"Meagreness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... church I had the misfortune to see in the boxes a pair of horrible mummies, decked off with robes and ornaments—a count of Nassau-Saarwerden and his daughter, according to the custodian—an unhappy pair who, having escaped our common doom of corruption by some physical aridity or meagreness, have been compelled to leave their tombs and attitudinize as works of art. In Kleber's square I saw the conqueror of Heliopolis, excessively pigeon-breasted, dangling his sabre over a cowering little figure of Egypt, and looking around in amazement at the neighboring windows: in fact, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... when such scenes delighted Lily, when they gratified her sense of beauty and her craving for the external finish of life; there were others when they gave a sharper edge to the meagreness of her own opportunities. This was one of the moments when the sense of contrast was uppermost, and she turned away impatiently as Mrs. George Dorset, glittering in serpentine spangles, drew Percy Gryce in her wake to a ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... picturing in the radiant colours of his own Western sky the glory of prairie, foot-hill, and mountain, the greatness and promise of the new land, and the worth of the work he was trying to do. But his two years of missionary experience had made him feel the hardship, the isolation, the meagreness, of the life which she would have to share with him. The sunset colours were still there, but they were laid upon ragged rock, lonely hill, and wind-swept, empty prairie. It took him days of hard riding and harder thinking to give final form to the last paragraph ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... cast. Both were accustomed to work, as, blessed be God! the American woman usually works; that is to say, within doors, and to render home neat, comfortable, and welcome. As housewives, they were expert and willing, considering the meagreness of their means; and le Bourdon told the half-delighted, half-blushing Margery, ere the latter had been twenty-four hours in his chiente, that nothing but the presence of such a one as herself was wanting to render ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... unwilling to believe that the phenomena are produced by the action of intelligences other than that of the medium, abandon further study because of the meagreness of the intellectual results. They have waited on the visitors from another world, notebook in hand, plying them with careful questions intended to increase our modest store of knowledge. The replies ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... thought of my mission. All that wild day in the snow it had seemed the merest farce. The three words Harry Bullivant had scribbled had danced through my head in a crazy fandango. They were present to me now, but coolly and sanely in all their meagreness. ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... Boswell to whom this advice was given, it is not unlikely that he needed it. The meagreness of his record of Johnson's talk at this season may have been due, as seems to have happened before, to too much ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... appliance of every theatrical accessory;—of architecture, lighting, music, the illusion of decorations changing in a moment as if by enchantment, machinery and costume;—by all this, we are now so completely spoiled, that this earlier meagreness of stage decoration will in no wise satisfy us. Much, however, might be urged in favour of such a constitution of the theatre. Where the spectators are not allured by any splendid accessories, they ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... pane had been cleared of its dinginess; not a cobweb had been swept from its ceiling; nothing had been removed, except the pair of living skeletons who once acted as his attendants. They had been removed by the Remover of all things; and were succeeded by a pair, so similar in meagreness and oddity of appearance, that I could not have known the change, except for its mention by their master, congratulating himself on being so "fortunate" in finding substitutes. I found Mordecai immersed in day-books and ledgers, and calculating the exchanges with as much anxiety as if he were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... inattentive, unlistening. She was not amongst those who counted. He pushed open an ill-fitting door, whose broken glass top was stuffed with brown paper. The room within was almost horrible in its meagreness. The floor was uncarpeted, the wall unpapered. In a three-legged chair drawn up to the table, with paper before him and a pencil in his hand, sat David Ross. He looked up at the panting ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and doubtful indications alone, whether he is speaking of a place from personal knowledge or only from hearsay. In truth, though there are delightful exceptions, and nearly every part of the book suggests interesting questions, a desperate meagreness and baldness does extend over considerable tracts of the story. In fact his book reminds us sometimes of his own description of Khorasan:—"On chevauche par beaus plains et belles costieres, la ou il a moult beaus herbages et bonne pasture et fruis assez.... Et aucune fois y treuve l'en ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Medici Chapel and the entrance to the Laurenziana, but the old man had lost and forgotten the plans, if he had ever made them. The difficulties that beset the Duke and the academicians in completing the designs, and the meagreness of Michael Angelo's instructions to them, must give us pause when we attempt to attribute the faults of these monuments to the master mind. "About the staircase of the Library, of which so much has been said ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... considerably later period than between it and England, to which, and as far as can be seen to no other possible cause is to be attributed two very striking characteristics of its fauna, namely, its excessive meagreness and its strikingly northern character. Not only does it come far short of the already meagre English fauna, but all the distinctively southern species are the ones missing, though there is nothing in the climate to account for the fact. ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... admired the service to its owner's content, establishing thus a new bond of sympathy between them; and both were soon seated near the table, sipping the tea with demure little spoons, that approached the meagreness of Chinese chop-sticks, and decorating ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... fasting, and growing thin and emaciated; their ordinary meal is a handful of parched grain and a few swallows of milk or water. Among the aesthetic Brahmans are many specimens reduced by habitual fasting and general meagreness of diet to the condition of living skeletons; yet they seem to enjoy splendid health, and live to a shrivelled old age. The Brahman shop-keeper squats contentedly among his wares, passing the hours in dreamy meditation and in consoling ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... horrible. There was something grotesque in their decrepitude. Their toothless mouths, their hooked noses, the meagreness of the active one, and the hanging yellow cheeks of the other (the still one, whose head trembled) would have been laughable if the sight of their dreadful physical degradation had not been appalling to one's eyes, had not gripped one's heart with poignant ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... conscience does not set the same price upon the labor of an overseer and the work of a hod-carrier. A reduction in the price of the day's work, then, is necessary: so that the laborer, after having been afflicted in mind by a degrading function, cannot fail to be struck also in his body by the meagreness of his reward. This is the literal application of the words of the Gospel: HE THAT HATH NOT, FROM HIM SHALL BE TAKEN EVEN THAT WHICH ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... the greatest, as appears by those prodigious symptoms which it hath, and that it produceth. For besides fear and sorrow, which is common to all melancholy, anxiety of mind, suspicion, aggravation, restless thoughts, paleness, meagreness, neglect of business, and the like, these men are farther yet misaffected, and in a higher strain. 'Tis a more vehement passion, a more furious perturbation, a bitter pain, a fire, a pernicious curiosity, a gall ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... with which the gold discoveries had been regarded by the squatters and employers of labour were by no means realised; for though men were for a time scarce, and wages exceedingly high, yet, when the real nature of a gold-digger's life and the meagreness of the average earnings became apparent, the great majority of the miners returned to their ordinary employments and the colony resumed its former career of steady progress, though with this difference, that the ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... so famished them, the cause of their meagreness and of their wretched husk not yet being manifest, and lo! from the depths of its head, a shade turned his eyes on me, and looked fixedly, then cried out loudly, "What grace to me is this!" Never should I have recognized him by his face; but in his voice that was disclosed ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... a more common-sense treatment that we want; for here is sufficient simplicity, but a simplicity barren of all satisfaction. And singularly enough, it seems, with all its meagreness, to pass easily into an ostentatious display. In these houses there is no thought of "architecture"; that is considered as something quite apart, and not essential to the well-building of the house. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... walls were narrow, and its furniture simple even to meagreness, it was a palace in her regard to the luxurious chambers she had left. It was all her own. She need not veil her heart there. No semblances were required. No intrusion feared. It seemed to her, for ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... its author, occurring in the autumn of the same year, prevented the completion of his design. The two remaining volumes, however, were printed in the course of that and the following year from his own manuscripts; and although their comparative meagreness and confused chronology betray the want of the same paternal hand, they contain much interesting information. The relation of the conquest of Granada, especially, with which the work concludes, exhibits some important ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... It is remarkable that her carelessness never compromises her refinement. Indeed, through this very loophole of character, the reality, depth, genuineness of that refinement may be ascertained. A whole garment sometimes covers meagreness and malformation; through a rent sleeve a fair round arm may be revealed. I have seen and handled many of her possessions, because they are frequently astray. I never saw anything that did not proclaim the lady—nothing sordid, nothing soiled. In one sense she is ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... rapidly advancing dormitory and boarding hall at Pleasant Hill, Tenn., and for the slightly increased accommodations in the Grand View Normal Institute, but we see clearly that enlargement only necessitates greater enlargement. The meagreness of the supply renders the destitution more manifest. The little which has been done, and well done, only gives louder voice to the ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... Asquith assured me that "everything is going to the devil damned fast." Some conspicuous men who have always been sober have taken to drink. The very few public dinners that are held are served with ostentatious meagreness to escape criticism. I attended one last week at which there was no bread, no butter, no sugar served. All of which doesn't mean that the world here is going to the bad—only that it moves backward ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... 'rainy day' that might be in store for himself and his own on several occasions, he has looked at me so earnestly and replied, 'Cast your bread upon the waters.' Although the petty sum of $22,000 was an insufficient return for Congress to make me, and allowanced to its meagreness by men who traduced and vilified the loved wife of the great man who made them, and from whom they amassed great fortunes—for Weed, and Seward, and R. did this last. And yet, all this was permitted by an American ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... gazes upon the image of the Virgin Mother. Since they had entered the tent he had scarcely spoken more than a single sentence at a time. Only once had he given a glimpse of himself. Then he had apologised for the meagreness of the meal. "To-morrow," he had said, "we will have game, the country is full of it; but to-day—" he had looked down as he had spoken—"to-day I felt somehow as though I could not kill anything. Life is too ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... had long since begun to be deteriorated by acquaintance with other models of feminine loveliness than it was my happiness to know in America. I often found, or seemed to find, if I may dare to confess it, in the persons of such of my dear countrywomen as I now occasionally met, a certain meagreness, (Heaven forbid that I should call it scrawniness!) a deficiency of physical development, a scantiness, so to speak, in the pattern of their material make, a paleness of complexion, a thinness of voice,—all of which characteristics, nevertheless, only made me resolve so much the more sturdily ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... he possessed, carefully disposed to cover its meagreness, was grey, and its color permeated, suggested, the tone of his thin face. Surrounded by the cruel exuberance of the children, he seemed incalculably worn, permanently weary, although he was surprisingly sharp-eyed and adequate. It was, Lee thought unsympathetically, a curiously ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... for the thousandth man, deny themselves And live in meagreness to make sure a life Of meagreness by hearth stones long since stale; And live in ways, companionships as fixed As the geared figures of the Strassburg clock. You wonder at war? Why war lets loose desires, Emotions long repressed. Would you stop war? Then let men live. ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... University of Paris, like that of the greater number of human institutions, was insignificant when viewed in the light of its subsequent growth, the meagreness of the early course of instruction was almost incredible to those who, in an age of richer mental acquisitions, listened to the prelections of its numerous and learned doctors. The Trivium and the Quadrivium constituted the whole cycle of human knowledge. Grammar, logic, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... does with the more sonorous grace in proportion to the meagreness of the cheer which he has provided," said Bucklaw; "as if that infernal clang and jangle, which will one day bring the belfry down the cliff, could convert a starved hen into a fat capon, and a blade-bone of mutton into a haunch ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... buildings, where composed of imperfect materials, by buttresses or pinnacles; partly out of the conditions of Gothic warfare, which generally required a tower at the angle; partly out of the natural dislike of the meagreness of effect in buildings which admitted large surfaces of wall, if the angle were entirely unrelieved. The Ducal Palace, in its acknowledgment of this principle, makes a more definite concession to ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... great Missionary Societies. It had given motive and impetus to countless philanthropic schemes. What it failed in was the education and development of character; and this was the result of the increasing meagreness of its writing and preaching. There were still Evangelical preachers of force and eloquence—Robert Hall, Edward Irving, Chalmers, Jay of Bath—but they were not Churchmen. The circle of themes dwelt on by this school in the Church ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... came so seldom hither that a five minutes' absence of the proprietor counted for little. Joanna waited in the little shop, where Emily had tastefully set out—as women can—articles in themselves of slight value, so as to obscure the meagreness of the stock-in-trade; till she saw a figure pausing without the window apparently absorbed in the contemplation of the sixpenny books, packets of paper, and prints hung on a string. It was Captain Shadrach ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... hollow could occasionally see and hear a shell as it screeched past them overhead; but they gave not one-tenth the heed to it that they gave to the breakfast they were despatching. Indeed, their sole grumblings were at the meagreness of the ration which had been dealt out to them the night before ere they had been marched forward into their present position; and as a field officer, coming from the American camp, descended into the ravine, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... occupied by the king was a long roomy place, containing a single bedstead of carved wood, surmounted by the usual distinctive canopy, from which tapestried hangings depended, and upon which scriptural subjects were woven; the furniture of the room partook of the usual meagreness of the times. The entrance was through a small antechamber, wherein, on a humbler bedstead, Alfgar slept. Both rooms were hung with tapestry, which concealed rough walls, such as a builder would blush to own as his ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... his body was fast sinking under the complication of disease, which so soon after deprived Society Of One Of its most distinguished members, the arts of an enlightened patron, and his intimates of an amiable and attaching friend. Of the meagreness and insufficiency of his memoir of Lord Orford's life prefixed to the letters, he was himself aware, and expressed to the author of these pages his inability then to improve it, and his regret that circumstances had deprived him, while it was yet ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... than ever before. What a reunion we had! The folks all about us didn't understand it in the least, but we did, and that was enough. I forgot my coarse clothes, my well-nigh empty pockets, my inability to buy the many beautiful things that kept tantalizing me, and the meagreness of my salary. These were all swallowed up in the joy of seeing the boys, and I wanted to proclaim to all and sundry; "These are my jewels." Those boys are noble, clean, upstanding fellows, and no schoolmaster ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... numbers, many on the roof of the house. In order to pass the time and keep up their courage, the Dutch sometimes had entertainments, at which the cheerfulness of the partakers had to make up for the meagreness of the fare. After the return of the sun the bears again came very close, so that there was a number of hunting adventures with them, all of which came off successfully. Several bears made themselves at home in the vessel ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... entitling himself to say—'I too have seen Kant.' This went on for many days—during which, from morning to night, the house was thronged with the public. Great was the astonishment of all people at the meagreness of Kant's appearance; and it was universally agreed that a corpse so wasted and fleshless had never been beheld. His head rested upon the same cushion on which once the gentlemen of the university had presented an address to him; and I thought that I could not apply it to a more honorable ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... give time to his startled friend to recover from the glow of consciousness burning on his cheek,—he resumed with a less stern inflexion. "It is the vexation of this conviction that hath brought my face to the meagreness and sallow tint that accused the scorching sun of Barbary. I love the rush of battle. The clash of swords or roaring of artillery is music to me. There is joy in contending, life for life, with a traitor, and marshaling ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... our knowledge is more than knowledge. It is an immediate consciousness of personality, any evaluation of which carries some emotion, joy or sorrow, shame or exaltation. But in a foreign land we try to find our compensation for the meagreness of our data by the compactness of the generalisation which our imperfect sympathy itself helps us to form. When a stranger from the West travels in the Eastern world he takes the facts that displease him and readily ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... encourage those who look to the speedy Christianizing of this land. And yet we cannot, I repeat, ignore the fact of the relative meagreness of the results. It is a sad truth that the total Protestant Indian community, at the present time, is only one three-hundredth ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... his opponents, and he was minded to use this victory for all that it was worth. It is matter of regret that practically no account is given us of the steps by which the measures that he sought to have enacted were attained. This very meagreness, however, is strong evidence that the measures were enacted without much friction. Apparently, the only object of the delegates now was to suit their action to the monarch's will. They therefore adopted as their guiding star the propositions with which the diet had been opened by the king, and ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson |
