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More "Ugliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we could never attain. My father brought to us, one day, a large poster, and my mind still holds a recollection of its crude, coarse work and glaring colors. About the edges were grouped in unadorned and exaggerated ugliness the pictures of our former Presidents, and in the midst of them were the faces of "Lincoln and Hamlin," surrounded by way of a frame with a rail fence. We are all familiar with the strong and rugged face of Mr. Lincoln, the deep lines about the mouth, and the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... enterprises, and they laughed in naive enjoyment as certain bloodcurdling traits in their characters were depicted with startling vividness. Accented by make-up and magnified on the screen, the goggling, frog-like ugliness of Big Medicine became like unto ogres of childish memory; his smile was a thing to make one's back hair stand up with a cold, prickling sensation. Happy Jack stared at himself and his exaggerated awkwardness incredulously, with a sheepish grin of appreciation. The rest of them watched and missed ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... peculiarity or absurdity. In such cases "pretty" seems to be given the meaning of "funny" or "amusing." Nevertheless, we score this response as failure, since it betokens a rather infantile tolerance of ugliness. ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... these struggling hordes. You shall live in a palace where the perfume of flowers lingers always, with the sound of running water in your ears, a palace from which all sordid things and all manner of ugliness are banished because we alone have found the key ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to cater for both. Had not all his neighbours their litters of children to provide for, while he, thanks to the immortals, had been far too wise to burden the earth with animals who would add to the ugliness of their father the Tartarean hue of their mother? And after all, Philammon could pay him back when he became a great sophist, and made money, as of course he would some day or other; and in the meantime, something might turn up—things were always turning up for those whom the gods favoured; ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... out of his crafty skull than I remember of the History of France and the dates we whined at school. Never, I tell you, bad be been sent to the front, although he was Class 1903, [note 1] and a lusty devil at that, he was. Danger and dog-tiredness and all the ugliness of war—not for him, but for the others, oui. He knew damned well that if he set foot in the firing-line, the line would see that the beast got it, so he ran like hell from it, and stopped where he was. He said they'd tried all ways to ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... letter home Norah wrote frantically, demanding to know if I was the only woman in the house. I calmed her fears by assuring her that, while the men were interesting and ugly with the fascinating ugliness of a bulldog, the women were crushed looking and uninteresting and wore hopeless hats. I have written Norah and Max reams about this household, from the aborigines to Minna, who tidies my room and serves my meals, and admires my clothes. Minna is related ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... oracle must accept the husband or wife that falls to their lot just the same as if they married them in the usual way, but if dissatisfied on account of ugliness, dress, or any other cause the consulter, by doing penance in the shape of a pilgrimage to a certain place in the exact centre of the world and paying a small sum, can ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... Tres Riches Heures"; one was possessed by that gifted Milanese lady whom Ludovico Sforza put out of the line of Lombardy's throne. The wonderful Gothic ingenuousness lies in their careful paintings, the ingenuousness where virtue is expressed by beauty, and vice by ugliness, and where, with delightful seriousness, standing figures overtop the houses they occupy—the same people, the same battlements, we have seen on the early tapestries. Weavers must surely have consulted the lovely books of Gothic miniature, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... Sahara of the city's noise: arid, senseless, inhospitable noise: roaring of wheels, clanging of bells, shrieking of whistles, clatter of machinery, squawking of horns, raucous and strident voices: confused, bewildering, exhausting noise, a desolate and unfriendly desert of heard ugliness. ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... faces, simpering almond-eyed beauties in cobwebby laces; and in the place of honor a frowning hag, whose wrinkles even the flattering painter dare not hide. Time had added to the sallowness of her complexion, and certain cracks in the canvas but intensified her ugliness. Artistic cracks they were, too, for they fell in just the right places, and heightened ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... and far enough away from her, the king, with angry countenance, said to Cromwell: 'Call you that a beauty? She is a Flanders mare, but no princess.' [Footnote: Burnet, p. 174. Tytler, p. 417.] Anne's ugliness was surely given her of God, that by it, the Church, in which alone is salvation, might be delivered from the great danger which threatened it. For had Anne of Cleves, the sister, niece, granddaughter and aunt of all the ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... yet further the suffering that produced the distortion, he would often represent attendant demons, whom he made as ugly as his imagination could compass; avoiding, however, all grotesqueness beyond what was sufficient to indicate that they were demons, and not men. Their ugliness rose from hate, envy, and all evil passions; amongst which he especially delighted to represent a gloating exultation over human distress. And often in the midst of his clouds of demon faces, would some one who knew him ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... who were already on the high road to the coming ideal of universal ugliness, Antinous Lebeau was remarkable for his ugliness, and one might have said that he positively threw zeal, too much zeal, into the matter, though he was not hideous like Mirabeau, who made the people exclaim: "Oh! the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... thrusting an iron rod, two feet long, through the nose of my plough, about eighteen inches from the end, I had my implement complete. The iron rod was to keep the pointed end of my oak tree from burying itself too deeply in the ground. It was not a beautiful object, but its usefulness condoned its ugliness. ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... bring that up as a claim," he said; "what was I born for except to be useful to you? But I love you so; if you could only make up your mind to endure my ugliness and ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... mistress of the house is charming. One must do women the justice to say, that they never take a pride in ugliness; that they never make elegance to consist in appearing to the greatest possible disadvantage. The woman whom you are visiting, then, is dressed in the best taste. A beautiful lace cap covers her light hair; she wears a soft figured Gros do Naples; her stockings are of exquisite fineness; her shoes ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... believe that individual Partingtons can sweep back with their little mops of beneficence and philanthropy the Atlantic Ocean of sin, suffering, and despair which floods in to the shores of our industrialism—at high tide nearly swamping its prosperity, and at low tide leaving all its ugliness, squalor, and despairing hopelessness bare to the eye ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... mixed up with the repast of Atreus and Thyestes, and many other incidents. In detail there is no want of beautiful lines, bold images, nay, even features which betray the peculiar conception of Shakespeare. Among these we may reckon the joy of the treacherous Moor at the blackness and ugliness of his child begot in adultery; and in the compassion of Titus Andronicus, grown childish through grief, for a fly which had been struck dead, and his rage afterwards when he imagines he discovers in it his black enemy; we recognize the future poet of LEAR. Are the critics afraid ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... for himself and Mrs Quilp, a small sleeping-closet for that lady's mother, who resided with the couple and waged perpetual war with Daniel; of whom, notwithstanding, she stood in no slight dread. Indeed, the ugly creature contrived by some means or other—whether by his ugliness or his ferocity or his natural cunning is no great matter—to impress with a wholesome fear of his anger, most of those with whom he was brought into daily contact and communication. Over nobody had he such complete ascendance as Mrs Quilp herself—a ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... him. IN the same way the vulgar people want to enjoy life just as they want to enjoy gin—because they are too stupid to see that they are paying too big a price for it. That they never find happiness—that they don't even know how to look for it—is proved by the paralyzing clumsiness and ugliness of everything they do. Their discordant colours are cries of pain. Look at the brick villas beyond the college on this side of the river. There's one with spotted blinds; look at it! just go and look ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... wandered among the ruins of the ancient abbey. "Why were these hard times for the poor?" Brooding over these questions, he observed two men hard by in the old cloister garden, one of lofty stature, nearer forty than fifty years of age, the other younger and shorter, with a pale face redeemed from ugliness by its intellectual brow. Egremont joined the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... ownerless and vicious dogs. If you can't do that, have plenty of water where they can get at it. A dog that has all the water he wants, will never go mad. This dog of mine has not one single thing the matter with him but pure ugliness. Yet, if I let him loose, and he ran through the village with his tongue out, I'll warrant you there'd be a cry of 'mad dog!' However, I'm going to kill him. I've no use for a bad dog. Have plenty of animals, I say, and treat them kindly, but if there's a vicious ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... birds-of-Paradise feathers, the gowns without waists, the bare arms and long gloves, the short leg-of-mutton sleeves, and other monstrosities of the ladies. And for thirty years his sitters were attired in red, or green, or blue, or purple. He absolutely revelled in the ugliness of fashion. Occasionally Lawrence did some very good things, as when he painted the Irish orator and patriot, Curran, in one sitting, in which, according to Williams, "he finished the most extraordinary likeness of the most ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... thought of going downstairs to meet people, and especially the young men from Crompton, clad in that spotted brown and white gown, with nothing to relieve its ugliness, not even a collar, for the one she had worn the previous day was past being worn again until it had been laundered. She looked at her handkerchief. ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... few miles below, was a similar settlement, called Lower Ashuelot—the germ of the present Swanzey. This, too, suffered greatly from Indian attacks.] In 1746 the place was in all the rawness and ugliness of a backwoods hamlet. The rough fields, lately won from the virgin forest, showed here and there, among the stumps, a few log-cabins, roofed with slabs of pine, spruce, or hemlock. Near by was a wooden fort, made, no doubt, after the common frontier pattern, of a stockade ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... city life are thus largely reinterpreted; and if so more efficiently combated; since the poverty, squalor and ugliness of our cities, their disease and their intemperance, their ignorance, dulness and mental defect, their vice and crime are thus capable not only of separate treatment but of an increasingly unified civic hygiene, and this in the widest ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... of Melos; and she, as I have already asserted, in the 'Queen of the Air,' has nothing notable in feature except dignity and simplicity. Of Athena I do not know one authentic type of great beauty; but the intense ugliness which the Greeks could tolerate in their symbolism of her will be convincingly proved to you by the coin represented in Plate VI. You need only look at two or three vases of the best time to assure yourselves that beauty of feature was, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... proletariat, the corrupting influence of the interests which consume the two middle classes, the cruelties of the artist's thought, and the excessive pleasure which is sought for incessantly by the great, explain the normal ugliness of the Parisian physiognomy. It is only in the Orient that the human race presents a magnificent figure, but that is an effect of the constant calm affected by those profound philosophers with their long pipes, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... my friends? The poor fellow is going to have his own festive day by singing the ugliness of his King. Go along, Virupaksha, you will find plenty of people ready to believe you: may you ...
— The King of the Dark Chamber • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... myriad lights pricking out in the dusk, and see the copper lantern of the full moon lifting above the black line of the hills. Eleanor, taught by Maurice, had learned to feel the strange loveliness of Mercer's ugliness, and it was her idea that Mr. Houghton should feel it, too. "Edith's too much of a child to appreciate ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... to produce discomfort, sat the Sunday-school classes, and upon one of these, near the door, D'Entremont sat down. He looked at the bare walls, at the white pulpit, at the carpetless floors, at the general ugliness of things, the box stove, which stood in the only aisle, the tin chandeliers with their half-burned candles, the eight-by-ten lights of glass in the windows, and he was favorably impressed. With a quick conscience he had often felt the frivolous emptiness of a worldly ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... born to seek and take his mother's breast. But as a matter of fact man has a very decided, clear, and yet complicated instinct—namely, for the selection, both earnest and capricious, of another individual, to satisfy his instinct of sex. The beauty or ugliness of the other individual has nothing whatever to do with this satisfaction in itself, that is in so far as it is a matter of pleasure based upon a pressing desire of the individual. The regard, however, for this satisfaction, which is ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... furniture, don't discard a comfortable piece that you like just because it doesn't seem to fit into the scheme of decoration. A chair or a sofa that appears to quarrel violently with all other pieces in a room can often be made to conform by a change in upholstery, or in cases of extreme ugliness, with a slip cover of heavy chintz, ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... expression more than once; doctors see it often, in the sudden revulsion from terror and agony to certainty and peace; I only marvel where he ever met it: but the general effect is unpleasing, marred by patches of sheer ugliness, like that child's foot. There is the same mistake in all his pictures. Whatever they are, they are not beautiful; and no magnificence of surface-colouring will make up, in my eyes, for wilful ugliness of form. I say that nature is beautiful; and therefore nature ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... not been in the camp a week before McWha's "ugliness" to her had aroused even the Boss's resentment, and the Boss was a just man. Of course, it was generally recognized that McWha was not bound, by any law or obligation, to take any notice of the child, still less ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... a soldier and an adventurer into far and strange countries must needs have faced Death many times and in many guises. I had learned to know that grim countenance, and to have no great fear of it. And beneath the ugliness of the mask that now presented itself there was only Death at last. I was no babe to whimper at a sudden darkness, to cry out against a curtain that a Hand chose to drop between me and the life I had lived. Death frighted ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... enjoyed the sour apples, the first I had tasted that summer. Once during the afternoon a red squirrel came jumping over the fir needles, and looked up impudently into my face. The sight of so much ugliness almost overcame him, but he managed to scamper off at a good speed. I tried hard to attract this, my only friend, by pretending to be Hiawatha, and calling him an "Adjidaumo," but ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... robbed of its opinion that one of Toni's rejected admirers had thus sought to avenge himself. The suspicion of the authorities, however, fastened itself upon a waitress, a plump, red-haired wanton who had taken the place of the imported beauties and whose insolent ugliness the men of the town, relieved of nobler delights, enjoyed thoroughly. The insight of the investigating judge had found in the girl's serving in the house and her apparent intimacy with its master a scent which he would by no means abandon. Only, because a few confirmatory details were still to seek, ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... bad portraits of Lord Byron spread over the world, there is one that surpasses all others in ugliness, which is often put up for sale, and which a mercantile spirit wishes to pass off for a good likeness; it was done by an American, Mr. West,—an excellent man, but a very bad painter. This portrait, which ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the chapters about Njal's death, is the result of a harmony between two extremes of sentiment, each of which by itself was dangerous, and both of which have here been brought to terms with each other and with the whole design of the work. The ugliness of Skarphedinn's demeanour might have turned out to be as excessive as the brutalities of Svarfdla or Ljsvetninga Saga; the gentleness of Njal has some affinities with the gentleness of the martyrs. ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... forget to speak of an incident which had a considerable influence on my character at this time. The church which my uncle and his family "attended," as it was called, was one of those most dreary places of worship too common at that time, in London and elsewhere. It was ugly outside, but the outside ugliness was as nothing compared with the ugliness within. The windows were long and bluntly rounded at the top, and the sunlight was modified by scanty calico blinds, which, being yellow with age and smoke, toned the light ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... exposure to the rays of the burning sun, the biting of the frost, and the pelting of the pitiless sleet and snow, destroys their beauty at a very early age; and if in infancy their personal advantages are remarkable, their ugliness at an advanced age is no less so, for then it ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... behind the foreign settlement and its nondescript ugliness to plunge into the labyrinth of little native streets, wayward and wandering like sheep-tracks, with sudden abrupt hills and flights of steps which checked the rickshaws' progress. Here, the houses of the ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... rope choked him. Finally he ceased all effort and turned his eyes along the rope. At the far end stood the little mare, legs braced in the sand, and astride her, stolid and grim, and with eyes narrowed, the figure of the large man. At sight of him Pat began to pull again, more through ugliness now than desire to escape, until he found that he was dragging the little gray out of her stiffened hold. Then he slackened off. Also, as she wheeled back toward camp, he set out amiably after her. In camp he found his ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... melody; he invents and executes marvellous variations upon verse; he has footed the tight-rope of the galliambic measure and the swaying planks of various trochaic experiments; but his resolve to astonish is stronger than his desire to charm, and he lets technical skill carry him into such excesses of ugliness in verse as technical skill carried Liszt, and sometimes Berlioz, in music. Meredith has written lines which any poet who ever wrote in English would be proud of; he has also written lines as tuneless as a deal table ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... a hero—young and handsome, Noble, rich, celebrated, and a stranger, Like other slaves of course must pay his ransom, Before he can escape from so much danger As will environ a conspicuous man. Some Talk about poetry, and "rack and manger," And ugliness, disease, as toil and trouble;— I wish they knew the life ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... way of marking in your mind the beauty and significance of the place? No, a man in uniform will thrust into your hand a booklet of well-intentioned description (but of unapproachable typographic ugliness) and you will find before you a stall for the sale of cheap souvenirs, ash trays, and hideous postcards. In such ways do things of Beauty pass into the custody of those unequipped to ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... His teaching and commandment require of us, our sense of the beauty and simplicity of His life is overshadowed by the terror aroused in us by His expectation of us. We know that the ugliness of our lives can never reproduce the beauty of His. From a human point of view, the imitation of Christ is a complete impossibility, and one wonders how so many Christians can go on, generation after generation, ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... volcano's vat and at different spots saw the treacly sulphur pouring out, brilliant yellow with red streaks. The man to whom there first came the idea of hell and a prisoned revengeful power must surely have looked into a crater. In the throat of this crater there seethed and spluttered an ugliness that was scarlet, green, brown and yellow. The sound of the steam blowing off was like the roar of the sea. The air was stifling. It was very hot, and there ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... light on her breast, that moved as she moved, struck a thrill of pleasure through Tressady's senses. The squalid monotony and physical defect of the crowd about him passed from his mind. Her beauty redressed the balance. "'Loveliness, magic, and grace—they are here; they are set in the world!'—and ugliness and pain have not conquered while this face still looks and breathes." This, and nothing less, was the cry of the young man's heart and imagination as he strained ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Connecticut Samaria concealed its somewhat chilly architectural beauties beneath a veil of feathery elms and round-topped maples. It was not until you had climbed the hill from the clump of houses and shops which had grown up around the railway station,—a place of prosperous ugliness and unabashed modernity,—that you perceived the respectable evidences of what is called in America "an ancient town." The village green, and perhaps a half dozen of the white wooden houses which fronted it with their prim ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... coon-trails. He was black and white, grizzled and battlescarred; and if ever a dog had an evil eye, Moze was that dog. He had a way of wagging his tail—an indeterminate, equivocal sort of wag, as if he realized his ugliness and knew he stood little chance of making friends, but was still hopeful and willing. As for me, the first time he manifested this evidence of a good heart under a rough ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... sea; not even the ocean could have filled it." Chapel Porth is named as the scene of this incident. The village of St. Agnes lies at the eastward foot of the Beacon, and Trevaunance, on the coast, is its port. It is a neighbourhood where natural beauties contend with the ugliness of industrialism, and usually emerge triumphant. There is a story told of St. Agnes in connection with Wesley, which proves how rapidly folk-lore may spring up; it is even more remarkable, because more modern, than the manner in which Devonians have associated mythology ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... most uninteresting or unpleasing parts of America, before this strong sense of a strange kind of greatness can grow upon the soul. . . . The externals of the Middle West affect an Englishman as ugly, and yet ugliness is not exactly the point. There are things in England that are quite as ugly or even uglier. Rows of red brick villas in the suburbs of a town in the Midlands are, one would suppose, as hideous ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... class and the people, the ugliness is more pleasant and sometimes becomes a kind of prettiness. The eyes are still too small and hardly able to open, but the faces are rounder, browner, more vivacious; and in the women there remains a certain vagueness in the ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... the margin of the sea, machine-bathing at eleven o'clock will hardly furnish them with a magical early memory. Time was when this was made penitential to them, like the rest of life, upon a principle that no longer prevails. It was vulgarized for them and made violent. A bathing woman, type of all ugliness in their sensitive eyes, came striding, shapeless, through the unfriendly sea, seized them if they were very young, ducked them, and returned them to the chilly machine, generally in the futile and superfluous saltness of tears. "Too much of ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... farms. A mile beyond I could see the rebel cavalry. Sometimes the enemy amused himself by throwing shells at our pickets, when they were a little too venturesome; but beyond a feeble show of strength and ugliness, nothing transpired to disturb the dulness of the camp."* (* From Brook Farm to ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... out of sight behind the hills in Baldwin. The fish were worthless, but I thought I must have something to show for the day spent. After exhibiting them to mother and sister, and hearing the comments as to their ugliness, and much speculation as to what their horns were for, I gave them to Mr. Lambard, who said that pouts were the best of ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... appear like a sort of repetition of what we have before said, to insist here upon the nature of UGLINESS; as I imagine it to be in all respects the opposite to those qualities which we have laid down for the constituents of beauty. But though ugliness be the opposite to beauty, it is not the opposite to proportion and fitness. For it is possible that a thing may be very ugly with any proportions, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... the very centre of the town, you can escape from the heavy pall of smoke-filled air, into fresh and picturesque country, whose beauties, to my thinking, strike one all the more vividly from the force of contrast with the ugliness and griminess which you cannot forget ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... and contract incurable ugliness and infirmity under the pressure of disproportionate misfortune, like the spine beneath ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... abject misery and shame. But had he not learned to rejoice over all dead hopes, and write Te Deums on their coffin lids? And now he stood in dim light, in the vapour from damp garments, in dinginess and ugliness, with a sense of spiritual squalor and destitution in his very soul. He had tried to pray his own prayer while the deacon prayed his; but there had come to him no reviving—no message for this handful ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... believed that never have the gardens looked better than at present, when taste in things floricultural has broken away from the formalism of scroll-pattern borders and indulgence in the eccentricities of topiarian art—is even, it is to be hoped, on the way to free itself finally from the ugliness of "carpet bedding"—when plants are largely grouped and massed instead of being placed in alternate kinds at regular intervals in geometrical patterns. Present day taste with its appreciation of garden colour, of masses and groups of particular kinds, instead of isolated plants dotted about ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold
... two sisters, named Luceta and Troccola, who had two daughters, Marziella and Puccia. Marziella was as fair to look upon as she was good at heart; whilst, on the contrary, Puccia by the same rule had a face of ugliness and a heart of pestilence, but the girl resembled her parent, for Troccola was a harpy within and ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... we taken of ourselves to perceive those monsters which had most of ugliness and horror to commend them; for, thereby did we stand to have won the game of watching, until such time as a more fearsome Brute be discovered. And so went the play; yet with ever, it doth seem to me now, something of a half-known shudder to the heart, and a child's rejoicing unknowingly ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... by my forefinger, and walking decorously along the pavement. She stopped to contemplate the monkey, and after a while, shocked by his horrible ugliness, began ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... traits that make women attractive. She had one, however—an indulgent love of her only child, Andrew Jackson Badger, who was about as disagreeable a cub as can well be imagined. Yet I am not sure that Andrew was wholly responsible for his ugliness, as most of his bad traits came to him by inheritance from the admirable pair whom he called father ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... I call downright Radical nonsense," said Mrs. Low, nodding her head energetically. "Portrait indeed! Why should we want to have a portrait of ignorance and ugliness? What we all want is to have things ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... began to change visibly. The shades of ugliness that had so long hung over it vanished away. Its very angles seemed to grow less acute, and never, in its palmiest days, had it rejoiced in such bright coats of paint. But, with all the brightening up without ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... University Place. Because human society had mysterious unwritten laws, the woman he loved was forced to steal away from the freshness and peace of green fields and sweeping river, to take refuge amid the noisome ugliness from which, in spite of her courage, her exquisite nature must shrink. He, whose needs were simple, as his tastes were comparatively coarse, could command the sybaritic luxury of a Roman patrician, while she, who could not lift her hand without betraying the habits ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... yellow sandstone, marble and brick. It boasted a round dome, rising from a Gothic main roof and a little pagoda-like tower on each of the mansard roofs that crowned the two wings. There had been a time when to Roger the Science Building had been beautiful. But he saw its ugliness now and ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... and papooses. Their curiosity. Pride of an Indian on his ability to repeat one line of a song. Indian women. Extreme beauty of their limbs; slender ankles and statuesque feet; haggardness of expression and ugliness of features. Girl of sixteen, a "wildwood Cleopatra," an exception to the general hideousness. The California Indian not the Indian of the Leatherstocking tales. A stop at the Buckeye Rancho. Start for Pleasant Valley Rancho. The trail again lost. Camping out for the night. Growling bears. ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... sister with a smile on her lips, and the patience of a lamb. But this angelic behaviour did not soften them. They became even more tyrannical and grumpy, for Marouckla grew daily more beautiful, while Helen's ugliness increased. So the stepmother determined to get rid of Marouckla, for she knew that while she remained her own daughter would have no suitors. Hunger, every kind of privation, abuse, every means was used to make the girl's life miserable. The most ...
— Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen • Alexander Chodsko
... our success in this process of education will be the number of reactions we can induce to the right sort of stimuli. In this, we shall have occasion to make many substitutions. The boy who has been reacting to ugliness must be lured away by the substitution of beauty. The beautiful picture will take the place of the bizarre until nothing but such a picture will give pleasure and satisfaction. Indeed, the substitution of beauty for ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... not of an intellectual ugliness. Her features were coarse, and the ordinary expression rather vulgar, she had an ugly mouth, and one or two irregularly prominent teeth, which perhaps gave her countenance an habitual gaiety. Her eye was full, dark, and expressive; and when she declaimed, which was almost whenever she spoke, she ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... besides their general resemblance to the French anarchists, had also some minuter features of ugliness, which Englishmen have often exulted have not marked an English revolution—sanguinary proscriptions![328] We had thought that we had no revolutionary tribunals! no Septembrisers! no noyades! no moveable guillotines awaiting for carts loaded with human victims! no infuriated ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... could see wonders in the scale of a fish or a grain of sand, Beecher had an eye like the glass of a microscope, which reveals marvels of beauty in common things. He could see beauty and harmony where others saw only ugliness and discord, because he read the hidden meaning in things. Like Ruskin, he could see the marvelous philosophy, the Divine plan, in the lowliest object. He could feel the Divine presence in ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... up to his sitting-room, a comfortable apartment with two long windows opening on to a trellised verandah and balcony—a room which, as he had furnished and decorated it himself to suit his own tastes, had none of the depressing ugliness of typical lodgings. ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... and bad sights. Don't go on thinking I don't care. These people earn fortunes beside those I have known, but in all London I've never seen anything so horrible as this, nothing so hideous, sordid—" he stopped with a gasp, "the women—the children—the lost desire—the ugliness." ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... from occasional lodges; and once, as though to complete the impression, a young man and two women, superbly mounted, came trotting out of one of these driveways, talking and laughing gayly. Honora took a good look at the man. He was not handsome, but had, in fact, a distinguished and haunting ugliness. The girls were straight-featured and conventional to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... elephantiasis, causing horrible club-feet, is especially conspicuous; there is, too, no scarcity of persons afflicted with blindness and other ills. Even the cats and dogs, that run about the gutters in great numbers, partake of the universal ugliness: most of them are covered with the mange, or are full of wounds and sores. I should like to be endowed with the magic power of transporting hither every traveller who starts back with affright ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... as their becomingnesses;' and seeing that dirt is proper to a swine, malice to a monkey, poison to a nettle, and folly to a fool, they called a nettle but a nettle, and the faults of fools but folly; and never saw the difference between ugliness and beauty absolute, decency and indecency absolute, glory or shame absolute, and ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... progress of our comedy she appear to act with an utter lack of reason or even common-sense—as every woman worth the winning must do once or twice in a lifetime—that I be permitted to record the fact, to set it down in all its ugliness, nay, even to exaggerate it a little—all to the end that I may eventually exasperate you and goad you into crying out, "Come, come, you are not treating the girl with ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... she continued, "have been—well, I suppose we should call it engaged—for three years. During those three years I have earned, by disgusting and wearisome labour, just enough to keep me alive in a world which has had nothing to offer me but ugliness and discomfort and misery. You, as you admitted last time we met, have done no better. You have lived in a garret and gone often hungry to bed. For three years this has been going on. All that time I have waited ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... must teach their children the potential influence of kindness to dumb animals and to birds. By it they will conquer what of viciousness, ugliness, or wildness is often the character of their beasts of burden; and they will find, by the almost total eradication of the destructive flies and insects which are the scourge of their crops, the value ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Laplander; the wild Feejeeian, and docile Guinea Negro; the stolid Indian, and ant-like plodder of teeming India,—are but the outward symbols of that contrariety of moral, or rather immoral existence which is the fate of barbarism. They have no equality of beauty nor ugliness, leanness nor obesity, vice nor virtue, but varying differences, such as the spontaneous growth of uncultured nature in different climes exhibits in the vegetable and lower orders of the animal creation. ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... stake a considerable wager (though by no means a positive man) that some such mitigated description would lead the beagles of the law into a much surer track for finding this ungracious varlet, than to set them upon a false scent after fictitious ugliness and fictitious shabbiness; though, to do those gentlemen justice, I have no doubt their experience has taught them in all such cases to abate a great deal of the deformity which they are instructed to expect, and has discovered to them that the Devil's agents ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... of the deeper insight he had attained, he could look back over the whole sordid tragedy and discern one of those steep and arduous roads by which the spirit mounts to enlightenment through the flesh. And if this were so here—if in ugliness such as this he could find beauty, was it not one and the same over the broad field of human effort? Had not his own life proved to him that let a man's eyes be opened, and even in the depths of abasement he may look in his soul and ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... green fields, hedges, and other monotonous features of an ordinary English landscape. There were little factory villages, too, or larger towns, with their tall chimneys, and their pennons of black smoke, their ugliness of brick-work, and their heaps of refuse matter from the furnace, which seems to be the only kind of stuff which Nature cannot take back to herself and resolve into the elements, when man has thrown it aside. These hillocks of waste ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... soon after their coming to the ranch, a cactus fence round the house enclosure; and seeing the dry ugliness of the long, straight sticks placed close together, Annesley disliked and wondered at it. At last she questioned Knight, and complained that the bristly barrier was an eyesore. She wished ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... well admit first as last that there is no way of escape from the difficulties which these queries suggest. In that case it is not for us to pick and choose—to say that God is the beauty of the beautiful, but not the ugliness of the ugly; the compassion of the compassionate, but not the cruelty of the cruel: if He is all, He is both, and for that very reason is neither. That is the real inwardness of a conception of the Deity which represents Him, with ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... like Larry—weak, impulsive, sentimental, introspective creatures—did they ever mean what they did? This man, this Walenn, was, by all accounts, better dead than alive; no need to waste a thought on him! But, crime—the ugliness—Justice unsatisfied! Crime concealed—and his own share in the concealment! And yet—brother to brother! Surely no one could demand action from him! It was only a question of what he was going to advise Larry to do. To keep silent, and disappear? ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... amusement with the little "Bakemono" (apparition). Of their ill intent O'Iwa knew nothing. Indeed a short experience with O'Iwa disarmed derision. Most of the unseemly lovers came genuinely to like the girl, unless inherent malice and ugliness of disposition, as with Natsume and Akiyama Cho[u]zaemon, made their sport more than mere pastime. But as grown men they could not face the results of the final step, and no parent was harsh enough to graft his unwilling stock on O'Iwa's persimmon ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... a long and very interesting conversation with the King, and saw much of my excellent friends Arrivabene and Quetelet. But after all Brussels is not Paris. I was more than ever struck by the ugliness of the country and the provincialness of ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... genius as in its revelation of those moral, personal, and political instincts which were the make-up of his character and the permanent support of that literary genius. It is by far the most depressing of all his books; it is in some ways the most irritating; yet its ugliness gives the last touch of honesty to all that spontaneous and splendid output. Without this one discordant note all his merriment ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... does work discover— What was rest from work—my life? Did I live man's hater, lover? Leave the world at peace, at strife? Call earth ugliness or beauty? See things there in large or small? Use to pay its Lord my duty? Use to own ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... smile on his countenance that completed his ugliness, and would have frightened any honest man from his side at once. Merely glancing my way, he shuffled up to my companion, and leading him aside, drew out a paper which he laid on a flat tombstone with a gesture ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... my knife, During his natural college life; That knife, which ugliness inherits, And due to his superior merits, And when from Harvard he shall steer, I order him to leave it here, That't may from class to class descend, Till ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... through had not been able to affect that, unless to render her beauty more spiritual and delicate. Her hair of that light glistening brown which is best known as golden; her drooping eyes of deepest blue; her wide, square forehead, unshaded by that device of ugliness, the artificial fringe of hair; the full, open lips; the rounded chin—every mark of a certain order of ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... with it. But between the railway station and the High Street it is desolation and blank walls. A few pretty old cottages jut out over a narrow pavement; beyond a huddled roof or two rises the tower of St. Nicholas' Church, umber and solid; nearly all else is tumbled down ugliness, broken brickwork, mud and shaggy grass. A clear space, a level green, a bed of flowers—what an introduction that might be to Guildford. But, doubtless, the rubbish heap is, or some day will be, too ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... sleeping room, like every room that faced the south, that night, was full of strange, spectral effects. The scrolls and the roses on the cheap yellow curtains that hung in the windows, were changed to hideous faces of variable size and ugliness. Their grotesque shadows on the floor mingled with other faces—horrible as antique masks—wrought by the magic of the moon from the gigantic flowers that adorned the narrow strip of carpet by the bedside. Her dresses, suspended from a row of hooks ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... early days in London, but it may be safely assumed that he was provided with letters of introduction to persons of influence. We meet him first in the company of Heidegger, a Swiss adventurer who achieved notoriety through his incredible ugliness, and from 1709 onwards was concerned in the management of the opera at the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket. Through Heidegger, Handel was introduced to Mary Granville, then a little girl of ten, whom he delighted by his performance on her own spinet. Her uncle, ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... part of the conspiracy; that to show him a kindness I asked him at last to sit to me. I daresay moreover she was disgusted to hear that I had ended by attempting almost as many sketches of his beauty as I had attempted of hers. What was the value of tributes to beauty by a hand that luxuriated in ugliness? My relation to poor Dawling's want of modelling was simple enough. I was really digging in that sandy desert for the buried treasure of ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... socks and straw slippers. His hat, something like a reversed bowl, shone with lacquer and ornaments of gold. I must say, however, that Europeans have no right to quiz the head covering of any nation in the world, as ours far surpass all others in ugliness, and in the want of adaptation of means to ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... one of the most ancient, and the other by one of the greatest native sovereigns of Hindustan.[5] One cannot but feel that he approaches the capital of a dynasty of barbarian princes, who, like Attila, would choose their places of residence, as devils choose their pandemonia, for their ugliness, and rather reside in the dreary wastes of Tartary than on the shores of the Bosphorus. There are within the dominions of Sindhia seats for a capital that would not yield to any in India in convenience, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... to be disobeyed, must I?" the old man cried, his face positively terrifying in its ugliness. "We'll see about that! If you wa'n't callin' on a young man, you were callin' on a crazy woman, and I won't have it, I tell you, do you hear? I won't have a daughter o' mine consortin' with any o' that Boynton crew. Perhaps a night outdoors will teach you who's master in this house, ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... your opinion that a man's fine manners are no guarantee of his morality or uprightness; but do you think society would be improved by turning all its sin, wretchedness, and ugliness ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... and struggled to collect himself. "Not till you are in safety," he said, and was dully aware of some discomfort. The dying woman, the sheer ugliness of death, the sordid emotions about her numbed the life in him. He felt himself in a world inhuman. Yet, even afterwards, he seems not to have discovered anything ignoble in his admired Pretender. The blame was fate's that mocked coldly at the hopes ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... they imagined it, and drawing her progress from her cradle upwards: now engaged with her doll, then with her dancing master; now marching in her backboard; now crying over her German lessons; and dressed for her first ball finally, and bestowing her hand upon a dandy of preternatural ugliness, who was kneeling at her feet as the happy man. This picture was the delight of the laughing, happy girls; except, perhaps, the little cousins from Brianstone Square, who were invited to Ethel's party, but were so overpowered by the prodigious new dresses in which their mamma ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... she had gone, Vessons set out for Sally's, anxious that she should be quick. But Sally would not hurry. It was washing-day, and she also insisted on making all the children very smart, unaware that their extreme ugliness was her strength. It was not till three o'clock that she arrived at the front door, baby in arms, the four children, heavily expectant, at her heels, and Vessons stage-managing in ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... their way from school one day, when they had on their nice clothes, he covered them from head to foot with dirt and mud. In that sad plight John and Louisa went home crying. Their mother felt as badly as they did, when she saw the ugliness of ...
— Charles Duran - Or, The Career of a Bad Boy • The Author of The Waldos
... those brother fishermen, a little grizzled fellow, whom he was quite sure he never had seen before, but who had, nevertheless, straightway said to him, "How d'o, long Yann?" with all the familiarity of bosom acquaintance. He wore the provoking ugliness of a monkey, with an apish twinkling of mischief ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... shades of green, blue, yellow, and rose are as permanent, and as easily cleaned, as the dull grays and drabs and mud-colours which are often used upon bedroom walls—especially those upper ones which are above the zone of ornament, apparently under the impression that there is virtue in their very ugliness. ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... are treated with the respect that is their just due. Discipline there must be, but it is a wrong view of discipline that makes it consist of oaths and brutal insults delivered according to the prevalent good temper or ugliness of the overseer. Unfortunately, not every man who is placed in authority is wise, honest, and a gentleman. Bodily violence is no longer permitted by law, but too often the curses and insults which are heaped on men with no due cause are a violence which is more severe to many a ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... the water's edge, bravely clinging to nook and cranny, running along ledges, hanging trembling to ragged edges, boldly climbing up to the forest, were all spring's myriad tender things wherewith she redeems Nature from winter's ugliness. From the river below came gusts of misty wind, waves of sound of the water's many voices. It was a spot where Nature's kindly ministries got about ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... the gentle courtesy of their mistress and her kindly servant; the very dogs seemed to partake of the human nature of their protector, and attended us wherever we went, with more than ordinary civility. Hogarth might have been tempted to immortalize one of them for its extreme ugliness, and the waggish spirit with which it pulled at its companion's ears, who in vain attempted to tug at the bits of stumps that stuck out at either side of its tormentor's head. Mr. Fairholt was permitted to sketch the drawing room; the open door ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... fair; we were at liberty for an indefinite period. In forty minutes we struck another shore and another clime. San Francisco is original in its affectation of ugliness—it narrowly escaped being a beautiful city—and its humble acceptation of a climate which is as invigorating as it is unscrupulous, having a peculiar charm which is seldom discovered until one is beyond its ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... exquisitely becoming as it would be, you would better not indulge your artistic taste by wearing it. It would cost almost three times as much as cloth; it would be nearly impossible to make a well fitting modern skirt of it, and it would be worn into ugliness by a very few hours of trotting. Be thankful, therefore, that fashion says that woollen cloth is the most costly material ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... exalted character selecting unworthy and wicked husbands, it does seem as if Providence determines all matrimonial unions independently of our own wills and settled purposes. How often is wealth wedded to poverty, beauty to ugliness, and amiability to ill-temper! The hard, cold, unsocial, unsympathetic, wooden, scheming, selfish man is the only one who seems to attain his end, since he can bide his time,—wait for somebody to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... "Mother" Wells, who kept an establishment of doubtful reputation at Enfield Wash, and on being asked to identify the woman who had cut off her stays, and locked her up in the room referred to, pointed out one Mary Squires, an old gipsy of surpassing ugliness. Accordingly, Squires and Wells were committed for trial for assault and felony; the result of the trial being that Squires was condemned to death, and Wells to be burned in the hand, a sentence which was executed forthwith, ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... Acton's subsequent career belongs to history. His origin made him an expert on naval affairs, and in 1776 he obtained some credit for an expedition which he commanded against the Barbary pirates. In 1778 Maria Carolina of Naples visited her brother Leopold at Florence, and was impressed by Acton's ugliness and reputation for exceptional efficiency. Her favourite minister, Prince Caramanico, persuaded the Grand Duke, Leopold, to permit Acton to exchange into the Neapolitan service, and reorganize the navy of the southern kingdom. This actually came to pass, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... and was content with the plainest fare. But when he was no longer at the head of an army, he laid aside this Spartan temperance for the ostentatious luxury of a Sybarite. Though his person was ungraceful, and though his harsh features were redeemed from vulgar ugliness only by their stern, dauntless, and commanding expression, he was fond of rich and gay clothing, and replenished his wardrobe with absurd profusion. Sir John Malcolm gives us a letter worthy of Sir Matthew Mite, in which Clive orders "two hundred shirts, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the Ma'azah came in and explained, with their barking voices, that their people had been practicing at the Nishan ("target"); which meant "We have powder in abundance." One of them, at once dubbed El-Nasnas ("the Satyr") from his exceeding monstrous ugliness—a baboon's muzzle with a scatter of beard—kindly volunteered to guide us, with the intention of losing the way. The dialogue that took ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... had he not looked the part of prophet and saint. The old Grimshaw was gone. In his place an emaciated fanatic, unconscious of appetite, unaware of self, with burning eyes and tangled beard! That finished ugliness turned spiritual—a self-flagellated aesthete. He claimed that he could enter the shadowy confines of the "next world." Not heaven. Not hell. A neutral ground between the familiar earth and an inexplicable territory ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... the chief of workers, who out of nothing will make a piece of work that may stop a child from crying or lead nations to higher things. For what is it to be a poet? It is to see at a glance the glory of the world, to see beauty in all its forms and manifestations, to feel ugliness like a pain, to resent the wrongs of others as bitterly as one's own, to know mankind as others know single men, to know Nature as botanists know a flower, to be thought a fool, to hear at moments the clear ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... warm, and now it lay like a painted light on the grass and paths over which they passed to the entrance of the grounds around the Tree. Holden Chapel, which enclosed the space on the right as they went in, shed back the sun from its brick-red flank, rising unrelieved in its venerable ugliness by any touch of the festive preparations; but to their left and diagonally across from them high stagings supported tiers of seats along the equally unlovely red bulks of Hollis and of Harvard. These seats, and the windows in the stories above them, were densely ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... smiled and his eyes filled with playful tenderness. "I mean it, on my oath," he assured her. "You think the bombs and the dust made only death and ugliness. That was true at first. But then, just as the doctors foretold, they changed the life in the seeds and loins that were brave enough to stay. Wonders bloomed and walked." He broke off suddenly and asked, "Do any ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... assembled in a large room above, seated and at work. They all rose at our entrance, and I had a good look at their faces. There was not a single decent honest face amongst them. They were mostly heavy, square-jawed, hard-looking women. Judging by their faces, vice and ugliness would seem to ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... that it shall appear the result of accident. Having failed in effecting Middleton's death by this excellent way, he shall perhaps think that he cannot do better them to make his own exit in precisely the same manner. It might be easy, and as delightful as any death could be; no ugliness in it, no blood; for the Bloody Footstep of old times might be the result of the failure of the old plot, not of its success. Poison seems to be the only elegant method; but poison is vulgar, and in many respects ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... solemnity of thought, no joy in the life and aspects of nature, that would not still be' his. The same is the implicit teaching of all George Eliot's novels; whilst Professor Huxley tells us that come what may to our 'intellectual beliefs and even education,' 'the beauty of holiness and the ugliness of sin' will remain for those that have eyes to see them, 'no mere metaphors, but real and intense feelings.' These are but a few examples, but the view of life they illustrate is so well known that these few will suffice. The point on which the ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... ornamentation. In looking at such houses, one can hardly fail to be struck by the difference that may be effected by using the simplest materials—but using them with discrimination and taste. One architect may plan a house which will be plain to ugliness, the bricks laid in the most severe and commonplace fashion, and the outlines of the design—if design it can be called—devoid of any grace or variety. No projections to break up the dull flatness and give light and shade; no attempt to relieve the unmitigated ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... and burned as he spoke. She did not talk much, but devoted all her time and energies to looking with her whole soul. Never before or since was there a girl so much in love. A young girl thoroughly in love is the most beautiful object on earth—beautiful even in ugliness. Imagine, then, what ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... with a little laugh. "Not at the coal-hole," Lesley answered, trying also to be merry, "but at the ugliness of it all. Don't you think this kind of ugliness ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... stretching back along the bank, marked new avenues of wooden houses, and, across the bridge, the tops of tall buildings cut against the glow that shimmered about the town. At one end rose the great block of the Hulton factory, which lost something of its utilitarian ugliness at night. Its harsh, rectangular outline faded into the background of forest, and the rows of glimmering windows gave it a curious transparent look. It seemed to overflow with radiance and filled ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... to feel it and portray it in its reality, to love it for itself, to behold in it the only real, lasting, and changing beauty, without any idiotic idea of ennobling it by mutilation. To understand that all so-called ugliness is nothing but the mark of individual character, to create real men and endow them with life—yes, that's the only way to become ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... green droplight falling over the litter of papers and across his shoulder to the page of his book. The room, at the back of the house, had been chosen as much for its quiet as its low rent. A few of his own possessions relieved the ugliness of its mean furnishings, and it had acquired from his occupancy a lived-in, comfortable look. Two windows at the back framing the night sky were open, and the soft April air flowed in upon an atmosphere, smoke-thickened and heated ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... in the way people live, and I mean to change some things. It isn't because one is ashamed to be old-fashioned; some of the old ways are lovely. It is only when you tack hardness and commonness on them and think ugliness has a real virtue in it. We will have both sides to talk about. But if you were going back to England, it would break ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... into consideration at this point. By atmospheric conditions we mean the half-truths and rumors and expressions of feeling that were in the air. A sergeant of the company questioned carefully by the writer states positively that the expressions of ugliness were confined to comparatively few members of the company. The feeling seemed to spread through the company that morning that some of the men were going ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... Five feet two inches on an average,—pot-bellied, bow-legged, abortively featured, their clothing a wisp of rags,—these spectres of a people that were once well-grown, able-bodied, and comely, stalk abroad into the daylight of civilization, the annual apparition of Irish ugliness and Irish want." ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... seems bad to fear the opinion of people one despises, to practise what one does not believe, and to yield before prejudices and phantoms of which one knows the unreality. It is bad to be a slave or a hypocrite, as are three fourths of the world. Evil is ugliness, ignorance, folly, and baseness. Good is beauty, talent, ability, and ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... conditions. The little boy whose "Hail Columbia" has been ringing in my ears all day, accepted the conditions of his life, and the sting of his calamity has departed. It is pleasant to say to him, and to all the brotherhood and sisterhood of ugliness and lameness, that there is every reason to believe that there is no such thing in heaven as a one-legged or a club-footed soul—no such thing as an ugly or a misshapen soul—no such thing as a blind ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... energetic demon, altogether, than that of the finished picture," said Kenyon, taking the sketch into his hand. "What a spirit is conveyed into the ugliness of this strong, writhing, squirming dragon, under the Archangel's foot! Neither is the face an impossible one. Upon my word, I have seen it somewhere, and on the shoulders of a ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Paganini's only vice. In spite of the fact that he will always be almost as famous for his multiplex ugliness as for his skill, women found him fascinating, and kept him busy. When he was only seventeen, a beautiful dame of Bologna abducted him and held him prisoner in her country chateau, as once Liszt, his rival in technical fame, was kept a few months. Can there be any secret technical ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... gambler have his prey. He was little solicitous about that. If he could only so operate on the mind of this son,—so operate on the minds of both his sons, as to make them see the foolishness of folly, the ugliness of what is mean, the squalor and dirt of ignoble pursuits, then he could easily pardon past faults. If it were half his wealth, what would it signify if he could teach his children to accept those lessons without which no man can live as a gentleman, let ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... so silly to make ugliness. It's wicked. Do be good, and let's try to enjoy the lessons and ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... few yards of me. Knowing well that a front shot would not prove deadly, I sprang to my feet and ran behind the bush. Upon this the villain charged, blowing loudly, and chased me round the bush. Had his activity been equal to his ugliness, my wanderings would have terminated here, but by my superior agility I had the advantage in ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... so, under favourable circumstances, but that's all. You are as far from ugliness as I am, and have as little need to think of it. As far as features go, there's the making of a much handsomer woman ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... will. An iron will does not imply necessarily ugliness of temper, obstinacy, or pig-headedness. It is simply a straight-forward, dauntless, and invincible way of doing things. What I say, you must do, is back of all successful leadership, whether in the home or in the world-arena. The ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... triumphantly, more blessedly. So though the act of physical death remains, its whole character is changed. Hence the New Testament euphemisms for death are much more than euphemisms. Men christen it by names which drape its ugliness, because they fear it so much, but Faith can play with Leviathan, because it fears it not at all. Hence such names as 'sleep,' 'exodus,' are tokens of the victory won for all believers by Jesus. He will show Martha the hope for ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... servant; the very dogs seemed to partake of the human nature of their protector, and attended us wherever we went, with more than ordinary civility. Hogarth might have been tempted to immortalize one of them for its extreme ugliness, and the waggish spirit with which it pulled at its companion's ears, who in vain attempted to tug at the bits of stumps that stuck out at either side of its tormentor's head. Mr. Fairholt was permitted ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... desert possess generally thin, wiry forms, capable of great exertion, and severe privation. Many are of low stature, but not dwarfish; the specimens brought to Europe have been selected, like coster-mongers' dogs, on account of their extreme ugliness; consequently English ideas of the whole tribe are formed in the same way, as if the ugliest specimens of the English were exhibited in Africa as characteristic ...
— The Future of the Colored Race in America • William Aikman
... sunshine of kindness. She was that; life could hardly be brought lower! But did you notice how much beauty and delicacy there was after all buried beneath the sewer-mud in her? I had looked forward to bringing it out, freed from all want and ugliness, and showing the world how beautiful we are down here when the mud is scraped off us. Perhaps it might have induced them to act justly. That's what I dreamed, but it's a bitter lot to have the ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... I know just what is in your mind, and that is just what I am speaking to. Yes, learn from me that, though the sorrows of the world are great, its wickedness—that is, its ugliness—is small. Much cause to pity man, little to distrust him. I myself have known adversity, and know it still. But for that, do I turn cynic? No, no: it is small beer that sours. To my fellow-creatures I owe alleviations. So, whatever I may have undergone, it but deepens my confidence in my kind. ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... ejaculation that fell from my own lips at the time," said John. "Then I gave her a minute description of the old man, in all his ugliness. And then she administered ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... quite as it should be, My Fool; for the hate makes the love but the more poignant; the ugliness is but a fair setting for the beauty; and sweetness in bitterness is far ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... moral beauty, and that the saint is attracted by purity and compassion, and repelled by sin, disorder, and selfishness, in the same way as the artist is attracted and repelled by visible charm and ugliness. ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... possession of the few, and the envy of the multitude. In a round dozen that will fetch over L100 apiece there are not more than one or two that can lay any claim to be considered works of art; indeed, they are mostly distinguished by their surpassing ugliness. Nevertheless, they are the gems that give tone and rank to the finest collections. Some of ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... declared Eph, solemnly. "Yet they do say that, when I'm crossed in anything my mind's made up to, I can be tarnation ugly. I just told you I don't want the captain disturbed. Do you know, Sam Truax, I feel a queer notion coming over me? I've an idea that that feeling is just plain ugliness ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies • Victor G. Durham
... the sufferer. The shattered jaw dropped, and the wretch yelled aloud, to the horror of the spectators.[2] A mask taken from that dreadful head was long exhibited in different nations of Europe, and appalled the spectator by its ugliness, and the mixture of fiendish expression with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... summery grace about the flower girls designed by Calder for the niches above the colonnade, and in the figures of Edgar Walter's central fountain. Here on the fountain are Beauty and the Beast, Beauty clad in a summer hat and nothing else, the Beast clothed in ugliness. (p. 100.) Never mind the story. This is Beauty, and Beauty needs no story. Four airy pipers, suggestive at least of the song of the cicada on long, hot afternoons, support the fountain figure. Around ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... small care about liberty." But first in eminence among the exponents of the positive aspect of liberty stands Thomas Hill Green, of Oxford. In his works he contends that liberty is more than absence of restraint, just as beauty is more than absence of ugliness.[38] He holds that it includes also "a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying." He agrees with Mazzini that complete freedom is "found only in that satisfying fulfilment of civic duties to which rights, however precious, are but ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... inadequate to the theme. But Vergil could hardly realize this, since both Stoics and Epicureans had adopted the theory of the exploding winds. The real trouble with the theme is its hopelessly prosaic ugliness. Lucretius, by his imaginative power, had apparently deceived him into thinking that any fragment of science might be treated poetically. In his master the "flaring atom streams" had attained the sublimity of a Platonic vision, and the very majestic sadness of his materialism carried the young ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... landscape at first, and only appeared to lay bare the crudenesses of civilization. The unpainted wooden buildings of Rough-and-Ready, soaked and dripping with rain, took upon themselves a sleek and shining ugliness, as of second-hand garments; the absence of cornices or projections to break the monotony of the long straight lines of downpour made the town appear as if it had been recently submerged, every vestige of ornamentation swept away, and only the bare outlines left. ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... could make himself very agreeable to them, when he chose it; Sir Joshua Reynolds agreed with me that he could. Mr. Gibbon, with his usual sneer, controverted it, perhaps in resentment of Johnson's having talked with some disgust of his ugliness, which one would think a PHILOSOPHER would not mind. Dean Marlay wittily observed, 'A lady may be vain, when she can turn ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... as also, no doubt, did Jane-Pussy and her little son, Jerry, who was Nicky's most especial pal. Miss MAY SINCLAIR, without being a conscienceless sentimentalist, does us the fine service of reminding us that the world of men is not all drab ugliness, but that there are beautiful human relationships and unselfish characters, and wholesome training which justifies itself in the day of trial. She divides her charming chronicle into three parts—Peace, The Vortex, and Victory. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... something almost like violence, although the violence did not lie in his gestures. It was rather in the manner in which his personality assailed those within the room. Dark, with an attractive ugliness, arrogant, with restive and fathomless eyes, he seemed to unite the East and the West in his being. Had his mother been a Jewess of pride and intellect, and his father an adventurous American of the superman type? Kate, looking at him with fresh interest, ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... each of us a consciousness that we might find Eternal Happiness when we left the scroll and joined Him. Happiness here, and happiness there with Him. The quest for Eternal Happiness, which was always His Own Divine Thought. Why, then, did He create ugliness and evil? Why write those upon the scroll? Ah, this perhaps is the Eternal Riddle! But, in 2930, they told me that there could be no beauty without ugliness with which to compare it; no truth without a lie; no consciousness of happiness without unhappiness ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... lest this struggle with herself might bring on one of her trying headaches, I entered at last and made the best apology I could for her non-appearance. Much of this nervous dread of encountering strangers I ascribed to the idea of her personal ugliness, which had been strongly impressed upon her imagination early in life, and which she exaggerated to herself in a remarkable manner. "I notice," said she, "that after a stranger has once looked at my face, he is careful not to let his eyes wander to ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... water-front police for fifteen years,—six feet of threatening insolence; "Black" Morrison with two penitentiary sentences back of him; and "Splinter" Mallory, thin, leering, shifty. And yet Danbury, after he had recovered himself a bit, saw in their very ugliness the fighting spirit of the bulldog. He had not hired them for ornament but for the very lawlessness which led them rather to fight for what they wished than to work for it. Doubtless below their flannel shirts they all had hearts which beat warmly. So he met their gaze ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... was a wisp of hair on her forehead, another stuck to her cheek; her hat was on one side, undecorously tilted; her soaked veil resembled a sordid rag festooning her forehead. There was an utter unreserve in her aspect, an abandonment of safeguards, that ugliness of truth which can only be kept out of daily life by unremitting care for appearances. He did not know why, looking at her, he thought suddenly of to-morrow, and why the thought called out a deep feeling of unutterable, discouraged weariness—a fear of facing the succession ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... was minded to put these women in the best of humors, in order thus to work toward the avoidance of a strike by means of their influence over their husbands. She observed the hat that had been the cause of McMahon's complaint, which was, in truth, a riot of variegated ugliness. Cicily believed, however, that in this instance the end ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... Now the oppressed had the scourge in their own hands; how would they apply it? Coercion looked very ugly in the hands of a small privileged class; but when coercion could be applied by the masses would they see the ugliness of it? Would they not use the same machinery in order to crush the rich and the exalted, and take in the next place to crushing each other? Shall we not have a dead level of commonplace and suffer, to ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... slave to his childish caprices, which in all probability would have created the confidence so desired, when a most cruel, unnatural, I may say diabolical, report prevailed to alienate the child's affections even from his mother, in making him believe that, owing to his deformity and growing ugliness, she had transferred all her tenderness to his younger brother, who certainly was very superior in health and beauty to the puny Dauphin. Making a pretext of this calumny, the governor of the heir-apparent was malicious enough to prohibit him from eating or drinking anything but ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... over these questions, he observed two men hard by in the old cloister garden, one of lofty stature, nearer forty than fifty years of age, the other younger and shorter, with a pale face redeemed from ugliness by its intellectual brow. Egremont joined the strangers, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the nave by two bays, destroying the proportions of the whole, and hiding the dome from view on a near approach. The present tasteless faade was Maderna's work. The splendid atrium or portico added (1629-67), by Bernini, as an approach, mitigates but does not cure the ugliness and pettiness ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... guess would become their king? For a king or a leader they, as all bodies of men, must have. He with the thick locks, will it be? Through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness, small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy,—and burning fire of genius? It is Gabriel Honore Riquetti de Mirabeau; man-ruling deputy of Aix! Yes, that is the Type-Frenchman of this epoch; as Voltaire was of the last. He is French in his aspirations, acquisitions, in his virtues ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... only two or three are extant, not one of them excels the Venus of Melos; and she, as I have already asserted, in The Queen of the Air, has nothing notable in feature except dignity and simplicity. Of Athena I do not know one authentic type of great beauty; but the intense ugliness which the Greeks could tolerate in their symbolism of her will be convincingly proved to you by the coin represented in Plate VI. You need only look at two or three vases of the best time, to assure yourselves that beauty of feature was, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... fear of the devil is a cause of many errors such as the one mentioned in the following miracle: "In Trayguerra, a simple lad hearing San Vicente preach on the ugliness of the demon, prayed God that a devil be shown him in order to fight. It happened that a poor, old woman was passing who was dumb from birth, was very ugly and poorly dressed, and had sickle in her hand. The lad, thinking that she was the devil, furiously assailed ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... of the beaten, bruised, and wounded poor elf he first had seen, with clouted shoes, torn stockings, and coarse coating, dripping with water, and clotted with blood, was so great as scarcely to be credible. The ugliness of my companions did but enhance the superiority of my look; he could not be mistaken in which was his grandson, and the pleasure my pre-eminence inspired excited a smile of no little approbation. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... disgusted with the situation. His heart was large enough to feel sympathy for humanity in any shape, and he would have pitied his deformed fellow-prisoner, but for a deformity of the latter worse than any physical ugliness; for the Texan soon learnt that the hideous creature, whose couch as well as chain he was forced to share, had committed crimes of the most atrocious nature, among the rest murder! It was, in fact, for this last that he was now in the Acordada—a cowardly murder, ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... the man who had been kneeling by the tomb, had unobserved joined his associate and Egremont. He hardly reached the middle height; his form slender, but well proportioned; his pale countenance, slightly marked with the small pox, was redeemed from absolute ugliness by a highly-intellectual brow, and large dark eyes that indicated deep sensibility and great quickness of apprehension. Though young, he was already a little bald; he was dressed entirely in black; ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... anything attractive about it to Julia Cloud. She preferred the ugly old house in which she had always lived, with its scaling gray paint and no pretensions to fineness. At least it was softened by age, and had a look of experience which saved its ugliness from being crude, and gave it the ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... Progress! On with the dance! Let engines rip, and the little, squash-headed fellows with them! Commerce, literature, religion, science, politics, all taking a hand; what a glorious chance had money, ugliness, and ill will! Such were the reflections of Felix before ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... gentleman. Like Wilkes, he conciliated, by his good-humour and his high spirits, the regard of many who despised his character. Like Wilkes, he was hideously ugly; like Wilkes, he made a jest of his own ugliness; and, like Wilkes, he was, in spite of his ugliness, very attentive to his dress, and very successful in affairs ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to him a fine description of the clothing I had purchased he brought forth in accord many wonderful boots and shoes for the riding and a walking and also for the dance. I had never observed that the shoes of men were of such an ugliness; but when one was upon my foot, in place of the shoe of much beauty which I discarded, both I and the young man had ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the facts, breathlessly, and in spite of herself accusingly,—and then waited for the explanation that would extenuate the apparent ugliness of his attitude toward her, and set all the world right for her again. As she looked into his face she felt that it must come. She noted compassionately how the shadows under the dark eyes had deepened; how weary the pose of the fine head; and for the moment she longed only to rest it on her breast ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... "Their ugliness is increased by the colour with which the betel-nut stains their mouths. They appear very skilful in the use of bows and arrows. One of them brought a gannet which he had just killed, on board, and the hole made by the arrow could easily ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... fairly accomplished—they played and sang music well, and knew that it was necessary to keep up intelligent conversation and maintain graceful manners—but they've gone back to sheer barbarism in the frantic ugliness of their performances at hockey—and they've taken to the repulsive vices of Charles the Second's time in gambling and other immoralities. No, David! I don't take kindly to the 'ladies' who disport themselves under the benevolent dispensation of ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... head chambermaid came, it turned out, as good luck would have it, that Mr. Davager had drawn her attention rather too closely to his ugliness, by offering her a testimony of his regard in the shape of a kiss. I no sooner mentioned him than she flew into a passion; and when I added, by way of clinching the matter, that I was retained to defend ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... He too dragged one of the wine barrels, which did duty for chairs, close to the trestle table, and thus the members of the nameless Jacobin club made a compact group, picturesque in its weird horror, its uncompromising, flaunting ugliness. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... responsible for. Beauty is a pleasant thing, and not to be despised, although beauty alone is of little worth. The social conquests of history have not been confined to the possessors of beauty, and there have been many notable cases where decided plainness and even ugliness was the lot of one who nevertheless was ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... by the time the puppies were six months old they were just as shapely as the mother was, or as unshapely, if you like it better, for after all perhaps the beauty of their bodies consisted in their ugliness. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... entirely satisfactory. It had been very pleasant to see him, and his passionate declaration of enduring love thrilled her through and through, and even woke an echo in her own breast. It made her proud to think that this man, who, notwithstanding his ugliness and awkwardness, was yet, her instinct told her, worth half a dozen smart London fashionables, still loved her and had never ceased to love her. Poor Bottles! she had been very fond of him once. They had grown up together, and it really gave her ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... through the nose of my plough, about eighteen inches from the end, I had my implement complete. The iron rod was to keep the pointed end of my oak tree from burying itself too deeply in the ground. It was not a beautiful object, but its usefulness condoned its ugliness. ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... Moral, collected works, Vol. IV., pp. 187 and 198), Schopenhauer explains politeness as a conventional and systematic attempt to mask the egoism of human nature in the small affairs of life,—an egoism so repulsive that some such device is necessary for the purpose of concealing its ugliness. The relation which politeness bears to the true love of one's neighbor is analogous to that existing between justice as an affair of legality, and justice as the real integrity of ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place, moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness, proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was no passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more convenient places ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... a fairly good place to begin. Its ugliness and forlornness can be matched in the factory section of almost any large city. South Chicago is dominated by its steel mills,—enormous drab structures, whose every crevice leaks quivering heat and whose towering chimneys ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... palace surmounted an immense melon-shaped dome," grumbled by M. Daniset, an old art amateur, in a voice of restrained rage. "I am amazed at the degree of ugliness which a modern city can attain. Alca is becoming Americanised. Everywhere we are destroying all that is free, unexpected, measured, restrained, human, or traditional among the things that are left us. Everywhere we are destroying that charming object, ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... a hideous leer—oh, words are impotent to express the ugliness of that face! "Really, Monsieur, supposing I had stolen Miladi, you would be the last person I should inform of her whereabouts. You are simple, Monsieur. I had always heard that England was a country ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... drawing her progress from her cradle upwards: now engaged with her doll, then with her dancing master; now marching in her backboard; now crying over her German lessons; and dressed for her first ball finally, and bestowing her hand upon a dandy of preternatural ugliness, who was kneeling at her feet as the happy man. This picture was the delight of the laughing, happy girls; except, perhaps, the little cousins from Brianstone Square, who were invited to Ethel's party, but were so overpowered ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... may be of interest. Among the ornaments used are very large combs, decorated with pigs' tails. Pigs' tails also are stuck into the hair and ears. The hair is worn very long, rolled into little curls and plentifully oiled. A most peculiar deformation is applied to the nose and results in extreme ugliness: the septum is perforated, and instead of merely inserting a stick, a springy spiral is used, which presses the nose upward and forward, so that in time it develops into an immense, shapeless lump, as if numberless wasps had stung it. It takes a long time to get used to this sight, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... this picture was held when first executed. Its colossal dimensions, though familiar in the great mosaics, were hitherto unknown in painting; and not less astonishing appeared the deviation, though slight, from ugliness and lifelessness into grace and nature. "And thus," he says, "it happened that this work was an object of so much admiration to the people of that day, they having never seen anything better, that it was carried in solemn procession, with the sound of trumpets ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... like this, and in the streets, with a crowd of little wretches like herself; and yet she brought good looks out of this childhood. So much the worse for her. She had better have been hunted and worried to death for ugliness.' ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... but these are more or less conflicting qualities, and it is doubtful if any one design can surpass in all. Modern type is cleaner-cut than the old, but it may be questioned whether this is a real gain. William Morris held that all types should avoid hair-lines, fussiness, and ugliness. Legibility should have the right of way for most printed matter, especially children's books and newspapers. If the latter desire compactness, they should condense their style, not ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... he'd rid The bawling hive of fraud; and did. The very moment it departs, And honesty fills all their hearts, There shews 'em, like th' instructive tree, Those crimes which they're ashamed to see, Which now in silence they confess By blushing at their ugliness; Like children that would hide their faults And by their colour own their thoughts, Imagining when they're looked upon, That others see what they have done. But, O ye Gods! what consternation! How vast and sudden was th' alternation! In half an hour, the nation round, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... smoke-stack—or funnel—was telescopic, permitting it to be lowered almost out of sight. For those who can recall these predecessors of the modern battle-ships, the latter can make slight claim to beauty or impressiveness; yet, despite the ugliness of their angular broken sky-line, they have a gracefulness all their own, when moving slowly in still water. I remember a dozen years ago watching the French Mediterranean fleet of six or eight battle-ships leaving the harbor ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... conventionality. [Footnote: Keene, originally called Upper Ashuelot. On the same stream, a few miles below, was a similar settlement, called Lower Ashuelot—the germ of the present Swanzey. This, too, suffered greatly from Indian attacks.] In 1746 the place was in all the rawness and ugliness of a backwoods hamlet. The rough fields, lately won from the virgin forest, showed here and there, among the stumps, a few log-cabins, roofed with slabs of pine, spruce, or hemlock. Near by was a wooden fort, made, ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... much heat, my friends? The poor fellow is going to have his own festive day by singing the ugliness of his King. Go along, Virupaksha, you will find plenty of people ready to believe you: may you be ...
— The King of the Dark Chamber • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... it very ugly, disagreeable, and uninteresting. However, when we approached the environs of Wimple, I was in some measure repaid by the delightful appearance of the Park and country round it, for the ugliness of that we had passed through. I assure you I was very much pleased with the beauty of the grounds and the grandeur of the house itself. Most part of it is furnished in the old style, as for example, Mama's and my apartment are brown wainscots, ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... in their bitter cup the poisoned brewage of doubt. Already things were drifting toward the abyss, when the jackals suddenly emerged from the earth. A cadaverous and infected literature which had no form but that of ugliness, began to sprinkle with fetid blood all the monsters ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... hastening to him with a frightened air at the sound of his voice, or the ringing of his bell. That was all that was left to him who had commanded dozens of men of such ugliness of temper that they struck terror to all beholders when they went ashore in the ports. Nobody consulted him now, while on the sea everybody was seeking his counsel and many times had to interrupt his sleep. The house could ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the misfortunes and calamities of life, or the imperfections of nature, may become the objects of ridicule. Surely he hath a very ill-framed mind who can look on ugliness, infirmity, or poverty, as ridiculous in themselves: nor do I believe any man living, who meets a dirty fellow riding through the streets in a cart, is struck with an idea of the Ridiculous from it; ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... its occasionally overflowing the surrounding country. Bornou is not a pleasant place, it swarms with innumerable creeping horrors, and savage animals; the latter often enter the villages, and carry off the unfortunate slaves while at work. Simplicity, good-nature, and ugliness are the peculiar characteristics of the people; and although the men are not warriors, nor the women favored by nature, they are certainly a kind, inoffensive race. Angornou is the largest and most populous town of Bornou; it is situated a few miles from Lake Tchad, and ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... mounted astride of shaggy, meager little ponies, with perhaps one or two snake-eyed children seated behind them, clinging to their tattered blankets; tall lank young men on foot, with bows and arrows in their hands; and girls whose native ugliness not all the charms of glass beads and scarlet cloth could disguise, made up the procession; although here and there was a man who, like our visitor, seemed to hold some rank in this respectable community. They were the dregs of the Kansas nation, who, while their betters were gone ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... cheerful, with flowers in summer, as they were well heated and well lighted in winter. The most massive-looking but luxurious old arm-chairs, that modern taste would have repudiated for ugliness, abounded everywhere; and the four cumbrous but comfortable seats that stood around the circular dinner-table—and it was a matter of principle with Miss Betty that the company should never be more numerous—only needed speech to have told of ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Eighty-three Savonarola was appointed Lenten preacher at the Church of Saint Lorenzo in Florence. His exhortations were plain, homely, blunt—his voice uncertain, and his ugly features at times inclined his fashionable auditors to unseemly smiles. When ugliness forgets itself and gives off the flash of the spirit, it becomes magnificent—takes upon itself a halo—but this was not ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... is still living in the literature of France. Fat Peg is oddly of a piece with the work of Zola, the Goncourts, and the infinitely greater Flaubert; and, while similar in ugliness, still surpasses them in native power. The old author, breaking with an ECLAT DE VOIX, out of his tongue-tied century, has not yet been touched on his own ground, and still gives us the most vivid and shocking impression of reality. Even if that were not worth doing at all, it ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of a fellow, scarcely above middle height, with a lean, astute countenance, prominent of nose and cheek-bones, and with lank, black hair that reached almost to his shoulders. His mouth was long, thin-lipped, and humorous. He was only just redeemed from ugliness by the splendour of a pair of ever-questing, luminous eyes, so dark as to be almost black. Of the whimsical quality of his mind and his rare gift of graceful expression, his writings—unfortunately but too scanty—and particularly his Confessions, afford us very ample ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... direct and proper means of elevating humanity. Look at the concurrent action of morality, properly so called, and of political economy—the one inveighing against spoliation by an exposure of its moral ugliness, the other bringing it into discredit in our judgment, by showing its evil consequences. Concede that the triumph of the religious moralist, when realized, is more beautiful, more consoling and more radical; at the same time it is not easy to deny that ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... the lake near the city, the waters cast up a good- sized living specimen of that extraordinary fish-lizard, the great menobranchus, popularly known as the hell-bender from its extreme ugliness. Owing to the immense size of its spermatozoa, it has rendered great aid to embryology, a science which, when understood au fond, will bring about great changes in the human race. We were taken out in a steamboat ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... study, he went to gamble with other ne'er-do-weels, to whom he talked loosely, and whom he taught to be bad-hearted as himself. He made love to every woman, and despite his ugliness, he was not unsuccessful. For they are equally fortunate who are very handsome or very ugly, in so far as they are both remarkable and remarked. But the latter bear away the palm. Beautiful men begin well with women, who do all ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... please! Let me say all quickly and while I have the courage. I loved him, and he loved and loves me. I love that love in which I married him, and I love his love for me. It is indestructible, because it is in the fibre of my life. It has nothing to do with ugliness or beauty, or fortune or misfortune, or shame or happiness, or sin or holiness. When it becomes part of us, it must go on in one form or another, but it cannot die. It lives in breath and song and thought and work and words. That is the wonder of it, the pity of it, and the joy of it. Because it ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... disappointed surprise did my fellow-passengers view the ugliness of this town, which from a distance promises so much! On me it made but little impression, for I had seen towns precisely similar in Galicia. The streets and squares are full of pits and holes; the houses are built without the slightest regard to taste ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... fallen asleep in my trundle-bed. In a single hour I had awakened to the sharp sense of contrast, to the knowledge that all ways of life were not confined to the sordid circle in which I lived. Outside the poverty, the ugliness, the narrow streets, rose the spiked wall of the enchanted garden; and when I shut my eyes tight, I could see still the half-bared elms arching against the sunset, and the old house beyond, with its stuccoed wings and its grave white columns, which looked down on the magnolias ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... sometimes discomposed him. They called him "Jeffy," and treated him like some favoured domestic animal. They recognised him as a sort of custodian of Percy, and on that account showed off before him, and demonstrated to Percy that he was no custodian of theirs. They freely discussed his ugliness and poverty within earshot. They patronised him without stint, and made a display of their own affluence in his presence. And when once or twice he put down his foot and interdicted some illegal proceeding, they blustered rudely, and advised Percy ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... it isn't true. Only—I do hate the ugliness and the heat, and September's the loveliest month of all ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... herself kissed, and almost snatched away from Felix, to be deposited on a sofa; and while the like kisses were bestowed on the two little girls, and hospitable offers showered on all, she was amused by perceiving that good Mrs. Harewood was endowed with exactly the same grotesque order of ugliness as her son William; but she was even more engaging, from an indescribably droll mixture of heedlessness, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... than otherwise. A pair of thick black eyebrows almost covered the eyes of him; his look had in it something ominous, presage of the fate he met with: a tawny skin, torn by small-pox, increased his ugliness. He affected the freethinker, and carried libertinism to excess; a great deal of ambition and headlong rashness accompanied this vice." A dangerous adviser here in the Berlin element, with lightnings going!"Such a favorite was not the man to bring back my Brother from his ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... forgot entirely, for a time, the interview and the proposal which had been made him. But it was recalled to his memory some months after, when Four-Legs made his appearance, bringing with him a squaw of mature age, and a very Hecate for ugliness. She carried on her shoulders an immense pack of furs, which, approaching with her awkward criss-cross gait, she threw at his feet, thus marking, by an Indian custom, her sense of the relation ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... royal wardrobes, but, beautiful as velvet is, and exquisitely becoming as it would be, you would better not indulge your artistic taste by wearing it. It would cost almost three times as much as cloth; it would be nearly impossible to make a well fitting modern skirt of it, and it would be worn into ugliness by a very few hours of trotting. Be thankful, therefore, that fashion says that woollen cloth is the most costly material ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... jaws, and coming nearer and showing increased eagerness after every morsel. The enormous gape of their mouths, with their blood-red lining and long fringes of teeth, and the uncouth shapes of their bodies, made a picture of unsurpassable ugliness. I once or twice fired a heavy charge of shot at them, aiming at the vulnerable part of their bodies, which is a small space situated behind the eyes, but this had no other effect than to make them give a hoarse grunt and shake themselves; they immediately afterwards ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... He will, indeed, announce his way of thinking, not, however, under damning names, but as something that is understood of itself, and is equally approved of by others.] Richard's deformity is the expression of his internal malice, and perhaps in part the effect of it: for where is the ugliness that would not be softened by benevolence and openness? He, however, considers it as an iniquitous neglect of nature, which justifies him in taking his revenge on that human society from which it is the means of excluding him. Hence ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... shall become of your abandoned garment, Yon hump, and lump, and clod of ugliness, Which late you ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... ugliness &c. adj.; deformity, inelegance; acomia[obs3]; disfigurement &c. (blemish) 848; want of symmetry, inconcinnity[obs3]; distortion &c. 243; squalor &c. (uncleanness) 653. forbidding countenance, vinegar aspect, hanging ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... but actually achieving it, so that at the present moment all who come in contact with his personality, even though they may neither bow to his altar nor kneel before his priest, in some way find that the ugliness of their sin is taken away and the beauty of their ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... and the left arm, and was driven mad by the difficulties of the pose. 'Tonnerre de Dieu! when I heard you knock, I felt like a murderer; I rushed out to let fly at someone. And there was my Maenad on the mat!—all by herself, too, without that little piece of ugliness from upstairs behind her. I little thought this day—this cursed day—was to turn out so. I thought you were tired of the poor sculptor—that you had deserted him for good and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... you and others struggle to Him along the dusty road that winds and wanders. But our paradise would be no paradise if we did not know that our brothers were coming, coming; the beauty that we behold, sheer ugliness if we did not believe that you will some day ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... him, but left there apparently to scare the chambermaid: such as old carved heads and gargoyles of the most grinning and ghastly expression, Burmese and Chinese Buddhas in soapstone of every degree of placid ugliness, together, I am bound by force of truth to admit, with one piece of carved Italian marble in bas-relief, of great interest and beauty. Such was my bed-chamber for the night, and little wonder if it threatened to murder the innocent sleep. But it was later than 4 A.M., and wearied nature must ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... the prostitution of intellect implied in popular productions. In like manner, they would choose a friend or recommend a mistress for gross defects; and tolerate the sweetness of an actress's voice only for the ugliness of her face. Pure pleasures are in their judgment cloying ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... on saints and bull-pups, painted the squatter's portrait. But, alas! a woeful disappointment was in store. When the proofs arrived, it was found that all that delightful uncouthness of visage which is Chum's chief charm, all that fascinating ferocity which makes him a thing of ugliness and a joy for ever, had vanished—refined away, idealised into a demureness as of domestic tabby, a platitudinarian peacefulness—nay, a sort of beauty! The camera had been so accustomed to actresses that it could ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... win his affection by reason, and speaks a good word for herself (as who could blame her?) in hope to mollify the sullen bridegroom. She takes her topics from the benefits of poverty, the advantages of old age and ugliness, the vanity of youth, and the silly pride of ancestry and titles without inherent virtue, which is the true nobility. When I had closed Chaucer I returned to Ovid, and translated some more of his fables; and by this time had ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... yet full of malice; not less dingy, nor less filthy, nor less vile than beetles; who nevertheless by a certain obstinate malignity of disposition, tho they can never do good to any mortal, become frequently troublesome to the great. They frighten by their ugliness, they molest by their noise, they offend by their stench; they buzz round us, they cling to us, they lie in ambush for us, so that it is often better to be at enmity with powerful men than to attack these beetles; whom it is a disgrace even to overcome, and whom no one can either shake off or encounter ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... description of my young gentleman of blue blood and plebeian countenance, his expression not only saved him from ugliness but made him singularly attractive, it revealed a good nature, friendliness, love of his fellows, sincerity, and other pleasing qualities. After meeting and conversing with him I was not surprised to hear that he was universally liked, but regarding him critically I could not say that his ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... gleaming in the intense sunlight from amidst the trim verdure of their orchards, and their large barns and granaries surveying complacently far and wide the abundant harvests that are to be gathered into their capacious walls. The comfort, solidity, loneliness, and inelegance, not to say ugliness, of these rural dwellings is highly characteristic, the latter quality being to a certain degree modified by distance; the others represent very pleasingly, in the midst of the prosperous prospect, the best features of the institutions which ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... the sun" and "the children of the earth" there is a deep abyss. They do not understand each other. The "children of the sun" cannot admit the miseries and ugliness of daily life. They have compassion for the people who work below them. The "children of the earth" feel the superiority of the "children of the sun," but their narrow-mindedness, continually absorbed by the necessity of finding shelter and food, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... that. He was a river-driver of stalwart proportions, with a red handkerchief round his neck, and with loose corded trousers tucked into his boots. He had a face of natural ugliness made almost repulsive by marks of smallpox. Red, flabby lips and an overhanging brow made him a figure which men would avoid ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... attended to his education as he would have done that of his own child. He was of an open communicative disposition, and was beloved in spite of his ugliness and turbulence; for his ugliness was radiant with intellect, and his turbulence was calmed and repented of at the least caress of his mother. He pursued his studies at Troyes, the capital of Champagne. Rebellious against ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Secretary to the Muses,' to Will. Pierre of Lincoln's Inn Fields Playhouse, wherein, recalling how in his lampoons whilst he lived characters about town were shown in no very enviable light, he particularizes that 'the antiquated Coquet was told of her age and ugliness, tho' her vanity plac'd her in the first row in the King's ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... his mass, and stood In naked ugliness. He was a man Who stole the livery of the court of heaven ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
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