"Corroding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never seemed disposed to avail himself of my sympathy other than by mere companionship. He never sought to unbosom himself to me; there appeared to be a settled corroding anguish in his bosom that neither could be soothed "by silence nor by speaking." A devouring melancholy preyed upon his heart, and seemed to be drying up the very blood in his veins. It was not a soft melancholy—the disease of the affections; but a parching, ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... other minds, and often in the minds of strangers; and it would be difficult for me to describe the pleasure I have received when told by a friend that this work had cheered him in the hour of depression or of sickness—that even for a few moments it may have beguiled the weight of corroding care and worldly anxiety. I have been desirous of saying a word in favour of old Scottish life; and with some minds, perhaps, the book may have promoted a more kindly feeling towards hearts and heads of bygone days. And certainly I can now truly say, that my highest ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... Restauration of a Body to its own Colour, or a Retection of its native Colour, than a Change, yet still there Intervenes in it a change of the Colour which the Body appear'd to be of before this Operation. And such a change a Liquor may work, either by Dissolving, or Corroding, or by some such way of carrying off that Matter, which either Veil'd or Disguis'd the Colour that afterwards appears. Thus we restore Old pieces of Dirty Gold to a clean and nitid Yellow, by putting them into the Fire, and into Aqua-fortis, which take off ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... have succeeded other plagues, so they may have successors themselves. They take pains to spoil what they leave. Like the Harpies, they smear every thing that they touch with a miserable slime, which has the effect of a virus in corroding, or as some say, in scorching and burning. And then, perhaps, as if all this were little, when they can do nothing else, they die; as if out of sheer malevolence to man, for the poisonous elements of their nature are then let loose and dispersed abroad, and create a pestilence; and they manage ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... than the sigh suppressed, Corroding in the cavern of the heart, Making the countenance a masque of rest[ni] And turning Human Nature to an art. Few men dare show their thoughts of worst or best; Dissimulation always sets apart A corner for herself; and, therefore, Fiction Is ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... frank enjoyment of his late and simple dinner. The conversation, with its pleasant assumption of untold wealth of power and travel and regal luxuriousness, burned its memory across Norma's mind like a corroding acid. They were not contemptible, they were not robbers or brutes or hideous old plutocrats who had grown wealthy upon the wrongs of the poor. No, they were normal pleasant girls whose code it was to be generous to maids and underlings, to speak well of their neighbours, ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... to pass. The Wilhelminian Age perished owing to the fact that no definite objects were either selected or pursued in good time, and, above all, because both before and during the war, two systems in the Government of the country were constantly at variance with each other and mutually corroding. ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... to hide. Can the heart bleed and throb from day to day, And yet no trace its inmost pangs betray? Love scorns control, and prompts the labouring sigh, Pales the red lip, and dims the lucid eye; His look alarmed the stern Turanian Chief, Closely he mark'd his heart-corroding grief;— And though he knew not that the martial dame, Had in his bosom lit the tender flame[18]; Full well he knew such deep repinings prove, The hapless thraldom of disastrous love. Full well he knew ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... preservation on the upper half of the middle portion of the range, and form the most striking of all the glacial phenomena. They occur in large irregular patches in the summit and middle regions, and though they have been subjected to the action of the weather with its corroding storms for thousands of years, their mechanical excellence is such that they still reflect the sunbeams like glass, and attract the attention of every observer. The attention of the mountaineer is seldom arrested by moraines, however regular ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... are buried. It is a city without an inhabitant. Dismantled cannon, with the rust clinging in great flakes; scattered implements of war; broken weapons, bayonets, gun-locks, shot, shell or grenade, unclaimed, untouched, corroded and corroding, in silence and desolation, with no signs of life visible within these once warlike parapets except the peaceful sheep, grazing upon the very brow of the citadel, are the only relics of once ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... relations of the Andre family were ever peculiarly tender and affectionate; and in the loss of its head the survivors confessed a great and a corroding sorrow. To repair the shattered health and recruit the exhausted spirits of his mother and sisters, the son resolved to lead them at once away from the daily contemplation of the grave to more cheerful scenes. The medicinal waters of Derbyshire ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... corroding bitterness that has almost destroyed the nobler elements of your nature. I will exact no promise, but when I am gone, do not forget the request that my soul makes of yours. May God point out your work and help you ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... and already overshadowed the whole earth with the glory of honor and peace and perfect justice. Before the advancing tide of a spotless civilization, all poverty, all corruption and filthiness, all crime, all war and corroding seeds of discord were swept utterly away and washed from the world, to leave only forever and ever the magnificent harmony of nations and peoples, wherein none of those vile, base, and wicked things should even be dreamed of, ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... bent back, a goat-skin bag as heavily filled with water as could be carried. Strongly alkaline as that water was, corroding to the mouth and nauseous to the taste, still the refugees were clinging to it. For only this now stood between them and one of the most hideous deaths known to man—the death of thirst in ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... her pink and white frailty she knew and nursed the secret for which he had girdled the world. He felt that he must tear it from her, that he must crush it out of her body as the pit is squeezed from a cherry. And the corroding part of it was that he had been outwitted by a woman, that he was being defied by a physical weakling, a slender-limbed thing of ribbons and laces whose back he could bend and break ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... subordinate. He wishes, often from a distance, to control every detail of the administration. The tendency of the subordinate, on the other hand, is to lean in everything on superior authority. He does not dare to take any personal responsibility; indeed, it is possible to go further and say that the corroding action of bureaucracy renders those who live under its baneful shadow almost incapable of assuming responsibility. By force of habit and training it has become irksome to them. They fly for refuge to a superior official, who, in his turn, if the case at all admits of the adoption ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... was breathed the holy sentence of absolution; and on his hoary head was poured the baptismal stream; his eyes and ears had been opened by divine power; and, like Siloa's wave, it washed him clean. What was the leprosy of those men of old, to the corroding infection of SIN, which had for so many weary years diseased and defaced his spirit? They were healed by a miracle of power,—he, by a miracle of grace. Mr. Stillinghast was much exhausted, but calm and humble; he had suddenly become like a little child, so ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... thing to lie tossing restlessly from side to side, sleepless, through the silent watches of the night, spirit and matter warring against each other—the sword gnawing and corroding its sheath. A weary and harassing thing it is even where the body is the aggressor—when the fevered blood, darting like liquid fire through the veins, mounts to the throbbing brow, and, pressing like molten lead upon the brain, crushes out thought and feeling, leaving ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... rushed memory (and with it my hopeless misery) for now I remembered how, but a few short hours since, my dear lady had prophesied this new moon. Hereupon, crouching there, my aching head bowed upon my hands, I gave myself up to my despair and a corroding grief beyond all comforting. ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... intellectuality and taste, who lead him, or whom he leads, through all the intricacies of art, philosophy, criticism, humour. And lastly comes life itself, the great land and sea of people, England, Germany, France, battering, corroding, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... extremely severe in their military Discipline: A Soldier, for a trifling Fault, shall have all the Feathers stripp'd off his Back, and a corroding Plaister clapp'd on, which will eat to the Bones in a small Space of Time. For a capital Crime, every one in the Regiment is ordered to peck him as he's ty'd to a Post, till he dies. I have seen one who was condemn'd to ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... from misfortune," answered Ebenstreit, quietly. "Believe me, there is but one sorrow that may not be borne, may not be conquered, and that is poverty, which is a corroding, consuming malady, annihilating body, and soul, swifter and surer than the most subtle poison. It stifles all noble feelings, all poetical thoughts and great deeds, and, believe me, love even cannot resist its terrible power. One day you will understand this. ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... that may be wandering behind the close shutters of the silent old house you have come so far to see. There is a curious and distinct flavor of antiquity about the place; for the woodwork around the doors and windows, which has so bravely withstood the corroding tooth of Time and the wearing rain-drip from the great tree-branches creaking above the roof, is of a quaint but excellent pattern, of which we see too little in these days of hideous sawed scrollery and gimcrack ornament—the masonry of such an honest ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... in thy hand! Pale poverty or wealth. Corroding care or calm repose. Spring's balmy breath or winter's snows. Sickness or buoyant health,— Whate'er betide, If God provide, 'T is for the best; ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... from six to Eleven P.M. 6 days in the week, and is there not all Sunday? Fie, what a superfluity of man's time,—if you could think so! Enough for relaxation, mirth, converse, poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. O the corroding torturing tormenting thoughts, that disturb the Brain of the unlucky wight, who must draw upon it for daily sustenance. Henceforth I retract all my fond complaints of mercantile employment, look upon them as Lovers' quarrels. I ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... observed; who not- withstanding have an advantage of their preservation by abstaining from all flesh, and employing their teeth in such food unto which they may seem at first framed, from their figure and conformation; but sharp and corroding rheums had so early mouldered these rocks and hardest parts of his fabric, that a man might well conceive that his years were never like to double or twice tell over his teeth. Corruption had dealt more severely with them than sepulchral fires and smart flames with those of burnt bodies ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... down, how madly he would enjoy her. He strove subtly, but with all his energy, to enclose her, to have her. And always she was burning and brilliant and hard as salt, and deadly. Yet obstinately, all his flesh burning and corroding, as if he were invaded by some consuming, scathing poison, still he persisted, thinking at last he might overcome her. Even, in his frenzy, he sought for her mouth with his mouth, though it was like putting his face into some awful death. She yielded to him, and he pressed himself upon ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... and so on, for half an hour. An infant at the breast, when tired of its natural nourishment, is often given one of these fiery abominations to suck, as an appetizer, or by way of change and amusement. Their corroding juices are responsible for half the stomach troubles of the race; a milk diet would work wonders as a cure, if the people could be induced to do things by halves; but they cannot; it is "all peppers or all milk," and, the new diet disagreeing with them at first, they ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... my good old friend; and if the knowledge of who I am can only be obtained at the price of thy perjury, let me for ever remain ignorant—let the corroding thought still haunt my pillow, cross me at every turn, and render me insensible to the blessings of health and liberty—yet, in vain do I suppress the thought—who am I? why thus abandoned? perhaps the despised offspring of guilt—Ah! is it ...
— Speed the Plough - A Comedy, In Five Acts; As Performed At The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden • Thomas Morton
... solitude too much indulged in must necessarily have an unhappy effect upon the mind, which, when left to seek for resources wholly within itself will, unavoidably, in hours of gloom and despondency, brood over corroding thoughts that prey upon the spirits, and sometimes terminate in confirmed misanthropy—especially with those who, from constitution, or early misfortunes, are inclined to melancholy, and to view human nature in its dark shades. ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... senses. Wildered in a maze of wonders, he knew not what to conjecture. Melissa's miniature found in the streets of Paris, after she had some time been dead! He viewed it, he clasped it to his bosom.—"Such, said he, did she appear, ere the corroding cankers of grief had blighted her heavenly charms! By what providential miracle am I possessed of the likeness, when the original is no more? What benevolent angel has taken pity on my sufferings, and conveyed to me this ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... of more than dramatic justice, or of corroding infamy, seemed to reach every branch of this devoted family. After the extinction of the direct male heirs, a brother, who was a captain in the army, came home to take possession of the property. He was a person well-respected in life, and ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... journey onward in this way, we must naturally find ourselves a prey to fears and doubts, sometimes suspended between hope and despondency, while the heart is harassed by corroding desires that succeed each other like waves on a tempest-driven sea. We wish to be our own providence, to dispose of our own future of our lifetime according to those desires, instead of leaving that work to Him from whom we have received all ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... passed through Florence or had aught to do with its affairs—Mohammedans, even, in well-tolerated companionship with Christian cavaliers; some of them with faces blackened and robes tattered by the corroding breath of centuries, others fresh and bright in new red mantle or steel corselet, the exact doubles of the living. And wedged in with all these were detached arms, legs, and other members, with only here and there a gap where some image had been removed for public ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... that it is as hard for a lord to be a perfect gentleman as for a camel to pass through the needle's eye. But it also exposed to the rancours of jealousy a man who had nearly everything but domestic happiness to excite that most corroding of literary passions; and when he got out of gear he became the quarry of Spenser's "blatant beast." On the other hand, Burns was, beneath his disgust at Holy Fairs and Willies, sincerely reverential; much of Don Juan would have seemed ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... with a tone of coloring not unlike the brown of one of our own early winter landscapes. The travertine is also of a coarse grain and porous texture, not splintering into points and edges, but gradually corroding by natural decay. Stone of such a texture everywhere opens laps and nooks for the reception and formation of soil. Every grain of dust that is borne through the air by the lazy breeze of summer, instead of sliding ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... of those whom they ought to love and cherish. I sincerely believe if a man once excites jealousy in the breast of his wife, whether well founded or not, the virus that it engenders is of such a corroding nature that it is seldom, if ever, totally eradicated. Married persons, therefore, can never be too circumspect in their conduct. Though I never offered the most distant insult, or ever took even the most innocent liberty, with this young lady, yet I admit that I was guilty of an act ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... that," he said, smiling. It was many weeks since David had smiled so frankly. A strange thing had happened in that moment when he had forgotten himself in trying to comfort Blair's mother—his corroding suspicion of Elizabeth seemed to melt away! In its place was to come, a little later, the dreadful but far more bearable pain of enduring remorse for his own responsibility for Elizabeth's act. But just then, when ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... with the letters, because the colouring matter is soft whilst wet, and may easily be rubbed off. The acid I have chiefly employed has been the marine; but both the vitriolic and nitrous succeed very well. They should undoubtedly be so far diluted as not to be in danger of corroding the parchment, after which the degree of strength does not seem to be a matter ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... detached, but he is not disenchanted. His work is more joyous than Merimee's, if not so vigorous and compact, and his delight in it is less disguised. Even in the Cardinal sketches there is nothing that leaves an acrid after-taste, nothing corroding—as there is not seldom in the stronger and sterner short stories ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... could contemplate the ruined walls, the broken partitions, the ceilings fallen in, and between the loose stones the solitary flowers of the ruin. Only the arches which supported the vaulted roof of the chapel had resisted the corroding influence of time. ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... of the New Testament, which must from the first have been accessible to comparatively few, have all long since disappeared; and it is now impossible to tell whether they were worn away by the corroding tooth of time, or destroyed in seasons of persecution. Copies of them were rapidly multiplied; and though heathen adversaries displayed no small amount of malice and activity, it was soon found impossible ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... explained now. He knew that she had never loved him, but the possibility of her loving another man had never come home to him before. He tried to steady himself and realize it; it ate into his heart like corroding acid. Perhaps it was not true; there might be some mistake; then his heart told him that it was true; that there was no mistake. She loved this man, this stranger, of whose existence she had been ignorant ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... faith! not mine; For my coarse palate coarser food must please, Substantial beef, pies, puddings, ducks, and peas; Such food the fangs of keen disease defies, And such rare feeding Hornsey-house supplies: Nor these alone the joys that court us here, Wine! generous wine! that drowns corroding care, Asserts its empire in the glittering bowl, And pours Promethean vigour o'er the soul. Here, too, that bluff John Bull, whose blood boils high At such base wares of foreign luxury; Who scorns to revel in imported cheer, Who prides in perry, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... horror half so terrific as the fearful reality. I knew that for every hour of comparative ease and comfort its treacherous alliance might confer upon me now, I must endure days of bodily suffering; but I did not, could not conceive the mental hell into whose fierce, corroding fires I was about ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... of care, Nor dignity can shield a queen from woe. Despotic nature's stronger sceptre rules, And pain and passion in her right prevails. Oh, the unpity'd lot, severe condition, Of solitary, sad, dejected grandeur! Alone condemn'd to bear th' unsocial throb Of heartfelt anguish, and corroding grief; Deprived of what, within his homely shed, The poorest peasant in affliction finds, The kind, condoling, comfort of a dear ...
— The Earl of Essex • Henry Jones
... warfare about a multitude of petty internal affairs—is difficult to describe. But I think it may not be impertinent to say of it that it was something like the state of mind of a congregation, well fed, comfortable, conscious of many pleasant virtues and few corroding sins, before whom a preacher holds up the last judgment. None of them hopes to escape it, none of them can tell at what moment he may be called to his account, none of them would wish to go in just his present state, and yet none of them does anything when ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... mind. The gale had cracked a very large bough, which, having shown signs of weakness, had for many years been supported by a prop carefully put up by the farmer. But whether the prop in course of time had decayed at the line where the air and earth exercise their corroding influence upon wood; or whether the bough had stiffened with age, and could not swing easily to the wind; or whether, as seems most likely, the event occurred at that juncture in order to indicate the course of fate, it is certain that the huge bough was torn partly ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... they were old and tried. They had been answered, but.... In fact, they had been riddled several thousand times. But the worst of it was that the home was simply destroyed by the corroding influence of these ideas. Coldevin accentuated this. He had noticed that a great many people here in the city mainly lived in the restaurants. He had looked for acquaintances in their homes, but in vain; however, he met them when he occasionally went to a cafe. ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... And every ward has beds by comfort spread, And smooth'd for him who suffers on the bed: There all have kindness, most relief,—for some Is cure complete,—it is the sufferer's home: Fevers and chronic ills, corroding pains, Each accidental mischief man sustains; Fractures and wounds, and wither'd limbs and lame, With all that, slow or sudden, vex our frame, Have here attendance—here the sufferers lie, (Where love and science every aid apply,) And heal'd with rapture live, ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... shirt-collar illuminating the rusty black cravat. A grisly mustache was just beginning to roughen the stranger's upper lip. He looked disreputable to the last degree, but still had a ruined air of good society glimmering about him, like a few specks of polish on a sword-blade that has lain corroding in a mud-puddle. I took him to be some American marine officer, of dissipated habits, or perhaps a cashiered British major, stumbling into the wrong quarters through the unrectified bewilderment of last ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... each other in a disorderly confusion. For this very reason it has always been easier for me to play a passive part than an active one. It appears to me that many cultured people are attacked by the same disease. Criticism of ourselves and everything else is corroding our active power; we have no stable basis, no point of issue, no faith in life. Therein lies the reason why I do not care so much to win Aniela as I am afraid of losing her. In speaking of a disease common to our time, ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... death has entered and removed the best friend, Fate has done her worst; the plummet has sounded the depths of grief, and thereafter nothing can inspire terror. At one fell stroke all petty annoyances and corroding cares are sunk into nothingness. The memory of a great love lives enshrined in undying amber. It affords a ballast 'gainst all the storms that blow, and although it lends an unutterable sadness, it imparts an unspeakable ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... which consists in improvement and the constant uplifting of character. The evils that once vexed our world, both those occasioned by natural phenomena and those brought about by our own ignorance and sin, have, as you have heard, almost completely disappeared. Even mental troubles are gone, and no corroding care destroys our peace, for there is nothing for us to dread; no dark future, filled with unknown evils, awaits our unwilling feet, and no superstitious or unnatural fear disturbs the peaceful quiet of ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... fancifully ascribed to the sides of the stomach rubbing against each other, and to the increased acidity of the gastric juice corroding the coats of it. If either of these were the cause of hunger, inflammation must occur, when they had continued some time; but, on the contrary, coldness and not heat are attendant on hunger; which evinces, that like thirst it is owing to the inactivity of the membrane, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... close of the eighteenth century, conditions which prevailed in varying degree over the most part of Europe. Great French financiers like Turgot, great French thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau and the company of the "Encyclopaedia," had been keenly conscious of the corroding evils in the whole system of French political and social life, and had labored directly and indirectly to diminish them. Keen-eyed observers from abroad, men of the world like Chesterfield, philosophers like Arthur Young, had at different epochs observed the symptoms ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Revolution were rapidly passing to eternity. The cement of blood which bound these as one was dissolving, and the fabric of their creation was undermined in the hearts of the people, with corroding prejudices, actively fomented by the bigotry of a selfish superstition. A sectional struggle for supremacy had commenced. The control of the Government was the aim, and patriotism was consuming in the flame of ambition. The Government's ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... exhaustively. Not so the blotches of its conceivable blight: and while the symmetries of integral human character can only be traced by harmonious and tender skill, like the branches of a living tree, the faults and gaps of one gnawed away by corroding accident can be shuffled into senseless change like the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... fence, wrought in many an intricate design, formed a corroding barrier to the over-curious, while its spiked top challenged the foolish scaler. A clanging gate opened rebelliously to the paved way which led unto the wide balustraded steps. The windows, each with its projecting balcony, seemed thrusting back all cordial advances. Along that side toward the ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... a child of ten or twelve, sound, vigorous, well developed for his age, it gives me pleasure, whether on account of the present or of the future. I see him impetuous, sprightly, animated, free from anxiety or corroding care, living wholly in his own present, and enjoying a life full to overflowing. I foresee what he will be in later years, using the senses, the intellect, the bodily vigor, every day unfolding within him. When I think of him as a child, he delights me; when I think of him as a man, he delights ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... so from a strong conviction on his part that his duty lay the other way, and that it was high time literature should, regardless of merely dilettante aestheticism, address itself to exposing, by depicting it, the extent to which the evil genius is gnawing at and corroding the vitals of society; and it is not for a moment to be supposed he has done so from any pleasure he takes in gloating over the doings of the ghoul, or that he is in sympathy with those who do; of his works ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... already mentioned, each time liberates fresh gold from some combination. The discovery of a method to effect this before the first grinding would without doubt raise the value of gold-ores many fold. It is curious to find how the minute particles of gold, being scattered about and not corroding, at last accumulate in some quantity. A short time since a few miners, being out of work, obtained permission to scrape the ground round the house and mill; they washed the earth thus got together, and so procured thirty dollars worth of gold. ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... and the people he has humbled, will be one of horror and hate. Every sigh sent up from the hearts he has crushed and the homes he has made desolate, will be mingled with execrations on the name of the informer. Every heart-throb in the prison cells of this land where his victims count time by corroding his thought—every grief that finds utterance from these victims in the quarries of Portland will go up to heaven freighted with curses on the Nagles, the Devanys, the Masseys, the Gillespies, the Corridons, and the whole host of mercenary miscreants, who, faithless to their friends ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... as she wished, for many weeks after the serious attack from which she had suffered. There was not very much to cheer her in the few events that touched her interests during this time. She heard in March of the death of a friend's relation in the Colonies; and we see something of what was the corroding dread at her heart. ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... She alternately considered ways of leaving Kennicott, and remembered his virtues, pitied his bewilderment in face of the subtle corroding sicknesses which he could not dose nor cut out. Didn't he perhaps need her more than did the book-solaced Erik? Suppose Will were to die, suddenly. Suppose she never again saw him at breakfast, silent but amiable, listening to her chatter. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... acid on one of the wire ropes, and it ate into the metal, corroding it and separating a number of the strands so that a little extra weight broke ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... interest has already been opened as a field for discussion; so I suppose I may enter upon it without claiming the honor or risking the danger which may await its first explorer. It seems as though we are never to have an end to this baneful and corroding system, acting almost as prejudicially to the general interests of the community as a direct tax of several thousand dollars annually laid on each county for the benefit of a few individuals only, unless there be a law made fixing the limits of usury. A law for ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... needy, gain health and happiness from your hands, and let their voices bless you for good wrought amongst them. For nothing is so pitiful and so abhorrent, as the worship of wealth, and the selfishness that eats like a corroding poison into the purer metal of the rich man's nature. Your wealth will only bring you happiness in so far as you use it to benefit others less fortunate though equally deserving. It is given you as a trial, not as a reward.'—To you, oh Cynic, this message have I also: ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... described to me the torments of the water, the wheel and the fire until my soul sickened. He told me how it menaced alike the untrained savage, the peasant in his hut and the noble in his hall. I heard of parents who, by reason of this corroding fear, had denounced their children to the ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... merely mentions, under the article aphthae, that the latter sometimes spread around the fraenum and tongue, occasionally corroding the subjacent parts. He is so far from giving a clear description, under the head of Aphthae Serpentes, of any affection analogous to that we are about to record, that he quotes GALEN as remarking, very properly, ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... Chopin or Watteau, he danced on roses and thorns. All three were consumptives and the aura of decay floats about their work; all three suffered from the nostalgia of the impossible. The morbid decadent aquafortist that is revealed in the corroding etchings of Laforgue is germane to men in whom irony and pity are perpetually disputing. We think of Heine and his bitter-sweetness. Again with Zarathustra, Laforgue could say: "I do not give alms. I am not poor enough for that." He possesses the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... shatteringly gross personalities that he, who with the spiteful ironies of his venomous tongue had kept the camp in awe, was dazed to gloomy silence by Wylo's vivid flashes of wit. His weird models showed a mind corroding with vicious intent. He dared not open his lips while Wylo was about. The quaking piccaninnies cringed with fear as they watched him working up his malignant feelings into the most awful imps—imps which threatened ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... and not a criminal; they would remember after the careless remark and after the curt gesture, when it was too late. His malady obsessed them: it was in the air of the house, omnipresent; it weighed upon them, corroding the nerve and exasperating the spirit. Now and then, when Darius had vented a burst of irrational anger, they would say to each other with casual bitterness that really he was too annoying. Once, when his demeanour towards the new servant had strongly suggested that he thought ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... worst of all diseases except cancer—no tissue of the body escapes the ravages of this dreadful disease—bone, muscle, teeth, skin and every part of the body are destroyed by its deforming and corroding influence. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... board. Not a line nor a word could I find descriptive of my affliction. I brought common horse-sense to bear on the problem. Here were malignant and excessively active ulcers that were eating me up. There was an organic and corroding poison at work. Two things I concluded must be done. First, some agent must be found to destroy the poison. Secondly, the ulcers could not possibly heal from the outside in; they must heal from the inside out. I decided to fight the poison with ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... from injurious contention, that both the youth and elders of the Greeks may honour thee the more.' Thus did the old man give charge, but thou art forgetful. Yet even now desist, and lay aside thy mind-corroding wrath. To thee Agamemnon gives worthy gifts, ceasing from indignation. But if [thou wilt] hear from me, and I will repeat to thee how many presents Agamemnon in his tents hath promised thee: seven tripods, untouched by the fire, and ten talents of gold, twenty shining caldrons, ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... him before he goes? Will he bear me in mind? Does he purpose to come? Will this day—will the next hour bring him? or must I again assay that corroding pain of long attent—that rude agony of rupture at the close, that mute, mortal wrench, which, in at once uprooting hope and doubt, shakes life; while the hand that does the violence cannot be caressed to pity, because absence ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Live above its corroding cares and anxieties; remembering the description Jesus gives of His own true people; "They are not of the world, even as I am not ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... Sit down, good B.B., in the banking-office: what! is there not from six to eleven p.m. six days in the week, and is there not all Sunday? Fie, what a superfluity of man's time, if you could think so! Enough for relaxation, mirth, converse, poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. O the corroding, torturing, tormenting thoughts, that disturb the brain of the unlucky wight who must draw upon it for daily sustenance! Henceforth I retract all my fond complaints of mercantile employment; look upon them as lover's quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Welcome dead ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... None thinks upon the grief or pain, That soon must follow in their train,— The coffin shroud, and death's cold pall, That must so soon be flung o'er all; But yet, in that gay circle there, We can detect corroding care, Can plainly see, in sparkling eyes, Sorrow, clad in gay disguise,— Trying happy to appear, To ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... joy and sorrow of humanity—a book that set humility like a diamond in the forehead of virtue; that found mercy and charity outcasts among the minds of men and left them radiant queens in the world's heart; that stickled not to describe the gorgeous esotery of corroding passion and shamed it with the purity of Mary Magdelen; that dragged from the despair of old Job the uttermost poison-drop of doubt and answered it with the noble problem of organized existence; that teems ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... Powder, of the colour of Saffron, but in the intire Mass, like a blushing Rubie; (which Redness is a sign of perfect Fixation, and fixed Perfection) permanently Colouring, or Tinging; in all Examens whatsoever, even of Sulphur adurtive, and in Tryals of corroding Waters, and in the most vehement persecution of Fire, fixed, alwayes during, and unburnable; permanent as the ...
— The Golden Calf, Which the World Adores, and Desires • John Frederick Helvetius
... be finely tempered, and neither coarse nor rough. We can all recall a few cases where a rude treatment has effected a cure, but only by draining the life blood of the victim, or by turning every better human feeling into bitterness and corroding gall. Words of blame intended to fall upon the hearts of the young, or of the old, should always be spoken kindly, for we can never know how deeply they may penetrate, what tender schemes for widowed mother, aspiring brother, portionless sister, or starving wife and children they may ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... things that could shift the advantage to their side. One of the things that could defeat us is fear—fear of the task we face, fear of adjusting to it, fear that breeds more fear, sapping our faith, corroding our liberties, turning citizen against citizen, ally against ally. Fear could snatch away the very values we are ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... nobler motives, in purer and more unselfish habits. And better for us, perhaps, that He should not cure us at once, lest we should fancy that sin was a light thing, which we could throw off whenever we chose; and not what it is, an inward disease, corroding and corrupting, the wages whereof are death. Therefore it is, that because Christ loves us He hates our sins, and cannot abide or endure them, will punish them, and is merciful and loving in punishing them, as long as a tincture ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... had expressed his composition. What he had not revealed—that very vividness of sense of what was right (and what was wrong) in his conduct forbidding it—was the corroding struggle to preserve the path of his duty. Because of that struggle he kept locked the refuge that Nona was to him in his dismays. He would have no meetings with her save only such as thrice happy chance and most kind circumstance might apportion. That was within the capacity of his strength. He ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... of intimacy between them and my uncle and aunt. I think it was partly the sense of relief with which they welcomed a new interest—a little break in the monotony of anxiety which had been for so many months corroding their ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Detmold,[239] in a frenzy of wrath and excitement, and shows what he is really capable of under pressure of circumstances. Perhaps it is only fair to suppose that his long years of suffering, both from his physical condition and from the unscrupulous attacks of his enemies, had had a corroding effect upon his moral sensibilities. In his request to Campe to act as mediator in the disagreeable affair he says: "Sie koennen alle Schuld des Missverstaendnisses auf mich schieben, die Grossmut der Familie ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... most valuable allies have been the Jewish Press and the Jewish haute finance of Germany, Austria and Hungary. Just as we hope and believe that one result of this war will be the emancipation of Germany and German "culture" from the corroding influences of militarist doctrine, so there are good grounds for hoping that it will also give a new and healthy impetus to Jewish national policy, grant freer play to their many splendid qualities, and enable ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... description of noli me tangere and of lupus is rather practical. Lupus is "eating herpes," occurs mainly on the nose, or around the mouth, slowly increases, and either follows a preceding erysipelas or comes from some internal cause. Noli me tangere is a corroding ulcer, so called perhaps because irritation of it causes it to spread more rapidly. He thinks that deep cauterization of it is the best treatment. Since these are in the department of skin diseases this seems the place to mention ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... stepped in and ordered the roses, nor did the florist once suspect that so lavish a buyer of flowers could be a prey to emotions of corroding cynicism toward the person for ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... temperament or tradition. But love had been the one window through which light could enter her house of Life; and when this darkened, her whole nature had sickened and grown morbid. Then at last all the corroding bitterness in her heart had gathered to a canker which ached ceaselessly, like a physical sore, ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... submission arose from the implicit belief which, child as she was, she had, that everything that befell her was ordered by the kind Saviour, who would send nothing that was not for her real good. Such a belief, fully realized, would soon relieve most of us from the fretting cares and corroding anxieties that arise from our "taking thought" ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... isn't what the boy is worrying about," chuckled Lancelot Darby, as the party came ashore with the luncheon hampers. "It's the fate of the Barnacle that is corroding ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... stir her stomach to revolt; soon the charcoal that she bought from the charcoal dealer next door, strong Paris charcoal, full of half-charred wood, enveloped her in its stifling odor. The dirty, smoking funnel, the low chimney-piece poured back into her lungs the corroding heat of the waist-high oven. She suffocated, she felt the fiery heat of all her blood surge upward to her face and cause red blotches to appear on her forehead. Her head whirled. In the half-asphyxiated condition of laundresses who pass back ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... imagination of so nakedly human a kind that there is hardly an ornament, hardly an image, in the verse: it is like scraps of broken, of heart-broken, talk, overheard and jotted down at random, hardly suggesting a story, but burning into one like the touch of a corroding acid. These cruel and self-torturing lovers have no illusions, and their 'tragic hints' are like a fine, pained mockery of love itself, as they struggle open-eyed against the blindness of passion. The poem laughs while it cries, with a double-mindedness more constant ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... effects of the corroding wind of a hot Sirocco can only be conceived by those who have suffered from them; the unwonted dulness with which it overcasts even the most active mind; the deep-drawn sighs it will elicit; and if there be one melancholy feeling which presses on the heart more heavily than another, ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... case in contemporary drama; with a skill that is frequently sophistical, it shows up the inconsistencies of society; it exaggerates the shams and shibboleths of the social law; and so indirectly, by merely dissolving or corroding the outer crust, it again brings us back to the inner core. But, in both cases, whether it weakens society or strengthens nature, it has the same end in view: that of laying bare a secret portion of ourselves,—what might be called the ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... serious injury to one is an injury to all. The future progress of the world will not be assured until they cease their squabbles over territory, trade, and the natural resources of the world—not until they abandon corroding selfishness, jealousy, and suspicion, and covenant with each other openly ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... night, they camped beside a chorus of waterfalls, joyous, gurgling, laughing silver water, not the sullen silent blood red streams of the Desert that flow without a sound but the plunk of the soft bank corroding and falling in. They could not talk. They lay in quiet, listening to the tinkle and trill and treble of the silver flow over the stones; to the little waves lipping and lisping and lapping through the grasses; and when the moon came up, every ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... involve an argument; and of course I am thinking of some means which does not immediately run into argument. I am rather asking what must be the face-to-face antagonist, by which to withstand and baffle the fierce energy of passion and the all-corroding, all-dissolving scepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries? I have no intention at all to deny, that truth is the real object of our reason, and that, if it does not attain to truth, either the premiss or the process is in fault; but ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... for secret ends, Corroding cares, or sharp affliction, sends; We must conclude it best it should be so, And not desponding ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... at the question; for a single tinge of red, whether arising from such ultra-bestial cruelty in those who have the impudence to accuse the cannibals of theirs, or whether from abhorrent shame at the corroding disease of intractable superstition, hereditary in the European nations for fifteen centuries, a tinge of red came over the countenance of the emperor. When I raised up again my forehead, after such time as I thought would have removed all traces of it, still fixing my eyes ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... charm have held in thrall: Total eclipse—of pleasure on their part Who love pure melody and polished Art. Memory will echo long the silvery chime Of such a voice as even ruthless Time Might stay his stride to listen to, and spare From the corroding touch. Some scarce will care To hear "Tom Bowling" sung by other lips, And when in tenor strains "Total Eclipse" Sounds next upon our ears, SIMS REEVES will seem To sing again to us as in ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 16, 1891 • Various
... department store. The highest wage she could earn, even though she wore long dresses and called herself "experienced," was five dollars a week. This sum was of course inadequate even for her own needs and she was constantly filled with a corroding worry for "the folks at home." In a moment of panic, a fellow clerk who was "wise" showed her that it was possible to add to her wages by making appointments for money in the noon hour at down-town hotels. Having earned money in this way for a few months, the young girl made an arrangement with ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... procession of events become after such a revelation! Up to this, Ministers performed a sort of Greek chorus, chanting in ambiguous phrase the woes that invaded those who differed from them, and the heart-corroding sorrows that sat below the "gangway." There has come an end to all this. All the dramatic devices of those days are gone, and we live in an age in which many men are their own priests, their ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... does their soul feel fettered and restrained; but even in the world of the spirit. Neither is it to the enmity of society that they succumb; but under the assaults of this nameless anguish; under the corroding action of potent faculties "inferior still to their desires and their conceptions"; under the deception that comes from within. What can they do with the liberty so painfully won? On whom, on what, expend the exuberant vitality within them? ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... all ye pow'rs who rule above! O, Thou, whose very self art love! Thou know'st my words sincere! The life-blood streaming thro' my heart, Or my more dear immortal part, Is not more fondly dear! When heart-corroding care and grief Deprive my soul of rest, Her dear idea brings relief And solace to my breast. Thou Being, All-seeing, O hear my fervent pray'r! Still take her, and make her Thy most ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... style, suggesting startling contrasts and surprising applications of Bible thoughts and words, became a fruitful source of Jewish humor. If a theory of literary descent could be established, an illustration might be found in Heine's rapid transitions from tender sentiment to corroding wit, a modern development of the flashing humor of ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... there are some things cleverness cannot reach. What he failed to feel by instinct, he tried to scorn. It was not the patrician scorn, stupid yet not ignoble, for something hardly seen, hardly judged, merely felt as dull and insignificant; it was the corroding plebeian ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... native simplicity unabated. It was this combination of shrewdness and simplicity which had caused him to send Dorothy, bitter as it had been to part with her, to Europe to finish her education. His gorge had risen at the intolerable snobbishness which is corroding the wealthy sections of American society; he had made up his mind that she had a better chance of obtaining the necessary social acquirements, while remaining a gentlewoman, in Europe; and had acted with ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... dissenters from this wish, among the principal of whom might be classed the Panther, and his sister, Ie Sumach, so called from the number of her children, who was the widow of le Loup Cervier, now known to have fallen by the hand of the captive. Native ferocity held one in subjection, while the corroding passion of revenge prevented the other from admitting any gentler feeling at the moment. Not so with Rivenoak. This chief arose, stretched his arm before him in a gesture of courtesy, and paid his compliments with an ease and dignity that a prince might have envied. As, in that band, his wisdom ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... understand. Nevertheless it was not society, and it did not make his fellow-townsmen endurable to him. He recoiled from them more and more, and the solitude in which he lived among his books filled him with a black melancholy, which he describes as a poison, corroding the life of body and soul alike. To a friend who tries to reconcile him to Recanati, he writes: "It is very well to tell me that Plutarch and Alfieri loved Chaeronea and Asti; they loved them, but they left them; and so shall I love my native place when I am away ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... responded, but there was no feeling in it at all. She might equally well have seen the whole lot of them, herself included, jerked by wires from a sardonic heaven that had no purpose, no plan—only such figures of thought were not within her scope; still the feeling was there, corroding ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... 1844, says that "the cause of this great falling off, in a season of reviving prosperity in the trade, business and general prosperity of the country, cannot be regarded as transient, but, on the contrary, is shown to be deep and corroding. The cause is the dissatisfaction felt generally through the country, but most strongly in the densely peopled regions to with the rates of postage now established by law, and the frequent resort to various ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... grades than modern monarchies; and in the most enlightened, that of Greece, the plague spot of slavery was found. The giant republic, whose rising greatness throws into shade the once august names of Greece and Rome, suffers this heart-corroding leprosy to cleave to her vitals, and sully her fair fame, making her boasted vaunt of equality a base lie—the ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... simplicity. The wind, on meeting the semi-circular back of the barchan, is diverted on the two sides of it; these two currents come into violent collision again on the lee-side, where, the air being more or less still, a considerable portion of the wind is forcibly driven back towards the barchan, corroding its side in a double rotatory way, each such circle having for a diameter the radius of the barchan crescent containing them. In fact in many barchans the sand ripples on the windward slopes cross the direction of the ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... which had never looked longer than necessary in the glass. Lawn-tennis courts were marked out snowily on a shaven lawn; the only eyesore the good man encountered was poor Pocket's snob-wickets painted on a buttress in the back premises; his own belching blast-furnaces, corroding and defiling acres and acres within a few hundred yards of his garden wall, were but another form of beauty to the sturdy Briton who had made ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... is. This power of corroding glass has been used for engraving, or rather etching, upon it. The glass is first covered with a coat of wax, through which the figures to be engraved are to be scratched with a pin; then pouring the fluoric acid over the wax, it corrodes the glass where the scratches have ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... Camerara-mayor met for the first time on board her galley in the harbour of Villefranche, at the moment when the tearful eyes of the young princess were casting a last glance at the lovely Italian land, was that admirable queen whose life in default of mental courage became worn out by the corroding of adversity, and whose popular name has remained as a symbol in Spain of every royal and domestic virtue. Not quite fourteen at the period of that meeting, the princess was already as tall as the Duchess of Burgundy, whose perfect ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... grown to hate my present daily existence. It was a state of enforced passive inaction that seemed corroding my nerves as the long worn fetter eats into the flesh. The current of life was running at its swiftest and fiercest in my veins. Vitality was ardent in the brain and blood, but there was no worthy expense of my energies, and they simply fell back upon themselves again ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... implies ridicule, sharp, corroding ridicule. The comedy of the Greeks ridiculed everything,—persons, characters, opinions, customs, and sometimes philosophy and religion. Comedy became, therefore, a sort of consecrated slander, lyric ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various |
