"Avarice" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from the time Spain first learned of America, Cortes not only penetrated Mexico, but sent his corsairs up the west coast of the {134} continent. Pizarro conquered Peru. Spanish ships plied a trade rich beyond dreams of avarice between the gold realms of Peru and the spice islands of the Philippines. The chivalry of the Spanish nobility suddenly became a chivalry of the high seas. Religious zeal burned to a flame against those gold-lined pagan temples. ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... was debarred from nursing him. Her husband's brutal disposition was aggravated by his yielding to the many temptations held out by his situation, and the consequent disarrangement of his affairs. Fortunately she had no children; but her heart was bound up in her brothers and sisters, and these his avarice and ill temper soon drove from the house; they were dispersed about the country, earning their livelihood with toil and care. He even shewed an inclination to get rid of her mother—but Lucy was firm here—she had sacrificed herself for her; she lived for her ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... old gentleman had hardly suffered more during that fatal night than he did this night, during which Dionysia was away from the house. He knew very well that Blangin and his wife were honest people, in spite of their avarice and their covetousness; he knew that Jacques de Boiscoran ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... learn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in an inheritance of honour, bequeathed to us through a thousand years of noble history, which it should be our daily thirst to increase with splendid avarice, so that Englishmen, if it be a sin to covet honour, should be the most offending souls alive. Within the last few years we have had the laws of natural science opened to us with a rapidity which has been blinding by its brightness; and means of transit ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... that I do no good," observed Melchior, smiling, as soon as she was gone, "Her avarice and that of her husband are as notorious as their anxiety for children. Now, if I persuade them to be liberal, I ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... age," he sighed, "of avarice the fruit. Upon a steed I'd like to ride, and wear a cast iron suit, and live as lived the knights of old, the heroes of romance; I'd like to carry spurs of gold and wield a sword and lance; but in this drear and ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... at him, I observed that his eyes, which before had only expressed lust and sordid avarice, now gleamed wildly with a look of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... Lastly, and as my strongest argument, I endeavoured to excite their fears, by informing them that my rank in life would not permit me to be either murdered or secreted with impunity; and to interest their avarice, by the promises I made them of reward, if they would effect my deliverance. I only received a scornful laugh in reply to my threats; my promises might have done more, for the fellows were whispering together as if in ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... possible for a people with its mind in this state. No sentence of any great writer is intelligible to them. It is simply and sternly impossible for the English public, at this moment, to understand any thoughtful writing,—so incapable of thought has it become in its insanity of avarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, little worse than this incapacity of thought; it is not corruption of the inner nature; we ring true still, when anything strikes home to us; and though the idea that everything should "pay" has ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... please you,' said Isaac, 'before I depart. The gentile despises the Jew. He charges upon him usury and extortion. He accuses him of avarice. He believes him to subsist upon the very life blood of whomsoever he can draw into his meshes. I have known those who have firm faith that the Jew feeds but upon the flesh and blood of Pagan and Christian infants, ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... a great deal of harm in this country. The young and ambitious—there are all sorts of ambition, and, among others, that of being a rogue; as a proof of which, one daily hears people call envy, jealousy, covetousness, avarice, and half of the meaner vices, ambition—the young and ambitious, then, of this country, too often think to do a good thing, that shall have some of the peculiar merit of a certain other good thing that they have heard laughed at and applauded, under this designation. I can ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... who have published accounts of their voyages, speak of the perpetual wars between some tribes of Africa, of which the purpose was sometimes vengeance or robbery, sometimes the most ignominious kind of avarice, because the victor took the prisoners to the nearest slave market in order to sell them to the whites. One day as the boy, then seven years old, was standing at the side of his mother who was nursing his ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... chill'd,—like vampire, now, He sucks the life-blood of his friends or foes Until he viler grows than savage beast. And when, at length, stretch'd on his bed of death, And powerless, friendless, o'er his clammy brow The dark'ning shades descend, strong to the last His avarice lives; and while he feebly plucks His wretched coverlet, he gasps for breath, ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... length, 'YOU contract to marry Ellen Heathcote? the poor, innocent, confiding, light-hearted girl. No, no, Edward Dwyer, I know you too well for that—your services, be they what they will, must not, shall not go unrewarded—your avarice shall be appeased—but not with a human sacrifice! Dwyer, I speak to you without disguise; you know me to be acquainted with your history, and what's more, with your character. Now tell me frankly, were I to do as you desire me, in cool blood, should I not prove myself ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... these landlords against their designs, and an act was passed in 1787 for preventing tumultuous and illegal assemblies. Upon inquiry it was discovered that the clergy instead of receiving one-tenth scarcely received one-twentieth of the produce, and that the insurrection was owing to the avarice of the landlords, who charged the peasantry six pounds an acre for their land, and yet made them work for fivepence per day. It was also found that some landlords had excited their tenants to rob the clergy, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... describes the clergy as "lads of circumspection, and verily filii hujus saeculi." He complains of their avarice in inducing the queen, "at one chop, to give away fifty thousand pounds and better yearly from the inheritance of her crown unto them, and many a thousand after, unto ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... is only drest For show; mean handy-work of craftsman, cook, Or groom!—We must run glittering like a brook 5 In the open sunshine, or we are unblest: The wealthiest man among us is the best: No grandeur now in nature or in book Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore: 10 Plain living and high thinking are no more: The homely beauty of the good old cause Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence, And pure religion ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... wretch without it is under eternal quarantine; no friend to greet; no home to harbor him, the voyage of his life becomes a joyless peril; and in the midst of all ambition can achieve, or avarice amass, or rapacity plunder, he tosses on the surge, a buoyant pestilence. But let me not degrade into selfishness of individual safety or individual exposure this individual principle; it testifies a higher, a ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... for the captors. It was understood that the Lord Admiral was to have 5,000l., Essex as much, and Raleigh 3,000l.; but Essex, in his proud way, waived his claim in favour of the Queen, just in time to escape spoliation, for Elizabeth claimed everything. Her scandalous avarice had grown upon her year by year, and now in her old age her finer and more generous qualities were sapped by her greed for money. Even her political acumen had failed her; she was unable to see, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... anxieties and emotional desires into fresh forms of creative energy, and transferring their interest from narrow and unreal to universal objectives. The seven deadly sins of Christian ethics—Pride, Anger, Envy, Avarice, Sloth, Gluttony, and Lust—represent not so much deliberate wrongfulness, as the outstanding forms of man's uncontrolled and self-regarding instincts; unbridled self-assertion, ruthless acquisitiveness, ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... Spaniards the land of gold. Everywhere they looked for the yellow metal, more precious in their eyes than anything else the earth yields. The wonderful adventures of Cortez in Mexico and of Pizarro in Peru, and the vast wealth in gold found by those sons of fame, filled their people with hope and avarice, and men of enterprise began to look elsewhere for great and rich Indian nations to ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... young girl is not thus abandoned, when she has a dowry of a million, unless for some good reason. Love passes away; avarice remains. The infamous wretch was not free—he was married. He could only be the Count de Tremorel. It is he who ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... bottom of your garden. Take likewise a vase of the same water, and sprinkle it over any object that you may desire to change back again from gold into its former substance. If you do this in earnestness and sincerity, it may possibly repair the mischief which your avarice has occasioned." ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... execution of Martin, which he could not carry out himself, owing to the "superstitious" scruples of his followers, and to gain this he would have sacrificed the ransoms of the other two. He loved gold, but loved revenge more; and hatred was with him a stronger passion than avarice. ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... interesting to find Dennie writing in his introduction, "Literary industry, usefully employed, has a sort of draught upon the bank of opulence, and has the right of entry into the mansion of every Maecenas.... Authors far elevated above the mire of low avarice have thought it debasement to ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... ignoble treatment which that same Court had inflicted on him. He became sordid and grasping in money matters, basely begging for money, which he did not require, from those who, like Gustavus III. of Sweden, discovered only too late that he was demeaning himself from avarice and not from necessity. While keeping a certain maudlin sentiment about his exploits and those of his followers, which manifested itself in cruelly pathetic scenes when, as in his old age, people ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... every sleeping babe, before it has been scarred, and distorted, and encrusted in the long tragedy of life. Sorceress she was, pander and slave-dealer, steeped to the lips in falsehood, ferocity, and avarice; yet that paltry stone brought home to her some thought, true, spiritual, impalpable, unmarketable, before which all her treasures and all her ambition were as worthless in her own eyes as they were in the eyes ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... America is rather neglected in the talk about electricity and headlines. Needless to say, the modern vulgarity of avarice and advertisement sprawls all over Philadelphia or Boston; but so it does over Winchester or Canterbury. But most people know that there is something else to be found in Canterbury or Winchester; many people know that it is rather more interesting; and some people know that Alfred ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... arduous toils the breast inflame; Now avarice thirsts, insensible of shame; Now sloth unnerves them in voluptuous ease, And the sweet pleasures of the body please. With eager haste they rush the gulf within, And their whole souls are centred in their sin. But oh, great Jove! by whom all good is given— Dweller with lightnings and ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... under thee aspires, And Avarice under thee desires; Sloth under thee her ease assumes, Lux under thee all overflows, Wrath under thee outrageous grows, All ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the swift. You must treat your fellow men and women as if you had just arrived on this earth from the planet Mars. You must dig through the strata of conventionality to the virgin soil beneath. The great human passions are lust and avarice, though they take a thousand forms, in many of which they have more polite names. For instance, the former, when kept within polite boundaries, is usually known as Love. As Avarice makes but a sorry theme for the romantic ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... allowances for it. He is tumultuous and urgent, daring and impetuous, eager to say a great word. His conceptions shake him. They are all grandiose and huge. The great passions are awake in them—avarice, lust, hate, love, god-like pity, supreme courage, base fear. The whole trend of his mind is towards the heroic. He struggles to be in touch with the actual, and he makes many incursions upon it, but Romance snatches him away again, and claims him for her own. His native ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... seen in the heap of copper, but one of the gleaming sixpences was almost sure to have dropped from the hand of Thomas Crann. Not that this generosity sprung altogether from disinterested motives; for the fact was, that he had a morbid fear of avarice; a fear I believe not altogether groundless; for he was independent in his feelings almost to fierceness—certainly to ungraciousness; and this strengthened a natural tendency to saving and hoarding. The consciousness of this tendency drove him to the other extreme. Jean, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... thefts suggests a distinction between voluntary and involuntary, curable and incurable offences. Proceeding to the greater crime of homicide, Plato distinguishes between mere homicide, manslaughter, which is partly voluntary and partly involuntary, and murder, which arises from avarice, ambition, fear. He also enumerates murders by kindred, murders by slaves, wounds with or without intent to kill, wounds inflicted in anger, crimes of or against slaves, insults to parents. To these, various modes ...
— Laws • Plato
... people are evil judges of honest things." But the thirteen years of his imprisonment caused a reaction. People forgot how troublesome he had been and only recollected his magnificence. They remembered nothing but that he had spent his whole energy and fortune in resisting the brutality and avarice of the Spaniard. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... they found; From him by sterner chiefs to exile driven They but required a shelter, and 'twas given. By him no peasant mourned his rifled cot, And scarce the Serf could murmur o'er his lot; With him old Avarice found its hoard secure, With him contempt forbore to mock the poor; Youth present cheer and promised recompense Detained, till all too late to part from thence: 850 To Hate he offered, with the coming change, The deep reversion of delayed revenge; To Love, long baffled by the unequal match, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Tiger seated upon the bank of a large river, with a bunch of kusa grass in his paw, calling out to every one who passed: "Ho! ho! traveller, take this golden bracelet," but every one was afraid to approach him to receive it. At length, however, a certain wayfarer, tempted by avarice, regarded it as an instance of good fortune; but, said he, in this there is personal danger, in which we are not warranted to proceed. Yet, said he, there is risk in every undertaking for the ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... There is hardly a town of ten thousand inhabitants in the country where there are not men who could easily afford to give a hundred thousand dollars, or fifty, or twenty to their native or adoptive place and so enter upon a new life in bronze or marble. This would enrich us beyond the dreams of avarice in a high-grade portrait statuary; it would give work to hundreds of sculptors who now have little or nothing to do, and would revive or create the supplementary industries of casting in ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... for guesses concerning the mien with which the words were said. The conversation of the various human passions with Yorick concerning the advisability of offering the lady in Calais a seat in his chaise is here directly imitated in the questions put by avarice, vanity, etc., concerning the cousin's death. The actual journey does not begin until page 97, abrief autobiography of the hero occupying the first part of the book; this inconsequence is confessedly intended to be a Tristram Shandy whim.[9] The author's ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... main energies are devoted to exposure of the hollowness of this counsel of perfection. Temptations to vice beset rulers of men to a degree that is unknown to their subjects. To avarice rulers are especially prone. Stanchless avarice constantly converts kings of ordinary clay into monsters. How often ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... tries to skulk behind the skirts of Justice;—a State-Necessity that tries to steal a pitiful justification from whispered accusations and fabricated rumors. No, my Lords, that is no State Necessity;—tear off the mask, and you see coarse, vulgar avarice,—you see speculation, lurking under the gaudy disguise, and adding the guilt of libelling the public honor to its own ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... meaner sort of devotees,—persons who mistake spiritual selfishness for sanctity, and grab at the infinite prize of the great Future and Elsewhere with the egotism they excommunicate in its hardly more odious forms of avarice and self-indulgence. How could he speak with the old physician and the old black woman about a sorrow and a terror which but to name was to strike dumb the lips ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Avarice was a kind of disease that afflicted him. Apart from that he was a harmless, even a likable old fellow. He suffered from acute attacks, so to speak: these were his unmanageable times. He became sly and furtive, and ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... what gracious manners in the other The fact is that, just as it is not every wine, so it is not every life, that turns sour from keeping, Serious gravity I approve of in old age, but, as in other things, it must be within due limits: bitterness I can in no case approve. What the object of senile avarice may be I cannot conceive. For can there be anything more absurd than to seek more journey money, the less ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... hold it fast. And they afterwards heard that she spent the rest of her life in trying to put the handful of gold the Prince had thrown to her into her money-bag. For the Fairy, as a punishment for her avarice, caused it to slip out again as fast as ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... otherwise, he would have, without hesitation, sacrificed his most lively wishes to the appearances which it was important to give himself. Some words on the character of this man. He was a son of the grand family of misers. Avarice is, above all, a negative, passive passion. Yet Jacques Ferrand ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... new division of the lands. For he found a prodigious inequality, the city overcharged with many indigent persons, who had no 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, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... person with a narrow forehead, small grey eyes, and that peculiar expression of countenance which the vice of indulged avarice seems generally to produce. Though his lips denoted sensuality, their total want of firmness showed the astute Father Mendez that he would be easily moulded to his will. The marquis was perfectly well aware of the way in which the church was ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... his bushy brows in some perplexity. After all, he had not a shadow of proof, though he felt a moral certainty. His sheet-anchor was the avarice of the scoundrel he was dealing with, and this seemed to fail. Evidently a strong counter-influence had been ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... in his later years on the subject of money. It was not avarice, that "good old-gentlemanly vice" of Byron's which influenced him, but it resembled it at times. With his nephew as the inciting cause, money, to which he had hitherto been indifferent, now assumed a new value to him. This is evidenced by absurd economies ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... King is getting intractable about the Marriages; she reasoned with him from two o'clock till eight," without the least permanent effect. "It is his covetousness," I Dubourgay privately think!—Knyphausen, who knows the King well, privately tells me, "He will come round." "It is his avarice," thinks Knyphausen too; "nay it is also his jealousy of the Prince, who is very popular with the Army. King does everything to mortify him, uses him like a child; Crown-Prince bears it with admirable patience." This is Knyphausen's weak notion; rather a weak creaky official ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... glory of his earlier exploits, and the popularity secured by his equable temperament, undisturbed for eleven years. In the year 559, an incursion of the Huns was pushed forward to the very walls of Constantinople. The weakness of Justinian, the avarice of his ministers, and the rapacity of his courtiers, had introduced such abuses in the military establishments of the capital, that in this unexpected danger the city appeared almost without a regular garrison. In this difficulty, all ranks, from Justinian to the populace, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... with the exception of Turenne: war seemed rather to develop their worst qualities. It usually makes a man unscrupulous, hard, and arrogant. Military life is anything but interesting in the usual bearing of Prussian officers. In our own Revolutionary war, generals developed pride and avarice and jealousy. War turned Tilly into a fiend. How cold and sullen and selfish it made Napoleon! How grasping and greedy it made Marlborough! How unscrupulous it made Clive and Hastings! How stubborn and proud it made Wellington! How ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... in topical allusions and spared not even the emperors. Allusion was made to the unnatural vices attributed to Tiberius,[91] to the deaths of Claudius and Agrippina,[92] to the avarice of Galba,[93] to the divorce of Domitian,[94] and on more than one occasion heavy punishment was meted out ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... it is not so. In Naples there exist 70,000 souls, and out of these scarcely 10,000 or 15,000 do any work, and they are always lean from overwork and are getting weaker every day. The rest become a prey to idleness, avarice, ill-health, lasciviousness, usury, and other vices, and contaminate and corrupt very many families by holding them in servitude for their own use, by keeping them in poverty and slavishness, and by imparting to them their own vices. Therefore public slavery ruins them; useful works, ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... I did, that a dozen dollars would slide out of the pocket in a Commencement jaunt much easier than they would slide in again after you got home. That was the exact reason why I was not there.... I flatter myself that none of my friends ever thought me greatly absorbed in the sin of avarice, yet I assure you, Jem, that in these days of poverty I look upon a round dollar with a great deal of complacency. These rascal dollars are so necessary to the comfort of life, that next to a fine wife they are most essential, and their ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... model is molten into the mould, he helps himself to money here, there, and everywhere, scarcely giving a thought to his responsibilities, so certain is he of ultimate and beneficent triumph. He will make rich beyond the dreams of avarice all these his involuntary supporters. Unhappily, just before his scheme is ready and the metal runs, he is stopped by the stupidity of the law, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... dead now. Three of the quartette who had been joined by avarice and lawless actions were taken care of—Burkhardt a prisoner, Gordon dead by self-administered poison, Vorse by bullets. Almost did Steele Weir feel himself an embodiment of Fate, clipping the strands of these men's power and lives as with shears. Sorenson alone remained to be dealt ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... as the water-fall To one by deserts bound— Making the air all musical With cool, inviting sound— Is oft some unpretending strain Of rural song, to him whose brain Is fevered in the sordid strife That Avarice breeds 'twixt man and man, While moving on, in caravan, Across the sands ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... in the vanguard of Spanish colonial expansion in America, but such was the fact. History has made but scant and infrequent mention of these first obscure heroes, who faced obloquy and even risked starvation in the midst of irate colonists, whose avarice and brutality they fearlessly rebuked in the name of religion and humanity: they sank, after lives of self-immolation, into nameless graves, sometimes falling victims to the blind violence of the very Indians whose cause they ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... at the sight, let her have her way, not dreaming that such a skinny spectre could move so enormous a weight. But Thamar bound the mouth of her sack with a cord, and to the great surprise of the Egyptian, lifted it on her back. Avarice lent to that broken-down frame unexpected strength of muscles; all the nerves and fibres of the arms, the neck, the shoulders, strained to breaking, bore up under a mass of metal which would have made the ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... supper, when the school was called together to even-song, he would never fail to introduce some instructive homily against riches, and the corruption of the heart occasioned through the desire of them—ending with 'Lord, keep thy servants, above all things from the heinous sin of avarice. Having food and raiment, us therewithal be content. Give me Agar's wish,'—and the like;—which to the little auditory, sounded like a doctrine full of Christian prudence and simplicity,—but to poor D. was a receipt in full for that ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... take the form of those innumerable off-shoots of economic necessity, which are not themselves necessary either to human life or human welfare but which are the arbitrary creations of economic avarice divorced from necessity and indulged in out of an inert hatred of what is beautiful and real. Any labour, whether mental or physical, which directly satisfies the economic needs of humanity carries with it the unfathomable ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... himself to see how the trapper was being trapped in his own avarice as, with the most melancholy air, he answered: "I can make you the richest man in the world; but I know of no way of making the king's son ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... will tell you a secret, my friend. I deserved to be overcome in this battle, for I had weakened my army too much by detachments. Nothing but the skill of my generals and the bravery of my troops saved me from a defeat. Something is also due to the avarice of the pandours and Croats; a branch of our laurel-wreath belongs justly to Nadasti and Trenck. It is most fortunate that the courier who brought those last dispatches from Berlin, did not arrive during the battle. He would certainly ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... that night to Dirleton, his castle near North Berwick, {42} a strong hold, manned, and provisioned. Could he have carried the King in disguise across Fife to Elie, Dirleton was within a twelve miles sail, on summer seas. Had James's curiosity and avarice led him to ride away at once with Ruthven, and three or four servants, the plot might have succeeded. We must criticise the plot on these lines. Thus, if at all, had the Earl and his brother planned it. But ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... the greystone wings, the dark cedars, the faultless gravel drives, and the mint-sauce lawns of Holt Hangars runs a river called the Hudson, whose unkempt banks are covered with the palaces of those wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Here, where the hoot of the Haverstraw brick-barge-tug answers the howl of the locomotive on either shore, you shall find, with a complete installation of electric light, nickel-plated binnacles, and a calliope attachment to her steam-whistle, the twelve-hundred-ton ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... the mischief do you want to paint professionally?" inquired Scott, with unsatisfied curiosity. "It isn't avarice, ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... will learn to wait when they find they will not be waited for. Social virtues, are, in a great degree, good habits. How many great qualities are grafted into nations by their geographical position, by political necessity, and by institutions! Avarice was destroyed for a time among the Lacedaemonians by the creation of an iron coinage, too heavy and too bulky to ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... eyes glittering with avarice, he would tell of enormous sums which the Moors, the Romans, and other red mariners whom he called the Normans, had buried in caves along the coast. His ancestors knew much about all this. What a pity that they had died without saying a word! He related the true history of the cavern ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... was a strict business man, and looked after his affairs in person, passing between New York and Slapmansville (the name of the new settlement) twice a week, and spending the larger part of his time at the latter place. Also that, next to avarice, which was his crowning trait, his chief fault was jealousy. It galled him to think that his wife had obtained a settlement in bank from him before marriage, which enabled her to indulge her tastes for society; and it enraged him still more to observe how much she was ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... origin to a conversation with a friend, on the subject of Mr Godwin's essay on avarice and profusion, in his Enquirer. The discussion started the general question of the future improvement of society, and the Author at first sat down with an intention of merely stating his thoughts to his friend, upon paper, in a clearer manner than he thought he could do in conversation. ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... results. His fine hand had been working quietly for months to bring the malcontents into one camp, shaping every passion to which men are heir to serve his purpose. As he looked down the table he could read in the faces before him hatred, revenge, envy, fear, hope, avarice, recklessness, and even love, as the motives which he must fuse to one common end. His vanity stood on tiptoe at his superb skill in playing on men's wills. He knew he could mold these men to work his desire, and the ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... commencing those wrong calculations which belong to irrational hope and the sense of physical power. You thus read in the newspapers that the persons who murder their sweethearts are generally from two to six and twenty; and persons who murder from other motives than love—that is, from revenge, avarice, or ambition—are generally about twenty-eight,—Iago's age. Twenty-eight is the usual close of the active season for getting rid of one's fellow-creatures; a prize-fighter falls off after that age. I take it that Macbeth was about twenty-eight when he murdered Duncan, and from about fifty-four ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... villain's avarice no sooner arrived in town, full of hopes of money to carry on his cause, and of agreeably surprising his friend and protector Mr. M—, with so seasonable and unexpected a reinforcement, than an unforeseen ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... for boldness, are directed against those ecclesiastical abuses which touched the interests of the clerkly classes—against simony, avarice, venality in the Roman Curia, against the ambition of prelates and the effort to make princely benefices hereditary, rather than against the real sins of the Church—her wilful solidification of popular superstitions for the purposes of self-aggrandisement, her cruel persecution ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... former inhabitants. What has been done since, and what will continue to be done while the same inducements to war continue, I shall not dwell upon. I shall only in one word mention the horrid effects of bigotry and avarice, in the conquest of Spanish America; a conquest, on a low estimation, effected by the murder of ten millions of the species. I shall draw to a conclusion of this part, by making a general calculation ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the dead president of the Traders' Bank seemed to grow with time. Never popular, his memory was execrated by people who had lost nothing, but who were filled with disgust by constantly hearing new stories of the man's grasping avarice. The Traders' had been a favorite bank for small tradespeople, and in its savings department it had solicited the smallest deposits. People who had thought to be self-supporting to the last found themselves confronting the poorhouse, their two or three hundred dollar savings wiped away. ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Man, as it is to a Cormorant, or to a Wolf; and that without Lust, if you give it a softer Name, our Species could not be preserv'd, any more than that of Bulls or Goats. But not One in a Thousand can imagine, tho' it be equally demonstrable, that in the Civil Society the Avarice of Some and the Profuseness of Others, together with the Pride and Envy of most Individuals, are absolutely necessary to raise them to a great and powerful, and, in the Language of the World, polite Nation. It seems still to be a greater Paradox, that natural ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... given its sweetness to the cane— Unless his laws be trampled on—in vain? Built a brave world, which cannot yet subsist, Unless his right to rule it be dismissed? Impudent blasphemy! so Folly pleads, And, avarice being judge, with ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the sexes, illustrate the other noble passions, all of which, such as joy, are forms of, or rather children of, self-forgetful love. They do not illustrate the evil or ignoble passions—envy, jealousy, hatred, base fear, despair, revenge, avarice and remorse—which, driven by the emotion that so fiercely and swiftly accumulates around them, master the body and soul, the intellect and the will, like some furious tyrant, and in their extremes ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... swindlers who, of course, have not been lacking in the province of alchemy, exactly as later at a more critical time, in the high degree masonry. Who can exactly determine how great a part may have been played by avarice, ambition, vanity, curiosity, and finally by a not unpraiseworthy ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... settling upon it from time to time? I see Vultures, Harpyes, Ravens, Cormorants, and among many other feather'd Creatures several little winged Boys, that perch in great Numbers upon the middle Arches. These, said the Genius, are Envy, Avarice, Superstition, Despair, Love, with the like Cares and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... his host, while a slight blush rose to his cheeks, "I will tell you, that though to my father's sternness and avarice I attribute many of my faults, I yet always had a sort of love for him; and when in London I accidentally heard that he was growing blind, and living with an artful old jade of a housekeeper, who might send ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... terrible crime, and equally merits an infinite punishment. Thus, by a metaphysical quibble, the very basis of morals is overturned, and the child guilty of an equivocation through fear is put on a level with the pirate guilty of robbery and murder through cold blooded avarice and hate. In a hell where all are plunged in physical fire for eternity there are no degrees of retribution, though the degrees of evil and demerit are as numerous and various as the individuals. The Scriptures say, "Every man shall receive according to the deeds done in the body:" some "shall ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... himself. A century undisputed master of the world! A century of familiar converse in Eden's consecrated groves with the great First Cause—the omnipresent and omnipotent God. Picture one day of such existence! Ambition and Avarice, Jealousy and Passion, those demons that have deluged the world with blood and tears, have no place in Adam's peaceful bosom. He is not in the Grove of Daphne, where lust is law, but in the Garden ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... majority expressed themselves after this fashion: "Such tremors are incurable. As nature has formed us, bold or timid, cold or ardent, grave or gay, so we must remain. Whoever saw an ambitious man cured of his ambition, or a miser of his avarice?" ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... exactly; but from the quail, the woodcock, the swallow, and a thousand others, that are apparently more generous than the poor ant, to which AEsop has given a reputation for avarice that it will have some trouble to shake off. The birds swallow the seeds, many of which are covered with a hard, horny skin, that often resists digestion; these are carried by the inhabitants of the air across rivers, seas, and lakes, and ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... stealth wounds Concord; she is taken and killed by" Faith, which latter incident may be represented in the next compartment. In the fourth niche, Truth pulls out Falsehood's tongue; in the fifth, Modesty scourges Lust; in the sixth, Generosity pours coin into the throat of Avarice. To quote the words of the author from whom these interpretations are derived: "These sculptures are of the very highest class of art, and infinitely superior to any work in the chapter house; the only defect is the size of the heads: probably this was intentional on the part of ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... time, dwells in his villa on the other side of the Tiber, where he has covered a large tract of ground with magnificent porticos, and lined the banks of the river with elegant statues; profuse, with all his avarice, and, in the depth of infamy, proud and vain-glorious. Convenitur ad eum mira celebritate: cuncti detestantur, oderunt; et, quasi probent, quasi diligant, cursant, frequentant, utque breviter, quod sentio, enunciem, ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... to state in general terms how rich a return lies ready for public or private investments in good health, these examples (life insurance) show that the rate of this return is quite beyond the dreams of avarice. Were it possible for the public to realize this fact, motives both of economy and of humanity would dictate immediate and generous expenditure of public moneys for improving the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, as well as for eliminating ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... chained Prometheus? Take our own breed of these parasites; note how they grind down the stipend they are compelled to bestow upon the human tools they must use to still further swell their ungodly gains! Note how they take advantage of the public; how they extort, with Shylock avarice, every penny they possibly can from those who are compelled to use the appliances which wealth enables them to contrive for the public convenience and comfort; how they corrupt legislatures and dictate to the unscrupulous minions of the law. The Athenians were wise who ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... landed fish. Thomasin had never seen so much money before in her life. A thousand pounds! Unlike Joan, to whom the sum conveyed no significance, Mrs. Tregenza could estimate it. Her mind reached that far, and the bank-notes, for her, lay just within the estimation of avarice. Every snowy fragment meant a hundred pounds—a hundred sovereigns—two hundred ten-shilling pieces. The first shock overpast, and long before she grew sufficiently calm to associate the treasure with its possessor, Mrs. Tregenza began spending in her mind's eye. The points in house and garden, ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... undertaking, and shameful in the result, which you may avoid. But either a fond partiality for the task I have undertaken deceives me, or there never was any state either greater, or more moral, or richer in good examples, nor one into which luxury and avarice made their entrance so late, and where poverty and frugality were so much and so long honoured; so that the less wealth there was, the less desire was there. Of late, riches have introduced avarice, and excessive pleasures a longing for ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... kept up this investment, not by improving commerce, manufacture, or agriculture, but by forcibly raising the land-rents, on the principles and in the manner hereafter to be described. When these extortions disappointed or threatened to disappoint expectation, in order to purvey for the avarice which raged in England, they sought for expedients in breaches of all the agreements by which they were bound by any payment to the country powers, and in exciting disturbances among all the neighboring princes. Stimulating their ambition, and fomenting ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Truth to tell, there was scarcely a woman in the Island but thought she had as good a right to Margret's money as her newly-attentive kinsfolk. Mrs. Devine and Mrs. Cahill might agree in the morning, with many shakings of the head, that 'Liza Laffan's avarice and greed were beyond measure loathsome. Yet neither seemed pleased to see the other a little later in the day, when Mrs. Cahill climbing the hill with a full basket met Mrs. Devine descending with an ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... act very differently from what it has been their practice to act. On this occasion, I was not alarmed for myself, but I thought the course I took was necessary to save that dross which lures so many to perdition. Avarice blinded me to the secrets of ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... of gaming, whether of chucking, tossing up for money, or cards, and extremely ill-humoured and quarrelsome whenever luck was not on his side; which shews, that whatever people may pretend, avarice is at the bottom, and occasions all the fondness so many testify ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... sinners in Sion are afraid, trembling hath seized upon the hypocrites. Which of you can dwell with devouring fire? which of you shall dwell with everlasting burnings? He that walketh in justices, and speaketh truth, that casteth away avarice by oppression, and shaketh his hands from all bribes, that stoppeth his ears lest he hear blood, and shutteth his eyes that he may see no evil. He shall dwell on high, the fortifications of rocks shall be his highness: bread is given him, his waters are ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... small but that we may yet leave in it also unconquered spaces of beautiful solitude; where the chamois and red deer may wander fearless,—nor any fire of avarice scorch from the Highlands of Alp, or Grampian, the rapture of the ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... "The worse avarice is the cassock's," said the visitor. "A day of blood approaches, a day of cutting of priests' throats ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall |
