"Sordid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Grimshawe's mouth, seemed already stale. But if the two children, or either of them, happened to be in the study,—if they ran to open the door at the knock, if they came scampering and peeped down over the banisters,—the sordid and rusty gloom was apt to vanish quite away. The sunbeam itself looked like a golden rule, that had been flung down long ago, and had lain there till it was dusty and tarnished. They were cheery little imps, who ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "It was sordid," he continued. "One wondered how the performers could be content to risk their lives for the benefit of such a small and such an undistinguished audience. There was a trapeze troupe, however, who interested me. There ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... of sordid wealth, But that which wealth can never be, Her iron frame and robust health, Are ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... the idle days left its mark upon her spirit; gradually a great many things that had seemed worth while in the old life showed their true and petty and sordid natures now; gradually the purifying waters of solitude washed her soul clean. She began to plan for the future—a future so different from ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... the spoils of another? Old Sapor, proud as he was, was more than once in the grasp of Isaac. There! it is in this case—down, you see, in the most secret part of my pack—but who would look for wealth under this sordid covering? as who, lady, for a soul within this shriveled and shattered body? yet is there one there. In such outside, both of body and bag, is my safety. Who cares to stop the poor man, or hold parley with him? None so free of the world and its high ways as he; safe alike in the streets of Rome, ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... of things reigns supreme which cannot be surpassed by the most corrupt of South American Republics. There the Boer shows his character in its most unpleasant features. Low, sordid, corrupt, his chief magistrate as well as his lowest official readily listens to 'reasons that jingle,' and, like the gentleman in the 'Mikado,' is not averse to 'insults.' He calls his country a republic—it is so in name only. The majority ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... of his efforts the President had the unwitting support of the segregationists, who treated the nation to another sordid racial spectacular. In February 1965 Alabama police jailed Martin Luther King, Jr., and some 2,000 members of his voting rights drive, and a generally outraged nation watched King's later clash with the police over a voting rights ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... shine with yours in those. Oh, it is the defeats you want where to tell—some one you can take the defeats to, the failures, the lost things; the lamps that are gone out, the hopes that are ashes, the springs that spring no more, the secret sordid things that eat you up, that hedge you all about, that draw you down. Those! To have some one to tell those to! Yes, there's a thought that comes with living: Let who may receive a man's triumphs; to whom a soul ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... magnolia-shaded terraces that crowned the hill—still more hundreds of feet above the densely packed roofs and spires of the city crowded upon the hill's rocky sides. It was like some fine and pure old Greek temple, standing on a romantic headland, far above the murk and toil of sordid striving. But over the symmetrical pile floated a banner that meant to the world all that was signified even by the banners which Greece folded and laid away in eternal ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... of just pride, a spur to industry, an impulse to honor, and a safeguard to integrity, had now become the catchword of a mendicant—the cant or slang, as it were, of an impostor. He was not ashamed to beg in its name—to ask for whiskey in its name—and to sink, in its name, to the most sordid supplications. ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... fortifications, from which we had another splendid view. One can readily see how fair and beautiful a place, full of the sweetest harmonies of nature, and filling the human heart with a grateful sense of God's love, has, by the sordid wickedness of man, been perverted into a paradise of the Prince of Darkness, who, knowing too well the weakness and folly of poor erring humanity, lures by every artificial attraction and fascination even the poor pilgrim invalid, who hopefully journeys here to breathe ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... ev'ry sordid passion lull'd to rest, Man knows each gift of nature how to prize: Flies from the storm unto his fair one's breast, And there reposing ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... none of them so generous and forceful as their long-living and big-hearted sire. Robert, the eldest, a man forty years of age, was his father's right-hand man in financial matters, having a certain hard incisiveness which fitted him for the somewhat sordid details of business life. He was of medium height, of a rather spare build, with a high forehead, slightly inclined to baldness, bright, liquid-blue eyes, an eagle nose, and thin, firm, even lips. He was a man of few ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... Women (1893, new edition, 1894) is a rather sordid and depressing survey of the life-histories of certain orphaned daughters of a typical Gissing doctor—grave, benign, amiably diffident, terribly afraid of life. 'From the contact of coarse actualities his nature shrank.' After his death one daughter, a fancy-goods shop assistant (no wages), ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... checkermen which they had secreted in their pockets, a fact which each one stoutly denied with many weird and rather indelicate vows. I left them engaged in the pleasant game of recrimination, which had to do with stolen golf balls, the holding out of change and kindred sordid subjects. In my weakened condition this display of fraternal depravity so offended my instinctive sense of honor that I was forced to retire behind the protecting pages of a 1913 issue of "The Farmer's Wife Indispensable Companion," where I managed to lose ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... patriotism and judgment, and feeling that he was incapable of deceiving them, they seemed willing, at all times and under all circumstances, to hazard their lives and fortunes in his support. They were generally young men of gallant bearing and disinterested views. No sordid calculations were made by them. No mercenary considerations influenced their conduct. They beheld in Colonel Burr a patriot hero of the revolution, who had commingled with their fathers in the battle-field, and who had perilled every thing ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... familiar to be in a city again, whose streets are thronged with people, and resound with the din and bustle of business. It reminds me of the never-ending crowds of London, or the life and tumult of our scarcely less active New York. Although the end may be sordid for which so many are laboring, yet the very sight of so much activity is gratifying. It is peculiarly so to an American. After residing in a foreign land for some time, the peculiarities of our nation are more easily noticed; I find in my countrymen abroad ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... that is chargeable against one or all of this group of sincere and stalwart workers, it must be allowed that their power on their countrymen has been largely wielded for good. Particularly is this the case with Ruskin, whose influence has reached and ennobled many a life that, from pressure of sordid circumstances, was in great need of such help as his spirituality of tone, and deeply felt reverential belief in the Giver of all good and Maker of all ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... when we are all like him, when we are all just the same as he is? For you know we are just the same, no better. If we are better, we should have been just the same in his place.... I don't know about you, Lise, but I consider that I have a sordid soul in many ways, and his soul is not sordid; on the contrary, full of fine feeling.... No, Lise, I have no contempt for him. Do you know, Lise, my elder told me once to care for most people exactly as one would for children, and for some of them as one would ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... bare and sordid little room with horror. What strange fate had cast her up there? I asked her, and she told me her story. Guess what ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... open doorway and, bounding into the road, rolled over and over to my very feet. And, looking down at it, I saw that it was a very ill-used hat, frayed and worn, dented of crown and broken of brim, yet beneath its sordid shabbiness there lurked the dim semblance of what it had once been, for, in the scratched and tarnished buckle, in the jaunty curl of the brim, it still preserved a certain pitiful air of rakishness; wherefore, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... as introducing a sordid element into the conversation, seemed to hurt his feelings. He said he never took money from distinguished strangers; he suggested a souvenir—a diamond scarf pin, a gold snuffbox, some little trifle of that sort by which he could ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... Vespasian was mean: his grandfather had been a private soldier, his father a petty officer of the revenue; [35] his own merit had raised him, in an advanced age, to the empire; but his merit was rather useful than shining, and his virtues were disgraced by a strict and even sordid parsimony. Such a prince consulted his true interest by the association of a son, whose more splendid and amiable character might turn the public attention from the obscure origin, to the future glories, of the Flavian ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... exceedingly. Agatha, on the other hand, having from her childhood heard Uncle John quoted as wisdom and authority incarnate, had begun in her tender years to scoff at him as a pompous and purseproud city merchant, whose sordid mind was unable to cope with her transcendental affairs. She had habitually terrified her mother by ridiculing him with an absolute contempt of which only childhood and extreme ignorance are capable. She had felt humiliated by his kindness to ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... could visualize his vision, could see a united world, cleansed of wars, of boundary lines; a world where every man's chance of happiness was the equal of every other man's chance; where wealth and poverty were abolished, from which slums, degradation, starvation, the sordid wickednesses compelled by poverty, should have vanished. She could see a world of peace, ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... is found to be generous, disinterested, humane, and friendly. Hear but the sad story of the friendless orphans too credulously trusting all their whole substance into his hands, and he shall appear more sordid, more pitiless and unjust than the injured themselves have bitterness to paint him. Another shall be charitable to the poor, uncharitable in his censures and opinions of all the rest of the world besides: temperate in his appetites, intemperate ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... walled between the This and Now, upon a low and silver throne, and leaned upon its armposts, sadly looking upward toward the sun. Now the Hither Isles are flat and cold and swampy, with drear-drab light and all manner of slimy, creeping things, and piles of dirt and clouds of flying dust and sordid scraping ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... are of two kinds, the wholly sordid, when money, social position, or some personal aggrandisement has been the motive on one or both sides, without any basis of affection; and the partially-sordid, when these reasons are modified by some existing affection or liking. In this category come the people who marry ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... his peculiar misfortune that he had never a proper opportunity given him of displaying them. The fact that he was enormously popular was nothing, for many men are popular with not a tithe of the gifts or power which distinguished Robson. The favour of the "general," except in a sordid sense, is not worth much in these days. A proof of this is to be found in the fact that the name of Robson—after the lapse of twenty years—is scarcely known to the ordinary playgoer; but his genius, while he lived, was recognised ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... when others may be beaten down or surrendered. Possibly a man may attain to this, to despise these lower things, as below his natural dignity and the excellency of his spirit. Some may renounce much of that friendship with worldly and temporal things, as being sordid and base, but the enmity gets into this strong and invisible tower of darkness, self love and pride and therefore the apostle John makes this the last and chiefest, the pride of life, 1 John ii. 16. When the lusts of the eyes and ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... the more injurious, for the Danes could not believe that he could turn so suddenly from a friend into an enemy; so easily can some veer from goodwill into hate. I suppose that this man inaugurated the morals of our own day, for we do not account lying and treachery as sinful and sordid. When Huyrwil attacked the southern side of Zealand, Fridleif assailed him in the harbour which was afterwards called by Huyrwil's name. In this battle the soldiers, in their rivalry for glory, engaged with such bravery ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... not descend to questions or details—he would find all out later for himself—but one thing he must know: had she really consented to marry him? If so, she had her own reasons, of course, and desire for himself was not among them; but, somehow, he felt sure they were not sordid or paltry ones. He had always liked dangerous games—the most unbroken polo ponies to train in the country, the freshest horses, the fiercest beasts to stalk and kill—and why not a difficult wife? ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... chimney pots A rag of sunset crumbles gray; Below, fierce radiance hangs in clots O'er the streams that never stay. Shrill and high, newsboys cry The worst of the city's infamy For one more sordid day. ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... up enough to provide for his present needs, even if my treasury be drained to the last twenty-mark piece, and I will have to cut short my charities for the next quarter of a year. But he must not know these sordid details. ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... the pastime and the earnest of a more innocent and homelier age. Nowadays the nosegays are gathered and tied up by sordid hands, chiefly of the most ordinary flowers, and are sold along the Corso, at mean price, yet more than such Venal things are worth. Buying a basketful, you find them miserably wilted, as if they had flown hither and thither through two or three carnival days already; muddy, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... long these two diplomats had co-opted themselves into a kind of Secret Cabinet of Europe. It is a strange but profoundly interesting correspondence, both politically and personally. Nothing is too great or too small, too glorious or too mean for their pens. Amid foolish anecdotes and rather sordid love affairs the politics of Europe, and especially of Italy, are dissected and discussed. Leo X. had now plunged into political intrigue. Ferdinand of Spain was in difficulty. France had allied herself with Venice. The Swiss are the Ancient Romans, and may conquer Italy. Then ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... of love —of love, pure, devoted, unchangeable, springing from being beloved, and because her feelings were sensitive as the quivering aspen, which trembles at the rustling of an insect's wing. Amongst her suitors there might have been some who were disinterested; but the meanness and sordid objects of many caused her to regard all with suspicion, and there was none among the number to whose voice her bosom responded as the needle turns to the magnet, and frequently from a cause as inexplicable. She had resolved that the man to whom she gave her hand ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... wandered through Nathan's mind; but he took little time to con them over. He had made a discovery at that moment of more stirring importance and interest. Allowing that Edith Forrester was the prisoner of whom the disguised stranger and his sordid confederate spoke, and there was little reason to doubt it, he had learned, out of their own mouths, the place of her concealment, to discover which was the object of his daring visit to the village. Her prison-house was the wigwam of Wenonga, the chief,—if ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... Argus, rung the woods around; With him the youth pursued the goat or fawn, Or traced the mazy leveret o'er the lawn. Now left to man's ingratitude he lay, Unhoused, neglected in the public way; And where on heaps the rich manure was spread, Obscene with reptiles, took his sordid bed. ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... hour and a half. He got up heavily, and came to his dinner in his overcoat and with his hat on, without uttering a word. His silence in itself had nothing startlingly unusual in this household, hidden in the shades of the sordid street seldom touched by the sun, behind the dim shop with its wares of disreputable rubbish. Only that day Mr Verloc's taciturnity was so obviously thoughtful that the two women were impressed by it. They sat silent themselves, keeping a watchful eye on poor Stevie, lest ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... an audience, if corrupt and vitiated, is paltry, is despicable; that to consult its inclinations when at war with sound taste or proper decorum, is to do the work of those who are influenced only by a love of sordid gain, reckless of every pure and elevated feeling—that "the end of all writing is to instruct, the end of all poetry, to instruct by pleasing." This is the difference between the sentiment of the authors and that of the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... of manners, alike common to Church and laity, the opposite virtues were, as is invariable in such epochs of society, carried by the few purer natures into heroic extremes. "And as gold, the adorner of the world, springs from the sordid bosom of earth, so chastity, the image of gold, rose bright and unsullied from the clay of human ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... retire, His, and that age's temper I admire: The Samnites' chief, as by his fire he sate, With a vast sum of gold on him did wait; 'Return,' said he, 'your gold I nothing weigh, When those who can command it me obey.' This my assertion proves, he may be old, And yet not sordid, who refuses gold. In summer to sit still, or walk, I love, Near a cool fountain, or a shady grove. 620 What can in winter render more delight, Than the high sun at noon, and fire at night? While ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... at the present time is being gradually produced which takes it for granted that as a matter of good form young people should not have children for a few years after marriage, and it is becoming a common practice to start married life with sordid and unnatural preparations for a natural act; yet many of these young people, men and women alike, are most anxious to have children, and only seek to know how to prevent them because they believe it to be ...
— Conception Control and Its Effects on the Individual and the Nation • Florence E. Barrett
... the sense of a dumb confusion in America; with a consciousness "of how men, coming out of Europe and given millions of square miles of black fertile land mines and forests, have failed in the challenge given them by fate and have produced out of the stately order of nature only the sordid disorder of man." Out of this ache of confusion comes no lucidity. Sam McPherson is not sure but that he will find parenthood as petty as business was brutal; Beaut McGregor sets his men to marching and their orderly step resounds through the final chapters of his career as here recorded, but ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... heavy smells, the delays and neglect. It is a picture of vivid horror. But the final impression left on me by caring for many hundred wounded men is that of their patience and cheeriness. I think they would resent having a sordid pen picture made of their suffering and letting it go at that. After all, it is their wound: they suffered it for a purpose, and they conquer their bodily pain by will power and the Gallic touch of humor. Suffering borne nobly merits something more ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... his character which have lately come to my knowledge, he seems to have been so hackneyed in villainy, and so lost to all sense of honor and shame, that, while his faculties will enable him to continue his sordid pursuits, there will be no time for remorse." With this single expression of measureless contempt, Washington let Arnold drop from his life. The first shock had touched him to the quick, although it could not shake ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... knowledge of the world. In after years these two were fated to meet once again, and under circumstances sufficiently tragic; but the story of that meeting does not lie within the scope of this history. To the world Belle is dead, but there is another world of sickness, and sordid unchanging misery and shame, where the lovely face of Sister Agnes moves to and fro like a ray of heaven's own light. There those who would know her ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... later that the case had been reported to headquarters as false, he was firmly convinced that Gobardhan's magical rites had saved him from ruin, and presented him with a bonus of Rs. 50. Nalini Babu was not long in ascertaining how the land lay. He was exasperated by the sordid wrong-doing which reached his ears and resolved to report it to the District Magistrate. But in the end he kept silent, because Sadhu came to him with tearful eyes, saying that he had already suffered deep humiliation; and if old scandals ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... summed up as respect for ecclesiastics. (26) The spread of this misconception inflamed every worthless fellow with an intense desire to enter holy orders, and thus the love of diffusing God's religion degenerated into sordid avarice and ambition. (27) Every church became a theatre, where orators, instead of church teachers, harangued, caring not to instruct the people, but striving to attract admiration, to bring opponents to public scorn, and to ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... and I once asked her who the straw was down for, and she said it was for a 'Miss Magdalen Bellairs.' I was in love with her at the moment, if you can call it love. I have dragged myself through all kinds of sordid passions since—we parted." ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... put a gulf impassable between himself and the sordid love of gain (5) than he, who nobly preferred to be stinted of his dues (6) rather than snatch at the lion's share unjustly? It is a case in point that, being pronounced by the state to be the rightful heir to his brother's (7) wealth, he made over one half ...
— Agesilaus • Xenophon
... infirm, for your inspection; but if you durst have looked nearer, you would not have found Cowardice in the number of his infirmities.—We will try if we cannot redeem him from this universal censure.—Let the venal corporation of authors duck to the golden fool, let them shape their sordid quills to the mercenary ends of unmerited praise, or of baser detraction;—old Jack, though deserted by princes, though censured by an ungrateful world, and persecuted from age to age by Critic and Commentator, and though ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... kindness as to call them so; for I am satisfied that to prove them either, would but recommend them to their own party. Yet if some will needs make a merit of their infamy, and provoke a legend of their sordid lives, I think they must be gratified at last; and though I will not take the scavenger's employment from him, yet I may be persuaded to point at some men's doors, who have heaps of filth before them. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... interview? One thing, at least—he had thoroughly demonstrated that the charm once exercised over his imagination by this beautiful woman had completely vanished. He saw her now as she was—heartless, selfish, using her spell of beauty for her own sordid ends. If there had been left a shred of romance in his memory of her, it was now completely shattered. Her coolness, her adroit changing of moods, convinced him she was playing a game. What game? Nothing in her words had revealed its nature, yet the man instinctively ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... connections among men, as easily broken as mended pottery, get illustration in the mischief-maker who loves to divide men. "A whisperer separateth chief friends." There is keen irony here over the quality of ordinary friendship, as well as condemnation of the tale-bearer and his sordid soul. ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... soiled by the touch of actual merchandise. Nothing more squalid than ink ever enters their gates. They traffic with symbols only, and the symbols, no matter what they stand for, are never in themselves sordid. The men who have created these houses seem to have realized that, from their situation and their importance, a special effort toward representative magnificence was their pleasing duty, and to have made the effort with a superb prodigality and an ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... sixpence; I will see thee damned first, Wretch! whom no sense of wrongs Can rouse to vengeance! Sordid, unfeeling, ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... he was a peculiar character even for the times in which he lived. He shared with his contemporaries the restless spirit of roving and adventure which resulted from the invention of the mariner's compass and the discovery of the New World; but he was neither so sordid nor so rapacious as many of them, for his boyhood reading of romances had evidently fired him with the conceits of the past chivalric period. This imported into his conduct something inflated and something ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... see that even in our sordid times miracles may be wrought by good-will, industry, and skill. Explain to me my good Pontius how you were able to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Vicarage was drawn back into its silence and its loneliness. It assumed, more and more, its aspect of half-sinister, half-sordid tragedy. The Vicar's calamity no longer sheltered him. It took its place in the order ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... July days came to a close, the pulse of Anzac seemed to quicken. Men went about their work with increased energy, the Cove was busier than ever, and life altogether in that sun-scorched, sordid spot seemed less burdensome. Staff officers walked about with unaccustomed briskness, and made unnaturally long visits to observation points, gazing absorbedly at Turkish terrain. Visible signs there were that the dormant ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... presaged, is to be won by the submission of an inchoate State to a form of government subjecting its inhabitants to institutions abhorrent to their souls and fatal to their prosperity, forced upon them at the point of the bowie-knife and the muzzle of the revolver by hordes of sordid barbarians from a hostile soil, their natural and necessary enemies. And the sweet harbinger of this blessed peace, the halcyon which broods over the stormy waves and tells of the calm at hand, is a bribe so cunningly devised that its contrivers firmly believe it will buy up the souls of these ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... of funding debts; but, curiously enough, sordid capitalists and miserly landlords don't. I offered the other day to fund all my personal debts, in the shape of a long loan at three per cent, but my creditors did not take kindly to the idea. Such is the sordid meanness which is too sadly characteristic of the merely commercial mind. But ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... air seemed to be a person of distinction, a professor perhaps of some university on the continent; and an alderman of London, a relation of the doctor, who had come to introduce the foreigner. The alderman, a man of uncultivated mind and manners, and whom the doctor had been accustomed to see in sordid attire, surrounded with the incumbrances of his trade, was decked out for the occasion in a full-dress suit, with a wig of majestic and voluminous structure. Clarke was, as it appears, so much struck with the whimsical ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... receiving thankfully whatever coarse food might be set before the wayfarer, enduring hunger in silent resignation, taking no thought for the morrow, but busied eternally in the work of snatching souls from Satan and lifting men up from the sordid cares of daily life, of ministering to their infirmities and of bringing to their darkened souls a glimpse of heavenly light" (Lea),—in this way did the early Franciscans and Dominicans win the love and ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... should be charitable, because it is a duty and a pleasure. But even as a matter of policy, if you possess no higher incentive, you will find that the liberal man will command patronage, while the sordid, uncharitable miser will ...
— The Art of Money Getting - or, Golden Rules for Making Money • P. T. Barnum
... silent; and "bear my indigence with dignity," as you once said. The insuperable difficulty of Frederic is, that he, the genuine little ray of Veritable and Eternal that was in him, lay imbedded in the putrid Eighteenth Century, such an Ocean of sordid nothingness, shams, and scandalous hypocrisies, as never weltered in the world before; and that in everything I can find yet written or recorded of him, he still, to all intents and purposes, most tragically lies THERE;—and ought not to lie there, if any use ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... still blew in eddies of sand; dry leaves and stray bits of newspaper danced madly through the air; the high houses near the Segovia Bridge, their narrow windows and galleries hung with tatters, seemed greyer and more sordid than ever when glimpsed through an ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... alone listening to the wind. I said just now that I was thinking of you. I often think of you, Father O'Grady, and envy you your busy parish. If I ever find myself in London I shall go for long tram drives, and however sordid the district I shall view the dim congregation of houses with pleasure and rejoice in the ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... they did without sound bodies, and it must be unnecessary for me to say that the more highly cultured they became the more our race improved. Learning never made poor mothers. Ignorance does that. Do not keep education out of the home. Keep out folly, low desires, sordid ambitions, uncultivated tastes, narrow-mindedness, envy, strife, wastefulness, inordinate pleasures, and every evil thing that comes from an empty, ignorant mind. Keep out the darkness; let in the light. It is not God's way to give ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... Babylonian engineers had to solve was the keeping of the canals free from silt.(1) What the floods, if left unchecked, may do in Mesopotamia, is well illustrated by the decay of the ancient canal-system, which has been the immediate cause of the country's present state of sordid desolation. That the decay was gradual was not the fault of the rivers, but was due to the sound principles on which the old system of control had been evolved through many centuries of labour. At the time of the Moslem conquest the system had already begun to fail. In the fifth century ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... our warmth, the sun for our light, and the earth for our meat and rest." Related to the work is "Ethics of the Dust" (1865), lectures to little housewives on mineralogy and crystallography, nature's work in crystallization being the text for a diatribe against sordid living. "Sesame and Lilies," which belongs also to this period of the writer's work, consists of three addresses, delivered at Manchester and at Dublin, designed specially for young girls, and treating in the main of good and improving literature. The first of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... the least charm of the extraordinary fascination she had for him lay in her sweet innocence of heart, a fresh innocence that consisted with this gay Romany abandon, and even with a mental experience of the sordid, seamy side of life as comprehensive as that of many a woman twice her age. She had been defrauded out of her childish inheritance of innocence, but, somehow, even in her foul environment the seeds of a rare personal purity had persistently sprung up and flourished. ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... not the case. The vandalism of the Revolution of 1789 was perpetrated in cold blood. I speak, of course, now of the real authors of it all, at Paris, not of the mere mobs in the provinces, hot with the sordid lust of plunder or with personal spites and rancours—and it was perpetrated for the profit of those who promoted it. The bronzes and brasses and lead and hammered iron of the desecrated churches were turned into money, and the money went into the pockets ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... him love her, truly love her. If he had only meant the love that he swore before they had married! Why had he deceived her? It had all been in his hands, her fate and future; but almost before the bridal flowers had faded, she had come to know two bitter things: that he had married with a sordid mind; that he was incapable of the love which transmutes the half- comprehending, half-developed affection of the maid into the absorbing, understanding, beautiful passion of the woman. She had married not knowing what love and passion were; uncomprehending, and innocent ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... foliage. One could not walk under those trees day after day and year after year through life and not feel their spell upon his heart. "From the old grey trunks that mingled their mighty boughs high in the heaven," to those whose lives lay underneath, in busy and perhaps more or less sordid routine, must inevitably come "the thought of boundless power and inaccessible majesty!" And that is a good thought to keep in the heart. That grove in the midst of that little French town was worth more to it than sewers, more than a daily ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... intolerance of Ruskin: though we shall look as vainly for one word or sign that shall, on the mere ground of intellectual power, energy, and ultimate success, condone the unprincipled ambition of a Frederick, so- called the Great, and exalt him into a hero; or find in the cold heart and mean sordid soul of a Turner an ideal, because one of those strange physiological freaks that now and then startle the world, the artist's temperament and artist's skill, were his beyond those of any man of his age. But as our object here is to attempt placing her before the ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... belong to her, she put on the faded blue flannel dressing-gown. Then she walked to the southern window. None of the glories of Oxford were visible from it; only the bare branches of trees through which appeared a huddle of somewhat sordid looking roofs and the unimposing spire of St. Aloysius. With the same air, questioning yet as in a dream, she turned to the western window, which was open. Below, in its wintry dulness, lay the garden of the College, bounded by an old ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... have given us one perpetual summer, or a perpetual spring, or a uniform co-existence of all the seasons, the fruits being sown, ripening and reaped simultaneously. But not so. He has settled two things so clearly that none, even the most sordid worm that ever wriggled under the clay, showing himself above it as little as possible, can help seeing them. First a fixed order that nothing can change and that proclaims one Lord, one will, one dominion, one plan. The seasons come in regular succession. Every man living knows ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... house, which Crevel regarded as his own, Grindot had tried to compete with Cleretti, in whose hands the Duc d'Herouville had placed Josepha's villa. But Crevel, incapable of understanding art, had, like all sordid souls, wanted to spend a certain sum fixed beforehand. Grindot, fettered by a contract, had found it impossible to embody his ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... him all the knavish chicanery of the lowest pettifogger, together with a wife whom he had purchased of a drayman for twenty pounds; and he soon found means to obtain a dedimus as an acting justice of peace. He is not only a sordid miser in his disposition, but his avarice is mingled with a spirit of despotism, which is truly diabolical. — He is a brutal husband, an unnatural parent, a harsh master, an oppressive landlord, a litigious neighbour, and a partial magistrate. Friends he has none; and in point of hospitality and ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... their home, anigh. And now, seeking her pleasance once again, They came to their own land. But all in vain His care. Silent she was, and oft did grieve, Till Eblis wrathful cried: "Because this Eve Adam holds dear, art mourning? Still dost yearn To mate his sordid soul? Or wouldst thou turn From summer land to Eden walls? "The man Belike, ne'er loved thee. So is it young Eve can His pulses sway. Is she not passing fair? Her fancies wild, it is her daily care To bend beneath his ever fickle will. Red-lipped and soft, she deftly rules ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... the world a little justice too. It is far easier to know and honor a poet when his fame has taken shape in the spotlessness of marble than when the actual man comes staggering before you, besmeared with the sordid stains of his daily life. For my part, I chiefly wonder that his recognition dawned so brightly while he was still living. There must have been something very grand in his immediate presence, some strangely impressive characteristic in his natural behavior, to have caused him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... doubtless, well worthy that Milton should have commemorated him in a higher strain. Of Fairfax's eminent qualities the sonnet only dwells on two, his personal valour, which had been tried in many fights—he had been three times dangerously wounded in the Yorkshire campaign—and his superiority to sordid interests. Of his generalship, in which he was second to Cromwell only, and of his love of arts and learning, nothing is said, though the last was the passion of his life, for which at forty he renounced ambition. Perhaps ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... tranquilly, with his army and his immense booty, despite the attempts of the Duke of Hanover to prevent him, and as soon as he was on this side, had no care but how to terminate the campaign in repose. Thus finished a campaign tolerably brilliant, if the sordid and prodigious gain of the general had not soiled it. Yet that general, on his return, was not less well received by ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... far-off places and people. But instead of the pictures she wished to form, there kept coming before her mind the repulsive photograph which Mrs. Travis had produced. Though she had barely glanced at it, she saw it distinctly—the tawdry costume, the ignoble attitude, the shameless and sordid ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... companionway, met files of still more uneasy diners emerging from the saloon. The grinding jar of the vessel, the heavy smell of food, and the pound of ragtime combined to produce an effect as of some sordid and demoniac orgy—an effect derided by the smug respectability of ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... eggs; in short, exposed himself sadly. His friends were much annoyed that he did not give way, as soon as he found that there was no chance of carrying it, and that many Government supporters would vote against it; besides the mortification to the Prince, there was something mean and sordid in squabbling for all the money they could get, and the sum given him is satis superque for ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Old Hundred: "that I, you, none of us, go into things now for the sheer exuberance of our bodies and the sheer delight of playing a game. We must have some ulterior motive—usually a sordid one, getting money or downing the other fellow; and most of the time we have to drive our poor, old rackety bodies with a whip. About the time a man begins to vote, he begins to disintegrate. The rest of life is gradual running down, or breaking ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... for the great of soul, the ambitious, the imaginative, when circumstances condemn them to life amid dull, uninteresting, drab, and sometimes sordid surroundings. Born to love and be loved, Nan Brent's soul beat against her environment even as a wild bird, captured and loosed in a room, beats against the window-pane. From the moment she had felt within her the vague ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read—who had the habits and the cunning of a boor: whose aim in life was pettifogging: who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet he had rank, and honours, and power, somehow: and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state. He was high sheriff, and rode in a golden coach. Great ministers and statesmen courted him; and in Vanity Fair he had a higher place than ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and again, he leaned his head against the partition and burst into tears. Sordid and coarse as his nature was, he really loved his daughter. All the heart he had was in ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... warning which is given to them by parents and masters is made in a wrong form, and partly because there is not that constant joy and romance in their daily lives in comparison with which temptation, when it comes, will appear sordid and unworthy. In the second place, there is an atmosphere in the houses of tolerance towards these practices, accompanied by constant discussion, sometimes open, sometimes secret, which encourages ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... occasional glimpses as he caught of the play were delightful; Mr. Trimmer was a genius; the Traders' Club a fascinating introduction to a new life; Starlett and Allstyne a joyous relief to him after the sordid cares of business. In a word, Agnes ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... not my niece with those sordid beings, man,' said the Chevalier, angrily. 'Here is your price'—tossing a heavy purse on the table—'and as much more shall await you when you bring me sure intelligence where to find my niece. You understand; and mark, not one ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Railer!—peace. Think not thyself, Although thus eloquent, alone exempt From obligation not to slander Kings. 300 I deem thee most contemptible, the worst Of Agamemnon's followers to the war; Presume not then to take the names revered Of Sovereigns on thy sordid lips, to asperse Their sacred character, and to appoint 305 The Greeks a time when they shall voyage home. How soon, how late, with what success at last We shall return, we know not: but because Achaia's heroes numerous spoils allot To Agamemnon, Leader of the host, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... pleasure to its dregs, And now, grown old, must pay the penalty In wrinkles and uncourted loneliness; The widow, who, but newly desolate, Would grasp a hand, then start to find it gone; The spendthrift and the sordid usurer, Who knew no sentiment save lust for gold; The bloated drunkard, sinking 'neath the weight Of wassail inclination dissolute; The youth, who, following his baleful steps, Reeled for the first time from intemperance; And she who had forgot her covenant, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... best to write it. What I might have said to you in the garden would have been halting at best. How could I speak it all with your clear eyes upon me—all the sordid history of those years which are best buried, but whose ghosts to-night have ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... virtue being thus broken down, Nero gave a loose to appetites that were not only sordid, but inhuman. There was a sort of odd contrast in his disposition: for while he practised cruelties sufficient to make the mind shudder with horror, he was fond of those amusing arts which soften and refine the heart. He was particularly addicted, even from childhood, to music, ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... profit and the grossest sensual indulgence, and lets his own flesh and blood perish if they require of him to budge a hand-breadth from his egoistic standpoint. Foma, who is not built for a merchant, and who, while ambitious of command, is too magnanimous for the sordid business of a tradesman, has to give in. And the children of his triumphant guardian can only escape poverty by ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald |
