"Vileness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Sudermann's Die Ehre was then a new play, and on its production in the quiet university town caused the greatest excitement; it was extravagantly praised and bitterly attacked; other dramatists followed with plays written under the modern influence, and Philip witnessed a series of works in which the vileness of mankind was displayed before him. He had never been to a play in his life till then (poor touring companies sometimes came to the Assembly Rooms at Blackstable, but the Vicar, partly on account of his profession, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... obtain useful information from their weakness or their simplicity. They found what they sought in Judas of Kerioth. This wretch, actuated by motives impossible to explain, betrayed his Master, gave all the necessary information, and even undertook himself (although such an excess of vileness is scarcely credible) to guide the troop which was to effect his arrest. The remembrance of horror which the folly or the wickedness of this man has left in the Christian tradition has doubtless given rise to some exaggeration on this point. Judas, until then, had been a disciple like ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... and know my destiny. I feel it in the terrible looking for of judgment. I feel it in that I do not love my neighbor. If I did, would I not sympathize in his happiness? Would this wretched self for ever interpose? I never knew myself before. I now know the unutterable vileness of my heart. I would hide it from Thee, my God. I would hide it ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... had entered into their midst. His massive, herculean figure was clad in a doublet of black leather, and his face, in which could be seen no trace of intelligence, expressed, on the contrary, nothing but vileness and villainy; a great scar, running right across his face and losing itself in a bushy beard, added still further to the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... shed, the manifold pains I underwent, the labors I sustained, and the little fruit I reaped from them, moved Thee with compassion. This was the state of my soul when Thy goodness, surpassing all my vileness and infidelities, and abounding in proportion to my wretchedness, granted me in a moment, what all my own efforts could never procure. Beholding me rowing with laborious toil, the breath of Thy divine operations turned in my favor, ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... possession of the minx is worse yet. Worst of all that you should advertise by all these doings, to all our world, your infatuation for such a creature and your greater interest in her than in me. I am indignant that I have considered marrying a suitor capable of such vileness, of ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... so rapidly from the primitive dignity of his sylvan origin, that it is scarcely possible to indulge in any other expectation, than that the whole species must at length be exterminated by its own infinite imbecility and vileness." ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... torture to check the course of the erring soul. And yet there is no suffering that is not self-imposed. It is both consistent and just that a man should associate with his kind and look upon himself in others until he grows sick of his own vileness and cries out in agony of spirit against his own moral offenses. It must not be assumed that every person dying with considerable matter belonging to the lower astral level still within his emotional ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... aestheticisms the soul of John Norton had long slumbered, but now it awoke in remorse and pain, and, repulsing its habitual exaltations as if they were sins, he turned to the primal idea of the vileness of this life, and its sole utility in enabling man to gain heaven. A pessimist he admitted himself to be so far as this world was concerned. But the manifestations of modern pessimism were checked by constitutional mysticity. Schopenhauer, when he overstepped the line ruled ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... purity, tenderness, goodness; what capacities of vileness, bitterness and evil. Nature must needs be lavish with the mother and creator of men, and centre in her all the possibilities of life. And a few critical years can decide whether her life is to be full of sweetness and light, ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... and free and unconfined, between exhortation and prayer, Elder Cossey finally merged into a recital of his own weakness and vileness as a ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... indeed that you do seriously and heartily desire to see, and to be more deeply and powerfully convinced of your own vileness and sinfulness, of your own weakness and wretchedness, and of your wants and unworthiness? and that, in order to your deep and spiritual humiliation and self-debasing, that you may be more vile in your own eyes, and Jesus ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... business he had chosen. "I have been reading some of your cases. I was present while Jopp was tried. It was a hideous business. Father, it was a hideous thing! Grant he was vile, why should you hunt him with a vileness equal to his own? It was done with glee - that is the word - you did it with glee; and I looked on, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... corollary the brotherhood of men. It was his lofty idea of the infinite worth of human nature and of the inherent greatness of the human soul, in contrast with the then prevailing doctrines of human vileness and impotency, which made him resent with such indignation the wrongs of slavery, intemperance, and war, and urge with such ardor every effort to deliver men from poverty and ignorance, and to make them gentler and juster to ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... begin till I was about eleven. Till then I was a happy child, understanding nothing. Between then and now, if I have discovered little good either in myself or in others, I have learned by heart everything that is bad in the world. Nothing in meanness or vileness or wretchedness is a secret to me. Compare me with other girls of nineteen—perhaps still at school. What sort of a companion should I be for one of those, I wonder! What strange thoughts I should have, if ever I talked with such a girl; how old I ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... order to insure the happiness of my future life, I was beginning to be the executioner of my present felicity, and the tormentor of my heart. I revolted against such a necessity which I judged fictitious, and which I could not admit unless I stood guilty of vileness before the tribunal of my own reason. I thought that Father Georgi, if he wished to forbid my visiting that family, ought not to have said that it was worthy of respect; my sorrow would not have been so intense. The day and the whole of the night ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... said, "not here. This place hath been polluted by my craven fear, and the horror of the vile wretch, of whom no words may tell his vileness. Let us hence and onward. Thou seest I have once more come ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... the man grew to his surroundings. A soul ready to accept the impress of every stamp of depravity in the mint of vice was soon well beyond the reach of any possible redemption in contact with the moral vileness of the prisons on what was, but for their contamination, one of the loveliest ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... salvation—these his friends would persuade Job to the confession that he was a hypocrite, insisting that such things could not have come upon him but because of wickedness, and as they knew of none open, it must be for some secret vileness. They grow angry with him when he refuses to be persuaded against his knowledge of himself. They insist on his hypocrisy, he on his righteousness. Nor may we forget that herein lies not any overweening on the part of Job, for the poem prepares ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... to animals, so long as yet another spot in virgin beauty smiles before him. Here again, in selfish pursuit of profit, and consciously or unconsciously following the abominable principle of the great moral vileness which one man has expressed—'Apres nous le Deluge,'—he begins anew the work of destruction. Thus did cultivation, driven out, leave the East, and perhaps the deserts long ago robbed of their coverings; like the wild hordes of old over beautiful Greece, thus rolls this conquest with fearful ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... meal, and for a while silence reigned, broken only by a few desultory remarks as to the vileness of the food produced by the officer responsible for the mess catering, and the exorbitant price he demanded for it—statements which had staled with ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... and thence I shall go straight to Kharkhov. At Kharkhov I have a friend, a literary man. I shall go to him and I shall say, 'now, my friend, give up your rotten little love-stories and descriptions of nature, and expose the vileness of the human biped.... There's a ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... contributing to his own development, independent of surrounding circumstances, and of reacting upon the life around him, the bias given to his moral character in early life is of immense importance. Place even the highest-minded philosopher in the midst of daily discomfort, immorality, and vileness, and he will insensibly gravitate towards brutality. How much more susceptible is the impressionable and helpless child amidst such surroundings! It is not possible to rear a kindly nature, sensitive to evil, pure in mind and heart, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... companions took a savage pleasure in taunting him about his wife's depravity, until the very mention of her name was hateful to him. He acknowledged that he himself was bad enough, but her conduct had reached the extreme of vileness. The result was what might have been foreseen. Quarrels and recriminations were perpetual. The man hated the woman because of her vicious life; he hated himself because, as his conscience reminded him in lucid intervals, he was responsible ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... at them with the spiritual weapons that are yours. To master you I do not hesitate to strike at your nephews with the lethal weapons that are mine. When you shall have seen them hang you will understand the things that argument could not make clear to you. In the vileness of my act you will see a reflection of the vileness of your own, and perhaps your heart will be ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... greed and cold cruelty decked out with blasphemous phrase is viler, I think, than anything attributed by Shakespeare to the worst of his villains. But surely some hint of Richard's incredible vileness should have come earlier in the play, should have preceded at least his banishment of Bolingbroke, if Shakespeare had really meant to present him to us ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... him what I say; and tell him that a poor bruised, broken creature, who knows at least her own vileness, will pray for him night and morning. And now good-bye. Of my heart towards ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... easily are the words learnt for all this vileness; but by their means the vileness is committed with less shame. Not that I blame the words, being, as it were, choice and precious vessels; but that wine of error which is drunk to us in them by intoxicated teachers; and if ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... stand with their axe on their shoulders by the wheel, grinners in the pantomime, murderers in tragedies, who make ugly faces under black wigs,—in short, the very scum and refuse of the theatre; and it was of course that the contrast of the vileness of the actors with the pomp of their habits naturally excited ideas of contempt ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... upward glance and looked as if she would have spoken. But he went on, suddenly passionate, without giving her time to interrupt him. "O God! It needed this to show me the vileness of the thing I have done. Asad has no such motives as had I. I wanted you that I might punish you. But he...O God!" he groaned, and for a moment put his face to ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... represented, for him, the worst treason that man can offer to man. In this case it had ended in hideous catastrophe to an innocent and delightful being, whom he loved. But it was not thereby any the worse; the vileness of it was only made ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... human nature, and will impress that lesson with a searching force, such as no borrowed experience ever can approach. Most probable it is that Shakspeare drew some of his powerful scenes in the Timon of Athens, those which exhibit the vileness of ingratitude and the impassioned frenzy of misanthropy, from his personal recollections connected with the case of his own father. Possibly, though a cloud of two hundred and seventy years now veils it, this very Master Sadler, who was so urgent for his ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... rendered seemingly noble by a deliberate falsification of history, has warped the generosity which all children, German or other, possess, into a pitiful acquiescence in every form of intellectual and moral vileness. But in England, too, the danger signals are not wanting. We have observed the people falling more and more under the sway of one man's ideas, carried by his Press into every town and village of the countryside: we have noticed that complete independence does not appear always to exist as ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... De Tocqueville, and De Tocqueville follows Biot in speaking of the serf system as abolished in most of France hundreds of years before this. But Biot and De Tocqueville take for granted a knowledge in their readers that the essential vileness of the system, and even many of its most shocking outward features, remained. Richelieu might have crushed the serf system, really, as easily as Louis X and Philip the Long had crushed it nominally. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... been improving since his return from London. He found less satisfaction in his religious exercises; was not unfrequently clouded in temper, occasionally even to sullenness; referred things oftener than formerly to the vileness of the human nature, but was far less willing than before to allow that he might himself be wrong; while somehow the Bible had no more the same plenitude of relation to the wants of his being, and he rose from the reading of it unrefreshed. Men asked each other what had come to Blue Peter, but no ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... manuscripts been paper boomerangs they could not have returned with greater accuracy to their unhappy dispatcher. Oh, the vileness and utter degradation of the moment when the stale little cylinder of closely written pages, which seemed so fresh and full of promise a few days ago, is handed in by a remorseless postman! And what moral depravity shines through the editor's ridiculous ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... anything without your sanction?" He was always thinking of the disgrace attaching to himself by reason of his nephew's vileness, and now, if a daughter of the family should also go astray, so as to be exiled from the bosom of the Whartons, how manifest would it be that all the glory was departing from ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... patient!" cried Abogin, laughing, crying, and still brandishing his fists. "She is not ill, but accursed! The baseness! The vileness! The devil himself could not have imagined anything more loathsome! She sent me off that she might run away with a buffoon, a dull-witted clown, an Alphonse! Oh God, better she had died! I cannot bear it! ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... merely that men are legally guilty, as being devoid of 'true virtue,' though possessed of a certain factitious moral sense, but that they are actually for the most part detestably wicked. One illustration of his method may be sufficient. The vileness of man is proved by the remark (not peculiar to Edwards), that men who used to live 1,000 years now live only 70; whilst throughout Christendom their life does not average more than 40 or 50 years; so that 'sensuality and debauchery' have shortened our days to a twentieth ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... reined in his sweating mare and fell to cursing, his face distraught with agony and wet with blood and sweat and tears. So he stood, desperate—at bay, and taunted them with every vileness his furious tongue could frame. Then faltered at last with a great heartbroken sob, for they sat silent and still and would not ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... that seized me on the doorstep. A revulsion so violent that it nearly made me sick then and there; and if some one had seized me by the nape of my neck, and landed me straightway at my desk in Uncle Henry's office, would, I believe, have left me tamed for life. For if this unutterable vileness of sights and sounds and smells which hung around the dark entry of the slop shop were indeed the world, I felt a sudden and most vehement conviction that I would willingly renounce the world for ever. As it happened, I had not at ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... reached me, O auspicious King, that Salih con tinued: "So I acquainted the Commander of the Faithful with all that passed and Al-Rashid marvelled at the generosity and benevolence of Yahya and the vileness and ingratitude of Mansur, and bade restore the jewel to Yahya, saying, 'Whatso we have given it befitteth us not to take again.' After that Salih returned to Yahya and acquainted him with the tale of Mansur and his ill-conduct; whereupon replied he, 'O Salih, when a man is in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... she answered gently. "Before the war is just a different age." For a while she was silent; then she drew a deep breath. "Don't you feel it as I feel it?" she whispered. "The bigness of it, the wonder of it. Underneath all the horror, underlying all the vileness—the splendour of it all. The glory of human endurance. . . . People wondered that I could stand it—I with my idealism. But it seems to me that out of the sordid brutality an ideal has been born which is almost the greatest the world has ever known. Oh! Derek, we've ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... sort of bad boy. He regarded Gage as his superior, and he was ready to do almost anything for the fellow, but he could not imitate Leslie's daring, and he kept his own vileness so much concealed that many square, honest lads believed he was a really good fellow. Bart Hodge had begun to think Snell was a sneak and bad, but he had no proof of it, ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... into his old soft-spoken manner, and Tresler felt like hating him for the vileness of the ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... impatience, our self-love, are all there. God sees them; how can He, then, look on us as we desire He should? And often we almost long to be in those purging flames, even should it be for years and years, that this vileness might be burned away. ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... his prejudice, Which finds no virtue in politic foes, And thus shall shrewdness do its perfect work. But Seldonskip? I love this hombre not. He looketh on our race with proud disdain, Hence I with poison must sour Francos' mind, That he but vileness in this boor shall see. Some men, I ween, would tread in virtue's path, Unless strong passion, born of love intense, Should goad them to stretch out a greedy hand, And grasp from beauty's bough forbidden fruit. For lechery, like ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... Independence was a struggle for Liberty, and was elevated throughout by this holy cause. But the struggle for Slavemonger Independence is necessarily and plainly a struggle for Slavery, and is degraded throughout by the unutterable vileness of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... his Rosebud, a greater merit than was due to him; and moreover imagined, that it was improbable, that a man, who was capable of acting so generously (as they supposed) in this instance, should be guilty of any atrocious vileness. Not considering, that love, pride, and revenge as he owns in Vol.I.Letter XXXI. were ingredients of equal force in his composition; and that resistance was a stimulus ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... in that place, the whole vileness and stupidity of the ruler of the empire was publicly displayed. When he was entreated to abstain from abandoning himself to inconsolable grief, he remained obstinately inflexible, as if he had stopped his ears with wax to pass the rocks of ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... defamation; who would stoop to seek his fortune by effecting the fall of a frail woman, or would strive to advance it by stabbing the character of an honest one; who could crush aspiring merit behind the ambuscade of anonymous security, while he came forward openly in defence of the vileness which rank sanctified and influence protected—that man ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... important; and the loss and expenditure which the undertaking involved, was borne by the country to the last penny. Mr. Froude says it was proposed that the "worst money might be sent to Ireland, as the general dust-heap for the outcasting of England's vileness."[440] The standard for Ireland had always been under that of England, but the base proposal above-mentioned was happily not carried into execution. Still there were enough causes of misery in ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... indeed desire the dead Should still be near us at our side? Is there no baseness we would hide? No inner vileness that we dread? ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... detestable shaveling, the right Antichrist and general ambitious tyrant over all right principalities, and patron of the Diabolica fede—this I could not but greatly rest in wonder. Their fault therefore far to be aggravated by the vileness of their commander; and that at my hands no condition or composition they were to expect, other than they should render me the fort, and yield their selves to my will for life or death. With this answer he departed; ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... story is somewhat ugly, and its power does not alter its ugliness, for power can only make ugliness uglier. And in this poem there is little or nothing of the revelation of that secret wealth of valour and patience in humanity which makes real and redeems the revelation of its secret vileness in The Ring and the Book. It almost looks at first sight as if Browning had for a moment surrendered the whole of his impregnable philosophical position and admitted the strange heresy that a human story can be sordid. But this view of the poem is, of course, a mistake. It was written in ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... thought that prohibition had robbed him of his right of easy access to a reviving cocktail. He knew many places where he could buy bad drinks furtively, but he resented both the method and the vileness of the mixtures. He was putting on his coat when he heard a rap at the door. He crossed over and turned the knob, admitting a man standing ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... measure the worth and true design of its first founders; one thing to estimate the intention and sincerity of a movement, when it first stirred the hearts of men, and another thing to pass sentence upon it in the days of its degradation. The vileness into which Jesuitism eventually sank is a poor reason why we should malign and curse those who, centuries before, found in the rules and discipline and aims of that system an acceptable expression for their own disinterested social aspirations. It is childish to say that the subsequent ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... thought of Ps. ii. is: the Messiah as the conqueror of His enemies. The eyes of David were the more opened to this circumstance, the more he himself had had to contend against adversaries.—[Hebrew: bliel] always means unworthiness in a moral point of view, "wickedness," "vileness." Wickedness is here used in the concrete sense the wicked ones, the sons of wickedness, Deut. xiii. 14. The wicked ones, the enemies of the Church, are compared to the thorns, on account of their pricking nature; and therefore their end is like that of thorns, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... amuses itself with the "sacred sport" of ever changing emanations and manifestations. Myriads of "descents" are recorded in their sacred books, of all degrees and forms of grotesqueness, and not a few of unblushing vileness. It is an interesting fact that the same Krishna who poses, and by millions of Hindus is accepted, as the Supreme Deity, is nevertheless represented in the most popular books of Hinduism to-day—the Puranas, which ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... much more paper than the author, as the copies of a fashionable review are more numerous than those of the original book; in some, and those the most prominent instances, as ten thousand to five hundred. I know nothing that surpasses the vileness of deciding on the merits of a poet or painter,—(not by characteristic defects; for where there is genius, these always point to his characteristic beauties; but)—by accidental failures or faulty passages; except the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Speech was the greatest danger," she answered him. "She was a princess of a royal house—poor little angel—and she had a husband whose vileness and violence all Europe knew. How DARED ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... thousand spies (so that, when in company with six persons, one has reason to dread the presence of one spy), proclaims at once the morality of the governors and that of the governed: were the former just, and the latter good, this mass of vileness would never be employed; or, if employed, wickedness would expire for want of fuel, and the hydra of tyranny perish ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... in the hands of that hideous and atrocious mummy, of whose utter vileness the Mayor knew nothing; and seeing him, yet more, an object of deep contempt to Valerie, who made game of Crevel as of some mountebank, the Baron apparently thought him so impossible as a rival that he ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... vile. There was no measure to the vileness that Ellen had brought on him. For it was all her fault, since he never would have gone with that woman in London if it had not been for the way she had carried on the evening before. At the thought of that night in Piccadilly he began to hurry along the street, pushing in and out among ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... wonderful colorings, and the dull and loathsome moccasin sliding warily off the dead tree; in dimmer recesses the cow alligator, with her nest hard by; turtles a century old; owls and bats, raccoons, opossums, rats, centipedes and creatures of like vileness; great vines of beautiful leaf and scarlet fruit in deadly clusters; maddening mosquitoes, parasitic insects, gorgeous dragon-flies and pretty water-lizards: the blue heron, the snowy crane, the red-bird, the moss-bird, ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... Jesus Christ should he saved; but I had no deep sense of sin, of my sin. Since then I believe that I have passed through almost every phase of Christian experience that I have ever read or heard of; and now I have such a sight of my own utter vileness and unworthiness, that I feel that the great and holy God might well set His heel on me, so to speak, and crush me into nothing." This sense of absolute unworthiness was always a feature of her life. "A useless log" was the term she applied ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... knew or desired. The majority preferred it, on all grounds, to that offered them in a block of model lodgings not very far away; here was independence, that is to say, the liberty to be as vile as they pleased. How they came to love vileness, well, that is quite another matter, and shall not for ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... eyes! Golden circlets, with their adornments of coloured and lustrous gems, have bound the brow of infamy as well as that of honour—a mockery to both; as though virtue required a reward beyond the fulfilment of its own high purposes, or that infamy could be cheated into the forgetfulness of its vileness by the weight around its temples! Gilded coaches have glided before us, in which sat men who thought the buzz and shouts of crowds a guerdon for the toils, the anxieties, and, too often, the peculations ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... little; we would not seem to thrust ourselves upon him. Greeting, lord Timon; pray let me warn you against these abominable flatterers; they are your humble servants during meal-times, and else about as useful as carrion crows. Perfidy is the order of the day; everywhere ingratitude and vileness. I was just bringing a couple of hundred pounds, for your immediate necessities, and was nearly here before I heard of your splendid fortune. So I just came on to give you this word of caution; though indeed you are wise enough (I would take your advice ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... that actually blaze with the eloquent savagery and rapture of religious intolerance." He laughed in the midst of this declamation, but it was rather a sardonic laugh, and soon checked by fresh consideration of man's vileness. ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... prophets. They betray and even confess to standards that seem hopelessly base to us. They show themselves incapable of any disinterested enthusiasm for beauty or truth or goodness. They are altogether remote from intelligent sacrifice. To every test they betray vileness of texture; they are mean, cold, wicked. There are people who seem to cheat with a private self-approval, who are ever ready to do harsh and cruel things, whose use for social feeling is the malignant boycott, and for prosperity, monopolisation and humiliating display; who seize upon religion and ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... soldiers put up their horses in the kirk, and went to the manse, and destroyed the communion elements in a most profane manner, Mr. Semple being then from home. The next day he complained to the commanding officer, in such a pathetical manner representing the horrible vileness of such an action, that the officer not only regretted the action, but also gave money for furnishing them again:—he moreover told them, He was sorry for the errand they were going upon, for it would not prosper, and the profanity of that army would ruin them. About or after this, he went up ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... abused, enslaved, and persecuted, to unravel the mysteries of guilt, and hold up the workers of iniquity in the severe light of truth stripped of their disguise and covered with the confusion of their own vileness,— these are victories more glorious than any which have ever reddened ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... France. It will not be well for a premier race of the world to go down in defeat. We need her thrifty Lorraine peasants and Brittany sailors, her unfailing gift to the light of the world, more than we need a thorough German spy system and a soldiery obedient to commands of vileness. ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... even while he deceived and profaned her without remorse; he knew himself to be boundlessly loved by a lofty and noble spirit, that he was face to face with a grand and all-absorbing passion, and recognised fully both the grandeur of that passion and his own vileness. And yet under the lash of his base imaginings he would go so far as to hurt the mouth of the fond and patient creature, to prevent himself from crying aloud upon her lips the name that rose invincibly to his; and that ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio |
