"Blindness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... must suffer his love because she was poor before she married and he has paid her with a life of luxury. Where are we to end if such logic in questions of sexual intercourse is to benumb common sense? England brought us "The Blindness of Virtue," the story of a boy and a girl whom we are to believe to be constantly in grave danger because they are ignorant, while in reality nothing happens, and everything suggests that the moral danger for this particular girl would have ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... only the carryin' out of their own 'arthly longin's, while others fancy it all gold and shinin' lights! Well, I've an idee of my own, in that matter, which is just this, Sarpent. Whenever I've done wrong, I've ginirally found 'twas owin' to some blindness of the mind, which hid the right from view, and when sight has returned, then has come sorrow and repentance. Now, I consait that, after death, when the body is laid aside or, if used at all, is purified and ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... youth, beloved by a Dryad, but who brushed away a bee sent by her to call him to her, and she punished him with blindness ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... place most of such cures relate to hysteria, a disease we shall discuss later but which is characterized by symptoms that appear and disappear like magic. I have seen "cured" (and have "cured") such patients, affected with paralysis, deafness, dumbness, blindness, etc., with reasoning, electricity, bitter tonics, fake electrodes, hypnotism, and in one case by a forcible slap upon a prominent and naked part of the body. Hysteria has been the basis of many a saint's reputation and likewise ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... of the steel and oil kings, the railroad magnates or any of the other industrial potentates who acquired great wealth by pilfering America and peonizing its people. The whole sorry proceeding was disgraceful, high-handed and treacherous, and only made possible by reason of the blindness of the generous American people, drugged with the vanishing hope of "success" and too confident of the continued possession of its blood-bought liberties. And do the lumber barons were unhindered in their infamous work of debauchery, bribery, murder ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... dethroning the Rhenish princes, as little better than the Jacobins of 1792. The offer of a restored imperial dignity in Germany was declined by the Emperor of Austria at the instance of his Minister. With characteristic sense of present difficulties, and blindness to the great forces which really contained their solution, Metternich argued that the minor princes would only be driven into the arms of the foreigner by the establishment of any supreme German Power. They would probably desert Napoleon if the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... pity your infatuation, your blindness. Poor, innocent dove, that looks at others by the light of her own goodness, and so sees all manner of virtues in a brazen hussy. Now answer me one plain question. You called her 'the Sister!' Is she not the same woman that played the Sister ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... got a new decoration—a mitered hog carrying a discarded rack home on its shoulder, and Loyseleur weeping in its wake. Many rewards were offered for the capture of these painters, but nobody applied. Even the English guard feigned blindness and would not see ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... own advantage; for after a time of coldness, it seemed as if things went worse than ever between him and Mrs. Henry. They were then constantly together. I would not be thought to cast one shadow of blame, beyond what is due to a half-wilful blindness, on that unfortunate lady; but I do think, in these last days, she was playing very near the fire; and whether I be wrong or not in that, one thing is sure and quite sufficient: Mr. Henry thought so. The poor gentleman sat for days in my room, so great a picture ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stuff for Galena Creek, and Hank would not look at it on account of his courtin'. I took it alone myself by Yancey's and the second bridge and Miller Creek to the camp, nor I didn't tell Willomene good-bye, for I had got disgusted at her blindness." ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... The blindness of the majority turned away from those wise counsels. Parliament was dissolved. Burke, elected for Bristol, forthwith introduced thirteen resolutions, which he defended in his celebrated speech for "Conciliation ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... new work which the Spirit of God does, the full revelation of God given to men, the world in darkness, Satan its god, and the Jews no longer in their land but wandering amongst the nations with judicial blindness upon them. ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... Ella, you're done beat out, as Aun' Sheba says; and that's the only trouble—that and the blindness of yonder great boy, who expects to court you for months before venturing to stammer some incoherent nonsense. ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... seems to be no special liability to mental incompetency, though such marriages are accused of producing defective or idiot children. Men suffering from congenital defects should not marry. Natural blindness, deafness, muteness, and congenital deformities of limb are more or less likely to be passed on to their children. There are cases of natural blindness, though, to which this rule does not apply. Criminals, alcoholics, and persons disproportionate in size should not marry. In the last-mentioned, ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... knife to one of the monkey's eyes, "there arises the question—how far is this intellectual blindness the result of incapacity of intellectual vision, or of averted gaze, or of the wilful shutting of ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... April the reflection of light from the snow became so strong as to create inflammation in the eyes, and notwithstanding the usual precaution of wearing black crape veils during exposure, several cases of snow-blindness occurred shortly afterwards. ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... believes in them, because nobody encourages them, because they get no sympathy and are forever tortured for not doing that against which every fiber of their being protests, and every drop of their blood rebels? How many men have to feel their way to the goal through the blindness of ignorance and lack of experience? How many go bungling along from the lack of early discipline and drill in the vocation they have chosen? How many have to hobble along on crutches because they were never taught to help themselves, but have been accustomed ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... right angles, called "pierre de croix"—by mineralogists grenatite—found in the Coatdry, a small affluent of the Aven, washed out of the mica slaty rocks in which they abound. The peasants assign to them a miraculous origin, and wear them in little bags round the neck as charms against headache, blindness, shipwreck, and hydrophobia, being, as they allege, signed with the cross. According to tradition, a pagan chief, having, in his impious rage, thrown down the cross in the chapel of Coatdry, Heaven, in memorial of the outrage, placed ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... the question, but went on: "It's been coming on—this blindness—since her fifth year; she could always see to read better in dark corners than in a full light. For the last two years she has not been able to see; and she's only ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... rede there was for the matter, but he said he could see none, but that they should abide there till some keel should be brought thither: Grettir said it was but blindness to hope for that. "Rather will I risk whether I ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... was wroth, and said he would have the truth, if he had to go and fetch it himself. When he returned, he abused his whole subjectry for liars, and was in an unappeasable fury with the moral and mental blindness of the cat. He said that anybody but a near-sighted fool could see that there was nothing in ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... than that. Then she saw why: it was because Vincent conceived of nothing but emptiness if he let it go, and horribly feared that imaginary emptiness. Out of the incalculable richness of her kingdom she wondered again at his blindness. . . . And made a pitying guess at the reason for it . . . perhaps for him it was not imaginary. Perhaps one of the terms of the bargain he had made with life was that there should be nothing later but emptiness for him. Yes, she saw that. She would have ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... graze of movement within, by which we prepare to grasp the object, describe its lines, test its functions, sound it, move it, and handle it in a thousand ways. (This is attested by the facts of apraxia or psychic blindness. Cf. "Matter and Memory", ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... you wire me in the future use another name, for safety—say Jeraldine. In the next place, I am very much hampered by the blindness of my mission. I can see, I think, that the Robinsons expected some legacy which you are now apparently about to inherit, and your marriage became necessary to fulfill some condition of the ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... veranda with a closed book on his knee, and, as it were, looked out upon his solitude, as if the fact of Captain Whalley's blindness had opened his eyes to his own. There were many sorts of heartaches and troubles, and there was no place where they could not find a man out. And he felt ashamed, as though he had for six years behaved ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... had the brightest eyes in Edgewood. It was impossible to look at her without realizing that her physical sight was perfect. What mysterious species of blindness is it that descends, now and then, upon human creatures, and renders them ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... very good reader, and, what with blindness and spectacles, and poor light, would sometimes lose his place. But it never troubled him, for he always knew the sense of what was coming, and being no idolater of the letter, used the word that first suggested itself, and so recovered his place without pausing. It reminded his sons and daughters ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... in the west, the silence would have been complete. But, in truth, I hate silence as well as darkness, and have no more sympathy with the followers of Pythagoras than I have with the triumph of the blind Roman who silenced the covey of pretty women, in the heat of their condolences for his blindness, by reminding them that they forgot he could feel in the dark. I thought more of the fire inside, and the bottle of Burgundy, on which I had made as ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... than lead a life of pleasure." "May I die," says the Epicurean, "rather than make a fool of myself." The Idealist is to them, if not {227} a hypocrite, at least a visionary,—if not a Tartuffe, at least a Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Yet even for poor Don Quixote, with all his blindness and his follies, the world retains a sneaking admiration. It can spare a few or a good many of its worldly-wisdoms, rather than lose altogether its enthusiasms and its dreams. And the one thing which saves Epicureanism ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... that he had been driving a car of the conventional shape with a tonneau body, we paid no further attention to the information, concluding that he was a sportsman, anxious like ourselves for a brush with the Pirate. Our blindness was to cost us dear before ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... heart might be imbued With kindling drops of loving kindness, And knowledge pour, From shore to shore, Light on the eyes of mental blindness. ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... their people with the same faith, and to detach them from the mythical beliefs, the idolatrous practices which they had adopted from those among whom they lived, and to which they clung with the tenacity of spiritual blindness and long habit. The later Hebrews themselves kept a clear remembrance of their ancestors having been heathen polytheists, and their own historians, writing more than a thousand years after Abraham's times, distinctly state the fact. In a long exhortation to the assembled tribes of Israel, which ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... compositions Homer displays great gratitude towards Mentor of Ithaca, in the Odyssey, whose name he has inserted in his poem as the companion of Ulysses,(13) in return for the care taken of him when afflicted with blindness. He also testifies his gratitude to Phemius, who had given him ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... far from society being organized in a defence of its ideal so jealous and implacable that the least step from the straight path means exposure and ruin, it is almost impossible by any extravagance of misconduct to provoke society to relax its steady pretence of blindness, unless you do one or both of two fatal things. One is to get into the newspapers; and the other is to confess. If you confess misconduct to respectable men or women, they must either disown you or become virtually your accomplices: that is why they ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... secrets of our most intimate friends, far less our own, instead of pouring them into the bosom of the [Greek: bathukolpos akoitis], which is capacious enough to hold them all, were they tenfold more numerous and weighty? Such reticence is rife with awful peril. In our folly and blindness, we fancy ourselves secure, while the ground is mined under our guilty feet, and the explosion is even now preparing, from which only our disjecta membra will emerge. Of course, some cold-hearted caviler will begin to quote instances of carefully-planned ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... in together. To Betty, one of the pleasantest parts of her visit was this meeting with the "Cousin Carl," who had added such vistas of delight to her life by taking her to Europe the year she was threatened with blindness. His hair was grayer now than then, and the years had added a few lines to his kind face, but he was not nearly so grave. He smiled oftener, and she noticed with satisfaction his evident pride in Eugenia since she had blossomed into such a happy, enthusiastic ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the great majority life is other and sterner. As Milton lamenting his blindness, the stranger student mourns wisdom and life "at one entrance quite shut out." The influence of women, sweeter than that of the Pleiades, is absent, save in the shape of seamy-faced grim-mouthed landladies, ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... never before. The movement is irresistible; it brings with it exactness, exhaustive knowledge, a narrow but complete self-satisfaction, with such accompanying faults as pedantry, triviality, and the kind of partial blindness which belong to intellectual myopia. The specialist is idealized almost into sublimity in Browning's "Burial of the Grammarian." We never need fear that he will undervalue himself. To be the supreme authority on anything ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Moses or David or Isaiah spake of God. But he attends no church, belongs to no communion, and has no form of worship in his family; notable circumstances which we may refer, in part at least, to his blindness, but significant of more than that. His religion was of the spirit, and did not take kindly to any form. Though the most Puritan of the Puritan, he had never stopped long in the ranks of any Puritan party, or given satisfaction to Puritan ecclesiastics and theologians. In his youth ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... the lap,'" he quoted. "I was to have been a soldier, but just at that moment my sight failed. I was threatened with blindness. Fortunately it passed off with time, and I now see better than I did at twenty. But my career as a soldier was ended. I had no taste for politics—the world is not sufficiently honest. It seems to me a constant struggling for party ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... understanding had come to her she did not stay to question. The tragic force of it overwhelmed all reasoning. She knew beyond all doubting that she had made the most ghastly mistake of her life. She had done it in blindness, but the veil had been rent away; and, horror-struck, she now beheld the accursed quicksand ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... to a being, who makes us only useless presents, which he does not intend us to use? What confidence can we put in a God, who, according to our divines themselves, is malicious enough to harden the heart, to strike with blindness, to lay snares for us, to lead us into temptation? In fine, what confidence can we put in the ministers of this God, who, to guide us more conveniently, commands us ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... by one of the superior law courts of the British metropolis, directed to Bucharest in the Kingdom of Egypt, as I have known to happen.' The reader may perhaps attribute such mistakes as these to our insular ignorance of geography, or to the fact that the proverbial blindness of justice prevented her from consulting the map before issuing her process; but the fact remains, that notwithstanding the occurrence of a great war subsequent to the date above specified, which completely changed the map of Europe, wherein Roumania took a very ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... maledictions rung out, the demand for the men grew louder and louder, and at this perilous moment the angels "put forth their hand and pulled Lot into the house to them, and shut to the door," and "They smote the men that were at the door of the house with blindness, both small and great: so that they wearied ...
— Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley
... sit down calmly and discuss the matter. Perhaps you are now ready to tell me why you have lied to me; why you have concealed your possession of a secret map and other information; why you have deliberately delayed my march; and, above all, why you have refused to aid my blindness and have ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... who is affected with blindness, they fed even with unclean things, till his eyes got the power of vision. Him who is bitten by a mad dog, they fed not with the caul of his liver. But R. Mathia Ben Charash said, "it is allowed"; and again ...
— Hebrew Literature
... now wondered at my long blindness. No one else could have written those letters—no one but him. I read them over one by one when I reached home and, now that I possessed the key, he revealed himself in every line, expression, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... I plunged into her room. The moment I drew the blanket-thickness from my eyes I knew blindness and a modicum of what Bert Rhine must have suffered. Oh, the intolerable bite of the sulphur in my lungs, nostrils, eyes, and brain! No light burned in the room. I could only strangle and stumble for'ard to Margaret's ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... day; Punish'd belike, or haply rewarded, As we go wrong or go right on the way; Wisdom and Mercy, twin angels of kindness, Take by both hands the child lost in the night, Leading him safely, in spite of his blindness, Guiding him well through the ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Mesmer persisted that she was cured. Like the French philosopher, he would not allow facts to interfere with his theory.[71] He declared that there was a conspiracy against him; and that Mademoiselle Paradis, at the instigation of her family, feigned blindness in order to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... through the first two quatrains, reaching its climax at or near the end of the eighth line, and then subsides through the two tercets which make up the remaining six lines. If the sentiment expressed does not adjust itself to this ebb and flow, it is not suitable for a sonnet. Milton's sonnet on his blindness is one of the best. Notice the emotional transition in the middle of the eighth line. This sonnet will also illustrate the ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... hear me!" broke like a torrent from her trembling lips. "It is time she heard, and others also! I have been blind, I say, long enough. But for papa, I might have gone on in my blindness to the end." ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... principal implements and weapons, either for war or sorcery; many of the latter the women and children are never allowed to see, such as pieces of rock-crystal, by which the sorcerer can produce rain, cause blindness, or impart to the waters the power of destroying life, etc.; sacred daggers for causing the death of their enemies by enchantment; the moor-y-um-karr or flat oval piece of wood which is whirled round the camp at nights, and many others of a ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... walls of her hiding-place. Her face, too, was streaked with grime, and at the best she could never have been handsome, for she had the exact physical characteristics which Holmes had divined, with, in addition, a long and obstinate chin. What with her natural blindness, and what with the change from dark to light, she stood as one dazed, blinking about her to see where and who we were. And yet, in spite of all these disadvantages, there was a certain nobility in the woman's bearing—a gallantry in the defiant ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... contemporary critic of Shakspere and of Moliere, inexplicable as it may appear nowadays, has its parallel in the blindness of the contemporary critic in regard to 'Don Quixote' and 'Gil Blas,' 'Robinson Crusoe' and the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' He had not the insight to see in these comparatively commonplace narratives the ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... that Kate Madigan was putting on altogether too many airs as she pulled on her gloves; there was an inexcusable self-consciousness about her manner toward the Avalanche; and as for old Westlake himself, he was clearly taking advantage of Split's blindness and casting such glances at that giddy Kate as she, Sissy, would certainly not have tolerated—if she had been invited to go to the circus. If ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... look back through these leaves, but I know I wrote somewhere that I felt myself getting nearer and nearer to some end that was still hidden from me. The end is hidden no longer. The cloud is off my mind, the blindness has gone from my eyes. I see it! I ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... whether or not the "blackdeath" of child-bed is to be scattered broadcast by the agency of the mother's friend and adviser. Let the men who mould opinions look to it; if there is any voluntary blindness, any interested oversight, any culpable negligence, even, in such a matter, and the facts shall reach the public ear; the pestilence-carrier of the lying-in chamber must look to God for pardon, for man ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... only when Generals Fremont, Hunter and others declared the slaves free, that they might cripple the rebel armies and add them to our Union forces, that the cry of no law, no power was raised. Thus it is clear that the blindness and inability to find rightful authority, civil or military, first to emancipate, then to arm, and now to enfranchise the negroes, have the one source. Slavery perpetrated the "sum of all villainies" on the negroes, and then, to justify its wickedness, filled the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... scientific historians, was born within him as he pursued his studies in Rembrandt lore. Also he was conscious of sorrow, anger, and pride: sorrow for the artist of genius who goes down to his grave neglected, unwept, unhonoured, and unsung: anger at the stupidity and blindness of his contemporaries: pride at the unselfish industry and ceaseless activity of the men who, born years after, raise the ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... province which bear fruits that are sweet, but most dangerous, for when eaten they produce worms. Most of all is the shade of this tree noxious, for whoever sleeps for any length of time beneath its branches, wakens with a swollen head, and almost blind, though this blindness abates within a few days. The port of Carthagena lies four hundred and fifty-six miles from the port of Hispaniola called Beata, where preparations are generally made for voyages of discovery. Immediately on landing, Hojeda attacked the scattered ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... has been more warmly debated by medical men. It has been said that in such marriages the woman is more apt to be sterile; that if she have children, they are peculiarly liable to be born with some defect of body or mind,—deafness, blindness, idiocy, or lameness; that they die early; and that they are subject, beyond others, to fatal hereditary diseases, as cancer, ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... Invention, quick Utterance, and unprovoked Malice. This good Body is of a lasting Constitution, though extremely decayed in her Eyes, and decrepid in her Feet. The two Circumstances of being always at Home from her Lameness, and very attentive from her Blindness, make her Lodgings the Receptacle of all that passes in Town, Good or Bad; but for the latter, she seems to have the better Memory. There is another Thing to be noted of her, which is, That as it is usual with old People, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... there is a rush of human beings and a wild cry of "stop thief," and the throng sweeps rapidly down the side-walk overturning street stands, and knocking the unwary passer-by off his feet, in its mad chase after some unseen thief. Beggars line the side-walk, many of them professing the most hopeless blindness, but with eyes keen enough to tell the difference between the coins tossed into their hats. The "Bowery Bands," as the little street musicians are called, are out in force, and you can hear their discordant strains every ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... wretch who only wishes to be wedded to her grave.—If my brother brings you hither, I cannot help it—and if your coming prevents bloody and unnatural violence, it is so far well.—But by my consent you come not; and, were the choice mine, I would rather be struck with life-long blindness, than that my eyes should again open on your person—rather that my ears were stuffed with the earth of the grave, than that they should again ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... easily be obtained from the Italian sonnet, as hundreds of examples prove,—Milton's On his Blindness is a striking case, with no full stop until the end of the fourteenth line,—but even better for this object is the rime scheme invented by Spenser and used in a hundred and twenty-one sonnets: ababbcbccdcdee. The Spenserian sonnet, however, ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... before my eyes, and then suddenly the very blackness of darkness would appall me by its dense gloom. All at once, while gazing at a frightful creation of my distempered mind, I seemed struck with sudden blindness. I knew a candle was burning in the room but I could not see it, all was so pitchy dark. I lost the sense of feeling, too, for I endeavored to grasp my arm in one hand, but consciousness was gone. I put my hand to my side, my head, but felt nothing, and still ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... evidence of Pliny, who regarded it as a genuine Egyptian relic, and tells us that it was cut from the quarry of Syene, and dedicated to the sun by the son of Sesores, in obedience to an oracle, after his recovery from blindness. It is generally believed that it first stood before one of the temples of Heliopolis, was then removed to Alexandria, and finally transported to Rome by Caligula. This emperor constructed a special vessel ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... customary festivities. The family party could keep counsel, and preserve a discreet blindness when the ring dropped from the bride's fingers, and the wine stood untasted before her, while Lady Carnegie did the honours as if lonely age and narrow circumstances ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... accepted "sound" bases for prosperous business. I can hardly do better than to ask the reader to ponder a few extracts from that work, showing the established, and amazing theories, for then I have only to say that in the period of humanity's manhood the moral blindness of such "principles," their space-binding spirit of calculating selfishness and greed, will be regarded with utter loathing as slavery is regarded to-day. Behold ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... the old days when he and Phil were together, and of the plans they had sometimes made for keeping if possible together even after they went out into the world to work. He had the impatience of one who has recently put a doctrine by for the blindness, as it seemed to him, which kept Phil still in the power of the old superstition; but with his friend's white face, marked with mental suffering, there to soften him, he dwelt little on this, and much on his affection ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... heart quailed. Had he lost his way? He looked at the sun. He was not sure. He consulted his compass, but it quivered hesitatingly. For awhile that wild bewilderment which seizes upon the minds of the strongest, when lost, mastered him, in spite of his struggles against it. He moved in a maze of half-blindness, half-delirium. He was lost in it, swayed by it. He began to wander about; and there grew upon his senses strange delights and reeling agonies. He heard church bells, he caught at butterflies, he tumbled in new-mown ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... epic poem his life work, and had noted many historical subjects. By 1641 he had decided on a Biblical subject. He had probably conceived Paradise Lost at the age of thirty-two, although the poem was not composed until he was over fifty. It was written after his blindness and dictated in small portions to various persons, the work being collected and revised by Milton and Aubrey Phillips. It was completed, according to the authority of Phillips, in 1663, but on account of the Plague and the Great Fire, it was ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... sections in the Constitution in regard to counting the votes, and this request, and this reading, terminated his knowledge on earth. In this desire of my father to do what he could, he pressed me to accompany him on account of his blindness. Since the Convention honored me with the appointment of Secretary, he required of me a promise that I would not leave the position. When I read the section of the Constitution to him, he required me then to leave him for the Convention. Whatever my ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... decay, absolute non-existence, can be Pure and Chaste. Life is impurity, fact is impure. Everything has traces of alien matter; our very health is dependent on parasitic bacteria; the purest blood in the world has a tainted ancestor, and not a saint but has evil thoughts. It was blindness to that which set men stoning the woman taken in adultery. They forgot what they were made of. This stupidity, this unreasonable idealism of the common mind, fills life to-day with cruelties and exclusions, with ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... shot through Heidi's breast. She had to think of the poor grandmother. Her blindness was always a great sorrow to the child, and she had been struck with it ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri
... these days who would deny themselves for His sake, or sacrifice a personal passion for the purer honouring of His name. Inasmuch as the pride of great learning breeds arrogance, so the more the wonder of God's work is displayed to us, the more are we dazzled and confounded; and so in our blindness we turn from the worship of the Creator to that of His creation, forgetting that all the visible universe is but the outcome or expression of the hidden Divine Intelligence behind it. What of the marvels of the age!—the results of science!—the strange psychic prescience and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... where they make a sad mistake. I have learned through long years that Ezra of old was right when he told the people to turn from weeping and to 'drink the sweet.' Before this blindness came upon me I was something like Saul of Tarsus, always kicking against the pricks, or in other words, the dictates of conscience! 'Before I was afflicted, I went astray,' as the psalmist sang. But I ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... That thou wast anguished, and there fell a rain From thy blest eyelids, and in grief and pain Thou partedst from them yet one night and morn To find them wholesome food and nourishment Instead of what their blindness took for such, Laying thyself a seed in earthen rent From which, outspringing to the willing touch, Riseth for all thy children harvest great, For which they will all learn ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... given away if she had remained with him another instant. Danglar's wife! It was dark here in the alley-way, and she did not know where it led to. But did it matter? And she stumbled as she went along. But it was not the physical inability to see that made her stumble—it was a brain-blindness that fogged her soul itself. His wife! Gypsy Nan was ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... after her, directed his violence upon poor Bessy Mole, though all this time she had been creeping on, shaking, trembling, and crying, under the pelting of the storm; but, unluckily, in her nervousness and blindness from tears, she pulled up a young turnip, and the farmer fell on her and rated her hotly for not being worth half her wage, and doing him more harm than good with her carelessness. She had not a word to say for herself, and went on shivering ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... practices that have grown up during the decline of these old ones, the most important is the systematic culture of the powers of observation. After long ages of blindness, men are at last seeing that the spontaneous activity of the observing faculties in children has a meaning and a use. What was once thought mere purposeless action, or play, or mischief, as the case might be, is now recognised as ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... Concerning his blindness the headman said that it was more profitable for him to hear than to see, for by sight "energy might be diverted." He had recited in every prefecture his personal experience of rural reform. He asserted that while conditions varied in every prefecture, ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... complete. There was one influence she feared for the child and still secretly combated; that was my lord's; and half unconsciously, half in a wilful blindness, she continued to undermine her husband with his son. As long as Archie remained silent, she did so ruthlessly, with a single eye to heaven and the child's salvation; but the day came when Archie spoke. It was 1801, and Archie was ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... trespassing in the New World. Finally England was plunged into war with France in order to help Philip, and lost Calais for its pains. Mary's reign showed that in a sovereign good intentions and upright conversation exaggerate rather than redeem the evil effects of bigotry and blindness. She had, however, made it impossible for any successor to perpetuate in England the Roman jurisdiction and ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... This is the reading sanctioned by the Commentator, viz. putro' nanya'sritadravyah, signifying, that, on failure of those before designated, a son who would be otherwise incapable, by reason of blindness, &c. is to be deemed capable. Another reading may be, as suggested by the Commentator, putro nu'aya'sritadraoyah, "not the son whose paternal estate another holds," which is adopted by Colebrooke, and by his author, Jagannat'ha, (Dig. B. 1, ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... See Bees. Apicius, recipe for ragout of dormice by, Appian, quoted Appius Claudius Pulcher Apples, storing Apulian breed of horses Aquinas, Thomas Arbusta, the Italian Arista, etymology of word Aristotle, on blindness of puppies cited on goats' breathing through their ears on exercising of pregnant mares on breeding of mares story related by Arpent, derivation of Asparagus planting, Asses, use of, as compared with other draught animals manure of certain choice breeds of buying, breeding, care of, ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... the essence of thunder, since it breaketh not upon hearing of the fall of my sons. Thinking of their ages, O Sanjaya, and of their sports in childhood, and learning today that all of them have perished, my heart seems to break into pieces. Although in consequence of my blindness I never saw their forms, still I cherished a great love for them in consequence of the affection one feels for his children. Hearing that they had passed out of childhood and entered the period of youth and then of early manhood, I became exceedingly glad, O sinless one. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... approaching marriage. According to tradition, one learns that cats were occasionally made use of in medicine; to cure peasants of skin diseases, French sorcerers sprinkling the afflicted parts with three drops of blood drawn from the vein under a cat's tail; whilst blindness was treated by blowing into the patient's eyes, three times a day, the dust made from ashes of the head of a black cat that had been ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... applies what I said (too rudely) about "blindness of preconceived opinions" to those who believe in creation, whereas I exclusively apply the remark to those who give up multitudes of species as true species, but believe ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... the equilibrium of power—an equilibrium not established without five hearty civil wars and perhaps a hundred campaigns—all these so separated the two worlds of thought as to leave France excusable for her blindness towards the destinies and nature of England, and England excusable for her continued emptiness of knowledge upon the energy and genius of France: though these were increasing daily, immensely, ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... into a word." But the moral thought itself in Tacitus mostly belongs less to the practical wisdom of life, than to sombre poetic indignation, like that of Dante, against the perversities of men and the blindness of fortune. ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... has made this possible. If ever you meet him on some embassy you will then for the first time understand how unskilled an artist you have chosen for this commission; and I am downright afraid of your accusing me of jealousy or blindness, that out of so many excellences so few have been perceived by my poor sight or recorded ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... not be with the amazing surprise at these revelations a strange and unaccountable gladness? But, no less, at the thought of the soul's past blindness and persistence in ill-doing, will there not be an exquisite pain? And the soul's pain can be even more oppressive than the pain of the body. "Pain," it may be asked, "in the Presence of Christ?" Yes, indeed! pain, because in the Presence of Christ; pain in ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... profanely uttered. J. H. was a notorious swearer. He had a singular habit of calling on God to curse his eyes. After some years, this awful imprecation was verified. He was afflicted with a disease in his eyes, which terminated in total blindness. This so affected his general system, that he gradually sunk under it, and went to give up his account. A number of similar cases, some of them still more awful, you will find in the tract entitled, ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... wi' heartless slighten, Mid become a maiden's blighten, He mid ceaerlessly vorseaeke her, But must answer to her Meaeker; He mid slight, wi' selfish blindness, All her deeds o' loven-kindness, God wull waigh em wi' the slighten That mid be her love's requiten; He do look on each deceiver, He do know What weight o' woe Do breaek ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... my blindness, that the great things were the easiest to do, but now I see that drudgery is an inseparable part of everything worth while, and the more worth while it is, the more drudgery ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... mathematicians and monks and cardinals, caricatured everywhere, yet waiting and watching with his telescope to see the coming up of stellar reenforcements, when the stars in their courses would fight for the Copernican system; then sitting down in complete blindness and deafness to wait for the coming on of the generations who would build his monument and bow at his grave. The reformer, execrated by his contemporaries, fastened in a pillory, the slow fires of public contempt burning under him, ground under the cylinders of the printing-press, ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... impatiently. "You might gratify yourself a little for once in your life. Besides," he added, with true brotherly blindness, "it's you Ranald wants. At least he ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... I write of I had no conception of this, and I am sure that my blindness to so plain a fact kept me even from seeking and knowing the highest beauty in the things I worshipped. I believe that if I had been sensible of it I should hays read much more of such humane Italian poets and novelists as ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... this cruel deed, distracted, sued she for vengeance, Nodded the Ruler of Gods Celestial, matchless of All-might, When at the gest earth-plain and horrid spaces of ocean 205 Trembled, and every sphere rockt stars and planets resplendent. Meanwhile Theseus himself, obscured in blindness of darkness As to his mind, dismiss'd from breast oblivious all things Erewhile enjoined and held hereto in memory constant, Nor for his saddened sire the gladness-signals uphoisting 210 Heralded safe return within sight of the Erechthean ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... the blindness of Blanche to the advantage of being married, and the blindness of humanity to the advantage of being in existence, though sufficiently perceptible no doubt to venerable Philosophy ripening in the sun, was absolutely invisible to Arnold. He deliberately dropped the vast question ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... passed, Acte, when thou didst recline near Caesar's side at banquets, and they say that blindness is threatening thee; how ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... said Napoleon smilingly to the Bavarians, Wurtembergers, etc., by whom he was surrounded, "I am not come among you as the emperor of France, but as the protector of your country and of the German confederation. No Frenchman is among you; you alone shall beat the Austrians."[6] The extent of the blindness of the Rhenish confederation[7] is visible in their proclamations. The king of Saxony even called Heaven to his aid, and said to his soldiers, "Draw your swords against Austria with full trust in the aid ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... side of the village, and at some distance, I could plainly see in the twilight two huge black monsters stalking, heavily and solemnly, directly toward us. They were buffalo bulls. The wind blew from them to the village, and such was their blindness and stupidity that they were advancing upon the enemy without the least consciousness of his presence. Raymond told me that two men had hidden themselves with guns in a ravine about twenty yards in front of us. The two bulls walked slowly on, heavily swinging from side to side in their peculiar ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... blamed for her blindness; but fortune is not so blind as men are. Those who look into practical life will find that fortune is usually on the side of the industrious, as the winds and waves are on the side of the best navigators. In the pursuit of even the highest branches of ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... March 27, was a brilliant dazzling day of arctic sunshine, the sky a glittering blue, and the ice a glittering white, which, but for the smoked goggles worn by every member of the party, would certainly have given some of us an attack of snow blindness. From the time when the reappearing sun of the arctic spring got well above the horizon, these goggles ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... years. I never gave up the expectation of marrying again till I lost my eyesight; and even after that, at sixty-five, I had an offer of marriage; but I said to my gallant old beau, 'I will not take a man I cannot compliment by seeing him and admiring him every day. I love you, but my blindness would give you too much pain.' In our quiet towns, all the life worth living is domestic joy. Do not lose it, Ellenora; do not put it ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... spent in helping others, by correspondence and personal contact, to submit to the sorrows God had cast upon them. She believed, with Milton, that it is miserable enough to be blind, but still more miserable not to be able to bear blindness. Her own earlier life had been darkened by griefs, and she knew from a deep experience what it was to enter the cloud and stand waiting and hoping in the shadows. In her instructive and delightful society I spent many an hour twenty years ago in the houses of Procter and Rogers and ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... died in 1562, having brought his work down only to the year 1533. The original MS. is in the Royal Library at Stockholm. Svart writes in a forcible and at the same time easy style. Nor does he lack good sense; though the work is marred throughout by a bitterness toward popery and a total blindness to the errors ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... One cause of our blindness to the point appears to be this: We have from childhood been taught that 'God is a Spirit.' We, now, can only conceive of an eternal being as a 'spirit.' We know that legions of savage gods are now regarded as spirits. ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang |
