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Indigence   Listen
noun
Indigence  n.  The condition of being indigent; lack of estate, or means of comfortable subsistence; penury; poverty; as, helpless indigence.
Synonyms: Poverty; penury; destitution; want; need; privation; lack. See Poverty.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Indigence" Quotes from Famous Books



... books are dedicated to one or other of the pious family that had protected him. Once more there was a religious Lady Carbery, supporting locally the Church of England, patronizing schools, diffusing the most extensive relief to every mode of indigence or distress. A century and a half ago such a Lady Carbery was in South Wales, at the "Golden Grove;" now such another Lady Carbery was in central England, at Laxton. The two cases, divided by six generations, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... male and female slaves. Some score of glebe-bound peasants cultivated the large estate for their lord's behoof. Notwithstanding the distress that had fallen upon the Roman nobility, many of whom were sunk into indigence, the chief of the Anicii still controlled large means; and the disposal of these possessions at his death was matter of interest to many persons—not least to the clergy of Rome, who found in the dying man's ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing

... all others of the nobility of his parentage, is at utter variance with the subsequent events of his life, his long struggles with indigence and obscurity, and the difficulties he endured from the want of family connections. How can it be believed, says Bossi, that this same man, who, in his most cruel adversities was incessantly taunted ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving

... ineffectual, and has never either been able to raise the wages of curates, or to sink those of labourers to the degree that was intended; because it has never been able to hinder either the one from being willing to accept of less than the legal allowance, on account of the indigence of their situation and the multitude of their competitors, or the other from receiving more, on account of the contrary competition of those who expected to derive either profit ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... friend! to think what a blow I am to give to all her future prospects—how I am to strike her very soul to the earth, by telling her that her husband is a beggar!—that she is to forego all the elegancies of life—all the pleasures of society—to shrink with me into indigence and obscurity! To tell her that I have dragged her down from the sphere in which she might have continued to move in constant brightness—the light of every eye—the admiration of every heart!—How can she bear poverty? She has been brought up in all the refinements ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson

... with royalty a royal mind. The debauched companions of his youth were banished from his presence and his counsels, and forbidden to approach within ten miles of his dwelling. But at the same time we are assured that they were not left in indigence or necessity. Wisdom and virtue became the only recommendations which raised any one to his service, and those who had proved themselves most worthy, under the government of the former monarch, found themselves most readily welcomed by the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various

... early womanhood was passed in commercial affluence; but the loss of several vessels at sea in which her husband was interested was followed by other losses on land, and years were spent in comparitive indigence. In that remarkable book, "Idomen, or the Vale of Yumuri," she says, referring to this period: "Our table had been hospitable, our doors open to many; but to part with our well-garnished dwelling had now become inevitable. We retired, with one servant, to a remote house ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various

... Benzone, the tyrant of Crema. After a short time the Colleoni brothers found means to assassinate him also; therefore Bartolommeo alone, a child of whom no heed was taken, remained to be his father's avenger. He and his mother lived together in great indigence at Solza, until the lad felt strong enough to enter the service of one of the numerous petty Lombard princes, and to make himself if possible a captain of adventure. His name alone was a sufficient introduction, ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... more alive than it was when Dr Johnson visited it in the last century; he declared that one of the streets was lost, and that in those that remained there was "the silence and solitude of inactive indigence and gloomy depopulation." We thought it a very picturesque-looking place, and should have remained there longer had the wind not changed and induced us to put ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston

... can't tell till I encounter him; and then, uncle, when I have an old gentleman by the hand, who has been disabled in his country's service, and is struggling to support his motherless child, a poor relation, and a faithful servant, in honorable indigence, impulse will supply me with words to express ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... dismissing him without further questioning. I always noticed that these circular letters, when written in the vernacular, were remarkable for their beautiful caligraphy and grammatical inaccuracy, and that they all seem to have been written by the same hand. Perhaps indigence exercises a peculiar and ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte

... objected against me: Your rule is true enough as to what concerns death; but what will you say of indigence? What will you, moreover, say of pain, which Aristippus, Hieronimus, and most of the sages have reputed the worst of evils; and those who have denied it by word of mouth have, however, confessed it in effect? Posidonius being extremely tormented with a sharp and painful disease, Pompeius ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... meditating on something. His anger had not cooled, but he tried to appear not to notice his enemy. . . . The doctor stood, leaning with one hand on the edge of the table, and looked at Abogin with that profound and somewhat cynical, ugly contempt only to be found in the eyes of sorrow and indigence when they are confronted ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... experience has not uniformly proved that the voluntary flow of heaped-up plenty, bursting from the weight of heaped-up luxuriance, has ever run with a more copious stream of revenue, than could be squeezed from the dry husks of oppressed indigence by the straining of all the machinery in the world?' That is Burke, sir—Burke: who, by the fribbles of his own day, was lightly termed the dinner-bell of the House of Commons, yet compelled the attention of all ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... thing, and the completion always remains infinitely below the destination. It follows that the child is to us like the representation of the ideal; not, indeed, of the ideal as we have realized it, but such as our destination admitted; and, consequently, it is not at all the idea of its indigence, of its hinderances, that makes us experience emotion in the child's presence; it is, on the contrary, the idea of its pure and free force, of the integrity, the infinity of its being. This is the reason why, in the sight ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... man had passed easily all the ordeals, I appointed him "a Character-Diver," to discover the qualities and detect the faults of little children,[2] and raised him from indigence to affluence. ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... suppress it. Everywhere else they are entitled to the game, and will keep close watch that it runs into no other net. Let this tax be appropriated to the support of an institution where, in disease and indigence, its victims may find support and relief. Make it public, that all may see and know its habitues, and who may feel the reforming influence of public opinion. For, at last, this is the only power by which the morals ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... of fortune are avoidable only by practice of the sternest indigence: human foresight cannot provide against the envy of the gods and the tireless machinations of Fate. The widening circle of prosperity grows weaker as it spreads until the antagonistic forces which it has pushed back are made powerful by compression to resist ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... 11) explains Matt. 11:19, "Wisdom is justified by her children," saying that this is because the holy apostles "understood that the kingdom of God does not consist in eating and drinking, but in suffering indigence with equanimity," for they are neither uplifted by affluence, nor distressed by want. Again (De Doctr. Christ. iii), he says that in all such things "it is not making use of them, but the wantonness of the user, that is sinful." Now both these lives are lawful and praiseworthy—namely, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... Albufera, a strange concentration of poverty and degradation, housing in wretched shanties a people that lives among the reeds and mud of the lake marshes, fishing in the murky, shallow waters from black, bluff-bowed boats that look like coffins. On these ashen, weather-beaten features indigence was drawn in its most ghastly outlines. Every eye was aglow with the wild gleam of fever; and the odors that came from clothes, here, had not the vigorous pungency of the open seashore, but the subtle nausea of swamp land and the infectious muck of stagnant pools. The bags these ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... "He was a philosopher equally removed from superstition and impiety; a voluptuary who had no less aversion from debauchery than inclination for pleasure: a man who had never felt the pressure of indigence, and who had never been in possession of affluence: he lived in a condition despised by those who have everything, envied by those who have nothing, and relished by those who make their reason the foundation of their happiness. When he was young he ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton

... in evil case, Named Trijat, born of Garga's race, Earned ever toiling in a wood With spade and plough his livelihood. The youthful wife, his babes who bore, Their indigence felt more and more. Thus to the aged man she spake: "Hear this my word: my counsel take. Come, throw thy spade and plough away; To virtuous Rama go to-day, And somewhat of his ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... confusion now took place hi the financial world. Families who had lived in opulence found themselves suddenly reduced to indigence. Schemers who had been reveling in the delusion of princely fortune found their estates vanishing into thin air. Those who had any property remaining sought to secure it against reverses. Cautious persons found there ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... noble mind may be clouded by adversity, but cannot be wholly concealed; for true merit shines by a light of its own, and, glimmering through the rents and crannies of indigence, is perceived, respected, and honored by the ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... to myself a more perfect example of indigence than I now exhibited. There was no being in the city on whose kindness I had any claim. Money I had none, and what I then wore comprised my whole stock of movables. I had just lost my shoes, and this loss rendered my stockings of no use. My dignity remonstrated ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown

... was fifty-six years ago. When the academy received its new telescope it was too poor to provide it a suitable place. Therefore a dome was erected on the roof, which disturbed the symmetry of the Grecian architecture. The telescope does good service under the dome; but it is a sign of the indigence of the academy. When I reflect on the progress made by other institutions, I am astonished at the march of events. Twenty years after the founding of Abbot Academy, the little settlement at Chicago had not been heard of at Andover. When Rev. Dr. Joel Hawes received his first request to provide ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various

... Several who, when they came to us from the farmers, were decently clothed and possessed a flock of sheep, which they had earned, in a short time returned to their fastnesses in a state of nakedness and indigence, rejoicing that they had got free from the farmers, and could live as they pleased in the indulgence of their sensual appetites. Such fugitives from civilised life, I have never seen otherwise occupied than with their bows ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham

... summon him to answer for insubordination. Winchelsea was very unwilling to go to Rome; but Edward seized his temporalities, banished eighty monks for giving him support, and finally exiled him. He died in indigence at Rome. ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... condition of poverty, With thirst, with cold, with hunger so confounded; To aske help thee shameth in thine hearte; If thou none ask, so sore art thou y-wounded, That very need unwrappeth all thy wound hid. Maugre thine head thou must for indigence Or steal, or beg, or borrow ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... At the call of indigence or avarice the master of a family could dispose of his children or his slaves. But the condition of the slave was far more advantageous, since he regained by the first manumission his alienated freedom: the son was again restored to his unnatural father; he might be condemned to servitude ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... soul) is made mistress of her passions and concupiscences, lady of indigence, of shame, of poverty, and of all fortune's injuries. Let him that can, attain to this advantage. Herein consists the true and sovereign liberty, that affords us means wherewith to jest and make a scorn of force and injustice, and to deride imprisonment, ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson

... The "non-free will" is mythology; in real life it is only a question of STRONG and WEAK wills.—It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself, when a thinker, in every "causal-connection" and "psychological necessity," manifests something of compulsion, indigence, obsequiousness, oppression, and non-freedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings—the person betrays himself. And in general, if I have observed correctly, the "non-freedom of the will" is regarded as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again. Did our birth fall in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation? We ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... of indigence, and this isolation in the midst of Paris, Lisbeth relished with delight. And besides, she foresaw that the first passion would rob her of her slave. Sometimes she even blamed herself because her own tyranny and reproaches had compelled the ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... States," or Southern cities, and old lady, named Landon, the widow of a lost sea captain; and as a dernier resort, occurring in many such cases, with a family of children to provide for,—the father and husband cut off from life and usefulness, leaving his family but a stone's cast from indigence,—the mother, to keep grim poverty from famishing her hearth and desolating her home, took in gentlemen's washing. Her eldest child, a boy of some twelve years old, was in the habit of visiting the largest hotels in the city, where he received the finer pieces of the gentlemen's apparel, and carried ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley

... of poverty, indigence, managing to live, fortune and wealth, cleverly treated by von Justi, Staatswirthschaft, I, p. 449, seq. Rau, Lehrbuch I, 76, seq., establishes the following gradation: privation and wretchedness, poverty, indigence, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... bondage, slavery or involuntary servitude except for crimes; and they should specially acquire, hold and transmit property and all other privileges of persons common to inhabitants of a country in which they reside. It would be further stipulated that in case of indigence resulting from injury, sickness or age, any such emigrants who should become pauperous should not thereupon be suffered to perish or come to want, but should be supported and cared for as is customary with similar inhabitants of the country in which ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various

... but I leave you to the Father of the fatherless, and to the widow's God." Suppose this; and how changed these rags!—how changed the cold, naked room! The heart's warmth can do much to withstand the winter's cold;—and there is hope, there is honor, in this virtuous indigence. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... music is naturally connected a taste for poetry; and, fortunately for the poets of Africa, they are in a great measure exempted from that neglect and indigence, which, in more polished countries, commonly attend the votaries of the Muses. They consist of two classes; the most numerous are the singing men, called Jilli kea, mentioned in a former part of my narrative. One or more of these may ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park

... begins a second era in Addison's life, which extends to the summer of 1710, when his age was thirty-eight. This was the first term of his official career; and though very barren of literary performance, it not only raised him from indigence, but settled definitely his position as a public man. His correspondence shows that, while on the continent, he had been admitted to confidential intimacy by diplomatists and men of rank; immediately on his return he was enrolled in the Kit-Cat Club, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... singular spectacles in these volumes; that of a scholar of extensive erudition, whose life seems to have passed in the study of languages and the sciences, while his faculties appear to have been disordered from the simplicity of his nature, and driven to madness by indigence and insult. He formed the wild resolution of becoming a mendicant author, the hawker of his own works; and by this mode endured all the aggravated sufferings, the great and the petty insults of all ranks of society, and even sometimes from men of learning themselves, who denied a mendicant author ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... dependence on, and veneration of, the Supreme Being, is natural to man: it is imprinted deep in his heart; he is reminded of it, by the inward sense of his extreme indigence, and by all the objects which surround him; and it may be affirmed, that this perpetual recourse to the Deity, is one of the principal foundations of religion and the strongest band by which man is ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... what speaks of the narrowest and humblest life in the most remote of hill-fastnesses, a few deserted and dilapidated palaces alone telling of a period of importance long past, nothing can describe the effect of coming out of this indigence and insignificance upon the silent, solitary piazza where the incomparable cathedral rears its front, covered from base to pinnacle with the richest sculpture and most brilliant mosaic. The volcanic mass on which the town is built is over ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various

... am getting old, and heavy of heart;—and in short, it oftenest seems to me I shall never write any word about that matter; and have again fairly got into the element of the IMPOSSIBLE. Very well: could I help it? I can at least be honestly silent; and "bear my indigence with dignity," as you once said. The insuperable difficulty of Frederic is, that he, the genuine little ray of Veritable and Eternal that was in him, lay imbedded in the putrid Eighteenth Century, such an Ocean of sordid nothingness, shams, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... The Imperial pontiff inculcates, in the most persuasive language, the duties of benevolence and hospitality; exhorts his inferior clergy to recommend the universal practice of those virtues; promises to assist their indigence from the public treasury; and declares his resolution of establishing hospitals in every city, where the poor should be received without any invidious distinction of country or of religion. Julian beheld with envy the wise and humane regulations ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... them in your lot for the correction of selfishness," said Bessie laughing. "I believe if we all helped the need that belongs to us by kindred or service, there would be little misery of indigence in the world, and little superfluity of riches even amongst the richest. That must have been the original reading of the old saw that sayeth, 'Charity ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... souviens, car j'ai bonne memoire, Du premier jour ou je te mis. C'etait ma fete, et, pour comble de gloire, Tu fus chante par mes amis. Ton indigence, qui m'honore, Ne m'a point banni de leurs bras. Tous ils sont prets a nous feter encore: Mon vieil ami, ne nous ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield

... 1866 a most violent hurricane passed over the island, injuring the orchards, destroying the fruit-trees, and damaging the sponges, which had proved hitherto a source of profit. The hurricane, too, was followed by repeated droughts, and the inhabitants of the out-islands were reduced to indigence and want, a condition which is still, in some measure, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... as this indigence continues, all unions or relations constructed between Man and Woman are constructed in indigence, and can produce only indigent results or ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... played the part of royalist, but on the final restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 he was banished for life from France as a regicide, and then withdrew to Brussels and temporary oblivion. After the revolution of July 1830 he reappeared in France, was reduced by a series of lawsuits to extreme indigence, accepted a small pension assigned him by Louis Philippe (on whom he had heaped abuse and railing), and died, the last survivor of the Committee of Public Safety, on the 13th of January ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... much more do they benefit under the force of contrast with the men of their own level. A young man of that class, however noble in appearance, is somewhat degraded in the eyes of women, by the necessity which his indigence imposes of working under a master; but a beautiful young woman, in the very poorest family, unless she enters upon a life of domestic servitude, (in which case her labors are light, suited to her sex, and withdrawn from the public eye,) so long in fact as she stays under her father's roof, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... and glossy as silken velvet. The interior of the hut denoted poverty, but not indigence. There was a larder in one corner; a small oven wrought into the chimney to the right of the fire-place; faggots and logs of wood were piled up near the hearth, and diverse kitchen utensils and other comforts hung brightly ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance

... truth, more against nature to make the mothers depend upon the discretion of their children; they ought to be plentifully provided for, to maintain themselves according to their quality and age, by reason that necessity and indigence are much more unbecoming and insupportable to them than to men; the son should rather be cut ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... who had long been regarded as the head of the party, had fled into the Low Countries on the discomfiture of his friends; and as he concealed his name and quality, he had there languished in extreme indigence. Philip de Comines tells us,[***] that he himself saw him, as well as the duke of Exeter, in a condition no better than that of a common beggar; till being discovered by Philip, duke of Burgundy, they had small ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume

... fond of life than the gloomy astrologer, they were repelled by the grim loneliness of the place. Freiherr Roderick had granted shelter and subsistence on the property to two old maids, sisters of his father, who were living in indigence, having been but niggardly provided for. They, together with an aged serving-woman, occupied the small warm rooms of one of the wings; besides them and the cook, who had a large apartment on the ground floor adjoining the kitchen, the only other person ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... person, through bad laws, or subjection to the will of others, is denied the liberty to use the sources of happiness within his reach, he will not fail to find this enviable existence, if he escape the positive evils of life, the great sources of physical and mental suffering—such as indigence, disease, and the unkindness, worthlessness, or premature loss of objects of affection. The main stress of the problem lies, therefore, in the contest with these calamities, from which it is a rare good fortune entirely to escape; ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill

... themselves. It is not for weak beings, who enter into a composition with guilt, and cover selfishness and cowardice with the name of prudence. It is not for corrupt wretches, who rise from the bed of debauchery, or from the mire of indigence, to feast their eyes upon the blood that streams from the scaffold. It is the portion of a people who delight in humanity, practice justice, despise their flatterers, and respect the truth. While you are not such a people, O my fellow-citizens! ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... must have been awake the night I counted my money; otherwise, as I had never trusted the secret of my riches to any one, they could not have suspected me of possessing any property; for, ever since I kept company with them, I had appeared to be in great indigence. ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth

... found myself—a girl of twenty-one, alone in the world, and only twopence short of penniless, without a friend to protect, a relation to counsel her. (I don't count Aunt Susan, who lurked in ladylike indigence at Blackheath, and whose counsel, like her tracts, was given away too profusely to everybody to allow of one's placing any very high value upon it.) But, as a matter of fact, I must admit I was not in the least alarmed. Nature had endowed me with a profusion of crisp black ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... the son of a warrant officer. He did not contract this disease until he had been sent out to the West Indies, where it swept away hundreds. He had now been long in the service, with little or no chance of promotion. He had suffered from indigence, from reflections upon his humble birth, from sarcasms on his appearance. Every contumely had been heaped upon him at one time or another, in the ships in which he served; among a crowd he had found himself desolate—and now, although no one dared treat him to his face with disrespect, ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat

... and fre 2020 And of his poeple take and pile, Largesse be no weie of skile It mai be seid, bot Avarice, Which in a king is a gret vice. A king behoveth ek to fle The vice of Prodegalite, That he mesure in his expence So kepe, that of indigence He mai be sauf: for who that nedeth, In al his werk the worse he spedeth. 2030 As Aristotle upon Chaldee Ensample of gret Auctorite Unto king Alisandre tauhte Of thilke folk that were unsauhte Toward here king for his pilage: Wherof he bad, in his corage That he unto thre pointz entende, Wher that ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower

... laws I will give you Calmet's remarks; "A father could not sell his daughter as a slave, according to the Rabbins, until she was at the age of puberty, and unless he were reduced to the utmost indigence. Besides when a master bought an Israelitish girl, it was always with the presumption that he would take her to wife. Hence Moses adds, 'if she please not her master, and he does not think fit to marry her, he shall set her at liberty,' ...
— An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South • Angelina Emily Grimke

... attentively upon his travelling companion, Ganlesse, he could not help discovering (by the aid of imagination, perhaps), that though insignificant in person, plain in features, and dressed like one in indigence, there lurked still about his person and manners, that indefinable ease of manner which belongs only to men of birth and quality, or to those who are in the constant habit of frequenting the best company. His companion, whom he called Will Smith, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... accustomed to reverence. His opinion was that so much land should be entailed as that families should never fall into contempt, and as much left free as to give them all the advantages of property in case of any emergency. 'If,' said he, 'the nobility are suffered to sink into indigence, they of course become corrupt; they are ready to do whatever the king chooses; therefore it is fit they should be kept from becoming poor, unless it is fixed that when they fall below a certain standard of wealth they shall lose their peerages. We know the House of Peers have made noble stands, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... whom I had supposed to live in affluence. Poverty has in large cities very different appearances. It is often concealed in splendour and often in extravagance. It is the care of a very great part of mankind to conceal their indigence from the rest. They support themselves by temporary expedients, and every day is lost in ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson

... beneficent action.'—Reflect upon this, my dear, and see how it agrees with the declaration you have made to your aunt and sister, that you would not resume your estate, were you to be turned out of doors, and reduced to indigence and want. Their very fears that you will resume, point out to you the necessity of resuming upon the treatment ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... the wrinkled date, "The plumb, the fragrant apple, and the grape "Pluck'd from the purple vine; all plac'd around "In spreading baskets: snow-white honey fill'd "The central space. The prime of all the feast, "Was looks that hearty welcome gave, and prov'd "No indigence nor poverty of soul. "Meantime the empty'd bowls full oft they see "Spontaneously replenish'd; still the wine "Springs to the brim. Astonish'd, struck with dread, "To view the novel scene, the timid pair "Their hands upraise devoutly, and with prayers "Excuses utter ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... all, it was not inhumanity that prompted the ancients thus severely to chastise idleness; they were induced to it by a strict equity, and it would be doing them injustice to suppose, that it was thus they treated those unfortunate poor, whose indigence was occasioned by infirmities, by age, or unforeseen calamities. Every family constantly assisted its branches to save them from being reduced to beggary; which to them appeared worse than death. The magistrates protected those who were destitute ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... Toil and sorrow will have set their hard marks upon my brow. These garments, now so brightly stained with figures that denote my royal birth and princely station, will be worn bare, or exchanged for the sheep-skin vest of indigence. How, then, will you know that I am indeed your son, should I ever present myself before you cleansed of this ...
— The Children's Portion • Various

... penury, indigence, need, destitution, privation, neediness, impecuniosity, pauperism; deficiency, paucity, infecundity, dearth, lack, meagerness, sterility, barrenness. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... we are truly evangelical poor, the world will have compassion upon us, and will generously give us all that is necessary for our subsistence; but if we swerve from holy poverty, the world will shun us; the illicit means which we might take for avoiding indigence, would only make us feel it the more." Is not such a discourse sufficient to show us, that St. Francis had great talents and judgment, joined to great knowledge ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe

... character of this measure is very clearly expressed in the following circular of the Committee of Public Safety to its representatives on mission in the departments, Ventose, year II. "A summary act was necessary to put the aristocracy down. The national Convention has struck the blow. Virtuous indigence had to recover the property which crime had encroached upon. The national Convention has proclaimed its rights. A general list of all prisoners should be sent to the Committee of General Security, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... them, inspiring them to be good, devoting his whole thought to their welfare, Pestalozzi, who was described as "either a good-natured fool, or a poor devil, who was compelled, by indigence, to perform the menial office of schoolmaster," began a work ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley

... how poor was Leonard Jasper! Poor to the extreme of indigence! The love of his children, reaching toward him spontaneously its tendrils, he rejected in the selfish devotion of every thought and feeling to business as a means of acquiring wealth. And as to the true riches, which many around him were laying up where no moth could corrupt ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur

... they had been allotted was too tenacious to be unclenched. The breaking out of the civil wars utterly ruined him, by intercepting a small pension which Charles I. had allowed him, and he died in the utmost indigence. His son, after having served as a soldier abroad and in Britain, and passed through several vicissitudes of fortune, was fain to content himself with the situation of a non-commissioned officer in the Life-Guards, although lineally descended from the royal family, the father of the ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... misery, but can only learn that it always has been so. I fear it is, that the poor are without energy, and the rich without generosity. The decay of manufactures since the last century must have reduced many families to indigence. These have been able to subsist on the refuse of luxury, but, too supine for exertion, they have sought for nothing more; while the great, discharging their consciences with the superfluity of what administered to their pride, fostered the evil, instead of endeavouring to remedy it. ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady

... of the improvements and additions which were making to the Norland estate, and in spite of its owner having once been within some thousand pounds of being obliged to sell out at a loss, nothing gave any symptom of that indigence which he had tried to infer from it; no poverty of any kind, except of conversation, appeared; but there, the deficiency was considerable. John Dashwood had not much to say for himself that was worth hearing, and his wife had still less. But ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... out of tune," growled the general, as he looked up to the old, yellow dial, and ran his eye over the cords which supported the weights. Then glancing around the room, he saw everywhere age, decay, and indigence. There was an old divan, with a patched, faded covering of silk, and a grandfather's arm-chair near it, the cushion of which the general knew, by the long years of experience, to be hard as a stone. A round table stood near the divan, covered ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach

... Assembly Considering that the contribution of fourty shillings for entertaining of Highland boyes at Schools, in respect of the penury and great indigence of those parts hath not taken the intended effect. Therefore in respect of the necessity and profitablenesse of so pious a work The Assembly in lieu of the said fourty shillings Do Appoint and Ordain that there be an extraordinary Collection ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland

... phalanges. Suppose only five francs on each phalange, and that there were five hundred thousand phalanges on the globe, the jury would have accorded a sum of 2,500,000 francs; Jacquart would not have been compelled to die in a state bordering on indigence, after having ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various

... even in the years of plenty, (6) when abundance of all blessings reigns, not even then may the tyrant's heart rejoice amid the general joy, for the greater the indigence of the community the humbler he will find them: ...
— Hiero • Xenophon

... discourse; and I have great reason to conjecture that the habitual discontent that preyed upon his mind, and embittered his life, especially the latter part of it, communicated itself to me. I was educated in the belief that the world is blind to merit, continually suffers superior virtue to linger in indigence and neglect, and is therefore an odious, unjust, and ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... rent and, ere long, for the commonest necessities of life. In vain I struggled to redeem myself; the time of my prosperity had not come and I only sank deeper and deeper into debt and finally into indigence. A baby came. Our landlord was kind and allowed us to stay for two weeks under the roof for whose protection we could not pay; but at the end of that time we were asked to leave; and I found myself on the road with a dying wife, a wailing ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green

... this morning with her veil down, and walking with the hasty step of one who suffers some inward trouble. Ah! I guess it all. Her means are exhausted in elegant fancies, or have been taken away by some unexpected misfortune, and now she has fallen from luxury to indigence. While the work-woman manages not only to keep her little room, but also to furnish it with decent comfort by her steady toil, that of the singer is become the property of brokers. The one sparkled for a moment on the wave of prosperity; the other sails slowly but safely ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre

... disease there came a train of misfortune completely overwhelming the frail life of the poet. The year 1831 proved very unfavourable to his farming operations, and, having no capital whatever to fall back upon, he at once relapsed into his former state of indigence. It was in vain that he attempted to make up for his losses by increased exertions as a labourer. Working fifteen and sixteen hours a day during harvest time, and not unfrequently standing up to his knees in mud in the undrained fields, his health ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin

... accustomed to live by plunder, were become incapable of industry, and who, from the natural ferocity of their manners, indulged themselves in committing violence, even beyond what was requisite to supply their necessities. The English themselves, reduced to the most extreme indigence by these continued depredations, had shaken off all bands of government; and those who had been plundered today, betook themselves next day to a like disorderly life, and, from despair, joined the robbers in pillaging and ruining their ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... his wife lived; they spent the whole day at home drinking, and were not known to use bread or animal food. As may be supposed, the cows soon came to the market one by one; and Tim and his wife, after years of misery, died in great indigence. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various

... obscured by clouds. But this desolate tract was not wholly untenanted, for AEneas saw flitting about certain hideous shadowy forms. The spirits of Grief and Revenge and pale Disease, Fear and Famine and deformed Indigence, had their abode in this vestibule of Hades; and so, too, Death and Toil, and murderous War, and frantic Discord, her head crowned with curling vipers and bound by a blood-dyed fillet. Here, also, were the iron chambers in which dwelt the terrible Furies. In the midst rose a gloomy elm, which ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various

... would be seized and taken before a magistrate, to be punished for being homeless and without food. Many of them do not dread this punishment, but will seek to deserve it by more criminal conditions than enforced indigence and helpless hunger. They will break street-lamps and tradesmen's windows, to get a month's imprisonment, with food, and rest, and shelter for that period. Others, and the majority, have a prouder ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... shunned as the pest and bane of social enjoyment. In short, I am debarred from every kind of happiness. If I look back, I recoil with horror from the black catalogue of vices which have stained my past life, and reduced me to indigence and contempt. If I look forward, I shudder at the prospects which my foreboding mind presents to view both in this and a coming world. This is a deplorable, yet just, picture of myself. How totally the reverse of ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster

... thou give ear to that wherewith I would bespeak thee?" "Speak out," quoth the King, "that is with thee of fair rede;" and quoth the youth, "Rise, O my sire, that we depart this city ere any be ware of our wending; so shall we find rest and issue from the straits of indigence now closing around us. In this place there is no return of livelihood to us and poverty hath emaciated us and we are set in the sorriest of conditions than which naught can be sorrier." "O my child," quoth his ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... good management, make her a much greater merit in this family, than I can pretend to have! And shall I return, in the day of my power, insult and haughtiness for the kindness and benevolence I received from her in that of my indigence!—Indeed, I won't forgive you, my dear Mrs. Jervis, if I think you capable of looking upon me in any other light than as your daughter; for you have been a mother to me, when the absence of my own could not afford me the comfort and good counsel I received ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson

... and decency, in treating a distinguished prisoner of war as if he had been a Botany-Bay convict. If, at the present day, in any similar case between the same States, the repetition of such outrages would be more than unlikely, it is only because it is among nations as among individuals: imputed indigence provokes oppression and scorn; but that same indigence being risen to opulence, receives a politic consideration even from its ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville

... lamp extinguished in the gulf above. In every loosened orb that shoots across the face of night the experienced eye may trace the story and the fall of a fellow-being. Youth, beauty, wealth, the humility of indigence and the pride of power, alike find their term revealed in the bright, silent course of the celestial spark; and still new signs succeed to provoke the sympathy or dazzle the philosophy of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... childless. Yet, unmindful of the alleviation, a spirit of complaint, at what she impatiently called the bitterness of her lot and the hardness of the world, so preyed upon her, as ere long to hurry her from the obscurity of indigence to the deeper shades of ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... to the colonies. While he resided in the vicinity of Rotherhithe, his avocations obliging him to go early into the city and return late, he frequently saw deserted infants exposed to the inclemencies of the seasons, and through the indigence or cruelty of their parents left to casual relief, or untimely death. This naturally excited his compassion, and led him to project the establishment of an hospital for the reception of exposed and deserted young children; in which humane design he laboured more than seventeen years, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler

... inmates slept on the bare tiled floors, never unclothing themselves. There was neither furniture nor linen, the life led there was essentially an animal life, a commingling of either sex and of every age—humanity lapsing into animality through lack of even indispensable things, through indigence of so complete a character that men, women, and children fought even with tooth and nail for the very crumbs swept from the tables of the rich. And the worst of it all was the degradation of the human being; this was no case of the free naked savage, hunting ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... balance, and were to pursue awhile further our chase of the alien, the somehow repeatedly postponed real opportunity; and the second, the comparatively cramped and depressed connection with the classic refuge, as it then was, of spasmodic thrift, when not of settled indigence, for the embarrassed of our race in the largest sense of this matter, was to be shuffled off at last with no scant relief and reaction. This is perhaps exactly why the whole picture of our existence at the Pas-de-Calais watering place pleads to me now ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... It is in the end PIERRE or WILLIAM that bears it, takes it into his possession, and whom only it concerns. Oh what a valiant faculty is HOPE, that in a mortal subject, and in a moment, makes nothing of usurping infinity, immensity, eternity, and of supplying her master's indigence, at her pleasure, with all things that he can imagine or desire. And this Pierre or William, what is it but a sound, when all is done, ("What's in a name?") or three or four ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... Is obliged to quit trenches at Madras, and retire dismally upon Pondicherry,—to mere indigence, mutiny ("ten mutinies"), Official conspiracy, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... wealth and ease, ill could my Husband support the transition to distress and indigence. He looked back with repining to the comforts which He once enjoyed. He regretted the situation which for my sake He had quitted; and in moments when Despair possessed his mind, has reproached me with having made him ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis

... at Glasgow on the 19th January 1800. His parents being in circumstances of indigence, he was sent to labour in a factory so early as his eighth year. A limited attendance at school he supplemented by devoting his intervals of toil to self-instruction. He began to contribute verses to the public journals in his eighteenth year, and soon after composed a series of poems, entitled ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... been decreed to him for having subdued Corsica, fell down dead before the altar at which he was offering up his thanksgiving. Zimmerman, in his work on Experience in Physic, has related the circumstance of a worthy family in Holland being reduced to indigence; the elder brother passed over to the East Indies, acquired considerable fortune there, and returning home presented his sister with the richest jewel: the young woman, at this unexpected change of fortune became motionless and died. The famous ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various

... which I might emancipate my mind, through abstracting it from the body, would not serve my end. I should still need money to devote myself to certain experiments. But for that, I would accept the outward indigence of a sage possessed of both heaven and heart. A man need only never stoop, to remain lofty in poverty. He who struggles and endures, while marching on to a glorious end, presents a noble spectacle; but ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... caught by a revolving shaft and torn to pieces, limb from limb. There is no directing intelligence in human affairs, no protection, and no assistance. Those who act uprightly are not rewarded, but they and their children often wander in the utmost indigence. Those who do evil are not always punished, but frequently flourish and have happy children. Rewards and punishments are purely human institutions, and if government be relaxed they entirely disappear. No intelligence ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies

... starvation, famine, drought. dole, mite, pittance; short allowance, short commons; half rations; banyan day. emptiness, poorness &c. Adj.; depletion, vacancy, flaccidity; ebb tide; low water; " a beggarly account of empty boxes " [Romeo and Jul.]; indigence &c. 804; insolvency &c. (nonpayment) 808. V. be insufficient &c. Adj.; not suffice &c. 639; come short of &c. 304 run dry. want, lack, need, require; caret; be in want &c. (poor) 804, live from hand to mouth. render insufficient &c. Adj.; drain of resources, impoverish &c. (waste) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... views, and without any settled plan; as long as ministers shall conduct themselves, as if the empire, or their functions, were to end the next day; as long as the national treasures shall be exhausted by unparalleled depredations, and that its indigence shall only be removed by extravagant speculations, the ruinous consequences of which will not be perceived, or will be neglected, for the trifling advantages of the moment? and to make use of an energetic, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... day by five or six nuns. She entered the church by one door, Prince de Leon by another; not a compliment or a word passed between them; the curate said mass; married them; they mounted a coach, and drove off to the house of a friend some leagues from Paris. They paid for their folly by a cruel indigence which lasted all their lives, neither of them having survived the Duc de Rohan, Monsieur de Roquelaure, or Madame de Roquelaure. They ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... prudence and morality, produces a pleasing remission after more laborious studies; furnishes an amusement, not wholly unprofitable, for that part of life, the greater part of many lives, which would otherwise be lost in idleness or vice; it produces a useful traffic between the industry of indigence and the curiosity of wealth, and brings many things to notice ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart

... he was no financier, and never knew how to take care of money when he had any, the expenses of his outfit when promoted to the rank of Adjutant, in 1806, formed the nucleus of a debt which hampered him from youth to old age. His indigence often subjected him to straits which must have been hard to bear; but he was of a sanguine, joyous disposition, and poverty, though it might temporarily overcloud his happiness, had no power to break his indomitable ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... obey the voice of my selfish heart, I would gladly, proudly, share and follow your fortunes. You mistake me if you think sordid and vulgar ambition can only influence me. No! I could be worthy of you! The daughter of John Vernon could be a worthy wife to the man of indigence and genius. In your poverty I could soothe you; in your labour I could support you; in your reverses console, in your prosperity triumph. But—but, it must not be. Go, Godolphin—dear Godolphin! There are thousands better and fairer than I am, who ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... torture, sorrow, grief; misery, affliction, adversity, disaster, calamity, misfortune; straits, poverty, destitution, indigence. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... Secondly, when that which he deprives himself of, though it be required for the decencies of life, can nevertheless easily be recovered, so that he does not suffer extreme inconvenience. Thirdly, when he is in presence of extreme indigence in an individual, or great need on the part of the common weal. For in such cases it would seem praiseworthy to forego the requirements of one's station, in order to provide for ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... late seventies James Ollerenshaw had been a young-old man of nearly thirty. He had had a stepbrother, much older and much poorer than himself, and the stepbrother had died, leaving a daughter, named Susan, almost, but not quite, in a state of indigence. The stepbrother and James had not been on terms of effusive cordiality. But James was perfectly ready to look after Susan, his stepniece. Susan, aged seventeen years, was, however, not perfectly ready to be looked after. She had ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett

... were nothing of the kind. But the weak have grave misgivings of possible errors in justice. Besides, these vagabond families are very easily scared. The accusation against the Comprachicos was that they traded in other people's children. But the promiscuousness caused by poverty and indigence is such that at times it might have been difficult for a father and mother to prove a child ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... the interval was dead, and at the end of the four years my father died too. I was rich enough now—yet poor to hideous indigence: a nature the most gross, impure, depraved I ever saw, was associated with mine, and called by the law and by society a part of me. And I could not rid myself of it by any legal proceedings: for the doctors now discovered that my wife was mad—her excesses had prematurely ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... the withered neck, The coat worn out with care, The cleanliness of indigence, The brilliance of despair, The fond imponderable ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson

... rapture: they have never been amalgamated with society, are strangers to poverty themselves, and cannot comprehend its operation upon others; born and moving in a sphere where the chilling blasts of indigence never penetrate, or the clouds of adversity appal, they have no conception of the more delightful gratification which springs from the source of all earthly happiness, the pleasure and ability of administering to the wants and comforts of ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... the youngest of this illustrious band, was born at the imperial city of Weil, in the duchy of Wirtemberg, on the 21st December 1571. His parents, Henry Kepler and Catherine Guldenmann, were both of noble family, but had been reduced to indigence by their own bad conduct. Henry Kepler had been long in the service of the Duke of Wirtemberg as a petty officer, and in that capacity had wasted his fortune. Upon setting out for the army, he left ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster

... him, alas! who never shall return, To black adversity's approach exposed, With want and hardships unforeseen enclosed; His lovely daughter, left without a friend Her innocence to succour and defend, By youth and indigence set forth a prey To lawless guilt, that flatters to betray— While these reflections rack his feeling mind, 700 Rodmond, who hung beside, his grasp resign'd; And, as the tumbling waters o'er him roll'd, His outstretch'd arms the master's legs enfold. Sad Albert ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... reverence. His opinion was that so much land should be entailed as that families should never fall into contempt, and as much left free as to give them all the advantages of property in case of any emergency. 'If (said he,) the nobility are suffered to sink into indigence[312], they of course become corrupt; they are ready to do whatever the king chooses; therefore it is fit they should be kept from becoming poor, unless it is fixed that when they fall below a certain standard of wealth they shall lose their peerages[313]. We know the House of Peers ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... forthwith the same arrangement for all, Athenians, that each, taking his dividend from the public, may be what the state requires. Is peace to be had? You are better at home, under no compulsion to act dishonorably from indigence. Is there such an emergency as the present? Better to be a soldier, as you ought, in your country's cause, maintained by those very allowances. Is any one of you beyond the military age? What he now irregularly takes without doing service, let him take by just regulation, ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes

... self-advertising politicians, billionaire socialists, and the reporters. To-day the sentimental traveller 'feels a heart-pang to see the order, the cleanliness, the wide streets, the playgrounds, the big boulevards, the absence of indigence that have spoiled the most interesting part of New York City.' But apparently this is only a first impression; for Mr. Huneker had no trouble in discovering in one cafe a patriarchal figure quite of the type beloved of the local- color hunters ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... not in it, David, with you, my pippin, as auspicious counsellors of ingenious indigence. The remark which you uttered lately, when refusing to make the trumpery advance of half-a-crown on a garment which had been near to the illustrious person of my friend Chevy Slime, that remark was inspired. "Go to Holborn!" you said, and the longest-bearded of early prophets never uttered aught ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang

... alone felt sorrow at the dean's departure were two young women, whose parents, exempt from indigence, preserved them from suffering under his unpitying piety, but whose discretion had not protected them from the bewitching smiles of his nephew, and the ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald

... Erected at his own charge A Building and Colonnade For the convenience of those Persons Who, in this renowned Mart, Might carry on the Commerce of the World; Adding thereto, for the relief of Indigence, And for the advancement of Literature and Science, An Almshouse and a College of Lecturers; The City of London aiding him; Queen Elizabeth favouring the design, And, when the work was complete, Opening it in person, with a solemn Procession. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... districts he views not the hostile castle, and the haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay- built hut and miserable cabin, where cattle and men help to keep each other warm, and dwell in meanness, smoke, and indigence. A pleasing uniformity of decent competence appears throughout our habitations. The meanest of our log-houses is a dry and comfortable habitation. Lawyer or merchant are the fairest titles our towns afford; that of a farmer is the only appellation ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

... Twenty-four stuivers, or two shillings, a day were allowed by the States-General for the support of each prisoner and his family. As the family property of Grotius was at once sequestered, with a view to its ultimate confiscation, it was clear that abject indigence as well as imprisonment was to be the lifelong lot of this illustrious person, who had hitherto lived in modest affluence, occupying the most ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... it could be seen, between the towering backs of constables, that the spectacle itself was chiefly made up of indigence bedecked. The thousands of perspiring children, penned like sheep, and driven to and fro like sheep by anxious and officious rosettes, nearly all had the air of poverty decently putting the best face on itself; they were nearly all, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... discontent. The man was indisputably ill-clad, yet not without a certain fitness and good taste, withal; for he was obviously an applicant for admittance to the Home, where poverty was a qualification. In the army of indigence the uniform is rags; they serve to distinguish the rank and ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce

... ndividual in these kingdoms; and that the bread of thousands in Great Britain, principally and immediately depends upon this branch of commerce, of which a temporary interruption will reduce the hand of industry to idleness and want, and a longer cessation of it would sink the now opulent trader in indigence and ruin; and that at this particular season of the year, the petitioners have been accustomed to send to North America many ships wholly laden with the products of Britain; but by the unhappy differences at present subsisting, from whatever source they ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... poverty, and not Valjean, must be indicted; so runs the argument. This conclusion we deny. Let us consider. Poverty is not unwholesome. The bulk of men are poor, and always have been. Poverty is no new condition. Man's history is not one of affluence, but one of indigence. This is a patent fact. But a state of lack is not unwholesome, but on the contrary does great good. Poverty has supplied the world with most of the kings it boasts of. Palaces have not cradled the kings of thought, service, and achievement. What greatest ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... United States there is no religious animosity, because all religion is respected, and no sect is predominant; there is no jealousy of rank, because the people is everything, and none can contest its authority; lastly, there is no public indigence to supply the means of agitation, because the physical position of the country opens so wide a field to industry that man is able to accomplish the most surprising undertakings with his own native resources. Nevertheless, ambitious men are interested in the creation of parties, since it is difficult ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... is a tradition of the prophet, that death to the poor is a state of rest. That ass proceeds all the lighter on his journey on whom they load the lightest burden:—the poor dervish, who suffers under a load of indigence, will in like sort enter the gates of death with an easy burden; but with him who luxuriates in peace, plenty, and affluence, it must be a real hardship to die amidst all these comforts. At all events consider the prisoner, who is released from his thraldom, as better off than ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... Vices. All Mankind are so far related, that Care is to be taken, in things to which all are liable, you do not mention what concerns one in Terms which shall disgust another. Thus to tell a rich Man of the Indigence of a Kinsman of his, or abruptly inform a virtuous Woman of the Lapse of one who till then was in the same degree of Esteem with her self, is in a kind involving each of them in some Participation ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... distance, he took to the pleasant and profitable pastime of which Dick Turpin is the patron saint. He was all but hanged for his daring robberies, but unfortunately not quite so. He lived to suffer such indigence, that he and another rascal had but one under-garment between them, and entered into a compact that one should lie in bed while the other wore the article in question. Naturally enough the two fell out in time, and the end of Goodman—sad misnomer—was worse than his beginning: ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton

... continues, all unions or relations constructed between Man and Woman are constructed in indigence, and can produce only indigent ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... choice; and therefore I, perhaps, have never yet felt all the malignity with which a reproach, edged with the appellation of old maid, swells some of those hearts in which it is infixed. I was not condemned in my youth to solitude, either by indigence or deformity, nor passed the earlier part of life without the flattery of courtship, and the joys of triumph. I have danced the round of gaiety amidst the murmurs of envy, and gratulations of applause; been attended from pleasure to pleasure by the great, the sprightly, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... laws I will give you Calmet's remarks; "A father could not sell his daughter as a slave, according to the Rabbins, until she was at the age of puberty, and unless he were reduced to the utmost indigence. Besides, when a master bought an Israelitish girl, it was always with the presumption that he would take her to wife." Hence Moses adds, "if she please not her master, and he does not think fit to marry ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... which sovereigns and priests oblige their slaves to observe most rigorously. With this idea, many pious Christians have of their own accord renounced riches, distributed their patrimony among the poor, and retired into deserts, there to live in voluntary indigence. But this enthusiasm, this supernatural taste for misery, has been soon forced to yield to nature. The successors of these volunteers in poverty sold to the devout people their prayers, and their intercessions ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach

... to enlarge on this delicate subject. Permit me only to submit to your majesty's consideration, whether his long imprisonment and the confiscation of his estate, and the indigence and dispersion of his family, and the painful anxieties incident to all these circumstances, do not form an assemblage of sufferings which recommend him to the mediation of humanity? Allow me, Sir, on this occasion ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette

... Why, what's one baby's brain more or less to you? One case more or less for your filing cabinet, that's all. If I were one of these poor girls and found myself stuck in one of these places that screams out their indigence above the very doorway, dresses them in the blue calico of indigence, and then seals and stamps indigence all over them, I'd show you what real indigence is, once you insisted upon stamping me with it. But you're not going to make ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... prepare and stimulate his ambition for the lofty career of political action that awaited him at home. In truth, if we may judge from the letters written during his English residence, or the biographical fragments that occur in his other correspondence, he seems, beyond his personal indigence, to have had no other enduring interest but that of public affairs. His mind broods over the tragic epochs of English history with a fascinating and curious sympathy: there is an evident faith in a coming drama of popular action ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various



Words linked to "Indigence" :   beggary, mendicity, mendicancy, poorness, indigent, pauperization, poverty, need, impoverishment, pauperism, penury



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