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Indigence   Listen
noun
Indigence  n.  The condition of being indigent; lack of estate, or means of comfortable subsistence; penury; poverty; as, helpless indigence.
Synonyms: Poverty; penury; destitution; want; need; privation; lack. See Poverty.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Indigence" Quotes from Famous Books



... suggestion that the family of Castaing were in a state of indigence. He showed that his father had an income of 10,000 francs, while his two brothers were holding good positions, one as an officer in the army, the other as a government official. The mistress of Castaing he represented as enjoying an income of 5,000 francs. He protested ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving

... as come again it must, When Lancashire shall lift her head once more; Her suffering sons, now down amid the dust Of Indigence, shall pass through Plenty's door; Her commerce cover seas from shore to shore; Her arts arise to highest eminence; Her products prove unrivall'd, as of yore; Her valour and her virtue—men of sense And blue-eyed beauties—England's pride and ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh

... is made mistress of her passions and concupiscences, lady of indigence, of shame, of poverty, and of all fortune's injuries. Let him that can, attain to this advantage. Herein consists the true and sovereign liberty, that affords us means wherewith to jest and make a scorn of force and injustice, and to deride ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson

... soil or climate where experience has not uniformly proved that the voluntary flow of heaped-up plenty, bursting from the weight of its own rich luxuriance, has ever run with a more copious stream of revenue than could be squeezed from the dry husks of oppressed indigence by the straining of all the politic machinery in the world? ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke

... is nothing after disease, indigence and a sense of guilt, so fatal to health and to life itself as the want of a proper outlet for active faculties." I have seen young girls suffer and grow sensibly lowered in vitality in the first years after they leave school. In our attempt then to give a girl pleasure and freedom from care we ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... other in their labors and interests, but would be, on the contrary, competitors—and as the fact that there had been free competition would be held by all classes to absolve them from any responsibility as to each other's welfare—it would inevitably result that the weaker orders should fall into indigence, degradation, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... raised for the support of one description of the poor may be concluded the extent and greatness of that oppression, whose effects have rendered it possible for the few to afford so much, and have shown us that such a multitude of our brothers exist in even helpless indigence. Your Lordship tells us that the science of civil government has received all the perfection of which it is capable. For my part, I am more enthusiastic. The sorrow I feel from the contemplation of this melancholy picture ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... himselven large and fre 2020 And of his poeple take and pile, Largesse be no weie of skile It mai be seid, bot Avarice, Which in a king is a gret vice. A king behoveth ek to fle The vice of Prodegalite, That he mesure in his expence So kepe, that of indigence He mai be sauf: for who that nedeth, In al his werk the worse he spedeth. 2030 As Aristotle upon Chaldee Ensample of gret Auctorite Unto king Alisandre tauhte Of thilke folk that were unsauhte Toward here king for his pilage: Wherof he bad, in his corage That he unto thre pointz entende, ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower

... animal whose muscles wriggle heroically as watch-springs. The sixteenth century produced a race of artists peculiar in their feeling for material beauty, but normal, coming as they do at the foot of the hills, in their technical proficiency and aesthetic indigence. Craft holds the candle that betrays the bareness of the cupboard. The aesthetic significance of form is feebly and impurely felt, the power of creating it is lost almost; but finer descriptions have rarely been painted. They knew how ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... blaze, seems to have been a mad indulgence of the passions; and an unbridled use of intoxicating liquors. Brown fell a victim to his vices. Years after he had been laid in his grave, his daughter, Euphemia, being in great indigence, received real kindness from Sir James and Lady Mackintosh, the former of whom used to delight in telling the story of her father's saying to her: 'Effy, bring me the mooderate stimulus of a hoonderd draps o' laudanum in ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton

... ancestry were highly rated, he was never ashamed of his birth or poverty. Once when taunted by the aristocratic John Randolph with his lowly origin, he proudly exclaimed, "I was born to no proud paternal estate. I inherited only infancy, ignorance, and indigence." ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden

... three modalities or into three states is far from giving the number of the manifestations of being. Nature is not reduced to this indigence. From the fusion of these three states, in varying and incessant combination, and from the predominance of one of the primitive modalities, whether accidental or permanent, countless individualities are formed, each with ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... have grave misgivings of possible errors in justice. Besides, these vagabond families are very easily scared. The accusation against the Comprachicos was that they traded in other people's children. But the promiscuousness caused by poverty and indigence is such that at times it might have been difficult for a father and mother to ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... which they interested themselves in having republished. Hannah Adams had written some valuable works, and was now braiding straw for a living; and Mrs. Josiah Quincy exerted herself to have so talented a woman placed above indigence. She also endeavored to have Miss Edgeworth's "Moral Tales" republished for young people. Scott was beginning to infuse new life with his wonderful tales, which could safely be put in the hands of younger readers. The first decade of ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas

... as yet contains only one forty-second part of the population of France; and one half of its inhabitants, being in the most abject indigence, consume but little. Its revenue is nearly equal to that of the Republic of Columbia, and it exceeds the revenue of all the custom-houses of the United States* before the year 1795, when that confederation had 4,500,000 inhabitants, while the island of Cuba contained ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt

... none of their fire, while her tongue wagged more abusively when her temper was roused. John Quincy Adams described her as going about "like a virago-errant in enchanted armor, redeeming herself from the cramps of indigence by the notoriety of her eccentricities and the forced currency ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... acted—MYTHOLOGICALLY. The "non-free will" is mythology; in real life it is only a question of STRONG and WEAK wills.—It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself, when a thinker, in every "causal-connection" and "psychological necessity," manifests something of compulsion, indigence, obsequiousness, oppression, and non-freedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings—the person betrays himself. And in general, if I have observed correctly, the "non-freedom of the will" is regarded ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... causes of the misery; the whole matter was of so complicated a nature, that it became next to impossible to understand it thoroughly. It need excite no surprise, then, to learn that a bad feeling between working-men and the upper classes became very strong in this season of privation. The indigence and sufferings of the operatives induced a suspicion in the minds of many of them, that their legislators, their magistrates, their employers, and even the ministers of religion, were, in general, their oppressors and enemies; and were in league for their prostration ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... education, or the mistaken pride of ancestry, have never experienced the celestial rapture: they have never been amalgamated with society, are strangers to poverty themselves, and cannot comprehend its operation upon others; born and moving in a sphere where the chilling blasts of indigence never penetrate, or the clouds of adversity appal, they have no conception of the more delightful gratification which springs from the source of all earthly happiness, the pleasure and ability of administering to the wants and comforts ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... he was sure my play would be a failure; but I ought to get a good sum down in advance of royalties from Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and at once send him half of it. His letters were childishly ill-conditioned and unreasonable; but, believing him to be in extreme indigence, I felt too sorry for him even to argue the point. Again and again I had helped him, and it seemed sordid and silly to hurt our old friendship for money. I couldn't believe that he would talk of my having done anything ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris

... philosopher, and drew his own character in the following terms, in a letter to Count de Grammont. "He was a philosopher equally removed from superstition and impiety; a voluptuary who had no less aversion from debauchery than inclination for pleasure: a man who had never felt the pressure of indigence, and who had never been in possession of affluence: he lived in a condition despised by those who have everything, envied by those who have nothing, and relished by those who make their reason the foundation of their happiness. When he was young he hated profusion, being persuaded ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton

... districts he views not the hostile castle, and the haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay- built hut and miserable cabin, where cattle and men help to keep each other warm, and dwell in meanness, smoke, and indigence. A pleasing uniformity of decent competence appears throughout our habitations. The meanest of our log-houses is a dry and comfortable habitation. Lawyer or merchant are the fairest titles our towns afford; that of a farmer is the only appellation of the rural inhabitants of our country. ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

... all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again. Did our birth fall in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation? We have enough to live and bring ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... savage people, the condition of poverty is uniform. Provided the bare appetites are satisfied, suffering is scarcely felt. Where slavery exists, indigence is little known; for it is the master's interest to keep the slave in a condition fit for labour, and the employer generally takes care to supply the animal wants of the employed. It is only when society becomes civilized and free, and man enters into competition with his fellows, ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles

... vengeance pursued the financier who had deceived the nation. He was forced to fly from Paris. His whole property was confiscated, and he was reduced to indigence and contempt. When his scheme was first suggested to the regent, he was worth three millions of livres. He had ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... fifty-six years ago. When the academy received its new telescope it was too poor to provide it a suitable place. Therefore a dome was erected on the roof, which disturbed the symmetry of the Grecian architecture. The telescope does good service under the dome; but it is a sign of the indigence of the academy. When I reflect on the progress made by other institutions, I am astonished at the march of events. Twenty years after the founding of Abbot Academy, the little settlement at Chicago had not been heard of at Andover. When Rev. Dr. Joel Hawes received his first request to provide ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various

... itself to all the turns and outlines of my body without fretting me. I was picturesque and beautiful; its successor, so stiff, so heavy, makes a mere mannikin of me. There was no want to which, its complaisance did not lend itself, for indigence is ever obsequious. Was a book covered with dust, one of the lappets offered itself to wipe the dust away. Did the thick ink refuse to flow from the pen, it offered a fold. You saw traced in the long black lines upon it how many a service it had rendered me. Those long lines ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... part of his life, it is not known when, his indigence compelled him to teach a school; an humiliation, with which, though it certainly lasted but a little while, his enemies did not forget to reproach him, when he became conspicuous enough to excite malevolence; and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... have, without uncommon virtue, been able to despise, even when affluence and idleness have concurred to tempt them; and therefore he who feels nothing from indigence but the want of gratifications which he could not in any other condition make consistent with innocence, has given no proof of eminent patience. Esteem and influence every man desires, but they are equally ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson

... application was made to the Proprietors for lands in Carolina, by a number of Palatines harassed in Germany by the calamities of a tedious war, and reduced to circumstances of great indigence and misery. The Proprietors wisely judging, that by such acquisitions the value of their lands would increase, and the strength of their settlement would be promoted, determined to give every possible ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt

... and rhapsodies at the patriarchal age of 88! They will show you the trees under which he was wont to rest, the sunny views he loved, the very stones on which he sat; they will tell you anecdotes of his poverty—of an indigence such as we can scarcely credit. During the last months he was often thankful for a crust of bread, in exchange for which he would bring a sack of acorns, self-collected, to feed the giver's pigs. Destitution ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... wages of curates, or to sink those of labourers to the degree that was intended; because it has never been able to hinder either the one from being willing to accept of less than the legal allowance, on account of the indigence of their situation and the multitude of their competitors, or the other from receiving more, on account of the contrary competition of those who expected to derive either profit ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... consumption of goods remains and is carried on by the wife and children. The man of the household also can do something in this direction, and indeed, he commonly does; but with a still lower descent into the levels of indigence—along the margin of the slums—the man, and presently also the children, virtually cease to consume valuable goods for appearances, and the woman remains virtually the sole exponent of the household's pecuniary decency. No class ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... where a common sympathy and hearty co-operation lighten the burdens of each, is a very different poverty, different in kind, different in influence and effect, from that conscious and humiliating indigence which is every day forced to contrast itself with neighboring wealth on which it feels a sense of grinding dependence. The poverty of the frontier is indeed no poverty. It is but the beginning of wealth, and has the boundless possibilities of the future always opening before it. No man ever ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis

... donkeys, seeing nothing within the whole small compass of the walls save what speaks of the narrowest and humblest life in the most remote of hill-fastnesses, a few deserted and dilapidated palaces alone telling of a period of importance long past, nothing can describe the effect of coming out of this indigence and insignificance upon the silent, solitary piazza where the incomparable cathedral rears its front, covered from base to pinnacle with the richest sculpture and most brilliant mosaic. The volcanic mass on which the town is built is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various

... some of them must have been awake the night I counted my money; otherwise, as I had never trusted the secret of my riches to any one, they could not have suspected me of possessing any property; for ever since I kept company with them I had appeared to be in great indigence. ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth

... rent and, ere long, for the commonest necessities of life. In vain I struggled to redeem myself; the time of my prosperity had not come and I only sank deeper and deeper into debt and finally into indigence. A baby came. Our landlord was kind and allowed us to stay for two weeks under the roof for whose protection we could not pay; but at the end of that time we were asked to leave; and I found myself on the road with a dying wife, a wailing infant, no money ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green

... which influenced me then, will influence me now,' said Rose firmly. 'If I ever owed a strict and rigid duty to her, whose goodness saved me from a life of indigence and suffering, when should I ever feel it, as I should to-night? It is a struggle,' said Rose, 'but one I am proud to make; it is a pang, but one my heart ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens

... from being in the possession of every one born in a civilised country? Ignorance; bad laws or customs, debarring a man or woman from the sources of happiness within reach; and 'the positive evils of life, the great sources of physical and mental suffering—such as indigence, disease, and the unkindness, worthlessness, or premature loss of objects of affection.'[6] But every one of these calamitous impediments is susceptible of the weightiest modification, and some of them of final removal. Mr. Mill had learnt from Turgot and Condorcet—two ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley

... exigency; inanition, starvation, famine, drought. dole, mite, pittance; short allowance, short commons; half rations; banyan day. emptiness, poorness &c. Adj.; depletion, vacancy, flaccidity; ebb tide; low water; " a beggarly account of empty boxes " [Romeo and Jul.]; indigence &c. 804; insolvency &c. (nonpayment) 808. V. be insufficient &c. Adj.; not suffice &c. 639; come short of &c. 304 run dry. want, lack, need, require; caret; be in want &c. (poor) 804, live from hand to mouth. render insufficient &c. Adj.; drain of resources, impoverish &c. (waste) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... you the widow of Marat. I do not come here to ask your favors, such as cupidity would covet, or even such as would relieve indigence—Marat's widow needs no more than a tomb. Before arriving at that happy termination to my existence, however, I come to ask that justice may be done in respect to the reports recently put forth in this body against the memory of at once the most intrepid and the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... signs Robert Key. His mother was a daughter of Sir Robert Tyrwhitt of Kettleby, a very opulent Roman Catholic gentleman of Lincolnshire, and through her he was cousin of Mrs Rookwood. The opulence of the grandfather did not descend to his grandson, whose indigence was a great cause of his desperate character. He lived for a time at Glatton, in Huntingdonshire, but afterwards entered the service of Lord Mordaunt as keeper of his house at Turvey, his wife being the governess of his Lordship's children. He is described as "a young man with no hair ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt

... re-conduct her to her well- known place on Calvary, and subject her once more to the salutary action of interior tribulation. She felt again as if suddenly deprived of all the Divine gifts and favours, and reduced to the very extreme of spiritual indigence. Her natural talents and capabilities seemed paralysed; desolation overwhelmed her, temptations to anger, antipathy and even despair pressed on her. The last, especially, became so importunate, that she seemed to herself sometimes ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"

... nothing to arouse energy by opposition, and everything without and within to sap the very life of the soul. Childe Roland is himself hopeless and almost heartless; the plain to which the leering cripple had pointed and over which he rides is created in the utter indigence of nature—a very nightmare of poverty and mean repulsiveness. And yet he endures the test, and halts only when he faces the Dark Tower and blows the blast upon his horn. Browning was wise to carry his romance ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... 134: In the same year Charleston was reduced to ashes. A large portion of its inhabitants passed, in one day, from prosperity to indigence. Under the pressure of this misfortune, the legislature applied to parliament for aid; and that body, with a liberality reflecting honour on its members, voted twenty thousand pounds, to ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall

... so much more do they benefit under the force of contrast with the men of their own level. A young man of that class, however noble in appearance, is somewhat degraded in the eyes of women, by the necessity which his indigence imposes of working under a master; but a beautiful young woman, in the very poorest family, unless she enters upon a life of domestic servitude, (in which case her labors are light, suited to her sex, and withdrawn from the public ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... services to lay its foundation. Most of those very meritorious citizens have paid the debt of nature and gone to repose. It is believed that among the survivors there are some not provided for by existing laws, who are reduced to indigence and even to real distress. These men have a claim on the gratitude of their country, and it will do honor to their country to provide for them. The lapse of a few years more and the opportunity will be forever ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... this delicate subject. Permit me only to submit to your majesty's consideration, whether his long imprisonment and the confiscation of his estate, and the indigence and dispersion of his family, and the painful anxieties incident to all these circumstances, do not form an assemblage of sufferings which recommend him to the mediation of humanity? Allow me, Sir, on this occasion to be its organ; and to entreat that he may be permitted to come ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette

... enable me to solve at my leisure the problems that haunt me. Still, this sublime resignation, by which I might emancipate my mind, through abstracting it from the body, would not serve my end. I should still need money to devote myself to certain experiments. But for that, I would accept the outward indigence of a sage possessed of both heaven and heart. A man need only never stoop, to remain lofty in poverty. He who struggles and endures, while marching on to a glorious end, presents a noble spectacle; but who can have the strength to fight here? We can climb cliffs, but it is unendurable ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... manufacturers, and that was ruin. The bugbear of higher wages, immediate, threatening, near, the terror of the last thirty years, closed the prospect for Charles Chafe; he could see nothing beyond. He did not say so, but to him the prosperity of the British manufacturer was bound up in the indigence of the operative. Thriving workmen, doing well, and looking to do better, rose before him in terms of menace, though their prosperity might be rooted in his own. "Give them cheap food and keep them poor," was the sum of his advice. His opinions had the emphasis of the unexpected, the unnatural: ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... he says, with a flourish, "is now negotiating a loan. When ou-ah beloved country is reduced to such straits, that she must borow from strangers, I cannot think of relieving private indigence." ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend

... fortune are avoidable only by practice of the sternest indigence: human foresight cannot provide against the envy of the gods and the tireless machinations of Fate. The widening circle of prosperity grows weaker as it spreads until the antagonistic forces which it has pushed back are made powerful ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... The first, of weather-stained brick, was immediately at the end of High Street, where a diverging branch from that thoroughfare ran round to the low-lying Durnover lanes; so that the precincts of the bridge formed the merging point of respectability and indigence. The second bridge, of stone, was further out on the highway—in fact, fairly in the meadows, though still within the ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... caballero," and to look down with sovereign disdain upon "arts mechanical," and all the gainful pursuits of plebeian life; but this very inflation of spirit, while it fills his brain with vapors, lifts him above a thousand meannesses; and though it often keeps him in indigence, ever protects ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving

... for their society. By the virtuous part of the community I am shunned as the pest and bane of social enjoyment. In short, I am debarred from every kind of happiness. If I look back, I recoil with horror from the black catalogue of vices which have stained my past life, and reduced me to indigence and contempt. If I look forward, I shudder at the prospects which my foreboding mind presents to view both in this and a coming world. This is a deplorable, yet just, picture of myself. How totally the reverse of ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster

... female slaves. Some score of glebe-bound peasants cultivated the large estate for their lord's behoof. Notwithstanding the distress that had fallen upon the Roman nobility, many of whom were sunk into indigence, the chief of the Anicii still controlled large means; and the disposal of these possessions at his death was matter of interest to many persons—not least to the clergy of Rome, who found in the dying man's sister a piously tenacious advocate. ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing

... scarecrow blessed with youth, health, and discontent. The man was indisputably ill-clad, yet not without a certain fitness and good taste, withal; for he was obviously an applicant for admittance to the Home, where poverty was a qualification. In the army of indigence the uniform is rags; they serve to distinguish the rank and file from ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce

... old friends while in the states, none was I more happy to meet than Lavine, Dorin's mother. Just as I was leaving Albany I heard from our cousin Mrs. Garret Stadts who is living in Albany in obscurity and indigence owing to her husband being a drunken idle fellow, that Lavine was living in a tavern with a man of the name of Broomly. I immediately employed a friend of mine, Mr. Ramsay of Albany, to negotiate with the man for the purchase ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various

... successfully practised agriculture and other industrial arts: and those of them who were faithful to their vows aimed at no personal luxuries. On the contrary, their superfluous possessions were applied by them to the relief of indigence. But this industrial asceticism was made possible only by its association with another asceticism—the renunciation of women, the private home, the family. Even so, in the days when Christian piety was at its highest, those who were capable of responding to the industrial motives ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock

... Hexham. This nobleman, who had long been regarded as the head of the party, had fled into the Low Countries on the discomfiture of his friends; and as he concealed his name and quality, he had there languished in extreme indigence. Philip de Comines tells us,[***] that he himself saw him, as well as the duke of Exeter, in a condition no better than that of a common beggar; till being discovered by Philip, duke of Burgundy, they had small pensions ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume

... The differences characteristic of poverty, indigence, managing to live, fortune and wealth, cleverly treated by von Justi, Staatswirthschaft, I, p. 449, seq. Rau, Lehrbuch I, 76, seq., establishes the following gradation: privation and wretchedness, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... who had given her lessons in what may be called the life of indigence, was a sainted spinster named Marguerite, who was pious with a true piety, poor and charitable towards the poor, and even towards the rich, knowing how to write just sufficiently to sign herself Marguerite, and believing ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... said he, was with him. Just as impossible as for a camel to pass through the needle's eye or for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven was it that the wealthy could feel for the poor. Opulence and indigence were no more sympathetic than oil and vinegar. The poor must ever have a champion, a savior, a mediator, or they are ground beneath a relentless heel. It was Elmendorf's belief that no manufacturer, employer, landlord, capitalist, or manager could by any possible chance deal justly ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King

... walked away from the house, and heard the trams grinding, and the rattle of carts over the rough paving. Holloway Road at this point is at its worst—dull and ugly, with an air of third-rate respectable indigence. She crossed the road, and passed into a squalid thoroughfare called Grove Road, and marched past the ugly houses with her head in the air, pretending that she had no interest whatever in Toby. All her thoughts were busy inventing indifference; and her consciousness ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton

... large old country hostelry. As such the courtyard is depicted by Hogarth in his print of the "Stage Coach." Its career has been uneventful in the main, though in 1767 one of its guests ended his life by poison, leaving behind this message: "I have for fifteen years past suffered more indigence than ever gentleman before submitted to, I am neglected by my acquaintance, traduced by my enemies, and insulted ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley

... anguish, agony, torture, sorrow, grief; misery, affliction, adversity, disaster, calamity, misfortune; straits, poverty, destitution, indigence. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... home for working people that was sanitary, wholesome and complete, at a rental of exact cost. Peabody expected that his example would be imitated by the rich men of the nobility, and that squalor and indigence would soon ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... expressive eyes of Lucy beaming at once with pleasure for her father's deliverance, and gratitude for her deliverer: but is not my fortune affluence," continued he, "nay superfluous wealth, when compared to the extreme indigence of Eldridge; and what have I done to deserve ease and plenty, while a brave worthy officer starves in a prison? Three hundred a year is surely sufficient for all my wants and wishes: at any rate ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson

... as she sat reading the inscription, that it might have been pleasanter to the decayed gentlewomen in question not to have their indigence quite so openly proclaimed to the world, even though coupled with good birth and quality, and redounding to the fame of Mistress Perpetua Furnival. But Phoebe had not much time to meditate; for the door of the first little ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt

... continues, all unions or relations constructed between Man and Woman are constructed in indigence, and can produce only ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... reflect with pleasure on those numerous charitable institutions, which are justly the honour of Great Britain; we are not too hastily to infer a strong principle of internal benevolence, from liberal contributions to the relief of indigence and misery. When these contributions indeed are equally abundant in frugal times, or from individuals personally oeconomical, the source from which they originate becomes less questionable. But a vigorous principle of philanthropy must not be at once conceded, on the ground ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce

... Valjean, must be indicted; so runs the argument. This conclusion we deny. Let us consider. Poverty is not unwholesome. The bulk of men are poor, and always have been. Poverty is no new condition. Man's history is not one of affluence, but one of indigence. This is a patent fact. But a state of lack is not unwholesome, but on the contrary does great good. Poverty has supplied the world with most of the kings it boasts of. Palaces have not cradled the kings of thought, service, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... man had passed easily all the ordeals, I appointed him "a Character-Diver," to discover the qualities and detect the faults of little children,[2] and raised him from indigence to affluence. ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... administration of the empire gave general satisfaction to his subjects; he protected and relieved the poor, extended cultivation, and punished governors who allowed any men in their province to fall into indigence. His prudence and moderation are especially conspicuous in his arrangement of the Armenian difficulty, whereby he healed a chronic sore that had long drained, the resources of his country. His submission ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson

... means are able to enjoy advantages which they could not do in England. The town is certainly more alive than it was when Dr Johnson visited it in the last century; he declared that one of the streets was lost, and that in those that remained there was "the silence and solitude of inactive indigence and gloomy depopulation." We thought it a very picturesque-looking place, and should have remained there longer had the wind not changed and induced us ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston

... he possesses tact, the sentiment of probity, and a proper subordination, his ignorance is gross, he knows absolutely nothing, and he has a horror of learning anything. Oh, dear mother, what an accomplished door-keeper this colonel would have made, had he been born in indigence! I don't think a bit the better of him for his bravery, for he did not fight against the Russians, the Austrians, or the Prussians: he fought against ennui. When he rushed upon the enemy, Captain Fischtaminel's purpose was to ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... declare to him that he must live: unaccustomed to reason, having never been submitted to a wholesome discipline, he conceives he must do it at the expence of a society who has done nothing for him: who condemns him to groan in misery, to languish in indigence: frequently deprived of the common necessaries requisite to support his existence, which his essence, of which he is not the master, compels him to conserve. He compensates himself by theft, he revenges ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach

... too, that, being more cheerful and fond of life than the gloomy astrologer, they were repelled by the grim loneliness of the place. Freiherr Roderick had granted shelter and subsistence on the property to two old maids, sisters of his father, who were living in indigence, having been but niggardly provided for. They, together with an aged serving-woman, occupied the small warm rooms of one of the wings; besides them and the cook, who had a large apartment on the ground floor adjoining the kitchen, the only other person was a worn-out chasseur, ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... odorous flowers of all colors, and studded with superb groves of oak. The freshness and beauty of this spot, which Nature seemed to have taken pleasure in adorning and enriching with her most precious gifts, contrasted, in a striking manner, with the indigence and uncleanliness of its inhabitants; and I regretted that it had not fallen to the lot of civilized men. I was wrong no doubt: it is just that those should be most favored by their common mother, who are least disposed to pervert her gifts, or to give the preference ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere

... again turning his eyes attentively upon his travelling companion, Ganlesse, he could not help discovering (by the aid of imagination, perhaps), that though insignificant in person, plain in features, and dressed like one in indigence, there lurked still about his person and manners, that indefinable ease of manner which belongs only to men of birth and quality, or to those who are in the constant habit of frequenting the best company. His companion, whom he called Will Smith, although tall and rather ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... perhaps, have never yet felt all the malignity with which a reproach, edged with the appellation of old maid, swells some of those hearts in which it is infixed. I was not condemned in my youth to solitude, either by indigence or deformity, nor passed the earlier part of life without the flattery of courtship, and the joys of triumph. I have danced the round of gaiety amidst the murmurs of envy, and gratulations of applause; been attended from pleasure to pleasure ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... tyrant of Crema. After a short time the Colleoni brothers found means to assassinate him also; therefore Bartolommeo alone, a child of whom no heed was taken, remained to be his father's avenger. He and his mother lived together in great indigence at Solza, until the lad felt strong enough to enter the service of one of the numerous petty Lombard princes, and to make himself if possible a captain of adventure. His name alone was a sufficient introduction, and the Duchy of Milan, dismembered upon the death of Gian Maria Visconti, was in such ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... to summon him to answer for insubordination. Winchelsea was very unwilling to go to Rome; but Edward seized his temporalities, banished eighty monks for giving him support, and finally exiled him. He died in indigence ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... citizen of Geneva, had the good fortune and good sense to discover and possess this inestimable treasure; and in the capital of taste and luxury she resisted the temptations of wealth, as she had sustained the hardships of indigence. The genius of her husband has exalted him to the most conspicuous station in Europe. In every change of prosperity and disgrace he has reclined on the bosom of a faithful friend; and Mademoiselle Curchod is now the wife of M. Necker,[65] the minister, and perhaps the legislator, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various

... a great deal that he may live and take part in the struggle for existence; but everything that he as an individual learns and does with this end in view has nothing whatever to do with culture. This latter only takes its beginning in a sphere that lies far above the world of necessity, indigence, and struggle for existence. The question now is to what extent a man values his ego in comparison with other egos, how much of his strength he uses up in the endeavour to earn his living. Many a one, by stoically confining his needs within a narrow compass, will shortly and easily ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... mind may be clouded by adversity, but cannot be wholly concealed; for true merit shines by a light of its own, and, glimmering through the rents and crannies of indigence, is perceived, respected, and honored by the generous ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... need, lack, poverty, exigency; inanition, starvation, famine, drought. dole, mite, pittance; short allowance, short commons; half rations; banyan day. emptiness, poorness &c adj.; depletion, vacancy, flaccidity; ebb tide; low water; a beggarly account of empty boxes [Romeo and Juliet]; indigence &c 804; insolvency &c (nonpayment) 808. V. be insufficient &c adj.; not suffice &c 639; come short of &c 304; run dry. want, lack, need, require; caret; be in want &c (poor) 804, live from hand to mouth. render insufficient ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... all," he proceeded, "if he should prove to be the person I seek, everything may go well; I certainly observed faint traces of an honorable feeling about him when I gave him the money, which, notwithstanding his indigence and dissipation, he for a ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... went to the Holy Land with the First Crusade, is cited in the chronicles of Auvergne as being armed with an axe on account of the family indigence, which to this day weighs heavily on the race. This noble baron, famous for discomfiting a vast number of infidels, died, without "or" or "fer," as naked as a worm, near Jerusalem, on the plains of Ascalon, ambulances ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac

... out of a marbil stoon, For ther is nouthir licour nor moisture; An ernest grote, whan it is dronke and goon, Bargeyn of marchauntys stant in aventure. My purs and I be callyd to the lure Off indigence, our stuff leyd in morgage; But ye, my lord, may al our soor recure, With a receyt ...
— A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483 • Anonymous

... Majesty, not so very long ago, the painful and afflicting circumstance which you have just recalled to me. Your companions, for one fortnight, were at the pains to send to my little brother and to me a portion of their food. Our relations; who enjoyed all our property, had reduced us to indigence. But, as soon as my position was ameliorated, I sent fifteen hundred francs to the Reverend Father Superior of the Jesuits for his charities. That manner of reimbursement has not acquitted me, and I could not see an unfortunate man begging me for assistance without ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan

... have prepared for the human soul a future state of reward or punishment." The Imperial pontiff inculcates, in the most persuasive language, the duties of benevolence and hospitality; exhorts his inferior clergy to recommend the universal practice of those virtues; promises to assist their indigence from the public treasury; and declares his resolution of establishing hospitals in every city, where the poor should be received without any invidious distinction of country or of religion. Julian beheld with envy the wise and humane regulations of the church; and he very frankly ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... passed the first part of his life as master of a vessel trading to the colonies. While he resided in the vicinity of Rotherhithe, his avocations obliging him to go early into the city and return late, he frequently saw deserted infants exposed to the inclemencies of the seasons, and through the indigence or cruelty of their parents left to casual relief, or untimely death. This naturally excited his compassion, and led him to project the establishment of an hospital for the reception of exposed and deserted young children; in which humane design he laboured ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler

... amusements, that she had acquired a relish for, which might have taken her mind off from its most destructive bent; but these her indigence would not allow her to enjoy: forced then, by way of relaxation, to play the tunes her lover admired, and handle the pencil he taught her to hold, no wonder his image floated on her imagination, and ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft

... glossy as silken velvet. The interior of the hut denoted poverty, but not indigence. There was a larder in one corner; a small oven wrought into the chimney to the right of the fire-place; faggots and logs of wood were piled up near the hearth, and diverse kitchen utensils and other comforts hung brightly on the wall. In the angle of the solitary room ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance

... they may be, which Nature, or rather Providence, has conferred on me." It is probable that this declaration was the result of real feeling Textd have given great weight to any opinion or party he had espoused, and to whom indigence and exile might have offerred strong temptations to deviate from that line of conduct which a strict sense of ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... people. And it is manifest, that in proportion as the precepts of the divine Redeemer are obeyed by the nations that profess his name, will all distinctions arising merely from the inequality of fortune be lessened or done away, and better opportunities be offered for the children of indigence to adorn themselves with the treasures ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... resolving to stick at nothing nor no person that stands in his way against bringing the King out of debt, be it to retrench any man's place or profit, and that he cares not, for rather than be employed under the King, and have the King continue in this condition of indigence, he desires to be put out from among them, thinking it no honour to be a minister in such a government. He tells me he hath no friends in the whole Court but my Lord Keeper and Sir John Duncomb. He tells me they have ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... to know this would be my resolution. These men, my dear, with all their flatteries, look forward to the PERMANENT. Indeed, it is fit they should. For love must be a very foolish thing to look back upon, when it has brought persons born to affluence into indigence, and laid a generous mind under obligation ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... know how, upon occasion, to give it to themselves. It is not for weak beings, who enter into a composition with guilt, and cover selfishness and cowardice with the name of prudence. It is not for corrupt wretches, who rise from the bed of debauchery, or from the mire of indigence, to feast their eyes upon the blood that streams from the scaffold. It is the portion of a people who delight in humanity, practice justice, despise their flatterers, and respect the truth. While you are not such a people, O my fellow-citizens! you will talk in vain of liberty. ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... At the call of indigence or avarice the master of a family could dispose of his children or his slaves. But the condition of the slave was far more advantageous, since he regained by the first manumission his alienated freedom: the son was again restored to his unnatural father; he might be condemned to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... principal merit to a beneficent action.'—Reflect upon this, my dear, and see how it agrees with the declaration you have made to your aunt and sister, that you would not resume your estate, were you to be turned out of doors, and reduced to indigence and want. Their very fears that you will resume, point out to you the necessity of resuming upon the treatment ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... for help from many sources, but never found it till you came. Do you wonder that I tried to make it mine? Adam, you are a self-elected missionary to the world's afflicted; you can look beyond external poverty and see the indigence of souls. I am a pauper in your eyes; stretch out your hand and save ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott

... earnings; the fees he received for passports, and the arrangement of other affairs, formed part of his salary as secretary of legation, and as he possessed no fortune, this was his only resource. This indigence alone led him to resign his aristocratic independence and freedom of action. He had not entered the state service from ambition, but for money, that he might have the means of supporting his mother and unmarried sisters, and enable himself to live according to his rank ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach

... friends, of fellow citizens, of country, of an asylum; without any of those motives which moderate the ardor of bravery by the value which they attach to existence, they were ever ready to rush, as without sight, upon the most desperate attempts. Equally incapable of submitting to indigence or quiet; too proud to employ themselves in common labor; they would have been the scourge of the Old World, had they not been that of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... ambition to be independent, nor the skill to be useful.' Prompted, perhaps, by some secret reasons, I delivered this observation with too much acrimony, which my Sophia gently reproved. 'Whatsoever his former conduct may be, pappa, his circumstances should exempt him from censure now. His present indigence is a sufficient punishment for former folly; and I have heard my pappa himself say, that we should never strike our unnecessary blow at a victim over whom providence holds the scourge of its resentment.'—'You are right, ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith

... the wisdom of whose years, her faithful services, and good management, make her a much greater merit in this family, than I can pretend to have! And shall I return, in the day of my power, insult and haughtiness for the kindness and benevolence I received from her in that of my indigence!—Indeed, I won't forgive you, my dear Mrs. Jervis, if I think you capable of looking upon me in any other light than as your daughter; for you have been a mother to me, when the absence of my own could not afford me the comfort and good ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson

... from his practice of snarling.—Vitruvius tells us, that when he visited Alexandria, he recited his writings against the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer to King Ptolemy, which gave the king such offence, that he would take no notice of him; and afterwards, when, urged by indigence, he solicited charity, Ptolemy pulsed him with this contemptuous reflection, that if Homer, who had been dead one thousand years, could by his works give maintenance to many thousand people, a writer so much his superior ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various

... the only people who can rush out from the very virtues of private life to the perpetration of crimes at which we shudder. There is, to be sure, an outcry about their oppression; but that is wrong. Their indigence and ignorance are rather the result of neglect;—of neglect, sir, from the government of the country—from the earl to the squireen. They have been taught little that is suitable to their stations and duties in life, either as tenants who cultivate our lands, or as members ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... prices, that it was a period of excessive misery among the mass of the people and the tenants, a time in which a few might have become rich, while the many were crushed down into hopeless and almost permanent indigence." And yet the facts are such as to compel him, when speaking of the Restoration, to point out that[110:1]—"the labourers, as far as the will went, were better off under the rule of the Saints than under that of ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens

... another. One body of troops mutinies for want of pay; a debt is contracted to pay them; and they still remain unpaid. A territory destined to pay other troops is assigned for this debt; and these other troops fall into the same state of indigence and mutiny with the first. Bond is paid by bond; arrear is turned into new arrear; usury engenders new usury; mutiny, suspended in one quarter, starts up in another; until all the revenues and all the establishments are entangled into one inextricable knot of confusion, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... balance, and were to pursue awhile further our chase of the alien, the somehow repeatedly postponed real opportunity; and the second, the comparatively cramped and depressed connection with the classic refuge, as it then was, of spasmodic thrift, when not of settled indigence, for the embarrassed of our race in the largest sense of this matter, was to be shuffled off at last with no scant relief and reaction. This is perhaps exactly why the whole picture of our existence at the Pas-de-Calais watering place pleads to me ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... minister addressed had advocated provision against old age, etc.: the writer declares all private provision un-Christian. After decent maintenance and relief of family claims of indigence, he holds that all the rest is to go to the "Benefit Society," of which he draws up the rules, in technical form, with chapters of "Officers," "Contributors" etc., from the Acts of the Apostles, etc., and some of the early Fathers. He ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... character; and it is currently reported that Napoleon was the son of General Paoli; and that Louis and Jerome were the sons of the Marquis de Marbeuf, governor of the island. The conduct of the Marquis to the family of Bonaparte, then in the utmost indigence, would sanction a belief in this account; he protected the whole family, but particularly the sons, and he caused Napoleon to be placed at the Military School of Brienne, where he supplied him with money. This money was never spent among his companions, but ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison

... indigence continues, all unions or relations constructed between Man and Woman are constructed in indigence, and can produce only indigent results ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... "Middle States," or Southern cities, and old lady, named Landon, the widow of a lost sea captain; and as a dernier resort, occurring in many such cases, with a family of children to provide for,—the father and husband cut off from life and usefulness, leaving his family but a stone's cast from indigence,—the mother, to keep grim poverty from famishing her hearth and desolating her home, took in gentlemen's washing. Her eldest child, a boy of some twelve years old, was in the habit of visiting the largest hotels in ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley

... that he never asked a favour; whereas some other courtiers by their bold importunity exhausted that prince's treasures, who could not deny a man who craved, tho' he hated his forwardness; nor could remember the silent indigence of his friend, tho' he applauded the modesty of it. He was deeply immersed in the public distractions of the times, and is said to have committed many debaucheries, of which the following instance ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber

... how do I know now, that he has not found another to fill that place in his heart which I once occupied? On this subject I dared make no inquiry. And, even if this were not the case, I am not as I was. I had fortune and social standing when he wooed and won me. Now I am in comparative indigence, and branded as an impostor in my native city. If none recognized and received us in our own home, how could I expect him to do so? And to have been spurned as a mere pretender by him would have broken ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur

... sociological cranks, self-advertising politicians, billionaire socialists, and the reporters. To-day the sentimental traveller 'feels a heart-pang to see the order, the cleanliness, the wide streets, the playgrounds, the big boulevards, the absence of indigence that have spoiled the most interesting part of New York City.' But apparently this is only a first impression; for Mr. Huneker had no trouble in discovering in one cafe a patriarchal figure quite of the type beloved ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... volumes; that of a scholar of extensive erudition, whose life seems to have passed in the study of languages and the sciences, while his faculties appear to have been disordered from the simplicity of his nature, and driven to madness by indigence and insult. He formed the wild resolution of becoming a mendicant author, the hawker of his own works; and by this mode endured all the aggravated sufferings, the great and the petty insults of all ranks of society, and ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... stain upon the justice of the Country, if one whom truth and time must rank among its greatest Benefactors, shall be stricken down and permitted to die in indigence by the interested and unworthy efforts thus made to ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various

... nuits sans sommeil pour veiller la souffrance, Tant de pain retranche pour nourrir l'Indigence; Tant de pleurs toujours prets a s'unir a des pleurs, Tant de soupirs brulans vers une autre patrie, Et tant de patience, a porter une vie, Dont la Couronne ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton

... purpose of gaming. These will effectually suppress it. Everywhere else they are entitled to the game, and will keep close watch that it runs into no other net. Let this tax be appropriated to the support of an institution where, in disease and indigence, its victims may find support and relief. Make it public, that all may see and know its habitues, and who may feel the reforming influence of public opinion. For, at last, this is the only power by which the morals of a community are preserved. Let ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... hand to a sore, when you fear anything coming at you; so when a person feels his thoughts are run out, and has no more to say, it is as natural to supply his weak brain with powder at the nearest place of access, viz., the nostrils. This is so evident, that nature suggests the use according to the indigence of the persons who use this medicine, without being prepossessed with the force of fashion or custom. For example; the native Hibernians, who are reckoned not much unlike the ancient Boeotians, take this specific for emptiness in the head, in greater abundance than any other nation under ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken

... into favor; Sir Robert Ramble took back his wife; Solus married Miss Spinster; Mr. Placid assumed the rights of the head of the family; and Mr. Irwin, being accepted as the son-in-law of Lord Norland, was raised from indigence to domestic comfort. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... prince, "answer what I ask; for how think of temples and canals when the treasury is empty? The greatest misfortune has befallen Egypt: its rulers are threatened with indigence. We must examine this, first of all, and cure it; after that the ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus

... And there is a tradition of the prophet, that death to the poor is a state of rest. That ass proceeds all the lighter on his journey on whom they load the lightest burden:—the poor dervish, who suffers under a load of indigence, will in like sort enter the gates of death with an easy burden; but with him who luxuriates in peace, plenty, and affluence, it must be a real hardship to die amidst all these comforts. At all events consider the prisoner, who is released ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... ostentatious gentleman should throw a coin to the ragged beggar who was richer than himself; or when, though he would not always be so decidedly diabolical, his pretended wants should make him a sharer in the scanty living of real indigence. And then what an inexhaustible field of enjoyment, both as enabling him to discern so much folly and achieve such quantities of minor mischief, was opened to his sneering spirit by his pretensions ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... asserters of their independence, whom the flattering pens of Ovid and Horace represent as formidable even to Augustus, and preferring death to the loss of their liberties,[Y] favoured by the natural strength and indigence of their country, were not very likely to be so far subdued by any foreign power inferior to the Roman, as to suffer any considerable revolution in their customs and language: for as to the irruptions of the Goths, Vandals, ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.

... to myself a more perfect example of indigence than I now exhibited. There was no being in the city on whose kindness I had any claim. Money I had none, and what I then wore comprised my whole stock of movables. I had just lost my shoes, and this loss rendered my stockings of no use. My dignity remonstrated against a barefoot ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown

... every part of the country, for the moral and religious instruction of the people. We are very far indeed from saying that enough has been done in this way: no one is better aware that the vast debt, which the prosperous wealth of Britain owes in this respect to its suffering indigence, is still in great part undischarged, and that till it is taken up and put on a proper footing by the state, it never can be completely liquidated;—still, more has been done to discharge it during the last thirty years, than in the whole previous centuries ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various

... support it. In spite of the improvements and additions which were making to the Norland estate, and in spite of its owner having once been within some thousand pounds of being obliged to sell out at a loss, nothing gave any symptom of that indigence which he had tried to infer from it; no poverty of any kind, except of conversation, appeared; but there, the deficiency was considerable. John Dashwood had not much to say for himself that was worth hearing, and his wife had still less. But there was no peculiar ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... them in your lot for the correction of selfishness," said Bessie laughing. "I believe if we all helped the need that belongs to us by kindred or service, there would be little misery of indigence in the world, and little superfluity of riches even amongst the richest. That must have been the original reading of the old saw that sayeth, 'Charity should begin ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... permanently. To this last provision, however, there are three exceptions: one, when a man is entering religion and giving away all his goods; two, when he can easily replace what he gives away; and, three, when he is in presence of great indigence on the part of an individual, or great need on the part of the common weal. In these three cases it is praiseworthy for a man to forgo the requisites of his station in order to provide for ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien

... indigence, need, destitution, privation, neediness, impecuniosity, pauperism; deficiency, paucity, infecundity, dearth, lack, meagerness, sterility, barrenness. Associated ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... withered neck, The coat worn out with care, The cleanliness of indigence, The brilliance of despair, The fond imponderable dreams ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson

... either looking up or looking down, and they are taught how to do it. I remember attending the annual meeting of the Society for the Relief of Indigent Children. The indigent children were first fed and then insulted by a plethoric gentleman, who addressed to them a long discourse on indigence and the various duties that it entailed. And no one of the children was allowed to throw things at the speaker. They had all ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers

... teaching them, inspiring them to be good, devoting his whole thought to their welfare, Pestalozzi, who was described as "either a good-natured fool, or a poor devil, who was compelled, by indigence, to perform the menial office of schoolmaster," began a work ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley



Words linked to "Indigence" :   mendicity, penury, impoverishment, poorness, poverty



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