"Depravity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon which I feel moved to place all possible emphasis—the hideous depravity and the fiendish cunning of the criminals who engage in this most abhorrent and ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... in the sense of being opposed to the whole of related personalities: who sees the truth rather than struggles logically towards it, and truth of which I can at present form no conception; whose activities are unimpeded by intellectual doubt, un-perverted by moral depravity, and who is indifferent to results, because he has not to guide his conduct by calculation of them, or by any estimate of their value. I look up to him with awe, because in being passionless he sometimes seems to me to be without love. Yet I ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... of law dictated by instincts of self-preservation? Where was the ennobling influence of the gods, when nobody of any position finally believed in them? How powerless the gods, when the general depravity was so glaring as to call out the terrible invective of Paul, the cosmopolitan traveller, the shrewd observer, the pure-hearted Christian missionary, indicting not a few, but a whole people: "Who exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... with success." But another voice said: "The Marquis was your benefactor, the Marquise filled your mother's place. Had it not been for them you would have been reared in shame, in ignorance and in depravity. You would never have known parental tenderness, the happiness of a home or the comforts and luxuries that have surrounded you from your childhood. Is it too much to ask that you should silence the pleadings ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... of Christianity are most benevolent; but being opposed to men's lusts, which rule in their members, all the malevolence of depravity hath been excited against it. Jews and Gentile united in the opposition. "The kings of the earth stood up and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ—both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel." The Christian religion ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... with the Evangelicals, and far more strongly than the majority of them, the doctrine of Election, and the wise policy of cultivating friendly relations with Nonconformists, to whose places of worship he frequently went, as also the doctrine of personal assurance, and that of the utter depravity of human nature. But Gordon was not of a type of mind that can ever go completely with a party. He had such a strong individuality, that it would have been impossible for him to do as many do—sink his own views on questions not of vital importance, so as to be enabled to work with ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... expression upon his features not exactly that of peace and good-will to man. The lusty young fellow apologized; but the Deacon's face did not come right, and his theology backed round several points in the direction of total depravity. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... drive up to the door of his private house, we alighted at the log-hut which represented the inn. The room was horridly dirty, the floor was sanded, and there was a peculiar smell of bad drink, and an expression of depravity about the establishment. ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... while my every act has been as open and as free of wrong as are those of an infant, I have constantly been beset by such untoward affairs as this in which you have rendered such inestimable service. At the age of five, in Calcutta, I was in peril of my liberty on the score of depravity, although I never committed any act that could in any sense be called depraved. The main cause of my trouble at that time was a small girl of ten whose sight was partially destroyed by the fiendish act of some one who, according to her statement, ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... Masculine depravity rebels against it, and the whole modern feministic movement shakes it to the base. It remains to be seen whether Nature will admit ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... when I associated myself, sentimentally rather than actively, with a movement at a certain election directed towards the defeat of one who was probably the most corrupt alderman in what was at the time perhaps the corruptest city in the United States. Of the man's entire depravity, from a political point of view, there was not the least question among either his friends or his enemies. Nominally a Democrat, his vote and policy were never guided by any other consideration than ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... the customary thing for a stranger to do when he stands here is to make a pun on the name of this club, under the impression, of course, that he is the first man that that idea has occurred to. It is a credit to our human nature, not a blemish upon it; for it shows that underlying all our depravity (and God knows and you know we are depraved enough) and all our sophistication, and untarnished by them, there is a sweet germ of innocence and simplicity still. When a stranger says to me, with a glow of inspiration in his eye, some gentle, innocuous little thing about "Twain and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... taken, and made to suffer the penalty due for such a crime, and the melancholy incident became a pulpit theme over a great part of Scotland, being held up as a proper warning to youth to beware of such haunts of vice and depravity, the nurses of all that is precipitate, immoral, ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... the world. If man had only been left alone and had not had the stream of his ideas muddied by outside interference, he would have continued professing a religion that would have been both pure and simple. But human depravity did not permit the natural religion of primitive life to continue. The fanatics with their delusions and the priests with their love of power distorted man's primitive faith in God. They invented dogmas and practices by means of which they could hold the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... writer as wholly destitute of just notions. Amongst his irregularities, it must be reckoned that he is sometimes moral, and moral in a very sublime strain. But the general spirit and tendency of his works is mischievous,—and the more mischievous for this mixture: for perfect depravity of sentiment is not reconcilable with eloquence; and the mind (though corruptible, not complexionally vicious) would reject and throw off with disgust a lesson of pure and unmixed evil. These writers make even virtue a ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... an appalling picture to the young servant of the Man of Galilee—a blunt reminder of the inherent ferocity and depravity ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... the Cities and large Towns. The population of western towns does not differ essentially from the same class in the Atlantic states, excepting there is much less division into grades and ranks, less ignorance, low depravity and squalid poverty amongst the poor, and less aristocratic feeling amongst the rich. As there is never any lack of employment for laborers of every description, there is comparatively no suffering from that cause. And the hospitable habits ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... long black boots, with large nails under the soles. His long, pale, angular face was remarkable in many ways; it was interestingly stolid, and though somewhat effeminate, had rather fine features; unmistakable signs of depravity indicated his low class of mind and morals. Long hair fell in loose curls down to his shoulders, and hanging from his left ear was an earring of large dimensions, with malachite ornaments and a pendant. In his nervous fingers he held a small ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... times, the evidence for the student of science would have been irresistible. Of course he will be told that even then he would have hardened his heart; that the inquiry after truth tending naturally to depravity of mind, he would reject even evidence based on his beloved laws of probability; that his 'wicked and adulterous generation seeketh "in vain" after a sign,' and that if he will not accept Moses and the prophets, neither would he believe though one rose from the dead. Still ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... it evinced the delicacy of the ladies, gave opportunity for many lively sallies from the gentlemen. I saw the same sort of thing repeated on different occasions at least a dozen times; e.g. a young lady is employed in making a shirt, (which it would be a symptom of absolute depravity to name), a gentleman enters, and presently begins the sprightly dialogue with "What are ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... He had sinned. He would sin again. As Miss Gore had said, my dream castle was tottering—it had tottered and was falling. Jerry, my Perfect Man, at the first contact with the world felt the contagion of its innate depravity and corruption. The more I thought of Jerry's character, his ingenuous belief in the good of all things, the more it seemed to me that it was only a question of the strength of Jerry's spiritual health to resist the ravages of spiritual disease. You see, already I had ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... modern city than we realize, when the white slave traders find it necessary both forcibly to detain their victims and to ply young men with alcohol that they may profit thereby? General Bingham, who as Police Commissioner of New York certainly knew whereof he spoke, says: "There is not enough depravity in human nature to keep alive this very large business. The immorality of women and the brutishness of men have to be persuaded, coaxed and constantly stimulated in order to keep the social evil in its present state ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... private room up six pairs of stairs, a pic-nic to one of the suburbs, a dinner at a restaurateur's, or a family consultation on a proposal of marriage, are far more in Paul's way than tales of open horror or silk-and-satin depravity. One is only sorry, in the midst of so much gaiety and good-humour, to stumble on some scene or sentiment that gives on the inclination to throw the book in the fire, or start, like Caesar, on the top of the diligence to pull the author's ears. But the next page sets all right ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... where the only vegetation is sun-dried weeds and thistles. Here a herd of camels are contentedly browsing, munching the dry, thorny herbage with a satisfaction that is evident a mile away. From casual observations along the route, I am inclined to think a camel not far behind a goat in the depravity of its appetite; a camel will wander uneasily about over a greensward of moist, succulent grass, scanning his surroundings in search of giant thistles, frost-bitten tumble-weeds, tough, spriggy camel thorns, and odds and ends of unpalatable vegetation generally. Of course, the "ship of ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... her empire for this Villiers de l'Ile Adam, whose servant she would rather be than reign of Christendom. The English cardinal remonstrated with the pope that this love for one, in the heart of a woman who was the joy of all, was an infamous depravity, and that he ought with a brief in partibus, to annul this marriage, which robbed the fashionable world of its principal attraction. But the love of this poor woman, who had confessed the miseries of her life, was so sweet a thing, and so moved the most dissipated heart, ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... making any more movement than a corpse, without seeking in any way to prevent its putrefaction. There are those who wish to apply balm to themselves. No, no; leave yourselves as you are. You must know your corruption, and see the infinite depth of depravity that is in you. To apply balm is but to endeavour by good works to hide your corruption. Oh, do it not! You will wrong yourselves. God can suffer you; why cannot you suffer yourselves? The soul, ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... there is no question, aside from the frailties and objections which the writer of the romance has introduced, that there was a marriage of the soul, superseding all after ties which worldliness and depravity might have consummated, that overshadows sin, and may not pass into our reckoning. Not only such a marriage, but one, though secret, actually sanctioned by the laws of the land, she is known to have declared a fact previous to ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... gardener was certainly the skeleton, or cormorant, so to speak, of the banquet, eating them almost out of house and home, it must be mentioned in all due confidence; and, taking watch of his depravity of behaviour in this respect, the thoughtful Conny registered an inward determination never to invite Joe to another of their al fresco feasts, if she could possibly avoid doing so without seriously wounding his sensibilities. ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... is at to 'screw his courage to the sticking- place', the reproach to him, not to be 'lost so poorly in himself', the assurance that 'a little water clears them of this deed', show anything but her greater consistency in depravity. Her strong-nerved ambition furnishes ribs of steel to 'the sides of his intent'; and she is herself wound up to the execution of her baneful project with the same unshrinking fortitude in crime, ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... orthodox, who cannot break bread with the rest, for fear, though the food be kosher, the plates have been defiled. They brought their own to the feast, and sit at their own table, stern and justified. Did they but know what depravity is harbored in the impish mind of the girl yonder, who plans to hang her stocking overnight by the window! There is no fireplace in the tenement. Queer things happen over here, in the strife between the old and the new. The girls of the College ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... Marneffe was one of the class of employes who escape sheer brutishness by the kind of power that comes of depravity. The small, lean creature, with thin hair and a starved beard, an unwholesome pasty face, worn rather than wrinkled, with red-lidded eyes harnessed with spectacles, shuffling in his gait, and yet meaner in his appearance, realized the type of man ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... liberty of the press only; that sacred Palladium, which no influence, no power, no government, which nothing but the folly or the depravity, or the folly or the corruption, of a jury ever can destroy. And what calamities are the people saved from by having public communication kept open to them! I will tell you, gentlemen, what they are saved from; I will tell you also to ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... have charmed the world, their effect on Nero was curious. Seneca was his preceptor. But so too was Art. The lessons of these teachers, fusing in the demented mind of the monster, produced transcendental depravity, the apogee of the abnormal and the epileptically obscene. What is more important, they ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... began to have mastery in high places, and this can be distinctly made out early in this century, becoming more obvious in depravity, when Spain fell into disorder during the later years of the Napoleonic disturbances, and the authority and influence of Mexico were eliminated from Spain. I may offer the suggestion and allow it to vindicate its own importance, that if we have any Philippine Islands to spare, we should ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... blacker shame to come, I should say: "Behold the outcome of hardly more than a century of government by the people! Behold the superstructure whose foundations our forefathers laid upon the unstable overgrowth of popular caprice surfacing the unplummeted abysm of human depravity! Behold the reality behind our dream of the efficacy of forms, the saving grace of principles, the magic of words! We have believed in the wisdom of majorities and are fooled; trusted to the good honor of numbers, and are betrayed. Our touching faith in the liberty of the rascal, our strange ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... then were paid, was very liberal; but half-a-crown had a mean sound. He was employed in promoting the principles of his party, by epitomising Hacket's "Life of Archbishop Williams." The original book is written with such depravity of genius, such mixture of the fop and pedant, as has not often appeared. The epitome is free enough from affectation, but has little spirit ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... mischief, and only mischief, that he did; and though the scale on which he perpetrated mischief was great, his fickleness and vacillation deprived it altogether of the dignity of greatness. His crimes against the peace and welfare of mankind did not arise from any peculiar depravity; he was, on the contrary, naturally of a noble and generous spirit, though in process of time, through the reaction of his conduct upon his heart, these good qualities almost entirely disappeared. Still, he seems never ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... exposed to the contagion of crime in youth, and as they advance they are immersed in this contagion in prisons, which are the moral pest-houses in which law maintains the intense contagion of criminal depravity. Napoleon was an admirable subject for such contamination, and when we learn how he was reared amid the lawlessness and general scoundrelism of Corsica, we do not wonder that he became an imperial brigand. The low ethical standard of mankind, generally, and especially of historians, has heretofore ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... the word "gambling" had always been suspect. It had a bad sound; it seemed to be associated with depravity ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... some time, and being just about to set off for Bucks, I received your letter of this morning, and am at a loss which to admire most, the depravity of your heart, or the weakness of your understanding. Your quoting General Arnold's testimony to vindicate your own falsehood is perfectly consistent. You shall hear further from me on my return from Bucks. In the mean time, I have made ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... "I may tell you that I now fear I treated the lad injudiciously, and perhaps with needless harshness. I looked upon extravagance and eccentricity as signs of depravity. It was a vast relief when I heard from Colston, whom you may have met; that Cyril had prospered and was leading an exemplary ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... exhibited within the sanctuary, rivalling in horror the direst cruelties ever inflicted by pagan or barbarian fanaticism. This, however, instead of implying any defect in the gospel system, which breathes peace and love; only pourtrays in darker colours the deep and universal depravity of the human heart. Pure and unsophisticated morality, especially when attempted to be inculcated on mankind, as essential to their preserving an interest with their Creator, have constantly met with opposition. It was this which produced ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... virtually represented is to be found in the laws as they actually exist. These one-sided laws were not made because men meant to be unjust or unkind to women, but simply because they naturally looked at things mainly from their own point of view. It does not indicate any special depravity on the part of men. I have no doubt that if women alone had made the laws, those laws would be just as one-sided as they are to-day, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... symbolical of dissimulation and depravity, and taken to typify the degrading life of the mountebank. It may also be remembered that this carnivorous beast, which was supposed to carry its young in the mouth and give birth to them through the ear, is numbered among the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... or the smile plays on the countenance of the physician, telling that the dread crisis is over and that progress towards recovery has begun, or the remembrance of a father's love is rekindled in the heart of the wanderer. And thus a man who has been roused to see his moral guilt, as well as moral depravity—to see his dread and terrible danger—may well find unutterable peace the very moment he believes that there is for him deliverance from the evil, and forgiveness with God, "that He may be feared"—or even when the maybe dawns upon him that ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... neither great, nor wealthy, nor wise. Such excessive preparation, instead of being a compliment to the party invited, is nothing better than an indirect offence, conveying a tacit insinuation that it is absolutely necessary to provide such delicacies to bribe the depravity of their palates, when we desire the pleasure of their company, and that society must be purchased on dishonourable terms before it can be enjoyed. When twice as much cooking is undertaken as there are servants, or conveniences ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... themselves, and has no more reason to be surprised by references to vice in some of them than by the language of virtue in many others. Confucius said, indeed, in his own enigmatical way, that the single sentence, 'Thought without depravity,' covered the whole 300 pieces[1]; and it may very well be allowed that they were collected and preserved for the promotion of good government and virtuous manners. The merit attaching to them is that they give us faithful pictures of what was good and what was bad in the political ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... and depravity which the corrupt churchmen made upon all observers is reflected in innumerable writings of the time,—in the letters of the popes, in the exhortations of holy men like St. Bernard, in the acts of the councils, in the satirical poems of the popular troubadours and ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... retired, and we moved up towards our host, I found myself between two groups; one discussing the mercantile depravity of a gentleman called Wilmot, of whom I had never heard, the other arguing on dark dilemmas connected with an Abyssinian loan. A vacant chair happening to be by my side, Adrian, glass in hand, came round the table ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... of morals all the more rigid from the looseness which on every side they found to combat. In closing the theatres, they were actuated, in Mr. Green's words, by the hatred "of God-fearing men against the foulest depravity presented in a ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... inheritance. Such a case of turpitude might not be without example; but he confessed that in his eyes, it would amount to guilt of so black a dye, that he was unwilling to accuse human nature of such depravity; it went beyond the powers of his, Mr. Clapp's, imagination to comprehend. No, he acquitted Mrs. Stanley of all blame; she had been influenced and guided by the two gentlemen before him. He had himself observed, that during all the preliminary proceedings, the venerable step-mother ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... but rather a great one that they are no worse. Therefore he cannot think ambition, or love of power more justly laid to their charge than to other men, because, that would be to make religion itself, or at least the best constitution of Church-government, answerable for the errors and depravity of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... to the natural depravity of flesh and blood is due the discord and disagreement of men in this world. Let one become conscious of personal superiority in point of uprightness, learning, skill or natural ability, or let him become aware of his loftier station in life, and he ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... selfishness and beware: this is the end product of the system that begins with slave-holders like the former Ch'aka with their tribes of krenoj crackers, and builds up through familiar hierarchies like the D'zertanoj and reaches its zenith of depravity behind those strong walls. It is still absolute power that rules absolutely, each man out for all that he can get and the only way to climb being over the bodies of others, and all physical discoveries and inventions being treated as private ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... to his highest duties? Begin with the mothers; you will be astonished at the changes you will effect. From this first depravity all others come in succession. The entire moral order is changed; natural feeling is extinguished in all hearts. Within our homes there is less cheerfulness; the touching sight of a growing family no longer attaches the husband or attracts the attention ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... at pleasure without assigning any cause. In the early ages of the republic this privilege was rarely exercised, and the Roman ladies were strictly virtuous; but at a later period divorces were multiplied, and the most shocking depravity was the consequence. ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... mysteries of common life. In all these cases the tone of the artist's mind is felt throughout his work: what he paints, or sings, or writes, conveys a lesson while it pleases. On the other hand, depravity in an artist or a poet percolates through work which has in it nothing positive of evil, and a very miasma of poisonous influence may rise from the apparently innocuous creations of a tainted soul. Now Correggio is moralised in neither way—neither as a good nor as ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... deciding that, whatever you may do with your life, your chin must remain single. When one's chin begins to lead a double life one's own opportunities for depravity are insensibly narrowed. You needn't tell me that you haven't any hankerings after depravity; people with your coloured eyes ...
— When William Came • Saki
... chapter Moses presents the finest and most noteworthy example of chastity. Saintly and continent throughout his career, Noah had just rounded out his fifth century when he began married life. Thus far, he had renounced matrimony, repelled by the licentiousness of the young, who were drifting into the depravity of the Cainites. Notwithstanding, at the call of God, he obediently entered upon marriage, although it was quite possible for him to remain ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... Undoubtedly much of Sheridan's depravity must be attributed to his intimacy with a man whom it was a great honour to a youngster then to know, but who would probably be scouted even from a London club in the present day—the Prince of Wales. The part of a courtier is always degrading enough to play; but to be courtier to ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... of the late Leonidas Parker, which appeared in your issue of the 13th ultimo, has given rise to a series of disturbances in this neighborhood, which, for romantic interest and downright depravity, have seldom been surpassed, even in California. Before proceeding to relate in detail the late transactions, allow me to remark that the wonderful narrative of Parker excited throughout this county sentiments of the most profound and contradictory character. I, for one, halted ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... folks we watch grow up to be young women, and occasionally one of them gets nervous, what we call hysterical, and then that girl will begin to play all sorts of pranks,—to lie and cheat, perhaps, in the most unaccountable way, so that she might seem to a minister a good example of total depravity. We don't see her in that light. We give her iron and valerian, and get her on horseback, if we can, and so expect to make her will come all right again. By-and-by we are called in to see an old baby, three-score years ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... syllable to her husband or children as to the family to which she belonged. It was only, late in life, through confession she made to a priest, that who and what she had been was revealed. Shocked with the depravity of her unnatural parents, this pious and learned doctor, says the chronicle, 'commanded her to publish this account to her children and their issues, that they might know of what race they came, if so be, by the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... Chatham Square to the Bowery, one would not believe that New York had any claim to be a Christian city, or that the Sabbath had any friends. The shops are open, and trade is brisk. Abandoned females go in swarms, and crowd the sidewalk. Their dress, manner, and language indicate that depravity can go no lower. Young men known as Irish-Americans, who wear as a badge long frock-coats, crowd the corners of the streets, and insult the passer-by. Women from the windows arrest attention by loud calls to the men on the sidewalk, and jibes, profanity, and bad words pass ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... psychology. That Germany at the present moment, and for some time past, has been the victim of a morbid state of mind, few impartial observers will deny. It has, however, not been so generally recognized that this disease—for it is nothing less—is due not to any national depravity but to constitutional ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... to attempt to show the numerical relation which poverty, misery, and depravity bear to regular earnings and comparative comfort, and to describe the general conditions under ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... a time when people seemed to take pride in self- depreciation. Believing in total depravity, they were suspicious of all natural tendencies, and the crushing out of strong desires seemed no evil. Obedience to Another's will was the one supreme virtue, and the killing of human nature, the annihilation of self, was the condition of its attainment. [Footnote: See John Stuart Mill, ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... attention by hyperbolical or aggravated characters, by fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the writers of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant and a dwarf; and he that should form his expectations of human affairs from the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakespeare ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... morality and morality," replied Rameyev, not without some confusion. "I do not uphold depravity, but nevertheless demand freedom of thought and feeling. A free ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... of the Irish people. If they are wanting in industry, in regard for the rights of property, in reverence for the law, history furnishes a full explanation of their defects, without supposing in them any inherent depravity, or even any inherent weakness. They have never had the advantage of the training through which other nations have passed in their gradual rise from barbarism to civilization. The progress of the Irish people was ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... cities for selling molasses candy on Sunday. She was tried, condemned, and imprisoned. Coming out of prison, she went into the same business and sold molasses candy on Sunday. Again she was arrested, condemned, and imprisoned. On coming out—showing the total depravity of a woman's heart—she again went into the same business, and sold molasses candy on Sunday. Whereupon the police, the mayor and the public sentiment of the city rose up and declared that, though the heavens fell, no ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... they went along. They even referred freely to the affair of three hours before. The old gentleman read him no terrible lesson as to his depravity, and his probable end of life upon the gallows if he persisted in so headstrong and wilful a course. The story of the "forty she bears" he did not repeat to the youth, and no reference was made to the awful death of Jack Ketch. He was too shrewd an observer ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... their heads, and sometimes their hearts, together over puzzling cases—cases of fraud, of mischief-making, of ignorant evil-doing, of inherited tendencies, physical, mental, and moral— and sometimes it will seem as if the whole human creation were incurably ailing, and the doctrine of total depravity will take on alarming probability. But at this point some sound, smiling, active boy or girl comes in with a cheerful greeting, and pessimism retires into the background. And all this reminds me of one more quality which the children's librarian must have—a sense of humor. It ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... perfectly conscious of the baseness and rascality of the means which they will use every day towards this end, affect nevertheless—even to themselves—a high tone of moral rectitude, and shake their heads and sigh over the depravity of the world. Some of the craftiest scoundrels that ever walked this earth, or rather—for walking implies, at least, an erect position and the bearing of a man—that ever crawled and crept through life by its dirtiest and narrowest ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... married pair's return, a handsome dinner was served. The train was a trifle behind time; the day had been cold, and several other untoward circumstances had conspired to let loose the bridegroom's natural depravity. An overdone roast served to touch off this ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... dandies, and idlers were all examining the charming subject of their bet as horse-dealers examine a horse for sale. These connoisseurs, grown old in familiarity with every form of Parisian depravity, all men of superior talent each his own way, equally corrupt, equally corrupting, all given over to unbridled ambition, accustomed to assume and to guess everything, had their eyes centered on a masked woman, a woman whom no one else could identify. They, and certain habitual frequenters ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... me, it's all the world. It was in the papers, you must have read them, the most awful story, such—such depravity there never was—such treachery, such ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... said, addressing the commissioners, "can you not see that the prisoner's courage does not equal his depravity? But I will confound him. What did you do, prisoner, when the ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... husky, full-fronted and heavy-chested, with a malign eye, a cat-like grip on life, and a genius for trickery and evil. There was neither faith nor trust in her. Her treachery alone could be relied upon, and her wild- wood amours attested her general depravity. Much of evil and much of strength were there in these, Batard's progenitors, and, bone and flesh of their bone and flesh, he had inherited it all. And then came Black Leclere, to lay his heavy hand on the bit of pulsating puppy life, to press and prod and mould till it ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... my birthday, on which I complete my thirty-first year. The Persian New Testament has been begun and finished in it. Such a painful year I never passed, owing to the privations I have been called to, on the one hand, and the spectacle before me of human depravity on the other. But I hope I have not come to this seat of Satan in vain. The Word of God has found its way into Persia, and it is not in Satan's power to oppose its progress if the Lord hath ...
— Life of Henry Martyn, Missionary to India and Persia, 1781 to 1812 • Sarah J. Rhea
... complied with this instruction, the lid of the shagreen case flew open and revealed the superb sapphire which had radiated such insidious depravity into the mind ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... in guilt, and, attributing that change to a feeling of the woman's self-disgust and reproach, he had recourse to the most diabolical means of searing her conscience, and making her still more the associate of his depravity: indeed, it is not possible even to read without horror of the abominable artifices to which this monster of iniquity had recourse, although these were all minutely detailed in the written charges brought against ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... ignorance and superstition. In the fifteenth century, many great abuses scandalized a body of men who should have been the lights of the world; and the sacred pontiffs themselves set examples of unusual depravity. Julius II. marched at the head of armies. Alexander VI. secured his election by bribery, and reigned by extortion. He poisoned his own cardinals, and bestowed on his son Caesar Borgia—an incarnated demon—the highest dignities and ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... exaggerated way, but no longer to be mistaken, by the least sensitive of hearers, for great or even fine literature. And the sentiment in it is not so much human as French, a factitious idealism in depravity which one associates peculiarly with Paris. Marguerite Gautier is the type of the nice woman who sins and loves, and becomes regenerated by an unnatural kind of self-sacrifice, done for French family reasons. She is the Parisian whom Sarah Bernhardt impersonates perfectly in that ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... with "causes that operate sociologically," as one survivor of these unfittest put it to me. It was a piece of scientific humbug that cost the age which listened to it dear. "Causes that operate sociologically" are the opportunity of the political and every other kind of scamp who trades upon the depravity and helplessness of the slum, and the refuge of the pessimist who is useless in the fight against them. We have not done yet paying the bills he ran up for us. Some time since we turned to, to pull the drowning man out, and it was time. A little while longer, and we should hardly ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... unhappy persons whose old age is chilled with the infirmities of decaying nature, and never warmed into the glow of celestial aspirations by the presages of a blessed immortality. The natural desire of life is felt by both, and the uneradicated remains of our ancient and inveterate depravity will sometimes, even in aged Christians, repress the risings of the soul towards her native skies. But the prevailing tendency of the desires will be upwards. "To live is indeed Christ; but to die is gain." Hence their conversation will take its complexion and character, rather from the things ...
— The Baptist Magazine, Vol. 27, January, 1835 • Various
... realize the necessity of protecting young people from vice in all its forms; but this does not mean that everybody should read extensively in the mass of printed matter that sets forth the most awful details concerning human depravity. There is a real danger in this line. The sex-education movement has already brought the problems of sex out of the old-time secrecy, and no other topics of the times are so freely read and discussed. ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... chosen, it becomes a NUISANCE." Dr. Price considers this inadequacy of representation as our FUNDAMENTAL GRIEVANCE; and though, as to the corruption of this semblance of representation, he hopes it is not yet arrived to its full perfection of depravity, he fears that "nothing will be done towards gaining for us this ESSENTIAL BLESSING, until some GREAT ABUSE OF POWER again provokes our resentment, or some GREAT CALAMITY again alarms our fears, or perhaps till the acquisition of ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... cried the Governor, slowly recovering from the astonishment into which Pearl's response had thrown him. "Here is a child of three years old, and she cannot tell who made her! Without question, she is equally in the dark as to her soul, its present depravity, and future destiny! Methinks, gentlemen, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... going into the gallery to spit below. On another occasion a fellow came into church with a pot of beer and a pipe, and remained smoking in his pew until the end of the sermon[75]. O tempora! O mores! as some disconsolate clergymen wrote in their registers when the depravity of the times was worse than usual. The slumbering congregation of Hogarth's picture would have been a comfort to ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. Let any one dare to speak to me of its "humanitarian" blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... said to a man who advocated the doctrine of total depravity: "The ground for my rejection of all responsibility for belief is the acknowledged necessitated nature of belief. Show me," said he, "that it is not necessitated, and I am answered. When you show me that it is controlled by a will, equally necessitated, I am not answered. If a necessitated ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... Suetonius, equally with the masterly pencil of Tacitus, may convince us of the cruel depravity of Nero or Tiberius: But what a difference of sentiment! While the former coldly relates the facts; and the latter sets before our eyes the venerable figures of a Soranus and a Thrasea, intrepid in their fate, and only moved by the melting sorrows of ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... general tendency of which is throughout innocent and moral; and whatever may be said of these blemishes, it must be allowed that the pages of Achilles Tatius are purity itself when compared with the depravity of Longus, and some of his followers and imitators ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... on the shore, accusing the neglect of their countrymen. How long shall gratitude, and even piety deny them burial? They ought to be collected in one vast ossory, which shall stand a monument to future ages, of the two extremes of human character: of that depravity which, trampling on the rights of misfortune, perpetrated cold and calculating murder on a wretched and defenceless prisoner; and that virtue which animated this prisoner to die a willing martyr to his country. Or rather, were it possible, ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... people, instances of great guilt, depravity and misery are too common; nor can it be otherwise expected, while they are destitute of the knowledge of salvation in a crucified and ascended Saviour. One poor Gipsy, who had wandered in a state of wretchedness, bordering ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... sect, age, or nation—which is wide as the world, and common as God,"[48] has never produced a nation of Rationalists; a fact very unaccountable, if Rationalism be true; and one which might well lead these writers to acknowledge at least one kind of total depravity, namely, that inspired men should love the darkness of external revelations, and even of book revelations, and read Bibles, and Korans, and Vedas, and "Discourses Concerning Religion," and "Phases of Faith," while yet "everything that is of use to man lies ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... pleas only—first, the abnormality of Irishmen; second, Ireland's proximity to England. The first expresses the old traditional view that Ireland is outside the pale of all human analogy; the exception to all rules; her innate depravity and perversity such that she would abuse power where others respect it, derive enmity where others derive friendship, and willingly ruin herself by internal dissension and extravagant ambitions in order, if possible, at the same time ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... of the disgusting career you have been pursuing since then, coming here in disguise, terrorizing and denouncing the poor country people, so that they tremble at the mention of your name. You have descended to a depth of depravity beyond which it is impossible to go, and I demand from the court ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... ably and yet honorably in the state or national congress, whose votes his friends and rivals, to ensure the passage of their unscrupulous railroad-bills, have bought so often and with such bloodless depravity. But these faculties have been miserably misused. He may have loved some woman, and married her, and begotten children by her; domestic affection may have warmed his being, just as it does that of many a day-laborer. But ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... misdeed, vice, criminality, guilt, offense, viciousness, delinquency, ill-doing, transgression, wickedness, depravity, immorality, ungodliness, wrong, evil, iniquity, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... you cover up his guilt. Your love is blind to his depravity. But I have witness irreproachable: Tears have I seen, true ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... husky boy? Why, he's strong as an ox. No, sir-ree, nateral depravity, I say. I tried to whip it out of him. It ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... they found was too old. It was like an exposure of the sins of first men—alive with bats and smaller vermin. The monkeys there had preserved from age to age the germs of all depravity. Without words the two Americans turned away from that spot, ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... most communities, in killing the tap-root of the mystical tree of conversion—i.e., the tenet of total hereditary depravity, but the tree still stands erect, and men claim that a wonderful outpouring of the Spirit of God has, in many days and nights, resulted in 100 or 200 or 300 conversions. But what is conversion? It is lexically defined "to turn upon, to turn towards." ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... wash their spears, and it has been done in the case of all former kings of Zululand. I am no king, but sit in a heap. I cannot be a king till I have washed my assegais." All of which is doubtless very savage and very wrong, but such is the depravity of human nature, that there is something taking ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... the most splendid fetes ever beheld at Naples. But, notwithstanding the splendour with which he was encircled, and the flattering honours with which all ranks welcomed him, Nelson was fully sensible of the depravity, as well as weakness, of those by whom he was surrounded. "What precious moments," said he, "the courts of Naples and Vienna are losing! Three months would liberate Italy! but this court is so enervated ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... then, you think me in a very bad way?"—the usual answer to which being in the affirmative, he, on one occasion, replied,—"I am now, however, in a fairer way. I already believe in predestination, which I know you believe, and in the depravity of the human heart in general, and of my own in particular:—thus you see there are two points in which we agree. I shall get at the others by and by; but you cannot expect me to become a perfect Christian at once." On the subject of Dr. Southwood's amiable and, it is to be hoped for the sake ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... himself upon his acute conscience and his nice sense of honor. He felt that here was a chance to wreak vengeance upon Dumont—or rather, as he put it to himself, to bring Dumont to an accounting for his depravity. Just as Dumont maintained with himself a character of honesty by ignoring all the dubious acts which his agents were forced to do in carrying out his orders, so Herron kept peace with a far more sensitive conscience by never permitting it to look in upon his ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... may seem, the depravity among the Polynesians, which renders precautions like these necessary, was in a measure unknown before their intercourse with the whites. The excellent Captain Wilson, who took the first missionaries out to Tahiti, ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... What corruption! Versailles seemed but a vast conservatory sheltering the vile soil from which sprang the lilies of France—La Belle France, as Edgar Sheepmeadow so eloquently puts it. Did any single bloom escape the blight of ineffable depravity? No—not one! Occasionally some fresh young thing would appear at Court—appealing and innocent. Then the atmosphere would begin to take effect: some one would whisper something to her—she would leer almost ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... were passing the direct sufferings of humanity, and not seldom its dying pangs, it was impossible to expect a result different from that which did, in fact, take place—universal hardness of heart, obdurate depravity, and a twofold degradation of human nature, the natural sensibility and the conscientious principle." "Here was a constant irritation, a system of provocation to the appetite for blood, such as in other nations are connected ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... long lease of power had produced certain symptoms which their political foes now proceeded to describe as great public abuses. The truth of the matter, of course, is that neither political virtue nor political depravity was the exclusive possession of either of the great national organizations. The Republican party, especially under the enlightened autocracy of Roosevelt, had started such reforms as conservation, the improvement of country life, the regulation of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... offensive to their minds, which therefore receded with instinctive recoil, They were averse to look toward that which they could not see without seeing God; and thus they were hardened in ignorance, through a reaction of human depravity against the too luminous approach of the Divine presence to give ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... Petra, and brag about it afterward; after you have well discounted the lies they made their sculptors tell on huge stone monoliths when they got back home, they remain a pretty peppery line of potentates. But for imagination, self-esteem, ambition, gall, and picturesque depravity they were children—mere chickens—compared to the modern gentleman whom Grim and I met up ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... simply destructive to the life of civilized society. It is absurd for us to put our best energies to work to build up a splendid system of education for the youth of the whole nation, and at the same time to allow its structure to be undermined by the millionfold intellectual depravity. ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... measure of credulity which, although commendable, is, I believe, not required. These parents were severe, exacting, imperious—not bad nor exactly cruel—simply "consistent." They believed that man was a worm of the dust, and stood by the traditions. They believed in the dogma of total depravity ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... we met, and bowed with utmost gravity; I didn't dream he'd joined the team—I thought him all depravity. So when I found, at Haight Street ground, how great was his agility, I oped my eyes in marked surprise, amazed at ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... people is that they are insensible to the effects of this force. The senses may be educated to a keen perception of it, or they may be deadened by disease and sexual depravity. ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... end, compelled his beautiful and accomplished wife, Sabina, to put herself to death, that she might not survive him in such a wretched world. And in the cities at the foot of Vesuvius have been revealed to us, after nature had kindly hidden them for eighteen centuries, tokens of a depravity so utter, that we cannot help looking upon the fiery deluge from the mountain, that soon after St. Paul's visit swept them out of existence, as a Divine judgment like that of Sodom and Gomorrha. And darker even than these monstrosities of wickedness was ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the timber-yard, down among the ships, at the desk, and at the Council-table; and I among my books, and among my people, and in my pulpit. These are always golden moments to me, and why they do not multiply themselves into hours and days and years is to me but another proof of my deep depravity. And, John Fleming, sanctify you the Sabbath. As you love and value your immortal soul, sanctify and do not waste and desecrate the Sabbath. Let no man steal from you a single hour of the Sabbath-day. Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work, but the ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... more calmly on her present situation, for she had actually been rendered incapable of sober reflection, by the discovery of the act of atrocity of which she was the victim. She could not have imagined, that, in all the fermentation of civilized depravity, a similar plot could have entered a human mind. She had been stunned by an unexpected blow; yet life, however joyless, was not to be indolently resigned, or misery endured without exertion, and proudly termed patience. She had hitherto meditated only to point the dart of ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... described as the bedroom of old New York. The description was apt, for Brooklyn has always been a city of homes, a city of those of moderate means, a city of respectability. Brooklyn has never been able to boast of her wealth, as other cities, nor has she had to blush for her poverty and depravity as ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... upon with grave suspicion, when, taking advantage of the first occasion that offered itself, they fled back to the forest. Although by their return to their own people they foreswore their past moral and material bondage they could not help bringing with them some of the depravity they had seen, or endured, in their exile which clashed with the customs and sensibilities of the pure type of May Darats, remarkable for ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... Slander should never be spoken. If spoken, it should never be heard. When slanderous converse goes on, one should close one's ears or leave the place outright. Slanderous converse is the characteristic of wicked men. It is an indication of depravity. They, on the other hand, O king, who speak of the virtues of others in assemblies of the good, are good men. As a pair of sweet-tempered bulls governable and well-broken and used to bear burthens, put ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... old man would remark, after they had discussed Dr. Pound's latest flight on the nature of the Trinity or the depravity of man, or horticulture, or the Republican Party, "do you have any better news ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... diverse elements, auto-erotism everywhere plays its part. In the phenomena of auto-erotism, when we take a broad view of those phenomena, we are concerned, not with a form of insanity, not necessarily with a form of depravity, but with the inevitable by-products of that mighty process on which the animal ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... overturning "the rich but rotten, the mighty but marrowless, the disciplined but diseased, Roman empire; that gigantic and heartless and merciless usurpation of soulless materialism and abject superstition of universal despotism, of systemized and relentless plunder, and of depravity deep as hell." In connection with this subject we would refer our readers to Mallet's Northern Antiquities, pp. 79-83, where substantially the same account is given; to Norse Mythology, pp. 232-236; to George Stephen's Runic Monuments, ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... by uncovering them." It was all very mysterious, very terrible; but what wonder that the laureate of the ex-emperor, the contemner of the Bourbons, the paeanist of the "star of the brave," "the rainbow of the free," should make good his political heresy by personal depravity—by unmanly vice, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... become enemies, because of their spleen; others because of their total depravity; and others still because they persist in standing upright when someone wants them to lie down and be stepped on. That is the meaning of backbone, in this world of human strife, and if, from time to time, it has made an enemy of the peace-loving Dutchman, it has been the kind of enmity ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... respects, being of every variety of shape. They were made of very thin cloth, and the boys raised them to a wonderful height in the air by means of twine made from the cocoa-nut husk. Other games there were, some of which showed the natural depravity of the hearts of these poor savages, and made me wish fervently that missionaries might be sent out to them. But the amusement which the greatest number of the children of both sexes seemed to take chief delight in was swimming and diving in the sea, and the expertness ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... table and get drunk. Moreover, to be humorous the comedian must necessarily have exceeded the bounds of ordinary usage. Aristophanes occasionally deplores the degeneracy of his times,—the youth of the period making "rude jests," but his own writings are the principal evidence of this depravity. His allusions are not excusable on the ground of ignorance; they are intentionally impure. There was once an age of innocence—still reflected in childhood, and among some unprogressive races—in which a sort of natural darkness hung over ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Bulgar has not been caused by an extreme divergence of their private or their public morals, academically considered, but by the various incidents which in the eyes of each of them testified to the other's depravity. And at the bottom of it all was Macedonia—Macedonia which now, being wisely administered, will be the ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... last few hours had converted the carefully bedizened gallant into a coarse fellow, whose outward appearance bore visible tokens of his mental depravity. The faultlessly cut garment was pushed awry on his powerful limbs and soiled on the breast with wine stains. The closely fitting steel chain armour, in which he had ridden out, now hung in large folds upon ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... they have cognizance—not God, since God is so infinite that He is not within their ken—but one who is nearer God and to that extent represents God. This is the Christ Spirit. His special care is the earth. He came down upon it at a time of great earthly depravity—a time when the world was almost as wicked as it is now, in order to give the people the lesson of an ideal life. Then he returned to his own high station, having left an example which is still occasionally followed. That is the story of Christ as spirits ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the story-teller; the worth of the workmanship in itself was not visible to him; and if he could have been made to understand it as a European understands, he would have remained none the less convinced that such application of genius to production signified social depravity. And gradually, in the luxurious life of the capital itself, he found proof for the belief suggested to him by the art and the literature of the period. He visited the pleasure-resorts, the theatres, the opera; he ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... that there is no man, how hardened and diabolical soever in his natural temper, who does not exhibit to some particular object a peculiar species of affection. Such a man was Anthony Meehan. That sullen hatred which he bore to human society, and that inherent depravity of heart which left the trail of vice and crime upon his footsteps, were flung off his character when he addressed his daughter Anne. To him her voice was like music; to her he was not the reckless villain, treacherous and cruel, which the helpless ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... Reading—"'Cobbs,' says that boy, 'I'll tell you a secret. At Norah's house, they have been joking her about me, and [with a wondering look] pretending to laugh at our being engaged! Pretending to make game of it, Cobbs!' 'Such, sir,' I says, 'is the depravity of human natur.'" A glance during the utterance of which words, either at the Reader himself or at his audience, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... of his pursuers. And there are many other devices in every danger, by which to avoid death, if a man dares to do and say every thing. But this is not difficult, O Athenians! to escape death; but it is much more difficult to avoid depravity, for it runs swifter than death. And now I, being slow and aged, am overtaken by the slower of the two; but my accusers, being strong and active, have been overtaken by the swifter, wickedness. And now I depart, condemned by you to death; but they condemned by ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... and the hope and possibility of recovering esteem, must always be kept alive. Those who are excluded from hope, are necessarily excluded from virtue; the loss of reputation, we see, is almost always followed by total depravity. The cruel prejudices which are harboured against particular classes of people, usually tend to make the individuals who are the best disposed amongst these sects, despair of obtaining esteem; and, consequently, careless about deserving it. There can be nothing inherent ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... enfeeblement, from its manifold losses and mutilations of form, from its unwieldy particles and clumsy construction, and from its unmusical auxiliary verbs. All these are things which have entered the language through sin and depravity. On the other hand, he was exceedingly proud to record the number of primitive and vigorous factors still extant in the current speech; and in the tonic strength of its roots he recognised quite a wonderful affinity ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... self-respect, to set the lost creature whom he had rescued in any light of comparison with the young lady who was one day to be his wife. And yet, try as he might to drive her out, Sally kept her place in his thoughts. There was, apparently, some innate depravity in him. If a looking-glass had been handed to him at that moment, he would have been ashamed to look himself in ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... the Wagnerian enthusiast to me, "the cornet has now the Brunnhilda motive." It seems to me, in my then state of depravity, as if the cornet had even more than ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... great French War, among other means resorted to in order to ease the English prisoners at Verdun of their loose cash, a gaming table was set up for their sole accommodation, and, as usual, led to scenes of great depravity and horror. For instance, a young man was enticed into this sink of iniquity, when he was tempted to throw on the table a five-franc piece; he won, and repeated the experiment several times successfully, until luck turned against him, and he ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... I am glad to pay ten per cent to interest him in their sale; but that terra cotta cow that he sold you, 'twas a sad piece of business," and he looked at us as a Mackenzie might have looked upon some artless victim to man's depravity! Whereupon a new light seemed all at once to break in upon us, and we resolved to get at the truth, if we could, by a ruse which should throw him off his guard; so, in place of appearing put out by the discovery, we merely said—"Well, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... has said that morals are infinitely more rigid in North America than elsewhere. This is not, it seems to me, a trifling advantage. Whatever may be the depravity of the seaports, where the whole world holds rendezvous, it remains certain that it does not penetrate into the interior of the country. Open the journals and novels of the United States; you will not find a corrupt page in them. ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... and man. But what do we mean by x and y? Let us face our facts. What do we know of man apart from Jesus Christ? Surely it is only in him that we realize man—only in him that we grasp what human depravity really is, the real meaning and implications of human sin. It is those who have lived with Jesus Christ, who are most conscious of sin; and this is no mere morbid imagination or fancy, it rests on a much deeper exploration of human nature than men in general attempt. Not until we know what he ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover |
