"Abjectly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... like a deer and screaming with exultation, ran round the pack of old men and stabbed the frantic brute in the neck, with her spear held short in both hands. Shrinking abjectly from this attack, he swerved off toward the left. It was his left eye that was blinded, and the other was full of smoke and ashes. He missed the path, therefore, and plunged squalling over the edge of the bluff, which ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... and faith and himself irreproachable, yet perpetually wounded through his family, which bore a name of ill-repute in the New York business world; passionately grateful to his wife for having married him, delighting in her beauty and charm, and foolishly, abjectly eager to heap upon her and their child ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... unstable. Wouldn't keep. The Master has to send fresh supplies constantly all over the continent. That accounts for the deputies remaining loyal. If The Master had reason to suspect them, he had only to stop their supply.... They couldn't stock up on the deadly stuff for their own use. So they're as abjectly subject to The Master as their slaves are to them. No new slaves are to be made in Paraguay or Bolivia, except when necessary. It's believed that in six months the other republics will have every influential man subjected. Every army officer, every judge, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... remark. It was strange to see how dominated they all were by that queer little fragment of humanity, whose head scarcely reached a foot above the table before which he sat. They departed silently, almost abjectly, dismissed with a single wave of the hand. Mr. Fentolin beckoned his secretary to remain. She ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... prostitute is so often a little weak in character and a little defective in intelligence; she is so often regarded as a legitimate prey by the world in which she moves, and a legitimate object of contempt and oppression by the social world above her and its legal officers, that she easily becomes abjectly dependent on the man who in some degree protects her from this extortion, contempt, and oppression, even though he sometimes trains her to his own ends and exploits her professional activities for his own advantage. These circumstances ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Peggy, I'm misewable! I'm abjectly misewable!" sighed Rosalind in return. She gave a glance around, to make sure no one was within ear-shot, and then continued rapidly, "All my life long I've been bwought up to look forward to this time, and to work and plan and pwepare for it. Mother talked as if it ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... pressure prodding him as he goes, until he dies and his final form will be that predestined of the many pressures. An exchange of cradle-babes, and the base-born slave may wear the purple imperially, and the royal infant begs an alms as wheedlingly or cringe to the lash as abjectly as his meanest subject. A Chesterfield, with an empty belly, chancing upon good fare, will gorge as faithfully as the swine in the next sty. And an Epicurus, in the dirt-igloo of the Eskimos, will wax eloquent over the whale oil ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... precisely what Marfa Petrovna left him; this will be known to me within a very short period; but no doubt here in Petersburg, if he has any pecuniary resources, he will relapse at once into his old ways. He is the most depraved, and abjectly vicious specimen of that class of men. I have considerable reason to believe that Marfa Petrovna, who was so unfortunate as to fall in love with him and to pay his debts eight years ago, was of service to him ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... life had Jack Kennard felt so abjectly wretched as he did then, so miserably helpless. There was nothing that he could do, save to return to the lodging, which a kind friend had lent him for the occasion, and from whence he could, at any rate, see the windows behind which his ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... things and persons present in time and even place. Instead of dealing with thoughts and ideas, speech and writing is close to sense and the words used are names for images and acts. But there is another higher part of language that is not so abjectly tied down to perception, but that lives, moves, and has its being in the field of concepts rather than percepts, which, to use Earle's distinction, is symbolic and not presentative, that describes thinking that is not mere ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... evergreen gardens of New Orleans revisited in January impel to protest against every needless submission to the tyrannies of frost and of a gardening art—or non-art, a submission which only in the outdoor embellishment of the home takes winter supinely, abjectly. ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... nobility from the hungry and venal populace who were daily put up to sale, and bought by the highest bidder, manifested itself in the increasing disdain for the tastes and ruling sympathies of the lowest vulgar. No mob could be more abjectly servile than was that of Rome to the superstition of portents, prodigies, and omens. Thus far, in common with his order, and in this sense, Julius Csar was naturally a despiser of superstition. Mere strength of understanding ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... summoned him and his chief lieutenants to an audience in the tent placed at his disposal. Here Gordon went straight to the point, accusing them of meditated rebellion, and telling them that he meant to break up their confederacy. After listening to this indictment, they all made him submission very abjectly; but Gordon saw that Suleiman had not forgiven him, and when the truth came afterwards to be known, it was found that he did not carry out his project only because his principal lieutenants had deserted him. When the negotiations were ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... respect for place and influence. He was vaguely described as goodly in appearance, of high family, but not abundantly supplied with riches. However he chanced to come to the obscure settlement was not stated. He did come, saw Desire Michell, and fell as abjectly prostrate before her as any youth who never had left ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... a guinea he wont get even a week. I bet you another that Chubbs-Jenkinson apologizes abjectly. You evidently havent heard ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... tumult; but many thousands of people, with anxiety and sorrow in their faces, tried to catch a glimpse of the captives. The Duke's resolution failed as soon as he had left the royal presence. On his way to his prison he bemoaned himself, accused his followers, and abjectly implored the intercession of Dartmouth. "I know, my Lord, that you loved my father. For his sake, for God's sake, try if there be any room for mercy." Dartmouth replied that the King had spoken the truth, and that a subject who assumed the regal title excluded ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... simple, now full of arts and coquettish innuendoes, then again naive, unthinking and almost boyishly blunt and direct; in a word, one of those miraculous New York girls whom abstractly one may disapprove of, but in the concrete must abjectly adore. This easy predominance of the masculine heart over the masculine reason in the presence of an impressive woman, has been the motif of a thousand tragedies in times past, and will inspire a thousand more ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... triumphed, and was profoundly, abjectly wretched in her triumph. Great sobs seemed to tear at her very heart-strings. She had pulled down Paul's idol from her pedestal, but the one look she had cast at his face had shown her that she had also ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... have murdered for came from the house, an unheroic figure with suspenders dangling and a corncob pipe in his mouth, sullen, angry, and withal abjectly frightened, as mere man inevitably is when he sniffs a woman's battle in the air. The bride, at sight of her husband, took to hysterics. She wept, she laughed, and down tumbled her hair. She felt the situation demanded a scene. Rodney, with a marital brevity hardly ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... catching a rat, and being intolerably conceited about it—until Sara Ray cured him by calling him a "dear, sweet cat," and kissing him between the ears. Then Pat sneaked abjectly off, his tail drooping. He resented being called a sweet cat. He had a sense of humour, had Pat. Very few cats have; and most of them have such an inordinate appetite for flattery that they will swallow any amount of it and thrive thereon. Paddy had ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... L. Munatius Plancus and Asinius Pollio had also joined M. Antonius, Decimus Brutus attempted to make his escape into Macedonia to Marcus Brutus; but he was overtaken in the Alps by the cavalry of Antonius, and put to death after abjectly praying for mercy. This was the just punishment of a treacherous friend who helped Caesar to the supreme power and then betrayed him (Vell. Paterculus, ii. 61). Like many other men, he did well enough when he was directed by others, but when he was put in ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... abjectly] Don't be hard on me, Hector. I'd rather you quarrelled and took the money than made friends and starved. You don't know what the ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... complains of Goneril but Regan justifies her sister. Lear curses Goneril, and, when Regan tells him he had better return to her sister, he is indignant and says: "Ask her forgiveness?" and falls down on his knees demonstrating how indecent it would be if he were abjectly to beg food and clothing as charity from his own daughter, and he curses Goneril with the strangest curses and asks who put his servant in the stocks. Before Regan can answer, Goneril arrives. Lear becomes yet more exasperated and again curses Goneril, but when he is told that ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... of what is known as feminism. Of all the living creatures in the world the female of the human species has been the most downtrodden, for to every wretched class of man there was a still inferior, more wretched group, their wives. She was a slave to the slaves, a dependent of the abjectly poor. When men passed through the stage where woman's life might be taken at a whim, she remained a creature without rights of the wider kind. Men debated whether she had a soul, made cynical proverbs about her, called her the "weaker vessel," and debarred her ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... "You put me to shame!" he cried abjectly. "I'm—I'm unnerved, that's all. It was too much of a blow. After we'd got away from those scoundrels so neatly, too. Oh, it's maddening! I'll be all right in a minute. ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... He bit that off short as the significance of what Kellogg had just said hit him. "Good God, Leonard! I beg your pardon abjectly; I don't blame you for taking it seriously. Why, that would make Zarathustra ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... drowned in the adieus, and Mrs. Shaw sailed out with flying colors, while Milly sank back abjectly into the seat from which she had risen. Every minute she was realizing with a more awful clearness that she, whose one appearance on the stage had been short and disastrous, was cast to play the leading part in a public play before a large and ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... it, himself.' {210} But no such words, no such sound, did he utter, nor did one of you hear him do so; he only uttered threats to a different effect. And why? Because he knew that he had done what he was charged with doing; he was abjectly afraid to use any such expressions; his resolution could not rise to them, but shrank back; for it was in the grip of his conscience; whereas there was nothing to hinder him from uttering irrelevant abuse and slander. {211} But here is the strongest ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... been doing now; but summoning all his courage to the fore he had grimly said: "who's afraid?" and trembling like a leaf shaken in the wind, he had stalked into the cemetery, much to the admiration of his chums, who had expected the fat boy to back down abjectly. ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... wild astonishment, saw old Jerry crouch abjectly. Then with the mate's final words the old man straightened up as if in accusation. His white hair shone dimly ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... must remain there, shielded by the Church, or suffer elsewhere social ostracism and the prosecution of bigamous relations. Since 1890, the date of the manifesto (and it is to the period since 1890 that my criticism solely applies) the polygamist must be abjectly subservient to the prophets who protect him; he must obey their orders and do their work, or endure the punishment which they can inflict upon him and his wives and his children. Inveigled into a plural marriage ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... and recollected that he had sent Jerry to the canoe house along with the rest of the captives. Half an hour later he was having it out with Lamai. Beyond doubt, the boy had broken the taboos, and privily he told him so, until Lamai trembled and wept and squirmed abjectly at his feet, for the ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... the prisoner was brought up before the Mayor. We cannot say whether it was the sobering effect of prison walls, or whether he had been drinking before he entered the temple, and had now had time enough to recover himself—at any rate for some reason or other he was abjectly penitent when his case came on for hearing. The charge of poaching was first gone into, but was immediately disposed of by the evidence of the two Professors, who stated that the prisoner bore no resemblance to the poacher they had seen, save that ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... what?" snapped the doctor, his glance straying wrathfully toward the rotund clergyman, who all at once assumed an abjectly apologetic air and interested himself in a picture on ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... trouble seemed to go with it, but a great one yet remained. I didn't know how I could ever turn around again and see my sister lying there behind me, with her face fixed in death, for which I was, in a way, responsible. I was abjectly frightened, and knelt there a long time, praying and shuddering, before I could rise again to my feet and move about as I had to, since God had not stricken me and I must live my life and do what my sister had bidden me. ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... the States had offered the sovereignty of the provinces to Henry III., abjectly and as it were without any conditions at all, the effrontery of Henry IV. may be measured, who claimed the same sovereignty, after twenty years of republican independence, upon even more favourable terms than those which his predecessor ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that night, pronouncing himself to be the most abjectly miserable of God's creatures, and calling on Providence to remove him speedily from an unsympathetic world. He had said good night to the ladies at eleven o'clock when the three went upstairs to bed, and had forthwith gone to spend the rest of the evening in the ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... fitted to be entrusted with the toils of war and government, which have in the past been the especial sphere of male toil. The Roman woman had for generations been supplanted in the sphere of her domestic labours and in the toil of rearing and educating her offspring, and had long become abjectly parasitic, before the Roman male had been able to substitute the labour of the hireling and barbarian for his own, in the army, and in the ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... had elapsed Steinmetz came back, closely followed by the starosta, whose black eyes twinkled and gleamed in the sudden light of the lamp. He dropped on his knees when he saw Paul—suddenly, abjectly, like an animal, in ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... feet a cowardly and inhuman creature grovelled, abjectly praying for a life which by its continuance could only bring more sorrow, more horrors and more misery to thousands upon thousands of human beings dependent on this ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... doubtful whether the speaker had ever had money enough in his possession at one time to buy one, and yet he talked of taking away "ouah niggahs," as if they were as plenty about his place as hills of corn. As a rule, the more abjectly poor a Southerner was, the more readily he worked himself into a rage over the idea of ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... of laboratories that need it can't have it because over half the world's supply is tied up in jeweler's windows and in useless baubles. Then, too, it is the best thing known for contact points in electrical machinery. When the Government and all the scientific societies were abjectly begging the jewelers to let loose a little of it they refused—they were selling it to profiteering spendthrifts at a hundred and fifty dollars an ounce. The condition isn't much better right now; it's a vicious circle. As long as the price stays high it will be used for jewelry, and ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... stepped from the ranks of the hunters to those of the hunted. He now feared police interference as abjectly as did Calendar and his set of rogues; and Kirkwood felt wholly warranted in assuming that the adventurer, with his keen intelligence, would not handicap himself by ignoring this point. Indeed, if he were to be judged by what Kirkwood had inferred ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... some peoples the belief in miracles still persists, and wherever the belief in miracles is strongest we shall find that the people who believe are ignorant of physical science, are steeped in superstition, or are abjectly subservient to the authority of priests or fakirs. Scientific knowledge and freedom of thought and speech are fatal to superstition. It is only in those times, or amongst those people, where ignorance is rampant, or the priest is dominant, or ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... condemned to be hanged upon the very day of his arrival. Having been brought forth from his prison, he begged hard but not abjectly for his life. He offered a heavy ransom, but his enemies were greedy for blood, not for money. It was, however, difficult to find an executioner. The city hangman was absent, and the prejudice of the country and the age against the vile ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... then by a sign or a grunt, their surprise at not being beaten, or made to carry their captors. Some, however, caught sight of the little calabashes of coca which the English carried. That woke them from their torpor, and they began coaxing abjectly (and not in vain), for a taste of that miraculous herb, which would not only make food unnecessary, and enable their panting lungs to endure the keen mountain air, but would rid them, for a while at least, of the fallen Indian's most unpitying ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... came hurriedly back and stood bowing between us. He apologized abjectly to the Cuban for intruding me upon him. But the room was the best in the place at the disposal of the prisoners of the Juez O'Brien. And I was a noted caballero. Heaven knows what I had not done in Rio Medio. Burnt, slain, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... swayed to one party or the other by the theologians whom, for the time, it took into its favor. The emperors assumed the high prerogative of personally deciding in doctrinal disputes, and of dictating opinions to the clergy, who gradually lost their independence, and became abjectly ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. He knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him. One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the reward was great. Under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants; in his pocket, his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife, and twine. He wore straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave shrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... a person to be guilty of such actions, as shall put it in the power of another, even by a look, to mortify him! And if poor souls can be thus abjectly struck at such a discovery by a fellow-creature, how must they appear before an unerring and omniscient Judge, with a conscience standing in the place of a thousand witnesses? and calling in vain upon the mountains to fall upon them, and the hills to cover them!—How serious ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... rollickingly over on his back, and then staggered up and on to his absurdly large and spreading feet. Then he backed sideways among the straw, like a crab. Then he tried to rub one eye with one of his mushroom-like fore-feet, and, failing abjectly in that, fell plump on his nose. Staggering to his feet again, Finn turned his face once toward the broad sunbeam that divided the coach-house in two parts from the side window; and then, as though tried beyond endurance, opened wide his jaws and bleated forth his fright and ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... it, then it saw wonderful possibilities in the red man. And now, last of all, when some million or two of long-forgotten and neglected "Mountain Whites" are brought to its attention, it sees in these abjectly poor, dispirited and superstitious people, only another opportunity for elevating humanity, and proving the power of Christianity to restore the ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., June, 1888., No. 6 • Various
... happened ever since man first looked upon woman and called her good, again he played the blind force of male compulsion against the woman's secret weakness to yield. Not that it was Daylight's way abjectly to beg and entreat. On the contrary, he was masterful in whatever he did, but he had a trick of whimsical wheedling that Dede found harder to resist than the pleas of a suppliant lover. It was not a happy scene in its outcome, for Dede, in the throes of her own desire, desperate ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... to them is beggary or privation. Wherever the canon of conspicuous leisure has a chance undisturbed to work out its tendency, there will therefore emerge a secondary, and in a sense spurious, leisure class—abjectly poor and living in a precarious life of want and discomfort, but morally unable to stoop to gainful pursuits. The decayed gentleman and the lady who has seen better days are by no means unfamiliar phenomena even now. This ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... of a Mohani or love-charm given by the wise women is that she should kill an owl and serve some of its flesh to her husband as a charm. "It has not occurred," Mr. Kipling writes, "to the oriental jester to speak of a boiled owl in connection with intoxication, but when a husband is abjectly submissive to his wife her friends say that she has given him boiled owl's flesh to eat." [33] If a man is in love with some woman and wishes to kindle a similar sentiment in her the following method is given: ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... us, have we, in consequence of oppression, nearly lost the spirit of man, and, in no very trifling degree, adopted that of brutes? Do you answer, No?—I ask you, then, what set of men can you point me to, in all the world, who are so abjectly employed by their oppressors as we are by our natural enemies? How can, Oh! how can those enemies but say that we and our children are not of the HUMAN FAMILY, but were made by our creator to be an inheritance to them and theirs forever? How can the slave-holders but say that ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... her from Albert. One fine day the Marquis von Posa wearied of preaching freedom to deaf ears at the court of Philip the Second, and drove a sword through the king's body—and Prometheus rose from his rock and overthrew Olympus, and Faust, who had knelt abjectly before the Earth-Spirit, took possession of his earth, and subdued it by means of steam, and electricity, and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... deferentially or humbly, especially on the ground of pity. That to solicit is to ask with urgency. That to entreat is to ask with strong desire and moving appeal. That to beseech is to ask earnestly as a boon or favor. That to crave is to ask humbly and abjectly, as though unworthy of receiving. That to implore is to ask with fervor and intense earnestness. That to supplicate is to ask with urgent or even desperate appeal. (Both implore and supplicate imply humility, as of a prayer to a superior being.) That to importune is to ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... no evidence of peculation, and the order for an increasing daily supply to the Caddles' nursery was issued. Scarcely had the first instalment gone, when Caddles was back again at the great house in a state abjectly apologetic. ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... 1804 and 1814 had been very barren in external benefits to Spain, with her King held in "honorable captivity" in France, and the obscure Joseph abjectly striving to please not his subjects, but his august brother Napoleon. But in this time of chaos, when there was no Bourbon King, no long-established despotism to stifle popular sentiment, the unsuspected fact developed that Spain had caught ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... never known anything—that, should he see the door open, it would all too abjectly be the end of him. It would mean that the agent of his shame—for his shame was the deep abjection—was once more at large and in general possession; and what glared him thus in the face was the act ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... shot on the spot. No cornered rat could have been more abjectly afraid. His nerve had oozed away the more for the grimness of the man who stood before him—a man with such a wound as that who was still the ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... nothing like adventure here nowadays, said Helen May to herself, while she watched the little geysers of dust go dancing like whirling dervishes across the sand. A person lived on canned stuff and kept goats and was abjectly pleased to see any kind of human being. There certainly was no romance left in the country, though it had seemed almost as though there might be, when her Man of the Desert sang and all the little night-sounds hushed to listen, and the moon-trail across the sand of the desert lay like a ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... brilliant, careless sentences, and her half-insolent confidence, owned everybody there much more than she did: and she felt little and underdressed and outclassed to a point where even Gail might pity her, and probably did.... And if there is a more abjectly awful feeling than that the Other Girl pities you, nobody has discovered it yet.... Gail might even know how much of a pretender she was. If John—but no. John wasn't like that. He was—"fantastically honorable," she had ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... he is in the society of a great literary swell, who has read everything, and can mock or burlesque life right and left from the literature always at his command. At the same time he feels his mastery, and is abjectly grateful to him in his own simple love of the good for his patronage of the unassuming virtues. It is so pleasing to one's 'vanity, and so safe, to be of the master's side when he assails those vices and foibles which are ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... victories, and brute force, instead of teaching liberty, instead of inculcating the lofty Swiss ideal; it cares nothing for the moral and material needs of the people of to-day. 3. From the technical point of view, it is abjectly materialist and militarist, and has no ideals. True, that there is a contemporary movement, and a strong one, in favour of what is called "national education," in favour of "the teaching of civics." But we must be on our guard! Here is a new peril. They would make a sort of state ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... in answer to all men's wanderings and rebellions, only seeks to draw them to itself? That is what God wants to be known for. Is that hard and repellent? Does that make Him a great tyrant, who only wants to be abjectly worshipped? No; it makes Him the very embodiment and perfection of the purest love. Why does He desire that He should be known? for any good that it does to Him? No; except the good that even His creatures can do to Him when they gladden His paternal heart by recognising Him for what He is, the Infinite ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Is he, then, an idolater? Not at all; not necessarily, at least. He is under the compulsion of an old custom; and he will even tell you that it is all nonsense. The same force leads him to treat with respect and veneration a chief or chiefess even if abjectly poor, though before the law the highest chief is no better ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... shattered by the agitations he had gone through since the last evening, made him feel abjectly in the power of this loud invulnerable man. At that moment he snatched at a temporary repose to be won on any terms. He was rising to do what Raffles suggested, when the latter said, lifting up his finger as if ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... came to Crichton House the more abjectly miserable became Mr. Bultitude's state of mind. It was as much as he could do to crawl up the steps to the front door, and his knees positively clapped together when the Doctor, who had driven home, met them in the hall and said in a still grave voice, "Bultitude, ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... he did not know how to go even for a few weeks. There were certain individuals in particular who depended on him from day to day. One was Charles Richards's widow. The poor desperate creature had put herself abjectly into Elsmere's hands. He had sent her to an asylum, where she had been kindly and skilfully treated, and after six weeks' abstinence she had just returned to her children, and was being watched by himself and a competent woman neighbour, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nor any passes, but him first Behoves make feeling trial how each weighs. In straits like this along the foss are plac'd The father of his consort, and the rest Partakers in that council, seed of ill And sorrow to the Jews." I noted then, How Virgil gaz'd with wonder upon him, Thus abjectly extended on the cross In banishment eternal. To the friar He next his words address'd: "We pray ye tell, If so be lawful, whether on our right Lies any opening in the rock, whereby We both may issue ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... all habits is that of acquiescence. It is this habit of submission that explains the admired patience and long-suffering of the abjectly poor. The lower the individual falls, the more unconquerable becomes the inertia of mind which interferes between him and revolt against his condition. All the miseries of the flesh, even starvation, seem preferable to ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... an erect posture, and turned a threatening look upon his assailant, the onlookers, who all knew him, and all hated and feared him, saw a sudden and surprising transformation. The red all died out of his face, the eyes seemed starting from their sockets, the lower jaw dropped abjectly and suddenly, and, with a yell of terror, John Burrill lowered his head and dashed from the house, as if pursued ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... left us then and there, I think that we would have waited for him. He had us, so to speak, abjectly under his thumbs. His word had come to be our law, since it was but child's play for him to enforce it. But it so happened that he now took a step which was to call into life and action that last vestige ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... was the matter; but prudently made off again, and left the star-fish and his neighbour as they were. I waited a long time by the tank, watching for the result; but in vain. The star-fish, looking abjectly silly, lay with his white side up, without an effort to help himself. As to the dragonet, he stuck out his nose, fixed his eyes, and fell ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... make a chain of; they don't mind stooping to conquer; they don't mind playing upon the weaker, baser sides of men's natures; they don't mind appealing, for their own ends, to the pity and generosity of others; they don't mind swallowing indignity and smiling abjectly, like any woman of the harem at her lord, so that they gain their object. That is the sort of 'woman's nature' that our conditions are busy selecting. Let us cultivate it. We live in a scientific age; the fittest survive. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... rapid retreat for a few paces, and called to him: "I apologize humbly, abjectly. I kneel ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... that he might be in the same place with her at that very moment, and without her knowing it, was so strange and painful that she felt a violent revolt of all her strong and joy-loving youth. Why should she go on suffering so unbearably, so abjectly, so miserably? If only she could see him, hear his voice, even hear him say again such cruel and humiliating words as he had spoken on that dreadful day in Venice when that would be better than this blankness, this utter and final ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... him that his vitals were being devoured by seven worms. Such a diagnosis would ruin a modern physician. The modern physician tells his patient that he is ill because every drop of his blood is swarming with a million microbes; and the patient believes him abjectly and instantly. Had a bishop told William the Conqueror that the sun was seventy-seven miles distant from the earth, William would have believed him not only out of respect for the Church, but because he would have felt that seventy-seven ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... fought upon instinct alone. It had always been the custom of the mountain dwellers to shoulder their guns and go into the thick of every fray which seemed to them in any way to threaten their native land. They went blindly, they fought desperately, and they endured manfully. Ignorant, illiterate, abjectly poor, inured to hardship through generations, they asked no questions the answers to which they could not understand. It was enough for them to know that their native land was invaded by an armed foe. Whenever that occurred they ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... looseness of my apprehension, so wide it seemed to fling the gates of vision and divination—I won't pretend to dot, as it were, too many of the i's of my incompetence. I was competent only to have been abjectly interested. On reflection, moreover, I see that no impression of over-much company invaded the picture till the point was exactly reached for its contributing thoroughly to character and amusement; across at Fiumincino, which the age of the bicycle has made, in a small way, the handy Gravesend ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... respectful yearning in the young Frenchman's eyes and voice were well known to her because she had seen it often before, and remembered it, in Jem Bowles and Julius Steinberger. That this young man had without an hour of delay fallen abjectly in love with her was a circumstance with which she dealt after her own inimitably kind and undeleterious method, which in itself was an education to any ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... sleeping in those draughty tents. Faith, you have descended, sir, like an agreeable meteor, upon two of the most scandalously henpecked husbands in all the universe. In fact, you will not find a gentleman at Ingilby—save Mr. Erwyn, perhaps—but is an abject slave to his wife, and in consequence most abjectly content." ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... uttered a name of boyhood affection that none there had heard uttered for fifty years nearly; and it was as though a stone had been rolled away from a tomb—as though out of the grave of a dead past a voice had been resurrected. "Eddie!" he said a third time, pleadingly, abjectly, humbly, craving ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... is a matter too grave for women and too little for the Republic to grieve about. His Holiness would have us on our knees, weeping like naughty infants, and abjectly craving his pardon for daring to make our own laws ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... helped her to bear up bravely. Helped her, that is, to bear up by day, but oh the nights! Oh, those long, miserable nights of heart-break and homesickness, when the pain was so intense as almost to drive her to appeal on her knees to Aunt Pike to let her stay at home, to promise abjectly to be and do all that she could wish. And there were those other terrible moments, too, when misery nearly drove her to tell the truth ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... thrown into the sea. Another, whom M. Correard had snatched from the waves, turned traitor a second time, as soon as he recovered his senses; but he too was killed. At length the revolted, who were chiefly soldiers, threw themselves upon their knees, and abjectly implored mercy. At midnight, however, they rebelled again. Those who had no arms, fought with their teeth, and thus many severe wounds were inflicted. One was most wantonly and dreadfully bitten above the heel, while his companions were beating him upon the head with their carbines, ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... was that he outgeneraled me. He was furious, of course, but he apologized—abjectly. He admitted that he had been wrong; that he had imposed upon me. He promised to play fair if I'd permit him to withhold the report, and—I was deceived. No man likes to be thought a cry-baby. Those were eventful times; personal complaints were not ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... fugitive into every home, every spot of this broad land; to tear him from any altar, and demand the services of every "good citizen" in his hellish work. Men by thousands, once counted friends of freedom, bowed abjectly to this ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... things went on quietly enough for some months. I had a serious talk with Jones, reproaching him gravely for his outrageous demeanor. He capitulated abjectly on being shown the cable, which was procured in the manner kindly indicated by the President. The latter had perhaps been in too great a hurry with his heavy guns, for his hint of violence had rather ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... realize the superiority of the man, mentally, morally and physically, and the thought was maddening that perhaps Edith had freely given to him the love for which he had abjectly sued ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... she declared. "My brother issued his challenge and we accepted it. Yet we went abjectly away and obeyed him. If he means to fight he must fight now. I am no less a Burton than himself and I am ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... affected in any way by the opinion of the world? If we can answer all these questions in the negative, we must go a step farther, and ask if we have gained a state of independence of our own selfish passions, as well as of the world; for our most inveterate foes, and those before whom we cower most abjectly, are often those that dwell within the household of our own hearts. If the love of ease or of sensual indulgence rules there, we need to summon our moral courage to a stern strife, for there is no conquest ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... hunger and fatigue. He was sent, under a strong guard, to Ringwood; and all that was left him was, to prepare to meet the death of a rebel. But he clung to life, so justly forfeited, with singular tenacity. He abjectly and meanly sued for pardon from that inexorable tyrant who never forgot or forgave the slightest resistance from a friend, when even that resistance was lawful, much less rebellion from a man he both hated and despised. He was transferred to London, lodged in the Tower, and executed ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... that began abjectly but strengthened as it continued to something like a strange sneer. For he was a connoisseur; he knew. And he was certain that Fate would never leave a ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... out of the dark, eyes gazed down at him, instead of stars, out of the heavens. The night, and the stars, and the pines, and the desert wind reproached him for his faithlessness to themselves as comforters; but abjectly he admitted he could make no plea, save that he had heard once more of a Face that was ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... two elements of the plan it is still impotent until it has appealed to the basest element in every human breast—the willingness to accept happiness that is bought by the agony of another! It is too abjectly selfish and groveling to command the least respect from a noble character or a great, tender soul. It severs the ties of affection without compunction. It destroys all loyalty. It says, "No matter what becomes ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... boat high up towards .. the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. so, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height he could hardly hope to attain. It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward circumstance ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... had sought Abbott with the best intentions; to apologize abjectly, distasteful though it might be to his hot blood. Instead, he struck Abbott across the mouth, and the latter ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... when he visits a friend or gallants the ladies, decorates himself with a scarlet coat, cockade, and sword; who gives vent to a kind of Irish howl when his favourite kitten is suffocated under a feather bed; and falls abjectly on his knees when threatened with the dreadful name of Law, is a character which, in its surly good-humour and sensitive dignity, might easily, under more favourable circumstances, have grown into an individuality, if ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... retired to the temple of AEsculapius, the heart of the citadel. But the Carthaginian, uniting pusillanimity with cruelty, no sooner found the temple on fire, than he rushed out in Scipio's presence, with an olive-branch in his hands, and abjectly begged for his life, which Scipio granted, after he had prostrated himself at his feet in sight of his followers, who loaded him with the bitterest execrations. The wife of Hasdrubal, deserted by the abject wretch, called ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... was too mean and disgraceful to be spoken to. And besides, his feelings might be hurt if one were to tell him that. So, as Mitch came nearer and nearer, David felt guiltier and guiltier, and presently he was surprised to hear himself asking rather abjectly: ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott
... sitting coolly on their horses by the road-side as the great man passes, generally in a low norimon, on which they must necessarily look down—in contradiction to Japanese etiquette, which permits no inferior to look down upon a superior—while the people of the country are either abjectly kowtowing to him or patiently waiting in their closed houses until his passing shall set them ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver
... of discovering the number of her friends. Miserable children with faces which revealed two generations of hunger, homeless boys with vicious countenances, miserable wrecks of humanity, women with bloated faces, came to weep over Nora's bier, and to lay a flower there, and to scuttle away, more abjectly lonely than even sin could make them. If the cats and the dogs, the sparrows and horses to which she had shown kindness, could also have attended her funeral, the procession would have been, from a point of numbers, one of the most imposing the city had ever known. Tig used up all their ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... to see the new athletic games, introduced by the Spaniards, in the afternoon in Palace Yard. A grand tournament at Court preceded, and a bear-baiting followed, the humiliating spectacle of the Parliament of England kneeling at the feet of Cardinal Pole, and abjectly craving absolution from Rome. One man—Sir Ralph Bagenall—stood out, and stood up, when all his co-senators were thus prostrate in the dust. He was religiously a Gallio, not a Gospeller; but he was politically a sturdy Englishman, and no coward. Strange to say, no harm came to him. Nay, ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... his opinion of a woman's dress when he is desperately and abjectly in love with the wearer. Let me look. Like everything else of yours it's perfect. Where did ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... face without the slightest provocation, and, though the victim of the outrage might be strong as an ox, no remonstrance whatever would be made. It is difficult for us to comprehend How human beings can possibly become so abjectly servile and spiritless as the lower-class Russians. But the terrors of the knout and Siberia are ever present before them. Cheap chromolithographs of Gregorian saints hang on the walls of the saloon, and with them are mingled fancy pictures of Tiflis and Baku cafe-chantant belles. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... and the twilight shadows were stealing down upon them, when, creeping abjectly upon her knees towards the wretched girl, she said, "There is more, Maggie, more—I have not told ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... Tommy. All his dapper gaiety had disappeared. His clothes seemed to hang loosely on his limbs, and a perspiration broke out on his forehead. All his self-control vanished, and he fell abjectly on his knees ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... text-book of science, an appendix to the geography, an introduction to the primer of history? Of course it is not. A story is essentially and primarily a work of art, and its chief function must be sought in the line of the uses of art. Just as the drama is capable of secondary uses, yet fails abjectly to realise its purpose when those are substituted for its real significance as a work of art, so does the story lend itself to subsidiary purposes, but claims first and most strongly to be recognised in its real significance as a work of art. Since the drama deals with ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... petty officer, abjectly apologetic, and, backing down the ladder, he passed through another door entering into an alley-way between the officers' cabins. Here was the bowl of a supplementary periscope, so that a vision of what was taking place could be obtained without ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... probably observing something in the writer's eye which he did not like, became all on a sudden abjectly submissive, and, professing the highest admiration for the writer, begged him to visit him in his government; this the writer promised faithfully to do, and he takes the present opportunity of performing ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... back to his lair in the shanties, but he crawled abjectly toward them, begging to join the carouse notwithstanding his great misfortune. They would still have rejected him, but the old man had learned craft with his age, and when pleading was of no avail, betook himself to threats, which proved more effectual than his tears. Fearing ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... my discharge, sir?" asked Droom, rubbing his hands abjectly, but looking squarely into Bansemer's eyes for the first time in their acquaintance. Bansemer glared back for an instant and then shrugged his shoulders with ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... was owing to personal attraction. I never presumed on the distinction awarded me; never made myself or mine the subjects of conversation, or sought to engross the attention of others. I had always remembered the obscurity of my early life, the cloud upon my birth, not abjectly, but proudly. I was too proud to arrogate to myself any credit for the adventitious circumstances which had raised me above the level of others,—too proud of the love that had given the elevation, to exalt myself ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... floor Sefton made unconditional surrender, more abjectly even than Campbell He would never touch any one again. He would go softly all the days ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... fair Part of their Audience. The Ladies are wonderfully pleased to see a Man insulting Kings, or affronting the Gods, in one Scene, and throwing himself at the Feet of his Mistress in another. Let him behave himself insolently towards the Men, and abjectly towards the Fair One, and it is ten to one but he proves a Favourite of the Boxes. Dryden and Lee, in several of their Tragedies, have practised ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... money flung rolling on the floor, by one who was then young and unknown, and in the garb of despised Galilee? Why, in the same way we might ask, did Saul suffer Samuel to beard him in the very presence of his army? Why did David abjectly obey the orders of Joab? Why did Ahab not dare to arrest Elijah at the door of Naboth's vineyard? Because sin is weakness; because there is in the world nothing so abject as a guilty conscience, nothing so invincible as ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... feet and stood cowering abjectly before Scott, rage written on every lineament of his face, but not daring to give ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... rather terrifying prospects, and the third day promised even greater vicissitudes. Looking from the coach windows out upon the quiet, desolate grandeur of her surroundings, poor Beverly began to appreciate how abjectly helpless and alone she was. Her companions were ugly, vicious-looking men, any one of whom could inspire terror by a look. She had entrusted herself to the care of these strange creatures in the moment of inspired courage and now she was constrained to regret her action. ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... you've heard of that, a nickname that no gentleman——" then she too paused and looked at him, with a momentary flush. He was going to apologize abjectly, when with a slight laugh she ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... right number, Mrs. Kelver. There is one of me must worship, adore a woman madly, abjectly; grovel before her like the Troubadour before his Queen of Song, eat her slipper, drink the water she has washed in, scourge himself before her window, die for a kiss of her glove flung down with a laugh. ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... the Anglo-Albanian Society, the Hon. Aubrey Herbert, M.P., has several years' intimate experience of Albania—said in the New Statesman that in consequence of what occurred to Captain Brodie the Serbian Government was compelled to apologize abjectly. Now I happen to be very well acquainted with the stalwart Pouni[vs]a Ra[vc]i['c], the Montenegrin who arrested Brodie. Albanians have told me that Pouni[vs]a's knowledge of the north and north-west of their country is not a ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... recollection and saw far back amid the shadows of consciousness the vision of Chamont—Irma d'Anglars, the old harlot crowned with years and honors, ascending the steps in front of her chateau amid abjectly reverential villagers. Then as Satin whistled again, making game of the old hag, who could ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... The sea had never seemed more peaceful. Heads were bobbing merrily in the water, as though in for a pleasure swim; beyond them lay the steamer, abjectly motionless—looking like a monster which might have arisen from the deeps to bask upon the surface. Jeb was wondering if he should not yet swim back and try to climb aboard, when the great hulk swayed—gently at first, this way ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... swung open, and a sudden lurch flung Millie Stope against the wheel. Woolfolk caught and held her until the wave rolled by. She was stark with terror, and held abjectly to the rail while the next swell lifted them upward. He attempted to urge her back to the protection of the cabin, but she resisted with such a convulsive determination that he relinquished the effort and enveloped her in ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... been. Having the advantage was one of the attributes of the dominant race. Thus for those few brief seconds, Liu experienced the whole glory of it. And as little by little Rivers emerged from the drunken to the conscious, to the abjectly, cravenly conscious, so Liu mounted to ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... insomuch that you may see men that use the strongest language against the marriage-bed and the fruit of it, when some servant's or concubine's child is sick or dies, almost killed with grief, and abjectly lamenting. Some have given way to shameful and desperate sorrow at the loss of a dog or horse; others have borne the deaths of virtuous children without any extravagant or unbecoming grief; have passed the rest of their ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the hot blood which Henry had inherited, must be severely condemned in many details. We cannot avoid the feeling that much about it was insincere and theatrical, and even an intentional challenging of the fate he seemed to dread. But yet it does not appear what choice was left him between abjectly giving up all that he had been trained to believe of the place of the Church in the world and entering on ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams |
