"Deformity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dark, ivory skin and ebony, male and female, or almost sexless in the excess of deformity, there were some to suit all tastes. Each wore a tablet hung round the neck by a green cord: on this were writ the chief merits of the wearer, and also a list of his or her defects, so that intending purchasers might know ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... jokes, and their callousness to ridicule of personal defects. Jests which would provoke a blow from an Anglo-Saxon, or wound and rankle in the memory for life, are here taken in good part. A cripple often joins in the laugh at his own deformity; and the rough carelessness with which such personal misfortunes are alluded to is amazing to us of a more sensitive organization. I well remember the extreme difficulty I once had in breaking an Italian servant of the habit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... friendless solitude, groaning and tears, And savage faces, at the clanking hour, Seen through the steams and vapour of his dungeon, 15 By the lamp's dismal twilight! So he lies Circled with evil, till his very soul Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deform'd By sights of ever more deformity! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of them, in the full moonlight, the shambling figure halted and salaamed with clawlike hands extended. His deformity bent him almost double, but he was so muffled in rags that it was difficult to discern any tangible human shape at all. A tangled black beard hung wisplike from the dirty chuddah that draped his head, and above it two eyes, fevered and furtive, ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... most iniquitous acts are the three disasters—the most terrible of all to which man is exposed—that habitually strike him before birth: I refer to absolute poverty, disease (especially in the shocking forms of physiological degradation and incurable infirmities, of repulsive ugliness and deformity), and intellectual weakness. These are the three great priestesses of unrighteousness that lie in wait for innocence and brand it, on the threshold of life. And yet, mysterious as their method of choice may appear, the triple source whence they derive these three irremediable scourges is less ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... is so decided that one is tempted to conclude either that the masons had very crooked sight, or that they were playing tricks with their perspective. The feature, where it is at all marked, is something of a deformity. In our own day it has been introduced, apparently by design, into the plan of Truro cathedral. In medieval work, however, it will seldom be found in a chancel where no enlargement upon an early site has taken place; ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... and the most expensive embroidery, to a piece of chintz or linen, but the effect is the same. This costume, which prevails more or less through all Italy, but here is general, gives something of beauty to the plainest face, and something of elegance to the most vulgar figure; it can make deformity itself look passable: and when worn by a really graceful and beautiful female, the effect is peculiarly picturesque ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... well to do. That the youth of the village was steadily leaving it for the Colonies, that the constant marrying in and in which had gone on for generations had produced an ugly crop of mental deficiency, and physical deformity among the inhabitants—that the standard of morals was too low, and the standard of drink too high—were matters well known to the Rector and the Doctor. But there were no insanitary cottages, and no obvious scandals of any sort. ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is to procure your Pleasure, by exposing the little Embarrassment of a Person; But the Intention of Satire, is to raise your Detestation, by exposing the real Deformity of his Vices. ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... in the crucible and by the fire of God's word. It is intended to turn your spirit inside out—to lay bare every insidious enemy that may have crept in and lie lurking in the walls of Mansoul. It exhibits sin in all its hideous deformity, stript of its masquerade and disguises; so that it appears, what it really is, the great enemy to human happiness. It is calculated to stir up our pure minds to incessant vigilance, lest we should wander upon tempting, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... whom I had deemed a man of men Faulty, as great men are, but with no taint Of baseness,—with those faults that shew the saint Of after days, perhaps,—wert even then When first I loved thee but a spreading tree Whose leaves shewed not its roots' deformity; ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... the manners; vice 'losing all its deformity;' becoming decent (as established things, making regulations for themselves, do); becoming almost a kind of 'sweet' virtue! Intelligence so abounds; irradiated by wit and the art of conversation. Philosophism sits joyful in her glittering ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... members might be applied. Upon one point they were agreed. There was no doubt in any little head among them that Aunt Hannah had at some time sold herself to Satan, and that he had placed this deformity upon her as a mark of ownership. Then she had a humped back, poor woman, the result of the cruel weight of many weary years; and she leaned upon an old-fashioned staff with a curved and crutch-like handle; and her bleared eyes were bent forever ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... had "rings in their ears and lips, which, though they were of gold, were a deformity instead of ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... to occupy the place he did. But he was a leading actor in the mournful drama which filled up the whole period of the Twelve Years' Truce. His words had a direct influence on great events. He was a man of unquestionable erudition, of powers of mind above the average, while the absolute deformity of his moral constitution made him incapable of thinking, feeling, or acting rightly on any vital subject, by any accident or on any occasion. If there were one thing that he thoroughly hated in the world, it was the Reformed religion. If in his thought there were one term ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... relish the jest. The toys are very odd,—particularly the Roman whistles;—some of these are made of pewter, with a little wheel that whirls as you blow; others are of terra-cotta, very rudely modelled into every shape of bird, beast, and human deformity, each with a whistle in its head, breast, or tail, which it is no joke to hear, when blown close to your ears by a stout pair of lungs. The scene is very picturesque. Above, the dark vault of night, with its far stars, the blazing and flaring of lights below, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... shape as they can imagine. In their Temples, they have his image euile favouredly carved, and then painted, and adorned with chaines, copper, and beades; and covered with a skin, in such manner as the deformity may well suit with such a God. By him is commonly the ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... nose and mouth and teeth and chin and neck and bust were perfect, much more so at twenty-eight than they had been at eighteen. What wonder that with such charms still glowing in her face, and with such deformity destroying her figure, she should resolve to be seen, but only to be seen reclining ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... had been got up to the cathead in time of need; another was for cutting down the foremast, the foretop-mast being already by the board. The fog totally disappeared, and the black, rocky island stood in all its rugged deformity before their eyes. Suddenly the sun broke out in full splendor, as if to expose more clearly to the view of the sufferers their dreadful predicament. Despair was in every bosom—death, arrayed in all its ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... a cool, unconcerned fiend, laughing with a detestable glee over the whole of the better and worse elements of which human life is composed; treating well-nigh with equal derision the most pure of virtues, and the most odious of vices; dead alike to the beauty of the one, and the deformity of the other; a mere heartless despiser of that frail but noble humanity, whose type was never exhibited in a shape of more deplorable degradation than in his own contemptuously distinct delineation of ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... his dangerous claim to the possession or sovereignty of Colchos and its dependent states. Rich in the accumulated treasures of the East, he extorted from the Romans an annual payment of thirty thousand pieces of gold; and the smallness of the sum revealed the disgrace of a tribute in its naked deformity. In a previous debate, the chariot of Sesostris, and the wheel of fortune, were applied by one of the ministers of Justinian, who observed that the reduction of Antioch, and some Syrian cities, had elevated beyond measure the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... age, close-clipt and bristling; his beard was gray, coarse, and shaggy. His forehead was spacious and commanding; the eye was dark-blue, with an expression both majestic and benignant. His nose was aquiline but crooked. The lower part of his face was famous for its deformity. The under lip, a Burgundian inheritance, as faithfully transmitted as the duchy and county, was heavy and hanging; the lower jaw protruding so far beyond the upper that it was impossible for him to bring together the few fragments of teeth which still ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... the rescue, with accessory considerations; and then, the due administration of a little wholesome flattery: by this time we had obtained permission, after modest reluctance pretty well enacted, to transform the deformity of manuscript into the well-proportioned elegance of print. But, this much gained, our author would not yield to any argument we could urge upon the next point, viz: leave to produce the volume, duly fathered with ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... endeavored to wile away his time in prison by caricaturing his persecutors; and certainly he had succeeded in the attempt. Nothing more absurd than some of these pictures could be imagined; every possible deformity was ascribed to the originals, and the sketches were surrounded by pasquinades and quaint devices. Here and there might be found expressions of deeper and more fearful import, if indeed anything could be more fearful than the contrast between the ridiculous and such a dungeon. "Non ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... Permission was then granted. Flavius, advancing, was saluted by Arminius, who having removed his own attendants, requested that the archers ranged upon our bank might retire. When they were gone—"How came you," he asked his brother, "by that deformity in your face?" The brother having informed him where and in what fight, he desired to know "what reward he had received"? Flavius answered, "Increase of pay, the chain, the crown, and other military gifts"; which Arminius treated with derision, as ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... a misfortune. We know—it's been proved a thousand times ower—that a man can rise above sic trouble. But he canno do it if he's thinking of it a' the time. The men that have overcome the handicaps of blindness and deformity are those who gie no thought at all to what ails them—who go aboot as if they were as well and as strong as ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... King Richard III, as I have read, deformity of body was the fashion, and the nobility and gentry of the court thought it an indispensable requisite of a graceful form to pad for themselves a round shoulder, because the king was crooked. And can we think human nature so absurdly ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... posterity, he has dressed up the philosophy of his own faction in as decent a garb as he could to make her appearance in public; but through every disguise her hideous figure may be distinctly seen. If, however, the reader still wishes to see her in all her naked deformity, I would further refer him to a private letter of Brissot, written towards the end of the last year, and quoted in a late very able pamphlet of Mallet Du Pan. "We must" (says our philosopher) "set fire to the four corners of Europe"; in that alone is our safety. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... however different in size, in shape, in wealth, in architecture, this church is from that, it is the same thing still. There are the same dirty beggars stopping in their muttered prayers to beg; the same miserable cripples exhibiting their deformity at the doors; the same blind men, rattling little pots like kitchen pepper- castors: their depositories for alms; the same preposterous crowns of silver stuck upon the painted heads of single saints and Virgins in crowded pictures, so that a little figure on a mountain has a head-dress ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... special financial interest in the increase of surgical operations and who carefully reviews both the radical and conservative literature relating to circumcision, will not hasten to submit boys to this operation until it is certain that their sexual organs happen to have congenital deformity that only ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... is the son of Here without a father, and stands to her in the same relation as Athene to Zeus: her pride and want of sympathy are manifested by her casting him out at once, in consequence of his deformity."—Grote, vol. i. ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... purposes:—1. To cover us; 2. To defend us against cold; 3. To defend our bodies and limbs from injury. There is one more purpose of dress; in case of deformity, it seems ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... I recollected the Osman Aga's face was the mirror of deformity, although his pimple had budded elsewhere. He, instead of condoling with me on my misfortune, rather ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... away their very lives for a cause. Peter found himself regarding the ideas of these Reds from a new angle; before this they had been just a bunch of "nuts," but now they seemed to him creatures of monstrous deformity, products of the devil, or of a God ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... but little respect for practical principles; but I own it appears to me, that he is a much greater benefactor to mankind, who points out how an inferior good may be attained, than he who merely expatiates on the deformity of the present state of society, and the beauty of a different state, without pointing out a practical method, that might be immediately applied, of accelerating our advances from the ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... noble retainers of the family); but the infatuated young fool would not budge, although he had not even the excuse of love for staying. 'How she squints,' he would say of the Princess, 'and how crooked she is! She thinks no one can perceive her deformity. She writes me verses out of Gresset or Crebillon, and fancies I believe them to be original. Bah! they are no more her own than her hair is!' It was in this way that the wretched lad was dancing over the ruin ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... things, that which exceeds in deformity or disgrace, exceeds either in pain or evil—must it ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... Portugal, and even taking part of it away for the Queen of Etruria and the Prince of the Peace [Godoy]." Duroc was also to point out the difficulty, now that "all Italy" belonged to Napoleon, of allowing "that deformity," the kingdom of Etruria, to disfigure the peninsula. The change would in fact, doubly benefit the French Emperor. It would enable him completely to exclude British commerce from the port of Leghorn, where it was trickling ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... that has been often practiced even by great authors: when Homer, so many ages since, did the like with the battle of frogs and mice; Virgil, with the gnat and puddings; Ovid, with the nut; when Polycrates and his corrector Isocrates extolled tyranny; Glauco, injustice; Favorinus, deformity and the quartan ague; Synescius, baldness; Lucian, the fly and flattery; when Seneca made such sport with Claudius' canonizations; Plutarch, with his dialogue between Ulysses and Gryllus; Lucian and Apuleius, with the ass; and some other, I know not who, with the hog that ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... a monster and a deformity to look at; 'twas all wrong, of course, but she swelled with pride for all that. Even a Lapp can gladden ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... the same scene as I have already described, when a Moor came up to me and attempted to utter a few words in Spanish. He was a tall elderly man, with sharp but rather whimsical features, and might have been called good-looking, had he not been one-eyed, a very common deformity in this country. His body was swathed in an immense haik. Finding that I could understand Moorish, he instantly began talking with immense volubility, and I soon learned that he was a Mahasni. He expatiated ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... only by hypocrites and fanatics, and after all, it is the best crucible for eliminating the false from the true. Does the contemplation of physical monstrosities engender a predilection or affection for deformity? Does it not rather by contrast with symmetry and perfect proportion heighten the power and charm of the latter? The beauty of truth is never so invincible as when confronted with sophistry or falsehood; just as youth and health ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... concealed or disguised on any pretence; nor can we suppose, that the same privilege should be allowed in history as is in painting, which invented the profile, to represent the side-face of a prince who had lost an eye, and by that means ingeniously concealed so disagreeable a deformity.(225) History, the most essential rule of which is sincerity, will by no means admit of such indulgences, as indeed would deprive it of its ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... counterpart perceptible in front; a system of thighs and legs so strangely astray that they could touch each other only at the knees, and, viewed from the front, resembled the crescents of two scythes joined by the handles; large feet, monstrous hands; and, with all this deformity, an indescribable and redoubtable air of vigor, agility, and courage,—strange exception to the eternal rule which wills that force as well as beauty shall be the result of harmony. Such was the pope whom the fools ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... with the show and sat on three chairs, and shook hands with the gaping crowd, and was curiously happy. It was discomfort; it was ignominy; it was maddening to support by the exhibition of his physical deformity a perfectly worthless young couple like Jack and Camille Desmond, but it was all superbly ennobling for ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... countenance is much handsomer and more spiritualized in expression than any portrait of him extant. I noticed that the deformity of his foot, which had been a severe affliction to him on ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... maid!" I beat the rock in a passion with that new foot of mine—straight and sound and capable for labor as the feet of other men. It had all been done for her—all borne to win the love I had thought withheld, or stopped from fullest giving, because of this miserable deformity. A maid is a maid, I had known—won as maids are won. "Look at it!" cries I. "Is it the same as it was? Is it crooked any more? Is it the foot of a man or a cripple?" She would not look: but smiled into ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... supernatural powers. This very kinship may render verbal charms the more obnoxious to devout people, on the same principle which led Lord Bacon to declare superstition to be the more repulsive on account of its similitude to religion, "even as it addeth deformity to an ape to be so like a man." In the prayers offered by the Romans to their deities, the choice of apt phrases was considered to be of greater importance than the mental attitude of the petitioner, because of the prevalent belief in the efficacy ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... possible, the concurrent testimonies both of Lancastrian and Yorkist Chroniclers, too well demonstrate them. Tho' the latter may have endeavoured to soften the picture, and Shakespear may have thrown upon it the darkest shades by working up his deformity of body and mind into a picture of diabolical horror, the original, the undoubted traits are preserved by both parties; traits, which so far from being peculiar to Richard, marked likewise the other characters of ...
— A Walk through Leicester - being a Guide to Strangers • Susanna Watts
... birth, (For virgin buildings oft brought forth) And all that neighbour-ruin shows The quarries whence this dwelling rose. Near to this gloomy cloister's gates, There dwelt the blooming virgin Thwaites, Fair beyond measure, and an heir, Which might deformity make fair; And oft she spent the summer's suns Discoursing with the subtle Nuns, Whence, in these words, one to her weav'd, As 'twere by chance, thoughts long conceiv'd: 'Within this holy leisure, we Live innocently, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... I knew, Shane.... Part of me was not alive.... That was terrible to know, like finding out a horrible deformity, or knowing you are insane.... And I began to watch people.... I could say: There is a woman who knows she is loved, Shane.... There is a radiance in her face, an indescribable something.... You remember ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... corset now in vogue the pelvis is tilted forward, producing a sinking in of the abdomen and a marked prominence of the hips and sacrum, necessitating a compensatory curve of the spine which increases the curvature forward at the small of the back— a deformity which, a few years ago, women were going to orthopedic surgeons to have corrected. In this attitude the line passing through the centre of gravity strikes the heels, the knees are hyper-extended, and the muscles of the calves and ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... to say that sin must be somewhere lurking wherever there is deformity, pain, or discord—that, as a common phrase has it, the bleak and barren is the evidence of that which is forsaken of God. Things desolate are not divine. Religion is not repression but development into a fullness and beauty ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... great deal of pain at the middle of the thigh and thinks he felt something break when he fell. He cannot raise the injured leg. Carefully rip the trousers and the underclothing at the seam to above the painful point. When you have done this the deformity will indicate the location of the fracture. You must be very gentle now or you will do harm, but if one hand is put above where you think the {263} break occurred and the other below it and it is lifted gently you will find that there is ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... was the quality which survived all others, notwithstanding the bitter trial which his benignity must have stood through life, and the excitement to a spiteful reaction of feeling which was continually pressed upon him by the scorn and insult which his deformity drew ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... process of unnatural configuration. About a year's pressure is sufficient to produce the desired effect; the head is ever after completely flattened;" and as slaves are always left to nature, this deformity is consequently a mark of free birth. The Indians on the north coast possess the characteristics of the southern, but harsher and more boldly defined—they are of fiercer and more treacherous dispositions. Indeed, those of the south have a disposition to merriment and ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... The baby, young as he was, had thrown the blanket from his face, and the father's eyes were fixed on it: while he gazed the nurse would not stir. He seemed fascinated by its ugliness. Without absolute deformity, the child was indeed as unsightly as infant ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... he was low in stature; and this defect was enhanced by a distortion of the spine, so considerable as almost to amount to a hunch; his features, too, had all that sharpness and sickliness of hue which generally accompany deformity; he wore his hair, which was black as soot, in heavy neglected ringlets about his shoulders, and always without powder—a peculiarity in those days. There was something unpleasant, too, in the circumstance that he never raised his eyes to meet those of another; ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... insupportable name of Miserrimus Dexter. Stevenson, however, has used the effect so often, and with such telling results, that he may be said to have made it his own. To say nothing of Hyde, who was the very impersonation of deformity, there is the horrid blind Pew, Black Dog with two fingers missing, Long John with his one leg, and the sinister catechist who is blind but shoots by ear, and smites about him with his staff. In "The Black Arrow," ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... which, however, does not harm the soul's salvation), our evil nature resents the correction. Beside all this, there are some so wicked that they are ashamed of their patents because of poverty, lowly birth, deformity or dishonor, and allow these things to influence them more than the high Commandment of God, Who is above all things, and has with benevolent intent given them such parents, to exercise and try them in His Commandment. But the matter becomes still worse when the child has children ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... a traitor to that white and red Which sitting on her cheeks (being Cupid's throne) Is my heart's sovereign: O, when she is dead, This wonder, Beauty, shall be found in none. Now Agripyne's not mine, I vow to be In love with nothing but deformity. O fair Deformity, I muse all eyes Are not enamoured of thee: thou didst never Murder men's hearts, or let them pine like wax, Melting against the sun of thy disdain;[1] Thou art a faithful nurse to Chastity; Thy beauty is not like to Agripyne's, ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... parallel case, where there may be an operation of the intellect to compute proportions, but where the elegance or beauty must arise in the region of feeling. Thus, while reason conveys the knowledge of truth and falsehood, sentiment or emotion must give beauty and deformity, ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... greatness. But it is evident, if we accept this illustration as a fairly true one, that the chief point of importance is to explore no more persistently on one line than another: else the result must be a deformity. We all know how powerful is the majesty and personal dignity of a forest tree which has had air enough to breathe, and room for its widening roots, and inner vitality with which to accomplish its unceasing task. It obeys the perfect natural law of growth, and the peculiar awe it inspires ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... origin from the same prolific source. (1) some very ancient scribe mistook the first four letters of [Greek: agioi] for [Greek: apo]. It was but the mistaking of [Greek: AGIO] for [Greek: APO]. At the end of 1700 years, the only Copies which witness to this deformity are BP with four cursives,—in opposition to [Symbol: Aleph]AKL and the whole body of the cursives, the Vulgate[83] and the Harkleian. Euthalius knew nothing of it[84]. Obvious it was, next, for some one in perplexity,—(2) to introduce both readings ([Greek: apo] ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... by beautiful eyes and surmounted by a wealth of straight black hair; a form haggard, weazened by deformity, yet evidencing muscular toil; delicate hands and feet that like the features bespoke the poesy of soul within mis-shapen shell,—the hunchback scissors-grinder Pierre Frochard presented a remarkable aspect which, once seen, ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... Napoleon, who could ever admire his statue on the top of the column, in a costume so contrary to all that is graceful and dignified; a little cocked hat with its horrid stiff angles, a great coat with another angle sticking out, the tout ensemble presenting a deformity rather than an ornament: however there he stands on the pinnacle of what he and men in general would call the monument of his glory, a memento of blood, of tears of widows and orphans. Could the names of those ruined and ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... would give me a hearing. I never loved a woman, but she laughed at me; and here I am in my old age alone—alone! Don't take this girl from me, Mr. Pendennis, I say again. Leave her with me a little longer. She was like a child to me till yesterday. Why did you step in, and made her to mock my deformity and ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... proper sort of love for the young lady—not exactly such as would seek her for a wife, however, and succeeded in satisfying, after a while, the scruples of one who, in addition to deformity, he also discovered to labor under the more serious curse of partial idiocy. Having done this, and flattered, in sundry other ways, the peculiarities of his companion, he pursued his other point ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... remaining in heat for a longer period than usual. This sometimes occurs in tuberculosis of the ovaries. In chronic inflammation of the maternal passage there is more or less discharge from the vulva. Both sexes may be overly fat or weakened and debilitated by disease. Deformity of the generative organs and growths may be found on making an examination. Absence of, or lack of vitality of the spermatozoa may be determined by microscopic examination ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... such a deformity. Still the suffering made no impression upon him. All he had was his lawfully, and he was making lawful use of it—that was the most they wrung from him. Now, however, he is past persecution. He has a license to trade signed by ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... temples. He wore many rings on his fingers, and a brooch in his shirt-front, which was embroidered. When he called, he used to be dressed in a black dress-coat (as we should now call it), with grey, and sometimes nankeen trousers, his shirt open at the neck. Lord Byron's deformity in his foot was very evident, especially as he walked downstairs. He carried a stick. After Scott and he had ended their conversation in the drawing-room, it was a curious sight to see the two greatest poets of the age—both lame—stumping downstairs ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... until his head seemed to touch the pale crescent moon, and his bulk shut out from view all beyond itself. He saw his eyes firing and flaming like globes of lurid light, and he saw his hair and beard converted into one mass of living flame. The fiend stood revealed in all his hideous deformity. ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... is worth all the pretty-faced perfumed puppies that walk the Mall. Rose, my girl, it is very true he has not thy pretty face, but I know him to be wealthy and liberal; and were he ten times more ugly, these two virtues would be enough to counter balance all his deformity, and if not sufficient actually to alter the shape and hue of his features, at least enough to prevent one thinking them ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... smallest danger to the most inexperienced mind or the warmest passions from its immoral tendency. The principle upon which books of this description are considered pernicious is the notion that they represent vice in such glowing and attractive colours as to make us lose sight of its deformity and fill our imagination with the idea of its pleasures. No one who has any feeling or a spark of generosity or humanity in his breast can read this book without being moved with compassion for Madame de Tourval and with horror and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... for women and for feminine beauty; but love in the ideal, or, as he expressed it, romantic sense, he called lunacy, unpardonable imbecility; he regarded chivalrous sentiments as something of the nature of deformity or disease, and had more than once expressed his wonder that Toggenburg and all the minnesingers and troubadours had not been put into a lunatic asylum. 'If a woman takes your fancy,' he used to say, 'try and gain your end; but if you ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... word; so that what with his bottle, a hardy constitution, and light bed-clothes, Phelim got the upper hand of his malady. In a month he was again on his legs; but, alas! his complexion though not changed to deformity, was wofully out of joint. His principal blemish, in addition to the usual marks left by his complaint, consisted in a drooping of his left eyelid, which gave to his whole face a cast ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... one ever did them better than he, or came near him in imagining them; to which witness is borne by a marine monster that he made and presented to the Magnificent Giuliano de' Medici, which is so extravagant, bizarre, and fantastic in its deformity, that it seems impossible that Nature should produce anything so deformed and strange among her creations. This monster is now in the guardaroba of Duke Cosimo de' Medici, as is also a book, likewise by ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... neglected a duty, the calm satisfaction of the virtuous mind, and the fierce or sullen remorse of the criminal, are associated with the insuppressible persuasion of liberty. Destroy this persuasion, and virtue is despoiled of its loveliness, vice of its deformity. But it cannot be destroyed. It is the voice of nature. The Creator has so formed us, that we cannot throw off from ourselves the sense of responsibility, nor regard our fellow creatures as unfit for praise or blame, for love or hatred. Men treat each other as free ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... double pleasure for Triboulet to see, limned in well-chosen hues, his form, the crookedness of which he was as proud as any courtier of his symmetry and beauty, the while his dark, vain soul lay concealed behind the mask of merry deformity ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... the case among the Indians. When the toes are turned out, either in walking or running, the whole weight of the body falls too much on the great toe of the foot that is behind, and it is mainly owing to this circumstance, that so many have a deformity at the joint of the great toe. When the foot is turned in, the weight of the body is thrown equally on all the toes, and the deformity of the great ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... is usually severe, and the quality of his censure is merciless, when he attempts to treat the unwholesome theme of moral deformity; and all his efforts are mere attempts, for no human language can do full justice to such a theme, or fully express the contempt such excesses deserve. It is just, then, that, when he stands in the presence of the moral leper who blushes not for his degradation, he flay ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... maiden of more than mortal beauty, named Melusine, and, falling at once in love, obtained her hand, on condition that he should never ask to behold her on a Saturday. Their marriage was happy, excepting that all their children had some deformity; but at last, in a fit of curiosity, Raymond hid himself, in order to penetrate into his lady's secret, and, to his dismay, perceived that from the waist downward she was transformed into a blue-and-white serpent, an enchantment ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... as ever it was in Shakespeare's time "with such waterflies"—"diminutives of nature"—as excited the scorn of his moralizing cynic, Velasquez is as unquestionably condemned as is Raphael or Titian. It is true that this miraculous power of hand (?)[35] makes beautiful for us the deformity of dwarfs, and dignifies the degradation of princes; but that is not the question. It is true, again, that Mr. Whistler's own merest "arrangements" in colour are lovely and effective;[36] but his portraits, to speak of these alone, ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... left alone. He was a youth of about twenty, but looked older. Heavy brows shaded deep-set eyes, his shoulders were square, with a slight deformity of the spine. His name ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... Comte's Positive Philosophy, or of Renan's Vie de Jesus, commits a crime punishable with fine and imprisonment. Sir James Stephen dislikes the law profoundly, but he prefers "stating it in its natural naked deformity to explaining it away in such a manner as to prolong its existence and give it an air of plausibility and humanity." To terminate this mischievous law he has drafted a Bill, which many Liberal members of Parliament ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... is the record of a pupil of Cornelius Agrippa, who drank half of the elixir his master had compounded in the belief that it was a potion to destroy love. It is written on his three hundred and twenty-third birthday. Transformation, like Frankenstein, dwells on the pathos of ugliness and deformity, but the subject is treated rather in the spirit of an eastern fairy tale than in that of a novel of terror. The dwarf, in return for a chest of treasure, borrows a beautiful body, and, thus disguised, wins the love of Juliet, and all ends happily. Mrs. Shelley's short ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... communications with the coast, the rebels, &c. In his youth his left leg had been broken and badly set; and though Theodore liked him, he did not give him a military command, but always employed him in a civil capacity. He did not like to speak of the accident that occasioned his deformity, and would, if asked, always give an evasive answer. Pietro, the Italian, was a great gossip, and his stories could not always be relied upon. His account of the broken leg was that when Samuel went to Shoa, some Englishman there gave him a kick which sent him rolling down some small ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... and accept homes and hospitable treatment on the soil of the country. These revilers of Democracy in Europe were long advised with, were consulted beforehand, and knew the plottings of the pro-slavery spirit, in its preparation for rebellion. They were indifferent as to the character or hateful deformity of the agency to be employed, provided it could be made instrumental in breaking the jurisdiction of a government, heretofore more esteemed by the enlightened liberalists of the world than any other that ever existed. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... showed their bare arms, which were as strong as blackmiths'. They were two strong fellows, who thought a great deal of their vigor, and who showed in all their movements that elasticity and grace of the limbs which can only be acquired by exercise, and which is so different to the deformity with which the same continual ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... stood looking up from his squat, toad-like deformity into the face of the man who towered above him, yet in his eyes was the blaze with which a giant might look down on ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... discernment of what is right, and a disposition to regulate ourselves by it. There is greater variety of parts in what we call a character than there are features in a face, and the morality of that is no more determined by one part than the beauty or deformity of this is by one single feature: each is to be judged of by all the parts or features, not taken singly, but together. In the inward frame the various passions, appetites, affections, stand in different respects to each other. ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... book, to which Dickens made reply in one of his later editions, declaring his belief that he had tried to do a service to society, and had certainly done no disservice, in depicting a knot of such associates in crime in all their deformity and squalid wretchedness, skulking uneasily through a miserable life to a painful and shameful death. It is, indeed, never the subject that can be objectionable, if the treatment is not so, as we may see by much popular writing since, where ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... breeds in which these latter bones are not unnaturally short or delicate; and that the crest of the sternum, to which the pectoral muscles are attached, has invariably become less prominent, the whole sternum being also extremely liable to deformity. These results we may attribute to the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... salivation, hydrocephalus; others from some accidental symptom of the disease, as tooth-ach, head-ach, heart-burn; in which the pain is only a concomitant circumstance of the excess or deficiency of fibrous actions, and not the cause of them. Others again are taken from the deformity occasioned in consequence of the unnatural fibrous motions, which constitute diseases, as tumours, eruptions, extenuations; all these therefore improperly give names to diseases; and some difficulty is thus occasioned to the reader in endeavouring to ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... beyond parallel in their execution. It is perhaps unexampled that a coinage practised for centuries with a certain technical skill should have essentially limited itself to always imitating two or three Greek dies, and always with increasing deformity. On the other hand the art of poetry was highly valued by the Celts, and intimately blended with the religious and even with the political institutions of the nation; we find religious poetry, as well as that of the court and of the mendicant, flourishing.(17) ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... report. Oft at midnight upon the poet's ear there fell the sound of celestial music, that afterward he transposed into his "Paradise Regained." Dying, it was given him to proudly say: "I am not one of those who have disgraced beauty of sentiment by deformity of conduct, nor the maxims of the freeman by the actions of the slave, but by the grace of God, I have kept my soul unsullied." Here is the immortal Bunyan, spending his best years in Bedford jail because he insisted on giving men the message God had first given him; but he, too, opened ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... violence of individuals, we should with equal care avoid the opposite error of looking with approval, or even with indifference, upon usages or institutions whose only claim to our forbearance lies in laws or popular opinions whose deformity should be discovered, and whose power should melt away beneath the light and ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... resentment he accepted with timorous humility, as part of his existence, her taunts at his twisted limbs. What use in rebellion or anger? With the fatalism of the East he resigned himself to that which was. He had been born a deformity, and even his glance carried evil. This was life. He knew no other. Of his origin he knew nothing except that from the old woman's rambling outbursts he had gathered that he was of Syrian blood and a ...
— The Little Hunchback Zia • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of the rectus muscles have been cut and cicatrized, and if the deformity be not congenital, ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... riches of one of the greatest charms, over-bearing dominion. We do, indeed, import gorgeous silks and luscious sweets from the Indies, but we import, at the same time, the spirit of despotism, which adds deformity to the purple robe, and bitterness to the honied beverage." "That Oriental manners are unfavourable to liberty, is, I believe, universally conceded. The natives of the East Indies entertain not the idea of independence. They treat the Europeans, who go among them to acquire ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... continued succession of lawns and shrubberies which is every where to be met with; and they are regarded rather as the venerable marks of ancient splendour, than as the barbarous affectation of modern distinction. In France, the native deformity of this taste appears in its real light, without the colouring of any such adventitious circumstances as conceal it in this country. It does not appear there under the softening veil of ancient manners; its avenues do not conduct ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... oblivious, or nearly so, of all swelling, and the bones can be skiagraphed in the thinner parts of the body at present, say up to the elbow and the ankle, with very great accuracy. Thus, Figure 8 shows the deformity from an old fracture of the ulna (one of the bones of the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... prove it, and he will do so to the complete extinction of the light of truth; but set aside his confirmations, return and view the proposition itself from your own rationality, and you will see its falsity in all its deformity. From all this it can be seen that man is able to abuse these two capacities, which he has from the Lord, to confirm evils and falsities of every kind. This no beast can do, because no beast enjoys these capacities. Consequently, a beast is born into all the order of its life, and into ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... eyes of a dog; her pretty ways are those of a young child; but she has not the dull, soulless, sensual look of the pure-bred Turkish woman, such as I have seen in Cairo through the transparent veils. In them there is no attraction save of the flesh; and that only for the male who, deformity aside, reckons women as merely so much cubical content of animated matter placed by Allah at his disposal for the satisfaction of his desires and the procreation of children. I cannot for the life of me understand an Englishman falling in love with a Turkish woman. But I can quite ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... who had been despised for his deformity and weakness and meanness became beautiful and strong and stately as a pine-tree. There was no man in all the land so graceful or of ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Morris that the Dark Ages were to him a time of special light and illumination. Life then was simple. Men worked for the love of it, and if they wanted things they made them. "Every trade exclusively followed means a deformity," says Ruskin. Division of labor had not yet come, and men were skilled in many ways. There was neither poverty nor riches, and the idea of brotherhood was firmly fixed in the minds of men. The feverish desire for place, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... met wi' mony crosses and sair trials in my day; but few o' them made me shed bitterer tears than that proud, handsom' young leddy's speech on the deformity o' ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... modes we often see, Made to conceal deformity: Those to whom nature has been kind, ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... be; and so is as real an idea as the other. Though the first of these, having the name COURAGE given to it, may, in respect of that name, be a right or wrong idea; but the other, whilst it has not a common received name of any known language assigned to it, is not capable of any deformity, being made with no reference to ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... speedily be banished. There is no form of human excellence before which we bow with profounder deference than that which appears in a delicate woman, adorned with the inward graces and devoted to the peculiar duties of her sex; and there is no deformity of human character from which we turn with deeper loathing than from a woman forgetful of her nature, and clamorous for the vocation and rights of men. It would not be fair to object to the abolitionists the disgusting and disorganizing opinions of even some of their leading advocates and publications, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... was somewhat deformed in person, blind in one eye, one leg shorter than the other, one arm somewhat withered, with a mind as eccentric as his person was deformed. To say nothing of the deformity of his habits, suffice it, he had a propensity for taking snuff that may seem almost incredible, when in these days those who use it are not very much inclined to expose the article. He used to carry it in his coat-pocket, ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... interlude. It was an improvisation. She sat low at the instrument, and the lines of her body settled into ungraceful curves and angles that gave it an appearance of deformity. Gradually and imperceptibly the interlude melted into the soft opening minor chords of ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... know how long the free kindergarten system has obtained to any degree in New York City, but I do know that I have as yet found only one working girl who has had the benefit of any such training in childhood. She was "Lame Lena" at Springer's box-factory; and in spite of her deformity, which made it difficult for her to walk across the floor, she was the quickest worker and made more money than any other girl in ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... laddies, with their short jackets and wide white collars; they all look so jolly, and rosy, and clean, and kissable! I should like to kiss the chambermaid, too! She has a pink print dress; no bangs, thank goodness (it's curious our servants can't leave that deformity to the upper classes), but shining brown hair, plump figure, soft voice, and a most engaging way of saying, "Yes, miss? Anythink more, miss?" I long to ask her to sit down comfortably and be English, ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... while this artist was working at the ornamentation of the temples at Nikko, he saw and fell in love with a very beautiful Japanese girl resident in the city; but she would have nothing to do with him on account of his deformity of person. In vain was his genius, in vain his tender pleadings; she was inflexible, so that at last, quite heartbroken, the poor sculptor went back to Tokio, his native place, where he carved an image of his beloved ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou |
