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More "Ignoble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... poor Harriet, after all. Stern justice must take its course— justice tempered with delicacy, justice tempered with compassion, justice that pities a forlorn dead girl and refuses to strike her. Except in the back. Will not be ignoble and say the harsh thing, but only insinuate it. Stern justice knows about the carriage and the wet-nurse and the bonnet-shop and the other dark things that caused this sad mischief, and may not, must not blink them; so ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... solution is this. Murder in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this reason, that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life; an instinct, which, as being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind, (though different in degree,) amongst all living creatures; this instinct therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... him. I think I know the thing that drove him here amongst us. It is a great temptation, which pursues him here—even here, where his life is so commendable. I have seen him fighting it. I have seen his torture, the piteous, ignoble yielding, and the struggle, with more than mortal energy, to be master ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... himself, until one day there is magic in the air, and the eyes of a girl rest upon him. He does not know that it is he himself who crowned her, and if the girl is as pure as he, their love is the one form of idolatry that is not quite ignoble. It is the joining of two souls on their way to God. But if the woman be bad, the test of the man is when he wakens from his dream. The nobler his ideal, the further will he have been hurried down the wrong way, for those who only run after ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... "please don't consider it is at all ignoble to be financially embarrassed. In fact, more than half of our girls are continually 'rationed,' as they call a cut in allowance. And if it is only a matter of ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... returned Judith slangily. "Undoubtedly you refer to the ignoble Miss Noble. Noble by name but not by nature," she added with ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... what will reflective readers say of a governing class, such as ours, addressing its workers with an indictment of 'over-production!' Over-production: runs it not so? 'Ye miscellaneous ignoble, manufacturing individuals, ye have produced too much. We accuse you of making above two hundred thousand shirts for the bare backs of mankind. Your trousers too, which you have made of fustian, of cassimere, of Scotch plaid, of jane, nankeen, and woollen broadcloth, are ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... was organized for practically the same purposes as our present national banks, but for lack of proper restrictions its use was soon perverted to ignoble purposes. The bank managers showed so much partiality in the distribution of their favors and accommodations, and meddled in politics to such an extent, that the people became disgusted with it, and a renewal of ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... enjoyment with them. From that moment the horizon becomes void; no fresh hope inflames you; there is nothing left but to die. And yet you still cling on, you won't admit that it's all up with you, you obstinately persist in trying to produce—just as old men cling to love with painful, ignoble efforts. Ah! a man ought to have the courage and the pride to strangle himself before his ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... one fadeless wreath upon his tomb. He would not play the ignoble part of a Twiggs or a Lynde. He offered a stainless sword to the Bonnie ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... general realization of the extremely high quality of "The New Machiavelli" has reduced almost to silence the ignoble tittle-tattle that accompanied its serial publication in the English Review. It is years since a novel gave rise to so much offensive and ridiculous chatter before being issued as a book. When the chatter began, dozens of people who would no more dream of paying four-and-sixpence for a ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... would live, again she would love, only this time it would be a better life, a deeper, purer love. Yet immediately afterwards she recollected that this was impossible, for she had been soiled and degraded by an ignoble, ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... her by the hand and lead her to a higher seat on the dais, and place upon her head, or at least upon her letter-paper and the panels of her carriage, a coronet in which the strawberry leaves should stand out more prominently than in her brother's emblazonment. Lesbia's mind could not conceive an ignoble marriage, or the possibility of the most worthy happening to be found in a lower circle than ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... uncle to decide. They showed wisdom by their decision. Now, the greatest of all the Umbrian painters, before Raphael, was a queer little miserly man named Perugino, who at that time had a studio in Perugia, an Umbrian town not far distant from Urbino. Although he was of mean appearance and ignoble character, he had an unmistakable power in painting mild-eyed Madonnas and spotless saints against delicate landscape back-grounds. People disliked the man, but they could not help seeing the beauty of his art, and so his studio was crowded. Hither was sent the boy Raphael and when Perugino ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... abnegation, is of the imperishable things that draw weak man a little nearer to the angels. When Carlotta wept upon my shoulder during those few first moments of her return I knew that all resentment was gone from my heart, that it would have been a poor, ignoble thing. Had she come back to me leprous of body and abominable of spirit, it would not have mattered. I would have forgiven her, loved her, cherished her just the same. It was a question, not of reason, not of human pity, not of quixotism; not of any argument or sentiment for which I could ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... they two must play together. If his father had only winked at him! Surely he might have done that with safety! But not to be admitted to the secret,—not to be allowed to play the heroic part,—to be used as an ignoble tool by a father who neither loved him nor knew his courage,—that was too much! He would not betray his father—no, a thousand times, no! But ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... and his canoe were put on board the stage for Moosehead Lake, sixty and odd miles distant, an hour before we started in an open wagon. We carried hard bread, pork, smoked beef, tea, sugar, etc., seemingly enough for a regiment; the sight of which brought together reminded me by what ignoble means we had maintained our ground hitherto. We went by the Avenue Road, which is quite straight and very good, north-westward toward Moosehead Lake, through more than a dozen flourishing towns, with almost every one its academy,—not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... seen; that they had seen her, and guessed, of course, that she was his mother, was positively unendurable to Blair. He tried to speak, but his voice shook into silence. His dismay was not entirely ignoble; the situation was excruciating to a man whose feeling for beauty was a form of religion; his mortification had in it the element of horror for a profaned ideal; his mother was an esthetic insult ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... which you are about to embark; for I will now openly declare, what I have often before left you to infer, that I have no sympathies for those who come to oppress and enslave my country; nor will I ever aid or sanction their ignoble purposes—not even to the withholding any intelligence I may gain of their movements, which may avert disaster or peril from our ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... bushman's boots, and his hands trembled as he drew them on. He could now see the form of Howie plainly enough as it lay half in the starlight and half in the darkness of the tent. He stepped over it without a mistake, and the ignoble strains droned ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... fallen, when the peasants anxiously draw their conclusions as to the expected yield. But however valuable the fruit, the wood of the tree is worthless for commerce, except to make walking-sticks, or to serve the ignoble purpose of supplying hotels and cafes with tooth-picks! Lemons, which are far more delicate than oranges and require to be kept protected by screens and matting during the sharp winter nights, are less common at Sorrento than on the ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... and not in knowing; and that they have not used to enlarge their observation to match and sort that effect with instances of a diverse subject, which must of necessity be before any cause be found out. That they have passed over the observation of instances vulgar and ignoble, and stayed their attention chiefly upon instances of mark; whereas the other sort are for the most part more significant and of better height and information. That every particular that worketh any effect is a thing compounded (more or less) of diverse single natures, (more manifest ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... collection of "The Country Gentleman." I had never seen an agricultural paper before, though our little penny daily did occasionally contain extracts from some of them. I became immediately interested. The thought struck me that this bundle of old papers, now about to be used for such ignoble purposes as wrappers for groceries, must contain stores of the very information I was so laboriously seeking after. Hastily turning them over, my eye lighted on an article headed "Strawberries: how to plant and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... with the magnificent dreamer, who was regarded by his own generation as the fool of an idea. A more prosaic treatment would have utterly failed to represent that mind, which existed from boyhood in an ideal world, and, amid frustrated hopes, shattered plans, and ignoble returns for his sacrifices, could always rebuild its glowing projects, and conquer obloquy and death ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... at length, meditatively, removed the cigar from his lips and delicately knocked off the ash. "Circumstances alter cases. That method is too expensive. Son Altesse cannot afford the blood of the Fatherland in return for such ignoble carcasses. We—the price paid in the Herrero ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... hour; and certainly, although I could not discern his features, I saw him make no gesture either to invite help or to indicate that he had any understanding of his position. If mad, I thought (right or wrong) his death thus less ignoble than his life had become; if sane, he held a strong and steadfast heart, and bore himself well on his last voyage. By some strange chance, the boat spun and tossed among the breakers, yet kept an even keel, and boat and man together made a viking end. For, so standing, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... the four cardinal points of the compass of suspicion, and govern the stormy sea of soliloquies. From these frightful tempests which ravage a woman's heart springs an ignoble, unworthy resolution, one which every woman, the duchess as well as the shopkeeper's wife, the baroness as well as the stockbroker's lady, the angel as well as the shrew, the indifferent as well as the passionate, at once ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... crowd's ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray; Along the cool, sequester'd vale of life, They kept the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... and he who is devoid of wisdom is the destroyer of states and households. There are rulers and there are subjects in states. And the first claim to rule is that of parents to rule over their children; the second, that of the noble to rule over the ignoble; thirdly, the elder must govern the younger; in the fourth place, the slave must obey his master; fifthly, there is the power of the stronger, which the poet Pindar declares to be according to nature; ...
— Laws • Plato
... preservation. But yet there is a higher interest than that, that relates to the eternal interest of our souls. And truly to own and profess, and prosecute that interest of soul preservation, of eternal rest to our souls, is neither ignoble, nor unbeseeming a Christian; neither is it any way inconsistent with the pursuance of that more public and catholic interest of God's glory, in respect of which all interests, even the most general and public, are particular and private. For this is the goodness of our God, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... express sentiments like these, shew only that they distinguish the slave and the freeman, the noble and the ignoble from each other by their virtues and their [1255b] vices; for they think it reasonable, that as a man begets a man, and a beast a beast, so from a good man, a good man should be descended; and this is what nature desires to do, but frequently cannot accomplish it. ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... he, a minister of the connection, could not be kept in ignorance of. It was but a momentary pang. Phoebe was not so foolish as to shrink before the inevitable, or to attempt by foolish expedients to stave off such a danger. She shrank for a second, then drew herself up and shook off all such ignoble cares. "I am myself whatever happens," was her reflection; and she said with ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... lives, we have enjoyed the delight of seeing at the house of a friend one of the grand pictures of MURILLO, which was obtained by a distinguished connoisseur at Lima, in 1828, from the cloister of an old convent, where it had hung for countless years in ignoble seclusion. It had probably been brought from Spain during the life-time of the painter, as it is not described by any of his biographers, who have carefully enumerated the works of his pencil. This idea is strengthened by the fact of his having inscribed his name upon the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... daily life. Yet the variety was considerable: hardy and danger-loving pioneers fulfilling the requirements of romance; shiftless vagrants curiously combining utter inefficiency with a sort of bastard contempt for hardship; ruffians who could only offset against every brutal vice an ignoble physical courage; intelligent men whose observant eyes ranged over the whole region in a shrewd search after enterprise and profit; a few educated men, decent in apparel and bearing, useful in legislation and in preventing the ideal from becoming altogether ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... vain: strike other chords; Fill high the cup with Samian wine! Leave battles to the Turkish hordes, And shed the blood of Scio's vine! Hark! rising to the ignoble call— ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... is to discuss the evils of the great modern Capitalist Press, its function in vitiating and misinforming opinion, and in putting power into ignoble hands; its correction by the formation of small independent organs, and their ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... fomenting always antipathies conformably with the ancient maxim of tyrants, Divide and govern,—this government has constituted itself the adversary of every generous thought, the ally and patron of all ignoble causes, the government declared by the whole civilized world paymaster of the executioners ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... irretrievably. The real brevity of the time at your disposal, whether for the training of your mind, or for your growth into the character of good men, consists in this, that deterioration is standing always at the back of any neglect or waste. Deterioration is the inseparable shadow of every form of ignoble life. ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... his hand on the young officer's shoulder as he was about leaving the house, said, 'Snelling, you need not go, I will excuse you.' 'By no means,' was the reply, 'I feel more like doing my duty now than ever.' 'Stay, it is a false alarm by my order,' said the General."[150] The ignoble surrender of Detroit by General Hull was deplored by many of the men under him. The story is told that while General Hull's aid was trying to place the white flag in position he called, "Snelling, come and help me fix this flag." Whereupon that officer ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... amazing paradox was revealed in the fact that Palla fascinated her; that she believed her to be as fine as she was perverse; as honest as she was beautiful; as spiritually chaste as she knew her to be mentally and bodily untainted by anything ignoble. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... will with him, that is, she took her own gait. 'What that pace was there is no word mean enough to describe; it was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run.' He must belabor her incessantly. It was an ignoble toil, and he felt ashamed of himself besides, for he remembered her sex. 'The sound of my own blows sickened me. Once when I looked at her she had a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance who had formerly ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... on. And you need not fear that your virtue will be thrown away; the people of Scotland will be quick to understand, in default of visible fire and halter, that you have done a brave action for Christianity and the national weal; and if they are spared in the future any of the present ignoble jealousy of sect against sect, they will not forget that to that end you gave of your household comfort and stinted your children. Even if you fail—ay, and even if there were not found one to profit by your invitation—your ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and as the agreement was not observed, the troopers were useless. Before Chalons four hours had been lost—not by accident, as the royalist legend tells, for Valory the outrider testifies that it took but a few minutes to repair. Bouille knew the ignoble cause of his own ruin and of so much sorrow, but never revealed it. When he came to England he misled questioners, and he exacted an oath from his son that he would keep the miserable secret for half a century. The younger Bouille was true to his ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... looked at with a sportsman's eye. It is so with all forests and moorlands. The spirit of Robin Hood and Johnny of Breadislee is theirs. They are remnants of the home of man's fierce youth, still consecrated to the genius of animal excitement and savage freedom; after all, not the most ignoble qualities of human nature. Besides, there is no better method of giving a living picture of a whole country than by taking some one feature of it as a guide, and bringing all other observations into harmony with that original key. Even in merely scientific books this ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... beautiful man of his own times Ton chath eauton hathropon challei euprepestatos. He would therefore have looked the part admirably of the dying gladiator; and he would have died in his natural vocation. But it was ordered otherwise; his death was destined to private malice, and to an ignoble hand. And much obscurity still rests upon the motives of the assassins, though its circumstances are reported with unusual minuteness of detail. One thing is evident, that the public and patriotic motives assigned by the perpetrators ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... them that are given to change: for their calamity shall rise suddenly; and who knoweth the destruction of them both?'" and he finally warned them of the risk they incurred, after having been advanced and blessed in an unexampled way, of being flung back to their previous ignoble position upon the ash heap. There are plenty of respectable Boers in whose ears those expressions ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... the real object of his attention was her friend Laura. But if such was her object, she lacked the strength of mind and hardness of heart to carry it out, and in the end she becomes a benevolent providence, who labors for the reconciliation of the estranged couple. She proves too noble for the ignoble role she had undertaken. Instead of wrecking the marriage, she sacrifices herself upon the altar of friendship. To that there can, of course, be no objection; but in that case the process of her mental change ought to have been clearly shown. In Ibsen's "Rosmersholm," ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... instant that I was visited by the idea of writing the book which ultimately became "The Old Wives' Tale." Of course I felt that the woman who caused the ignoble mirth in the restaurant would not serve me as a type of heroine. For she was much too old and obviously unsympathetic. It is an absolute rule that the principal character of a novel must not be unsympathetic, and the whole modern tendency ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... dreams. To fully understand the sudden transformation of this illustrious author, it is necessary to realize the simplicity that constant work and solitude leave in the heart; all that love—reduced to a mere need, and now repugnant, beside an ignoble woman—excites of regret and longings for diviner sentiments in the higher regions of the soul. D'Arthez was, indeed, the child, the boy that Madame de Cadignan had recognized. An illumination something like his own had taken place in the beautiful ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... entered France, like many other adventurous knights, in Garibaldi's suite, came to Paris after the siege, and immediately after the outbreak of the eighteenth of March was created general by the Commune, and gathered round him in guise of staff the most illustrious, or least ignoble, of those foreign parasites and vagabonds, who have made of Paris a grand occidental Bohemian Babel. These soldiers of fortune, most of whom had been "unfortunate" at home, formed the marrow of ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... precipitate into an irrecoverable abyss of perilous communication or unwholesome truth. One's pillow became at once the legitimate and natural bourne to "the overheated brain;" and the generous rashness of the coenatorial reveller was not damped by untimeous caution or ignoble calculation. ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pretty?" she said. "See, here is a falcon-gentil. We call it 'ignoble,' because it takes the quarry in direct chase. This is a blue falcon. In falconry we call it 'noble' because it rises over the quarry, and wheeling, drops upon it from above. This white bird is a gerfalcon from the north. It is also 'noble!' Here is a merlin, ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... diluted in its downward percolation till sutlers and horse-thieves would strive in vain to emulate the fraudulent audacity of their superiors. It was well he spared me then, for soon after landing, my eyes and ears grew weary with the repetition of all these ignoble details. To illustrate how heavily the taxes were already beginning to weigh on the non-militant part of the population, my informant proved to me by very clear figures that, if he individually could secure permanent exemption from such burdens by the absolute ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... upon the Northern Consolidated evening, he ran plump upon an incident that was to have a last profound effect upon this history. No one not a prophet would have guessed this from the incident's character, for on its ignoble face it was nothing better than just a drunken clash between a Caucasian, and an African triumvirate that had locked horns with him in the street. The Caucasian, moved of liquor and pride of skin, had demanded the entire sidewalk. He enforced his demands by shoving the obstructing Africans ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... with the utmost rigour of military discipline. His daughter Bess is not less a Tudor. The mean, unworthy treatment of the queen of Scots is striking; and you will find Elizabeth's jealousy of her crown and her avarice were at war, and how the more ignoble passion predominated. But the most amusing passage is one in a private letter, as it paints the awe of children for their parents a little differently from modern habitudes. Mr. Talbot, second son of the Earl of Shrewsbury, was a member of the House of Commons, and was married. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... the gentleman who sits near me [Mr. McDowell], and who represents another portion of that State. In him I recognize the feelings of our Western brethren; his were the sentiments that accord with their acts in the past, and which, with a few ignoble exceptions, I doubt not they will emulate, if again the necessity should exist. Yes, sir, if ever they hear that the invader's foot has been pressed upon our soil, they will descend to the plain like an avalanche, rushing to bury ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... tormentors. Have they said That they were guilty? O white innocence, That thou shouldst wear the mask of guilt to hide 25 Thine awful and serenest countenance From those who know thee not! [ENTER JUDGE WITH LUCRETIA AND GIACOMO, GUARDED.] Ignoble hearts! For some brief spasms of pain, which are at least As mortal as the limbs through which they pass, Are centuries of high splendour laid in dust? 30 And that eternal honour which should live Sunlike, above the reek of mortal fame, Changed to a mockery and a byword? What! Will you give ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... productiveness and fertility of the soil afford ample field for their encouragement. To hail their enslaved bondmen upon their deliverance, in the glorious kingdom of British Liberty, in the Canadas, we cordially invite the free and the bond, the noble and the ignoble—we have no ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... Venezuela two years, campaigning nearly all the time. But it was an ignoble warfare, cruel and ruthless, and had I not given my word to Carmen, to stand by him until the country was pacified, I should have resigned my commission much sooner than I did. Ramon, who acted as one of my orderlies, bore himself bravely ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... this, my frightened courage, in some extraordinary way, came back. I had played an ignoble part thus far, as almost any girl might have done. But now I resolved that, whatever might happen, my dear friend and guardian should not be entrapped and lose his life through my cowardice. We had been expecting ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... not only held to be undignified in a man or woman, but to weaken and corrupt the soul; the mind becomes foolishly dependent on applause, over-skilful in producing tawdry and momentary illusions of excellence; it is our experience that actors and actresses as a class are loud, ignoble, and insincere. If they have not such flamboyant qualities then they are tepid and ineffectual players. Nor may the samurai do personal services, except in the matter of medicine or surgery; they may not be barbers, for example, nor inn waiters, nor boot cleaners. But, nowadays, we have ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... sleeping passion of his animal nature. For this is the commencement of a struggle for mastery in which quarter is neither to be given nor taken. It is, once for all, "To be, or Not to be;" to conquer, means Adept-ship: to fail, an ignoble Martyrdom; for to fall victim to lust, pride, avarice, vanity, selfishness, cowardice, or any other of the lower propensities, is indeed ignoble, if measured by the standard of true manhood. The Chela is not only called to ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... yet they had no sooner formed the quintet than they all somehow seemed to feel insulted; and I really believe it was owing to the promptitude with which they consented to join. They had joined, of course, from a not ignoble feeling of shame, for fear people might say afterwards that they had not dared to join; still they felt Pyotr Verhovensky ought to have appreciated their heroism and have rewarded it by telling them some really important bits of news at least. ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... so abruptly put out, the clouds lowered over him thicker and more hopelessly. He was worse off than the shipwrecked sailor; the pawnbroker had taken his last resources. All the romance with which he had invested the idea of his suicide now vanished, leaving bare the stern and ignoble reality. He must kill himself, not like the gay gamester who voluntarily leaves upon the roulette table the remains of his fortune, but like the Greek, who surprised and hunted, knows that every door will be shut upon him. His death would not be voluntary; ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... became at thirteen, and in an English castle, the King of Scotland. His prison, however, proved a noble school instead of an ignoble confinement to his fine and elevated spirit. The name of Stewart has never been so splendidly illustrated as by this patriotic and chivalrous Prince. No doubt it is infinitely to the credit of the English kings, both Henrys, IV and V, that he received ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... has played an ignoble part among the nations. We have tamely submitted to seeing the weak, whom we have covenanted to protect, wronged. We have seen our men, women, and children murdered on the high seas without protest. We have used elocution as a substitute ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... face with those realities which, during this week of madness, he had simply refused to see. He could pit himself against her no longer. When it came to the point he had not the nerve to enter upon a degrading and ignoble conflict, in which all that was to be won was her hatred or her fear. That, indeed, would be the last and worst ruin, for it would be the ruin, not of happiness or of hope, but ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and ignoble saying, "If there were not a God it would be necessary to invent Him," we shall say nothing. It is the expression of the unclean scepticism of those conservatives who look upon religion merely as a means of government and whose interest it is that in the other life there shall be a hell ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... without leaving a memory of a single generous deed, of a single service rendered—even involuntarily—to the polity of nations. Other despotisms there have been, but none whose origin was so grimly fantastic in its baseness, and the beginning of whose end was so gruesomely ignoble. What is amazing is the myth of its irresistible strength which is ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... trial, working with might and main, suffering from endless ills, in peril of their lives, and deprived of property and home, now joined in one heartrending wail of woe and disappointment. The consternation that followed the announcement of the ignoble surrender is thus described by Mr. Nixon, who was an eye-witness and sharer of ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... saying of him was that he made a fortune by "pinching the bellies of the soldiers"—that is, as an army contractor who defrauded in quantity and quality of supplies. By a multitude of underhand and ignoble artifices he finally found himself the lord of a manor sixteen miles long and twenty-four broad. On this estate he built flour and saw mills, a bakery and a brewery. In his advanced old age he exhibited great piety but held on grimly to every shilling that he could ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... face was thrown aside, and the tribes looked on the mis-shapen and degraded features of Tohomish the Pine Voice. He stood silent at first, his eyes bent on the ground, like a man in a trance. For a moment the spectators forgot the wonderful eloquence of the man in his ignoble appearance. What could he do against Wau-ca-cus the Klickitat and Snoqualmie the Cayuse, whose sonorous utterances still rang in their ears, whose majestic presence ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... unjust. If she were capable of the despicable course my ward is disposed to impute to her, I should cease to feel any interest in her career or fate; but I cherish the conviction that she would scorn to be guilty of conduct so ignoble. Her defects of character I shall neither deny nor attempt to palliate, but I trust her true womanly heart as I trust my own manly honor; and a stern sense of justice to the absent constrains me to vindicate her from Muriel's hasty and unfounded ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... these rudely but patiently resident races, possessing fields and orchards, quiet herds, homes of a sort, moralities and memories not ignoble, dwelt, or rather drifted, and shook, a shattered chain of gloomier tribes, piratical mainly, and predatory, nomad essentially; homeless, of necessity, finding no stay nor comfort in earth, or bitter sky: desperately ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... introspection, morbid or other, no pathos or complaint, no melodious informing of the public what dreadful emotions you labor under: here, in rapid prompt form, indicating that it is truth and not fable, are generous aspirations for the world and yourself, generous pride, disdain of the ignoble, of the dark, mendacious;—here, in short, is a swift-handed, valiant, STEEL-bright kind of soul; very likely for a King's, if other things answer, and not likely for a Poet's. No doubt he could have made something of Literature too; could have written Books, and left some ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... fostering of an anti-Davis spirit might seem less malicious if the fact were not known that many editors detested Davis because of his desire to abolish the exemption of editors from conscription. Their ignoble course brings to mind one of the few sarcasms recorded of Lee—the remark that the great mistake of the South was in making all its best military geniuses editors of newspapers. But it must be added in all fairness ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... ignorance and comparative degradation, they should make no atonement by elevating the other class by higher virtues, and more liberal attainments—if, besides degraded slaves, there should be ignorant, ignoble, and degraded freemen. There is a broad and well marked line, beyond which no slavish vice should be regarded with the least toleration or allowance. One class is cut off from all interest in the State—that abstraction so potent to the feelings ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... eager little man, so redolent of the elements that went into his careful grooming. She even tried in vain to read his novels; but they proved too much for her. She explained to him that his local colour was so brilliant that it dazzled her; but the ignoble truth was that she found it boring, although her letters going out of town were splashed thickly ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... was something half-alarmed and half-defiant in the pose of his lifted head, the glance of his handsome bright eyes. Her heart sank a little: it seemed to her that it would have been nobler in her husband to tell her the whole truth, and it had never occurred to her before to think of him as ignoble in ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... said to herself betimes, in a general way, that whatever habits her youth might form, that of seeing an interested suitor in every bush should certainly never grow to be one of them—an attitude she had early judged as ignoble, as poisonous. She had had accordingly in fact as little to do with it as possible and she scarce knew why at the present moment she should have had to catch herself in the act of imputing an ugly motive. It didn't sit, the ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... 5:10-12). This was because he remembered not that the name of God was in the command. Israel's trumpets of ram's horns (Josh 6:2-4), and Isaiah's walking naked (Isa 20:3), and Ezekiel's wars against a tile (Eze 4:1-4), would, doubtless, have been ignoble acts, but that the name of God was that which gave them reverence, power, glory, and beauty. Set therefore the name of God, and 'Thus saith the Lord,' against all reasonings, defamings, and reproaches, that either by the world, or thy own heart, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... destroy their organization. In the ensuing fracas the lumber barons came out only second best—and they were bad losers. After the war-fever had died down—one year after the signing of the Armistice—they were still trying in Centralia to attain their ignoble ends by ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... of all this was to make me feel, as I had never felt before, the intolerable nature of the yoke I was living under. When I looked into the future and saw nothing before me but years of this ignoble bondage, I told myself that nothing—no sacrament or contract, no law of church or ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... deny by my life that others are my superiors. I deny that anything can hurt the essential ME. I deny a vindictive God. I deny that slavery is religious. I deny that I am not the friend of the White Life. I deny that I am mean, low or ignoble in morals. I deny that my best life depends on creeds. I deny that the Universe is not for me. I deny that health is not my rightful claim. I deny that I am unhappy or depressed. I deny that I am weak and a nonentity. I ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... Highlands, that the chiefs, at least, those of the northern ridge of the Grampians, were humane in their doings, even kindly, and certainly they were never fond of taking a clansman's life on the gallows-tree. Their whole code was against that ignoble death, unless when an enemy had played them unfair, or a vassal had proved himself traitor, and then they swiftly slipped a life to the other world, holding this world to have no ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... Let us forgive; it were wicked to forget. For fifty years no American has had such opportunity to serve his country in an hour of need. Never has an American so signally betrayed the trust—not once since Benedict Arnold turned a less ignoble traitor! ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... marketplace unto the rulers." [93:2] We here discover one great cause of our Lord under the government of the pagan emperors. The Jews were prompted by mere bigotry to display hatred to the gospel—but the Gentiles were generally guided by the still more ignoble principle of selfishness. Many of the heathen multitude cared little for their idolatrous worship; but all who depended for subsistence on the prevalence of superstition, such as the image-makers, the jugglers, the fortune-tellers, and a considerable number of the ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Perhaps she was of the enemy's country. Perhaps those she loved, those who made up her life, had set her feet in this path that she was treading. If she was a spy,—Lord! How the mere word hurt one!—it wasn't for ignoble motives; it ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... reality—were devised to destroy man's sense of causality: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect!—And not an attack with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired by the most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of priests! An attack of parasites! The vampirism of pale, subterranean leeches!... When the natural consequences of an act are no longer "natural," but are regarded as produced ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... they who moved the country, shaking its torpor like successive earthquakes. Risen against the conceit of riches, and the hypocrisies of Society, against unimpassioned and unimaginative religion, against ignoble success and the complacent economics that hewed mankind into statistics to fit their abstractions—one and all, in spite of their variety or mutual hostility, they were rebels, and their personality expressed itself in rebellion. That was the ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... have been a trace of aspiration. Otherwise the whole affair was a hodge-podge of petty people and ignoble motives—of Una and Wilkins and S. Herbert Ross and Bessie Kraker, who married a mattress-renovator, and Bessie's successor; of fifteen dollars a week, and everybody trying to deceive everybody else; of vague reasons for going, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... washerwoman, a barber's wife, a milkmaid, and the daughter of a land-owner- choosing the darkest time of night and the most secret part of the house, he drank with them, was sprinkled and anointed, and went through many ignoble ceremonies, such as sitting nude upon a dead body. The teacher informed him that he was not to indulge shame, or aversion to anything, nor to prefer one thing to another, nor to regard caste, ceremonial cleanness or uncleanness, but freely to enjoy all ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... a note that rings false in the very name of that happy country now. Its traditions have been vulgarised by people who have never passed its borders. All sorts of charlatans have soiled its history with ignoble use, and the very centre and citadel of its capital has an air of being built of gingerbread. In point of fact, though its inhabitants are sparser than they once were, and its occasional guests of distinction fewer, the place itself is as real ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... straight stem—an American invention, by the way—is held to be more dangerous in case of collisions. Many of the old-time sailing ships have been shorn of their towering masts, robbed of their canvas, and made into ignoble barges which, loaded with coal, are towed along by some fuming, fussing tugboat—as Samson shorn of his locks was made to bear the burdens of the Philistines. This transformation from sail to steam has robbed the ocean of much of its picturesqueness, and seafaring life of much ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... little dove afraid of in her nest?" pinching Kitty's cheek as though she had been a dove very lately fledged indeed. She had always in fact the feeling when with Kitty that through her she suffered to live and patted on the back the whole ignoble, effete race of domestic women. Catharine caught sight of her satchel, which portended ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... preach, 'In greatness is no trust.' Here is an acre sown indeed With the richest, royall'st seed That the earth did e'er suck in, Since the first man died for sin. Here the bones of birth have cried, 'Though gods they were, as men they died.' Here are sands, ignoble things, Dropt from the ruined sides of kings. Here's a world of pomp and state, Buried in dust, once ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... Debats—a sworn enemy to Napoleon, a fanatic partisan of the Bourbons; he is one of our men. I looked, at him. At every fresh epithet of the Minister the Abbe bowed his head down to his plate with a smile of cheerfulness and self-complacency, and with a sort of leer. I never saw a more ignoble countenance. Fouche explained to me, on leaving the breakfast table, in what manner all these valets of literature were men of his, and while I acknowledged to myself that the system might be necessary, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... you took me, as soldiers use fascines to build entrenchments between the enemy and themselves. You brought me to Les Touches to mask your real feelings and leave you safe to follow your own secret adoration. The scheme was grand and ignoble both; but to carry it out you should have chosen either a common man or one so preoccupied by noble thoughts that you could easily deceive him. You thought me simple and easy to mislead as a man of genius. I am not a man of genius, I am a man of talent, and as ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... headland." This was literally true; but the fact is, the headlands of America had been decorated with gibbets from the very commencement of the war, and the surrender of Lord Cornwallis had nothing to do with the matter. As for the fall of Cornwallis, it was not an ignoble one; for his handfull of men could scarcely have been expected to hold out against the united arms of France and America. One member, Mr. Courtenay, in reply, justly observed that his chains were wreathed with laurels; that he ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... sad at heart, perplexed by the rather incomprehensible dealings of God with man. Yet, to the end, she would remain charming, gently gay even, both out of consideration for others and a fine self-respect, since she held it the mark of a cowardly and ignoble nature to let anything squalid appear in her attitude towards ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... born spirit of immortal fire Is stranger to ignoble deeds, and shuns The name of cowardice. But well thy mind, Sage, and matur'd by long experience, weighs The perilous attempt, to storm the town, And rescue thence, the suff'ring citizens. For but one pass to that peninsula, On which ...
— The Battle of Bunkers-Hill • Hugh Henry Brackenridge
... very first Of human life must spring from woman's breast, Your first small words are taught you from her lips, Your first tears quench'd by her, and your last sighs Too often breathed out in a woman's hearing, When men have shrunk from the ignoble care Of watching the last hour of him ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... afar. And so, if one comes to her from the country, or returns to her from her own hills, it is ever with a sense of loss, of sadness, of regret: she has lost her soul for the sake of the stranger, she has forgotten the splendid past for an ignoble present, a strangely wearying dream of ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... she had not confined her assurance to the verdict of a jury, that she had protested that she would not accept Major Grantly's hand as long as people thought that her father had stolen the cheque; but the archdeacon felt that it would be ignoble to hold her closely to her words. The event, according to his ideas of the compact, was to depend on the verdict of the jury. If the jury should find Mr Crawley not guilty, all objection on his part to the marriage was ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... Charles asked leave to seek out the woman who had betrayed Henri, and by us was detailed on secret service. He gave up home, family, friends. He lived in exile, in poverty, at all times in danger of a swift and ignoble death. In the War Office we know him as one who has given to his country services she cannot hope to reward. For she cannot return to him the years he has lost. She cannot return to him his brother. But she can and will clear ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... fully aware of the disadvantages as well as sinfulness of this habit, deprecates it with a qualification at which it is impossible to repress a smile. It savours so much of "beating the Devil round a bush." Thus he says—"May God preserve me from the indecent, ignoble, criminal slavery, to the mean delight of smoking a weed, which I see so many carried away with. And if ever I should smoke it, let me be so wise as to do it, not only with moderation, but also with such employment of my mind, as ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... Mr. Adams, were shown to him, on which he remarked, "The thing is not new. From the nature of our institutions, competitors for public favor and their respective partisans seek success by slander of each other. I disdain the ignoble warfare, and neither wage it myself or encourage it in my friends. But, from appearances, they will decide the election to ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... pugnacity and acquisitiveness have been the real foundation of much miscalled patriotism, better motives are generally mingled with these primitive instincts. It is the subtle blend of noble and ignoble sentiment which makes patriotism such a difficult problem for the moralist. The patriot nearly always believes, or thinks he believes, that he desires the greatness of his country because his country stands for something intrinsically great and ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... F. Simpson, a thorough-going sportsman of the good old type, had been out one day in the Koosee derahs; he had had a long and unsuccessful beat for tiger, and had given up all hope of bagging one that day; he thought therefore that he might as well turn his attention to more ignoble game. Extracting his bullets, he replaced them with No. 4 shot. In a few minutes a peacock got up in front of him, and he fired. The report roused a very fine tiger right in front of his elephant; to make the best of a bad bargain, he gave the retreating animal the full benefit of his remaining ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... ignoble. It was not like anything human. Dr. Tyrell looked at it dispassionately. With a mechanical gesture he ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... self-contempt, which—Piers was but one-and-twenty—he did not try to analyze. Every shop-mirror which reflected him seemed to present a malicious caricature; he hurried away on to the pavement, small, ignoble, silly. His heart did battle, and at moments assailed him in a triumph of heroic desire; but then again came the sinking moments, the sense of a grovelling ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... excuse is my conviction that I should never make her happy. She has been brought up as an angel, with pure thoughts, with holy hopes, with a belief in all that is good, and high, and noble. I have been surrounded through my whole life by things low, and mean, and ignoble. How could I live with her, or she with me? I know now that this is so; but my fault has been that I did not know it when I was there with her. I choose to tell you all," he continued, towards the ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... But such are exceptions only, and should not preclude attempts at improvement. If a bungler tries and fails, let him be Anathema, Maranathema; but let not his failure deter from trial a genuine artist. Nor is it an ignoble office to be thus shapers only of great thinkers' thoughts—Python interpreters to oracles. Nor is his work of slight account who thus—as sunbeams gift dark thunder-clouds with 'silver lining' and a fringe ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... fiercely, her voice shaking with passion, "you know what an ignoble canaille is this young man, without even enough decency of feeling to respect the troops of whom he has demanded such bloody sacrifices. At Metz we were near enough to the fighting to realize the blood ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... fierceness, currishness, and ravening. Of that red earth of which man was fashioned this piece was the basest, of the rubbish which was left and thrown by came this jailor; his descent is then more ancient, but more ignoble, for he comes of the race of those angels that fell with Lucifer from heaven, whither he never (or very hardly) returns. Of all his bunches of keys not one hath wards to open that door, for this jailor's soul stands not upon those two pillars that support heaven (justice and ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... to the religious orders, "shamefully beating their tenants and servants, in such wise as some whole towns were fain to keep the churches both night and day, and durst not come at their own houses."—Whilst engaged in these ignoble practices, less dissonant, however, to the manners of his age than to those of our's, he wooed, and won, and married, a daughter of the Percy of Northumberland; and it is conjectured, upon very plausible grounds, that his courtship and marriage ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... achievements in Tunis for the deliverance of white slaves, improved the occasion to read a lecture to his countrymen on the inconsistency and guilt of holding blacks in servitude. In the Missouri struggle of 1819- 20, the people of the free states, with a few ignoble exceptions, took issue with the South against the extension of slavery. Some ten years later, the present antislavery agitation commenced. It originated, beyond a question, in the democratic element. With the words of Jefferson on their lips, young, earnest, and enthusiastic ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... fruit which she has plucked. Adam stands grasping the tree with his left hand, and raises his right to gather for himself. The serpent, who looks down upon Eve, has the face and body of a woman. The forms in this group are fine; Adam's is remarkable for its symmetry and grace; but Eve's face is ignoble. Indeed, Holbein, like Rembrandt, seems to have been incapable of an idea ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... palaces, and ruins, is called 'cicerone,' or a Cicero! It is unfortunate that terms like these, having once sprung up, are not again, or are not easily again, got rid of. They remain, testifying to an ignoble past, and in some sort helping to maintain it, long after the temper and tone of mind that produced them has passed away. [Footnote: See on this matter Marsh, On the English Language, ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... gruntings, as though the ever-present music of bleating goats has had the lamentable effect of neutralizing the naturally superior articulation of a human being and dragging his powers of utterance down almost to the ignoble ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... it was unknown in many parts of the Church, and was denied by the Fathers, so that neither perpetuity nor universality could be pleaded in its favour; and they declared it an absurd contradiction, founded on ignoble deceit, and incapable of being made an article of faith by Pope or Council.[396] One bishop protested that he would die rather than proclaim it. Another thought it would be an act ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... life would bring him the remotest approach to lasting happiness and satisfaction except one that gave scope to his intellectual passion. To yield to the immediate pressure of circumstances was perhaps ignoble, was even more probably a surer road to the loss of happiness for himself and for his wife than the repeated and painful sacrifices of the present. With all this, however, and the more when assured of her entire confidence in his judgment, he could not ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... the genuine American originality which Europe finds it so impossible to understand. And it is just as little understood by most of the diplomatists here, and what is still worse, it is not even studied by them. It is wretched work to be obliged to witness the low, the actually ignoble parts which many men play in the great farce of political life. I could easily mention a full score of would-be-eminent men, who are unsurpassed by the meanest of the vulgar herd in flippancy and ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... often breathed out in a woman's hearing, When men have shrunk from the ignoble care Of watching the last hour of him ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... any right to call it an ignoble judgment, if he determine to put them in order, as for sleep. A brave belief in life is indeed an enviable state of mind, but, as far as I can discern, an unusual one. I know few Christians so convinced ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... present moment was anxious rather to speak of Kate's ignoble father than of his own noble uncle. He had declared his intention of making inquiry of Father Marty, and he thought that he should do so with something of a high hand. He still had that scheme in his head, and he might perhaps be better prepared to discuss it with the priest ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... ink, mingled with pencil-caricatures and grotesque inscriptions. Although it was in the month of May that I made this visit, I shivered with cold as I entered this old house, and my gorge rose in disgust at the unaired smell and ignoble scenes which everywhere appeared. The clerk I applied to had the very face one might expect to find in such a place: one of those colorless, hard, sinister faces which are to be seen in nearly all the scenes of Paris reality. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... I go away. I skirt the forge of the ignoble Brisbille. It is the last house in that chain of low hills which is the street. Out of the deep dark the smithy window flames with vivid orange behind its black tracery. In the middle of that square-ruled page of light I see transparently outlined the smith's eccentric silhouette, now black ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... venerable man approach, and thought on all he had deserved and all he had suffered, she was moved to tears. Columbus had borne up firmly against the rude conflicts of the world,-he had endured with lofty scorn the injuries and insults of ignoble men; but he possessed strong and quick sensibility. When he found himself thus kindly received by his sovereigns, and beheld tears in the benign eyes of Isabella, his long-suppressed feelings burst forth: he threw himself ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... cooing of a middle-aged couple as indecent," she went on, "to look the other way a great deal while we're here. For I was for the first time seriously smitten with my husband when he rode out to meet me, returning from ignoble captivity in the tents of Brounckers, eighteen months ago. When I nursed him through enteric in the Hospital at Frostenberg—I won't disguise it—I fell in love! With a bag of bones, for he was nothing else: but genuine passion is indifferent ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Aristotelian philosophers, especially, no doubt, those he had left behind at Pisa, on the ground of his spoiling the pure, smooth, crystalline, celestial face of the moon as they had thought it, and making it harsh and rugged, and like so vile and ignoble a body as ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... glimpses of little green valleys; here and there, a few small houses and flocks of sheep show that these cases are peopled "far from the maddening crowd's ignoble strife." ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... judgment. These authors slain, he went to dine alone at the lonely club of the Polyanthus, where the vast solitudes frightened him, and made him only the more moody. He had been to more theaters for relaxation. The whole house was roaring with laughter and applause, and he saw only an ignoble farce that made him sad. It would have damped the spirits of the buffoon on the stage to have seen Pen's dismal face. He hardly knew what was happening; the scene, and the drama passed before him like a dream or a fever. ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... reserve; My life was theirs; each drop about my heart Pledg'd to the public cause; devoted to it; That was my compact; is the subjects' less? If they are all debas'd, and willing slaves, The young but breathing to grow grey in bondage, And the old sinking to ignoble graves, Of such a race no matter who is king. And yet I will not think it; no! my people Are brave and gen'rous; ...
— The Grecian Daughter • Arthur Murphy
... reap an aftermath Of youth's vainglorious weeds, But up the steep, amid the wrath 110 And shock of deadly hostile creeds, Where the world's best hope and stay By battle's flashes gropes a desperate way, And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds. Peace hath her not ignoble wreath, 115 Ere yet the sharp, decisive word Lights the black lips of cannon, and the sword Dreams in its easeful sheath: But some day the live coal behind the thought. Whether from Baael's stone obscene, 120 Or from the shrine serene Of God's pure altar brought, Bursts up in flame; the war of ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... delicate, characterless, and preserves late the self-conscious expression of a rather frivolous girl of seventeen. She had ideals of her own, which she pursued regardless of the course in which they led her; and these ideals were far from ignoble. To beauty of all kinds she was passionately sensitive. As a girl she had played the piano well, and, though the power had gone from long disuse, music was still her chief passion. Graceful ease, delicacy in her surroundings, freedom from domestic ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... began, "please don't consider it is at all ignoble to be financially embarrassed. In fact, more than half of our girls are continually 'rationed,' as they call a cut in allowance. And if it is only a matter of a pretty little ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... were allowed to enter the palace gate borne in their palanquins. They were preceded the whole way by a band of music. They ascended into the hall, where they performed their obeisances. Hideyoshi is a mean and ignoble-looking man; his complexion is dark, and his features are wanting in distinction. But his eyeballs send out fire in flashes—enough to pierce one through. He sat upon a threefold cushion with his face to the south. He wore a gauze hat and a dark-coloured ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the tennur or oven, (which is like a great earthen jar sunken in the ground,) to shake off the fleas into the fire. The story which I have translated goes thus: A brilliant bug and a noble flea once went to the oven to shake off the ignoble fleas from their garments into the fire. But alas, alas, the noble flea lost his footing, fell into the fire and was consumed. Then the brilliant bug began ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... "That ignoble peace! It was no peace at all, with that crime and shame at our very gates." She was conscious of parroting the current phrases of the newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose her words. She must sacrifice anything to the high ideal she had for him, and after a good deal of rapid ...
— Different Girls • Various
... nearest, had been trodden into dust by the hoofs of the beast! And yet, all the while, I had scorned, as a dream, more wild than the word of a sorcerer, the hope that the old man and the child, the wise and the ignorant, took from their souls as inborn. Man and fiend had alike failed a mind, not ignoble, not skill-less, not abjectly craven; alike failed a heart not feeble and selfish, not dead to the hero's devotion, willing to shed every drop of its blood for a something more dear than an animal's life for itself! What remained—what remained for man's hope?—man's mind and man's ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Heretique that makes the fire, Not she which burnes in't. Ile not call you Tyrant: But this most cruell vsage of your Queene (Not able to produce more accusation Then your owne weake-hindg'd Fancy) something sauors Of Tyrannie, and will ignoble make you, Yea, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... hopeless, and are illuminated by no high call for heroic deeds. There the observer sees whatever there is to be seen of petty spite and jealousies, the manipulating of jobs, the dodging of regulations, all that is most ignoble in the soldier's trade. There also are the men with grievances, who, in their own estimation, are fit for posts quite other than those they hold. Some one described war at the front as an affair of months of boredom punctuated ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... inglorious campaign of the Thierache. Edward returned to Brussels "like a fox to his hole," and each side denounced the other for failing to keep the appointed tryst. The chivalry of the fourteenth century saw something ignoble in the sluggishness of Philip; but no modern soldier would blame him for his inactivity. Without striking a blow, he obtained the object of his campaign, for the enemy abandoned French territory. Had Edward been fully confident of victory, he could easily ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... passages:—"Much of my life has been lost under the pressures of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has always been spent in provision for the day that was passing over me; but I shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my assistance foreign nations and distant ages gain access to the propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth; if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... perverted one unless the foundation is carefully laid in early years. The fitting way then to cultivate moral judgments, that is, to start just ideas of right and wrong, of virtues and vices, is by a regular and systematic presentation of persons illustrating noble and ignoble acts. A preference for the right and an aversion for the wrong will be the sure result of careful teaching. Habits of judging will be formed and strong moral convictions established which may be gradually brought ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... logic of things that he must suffer for it. But what a shipwreck! After a pure and dignified life, wholly filled up by duty and a striving after knowledge, entirely devoted to warring against the animal element in man, and to educating himself up to an ideal standard of freedom from ignoble instincts, thus shamefully to choke and drown in the muddy lees of ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... which I vacillated between an ignoble love and a noble duty. Then, late in the evening, the whole court was fanned into a blaze destined to spread throughout Europe and America, by the announcement that the war ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... red-tiled) straggle up the immediate hills which surround it. Those of more pretention and inevitable ugliness range themselves decently and in order along two parallel roads. Aloof as this village is from "the madding crowd's ignoble strife," it has yet been touched to its undoing by the ruthless finger of conventionality. The inevitable Kur-Haus and bandstand and Anlagen are here; worst of all, a Trink-Halle! The Trink-Halle stands a mute and awful warning to the vaulting ambition ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... occasion. There is a nobler strain heard in the words:—'Endure, my soul, thou hast endured worse.' Nor must we allow our citizens to receive bribes, or to say, 'Gifts persuade the gods, gifts reverend kings;' or to applaud the ignoble advice of Phoenix to Achilles that he should get money out of the Greeks before he assisted them; or the meanness of Achilles himself in taking gifts from Agamemnon; or his requiring a ransom for the body of Hector; or his cursing of Apollo; or his insolence ...
— The Republic • Plato
... at least upon her letter-paper and the panels of her carriage, a coronet in which the strawberry leaves should stand out more prominently than in her brother's emblazonment. Lesbia's mind could not conceive an ignoble marriage, or the possibility of the most worthy happening to be found in a ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... advise you of a weapon.... Oh, might you obtain it! The most splendid of heroes I must call you, for it is destined to the strongest alone." And she relates how at the marriage-feast of Hunding, while the men drank, and the woman who "unconsulted had been offered him for wife by ignoble traffickers" sat sadly apart, a stranger appeared, an elderly man in grey garb, whose hat-brim concealed one of his eyes. But the brilliant beam of the other eye created terror in the bystanders,—all save herself, in whom it aroused an aching longing, sorrow and comfort in equal ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... wrong, because I could not tell him that I had done so. It made me afraid of him, and I never before was afraid of any one. Well; I did not tell him, and now he has found it out. I would not condescend to ask him how; but I think I know. This at least I know, that he did so in no ignoble way, by no mean little suspicions. He did not seek to discover it. It had come upon him like a great blow, and he came at once to me to learn the truth. I told him the truth, and this has been ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... unaffected, or more truly dignified, than the man himself. His noble head; his clear, honest, brown eye; his finely-traced mouth, beautiful as a woman's, and only strung up to sternness when anything ignoble or mean had outraged him; and, last of all, his voice contains a fascination perfectly irresistible, allied, as you knew and felt these graces were, with a thoroughly pure, untarnished nature. The true measure ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... spectral it disappears without leaving a memory of a single generous deed, of a single service rendered—even involuntarily—to the polity of nations. Other despotisms there have been, but none whose origin was so grimly fantastic in its baseness, and the beginning of whose end was so gruesomely ignoble. What is amazing is the myth of its irresistible strength ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... happy region is thy place, Cease thy celestial song a little space; Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine, Since Heaven's eternal year is thine. Hear then a mortal Muse thy praise rehearse, In no ignoble verse; But such as thy own voice did practise here, When thy first fruits of Poesy were given; To make thyself a welcome inmate there: While yet a young probationer, And ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... urbane, impressive, diffusing about him a "sultry" warmth of benevolence, as the author calls it again and again, and basking in the noontide of prosperity and the consideration of society; but in reality hard, gross, and ignoble. Judge Pyncheon is an elaborate piece of description, made up of a hundred admirable touches, in which satire is always winged with fancy, and fancy is linked with a deep sense of reality. It is difficult to say whether ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one. Indeed, in most other towns art has often to present herself in the form of a reaction against the sordid ugliness of ignoble lives, but at Oxford she comes to us as an exquisite flower born of the beauty of life and expressive of life's joy. She finds her home by the Isis as once she did by the Ilissus; the Magdalen walks and the Magdalen cloisters are as dear to her as were ever the silver olives of Colonus ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... friend Laura. But if such was her object, she lacked the strength of mind and hardness of heart to carry it out, and in the end she becomes a benevolent providence, who labors for the reconciliation of the estranged couple. She proves too noble for the ignoble role she had undertaken. Instead of wrecking the marriage, she sacrifices herself upon the altar of friendship. To that there can, of course, be no objection; but in that case the process of her mental change ought to have been clearly shown. In Ibsen's "Rosmersholm," Rebecca West, occupying ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... 220 Besides what hope the never-ending flight Of future days may bring, what chance, what change Worth waiting, since our present lot appeers For happy though but ill, for ill not worst, If we procure not to our selves more woe. Thus Belial with words cloath'd in reasons garb Counsel'd ignoble ease, and peaceful sloath, Not peace: and after him thus Mammon spake. Either to disinthrone the King of Heav'n We warr, if warr be best, or to regain 230 Our own right lost: him to unthrone we then May hope, when ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... of Bludston flooded the asphalt of the yard, which sent up a reek of heat, causing curates to fan themselves with their black straw hats, and little boys in clean collars to wriggle in sticky discomfort, while in the still air above the ignoble town hung the heavy pall of smoke. Presently there was the sound of wheels and the sight of the head of the vicar's coachman above the coping of the schoolyard wall. Then the gates opened and the vicar and his wife and Miss Merewether, her daughter, and Maisie Shepherd ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... confidential file relating to this part of the case was forgotten in destroying and removing secret papers when Manila passed into a democratic conqueror's hands, and now whoever wishes may read, in the Bureau of Archives, documents which the Conde de Caspe, to use a noble title for an ignoble man, considered safely hidden. As with Weyler's contidential letter to the friar landlords, these discoveries convict their writers of bad faith, with no ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... who knoweth the destruction of them both?'" and he finally warned them of the risk they incurred, after having been advanced and blessed in an unexampled way, of being flung back to their previous ignoble position upon the ash heap. There are plenty of respectable Boers in whose ears those ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... the sweet, shy ways of little children. I have known the sad opposites of all these, a ghastly touch picture. Remember, I have sometimes travelled over a dusty road as far as my feet could go. At a sudden turn I have stepped upon starved, ignoble weeds, and reaching out my hands, I have touched a fair tree out of which a parasite had taken the life like a vampire. I have touched a pretty bird whose soft wings hung limp, whose little heart beat no more. I have wept over the feebleness and deformity ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... how foolish this is, what little concern it is to us. We are right in that; yet any defect of memory is a great concern compared to many of the trifling niceties, comforts, offences, and rectangularities which, perhaps, we do not think it an ignoble use of heart and time to waste ourselves upon. It would be well enough to entertain the rabble of small troubles and offences, if we could lay them aside with the delightful facility of children, who, after an agony of tears, are soon found laughing ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... the day, and I decided for war," he said. It was reserved for Harnack and Hauptmann, not to speak of the Kaiser, to cant about the responsibilities of "Kul-tur" (that harlot of the German dictionary, debased by all ignoble uses), about the hastening of the kingdom of heaven, and about the German sword being sanctified by God. But the old German Adam remained, and when, two days before the declaration of war with France, the German soldiers were flying to the Belgian ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... heard an actor give this word 'so' its proper emphasis. Shakspeare's meaning is—'lov'd you? Hum!—so I do still, &c.' There has been no change in my opinion:—I think as ill of you as I did. Else Hamlet tells an ignoble falsehood, and a useless one, as the last speech to Guildenstern—'Why, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... before him, while the girl, swept on by her ignoble rage, displayed still more of the moral ulceration which had been injected into ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... of the Citizens' Representatives in favour of a monarchy and the request of the high local officials for the President's accession to the Throne have been represented as inspired by the unanimous will of the people, it is well known that the same has been the work of ignoble men whose bribery and intimidation have been sanctioned by the authorities. Although inept efforts have been made to disguise the deceit, the same is unhidden to the eyes ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... those houses of which there are thousands in Paris, ignoble, vulgar, narrow, yellowish in tone, with four storeys and three windows on each floor. The outer blinds of the first floor were closed. Where was she going? The young man fancied he heard the tinkle of a bell on the second floor. As if in answer to it, a light began to ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... that the schism should cease, there seemed no likelihood whatever of any change. The weaker of the two, since the rise of Nur-ed-Din, was undoubtedly the Egyptian house. The last of the Fatimite caliphs were mere tools in the hands of rival ministers, and passed their ignoble lives—Rois Faineants—in their luxurious palaces. Syria, which had been theirs, was lost to them, and occupied partly by Mohammedans of the rival sect, and partly by the Christians. Their final fall, however, was caused by internal dissensions and the quarrels of two candidates ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... of work incapable of appealing to individuals as does my work to me. But in many instances work seems menial and ignoble because it is not understood. It is not seen in its relationships and broader aspects. The single task as performed by the individual is so small and so specialized that it does not ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... else to do, but wait as others did. I said that we looked like vessels which had come so far up the river with the tide; and now that it had turned we were stranded and fast in the mud. Sometimes I changed the figure to one not so ignoble, and likened ourselves to the stately vessels anchored in Falmouth harbour, which were there because the wind was contrary. We were wind-bound too, and dependent on circumstances; but my idea of true religion was that we ought not to be like this. I rather took for our type the ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... jarring note in the sweet melody of her love-story, this apprehension of Derek's regarding his mother. The Derek she loved was a strong man, with a strong man's contempt for other people's criticism; and there had been something ignoble and fussy in his attitude regarding Lady Underhill. She had tried to feel that the flaw in her idol did not exist. And here was Freddie Rooke, a man who admired Derek with all his hero-worshipping nature, pointing it out independently. She was ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... were to accept the law of one's talent and thinking that if certain consequences didn't follow it was only because one wasn't logical enough. My disaster has served me right—I mean for using that ignoble word at all. It's a mere distributor's, a mere hawker's word. What is 'success' anyhow? When a book's right, it's right—shame to it surely if it isn't. When it sells it sells—it brings money like potatoes or beer. If there's ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... prisoner the King Anarchus; for, having remembered that which Epistemon had related, how the kings and rich men in this world were used in the Elysian fields, and how they got their living there by base and ignoble trades, he, therefore, one day apparelled his king in a pretty little canvas doublet, all jagged and pinked like the tippet of a light horseman's cap, together with a pair of large mariner's breeches, and stockings without ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... faithful' to the decision taken. 22: Main meine; 'I intend the weal not of one only (myself), but of the whole fatherland.' 23: Pfaffenfeind, as a term of reproach among the humanists, had a suggestion of flying at ignoble game. 24: Liegen lgen. 25: Mir ... vil, 'many would have liked me better.' 26: Verjagt; Hutten's revolutionary writings led to a papal order that he be brought to Rome in chains. Banished on that account by his former friend, ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... shall not understand the attraction which this naked immoralism in international affairs exercises over the minds of many who are not otherwise ignoble, if we do not remember that the repudiation of the Christian ethical standard has been equally thorough in commercial competition. The German officer believes himself to have chosen a morally nobler profession than that of the business-man; he serves (he thinks) a larger cause, and ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... composure of your soul by such an expectation," returned Wallace; "I know my adversary too well to anticipate his relinquishing the object of his vengeance but at a price more infamous than the most ignoble death. Therefore, best beloved of all on earth! look for no deliverance for thy Wallace but what passes through the grave; and to me, dearest Helen, its gates are on golden hinges turning; for all is light and bliss which shines on me from within ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... end. In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live. The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe. And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide. For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him. I will endeavour to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the immortal creature. The soul in her totality has the care of inanimate ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... view writers who are a whole head and shoulders above himself. And these two, followed by their imitator, Guilpin, assail each other in a fashion which argues either a very absurd sincerity of literary jealousy, or a very ignoble simulation of it, for the purpose of getting up interest on the part of the public. Nevertheless, both Marston and Hall are very interesting figures in English literature, and their satirical performances cannot be passed over in ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... country. To this bequest she added a revenue sufficient to supply all the requirements of a well-bred tom-cat, and at the same time she left pensions to certain persons whose duty it should be to wait upon him. Her ignoble family contested the will, and there was a long suit. Moncrif gives a handsome double-plate illustration of this incident. Mlle. Dupuy, sadly wasted by illness, is seen in bed, with her cat in her arms, ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... suffer all things, even to the sacrificing of her life. She wished she could have seen him; the slightest, the most momentary, contact with such a spirit would have ennobled her own character and made ignoble thoughts and ignoble acts thereafter impossible to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... painting have been employed on most ignoble objects—on scourgers and hangmen, on beggarly enthusiasts and base impostors. Look at the two masterpieces of the pencil; the Transfiguration of Raphael, and the St. Jerome of Correggio; [102] can any thing be more incongruous, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... but why not enlighten me as to your reasons for a course so remarkable? Most parents desire their daughters to do well, but you, on the contrary, not only wish, but urge me to do ill. A noble lover sues for my hand, and his cause is slighted; an ignoble one requests the same favor, and you run to grant it. Is there love in this? Is there consideration? Perhaps; but if so, you should be able to show where it lies. I am not a child, young as I am; I will understand any reasons you may advance. Then let me have your confidence; it ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... moment this belief in an after-death existence is erected into a dogma, the moment it comes to be looked upon as an article of faith, which it is a duty to hold, or at least which it is the evidence of an ignoble disposition of mind not to hold, then it becomes an enemy ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... drive these freighting teams to Denver. Many of them were sons of rich fathers, well educated, and had never engaged in manual labor, much less in such menial work as this, and when these proud and high-spirited fellows felt what an ignoble life they had been reduced to, the reader may well believe they did not feel good-natured over it. And now, when these young gentlemen came to understand that they were to be associated with a man that was reported to be the representative ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... which if I am not mistaken bears in Welsh the name of Mynydd Llanfair, or Saint Mary's Mount. It is called Cybi's town from one Cybi, who about the year 500 built a college here to which youths noble and ignoble resorted from far and near. He was a native of Dyfed or Pembrokeshire, and was a friend and for a long time a fellow-labourer of Saint David. Besides being learned, according to the standard of the time, he was a great walker, and from bronzing his countenance by frequent walking in the sun was ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... which appears astonishing to us, was not only justifiable, but absolutely essential; far from considering them as a makeshift, the Greeks would certainly, and with justice too, have looked upon it as a makeshift to be obliged to allow a player with vulgar, ignoble, or strongly marked features, to represent an Apollo or a Hercules; nay, rather they would have deemed it downright profanation. How little is it in the power of the most finished actor to change the character of his features! How prejudicial must this be to the expression of passion, as ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... the girl's leaving home. She remained in her mother's house, but without capitulation. It was "her mother's house" now, no longer home. She was one of those proud, not ignoble natures whose affection is entirely dependent upon respect. Her mother had been the great figure in her rather narrow life, object of a silent, critical, undemonstrative affection which was the furthest possible remove from Jacqueline's ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... missed a real childhood,—its follies, its innocent pleasures, its winsome affections,—so later, the temptations that would naturally beset a career so extraordinary fell harmlessly away from him, for a passion for knowledge burned within him, consuming all ignoble motives and keeping this young scholar, in friar's robes, in marvelous singleness of heart, in the midst of a flattering ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... beyond or the heaven above,— act in obedience to the law of their limited natures. Still, let us recognize the limitation, and not forget that the pursuit which may be fitting and praiseworthy toil for one class of minds may be ignoble indolence for another. We must remember, on the other hand, that, however humble may be the intellectual position of the man of science or knowledge, in distinction from wisdom, the results of his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... for ignoble things; The strife for triumph more than truth; The hardening of the heart that brings Irreverence for ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... to the Virgin there may be detected a feeling of painful humiliation, of suffering, of sadness, produced by the recollection of her ignoble and childless marriage. ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... the great, such as Donald McKaye. Now, for the first time, she realized that human society is organized in three strata—high, mediocre, and low, and that when a mediocrity has climbed to the seats of the mighty, his fellows strive to drag him back, down to their own ignoble level—or lower. To Nan, child of poverty, sorrow, and solitude, the world had always appeared more or less incomprehensible, but this afternoon, as she retraced her slow steps to the Sawdust Pile, ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... dancing girl, a weaver's daughter, a woman of ill fame, a washerwoman, a barber's wife, a milkmaid, and the daughter of a land-owner- choosing the darkest time of night and the most secret part of the house, he drank with them, was sprinkled and anointed, and went through many ignoble ceremonies, such as sitting nude upon a dead body. The teacher informed him that he was not to indulge shame, or aversion to anything, nor to prefer one thing to another, nor to regard caste, ceremonial cleanness or uncleanness, but freely to enjoy all the pleasures of ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... wrapped the last years of his life in gloom, seemed to clear away from Esmond during this fortunate voyage and campaign. His energies seemed to awaken and to expand under a cheerful sense of freedom. Was his heart secretly glad to have escaped from that fond but ignoble bondage at home? Was it that the inferiority to which the idea of his base birth had compelled him, vanished with the knowledge of that secret, which though, perforce, kept to himself, was yet enough to cheer and console him? At any rate, young Esmond of the army was quite a different ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... suffered much in his own life, and against which he guarded with a curious amount of caution. His own family grudged the distinction which his talents gained for him, and a dark story is told of a secret attempt made by them to assassinate him through his servants. Alberti met these ignoble jealousies with a stately calm and a sweet dignity of demeanour, never condescending to accuse his relatives, never seeking to retaliate, but acting always for the honour of his illustrious house. In the same spirit of generosity he refused to enter into wordy warfare with detractors and calumniators, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... about nerve! You beat all creation. I'm holding on by the skin of my teeth, and you want me to wait till you get your measly old camera adjusted, and snap me off in this ignoble position. Well, I'm waiting, but it's to get my second wind, and not to oblige a crank," ...
— The Outdoor Chums - The First Tour of the Rod, Gun and Camera Club • Captain Quincy Allen
... were useless. Before Chalons four hours had been lost—not by accident, as the royalist legend tells, for Valory the outrider testifies that it took but a few minutes to repair. Bouille knew the ignoble cause of his own ruin and of so much sorrow, but never revealed it. When he came to England he misled questioners, and he exacted an oath from his son that he would keep the miserable secret for half a century. The younger Bouille was ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... it have been for the Plataeans who remained in the town if they had stood by their first purpose, and shared the fortunes of their brave comrades. Better far to have died, sword in hand, than to meet the ignoble fate which was now reserved for them. It was in the following summer, two years after the beginning of the siege, that the crisis arrived. The Plataeans had come to the end of their provisions, and were suffering severely from want of food. In ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... the harder, deep, guttural, contemptuous "huh-huh's!"—a fitting rebuke, methought, for the ignoble deception implied ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... turns of character, even in the most depraved. The exaltation of his intellectual pursuits, and his sincere piety, have enabled him to rise above all the petty disquietudes of everyday life, and he seems utterly incapable of envy or detraction, or the indulgence of any ignoble or unmanly passions. Indeed, one of his most intimate friends remarked "that he was the beau-ideal of dignified manliness and truthfulness of character." His manners possess all that unostentatious frankness, and self-possessed urbanity and quietude, that is indicative of refined feelings. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... to the liquor interest on the part of a national institution dependent upon the public patronage for support, which insults all that is best in our public opinion, and insisting as it does on a condition of ignoble slavery on the part of the employees of the Company. You refer to the matter in which Mr. Smith was regarded as over-active ...
— The Story of a Dark Plot - or Tyranny on the Frontier • A.L.O. C. and W.W. Smith
... nothing of him but a living skeleton, covered over with a wrinkled, yellow skin. Since the melting away of his gold, it had been very generally conceded that there was no such striking resemblance, after all, betwixt the ignoble features of the ruined merchant and that majestic face upon the mountain-side. So the people ceased to honour him during his lifetime, and quietly consigned him to forgetfulness after his decease. Once in a while, it is true, his memory was brought up in connection with the magnificent ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... impressive than the close of Wolsey's career. "The history of mankind is the history of great men," was Carlyle's motto, and Froude's. It is a noble one, and to discredit great men with low motives is the vice of ignoble minds. The reign of Henry VIII., after Wolsey's fall, was rich in horrors and in tragical catastrophes. But it was not a mere carnival of lust and blood. High principles were at stake, and profound issues divided ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... of the United States. The Senator from Illinois faltered. He got the prize for which he faltered; but lo! the grand prize of his ambition to-day slips from his grasp because of his faltering in his former contest, and his success in the canvass for the Senate, purchased for an ignoble price, has cost him the loss of the Presidency of the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... is directed towards some whose chief sin is lack of any positive qualities, good or bad. One infers that he would almost rather wander in a flame with Ulysses, or lie in the ice with Ugolino, than undergo the milder punishment of Celestine and his ignoble companions. For the simply self-indulgent, Francesca or Ciacco, he has pity in abundance; Farinata, Brunetto, and the other famous men who share the fates of these, may probably come into the same category. In such cases as these, while he has ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... this torpid way of life did not suit the stirring spirit of Pizarro, as he grew older, and listened to the tales, widely circulated and se captivating to a youthful fancy, of the New World. He shared in the popular enthusiasm, and availed himself of a favorable moment to abandon his ignoble charge, and escape to Seville, the port where the Spanish adventurers embarked to seek their fortunes in the West. Few of them could have turned their backs on their native land with less cause for ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... which human courage cannot extend. Mr. Pickwick gazed through his spectacles for an instant on the advancing mass, and then fairly turned his back and—we will not say fled; firstly, because it is an ignoble term, and, secondly, because Mr. Pickwick's figure was by no means adapted for that mode of retreat—he trotted away, at as quick a rate as his legs would convey him; so quickly, indeed, that he did not perceive the ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... great souls to believe that every person of figure truly is what he ought to be, and that a person of true honour thinks it even criminal to suspect that any he is conversing with is capable of debasing[212] the dignity of his nature so low as to be guilty of such vile and ignoble practices. None could be freer of these, or indeed of all other vices, than the noble person I speak of. The fixed and unalterable principles of justice and integrity, which always made the rules of his ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... no whit happier, who in due course would give birth to children of their own as poor in spirit and looks as they. Yet now and again a young girl would pass, tall and fair and desirable, rousing in young men a not ignoble passion to possess, and in the old regret for the bliss ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... wherein sorrow is a part of the discipline is that in which is developed human sympathy, one of the finest and most ennobling manifestations of the Love which is, in its essence, divine. In human life there is much that is ignoble, and the race has almost contemptible weakness and insignificance in comparison with the ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... dear? But you are so emancipated. Ah, well! so our pure and beautiful friendship has been misinterpreted, bespattered! Just because you wear a morning wrapper, and have lived here alone for a year, people with coarse souls and ignoble eyes make unpleasant remarks! But what really did drive BEATA mad? Why did she jump into the mill-race? I'm sure we did everything we could to spare her! I made it the business of my life to keep her in ignorance of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... to tell you,' I said, 'that I consider it a wretched, an ignoble age. Where's the greatness of life? Where's dignity, leisure, stateliness; where's Art and Eloquence? Where are your great scholars, statesmen? Let me ask you, sir,' I cried glaring at him, 'where's your Gibbon, your ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... judgment of the worldly, that judgment was less inspired by the harmonies of the universe than by the discords that had jarred his being and the poisonous shocks he had received in the encounter of the noble with the ignoble. There was yet in him a profound need of redemption into the love of the truth for the truth's sake. He had the fault of thinking too well of himself—which who has not who thinks of himself at all, apart from his relation to the holy force of ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... sacrificial ladle, from the Roman household, so far at least as sumptuary laws and the terror of censorial censure could banish it: even in architecture we shall again encounter the same spirit of hostility to luxury whether noble or ignoble. Although, however, in consequence of these influences Rome probably preserved a certain outward simplicity longer than Capua and Volsinii, her commerce and trade—on which, in fact, along with agriculture her prosperity from the beginning rested—must not be regarded as having been inconsiderable, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... sufficiently the commander's will—we may believe that we should not have had to blush for the cowardice and recreancy of the crew, nor weep for the untimely dead. But, apparently, each subordinate officer lost all presence of mind, then courage, and so honor. In a wild scramble, that ignoble mob of firemen, engineers, waiters, and crew, rushed for the boats, and abandoned the helpless women, children, and men to the mercy of the deep! Four hours there were from the catastrophe of collision to the ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... always thinking of the possibility of somebody else than the reader to whom they were addressed reading them. With nearly an equal presumption as to the fact in the case of Horace (though to do him justice he did not indulge in any ignoble tricks with them) this fact rarely occurs and never offends. An unkind critic with a turn for rather obvious epigram might say that the man's nature was so artificial that his artifice seems natural. If ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... the happy light in his eyes Hugh knew the die was cast, once and for all. Having tasted of the sweets of popularity and honest praise, nothing on earth could now tempt Nick to fall back again to his former ignoble ways. His foot was firmly planted on the second round of the ladder, and he had his aspiring eye on the ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... political sagacity which, triumphing over all local jealousies, could bend to one great aim the passions of the multitude and the fears of the Courts, or whether the cause of the whole nation would be wrecked in an ignoble strife between demagogues and reactionists, between the rabble of the street and the camarilla round ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... may be overmuch He shunned the common stain and smutch, From soilure of ignoble touch Too grandly free, Too loftily secure in such Cold purity; But he preserved from chance control The fortress of his established soul, In all things sought to see the whole; Brooked no disguise, And set his heart upon the goal, Not ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... of woman And face so debonair Had the sleek false paws of a lion, That could furtively seize and tear. So far to the shoulders,—but if you took The Beast in reverse you would find The ignoble form of a craven cur Was all that ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... How long the ignoble sloth, how long The trust in greatness not thine own? Surely the lion's brood is strong ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... fear! What a change of flesh is here! Think how many royal bones Sleep within these heaps of stones. Here they lie had realms and lands Who now want strength to stir their hands. ... Here are sands, ignoble things Dropt from the ruined sides of kings; Here's a world of pomp and state, Buried in dust once ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... critical as the most fastidious could be of any singularity in attire, and they held the unfortunate juvenile in his embarrassing position for a long time, to his intense despair, until he was rescued from his ignoble position by some grown-up friend. Then, the young East is prone to the pleasures of tobacco. It was, I presume, before breakfast with most of the bathers, and smoking under those conditions is a trial even to the experienced. Some, pale from their long immersion—for ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... both the Roman general and all the army were afraid to fight. For this reason he recovered nothing of all that had been lost, but even lost Rome as well, and pretty nearly everything else. During this time he became exceedingly avaricious and greedy for ignoble gain. Because he had received no funds from the Emperor, he plundered all the Italian peoples of Ravenna and Sicily, and the rest of Italy without mercy, by way of exacting vengeance for irregularities in their past lives. ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... in some uncertainty. Doctor Anderson tells us, that he undertook the chief direction; and Mr. Nichols,[2] that he assisted Archibald Hamilton the printer. Whatever his part might be, the performance of it was enough to waste his strength with ignoble labour, to embitter his temper by useless altercation, and to draw on him contempt and insult from those who, however they surpassed him in learning, could scarcely be regarded as his superiors in native vigour and fertility of mind. "Sure ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... who had sat patiently through trouble and trial, working with might and main, suffering from endless ills, in peril of their lives, and deprived of property and home, now joined in one heartrending wail of woe and disappointment. The consternation that followed the announcement of the ignoble surrender is thus described by Mr. Nixon, who was an eye-witness and sharer of ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... Augustus, or Adrian, could return to this world, how would their Roman pride endure to see their last resting-places, the towers and the pyramids in which they fortified themselves, thus violated and put to ignoble uses, and the urns which contained their ashes stuck up as ornaments in a painted room, where barbarian visitors lounge away their hours, and stare upon their relics with scornful indifference ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... true gladness is the gladness that springs from the conscious possession of liberty from the captivity which holds men slaves to evil and to their worst selves. Brethren, let us not fancy that these surface-joys are the joys adequate to a human spirit. They are ignoble, and they are infinitely foolish, because a touch of an awakened conscience, a stirring of one's deeper self, can scatter them all to pieces. So then, that is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Ulysses bent his course to the cottage of the herdsman, and, entering in at the front court, the dogs, of which Eumaeus kept many fierce ones for the protection of the cattle, flew with open mouths upon him, as those ignoble animals have oftentimes an antipathy to the sight of anything like a beggar, and would have rent him in pieces with their teeth, if Ulysses had not had the prudence to let fall his staff, which had chiefly provoked their ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... from Nature, literature recedes into metaphysics, or dwindles into novels. How ignoble seems the current material of London literary life, for instance, compared with the noble simplicity which, a half-century ago, made the Lake Country an enchanted land forever! Is it worth a voyage to England to sup with Thackeray in the Pot ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... become her social inferiors for her own good; the mother—her name he learnt was Mrs. Sawbridge—had all Lady Harman's tall slenderness, but otherwise resembled her only in the poise of her neck and an occasional gesture; she was fair and with a kind of ignoble and premeditated refinement in her speech and manner. She was dressed with the restraint of a prolonged and attenuated widowhood, in a rich and complicatedly quiet dress of mauve and grey. She was obviously a transitory visitor and not so much taking the opulence about her and particularly the ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... fame, a washerwoman, a barber's wife, a milkmaid, and the daughter of a land-owner- choosing the darkest time of night and the most secret part of the house, he drank with them, was sprinkled and anointed, and went through many ignoble ceremonies, such as sitting nude upon a dead body. The teacher informed him that he was not to indulge shame, or aversion to anything, nor to prefer one thing to another, nor to regard caste, ceremonial cleanness or uncleanness, but freely to enjoy all the pleasures ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... What penalty, or that any penalty, was exacted of those who survived to be tried for Hudson's murder remains unknown. Their ignoble fate is hidden in a sordid darkness: fitly in contrast with his noble fate—that lies retired within ...
— Henry Hudson - A Brief Statement Of His Aims And His Achievements • Thomas A. Janvier
... that not merely the verbiage, but the sentiment, is thus egotistic throughout, exhibiting a degree of arrogance and self-importance, only to be met with in a Clerical Locofoco, used by bad men for ignoble purposes. To carry out the idea of your vanity, you say in the winding ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... and probably in those of a higher power, this apparently ignoble act would redound no little to the credit ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... fact, one of a thousand similar facts, simply by way of reminding the reader of what he must himself have often witnessed; namely, that no woman is condemned by nature to any ignoble necessity of repining against the power of other women; her own may be far more confined, but within its own circle may possibly, measured against that of the haughtiest beauty, be the profounder. However, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... giving him strength and skill, and how instead of making a noble use of that strength and skill he had made himself like one of the wild beasts. Then he sang of how the vengeance of the Gods was about to fall on this ignoble King. ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... her. She understood now the reason for the great painter's flattering deference to her opinion. From the first he had sought to blind her. His ways were subtler than those of Charles Haney and his like, but his soul was no higher; it was indeed more ignoble, for he was of those who claim to dispense learning and light. Pretending to add beauty to the world, he was ready to feed himself at the cost of a woman's soul. She recalled Mrs. Moss' hints about his life ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... doves represents a great and widespread decline in the ethics of sportsmanship. In the twenty-six States named, a great many men who call themselves sportsmen indulge in the cheap and ignoble pastime of potting weak and confiding doves. It is on a par with the "sport" of hunting English sparrows in a city street. Of course this is, to a certain extent, a matter of taste; but there is at least one club of sportsmen ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... the gallant Colonel Gardiner put himself at their head. A blow from a scytheblade in the hands of a gigantic Macgregor ended his life, and spared him the shame and sorrow of another defeat. The Park walls at their back prevented the infantry from seeking ignoble security in flight, after the fashion of the dragoons, and they were forced to lay down their weapons and beg for quarter. Some 400 of them fell, struck down by the broadswords and dirks of their enemy, more than 700 were taken prisoners, and ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... circumstance in the history of the world. In 1260, the Flagellants appeared in Italy as Devoti. "When the land was polluted by vices and crimes, an unexampled spirit of remorse suddenly seized the minds of the Italians. The fear of Christ fell upon all: noble and ignoble, old and young, and even children of five years of age, marched through the streets with no covering but a scarf round the waist. They each carried a scourge of leathern thongs, which they applied to ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... with a purity almost unearthly; sometimes sorrow sears, rendering the very soul insensible; and sometimes sorrow remains under the ashes, a living coal steadily consuming all that is noble, hardening all that is ignoble; and is extinguished leaving a devil behind it—fully equipped to slay the ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... This ignoble curiosity was likewise ignored by Miss Berta, who proceeded with dignified slowness to drop her valentines one by one into the caldron. Bea, with lingering care, deposited her contribution on the very top. One slid ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... left his cart, bewitched away from everyday things by the music. It may be the smart uniform had something to do with the popularity of the organization; there is ever a fine line between art and vanity—but why dwell upon an ignoble motive? ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... harsh terms any old sordidities and poverties? The Great American Museum, the down-town scenery and aspects at large, and even the up-town improvements on them, as then flourishing?—why, they must have been for the most part of the last meanness: the Barnum picture above all ignoble and awful, its blatant face or frame stuck about with innumerable flags that waved, poor vulgar-sized ensigns, over spurious relics and catchpenny monsters in effigy, to say nothing of the promise within of the still more monstrous and abnormal living—from ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... that her frankness and freedom from the restraints of etiquette were the result of an immoral and depraved mind. She exaggerated her extravagance, and accused her, by whispers and insinuations spread far and near, of the most ignoble crimes of which woman can be guilty. The young and inexperienced dauphiness soon found herself involved in most embarrassing difficulties. She had no kind friend to council her. Louis still remained cold, distant, and reserved. Thus, week after week, month after month, year ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... gymnastic glory; while flying trowsers, elastic jackets, and feathered buskins, fit for Mercury himself, will contribute at once to the adornment, the swiftness, and the reputation, of our noble and ignoble racers. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... hard tasks; it is noble enough to attract him who loves his fellow-man; success in it is rare enough and glorious enough to stimulate him who likes to succeed where others have failed. Advertising may be good or bad, noble or ignoble, right or wrong, according to what is advertised and our methods of advertising it. He who would scorn to announce the curative powers of bottled spring-water and pink aniline dye; he who regards ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... creature, with nothing but beauty, and bestow three enormous volumes on her, is to make a perverse selection, beauty being, after all, rarer in women than wit, sense, and goodness. It is as false and ignoble in art, as to marry a pretty face without heart and ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... Payne. "I don't know! I don't believe we are so stupid and so ignoble! As to mending it, that's another question. Writing is such a curious thing—it seems to represent anything in the world except the current of a man's thoughts. Reverie—has anyone ever tried to represent that? I have been out for a walk sometimes, and reflected when I came in that ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... they said. And when he wanted to know whether it was rather beneath the apparent character of M. de Charlus, or of M. des Laumes, or of M. d'Orsan that he must place the untravelled region in which this ignoble action might have had its birth; as none of these men had ever, in conversation with Swann, suggested that he approved of anonymous letters, and as everything that they had ever said to him implied that they strongly disapproved, he ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... and admirable philosopher, Epictetus, discovered that "happiness is not in strength, or wealth, or power; or all three. It lies in ourselves, in true freedom, in the conquest of every ignoble fear, in perfect self-government, in a power of contentment and peace, and the even flow of life, even in poverty, exile, disease and the very ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... her to Grosvenor Place; but it was not in its nature consoling. The prevision of disgrace was now so vivid to her that it seemed to her that if it had not already overtaken them she had only to thank the loose, mysterious, rather ignoble tolerance of people like Mrs. Collingwood. There were plenty of that species, even among the good; perhaps indeed exposure and dishonour would begin only when the bad had got hold of the facts. Would the bad be most horrified and do most to spread ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... the village, and of course from the tenants on our estate. What do you think, Roy? If I resist, we shall, from our weakness, in all probability be beaten, and the new government will confiscate your father's property here; while, if we settle down to an ignoble peace—" ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... recognition of the fact, seeking miserably to palliate and excuse it. When she had given Garth that impetuous assurance of her confidence, she had not, in her crudest imaginings, dreamed of anything so hideous and ignoble as the actual truth had proved to be. Vaguely, she had deemed him outcast for some big, reckless sin that by the splendour of its recklessness almost ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... wonder he hated Dick—hated him now with a cumulative, almost murderous intensity. He had mocked at the other, but how should he stand against him in fair field? It was he—Alan Massey—that was the outcast, his mother a woman of doubtful fame, himself a follower of false fires, his life ignoble, wayward, erratic, unclean? Would it not be John rather than Alan Massey Tony Holiday would choose, if she knew all? This ugly, venomous, sin-scarred old rascal held his fate in the hollow of his ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... the first to recognise and acclaim the transcendent merits of the Elgin Marbles; he rejoiced with a personal joy in the purchase of the Angerstein collection as the nucleus of a National Gallery; he scorned the ignoble fears of some of his colleagues lest the newly-started winter exhibitions of old masters should injure their professional prospects; he used his interest at Court to have Raphael's cartoons brought up to London for the benefit of students and public; he ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... in sooth, much shamefaced, we did go home, Judge of the Supreme Court, officers of the Army, and all, vaguely feeling we had been caught doing some ignoble thing. For my part, although I hope mawkishness no more marks me than another, and although I made neither then nor at any time a resolution to discontinue sports of the field, I have never since then shot in a pigeon match, nor cared to see others do so, for it ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... what he clung to, but of what he had given up. He had turned his back on serious work, so that pottering was now all he could aspire to. It couldn't be fruitful, it couldn't be anything but ridiculous, almost ignoble; but it soothed his nerves, it was in the nature of a secret dissipation. He had never suspected he should some day have nerves on his own part to count with; but this possibility had been revealed to him on the day it became clear that he was letting something ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... they have not used to enlarge their observation to match and sort that effect with instances of a diverse subject, which must of necessity be before any cause be found out. That they have passed over the observation of instances vulgar and ignoble, and stayed their attention chiefly upon instances of mark; whereas the other sort are for the most part more significant and of better height and information. That every particular that worketh any effect is a thing compounded ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... are not too ignoble a quarry for this villainous gos-hawk!—His assiduities; his watchings; his nightly risques; the inclement weather he journeys in; must not be all placed to your account. He has opportunities of making ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... steadily growing. There had been no violent counter-revolution, but the interests of the country had been sacrificed without scruple to those of the king's friends, the swarm of courtiers who had shared his ignoble exile at Palermo. The revolutionary society of the Carbonari spread rapidly, alike in the army and in civil society. In Naples, as in Portugal, the Spanish revolution brought things to a crisis. On July 2, 1820, a military outbreak took place at Nola. This was followed by a general ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... and fear! What a change of flesh is here! Think how many royal bones Sleep within these heaps of stones. Here they lie had realms and lands Who now want strength to stir their hands. ... Here are sands, ignoble things Dropt from the ruined sides of kings; Here's a world of pomp and state, Buried in dust once dead ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... on which everything depends? Not at all. He is meditating on suicide; and he finds that what stands in the way of it, and counterbalances its infinite attraction, is not any thought of a sacred unaccomplished duty, but the doubt, quite irrelevant to that issue, whether it is not ignoble in the mind to end its misery, and, still more, whether death would end it. Hamlet, that is to say, is here, in effect, precisely where he was at the time of his first soliloquy ('O that this too too solid flesh would melt') two months ago, before ever he heard of his father's ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... word vttered concerning their dishonestie. Some of them will notwithstanding speake filthy and immodest words. [Sidenote: Their insolencie against strangers.] But towards other people, the said Tartars be most insolent, and they scorne and set nought by all other noble and ignoble persons whatsoeuer. For we saw in the Emperours court the great duke of Russia, the kings sonne of Georgia, and many great Soldanes receiuing no due honour and estimation among them. So that euen the very Tartars assigned to giue attendance vnto them, were they neuer so base, would alwaies goe ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... girlish reading; to be later, perhaps, the Flora Macdonald of a middle-aged Prince Charlie did not, however, evoke any ludicrous associations in her mind. Her feminine fancy exalted the escaped duelist and alleged assassin into a social martyr. His actual small political intrigues and ignoble aims of office seemed to her little different from those aspirations of royalty which she had read about—as perhaps they were. Indeed, it is to be feared that in foolish little Mrs. Bunker, Wynyard Marion had found the ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... issue was drawn, the result was assured. It was not Christianity that failed, it was slavery. . . . This, too, is a climactic day in history. For so long time the Gospel and war have lived together in ignoble amity! If at last disharmony between the spirit of Jesus and the spirit of war is becoming evident, then a great hope has dawned for the race. . . . The main issue is clear. Christianity will indeed have failed if it does not stop ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... revealed to public view, and attested by indisputable evidence. Ignorance is always credulous. Much was then thought wonderful, nay, almost supernatural, which can now be explained and accounted for, by asy and very ignoble means. My father—for all this time, though I have never mentioned him, I had a father living—my father, being in public life, and much occupied with the affairs of the nation, had little leisure to attend to his family. A great deal went on in his house, without his ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... speculation, as it turned out. All his speculation had a way of turning badly. That was because people, even people in Nicaragua, distrusted him for one reason or another; they said his whole existence was a tangle of shady and ignoble transactions—that he looked like a fraud, and behaved like one. He couldn't help his face; but his face, they soon discovered, was not the only, or even the most, evasive and fugitive part of ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... interrupted the priest, angrily. "A thousand horses cannot make a man noble, nor was poverty ever ignoble. You talk like a weak boy. Every word you say is your own condemnation. Why should you complain? Your bed is of your own making. The other prodigal was forced to herd with the swine—you have ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... aristocracy—there is but one man there who has truly comprehended the Hat; and that is the Prince de Bethune. How is it that men do not consider, as women do, that the hat is the first thing that strikes the eye? And why have they never thought of changing the present system, which is, let us say it frankly, ignoble? Yes, ignoble; and yet a Frenchman is, of all nationalities, the one most persistent in this folly! I know the difficulties of a change, messieurs. I don't speak of my own writings on the matter, ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... clog-day in Kansas. His collar had been torn away; his straw hat had been twisted and battered; his shirt with ox-blood stripes split to the waist. And from head to knee he was drenched with some vile and ignoble greasy fluid that loudly proclaimed to the nose its component leaven of ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... patterns became the fashion here. Yet the Papal capital did not wholly cease to be the resort of students and of artists. The universities maintained themselves in a respectable position—- far different, indeed, from that which they had held in the last century, yet not ignoble. Much was being learned on many lines of study divergent from those prescribed by earlier humanists. Padua, in particular, distinguished itself for medical researches. This was the flourishing time, moreover, of Academies, in which, notwithstanding nonsense ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... which some of the seemingly trifling incidents of that night had a special bearing. One of those incidents was the cutting of a finger. Ned Spivin, whose tendency towards fun and frolic at all times rendered him rather slap-dash and careless, was engaged in the rather ignoble work of cutting off skates' tails—these appendages not being deemed marketable. This operation he performed with a hatchet, but some one borrowed the hatchet for a few minutes, and Spivin continued the operation with his knife. One of the tails being tough, ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... Church, and the intrusive and decisive heroism of Damien, with something almost to be called remorse. I am sure it is so with yourself; I am persuaded your letter was inspired by a certain envy, not essentially ignoble, and the one human trait to be espied in that performance. You were thinking of the lost chance, the past day; of that which should have been conceived and was not; of the service due and not rendered. Time was, said the voice in your ear, in your pleasant room, as you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been observed, that it is degrading and untrue to describe the human species as incapable of receiving gratification only from comic scenes; that "there is a luxury in wo," independent of its purifying the bosom and suppressing the more ignoble passions. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... A small square of silk or linen, used in various ignoble offices about the face and especially serviceable at funerals to conceal the lack of tears. The handkerchief is of recent invention; our ancestors knew nothing of it and intrusted its duties to the sleeve. ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... Howard," returned Griffith, biting his lip as he looked around at the wondering seamen who were listeners, "you will wait in vain; but I pledge you my word that when that time arrives you shall be advised, and that your own hands shall do the ignoble deed." ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... labors with the heaviest load, And the wolf dies in silence,—not bestow'd In vain should such example be; if they, Things of ignoble or of savage mood, Endure and shrink not, we of nobler clay May temper it to bear,—it is ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... others," it is certain that it can never be added to any second state of existence. The loss of that bloom of the soul, like that of other virginities, is irreparable. Desroches had not aspired to restore it to himself. He no longer risked anything ignoble or dishonest, but the good tricks admitted the code of procedure, the good traps, the good treacheries which could be legitimately played off upon an adversary, he was very ready ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... district. Both of these individuals, however, died unmarried, and the next owner of the manor neither distinguished himself nor contributed to the glory of his line. That glory, such as it was, for the ignoble Francois was the founder of it, gradually departed. The Clairvilles deteriorated, sold off large parcels of their land, married undesirable persons, till, in the present generation, the culmination of ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... my bedroom! You have been listening, dear? But you are so emancipated. Ah, well! so our pure and beautiful friendship has been misinterpreted, bespattered! Just because you wear a morning wrapper, and have lived here alone for a year, people with coarse souls and ignoble eyes make unpleasant remarks! But what really did drive BEATA mad? Why did she jump into the mill-race? I'm sure we did everything we could to spare her! I made it the business of my life to keep her in ignorance of all our interests—didn't ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... there was no passion of an ignoble sort, only a passion of pity and remorse, and a sweet, tender, reminiscent love. He did not love the woman before him so much as the girl whose ghost she was-the woman whose promise she was. He held himself responsible ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... turned healer. How well the English milor had gauged the strange personality of that redoubtable man! Professional pride—interest in intricate cases— call it what you will—was the only redeeming feature in Laporte's abominable character. Everything else in him, every thought, every action was ignoble, ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... other high dignities, he and Ursicinus alone, after the frequent and great toils which they had endured for the sake of the republic, had been so despised that he himself had been accused of treason in consequence of the examination of some slaves, and had been exposed to an ignoble trial; while Ursicinus had been brought over from the East, and placed at the mercy of his enemies; and these were the subjects of his incessant complaints both in public and ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... the cathedral. The Hotel de Ville tells of revolutions; the Hotel-Dieu, of the miseries of Paris. After gazing at the splendors of the Louvre we can, by taking two steps, look down upon the rags and tatters of that ignoble nest of houses huddling between the quai de la Tournelle and the Hotel-Dieu,—a foul spot, which a modern municipality is endeavoring at the ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... profound the wisdom, and how luminous the intellect of Joan of Arc, you must study her there, where she fought out that long fight all alone—and not merely against the subtlest brains and deepest learning of France, but against the ignoble deceits, the meanest treacheries, and the hardest hearts to be found in any ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... fairly puzzled, what should I come across but this handy stone, which the good priests of old did erect, as far as I can see, for no other purpose than to provide worthy cavalieros with an escape from such ignoble and scurvy enemies. I had no time to spare in clambering up it, for I had to tear my heel out of the mouth of the foremost of them, and might have been dragged down by it had he not found my spur too tough a morsel for ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in its conspicuous seclusion, and was finally carried over the cataract. This public character they suspected of design in his death as in his life, and they would not be moved by his memory; though they gave a sigh to that dream, half pathetic, half ludicrous, yet not ignoble, of Mordecai Noah, who thought to assemble all the Jews of the world, and all the Indians, as remnants of the lost tribes, upon Grand Island, there to rebuild Jerusalem, and who actually laid the corner-stone of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that comes of age. Man the warrior, man the lawyer, and all the bickering aspects of life, pass into obscurity; the grave dreamers, man the curious learner, and man the creative artist, come forward to replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a less ignoble adventure. ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... liquor interest on the part of a national institution dependent upon the public patronage for support, which insults all that is best in our public opinion, and insisting as it does on a condition of ignoble slavery on the part of the employees of the Company. You refer to the matter in which Mr. Smith was regarded as over-active as ...
— The Story of a Dark Plot - or Tyranny on the Frontier • A.L.O. C. and W.W. Smith
... him a few favorites of his immediate family and a small body of troops, and commenced his journey—a journey which was considered by all the people as a base and ignoble flight. He involved himself in endless troubles by this step. A revolt broke out on the way among the guards who accompanied him. One of the generals who headed the revolt sent a messenger to Genghis Khan ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... had disappeared before his death, leaving nothing of him but a living skeleton, covered over with a wrinkled yellow skin. Since the melting away of his gold, it had been very generally conceded that there was no such striking resemblance, after all, betwixt the ignoble features of the ruined merchant and that majestic face upon the mountain-side. So the people ceased to honor him during his lifetime, and quietly consigned him to forgetfulness after his decease. Once in ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Mayor that was of Diabolus' making was the Lord Lustings; a man that had neither eyes nor ears; all that he did, whether as a man or as an officer, he did it naturally, as doth the beast.[58] And that which made him yet the more ignoble, though not to Mansoul, yet to them that beheld and were grieved for its ruins, was, that he never could savour good, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... In this case, what a war! What a home, where the son sees a tyrant in the father, and in the mother but a trembling victim! I speak not for myself—whatever may have been the course of our long wedded life, I have not to complain of these ignoble storms. But when the family chief neglects his wife, or prefers another to her, the children too, courtiers as we are, will desert her. You look incredulous about domestic love. Tenez, my child, if I may so surmise, I think you cannot ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... me. 'You forget, my lady, that I am of those you and your station deem ignoble. Yet, none the less, am I ashamed of this business—though, since my lord commands, it is not for me to question nor delay. Therefore, I pray you, let us mount and ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... hopes for the elevation of English art by means of fresco I cannot sympathize.... It is not the material nor the space that can give us thoughts, passions, or power. I see on our Academy walls nothing but what is ignoble in small pictures, and would be disgusting in large ones.... It is not the love of fresco that we want; it is the love of God and His creatures; it is humility, and charity, and self-denial, and fasting, and prayer; it is a total ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... Of human life must spring from woman's breast, Your first small words are taught you from her lips, Your first tears quench'd by her, and your last sighs Too often breathed out in a woman's hearing, When men have shrunk from the ignoble care Of watching the last hour of him ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... possession of it in a night. Moreover the truth about the auburn mustaches and goatee was coming out in snowy splotches; the fading dye showed a mottle of red and white not agreeable to the eye. Here was not merely senility, but ignoble and repulsive senility. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... upwards! It were a life of gods to dwell in such an element: to see, and hear, and talk brave things. Now fie upon these casual potations. That a man's most exalted reason should depend upon the ignoble fermenting of a fruit, which sparrows pluck ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... sea-sickness. As a lad of seventeen, facing the insidious and repulsive foe for the first time, he had expressed his own and his brother's dread of the unequal encounter. Now he was doomed to feel its ignoble clutch to the last moment. "The Duke had gone below, and on either side of the cabin staircase lay the two princes in an ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... nature which, alas, he, her son, had never seen; that they had seen her, and guessed, of course, that she was his mother, was positively unendurable to Blair. He tried to speak, but his voice shook into silence. His dismay was not entirely ignoble; the situation was excruciating to a man whose feeling for beauty was a form of religion; his mortification had in it the element of horror for a profaned ideal; his mother was an esthetic ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... rudely snapped. The lips from which flowed those living and glorious truths that our fathers uttered, are closed in death! Yes, my friends, Death has been among us! He has not entered the humble cottage of some unknown, ignoble peasant; he has knocked audibly at the palace of a nation! His footstep has been heard in the Hall of State! He has cloven down his victim in the midst of the councils of a people! He has borne in triumph from among you the gravest, wisest, most reverend head! Ah! he ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... to give up wealth and power for truth and service; others, who could draw upon no hidden source of strength, have been sustained in the midst of trials which have seemed heavy enough to crush; and, most wonderful of all, in spite of all vices and crimes, all darkness and ignorance, all bondage to ignoble ideals and slavery to commercialism and pleasure, the race of man has never been content with things as they have been. As the moon draws the tides by unseen attractions, so by unseen attractions the souls of men have been made dissatisfied, and drawn toward truth and beauty, love and ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... birth so base, Ranks among the ignoble race, And desireth that thy name, Unto honour should obtain; First let me have but a catch of thy gold, Then, though thou be an ass, By this light, Thou shalt pass For a knight; For here it ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... certainly by the conventions of life. The result is that though there is more true religion in the schools than is acknowledged by those outside and than those within care to boast of, and though the standard of conduct is not ignoble, there is too little fusion; both components are brittle, they cannot stand the strain of sudden temptation, they lack enduring power. No one will forget how in those first months of war, consolation was offered even from pulpits ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... voice sounded hollow from the depths. Karl, in his turn, went over the lip of the crevasse. Helen, conscious of an exaltation that lifted her out of the region of ignoble fear, looked down. She could see now what was being done. Barth was swinging his ax and smiting the ice with the adz. His head was just below the level of her feet, though he was distant the full length ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... therefore, reduced to: and this to a heart, for so many years waging offensive war, (not valuing whom the opponent,) what a reduction! now comparing himself to the superannuated lion in the fable, kicked in the jaws, and laid sprawling, by the spurning heel of an ignoble ass! ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... it, nor agree to it; but at that time I knew not what else to do, but wait as others did. I said that we looked like vessels which had come so far up the river with the tide; and now that it had turned we were stranded and fast in the mud. Sometimes I changed the figure to one not so ignoble, and likened ourselves to the stately vessels anchored in Falmouth harbour, which were there because the wind was contrary. We were wind-bound too, and dependent on circumstances; but my idea of true religion was that we ought not to be like this. I rather took for our type the great steamers ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... despairing of his brother's aid, and shrinking from trespassing any further on his mother's resources, the future looked gloomy enough: indeed nothing but the frequent presence and the constant influence of Sybil had driven from his mind the ignoble melancholy which, relieved by no pensive fancy, is the ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... to draw back the sweet faces that have vanished, slowly arises a new stratagem of grief, and we say, 'Be it that they no more come back to us, yet what hinders but we should go to them?' Perilous is that crisis for the young. In its effect perfectly the same as the ignoble witchcraft of the poor African Obeah, his sublimer witchcraft of grief will, if left to follow its own natural course, terminate in the same catastrophe of death. Poetry, which neglects no phenomena that are interesting to the heart of man, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... been carried off safely by the trustworthy St. Luc. She must have died of grief if she had not been kept alive to be the instrument of retributive justice. (In the sequel you will find that this Queen of Hearts descended upon the ignoble due at the proper time like a thousand of brick and took the last trick ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... all pleasure, though he never stopped to think of it. The lines of her slender form, as she sat with such careless dignity beside him, her lovely eyes, the turns of her head, the softening tones of her voice, the sense of an emerging bond that had in it nothing ignoble, nothing to be ashamed of, together with the child's simple liking for him, and the mere physical delight of this morning of late May—the rush and splendour of its white, thunderous clouds, its penetrating, scented air: each and all played their part in the rise of a new emotion he would ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... others the path he had found unprofitable for himself. It is one of two extremes, both to be avoided, "The one extreme is a life devoted to pleasures and lusts; this is degrading, sensual, vulgar, profitless; the other is a life given to mortifications; this is painful, ignoble, and profitless. By avoiding these two extremes the Tathagata has gained the knowledge of the Middle Path, which leads to insight, wisdom, calm, to Nirvana." The way, therefore, to escape from the Karma, the moral retribution which works inexorably ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... our greater contempt. He let himself become a prisoner, and was thankful to gain a three years' accession of life in captivity. He was tamed like a wild beast by his belly, and by wine; Antony took himself out of the world in a cowardly, pitiful, and ignoble manner, but, still in time to prevent the enemy having his person in ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... notice, however, that it is not my intention to offer an interpretation (which is unnecessary, since we all know the "Ave Maria"), but, as I said, to show the idioms of these languages. These idioms, moreover, ought not to displease or appear ignoble, for every tongue has its own beauty and elegance for those who are born in it, which the eyes of foreigners cannot discern. This point has been discussed by Jesus Sidrac in the prologue to his Ecclesiasticus, a holy and Catholic work; and it was proved at length, and with great erudition, by ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... to be trampled on, it was a species of consolation that their oppressor was feared by others as well as themselves. But that the oppression of the doomed French nation was to be continued by a more ignoble hand was altogether intolerable. Frenchmen had begun to ask one another, who was this Mazarin who had come to rule over them? He could not—like Richelieu—boast of his high birth, of descent from a long line of noble ancestors—Frenchmen. ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... degree, and meeting with a thousand dangers and oppositions, succeeds too seldom in an age to fall under common observation. Or, is avarice perhaps the same passion with ambition, only placed in more ignoble and dastardly minds, by which the object is changed from power to money? Or it may be, that one man pursues power in order to wealth, and another wealth in order to power; which last is the safer way, though longer about, and suiting with every period as well ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... for a future life. It clings with intense enjoyment and love to the present world, and the state after death looms up in the distance as a cold and repugnant shadow. And yet it would often hold death preferable to disgrace. The distinction between a noble and ignoble life is strongly marked in Homer, and yet a sense of right and wrong about particular actions seems fluctuating" and confused.[902] A sensuous conception of happiness is the chief good, and mere temporal advantage the principal reward of virtue. We hear nothing of the approving ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... are frequent among the citizens of the depredations and immoralities of riotous clercs, who lived by their wits or by their nimble fingers, or by reciting or singing licentious ballads:—the paouvres escolliers, whose miserable estate, temptations, debauchery, ignoble pleasures, remorse and degradation have been so pathetically sung by Francois Villon, master of arts, poet, bohemian, burglar and homicide. The richer scholars often indulged in excesses, and of the vast majority who were poor, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... Holy Ghost, to whom lust is opposed as the flesh is opposed to the spirit. This is the mighty trio that takes possession of the whole being of man, controls his superior and inferior appetites, and wars on the whole being on God. And lust is the most ignoble of ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... or difficulty and finally rescues him, much to the reader's relief. Love stories appeal, of course, to the sex impulse, humorous stories to laughter, and mystery stories to curiosity. Cynical stories, showing the "pillars of society" in an ignoble light, appeal to the self-assertive impulse of the reader, in that he is led to apply their teaching to pretentious people whom he knows about, and set them down a peg, to his own relative advancement. But here again we have to insist, as under the ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... Presidency of the United States. The Senator from Illinois faltered. He got the prize for which he faltered; but lo! the grand prize of his ambition to-day slips from his grasp because of his faltering in his former contest, and his success in the canvass for the Senate, purchased for an ignoble price, has cost him the loss of the Presidency ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... Major Benjy ought instantly to have challenged his ignoble friend to another duel for this insolent suggestion, but he did nothing of the kind, and his silence, which had some awful quality of consent about it, chilled her mind, even as the sea-mist, now thick and cold, ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... the people who walk here appear one and all to be employed in labour that soils body and spirit. Journey on the top of a tram-car from King's Cross to Holloway, and civilisation has taught you its ultimate achievement in ignoble hideousness. You look off into narrow side-channels where unconscious degradation has made its inexpugnable home, and sits veiled with refuse. You pass above lines of railway, which cleave the region with black-breathing fissure. You see the pavements half occupied with the paltriest and most sordid ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... From spleen, from obstinacy, hate, or fear! See anger, zeal and fortitude supply; Even avarice, prudence; sloth, philosophy; Lust, through some certain strainers well refined, Is gentle love, and charms all womankind; Envy, to which th' ignoble mind's a slave, Is emulation in the learned or brave; Nor virtue, male or female, can we name, But what will grow on pride, or grow on shame. Thus Nature gives us (let it check our pride) The virtue nearest to our vice allied: Reason ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... been also for Halicarnassian) sculpture. But Byron loved Greece herself—through her death—and to his own; while the subsequent refusal of England to give Greece one of our own princes for a king, has always been held by me the most ignoble, cowardly, and lamentable, of all ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... Esplanade or the kettledrum, and who was becoming seriously uneasy, as Kunz, in his fresh snowiness, was disposed to make researches among vulgar remains of crabs and hakes, and was with difficulty restrained from disputing them with a very ignoble and spiteful yellow ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the mailbags in Epping Forest. The real, living bushranger is, however, more of a ruffian and less of a hero than our ideal highwayman; for time, like distance, softens down the harsh and the coarse, and gives dignity to the ignoble. ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... that this was another example of the folly of attempting to economize. At the same time he was gently thrilled by what he owned to himself was a not ignoble emotion: that sigh seemed to speak so naturally and pathetically of disillusionment, it was such a simple little confession of a damaged ideal. It did not occur to him to suspect that the character of which his wife had formed too proudly high an ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... mellifluously like a sucking-dove; but Modestine would be neither softened nor intimidated. She held doggedly to her pace; nothing but a blow would move her, and that only for a second. I must follow at her heels, incessantly belabouring. A moment's pause in this ignoble toil, and she relapsed into her own private gait. I think I never heard of any one in as mean a situation. I must reach the lake of Bouchet, where I meant to camp, before sundown, and, to have even a hope of this, I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... details in the shape of articles entitled "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon." The object of the editor, Mr. William T. Stead, a quondam teacher in the London schools and a respectable Methodist strengthened by non- Conformist support, in starting this ignoble surprise on the public was much debated. His partisans asserted that he had been honestly deceived by some designing knave as if such child-like credulity were any excuse for a veteran journalist! His foes opined ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... this country there is no excuse for the young man who seeks the society of the loose and the dissolute. There is at all times and everywhere open to him a society of persons of the opposite sex of his own age and of pure thoughts and lives, whose conversation will refine him and drive from his bosom ignoble and impure thoughts. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... had read the resignation. She could measure the depth of his fall. They were now to be reduced to live on four thousand francs a year; and that day she had counted up her debts,—they amounted to something like thirty-two thousand francs! The most ignoble of all wretchedness had come upon them. And that noble man who had trusted her was ignorant that she had abused the fortune he had confided to her care. She was sobbing at his ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... the ignoble fact, he felt obliged to admit, apologetically: "I am afraid I was looking rather hard at ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... commercial city; what was preached here would be carried to the ends of the earth. It was a city of art and culture and yet a place where the vices of the east and west met and held high carnival. Religion itself was put to ignoble uses; a thousand priestesses ministered to a base worship in the magnificent temple of the goddess Aphrodite. Greek philosophy showed its decay in endless discussions about words and the tendency to set intellectual above moral distinctions. There was a denial of the future life ...
— Bible Studies in the Life of Paul - Historical and Constructive • Henry T. Sell
... been my ideal, and is still. She was the daughter of the Rev. Samuel Ware of Coniston, and a descendant of Captain Timothy Prescott, whom General Stark called 'Honest Tim.' She was, to me, all that a woman should be, in intellect, in her scorn of all that is ignoble and false, and in her loyalty to her friends." Here the handkerchief came out of the reticule. "She went to Boston to teach school, and some time afterward I was offered a position in New York, and I never saw her again. But she married in Boston a man of learning and literary attainments, though ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the island in the Seine, where now stands the statue of Henry IV, between the King's garden on one side and the convent of the Augustinian monks on the other, the two pyres were raised—two out of the four had shrunk back into their ignoble confessions. It was the hour of vespers when these two aged and noble men were led out to be burned; they were tied each to the stake. The flames kindled dully and heavily; the wood, hastily piled up, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... first bewilderment of my heated brain I tried to think what slanderer could have traced my family to the ignoble animal mentioned above. Vain were my endeavours. At the end of that dance I whispered the Colonel to come into the cloak-room, and I ...
— The Trial of William Tinkling - Written by Himself at the Age of 8 Years • Charles Dickens
... attentively, and a feeling of some strange horror came over me. His livid skin, his features, huge and yet ignoble, gave an exact idea of what you must allow me to call the scum of the earth. A few bluish-black spots were scattered over his face, like bits of mud, and his eyes shot forth an evil gleam. The face seemed, perhaps, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... the true Prussian breed. It was a happy and honourable task so long as it consisted of civilising the world at large with high explosive, poisonous gas and burning oil, and the world at large was not too ready to answer back. To persist in this stern business, in face of the foolish and ignoble obstinacy of the adversary, required great courage and strength of mind; but the Prussian is essentially courageous and strong. Things came to a pretty pass, however, when the wicked adversary made himself some guns and shells and took to being stern on his own. People who behave like that, especially ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... I went. I think I never saw Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve: For flowers—as well expect a cedar grove! But cockle, spurge, according to their law Might propagate their kind, with none to awe, You'd think; a burr had ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... problems as to whether art has or has not of necessity a spiritual content. There cannot be any poetry whatsoever without a spiritual meaning of some sort: good or bad, moral, immoral, or non-moral, obscure or lucid, noble or ignoble, slight or weighty—such distinctions do not signify. In poetry we are not met by questions whether the poet intended to convey a meaning when he made it. Quite meaningless poetry (as some critics would ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... towards the door, and as he watched them leading him out he reflected bitterly that this was the man to whom Suzanne was betrothed—the man whom, not a doubt of it, she loved, since for him she had stooped so low. This miserable craven she preferred to him, because the man, so ignoble of nature, was noble ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... sooner formed the quintet than they all somehow seemed to feel insulted; and I really believe it was owing to the promptitude with which they consented to join. They had joined, of course, from a not ignoble feeling of shame, for fear people might say afterwards that they had not dared to join; still they felt Pyotr Verhovensky ought to have appreciated their heroism and have rewarded it by telling them some really ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... punished for theft has still his life to be preserved, and may one day have his property also to be protected by the same law under which he is suffering. One can imagine the strange effect it would produce upon the ignoble army of martyrs which throng our jails, to be told that they were sacrifices to society—victims whom the community was offering up, most unjustifiably, on the altar of its own interests! At first, the idea would be a little dim and mysterious; but, after a short time, the flattering ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... designs most beautiful and intricate; nothing more handsomely sets off a handsome man; it may cost some pain in the beginning, but I doubt if it be near so painful in the long-run, and I am sure it is far more becoming than the ignoble European practice of tight-lacing among women. And now it has been found needful to forbid the art. Their songs and dances were numerous (and the law has had to abolish them by the dozen). They now face empty-handed the tedium of their uneventful ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... heeded them not. His thoughts were far away. He was dreaming of old days, of his early struggles for fame, and of his friends and companions of years ago. "Where are they now?" he asked himself, sadly. "Some are wanderers on the face of the earth, in comic operas. Two of them found ignoble graves in the 'Tourists'' company. Others are sleeping beneath the daisies in Harper's ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... contented himself with letting the ground temporarily to some market-gardeners, at a yearly rental of 500 francs. And so, as we have said, the iron gate leading into the kitchen-garden had been closed up and left to the rust, which bade fair before long to eat off its hinges, while to prevent the ignoble glances of the diggers and delvers of the ground from presuming to sully the aristocratic enclosure belonging to the mansion, the gate had been boarded up to a height of six feet. True, the planks were not so closely adjusted but that a hasty peep might be obtained through their interstices; ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... his voice was low, but clear. "My hour is come, and like an honest debtor, I am not sorry to give back my life to nature, and in my soul is neither pain nor fear. I have tried to keep my soul stainless; I have aspired to ends not ignoble. Most of our earthly affairs are in the hands of destiny. We must not resist her. Let the Galileans triumph. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... greatly we were surprised by the sudden departure of Lord St Clair. "Ignoble Grand-sire!" exclaimed Sophia. "Unworthy Grandfather!" said I, and instantly fainted in each other's arms. How long we remained in this situation I know not; but when we recovered we found ourselves alone, without either Gustavus, Philander, or the Banknotes. As we were deploring our unhappy ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... two years, campaigning nearly all the time. But it was an ignoble warfare, cruel and ruthless, and had I not given my word to Carmen, to stand by him until the country was pacified, I should have resigned my commission much sooner than I did. Ramon, who acted as one of my orderlies, bore himself bravely and was ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... child, alone in the world, and under the immediate watch of Brigham Young. It would be your lot, in ordinary circumstances, to become the fiftieth bride of some ignoble elder, or by particular fortune, as fortune is counted in this land, to find favour in the eyes of the President himself. Such a fate for a girl like you were worse than death; better to die as your mother died than to sink daily deeper in the mire of this pit of woman's degradation. But is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lives, glory in their triumphs; till a day comes when it is softly said of some stranger, or some friend—it may be none the pleasanter to hear because it is a friend—"She is more to him than you could ever be." Is it only to jealous hearts, ignoble minds, that such tidings come with a shock of pain? Nay, the truer the heart the keener the pain. It may be short, but it is sharp. The second thought may be, "It is well for him; I am glad for him." But the ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... Marguerite, calling her 'Margot,' about Maxime and Leonie de Villepreux, saying he's her lover, about all our affairs, about Gaston, about your marriage, about your sister and your dresses and your dimples, about our darling father, whose history it professes to relate in the most ignoble, the most revolting terms. Papa's in the most awful state!" and Mme. de Brecourt panted to take breath. She had spoken with the volubility of horror and passion. "You're outraged with us and you must suffer ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... well-born; and overcome by the pride of wealth, he reviles the poor. He calls others fools, and does not look to himself. He blames the faults of others, but does not govern himself. When the wise and the foolish, the rich and the poor, the noble and the ignoble, the proud and the humble, have departed to the cemetery and all sleep there, their troubles are at an end, and their bodies are stripped of flesh, little else than bones, united by tendons—other men then perceive no difference between them, whereby they could recognise ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... when he stands staring up at the stars is to see (or conjure up rather) a dumb buffoon Fate, primeval, unfriendly and stupid, whom Man must defy. And Conrad defies it, but wearily, for he feels sick at heart,—because of his surety that Fate is ignoble, and blind. ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... of the Rue St. Antoine, who has just been cornuted by the young Duke of Richelieu. This part he performs with much truth, and avec rondeur, as the critics here express it, to signify plain-dealing. But DAMAS is no less ignoble in ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
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