"Contemplate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and gain their cordial consent to the renovation of the state upon a more equitable basis. He must be a man of large capacity, great attainments, thorough sincerity, earnest devotion, generous and self-sacrificing patriotism. He must have ability to conceive a high ideal, steadily contemplate it, and nevertheless consider the materials on which and the conditions under which he must do his work, maintain the sober judgment which discriminates between the ideal and the practicable, and exercise the rigid self-control which calmly renounces the best conceivable ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... he been without strong passions she would have loved him for none of these things. For of such is love between man and woman when they are of the highest types that Nature has produced. Betty hated the thought of sin as she hated vulgarity, and did not contemplate it for a moment, but if she had roused but the calm affection of this man she would have been as miserable as for the hour, at ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a clearer case of "stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in." I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which every where surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... and of characters with whom they are not connected, make a great impression upon them. The horror which is shown to falsehood, the shame which overwhelms the culprit, they have then leisure to contemplate; they see the effects of the storm at a distance; they dread to be exposed to its violence, and they will prepare for their own security. When any such strong impression has been made upon the mind, we should seize that moment to connect new principles with new habits ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... It was a pleasant morning, the sun was rising over the notched horizon of the tumbling ocean, the breeze was blowing, the surf on the bar was frothing and roaring cheerily—and it was his birthday. The morning, the sunrise, the surf and all the rest were pleasant to contemplate—his age was not. So he decided not to contemplate it. Instead he went out and hoisted at the top of the short pole on the edge of the bluff the flag he had set there on the day when the United States declared war against ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... all His works; I feel Him in myself; I see Him all around me; but as soon as I contemplate His nature, as soon as I try to find out where He is, what He is, what is His substance, He eludes my gaze; my imagination is overwhelmed. I do not therefore reason about Him, for it is more injurious ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... apparently as obnoxious to her as was Falstaff, for she would not even consent to meet Dickens when she was being lionized in London society—a degree of abstemiousness on her part which it is disheartening to contemplate. It does not seem too much to say that every shortcoming in Charlotte Bronte's admirable work, every limitation in her splendid genius, arose primarily from her want of humor. Her severities of judgment—and who more severe than she?—were due to the same ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... that, fully to understand the awful significance of this deadly occurrence. To draw blood from a god, and, above all, to let that blood fall upon the dust of the ground, is the very worst luck—too awful for the human mind to contemplate. ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... cage, To sigh or sing her lonely state, A show for youth or doating age, With idiot eyes to contemplate. ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... mother of oratory, of public morality, of public religion, and the drama. The privilege we thus possess, we are indeed too apt to abuse; but man is scarcely ever so magnificent and so awful, as when hundreds of human heads are assembled together, hundreds of faces lifted up to contemplate one object, and hundreds of voices uttered in the ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... misapplied horror, that there is nothing a woman is less modest about than the state of pregnancy, while Weininger exclaims: "Never yet has a pregnant woman given expression in any form—poem, memoirs, or gynaecological monograph—to her sensations or feelings."[208] Yet when we contemplate the mystery of pregnancy and all that it involves, how trivial all such considerations become! We are here lifted into a region where our highest intelligence can only lead us to adoration, for we are gazing at a process in which the operations of Nature become one with ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the first Place, one Garden will not hold all Sorts of Plants; and in the second, 'tis a double Pleasure, to see a painted Flower vie with the Life; and in one we contemplate the Artifice of Nature, in the other the Skill of the Painter; and in both, the Goodness of God, who gives all Things for our Use, in every Thing equally admirable and amiable: And in the last Place, a Garden is not always green; nor the ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... and noble young man! I am proud to be his mother, and I should admire him if I were not so. I rejoice as much in the nobleness of his character, as I grieve at being unable to render his life more happy. He was born for better things. He is worthy of them. We contemplate passing a couple of months at Geneva. There he will at least hear the French language spoken. That will be an agreeable change for him. The mother-tongue, is it not ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... so much plate and so many jewels in the house, for the fact was sure to be known where it was least desirable it should: she always said she would think about it. At times she would for a moment contemplate sending her valuables to the bank; but her next thought—by no means an unwise one—would always be, "Of what use will they be at the bank? I might as well not have them at all! Better sell them and do some good with the money!—No; I must ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... even admitting this, we still see the primary difficulty remaining, viz. what reason is there for imagining that the gift in any shape, and more especially when slaughtered, will be accepted? We are driven then to contemplate the revelation of the divine will as the only adequate explanation; and this, it is evident, we must consider as having been handed down by a corrupt process of tradition, among the various nations of the earth. It would be easy to urge arguments in behalf of this opinion. But already ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... look at Godfrey de Bouillon. The fact that he owed homage to any suzerain, the fact that he exacted service from such and such vassals, are questions which concern feudal rights, and have nothing to do with chivalry. But if I contemplate him in battle beneath the walls of Jerusalem; if I am a spectator of his entry into the Holy City; if I see him ardent, brave, powerful and pure, valiant and gentle, humble and proud, refusing to wear the golden crown in the Holy City where Jesus wore the crown of thorns, I am not then ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... Socialist State can exist, no better State can exist, than the one we have now with all its squalor and cruelty. Every change in human institutions must happen concurrently with a change of ideas. Upon this plastic, uncertain, teachable thing Human Nature, within us and without, we have, if we really contemplate Socialism as our achievement, to impose guiding ideas and guiding habits, we have to co-ordinate all the Good Will that is active or latent in our world in one constructive plan. To-day the spirit of humanity is lost to itself, ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... certain trains or habits of thought, those affections may be regarded as virtually subject to the will, and, if right, as duties. It is in this sense that gratitude and love to God are duties. We cannot contemplate the tokens of his love in the outward universe, the unnumbered objects which have no other possible use than to be enjoyed, the benignity of his perpetual providence, the endowments and capacities of our own being, the immortality of our natural aspiration and ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... at the height of his fame as the foremost of living writers, was content to contemplate the past, there was a student in the Paris seminary who taught men to fix hope and endeavour on the future, and led the world at twenty-three. Turgot, when he proclaimed that upward growth and progress is the law of human life, ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... to be prepared for all possibilities, let us now contemplate another. Let us suppose the worst possible issue of this war—the one apparently desired by those English writers whose moral feeling is so philosophically indifferent between the apostles of slavery and its enemies. Suppose that the North should stoop to recognize ...
— The Contest in America • John Stuart Mill
... his numerous debts. For he owed much money. He owed for food in the settlement store; he owed for clothing he had bought in town; and he owed innumerable gambling debts—big sums, sums mounting to heights he dared not contemplate. And all he had to his name was the three dollars lying so peacefully before him, with the speculative Franke hovering over them like a fat buzzard over a dead coyote. What to do! He could not decide. ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... of Life, and disease is the absence of health, so to enter into the Spirit of Life we require to contemplate it, where it is to be found, and not where it is not- -we are met with the old question, "Why seek ye the living among the dead?" This is why we start our studies by considering the cosmic creation, for it is there that we find the Life Spirit working through untold ages, not merely ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... past daylight, when the hearty voice of the convict roused us from a deep sleep, where dreams of home and comforts of civilization were much pleasanter things to contemplate, than the half-naked bodies of ten natives, who were lying upon the ground, circling the cold ashes, where the night before a fire blazed. They lay like black snakes gorged with carrion—lifeless and torpid, and nothing ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... free—the history of men who have acquired and are exercising their freedom—the history of those great movements in the world, by which liberty has been established and perpetuated, forms a subject which we cannot contemplate too closely. This is the real history of man, of the human family, of ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... my prayer began to pass from the natural to the supernatural, I strove to obliterate from my soul every physical obstacle. To lift my soul up, to contemplate, I dared not; aware of my imperfection it seemed over bold. Nevertheless I knew the presence of God to be about me, and I tried to gather myself in him. And nothing could then induce me to return to the ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... from us at midnight. Suppose an analogous case existed on the Earth; suppose, for instance, that neither in Europe, Asia or North America was the Moon ever visible—that, in fact, it was to be seen only at our antipodes. With what astonishment should we contemplate her for the first time on our arrival in ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... time! Why this deep grief when necessity compels?—can our love exist without sacrifices, and by refraining from desiring all things? Can you alter the fact that you are not wholly mine, nor I wholly yours? Ah! contemplate the beauties of Nature, and reconcile your spirit to the inevitable. Love demands all, and has a right to do so, and thus it is I feel towards you and you towards me; but you do not sufficiently remember that I must live both for you and for myself. ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... moral virtues of temperance and fortitude. It may direct the understanding, and ultimately the members of the body, in order to the production of some practical result in the external world, as a bridge. Lastly, it may direct the understanding to speculate and think, contemplate and consider, for mere contemplation's sake. Happiness must take one or ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... least not less than what they share. Embodying in itself all the others, in some aspects of its character it presents these united in a singular and beauteous whole. By reason of the light broken by error falling upon it, many who contemplate its features apprehend not the individuality it displays, but, reflecting on each part separately, connect them so as not to be impressed by the object presented in the union of all. Like the distinct objects ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... reports which you communicated to me yesterday afternoon, I can find no foundation for the apprehension that the students of Washington college contemplate any attack upon the man confined in jail for shooting Mr. —- Friday night. On the contrary, I have been assured by members of the faculty and individual students that they have heard no suggestion of the kind, and they believe that ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... the right understanding of the book, but for us the chief interest lies elsewhere. We do not come to Marcus Aurelius for a treatise on Stoicism. He is no head of a school to lay down a body of doctrine for students; he does not even contemplate that others should read what he writes. His philosophy is not an eager intellectual inquiry, but more what we should call religious feeling. The uncompromising stiffness of Zeno or Chrysippus is softened and transformed by passing through a nature reverent and tolerant, gentle and ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... turned from that awful image of an angry and avenging God to contemplate Divine compassion in the Redeemer of mankind—godlike power joined with human love. He preached of Christ the Saviour with a fulness and a force which were new to Angela. He held up that commanding, that touching image, unobscured by any other ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... the cat by the neck and tossed her out in the back shed into an old oyster box full of sawdust, with a parting injunction that if she was going to have fits she better go out where there was plenty of fresh air. "Death is always a sad thing to contemplate. One day we are full of health, and joy, and cold victuals, and the next we are screwed down in a box, a few words are said over our remains, a few tears are shed, and there is a race to see who shall get back from the cemetery ...
— The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy - Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, No. 2 - 1883 • George W. Peck
... look at the prospect of nature before his eyes, but to contemplate the prospect of the future in his imagination, that he sat there, and smoked ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... multitude of people jostling against each other without grace or order, is fascinated by one couple of equal beauty, darting forward, like twin stars, in free and unimpeded space. As if in the pride of defiance, the cavalier accentuates his steps, quits his partner for a moment, as if to contemplate her with renewed delight, rejoins her with passionate eagerness, or whirls himself rapidly round, as though overcome with the sudden joy and yielding to the delicious giddiness of rapture. Sometimes, two couples start at ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... his cheeks and fixing us with his little eyes with an expression of dignity that would have pleased me vastly if I had been free to enjoy it. But the reflection that Laval's presence, which would cut the knot of our difficulties, would also place me at the mercy of his wit, did not enable me to contemplate it with entire indifference. ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... more and more impressed with the moral qualities of vegetables, and contemplate forming a science which shall rank with comparative anatomy and comparative philology,—the science of comparative vegetable morality. We live in an age of protoplasm. And, if life-matter is essentially the same in all forms ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... he didn't for an instant contemplate abandoning either his rigid rule of solitude or his chosen career without a fight; but he preferred not ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... sure that he would make a good musician. At this point, however, the organist interposed with the remark that he understood that the boy's father had refused to let him follow up his musical studies. 'What!' cried the Duke in astonishment, 'is it possible that he can contemplate anything so foolish and unjust as to stifle the genius of his own son! I cannot believe it. Who is the father? Where does he live?' On being told that the surgeon was staying in the palace, the Duke ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... "you have always bewildered me, and when I contemplate this new caprice I am beyond the phenomenon of bewilderment. But in one respect my mind retains its serene equipoise. Nothing short of an Act of God shall drag me from my bed at half-past four in ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... mitigating feature of the business was that the matter to be reported was only a concert. Both Mr. Clotworthy and Tarleton trembled when they thought of the calamity that would have befallen the paper if the forgotten report had been of a murder! They hardly dared contemplate such a devastating prospect. They invited John to think of another profession and wished him a very good morning. Tarleton quitted the room, leaving John alone with the editor, and as he went he showed such ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... Mr. Brown confined, to the lodge, and Mistress Jeanie in close attendance upon him there, the kirkyard was a lonely place for a sociable little dog; and a soft, spring day given over to brooding beside a beloved grave, was quite too heart-breaking a thing to contemplate. Just for cheerful occupation Bobby had another tussle with the collar. He pulled it so far under his thatch that no one could have guessed that he had a collar on at all, when he suddenly righted himself and scampered away ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... short laugh, and drew out a gold cigarette-case, in which, with plump jewelled fingers, he groped for a gold-tipped cigarette. Selecting one, he paused to contemplate it a moment before saying: "My dear Miss Lily, I'm sorry if there's been any little misapprehension between us-but you made me feel my suit was so hopeless that I had really ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... more serious things to cry over that one learns to be philosophical. I thought I might put some big, spreading branches in these old pots to cover the walls as much as possible, for we must have some rooms available in case of a shower. A wet day is too terrible a catastrophe to contemplate, so we won't even imagine it. Given sunshine and unlimited borrowing, we can struggle through. Think of it, my dears—I have invited over a hundred people, and ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the beautiful, your eager worship of the refinements of the senses, your ardent aspirations for a better state of things, your courageous contempt of many degrading and servile customs, to which woman is condemned; yes, now I understand the noble pride with which you contemplate the mob of vain, self-sufficient, ridiculous men, who look upon woman as a creature destined for their service, according to the laws made after their own not very handsome image. In the eyes of these hedge-tyrants, woman, a kind of inferior being to whom ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... convictions. She used words so exactly like some I have used myself that I must repeat them, 'that if there was anything in it, there was so much, it became scarcely possible to limit consequences, and the subject grew awful to contemplate.' ... ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... which might be made to the intuitive nature of the Idea. How is it, we may be asked, that artists, who are supposed, from their early discipline, to have overcome all conventional bias, and also to have acquired the more difficult power of analyzing their models, so as to contemplate them in their separate elements, have so often varied as to their ideas of Beauty? Whether artists have really the power thus ascribed to them, we shall not here inquire; it is no doubt, if possible, their business to acquire it. But, admitting it as true, we deny the position: they do not ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... Minnie found the bottle in the tire box, which contained, instead of a tire, two dozen sandwiches, eight cold frankfurters, some dill pickles and a ringkuchen, for they did not contemplate returning to Johnsonhurst until ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... also the first object seen from a distance when one is approaching Toledo. It is upon a bleak height. As you come out of the broad portals of the Alcazar (Al-casa-zar, the czar's house), you walk to the edge of the precipitous rock upon which it stands, and contemplate the view across the far-reaching plain, gloomy and desolate, while at the base of the rock rushes past the rapid Tagus. This whole valley, now so dead and silent, once teemed with a dense population, and ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... interest was too profound for any conventional expression. He was listening to the story of his future wife's youth. That there could be any passage in that history which would hinder him from claiming this woman as his wife was a possibility he did not for a moment contemplate. If there were shame involved in the story, as Madame Meynell's manner led him to suppose there must be, so much the worse was it for him, since the shame must be his, ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... actions. If I put myself in the place of the man who has robbed me, I find that I am possessed by an exceeding desire not to be fined or imprisoned; if in that of the man who has smitten me on one cheek, I contemplate with satisfaction the absence of any worse result than the turning of the other cheek for like treatment. Strictly observed, the "golden rule" involves the negation of law by the refusal to put it in motion against law-breakers; and, as regards ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... shades around. In a wide alcove was gathered a collection of portraits of distinguished men and women, statesmen, artists and literati of this country and of Europe, and each picture was accompanied by an autograph letter to the well-beloved Sebastian Early. It could be no small thing to contemplate the possession of this house of notabilities and of the man who had built it up around himself. This, Mr. Early meant, should be the artistic opening of his campaign. And Miss ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... partial eyes: and when he considers, how much men, who could judge of others with great exactness, have often failed of judging of themselves, he will be afraid of deciding too hastily in his own favour, or of allowing himself to contemplate with too much complacence, treasure that has not yet been brought to the test, nor passed the only trial that can ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... gone, a brief bright season of loss and gain, fine gowns, flirtation, lobster en mayonaise, champagne, sunshine, dust, glare, babble of many voices, successes, failures, triumphs, humiliations. A very pretty picture to contemplate from the outside, this little world in holiday clothes, framed in greenery! but just on the Brocken, where the nicest girl among the dancers had the unpleasant peculiarity of dropping a little red mouse out ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... led her to Terry and asked him what he thought about her plan. He said to us: 'The kind of prostitution you contemplate is no worse than the kind often called marriage. Selling your body for a lifetime is perhaps worse than selling it for an hour or for a day. But the immediate result of this kind of prostitution which you plan is very terrible practically. ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... reproducing before the eye of the reader the entire series of reliefs and drawings which belong to it. It is the infinite variety in the attitudes, even more than the truth and naturalness of any particular specimens, that impresses us as we contemplate the series. Lions, wild asses, dogs, deer, wild goats, horses, are represented in profusion: and we scarcely find a single form which is repeated. Some specimens have been already given, as the hunted stag and hind [PLATE XXVII.] and the startled wild ass [PLATE XXVI.] Others ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... inclined to ask whether this can be the same Arthur who, two months ago, had that freshness of feeling, that delicate honour which shrinks from wounding even a sentiment, and does not contemplate any more positive offence as possible for it?—who thought that his own self-respect was a higher tribunal than any external opinion? The same, I assure you, only under different conditions. Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... and idle word to the very children, and the old wives by their spinning-wheels. Then will be manifested some new attribute of divinity, of which as yet thou, nor I, nor any creature, may have an opportunity to contemplate. All this has lain in the purpose of God, in order to increase the happiness of His creatures; for all the other attributes of the Almighty, such as Infinity, Omnipresence, Omnipotence, awaken only awe in the mind of the finite; but those ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... thunderstorm pouring down your neck and into your ears, and a woman, possessed by all the devils, driving furiously to an express train that she can never catch. In that lunatic escape from Coton Manor she had not looked back once; she left Durant to contemplate a certain absurd little figure that stood under an immense Doris portico, regarding the face of ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... it will be well for us to bear in remembrance for the confusion of our pride! It is from the protection of animals that has sprung, in New York, that of the child. And, when we contemplate the great number of societies in the United States,—the Humane Society of Saratoga, of Bangor, of Keene, of Taunton, of Connecticut, the Western Pennsylvania, the Tennessee Society, those of Nashville, of Cleveland, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 2, November, 1884 • Various
... exclamations. If not mirth, at least a temperate countenance in the standers-by, is proper in the presence of a wise sick man: he does not quarrel with health, for, seeing himself in a contrary condition, he is pleased to contemplate it sound and entire in others, and at least to enjoy it for company: he does not, for feeling himself melt away, abandon all living thoughts, nor avoid ordinary discourse. I would study sickness whilst I am well; when it has seized me, it will make its impression real enough, without the help of ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the ice had not been brought from the South Pole by some Antarctic expedition. Her mind was not, like poor Diva's, taken up with obstinate questionings about the kingfisher-blue tea-gown, for she had already determined what she was going to do about it. Naturally it was impossible to contemplate fresh encounters like that of last night, but another gown, crimson-lake, the colour of Mrs. Trout's toilet for the second evening of the Duke of Hampshire's visit, as Vogue informed her, had completely annihilated Newport with ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... enjoyed it!" He laughed at her incredulous face. "It was experience, you see—disease flourishes in many and divers forms down there, and although I couldn't contemplate staying there for ever, ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... by competent authority, we make an extract from a leader in the London "Times," on the occasion of the elevation of Lord John Russell to the peerage. "But however welcome to the House of Lords may be the accession of Lord John Russell, the House of Commons, we apprehend, will contemplate it with very little satisfaction. While the House of Lords does but one-twentieth part of the business of the House of Commons, it boasts a lion's share of the present administration. Three out of our five Secretaries of State, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... want, persons of both sexes, decently dressed, approach you, and whisper to you: "Monsieur, bestow your charity on the Marquis, or Marquise—on the Baron or Baroness, such a one, ruined by the Revolution;" and you sometimes hear names on which history has shed so brilliant a lustre that, while you contemplate the deplorable reverses of human greatness, you are not a little surprised to find that it is in your power to relieve with a trifle the wants of the grandson of an illustrious warrior, before whom nations trembled, or of the granddaughter of that eminent statesman who often had ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... would come, when she should stand up in the face of her country, before the solemn judge on his bench, before all the gaping, wondering people—before, oh! thought most dreadful of all, which we would not, could not, contemplate—before one who knew everything, and say—— She picked herself up trembling as it were, and uncovered her eyes, and protested to herself that she would say nothing that was not true. Nothing that was not true! She would tell her story—so well remembered, so often conned; that ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... emphasizing the tender, admitting the use of earthy realism in the manner of Gay, and recommending for pastoral such "inimitably pretty and delightful" tales as The Two Children in the Wood. Had his contemporaries read the treatise, how they would have been amused to contemplate the serious literary treatment of chapbook narratives, despite Addison's praise of ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... thing to contemplate that tower of polished leather, brass and steel, with a man inside of it some forty pounds heavier than I, and think that in a minute or so we two should be engaged in a close grapple, whose termination involved considerable ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... when I contemplate the future of little boys who come before me for the first time, and are sentenced to the chain-gang. Some of them are bright-faced and intelligent; some are orphans; many thoroughly penitent; and, I believe, nearly all could be reclaimed, could they be sent ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... devastating whirlwind. Its versatility is altogether worthy of notice, and we may well hold the lesson in history in abeyance, for the nonce, while we inculcate due respect for the hand. For no one can contemplate his hand for five minutes and not gain for it a feeling of ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... in the morning, and did not leave work till seven in the evening. This lengthening of the days was a great advantage to me. I awoke with the dawn, and generally had a full hour to myself before any other part of the family was up. Then I used to contemplate the portrait of my dear father, which I used to talk to as if it could understand me, to mend my clothes, and to read in old school-books of the children's that were lying about, and never looked ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... waiting for me in vain, then wandering off, perhaps to fall under a bush and die alone, was too appalling to contemplate. That we must keep together, at all costs, was like a point of honour, like an article of faith with us—confirmed by what we had gone through already. It was like a law of existence, like a creed, like a defence which, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... reform, at the time that he approves of its expediency, by reviling his own constituents, the parish clerk, the sexton, and the grave-digger; and if there be any man who can apply what I am not, to himself, I leave him to think of it in the committee, and contemplate upon ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... not work a practical emancipation of the slave, as some have thought. Negroes were rated as chattel property by both armies and both governments during the entire war. This is the cold fact of history, and it is not pleasing to contemplate. The Negro occupied the anomalous position of an American slave and an American soldier. He was a soldier in the hour of danger, but a chattel ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... of the most important figures in London. The Whigs feared the lash of his satire; the Tories feared to lose his support. He was courted, flattered, cajoled on every side; but the use he made of his new power is sad to contemplate. An unbearable arrogance took possession of him. Lords, statesmen, even ladies were compelled to sue for his favor and to apologize for every fancied slight to his egoism. It is at this time that he writes in his ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... is almost impossible, in consequence of these unwise repetitions of it, to contemplate the buttress without some degree of prejudice; and I look upon it as one of the most justifiable causes of the unfortunate aversion with which many of our best architects regard the whole Gothic school. It may, however, always be regarded with respect when its form is simple and its service clear; ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... repast at Childs's. But New York dearly loves to be pillaged; it cherishes a reputation for princely carelessness of expenditure. It follows that freedom from extortion in places of entertainment argues a want of popularity, than which nothing can be more distressing to contemplate. Nothing speeds the Manhattan sleep-hater more swiftly to a change of scene than the knowledge that he is getting ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... night to spend in ignorant sleep. Even if there were a cosmic drama—which there is not—man is too trivial to play in it a leading role. The free man knows all this; but his heart is tempered and strong. He can contemplate his place in the universe without bitterness and without fear. For the free man's love, as his worship, flows from his ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... hand and hand with this gain making, as the warden was reported as saying to the prisoners, "I mean to use you so that you will not wish to come back," meaning, of course, usage beyond what the law and courts contemplate. ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... on Indian Creek who went to school under Uriah York, and they recall the uniqueness of his discipline as well as his school curriculum. The hickory rod was the enforcer of school rules, but full opportunity to contemplate the delicate distinction between right and wrong was given to all. A three-inch circle was drawn upon the schoolroom wall and the offending pupil was compelled to hold his nose within the ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... I was honestly enjoying myself, strange as this statement may seem. Here was I, setting forth upon an adventure with the handsomest, wittiest girl I had ever laid eyes upon. If I extricated her neatly, she would always be in my debt; and the thought of this was mighty pleasant to contemplate. ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... usually contents himself by compassionating the inadequacy of my efforts for dealing with the miseries which they contemplate, with the remark that I don't go deep enough, that mine is a superficial operation, whereas they destroy poverty by dragging ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... the mind? Mathematicians treat of quantity, without regarding what other sensible qualities it is attended with, as being altogether indifferent to their demonstrations. But, when laying aside the words, they contemplate the bare ideas, I believe you will find, they are not the pure abstracted ideas ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... that Celsus lived centuries before the introduction of chloroform and ether, it is wonderful to contemplate what was ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... even without a bootlegger's load, was not a matter which Casey liked to contemplate. He would have to face the Little Woman if he went back; either as a deliberate liar, who lied to his wife to gain the freedom he might have had without resorting to deceit, or as the victim once more of crooks. Casey thought he would prefer the accusation ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... without end. It was processional—a great confused host covered with clouds of dust, shields and spears, and brass and scarlet, and noise of chariot-wheels and blowing of trumpets—an awful pageant fascinating and terrifying to contemplate. And when she stood still, a little frightened, to see a horde of Salvationists surge past her in the street, with discordant shouting and singing, waving of red flags and loud braying of brass instruments, this ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... the present. She drew many experiences from the past, and a vast knowledge of the constitutions and changes of society; but personally it did not amuse her to think of it, and the future she declined to contemplate. It had disagreeable things in it, of that there could be no doubt; and why go out and meet the disagreeable? It was time enough when it arrived. There was probably illness, and certainly dying, in it; things which she was brave enough to face when they came, and ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... order to look more closely, and still more closely at the hateful and insidious approaches of old age? Did she shut herself up ten times, twenty times a day, leaving her friends chatting in the drawing-room, and go up to her room where, under the protection of bolts and bars, she would again contemplate the work of time on her ripe beauty, now beginning to wither, and recognize with despair the gradual progress of the process which no one else had as yet seemed to perceive, but of which she, herself, was well aware. She knows where to seek ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... questionable themes for a public discourse; but these two ladies are spinsters yet, and spinsters are presumed to be wholly innocent of the necessary information—are supposed, in truth, to be too pure-minded to contemplate vice in its most repulsive shape, not to say analyze it, and dwell oratorically before the world upon its nauseous details. The women's crusade against liquor effected nothing, for the simple reason that women were out of their proper sphere ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... so beaten down as to present the appearance of an army having passed that way, and the river was full up to its banks. Having seen the fall in the nearest of the two arms, I descended below their junction, to contemplate the cascade they formed when united, down the precipice of 120 feet; the noise of the fall was such that my own voice was scarcely audible, but a thick mist which rose up to the clouds from the abyss, admitted of a white foam only ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... to become riveted upon the face of the lady at the table's head. In addition to the beauties which from above he had descried, he now perceived that her mouth was sensitive and kindly, her whole expression one of gentle wistfulness, exceeding sweet to contemplate. What did she in this galley, he wondered; and he has confessed that just as at sight he had disliked his brother, so from that hour—from the very instant of his eyes' alighting on her there—he loved the ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... Some minds, Reaching your state, and finding life a bane, Decide within themselves that naught can be Worse than the present world, and then set out To revolutionize, rend, whirl, uproot The world's foundations. And the mess they make Is pitiful to contemplate! Such sweet And beautiful souls as I have seen go wrong Along this path: Shelley—he had your eyes; And Christ—but I'll not talk theology. Besides, his churches almost have ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... foster vice and enervation, but we throw away one of the most precious implements for ministering to life's highest needs. There is no doubt that this ill adjusted function consumes quite unnecessarily vast stores of vital energy, even when we contemplate it in its immature manifestations which are infinitely more wholesome than the dumb swamping process. Every high school boy and girl knows the difference between the concentration and the diffusion of this impulse, although ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... indirectly to the ruin of the order of the Templars. The record is one of the dark episodes of history, encompassed with contradictions, full of surprises, painful to contemplate, whatever view may be ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... was not a thing easy for the good soul to contemplate, and she left the sentence unfinished and disappeared into the cabin again, while the man outside dropped his head in his hands, feeling the most helpless ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... encouragement. Two vocations, it may be said, were open to him from the beginning; they were to sell newspapers or to black shoes. To one of Tom's education and former life, it was the most bitter humiliation to contemplate adopting either of these employments. But the night came when he felt he must do ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... project was then proposed for clearing Ireland of Irish to the Shannon. Some went so far as already to contemplate their utter extirpation; but "there was no precedent for it found in the chronicles of the conquest. Add to this the difficulty of finding people to reinhabit it ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... Clifford. Until now the buyers across the Atlantic had shown little interest in their well-known materials, although salesman after salesman had been sent out, and money sunk in advertising to an extent that made him shudder to contemplate. Bitterly he had begun to fear that the wish of his heart would never be realised in his lifetime, yet now, behold! It had come about, and through the agency and judgment of his son. He felt a burning ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... crossed the bridge over the Avon on my return, I paused to contemplate the distant church in which the poet lies buried, and could not but exult in the malediction which has kept his ashes undisturbed in its quiet and hallowed vaults. What honor could his name have derived from being mingled in dusty companionship with the epitaphs ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... themselves to Vendale. Was it possible to put Madame Dor into the stove? The stove wouldn't hold her. Was it possible to treat Madame Dor, not as a living woman, but as an article of furniture? Could the mind be brought to contemplate this respectable matron purely in the light of a chest of drawers, with a black gauze held-dress accidentally left on the top of it? Yes, the mind could be brought to do that. With a comparatively trifling effort, Vendale's mind did it. As he took his place on the old-fashioned ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... I answered. "Let Genevieve tell her of what you contemplate, and if a reason she must have, let Genevieve bid her come to me. This much will I do for you in the matter; indeed, Andrea, it is the last service I am like ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... made me an offer of fourteen pounds a month, to write and edit a new publication they contemplate, entirely by myself, to be published monthly, and each number to contain four woodcuts. I am to make my estimate and calculation, and to give them a decisive answer on Friday morning. The work will be no joke, but the emolument is ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... the ripened rose, nor seek[gr] To wear it? who can curiously behold The smoothness and the sheen of Beauty's cheek, Nor feel the heart can never all grow old?[gs] Who can contemplate Fame through clouds unfold The star[284] which rises o'er her steep, nor climb? Harold, once more within the vortex, rolled On with the giddy circle, chasing Time, Yet with a nobler aim than in his Youth's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... dost thou feel thine evil. Rejoice and give thanks that thou dost not need to feel it!" And so the lesser evil grows light by comparison with the greatest evil. That is what others mean when they say, "I have deserved far worse things, yea, hell itself"—a thing easy to say, but horrible to contemplate. ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... covered with steamboats, her roads with locomotives, her streets with cabs, her skies with balloons of a power and magnitude hitherto unknown in the history of aeronautics in this or any other nation—I say, whether I look merely at home, or, stretching my eyes farther, contemplate the boundless prospect of conquest and possession—achieved by British perseverance and British valour—which is outspread before me, I clasp my hands, and turning my eyes to the broad expanse above my head, exclaim, "Thank Heaven, I ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... bring all our great western ports into connection with the American continent by a rapidity of communication which we still want. We have ruins to restore, false gods to overthrow, truths to make triumphant. This is the sense that I attach to the Empire; these are the conquests which I contemplate." Never had the ideal of industrious peace been more impressively set before mankind than in the years which succeeded the convulsion of 1848. Yet the epoch on which Europe was then about to enter proved ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... seraglios of the East; and over my sheets the American Indian will smoke the calumet of peace. We shall reduce politics to its proper level in the affairs of life; raise literature to its due place in the thoughts and business of men. It is a grand thought, and my heart swells with pride while I contemplate it!" ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
