul as the rottenness of the grave. ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... parts of the town, I think, is down by the landing-wharf: though it may be, that its being associated with a great deal of rottenness on the evening of our arrival, has stamped it deeper in my mind. Here, again, the houses are very high, and are of an infinite variety of deformed shapes, and have (as most of the houses have) something hanging out of a great many windows, and wafting its frowsy fragrance ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... is one thing to hear of them, and another to see them by the light of this nineteenth century, in a city whose streets look much like the streets of any other, and where men and women appear much as they do any where else. Here we saw, in one morning, the splendor and the rottenness of the Romish system. From those majestic arches, that triumphant chant, there is but a step down to the worship of dead men's ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... weighty responsibilities. Uninvited, and by methods not always of the gentlest, we have broken down the barriers behind which these ancient nations sought to conceal from the world without the mysteries, perhaps also, in the case of China at least, the raps and rottenness of their waning civilisations. Neither our own consciences nor the judgment of mankind will acquit us if, when we are asked to what use we have turned our opportunities, we can only say that we have filled our pockets ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... boards which supplied the place of door and window, were wrenched from their positions, to afford an aperture wide enough for the passage of a human body. The kennel was stagnant and filthy. The very rats, which here and there lay putrefying in its rottenness, were hideous ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... left and right Consumed of rottenness and rust, Worm-eaten of the worms of night, Dead as their spirits who put trust, Round its base muttering as they sit, In the time-cankered name ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... never trodden now by the foot of man, and whose very existence seemed to be forgotten, there would jut into the path porticoes, oriels, doorways of enriched and florid middle-age design, their extinct air being accentuated by the rottenness of the stones. It seemed impossible that modern thought could house itself in such ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... what it reveals. . . . It is a test for love, a symptom, a revelation of an unloving nature at bottom. It is the intermittent fever which bespeaks unintermittent disease within; the occasional bubble escaping to the surface which betrays some rottenness underneath; a sample of the most hidden products of the soul dropped involuntarily when off one's guard; IN A WORD, the lightning form of a hundred hideous and un-Christian sins. The Greatest Thing ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... repent, yea, even to hate their forepassed happiness. He takes the account of the rich, and proves him a beggar, a naked beggar, which hath interest in nothing but in the gravel that fills his mouth. He holds a glass before the eyes of the most beautiful, and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness, and they ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... the lungs is a frequent termination of pneumonia; and in that congestion the air-cells are easily ruptured and filled with blood. That blood assumes a black pulpy appearance, commonly indicated by the term of 'rottenness', an indication or consequence of the violence of the disease, and the hopelessness of the case. A different consequence of inflammation of the lungs is the formation of tubercles, and, after that, of suppuration and abscess, when, generally speaking, the case ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... from the surrounding fence, is one seething, living mass of stinking putrefaction. Here in the tropics, under a brazen sun, all unclean things turn to putrid filthy life within the hour; and in a native gaol the atmosphere is heavy with the fumes and rottenness of the offal of years, and the reeking pungency of offal that is new. No ventilation can penetrate into the fetid airless cells, nor could the veriest hurricane purge the odours bred ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... of a mathematical principle can not come to me unless I am prepared to receive it. And the greatest good comes to men only after they have learned the nothingness of the material ambitions and aims which they have been pursuing. By its own rottenness the world had been made fallow for truth. The awfulness of its own exposure in its rampant, unlicensed revels, had shown as never before the human mind's absolute nothingness—its nothingness as regards real value, permanence, and genuine ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... nothing. 'Your new moons and Sabbaths—the calling of assemblies—I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting.' These are only as the whitewash of your sepulchres to hide the loathsomeness within—'the rottenness and dead men's bones!' If you had made no impious pretensions, I would not, peradventure, have dealt so sternly with you. If like the other trees you had confessed your nakedness, and stood with your leafless stems, waiting for summer suns, and dews, and rains, to fructify you, and to bring your ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... irrelevantly, and because he liked the sound of it, "Puritanism is the preliminary rottenness of New England. If he is struck with that by all means let him go; the further ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... them has been adapted to sacred words, and is much used in churches, but for the most part "Martha" is made of a series of jiggy choruses. Berlioz, who especially hated Flotow, declared that the "introduction of the Irish melody ('Last Rose of Summer') served to disinfect the rottenness of the ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... victors for such reward as he might receive. After he had become enriched by this kind of gain, he resolved to return to his native land by sea; (for he was born, it is said, in the island of Ceos[32]). {Accordingly} he embarked in a ship, which a dreadful tempest, together with its own rottenness, caused to founder at sea. Some gathered together their girdles,[33] others their precious effects, {which formed} the support of their existence. One who was over inquisitive, {remarked}: "Are you going to save none of your property, Simonides?" He made reply: "All my ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... commission, yet he was at the same time caressed and praised on all sides, returned to the council, and dubbed the darling of Virginia's hopes. The assembly then proceeded to undo all the evil and clean out all the rottenness that had disgraced the conduct of their predecessors. Taxes, church tyranny, restriction of the franchise, illegal assessments, fees, and liquor-dealing were done away with; two magistrates were proved thieves and disfranchised, and trade with Indians was for the present stopped. Bacon received a ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... died a millionaire. But for all his toil and skill he received no more than a shepherd's wage. There were not wanting persons, of course, who regarded his condition as a crucial instance of the exceeding rottenness of our present industrial system. There was a great lady from London, named Lady Lottie Passingham, who resolved to take up the case. Lady Lottie belonged to the class who look upon the universe as a leaky ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... reader has under his eye at this moment is, from one end to the other, as a whole and in detail, whatever may be its intermittences, exceptions and faults, the march from evil to good, from the unjust to the just, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. Point of departure: matter; point of arrival: the soul. The hydra at the beginning, the angel ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... have people assume that newspaper men are a lot of semi-crooks and shysters. What does the petty grafting that a few reporters do—and, mind you, there's mighty little of it done—amount to, compared with the rottenness of a paper run by my church-going ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the general, with that superior smile which Garnet so hated, "States, like apples—and like men—have two sorts of rottenness. One begins at the surface and shows from the start; the other starts from the core, and doesn't show till the whole thing ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... supposed that society in this earth of ours is ever so viciously put together, is ever so totally without organic life, that a rogue, unredeemed by any merit, can prosper in it. There is no strength in rottenness; and when it comes to that, society dies and falls in pieces. Success, as it is called, even worldly success, is impossible, without some exercise of what is called moral virtue, without some portion of it, infinitesimally small, perhaps, but still some. Courage, for instance, steady ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... are liable, as are all things human, to great abuses. The multiplication of public placeholders, which they imply, is a serious evil. But the corruption thus engendered, foul as it is, does not strike so deep as the rottenness of private corporations; and official rank, position, and duty have, in practice, proved better securities for fidelity and pecuniary integrity in the conduct of the interests in question, than the suretyships of private corporate agents, whose bondsmen so often fail or abscond before their ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... adversaries' ideal which defeated you. Instead of wasting your strength in fighting against it, why not make use of it, side by side with your own, against the enemies of all ideals, the men who are exploiting your country and your wealth of ideas, the men who are bringing European civilization to rottenness?" ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... that I have adduced to prove that the yellow fever is not an American, but an African disease, imported in slave-ships, and periodically renewed from those cargoes of human rottenness and putrefaction, I ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... whole of my argument upon it. It is this—God has, in no instance, promised eternal to unbelievers; and unless you can prove that the promise does extend to them, your arguments must fall like rottenness to the ground. We have certainly proved this, and to attend to the objector's request would but be, in some measure, going over the ground already occupied. We will, however, just touch this point again. We will introduce the following words of Paul ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... a storm of bravos; the leaven of perversion was doing its work and it was Chouteau's hour of triumph, airing his muddled theories and ringing the changes on the Republic, the Rights of Man, the rottenness of the Empire, which must be destroyed, and the treason of their commanders, who, as it had been proved, had sold themselves to the enemy at the rate of a million a piece. He was a revolutionist, he boldly declared; the others could not even say that they were republicans, did ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... hate that word. If any word in the language reminds me of a whited sepulchre it is that;—all clean and polished outside with filth and rottenness within. Are your thoughts delicate? that's the thing. You are engaged to marry John Grey. That may be delicate enough if you love him truly, and feel yourself fitted to be his wife; but it's about the most indelicate thing you can do, if you love any one better than ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... eyes of the world. It would be a despicable and a cowardly act, and it horrifies me to think that the United States could be capable of it. For Spain I care nothing. The sooner she dies of her own rottenness the better; but let her die a natural death. My concern is for my own country. I don't want her to violate those fundamental principles to whose adherence alone she can hope to reach ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... and Necrosis.—Caries is a word which appears to be used with a considerable amount of looseness. In addition to the meaning implied by necrosis (namely, 'death' of the part), caries is generally used to indicate that there is also a condition of rottenness, decay, and stench. It is particularly applied, in fact, when the death of the bone is slowly progressive, and is due to the inroads made upon it by putrefactive ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... quarter of a century ago, alas!—and had very little experience in these matters, I was reading on a coachbox (for I read everywhere in those days) an account of some gigantic trees; one of them was described as sound outside, but within, for many feet, a mass of rottenness and decay. If a boy should climb up birdsnesting into the fork of it, thought I, he might go down feet first and hands overhead, and never be heard of again. How inexplicable too, as well as melancholy, such a ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... which will benefit and make others happy quite as much as they will contribute to my satisfaction, I expect to spend my life. Felix Brand will design some beautiful buildings. But he will add to the rottenness of the world and spread disaster and misery with every day of his life. Will the buildings atone for ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... anything! Look at your own Daniel Webster!" I wondered and began to look at and inquire about him, and soon discovered that his whole panoply of moral power was a shell—that his life was full of rottenness. Then I knew why I had come to Washington. I gathered the principal facts of his life at the Capitol, stated them to Dr. Snodgrass, a prominent Washington correspondent, whose anti-slavery paper had been suppressed in Baltimore by ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... Church awakened in the minds of the people of every enlightened Christian nation; and the result has been a criticism so pungent, and an examination so thorough and direct, into the deformities of the Church, that she has been obliged to contemplate her own condition and the rottenness of her position, until she fairly trembles at the view ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... flourishing commonwealth into one "lying as if broken-backed on the public highway; a nation anarchic every fibre of it, and under the feet and hoofs of travelling neighbours." [Footnote: Thomas Carlyle, Frederick the Great, vol. viii., p. 105.] In the rottenness of the social organism, venality, unprincipled ambition, and religious intolerance found a congenial soil; and favoured by and favouring foreign intrigues and interferences, they bore deadly fruit—confederations, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... to accept millions as a compromise.[1428] Moreover it was conceded that Barlow, with the possible exception of Tilden and O'Conor, knew more of the canal frauds than any one in the State. The list of suits brought by him showed the rottenness of the whole system of canal management, while a recent letter, denouncing a leader of the Ring, did not veil his hostility to its individual members.[1429] This attack, boldly directed against a prominent Republican, aroused the fierce ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... affairs in Canada were looking very grave. There were constant difficulties arising between the various officials there, and the most gross corruption existed in financial affairs, so that there was a rottenness that was eating like a canker into the heart of the colony, despite its outward aspect of prosperity. France was burdened by foreign wars and could do little for her dependencies beyond the sea; whilst England was beginning to awake from her apathy, and she had at ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... both of us are, Michael, but I at least acknowledge it. I loathe myself. You, tomorrow, must don your saintly garb and hide under it your rottenness and foulness. I do not ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... the land move about in the meantime, armed and always in their proper turn. They do not use dung and filth for manuring the fields, thinking that the fruit contracts something of their rottenness, and when eaten gives a short and poor subsistence, as women who are beautiful with rouge and from want of exercise bring forth feeble offspring. Wherefore they do not as it were paint the earth, but dig it up well and use secret ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... yields each particle its tongue Of elemental flame—no matter whence flame sprung, From gums and spice, or else from straw and rottenness." ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... greater part of the three days following the dinner, on the cliffs beyond the Golden Gate. There was no great moral battle going on in his mind; he intended to marry Magdalena. One of his pet theories was that one secret of the rottenness underlying the social, and in natural sequence, the political structure of the United States was the absence of a convention. Men were on their knees to women so long as their pleasure was materially abetted ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... has not the right to kiss the sole of Spencer's foot, let alone speaking about him in that tone! Sapping the foundations of civilisation, of authority, of other people's altars, spattering them with filth, winking jocosely at them only to justify and conceal one's own rottenness and moral poverty is only possible for a very vain, base, ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... friends! I've been forced to live my life with rustlers—vile men like y'u an' Daggs an' the rest of your like.... But I've been good! Do y'u heah that? ... I AM good—so help me God, y'u an' all your rottenness ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... doing in the midst of this rottenness? She, the woman of business? Could she hope to regenerate these poor wretches by her example? No! She could not teach them to be good, and they excelled in teaching others harm. She must leave this gilded vice, taking with her those she ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... a dream of God and man my thoughts in shining flocks were led: But as I went through Patrick Street the hopes and prophecies were dead. The hopes and prophecies were dead: they could not blossom where the feet Walked amid rottenness, or where the brawling shouters stamped the street. Where was the beauty that the Lord gave man when first he towered in pride? But one came by me at whose word the bitter condemnation died. His brows were crowned with thorns of light: his eyes were bright as one who sees The starry palaces shine ...
— By Still Waters - Lyrical Poems Old and New • George William Russell
... there's nothing unfit for poetry. Nothing, Dogson! Poetry's everywhere, and the real thing is commoner among drabs and pot-houses and rubbish-heaps than in your Sunday parlours. The poet's business is to distil it out of rottenness, and show that it is all one spirit, the thing that keeps the stars in their place.... I wanted to call my book 'Drains,' for drains are sheer poetry carrying off the excess and discards of human life to make the fields green and the corn ripen. But the publishers kicked. So I called it 'Whorls,' ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... of the islands, how interested I had been in the whole business, puzzling out the effect of the winds on the tides, the set of the currents, and so on. I talked about my difficulties, too; the changes in the buoys, the prehistoric rottenness of the English charts. He drew me out as much as he could, and in the light of what followed I can see the point ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... Rochelle.—The rottenness of the State was chiefly owing to the nobility, who, as long as they were allowed to grind down their peasants and shine at court, had no sense of duty or public spirit, and hated the burghers and lawyers far too much to make common cause ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from Spain to the Greek islands and Constantinople, thence to St. Petersburg, and finally to England. Every-where his seductions are successful, and Byron uses him as a means of exposing the weakness of the human heart and the rottenness of society in all countries. In 1823, breaking away from his life of selfish indulgence in Italy, Byron threw himself into the cause of Grecian liberty, which he had sung so gloriously in the Isles of Greece. He died at Missolonghi, in the following ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... then there is every reason to suppose that the existing folly will follow in the footsteps of the past, and after displaying a given amount of cunning and credulity in those deceiving and deceived, will drop from the public view like a fruit which has ripened into spontaneous rottenness, and be succeeded by the fresh bloom of some other delusion required by the same ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... which stands, and will stand; marches, and will march, proving its growth, its health, its progressive force, its certainty of final victory, by those very changes, disputes, mistakes, which the ignorant and the bigoted hold up to scorn, as proofs of its uncertainty and its rottenness; because they never have dared or cared to ask boldly—What are the facts of the case?—and have never discovered either the acuteness, the patience, the calm justice, necessary for ascertaining the facts, or their awful and divine certainty when ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... would have perceived that for the maladministration of which they with good reason complained he was not responsible. He could as yet work only with the machinery which he had found; and the machinery which he had found was all rust and rottenness. From the time of the Restoration to the time of the Revolution, neglect and fraud had been almost constantly impairing the efficiency of every department of the government. Honours and public trusts, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his teeth. "And woe unto you too, race of vipers, bladders of wind! As the fire devours the stubble, and the flame consumes the chaff, so your root will be rottenness and your seed go up as dust. Fear will engulf you like a torrent. The high peaks will be broken, the mountains will sever, and night be upon all. The valleys and hills will be strewn with your corpses, the rocks will run with your blood, ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... courtiers of the Medicis. When he tried to restore the ruined finances of the church he was accused of niggardliness; when he made war on abuses he was called a barbarian; when he frankly confessed, in his appeal to the German Diets, that perchance the whole evil infecting the church came from the rottenness of the Curia, he was assailed as putting arms into the arsenal of the enemy. His greatest crime in the eyes of his court was that he was a foreigner, an austere, phlegmatic man, who could understand neither ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... and beckoned through the dusk. In the old days it had always been when he had attained this point in his advance that the pleasure of London had failed, leaving him with a cramped sensation, a frenzied desire for escape, and an overwhelming sense of the inherent rottenness of western civilisation. It was upon such occasions that he saw, or thought he saw, the inevitable tendency of European cities to emasculate and corrupt the rugged nobilities of mankind. A revolt against artificiality had ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... died for us!' cried the priest, 'convince her of our nothingness! Tell her that we are but dust, rottenness, and damnation! Ah! suffer that I may hide my head in a hair-cloth and rest it against Thy feet and stay there, motionless, until I rot away in death. The earth will no longer exist for me. The sun will no longer shine. I shall see nothing more, feel nothing, hear nothing. Nought of all this ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... that being a prisoner, I might mimic a maimed liberty by doing with impunity things unpermitted me, a darkened likeness of Thy Omnipotency? Behold, Thy servant, fleeing from his Lord, and obtaining a shadow. O rottenness, O monstrousness of life, and depth of death! could I like what I might not, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... nations under the righteous wrath of God,* [[* Rom. 1, 18-32.]] and the course which the Greek nation and the Roman would have run from their pristine vigor exhibited in the days of Thermopylae and Cannae down to the state of marasmus senilis pictured by Juvenal, a state of rottenness which even the transfusion of German blood into the putrid veins of that degenerate and decaying race could not remedy, is a fearful corroboration of the ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... times were burnt by the hangman, and which one is nowadays compelled to leave in circulation after interdicting them and thereby designating them to evil curiosity, which explains the contagious rottenness of the century. Ah! I well recognised there some of the ideas of our distinguished and poetical relative, that dear Viscount Philibert de la Choue. A man of letters, yes! a man of letters! Literature, mere literature! I beg ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... editorial chair of the National Reformer, was to indite a vigorous protest against the investment of national capital in the Suez Canal Shares. He exposed the financial condition of Egypt, gave detail after detail of the Khedive's indebtedness, unveiled the rottenness of the Egyptian Government, warned the people of the danger of taking the first steps in a path which must lead to continual interference in Egyptian finance, denounced the shameful job perpetrated ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... should utter a reproach? Thy punishment; that bitter, miserable end; that long battling with poverty, debt, disease, all brought on by thyself; that abandonment in the hour of need, more bitter than them all; that awakening to the terrible truth of the hollowness of man and rottenness of the world!—surely this is enough: surely we may hope that a pardon followed. But now let us view thee in thy upward flight the genius, the wit, the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... ourselves. If we have it we shall beget it in others. Oh! get hold of God. Ask Him to baptize you with His Spirit "till the zeal of His house eats you up." This Spirit will burn His way through all obstacles of flesh and blood, of forms, proprieties, and respectabilities—of death, and rottenness of all descriptions! He will burn His way through, and produce living and telling results in the hearts of those to whom you speak. Earnestness—such earnestness that it comes to desperation—like that of Paul, who counted all things but dross; yea, and who counted not his life dear unto him. ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... a fly, or else the parasite has devoured the grub. In the third case, an accident has occurred. I open the barren pupae. They are coated inside with a dark glaze, the remains of the dead maggot converted into black rottenness. The grub, therefore, has undergone inoculation by the virus through the fine openings effected by the Chalcidid. The skin has had time to harden into a shell; but it was too late, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... of grander promise than Greece or Rome? But Greece died of premature old age, and Rome of rottenness begotten of sin. But each of them, you will say, left a priceless heritage to the immortal race. But if Greece and Rome and a host of older nations, of which History has often forgotten the very name, have failed and died, can anything but ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... and the distribution of wealth coincide accurately with the principles of the New Testament? Will anybody tell me that the state of a hundred streets within a mile of this spot is what it would be if the Christian men of this nation lived the lives that they ought to live? Could there be such rottenness and corruption if the 'salt' had not 'lost his savour'? Will anybody tell me that the disgusting vice which our newspapers do not think themselves degraded by printing in loathsome detail, and so bringing the foulness of a common ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... floor we came to a door, locked and bolted. With all the force that he could gather in the narrow hall, Kennedy catapulted himself against it. It yielded in its rottenness with ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... the anxieties he could own to. The count put up with the stupidity of Mme Maloir, playing bezique with her in spite of her musty smell. He put up with Mme Lerat and her encumbrances, with Louiset and the mournful complaints peculiar to a child who is being eaten up with the rottenness inherited from some unknown father. But he spent hours worse than these. One evening he had heard Nana angrily telling her maid that a man pretending to be rich had just swindled her—a handsome man calling himself an American and owning gold mines ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... eternal restless change Self-fed and self-consumed. If this fail, The pillared firmament is rottenness, &c. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... splendor, which threw a ghastliness around. Being full of conceits that night, I called it a frigid fire, a funeral light, illumining decay and death, an emblem of fame that gleams around the dead man without warming him, or of genius when it owes its brilliancy to moral rottenness, and was thinking that such ghostlike torches were just fit to light up this dead forest or to blaze coldly in tombs, when, starting from my abstraction, I looked up the canal. I recollected myself, and discovered the lanterns glimmering ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... And I think we shall be preserved from the Pope by the rottenness of the Church; from the drapeau rouge by the indignation and horror of all honest men. You see how the Provisional Government has resisted the insane attempt of the fanatics to make the red flag accepted as ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... certain fashion contrary to the purpose of the baker's art, are beautiful in a manner, and in a peculiar way excite a desire for eating. And again, figs, when they are quite ripe, gape open; and in the ripe olives the very circumstance of their being near to rottenness adds a peculiar beauty to the fruit. And the ears of corn bending down, and the lion's eyebrows, and the foam which flows from the mouth of wild boars, and many other things,—though they are far from being beautiful if a man should examine them ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... duke of Richmond's in 1780 for manhood suffrage. The general ground was this:—"The machine itself is well enough to answer any good purpose, provided the materials were sound. But what signifies the arrangement of rottenness?" ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... seemed to be working in the souls of all alike, Gudrun, Palmer, the rakish young bloods, the gaunt, middle-aged men. All had a secret sense of power, and of inexpressible destructiveness, and of fatal half-heartedness, a sort of rottenness in the will. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... overtook them, in old age or at the parting hour. He tells us that they died suddenly, and violently, and in madness; but nothing can exceed the bitter mockery with which he records the loathsome disease, and "death by rottenness," of the fierce and ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... a wholesome silent influence around us. But these three types must all be blended, both in regard to the manner of working, and in regard to the effects produced. We shall refresh and beautify the world only in proportion as we save it from its rottenness and corruption, and we shall do either only in proportion as we bear abroad the name of Christ, in whom is 'life; and the life is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... God I stand and so proclaim mine innocence. Though ye sinless hosts of heaven had foretold ye coming of this most desolating breath, proclaiming it a work of uninspired man, its quaking thunders, its firmament-clogging rottenness his own achievement in due course of nature, yet had not I believed it; but had said the pit itself hath furnished forth the stink, and heaven's artillery hath shook the globe in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ludicrous circumstance that he should have dedicated his Cain to the worthy Baronet! Did the latter ever acknowledge the obligation? We are not nice, not very nice; but we do not particularly approve those subjects that shine chiefly from their rottenness: nor do we wish to see the Muses drest out in the flounces of a false or questionable philosophy, like Portia and Nerissa in the garb of Doctors of Law. We like metaphysics as well as Lord Byron; but not to see them making flowery speeches, nor dancing a ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... a serene contempt for ordinary mortals. He is always growing black with fury, and bullying weak men. On such occasions, his lips may be observed to be twisted into an evil sneer. He is a seducer and liar: he has ruined various women, and had special facilities for becoming acquainted with the rottenness of society: and occasionally he expresses, in language of the most profane, not to say blasphemous character, a momentary regret for having done so much harm,—such as the Devil might sentimentally have expressed, when he had succeeded in misleading our first parents. Of course, he never ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... quarter is given, and where the merits of the deserving rather than the lapses of the blameworthy are torn as the most toothsome morsel in a furious feast. The Bible says that envy is the rottenness of the bones, meaning that utter corruption which has finally reached the framework of the structure. Society as now organized is really making progress toward the extinction of this hideous blemish. When, as in ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... Have set me in the hot forefront of battle Hadst thou but known me as Uriah! Bah! Why, what a brainless dullard have I been, To see this pretty puff-ball of a preacher Wax large before mine eyes in righteous husk— And think him whole within—when but a touch, But one, had aired his rottenness! Oh! dotard that I am! blind, deaf and stupid! It takes a miracle to make me see What lay before me open. He did take Her part; ever professed himself her friend; And at her trial fell in trance. What more? He is the man! He is the man! Now ends our game of hoodman blind; oh, I Was warm, ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... preliminary cough, I should have embarked upon the following moving address: 'My dear sir, my dear Reverend Jones or Brown (as the case may be), believe me when I say that your whole system of work is founded on a fallacious dream and reeks of rottenness. No, no, I beg that you will not interrupt me. The real state of the case, if I may say so, is briefly this: a boy goes to school to enjoy himself, and, on arriving, finds to his consternation that a great deal more work is expected of him than he is prepared to ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... another world. To get to it, it is necessary to go astray in little streets, villainous, stinking, crooked; to enter it, it is necessary to descend a sufficiently long slope, tortuous, rugged, uneven. I have seen there a house of dirt, half buried, tumbling to pieces with old age and rottenness, which did not cover a space of four square fathoms, and in which were lodged, nevertheless, more than fifty households, having in charge an infinite number of little children, legitimate, natural, or stolen. I was assured that in this little dwelling and in the others ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... should undergo for these crimes, namely, the destruction of his people, with the corruption of the king's own wives and children; and that he should himself die of a distemper in his bowels, with long torments, those his bowels falling out by the violence of the inward rottenness of the parts, insomuch that, though he see his own misery, he shall not be able at all to help himself, but shall die in that manner. This it was which Elijah denounced to him in ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... safe in the streets of Toronto. I was not the least frightened for myself, but it was trying to see him always looking over, and about to lean against old crazy wooden balustrades that William said must have given way from sheer rottenness with any weight upon them. This is such a night, not a single cloud; the clearest possible sky and the moon shining brightly, as it did over the two Falls the first night we were here. Papa calls me every minute—"Oh come, do come, this minute; ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... mortality, roses whose petals are yet unspotted by dust and rain, and whose divine perfume the hot south wind has not scorched, nor the east wind nipped and frozen—you are the protest, set every year among us, against the rottenness of the world's doings, the protest of the angelic life against the earthly, of the eternal good against the ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford |
