"Ignoble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... critical as the most fastidious could be of any singularity in attire, and they held the unfortunate juvenile in his embarrassing position for a long time, to his intense despair, until he was rescued from his ignoble position by some grown-up friend. Then, the young East is prone to the pleasures of tobacco. It was, I presume, before breakfast with most of the bathers, and smoking under those conditions is a trial even to the experienced. Some, pale from their long immersion—for ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... both the Roman general and all the army were afraid to fight. For this reason he recovered nothing of all that had been lost, but even lost Rome as well, and pretty nearly everything else. During this time he became exceedingly avaricious and greedy for ignoble gain. Because he had received no funds from the Emperor, he plundered all the Italian peoples of Ravenna and Sicily, and the rest of Italy without mercy, by way of exacting vengeance for irregularities in their past lives. ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... in some uncertainty. Doctor Anderson tells us, that he undertook the chief direction; and Mr. Nichols,[2] that he assisted Archibald Hamilton the printer. Whatever his part might be, the performance of it was enough to waste his strength with ignoble labour, to embitter his temper by useless altercation, and to draw on him contempt and insult from those who, however they surpassed him in learning, could scarcely be regarded as his superiors in native vigour and fertility of mind. "Sure ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... who had sat patiently through trouble and trial, working with might and main, suffering from endless ills, in peril of their lives, and deprived of property and home, now joined in one heartrending wail of woe and disappointment. The consternation that followed the announcement of the ignoble surrender is thus described by Mr. Nixon, who was an eye-witness and sharer of ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... Augustus, or Adrian, could return to this world, how would their Roman pride endure to see their last resting-places, the towers and the pyramids in which they fortified themselves, thus violated and put to ignoble uses, and the urns which contained their ashes stuck up as ornaments in a painted room, where barbarian visitors lounge away their hours, and stare upon their relics with scornful indifference ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... true gladness is the gladness that springs from the conscious possession of liberty from the captivity which holds men slaves to evil and to their worst selves. Brethren, let us not fancy that these surface-joys are the joys adequate to a human spirit. They are ignoble, and they are infinitely foolish, because a touch of an awakened conscience, a stirring of one's deeper self, can scatter them all to pieces. So then, that is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Ulysses bent his course to the cottage of the herdsman, and, entering in at the front court, the dogs, of which Eumaeus kept many fierce ones for the protection of the cattle, flew with open mouths upon him, as those ignoble animals have oftentimes an antipathy to the sight of anything like a beggar, and would have rent him in pieces with their teeth, if Ulysses had not had the prudence to let fall his staff, which had chiefly provoked their ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... from Nature, literature recedes into metaphysics, or dwindles into novels. How ignoble seems the current material of London literary life, for instance, compared with the noble simplicity which, a half-century ago, made the Lake Country an enchanted land forever! Is it worth a voyage to England to sup with Thackeray in the Pot ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... become her social inferiors for her own good; the mother—her name he learnt was Mrs. Sawbridge—had all Lady Harman's tall slenderness, but otherwise resembled her only in the poise of her neck and an occasional gesture; she was fair and with a kind of ignoble and premeditated refinement in her speech and manner. She was dressed with the restraint of a prolonged and attenuated widowhood, in a rich and complicatedly quiet dress of mauve and grey. She was obviously a transitory visitor and not so much taking the opulence about her and particularly the ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... fame, a washerwoman, a barber's wife, a milkmaid, and the daughter of a land-owner- choosing the darkest time of night and the most secret part of the house, he drank with them, was sprinkled and anointed, and went through many ignoble ceremonies, such as sitting nude upon a dead body. The teacher informed him that he was not to indulge shame, or aversion to anything, nor to prefer one thing to another, nor to regard caste, ceremonial cleanness or uncleanness, but freely to enjoy all the pleasures ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... What penalty, or that any penalty, was exacted of those who survived to be tried for Hudson's murder remains unknown. Their ignoble fate is hidden in a sordid darkness: fitly in contrast with his noble fate—that lies retired within ...
— Henry Hudson - A Brief Statement Of His Aims And His Achievements • Thomas A. Janvier
... that not merely the verbiage, but the sentiment, is thus egotistic throughout, exhibiting a degree of arrogance and self-importance, only to be met with in a Clerical Locofoco, used by bad men for ignoble purposes. To carry out the idea of your vanity, you say in the winding ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... and probably in those of a higher power, this apparently ignoble act would redound no little to the credit ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... fact, one of a thousand similar facts, simply by way of reminding the reader of what he must himself have often witnessed; namely, that no woman is condemned by nature to any ignoble necessity of repining against the power of other women; her own may be far more confined, but within its own circle may possibly, measured against that of the haughtiest beauty, be the profounder. However, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... giving him strength and skill, and how instead of making a noble use of that strength and skill he had made himself like one of the wild beasts. Then he sang of how the vengeance of the Gods was about to fall on this ignoble King. ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... her. She understood now the reason for the great painter's flattering deference to her opinion. From the first he had sought to blind her. His ways were subtler than those of Charles Haney and his like, but his soul was no higher; it was indeed more ignoble, for he was of those who claim to dispense learning and light. Pretending to add beauty to the world, he was ready to feed himself at the cost of a woman's soul. She recalled Mrs. Moss' hints about his life ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... doves represents a great and widespread decline in the ethics of sportsmanship. In the twenty-six States named, a great many men who call themselves sportsmen indulge in the cheap and ignoble pastime of potting weak and confiding doves. It is on a par with the "sport" of hunting English sparrows in a city street. Of course this is, to a certain extent, a matter of taste; but there is at least one club of sportsmen ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... the gallant Colonel Gardiner put himself at their head. A blow from a scytheblade in the hands of a gigantic Macgregor ended his life, and spared him the shame and sorrow of another defeat. The Park walls at their back prevented the infantry from seeking ignoble security in flight, after the fashion of the dragoons, and they were forced to lay down their weapons and beg for quarter. Some 400 of them fell, struck down by the broadswords and dirks of their enemy, more than 700 were taken prisoners, and ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... circumstance in the history of the world. In 1260, the Flagellants appeared in Italy as Devoti. "When the land was polluted by vices and crimes, an unexampled spirit of remorse suddenly seized the minds of the Italians. The fear of Christ fell upon all: noble and ignoble, old and young, and even children of five years of age, marched through the streets with no covering but a scarf round the waist. They each carried a scourge of leathern thongs, which they applied to ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... with a purity almost unearthly; sometimes sorrow sears, rendering the very soul insensible; and sometimes sorrow remains under the ashes, a living coal steadily consuming all that is noble, hardening all that is ignoble; and is extinguished leaving a devil behind it—fully equipped to slay the ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... This ignoble curiosity was likewise ignored by Miss Berta, who proceeded with dignified slowness to drop her valentines one by one into the caldron. Bea, with lingering care, deposited her contribution on the very top. One slid ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... left his cart, bewitched away from everyday things by the music. It may be the smart uniform had something to do with the popularity of the organization; there is ever a fine line between art and vanity—but why dwell upon an ignoble motive? ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... harsh terms any old sordidities and poverties? The Great American Museum, the down-town scenery and aspects at large, and even the up-town improvements on them, as then flourishing?—why, they must have been for the most part of the last meanness: the Barnum picture above all ignoble and awful, its blatant face or frame stuck about with innumerable flags that waved, poor vulgar-sized ensigns, over spurious relics and catchpenny monsters in effigy, to say nothing of the promise within of the still more monstrous and abnormal living—from ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... that her frankness and freedom from the restraints of etiquette were the result of an immoral and depraved mind. She exaggerated her extravagance, and accused her, by whispers and insinuations spread far and near, of the most ignoble crimes of which woman can be guilty. The young and inexperienced dauphiness soon found herself involved in most embarrassing difficulties. She had no kind friend to council her. Louis still remained cold, distant, and reserved. Thus, week after week, month after month, year ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... gymnastic glory; while flying trowsers, elastic jackets, and feathered buskins, fit for Mercury himself, will contribute at once to the adornment, the swiftness, and the reputation, of our noble and ignoble racers. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... hard tasks; it is noble enough to attract him who loves his fellow-man; success in it is rare enough and glorious enough to stimulate him who likes to succeed where others have failed. Advertising may be good or bad, noble or ignoble, right or wrong, according to what is advertised and our methods of advertising it. He who would scorn to announce the curative powers of bottled spring-water and pink aniline dye; he who regards ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... looked at with a sportsman's eye. It is so with all forests and moorlands. The spirit of Robin Hood and Johnny of Breadislee is theirs. They are remnants of the home of man's fierce youth, still consecrated to the genius of animal excitement and savage freedom; after all, not the most ignoble qualities of human nature. Besides, there is no better method of giving a living picture of a whole country than by taking some one feature of it as a guide, and bringing all other observations into harmony with that original key. Even in merely scientific books ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... creature, with nothing but beauty, and bestow three enormous volumes on her, is to make a perverse selection, beauty being, after all, rarer in women than wit, sense, and goodness. It is as false and ignoble in art, as to marry a pretty face without heart and ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... Payne. "I don't know! I don't believe we are so stupid and so ignoble! As to mending it, that's another question. Writing is such a curious thing—it seems to represent anything in the world except the current of a man's thoughts. Reverie—has anyone ever tried to represent that? I have been out for a walk sometimes, and reflected when I came in that ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... they said. And when he wanted to know whether it was rather beneath the apparent character of M. de Charlus, or of M. des Laumes, or of M. d'Orsan that he must place the untravelled region in which this ignoble action might have had its birth; as none of these men had ever, in conversation with Swann, suggested that he approved of anonymous letters, and as everything that they had ever said to him implied that they strongly disapproved, he ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... and admirable philosopher, Epictetus, discovered that "happiness is not in strength, or wealth, or power; or all three. It lies in ourselves, in true freedom, in the conquest of every ignoble fear, in perfect self-government, in a power of contentment and peace, and the even flow of life, even in poverty, exile, disease and the very ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... her to Grosvenor Place; but it was not in its nature consoling. The prevision of disgrace was now so vivid to her that it seemed to her that if it had not already overtaken them she had only to thank the loose, mysterious, rather ignoble tolerance of people like Mrs. Collingwood. There were plenty of that species, even among the good; perhaps indeed exposure and dishonour would begin only when the bad had got hold of the facts. Would the bad be most horrified and do most to spread ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... the village, and of course from the tenants on our estate. What do you think, Roy? If I resist, we shall, from our weakness, in all probability be beaten, and the new government will confiscate your father's property here; while, if we settle down to an ignoble peace—" ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... recognition of the fact, seeking miserably to palliate and excuse it. When she had given Garth that impetuous assurance of her confidence, she had not, in her crudest imaginings, dreamed of anything so hideous and ignoble as the actual truth had proved to be. Vaguely, she had deemed him outcast for some big, reckless sin that by the splendour of its recklessness almost ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... wonder he hated Dick—hated him now with a cumulative, almost murderous intensity. He had mocked at the other, but how should he stand against him in fair field? It was he—Alan Massey—that was the outcast, his mother a woman of doubtful fame, himself a follower of false fires, his life ignoble, wayward, erratic, unclean? Would it not be John rather than Alan Massey Tony Holiday would choose, if she knew all? This ugly, venomous, sin-scarred old rascal held his fate in the hollow of his ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... the first to recognise and acclaim the transcendent merits of the Elgin Marbles; he rejoiced with a personal joy in the purchase of the Angerstein collection as the nucleus of a National Gallery; he scorned the ignoble fears of some of his colleagues lest the newly-started winter exhibitions of old masters should injure their professional prospects; he used his interest at Court to have Raphael's cartoons brought up to London for the benefit of students and public; he ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... in sooth, much shamefaced, we did go home, Judge of the Supreme Court, officers of the Army, and all, vaguely feeling we had been caught doing some ignoble thing. For my part, although I hope mawkishness no more marks me than another, and although I made neither then nor at any time a resolution to discontinue sports of the field, I have never since then shot in a pigeon match, nor cared to see others do so, for it ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... what he clung to, but of what he had given up. He had turned his back on serious work, so that pottering was now all he could aspire to. It couldn't be fruitful, it couldn't be anything but ridiculous, almost ignoble; but it soothed his nerves, it was in the nature of a secret dissipation. He had never suspected he should some day have nerves on his own part to count with; but this possibility had been revealed to him on the day it became clear that he was letting something ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... they have not used to enlarge their observation to match and sort that effect with instances of a diverse subject, which must of necessity be before any cause be found out. That they have passed over the observation of instances vulgar and ignoble, and stayed their attention chiefly upon instances of mark; whereas the other sort are for the most part more significant and of better height and information. That every particular that worketh any effect is a thing compounded ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... are not too ignoble a quarry for this villainous gos-hawk!—His assiduities; his watchings; his nightly risques; the inclement weather he journeys in; must not be all placed to your account. He has opportunities of making ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... steadily growing. There had been no violent counter-revolution, but the interests of the country had been sacrificed without scruple to those of the king's friends, the swarm of courtiers who had shared his ignoble exile at Palermo. The revolutionary society of the Carbonari spread rapidly, alike in the army and in civil society. In Naples, as in Portugal, the Spanish revolution brought things to a crisis. On July 2, 1820, a military outbreak took place at Nola. This was followed by a general ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... and fear! What a change of flesh is here! Think how many royal bones Sleep within these heaps of stones. Here they lie had realms and lands Who now want strength to stir their hands. ... Here are sands, ignoble things Dropt from the ruined sides of kings; Here's a world of pomp and state, Buried in dust once dead ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... on which everything depends? Not at all. He is meditating on suicide; and he finds that what stands in the way of it, and counterbalances its infinite attraction, is not any thought of a sacred unaccomplished duty, but the doubt, quite irrelevant to that issue, whether it is not ignoble in the mind to end its misery, and, still more, whether death would end it. Hamlet, that is to say, is here, in effect, precisely where he was at the time of his first soliloquy ('O that this too too solid flesh would melt') two months ago, before ever he heard of his father's ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... word vttered concerning their dishonestie. Some of them will notwithstanding speake filthy and immodest words. [Sidenote: Their insolencie against strangers.] But towards other people, the said Tartars be most insolent, and they scorne and set nought by all other noble and ignoble persons whatsoeuer. For we saw in the Emperours court the great duke of Russia, the kings sonne of Georgia, and many great Soldanes receiuing no due honour and estimation among them. So that euen the very Tartars assigned to giue attendance vnto them, were they neuer so base, would alwaies goe ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... girlish reading; to be later, perhaps, the Flora Macdonald of a middle-aged Prince Charlie did not, however, evoke any ludicrous associations in her mind. Her feminine fancy exalted the escaped duelist and alleged assassin into a social martyr. His actual small political intrigues and ignoble aims of office seemed to her little different from those aspirations of royalty which she had read about—as perhaps they were. Indeed, it is to be feared that in foolish little Mrs. Bunker, Wynyard Marion had found the ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... issue was drawn, the result was assured. It was not Christianity that failed, it was slavery. . . . This, too, is a climactic day in history. For so long time the Gospel and war have lived together in ignoble amity! If at last disharmony between the spirit of Jesus and the spirit of war is becoming evident, then a great hope has dawned for the race. . . . The main issue is clear. Christianity will indeed have failed if it does not stop ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... revealed to public view, and attested by indisputable evidence. Ignorance is always credulous. Much was then thought wonderful, nay, almost supernatural, which can now be explained and accounted for, by asy and very ignoble means. My father—for all this time, though I have never mentioned him, I had a father living—my father, being in public life, and much occupied with the affairs of the nation, had little leisure to attend to his family. A great deal went on in his house, without his ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... speculation, as it turned out. All his speculation had a way of turning badly. That was because people, even people in Nicaragua, distrusted him for one reason or another; they said his whole existence was a tangle of shady and ignoble transactions—that he looked like a fraud, and behaved like one. He couldn't help his face; but his face, they soon discovered, was not the only, or even the most, evasive and fugitive part of ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... interrupted the priest, angrily. "A thousand horses cannot make a man noble, nor was poverty ever ignoble. You talk like a weak boy. Every word you say is your own condemnation. Why should you complain? Your bed is of your own making. The other prodigal was forced to herd with the swine—you have ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... aristocracy—there is but one man there who has truly comprehended the Hat; and that is the Prince de Bethune. How is it that men do not consider, as women do, that the hat is the first thing that strikes the eye? And why have they never thought of changing the present system, which is, let us say it frankly, ignoble? Yes, ignoble; and yet a Frenchman is, of all nationalities, the one most persistent in this folly! I know the difficulties of a change, messieurs. I don't speak of my own writings on the matter, ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... clog-day in Kansas. His collar had been torn away; his straw hat had been twisted and battered; his shirt with ox-blood stripes split to the waist. And from head to knee he was drenched with some vile and ignoble greasy fluid that loudly proclaimed to the nose its component leaven of ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... patterns became the fashion here. Yet the Papal capital did not wholly cease to be the resort of students and of artists. The universities maintained themselves in a respectable position—- far different, indeed, from that which they had held in the last century, yet not ignoble. Much was being learned on many lines of study divergent from those prescribed by earlier humanists. Padua, in particular, distinguished itself for medical researches. This was the flourishing time, moreover, of Academies, in which, notwithstanding nonsense ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... which some of the seemingly trifling incidents of that night had a special bearing. One of those incidents was the cutting of a finger. Ned Spivin, whose tendency towards fun and frolic at all times rendered him rather slap-dash and careless, was engaged in the rather ignoble work of cutting off skates' tails—these appendages not being deemed marketable. This operation he performed with a hatchet, but some one borrowed the hatchet for a few minutes, and Spivin continued the operation with his knife. One of the tails being tough, ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... Church, and the intrusive and decisive heroism of Damien, with something almost to be called remorse. I am sure it is so with yourself; I am persuaded your letter was inspired by a certain envy, not essentially ignoble, and the one human trait to be espied in that performance. You were thinking of the lost chance, the past day; of that which should have been conceived and was not; of the service due and not rendered. Time was, said the voice in your ear, in your pleasant room, as you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been observed, that it is degrading and untrue to describe the human species as incapable of receiving gratification only from comic scenes; that "there is a luxury in wo," independent of its purifying the bosom and suppressing the more ignoble passions. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... A small square of silk or linen, used in various ignoble offices about the face and especially serviceable at funerals to conceal the lack of tears. The handkerchief is of recent invention; our ancestors knew nothing of it and intrusted its duties to the sleeve. ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... Howard," returned Griffith, biting his lip as he looked around at the wondering seamen who were listeners, "you will wait in vain; but I pledge you my word that when that time arrives you shall be advised, and that your own hands shall do the ignoble deed." ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... labors with the heaviest load, And the wolf dies in silence,—not bestow'd In vain should such example be; if they, Things of ignoble or of savage mood, Endure and shrink not, we of nobler clay May temper it to bear,—it is ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... others," it is certain that it can never be added to any second state of existence. The loss of that bloom of the soul, like that of other virginities, is irreparable. Desroches had not aspired to restore it to himself. He no longer risked anything ignoble or dishonest, but the good tricks admitted the code of procedure, the good traps, the good treacheries which could be legitimately played off upon an adversary, he was very ready ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... district. Both of these individuals, however, died unmarried, and the next owner of the manor neither distinguished himself nor contributed to the glory of his line. That glory, such as it was, for the ignoble Francois was the founder of it, gradually departed. The Clairvilles deteriorated, sold off large parcels of their land, married undesirable persons, till, in the present generation, the culmination of ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... my bedroom! You have been listening, dear? But you are so emancipated. Ah, well! so our pure and beautiful friendship has been misinterpreted, bespattered! Just because you wear a morning wrapper, and have lived here alone for a year, people with coarse souls and ignoble eyes make unpleasant remarks! But what really did drive BEATA mad? Why did she jump into the mill-race? I'm sure we did everything we could to spare her! I made it the business of my life to keep her in ignorance of all our interests—didn't ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... there was no passion of an ignoble sort, only a passion of pity and remorse, and a sweet, tender, reminiscent love. He did not love the woman before him so much as the girl whose ghost she was-the woman whose promise she was. He held himself responsible ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... turned healer. How well the English milor had gauged the strange personality of that redoubtable man! Professional pride—interest in intricate cases— call it what you will—was the only redeeming feature in Laporte's abominable character. Everything else in him, every thought, every action was ignoble, ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... other high dignities, he and Ursicinus alone, after the frequent and great toils which they had endured for the sake of the republic, had been so despised that he himself had been accused of treason in consequence of the examination of some slaves, and had been exposed to an ignoble trial; while Ursicinus had been brought over from the East, and placed at the mercy of his enemies; and these were the subjects of his incessant complaints both in public and ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... the cathedral. The Hotel de Ville tells of revolutions; the Hotel-Dieu, of the miseries of Paris. After gazing at the splendors of the Louvre we can, by taking two steps, look down upon the rags and tatters of that ignoble nest of houses huddling between the quai de la Tournelle and the Hotel-Dieu,—a foul spot, which a modern municipality is endeavoring at the ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... profound the wisdom, and how luminous the intellect of Joan of Arc, you must study her there, where she fought out that long fight all alone—and not merely against the subtlest brains and deepest learning of France, but against the ignoble deceits, the meanest treacheries, and the hardest hearts to be found in any ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... fairly puzzled, what should I come across but this handy stone, which the good priests of old did erect, as far as I can see, for no other purpose than to provide worthy cavalieros with an escape from such ignoble and scurvy enemies. I had no time to spare in clambering up it, for I had to tear my heel out of the mouth of the foremost of them, and might have been dragged down by it had he not found my spur too tough a morsel for ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in its conspicuous seclusion, and was finally carried over the cataract. This public character they suspected of design in his death as in his life, and they would not be moved by his memory; though they gave a sigh to that dream, half pathetic, half ludicrous, yet not ignoble, of Mordecai Noah, who thought to assemble all the Jews of the world, and all the Indians, as remnants of the lost tribes, upon Grand Island, there to rebuild Jerusalem, and who actually laid the corner-stone of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that comes of age. Man the warrior, man the lawyer, and all the bickering aspects of life, pass into obscurity; the grave dreamers, man the curious learner, and man the creative artist, come forward to replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a less ignoble adventure. ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... liquor interest on the part of a national institution dependent upon the public patronage for support, which insults all that is best in our public opinion, and insisting as it does on a condition of ignoble slavery on the part of the employees of the Company. You refer to the matter in which Mr. Smith was regarded as over-active as ...
— The Story of a Dark Plot - or Tyranny on the Frontier • A.L.O. C. and W.W. Smith
... him a few favorites of his immediate family and a small body of troops, and commenced his journey—a journey which was considered by all the people as a base and ignoble flight. He involved himself in endless troubles by this step. A revolt broke out on the way among the guards who accompanied him. One of the generals who headed the revolt sent a messenger to Genghis Khan ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... had disappeared before his death, leaving nothing of him but a living skeleton, covered over with a wrinkled yellow skin. Since the melting away of his gold, it had been very generally conceded that there was no such striking resemblance, after all, betwixt the ignoble features of the ruined merchant and that majestic face upon the mountain-side. So the people ceased to honor him during his lifetime, and quietly consigned him to forgetfulness after his decease. Once in ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Mayor that was of Diabolus' making was the Lord Lustings; a man that had neither eyes nor ears; all that he did, whether as a man or as an officer, he did it naturally, as doth the beast.[58] And that which made him yet the more ignoble, though not to Mansoul, yet to them that beheld and were grieved for its ruins, was, that he never could savour good, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... In this case, what a war! What a home, where the son sees a tyrant in the father, and in the mother but a trembling victim! I speak not for myself—whatever may have been the course of our long wedded life, I have not to complain of these ignoble storms. But when the family chief neglects his wife, or prefers another to her, the children too, courtiers as we are, will desert her. You look incredulous about domestic love. Tenez, my child, if I may so surmise, I think you cannot ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... me. 'You forget, my lady, that I am of those you and your station deem ignoble. Yet, none the less, am I ashamed of this business—though, since my lord commands, it is not for me to question nor delay. Therefore, I pray you, let us mount and ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... hopes for the elevation of English art by means of fresco I cannot sympathize.... It is not the material nor the space that can give us thoughts, passions, or power. I see on our Academy walls nothing but what is ignoble in small pictures, and would be disgusting in large ones.... It is not the love of fresco that we want; it is the love of God and His creatures; it is humility, and charity, and self-denial, and fasting, and prayer; it is a total ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... Of human life must spring from woman's breast, Your first small words are taught you from her lips, Your first tears quench'd by her, and your last sighs Too often breathed out in a woman's hearing, When men have shrunk from the ignoble care Of watching the last hour of him ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... possession of it in a night. Moreover the truth about the auburn mustaches and goatee was coming out in snowy splotches; the fading dye showed a mottle of red and white not agreeable to the eye. Here was not merely senility, but ignoble and repulsive senility. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... upwards! It were a life of gods to dwell in such an element: to see, and hear, and talk brave things. Now fie upon these casual potations. That a man's most exalted reason should depend upon the ignoble fermenting of a fruit, which sparrows pluck ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... sea-sickness. As a lad of seventeen, facing the insidious and repulsive foe for the first time, he had expressed his own and his brother's dread of the unequal encounter. Now he was doomed to feel its ignoble clutch to the last moment. "The Duke had gone below, and on either side of the cabin staircase lay the two princes in an ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... nature which, alas, he, her son, had never seen; that they had seen her, and guessed, of course, that she was his mother, was positively unendurable to Blair. He tried to speak, but his voice shook into silence. His dismay was not entirely ignoble; the situation was excruciating to a man whose feeling for beauty was a form of religion; his mortification had in it the element of horror for a profaned ideal; his mother was an esthetic ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... rudely snapped. The lips from which flowed those living and glorious truths that our fathers uttered, are closed in death! Yes, my friends, Death has been among us! He has not entered the humble cottage of some unknown, ignoble peasant; he has knocked audibly at the palace of a nation! His footstep has been heard in the Hall of State! He has cloven down his victim in the midst of the councils of a people! He has borne in triumph from among you the gravest, wisest, most reverend head! Ah! he ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... to give up wealth and power for truth and service; others, who could draw upon no hidden source of strength, have been sustained in the midst of trials which have seemed heavy enough to crush; and, most wonderful of all, in spite of all vices and crimes, all darkness and ignorance, all bondage to ignoble ideals and slavery to commercialism and pleasure, the race of man has never been content with things as they have been. As the moon draws the tides by unseen attractions, so by unseen attractions the souls of men have been made dissatisfied, and drawn toward truth and beauty, love and ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... birth so base, Ranks among the ignoble race, And desireth that thy name, Unto honour should obtain; First let me have but a catch of thy gold, Then, though thou be an ass, By this light, Thou shalt pass For a knight; For here it ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... certainly by the conventions of life. The result is that though there is more true religion in the schools than is acknowledged by those outside and than those within care to boast of, and though the standard of conduct is not ignoble, there is too little fusion; both components are brittle, they cannot stand the strain of sudden temptation, they lack enduring power. No one will forget how in those first months of war, consolation was offered even from pulpits ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... voice sounded hollow from the depths. Karl, in his turn, went over the lip of the crevasse. Helen, conscious of an exaltation that lifted her out of the region of ignoble fear, looked down. She could see now what was being done. Barth was swinging his ax and smiting the ice with the adz. His head was just below the level of her feet, though he was distant the full length ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... therefore, reduced to: and this to a heart, for so many years waging offensive war, (not valuing whom the opponent,) what a reduction! now comparing himself to the superannuated lion in the fable, kicked in the jaws, and laid sprawling, by the spurning heel of an ignoble ass! ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... it, nor agree to it; but at that time I knew not what else to do, but wait as others did. I said that we looked like vessels which had come so far up the river with the tide; and now that it had turned we were stranded and fast in the mud. Sometimes I changed the figure to one not so ignoble, and likened ourselves to the stately vessels anchored in Falmouth harbour, which were there because the wind was contrary. We were wind-bound too, and dependent on circumstances; but my idea of true religion was that we ought not to be like this. I rather took for our type the great steamers ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... despairing of his brother's aid, and shrinking from trespassing any further on his mother's resources, the future looked gloomy enough: indeed nothing but the frequent presence and the constant influence of Sybil had driven from his mind the ignoble melancholy which, relieved by no pensive fancy, is the ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... to draw back the sweet faces that have vanished, slowly arises a new stratagem of grief, and we say, 'Be it that they no more come back to us, yet what hinders but we should go to them?' Perilous is that crisis for the young. In its effect perfectly the same as the ignoble witchcraft of the poor African Obeah, his sublimer witchcraft of grief will, if left to follow its own natural course, terminate in the same catastrophe of death. Poetry, which neglects no phenomena that are interesting to the heart of man, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... been carried off safely by the trustworthy St. Luc. She must have died of grief if she had not been kept alive to be the instrument of retributive justice. (In the sequel you will find that this Queen of Hearts descended upon the ignoble due at the proper time like a thousand of brick and took the last trick ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... all pleasure, though he never stopped to think of it. The lines of her slender form, as she sat with such careless dignity beside him, her lovely eyes, the turns of her head, the softening tones of her voice, the sense of an emerging bond that had in it nothing ignoble, nothing to be ashamed of, together with the child's simple liking for him, and the mere physical delight of this morning of late May—the rush and splendour of its white, thunderous clouds, its penetrating, scented air: each and all played their part in the rise of a new emotion he would ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... others the path he had found unprofitable for himself. It is one of two extremes, both to be avoided, "The one extreme is a life devoted to pleasures and lusts; this is degrading, sensual, vulgar, profitless; the other is a life given to mortifications; this is painful, ignoble, and profitless. By avoiding these two extremes the Tathagata has gained the knowledge of the Middle Path, which leads to insight, wisdom, calm, to Nirvana." The way, therefore, to escape from the Karma, the moral retribution which works inexorably ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... our greater contempt. He let himself become a prisoner, and was thankful to gain a three years' accession of life in captivity. He was tamed like a wild beast by his belly, and by wine; Antony took himself out of the world in a cowardly, pitiful, and ignoble manner, but, still in time to prevent the enemy having his person in ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... notice, however, that it is not my intention to offer an interpretation (which is unnecessary, since we all know the "Ave Maria"), but, as I said, to show the idioms of these languages. These idioms, moreover, ought not to displease or appear ignoble, for every tongue has its own beauty and elegance for those who are born in it, which the eyes of foreigners cannot discern. This point has been discussed by Jesus Sidrac in the prologue to his Ecclesiasticus, a holy and Catholic work; and it was proved at length, and with great erudition, by ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... to be trampled on, it was a species of consolation that their oppressor was feared by others as well as themselves. But that the oppression of the doomed French nation was to be continued by a more ignoble hand was altogether intolerable. Frenchmen had begun to ask one another, who was this Mazarin who had come to rule over them? He could not—like Richelieu—boast of his high birth, of descent from a long line of noble ancestors—Frenchmen. ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... degree, and meeting with a thousand dangers and oppositions, succeeds too seldom in an age to fall under common observation. Or, is avarice perhaps the same passion with ambition, only placed in more ignoble and dastardly minds, by which the object is changed from power to money? Or it may be, that one man pursues power in order to wealth, and another wealth in order to power; which last is the safer way, though longer about, and suiting with every period as well ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... for a future life. It clings with intense enjoyment and love to the present world, and the state after death looms up in the distance as a cold and repugnant shadow. And yet it would often hold death preferable to disgrace. The distinction between a noble and ignoble life is strongly marked in Homer, and yet a sense of right and wrong about particular actions seems fluctuating" and confused.[902] A sensuous conception of happiness is the chief good, and mere temporal advantage the principal reward of virtue. We hear nothing of the approving ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... are frequent among the citizens of the depredations and immoralities of riotous clercs, who lived by their wits or by their nimble fingers, or by reciting or singing licentious ballads:—the paouvres escolliers, whose miserable estate, temptations, debauchery, ignoble pleasures, remorse and degradation have been so pathetically sung by Francois Villon, master of arts, poet, bohemian, burglar and homicide. The richer scholars often indulged in excesses, and of the vast majority who were poor, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... Holy Ghost, to whom lust is opposed as the flesh is opposed to the spirit. This is the mighty trio that takes possession of the whole being of man, controls his superior and inferior appetites, and wars on the whole being on God. And lust is the most ignoble of ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... or difficulty and finally rescues him, much to the reader's relief. Love stories appeal, of course, to the sex impulse, humorous stories to laughter, and mystery stories to curiosity. Cynical stories, showing the "pillars of society" in an ignoble light, appeal to the self-assertive impulse of the reader, in that he is led to apply their teaching to pretentious people whom he knows about, and set them down a peg, to his own relative advancement. But here again we have to insist, as under the ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... Presidency of the United States. The Senator from Illinois faltered. He got the prize for which he faltered; but lo! the grand prize of his ambition to-day slips from his grasp because of his faltering in his former contest, and his success in the canvass for the Senate, purchased for an ignoble price, has cost him the loss of the Presidency ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... Major Benjy ought instantly to have challenged his ignoble friend to another duel for this insolent suggestion, but he did nothing of the kind, and his silence, which had some awful quality of consent about it, chilled her mind, even as the sea-mist, now thick and cold, ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... the people who walk here appear one and all to be employed in labour that soils body and spirit. Journey on the top of a tram-car from King's Cross to Holloway, and civilisation has taught you its ultimate achievement in ignoble hideousness. You look off into narrow side-channels where unconscious degradation has made its inexpugnable home, and sits veiled with refuse. You pass above lines of railway, which cleave the region with black-breathing fissure. You see the pavements half occupied with the paltriest and most sordid ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... From spleen, from obstinacy, hate, or fear! See anger, zeal and fortitude supply; Even avarice, prudence; sloth, philosophy; Lust, through some certain strainers well refined, Is gentle love, and charms all womankind; Envy, to which th' ignoble mind's a slave, Is emulation in the learned or brave; Nor virtue, male or female, can we name, But what will grow on pride, or grow on shame. Thus Nature gives us (let it check our pride) The virtue nearest to our vice allied: Reason ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... been also for Halicarnassian) sculpture. But Byron loved Greece herself—through her death—and to his own; while the subsequent refusal of England to give Greece one of our own princes for a king, has always been held by me the most ignoble, cowardly, and lamentable, of all ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... for ignoble things; The strife for triumph more than truth; The hardening of the heart that brings Irreverence for ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... Esplanade or the kettledrum, and who was becoming seriously uneasy, as Kunz, in his fresh snowiness, was disposed to make researches among vulgar remains of crabs and hakes, and was with difficulty restrained from disputing them with a very ignoble and spiteful yellow ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the mailbags in Epping Forest. The real, living bushranger is, however, more of a ruffian and less of a hero than our ideal highwayman; for time, like distance, softens down the harsh and the coarse, and gives dignity to the ignoble. ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... that this was another example of the folly of attempting to economize. At the same time he was gently thrilled by what he owned to himself was a not ignoble emotion: that sigh seemed to speak so naturally and pathetically of disillusionment, it was such a simple little confession of a damaged ideal. It did not occur to him to suspect that the character of which his wife had formed too proudly high an ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... mellifluously like a sucking-dove; but Modestine would be neither softened nor intimidated. She held doggedly to her pace; nothing but a blow would move her, and that only for a second. I must follow at her heels, incessantly belabouring. A moment's pause in this ignoble toil, and she relapsed into her own private gait. I think I never heard of any one in as mean a situation. I must reach the lake of Bouchet, where I meant to camp, before sundown, and, to have even a hope of this, I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... details in the shape of articles entitled "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon." The object of the editor, Mr. William T. Stead, a quondam teacher in the London schools and a respectable Methodist strengthened by non- Conformist support, in starting this ignoble surprise on the public was much debated. His partisans asserted that he had been honestly deceived by some designing knave as if such child-like credulity were any excuse for a veteran journalist! His foes opined ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... this country there is no excuse for the young man who seeks the society of the loose and the dissolute. There is at all times and everywhere open to him a society of persons of the opposite sex of his own age and of pure thoughts and lives, whose conversation will refine him and drive from his bosom ignoble and impure thoughts. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... had read the resignation. She could measure the depth of his fall. They were now to be reduced to live on four thousand francs a year; and that day she had counted up her debts,—they amounted to something like thirty-two thousand francs! The most ignoble of all wretchedness had come upon them. And that noble man who had trusted her was ignorant that she had abused the fortune he had confided to her care. She was sobbing at his ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... the ignoble fact, he felt obliged to admit, apologetically: "I am afraid I was looking rather hard at ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... commercial city; what was preached here would be carried to the ends of the earth. It was a city of art and culture and yet a place where the vices of the east and west met and held high carnival. Religion itself was put to ignoble uses; a thousand priestesses ministered to a base worship in the magnificent temple of the goddess Aphrodite. Greek philosophy showed its decay in endless discussions about words and the tendency to set intellectual above moral distinctions. There was a denial of the future life ...
— Bible Studies in the Life of Paul - Historical and Constructive • Henry T. Sell
... been my ideal, and is still. She was the daughter of the Rev. Samuel Ware of Coniston, and a descendant of Captain Timothy Prescott, whom General Stark called 'Honest Tim.' She was, to me, all that a woman should be, in intellect, in her scorn of all that is ignoble and false, and in her loyalty to her friends." Here the handkerchief came out of the reticule. "She went to Boston to teach school, and some time afterward I was offered a position in New York, and I never saw her again. But she married in Boston a man of learning and literary attainments, though ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the island in the Seine, where now stands the statue of Henry IV, between the King's garden on one side and the convent of the Augustinian monks on the other, the two pyres were raised—two out of the four had shrunk back into their ignoble confessions. It was the hour of vespers when these two aged and noble men were led out to be burned; they were tied each to the stake. The flames kindled dully and heavily; the wood, hastily piled up, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... first bewilderment of my heated brain I tried to think what slanderer could have traced my family to the ignoble animal mentioned above. Vain were my endeavours. At the end of that dance I whispered the Colonel to come into the cloak-room, and I ...
— The Trial of William Tinkling - Written by Himself at the Age of 8 Years • Charles Dickens
... attentively, and a feeling of some strange horror came over me. His livid skin, his features, huge and yet ignoble, gave an exact idea of what you must allow me to call the scum of the earth. A few bluish-black spots were scattered over his face, like bits of mud, and his eyes shot forth an evil gleam. The face seemed, perhaps, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... the true Prussian breed. It was a happy and honourable task so long as it consisted of civilising the world at large with high explosive, poisonous gas and burning oil, and the world at large was not too ready to answer back. To persist in this stern business, in face of the foolish and ignoble obstinacy of the adversary, required great courage and strength of mind; but the Prussian is essentially courageous and strong. Things came to a pretty pass, however, when the wicked adversary made himself some guns and shells and took to being stern on his own. People who behave like that, especially ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... I went. I think I never saw Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve: For flowers—as well expect a cedar grove! But cockle, spurge, according to their law Might propagate their kind, with none to awe, You'd think; a burr had ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... problems as to whether art has or has not of necessity a spiritual content. There cannot be any poetry whatsoever without a spiritual meaning of some sort: good or bad, moral, immoral, or non-moral, obscure or lucid, noble or ignoble, slight or weighty—such distinctions do not signify. In poetry we are not met by questions whether the poet intended to convey a meaning when he made it. Quite meaningless poetry (as some critics would ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... towards the door, and as he watched them leading him out he reflected bitterly that this was the man to whom Suzanne was betrothed—the man whom, not a doubt of it, she loved, since for him she had stooped so low. This miserable craven she preferred to him, because the man, so ignoble of nature, was noble ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... sooner formed the quintet than they all somehow seemed to feel insulted; and I really believe it was owing to the promptitude with which they consented to join. They had joined, of course, from a not ignoble feeling of shame, for fear people might say afterwards that they had not dared to join; still they felt Pyotr Verhovensky ought to have appreciated their heroism and have rewarded it by telling them some really ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... punished for theft has still his life to be preserved, and may one day have his property also to be protected by the same law under which he is suffering. One can imagine the strange effect it would produce upon the ignoble army of martyrs which throng our jails, to be told that they were sacrifices to society—victims whom the community was offering up, most unjustifiably, on the altar of its own interests! At first, the idea would be a little dim and mysterious; but, after a short time, the flattering ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... designs most beautiful and intricate; nothing more handsomely sets off a handsome man; it may cost some pain in the beginning, but I doubt if it be near so painful in the long-run, and I am sure it is far more becoming than the ignoble European practice of tight-lacing among women. And now it has been found needful to forbid the art. Their songs and dances were numerous (and the law has had to abolish them by the dozen). They now face empty-handed the tedium of their uneventful ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... heeded them not. His thoughts were far away. He was dreaming of old days, of his early struggles for fame, and of his friends and companions of years ago. "Where are they now?" he asked himself, sadly. "Some are wanderers on the face of the earth, in comic operas. Two of them found ignoble graves in the 'Tourists'' company. Others are sleeping beneath the daisies in Harper's ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... contented himself with letting the ground temporarily to some market-gardeners, at a yearly rental of 500 francs. And so, as we have said, the iron gate leading into the kitchen-garden had been closed up and left to the rust, which bade fair before long to eat off its hinges, while to prevent the ignoble glances of the diggers and delvers of the ground from presuming to sully the aristocratic enclosure belonging to the mansion, the gate had been boarded up to a height of six feet. True, the planks were not so closely adjusted but that a hasty peep might be obtained through their interstices; ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... his voice was low, but clear. "My hour is come, and like an honest debtor, I am not sorry to give back my life to nature, and in my soul is neither pain nor fear. I have tried to keep my soul stainless; I have aspired to ends not ignoble. Most of our earthly affairs are in the hands of destiny. We must not resist her. Let the Galileans triumph. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... greatly we were surprised by the sudden departure of Lord St Clair. "Ignoble Grand-sire!" exclaimed Sophia. "Unworthy Grandfather!" said I, and instantly fainted in each other's arms. How long we remained in this situation I know not; but when we recovered we found ourselves alone, without either Gustavus, Philander, or the Banknotes. As we were deploring our unhappy ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... two years, campaigning nearly all the time. But it was an ignoble warfare, cruel and ruthless, and had I not given my word to Carmen, to stand by him until the country was pacified, I should have resigned my commission much sooner than I did. Ramon, who acted as one of my orderlies, bore himself bravely and was ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... child, alone in the world, and under the immediate watch of Brigham Young. It would be your lot, in ordinary circumstances, to become the fiftieth bride of some ignoble elder, or by particular fortune, as fortune is counted in this land, to find favour in the eyes of the President himself. Such a fate for a girl like you were worse than death; better to die as your mother died than to sink daily deeper in the mire of this pit of woman's degradation. But is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lives, glory in their triumphs; till a day comes when it is softly said of some stranger, or some friend—it may be none the pleasanter to hear because it is a friend—"She is more to him than you could ever be." Is it only to jealous hearts, ignoble minds, that such tidings come with a shock of pain? Nay, the truer the heart the keener the pain. It may be short, but it is sharp. The second thought may be, "It is well for him; I am glad for him." But the ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... Marguerite, calling her 'Margot,' about Maxime and Leonie de Villepreux, saying he's her lover, about all our affairs, about Gaston, about your marriage, about your sister and your dresses and your dimples, about our darling father, whose history it professes to relate in the most ignoble, the most revolting terms. Papa's in the most awful state!" and Mme. de Brecourt panted to take breath. She had spoken with the volubility of horror and passion. "You're outraged with us and you must suffer ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... well-born; and overcome by the pride of wealth, he reviles the poor. He calls others fools, and does not look to himself. He blames the faults of others, but does not govern himself. When the wise and the foolish, the rich and the poor, the noble and the ignoble, the proud and the humble, have departed to the cemetery and all sleep there, their troubles are at an end, and their bodies are stripped of flesh, little else than bones, united by tendons—other men then perceive no difference between them, whereby they could recognise ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... when he stands staring up at the stars is to see (or conjure up rather) a dumb buffoon Fate, primeval, unfriendly and stupid, whom Man must defy. And Conrad defies it, but wearily, for he feels sick at heart,—because of his surety that Fate is ignoble, and blind. ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... of the Rue St. Antoine, who has just been cornuted by the young Duke of Richelieu. This part he performs with much truth, and avec rondeur, as the critics here express it, to signify plain-dealing. But DAMAS is no less ignoble in ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon |
