"Foulness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this repulsiveness was due to the coarseness and foulness of the meal, the wretched cooking, and the lack of salt, but there was a still more potent reason than all these. Nature does not intend that man shall live by bread alone, nor by any one kind of food. She indicates this by the varying tastes and ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... was robbed of fulfilment by the loose mouth with the slime of the gutter and sensuality of the beast writ large upon its thick lips. From the thin peaked nose upwards it was the face of a son of the gods who knew his parentage and birthright; but downward that of a human swine who loved the foulness of the trough for the trough's sake. A Poet of poets, said the eyes: Slime of the gutter and old age unashamed of its shame, retorted the mouth; and both spoke truth. Evidently his scrutiny satisfied him, for he heaved a sigh of contentment as he ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... no longer come up the Thames, they came on to the Essex coast, to Harwich and Walton and Clacton, and afterwards to Foulness and Shoebury, to bring off the people. They lay in a huge sickle-shaped curve that vanished into mist at last towards the Naze. Close inshore was a multitude of fishing smacks—English, Scotch, French, Dutch, and Swedish; steam launches from the Thames, yachts, electric boats; and beyond were ships ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... clear and transparent, different altogether from the muddy foulness of the lower reaches. And the country around lost the density of matted jungle and undulated in a succession of grassy stretches through which cropped great round hummocks of sandy hills. The stream ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... feasted and gloated on the disgusting details of adultery and incest? They were repelled and sickened by such odious and unnatural wickedness—he was attracted and delighted. What to them was the foulness of pollution, seemed to him the beauty of innocence. What to them was the blast from hell, to him was the air from heaven. They read and they condemned. They asked each other "What manner of man is this?" ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... an hour, as well as I could measure time, which passed slowly; for not only were the minutes tedious, but the foulness of the air made them also extremely uncomfortable. Desiree was again lying down, half-unconscious but not asleep, for now and then she spoke drowsily. Harry complained of a dizziness in the head, and my own seemed ready to burst through my temples. The soroche of the mountains ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... one-tenth for smelling; so that by far the greater part of the nose is built on breathing lines. But the smelling part of it, though small, is very important, because it now has to decide, not merely upon the goodness or badness of the food, but also upon the purity or foulness of the air we breathe. The nostrils lie, as you can see, side by side, separated from each other by a thin, straight plate of gristle and bone known as the septum. This should be perfectly straight and flat; but very often when the nose does not grow properly in childhood, it becomes crumpled ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... they were forever of the same shapeless pattern. More forlorn they were than stale bones. They seemed to have been strewn there by the wind and to be waiting till the wind should come again and blow them away. Yet serene above their foulness swam a pure and quiet light, such as the East never sees; they might be bathing in the air of creation's first morning. Beneath sun and stars their days and nights were ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... when it shall be helpful in the tribulation of the Christians. The river which ye see divideth this island, and even as now it appeareth unto you ripe in fruits, so is it at every time without shadow or foulness. For the light shineth in it without failing." Then holy Brendan saith unto the young man, "Lord father, tell me if this land shall be ever revealed unto men." And he saith, "When the Almighty Creator shall have made all nations subject ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute
... Britain and also upon the great mountains where they live, and equally warms the hearts of Indians and Englishmen; that as there is no spots or blackness in the sun, so neither is there any rust or foulness on this chain. And as the King had fastened one end to his breast, he defied them to carry the other end of the chain and fasten it to the breast of Moytoy of Telliquo, and to the breasts of all their old wise men, their ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... together, but nothing more. She would coax me with the prettiest gestures, and cajole me with the sweetest endearments; then, when I steadfastly resisted her, she would fly into a fury and flout me with the foulness of the stews. She was beautiful, but born to be bad. No power on heaven or earth could have saved her. Yet in her badness she was frank, natural and ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... friend and habitation Of the lowly-hearted, Dispel our evil, cleanse our foulness, And our discords turn to concord, And ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... Mirabeau,[1422] "that the nobility is demeaning itself and becoming a wreck. It is extended to all those children of bloodsuckers, the vagabonds of finance, introduced by La Pompadour, herself the spring of this foulness. One portion of it demeans itself in its servility to the court; the other portion is amalgamated with that quill-driving rabble who are converting the blood of the king's subjects into ink; another perishes stifled beneath vile ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... your God let you go down into such foulness, then?"—the words broke from his lips irrepressibly. "It was He who put you in the hands of a selfish woman; it was He who gave you a weak will. It is He who suffers marriages as false as yours. Why, child! you call it crime, the vow that bound you for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... street at the entrance to Gotham Court, and Detective Finn dug a tunnel of light with his bullseye lantern into the foulness and blackness of that smirch on civilization, a score or more of boys who had been congregated at the edge of the court suddenly plunged back into the obscurity, and we heard the splash of their feet in the foul collections of ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... a month in a vast enclosed space that was open to the sky, but nevertheless of an indescribable foulness, a place of filth, disease, and suffering beyond human conception, the details of which the curious may seek for himself in my Lord Henry's chronicles. They are too revolting by far ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... subject-matter—by which a novel has to deal in the first place with a single and rhythmical series of events; it was too discursive. They made this charge against English fiction; they also retorted the charge brought by native writers and their readers against the French of foulness, sordidness and pessimism in their view of life. "We do not," says a novelist in one of Mr. Moore's books, "we do not always choose what you call unpleasant subjects, but we do try to get to the roots of things; and the basis of life being material and ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... day the great prophet of the temple summoned the prince, and reminded him that he had not entered for prayers exclusively, but to learn wisdom. The prophet praised his devotion, declared that he was purified then from worldly foulness, and commanded him to become acquainted with the schools connected with ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... ere he could shut the frail door which separated the two compartments of the cavern, he heard the clang of the scourge and the groans of the penitent under his self-inflicted penance. A cold shudder came over the knight as he reflected what could be the foulness of the sin, what the depth of the remorse, which, apparently, such severe penance could neither cleanse nor assuage. He told his beads devoutly, and flung himself on his rude couch, after a glance at the still sleeping Moslem, and, wearied by the various scenes of the day and the night, soon ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... felt no desire to return to mankind. I was only glad to be quit of the foulness of the Beast People. And on the third day I was picked up by a brig from Apia to San Francisco. Neither the captain nor the mate would believe my story, judging that solitude and danger had made me mad; and fearing their opinion might be that of others, I refrained from telling my adventure ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... which will be irrevocable. Think that your end belongs to me. Half man, half corpse, listen! At least, let it not be your determination to expire here, exhausted for hours, days, and weeks, by frightful agonies of hunger and foulness, under the weight of those stones, alone in this cell, deserted, forgotten, annihilated, left as food for the rats and the weasels, gnawed by creatures of darkness while the world comes and goes, buys and sells, whilst carriages roll in the streets above your ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Divine Spirit uninterruptedly abides, ungrieved and unrestrained, must be free from the stains which so often drive that heavenly visitant from our breasts. The white-breasted Dove of God cannot brood over foulness. There has never been but one manhood capable of receiving and retaining the whole fulness of the Spirit ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... we teach our babies, and also shame. The child is pure, innocent, natural. One of the first efforts of nursery culture is to smear that white page with our self-made foulness. We labor conscientiously and with patience, to teach our babies shame. We degrade the human body, we befoul the habits of nature, we desecrate life, teaching evil and foolish falsehood to our defenceless little children. The "sex-taboos" of darkest savagery, the decencies and indecencies ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... of dishonesty cannot arise from local causes; it is the result of disease in the whole community; an eruption betokening foulness of the blood; blotches symptomatic of a ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... and chivalric piggishness and penury, it is none the less true that they outbalanced it by sundry and peculiar vices. And yet, bad as life then was, it is impossible for us to guess at, or realize, all its foulness. We know it mostly from poets, and the poet and historian, like the artist, have in every age lived quite out of the actual, and with all the tact of repulsion ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and pointed out the positions of Liege and Polpier on the wall-map, and their relative distances from London. A moment later the Vicar frowned again as Mr Boult launched into a violent—and as it turned out, a lengthy—invective against the German Emperor; with the foulness of whose character and designs he had, it seemed, been intimately acquainted for a number of years. "Who made the War?" "Who had been planning it and spying for the opportunity to gratify his unbridled lust of power?" "Who would ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... desirous of bringing to the birth. And love is not of beauty only, but of birth in beauty; this is the principle of immortality in a mortal creature. When beauty approaches, then the conceiving power is benign and diffuse; when foulness, she ...
— Symposium • Plato
... which is held in the hand in the current of a running stream, in the waters of which the cloth leaves all its foulness and dirt, is meant ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... then, not only the foulness engendered by human lungs breathing in the narrowest and most crowded of quarters, but the added foulness of dirt of every degree and order, overlaid and penetrated by this deposit of fine soot; the result a griminess ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... distinguished and high with wonder fairness, and he hath foulest feet and rivelled. And he wondereth of the fairness of his feathers, and areareth them up as it were a circle about his head, and then he looketh to his feet, and seeth the foulness of his feet, and like as he were ashamed he letteth his feathers fall suddenly, and all the tail downward, as though he took no heed of the fairness of his feathers. And as one saith, he hath the voice of a fiend, head of a serpent, pace of a thief. ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... at the discovery of the foulness of the sin, she vows herself to the life of an uncloistered nun. Her death in a thunderstorm is translation rather than dissolution.—Elizabeth Stuart ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... refer to a literary phenomenon that will in time become historical, that phenomenon being the sudden growth, in all parts of Europe, of a fungus-literature bred of Foulness and Decay; and contemporaneously, the intrusion into all parts of human life of a Calvinistic yet materialistic Morality. This literature of a sunless Decadence has spread widely, by virtue of its ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... some five or six hundred strong filed into the station. Stalwart and stolid, tow-haired, with the stamp of acquiescent patience in their homely faces, they came on with the swing, but none of the usual spirit, of drilled men. They asked no questions, but went where they were led, and the foulness of the close-packed steerage seemed to cling about them. For a time the depot rang to the rhythmic tramp of feet, and when, at a sign from the interpreter, it stopped, two bewildered children, frowsy and unwashed, ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... the Castle hall to several of the most distinguished Cavalier families, besides a world of boys from the village, who went to see the novel circumstance of a parson in a cassock and surplice, he went at great length into the foulness of the various crimes committed by the rebellious party during the late evil times, and greatly magnified the merciful and peaceful nature of the honourable Lady of the Manor, who condescended to look upon, or receive into her house in the way of friendship and hospitality, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... still; and from the wet, sticky foulness of it I rose and stood shuddering. Elza lay on the ground; but she had risen upon one elbow and I saw that she was unharmed save for the shock of terror through which she had passed—a mitigated shock with ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... small, badly planned, badly managed, and badly built; every thing done there was badly and meanly done. It was white- washed from the topmost point of every chimney down to the lowest edge of the basement. A whited sepulchre. For there was foulness there, in the air, in the surroundings, in every thing. Squalor and dirt reigned. His heart grew sick as those hideous walls rose ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... there was no salvation; and that it would lie among them rotting slowly, as they were rotting, through months or years—until finally, in its turn, it would drop down from amidst those lepers of the ocean, and would sink with all its foulness upon it into the black depths beneath ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... that will swear upon a book never to rest one night where we rest another this twelvemonth until that we find Sir Tristram. And as for me, said Sir Launcelot, I promise you upon this book that an I may meet with him, either with fairness or foulness I shall bring him to this court, or else I shall die therefore. And the names of these ten knights that had undertaken this quest were these following: First was Sir Launcelot, Sir Ector de Maris, Sir ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... Singing Arrow and waited for what might come. Her fate was hanging with Starling's at the council ring, and I knew that I must keep away from her. That was not easy. Each time that I let my glance rest upon the foulness of the camp I felt that I must go to her and blind her eyes. But I never made more than one step. I had only to look at her to understand that her spirit had learned in these months to hold itself above the body. What ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... manners, a nuisance to society; which they scandalized and disturbed by their riots, their mad frolics, and even by their quarrels. Their heads and waists were bound with ivy, and in their hands they brandished a thirsus, or kind of lance, garnished with vine-leaves. When by any foulness of weather they were driven into their huts, they passed their time in a kind of noisy merriment, of shoutings and dithirambic catches, accompanied by timpanums, by cymbals, by sistrums, and other instruments, in which noise was more consulted than music, and corresponded to the ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... the street, all muddy with puddles, and suddenly seeing the sky reflected in these puddles in such a way as quite to conceal the foulness of the street." ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Taylor has pointed out, is Scandinavian to this day. Deptford (the deep fiord), Greenwich (the green reach), and Woolwich (the hill reach) all bear good Norse names. So do the Foreness, the Whiteness, Shellness, Sheerness, Shoeburyness, Foulness, Wrabness, and Orfordness. Walton-on-the-Naze near Harwich in like manner still recalls the time when a Danish 'wall'—that is to say, a vallum, or earthwork—ran across the isthmus to defend the Scandinavian ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... evil tends to make us insensitive to its presence. Conscience becomes dull by practice of sin and by neglect of conscience, until that which at first was as sensitive as the palm of a little child's hand becomes as if it were 'seared with a hot iron.' The foulness of the atmosphere of a crowded hall is not perceived by the people in it. It needs a man to come in from the outer air to detect it. We can accustom ourselves to any mephitic and poisonous atmosphere, and many of us live ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... with which the lady spoke of sweeping them—as if they had been so much foulness—from Roccaleone, unless they did her bidding. They were still hesitating, when the Count ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... now call to mind my past foulness, and the carnal corruptions of my soul; not because I love them, but that I may love Thee, O my God. For love of Thy love I do it; reviewing my most wicked ways in the very bitterness of my remembrance, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... consequences of it. This tenderness increased as they grew in years, and came to such a height, that I dreaded the end of it. At last I applied such remedies as were in my power; I not only gave my son a severe reprimand in private, laying before him the foulness of the passion he was entertaining, and the eternal disgrace he would bring upon my family if he persisted in such criminal courses, but I also represented the same thing to my daughter; and besides I shut her up so close, that she could have no conversation ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... supernatural prowess, save of the god Thor only, to the greatness of whose force nothing human or divine could fitly be compared. The hearts of men ought not to be terrified at phantoms, which were only awful from their ghastly foulness, and whose semblances, marked by counterfeit ghostliness, were wont for a moment to borrow materiality from the fluent air. Swanhwid therefore erred in trying, womanlike, to sap the firm strength of men, and to melt in unmanly panic ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... reminded me in their personal appearance of the cannibals of the outer shore. These hideous beings all gathered around me, blinking at me with their bleary eyes and grinning with their abominable faces, and then each one embraced me. The filth, squalor, and unutterable foulness of these wretches all combined to fill my soul with loathing, and the inconceivable horror of that embrace wellnigh overwhelmed me. Yet, after all, it was surpassed by the horror of the thought that Almah might be at that very moment undergoing the same experience; and for her such a ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... more fortunate families take into their houses those to whom Providence has been less bountiful. You whose daily business takes you to the hovels of the poor, know how wretched and filthy they are, how even the healthy can scarcely bear the foulness of their atmosphere. How great must be the power of such pest-holes to extend the plague when once it finds a foothold there! Let us tear down those hovels. There are enough rich men among you to build new ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... called it in his 'Prospectus,' and, from the first, its guiding spirit. Happily so, for his was a spirit fitted to rule, both by power, and tact, and taste. With 'Uncle MARK' in the chair, I knew there would be neither austere autocracy, nor faineant laxity, neither weakness of stroke nor foulness of blow, neither Rosa-Matilda-ish, mawkishness, ...
— Punch, Volume 101, Jubilee Issue, July 18, 1891 • Various
... To one who knows the morality of the most brilliant society of the Greeks and Romans, there is no need to extol the pure and lofty moral tone of Jesus of Nazareth. But those who have not read the masterpieces of ancient art, with their mingled beauty and foulness, may be assured that literature owes more to Christianity than has ever yet been told. With Christianity a great healthy breeze swept over the world. Men became ashamed of wallowing in the mire. An ideal was raised up before ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... curiosity of the schoolboy, the perverse craving for the knowledge of vice. He listened with all his ears to everything that was said and went about through the great city with eyes open only to its foulness. He even looked up in the dictionary the meanings of the new words, finding in the cold, scientific definitions some strange ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... outwardly. It is no solid and genuine felicity; it is a plaster, and that a thin one; and so, as long as they can stand and be seen at their pleasure, they shine and impose on us: when anything has fallen which disturbs and uncovers them, it is evident how much deep and real foulness an extraneous ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... the hot pit whence had issued the storm of foulness that blasted the fair kingdom of France after laying low the hallowed heads of a good king and a beautiful queen, in Paris, leaders and led were now chopping each other's heads off, a qui mieux mieux. "Those thinkers, those lofty patriots, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... splendid situation to which he advances, he will have so many means of commanding the respect and admiration of mankind, and will be enabled to act with such superior propriety and grace, that the luster of his future conduct will entirely cover or efface the foulness of the steps by which he arrived at that elevation. In many governments the candidates for the highest stations are above the law, and if they can attain the object of their ambition, they have no fear of being called to account for the means by ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... stethoscope, measure the organic disease. Now at last she knew why the pulse beat with such unhealthy irregularity, and why men felt an anxiety which they could not or would not explain. Her interest in the disease overcame her disgust at the foulness of the revelation. To say that the discovery gave her actual pleasure would be doing her injustice; but the excitement of the moment swept away every other sensation. She did not even think of herself. Not until afterwards did she fairly grasp the ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... that the constant dews besprinkle their persons with a cold and bracing moisture, and that they enjoy the freshness of a purer atmosphere; and that they are the first of all tribes to feel the rays of the morning sun, which are instinct with life, before they become tainted with any of the foulness arising from human things. Having discussed this matter let us now return ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... replacing the tool beneath the cloak, and again offering him my arm. He leaned upon it heavily. We continued our route in search of the Amontillado. We passed through a range of low arches, descended, passed on, and descending again, arrived at a deep crypt, in which the foulness of the air caused our flambeaux rather to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... worst of the business was that another convoy having occupied the spot the day before, the field was absolutely invisible under the superincumbent filth; it was no better than a common cesspool, of unimaginable foulness. The sole means the men had of self-protection was to scatter over the ground some large flat stones, of which they were so fortunate as to find a number in the vicinity. By way of compensation they had a somewhat less hard time of it that evening; the strictness of their ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Tronchin, originated from such a circumstance; as also the case related by Van Swieten,[21] of a whole family afflicted with the same complaint, from such a cistern. And it is highly probable that the case of disease recorded by Dr. Duncan,[22] proceeded more from some foulness in the cistern, than from the solvent power of the water. In this instance the officers of the packet boat used water for their drink and cooking out of a leaden cistern, whilst the sailors used the water taken from ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... had commenced farmer, a business of which he was totally ignorant, and in the pursuit of which he sunk a good fortune; yet when he quitted this farm, or rather when his property and stock were seized and sold under an execution, perhaps the county of Hants could not have produced its equal for foulness and bad condition. I had occupied three thousand acres of land in Wiltshire, and I will venture to say, that there was not half the quantity of couch grass upon the whole of it that I now found upon ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... "In the foulness of his thoughts to frustrate God's purposes of salvation, I believe that when he knew that the Christ had been born, that God had Himself become incarnate, so that He might deliver man—for we must never forget that 'God was in Christ reconciling ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... see it solved as here In plain results which he who runs may read. Not always is the sinner's punishment Shown in this world. May the Eternal Mercy Cleanse us from secret faults, nor, while we mark Another's foulness, blind us to ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... and almost the only, cause of the deepness and foulness of the roads is occasioned by the standing water, which (for want of due care to draw it off by scouring and opening ditches and drains, and other watercourses, and clearing of passages) soaks into the earth, and softens it to such a degree that it cannot bear the weight of horses and ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... contained parliamentary proceedings, extracts from sermons, a bit of verse of more than Franklinian foulness, rhymes eulogizing Gilbert Tennent, and a manual of arms. The title-page wore the coronet and plumes of the Prince of Wales. Franklin ridiculed his rival's magazine in doggerel verse; his own he made no mention of in his ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... How foulness grows fair with the stern lustration of sleets and snows, And rottenness changes back to the breath and the cheek of the rose, And how gentle the wind that seems wild ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... the light to distinguish the relics left by the prisoners: here a pair of stays of which some female prisoner had divested herself, there a red cockade, all kinds of articles of clothing steeped in slime of indescribable foulness; and cowering at one end of the corridor a dozen prisoners waiting to know their fate. They were more respectable than usual, and not apparently of a very sanguinary type. They were all men. To-day no less than a hundred women were marched down the streets in one gang. The papers are so ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... five dreadful days in the darkness, dampness, chill and foulness of that tiny cell. I found that influence such as Tanno and Vedia possessed and cash such as they had at their disposal, could do much even for the occupant of such a cell, destined to such a doom. I was visited by Galen, more ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... I've run my last race now. Then, I used to keep poets at my expense, and I used to buy pictures and books of the Jews, geese of the best breeds, and pouter-pigeons of pure blood.... I used to go in for everything! Though dogs I never did care for keeping, because it goes with drinking, foulness, and buffoonery! I was a young man of spirit, not to be outdone. That there should be anything of Teliegin's and not first-rate ... why, it was not to be thought of! And I had a splendid stud of horses. ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... an accomplished and virtuous lawyer holds a high place in the aristocracy of merit in every free country. Like all things human, the legal profession has its dark as well as its bright side, has in it germs of decay and rotten foulness as well as of health and beauty; but yet it is a noble profession, and one which I admire and respect. But, above all, I would desire to respect the bar of my own country, and the Irish bar—the bar made illustrious by such memories as those of Grattan and Flood, and the Emmets, ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... sun dries up and purifies the immemorial filth of Africa, where that sun enters there is none of the foulness of damp. But into the Mellah of Sefrou it never comes, for the streets form a sort of subterranean rabbit-warren under the upper stories of a solid agglomeration of tall houses—a buried city lit even at midday by oil-lamps ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... with a touch that's neither felt nor seen;" For naught that you assail with falchion free Has either nerves to feel or eyes to see. Against abstractions evermore you charge You hack no helmet and you need no targe. That wickedness is wrong and sin a vice, That wrong's not right and foulness never nice, Fearless affirm. All consequences dare: Smite the offense and the offender spare. When Ananias and Sapphira lied Falsehood, had you been there, had surely died. When money-changers in the Temple sat, At money-changing you'd have whirled the "cat" (That John-the-Baptist of the ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... such things, turn by turn delighted by their beauty and offended by their foulness, that one acquires the habit of spending a part only of one's intellectual and moral life in the present, and the rest in the past. Impressions are not derived from description, and thoughts are not suggested by books. The juxtaposition of concrete ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... becomes only a more extended place-hunting, and man the walking dummy of society. And then, since man no longer is properly vitalized, disease sets in, consumption, decay, putrefaction, filling all the air with the breath of their foulness. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... turning of a dog twice before he lies down, a feature of the canine race. Those who were physically incapable of dancing lined the walls and adorned the manger seats. For the rest, they occupied the sanded floor, and danced until the dust clouded the air and added to the choking foulness of the atmosphere. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... it does us. And this exquisitely soft, pure, yielding, unseen being, like a beautiful and beneficent fairy, brings us blessings from all around. It has the skill to wash our blood clean from all foulness. Its weight keeps us from tumbling to pieces. It is a reservoir where the waters lie stored, until they fall and gladden the earth. It is a great-coat that softens to us the heat of the day, and the cold of the night. It carries sounds to our ears ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... everywhere inherently wrong, irrespective of the civilization to which they appear to belong. The gospel transformed "the Five Points'' in New York not because they were uncivilized but because they were evil. It will do in China only what it does in America—fight vice, cleanse foulness, dispel superstition. Christianity is the only power which does this. It has transformed every people among whom it has had free course. It has purified society. It has promoted intelligence. It has elevated woman. It has fitted ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... forgetting that the evil was in the fruits of a bad system, bringing disgrace upon his countrymen, corrupting the moral foundation of society, spreading vice around the domestic fireside, and giving to base-minded men power to speculate in the foulness of their own crimes. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... were spilled inland among the thrown and standing trees and the slime-coated flowers and grasses like the titanic vomit of some Northland monster. The sun was not idle, and the steaming thaw washed the mud and foulness from the bergs till they blazed like heaped diamonds in the brightness, or shimmered opalescent-blue. Yet they were reared hazardously one on another, and ever and anon flashing towers and rainbow minarets crumbled thunderously into the flood. By one of the gaps so made ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... things that I love and bow before. Here are lips,—and lips are things that speak of beauty; here are eyes,—and eyes are things that seek the light. And now to gaze upon that face and say: "This man lived in foulness; he was the slave of hateful lust—he died rotten, and sodden with drink."—I say that I do not ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... paragraphs in this serial which are most chaotic and unmeaning, and some, indeed, which fall below its own excellent standard of refinement; but we do not remember ever to have met in its pages a double-entendre or a foulness of speech. We must advise its conductor (who, we may say in passing, is a gentleman whose writings have not infrequently appeared in the "Atlantic") never to allow his paper to descend to the level of the ignoble vulgus; and we are glad that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... pale, the eyes loose their brightness and by degrees the white grows as it were greenish, the gums want their due firmness, with their proper colour; and an unpleasing foulness grows upon the teeth: the inside of the mouth is pale and furred, and the throat dry and husky: the colour of the skin is pale (though there are periods when the face is florid) and as the obstruction gathers ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... be linked to the complex and antagonistic forces that constitute one soul, it seemed to him not impossibly strange that one spiritual force should possess divers forms for widely various manifestation. Nor, to him, was it great effort to believe that as pure water washes away all natural foulness, so water, holy by consecration, must needs cleanse God's world from that supernatural evil Thing. Therefore, faster than ever man's foot had covered those leagues, he sped under the dark, still night, over the waste, trackless snow-ridges ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... Always was—confound it!— An unsavoury mess, Foulness reeking round it. Resurrection pie Not in it for nastiness. Dished-up—who knows why?— With unseemly hastiness. Of the chef's poor skill, Feeblest of expedients. Sure we've had our fill Of its stale ingredients. Toujours perdrix? Pooh! That is scarce delightful; Toujours Irish ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... go to bed at night; or some senna tea in the morning. You do very well to live extremely low, for some time; and I could wish, though I do not expect it, that you would take one gentle vomit; for those giddinesses and swimmings in the head always proceed from some foulness of the stomach. However, upon the whole, I am very glad that your old complaint has not mixed itself with this, which I am fully convinced arises simply from your ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... highest and best to which mortals can hope to attain, types embodying the highest perfection of body and mind. The influence of those types has gone on from century to century, never in the darkest ages wholly forgotten, and serving at all times to redeem human nature from foulness and degradation. All through the history of art they have been acting as ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... union of sympathy and propagate the cult of a view of life. Gloom and savagery, passion and crime, luxury and lust, romance and adventure, adultery and divorce, self-indulgence and cynicism, the reality of foulness and decay, are so suggested as to become centers on which receptive minds will organize and congenial ones will combine in sympathy. It is the effect of a great and active literature of belles-lettres, which is practically current ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Around and above his blighted neighbourhood flows the tide of active, prosperous life. Men and women travel past in street cars by the Elevated Railroad and across the bridge, and take no thought of its wretchedness, of the criminals bred there, and of the disease engendered by its foulness. It is a fearful menace to the public health, both moral and physical, yet the multitude is as heedless of danger as the peasant who makes his house and plants green vineyards and olives above Vesuvian fires. We are almost as careless and quite as ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... beneath the shock; the moribund life which it was pursuing to imbecility and foulness, was extinguished. For another reason, the end of the universe seemed near; such cities as had been forgotten by Attila were decimated by famine and plague. The Latin language in its turn, seemed to sink ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... more gave my purse and pistols to my friend. "You are going to bathe again?" he said. "Certainly," said I; "you don't suppose that I would come to Jordan and not wash there, even if I were not foul with the foulness of the Dead Sea!" "You'll kill yourself, in your present state of heat;" he said, remonstrating just as one's mother or wife might do. But even had it been my mother or wife I could not have attended to such remonstrance then; and before he had done looking at me with ...
— A Ride Across Palestine • Anthony Trollope
... Colonel Rawlings was, some time late in the morning of the 16th of November, attacked by the Hessians, when he fought with great gallantry and effect as they were climbing the heights, until the arms of the riflemen became useless from the foulness they contracted from the ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... the blood requires cleansing and attenuating, this tea will be of considerable service to the healthy as well as the diseased. By these means the constitution will be preserved and restored from all those chronic and acute afflictions, which are the consequences of acrimonious humours and foulness ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... face was as the face of an ass, his shape that of an ape and his look as the look of a malignant snake: his presence was grievouser than parting from the beloved make; and blacker than night was his blackness and more fetid than the lion was his breath for foulness; more crooked than a bow was his crookedness and grimmer than the leopard was his ugliness, and he was branded with the mark of the Infidels on face.[FN392] After this he came up to King Afridun and kissed his feet and stood before him; and the King ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... fountains had lent: the image that seemed its soul, and the deep and the limpid expression of its great strength. But if we rejoin it, down yonder, beneath those great trees, we shall find that it has already forgotten the foulness of the gutters. It has caught the azure again in its transparent waves; and flows on to the sea, as clear as it was on the days when it first smilingly leapt from its source ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... art disturbed by the heinousness of thy crimes, and confounded by the foulness of thy conscience, {379} if terrified by the horror of judgment thou begin to be swallowed up in the gulf of despair, think of Mary, invoke Mary; let her not depart from thy heart, let her not depart from thy mouth. For whilst thinking of her, thou dost not err; imploring her, thou dost not despair; ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... bread, and Bellevue, the poor people's hospital, became a public scandal. In one night there were five drunken fights, one of them between two of the attendants who dropped the corpse they were carrying to the morgue and fought over it. The tenements were plunged back into the foulness of their worst day; the inspectors were answerable, not to the Health Board, but to the district leader, and the landlord who stood well with him thumbed his nose at them and at their orders to clean up. The neighborhood parks, acquired at ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... so care-worn, With cold utterance, And speaketh grimly, The ghost to the dust: "Dry dust! thou dreary one! How little didst thou labor for me! In the foulness of earth Thou all wearest away Like to the loam! Little didst thou think How thy soul's journey Would be thereafter, When from the body It ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... invent, and who possesses the gift of insight, cannot rest. He lived in the midst of inventors. Watt and Boulton were constantly suggesting new things, and Murdock became possessed by the same spirit. In 1791 he took out his first patent. It was for a method of preserving ships' bottoms from foulness by the use of a certain kind of chemical paint. Mr. Murdock's grandson informs us that it was recently re-patented and was the cause of a lawsuit, and that Hislop's patent for revivifying gas-lime would have been an infringement, if it ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... England! Not only in your name, but at your cost! You are responsible for this bloodshed, this misery! How long is it to go on? How long are you free men going to allow yourselves to be bloody executioners? How long are you to be slavish followers of that grasping ambition which veils its foulness under ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... all their advantages, they had all ours too. It is with our mental as with our bodily vision,—we see only what is remote; and the image to the mind depends, not only upon seeing, but upon not seeing. In the distant star, all foulness and gloom are lost, and only the pure splendor reaches us. Inspired by Mr. Ruskin's eloquence, the neophyte sets forth with contrition to put his precepts into practice. But the counterstatement which he had overlooked does not, therefore, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... spiritual consciousness, and lead a man too weak to stand in his own strength when appetite, held only in abeyance, springs back upon him to trust in God as his only hope of permanent reformation. First we must help him physically, we must take him out of his debasement, his foulness and his discomfort, and surround him with the influences of a home. Must get him clothed and in his right mind, and make him feel once more that he has sympathy—is regarded as a man full of the noblest possibilities—and so be stimulated to personal effort. But this is only preliminary work, ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... lightning of His glance were death. Nay, more, has it not happened to some here—to clergyman, lawyer, physician, perhaps, alas! to some pure-minded, noble- hearted woman—to be brought in contact perforce with that which truly sickens them—with some case of human folly, baseness, foulness—which, however much their soul revolts from it, they must handle, they must toil over many weeks and months, in hope that that which is crooked may be made somewhat straight, till their whole soul was distempered, all but degraded, by the continual sight of sin, till ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... thou obtain a night's lodging? Thou wouldst not dare expect it from a laborer or diligent student. And who, for the dishonor and the shame, would ever give thee, Belphegor the Slothful, a moment's welcome, if Hypocrisy did not disguise thy foulness under the name of an internal disease, or as a good intent or a seeming despisal of wealth or the like. She too—my dear daughter Hypocrisy—what good is or ever would she be, notwithstanding her skill as a seamstress, and ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... wonderfully clear, but of a yet more wonderful Effect; the other's Name was Worldly-Wisdom, its Water was thick, and yet far from dormant or stagnating, for it was in a continual violent Agitation; which kept the Travellers whom I shall mention by and by, from being sensible of the Foulness and Thickness of the Water; which had this Effect, that it intoxicated those who drunk it, and made 'em mistake every Object that lay before them: both Rivulets were parted near their Springs into so many others, as there were strait and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... or spur of the hay, is confined to the June grass, as far as my observation extends; owing, probably, to its early maturity. Most other kinds of grass are cut before the seeds have matured sufficiently to produce the spur. I was suspicious of the foulness of the feed before I examined any hay, and have found the spur in the hay ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... shadows the rushing water seemed to leap out of the darkness and to vanish again. Decayed drift-wood, trunks of trees, fragments of broken sluicing,—the wash and waste of many a mile,—swept into sight a moment, and were gone. All of decay, wreck, and foulness gathered in the long circuit of mining-camp and settlement, all the dregs and refuse of a crude and wanton civilization, reappeared for an instant, and then were hurried away in the darkness and lost. No wonder that as the wind ruffled the yellow ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... was the part of a brave man to chastise villainous and wicked men when attacked by them, but to seek out and overcome the more noble wild beasts. Others relate that Phaea was a woman, a robber full of cruelty, that lived in Crommyon, and had the name of Sow given her from the foulness of her life and manners, and afterwards was killed by Theseus. He slew also Sciron, upon the borders of Megara, casting him down from the rocks, being, as most report, a notorious robber of all passengers, and, as others add, accustomed out of insolence and wantonness, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... whom these men were I have been able to learn nothing. A boat was seen passing towards Bradwell—indeed, it seems that you saw it, and that night a boat was seen sailing southwards down St. Peter's sands towards a ship that had anchored off Foulness Point. But what that ship was, whence she came, and whither she went, none know, though the tidings of this fray have made ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... from Surgeon-General Finley to proceed to Winchester, Virginia, to assist in the care of the wounded from General Banks' army. She found the hospital there in a most deplorable condition. Gangrene was in all the wards, the filth and foulness of the atmosphere were fearful. Men were being swept off by scores, and all things were in such a state as must ever result from inexperience, and perhaps incompetence, on the part of those in charge. Appliances and stores were ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... architect deals with dead stone and timber, the statesman and Socialist deal with living and striving things. But he seeks to make a plan as one designs and lays out a garden, so that sweet and seemly things may grow, wide and beautiful vistas open and weeds and foulness disappear. Always a garden plan develops and renews itself and discovers new possibilities, but what makes all its graciousness and beauty possible is the scheme and the persistent intention, the watching and the waiting, the digging and burning, the weeder ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... year, 1584, requested the Privy Council to dispatch "favorable letters unto the Lord Mayor of London to permit us to exercise within the city," and the Lord Mayor refused, with the significant remark that "if in winter ... the foulness of season do hinder the passage into the fields to play, the remedy is ill conceived to bring them into London."[95] Obviously the Queen's Men were seeking permission to play in the city only during the cold ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... they were sailing in the expanse of heaven, and this a great planet, whose orient edge widened through ether. A world from which all ignoble care and petty thoughts were banished, with all the common and poor elements of life. No foulness, nor tumult, in those tremulous streets, that filled, or fell, beneath the moon; but rippled music of majestic change, or thrilling silence. No weak walls could rise above them; no low-roofed cottage, nor straw-built shed. Only ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... last, the second Luzon town, and a corral for the mules. As they passed a nipa-shack, at the outer edge, a sound of music came softly forth. Some native was playing one of the queer Filipino mandolins. The Train pushed on, without Cairns and Bedient. All the famine and foulness and fever lifted from these two. They forgot blood and pain and glaring suns. The early stars changed to lily-gardens, vast and white and beautiful, and ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... rode despite that weather's foulness—a foulness that might have given pause to one whose haste to bear a letter was less attuned to his ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... where tall chimneys of nitrate plant and smelters belched their foulness against the blue sky. In the forests the loggers were tearing and slashing into all but the remnant of the timber. Down the gloomy gulch cut out of the lava ran a broad, white ribbon of concrete road. Lastly, and primary cause ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... from our childhood. When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary for us to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to? Before motor cars became common, necessity had accustomed us to a foulness in our streets which would have horrified us had the street been our drawing-room carpet. Before long we shall be as particular about our streets as we now are about our carpets; and their condition in the nineteenth century will become as forgotten and incredible ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... are, though," said Carthew. "It's deadly hot above, and there's no wind. I'll wash out this——" and he paused, seeking a word and not finding one for the grisly foulness ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... speak of shame?" he said—"What shame is left in either man or woman nowadays? Naked to the very skin of foulness, they flaunt a nudity of vice in every public thoroughfare! Your sentiments, my grand Sergius, are those of an old world long passed away! You are a reformer, a lover of truth—a hater of shams—and in the days when the people loved truth,—and wanted justice,—and ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... you, an' yer Master, are all shams an' humbugs. I know Him now. He's 'live to me. So now, when I see you belie Him, an' keep men from Him with yer hundreds o' wranglin' creeds, an' that there's as much honest love of truth outside the Church as in it, I don't put yer bigotry an' foulness on Him. I on'y think there's an awful mistake: just this: that the Church thinks it is Christ's body an' us uns is outsiders, an' we think so too, an' despise Him through you with yer stingy souls an' fights an' squabblins; not seein' that the Church is jes' an hospital, where ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... rare presence of a decent woman or a clergyman will almost always put a check upon blackguardly speech, even that of a dog driver; women and clergymen being supposed the only two classes who could have any possible objection to foulness of mouth. To refer continually to the excrements of the body, to sexual commerce, natural and unnatural, all in the grossest terms, and to mix these matters intimately with the sacred names, is "manly" speech amongst a large part of ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... the wilderness, the Parisians had to rise before daybreak if they wished to eat. The crowd was lined up, men, women and children tightly packed together, under a sky of molten lead. The heat beat down on the rotting foulness of the kennels and exaggerated the stench of unwashed, sweating humanity. All were pushing, abusing their neighbours, exchanging looks fraught with every sort of emotion one human being can feel for another,—dislike, disgust, interest, attraction, indifference. Painful ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... thought of his mission, and on the way reflected upon possible improvements of the public grounds, upon the desirability of fountains, and why people lived where there were neither parks nor fountains, but only mud, lime, and bricks, emitting horrid exhalations and every conceivable foulness. This reminded him of his own walks about the Cyennaza, and he ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... their own dissolute Behaviour has given sting to. But I, who am perfectly acquainted with the Sweetness of your Disposition, and that Tenderness with which you consider the Errors of your Fellow Creatures, need not be inform'd, that while you expose the Foulness of those Facts, which renders them deservedly Objects of Reproach, you will [not] forget to pity the Weakness of Humanity and Lethargy of Reason, which at some unguarded Hours, steals on the Souls of even the wisest Men; and tho' I shou'd find, ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... is by our means that virtue is preserved to the rich: it is we who appease the wicked rage which would otherwise wreck society.' There are men who boast that they have brought their sins only to the houses of shame, and that they have respected purity in the midst of their foulness. 'Such things must be,' they say: 'let us alone, lest a worse thing ensue.' When they are filled full with sin, they cry 'Lo! our appetite has gone from us and we are clean.' They are willing to slake lust with satiety, but not to combat it with prayer. ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... application for food and lodging was received with a volley of curses, he honestly admired the noble fluency of his enemy. When he was harvesting, the singing stacker became increasingly and distressingly pornographic; instead of rebuking him for foulness, which would only have bewildered the stacker, Mr. Lindsay taught him the first stanza of Swinburne's chorus. "The next morning when my friend climbed into our barge to ride to the ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps |
