"Meanness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thought or spoke of her as a prig, but all her influence was brought to bear in the right direction. The girl who could do or think meanly avoided the expression of Annabel's beautiful eyes. It was impossible for her to think badly of her fellow-creatures, but meanness and sin made her sorrowful. There was not a girl in Heath Hall who would ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... old opinions as stoutly as he could, and condemned and opposed the war which England had declared against the French republic. Burke, who was profoundly incapable of the meanness of letting personal estrangement blind his eyes to what was best for the commonwealth, kept hoping against hope that each new trait of excess in France would at length bring the great Whig leader to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... receive both days' wages in one piece. The young headman of a new village himself came on with his men. The march was a pretty long one, and one of the men proposed to lay the burdens down beside a hut a mile or more from the next village. The headman scolded the fellow for his meanness in wishing to get rid of our goods where we could not procure carriers, and made him carry them on. The village, at the foot of the cataracts, had increased very much in size and wealth since we passed it on our way up. A number of large ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... impartial, catholic spirit and teachings of Christ as to render themselves unworthy of all sympathy and encouragement; but the exclusiveness of secret societies is, we think, unparalleled in our day for its selfishness and meanness. They claim to be charitable and benevolent institutions; they assert that membership in them confers great honors and advantages; they profess (at least many of them) to act on the principle of the universal brotherhood of men and fatherhood ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher
... accept. "Francis," says Robertson, "notwithstanding the many errors conspicuous in his foreign policy and domestic administration, was nevertheless humane, beneficent, generous. He possessed dignity without pride, affability free from meanness, and courtesy exempt from deceit. All who had access to him, and no man of merit was ever denied that privilege, respected and loved him. Captivated with his personal qualities, his subjects forgot his ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... needs to be guided rightly to produce the noblest virtues; while irreligion, and the argumentative philosophic spirit generally, on the other hand, assaults the life and enfeebles it, degrades the soul, concentrates all the passions in the basest self-interest, in the meanness of the human self; thus it saps unnoticed the very foundations of all society, for what is common to all these private interests is so small that it will never outweigh their opposing interests.—If atheism does not lead to bloodshed, it is less from love of peace ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... in such wise, because he was a man who had, deep-rooted in his nature, a belief in all the gentle and good things his life had been without. Bred in meanness and hard dealing, this had rescued him to be a man of honourable mind and open hand. Bred in coldness and severity, this had rescued him to have a warm and sympathetic heart. Bred in a creed too darkly ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Paris. They are grave, these young faces: one hears a great deal of the gaiety in the trenches, but the wounded are not gay. Neither are they sad, however. They are calm, meditative, strangely purified and matured. It is as though their great experience had purged them of pettiness, meanness and frivolity, burning them down to the bare bones of character, the fundamental substance of the soul, and shaping that substance into something so strong and finely tempered that for a long time to come Paris will not care to wear ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... understood—but they made a fine display. The salutes from uniformed men of every nation almost turned her head. The little restaurant round the corner, where they had eaten for so many years, suddenly appeared to her an inappropriate setting for his exalted rank. She railed against its meanness. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... deeply loved men of his time. He was of an eminently social temper, although averse to large companies and shy and silent in their presence. "There is no such thing," he once said, "as real conversation but between two persons." He was free from malice, meanness, or jealousy, Pope to the contrary notwithstanding. He was absolutely loyal to his principles and to his friends, in a time when many men changed both with as little compunction as they changed wigs and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Miss Howe to Clarissa.—Observations on Lovelace's meanness, pride, and revenge. Politeness not to be expected from him. She raves at him for the artful manner in which he urges Clarissa to marry him. Advises her how to ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... cattleman ironically, from the porch. "You're the curly-haired hero, Keller, and I'm the red-headed villain of this play. You want to beware of the miscreant, Miss Sanderson, or he'll sure do you a meanness." ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... be got over? There was of course the shadow of a possibility that I might get out of my difficulties, could I but fabricate a sufficiently ingenious string of falsehoods; but now that it actually came to the point, I could not bring myself to the depths of meanness and cowardice which this involved. I had learned at school the maxim that "liars never prosper," and my dear old father had taught me to avoid falsehood from much higher considerations than those of mere temporal ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... Sometimes they cart off the furniture. Pianos they are very fond of. When they see one, they first sit down and play a few sentimental ditties, then they go away, requisition a cart, and minstrel and instrument disappear together. They are a singular mixture of bravery and meanness. No one can deny that they possess the former quality, but they are courageous without one spark of heroism. After fighting all day, they will rifle the corpses of their fallen foes of every article they can lay their hands on, and will return to their ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... son, and she seemed to see him more clearly than she had ever seen him before,—his foppery, his meanness, ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... corrupters are the Hope and the Fear of immense Wealthy, even to men reputed the most honourable, if they have been reared and pampered in the belief that wealth is the Arch blessing of life. Rightly considered, in Philip Beaufort's solitary meanness lay the vast moral of ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that had been in Tony's eyes as he turned away, the change that had come over his face as she asked her purposely pointed questions, and the recollection of the fair face of Ailleen and the crafty meanness of Dickson's, all combined to stir ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... memory, or our Time yielded to sight: I suppose, there hath not been any more notable then this in hand; either in respect of the greatness of the person in whom the first injury was offered, or the meanness of him who righted himself. The one being, in his own conceit, the mightiest Monarch of all the world! The other, an English Captain, a mean subject of her Majesty's! Who (besides the wrongs received ...
— Sir Francis Drake Revived • Philip Nichols
... discarded him long before his death. In 1778 he acquired extraordinary eclat by the seduction of the Marchioness of Caermarthen, under circumstances which have few parallels in the licentiousness of fashionable life. The meanness with which he obliged his wretched victim to supply him with money would have been disgraceful to the basest adulteries of the cellar or garret. A divorce ensued, the guilty parties married; but, within ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... title. Does he take pains to inform himself by reading and conversation with experts upon its probable effect? Or an international copyright law is proposed, a measure that will relieve the people of the United States from the world-wide reputation of sneaking meanness towards foreign authors. Does he examine the subject, and try to understand it? That is not necessary. Or it is a question of tariff. He is to vote "yes" or "no" on these proposals. It is not necessary for him to master these subjects, but it is necessary for him to know how to vote. And how ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... out for meanness," he announced when he returned. "They tell me this yere is on a sort of short cut from some of the Truckee lakes down to their villages. But we got to keep a sharp eye on our horses; and we got to stand ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... murmured about his extravagant way of life. Though he became the favourite and leader of young men who were much his superiors in wealth and station, he was much too generous to endeavour to propitiate them by any meanness or cringing on his own part, and would not neglect the humblest man of his acquaintance in order to curry favour with the richest young grandee in the university. His name is still remembered at the Union Debating Club, as one of the brilliant orators of his day. ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... central at the best, not dominant; and this is one of the chief modes in which the cessation of superstition, so far as it has taken place, has been of evil consequence to art, that the observance of local sanctities being abolished, meanness and mistake are anywhere allowed of, and the thoughts and wealth which were devoted and expended to good purpose in one place, are now distracted and ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... grimly: "that is the typical stanza. And the very last charity-sermon I heard was infected with it. After giving many good reasons for charity, the preacher wound up with 'and, for all you give, you will be repaid a thousandfold!' Oh the utter meanness of such a motive, to be put before men who do know what self-sacrifice is, who can appreciate generosity and heroism! Talk of Original Sin!" he went on with increasing bitterness. "Can you have a stronger proof of the Original Goodness there must be in ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... to have it against us is painful when we are among friends, and harmful in the case of the outer world. We should neither flatter opinion nor court it; but it is better, if we can help it, not to throw it on to a false scent. The first error is a meanness; the second an imprudence. We should be ashamed of the one; we may regret the other. Look to yourself; you are much given to this last fault, and it has already done you great harm. Be ready to bend your pride; abase yourself even ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... order to counteract this gold in one hand by gold in the other, Talleyrand demanded a douceur of L50,000 for himself and chiefs, besides a loan to be afterward made from America to France. To extract these conditions, every argument that meanness could suggest was employed by Talleyrand; he demanded to be fed as a lawyer or bribed as a friend. But the Americans were inexorable, and two of their number, Pinckney and Marshall, returned to announce to their countrymen the terms on which peace was offered. ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... to plant a blister there!' What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others and ignorance of ourselves—seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy—mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Martin foolishly admitted that he knew a great deal; perhaps he did this out of mere fatal vanity. Cross to France, however, he would not, even when offered a safe-conduct and promise of reward. Colbert therefore proposes to ask Charles to surrender the valet, and probably Charles descended to the meanness. By July 19, at all events, Louvois, the War Minister of Louis XIV., was bidding Saint- Mars, at Pignerol in Piedmont, expect from Dunkirk a prisoner of the very highest importance—a valet! This valet, now called "Eustache ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... spent the morning in stealing them—yes, stealing them, by highway robbery. And you have spent the afternoon in putting me in the wrong about them—in assuming that it was I who wanted to steal YOUR letters—in explaining that it all came about through my meanness and selfishness, and your goodness, your devotion, your self-sacrifice. ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... Dick could only feel and the Dean do no more than adumbrate; nay, in time, as he grew zealous in the cause, his self-interest and personal ambition would be conquered, or at least would be so blended and fused with the nobility of the cause as to lose any grossness or meanness which might be thought to characterise them in an uncompounded condition. All this might be achieved if only the great idea could be made to seem great enough and the potentialities which lay in its realisation ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... this characteristic made him commit many injustices. It was his habit to treat men as levers, which he put aside when he had no further use for them. He was quick of apprehension, and of very superior intelligence, and his whole character was a mixture of generosity and meanness, of greatness ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... all shams and all hypocrisies, and denounces lies. He is temperate in eating and drinking; he has no vices. He believes in friendship, in love, in truth. He labors for the good of his countrymen. He is affectionate to those who comprehend him. He accepts hospitalities, but will not stoop to meanness or injustice. He will not return to his native city, which he loves so well, even when permitted, if obliged to submit to humiliating ceremonies. He even refuses a laurel crown from any city but from the one in which he was born. No honors could tempt him ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... went to de War de old overseer tried himself in meanness over de slaves as seemingly he tried to be important. One day de slaves caught him and one held him whilst another knocked him in de ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... heart sang a sort of fierce paean: as a woman, delivered of a man-child, goes triumphing to meet the sordidness of death, so was there in Rainham's rapid acceptance of his fruitless and ineffectual love a distinct sense of victory, in which pain expired—victory over the meanness and triviality of modern life, which could never seem quite mean and trivial again, since he had proved it to be capable of such moments; had looked once—and could so sing his "Nunc Dimittis"—upon ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... about business a great deal more serious than that. We are doing our fighting with the Captain looking at us, and that should be a stimulus, a joy and not a terror. Realise God's eye watching you, and sin, and meanness, and negligence, and selfishness, and sensuality, and lust, and passion, and all the other devils that are in you will vanish like ghosts at cockcrow. 'Walk before Me,' and if you feel that I am beside you, you cannot sin. 'Walk before Me, and be ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... concerning their footmen's calves. Nevertheless, to the end he was not kinder to Dives' oppression, less sympathetic towards the troubles of Lazarus, nor more indulgent to the vulgarity of the snob; nor a whit more tolerant of viciousness, affectation, or meanness ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... he, "the passage of the 'Memoires de D'Aubigny,' in which that devoted servant, a Gascon like myself, poor as myself, and, I was going to add, brave as myself, relates instances of the meanness of Henry IV.? My father always told me, I remember, that D'Aubigny was a liar. But, nevertheless, examine how all the princes, the issue of the great Henry, keep up the character ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... him appear quite agreeable, and notwithstanding all that I had heard and known of him, I fancied his brutality was frankness, and his presumption strength of character.—I gave him credit especially for a happy instinct for true merit, and an honourable antipathy to flattery and meanness.—The manner in which he pronounced the words, fawning puppy! applied to Sir Amyas Courtney, pleased me peculiarly—and I had just exalted Frumpton into a great man, and an original genius, when he fell flat to the level, and below ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... Democratic majority into a minority, "deserves," says von Holst, "to be counted among the most meritorious proofs of the sound and honorable feeling of the American nation."[57] But while the administration had thus smirched the inception and the whole character of the war with meanness and dishonor, the generals and the army were winning abundant glory for the national arms. Good strategy achieved a series of brilliant victories, and fortunately for the Whigs General Taylor and General Scott, together with a large proportion ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... to Mackenzie's imagination to fix his identity, not bending to reveal his name. Hector Hall, Mackenzie knew him to be, on account of his pistols, on account of the cold meanness of his eyes which Dad Frazer had described as holding such a throat-cutting look. But armed as he was, severe and flash-tempered as he seemed, Mackenzie was not in any sort of a flurry to give ground before him. He looked up at him coolly, felt in his pocket ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... off'n 'em.[5] I'm one of the lads that knocked the bark off this country. An' I've got the best bunch of man-hunters you ever did see. I'm not braggin'. I'm tellin' you that my boys will make you look like a plugged nickel if you don't get shet of yore meanness. They're a hell-poppin' bunch of jim-dandies, an' don't ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... due may be spilled over or suffered to leak out or that it may heap up its own measure over full in return. [Footnote: We have here, first, a figure drawn from pecuniary accounts, then one from liquid measure, then one from dry measure—all designed to affix the brand of the most petty meanness on the (so called) friendship which makes it a point neither to leave nor to brook a preponderance of obligation on either side.] But worst of all is the third limit which prescribes that friends shall ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... New York" represents a class of publications which has, of late, in many ways, been set before the public with too great liberality. The sole object seems to be to exhibit the "Yankee" character in its traditional deformities of stupidity and meanness,—otherwise denominated simplicity and shrewdness. Mr. Jonathan Slick is in no respect different from the ordinary fabulous Yankee. An illiterate clown he is, who, visiting New York, contrives by vice of impudence, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... gone to her to beg for her tears? What need had he to poison her life? Oh, the meanness ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... with consummate perfection; to freight the miserable barque of his fortunes with so precious a cargo; to encounter the feeling—and there is no escape for it—"I must drag that woman down, not alone into obscurity, but into all the sordid meanness of a small condition, that never can emerge into anything better." He cannot disguise from himself that it is not within his reach to attain power, or place, or high consideration. Such men make no name in life; they leave no mark on their time. They are heaven-born ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... estimated at one hundred guineas value, and upon which the names of the winning horses, the winner, and jockey were usually engraved. William III. added to the plates, as did Queen Anne; but in 1720 George I. discontinued this royal encouragement to the sport, apparently through sheer meanness. Since that period 'King's Plates' and 'Queen's Plates' ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... and benevolence anticipated the demands of poverty.[I] Every misfortune was relieved, as it were, before it could be felt, without ostentation on the one hand, and without meanness on the other. It was, in short, a society of brethren; every individual of which was equally ready to give, and to receive, what he thought the common right of mankind. So perfect a harmony naturally prevented all those connections ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... action. Yes; for all her softness and femininity, she could freeze iron-hard at the suspicion of baseness; and I have seen the blood flush from her white cap to her lace collar when she has heard of an act of meanness. ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... to be jealous of the success of others. It is the other way about: we are the most extraordinarily ambitious, and the success of one man in any walk of life spurs the others on. It does not sour them, and it is a libel even to suggest so great a meanness of spirit. ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... on our haunches and go through our postures for a crumb! How we crawl on our belly and lick their feet for a stroke and a smile! What a hound's life does that man lead who lives upon the approval and the praise and the patronage of men! What meanness fills his mind; what baseness fills his heart! What a shameful leash he is led about the world in! How kicked about and spat upon he is; while not half so much as he knows all the time that he deserves to be! Better far be a dog at once and bay the ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... soul was enlightened with ascetic penances, and his organs and their functions were under complete control. His practices and his speech were both very nice. He was contented and without avarice. He was without meanness of any kind and without envy. He was old and used to observe the vow of silence. And he was the refuge whom all creatures ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... member of the piratical body, and was proud to consider himself a buccaneer, did not understand the true nature of a pirate. Under the brutality, the cruelty, the dishonesty, and the recklessness of the sea-robbers of those days, there was nearly always meanness and cowardice. Roc, as we have said in the beginning of this sketch, was a typical pirate; under certain circumstances he showed himself to have all those brave and savage qualities which Esquemeling esteemed and revered, and under other circumstances ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... characteristics of Hoxton: congratulate ourselves on the amount of light, air and beauty which its inhabitants enjoy, the sort of children that are reared in it, as the best we can do towards furthering the racial aim? It is a monument of stupidity no less than of meanness. Yet the conception of God which the whole religious experience of growing man presses on us, suggests that both intelligence and love ought to characterize His ideal for human life. Look then at these, ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... word in the English language. If there is a word in the English language that means treachery, servility, and cowardice, it is that word 'conservative.' It ought never hereafter to be on the lips of an American statesman. For twenty years it has stood in America the synonym of meanness and baseness. I have studied somewhat carefully the political history of the country during the last fifteen or twenty years, and I have always noticed that when I heard a man prate about being a conservative and about conservatism, ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... scorn—"it's not me that bothers. But it's the nasty meanness of it. Me writing him such loving letters"—she put her hands before her face and laughed malevolently—"and sending him nice little cakes and bits I thought he'd fancy all the time. You bet he fed that gurrl on my things—I know he did. It's just like him.—I'll bet they laughed together ...
— Wintry Peacock - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • D. H. Lawrence
... that his speech was of one gently born—"nay, it is truly no gentleman's conduct, but in these days, when Kings are laid low at the hands of traitors"—and his voice had a bitter ring—"and rebels sit in high places, a gentleman must perforce descend to trickery and meanness now and then." ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... not the least touch of exaggeration, and all the values are kept to a marvel. Looking at the minor characters, perhaps one may say that the husband, Stahov, will be the most suggestive, and not the least familiar character, to English households. His essentially masculine meanness, his self-complacency, his unconscious indifference to the opinion of others, his absurdity as 'un pere de famille' is balanced by the foolish affection and jealousy which his wife, Anna Vassilyevna, cannot help feeling towards him. ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... in the continued and repeated use of contrast. The first paragraph, with its beautiful description of the "Golden River" and the "Treasure Valley," is itself a perfect contrast to the second, with its "Black Brothers" and all their meanness; and we have already seen that the second paragraph itself is ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... more concealment or locking up, or doling out of Yarmouth bloaters, or any other thing. A great change had been wrought in the hitherto inexorable old man of the sea. His conduct became marked by a generosity that wiped out recollections of past meanness. His natural make-up prevented him from giving prominence to his better side, or of making himself endeared to those faithful men who spent a long life in his service, sharing his precarious fortunes in working and navigating a vessel that ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... American born. It is not that there is no sizzling or crackling radiator, no tropic-breathing register; but that the grate in most of the houses that the traveler sees, the public-houses namely, seems to have shrunken to a most sordid meanness of size. In Exeter, for example, where there is such a beautiful cathedral, one found a bedroom grate of the capacity of a quart pot, and the heating capabilities of a glowworm. I might say the same of the Plymouth grate, but not quite the same of the ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... among the men—their generosity, kindness, chivalry, patience, and self-sacrifice. The sins which they dislike are those sins of the spirit which Christ denounced most bitterly—hypocrisy, pride, meanness. They love giving, they bear pain patiently, they honor true womanhood, they ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... cantankerous ways, how she eternally fidgeted over a little harmless dust about the corners of the furniture, as if it was not the nature of dust to settle on furniture; how she would have window panes washed which had never been washed before; her meanness in inquiring about the consumption of oil and milk and firewood, matters which the saheb had never stooped to look into; and her unworthy and insulting practice of locking up stores, and doling them out day by day, not to ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... to the test by rough and angry times, as Waller was, may be pitied, but meanness is nothing but contemptible under any circumstances. If it be true that "every conqueror creates a Muse," Cromwell was unfortunate. Even Milton's sonnet, though dignified, is reserved if not distrustful. Marvell's "Horatian Ode," the most truly classic in our language, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... to make us atrabiliar! Here we see words in their weaknesses and their meannesses, as elsewhere in their glory and beauty. And not so much their meanness and weakness, as that of those who have distorted these innocent servants of truth to become tools of falsehood and the abject instruments of the extinction ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... honourable a man as was ever loved and deluded by woman. It may be said that his blindness in love proved the point, for shrewdness in love usually goes with meanness in general. Once the passion had mastered him, the intellect had gone for naught. Knight, as a lover, was more single-minded and far simpler than his friend Stephen, who in other capacities ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... were soon scattered to the winds, and I sent a repetition of my former request to Louisa, couched in the most affectionate language, adding many words of endearment, without once thinking of the meanness of thus employing her affection to pander to my ...
— Hurrah for New England! - The Virginia Boy's Vacation • Louisa C. Tuthill
... London, and possibly some of it was used for repairing the British squadron which Hawkins had pronounced as being composed of the finest ships in the world for him to hand over to Philip, even though they had been neglected owing to the Queen's meanness. The plausible way in which the great seaman put this proposition caught the imagination of the negotiators. They were captivated by him. He had caused them to believe that he was a genuine seceder from heresy and from allegiance to the Queen of England, and ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... Fame is looked on as a Meanness [and [10]] Imperfection in the greatest Character. A solid and substantial Greatness of Soul looks down with a generous Neglect on the Censures and Applauses of the Multitude, and places a Man beyond the little Noise and Strife ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... History," in which the grandfather is the principal personage, with which he flatters himself he has duped every body else, or to disarm him of any intention of publishing the true history of his connection with the British Commissioners.—And what most of all enhances the meanness of Mr. Reed's conduct is the fact, that, but a year or two since, he was accustomed, at the Whig political meetings of this city, to make Mr. Bancroft (who then held the office of Collector of the Port of Boston, and was a prominent Democrat,) the especial object of his abuse, lavished ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... perplexity), are all significant. The peculiar grandeur of such expressions lies partly in the dimness of the approximation to any attempt at settling their limits, and still more in this, that the conventional character, and consequent meanness of ordinary human dates, are abandoned in the celestial chronologies. Hours and days, or lunations and months, have no true or philosophic relation to the origin, or duration, or periods of return belonging to great events, or revolutionary agencies, or vast national crimes; but the ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... whom she would never in any way acknowledge again, were invited; nor did the knowledge of what it meant cause many of them to decline the questionable honor—which fact carried in it the best justification of which the meanness and insult were capable. Mrs. Wardour accepted for herself and Letty; but in their case Lady Margaret did call, and in person give the invitation. Godfrey positively refused to accompany them. He would not be patronized, he said; "—and by an ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... and this was that perhaps even her temperament was not what she had believed it, but was still largely unknown to her. She had always known that she was quick and passionate, but she certainly had not supposed that she was capable of the meanness of wondering whether Mr. Ludlow would take her note as less final than she had meant it, and would perhaps seek some explanation of it. No girl that she ever heard or read of, had ever fallen quite so low as to hope that; but was not she hoping just that? Perhaps she had even written ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... command of the little Midshipman with him at his right hand; he had meant to do his duty by him, and had felt almost as kindly towards the boy as if they had been shipwrecked and cast upon a desert place together. And now, that the false Rob had brought distrust, treachery, and meanness into the very parlour, which was a kind of sacred place, Captain Cuttle felt as if the parlour might have gone down next, and not surprised him much by its sinking, or given him any ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... of meanness could he perpetrate, than stealing away the heart of that young girl, or are you so blind you cannot see through ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... femininity should be hedged with. I couldn't endure it. I never had to, and I couldn't submit to being estimated every day and in the intimacy of home life—according to the old-fashioned standards that narrow a woman's heart and mind until they hold nothing but pettiness and smallness and meanness of spirit. Because I couldn't, I should make you the ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... Patriarch. Certainly he had seemed to threaten her, but it was hard to believe that he had sunk so low as to be capable of criticising her work, not on its own merits, but with regard to the terms he should be on with its author. She was too upright herself, however, to think such dishonest meanness possible, so she put the suspicion far from her, and tried to find some charitable explanation of the several signs of paltriness she had already detected, and to think of him as he had seemed to her in the old days, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... nothing for your money, and less for you, who show the meanness there is in your nature when you speak of Harold Hastings as you have done. Supposing he is poor—suppose he is a painter and a carpenter, and has been what you started to call him—is he less a man for that? A thousand times no, and there is more ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... Haven't I marched and starved and shared my plans with you? If there had been any meanness in you, wouldn't I have found it out? What's more, Benson knows what really happened, and so does Colonel Challoner. How else could Clarke have put ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... services I always used to try and make them feel that Christ was the fulfilment of all the best things that they admired, that He was their natural hero. I would tell them some story of heroism and meanness contrasted, of courage and cowardice, of noble forgiveness and vile cruelty, and so get them on the side of the angels. Then I would try and spring it upon them that Christ was the Lord of the heroes and the brave men and the noble men, and ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... working hard over his spelling-book, and few of them now had the meanness to laugh when a word ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)
... would give up all we own were the glory or honour of England at stake. And yet you call us rebels, and accuse us of meanness and of parsimony. If you wish money, leave the matter to our colonial assemblies, and see how readily you will get it. But if you wish war, persist in trying to grind the spirit from a people who have ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... rapids of Niagara, and lay it on our unmoistened paper without breaking a bubble or losing a speck of foam. We steal a landscape from its lawful owners, and defy the charge of dishonesty. We skin the flints by the wayside, and nobody accuses us of meanness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... warehouses, completely dwarfing the adjacent farm-houses. Many of the residences we found deserted; and of those that were occupied but few gave us greeting. But the welcome of this few was so hearty and substantial as to put us in a humor to forgive the meanness of the rest. ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... rewarded him with the sixty thousand gold pieces, which had been withheld by Mahmud. Meantime, Ferdusi's poem of Yussuf, and his magnificent verses on several subjects, had received the fame they deserved. Shah Mahmud's late remorse awoke. Thinking by a tardy act of liberality to repair his former meanness, he dispatched to the author of the Shah Namah the sixty thousand pieces he had promised, a robe of state, and many apologies and expressions of friendship and admiration, requesting his return, and professing great sorrow for the past. But when the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... known that the Good People cannot abide meanness. They like to be liberally dealt with when they beg or borrow of the human race; and, on the other hand, to those who come to them in need, ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... reference to 'the high-minded and intelligent William Taylor,' because William Taylor, whose influence upon Borrow's destiny was so pronounced, has been revealed to many by the slanders of Harriet Martineau, that extraordinary compound of meanness and generosity, of poverty-stricken intelligence and rich endowment. In her Autobiography, published in 1877, thirty-four years after Robberds's Memoir of William Taylor, she dwells upon the drinking propensities of ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... with the publication. It is Palmerston on whom the blame ought to rest, and on whom it will rest, only nobody seems to take the least interest in the dispute, and he brazens it out in a very unblushing manner. I am more particularly struck with the meanness here exhibited, from having just been reading Lord Chatham's correspondence, in which his noble and lofty character, so abhorrent of everything like trickery, shabbiness, and underhand dealing, shines forth with peculiar lustre. ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... little depth of the mass, much of the city has been exposed to view. Street succeeds street in various directions, and porticos, theatres, temples, magazines, shops, and private mansions, all remain to attest the mixture of elegance and meanness of Pompeii; and we can, from an inspection, not only form a most correct idea of the customs and tastes of the ancient inhabitants, but are thereby the better enabled to judge of those of contemporary cities, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... my own acquaintance with Falconer commenced. I had just come out of one of the theatres in the neighbourhood of the Strand, unable to endure any longer the dreary combination of false magnanimity and real meanness, imported from Paris in the shape of a melodrama, for the delectation of the London public. I had turned northwards, and was walking up one of the streets near Covent Garden, when my attention was attracted to a woman who ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... could never have intended to sustain, or which in the first collision your pusillanimity threw away. Yet I deprecate your perfidy even more than I despise your weakness. I can comprehend the effrontery of a fair aggression; but I scorn the meanness of intrigue. I may face the man-at-arms, but I shudder at the assassin. I may determine to hunt down and destroy the lion, but I disdain the trap and the pitfall. And what has been the pretext of his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... irony, the meanness, of the trade of life that virtue may prove vicious in effect; and viciousness may produce good fruit. Figs ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... times it happens that the meanness and trifling nature of a cause not very obvious to observation has occasioned it to be entirely overlooked, even on account of that very meanness, since no one is willing to acknowledge that he has been alarmed by a cause of ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... For thou art the orphan's father, the widow's husband, The desolate woman's brother, the garment of the motherless. Let me celebrate thy name in this land for every virtue. A guide without greediness of heart; A great one without any meanness. Destroying deceit, encouraging justice; Coming to the cry, and allowing utterance. Let me speak, do thou hear and do justice; O praised! whom the praised ones praise. Abolish oppression, behold me, I am overladen, Reckon with me, behold ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... responsibility rests with him. Now is this so? When we see an important firm representing a large capital and employing many hands, paying a wage barely sufficient for the maintenance of life, we are apt to accuse the employers of meanness and extortion: we say this firm could afford to pay higher wages, but they prefer to take higher profits; the necessity of the poor is their opportunity. Now this accusation ought to be fairly faced. It will then be ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... affection or some great self-sacrifice, and I respect and admire them, and think they are like that all through. And the day comes when they are not quite straightforward, or are guilty of some petty meanness, which a man who is not fit to black their ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... his mother crept up the bank of the river, stopping occasionally to let the old negress rest, his impression of the meanness and shabbiness of the whole village grew. From the top of the bank the single business street ran straight back from the river. It was stony in places, muddy in places, strewn with goods-boxes, broken planking, ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... technical critic; he was for ever dominated by an intense personal fervour. He cared little for the manner of saying a thing, so long as the heart spoke out frankly and freely; he strove to discern the energy of the soul in all men; he could forgive everything except meanness, cowardice, egotism and conceit; there was no fault of a generous and impulsive nature that ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... in astonishment. A fleeting sense of shame swept through his festering mind. Then the lustful meanness of his corrupted soul welled up anew, and he laughed brutally. The idea was delightfully novel; the girl beautifully audacious; the situation piquantly amusing. He would draw her out to his further enjoyment. "So," he observed parenthetically, "I judge you are ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... as he talked on, a sense of shame from another side creep towards him and begin to enclose him. Shame at the smallness, meanness, emptiness of the ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... in countenance. I know already from this day what your intellectual life will be. I fear for you many and deep sorrows. I hope for you the purest of joys. Guard within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness. Know how to replace in your heart, by the happiness of those you love, the happiness that may be wanting to yourself. Keep the hope of another life. It is there that mothers meet their sons again. Love all God's creatures. Forgive those who are ill-conditioned, resist those who are ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... brother, would not the result have been for good? Would not Lubin's cottage have been better furnished, his hours more nobly employed; would he not have scorned to throw away so much money on sweetmeats; would not honest Pride have kept him from the meanness of giving ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... meanness had been brought to light by an explanation between the lady and the Englishman. On his saying to the princess that he was ready to do anything for her, and that the two hundred sequins he had given her were as nothing ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... boundless harmony; until, as such things happen, they both fell in love with one maid, which brought out the differences in their natures to a surprising degree, converting Dan'l into an Early Christian for all to behold, while Phoby turned to envy and spite, and to a disgraceful meanness of spirit. The reason of this to some extent was that the girl—Amelia Sanders by name—couldn't abide him because of the colour of his hair and his splay feet: yet I believe she would have married him (her father being a boat-builder in a small ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lips. Undoubtedly, my presence near the scene had contributed to give him the odious, infamous, ignoble courage of a murderer. Were it not for me, he would have fled. I had formed that soul, trained that mind, enlarged that heart; I knew it; he was incapable of cowardice or meanness. Do justice to that involuntarily guilty arm, do justice to him, whom God, in his mercy, has allowed to sleep in his quiet grave, where you have wept for him, suspecting, it may be, the extenuating truth. Punish, curse the guilty creature before you! Horrified by ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... engravings. He wrote it there with the intention of deluding his countrymen into the belief that he was absent, and about to settle in Italy—an impression which would materially raise the price of his productions. Strange and sad it is to see so much genius united with so much meanness—the head of fine gold with the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... could prove to her friend that no such beginning was possible. In the first place there was the falsehood, the base falsehood, which Sir Francis had told. In order to save himself he had declared that he had rejected her. It was very mean. At this moment its peculiar meanness made her feel doubly sure that the man was altogether unfitted to be her husband. But she would allow the false assertion to pass unnoticed. If he could find a comfort in that let him have it. Perhaps upon the whole it would be better that some such story should go forth in ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... cares beguil'd, The sports of children satisfy the child; Each nobler aim, repress'd by long control, 155 Now sinks at last, or feebly mans the soul; While low delights, succeeding fast behind, In happier meanness occupy the mind: As in those domes, where Caesars once bore sway, Defac'd by time and tottering in decay, 160 There in the ruin, heedless of the dead, The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed, And, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... was open to view and accessible on the other three sides. Diard paid the rent in advance, and left Juana barely enough money for the necessary expenses of three months, a sum not exceeding a thousand francs. Madame Diard made no observation on this unusual meanness. When her husband told her that he was going to the watering-places and that she would stay at Bordeaux, Juana offered no difficulty, and at once formed a plan to teach the children Spanish and Italian, and to make ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... large, though somewhat opposed divisions of mankind, the philosophic pessimist and the convinced and consistent Christian believer, will tell us that this is at least not one of the points in which it is unfaithful to life. If the author is closer and more faithful in his study of meanness and vice than in his studies of nobility and virtue, the blame is due at least as much to his models as to himself. If he has seldom succeeded in combining a really passionate with a really noble conception of love, very few of his countrymen have been more fortunate in that respect. ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... astringent stage of suspicion and mistrust is as quick to declare itself as the expansive flow of confidence is slow in gathering way. The creditor who has once turned into the narrow path of commercial fears and precautions speedily takes a course of malignant meanness which puts him below the level of his debtor. He passes from specious civility to impatient rage, to the surly clamor of importunity, to bursts of disappointment, to the livid coldness of a mind made up to vengeance, and the scowling insolence of ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... hatred of four millions of people—the guarding yourselves from universal disaffection by a police; a confidence in the little cunning of Bow Street, when you might rest your security upon the eternal basis of the best feelings: this is the meanness and madness to which nations are reduced when they lose sight of the first elements of justice, without which a country can be no more secure than it can be healthy without air. I sicken at such ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... Gordon, a surgeon. Gordon, again, was an excellent man, appreciated by Smollett himself in after days, and the odious Potion of "Roderick Random" must, like his rival, Crab, have been merely a fancy sketch of meanness, hypocrisy, and profligacy. Perhaps the good surgeon became the victim of that "one continued string of epigrammatic sarcasms," such as Mr. Colquhoun told Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Smollett used to play off on his companions, "for which no talents could compensate." ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... and Edward Hogg (see page 109). In reply Lamb says (Good Friday, 1830):—"I do assure you that your verses gratified me very much, and my sister is quite proud of them. For the first time in my life I congratulated myself upon the shortness and meanness of my name. Had it been Schwartzenberg or Esterhazy it would have put you ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Poetry the Dignity and meanness of the Persons represented make two different Species of imitation the one Tragick, which agrees to none but great and Illustrious persons, the other Comick, which suits with common and gentile humors: so in Epick too, there ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... of seeing the Brazilian in the church; for Crevel, now so entirely the husband, had invited him out of bravado. And the Baron's presence at the breakfast astonished no one. All these men of wit and of the world were familiar with the meanness of ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... everything that is right and proper and sensible with inevitable regularity. He always wore just the right and proper clothes, steering the narrow way between the smart and the shabby, always subscribed to the right charities, just the judicious compromise between ostentation and meanness, and never failed to have his hair cut to ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells |
