"Sordid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... old frontier fort. Here, then, was civilization—the stage coach, the new telegraph wire, men and women, weekly or daily touch with the world, that prying curiosity regarding the affairs of others which we call news. To me it seemed tawdry, sordid, worthless, after that which I had left. The noise seemed insupportable, the food distasteful. I could tolerate no roof, and in my own ragged robes slept on the ground within the ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... the harem of beauteous dark-eyed women, the dream-like indolence and ease. That is the life for me. That is whither I and my treasure will go. A plague upon old Miriam, that she clings to these cold forests and the sordid life we live here! But for her insane jealousy and love I would defy Joanna and go. But the pair of them are too much for me. I must find a way of ridding myself of one or both. I will not be bound like this ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... of his efforts the President had the unwitting support of the segregationists, who treated the nation to another sordid racial spectacular. In February 1965 Alabama police jailed Martin Luther King, Jr., and some 2,000 members of his voting rights drive, and a generally outraged nation watched King's later clash with the police over a voting rights ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... diplomatic circles, would divert her thoughts, and might possibly make the coming years endurable. Was the game worth the candle? No thought of Muriel's misery entered for an instant into this entirely sordid calculation, or would have deterred her even momentarily, had it presented itself in expostulation. The girl's heart had suddenly grown callous, and her hand would have ruthlessly smitten down any object ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... lochs, the free fresh air of Scotland, to a dreary lodging of two little rooms in a dingy street, where I had to cut and contrive and economize to make ends meet. I was an ignorant girl, and I could not do it. I got into debt, and my husband was angry with me. Why should I tell you the petty, sordid details of my life? I soon found out that I was miserable and ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Tam-o'-Shanter and strolled out to avoid the discussion between his father and sister, which he saw was about to be renewed. His artistic nature revolted at these petty and sordid disputes, and he turned to the crisp air and the broad landscape to soothe his ruffled feelings. Avarice had no place among his failings, and his father's perpetual chatter about money inspired him with a positive loathing and disgust for ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... most remarkable trials in which as a Judge I have presided was what was known as the Muswell Hill tragedy. It was a brutal, commonplace affair, and with its sordid details might make a respectable society novel. I should have liked Sherlock Holmes to have been in the case, because he would have saved me a great deal of sensational development, as well as ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... to look at Adelaide and her mother, and saw that they were tremulous with pleasure and delight at their little trick. He felt himself mean, sordid, a fool; he longed to punish himself, to rend his heart. A few tears rose to his eyes; by an irresistible impulse he sprang up, clasped Adelaide in his arms, pressed her to his heart, and stole a kiss; then ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... in the sordid hell with a blue sky that New York was before the war, latterly the sky itself had darkened. The world in which she moved, distressed her. Its parure of gaiety shocked. Those who peopled it were not sordid, they were not even blue. Europe agonised and they dined and danced, displayed themselves ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... Britain declines negotiating further— Flouts France and Russia indiscriminately. "Since one dethrones and keeps as prisoners The most legitimate kings"—that means myself— "The other suffers their unworthy treatment For sordid interests"—that's for Alexander!... And what is Georgy made to say besides?— "Pacific overtures to us are wiles Woven to unnerve the generous nations round Lately escaped the galling yoke of France, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... bolting place, in that their kneading trough, in another (I have heard) a hogs-trough; for the words that were given mee were these, this place have I knowne a hog-stie, in another a store house, to store up their hoorded meal; and in all of it something of this sordid kind and condition. It was first let by the corporation afore named, to one Wyat, after him, to one Peacocke, after him, to one Cleybrooke, and last, to one Wilson, all bakers, and this chappell still imployed in the way of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... victorious Republicans had neither the will nor the power to injure Southern property or to weaken the protection it enjoyed under the Constitution. Their hostility to the Union is purely gratuitous, or springs from motives of the most sordid character. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... gone quite out of sight she walked quickly up the little street till she came to a low, leather-bound door which gave access to the church whose fine buttress bestowed such distinction on the otherwise rather sordid Rue Saint Ange. Pushing open the door she passed through into the dimly-lit side aisle where ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... base and sordid in charity: charity lifts not itself up above others; admits of no divisions; is not seditious; but does all things ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... first crusade, that remained in Palestine, were divided by sordid ambition and avarice, and in 1187 Saladin, sultan of Egypt and Syria, the most valiant chief of the Mohammedan warriors, recaptured Jerusalem and subsequent crusaders were ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... grave already digging for him—one human eye, secreted from the world and unobserved, peered into the lonely chamber, watching for the dissolution, impatient at delay, and greedy for the sight. I speak of an old, grey-headed man, a small, thin creature of skin and bone, sordid and avaricious in spirit—one who had never known Mildred, had not once spoken to or seen him, but who had heard of his possessions, of his funded gold, and whose grasping soul was sick to handle and secure them. Abraham Allcraft, hunks as he was, was reputed wealthy. For years he had retained ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... his health when his body is covered with running sores. It has been estimated that the annual profits from violations of the prohibition laws have reached $300,000,000. Men who thus violate these laws for sordid gain are not likely to obey other laws, and the respect for law among all classes steadily diminishes as our people become familiar with, and tolerant to, wholesale criminality. Whether the moral and economic ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... Constitution ... to promote the general welfare." By what right do statesmen now venture to think that they can leave our national interests out of the account? Who and where is the sentimentalist who arraigns us for descending to too sordid a level when we recognize our interest to hold what the discharge of duty has placed in our hand? Since when has it been statesmanship to shut our eyes to the interests of our own country, and patriotism to consider only the interests or the wishes ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... worth the effort on Smithy's part, and even when Larkin had finally discovered the man's sordid motives he felt a species of admiration for the man's coolness and bravery. He felt, too, that, if he could not get a grip on the blackmailer before another payment was demanded, he could part with the money for the first time with ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... and doth breathe divinity into the very dust we tread. With love shall life roll gloriously on from year to year, like the voice of some great music that hath power to hold the hearer's heart poised on eagles' wings above the sordid shame and ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... simple but eloquent language, the life of the private soldier, his privations and sufferings, the patriotism which animated him, and led him to endure, without murmuring, hardships, sickness, and even death itself, for his country. She contrasted this with the sordid love of gain which not only shrank from these sacrifices in person, but grudged the pittance necessary to alleviate them, while it made the trifling amount it had already contributed, an excuse for making no further donations, and closed with this forcible ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... from the bed, You lay upon your back, and waited; You dozed, and watched the night revealing The thousand sordid images Of which your soul was constituted; They flickered against the ceiling. And when all the world came back And the light crept up between the shutters, And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, You had such a vision of the street As the street hardly understands; Sitting ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... listlessly upon the ground. As I looked upon this man, I thought him one of the most disagreeable fellows I had ever seen. His features were ugly, and, moreover, as dark as pepper; and, besides being dark, his skin was dirty. As for his dress, it was torn and sordid. His chest was broad, and his arms seemed powerful; but, upon the whole, he looked a very caitiff. "I am sorry that man has lost his wife," thought I; "for I am sure he will never get another." What surprises me is, that he ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... wall where grated windows admitted sunshine, and their hymn to Labor was the only sound that broke the brooding silence. The room was scrupulously clean and tidy, and the inmates, wearing the regulation uniform of blue-striped homespun, appeared comparatively neat; but sordid, sullen, repulsively coarse and brutish were many of the countenances bent over the daily task, and now and then swift, furtive glances from downcast eyes betrayed ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... The sight and smell of drugs, dressings, and disinfectants afflicted him with an agony of sensation. There was no escaping these things in the little flat, and he could not help associating his wife with them: it seemed as if a crowd of trivial and sordid images was blotting out the delicate moral impressions he had once had. Tyson was paying the penalty of having lived the life of the senses; his brain had become their servant, and he was horrified to find that he could not command its ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... morals of all ranks of people, from the candidate to the lowest borough elector. The expedient of establishing funds of credit for raising supplies to defray the expenses of government, threw large premiums and sums of money into the hands of low sordid usurers, brokers, and jobbers, who distinguished themselves by the name of the monied interest. Intoxicated by this flow of wealth, they affected to rival the luxury and magnificence of their superiors; but being destitute of sentiment and taste to conduct them in their ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... as he strode along, suddenly conscious of the stir and unseen movement in the fetid air about him, of the murmur of voices, the desolate wailing of children, the noise of drunken altercation, and all the sordid sounds that were part and parcel of the place. Of all this Barnabas was heedful, but he was wholly unaware of the figure that dogged him from behind, following him step by step, patient and persistent. Thus, at last, Barnabas reached a certain narrow alley, beyond ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... children clean, and doing the washing at home—and tea and sugar rising, and my husband grumbling every week when I have to ask him for the house-money. Oh, no more of it! no more of it! People meant for better things all ground down to the same sordid and selfish level—is that a pleasant sight to contemplate? I shudder when I think of the last twenty years of my life!' That's what she complained of, Mr. Hethcote, in the solitary middle of the lake, with nobody ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... manner of his teaching, he is not always gentle, but he is always sincere. He speaks soft words to persuade; but if that is not enough, he does not scruple to knock the muck-rake out of sordid hands with a fine, sudden stroke, if so he may make men look up from the rubbish under their feet to the flowers that bloom around them and the stars that glow above and the God that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... me," said Roger very huskily. And both his daughters turned with a start, as though in their bitter absorption they had forgotten his presence there. Both flushed, and now the glances of all three in that room avoided each other. For they felt how sordid it had been. Deborah ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... with God in Paradise; Nor all the shows of beauty shed around This fair false world her wings to earth have bound; Unto the Love of Loves aloft she flies. Nay, things that suffer death, quench not the fire Of deathless spirits; nor eternity Serves sordid Time, that withers all things rare. Not love but lawless impulse is desire: That slays the soul; our love makes still more fair Our friends on earth, fairer in ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... thou art gone, Gone like a star that through the firmament Shot and was lost, in its eccentric course Dazzling, perplexing. Yet thy heart, methinks, Was generous, noble—noble in its scorn Of all things low or little; nothing there Sordid or servile. If imagined wrongs Pursued thee, urging thee sometimes to do Things long regretted, oft, as many know, None more than I, thy gratitude would build On slight foundations; and, if in thy life Not ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... demands. His trousers, always threadbare, looked like camlet—the stuff of which attorneys' gowns are made; and his habitual stoop set them, in time, in such innumerable creases, that in places they were traced with lines, whitish, rusty, or shiny, betraying either sordid avarice, or the most unheeding poverty. His coarse worsted stockings were twisted anyhow in his ill-shaped shoes. His linen had the tawny tinge acquired by long sojourn in a wardrobe, showing that the late lamented Madame Popinot had had a mania for much ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... and chimney pots A rag of sunset crumbles gray; Below, fierce radiance hangs in clots O'er the streams that never stay. Shrill and high, newsboys cry The worst of the city's infamy For one more sordid day. ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... trader believes that Trade, in its ideal, is generous and beautiful. It is the reality that he makes of it, by the way in which he does it, that seems to him sordid. ...
— Heart's-ease • Phillips Brooks
... may call you so, my boy. We have a few cultured citizens, Stephen, but all are not so. I miss the atmosphere. I seemed to live again when I got to Boston. But business, sir,—the making of money is a sordid occupation. You will ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... words again and again, he leaned his head against the partition and burst into tears. Sordid and coarse as his nature was, he really loved his daughter. All the heart he had was in his statues and ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... being that business was the chief function. It is generally admitted that in the early days thousands joined the order "for what there was in it;" believing that the organization furnished a means for abolishing the middlemen, and putting ready money into the pockets of the farmers. When these sordid souls were disillusioned, their enthusiasm went down to the zero of activity. They misunderstood, or interpreted too radically, a well-defined, conservative, legitimate purpose of the Grange to co-operate on business lines. The order did believe that ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... which he had quite expected would only be justifiable after the lapse of some years. But, while prospering beyond his highest anticipations, what of the growth of the true man, the development of the great human soul, which craves a higher destiny than mere grovelling among the sordid things of earth? While supremely unconscious of any change in himself, there was nevertheless a great change—a very great change indeed. It was inevitable. A life so narrow, so circumscribed, so barren of beauty, lived so solitarily, away ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... be any fact well established in human experience it is that with economic development the power of organized religion begins to wane—the rise of the merchant spells the decline of the priest. A sordid change, from masses and mysteries to sugar and shoes, this is often said to be, but it should be noted that the epochs of greatest economic activity have been those during which the generality of mankind have lived fuller and freer lives, ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... greed, of all the baser passions, was profound: he had the terrible logic of animalism. Love-making, drunkenness, cheating, quarreling, the mere idleness of sitting drowsily in a chair, the gross life of the farmyard and the fields, civic dissensions, the sordid provincial dance of the seven deadly sins, he saw in the same direct, unilluminating way as the Dutch painters; finding, indeed, no beauty in any of these things, but getting his beauty in the deft arrangement ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... enforcing discipline was the hope of reward. This principle was robbed of its more sordid elements by the nature of the reward held forth. A day of good conduct and of faithful work invariably closed with an hour devoted to histrionic and musical exercise. To recite before the teacher and to hear the teacher recite was worth considerable effort. ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... living—as a matter of fact, I can easily get the wherewithal to purchase any luxuries that I desire—and it is gotten without a petty-larceny struggle with my fellow men. Here I exploit only natural resources, take only what the earth has prodigally provided. Why should I live in the smoke and sordid clutter of a town when I love the clean outdoors? The best citizen is the man with a sound mind and a strong, healthy body; and the only obligation any of us has to society is not to be a burden on society. So I live in the wilds the greater part of the year, I keep my muscles in trim, ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Age come back to earth again—the age of natural and pure simplicity, truth, trust, honor, faith and joy, unspoiled by malice or deceit, by lies, conventions, sordid ambitions, or the lust of wealth or ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... Lord Chatham. I well knew what unworthy conclusions would be drawn from it. But I am called upon to deliver my opinion, and surely it is not in the little censure of Mr. Home to deter me from doing signal justice to a man who, I confess, has grown upon my esteem. As for the common, sordid views of avarice, or any purpose of vulgar ambition, I question whether the applause of Junius would be of service to Lord Chatham. My vote will hardly recommend him to an increase of his pension, or to a seat in the Cabinet. But if his ambition be upon a level with his understanding; if he ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... and slept badly. The ludicrous scenes of the evening danced before my eyes; the smoke-filled, sordid room, the ignoble faces round the table, the foolish hullaballoo, the collapse of Anastasius, my melodramatic intervention, and the ironical courtesy of the fleshy Captain Vauvenarde. Also, in the small hours of the night, Anastasius's ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... dealings with the outer world entirely under his control, subject only to the check of the Abbot. Brother Samuel was a gnarled and stringy old monk whose stern and sharp-featured face reflected no light from above but only that sordid workaday world toward which it was forever turned. A huge book of accounts was tucked under one of his arms, while a great bunch of keys hung from the other hand, a badge of his office, and also on occasion of impatience a weapon of offense, as many ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... motives, the sordid motives, which Mr. Froude, oblivious of the responsibility of his high literary status, has permitted himself gratuitously, and we may add scandalously, to impute to the heads of the Reform movement in Trinidad. It was perfectly competent that our author ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... not my niece with those sordid beings, man,' said the Chevalier, angrily. 'Here is your price'—tossing a heavy purse on the table—'and as much more shall await you when you bring me sure intelligence where to find my niece. You understand; and mark, not one word of the gentleman you saw ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... implacability, this confession of unintelligibility. The exact point of the story of Kurtz, in "Heart of Darkness," is that it is pointless, that Kurtz's death is as meaningless as his life, that the moral of such a sordid tragedy is a wholesale negation of all morals. And this, no less, is the point of the story of Falk, and of that of Almayer, and of that of Jim. Mr. Follett (he must be a forward-looker in his heart!) finds himself, in the end, unable to accept so profound a determinism unadulterated, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... "How sordid crime really is," he remarked as we walked on down the street. "Look at that place of Albano's. I defy even the police news reporter on the Star to find any glamour ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... be, pursue your task undauntedly, and whilst so many others convert the noblest employments of human society into sordid trades, let the generous Muse resume her ancient dignity, re- assert her ancient prerogative, and instruct and reform, as well as amuse the world. Let her give a new turn to the thoughts of men, raise new affections in their minds, and ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... posts of emolument - in short, popular religion may be summed up as respect for ecclesiastics. (26) The spread of this misconception inflamed every worthless fellow with an intense desire to enter holy orders, and thus the love of diffusing God's religion degenerated into sordid avarice and ambition. (27) Every church became a theatre, where orators, instead of church teachers, harangued, caring not to instruct the people, but striving to attract admiration, to bring opponents to public scorn, and to preach only novelties and paradoxes, ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... touched, for he knew what delight the good skates meant in the cold weather, and the pride the boy had felt in the silver watch that kept such excellent time. But he could not think of much to say just then, for the sight of the poor little pile of dirty money that was the sordid price of so much pleasure ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... towards each other. Some circumstances give a color of probability to this story. Otherwise it has sometimes happened, on occasion of a murder not sufficiently accounted for, that, from pure goodness of heart intolerant of a mere sordid motive for a striking murder, some person has forged, and the public has accredited, a story representing the murderer as having moved under some loftier excitement: and in this case the public, too much shocked at the idea of Williams having on the single motive of gain consummated ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... them rather to ask him to bestow upon them the gift of his time and such ability as he possessed. He took a very high tone indeed in his speeches, and was saved the labour of parading the streets. During these days he looked down from an immeasurable height on the truckling, mean, sordid doings of Griffenbottom, Underwood, and Westmacott. A huge board had been hoisted up over the somewhat low frontage of the Cordwainers' Arms, and on this was painted in letters two feet high a legend which it delighted him to read, MOGGS, PURITY, ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... as De Maistre certainly was, to look helplessly on the physical pains of a tender woman and famishing little ones. The anxieties that press upon his heart in such calamity as this are too sharp, too tightened, and too sordid for him to draw a single free breath, or to raise his eyes for a single moment of relief from the monstrous perplexity that chokes him. The hour of bereavement has its bitterness, but the bitterness is gradually suffused with soft reminiscence. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... hoisted by its legitimate chiefs, or at the common uprising of its whole people, you would have been found in the van, amidst the ranks of your countrymen; but I maintained that you would never have shared in a conspiracy frantic in itself, and defiled by the lawless schemes and sordid ambition of its main projectors, had you not been betrayed and decoyed into it by the misrepresentations and domestic treachery of your kinsman,—the very man who denounced you. Unfortunately, of this statement I had no proof ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to see things in their relation to other things; the non-sane view is to see them isolated, in such a way that they exercise a kind of hypnotic spell over us. And it makes no difference what a man's habitual interests may be, whether they be sordid or lofty, he needs ever and anon to get away from them. In reality, nothing wherewith a man occupies himself need be sordid. The spiritual attitude does not consist in turning one's back on things mundane and fixing one's gaze on some supernal blaze of glory, but rather ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... back at the hotel. Mr. Gumpus was in the doorway, amusement in every line of his ugly face. Beside him stood the slovenly servant. She was crying—the more human second thought of a heart not altogether corrupted by the sordid hardness of her lot. How can faith in the human race falter when one considers how much heart it has in spite of all it suffers in the struggle upward through the dense fogs of ignorance upward, toward ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... and despised, all over the earth? If these be the signs of love, what are those of hate? And can it be that he, their Lord of Heaven, hath in store for them a world of bliss beyond this life, who gives them here on earth scarce the sordid shelter of a cabin? In truth, they seem to be a community living upon their imaginations. They fancy themselves favorites of Heaven—though all the world thinks otherwise. They fancy themselves the greatest benefactors the world has ever ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... cashier's desk sits Bogle, cold, sordid, slow, smouldering, and takes your money. Behind a mountain of toothpicks he makes your change, files your check, and ejects at you, like a toad, a word about the weather. Beyond a corroboration of his ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... felt annoyed and degraded by the familiar impudence of the trader, and yet both saw the absolute necessity of putting a constraint on their feelings. The more hopelessly sordid and insensible he appeared, the greater became Mrs. Shelby's dread of his succeeding in recapturing Eliza and her child, and of course the greater her motive for detaining him by every female artifice. She therefore graciously ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the ancient ferryman to take me across for nothing. This worthy individual, however, enters such a wordy protestation against this that I hand him a whole handful of the picayunish tsin. The soldiers make him give me back the over-payment, to the last tsin. The sordid money-making methods of the commercial world seem to be regarded with more or less contempt by the gallant sons of Mars everywhere, not excepting even the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... home, and friends, Die in a sordid strife — You can count your friends on your finger ends In the critical hours of life. Sacrifice all for the family's sake, Bow to their selfish rule! Slave till your big soft heart they break — The heart of the ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... pretty girl of nineteen or twenty; showily dressed, and quick with her tongue. She was good-natured and jolly, and though Praed himself was the essence of refinement there was something about her reckless mirth and joy in life—the immense relief of having passed from the sordid life of a barmaid to this quasi-ladyhood—that enlisted his sympathies. Though she was always somebody else's mistress until she developed her special talent as a manageress of high-class houses of accommodation, "private hotels" on the Continent, chiefly frequented by English ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours. We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This sea, that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers— For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... my heart, And rather for applause than pay, Embrace the literary way) Yet as a writer and a wit, With some abatements they admit. What is his case then, do you think, Who toils for wealth nor sleeps a wink, Preferring to the pleasing pain Of composition sordid gain? But hap what will (as Sinon said, When to king Priam he was led), I book the third shall now fulfil, With Aesop for my master still; Which book I dedicate to you, As both to worth and honour due. Pleased, if you read—if ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... Transformation for these grubs! Give us animation, inspiration, joy, faith! Give us enlivening, lightsome airs, to which our souls shall, on a sudden, begin to dance, keeping step with the angels! What else is worth having? Each one of these sordid sons of men—is he not a new-born Apollo, who waits only for the ambrosia from Olympus, to spring forth in divineness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... head in a rougher method of opposition, from each of which extremities being carried back to its fountain, it was returned to them from thence, and so backwards and forwards, till the circulation and union were confirmed and completed, the sordid unnatural, offensive parts being in the meantime thrown off as dregs of nature, and nuisances of human society; but of these in so well-tempered a constitution, there were but few; however, when there were any to be found, though they had been of the most exalted nature, and bore ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... middle of the causeway. The lane, which was composed of dwellings of the lowest order, tenanted by the most abject profligates, was dark as midnight; for the tall dingy buildings absolutely intercepted every ray of light that proceeded from the murky sky, and there was not a spark in any of the sordid casements, nor any votive lamp in that foul alley. The only glimpse of casual illumination, and that too barely serving to render the darkness and the filth perceptible, was the faint streak of lustre where the Suburra crossed the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... Cobbett. Or some new-seen and yet familiar cluster of houses in a grey village of the upper Thames overtopped by the delicate tracery of a fourteenth-century church; or even sometimes the very buildings of the past untouched by the degradation of the sordid utilitarianism that cares not and knows not of beauty and history: as once, when I was journeying (in a dream of the night) down the well-remembered reaches of the Thames betwixt Streatley and Wallingford, where the foothills ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... his life, always sitting in his amen corner with my attention fixed anxiously upon the spiritual pulse of the congregation, always giving him the most nourishing food our limited means afforded, always standing between him and sordid dickering with the butcher and candlestick maker, always making myself a Chinese wall to separate him on sermon-making days ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... negotiating was interpreted commonly in America—naturally aroused little enthusiasm for the nation, and when suddenly, during the stormy weeks of mid-May, Italy made her decision and broke with Austria, Americans inferred, erroneously, that her "sordid" bargaining having met with a stubborn resistance from Vienna, there was nothing left for a government that had spent millions in war preparation but to declare war. The affair had that surface ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... virulence of party feeling in this country, it certainly would not seem to require a very large amount of manly principle to rise superior to such a sordid sentiment in view of our common peril. Patriotism, my friend, is an admirable and most praiseworthy virtue. It is correctly classed among the noblest instincts of human nature. It has in all ages been a fruitful theme of poetic fervor; it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... Mary V wished him to do: settle down there at the ranch and work out his debt where he had made it. Looking down into the grimy, friendly faces of those who had braved desert wind and sun for him, the sallow, shifty-eyed face of Bland Halliday seemed to epitomize the sordid avariciousness of the man and made him wonder if any measure of success would atone for the forced intimacy with the fellow. Mary V, had she known his mood then, might have won her way with him and altered immeasurably ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... can go a year on mouldy bacon And fight the scurvy off with bayo beans; If you can jump your socks and do your washing And smile the while you patch your threadbare jeans; If you can laugh when sordid hunger mocks you And smile while passing strangers eat your grub; If you can boost when everybody knocks you And know him wrong who holds ...
— Rhymes of a Roughneck • Pat O'Cotter
... at Redding were hunters who knew the wild Indians and had told him tales that glorified at least the wonderful woodcraft of the red man. Once or twice Rolf had seen Indians travelling through, and he had been repelled by their sordid squalour. But here was something of a different kind; not the Champlain ideal, indeed, for the Indian wore clothes like any poor farmer, except on his head and his feet; his head was bare, and his feet were covered with moccasins that ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... sordid or niggardly," added Monsieur; "and who pays in gold all the orders I have ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to a man; she was also the Idea to my brain, and what his Idea is to an artist an artist alone can know. But it is something he will live and die for, and count his heart's blood as nothing beside it. That she was a sacred thing, to be protected and guarded from the sordid incidents of daily life that she hated, had always been my thought. She was an artist, and as such had Art's own penalties to pay—the excessive nervous strain it puts upon the body, the long weakening tension, the extreme mental and bodily fatigue that sometimes accompanies ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... the sphere of our duty; if, on the contrary, we do not stretch and expand our minds to the compass of their object; be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds. It is not a predilection to mean, sordid, home-bred cares that will avert the consequences of a false estimation of our interest, or prevent the shameful dilapidation into which a great empire must fall by mean reparation ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... stood. There had been an old stone church there, too; and, south of that, old, old houses with hip-roofs and dormers where now the high white cliffs of modern architecture rose, riddled with tiny windows, every vane glittering in the sun. South, the old houses still remained, now degraded to sordid uses. North, the square, red-brick mansions, with their white pillars and steps, still faced the sunset—the last practically unbroken rank of the old regime, the last of the old guard, standing fast and still confronting, still resisting the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... off his drowsyhed.[*] Fresh from his couch up springs the lusty Sun, And girds himself his mighty race to run. Meantime, by truant love of rambling led, I turn my back on thy detested walls, Proud City, and thy sons I leave behind, A selfish, sordid, money-getting kind, Who shut their ears when holy Freedom calls. I pass not thee so lightly, humble spire, That mindest me of many a pleasure gone, Of merriest days, of love and Islington, Kindling anew the flames of past desire; And I shall muse on thee, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... the post-office Mr. Homer Hollopeter mourned deeply and sincerely for his cousin. The little room devoted to collecting and dispensing the United States mail, formerly a dingy and sordid den, had become, through Mr. Homer's efforts, cheerfully seconded by those of Will Jaquith, a little temple of shining neatness, where even Miss Phoebe's or Miss Vesta's dainty feet might have trod without ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... to our ideas. Mr. Caudle, with meek persistency, goes out to amuse himself alone when his day's work is done. Mrs. Caudle's day's work never is done. She has the wearing charge of a large family, and the anxiety of making both ends meet on a paltry income, which entails much self denial and sordid parsimony, but is conscientiously done, if not cheerfully, nevertheless. It is Mr. Caudle, however, who grumbles, making no allowance for extra pressure of work on washing days, when she is too busy to hash the cold mutton. The rule of her life is weariness and worry from morning till night, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... impassioned life may only fill us with unutterable envy. But still to have sat in his homely rooms, to have paced his little terraces, does bring a certain imagined peace into the mind, a noble shame for all that is sordid or mean, a hatred for the conventional aims, the ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... misty and confused, he would be called out of bed in the black hours before the winter dawn by the unclean and desperate interlopers who supplied the table. He would open the door to these men, since infamous throughout the land. He would help them with their tragic burden, pay them their sordid price, and remain alone, when they were gone, with the unfriendly relics of humanity. From such a scene he would return to snatch another hour or two of slumber, to repair the abuses of the night, and refresh himself for the labours ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... through the first room, where a basket of eggs was deposited on the open hearth, near a heap of broken egg-shells and a bank of ashes. In strange keeping with that sordid litter, there was a low bedstead of carved ebony, covered carelessly with a piece of rich oriental carpet, that looked as if it had served to cover the steps to a Madonna's throne; and a carved cassone, or large chest, with painted devices on ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... thought about it," said Rachel, looking pensively at the flowers. "But surely it was a very sordid case?" ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... They came to their own land. But all in vain His care. Silent she was, and oft did grieve, Till Eblis wrathful cried: "Because this Eve Adam holds dear, art mourning? Still dost yearn To mate his sordid soul? Or wouldst thou turn From summer land to Eden walls? "The man Belike, ne'er loved thee. So is it young Eve can His pulses sway. Is she not passing fair? Her fancies wild, it is her daily care To bend ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... William Lord Russell, son of the Earl of Bedford, did not scruple to concert with a foreign mission schemes for embarrassing his own sovereign. This was the whole extent of Russell's offence. His principles and his fortune alike raised him above all temptations of a sordid kind: but there is too much reason to believe that some of his associates were less scrupulous. It would be unjust to impute to them the extreme wickedness of taking bribes to injure their country. On the contrary, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the office of these divine ideals to rebuke the lower physical life, and smite each sordid, selfish purpose. The vision hour is the natural enemy of the vulgar mood. Men begin life with the high purpose of living nobly, generously, openly. Full of the choicest aspirations, hungering for the highest things, the youth enters triumphantly upon ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... front faced the edge of the quay and looked over the Seine, was a sordid back-shop: here the pallet of Mother Toulouche, a kitchen stove out of order, and the overflow of the goods which were crowded out of the store were jumbled up in ill-smelling disorder. This back-shop communicated with ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... could collect their scattered indignities and roar a little in exasperated protest. The elephants, too, perhaps felt the humility of their position, accustomed though they might be to it by many years of sordid slavery. It may be, too, that the sight of that patronising and ignorant crowd, the crush and pack of the High Street, the silly sniggering, the triumphant jangle of the Cathedral bells, thrust through their slow and heavy brains some vision long ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... penmanship had been always prone to dream. No dull and sordid reality, no hopeless sorrow had yet awakened him. Nor had his wife's death been more real than the half-strangled anguish of a dreamer, tossing in darkness. As for the children, they paid no more attention to Ledlie ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... year and be silent. The Marquis, he now found, was not so infirm as he had thought, nor the Marchioness quite so full of fears. He must give it up, and take his pittance. But in doing so he continued to assure himself that he was greatly injured, and did not cease to accuse Lord Kingsbury of sordid parsimony in refusing to reward adequately one whose services to the family had been ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... within him, for here was indeed a rosy prospect suddenly opening out before him, a prospect which promised to put an abrupt and permanent end to certain sordid embarrassments that of late had been causing his poor widowed mother a vast amount of anxiety and trouble, and sowing her beloved head with many premature white hairs. For Harry's father had died about four months before this story opens, ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... himself at full length, and rolled over and over, and leaped as if he had been revelling in a bath of freshest water; pleasant to see him race up to a serious-minded hog, and scrutinise that stolid animal closely, and then leave him to his sordid researches after edible roots, with open contempt, as who should say: "Can the same scheme of creation include me ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... captive? Yea, and caged apart. No weight of arms enfolded Can crush the turmoil in that seething heart Which Nature—not her journeymen—self-moulded. Let sordid jailers vex their prize; But only bends that brow to lightning, As gazing from the seaward rock, his sighs Cleave through the storm and haste ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... had had her share of trouble, no doubt; but Fate had shown her fair play. Just simple everyday Death!—maternity troubles lived through in shelter; nursing galore, certainly—who escapes it? Of purse troubles, debts and sordid plagues, a certain measure no doubt, for who escapes them? But to that life of hers the scorching fires that had worked so hard to slay her sister's heart, and failed so signally, had never penetrated. Indeed, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... comedy was the talk of the town; his last, The Way of the World, that monument of characterisation (of a kind) and fine English, was only a 'success of esteem.' The reason is not far to seek. Congreve's plays were too sordid in conception and too unamusing in effect for even the audiences to which they were produced; they were excellent literature, but they were bad drama, and they were innately detestable to boot. Audiences are ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... was sent forth from one end of Europe to the other, but the crime had sunk too deeply into the hearts of an outraged public for these ebullitions to have any real effect. There might be flaws in diction and even matters of fact, but the sordid reality of the documentary and verbal story that came to them was never doubted. The big heart of the British nation was beginning to be moved in sympathy towards the martyr long before his death, and of course long before O'Meara's book appeared, though ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... distorted spelling intensifies the impression of ignorant vulgarity, and there is a moral lesson in the story of Mr. Deuceace that atones in some degree for the very low company whom we meet in it. But the labour of deciphering the ugly words, and the cheerless atmosphere of sordid vice and servility which they are most appropriately used to describe, are so unfamiliar to contemporary novel-readers that we think few will master two hundred pages of this dialect in the present edition. On the whole, after renewing our old acquaintance with ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... but if you durst have looked nearer, you would not have found Cowardice in the number of his infirmities.—We will try if we cannot redeem him from this universal censure.—Let the venal corporation of authors duck to the golden fool, let them shape their sordid quills to the mercenary ends of unmerited praise, or of baser detraction;—old Jack, though deserted by princes, though censured by an ungrateful world, and persecuted from age to age by Critic and Commentator, and though never rich enough to hire one literary prostitute, shall find ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... other men are simply depressed or disgusted or appalled, lose their vital forces, and gaze in paralysed fascination, these writers, in virtue of a sense which is more aesthetic than moral, are aware of tremendous issues, see in sordid suffering the agonies of a labouring universe, and feel awe and wonder, not mere disgust and distress, at what human beings suffer and endure. That is why Homer leaves us with another feeling than depression, when he ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... have known a great and exalted love, and have had it flee from your grasp—flee as a shadow before it is sullied by selfishness or misunderstanding—is the highest good. The memory of such a love can not die from out the heart. It affords a ballast 'gainst all the sordid impulses of life, and though it gives an unutterable sadness, it imparts ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... sitting by his bedside through the long hours of that night, she tried in very simple words to awaken him to a sense of his condition. It was not an easy business to let any glimmer of spiritual light in upon the darkness of that sordid mind. There did arise perhaps in this last extremity some dim sense of remorse in the breast of Mr. Whitelaw, some vague consciousness that in that one act of his life, and in the whole tenor of his life, he had ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... more and more regretful, while it deepened his feelings for her. He saw how far removed was her mind from the sordid views of things, and how sincere a philosophy governed her actions ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... self-devotion to the coming "squire" with very little philosophy, little temper, and no allowance for the feelings of an only daughter expecting to see a white-headed, fond father, dragged from his home to a jail. He had been incensed; he had wronged her by imputations of sordid motives—of pride, of contempt for himself as a beggar; and at last broke from her in sullen resentment, after requiring her to bring all his letters, at their next interview, which was to be a farewell one. And now she was bringing every thing she had received ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... constrained to take, it is of some interest to us, says the Building News, to know how the poor are housed in the city of Paris, which contains, more than any city in the world, the opposite poles of luxurious magnificence and of sordid, bestial poverty. The statistics of the Parisian working classes in the way of lodgings are not of an encouraging nature, and reflect great discredit on the powers that be, who can be stern enough ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... degrades to the purposes of wily craft the plan of rule our fathers established and bequeathed to us as an object of our love and veneration. It perverts the patriotic sentiments of our countrymen and tempts them to pitiful calculation of the sordid gain to be derived from their Government's maintenance. It undermines the self-reliance of our people and substitutes in its place dependence upon governmental favoritism. It stifles the spirit of true Americanism and stupefies every ennobling trait ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... treatise written in 386 to justify the Divine regulation of the world, we find him declaring that just as the executioner, however repulsive he may be, occupies a necessary place in society, so the prostitute and her like, however sordid and ugly and wicked they may be, are equally necessary; remove prostitutes from human affairs and you would pollute the world with lust: "Aufer meretrices de rebus humanis, turbaveris omnia libidinibus."[194] Aquinas, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the unhappy mortals for whom no such sun will ever rise. I should like to add to the Litany a new petition: "For all inhabitants of great towns, and especially for all such as dwell in lodgings, boarding-houses, flats, or any other sordid substitute for Home which need or ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... and passionate—her impulses high and generous; but when Lady Chillington was in her worse moods, she had to curb the former as with an iron chain; while the latter were outraged continually by Lady Chillington's mean and miserly mode of life, and by a certain low and sordid tone of thought which at such times pervaded all she said and did. And yet, strange to say, she had rare fits of generosity and goodwill—times when her soul seemed to sit in sackcloth and ashes, as if in repentance for those other occasions when the "dark fit" was ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... but 'pon honor, I like your honest simple face, and I won't desert you. Besides! I know a guy in Kalispell, and I can panhandle the sordid necessary chuck while I wait for you. Little you know, my cockerel, how facile a brain your 'bus so lightly bears. When I've cashed in on the mine, I'll take my rightful place among the motored ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... the most painful of humiliations—the sense of shame for a parent; there was nothing for it but to be passive while his father poured out a flood of reasons—sordid, whining, contemptible, money-getting reasons—in which the niggardly old man wrapped his refusal. David crushed down his pain into the depths of his soul; he saw that he was alone; saw that he had no one to look to but himself; saw, too, that his father ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... been put into course of publication. Rutebeuf, a trouvere of the reign of St. Louis (Louis IX., thirteenth century), is perhaps as conspicuous a personal name as any that thus far emerges out of the sea of practically anonymous early French authorship. A frankly sordid and mercenary singer, Rutebeuf, always tending to mockery, was not seldom licentious,—in both these respects anticipating, as probably also to some extent by example conforming, the subsequent literary spirit of his nation. The fabliaux ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... to his feeling of wrath that Nan Archdale should become cognisant of so sordid a tale, there was associated a feeling of shame that he, Coxeter, had overheard what it had not been meant ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... original was fair; he had beautiful brown eyes, a beautiful bright open face; a little feminine, a little hard, a little weak; still full of the light of youth, but already beginning to be vulgarised; a sordid bloom come upon it, the lines coarsened with a touch of puffiness. He was dressed, as for a gala, in peach-colour and silver; his breast sparkled with stars and was bright with ribbons; for he had held a levee in the afternoon and received a distinguished personage incognito. Now he sat with a bowed ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the winds of America over these bereaved streets, and the sea which bore your mourners home affirms it. Whilst the polished and pleasant traitors to human rights, with perverted learning and disgraced graces, die and are utterly forgotten, with their double tongue saying all that is sordid about the corruption of man, you believed in the divinity of all, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... kindred and race can bring to the masses, but which once saintly souls brought to their favored children in the crusade of the sixties, that finest thing in American history, and one of the few things untainted by sordid greed and cheap vainglory. The teachers in these institutions came not to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raise them out of their places where the filth of slavery had wallowed them. The colleges they founded were social ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... injustice when we think that the heart of us is sordid; what is sordid is rather the situation that cramps or stifles the heart. In itself our generative principle is surely no less fertile and generous than the generative principle of crystals or flowers. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... disastrous period, the sordid and servile vices seem to have kept pace with the wildest licentiousness; and the dark and stern persecutions in Scotland form a fearful contrast with the bacchanalian revels of the court. The effects on the character and estimation of the female sex, sustain all that has been said ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various |
