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Nemesis   /nˈɛməsɪs/   Listen
Nemesis

noun
(pl. nemeses)
1.
(Greek mythology) the goddess of divine retribution and vengeance.
2.
Something causing misery or death.  Synonyms: bane, curse, scourge.






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"Nemesis" Quotes from Famous Books



... great issue which underlies everything. Is there or is there not in the affairs of men a Providence which the ancients pictured as the slow-footed Nemesis, but which we moderns have somewhat learned to disregard? "If right and wrong, in this God's world of ours, are linked with higher Powers," is the great question which the devout soul, whether warrior or saint, ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz

... substance of the Riverside Edition has been preserved, with hardly an exception, although some poems and fragments have been added. None of the poems therein printed have been omitted. "The House," which appeared in the first volume of Poems, and "Nemesis," "Una," "Love and Thought" and "Merlin's Songs," from the May-Day volume, have been restored. To the few mottoes of the Essays, which Mr. Emerson printed as "Elements" in May-Day, most of the others have been added. Following Mr. Emerson's precedent of giving ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... of that haughty old peeress so humiliated was wonderfully pleasant to the wounded pride of Rachael Closs. But far beyond this was the yearning, almost passionate fondness she felt for her brother and the beautiful girl who had been to her at once a Nemesis and an infatuation. ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens

... as the popular religion. The conception which it replaced was that of providence. But the Greeks and Romans knew nothing of providence. They were under the influence of another idea of a different character, the idea, namely, of nemesis and fate. And before them there were more primitive peoples who had no conception of man's destiny at all. In a paper, not yet published, Ellsworth Faris has sketched the natural history of the idea of progress and its predecessors ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... walls of Troy; but in matters that come within the range of ordinary experience, he rarely fails to rise to the appropriate level. Take, for instance, the description of the Iron Age ("Works and Days", 182 ff.) with its catalogue of wrongdoings and violence ever increasing until Aidos and Nemesis are forced to leave mankind who thenceforward shall have 'no remedy against evil'. Such occasions, however, rarely occur and are perhaps not characteristic of Hesiod's genius: if we would see Hesiod at his best, in his most natural vein, we must turn to such a passage as that which ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod

... adieus. Last, he commits himself to the forest primeval; there, so long as life shall be his, to act upon a calm, cloistered scheme of strategical, implacable, and lonesome vengeance. Ever on the noiseless trail; cool, collected, patient; less seen than felt; snuffing, smelling—a Leather-stocking Nemesis. In the settlements he will not be seen again; in eyes of old companions tears may start at some chance thing that speaks of him; but they never look for him, nor call; they know he will not come. Suns and seasons fleet; the tiger-lily blows and ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... there has been on the surface a certain amount of give and take; or at least, as far as the English are concerned, of take rather than give. But it is true that it was once all the other way; and indeed the one thing is something like a just nemesis of the other. Indeed, the story of the reversal is somewhat singular, when we come to think of it. It began in a certain atmosphere and spirit of certain well-meaning people who talked about the English-speaking race; and were apparently indifferent to ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... to see a vision of the future. He seems to be standing somewhere, an old, old man, with a younger one at his side; the younger one has Isley's face. Horses' feet again! Ah, God! Nemesis once more in ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... to which we become faithless has its unfailing Nemesis, if only in that division of soul which narrows all newer joys by the intrusion of regret and the established presentiment of change. I refer not merely to the love of a person, but to the love of ideas, practical beliefs, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot

... and looked back. A hundred yards to the rear four unwinking eyes trailed them, like some modern Nemesis in monstrous guise. ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... future state, and in uncaused volitions, the indication, as the doctors say, is to suppress Theology and Philosophy, whose bickerings about things of which they know nothing have been the prime cause and continual sustenance of that evil scepticism which is the Nemesis of meddling with ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley

... laboured during the past two years inspires the confidence that a consensus of British opinion will, in the Union's interest, stay the hand of the South African Government, veto this iniquity and avert the Nemesis that would ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... similar series of pursuits by the male in appropriate form, "in this manner pairs of all sorts of creatures down to ants were created". This myth is a parallel to the various Greek legends about the amours in bestial form of Zeus, Nemesis, Cronus, Demeter and other gods and goddesses. In the Brahmanas this myth is an explanation of the origin of species, and such an explanation as could scarcely have occurred to a civilised mind. In other myths in the Brahmanas, Prajapati creates men from his body, or rather ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... anti-social and individualist demonstration. Hubris, you know, is Greek for insolence; at least, not quite insolence, but a sort of pride and overweening rebelliousness against the gods, the kind of arrogance that brings Nemesis after it, you understand. It was hubris in Agamemnon and Xerxes to go swelling about and ruffling themselves like turkey-cocks, because they were great conquerors and all that sort of thing; and it was their ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... something quite different from that which they intended and wished. Sublime laws govern above us, between us, full of mystery in the midst of life; one of them in reference to guilt, punishment of guilt, is called nemesis. Faith in that meaning of the word, which we regard as a low one [he means the faith which has its dogmas beyond which the man of the most recent culture has passed, not knowing that he also carries around with him his dogmas, his ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid

... of you to say that the fourteen pages of good advice did not bore you. Can it have been that you did not read them? No Dean—and perhaps no don—who has been in that portentous position as long as I have can fail to become a perennial stream of advice. It is the Nemesis of those who have all their lives been treated with more respect than they have deserved. I am the only exception with which I am acquainted. Child, why do you not make more use of your noble gifts ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain

... Buckingham overtaken by Nemesis; that is to say, in this, as in so many other instances, how soon was he visited by the consequences which in the nature of things attended his actions! First, owing to his influence the establishment of that council ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... are so unused to kindness, that when they occasionally meet with it they look upon it with suspicion, as a dog often beaten snaps at your fingers if you attempt to caress him. "They are ungrateful, notoriously, abominably ungrateful!"—this is the general cry. Now, in the name of Nemesis! for what are they to be grateful? Where is the human being that ever conferred a benefit on Greek or Greeks? They are to be grateful to the Turks for their fetters, and to the Franks for their broken promises and lying counsels. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... the hand of Nemesis that the South, led to crushing defeat by its slave-holding aristocracy, should now have its interests sacrificed through the characteristic faults of one of its poor whites,—his virtues overborne by his narrow judgment, uncontrolled temper and ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... tightly on the prize which he had just received from his victim, he turned, and started to run. But an avenging Nemesis, in the shape of a piece of orange-peel, was behind him; his foot slipped upon it, and he came heavily to the ground. Before he could rise, the florist precipitated himself upon him with so much momentum, that he ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews

... now no longer a resident of the Ormgrass Farm. After the discovery of their true relation, Tharald had shown a sort of sullen, superstitious fear of him, evidently regarding him as a providential Nemesis who had come to avenge the wrong he had done to his absent brother. No amount of friendliness on Maurice's part could dispel this lurking suspicion, and at last he became convinced that, for the old man's sake as well as for ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... he had known that Mr Wentworth was thinking only of disgrace and the stern sentence of public opinion, Wodehouse could have put up with it; but he himself, in his guilty imagination, jumped at the bar and the prison which had haunted him for long. Somehow it felt natural that such a Nemesis should come to him after the morning's triumph. He stood looking after the Curate, guilty and horror-stricken, till it occurred to him that he might be remarked; and then he made a circuit past Elsworthy's shop-window as far as the ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... The Sirens three, Ulysses shunned were such as she, Though robed in simpler raiment. Is there no modern Nemesis To deal out to such ghouls as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various

... taken for me from Antwerp the "St. Jerome in the Cell," the "Melancholy," and three new "Marys," the "Anthony" and the "Veronica" for the good sculptor, Master Conrad, whose like I have not seen; he serves Lady Margaret, the Emperor's daughter. Also I gave Master Figidius a "Eustace" and a "Nemesis." I owe my host 7 florins, 20 stivers, I thaler—that is, on Sunday before St. Bartholomew: for sitting room, bedroom, and bedding I am to pay him 11 ...
— Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - [This is our volunteer's translation of the title] • Albrecht Durer

... culture, and removal of prejudice—then, and not till then, will this powerful little play meet with the appreciation which is its due. The main idea is suggested by the Misses TAYLOR'S well-known poem, The Pin, though the dramatist has gone further than the poetess in working out the notion of Nemesis. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various

... shortly; but it may here be remarked that in 1505, the date of the first project, Julius was only entering upon his conquests. It would have been a gross act of flattery on the part of the sculptor, a flying in the face of Nemesis on the part of his patron, to design a sepulchre anticipating length of life and ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... The Nemesis which waits upon men of extraordinary wit or humor has not neglected Mr. Lincoln, and the young lawyers of Illinois, who never knew him, have an endless store of jokes and pleasantries in his name; some of them as old as Howleglass or Rabelais. [Footnote: As a specimen of these ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... Serpent"—but published in Warwick Lane, and later in the stirring High Street of Beverley, as "Three Times Dead." In "Three Times Dead" I gave loose to all my leanings to the violent in melodrama. Death stalked in ghastliest form across my pages; and villainy reigned triumphant till the Nemesis of the last chapter. I wrote with all the freedom of one who feared not the face of a critic; and, indeed, thanks to the obscurity of its original production, and its re-issue as the ordinary two-shilling railway novel, this first novel of mine has almost entirely escaped the critical lash, and ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various

... responsibility; and thus, by each owning to but a little share collectively, they commit a great enormity. It is the whole and sole responsibility of the individual, responsibility to that inner arbiter sitting foro conscientiae, and the sight of those frowning attendants of the court, Nemesis and Adraste, ready with the scourge to follow crime, that keep the man honest. Put not confidence, Eusebius, in bodies, in guilds, and committees. Trust not to them property or person; they may be all individually good Samaritans, but collectively ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... his Lampooner at the Feast. And I have often thought what a pretty picture, for Millais to do, of the Child Keats keeping guard outside his sick Mother's Chamber with a drawn Sword. If Catullus, however, were only Fescennining, his 'Malice' was not against Caesar, but against the Nemesis that might else be revenged on him—eh? But I don't understand how Suetonius, or those he wrote for, could have forgotten, though for party purposes they may have ignored, the nature and humour of that Fescennine which is known to Scholars two thousand years after. How very learned, and probably ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald

... out a golden goblet for himself, "Hear, God of war," cried Cataline, "unto whose minister and omen we offer daily worship; hear, mighty Mars, the homicide and the avenger; and thou, most ancient goddess, hear, Nemesis! and Hecate, and Hades! and all ye powers of darkness, Furies and Fates, hear ye! For unto ye we swear, never to quench the torch; never to sheath the brand; till all our foes be prostrate, till not one drop shall run in living ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... broke open the coffin of Murillo, and scattered his ashes to the wind. Marshal Soult treated the ashes of Cervantes in a similar manner. War desecrates all things, human and divine; but sometimes becomes a Nemesis, dispensing poetical justice, as when Waterloo caused the return to Spain of a portion of ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... Nemesis had called at last in the shape of a rival claimant. I staggered for an instant; then I said, "Oh, I think you are under a mistake; ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various

... spite of this contemporary succes d'estime, Tibullus is clearly a minor poet. He expresses only one aspect of his time. His few themes are oft-repeated and in monotonous rhythms. He sings of nothing greater than his own lost loves. Yet of Delia, Nemesis and Neaera, we learn only that all were fair, faithless and venal. For a man whose ideal of love was life-long fidelity, he ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus

... war, the kings and peoples of Asia had he broken, grievous slavery was he bringing even to thee, O Rome,—for all else had fallen before that man's sword,—when suddenly, in the midst of his struggle for mastery, headlong he fell, driven from fatherland into exile. Such is the will of Nemesis; at a mere nod, in a moment of time, the ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... the wild country whither Aulus had borne his captive, exclaiming in a low silent voice with a clinched hand, and eyes turned heavenward, "I will die, ere dishonor reach her! Aid me! aid me, thou Nemesis—aid me to ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... terror to their guilty souls. Something more than mortal is pursuing—to punish them. Is it the hand of God? For days they have been in dread of God's hand; and now they seem to see it stretched out, and coming towards them! Surely a Fate—an avenging Nemesis! ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid

... instant of hesitation never left her mind. To the end of her days she will carry a vision of his tall form, imposing in his judicial robes and with the majesty of his office still upon him, fingering this envelope in sight of such persons as still lingered in his part of the room. Nemesis was lowering its black wings over his devoted head, and, with feelings which left her dazed and transfixed in silent terror, Deborah saw his finger tear its way through the envelope and his eyes fall frowningly on the ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green

... named Moran. This particular ruin did Mr. Moran boast to have contributed as his separate contribution to the general ruinations of the stables. And the particular object was, that his horses, and consequently himself, might be left in genial laziness. But, as Nemesis would have it, Mr. Moran was the charioteer specially appointed to this particular service. We were to return by easy journeys of twenty-five miles a day, or even less; since every such interval brought us to the house of some hospitable family, connected by friendship ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... was the man he most dreaded, with a shadow of a smile on his lips, his figure motionless, his hand ready, like an avenging Nemesis from out of the night. A perceptible shudder shook the fellow. Weir it was—"Cold Steel," whose counter-stroke against one man already had been swift and deadly, whom nothing checked or turned or terrified, ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd

... and the "Assin-a-pau-tuk," had quitted their earthen forts on the banks of the streams and urged their way to the broader tide of the Missouri. More fatal to the conquerors came afterward, the white man, "Nemesis" of all Indian life, spying with the instinct of his race, a spot of abounding fertility, where the great water-reaches stretched from the mountains to the sea, and southward touched almost the beginning of the great River ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce

... steps hardly died away in the hallway before the beautiful Nemesis made a careful inspection of her splendid reception-room. The splendors of its curtained arches, its fretted ceiling, and its frescoed walls were idly passed over, for the woman only made an exhaustive survey of its geometrical ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... of a Providence whose intervention in human affairs is no longer recognized, there still is a Nemesis of history whose operations can scarcely be denied. International morality, strange as the juxtaposition of the two words may seem, exists no less than the law of gravity; and a statesman who offends against the one must expect much the same ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott

... was so much engaged in admiring herself that she forgot the hot water she was supposed to carry to the various rooms. Nor did she see Ruth sitting up in bed looking at her in dawning amusement. Nor did she, as she pirouetted there, hear her Nemesis outside ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson

... north and unmoved by the glorious aims that, like a star of hope, led Hudson on. They saw no star of hope, and felt only hunger and cold and that dislike of the hardships of life which is the birthright of the weakling, as well as his Nemesis. ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut

... united effort among the leaders of the race along all lines to this end. Advocates of higher learning and of industrial education must accord respect to each other's opinions and work unitedly, in order that neither may fall a sacrifice to the "Nemesis of Neglect." And the race must sustain its leaders of thought and action. There is no time to lose, none to waste in eternal strife. The field is large enough for all to glean and work in. The race must make a common cause, meet a common ...
— The Educated Negro and His Mission - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 8 • W. S. Scarborough

... that at first I was a wee bit sorry for her, but after all, this Nemesis was thoroughly deserved, and when I saw the impression that the metamorphosis had made on Jack—the darling goose can't conceal his feelings—I must own to ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris

... face of the corpse, and sinister Lydia Maitland was watching the scene with eyes which made me shudder, reminding me of what I had divined at the time of my last conversation with Alba. If she does not undertake to play the part of a Nemesis and to tell all to the Countess, I am mistaken in faces! For the moment she was silent, and guess the only words the mother uttered when her lover, he on whose account her daughter had suffered so much, approached their ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget

... community. The laws are adequate; we simply require efficient and faithful officers to execute them; and as a legislative body we have done our duty in condemning this outrage, the punishment of which we leave to another tribunal—the Nemesis ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... "Sir Rohan" attempts character in Redruth the butler, and in the villain and heroine of her story. We are inclined to think the villain the best hit of the three, because he is downright scoundrel without a redeeming point, as the Nemesis of the story required him to be, and because he is so far a purely ideal character. But there is no such thing possible as an ideal butler, at least in the sense our author assumes in the cellar-scene. The better poet, the worse butler; and so we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... you heard of the coming of Nemesis, How she glides through the ambient gloom That envelops the Downing-Street premises Where GEORGE is awaiting his doom? For the hour of his utter discredit Has struck and the blighter must go If the Carmelite organs have said it It's bound to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various

... seems that way." He glanced back at her curiously. "And wherever he goes, Del lugs an old Russian book, which he can't read but which he nevertheless regards, in some sort of way, as St. Vincent's Nemesis. And do you know, Frona, he has such faith in it that I can't help catching a little myself. I don't know whether you'll come to me, or whether I'll go ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London

... the eighteenth of June,—a day which, if the Greek superstition still retained its influence, would be held sacred to Nemesis,—a day on which the two greatest princes of modern times were taught, by a terrible experience, that neither skill nor valor can fix the inconstancy of fortune. The battle began before noon; and part of the Prussian ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... not be taught to eat leather, says the old adage: no;—and where, by general fault and error, and the inevitable nemesis of things, the universal kennel is set to diet upon leather; and from its keepers, its 'Liberal Premiers,' or whatever their title is, will accept or expect nothing else, and calls it by the pleasant name of progress, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... Nemesis of the East, had won her maiden spurs on the field of warfare in her brief conflict with China in 1894, but that was looked upon as a fight between a young game-cock and a decrepit barn-yard fowl, and the Western ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... these mistakes, by the hypothesis, themselves punish him who made them, without any resentment whatsoever, or Nemesis of the Gods being required for ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley

... upon the case, which asserts that the moral of the Trojan war was (to borrow a phrase from children) tit for tat. It was a case of retaliation for crimes against Hellas, committed by Troy in an earlier generation. It may be so; Nemesis knows best. But this moral, if it concerns the total expedition to the Troad, cannot concern the 'Iliad,' which does not take up matters from so early a period, nor go on to the ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... Homer the reflective passages are cheerless,[73] and the moment the Greeks grew systematically pensive and thought of ultimates, they became unmitigated pessimists.[74] The jealousy of the gods, the nemesis that follows too much happiness, the all-encompassing death, fate's dark opacity, the ultimate and unintelligible cruelty, were the fixed background of their imagination. The beautiful joyousness of their polytheism is only a poetic modern fiction. They knew no joys comparable in quality of ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... The terrible Nemesis of evil is that it ever tends to reproduce itself in aggravated forms. Think of the influence of habit; the searing of conscience, so that we become able to do things that we would have shrunk from at an earlier stage. Remember how impunity leads to greater ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... that great masterpiece. Mean and ordinary though the surroundings of the story may seem, the heroine Natasha is like one of the noble victims of Greek tragedy; she is Antigone with the passion of Phaedra, and it is impossible to approach her without a feeling of awe. Greek also is the gloom of Nemesis that hangs over each character, only it is a Nemesis that does not stand outside of life, but is part of our own nature and of the same material as life itself. Aleosha, the beautiful young lad whom Natasha follows to her doom, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... years later that this Caesar laid rough hands on my most intimate fate. In anger at this I betrayed the secret of his Caesar mania and made my erstwhile benefactor such a laughing stock, that his existence became unbearable to him. And now listen how Nemesis overtakes one! A year later I wrote a book-I am, you must know, an author who's not made his name.... And in this book I described incidents of family life: how I played with my daughter—she was called Julia, as Caesar's daughter ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg

... It was Nemesis, therefore, and not the mere lust of plunder, that guided the Boriquen Indians and their Carib allies on their ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk

... loyal to Hellas,—to strive valiantly for her freedom,—and now! Was the Nemesis coming upon him, not in one great clap, but stealthily, finger by finger, cubit by cubit, until his soul's price was to be utterly paid? Was this the beginning of the recompense for the night scene ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... as she faced the man who watched her with fatherly solicitude. He stood waiting like some Nemesis,—waiting with the assurance that she would act as all the royal women of her race had always acted, bravely and loyally. From without there came a fresh cheer from the impatient men ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... on for its own purposes; it was the others he had evoked—and, above all, the sense of common misfortune which no man can avert for ever. For the moment he lost faith in his own power to maintain himself against a patient and faceless Nemesis. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie

... Elders over his death have a note of personal affection (pp. 66 ff.). But I suspect that Aeschylus, a believer in the mystic meaning of names, took the name Agamemnon to be a warning that [Greek: Aga mimnei], "the unseen Wrath abides." Aga, of course, is not exactly wrath; it is more like Nemesis, the feeling that something is [Greek: agan], "too much," the condemnation of Hubris (pride or overgrowth) and of all things that are in excess. Aga is sometimes called "the jealousy of God," but such a translation is not happy. It is not the jealousy, ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus

... to herself for the first time. Was it her own soul? Had her Other Self, waking from sleep in the eternal spaces, bethought itself and come to whisper and warn and help? Or was it Penalty, or Nemesis, or that Destiny which will have its toll for all it gives of beauty, or pleasure, or ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... secretary for him from among the best clerks, and further intimated that the selection had fallen upon himself, Jones accepted the promotion quietly, fatalistically, yet with a degree of inward loathing hardly to be described. For he saw in this merely another move in the evolution of the inevitable Nemesis which he simply dared not seek to frustrate by any personal consideration; and at the same time he was conscious of a certain feeling of relief that the suspense of waiting might soon be mitigated. A secret sense of ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood

... any prejudices. He will be found always to believe that as a man sows so shall he reap. And this is so evidently true when it is considered, that if one takes the larger view, including all human life, it makes intelligible the awful Nemesis which seems consciously to pursue the human race,—that inexorable appearance of pain in the midst of pleasure. The great Greek poets saw this apparition so plainly that their recorded observation has given to us younger and blinder observers the idea of it. It ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins

... but know that. He had sacrificed personal ambition, personal happiness, to the service of one supremely dear to him. Not for a moment did he regret it. Had it to be done all over again, without hesitation he would do it. Still there was no blinking facts. Here was the nemesis, not of ill living, but of good—namely, emptiness, loneliness, homelessness, Old Age here at his elbow, Death waiting ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... to estimate the malign influence upon society of one single fallen woman? Did you ever endeavor to calculate the evils of such a leaven stealthily disseminating its influence in a community? Woman, courted, flattered, fondled, tempted and deceived, becomes in turn the terrible Nemesis—the insatiate Avenger of her sex! Armed with a power which is all but irresistible, and stripped of that which alone can retain and purify her influence, she steps upon the arena of life ready to act ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... of the past. For a long time now he has eaten of the white man's lotos—the bimonthly beef-issue. I looked on him and wondered at the new things. The buffalo, the warpath, all are gone. What of the cavalrymen over at Adobe—his Nemesis in the stirring days—are they, too, lounging in barracks, since his lordship no longer leads them trooping over the burning flats by day and through the ragged hills by night? I will go ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington

... Francis from Italy. It was signed at Worms on the 8th of May, the day on which Luther was outlawed;[432] and a war broke out in Italy, the effects of which (p. 154) were little foreseen by its principal authors. A veritable Nemesis attended this policy conceived in perfidy and greed. The battle of Pavia made Charles more nearly dictator of Europe than any ruler has since been, except Napoleon Bonaparte. It led to the sack of Rome and the imprisonment of Clement VII. by Charles's troops. The dependence of the Pope on the ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard

... I believe him to be," replied Mr. Carlyle, glancing round to make sure that none could hear the assertion save those present. "But what I say to you and Barbara, I would not say to the world. Whatever be the man's guilt, I am not his Nemesis. Dear Mrs. Hare, take courage, take comfort—happier ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood

... Ouida's story "Signa," which I devoured regularly for a couple of years. I never knew the finish until I grew up, for the closing chapters were missing from my copy, so I kept on dreaming with the hero, and, like him, unable to see Nemesis, at the end. My work on the ranch at one time was to watch the bees, and as I sat under a tree from sunrise till late in the afternoon, waiting for the swarming, I had plenty of time to read and dream. Livermore Valley was very flat, and even the ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London

... "The veiled Metropole Nemesis was to see the sentry today.... She seemed to be quite happy about something and looked up in the direction of my window a number of times.... She was eating some of those champagne-colored rose leaves ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe

... it. They even use their friends for their own selfish purposes, and so never have true friends. Some men shed friends at every step they rise in the social scale. It is mean and contemptible to merely use men, so long as they further one's personal interests. But there is a nemesis on such heartlessness. To such can never come the ecstasy and comfort of mutual trust. This worldly policy can never truly succeed. It stands to reason that they cannot have brothers born for adversity, and cannot count on the joy of the ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black

... says: "All that glitters is not gold"? It applies not only to physical but also to mental condition. My mental condition was one of happiness. Louise was beautiful. Louise was kind, and the world was good and so was the champagne. But Nemesis was not ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon

... there are some whose speeches would be more enjoyable if they were all diagrams. As for that pledge of the New Citizenship, the Education Bill, the debate on the second reading has been such a long eulogy of its author that Mr. Fisher would be well advised to offer a propitiatory sacrifice to Nemesis. ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch

... lived, and there she died. As soon as she was laid in her grave, it was torn down, and the precious damson-tree was felled. I was rather glad that the school-house was so ugly, that I might have a double reason for hating the usurper. If Nemesis cared for school-boys, she doubtless looks on with a grin, now, to see them scampering at their will round the precincts of the former enemy of their race, and listens with pleasure while they "make day hideous" ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various

... sculptor of the age of Phidias, and said to have been his favourite pupil. His most noted work was the statue at Rhamnus of Nemesis, by some attributed to Phidias himself. Of this statue part of the head is in the British Museum; some fragments of the reliefs which adorned the pedestal are in the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... wife recklessly broke the bond which she had as recklessly formed, and which the poet would have honorably and truly respected all his life; and then her passionate regret reacted fatally on herself,—and on him also, by a Nemesis not so very strange or unnatural, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... "for ridding the world of a sordid worm;* of a man whose very soul was dross, and who never had a feeling for the Truthful and the Beautiful? When I stood before my uncle in the moonlight, in the gardens of the ancestral halls of the De Barnwells, I felt that it was the Nemesis come to overthrow him. 'Dog,' I said to the trembling slave, 'tell me where thy Gold is. THOU hast no use for it. I can spend it in relieving the Poverty on which thou tramplest; in aiding Science, which thou knowest not; in uplifting Art, to which thou art blind. Give Gold, and thou ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray

... conquest. Mr. Johnson, when elected, appeared to represent the most violent radical ideas and the most vindictive passions engendered by the war. He spoke as if the blacks were to find in him a Moses, and the Rebels a Nemesis. It seemed as if there could not be in the whole land a sufficient number of sour-apple trees to furnish hanging accommodations for the possible victims of his patriotic wrath. One almost feared that reconciliation would be indefinitely postponed by the relentless severity with which he would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... while brilliant with serious ability it gave not the least hint of those rich resources of humour that since have diffused so much innocent pleasure. Most of her successes have been gained as the formidable lady who typifies in comedy the domestic proprieties and the Nemesis of respectability. It was her refined and severely correct demeanour that gave soul and wings to the wild fun of A Night Off. From Miss Garth to Mrs. Laburnum is a far stretch of imitative talent for the interpretation of the woman nature that everybody, ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter

... commander, who inspired them with the fullest confidence. He came invested with the halo of a constitution-maker-under-difficulties; it was known that he had stopped at nothing in carrying out his mission in Sicily; not even at getting rid of the Queen, who found in Bentinck the Nemesis for having led a greater Englishman to stain his fame in the roads of Naples. Driven rather than persuaded to leave Sicily, Marie Antoinette's sister encountered so frightful a sea voyage that she died soon after joining ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... and revenge, the mother and the wife in her asserting themselves in a way which I leave you to imagine. She deafened the gods with her cries, appealing to Jupiter, Nemesis, the judges from Hades, in fact all who would be importuned. She represented the seriousness of the case, pointing out that her son could now not make a step without a stick. No punishment, she urged, was heavy enough for so dire a crime, and she demanded that the ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine

... is not for us to punish men nor avenge ourselves for slights, wrongs and insults—wait, and you will see that Nemesis unhorses the ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard

... beautiful, of the historically interesting places of the world, he had visited and sojourned in—without avail. His haunting feeling, he said, was that he did not belong to himself. Pursued by this Nemesis, he came home to end it all. He still proclaimed his spiritual independence; but it was immeshed, and he must tear the strands. This was wonderfully perplexing to me, and, out of my curiosity, I must persuade him to make one more ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... that wrong, and by your hand must he be destroyed." He rose, and caught the younger man's hands again in his own, forced Mr. Caryll to confront him. "He shall know when the time comes whose hand it was that pulled him down; he shall know the Nemesis that has lain in wait for him these thirty years to smite him at the end. And he shall taste hell in this world before he goes to it in the next. It is God's own justice, boy! Will you be false to the duty that lies before ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini

... is at the North. If you are for the South, your place is with those who are preparing to defend the rights and liberties of the South. A word to the wise is sufficient. You will hear from me again in due time. NEMESIS." ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris

... with a weak, if not a missing, link in the middle. Picture, if you will, an insane man being choked by a supposedly sane one, and he in turn being choked by a temporarily sane insane friend of the assaulted one, and you will have Nemesis as nearly in a nutshell as any mere rhetorician has yet been able to ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... trade Of assassination sadly Blots the record he has made, And your name and title paints In the calendar of saints; When the devils, dancing madly In the midmost Hell, are very Multitudinously merry— Then beware, beware, beware!—- Nemesis is everywhere! You shall hear her at your back, And, your hunted visage turning, Fancy that her eyes are burning Like a tiger's on your track! You shall hear her in the breeze Whispering to summer trees. You shall hear her calling, calling To your ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce

... direct from poor Alda till Clement was summoned by a telegram from Ironbeam Park to find his sister in the utmost danger, with a new-born son by her side, and her husband in the paroxysms of the terrible Nemesis ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge

... did belated Nemesis overtake the press-gang. It died the unmourned victim of its own enormities, and the manner of its passing forms the by no means least interesting chapter in ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson

... did not strike us as a bad one. He could pitch, and he always kept his arm in prime condition. We welcomed him into the fray for two reasons—because he might win the game, and because he might be overtaken by the baseball Nemesis. ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey

... manes of Sulpicia Pallas have avenged her. Here lies Lucius Horatillavus, physician, who poisoned himself." If the epitaph is genuine, it is a confession of guilt. The death of the quack by his own poison is a curious Nemesis. The manner of his death proves that it was accidental, as few quacks are bold enough ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... terrible "hundred years war," wherein Englishmen, led by the descendants of their Norman and French conquerors, retaliated upon Normandy and France the woes they had themselves endured. Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt avenged Hastings; the siege of Rouen under Henry the Fifth was a strange Nemesis. During that century the state of France was almost as sad as that of England during the earlier period; it was but a field for English youth to learn the arts of warfare at the ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... it. His wicked heart sank accordingly. He knew that he had been a bad, bad boy, and he conceived the notion that Nemesis was rolling up her sleeves, all to his ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White

... and was possibly impolite, but she was not prepared for the Nemesis that descended upon her head. She had just congratulated herself that Blanche, Mabel, and Elsie had beaten a retreat and that she had been able to take her snap-shot so successfully, when who should make his unwelcome appearance but the guide, catching her in the very act ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil

... female are often like one another. Thus it is very difficult to distinguish a male starfish from a female starfish, or a male sea-urchin from a female sea-urchin. It becomes abundantly clear that degeneration in active function, whether it be that of the male or the female, is the inevitable nemesis of parasitism. The males and females in the cases we have examined may be said to be martyrs to ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... in the sword of Damocles which hung above him, and the time might come when Raby would cease to stand between him and his Nemesis. ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed

... stirring to and fro dances of maidens and shrill noise of pipes: and binding golden bay-leaves in their hair they make them merry cheer. Nor pestilence nor wasting eld approach that hallowed race: they toil not neither do they fight, and dwell unharmed of cruel Nemesis. ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar

... me that Aunt Martha knew the awful relatives of Bunch, and that the old lady was camping on my trial. Yes; there she stood, old Aunt Nemesis, glaring at me from ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh

... to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny—the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves—of, by, and for, slaves—must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... the death of her daughters; and, meeting her on the staircase, I sometimes fancied that she did not see me so much as something beyond me. Did any misfortune befall her after this double funeral? Did the Nemesis that waits upon the sighs of children pursue her steps? Not apparently: externally, things went well; her sons were reasonably prosperous; her handsome daughter—for she had a more youthful daughter, who really was handsome—continued to improve in personal attractions; and some years after, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... will see itself in everything, and set down blasphemies; it will see Beelzebub in the casting out of devils, it will find its god of flies in every alabaster box of precious ointment. The indignation of zeal towards God (nemesis) it will take for anger against man, faith and veneration it will miss of, as not comprehending, charity it will turn into lust, compassion into pride, every virtue it will go over against, like Shimei, casting ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... hands the decadent idea, what there was of it, went entirely to pieces, which nobody has troubled to pick up. Oddly enough (unless this be always the Nemesis of excess) it began to be insupportable in the very ways in which it claimed specially to be subtle and tactful; in the feeling for different art-forms, in the welding of subject and style, in the appropriateness of the epithet ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... of his colleagues was anxious to take his job; perhaps the Nationalist leader insisted on keeping him in the silken fetters of office as a hostage for Home Rule. Anyhow, the opportunity was missed; and thenceforward Nemesis dogged ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various

... ruminated, there came to his stolid vision the form of Youth, glorious Youth, rising exultant and invincible, supple of muscle and silken of skin, with heart and lungs that had never been tired and torn and that laughed at limitation of effort. Yes, Youth was the Nemesis. It destroyed the old uns and recked not that, in so doing, it destroyed itself. It enlarged its arteries and smashed its knuckles, and was in turn destroyed by Youth. For Youth was ever youthful. It was only Age that ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London

... to understand at once the relevance of the ragged money and realized that Joan was sobbing into his shoulder the tale of an eavesdropping bartender and a doctor. He accepted it, dazedly, thunderstruck at the alertness of his Nemesis who missed no single chance to ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... very sorry to hear from Hooker that you have been unwell again. You see if young men from the country will go plunging into the dissipations of the metropolis nemesis follows. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley

... in which God makes terrible examples, to put before the most stupid and sensual the choice of Hercules, the upward road of life, the downward one which leads to the pit. Since the time of Pharaoh and the Red Sea host, history is full of such palpable, unmistakable revelations of the Divine Nemesis; and in England, too, at that moment, the crisis was there; and the judgment of God was revealed accordingly. Sir Lewis Stukely remained, it seems, at court; high in favour with James: but he found, nevertheless, that people looked darkly on him. Like many self-convicted rogues, ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley

... your isolation: he is dead, Or all as dead: henceforth we let you be: Win you the hearts of women; and beware Lest, where you seek the common love of these, The common hate with the revolving wheel Should drag you down, and some great Nemesis Break from a darkened future, crowned with fire, And tread you out for ever: but howso'er Fixed in yourself, never in your own arms To hold your own, deny not hers to her, Give her the child! O if, I say, you keep One pulse that ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... because she feared him, and it seems like the Nemesis of fate that three hundred years later the death-blow of Spain as a world power was dealt in Manila Bay by the nation which Raleigh strove so hard to plant, himself all unconscious of what the years were to bring. On that famous morning when Dewey startled the world and chastised Spain for her ...
— The White Doe - The Fate of Virginia Dare • Sallie Southall Cotten

... over the Nemesis had come, and Lucia, woman as she was, could not repress a thrill of malicious joy, even though Elsley became more intolerable than ever ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... a red-hot raving Nemesis indeed; and Will, while prepared for a speedy meeting with his enemy, neither expected nor desired an encounter just then. But it had come, and he knew what was before him. Grimbal, just returned from a long day's sport, rode back to his hotel in a ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... mythology there was a very distinct recognition of the power of conscience, and a reference of its authority to the Divinity, together with the idea of retribution. Nemesis was regarded as the impersonation of the upbraidings of conscience, of the natural dread of punishment that springs up in the human heart after the commission of sin. And as the feeling of remorse may be considered as the consequence ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... the Tartars) declined to put in a claim to the Tsin succession against his brothers "because he had not been in mourning whilst a fugitive." In 642 Sung and her allies made war on Ts'i, which was then mourning for the First Protector; by a just Nemesis the Tartars came to the rescue and saved Ts'i. In 627, after the Second Protector's death, Ts'in declared war, whilst Tsin was mourning, upon a petty orthodox principality belonging to the same clan as Tsin and the Emperor, and belonging also to the ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker

... that the guilty will not escape the vengeance of the goddess, since it is inevitable; but, as to him, he will not wreak it. Nemesis shall watch; he will sleep. He reserves to himself, however, one revenge. Which? Ever ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... her husband. "Lawyer Cole says most American names are corrupted, and how do you know that yours ain't?" Mulrady, who would not swear that his ancestors came from Ireland to the Carolinas in '98, was helpless to refute the assertion. But the terrible Nemesis of an un-Spanish, American provincial speech avenged the orthographical outrage at once. When Mrs. Mulrady began to be addressed orally, as well as by letter, as "Mrs. Mulraid," and when simple amatory effusions to her daughter rhymed with ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte

... Nemesis was coming, however. He had got as far as Chapter LIX, which at his leisurely pace he could hardly have reached before October or November 1614, when there was put into his hand a small octave lately printed ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... Materialists—they have none greater! They can show on their side no intellect equal to Caesar's! And yet this magnificent freethinker, rejecting a soul and a Deity, habitually entered his chariot muttering a charm; crawled on his knees up the steps of a temple to propitiate the abstraction called 'Nemesis;' and did not cross the Rubicon till he had consulted the omens. What does all this prove?—a very simple truth. Man has some instincts with the brutes; for instance, hunger and sexual love. Man has ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... his midnight dreams, black NEMESIS! Whom,[1] self-conceiving in the inmost depths Of CHAOS, blackest NIGHT long-labouring bore, When the stern DESTINIES, her elder brood. And shapeless DEATH, from that more monstrous birth Leapt shuddering! haunt his slumbers, Nemesis, Scorch with the fires of Phlegethon his heart, Till helpless, ...
— Poems • Robert Southey

... my boy! That's just what I wanted. Nemesis has a clear road, and her shadowy sword shall reach you. Now for the ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... their spiritual and intellectual sop to Nemesis. Even when most positive, they admitted a percentage of doubt. Mr. Tennyson has said well, "There lives more doubt"—I quote from memory—"in honest faith, believe me, than in half the" systems of philosophy, or words to that effect. The victor had a slave at his ear during ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler

... back before this apparition and appeared to lose his power of speech. She advanced like an avenging Nemesis between us. ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green

... the Frenchman's only scourge, Your kingdom's terror and black Nemesis? O, were mine eye-balls into bullets turn'd, That I in rage might shoot them at your faces! O, that I could but can these dead to life! It were enough to fright the realm of France: Were but his picture ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]

... even the good faith of the Union delegates; and although he had escaped himself through flush times and starvation times with a handsomely provided purse, he had so little faith in either man or master, and so profound a terror for the unerring Nemesis of mercantile affairs, that he could think of no hope for our country outside of a sudden and complete political subversion. Down must go Lords and Church and Army; and capital, by some happy direction, must change ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... of perhaps ninety percent of those Caucasians who believe in a God of any kind. Their root-conviction is that if God would only let them alone they would get along well enough; but as a terrible avenging spirit, like the Fury or the Nemesis of the ancients, he is always tracking them down. The aversion from God so noticeable in the mind of to-day is, I venture to think, chiefly inspired by the instinct to get away from, or to hide from, ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... shocked and driven into himself by 'the immoral thoughtlessness' of men. The courses of nature, and the prodigious injustices of man in society, affect him with neither horror nor awe. He will see no monster if he can help it. For the fatal Nemesis or terrible Erinnyes, daughters of Erebus and Night, Emerson substitutes a fair-weather abstraction named Compensation. One radical tragedy in nature he admits—'the distinction of More and Less.' If I am poor in faculty, dim in vision, shut out from opportunity, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley

... how I felt at getting into such a scrape, you wouldn't look at me as if you were an Avenging Conscience, or a Nemesis, or any of those horrid furies. No; and you wouldn't look speechlessly sorrowful, either. Of course I ought to have told him at once that Henry did not live here, and I ought to have sent him next door ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various

... Story, rather than "The Ashburnham Tragedy", just because it is so sad, just because there was no current to draw things along to a swift and inevitable end. There is about it none of the elevation that accompanies tragedy; there is about it no nemesis, no destiny. Here were two noble people—for I am convinced that both Edward and Leonora had noble natures—here, then, were two noble natures, drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heart-aches, agony of the mind and death. ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford

... citoyen!" said Henry. "I am rejoiced to see a man of your character invested with these functions. But, to speak truth, I have small confidence in this systematic justice, set up by the moderates of the Convention, in this complaisant Nemesis that is considerate to conspirators and merciful to traitors, that hardly dares strike a blow at the Federalists and fears to summon the Austrian to the bar. No, it is not the Revolutionary Tribunal will save the Republic. They are very culpable, the men who, ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France

... presenting it as a peace-offering to propitiate the just wrath of his parents, Aristides had gone but a few rods when an unexpected circumstance occurred which dashed his fond hope, and to the conscientious child seemed the shadow of an inevitable Nemesis. At the curve of the road, as the settlement of Smith's Pocket came into view, with its straggling street, and its church spire that seemed a tongue of flame in the setting sun, a broad-shouldered figure sprang, apparently, from out of the bank, and stood in the ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... can do no wrong," said MacGregor with gentle irony, "and neither can the law. Remember that, Philip, as long as you are in the service. The law may break up homes, ruin states, set itself a Nemesis on innocent men's heels—but it can do no wrong. It is the Juggernaut before which we all must bow our heads, even you and I, and when by any chance it makes a mistake, it is still law, and unassailable. It is the greatest ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood

... unutterable suspicion, Hans one day followed in the rear of an exciting race between the timorous dame and an avenging pullet. They were too rapid for him; but bursting suddenly in at the lady's door some fifteen minutes afterward, he found her in the act of placing the plucked and eviscerated Nemesis upon her cooking range. The Frau betrayed considerable confusion; and although the accusing Blisselwartle could not but recognize in her act a certain poetic justice, he could not conceal from himself that there was something grossly selfish and sordid in it. He thought it was a good ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)

... was showing more skill than Thumper, the memory of a mauled cat came to my mind. The ursine look shot at Jim now and then recalled it. I even went to the length of remonstrating, but it was without effect. It was on a Sunday morning that Nemesis attended to Jim's case. Circumstances were propitious. An excursion train, crowded with passengers, pulled up at the station. Jim had a new suit of black broadcloth, due to a temporary aberration of our local Solomon who ran the clothing store. Because of ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips

... for himself the Catholic claims, and the child would say to the father, 'Father, if there be such a sacrament as Penance, can I go?' And the good Archbishop, being evasive in his answers, the young boy found himself emerging more and more in a woeful Nemesis of faith." It would be literally impossible, I think, to construct a story less characteristic both of Hugh's own attitude of mind as well as of the atmosphere of our family and ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson

... present century; on Cape Sunium the temple of Athena, 430 B.C., partly standing; at Nemea, the temple of Zeus; at Tegea, the temple of Athena Elea (400? B.C.); at Rhamnus, the temples of Themis and of Nemesis; at Argos, two temples, stoa, and other ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... he wished they'd go away,' at the same time asking Mrs. Golding 'whether or not, she had been guilty of some atrocious crime, for which providence was determined to pursue her on this side the grave,' and to break crockery till death put an end to the stupendous Nemesis. 'Having hitherto been esteemed a most deserving person,' Mrs. Golding replied, with some natural warmth, that 'her conscience was quite clear, and she could as well wait the will of providence in her own house as in any other place,' she and the maid went to ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang

... to the writers of this time the scorn of Boileau and others down to La Harpe. The Dedication to the Queen may perhaps be excused for asserting, in its first words, that as Endymion was put to sleep by the Moon, so he has been reawakened by the Sun,[212] i.e. her Majesty. But a Nemesis of this Phebus follows. For, later, it is laid down that "La Lune doit toujours sa lumiere au Soleil." From which it will follow that Diana owed her splendour to Anne of Austria, or was it Marie de Medicis?[213] It was fortunate for Gombauld that he did not live ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... to the right, but like a pursuing Nemesis, the strange ship came after them in the ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell

... not often carry off a prize; but among his proud recollections was a success he had achieved in the form of a rebuke to an impious voluptuary who set up a statue of Diana in the room which beheld his debauches. Here was the nemesis of a system of education which had aimed solely at the practical, the useful; having always laboured to produce the man perfectly equipped for public affairs, and nothing else whatever. Rome found herself tottering with senile steps in the same path when the Empire and ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing

... Telemachus makes a noble, yes, a heroic response. It would be wrong all around, wrong to the mother, wrong to her father, unless he (Telemachus) restored the dower, wrong to the Gods; vengeance from the Erinyes, and nemesis from man would come upon him for such a deed. Thus the young hero appeals to the divine order and puts himself in harmony with its behests. Boldly he declares, that if the Suitors continue in their ill-doing, "I shall invoke the ever-living Gods; if Zeus may grant fit retribution for your ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... her daughter-in-law going into the house; but she was destined never to tell her what she thought of her. Estelle escaped Nemesis by the ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome

... to me that you have hatched some conspiracy against him; but if you dare to cast a single stone in his path, to touch a single hair of his head, I will show you that even a weak woman can be terrible. Nemesis and the Erinnyes from Alecto to Megaera, the most terrible of all the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... back on the staircase. The lie was scarcely off his lips when a heavy hand fell on his shoulder, and, twisting him round with a jerk, brought him face to face with an old friend. The tutor's eyes met those of Mr. Dunborough, he uttered one low shriek, and turned as white as paper. He knew that Nemesis had ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman



Words linked to "Nemesis" :   Greek deity, Greek mythology, affliction



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