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More "Humiliating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... too glad to do so, for I felt ashamed of seeming, by my silent presence, to be joining in Ikonin's humiliating prayers for grace. I have no recollection of how I threaded my way through the students in the hall, nor of what I replied to their questions, nor of how I passed into the vestibule and departed home. I was offended, humiliated, and ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... inclined to raise your hat. But if it is only fear of the knout, then hanging is the best end you could wish the leaders, who are able to control such suffering, and who, in the hope of personal advancement, refuse to alleviate it. But what is more humiliating than anything else, is the realisation that these miserable creatures are an enemy able to keep the flower of England's army in check, to levy a tax of six millions a-month upon this country, and render abortive a military reputation built upon unparalleled ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... wages. Well, of course, they could do without Hannah—it would be very painful to part with her, but anything would be better than the humiliating conclusion that Mrs. Ellsworthy and Miss Martineau considered them too poor to live. Then, of course, they could do without meat—what did healthy girls want with meat? Only—and here Primrose sighed deeply—Daisy was not very strong. Eggs were cheap enough in Rosebury, and so was butter, and ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... the image of a boy's face, a swarthy little boy, grinning, grinning with a horrible knowingness and pointing his finger—an accusing finger. It had been the most exasperating, humiliating, and shameful incident in the bishop's career. It was the afternoon for his fortnightly address to the Shop-girls' Church Association, and he had been seized with a panic fear, entirely irrational and unjustifiable, ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... have been so long in use that the patents are off and the processes are well enough known. We have the coal tar and we have the chemists, so there seems no good reason why we should not make our own dyes, at least enough of them so we will not be caught napping as we were in 1914. It was decidedly humiliating for our Government to have to beg Germany to sell us enough colors to print our stamps and greenbacks and then have to beg Great Britain for permission to bring them over by ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... where once he had been served as a king by all these female attendants, he was simply being "pestered" as a punishment for his past behavior with Blossy. Ah, with its surprising ending that had been a humiliating affair; and he felt too that he would be long in forgiving Mrs. Darby for not having confided to him her actual intentions. Now he was afraid to be decently courteous to one of the sisters for fear that they might accuse ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... of the room; but he looked on like a worldling, with a mocking smile at the rapture of the two lovers. He soon found, however, that the role which he was condemned to play had its ridiculous and humiliating aspect, and he resolved to bear it no longer. He came forward, and with his usual cool impertinence he approached the princess, who greeted him with a crimson blush ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... I may have felt hurt at your indiscretion, but that is all. Put yourself in my place, and you will allow that it is humiliating for a priest.... ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... citizen, why adopt the official tone? He could have expressed the same opinions a few days later from his place in the House. Besides, his attack on Vitellius came too late to prove his independence, and what seemed particularly humiliating for the country and insulting to the emperor was his boast that he had held the empire in the hollow of his hand, and had given it to Vespasian. However, they concealed their ill-will and made a great show of flattery, decreeing to Mucianus in the most complimentary terms full ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... access to the liberal professions in which they know (though they dare not confess it) he would be a serious rival to the European. As it is, in the few places open to Monkeys—the somewhat parasitical domestic occupation of "companions" and the more manly, but still humiliating, task of acting as assistants to organ-grinders, the Monkey has ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... convinced, that they had been led into a terrible delusion. All the prisoners on account of witchcraft were set free. But the innocent dead could not be restored to life; and the hill where they were executed, will always remind people of the saddest and most humiliating ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... woman replied that it was better to make a sort of humiliating confession than to admit the full extent of his unreasoning stupidity; and the surveyor, half agreeing with her in his own mind, immediately went to his study, wrote the epistle as directed, and sent it ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... self-compassion. 'You can't imagine the strain it is. And if that wasn't enough, his mother comes up from Clapham and lectures me. I wouldn't mind that, only she's not very safe about her h's, and she stops to dinner and talks about the nobility she's had cooks from, to impress the servants. It's so humiliating, to be lectured by any ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... Mr. Grunert, closely approaching Lombard. "In 1803, when the king sent him to Brussels to negotiate with Bonaparte, about an honorable peace between Prussia and France, he allowed himself to be bribed. He exercised an influence humiliating and disadvantageous to us; but Bonaparte bribed him by paying him the sum of six thousand Napoleons d'or. Deny it ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... a really remarkable book: but neither of them aimed at giving a full picture of Oxford life. And the interest of Miss Broughton's 'Belinda' and Mr. Hardy's 'Jude the Obscure' lies outside the proctor's rounds. Yes (and humiliating as the confession may be), with all its crudities and absurdities, Verdant Green does mark the nearest approach yet made ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... not be possible to write satire, epic, idyl, not even elegy, upon that "rat-hole philosophy," as Mr. Emerson once styled the new fetichism of the mahogany tables. It has not one element that asks the sense of beauty to incorporate it, or challenges the weapon of wit to transfix it. It is humiliating, but not pathetic, not even when yearning hearts are trying to pretend that their first-born vibrates to them through a stranger's and a hireling's mind. It is not even grotesque, but it is gross, and flat, and stale; its messages ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... English colony whatever, except the governor-general of India. It was twice as large as the official income of a British secretary of state has ever been. We decline entering at all into the minor charges connected with this humiliating subject: at least a single example may serve. One of the loudest complaints was about the deficiency and inferior quality of wine: on examination it appeared, that Napoleon's upper domestics were allowed each day, ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... it is best," he said, "not to think too much about it. From what experience I have had, I have come to the humiliating conclusion that men have very little to do with the formation of their own lives. A ship-captain may sit down and mark his course across the chart with the greatest accuracy, the most profound knowledge of wind and current, and the keenest ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... and had been predisposed by training to regard all flattering attention and interest as due to the favorable impression which he supposed himself to make invariably upon those whose judgment was worth anything. It is true there had been one marked and humiliating exception. But the consoling thought now flashed into his mind that, perhaps, Miss Romeyn was, as she asserted, but a mere "child," and incapable of appreciating him. The influence of the punch he had drank and the immediate and friendly interest manifested by these gentlemen who knew ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... to be a Christian, or consent to have his tongue burned with a red-hot iron and drink cow's urine in order to regain his caste. One of the native correspondents had complained rather naively that the law would be used to enable a man to escape these 'humiliating expiations.' Would they not be far more humiliating for English legislation? What did you mean, it would be asked, by your former profession that you would enforce religious equality? What of the acts ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... him as though he were still a freshman. He was wearing his first dress-coat and the tallest collar he could buy, and it was humiliating to be called Walter and sent away by a girl who preferred to talk to a rustic-looking person in a cutaway coat and a turnover collar ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... 2nd October 534, Athalaric died in his eighteenth year. This apparently upset Amalasuntha's plans. At any rate, we see her suddenly face quite about and sending for Theodahad, the son of Amalafrida, upon whom she had but lately pronounced a humiliating sentence, she offered to make him her official colleague upon the Gothic throne. This man was an ambitious villain. Of course he accepted Amalasuntha's foolish offer and swore to observe the agreement made between them. But before many weeks had passed he had made her a prisoner and had her securely ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... before you in the capacity of a private soldier, and, oh! bitter and humiliating reflection, in that most wretched and disgraceful of all situations, a suspected traitor, I am not indeed what I seem to be. It is not for me here to enter into the history of my past life; neither will I tarnish the hitherto unsullied reputation ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... of the army, for clothing especially, still continued and were the more severely felt when a cooperation with French troops was expected. So late as the 20th of June (1780) Washington informed Congress that he still labored under the painful and humiliating embarrassment of having no shirts for the soldiers, many of whom were destitute of that necessary article. "For the troops to be without clothing at any time," he added, "is highly injurious to the service and distressing to our feelings, but the want will be more peculiarly mortifying when they ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... him until he was sick of it and begged them to stop. Then, when they got back to the station, they popped him into the "jigger" along with privates charged with sassing the cook and other heinous offenses—a most humiliating experience for a brigadier general. Now he must die; and it came to him that it was as hard for a general officer to die as ever it was for ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... husband made him the central figure in a scandal that filled the friends of Frances with disgust, and that for her was an awakening cruel and humiliating. Men no longer permitted their womenfolk to sit to Stedman for a portrait, and the need of money grew imperative. He the more blamed Frances for having quarrelled with her aunt, told her it was for her money he had married ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... have been humiliating and afflicting, had this record of the Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy, in which there is so much to admire, been closed with the details of a calamity in any way disgraceful to the service. Truth has required that the words 'dismay' and 'panic' should ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... demand I am about to make upon you, upon all the kindness which you have shown us for these many years. Herbert, your namesake, is in deep trouble—disgrace, I might better say. Never mind the details. They are sufficiently serious, sufficiently humiliating. We have managed to cover it up, to conceal what we can, but for the present at least, or until this blows over, it is impossible for him to remain at home. It has all come about so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that there has been no time to write to you to obtain your consent. But he must leave ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... of the fete—indeed, the fete itself. Every one expected much more than on the eve, when the Brothers of the Sacred Rosary had had their sermon and procession; for the Brothers of the Third Order were more numerous, and counted on humiliating their rivals. The Chinese candle merchants had reaped a ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... momentary triumph of which has crushed Paris beneath so odious and humiliating a yoke, carried the distresses of France to their height, and put civilisation in peril, the International Society has borne a part which has suddenly revealed to all the fatal power ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... her pleasure; also in striking contrast with those he employed to gain Madame de Montfort, a clever adventuress, who balanced him, in hand, against her bird in the bush, and decided that to make sure of the less was better than to wait for the chance of the greater. But Josephine felt nothing humiliating in his lordliness. She loved him, she was a woman devoid of self-esteem; hence humiliation ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... sound depressing enough, but if the message received within these chilly walls is cheering, maybe we can forget or ignore the physical discomforts. But is the message cheering? Hell, damnation, eternal tortures, painful theological hair-splittings, harrowing self-examinations, and humiliating public confessions—this is what they gather on the narrow wooden benches to listen to hour after hour, searching their souls for sin with an almost frenzied eagerness. And yet, forlorn and tedious as the bleak service ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... time, would greet you with a very supple neck and pray for a further extension, which would be permitted on the understanding that in the event of failure his garments and personal charms should be held in bondage. To escape so humiliating a necessity, as the time drew near I would address myself to another, one calling himself William, perchance, and dwelling in a northern province, to whom I would be compelled to assign my peach-orchard at Yuen-ping. Then by varying degrees of infamy I would in turn be driven to visit a certain ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... the great discomfiture of my preaching. Open-air addresses were not common in those days, and for a man to set up (as some said) and pretend to be a second Whitfield or Wesley, was bad enough, but to fail was most humiliating! ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... friend of mine and keep her from me under guard. This morning I went to see her in her bed, and I remarked that Kay lies with her every night. Sire, for God's sake, be not angry, if I am disgruntled and if I complain. For it is very humiliating for me to be hated and despised by one with whom Kay is allowed to lie." "Silence!" says the king; "I don't believe it." "Then come, my lord, and see the sheets and the state in which Kay has left them. Since you will not believe my words, and since you think I am lying, ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... just been made to witness the most high-handed and humiliating act of violence that it has ever been our duty to chronicle.... At the May term of the Superior Court a negro man was tried and condemned on the charge of having attempted to commit rape upon a little white girl in this county. His trial was a fair one, ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... and yet most simple," as Monsieur had truly said; yet to the flock of Miss Milwood's girls, who, well down to the front, had lost nothing of this surprising interview, it was only "most astonishing," and to some of them most humiliating and mortifying. Kitty Grant was the first to voice this mortification, by turning upon them and saying, as Esther disappeared with Monsieur Baudouin, "Say, girls, how do you feel now? I feel like one of Cinderella's sisters. ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... interval than usual. Anne's hands and feet became nerveless bits of ice. Had his courage given out? Had he run away? Worse still, was he nerving himself to an ordeal to which he would prove unequal? A humiliating breakdown! Anne's blood pounded through her body as he finally emerged from the curtains, and she broke her fan, much to the ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... French, English and American troops co-operated in this thrust that extended from the plains of the Piave into Trentino. The immediate effect of the Italian offensive was to force Austria to her knees in abject surrender. An armistice, humiliating in its terms, was signed by the Austrian representatives, and the back door to Germany ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... a common robber or a midnight bravo; but for her husband's peace, and in obedience to the spirit of the oath which imperious circumstances had alone led her in some degree to violate, she was forced to adopt that sad and humiliating alternative." ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... never attempted to track a fellow creature surreptitiously through the streets of London on a hot day, the feat may appear simple. It is in reality a most exhausting, dilatory, and humiliating exercise. Our difficulty lay not so much in keeping our friend in sight as in avoiding frequent and unexpected collisions with him. The general idea, as they say on field days, was to keep about twenty yards behind him; but under certain circumstances distance has an uncanny habit of annihilating ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... the other hand, was a Papist by birth, and by a tie of honour; and he resisted all temptations to desert his afflicted faith, which temptations lay in bribes of great magnitude prospectively, and in persecutions for the present that were painfully humiliating. How base a time-server does Dryden appear on the one side! on the other, how much of a martyr should we be disposed to pronounce Pope! And yet, for all that, such is the overruling force of a nature originally ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... This was rather humiliating to Julia, but she concluded it was her only alternative, so she dried her eyes, and seeking out her sister, very soon talked her into a strong desire to try the mysteries of a school in Frankfort, and also drew from her a promise to try her powers ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... dreams, when I have them, are practically all of the pure nightmare description and of the usual sealed-pattern. I am worried by the sense of not being able to pack in time to catch my train, or else I am compelled to go back to Oxford and try to pass an examination under impossible and humiliating conditions. Indeed, I don't think I can ever remember a dream, except this one about my son, which was of a non- egotistical kind, that is, in which somebody else speaks, and of which I am not the centre. In a word, it seems to me that, though my son had no ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... he calls "the Magna Charta of the Indians in South Africa". Now, what is this "Magna Charta"? In 1913, when the South African Parliament was at the noontide of its "mad career", it passed this iniquitous land law to repress the native race; and also a law imposing the most humiliating limitations on British Indians. Yet it must be added that the Indian law was the milder of the two, as it did not prohibit Indian residents in South Africa from living on the land. The Rt. Hon. A. Fischer, Union Minister of the ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... her careless ways, ready opinions, gentle loving incapacity to become a machine, Maria was at discord with every principle of Cowan's Bridge. She incurred the bitter resentment of one of the teachers, who sought all means of humiliating and mortifying the sweet-natured, shiftless little creature. When, in September, bright, talkative Charlotte and baby Emily came to Cowan's Bridge, they found their idolised little mother, their Maria, the butt, laughingstock and ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... later, he has insisted on the "helplessness"—the "humiliating impotence created by the fact that our neutrality can only be preserved by failure to help to right ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... terms the Greeks consented, on condition that Oleg would cease hostilities, and return peaceably to his country. Upon this basis of a treaty, the Russian array retired to some distance from the city, and Oleg sent four commissioners to arrange with the emperor the details of peace. The humiliating treaty ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... life seemed to be to realise an ideal of bourgeois prosperity. Dickens seems to have regarded his art partly as a means of social reform, and partly as a method of making money. The latter aim is to a great extent accounted for by the miserable and humiliating circumstances of his early life, which bit very deep into him. Yet his art was hardly an end in itself, but something through which he made ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... comes to-morrow, Sabina, I would rather not have him go home quite as early, because you see,' (oh how I mentally groaned at this humiliating nonsense,) 'I might want him. You won't forget, will ...
— A Christmas Story - Man in His Element: or, A New Way to Keep House • Samuel W. Francis
... this humiliating service, Nelson was ordered to hoist his broad pendant on board the MINERVE frigate, Captain George Cockburn, and with the BLANCHE under his command, proceed to Porto Ferrajo, and superintend the evacuation of that place also. On his way, he fell in with two Spanish frigates, the SABINA ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... this arrangement might be to the Government of India, to every member of the Delhi royal family it must have seemed oppressive and humiliating to the last degree. Outwardly they appeared to accept the inevitable quietly and submissively, but they were only biding their time, and longing for an opportunity to throw off the hated English yoke. The war with Persia in 1856 seemed to offer the chance they wanted. On the ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... to respond as they rise in the scale of civilisation; it has proved its power to enter into the lives of various nations, and to adapt itself to their circumstances and guide their aspirations without humiliating them. A religion which identifies itself, as Christianity does, with the cause of freedom in every land, and tends to unite all men in one great brotherhood under the loving God who is the Father of all alike, is surely the desire of all nations, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... exquisitely fine even on the first night, and every repetition disclosed augmented excellence. In the second scene of the second act, where Bertrand prostrates himself before Eugenia, Mr. M'Kenzie presented in his posture of supplication, such a natural yet terrible, picture of the humiliating effects of guilt and consequent remorse, as could not fail to make an awful impression on the most hardened and unfeeling sinner. In Longueville Mr. Warren was, as he always is, correct and respectable, and Mr. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... in the most dangerous affairs,—I had often enough found opportunity to mediate, to hush up, to divert the lightning-flash, with every other assistance of the kind; in the course of which, as well in my own person as through others, I could not fail to come to the knowledge of many afflicting and humiliating facts. To relieve myself I designed several plays, and wrote the arguments [Footnote: "/Exposition/," in a dramatic sense, properly means a statement of the events which take place before the action of the play commences.—TRANS.] of most of them. But since the intrigues were always ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the daily habits of many kinds of wild animals in their wild haunts, but in the field I never yet have seen either a fight between animals of the same species, or between two of different species. This may seem a very humiliating admission for a hunter to make, but it happens to be true. In the matter of finding big snakes, having exciting adventures, and witnessing combats between wild animals, there are some men ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... wildfire, and on their way back to the Bow and String, there came from small boys and hidden voices such exclamations as: "Look at the woman in man's clothing;" "Isn't he a beautiful man?" "Look at him blush;" and others too coarse to be repeated. Imagine the humiliating situation, from which there ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... extend our foreign commerce. To this end our merchant marine should be improved and enlarged. We should do our full share of the carrying trade of the world. We do not do it now. We should be the laggard no longer. The inferiority of our merchant marine is justly humiliating to the national pride. The Government by every proper constitutional means, should aid in making our ships familiar visitors at every commercial port of the world, thus opening up new and valuable markets to the surplus products of the ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... profits made upon the sale of margarine. As Tims brought the car up before the front entrance with an impressive sweep, the hall-door was thrown open by the butler, who habitually strove by an excessive dignity of demeanour to remove from his mental palate the humiliating flavour of margarine. ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... power. He dared all, trampled on every feeling of justice, and thereby finally goaded the nations to resist him. In 1810 he exclaimed triumphantly, 'Three years yet, and I shall be master of the world!' And when he lately took the field against Russia, he said, 'After humiliating Russia and reducing her to an Asiatic power, I shall establish at Paris a universal European court and universal archives!' He believes himself to be the master of the world; he thinks the thunderbolts ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... nobility as think they ought to form a separate order." This is the party which offers resistance to follies and errors, but with follies and errors almost equally great. In the beginning "the prelates,[2129] instead of conciliating the cures, kept them at a humiliating distance, affecting distinctions, exacting respect," and, in their own chamber, "ranging themselves apart on separate benches." The nobles, on the other hand, the more to alienate the commons, began by charging these with, "revolt, treachery, and treason," ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the Miss Revels. That the two eldest, provided they were admitted, would not much take to heart, either the conduct of their father, or the coolness of their relation, he was pretty well assured; but he was too well acquainted with Isabel's character, not to know that she would deeply feel the humiliating situation in which she was placed, and that it would prey upon her generous and sensitive mind. As, however, there was no remedy, he almost congratulated himself that, as the colonel's message was to be delivered, the commission had been placed ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the Tin Soldier can cut some of the hay with his sharp sword, and you can stuff me with that material until we reach a place where there is straw. It is true I have been stuffed with straw all my life and it will be somewhat humiliating to be filled with common hay, but I am willing to sacrifice my pride in a good cause. Moreover, to abandon our errand and so deprive the great Emperor of the Winkies—or this noble Soldier—of his bride, would be equally humiliating, ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... think. The next thing I knew she came headlong, mouth open, fairly screaming at me; and I turned and jumped clean into the Gray Water. Oh, Scott, it was humiliating to have to swim to the point with all my clothes on, scramble into the canoe, and shove off because a very angry wild creature drove me out ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... maiden aunt, a personage of some prestige and character. But invitations do not flow to a penniless young woman from the country, nor do partners flock to be presented to strangers in those days, and Amaryllis had spent many humiliating hours as a wall-flower and had grown to hate balls. She was not expansive in herself and did not make friends easily, and pretty as she was, as a girl, luck did ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... having raised a storm at sea in order to drive him out of his course, Zeus became so angry that he hung her in the clouds by a golden chain, and attached heavy anvils to her feet. Her son Hephaestus tried to release his mother from her humiliating position, for which Zeus threw him out of heaven, and his leg ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... about your preface. I like both that and the Supplement without an exception. The account of what you mean by Imagination is very valuable to me. It will help me to like some things in poetry better, which is a little humiliating in me to confess. I thought I could not be instructed in that science (I mean the critical), as I once heard old obscene beastly Peter Pindar in a dispute on Milton say he thought that if he had reason to value himself upon one thing ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... knew, or even suspected, how she was degraded by her step-father. Before the world he was courteous and considerate toward her as toward everybody. Indeed, Presbury's natural instincts were gentle and kindly. His hatred of Mildred and his passion for humiliating her were the result of his conviction that he had been tricked into the marriage and his inability to gratify his resentment upon his wife. He could not make the mother suffer; but he could make the daughter suffer—and he did. Besides, ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... she always returned to the Settlement at night, and this threw an additional interest about her to her friends—an interest of which she was ashamed, for she knew how little she was really doing, and that her sacrifice was one of discomfort merely. The good she did now, it was humiliating to acknowledge, was in no way proportionate to that which her influence had wrought among people of her ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... made to represent this pure, and valuable, and disinterested man as a mendicant philanthropist, who, for his exertions in the cause of justice, stooped to the humiliating attitude of collecting a remuneration from his friends. The words of William Wilberforce, and other Abolition leaders, prove that he had expended a very considerable portion of his own small patrimony ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... certain pride in her common sense, and it was humiliating to find that her nerves could be so distraught. She was worried and unhappy. It had not been easy to take Margaret back to her bosom as if nothing had happened. Susie was human; and, though she did ten times more than could be expected of her, ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... moralities—for the ashes of repentance! I ask a man into the rose-garden to make love to me and he preaches to me instead—preaches to me! of the world, the flesh and the devil, par exemple! Was ever a pretty woman in a more humiliating position!" ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... Zayonchek, Doumerc, and, finally, to his own sure and profound decision, his recognition of the true steps to be taken, Napoleon owed the possibility that he could escape after a bloody scene, the most humiliating, the most ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... each other in endeavours to overcome the arrogance of the young Count. The style of the whole is more sententious than imaginative: the glowing colours of fancy could not with propriety have been employed on such a subject. In the passages where the humiliating rejection of the poor Helena is most painfully affecting, the cowardly Parolles steps in to the relief of the spectator. The mystification by which his pretended valour and his shameless slanders ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... not know. But, if it is a question of equality, let the equality be complete. Though it has been found that to contract marriages through the agency of match-makers is humiliating, it is nevertheless a thousand times preferable to our system. There the rights and the chances are equal; here the woman is a slave, exhibited in the market. But as she cannot bend to her condition, or make advances herself, there begins that ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... were nobles. The government was virtually, from first to last, in the hands of the aristocracy. Still there was an important popular element, especially in the latter days of the republic, to which revolutionary leaders appealed, like the Gracchi, Marius, Catiline, and Caesar. One of the most humiliating lessons which we learn of antiquity, we are forced to own, was the signal incapacity of the people to govern themselves, when they had obtained a greater share of power than the old constitution had allowed. The republic did not long survive when successful ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... recklessly bold, and he would not have it said that there was any place he could not follow his Master. He declared that he would even lay down his life for his sake. "Wilt thou lay down thy life for my sake?" answered the Master. "Wilt thou, indeed?" Then he foretold Peter's sad, humiliating fall—that, instead of laying down his life ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... treat for peace, and was compelled to submit to conditions to the last degree humiliating. He agreed to give the Sultan his daughter in marriage, to indemnify him with an immense treasure, and to cede for ever the ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... experienced by this man, he valued feminine virtue occasionally purchased with gold as little in comparison with the virgin souls, honor and virtue that he often succeeded in humiliating, in bending before him like a reed, and snuffing out with his irony, whenever necessity placed at his mercy any of those puritanical beings who had passed sometimes with haughty brow before the millions of this man of money. It was ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... Sir Walter Scott, in his biographical notice of Fielding, " is a humiliating anecdote, even after we have made allowance for the aristocratic exaggeration of Walpole; yet it is consoling to observe that Fielding's principles remained unshaken, though the circumstances attending his official situation ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... favourable on my side; for had there been no persons of the above description in company, that task, I was told, would have fallen on me; which would have been no less fatiguing and troublesome, than humiliating and vexatious. ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... covetous eye on his own person. In the name of the Temperance reformers of Edinburgh—in the name of universal Scotland, I would welcome these two victims of the white man's pride, ambition, selfishness, and cupidity. I welcome them as our equals in every respect. (Great applause.) What a humiliating thought it will be, surely, for our American friends on the other side of the water, when they hear (and we shall endeavour to let them hear) that the very man whom they consider not worthy to sit in a third class carriage along with a white ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... from."—"From Scotland," cried Davies, roguishly. "Mr Johnson (said I) I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." I am willing to flatter myself that I meant this as light pleasantry to soothe and conciliate him, and not as an humiliating abasement at the expense of my country. But however that might be, this speech was somewhat unlucky; for with that quickness of wit for which he was so remarkable, he {99} seized the expression "come from Scotland," which I used in the sense of being of that country; ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... the war party returned: "Where's he been? Well, I'll tell you where he's been. And I just want you to know who done this." Here Exhibit A got behind a post. The recital of the details of his catastrophe was humiliating. But the mother continued: "Henry Perkins done this. I don't believe in stirring up neighborhood quarrels and all that, but I've just stood this long enough. My boy can't stick his nose out of the door ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... independence. Frederick Henry of Nassau, who had succeeded his brother in the command of the Republic's armies, took Bois-le-Duc in 1629, and Venloo, Ruremonde and Maestricht in 1632. He was supported, in these last operations, by Louis XIII, who, prompted by Richelieu, took this opportunity of humiliating the Hapsburg dynasty. The Spanish commander, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, proved so inefficient that some Belgian patriots tried to take matters into their own hands and to deliver their country from a foreign domination which was so fatal to its interests. It soon became clear, however, that any ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... his departure confided to M. Dumaine that his Government will not raise any objection to the punishment of the guilty and the dissolution of the revolutionary associations, but that they could not accept requirements which were humiliating to the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... still but partially in the hands of its magistrates, and the riotous student is amenable only to university jurisdiction. Within the memory of living men the chief magistrate of the city on his entrance into office was bound to swear in a humiliating ceremony not to violate the privileges of the great academical body which reigned supreme within ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... anxiety and care to the four winds, and decided to be as happy as any of them. The pennant was mine! Something kept ringing that in my ears. With the Rube working his iron arm for the edification of his proud Nancy Brown, there was extreme likelihood of divers shut-outs and humiliating defeats for ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... was just what I did, but I was not pleased to have Miss Wyeth know it. Although my time was chiefly spent in killing time, I had once, in a fit of energy, succeeded in writing some verses 'To a Tomtit,' so I evaded a humiliating confession by saying that I had done a ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... he but bestowed fair room, and dwelt with his ordinary energy on the sufferings of the genuine witnesses to the truth of Christianity, the Polycarps, or the martyrs of Vienne. And indeed, if, after all, the view of the early progress of Christianity be melancholy and humiliating we must beware lest we charge the whole of this on the infidelity of the historian. It is idle, it is disingenuous, to deny or to dissemble the early depravations of Christianity, its gradual but rapid departure from its primitive simplicity and purity, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... controls, figured orbits. Anything to keep from having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates or from having to think about the humiliating job he ...
— Postmark Ganymede • Robert Silverberg
... down. She would go back to Max, and all thought that it might be weak-minded of her, humiliating to her self-respect, was swept aside. Love, the great teacher, had brought her through the dark places where the lesser gods hold sway, out into the light of day, and she knew that to return to Max, to ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... increases with each successive drink until finally the man, completely under the influence of liquor, reaches a stage when he can neither think rationally nor speak intelligently, nor even walk straight or stand upright—making the most humiliating and disgusting spectacle ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... whispering, and upon one pretence or another crossing and re-crossing the hall, and stealing hurried glances at the criminal. Merton sate with his face buried in his hands, sobbing, and taking no note of the humiliating scrutiny of which he was the subject. Meanwhile Marston, pale and agitated, made out his committal, and having sworn in several of his laborers and servants as special constables, dispatched the prisoner in their charge to the county gaol, where, ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... humiliating position for a man to find himself in, and especially after his talk with Mrs. Hardesty. Perhaps he had not considered the ways and means very carefully, but he had promised her to go back to New York. A man ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... Americans, who believed that their weakness for the French capital was returned, a painful surprise. They imagined in the simplicity of their innocent hearts that she loved them for themselves, and have awakened, like other rich lovers, to the humiliating knowledge that a penniless neighbor was receiving the caresses that Croesus paid for. Not only did the entire Parisian press teem at that moment with covert insults directed towards us, but in society, at the clubs and tables of the aristocracy, it was impossible ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... pointed Bill's head in the right direction Mr. Shrimplin drove that trusty beast up to the lamp-post on the corner of High Street, when suddenly and for no apparent reason Bill settled back in the shafts and exhibited unmistakable, though humiliating symptoms of fright. ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... there is something in that,' said Guy, thoughtfully; 'at any rate, it is no bad thing to think so, it is so humiliating.' ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... these men displayed, in his speech and bearing, the most reckless hardihood; and the other, in his every word and action, testified such an extreme of abject cowardice that it was humiliating to see him; it would be difficult to say which of them would most have repelled and shocked an observer. Hugh's was the dogged desperation of a savage at the stake; the hangman was reduced to a condition little better, if any, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... familiarly as "thou." Perhaps there is a little too much familiarity in all this, for the worthy man has not yet begun to realize the prestige and authority of his new station; and there was some one who considered this free-and-easy manner very humiliating. But that some one can not see him at this moment, and the master takes advantage of the fact to bestow a hearty greeting upon the old bookkeeper, Sigismond, who comes out last of all, erect and red-faced, imprisoned in a high collar and bareheaded—whatever ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... complicated cares and trials wherewith the lot of man in every station is chequered and environed; and when he heard those bondmen of hard labour, jocund after sound slumbers and light suppers, laughing contemptuously as they beheld the humiliating sight, which divers gallants and youngsters, courtiers of the court, degraded with debauch, made of themselves as they stumbled homeward, he thought there was surely more bliss in the cup that was earned by the constancy of health and a willing mind, than in all the possets ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... closer to the old man. She knew he had lived on a grand scale, and the thought of this gilded the ci-devant financier's present poverty, which she deemed less humiliating as being due to general causes, the result of the public bankruptcy. She saw in him, with curiosity not unmixed with respect, the survival of one of those open-handed millionaires of whom her elder comrades of the stage spoke with sighs of unfeigned regret. Besides, ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... the country or the moral obligation to provide for them less under present circumstances than they could be were we actually involved in war? It appears to me to be the indispensable duty of all concerned in the administration of public affairs to see that a state of things so humiliating and so perilous should not last a moment longer than is absolutely unavoidable. Much less excusable should we be in parting with any portion of our available means, at least until the demands of the Treasury are fully supplied. But besides the urgency of such considerations, the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... clamored day by day for an "advance upon Richmond." The damnation of public clamor, and not the incompetency of the general, set the inchoate armies of Scott upon that fatal adventure. But that humiliating, incredible, and for years misunderstood Sunday, on the plateaus of Manassas, where, after all, blundering and imbecility brought disaster, but not shame, upon the devoted soldiery, aroused the sense of the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... the country as a convicted usurper, a political criminal, guilty of a bold and persistent attempt to possess himself of the legislative powers solemnly secured to Congress by the Constitution. No vindication could be more complete, no condemnation could be more absolute and humiliating. Unless reopened by the sword, as recklessly threatened in some circles, this question is now closed ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... passed in that interview, but I do not know how to reproduce it, how to give anything like an impression of the marvellous thing it was, or that it turned into under her hands. It ought, you see, to have been so ugly, so humiliating, so absolutely intolerable for both of us. And it wasn't. She took it from me, at the end, and held it up, as it were a little way out of my grasp; and before I knew where I was, with some sudden twist ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... she had any transaction, and to refer the principle of her approbation or displeasure to the cordiality or injustice of their sentiments. She was occasionally severe and imperious in her resentments; and, when she strongly disapproved, was apt to express her censure in terms that gave a very humiliating sensation to the person against whom it was directed. Her displeasure however never assumed its severest form, but when it was barbed by disappointment. Where she expected little, she was not very rigid ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... great relief. I was suffering more from my humiliating position, being unable to stand, than from the tortures themselves, bad as they were. The Pombo told me that I must now look toward the tent. He then got up and walked ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... suspicion. He has been ever on the defensive, like a prisoner in the dock. He has been ever on the alert for a sentence of doom. He has been cuffed, kicked, caned, flogged, shut up in the dark, fed on bread and water, sent hungry to bed, subjected to a variety of cruel and humiliating punishments, terrified with idle—but to him appalling—threats. In his misery he has shed a whole ocean of tears,—the salt and bitter tears of hopeless grief and helpless anger, not the soul-refreshing tears which are sometimes distilled from sorrow by the sunshine of love. But of ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... he sat motionless, listening to the muffled peals of the organ. Then the humiliating events of the last twenty-four hours began crowding in upon his memory: the insolent demands of his landlady; the guarded questions of Kling when he inspected the dressing-case; the look of doubt on both ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... one of the biggest bubbles in history, and left Russia in a profoundly humiliating situation. Her navy was practically destroyed, her armies soundly beaten, her offensive power temporarily reduced to zero, her treasury exhausted, her pride laid in the dust. If the greatness of a nation consisted in the number and size of its battleships, in the capacity of its ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... him afterwards—is now dead. It is strange that he is dead. There is something repulsive to me in the thought of his lying dead: such a humiliating, somehow degraded corpse. Death has no beauty in Italy, unless it be violent. The death of man or woman through sickness is an occasion of horror, repulsive. They belong entirely to life, they are so limited to life, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... enough, doctor," she said. "You are giving your time, your skill, for nothing. Oh doctor, don't you see you are humiliating me by refusing to take ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... you never give me credit for anything but a light and callous heart? Will you never be convinced that, that; but why make this humiliating confession? Oh! no, let me be misunderstood for ever! The time may come when Vivian Grey will find that ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... not remain long together. Nitschmann soon returned to Germany to lead a new colony of his brethren to Pennsylvania; Charles Wesley remained for four months at Frederica, and then recrossed the ocean, weary of the hardness of the people's hearts; and, except for the painful and humiliating discipline which was preparing him to "take the whole world to be his parish," it had been well for John Wesley if he had returned with his brother. Never did a really great and good man act more like a fool than he did in his Georgia ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... involuntary twitch. If the candidate fails in a minor degree, he is promptly put back, to come up again for the next examination; but in the event of his being unable to stand the torture, he is contemptuously told to go and herd with the women—than which there is no more humiliating expression. ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... in a bad humour, trying in vain to justify a refusal which seemed humiliating and almost incredible. My good sense shewed me, in spite of all sophisms, that I had been grievously insulted. I recollected the witty saying of Populia, who was never unfaithful to her husband except when she was with child; "Non tollo ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... bind him to her. One can see every day how women manage,—the very word tells the whole story,—MANAGE men, by cunning strategy, cajolery, and all manner of indirections, just as if they were elephants. But if men were what they ought to be, there would be no such humiliating necessity. They ought to be so upright, so candid, so just, that it is only necessary to show this is right, this is reasonable, this is wrong, for them to do it, or to refrain from the doing. As it is, men smoke by the hour together, and their wives are thankful it is nothing worse. They ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... point on which Lydgate smarted as much as Wrench could desire. To be puffed by ignorance was not only humiliating, but perilous, and not more enviable than the reputation of the weather-prophet. He was impatient of the foolish expectations amidst which all work must be carried on, and likely enough to damage himself as much as Mr. Wrench could ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Yasmini walked the length of the room with Tess's very stride and attitude Tess got her first genuine glimpse of herself as another's capably critical eyes saw her—a priceless experience, and not so humiliating after all. ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... of intelligence beamed from her lovely eyes. I referred to my college days (and I suspect she took me for a Freshman), I hinted at Stillton, I even suggested that we had met as babies; but she only said that her recollection did not extend to that early period, and left me—for what? it is humiliating, but I will acknowledge it—for another fellow. This at last convinced me that she could not be my Jennie. Her resemblance to the photograph, however, was perfect,—really startling. In justice I must add that she ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... a majority of whose inhabitants are female, demoralization has naturally extended far and wide, till strict veracity has become unpractical. The first falsehood (after the serpent's) must have been humiliating to him who uttered it, and a fatal example to those who heard; but mankind soon grew used to the new fashion. I pass over the rude barbarian ages, whose gross and inartistic lying offers no claim to respectful and sympathetic interest, and no excuse but the lame one of ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... future had appeared couleur de rose, and she had sunned herself in the prospect of increased importance at home, and the honour which would be paid to the beautiful young bride by her husband's friends and relatives. How miserable, how humiliating, if all these dreams came to naught, and she found herself bound to an unsuccessful man, with all her ambitions nipped ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... besides, both of them had a fund of gay humor. She was always the first to laugh at herself. She was still eating her heart out: for the old passion still had its grip on her: she still thought of the blackguard she loved: and she could not bear to be in so humiliating a position or, above all, to have Christophe suspecting ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... himself brought Suzanne to the house at about twelve o'clock. Red with shame, her eyes swollen with tears, she submitted to Mme. Morestal's humiliating reception and took her seat by ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... good-fellowship the lonely painter should be abandoned to his own melancholy. Stroeve had set up a Christmas-tree in his studio, and I suspected that we should both find absurd little presents hanging on its festive branches; but he was shy about seeing Strickland again; it was a little humiliating to forgive so easily insults so outrageous, and he wished me to be present at the reconciliation on which he ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... round that they build up a world that is fiercely and tremendously complete. Every detail fits in, and the world in which they live is not, as is commonly supposed, a world of disconnected and fantastic imaginations, but one of iron-bound and remorseless logic. No task is more humiliating, nor more likely to shake one's sense of security in fundamental convictions, than that of arguing out ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... never told to any one. I am lonely and wretched. With the exception of yourself, I do not think that there is anybody who really cares for—I mean who really sympathises with me in the world. I daresay that it is my own fault and it sounds a humiliating thing to say, and, in a fashion, a selfish thing. I never should have said it to any living soul but you. What is the use of being great when there is nobody to work for? Things might have been different, but the world is a hard place. ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... unlikely that—seeing himself unmasked—he had found a sure and rapid way of allowing the money to pass through St. Genis' hands into those of de Marmont, and at the same time hopelessly humiliating and discrediting his rival in the affections of Mlle. ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... from the EXAMINER here, that Hearst was making a very strong fight for a delegation from Illinois. His boom seems to me to be increasing. That it is possible for such a man to receive the nomination, is too humiliating to be thought of. ... ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... to be expected and is to an extent unavoidable, we should court no more of that kind of experience than is necessary to avoid a repetition of it. The Socialist Party has already achieved some victories of this kind which proved to be defeats, crushing and humiliating, and from which the party has not even now, after many years, entirely recovered [referring, doubtless, to Haverhill and Brockton.—W. ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... simple: to bring about a difference, touch by touch, without letting either of the three, and least of all her father, so much as suspect her hand. If they should suspect they would want a reason, and the humiliating truth was that she wasn't ready with a reason—not, that is, with what she would have called a reasonable one. She thought of herself, instinctively, beautifully, as having dealt, all her life, at her father's side and by his example, only ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... high—she was bulky—she was built like an ox—and she could no more have squeezed herself under that rock than she could have passed between the cylinders of a sugar mill. What could she gain by it, even if she succeeded? To be chased and abused by a savage husband could not be otherwise than humiliating to her high spirit, yet it could never make her feel so flat as an hour's repose under that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... tyranny and infant avarice exemplified in the social conditions of Great Britain.— Superstitions of the dark ages still in force amongst the trading community, furnishing valuable hints to certain American journalists, and highly suggestive of reflections humiliating to the national vanity. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to dinner has wounded me to the quick. I cannot come for reasons of the most humiliating nature—my personal appearance. You may imagine my mortification in making this disclosure to you, but it ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... changes,—she utters sentiments that chill and revolt me; the very beauty seems vanished from her face. I recall with a sigh the simple sweetness of Susan, and I feel as if I deceived both my mistress and myself. Perhaps, however, all the circumstances of this connection tend to increase my doubts. It is humiliating to me to know that I woo clandestinely and upon sufferance; that I am stealing, as it were, into a fortune; that I am eating Sir Miles's bread, and yet counting upon his death; and this shame in myself may make me unconsciously ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hatchway in a most undignified manner. The frontispiece shows you how this was done. They put him in his box and put a rope round it and fastened the rope to the donkey engine, a little steam-engine which is used for hoisting and such purposes. How humiliating for a horse to be dragged aloft by a donkey engine! The captain stood near to give the signal when the steamer rested for a moment on a level keel. The donkey engine puffed, and the sailors stood ready to steer the patient upward, just as you see in ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... you have twelve hundred thousand fighting men; but we had a million in 1794, and shall have still. The love of honour and independence is not extinct in France; it will fire every heart, when the business is to repel the humiliating and unjust yoke, that you ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... spent the next ten minutes trying to force his prisoner to beg his pardon. They were long and humiliating and painful minutes for Macalister, but he endured them doggedly and in silence. The officer's temper rose minute by minute. The forward wall of the firing trench was built up with wicker-work facings and the officer drew ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... last to you, my misfortunes have but gone on accumulating. It seems as though Destiny would discharge all its wrath and fury upon the poor Country which I had to rule over. The Swedes have entered Pommern. The French, after having concluded a Neutrality humiliating to the King of England and themselves [Kloster-Zeven, which we know], are in full march upon Halberstadt and Magdeburg. From Preussen I am in daily expectation of hearing of a battle having been fought: the proportion of combatants being 25,000 against 80,000 ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... smarting under his humiliating defeat, had spies constantly watching his foes, intending, if possible, to take them by surprise. When the spies reported to him the lack of vigilance on the part of the enemy, he stealthily crossed to the island with his force and ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... ask you, will you say of that working-man, since such I must acknowledge him to be, who, at such a time, deserts his post, and sells his flag; who, at such a time, turns a traitor and a craven and a recreant, who, at such a time, is not ashamed to make to you the dastardly and humiliating avowal that he will hold himself aloof, and will not be one of those associated in the gallant stand for Freedom ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... Hague in December 1784, when this very question brought Joseph II to the brink of war with Holland, quoted the declaration of the Grand Pensionary, that the Dutch ought to spend their last florin "rather than submit to so destructive and humiliating a measure as the opening of the Scheldt."[122] The effusive thanks of the Dutch when the Court of Versailles opposed the demand of Joseph II, shows that they looked on the control of that estuary as vital to their interests. This question was brought to an issue on 23rd November, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... however, he realized that the end had come and raised the white flag. Nearly twenty-four hours passed before the terms of surrender were agreed upon, but Grant, who had served in the same division with Pemberton in the Mexican War, was not inclined to exact humiliating conditions upon his old acquaintance whose men had made such a long and gallant fight. He, accordingly, offered to free all the prisoners upon their signing a written promise not to take arms again unless properly exchanged, and to allow all the officers to retain their side arms ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... wife wishes a dollar of that money she must ask her husband for it; and if he be of a niggardly nature, she will hear him say, every time, "What have you done with the twenty-five cents I gave you yesterday?" Isn't such a position humiliating enough to be called "servitude?" That husband sued and obtained damages for the loss of the services of his wife, precisely as he would have done had it been his ox, cow or horse; and exactly as the master, under the old regime, would have recovered ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... his hope grew cold. Her motherhood was only another sanctuary from which she shut him out. There was something so humiliating in his pain that he would have hidden it even from Edith. But Edith was ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... a return to the Jewish communion. Having recanted his heresies, he was readmitted after an excommunication of fifteen years, but was soon excommunicated a second time. After seven years of exclusion, he once more sought admission, and, on passing through a humiliating penance, was again received. His vacillating autobiography, Exemplar Humanae Vitae, was published with a "refutation'' by Limborch in 1687, and republished in 1847. In this brief work Acosta declares his opposition ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... it cost her to come back and look after Colin. That knowledge was beyond Adeline Fielding. She congratulated Anne and expected Anne to congratulate herself on being "well out of it." Her safety was revolting and humiliating to Anne when she thought of Queenie and Cutler and Dicky, and Eliot and Jerrold and all the allied armies in the thick of it. She had left a world where life was lived at its highest pitch of intensity for a world ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... exasperation and amusement were about equally blended. It was amusing to note the signs of apprehension on the part of Miss Wickham's disagreeable relatives as they noted their aunt's doting fondness for her hired companion. And while she felt that they richly deserved this little punishment, it was humiliating to be so ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... inalienably connected in his memory with unnecessary washing up; with boring parties; with stiff collars; with unending polishing of shoes; humiliating walks down the avenue, stammering, idiotic phrases, while from every window the eyes of malicious friends were set in mockery. Girls never slid down the banisters or fell out of apple trees, or snapped garter snakes, or raised white mice or collected ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... ambassadors of those who are called rebels, are in Paris. In Paris they transact the reciprocal business of America and France. Can there be a more mortifying insult? Can even our ministers sustain a more humiliating disgrace? Do they dare to ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Flying Childers could lay themselves out at full speed in a city building lot; and it is reasonable to suppose that, notwithstanding all his fortitude, the spirits of the youth were depressed, and his faculties chilled by such humiliating neglect, and such reiterated disappointments. Who is he that would not, under such circumstances, sink into languor? It cannot be doubted that dejection every day detracted from his powers, and that by a kind of irresistible gravitation, he descended like ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... always been able to comfort herself with the idea that the child under her particular training was as well-behaved as any of those of her more demonstrative friend. But now, all this consolation had been put to flight; she could not meet Mrs. Kittridge without most humiliating recollections. ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... be humiliating," he wrote in a letter to one of his officers, "to offer peace on the principles established in the declaration of the Republic of Venezuela,[1] which ought to be the foundation of all negotiations; first, because it is ordered by a law of the Republic, and second, ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... in the same age; only in Ireland the anarchy endured much longer from the incompleteness of the conquest and the absence of the seat of supreme government, which kept the races longer separate and antagonistic. Perhaps the most humiliating notice of the degrading effects of conquest on the noble Saxon race to be found in history, is the language in which Giraldus Cambrensis, the reviler of the Irish Celt, contrasts them with his countrymen, the Welsh. ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... remain at home, but was easily prevailed upon to go. She was not entirely happy, for the humiliating failure of her hopes had left her for the moment without a recognised admirer, and the fear of old maidenhood had again laid hold of her heart. Her Aunt Laura's case was no consoling example. Not one man in a hundred would choose a wife for Colonel ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... by her friend's sorrow and humiliating poverty, and was therefore out of sorts, a state of mind which with her always found expression in calling her maid "my dear" and speaking to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... acquaint the holy Patriarch with the various revolutions which would take place in his Order, and he signified them to him by the statue itself, by the different metals of which it was composed, either thus to modify by these humiliating foreshowings the honor which he derived from being the Founder of so wonderful a work as that of the establishment of his Order; or to inspire him with the intention of sending up fervent prayers to heaven, which should draw down graces on his flock ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... affection. Bitter as she was, she could not blame him; she had been madly foolish and must suffer for it. She called her pride to the rescue, but it failed her. The torturing anxiety about the man's fate remained, and with it a humiliating regret, which was not altogether selfish, that it was Sylvia Marston he had chosen. Sylvia, who was clever, had, of course, tricked him; but this was no consolation. It was, however, needful to hide her feelings from her father and assume an interest ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... they came face to face, to give the cut direct. Their greeting was scarcely more than a nod, and showed their mutual constraint. Leigh read in Emmet's bold eyes a warning such as an injured husband might convey to the man that had wronged him, and a defiant reassertion of himself after his humiliating confession. He suspected also, what indeed was the truth, that the discovery of his own feeling for the bishop's daughter had opened Emmet's eyes anew to her value, and had cleared them of the mists of passion for the unfortunate Lena Harpster. From now on the mayor ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... not think of letting him go without having eaten. A special service was prepared for him in the kindest way possible, and Keith enjoyed very much the many dainties offered him. Nevertheless he felt the situation as humiliating and was actually glad when he got away at last. But the gladness was only a surface gloss on a burning core of regrets ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... passed in a thick mist of empty, senseless longing. She made no fire, cooked no dinner, drank no tea, and only late in the evening ate a piece of bread. When she went to bed it occurred to her that her life had never yet been so humiliating, so lonely and void. During the last years she had become accustomed to live constantly in the expectation of something momentous, something good. Young people were circling around her, noisy, vigorous, ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... these duties for her ears and eyes; Heard by what service she must gain her bread, And went with scorn and sorrow to her bed. Jane was a servant fitted for her place, Experienced, cunning, fraudful, selfish, base; Skill'd in those mean humiliating arts That make their way to proud and selfish hearts: By instinct taught, she felt an awe, a fear, For Jesse's upright, simple character; Whom with gross flattery she awhile assail'd, And then beheld with hatred when it fail'd; ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... first who discovered the great river of the Amazons; and also the first who sailed up that of St. Lawrence. Even to the present day, they carry on a considerable traffic in small ornaments made of ivory, a humiliating memento of their connection with Senegal: but all the rest of their commerce is dwindled into the fishery, and a small portion ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... a force of fourteen hundred raw recruits, unused to Indian warfare, St. Clair marched into the heart of the Indian country and suffered an inglorious defeat, on November 4, 1791. More than half of his command were killed, and scarcely a man escaped unscathed. It was a most humiliating reverse for the new Government, occurring almost under the eyes of British garrisons, and just as opposition was coming to a head ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... we must deal with life; it is no good making up a philosophy which just keeps us gay when all is serene and prosperous. Unpleasant, tedious, vexing, humiliating, painful, shattering things befall us all by the way. That is the test of our belief in life, if nothing daunts us, if nothing really mars ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... he had gathered from the earl's manner. But he had not imagined the proud lord's great-heartedness would go so far as to trust him with the guardianship of the boy. That moved, and that humbled him, though it was far from humiliating. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... those days was known of the interior of Japan, as the Dutch ambassadors were compelled to submit to the most humiliating conditions to keep up their intercourse with the country. On visiting the capital, they were conveyed in palanquins, well enclosed with fixed lattice-work, like prison-vans in England; and the bearers dared not, ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... have told you already that you are right. You insist on saving me from a humiliating position. I respect your courage and your straightforwardness. You remind me of an ancient Spartan having it out with a silly ass of a stranger who took advantage of her parents' good-nature. I am as little vain, I think, as any man, ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... Ruling. To an outsider, this seemed almost to mean the longest way round to an end that everybody had seen from the beginning. Parliamentary Ruling also seemed apt to lead its followers into paths unexpected even by them, from which they did not know how to get out, and it also led to revelations humiliating ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... obviously uneasy. There are certain things to which in good society one does not refer, first and foremost humiliating antecedents. The present circumstances were exceptional to be sure, but it was to be hoped that Mr. Mutimer would outgrow this habit of advertising his origin. Let him talk of the working-classes if he liked, but always in the third person. The good lady ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... thought Joyce; it lowered her in their estimation and laid her open to impudence. Though she was attractive to many, she never succeeded in holding the attention of her admirers very long; which was humiliating to say the least of it. Joyce looked upon her as an example of a true flirt, and feared her accordingly—not on her husband's account, for Ray gave her a wide berth—but as a criminal at large. Women had whispered tales which she found impossible to credit; the world ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... only too glad to do so, for I felt ashamed of seeming, by my silent presence, to be joining in Ikonin's humiliating prayers for grace. I have no recollection of how I threaded my way through the students in the hall, nor of what I replied to their questions, nor of how I passed into the vestibule and departed home. I was ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... itself furnishing two to three millions of the aggregate result. But this putting her collection of customs into the hands of foreigners, though it has taught China her own wastefulness and the superiority of Western finance, is a burden so humiliating that it cannot always continue. When China fully awakes, she will realize her strength and will reclaim what her weakness ceded to ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... to grief several times at Kenton brook, essaying to jump it at places obviously—as the Duffer pointed out—beyond his stride. The Duffer and he put their names down for the house-handicaps, and curtailed their visits to the Creameries. After this self-denial it is humiliating to record that neither boy succeeded in winning anything. Caesar won the house mile handicap; Scaife won the under sixteen high jump—a triumph for the Manor; and Fluff, the despised Fluff, actually secured an immense tankard, ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... the sentiments of the Northern people; whereas, as a matter of fact, but for the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, I believe the great majority of the Northern people, and the soldiers unanimously, would have been in favor of a speedy reconstruction on terms that would be the least humiliating to the people who had rebelled against their government. They believed, I have no doubt, as I did, that besides being the mildest, it was ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... trials wherewith the lot of man in every station is chequered and environed; and when he heard those bondmen of hard labour, jocund after sound slumbers and light suppers, laughing contemptuously as they beheld the humiliating sight, which divers gallants and youngsters, courtiers of the court, degraded with debauch, made of themselves as they stumbled homeward, he thought there was surely more bliss in the cup that was earned by the constancy of health and a willing mind, than in all the possets ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... be tedious to read the various wars between Charles and his rival. Each of them gained, at different times, great successes, and each experienced, in turn, the most humiliating reverses. Francis was even taken prisoner at the battle of Pavia, in 1525, and confined in a fortress at Madrid, until he promised to the victors the complete dismemberment of France—an extorted promise he never meant to keep. No sooner had ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... subside, and she put out her mouth for the cake and bit a piece; and then Tom bit a piece, just for company, and they ate together and rubbed each other's cheeks and brows and noses together, while they ate, with a humiliating resemblance to two ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... which are so swollen that I can hardly draw on my sleeves, and for two days stockings have been an impossibility, and I have had to sew up my feet daily in linen! The swellings from the bites have become confluent, and are scarlet with inflammation. It is truly humiliating that "the crown of things" cannot defend himself against these minute enemies, and should be made as miserable as I am ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... Konrad Krause is good during the day as well. When he wants something, he speaks without humiliating me; and something in the sound of his voice makes me happy. He does not permit anything nasty to be said about me in his presence. ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... Dinner had gone on a little way, and her companion had begun to put the usual questions to her about where she had been, and where she was going, questions to which Chatty, who had been nowhere, and had not as yet one other invitation (which feels a little humiliating when you hear of all the great things that are going on), could make but little reply, when in one of the pauses of the conversation, she was suddenly aware of a laugh, which made her start slightly, and opened up an entirely new interest in this as yet not very exciting company. It ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... were to vie with each other in endeavours to overcome the arrogance of the young Count. The style of the whole is more sententious than imaginative: the glowing colours of fancy could not with propriety have been employed on such a subject. In the passages where the humiliating rejection of the poor Helena is most painfully affecting, the cowardly Parolles steps in to the relief of the spectator. The mystification by which his pretended valour and his shameless slanders are unmasked must be ranked among the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... great presence? Why is it that I recall these things? Why do I bring forward what many of us, forgetting the iron weight with which the sentiments of his age press down even upon the mightiest genius, might look upon as a humiliating circumstance far greater than it is, in the life of a man we ought all to love so much? Is history a thing done away with, or is not the past for ever in the present? And is it not but too probable that we ourselves are occasionally guilty of things which, for our lights, are as sad aberrations ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... thereby finally goaded the nations to resist him. In 1810 he exclaimed triumphantly, 'Three years yet, and I shall be master of the world!' And when he lately took the field against Russia, he said, 'After humiliating Russia and reducing her to an Asiatic power, I shall establish at Paris a universal European court and universal archives!' He believes himself to be the master of the world; he thinks the thunderbolts of heaven are ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... non-appearance she would not think; but when the fear that she was perhaps looking for him in vain assailed her, the blood crimsoned her face as if she felt the shame of a humiliating insult. Yet why should she make the period of waiting more torturing than ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and least of all in that lazy and good-natured place. Considering, too, the errand on which I had come, not for my own convenience but for the sake of another, my treatment seemed to me very hard. What was still more humiliating was the fact that my spirit seemed just as powerless in the hands of these ruffians as my body would have been on earth. I was pushed, hustled, insulted, hurt. I could have summoned Amroth to my ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that for which the Hemerlingues were waiting, following with their eyes to its last stage that heart-rending, humiliating exit which piles upon the back of the rejected one something of the shame and horror of an expulsion; then, as soon as the Nabob had disappeared, they looked at each other with a silent laugh and left the gallery, the old woman not daring to ask them to ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... idea of power from such distinction, though from the weakness of mankind it is impossible to disconnect them. What services, then, can a man render to society to compensate for the outrage done to the dignity of our nature when we bind ourselves to address him and his posterity with humiliating circumlocutions, calling him most noble, most honourable, most high, most august, serene, excellent, eminent, and so forth; when it is more than probable that such unnatural flattery will but generate vices ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... a humiliating sense of being no match for the little stranger on sea topics, so he changed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... they had taken her at a flying pace down the road to destruction. And when the end came, at the same time that I had my first financial blow, the surprise was overwhelming. It was an end so shameful and to me so humiliating that I could not bear at first to go out among men and meet my friends. It was a critical time and my affairs needed my closest attention. But I was too broken down and overcome by the disgrace to attempt to do anything. And when I did go ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... and all the wild and amusing caprice, and daring wilfulness, and grand affectation, that distinguish and inspire a circle of patrician youth, there came over him the consciousness that to him something dark had occurred, something bitter and disappointing and humiliating, and that the breaking morn would not bring to him a day so bright and ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... Algerian, Greek, Arab, Khabyle, Russian, Indian, Italian, Englishman, Scotsman, Jew, and Nubian rub shoulders in the thronged streets. The miles of docks are crammed with ships. Food of all sorts abounds. In the bright, dry light all is gay and busy. The most sthetic, and perhaps most humiliating, sight that a Westerner could see we came on there: two Arab Spahis walking down the main street in their long robe uniforms, white and red, and their white linen bonnets bound with a dark fur and canting slightly backwards. Over ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... first articles of religion, and respect and reverence for their lords and superiors, and initiated them in the ceremonies of a court. They were called pages, valets, or varlets, and their office was to carve, to wait at table, and to perform other menial services, which were not then considered humiliating. In their leisure hours they learned to dance and play on the harp, were instructed in the mysteries of woods and rivers, that is, in hunting, falconry, and fishing, and in wrestling, tilting with spears, and performing other ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... bodice, which broke the point of the furious Frenchman's rapier. The sight of the bleeding beauty—for she received a slight scratch—brought the diplomat to his senses. Falling on his knees, he poured forth his remorse in passionate self-reproaches, but only received his pardon on the most humiliating terms, namely, that he should present her with the weapon which had so nearly pierced her heart, on which was to be inscribed this memento of the jealous madness of its owner: "Epee de M———, qui osa frapper La Gabrielli." Only Metastasio's persuasions (for Gabrielli prized his friendship ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... no avoiding the humiliating scene of a public trial, the noble relatives of the Count endeavored to predispose the minds of the magistrates before whom he was to be arraigned. They accordingly made urgent and eloquent representations of the high descent, and noble and powerful connexions ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... and cruel question as I think it—of social inequalities. Circumstances which will try you to the quick, spare me the ungracious necessity of paining a man who has lived in friendly intimacy under the same roof with myself by any humiliating reference to matters of rank and station. You must leave Limmeridge House, Mr. Hartright, before more harm is done. It is my duty to say that to you; and it would be equally my duty to say it, under precisely the same serious necessity, if you ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... short time and that ultimately a coalition must take place under the direction and supremacy of Sir Robert Peel. This is jumping to a conclusion over many difficulties. However, nothing can be more meagre than the triumph of the Whigs nor more humiliating than their position; even my Whig-Radical friends write me word that 'O'Connell holds the destiny of the Government in his hands, and is acknowledged to be the greatest man going.' It was hardly worth while (in a national point of view, whatever it may have been in a party one) to ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... aching senses, wearied and reeling already, gave way beneath this terrible violence; her useless struggles ceased, her arms fell inert by her side: and losing consciousness completely, her proud, unbendable spirit was spared the humiliating knowledge of her final removal by the rough soldiers, and of the complete wreckage ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... themselves above the prejudices of education and of the society in which they were born. Pyrrhonism is now the fashion above everything else. People think that the legitimate exercise of the mind consists in not believing rashly, and in knowing how to doubt many things. What can be more intolerable and humiliating than to see our pretended great men boast themselves of believing nothing, and of calling those people simple and credulous who have not perhaps examined the first proofs of religion?" The condition of things was no better in ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... Davison under his breath, and laughed. But the meaning of his laugh was lost on every one except Mildred. She flushed hotly at the thought of having to bear the responsibility of that ridiculous scene on the Cherwell; it was humiliating, indeed. She took up the crystal to conceal ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... recalled it, and then vacillating again, he drew a second, in slightly altered words, which he signed and did not recall. There had been a struggle in which the weaker nature had prevailed, and the orthodox leaders made haste to improve their triumph. The first step being over, confessions far more humiliating could now be extorted. Bonner came to his cell, and obtained from him a promise in writing, "to submit to the king and queen in all their laws and ordinances, as well touching the pope's supremacy, as in all other things;" with ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... suppose all would be wofully exaggerated and painfully vulgarised by the actors and actresses on such a stage. What, I cannot help asking myself, would they make of Mr. Rochester? And the picture my fancy conjures up by way of reply is a somewhat humiliating one. What would they make of Jane Eyre? I see something very pert and very affected as an answer ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... to his room and started in on his report. It had stuck in Crowley's crop—seemed humiliating—to be made a subaltern in the case of women operatives. He believed that at last he was in right and proper on the grand opportunity of his career; he would come down from the bush with the bacon; Elsham had fallen down ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... Tommy congregated in the back-yard, expostulated with Melons; in vain the unhappy father shook his fist at him. Secure in his position, Melons redoubled his exertions and at last landed Tommy on the roof. Then it was that the humiliating fact was disclosed that Tommy had been acting in collusion with Melons. He grinned delightedly back at his parents, as if "by merit raised to that bad eminence." Long before the ladder arrived that was to succor him, he became ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... was any place he could not follow his Master. He declared that he would even lay down his life for his sake. "Wilt thou lay down thy life for my sake?" answered the Master. "Wilt thou, indeed?" Then he foretold Peter's sad, humiliating fall—that, instead of laying down his life for ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... I am trying to earn something to support her," sobbed Katy, who, with her independent notions of trade in general, and of the candy trade in particular, would not have revealed this humiliating truth, except under the severe pressure ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... The effort, however, to tie down so spirited a nation to so tame a policy, proved to be futile. The recollections of the empire, which the government itself did so much to arouse, moved the people to compare the achievements of the past with the humiliating position of their country under the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... "It is humiliating—very," sighed Mr. Rhinds. "Still, I shall be the last to offer any objection to any arrangement that seems wise to the ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... war party returned: "Where's he been? Well, I'll tell you where he's been. And I just want you to know who done this." Here Exhibit A got behind a post. The recital of the details of his catastrophe was humiliating. But the mother continued: "Henry Perkins done this. I don't believe in stirring up neighborhood quarrels and all that, but I've just stood this long enough. My boy can't stick his nose out of the door without that Perkins boy jumpin' on him. If you ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... care of half a life in gathering; then the compulsory abdication of the great and conspicuous mansion for the small, obscure, hired cottage; then the saddening bodings and deep concern felt in seeing the means of living daily diminishing, with no prospect of ever being replenished; and, finally, the humiliating resort of the wife and children to the needle or menial employments, for the actual necessaries of life,—these, all these, are but the usual graduated vicissitudes of sorrow and trial which are allotted to those whose folly and extravagance have suddenly thrown them on the downward ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... cycle of fiction stands is a certain most important truth about the enduring spirit of youth, the truth of the near kinship between terror and joy. The Bronte heroine, dingily dressed, badly educated, hampered by a humiliating inexperience, a kind of ugly innocence, is yet, by the very fact of her solitude and her gaucherie, full of the greatest delight that is possible to a human being, the delight of expectation, the delight of an ardent and flamboyant ignorance. She serves to show how futile it is of humanity ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... if you got the chance or get the crowd to lynch him. That if a thief stole from you the shrewdest thing to do was to induce him as a set-off to give you the proceeds of his next thieving. That it was humiliating to live in a town where a self-confessed rascal could snap his fingers at the law ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... naïve Americans, who believed that their weakness for the French capital was returned, a painful surprise. They imagined in the simplicity of their innocent hearts that she loved them for themselves, and have awakened, like other rich lovers, to the humiliating knowledge that a penniless neighbor was receiving the caresses that Croesus paid for. Not only did the entire Parisian press teem at that moment with covert insults directed towards us, but in society, at the clubs and tables of the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... fascinating room and perfect dream of a bed. I feel an ungrateful wretch for so much as mentioning this matter to you after the way in which you have indulged me. Only something rather extraordinary really did happen, of which I honestly confess I am still expiring to find a reasonable and not too humiliating explanation. For, though I blush to ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... water". Such was the legal form of words which implied banishment from Rome, outlawry, and social excommunication. Every man knew against whom the motion was levelled. It was carried—carried in spite of the indignation of all honest men in Rome, in spite of all Cicero's humiliating efforts to obtain ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... management of which he was in any way responsible. He was, in fact, entirely ignorant of the art of boat sailing. But the men who sat on the window sills of Brannigan's shop, battered sea dogs every one of them, had their eyes fixed on him. It would be deeply humiliating to have to own up before them that he knew nothing about boats. Sir Lucius's order applied, very properly, to Priscilla who was a child. Peter Walsh looked as if he thought that Frank also ought to be treated as a child. This was intolerable. The day seemed very calm. It was difficult to think ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... Sophia's mother for nearly sixteen years had not been lost on Mrs. Baines, and though she was now discovering undreamt-of dangers in Sophia's erratic temperament, she kept her presence of mind sufficiently well to behave with diplomatic smoothness. It was undoubtedly humiliating to a mother to be forced to use diplomacy in dealing with a girl in short sleeves. In HER day mothers had been autocrats. But ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... important measure occurred at the very period when the power of Cimon was weakened by the humiliating circumstances that attended his expedition to Ithome, and by the vigorous and popular measures of the opposition, so there seems every reason to believe that it was principally advised and effected by Pericles, who appears shortly ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by making it obligatory on the members of the Hanlin Academy, the Emperor's "Forest of Pencils," to come there for a course of instruction in science and international law. Against this daring innovation, Wojin, a Manchu tutor of the Emperor, protested, declaring that it would be humiliating to China to have her choicest scholars sit at the feet of foreign professors. The scheme fell through, but before many years the Emperor himself had taken up the study of the English language, and two of our students ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... attack which Hole-in-the-Day had made on the Sioux a short time before, Major Plympton decided not to execute the prisoners. They were turned over to their own people to be flogged in the presence of the officers. More humiliating than death was their punishment. Their blankets, leggins, and breech-cloths were cut into small pieces, and finally the braves whipped them with long sticks while the ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... (England, Russia. Austria, and Sweden), only to see Napoleon hurl it to the ground on the field of Austerlitz (December, 1805). England's isolation seemed as complete as the Emperor's victory. Russia, Austria, and Prussia made humiliating peace with the victor, who carved his conquests into new states and kingdoms. Pitt, who, at the news of Austerlitz, had pointed to the map of Europe with the words "Roll up that map, there will be no use for it these ten years," survived ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... now took charge of her and led her to a room where she was searched by a matron for concealed weapons, a humiliating ordeal to which even the richest and most influential visitors must submit with as good grace as possible. The matron was a hard-looking woman of about fifty years of age, in whom every spark of human pity and sympathy had been killed during her many years of constant ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... are to come into this right relationship with Him, the first thing we must learn is that our wills must be broken to His will. To be broken is the beginning of Revival. It is painful, it is humiliating, but it is the only way. It is being "Not I, but Christ,"[footnote1:Gal. 2: 20.] and a "C" is a bent "I." The Lord Jesus cannot live in us fully and reveal Himself through us until the proud self within us is broken. This simply means that the hard unyielding self, which justifies itself, ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... the time their vessels were ready most of them had changed their mind and declined to go, but they wrote letters to Spain bitterly complaining of the admiral and his brothers, and accusing them of oppression and despotism. Columbus found himself obliged to agree to the most humiliating terms with the rebels, conceding a complete pardon, restoring them to their official posts, promising to pay their salary in arrears and distributing lands and Indians among them. Nevertheless, other quarrels followed, Columbus was forced to take severe ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... join his arms to those of Kajaaga.' A message of this nature from so powerful a prince could not fail to create great alarm; and the inhabitants of Teesee, after a long consultation, agreed to conform to his good pleasure, humiliating as it was to them. Accordingly, one and all publicly offered up eleven prayers, which were considered a sufficient testimony of their having renounced paganism, and embraced ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... miserably humiliating, but I could do no more. It was madness to keep the poor wretch where I had laid him; discovery might come at any time. Once I thought of leaving him there and going away myself— disappearing, as it were, from the world. I could keep my chambers untouched for months—perhaps years—by ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... mongrel! Ah, white-galled Norman eft! God's feet, if I pommel you for this!' Pommel him he did; and, having drawn blood at his ears, he turned him over his knee as if he had been a schoolboy, and lathered his rump with a chair-leg. This humiliating punishment had humiliating effects. Gilles believed himself a boy in the cloister-school again, with his smock up. 'Mea culpa, mea culpa! Hey, reverend father, have pity!' he began to roar. Dropping him at last, Richard tumbled him on to the bed. 'Blubber yourself ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... priest of a century ago—a friend of Whitefield." He is likely to come under the spell of this reverend Ghost who haunts the "Manse" and as it rains and darkens and the sky glooms through the dusty attic windows, he is likely "to muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact that the works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands" ... "that thought grows moldy," and as the garret is in Massachusetts, the "thought" and the "mold" are likely to be quite native. ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... It is a humiliating confession, is it not, that one has wilfully thrown away something that perhaps one might have had, for something that one knows one can never have? It is sheerest folly. And to do it with one's eyes open ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... shall encounter many unsolved theories. Indeed, the facts of his life are suggestive of the mystery of being. If it be suggested that he is "part and parcel" of nature and has slowly arisen out of lower forms, it should not be a humiliating thought, for his daily life is dependent upon the lower elements of nature. The life of every day is dependent upon the dust of the earth. The food he eats comes from the earth just the same as that of the hog, the rabbit, or ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... thing. Her cheeks scorched with the thought and she shivered at the remembrance of all that she had gone through. She had been down into the depths and she would carry the scars all her life. The girl who had started out so triumphantly from Biskra had become a woman through bitter knowledge and humiliating experience. ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... inveigled on board under false pretences, by my advertising the Candace as the newest thing in yachts. I've had a letter and several cypher telegrams from the assistant conductor, a useful chap, telling me the whole story of the plot, which he's nosed out; and I'm faced with humiliating failure unless I can save the situation by a grand coup at the eleventh hour. Now, you can guess why on the spur of the moment I bought up your rights to dig in the Sudan, ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... any detailed description of the appearance of Concepcion, for I feel that it is quite impossible to convey the mingled feelings which I experienced. Several of the officers visited it before me, but their strongest language failed to give a just idea of the scene of desolation. It is a bitter and humiliating thing to see works, which have cost man so much time and labour, overthrown in one minute; yet compassion for the inhabitants was almost instantly banished, by the surprise in seeing a state of things ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... extinguished, as the first spark is extinguished which the steel gives birth to. He could not confide himself to Wilhelm; the understanding which this very confidence would give birth to between them, must separate them from each other. It was humiliating, it was annihilating. But for Sophie? No, how could he, after that, declare the love of his heart? how far below her should he be placed, as the child of poverty and shame! But the mother of the family? Yes, she was gentle and kind; with a maternal sentiment she extended ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... she began again very suddenly with renewed assurance. "These things never last, and I think Patty is quite wrong to insist upon telling you. Of course it is humiliating for a time, but—but"—she hesitated, and then brought out triumphantly—"he married very young, you know, and men aren't like women—there's no use pretending they are. Now when a woman loves ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... impetuosity of his own sovereign, Christian V., and his fall in the beginning of 1676 not only, as he had foreseen, involved Denmark in an unprofitable war, but, as his friend and disciple, Jens Juel, well observed, relegated her henceforth to the humiliating position of an international catspaw. Thus at the peace of Fontainebleau (September 2, 1679) Denmark, which had borne the brunt of the struggle in the Baltic, was compelled by the inexorable French king to make ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... one must be careful not to confirm him in the coward's code. The injustice of it he must see, see by smarting under it. If ever punishment before others is wise it is in this case; for surely he who delights in humiliating others must be humiliated. But though justice suggests this course, experience shows that it does not always work; the bully only bides his time, and, cherishing resentment, he wreaks it on the ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... The poor girl had become so nervous under the ordeal, which for her had been of a very violent character, that she imagined nothing could be more disgraceful and humiliating than to have her name mixed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
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