"Poverty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... soon grew more loud, the passengers more numerous, the shops more busy, until she was carried onward in a stream of life setting that way, and flowing, indifferently, past marts and mansions, prisons, churches, market-places, wealth, poverty, good, and evil, like the broad river side by side with it, awakened from its dreams of rushes, willows, and green moss, and rolling on, turbid and troubled, among the works and cares of ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... and gleaned, from my visits to shieling and cottage, most of my conceptions of the state of the Northern Highlands, ere the clearance system had depopulated the interior of the country, and precipitated its poverty-stricken population upon the coasts. ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... began with beggars as usual, and John Nicolson has not sense to keep them out. I never yield, however, to this importunity, thinking it wrong that what I can spare to meritorious poverty, of which I hear and see too much, should be diverted by impudent importunity. I was detained at the Parliament House till nearly three by the great case concerning prescription, Maule v. Maule.[233] This was made up to me by hearing an excellent opinion from ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... curiosity, and a pride in their own courage. One after another desperate attempts were made, and it was reached at last by another Scot, Alexander Gordon Laing. And his success was a symbol of all earthly endeavours, for the golden city of his dreams was no more than a poverty-stricken village. ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... property become the possession of the colored race, and they thus be prepared for their place in American politics, industry and prosperity, or will they be allowed for the lack of these things to be crushed back into a condition of semi-slavery or be goaded to resistance or discouraged in poverty, pauperism and degradation? That is a fundamental question. For that, men should read, ...
— The American Missionary, October, 1890, Vol. XLIV., No. 10 • Various
... 1 (16 pence) monthly in the lowest class in which they are levied to Rs. 4 (5 shillings) in the highest class. In rural primary schools the children of agriculturists are exempt because they pay local rate, and others, when not exempt on the score of poverty, pay nominal fees. Besides the Government schools there are aided schools of the above classes usually of a sectarian character, and these, if they satisfy the standards laid down, receive grants. There is a decreasing, but still considerable, class of private schools, which ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... and she had one son, called Jack. Jack and his mother owned just three cows. They lived well and happy for a long time; but at last hard times came down on them, and the crops failed, and poverty looked in at the door, and things got so sore against the poor widow that for want of money and for want of necessities she had to make up her mind to sell one of the cows. "Jack," she said one night, "go over in the morning to the fair ...
— Stories to Read or Tell from Fairy Tales and Folklore • Laure Claire Foucher
... were of a rough, ignorant and poverty toiling type, but of late years have greatly improved with the introduction of organized labor and education. Previous bad conditions, however, have left their mark in a stunted and physically degenerate type of descendants ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... changes of fortune gave a tendency to make light of one's present condition. A man would say "I'm busted" without any more feeling than he would say "I have a cold." Now, in Fairfield, that is not likely lonesome in that respect, one of the principal objects in life was to conceal the poverty which would persist in sticking its gaunt elbows through the cloth of words spread over it. Red asked straight-forward questions—shrewd ones, too—seeing that the other was one of his own kind and would ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... haunts. In their youth lonely people suffer more than others from that restlessness which fills the mind with sudden distaste for the present scene, and a fierce longing to be somewhere far away. Others are preserved from it by the love of home; but we, in our poverty of attachment, listen more readily to the ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... as you have perhaps noticed, of poor daddy tottering on the brink of bankruptcy; nor the slightest reference to brave young women going out alone in the cold, cold world to earn their bread! What were floods, earthquakes, cyclones, poverty, debt—what was anything that might, could, would or should happen, compared to the joy of their ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... established upon a different foundation; and that necessity would compel the people to scatter. Early in 1819 the leaders after consultation determined that, to succeed, they must establish a community of goods and efforts, and draw in to themselves all whom poverty had compelled to take service at a distance. This resolution was laid before the whole society, and, after some weeks of discussion, was agreed to; and on the 15th of April articles of agreement for a community of goods were signed. There were then about two hundred ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... you have lived rightly, you have found enough learning to make you humble, enough friendship to make your hearts large and warm, enough culture to teach you the refinement of simplicity, enough wisdom to keep you sweet in poverty and temperate in wealth. Here you have learned to see great and small in their true relation, to look at both sides of a question, to respect the point of view of every honest man or woman, and to recognize the ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... go and get it over," he remarked ungraciously. He telephoned Strong his acceptance, and asked if he might meet him at the restaurant. He did not wish Strong to know the new address. He would keep his struggle and his poverty to ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... tells us how he finally was dismissed from the "Call" for general incompetency, and presently found himself in the depths of hard luck, debt, and poverty. But this is only his old habit of making a story on himself sound as uncomplimentary as possible. The true version is that the "Call" publisher and Mark Twain had a friendly talk and decided that it was better for both to break off the connection. Almost immediately he arranged ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the majority of cases the children of poor parents, and subject to all the neglect and exposure incident to poverty, while, if they are born in affluence, they are so petted and pampered, in consequence of their affliction, that they become utterly dependent and useless, and contract habits that should be and which under other circumstances ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... attacked his people, and during the turmoil a hundred frasilahs of copper were stolen from him, and many of his people killed. Casembe kept him a prisoner till sixty of his people were either killed or died, among these Mohamad's eldest son: he was thus reduced to poverty. He gave something to Casembe to allow him to depart, and I suspect that my Sultan's letter had considerable influence in inducing Casembe to accede to his request, for he repeated again and again in my hearing that he must pay respect to my letter, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... minds of India. Much of the awakened mental activity, also, is spent—much wasted—on political writing and discussion, which is often uninformed by knowledge of present facts and of Indian history. The general poverty also, and the so-called Western desire to "get on," prevent many from becoming in any real sense students or thinkers or men of ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... a difference of degree and not of kind between 'being' and 'being consciously perceived.'"[Footnote: Matter and Memory, p. 30 (Fr. p. 25).] Consciousness—in regard to external perception—is explained by this indeterminateness and this choice. "But there is in this necessary poverty of conscious perception, something that is positive, that foretells spirit; it is, in the etymological sense of the word, discernment.'"[Footnote: Matter and Memory, p. 31 (Fr. p. 26).] The chief difficulty in dealing with the problems of Perception, is to explain "not how Perception ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... drill from the practical field-training. The former keeps always, as I have indicated in the first section, its full value for the creation of discipline and alertness, but leads only too easily to a routine which has nothing in common with the battle-field, and to that poverty-stricken 'schematisimus' to which human nature so ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... Dorothy, flushing. "I'll have to watch my step to merit that compliment. Now that you've heard the sad story of the poverty-stricken senior, I call for a change of subject. Did you know that Edith Hammond ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... to take full advantage of its results. Balzac employed his accumulated materials in bursts of creative energy which, if terrible in their intensity and their drain upon his health, had at least method in them, and effected their purpose. Poverty did not swerve him, nor ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... she had desired to marry him for his money. She forgot that the family clothes were threadbare and the family cares almost impossible to cope with. She knew only that better thing which is greater than poverty or pain or death itself. And, knowing it, she possessed more than the whole world, and found ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... that mode of living which is supposed to distinguish the educated class from all beneath it. She had brought into the world three sons and three daughters; of the former, two were dead, and of the latter, one,—in each case, poverty of diet having proved fatal to a weak constitution. For close upon thirty years the family had lived in houses of which the rent was out of all reasonable proportion to their means; at present, with a total income of one ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... every man looks only upon what benefits himself and regards not how others, especially the godly, fare. Indeed, the world is capable of scornful smiles and extreme pleasure at sight of Christians in poverty and distress, and in their sufferings it can give them vinegar and gall to drink. But you who claim to be a Christian, should know it is yours to share the sufferings of your brethren and to prove your heartfelt sympathy with them. If you cannot do more, ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... handsomely provided for out of these funds. No city in the world ever produced more philanthropists, or more misanthropists, than the city of Bristol. No city of its size in the world can boast more charitable institutions—no city is more degraded by poverty and wretchedness amongst its inhabitants, mainly created by the corrupt misapplication of ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... ball, so that after traversing the book it only penetrated the breast to the ribs, but it knocked him down and disabled him for the rest of the campaign. He was a most competent and worthy officer, and now lives in poverty in Chicago, sustained in part by his own labor, and in part by a pitiful ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... peasantry, exploited by the gentry, came to the support of these monks whose Messianism gave the poor a hope in this world. The nomad tribes also, abandoned by their nobles in the capital and wandering in poverty with their now worthless herds, joined these monks. We know of many revolts of Hun and Toba tribes in this period, revolts that had a religious appearance but in reality were simply the result of the extreme impoverishment of ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... whenever other food was to be had in sufficient quantity. But this we know by many proofs is not the case; and perhaps, indeed, it will be found, that this odium is fully as prevalent in savage countries, where nature has been bountiful, as in those where a more stinted hand has inflicted poverty on the inhabitants. The causes, then, and the remedies of this most shocking enormity, are to be looked for in other circumstances than the scarcity or the profusion of food. Here we may be allowed to join in opinion with Dr Robertson. "Human flesh was never used ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... pictures came into the possession of a poor widow, who being hard pressed by poverty, sold it to a bookseller for twelve scudi. In time it was bought from the bookseller by Grand Duke Ferdinand III. of Tuscany, who prayed before it night and morning, taking it with him on his travels. That picture is now in the Pitti Palace at Florence and it is called the "Madonna del Granduca." ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... proudest period in Duchess Betty's romantic life was when, with her husband, the Duke, she paid a visit, in 1755, to Dublin, the "dear, dirty" city she had known in the days of her poverty and obscurity, when her greatest dread was the sight of a bailiff in the house, and her highest ambition to procure a dress to display her budding charms at a dance. Her stay in Dublin was one long, intoxicating triumph. "No Queen," she said, "could have been more handsomely ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... purpose of enabling the proverbial "two ends" to "meet," dwelt a considerable population in houses of diminutive size and small accommodation. A few of these were persons who, having "seen better days," were anxious to hide their poverty and existence from the "friends" of those better days. There was likewise a sprinkling of individuals and families who, having grown callous to the sorrows of earth, had reached that condition wherein the meeting of the two ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... poverty and the sort of aversion they inspire, the gipsies are treated with a certain amount of consideration by the more ignorant folk, and they are very proud of it. They feel themselves to be a superior race as regards intelligence, and they heartily ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... successful, owned part, then the whole of the ship, afterwards two or three ships; and had wound up with handsome fortunes. Captain Turnbull was a married man without a family; his wife, fine in person, vulgar in speech, a would-be fashionable lady, against which fashion Captain T had for years pleaded poverty; but his brother, who had remained a bachelor, died, leaving him forty thousand pounds—a fact which could not be concealed. Captain Turnbull had not allowed his wife to be aware of the extent of his own fortune, more from a wish to ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... But, good my Lords, consider that we have four small children, one of them blind, and that they have nothing to live upon while their father is in prison, but the charity of Christian people.' Sir Matthew Hale: 'Alas! poor woman.' Twisden: 'Poverty is your cloak, for I hear your husband is better maintained by running up and down a-preaching than by following his calling?' Sir Matthew Hale: 'What is his calling?' Elizabeth: 'A tinker, please you my Lord; and because he is a tinker, and a poor man, therefore he is despised and cannot ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... for a laundry, was dimly lit with a candle. The pile of white linen brought into relief the dirt and poverty of the interior. The walls were stained with grease and patches of dirt, added slowly through the years as a face gathers wrinkles. But Jonah saw nothing of this. He was ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... at the collector's house, I found the Aga awaiting me. This man inspired me with great interest. I looked upon him, residing in his lone tower, the last of a once wealthy and powerful race now steeped in poverty, as a sort of master of Ravenswood in a Wolf's crag. At first he was bland and ceremonious; but on learning that I had lived long in the interior of society in Damascus and Aleppo, and finding that the interest with ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... by the feeble light of lanterns, upon the ceilings of crypts, or in the semicircular spaces left above some of the more conspicuous graves, the first Christian pictures were painted. Imperfect in design, exhibiting often the influence of pagan models, often displaying haste of performance and poverty of means, confined for the most part within a limited circle of ideas, and now faded in color, changed by damp, broken by rude treatment, sometimes blackened by the smoke of lamps,—they still give abundant evidence of the feeling and the spirit which animated those who painted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... husband and wife, contained the reasons which induced them to act such a tragedy on themselves and their offspring. This letter was altogether surprising for the calm resolution, the good humour, and the propriety with which it was written. They declared, that they withdrew themselves from poverty and rags—evils that, through a train of unlucky accidents, were become inevitable. They appealed to their neighbours for the industry with which they had endeavoured to earn a livelihood. They justified the murder of their child, by saying, it was less cruelty to take her with them, than ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... of these youthful squires of hers to her house; they kept rendezvous with her at the corner below and they parted from her at the gate. They somehow gathered, without being told it in so many words, that she was ashamed of the poverty of her home, and, boylike, they felt a dumb sympathy for her that she should be denied what so many girls had. But for all her sidewalk flirtations, she kept herself aloof from any touch of scandal; ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... remove from the world all outward evil—get rid of sickness, pain, poverty, death. Would not the worst part of evil still remain? Would not discontent, selfishness, envy, wilfulness, cruelty, self-indulgence continue? All these exist—perhaps exist most frequently—where there is the least of outward evil; and the outward evil is the bitter medicine ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... breakfast-table, so that they could have the gratification of opening all their parcels together. It was a point of honour not to take the tiniest peep inside even the most tempting-looking package until the whole family was assembled. Gwen had tried to make up for the poverty of her offerings by the warmth of the greetings she wrote outside, but she did not feel proud of her collection as she carried it downstairs. She was the last, so she hastily made her distribution, and turned to her own plate. She had been well remembered: ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... schools the poverty was rapidly becoming worse. Each week more children stayed away or came to school ragged and unkempt, some without any overcoats, small pitiful mites wearing shoes so old as barely to stick on their feet. And when the ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... to his Maker and listened to Satan. Man, in the pride of youth, health, and strength, and mental powers, may look with contempt on the Gospel, but God, in His loving mercy brings down those He loves, by poverty, suffering, and loss of friends, and then they feel their weakness and the vanity of all human systems, and are led to turn to Him who alone can lift them up and give them comfort, and a promise of a better life. How plain and easy are the demands He makes; ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston
... was determined to employ all the powers which my individual efforts could move, in order to separate the two countries. That Ireland was not able of herself to throw off the yoke, I knew; I therefore sought for aid wherever it was to be found. In honourable poverty I rejected offers which, to a man in my circumstances, might be considered highly advantageous. I remained faithful to what I thought the cause of my country, and sought in the French Republic an ally to rescue three millions of ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... Macao at these performances, and must say the Macaense are not without a goodly share of female beauty, although it is not apparent upon all occasions, for the decline of the place has affected the finances of the families, and their pride will not allow them to exhibit their poverty upon common occasions, not that there was any evidence of it here, for the ladies were all richly as ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... he mentions nothing of Ray's Ornithology may be the extreme poverty and distance of his country into which the works of our great naturalist may have never yet found their way. You have doubts, I know, whether this Ornithology is genuine, and really the work of Scopoli; as to myself I think I discover ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... new light, she suffered a pang for almost every pleasure she had then enjoyed, even then Madelon maintained that her childhood had been one of unclouded happiness, such as few children know. The sudden changes of fortune, from splendour to poverty of the shabbiest description, the reckless, dishonest expenditure, and the endless debts consequent on it; the means—doubtful to say the least of them—employed by M. Linders for procuring money; the ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... it," he whispered confidentially, "save it for to-morrow." In vain they tried to reassure him; the haunting poverty that had stalked beside him in life refused to be banished ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... who occupied a small post in the vicinity of the Pembina, to annoy them whenever possible. It required courage of the highest order on the part of the colonists to battle through the winter. They were in extreme poverty, and in many cases their frost-bitten, starved bodies were wrapped only in rags before spring came. Those who still had their plaids, or other presentable garments, were prepared to part with them for a morsel of food. With the coming of spring once more, the party travelled northward ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... justly been said—we think by Hood—that the children of the poor are not brought up, but dragged up. However facetious this remark may seem, there is much truth in it; and that children, reared in the reeking dens of squalor and poverty, live at all, is an apparent anomaly in the course of things, that, at first sight, would seem to set the laws of sanitary provision at defiance, and make it appear a perfect waste of time to insist on pure air and exercise as indispensable necessaries of life, and especially ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... school, about a fortnight before, two unhappy-looking little twin orphans, with white thin faces, and bones in their clothes instead of legs and arms, committed to the mercies of Mr Malison by their grandfather. Bent into all the angles of a grasshopper, and lean with ancient poverty, the old man tottered away with his stick in one hand, stretched far out to support his stooping frame, and carried in the other the caps of the two forsaken urchins, saying, as he went, in a quavering, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... peculiarity, to have nursed a spirit of atheism and wild schemes of reform. Charged by the authorities of his college with the authorship of an atheistical pamphlet,(644) he was expelled the university. An outcast from his family, he went forth to suffer poverty, to gather his livelihood as he could by the wonderful genius which nature had given him. Wronged as he thought by his university and his country, his wounded spirit imputed the supposed unkindness which he received to the religion ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... to almost every paper in London, from the Times downwards, Sands had held positions as editor and sub-editor of numerous journals. But he had lost each one in turn, and was beginning to understand that he was fated to die of poverty, and was beginning to grow tired of the useless struggle. No one was better organized to earn his living than Peter Sands, and no one failed more lamentably. Had fortune provided him with a dinner at Simpson's, ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... with Ida Palliser? Not much, perhaps. Only poverty, and poverty's natural corollary, a lack of friends. She was the handsomest girl in the school, and one of the cleverest—clever in an exceptional way, which claimed admiration even from the coldest. She occupied ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... yet, she had not the eyes to see, nor the heart to feel that her home possessed beauties beyond all others—the most precious beauties of all—love, sympathy, cheerfulness under poverty, patience with each other's faults, and, above all others, ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... religion, the constitution which Temujin made declared that there was but one God, the creator of heaven and earth, and it acknowledged him as the supreme ruler and governor of all mankind, the being "who alone gives life and death, riches and poverty, who grants and denies whatever he pleases, and exercises over all things an absolute power." This one fundamental article of faith was all that was required. For the rest, Temujin left the various nations and tribes throughout his dominions to adopt such modes of worship ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... a definite number of votes among the latter. Whether the hanging of single offenders and the high rewards such as a life-pension of sixty ducats paid to those who informed against them were of much avail, it is hard to decide; one of the chief causes of this evil, the poverty of many of the nobility, could not be removed in a day. In the year 1492 a proposal was urged by two of that order, that the State should spend 70,000 ducats for the relief of those poorer nobles who held ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... life, with its recurrent phases of brawls, drunken debauches by her father, occasional brief intervals of prosperity and longer ones of abject poverty. Lower Charleswood had seemed as an oasis in the wilderness and the employment offered by Sir Jacques too bountiful to be real. Nevertheless, it was real enough, and all went well for a season. Michael Duveen gave ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... "little share," being all that he deemed needful for man's abode on earth, and more than needful. It was hither that he came in the heyday of youth, forsaking the house of his wealthy father, the love of his mother, a life of pleasure with his gay companions, and dedicated himself to poverty and preaching the word of God. One of our party had said that she considered Saint Francis the author of much evil, and as having done irreparable harm to the Italian people in sanctifying dirt and idleness. But apostles ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... refuse to marry her old sweetheart; it was another to take his property and reduce him to poverty. But here was she doing both, and going to be persuaded to marry Neville, and swell his wealth with the very possessions she had taken from Griffith; and him wounded into the bargain for love of her. It was really too cruel. It was an accumulation of different cruelties. Her bosom revolted; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... them, whom history has represented as the vilest of rogues and traitors." As to the rest, I had never once heard of them. They all appeared with dejected looks, and in the meanest habit; most of them telling me, "they died in poverty and disgrace, and the rest on a scaffold ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... the Wheelers point out that the automobile was a gift. In vain did they bare to doubting eyes the whole pitiful poverty of their daily life. The town refused to see or to understand; in the town's eyes was the vision of the Wheeler automobile flying through the streets with selfishly empty seats; in the town's nose was the hateful smell ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... Before the supreme sad experience, the sudden, and to him incomprehensible, death of Arthur Hallam, the poet had agnostic leanings. He did then veritably fail and "falter" before the questions of life and death which beset him. His long years of comparative poverty, "the eternal want of pence," his failure to attract any measure of attention, his long-delayed marriage as far off as ever, the res angusta domi which made his family dependent upon him, all conspired to shut out the vision of anything but an iron necessity controlling him and everything. ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... gun, and perhaps a bayonet as well. Nor were there men only in the rebellious ranks. There were an almost equal number of women in crimson caps, their bosoms bare, their heads dishevelled, their garments filthy and in rags—for the tooth of poverty had bitten deeply into them during ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... misplaced in the printing of this essay. The only feeling that our Colonies inspire in me is a determination not to visit them. Socialism neither affrights nor attracts me—or, rather, it has both these effects equally. When I think of poverty and misery crushing the greater part of humanity, and most of all when I hear of some specific case of distress, I become a socialist indeed. But I am not less an artist than a human being, and when I think of Demos, ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... comparative poverty to the wealth of the girl beside me was a single mental leap. From that wealth to the grandfather who was responsible for it ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... however, the next evening, very much fatigued and disappointed; for he not only found the journey very harassing, in consequence of the badness of the paths, but discovered that his mercantile project was fruitless, owing to the poverty of the natives. Indeed, the people of Fernando Po are less abundantly supplied with provisions than the nations of Africa in general; their principal dependance being on yams, which are, of course, liable to occasional failure. They have very little ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... education of his family. In another year when his boy had passed his entrance examinations he would be able to send him to the high school in the neighbouring town of Easton, properly equipped and relieved of those handicaps with which poverty can so easily wash all the colour out of young life. A brilliant picture the father drew before the eyes of his wife of the educational career of their boy, who had already given promise of exceptional ability. But while she ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... de Pompadour. Here is her petition." I read it, and said that the woman had better write directly to Madame, and that I was sure, if what she asserted was true, her application would be successful. Madame du Chiron followed my advice. The woman wrote she was in the lowest depth of poverty, and I learnt that Madame sent her six louis until she could gain more accurate information as to the truth of her story. Colin, who was commissioned to take the money, made inquiries of M. de ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... diminishing their numbers enough has been said. That must originate with government in every case and in some cases exclusively belongs to it. They must act of themselves entirely, with respect to the very poor and to their children. With those who are not quite reduced to poverty, they should grant aid, to enable them to struggle against adversity, and prevent their offspring from becoming burthensome to ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... blowing among his curls and lifting his poor, thin garments, was in rapture of meditation wherein all that he saw was the beautiful face of the Mary of "Assumption," with the waves of her golden hair lying upon her shoulders and the light of an eternal sun shining down upon her brow. Nello, reared in poverty, and buffeted by fortune, and untaught in letters, and unheeded by men, had the compensation or the curse ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... overtures to those families of the ancient French nobility who had been ruined by the Revolution, and whose minds she expected to have found on a level with their circumstances. These, however, either suspecting her intent and her views, or preferring honest poverty to degrading and disgraceful splendour, had started objections which she was not prepared to encounter. Thus the time passed away; and when, on the 18th of the following May, the Senate proclaimed Napoleon Bonaparte Emperor of the French, not a Chamberlain was ready to attend him, nor a Maid ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... perfectly harmonious social state, and no system of education competent to lift society to a higher life. Education as it has been brightens life with literature and art, but does not elevate it. The same old element of poverty, misery, disease, crime, and insanity marches on, hand in hand with the college and the church, as it formerly went hand in hand with the hunting and warring barbarians of the forest. And the dull, blunted conscience of the time, lulled by the softly solemn platitudes of the pulpit and the soulless ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... the fear of God, but even by sense and reason. Not sense and reason, but nonsense and unreason, prejudice and fancy, greed and haste, have led them to such results as were to be expected—to superstitions, persecutions, wars, famines, pestilence, hereditary diseases, poverty, waste—waste incalculable, and now too often irremediable—waste of life, of labour, of capital, of raw material, of soil, of manure, of every bounty which God has bestowed on man, till, as in the eastern Mediterranean, whole countries, some ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... doctrines of his master, the misery of existence, the need of redemption, the path to felicity, the prohibition to shed blood. He simply stated that the priests of Buddha were bound to perpetual poverty, and that under the new dispensation all ecclesiastical property would accrue ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... necessarily connected with the throwing of inferior land out of cultivation, and the continued deterioration of the land of a superior quality; and that it is the natural and necessary consequence of causes, which are the certain indications of poverty and decline, namely, diminished capital, diminished population, a bad system of cultivation, and the low price of ...
— Nature and Progress of Rent • Thomas Malthus
... princely fortune and scattered it among the poor, like Cyprian and Chrysostom. This was in accordance with one of the great ideas of the early Church, almost impossible to resist. Charity unbounded, allied with poverty, was the great test of practical Christianity. It was afterwards lost sight of by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, and never was recognized by Protestantism at all, not even in theory. Thrift has been one of the watchwords of Protestantism for three hundred years. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... mediaeval riches and celebrity, for which—as the system always evil became hideous with malignant growth, so that each colony was a cancer on the mother country—there has been exacted punishment of modern poverty, and finally the humiliation of the haughty, with no consolation for defeat, but the fact that in desperate and forlorn circumstances there were seen glimpses of the ancient valor in Spanish soldiers, that was once their high distinction among ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... they conferred upon the world was that of charity. They were the true nurses of the poor. There were no poor laws, and union workhouses, and hospitals. The monks managed to supply all the wants of all who suffered from poverty, privation, and sickness. "The friendship of the poor constitutes us the friends of kings," says St. Bernard; "but the love of poverty makes kings of us." They welcomed in their ranks poor men, who were esteemed as highly as those of noble birth on ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... the appropriate moment to have bethought him of the solace of companionship in such poverty, but somehow his thoughts did take that flight, and unwarrantable as was the notion, he fancied himself returning at nightfall to his lowly cabin, and a certain girlish figure, whom our reader knows as Kate Kearney, standing watching ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... of these poor creatures mutilated and slew them, after having first violated them, or threw them into the midst of the bivouac fires. Farms were burned up, and families recently opulent or in comfortable circumstances were reduced in an instant to despair and poverty. Husbands and old men were slain with the sword while attempting to defend the honor of their wives and daughters; and when poor mothers attempted to approach the fires to warm the children at their breasts, they were burned or killed ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... that instinctive fear which humanity has felt from the beginning—the superstitious terror of tribes who confront extinction, in the face of famine; the quiet white tremor of the hard working hordes of modern cities in the face of poverty and starvation; the dread of savage and civilized races alike of the incomprehensible factor in the universe which wreaks destruction, that original and ultimate evil which all the world's religions recognize, interpret, and offer to ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... scene of this story be changed to some other place and time without difficulty? Give reasons. Compare Cranford with some place that you know in respect to the poverty, aristocracy, social etiquette, employments, and peculiar ways of ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... little brother, and from that time she scrubbed and mended and baked and sewed, and argued with the flesher about the quarter pound of beef and penny bone which provided dinner for two days (but if you think that this was poverty you don't know the meaning of the word), and she carried the water from the pump, and had her washing-days and her ironings and a stocking always on the wire for odd moments, and gossiped like a matron with the other women, and humoured the men with a tolerant smile - all these things ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... "My poverty did, sir, if he did not. I worked many months for him; but I had better have earned my bread ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... different departments; I refused to do it. I might have helped the cause of temperance in this town by trying to banish the saloon; instead of that I voted to license an establishment of crime and poverty and disease. I might have used my influence and my wealth to build healthy, comfortable homes for the men who work on this road; I never raised my finger in the matter. I might have helped to make life ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... for Fairy, but she has Gene. And quite a lot for Larkie, but she has Jim and Violet." And then, clasping her arm about his shoulders, which, despite her teasing remonstrance, he allowed to droop a little, she cried exultantly: "But not one bit for me, for I have you, and Connie is a poor, poverty-stricken, wretched little waif, with nothing in the world worth having, only she doesn't know ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... hands in his and still she listened to him. That airy reference of his to his poverty affected her favourably. He would scarcely have made it, she told herself, with an unconscious effort to silence unacknowledged misgivings, if her fortune ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... poet and the parson equally neglected. Let the poet then abandon his profession, and take up some honest lawful calling, where, joining industry to his great wit, he may soon get above the complaints of poverty, so common among these ingenious men, and lie under no necessity of prostituting his wit to any such vile purposes as are here censured. This will-be a course of life more profitable and honourable to himself, and more useful to others. ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Blue Bonnet's life. One that bade fair to rival all others, and pave the way for future usefulness. It was the Settlement work which the "Lambs" engaged in. Her first visit to the poorer districts filled her with horror. She had never known anything about real poverty. A kind fate had lifted her above all that; and when she went for the first time into a day nursery, a free kindergarten, and was told something of the homes the children came from, their limitation, their actual needs, tears blinded her eyes and her throat ached with the lumps ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... rested on the ridge crest once more. "We have seen such cell crystals before," she sighed. "The inefficiencies in such a poverty of dimensions! Do you still think we ...
— Sweet Their Blood and Sticky • Albert Teichner
... boots, mantillas. She has made up her mind, she conducts her administration in virtue of this principle: Charity well understood begins at home. When Adolphe complains of the contrast between his poverty-stricken wardrobe and Caroline's splendor, she says, "Why, you reproached me with buying ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... is one, it consists of many divisions, each of which has its proper function and object. In times past God has raised up companies of His servants to do this or that particular work—the sons of St. Francis to preach poverty, those of St. Bernard to labour in prayer with all holy women dedicating themselves to this purpose, the Society of Jesus for the education of youth and the conversion of the heathen—together with all the other Religious Orders whose ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... not?" she said in a deep breath. "He didn't fear that poverty and pain would keep anyone out of the kingdom of gladness. It was what He was telling them all the time—those exclusive, rich men who wanted to get the secret of His serene life. It wasn't that He liked pain and poverty, but He wanted everyone ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... can't marry Miss Tulliver, even if she would have me, if I have only my own resources to maintain her with. I have been brought up to no profession. I can't offer her poverty as well as deformity." ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... is), or which is known to be, not, indeed, its cause or its effect, but either one of a set of conditions, which together are its cause, or an occasional effect of its cause. Now, persons (usually from poverty, not from luxuriance, of imagination) often overrate the weight of true analogies; but the fallacy specially consists in inferring resemblance in one point from resemblance in another, when the evidence is not only not in favour of, but even positively ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... resolution I knew only too well what I was in for. I had done the same thing in my earlier life, only it needed a far greater courage to face that life now than it required then. Things were at their very worst when one day, as I was wending my way through the poverty-stricken locality in which I lived, I was hailed by my name. The man was shabbily dressed, but about my own age as far as I could gather, yet I never remembered having met ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... rapture of receipt! Come who have felt, in soul and heart and sense, The entire obedience Which opes the bosom, like a blissful wife, To the Husband of all life! Come ye that find contentment's very core In the light store And daisied path Of Poverty, And know how more A small thing that the righteous hath Availeth than the ungodly's riches great. Come likewise ye Which do not yet disown as out of date That brightest third of the dead Virtues three, Of ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... embarrassment. His room was on the fourth floor; everything indicated honest and industrious poverty. Some books, musical instruments, papers, a table and a few chairs, that was all, but everything was well cared for and presented an ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... incident may be mentioned here, though it did not happen till towards the end of the war. In spite of poverty, danger, and tribulation, marrying and giving in marriage did not cease among the sturdy borderers; and on a day in September there was a notable wedding feast at the palisaded house of John Wheelwright, one of the chief men of Wells. Elisha Plaisted was ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... passed in her mind, there met her a man, the surpassing beauty and nobleness of whose countenance revealed him to be her Lord. He carried in his hand the veil she had just given away; and throwing it over her head,—" Henceforth," He said, "My spouse, shalt thou have the poverty thou desirest, and shalt live for ever on alms, and as a pilgrim in the world, as I did." From this time she redoubled her labours in order to obtain large means for the purpose of charity, and besides this, spent much of her time in nursing and tending the sick, as well as relieving ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... see how the possibility of giving and receiving credit promotes wealth, by contemplating the poorer classes, whose poverty, both as cause and effect, is very closely related to the absence of credit. And here we have a suggestion of the reverse to the bright side of the picture of credit, analogous to that mentioned in 62 of the cooeperation of labor, viz.: that it tends to intensify inequality among ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... hard lot, the people seem happy and there is no starvation poverty. They and their ancestors from time immemorial have always worked hard under task-masters and they know of no better condition. Since their scanty clothing costs but little, if they can have enough to eat and a ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... Mary Masters. Mr. Surtees was certainly a gentleman, but his income was strictly limited to the sum of 120 pounds per annum which he received from Mr. Mainwaring. Now Mrs. Masters disliked clergymen, disliked gentlemen, and especially disliked poverty; and therefore was not disposed to look upon Mr. Surtees as an eligible suitor for her stepdaughter. But as the curate's courtship had hitherto been of the coldest kind and as it had received no encouragement from the young lady, Mary was certainly ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... that there is a sole minister to whom the miscarriages of the government may justly be imputed, may easily persuade themselves to believe that there have been no miscarriages, that all the measures were necessary, and well formed, that there is neither poverty nor oppression felt in the nation, that our compliance with France was no weakness, and that our dread of the treaty ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... Maurice Parmelee, Chap. XXVIII. Author also of "Poverty and Social Progress," "The Science of Human Behavior," "The Principles of Anthropology and Sociology in their relation to Criminal Procedure." During the late war Dr. Parmelee was a Representative of the U. S. War Trade Board stationed at the American Embassy, London; economic ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... that our local historians commonly avoid all romance as if it were of the Enemy; but if we compare their labors with "The Beauties of England and Wales," for example, the work certainly of uninspired men, we shall be convinced that the American Dryasdust suffers from poverty of material. There is no need to remind us of Hawthorne; but he is such a genius as is rare everywhere, and could conjure poetry out of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... expect little from Fanny, perhaps; she saw her mother die in want, her father stern, almost cruel to them, and soured by poverty. Fanny never had what she liked to eat or wear, till she came here, or even saw anything that pleased her; and the contrast makes ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... were good. He was kindly, sympathetic, generous to a fault, refined, ambitious, high principled at heart and a thorough gentleman by birth, training, and instinct. Yet, because of a lack of clear knowledge, his life has been one of hardship, privation, disappointment, disillusionment, galling poverty, and utter failure. He has been subjected to ridicule and the even more blighting cruelty of good-natured, patronizing, contemptuous tolerance. His reputation is that of a lazy, good-for-nothing, disreputable dead beat and loafer. ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... doubted the wisdom of this plan, that the majority of our students came to us in poverty, from the cabins of the cotton, sugar, and rice plantations of the South, and that while I knew it would please the students very much to place them at once in finely constructed buildings, I felt that ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... Carbury had gone to her own room after hearing the distressing story of Paul Montague's love, and had not seen Hetta since. Hetta was melancholy, thinking of her mother's hard words,— thinking perhaps of Paul's poverty as declared by her mother, and of the ages which might have to wear themselves out before she could become his wife; but still tinting all her thoughts with a rosy hue because of the love which had been declared ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... land, and the wealth centred in the hands of a few. Determined, therefore, to root out the evils of insolence, envy, avarice, and luxury, and those distempers of a state still more inveterate and fatal, I mean poverty and riches, he persuaded them to cancel all former divisions of land, and to make new ones, in such a manner that they might be perfectly equal in their possessions and way of living. Hence, if they were ambitious of distinction they might seek it in virtue, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... death of a Member. When Mr. Kelley entered the House as a Member from the city of Philadelphia, he had arrived at the mature age of forty-six, and had an established reputation for ability, industry, and fidelity to duty. He had been trained in the school of poverty, making his own way in the world, gathering knowledge by the wayside. He labored for several years at his trade as a mechanic, but, prompted by a restless thirst for knowledge, studied law, and for several years practiced the legal profession. In due time he became ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... fail to temper his duty with a little substantial justice of his own. Thus he was once called upon to execute a judgment for $30 against a poor family. Gates went down to the premises, looked over the situation, talked to the man—a poverty-stricken, discouraged, ague-shaken creature—and marched back to the offices of the plaintiffs in ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... on Friday. The age of the moon is also much attended to in many parts of the world. Among the vulgar Highlanders, an opinion prevails, that if a house takes fire while the moon is in the decrease, the family will from that time decline in its circumstances and sink into poverty. In this country, equally unfounded and ridiculous opinions are entertained. Passing by the more commonly received opinions that if swine are killed in the old of the moon, the pork will shrink in the pot; ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... generally grins, in the end, and I think I'm slowly shaking that monitorial air out of him, though once or twice I've had to remind him about La Rochefoucauld saying gravity was a stratagem invented to conceal the poverty of the mind! But Dinky-Dunk still objects to me putting my finger on his Adam's apple when he's talking. He wears a flannel shirt, when working outside, and his neck is bare. Yesterday I buried my face down in the corner next to his shoulder-blade ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... his own childhood. He is not so old that his childhood days could have been darkened by the one war which did mean suffering to many American children, especially those of the South. He was not born in the South, nor of parents actually afflicted by poverty, and did not spend his early days in any of the comparatively few places in America, such as the congested great city quarters and industrial agglomerations of poor and ignorant foreign working-people, where real child distress is common; so he certainly did ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... educated; and that they wrote, for the most part, with difficulty in Greek or Latin. When all this has been weighed and admitted, the fact remains that in existing accounts of the Crusades there is great poverty of description of scenery, and lack of much feeling for Nature. The historian, as such, was bound to give first place to matters of fact and practical importance, and so to judge a place by its value to an army passing through or occupying it; by its fertility, water-supply, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... another.*[3] But what becomes of the natural increase of families? "They swarm off!" was the explanation given to us by a native of the valley. "If they remained at home," said he, "we should all be sunk in poverty, scrambling with each other amongst these hills for a bare living. But our peasantry have a spirit above that: they will not consent to sink; they look up; and our parish schools give them a power of ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... thank you. She knows she's missing illness and pain and poverty and worry, and the whims and fancies and bad tempers of ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... they will be consigned; and the day will come when a just posterity will give to their hero the only pre-eminence he has earned, that of having been the greatest of the destroyers of the human race. What year of his military life has not consigned a million of human beings to death, to poverty, and wretchedness? What field in Europe may not raise a monument of the murders, the burnings, the desolations, the famines, and miseries, it has witnessed from him! And all this to acquire a reputation, which Cartouche attained with ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... orders, and had been dishonorably discharged. Although wounded in one of the engagements in which the regiment had distinguished itself, he had been allowed to languish almost forgotten for years and finally, failing to get a pension, had died in poverty. On his deathbed he had sent for Burridge, and reminding him of the battle in which he had led him asked that after he was gone, for the sake of his family, he would take up the matter of a pension and if possible have his record purged of the ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... leave the house—neither could he rest. Every word the girl had said of his selfishness, his egotism, burned like poison in his brain. Had his hold on her been so slight, after all? "She despises me. She hates me!" And in his heart he despised and hated himself. He cursed his poverty, his lack of resource. "Why am I, the evangel of this faith, dependent on others for revelation. Why must I beg and cringe for money, for power?" He was in the full surge of this flood of indignant query when Pratt shuffled ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland |
