"Rottenness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... then violently overthrown by the Revolution, it seemed to be dead. But, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, behold it springing up again spontaneously, in one direct, new, strong and active jet and higher than the old one, free of the excrescences, rottenness and parasites which, under the ancient regime, disfigured and discolored it. No more compulsory vows, no "frocked" younger sons "to make an elder," no girls immured from infancy, kept in the convent throughout their ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... that kind. But there, there is nothing subsists that is not of this character, and even more beautiful than these. 137. But the reason of this is, because the stones there are pure, and not eaten up and decayed, like those here, by rottenness and saltness, which flow down hither together, and which produce deformity and disease in the stones and the earth, and in other things, even animals and plants. But that earth is adorned with all these, and, ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... individual alone existed, and that society was an artificial product of the "social contract" and, as he attributed (just as Aristotle had done in the case of slavery) a permanent human character to the transitory manifestations of the period, such as the rottenness of the regime under which he lived, he further thought that Society was the cause of all evils, and that individuals are all born good and equal. At the end of the nineteenth century, on the contrary, all the inductive ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... you think that four years' insanity is going to prove the remedy?" Vane laughed cynically. "Except that there are a few million less men to carry on the rottenness"— ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... accused of niggardliness; when he made war on abuses he was called a barbarian; when he frankly confessed, in his appeal to the German Diets, that perchance the whole evil infecting the church came from the rottenness of the Curia, he was assailed as putting arms into the arsenal of the enemy. His greatest crime in the eyes of his court was that he was a foreigner, an austere, phlegmatic man, who could understand neither their ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... effected as gradually as possible, so as to neither interfere with the plans of the war now waging, nor to stir up needless political strife. We simply asked for some firmly-based official recognition of the rottenness of the 'slavery plank in the Southern platform,' and trusted that the utmost caution and deliberation would be observed in eventually forwarding emancipation. We were literally alone, as a publication, in these views, and were ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... said Lindau. "It would be a bity. I hobe it will last till it feelss its rottenness, like Herodt. Boat, when its hour gomes, when it trope to bieces with the veight off its own ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... over money and by reason of my haughty disposition at that time, I alienated the good will of a distant relative, and one day he east in my face my doubtful birth and shameful descent. I thought it all a slander and demanded satisfaction. The tomb which covered so much rottenness was again opened and to my consternation the whole truth came out to overwhelm me. To add to our sorrow, we had had for many years an old servant who had endured all my whims without ever leaving us, contenting himself merely with weeping and groaning at the rough ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Rottenness of all kinds is soon carried from the face of the land by the wise arrangements of Nature for preserving the world from plagues and diseases, which the decaying and unconsumed bodies of animals and vegetables ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... smile of a Jupiter over his writhing sacrifices. At times I laughed at the tortures of my own heart, saying to it, 'Writhe on, worm; thou deservest thy writhing in that thou writhest. Godless creature, why dost thou not laugh with me? Am I not merry over thee and the world—in that ye are both rottenness to the core?' The next moment my heart and I would come together with a shock, and I knew it was ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... With the drugs of Suian this Hana would palsy O'Iwa's mind and body; poison the very springs of life, cut off all hope of issue. Ah! Vain the love of a man. All is granted him; body and goods. Iemon sells Hana for a street harlot. Out with him! Help!... Ah! Kwaiba aids—in all his rottenness. How horrible he is—huge vacant eye holes, the purple whitish flesh gnawed and eaten.... Ugh! He stinks!... Nay! 'Tis not Kwaiba. 'Tis Cho[u]bei: Cho[u]bei the leper, who would embrace this Hana. Iemon comes. There is murder ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... independent thought, of much self-reliance. They began to wonder why they could not vote, when the sloping-shouldered, sloping-skulled youths who proposed to marry them, or had married them, had that right and did not exercise it and showed no information and no concern as to the rottenness of the local government.... The upper class of women are enlisted. Woman suffrage is the one interesting subject of discussion in ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... end. As the arts decay through neglect, as the body, once healthy and alert, will grow weak through sloth and indolence, even so the powers of the spirit, temperance, self-control, and courage, if we grow slack in training, fall back once more to rottenness and death. [76] We must watch ourselves; we must not surrender to the sweetness of the day. It is a great work, methinks, to found an empire, but a far greater to keep it safe. To seize it may be the fruit of daring and daring only, but to hold it is impossible ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... themselves. It is not charity these people need or want; it is justice. True, Christ said, "The poor ye have always with you," and it is probable that we shall always need to support by charity the crippled, the insane, and the unfortunate, but it is a certain indication of rottenness in any civilization that makes charity necessary for a man or woman who is able and willing ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... driving the money-changers from His Father's temple even with a whip. But He discriminated between the sin and the sinner. The fig-tree He blasted was one which, bearing no fruit, yet made a false show of health: the Pharisees He denounced were men who covered rottenness with a pretence of religion; the sinners He consorted with had a saving knowledge of their vileness. Sin He knew to be human and bound up in our nature: all was pardonable save the refusal to acknowledge ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... coffin. The bourian, flaring up, threw an uncertain bloody-bluish tinge on all around. Leaning over the dead, the murderer, paler than the corpse itself, gazed unmovingly on his work; he forgot why he had come—he turned away his head from the reek of rottenness—his gorge rose within him when he saw the bloody-headed worms that crawled from under the clothes. Interrupted in their loathsome work, they, scared by the light, crept into a mass, and hid themselves beneath each other. At length, steeling himself to the deed, he brandished his dagger, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... been predicted by writers on the state of Ireland, that, owing to the rottenness at the foundation of the social fabric, it would come down with a crash some day. The facts reported by the census commissioners of 1841 showed that this consummation could not be far off. Out of a population of 8,000,000, there were ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... scarcely say that I did, father; for although I had much to remark concerning their want of culture, and their servility, and their greed, and the absurdity of many of their customs, and the rottenness of most of their beliefs, and the thousand ways in which they spoiled lives that might have been beautiful and harmonious, I soon discovered that they were so absolutely swayed by the example of the higher orders that ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... 'Tis fabled there are fruits with tempting rinds 220 That are all dust and rottenness within. Would'st thou I should ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... strikes me that way, now you speak of it. They ain't no games or tricks here, no cheatin' an' no lyin'. Them trees just stand up natural an' strong an' clean like young boys their first time in the ring before they've learned its rottenness an' how to double-cross an' lay down to the bettin' odds an' the fight-fans. Yep; it is brave. Say, Saxon, you see things, don't you?" His pause was almost wistful, and he looked at her and studied her with a caressing softness that ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... means God employed to work the miracle—are just the questions about which we need not trouble our minds. We never shall know: and we need not know. The plain fact is, that the sacred river, pure and life-giving, became a detestable mass of rottenness—and with it all their streams and pools, and drinking water in vessels of wood and stone—for all, remember, came from the Nile, carried by canals and dykes over the whole land. 'And the fish that were in the river died, and the ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... a nation of grander promise than Greece or Rome? But Greece died of premature old age, and Rome of rottenness begotten of sin. But each of them, you will say, left a priceless heritage to the immortal race. But if Greece and Rome and a host of older nations, of which History has often forgotten the very name, have failed and died, can anything but ultimate failure await the ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... read in his Bible this passage: 'As the worm gnaweth the garment and rottenness the wood, so doth the weariness of solitude ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... I'm going to hear. I've heard enough to make me sick. I hope nobody else in this town will ever hear it. It's worse than I had ever imagined—you allowing that woman to support you! And it's nauseating to think that you don't realize the rottenness of it. But you seem to be incapable of any decent feeling ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... of hope left for you or for any man on earth. If Jesus be indeed an Almighty Savior, and if he has indeed risen from the dead, then, through the power of his mighty love, your filthy soul may be washed from its sins, and your mortal body may be raised from the rottenness of the grave. But if Christ be not risen, you are yet in your sins. You have no notion that any of the gods of the heathen, or the precepts of the Koran, can purify your heart. You know well that Infidelity never sanctified any of your comrades. Conscience tells you that you are not any better ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... late, but in what a soil! On the other hand, if a man has found his earthly father harsh and uncongenial, his conception of his Heavenly Parent will be painful. He will begin by seeing God as an exaggerated likeness of his father. He will therefore shrink from Him. The rottenness of stillborn love in the heart of a child poisons the blood of the soul, and ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... dream. If it had been a dream it had been an extraordinarily vivid and convincing dream. He still seemed to be in the presence of God, and it perplexed him not at all that he should also be in the presence of Croker. The feeling of mental rottenness and insecurity that had weakened his thought through the period of his illness, had gone. He was secure ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... and be Christlike; but only on condition that he yields to no temptation to drop his conduct to the level around him, and is never guilty of compromise. Once yield, and all is over. Flowers grow on a dunghill, and the very reeking rottenness may ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... teeming with the distorted colliers. The same secret seemed to be working in the souls of all alike, Gudrun, Palmer, the rakish young bloods, the gaunt, middle-aged men. All had a secret sense of power, and of inexpressible destructiveness, and of fatal half-heartedness, a sort of rottenness in the will. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... in the life of a people; it comes far below many other things in importance. A short rainfall for a year is more disastrous than a mad king; a plague is worse than fifty grasping governors; social rottenness is incomparably more dangerous ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... humorous, satirical sketches he swept away the metaphysical dreaming and foolish romantic affectation then in fashion, and taught men to see their country as it was, in all its hideous ugliness. With his help the young generation perceived the rottenness of the Administration, and the meanness, stupidity, dishonesty, and worthlessness of the landed proprietors, whom he made the special butt of his ridicule. The recognition of defects produced a desire for ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... praised an enemy is shown to this vile mob by the light thrown off from the radiant power of France as the greatest of men; he is confounded with his supporting element, even as the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias, that never spared a woman in his lust, seemed the holiest of deities when his rottenness was concealed by ivory and gold, and his libidinous head was lighted up by sunbeams from above. Here is Lord Byron connecting, in the portrait of some poor melodramatic hero possibly, some noble quality of courage or perseverance ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... military discipline was laid bare years afterwards by Prussia. The French had no generals, while we had one general and an excellent body of soldiers. Unquestionably the Russian war did us the service of thoroughly exposing the rottenness of our military system so far as concerned the officering of the army. The principle followed was precisely that complained of by Sir Thomas Picton forty years before; there was no actual test of fitness until it came to be ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... rejoinder to a son endeavouring to raise a monument to his beloved and respected parent. But, if we will rake up rottenness from the grave—rottenness in which we are interested—we must take our chance whether we shall find a Hamlet who will say, 'Alas! poor Yorick!' and say NO MORE than the musing ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... the ceiling is by Giulio and the walls are by his pupils. The whole illustrates, with every variety of fantastic invention, the story of Psyche, as told by Apuleius, and deserves to be curiously studied as a part of the fair outside of a superb and corrupt age, the inside of which was full of rottenness. The civilization of Italy, as a growth from the earliest Pagan times, and only modified by Christianity and the admixture of Northern blood and thought, is yet to be carefully analyzed; and until this analysis is made, discussion of certain features must necessarily ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... degrees myself, and have lived to laugh at them afterward. And I have had lessons that I hope you'll never have to learn. When I found out that my third wife had known a gambler before she married me, I found out what the Bible means by rottenness of the bones with which it says an evil woman uncrowns her husband. I'll tell you about it some day. But you've not been scarred in this little side-play. You're not even powder burnt. Why, in less than a month you'll be just as happy again as if ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... good. I feel that my situation in the country, my power, my popularity, my consequence, nay, my character, are all risked; but I have done right, and therefore in the end it must turn out to have been wise. If this fail me, the pillared firmament is rottenness, and ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... brats who are in that hutch of an after-castle. It's long enough since I sailed in such a small old-fashioned ship as this. She's no machines, and she's not even a steering mannikin. Look at the meanness of her furniture and (in your ear) I've suspicions that there's rottenness in her bottom. But she's the best I'd the means to buy, and if she reaches the place at the farther end I've got my eye on, we shall have to make a home there, or be content to die, for she'll never have strength to carry ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... been to chapel, he spoke better of you than he does of most: he said you was a fine old fellow, and an old-fashioned Puritan— he uses dreadful language, Mr. Lyon; but I saw he didn't mean you ill, for all that; he calls most folks' religion rottenness." ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... perpetrated only by the cruel and the heartless —so cruel and so heartless that they are utterly unfit to be trusted with a human life. They innoculate animals with a virus of disease; they put poison in their eyes until rottenness destroys the sight; until the poor brutes become insane. They given them a disease that resembles hydrophobia, that is accompanied by the most frightful convulsions and spasms. They put them in ovens to see what degree of heat it is that kills. They also try ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... and him safe in the streets of Toronto. I was not the least frightened for myself, but it was trying to see him always looking over, and about to lean against old crazy wooden balustrades that William said must have given way from sheer rottenness with any weight upon them. This is such a night, not a single cloud; the clearest possible sky and the moon shining brightly, as it did over the two Falls the first night we were here. Papa calls me every minute—"Oh come, do ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... believe, can hardly be acquainted with those alleys and stairways, narrow, dark, and foul. The unpaved ways show gaping holes in which the greasy mud lies thick or mingles with the pools of standing water, fed from every house and fermenting with rottenness. ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... capitalization on the one hand, and for construction out of earnings on the other, it may fairly be computed that, omitting the guarantees, the state had contributed from one-third to one-half their cost. The objections to this policy were manifold. It had been one great source of rottenness in politics. It had pauperized some sections of the country, leading them to look to the government to take the initiative in every movement. The land subsidies had delayed settlement, and the exemption ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... of these Messianic descriptions is the expulsion of the Assyrians; but most emphasis is laid on the restoration of the inner bases of the state, the rottenness of which has brought about and rendered inevitable the present crisis. The collapse of the government, the paralysis fallen on the law, the spoliation of the weak by the strong, these are the evils that call for redress. "How is the honourable city become a harlot; it was full of judgment, ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... indispensable, and it ended in his giving way. It certainly would have been very unjustifiable of him, after going all lengths with them, to hold back at last, but it shows the opinion of the best men among them of the rottenness of the concern. Lord Grey declined taking office, but wrote to say that the Government should have all his support, and that he wished Howick to be included in it, which is the same thing as if he were there himself. Nothing ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... corruption, the complete rottenness of our government stand so thoroughly exposed; never before were the American people brought face to face with the Judas nature of that political body, which has claimed for years to be absolutely beyond reproach, as the mainstay of our institutions, the true protector of the ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... not fit for riches, being ignorant of their true function; self-indulgence and moral rottenness follow wealth; because of the abuse of the power which wealth brings, we are taught that it is hard for the rich to enter ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... now rest in the full enjoyment of my labor and be satisfied." But when he does reach the end, when every pleasure tried, every beauty of surrounding created, and he expects to eat the fruit of his work, instantly his mouth is filled with rottenness and decay. "Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do; and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit; and there was no profit under the sun." Thus he groans again,—a groan that has ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... long silence that followed, there was only one answer—the subtle odour of rottenness ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... that I have adduced to prove that the yellow fever is not an American, but an African disease, imported in slave-ships, and periodically renewed from those cargoes of human rottenness and putrefaction, I hope ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... quarter is given, and where the merits of the deserving rather than the lapses of the blameworthy are torn as the most toothsome morsel in a furious feast. The Bible says that envy is the rottenness of the bones, meaning that utter corruption which has finally reached the framework of the structure. Society as now organized is really making progress toward the extinction of this hideous blemish. ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... girl was sobbing. Crumpled on the floor, she bent her proud head to the Maid's lap "What must I do?" she cried piteously. "The sight of you makes me feel my rottenness. I have been proud of worthless things and I have cherished that wicked pride that I might forget the doubts knocking on my heart. You say true, I am not content. I shall never be content, I am most malcontent ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... should be kept perfectly dry for about a fortnight, and, if they show any signs of rottenness, they should be carefully examined and the bad portions cut away; exposure to the air for a few days will generally cause these pared places to callus over. At all times, even when the stems appear to be in good health, a sharp look-out should be kept for patches of rottenness in the stem, ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... come upon the trench rather too suddenly, she wheeled round for the advantage of coming down upon it more determinately, rode resolutely at it, and gained the opposite bank. The hind feet of her horse were sinking back from the rottenness of the ground; but the strong supporting bridle-hand of Kate carried him forward; and in ten minutes more they would be in Cuzco. This being seen by the vicious Alcalde, who had built great hopes on the trench, he unslung his carbine, pulled up, and fired ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... immediately, and bury one decently, there'd be no particular horror in that kind of death. But to be found like that, and to lie in some riverside deadhouse down by Wapping, with a ghastly placard rotting on the rotting door, and nothing but ooze and slime and rottenness round about one—waiting to be identified! And who knows, after all, whether a dead man doesn't feel that ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... not be shaken off, before the conscience is emancipated. A political revolution must always be preceded by a spiritual one, that it might have some enduring effect. Otherwise, things will revert to their previous state of rottenness as sure as Allah lives. But mind you, I do not say, Cut down the hedges; mow the thistle-fields; uproot the obscene plants; no: I only ask you to go through them, and out of them, to return no more. Sell your little estate ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... highest point. Had they been in a temper to judge fairly, they would have perceived that for the maladministration of which they with good reason complained he was not responsible. He could as yet work only with the machinery which he had found; and the machinery which he had found was all rust and rottenness. From the time of the Restoration to the time of the Revolution, neglect and fraud had been almost constantly impairing the efficiency of every department of the government. Honours and public trusts, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... all racing is rotten—as everything connected with losing money must be. Out here, in addition to its inherent rottenness, it has the merit of being two-thirds sham; looking pretty on paper only. Every one knows every one else far too well for business purposes. How on earth can you rack and harry and post a man for his losings, when you are fond of his wife, and live in the same Station with him? ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of the general system of purgation and cleansing which one feels one's self in need of, in order to be in right relations to one's deity. For him who confesses, shams are over and realities have begun; he has exteriorized his rottenness. If he has not actually got rid of it, he at least no longer smears it over with a hypocritical show of virtue—he lives at least upon a basis of veracity. The complete decay of the practice of confession in Anglo-Saxon communities is a little hard to account for. Reaction ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... in a quiet corner of the club—it was on a Sunday evening—and had fallen into talking, first of all, of the present rottenness of the federal politics of the United States—not argumentatively or with any heat, but with the reflective sadness that steals over an elderly man when he sits in the leather armchair of a comfortable club smoking a good cigar and musing on the decadence ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... evening along the edge of the swamps, crossing several small creeks. In many places the wheels of the carts sank to the axletrees in consequence of the rottenness of the ground near the creeks. At length we camped, after travelling ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... greater affection for the lucubrations of Amiel than for Count Tolstoi's dealings with that odd compound of crudity and rottenness, the Russian nature; but Mr Arnold's "Amiel" is admirable. Never was there a more "gentlemanly correction," a more delicate and good-humoured setting to rights, than that which he administers to Amiel's two great ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... between the logs, of which the house was made; the flour-cask in the corner, serving also for a table; the blankets, spades, and other articles against the walls; the damp that blotched the ground; or the crop of vegetable rottenness in every crevice ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... my survey of this great subject may be, I trust I have said enough to expose the harmonious rottenness of the monetary policy of the Government, and by this I mean a rottenness so complete that it is impossible to find a single redeeming feature in the measure that has been adopted. It is rotten economically, it is rotten financially, ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... earnestly. "I love the country," he said; "it's fed me and harbored me. But I wouldn't lift a finger to put a single patch on this makeshift of a government; I wouldn't stave off the crash if I could. And it's coming! You and I have seen something of the rottenness of the underpinning which props up empires. You and I, Scarlett, have learned a few of the shameful secrets which even an enemy to France would not drag out ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... connects him with God in Christ. And so he may be like some fair tree that stands out there in the open, on all sides extending its equal beauty, with its stem symmetrical, cylindrical, perfect in its green cloud of foliage, yet there may be a worm at the root of it, and it may be given up to rottenness and destruction. Cultivated men may perish, and uncultured men may have the life. The maimed man may touch Christ with his stump, and so receive life, and the complete man may lay hold of the world and the flesh and the devil with his hands, and so ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Union Bank of Baltimore, he himself being a stockholder therein. And so thorough is my conviction of this principle, and so corrupting and pernicious do I deem the example which he has thereby set to future Committees of Ways and Means, to cite as precedents for yet ranker rottenness, that, if there were a prospect of his remaining in office longer than till the close of the present session of the Senate, I should deem it an indispensable, albeit a painful, duty of my station, to take the sense of this house on the question. And, sir, ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... confessed culprit would go towards the apartment of the holy inquisitor; but in the act of setting foot at its entrance, the trap opened, and the world of the living heard no more of him. I examined some of the earth found in the pit below this trap; it was a compost of common earth, rottenness, ashes, and human hair, fetid to the smell, and horrible to the sight and to the thought ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... little to laugh over. For the very rottenness of the service was due to the miserable and servile Ministry and Parliament of his Majesty, by means of which instruments he was forcing the colonies to the wall. Verily, that was a time when the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... you are"—he gave the dead man words—"what a colossal humbug. You and your nice Sunday go-to-meeting thoughts. It's so easy, isn't it? to dress up one's rottenness in pretty sentimental twaddle. But you don't deceive anybody. You don't even deceive yourself, not for three minutes at a stretch. You know that underneath all your humbugging pretenses the black sin is unchanged. You are no ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... Because France was not a nation, only a congeries of individualities. As Michelet says of the fourteenth century: "The kingdom was powerless, dying, losing self-consciousness, prostrate as a corpse. Gangrene had set in, maggots swarmed, I mean the brigands, English and Navarese. All this rottenness isolated, detached the members of the poor body from one another. One talks of the Kingdom, but there were no States General, nothing at all general, no intercommunication, the roads were in the power of cut-throats. The fields were all battlefields, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... mortals. He is always growing black with fury, and bullying weak men. On such occasions, his lips may be observed to be twisted into an evil sneer. He is a seducer and liar: he has ruined various women, and had special facilities for becoming acquainted with the rottenness of society: and occasionally he expresses, in language of the most profane, not to say blasphemous character, a momentary regret for having done so much harm,—such as the Devil might sentimentally have expressed, when he had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... material with a true worth and vitality of its own,—a race with elements of redemption in its heredity; whereas the great statesman, the really Great Soul who rebuilt Rome, had to do it, if the truth should be told, of materials little better than stubble and rottenness. Roman life, when Augustus came to work with it for his medium, was fearfully infected with corruption; one would have said that no power human or divine could have saved it. That he did with it as much as he did, is one of ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... which strikes me as rendering it unfit for the purpose to which it has been applied. I mean its extreme porousness, considered independently by the worm-eaten condition which is a consequence of navigation in these seas, and apart from the rottenness attendant upon age. It will appear perhaps an observation somewhat over-curious, but this wood would have every characteristic of Spanish oak, if Spanish oak were ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... this external rottenness moved the old-time Dark Forces, unchanged since the fall of Nicholas the Second, secret still and very active. The agents of the notorious Okhrana still functioned, for and against the Tsar, for and against Kerensky-whoever would pay.... ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... break up into ear-rings for wanton women! And they shall get themselves a new name, but the angel of ignominy, with the fiery brand, shall know them, and their heart shall be the tomb of dead desires that turn their life to rottenness." ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the general, with that superior smile which Garnet so hated, "States, like apples—and like men—have two sorts of rottenness. One begins at the surface and shows from the start; the other starts from the core, and doesn't show till ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... earthly ends. Then worse than this, still greater multitudes are prompted to this union by sensuous desires—base animalism. Oh, to what a sink of iniquity, what a pool of pollution, what a stagnant pit of moral rottenness is the Marriage relation sunk by the unhallowed and unbridled sensuality of thousands who enter it! If there is any place in the world where the voice of God should be heard ringing in pealing thunder-tones the ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... opinion. By advancing, the King gave the French occasion, if they were seeking one; and the Neapolitan army, which might well have deterred them, as it had embarrassed even Bonaparte in his time, had its rottenness revealed as only trial can reveal. When reviewed, it had appeared to Mack and Nelson a well-equipped force of thirty thousand of the "finest troops in Europe." Brought face to face with fifteen thousand French, in a month it ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... no vegetation can flourish, and above which, with the rapid growth of the ever-growing nuisance, no living thing will breathe with impunity. Look at our scientific machinery, which has destroyed domestic manufacture, which has substituted rottenness for strength in the thing made, and physical degradation in crowded towns for healthy and comfortable country life in the makers. The day would fail, if I should attempt to enumerate the evils which science has inflicted on ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... enthusiasts, without paroxysms of nervous excitement that toned down to musical philistinism at Baireuth, as though the gods were Bavarian composers. New York or Paris might be whatever one pleased — venal, sordid, vulgar — but society nursed there, in the rottenness of its decay, certain anarchistic ferments, and thought them proof of art. Perhaps they were; and at all events, Wagner was chiefly responsible for them as artistic emotion. New York knew better than Baireuth what Wagner meant, and the frivolities of Paris had more than once included the ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... have not settled, and I will here rest the whole of my argument upon it. It is this—God has, in no instance, promised eternal to unbelievers; and unless you can prove that the promise does extend to them, your arguments must fall like rottenness to the ground. We have certainly proved this, and to attend to the objector's request would but be, in some measure, going over the ground already occupied. We will, however, just touch this point again. We will introduce the following words of ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... but his; carrying all things so, by thy dexterity and prudence, that not one of thy husband's weaknesses be discovered to others by thee: 'A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband: but she that maketh ashamed, is as rottenness in his bones.' For then, as the wise man sayeth, 'she will do him good and not evil, all the days of her life' (Prov ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... replied she, with scorn; "no, Japhet, look upon me, for it is the last time you will behold my youth; look upon me as a sepulchre, fair without but unsavoury and rottenness within. Let me do you a greater kindness, let me awaken your dormant energies, and plant that ambition in your soul, which may lead to all that is great and good—a better path and more worthy of a man than the one which I have partly chosen, and partly ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... there is a season and a time. But the greater number come just as they can contrive; on the tops of coaches, for example; and amongst these there are fellows with dark sallow faces and sharp shining eyes; and it is these that have planted rottenness in the core of pugilism, for they are Jews, and, true to their kind, have only base ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... scholastic philosopher, though of no servile type, taking part in scholastic arguments. If he declared that he would have all the works of ARISTOTLE burned, it was not because he hated the Peripatetic's philosophy—though he could criticise as well as appreciate at times,—but because of the rottenness of the translations that were then used. It seems commonplace now, but it was a truly wonderful thing then: ROGER BACON believed in accuracy, and was by no means destitute of literary ethics. He believed in correct translation, correct quotation, and ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... peoples—of Tennyson, his poetry. I find it impossible, as I taste the sweetness of those lines, to escape the flavor, the conviction, the lush-ripening culmination, and last honey of decay (I dare not call it rottenness) of that feudalism which the mighty English dramatist painted in all the splendors of its noon and afternoon. And how they are chanted—both poets! Happy those kings and nobles to be so sung, so told! To run their course—to get their deeds and shapes in lasting pigments—the very ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... rottenness of the Country became an attraction for Friedrich; and henceforth West-Preussen was, what hitherto Silesia had been, his favorite child; which, with infinite care, like that of an anxious loving ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that," said I; "if he was alive there'd be some stir in him. The whale's not the danger; it's the lashing, which may part at any moment. It should be in a fair way of rottenness after so many years of salt water, and if ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... And I think we shall be preserved from the Pope by the rottenness of the Church; from the drapeau rouge by the indignation and horror of all honest men. You see how the Provisional Government has resisted the insane attempt of the fanatics to make the red flag accepted as the ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... glanced away. But the smith used to stand behind the counter and talk to Mr. Pappleworth. His speech was dirty, with a kind of rottenness. Again he found the youth with his cool, critical gaze fixed on his face. The smith started round as if ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... lies. The permission to use them is a 'mendacity licence.' In 'Rome-bred law ... fiction' is a 'wart which here and there disfigures the face of justice. In English law fiction is a syphilis which runs into every vein and carries into every part of the system the principle of rottenness.'[425] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... work! Had not every man in Australia laughed with his pitiless cartoons at the dignified magnates of Society and the utter rottenness of ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... those infamous books which in former times were burnt by the hangman, and which one is nowadays compelled to leave in circulation after interdicting them and thereby designating them to evil curiosity, which explains the contagious rottenness of the century. Ah! I well recognised there some of the ideas of our distinguished and poetical relative, that dear Viscount Philibert de la Choue. A man of letters, yes! a man of letters! Literature, mere literature! I beg God to forgive him, for he most surely does not ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... once, and to a dread end? What was this wretch? aged with vice—forestalling time—tottering on to a dishonoured grave—soiling all that he touched on his way—with grey hairs and filthy lewdness, the rottenness of the heart, not its passion, a nuisance and a curse to the world. What was the deed—that I should rid the earth of a thing at once base and venomous? Was it crime? Was it justice? Within myself I felt the will—the spirit that might bless mankind. I lacked the means to accomplish the ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... college-learning, vanity, strong-drink, and the world's perversity and his own. Under good guidance, especially if bred to strict silence, he might have been in some measure a luminous object,—not as now a phosphorescent one, shining by its mere rottenness! A sad "Calamity of Authors" indeed, when it overtakes a man!—Poor Gundling probably had lucid intervals now and then; tragic fits of discernment, in the inner-man of him. He had a Brother, also a learned man, who retained his senses; and was even a rather famed Professor ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... with talent. You may compare it, for the purpose of illustration, to one of George Robins' patent filters, into which pours turbid torrents of Thames water, its sediment, mud, dirt, weeds, and rottenness; straining through the various strata, its grosser particles are arrested in their course, and nothing that is not pure, transparent, and limpid is transmitted. In the great filter of London life, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... of Rochelle.—The rottenness of the State was chiefly owing to the nobility, who, as long as they were allowed to grind down their peasants and shine at court, had no sense of duty or public spirit, and hated the burghers and lawyers far too much to make common cause with them against the constantly increasing ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fellow-beings. Such a choice will commend itself to the best spirits; for, while it is the spontaneous movement of a mean nature to contract and swoop, a generous nature prefers to expand and soar. The vulture pounces on rottenness with a cry of obscene satisfaction; but the lark seeks the sunrise with a song of worship. So let the ingenuous mind, studying human character and life, bestow a shunning glance at evil, a fixed gaze on good. So, should any ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... never leave him. On the other hand, if a man has found his earthly father harsh and uncongenial, his conception of his Heavenly Parent will be painful. He will begin by seeing God as an exaggerated likeness of his father. He will therefore shrink from Him. The rottenness of still-born love in the heart of a child poisons the blood of the soul, and ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... their vices and creating scandal. But we are not discouraged. Is the holy arch in danger because a few nails are rusty, because a few cords are rotten? Other nails and cords are supplied in their place, and the rottenness is cast away. But we must not hide from ourselves that we are passing through a melancholy period. This is what priests for the greater part do not clearly see. They slumber in their priesthood, take their emoluments, grow fat, go their small way, and believe they have discharged ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... as Uriah! Bah! Why, what a brainless dullard have I been, To see this pretty puff-ball of a preacher Wax large before mine eyes in righteous husk— And think him whole within—when but a touch, But one, had aired his rottenness! Oh! dotard that I am! blind, deaf and stupid! It takes a miracle to make me see What lay before me open. He did take Her part; ever professed himself her friend; And at her trial fell in trance. What more? He is ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... their rather material views of morals, but they are frank. There may be mental prigs among them, but there are no moral prigs. In both England and America we suffer from a certain morbid ethical daintiness. There is a ripeness of moral fastidiousness that is often difficult to distinguish from rottenness. It is part of the feminism of America, born of our prosperity, for not one of these fastidious moralists is not a rich man, and Germany escapes ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... as they increase in number, make this city poorer, morally and spiritually; they drag it down and down into the mire. This is not American civilization; it is the rottenness of Gomorrah. This is not Democracy—it is savagery. It shows the glutton hunt for the Dollar with no thought for aught else under the sun or over the earth. It is decadence of the spirit in its most revolting form; it is rottenness of the heart and corruption ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... dreaming, here in the winter, the loveliest of all dreams, that he was young again? In the joyous growth of this snow-white glory he had forgotten all pain and decay, forgotten the moss on his bark, the rottenness of his roots was concealed. A rickety gate had been taken from its place and was propped against the fence, broken and useless. The artist hand of winter had sought it out too, and glorified it, and it was now an architectural masterpiece. The slanting black gate-posts ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... both sides to join either. I want to see whether there's good sense enough in this State to take the thing out of the hands of the fanatics so that we can get results that decent men can subscribe to—results instead of the ruin and rottenness we're ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... which threw a ghastliness around. Being full of conceits that night, I called it a frigid fire, a funeral light, illumining decay and death, an emblem of fame that gleams around the dead man without warming him, or of genius when it owes its brilliancy to moral rottenness, and was thinking that such ghostlike torches were just fit to light up this dead forest or to blaze coldly in tombs, when, starting from my abstraction, I looked up the canal. I recollected myself, and discovered the ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of every enlightened Christian nation; and the result has been a criticism so pungent, and an examination so thorough and direct, into the deformities of the Church, that she has been obliged to contemplate her own condition and the rottenness of her position, until she fairly trembles at the ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... wasted human energy, doomed to pass into utter oblivion, and human beings only live but to die and there an end, of what avail is it to be born at all? Surely it is but wanton cruelty to take upon ourselves the responsibility of continuing a race whose only consummation is rottenness in unremembered graves!" ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... heard, and my belly trembled, My lips quivered at the voice; Rottenness entered into my bones, and I trembled in my place: That I should rest waiting for the day of trouble, When he that shall invade them in troops cometh up against the people. For though the fig tree shall not blossom, ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... victors for such reward as he might receive. After he had become enriched by this kind of gain, he resolved to return to his native land by sea; (for he was born, it is said, in the island of Ceos[32]). {Accordingly} he embarked in a ship, which a dreadful tempest, together with its own rottenness, caused to founder at sea. Some gathered together their girdles,[33] others their precious effects, {which formed} the support of their existence. One who was over inquisitive, {remarked}: "Are you going to save none of your property, Simonides?" He made reply: "All my {possessions} ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... on to his ruin. At the expiration of ten years, Venus had a head on her shoulders, and he had almost lost his own. There had been years of disease among the cattle, insects in the turnips, and rottenness in the heart of his mangels; his expenses had become enormous, the Inspector of Nuisances had complained of the state of the drains round and about his farm, his oxen had strayed, two bulls had got loose and had maimed several people ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand
... natives running off with spears in their hands, and could not make his object understood by those who remained. The earth in this part of our old track had become very soft and, although the surface undulated, it possessed a peculiar rottenness, so that where the upper crust bore me on horseback the carts would suddenly sink to the axle. The horses at length began also to sink through the surface crust, and we were approaching a hollow which appeared likely to be still worse, when our wheel-carriages ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... the theatrical life and literature of the Restoration was morally rotten to the core. How that rottenness has been giving way, during the childhood of Nance Oldfield, to what may be styled a comparative decency, need not be described here. Suffice it to explain that such a change is taking place, and let us accordingly sing, rejoice and give thanks for small mercies. Thalia has ceased to be a wanton; ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... might go on and on. All these were apparently sincere searchers after truth, and passed in the world for respectable persons. Externally, they were fairly eligible as candidates for Chelaship, as appearances go; but "within all was rottenness and dead men's bones." The world's varnish was so thick as to hide the absence of the true gold underneath; and the "resolvent" doing its work, the candidate proved in each instance but a gilded figure of moral dross, from circumference ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... us good reason half a dozen times, with his too free speech and his high moral whine, to hang him with the lamppost rope! And now, when we have borne and borne and borne and borne with him, and he shows up, all at once, in all his rottenness, you say let him alone! One would think you were defending Honore Grandissime!" The back of one of the speaker's hands fluttered in the palm ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... Pamphlet I know not, and am in no condition to guess. A certain snappish vivacity (very unlike the style of Frederick whom it personates); a wearisome grimacing, gesticulating malice and smartness, approaching or reaching the sad dignity of what is called 'wit' in modern times; in general the rottenness of matter, and the epigrammatic unquiet graciosity of manner in this thing, and its elaborately INhuman turn both of expression and of thought, are visible characteristics of it. Thought, we said,—if thought it can be called: thought all hamstrung, shrivelled by inveterate rheumatism, on the part ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... impossible where there are concealments. A secret is like a worm in the heart of an apple, and nothing but rottenness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... called me!" he exclaimed vehemently. "I a traitor—the most loyal man in the solar system guard. Surrounded by rottenness and intrigue— ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... of the little country town lost in the immensity of the Texas prairie, Brann saw the world, and saw it with the blazing eye of righteous wrath. He saw the sins of high society in New York and London, the rottenness of autocracy in Russia, the world war boiling beneath the surface in the cauldron of Europe's misery. But he saw also, with mingled humor and anger, the trivial passing events of his own state and nation and the local affairs of his home town. Of all these things, great and small, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... disgust that bad eggs would ruin the good ones; but that many good ones could not take the rottenness from even one of the bad. It seemed a hopeless task to endeavor to inspire such impoverished souls, and I retired in despair, to accept the principalship of the ancient ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... connection with the County Council's sub-committee—in London! The story went on to relate how Medcroft, implacable leader of the opposition to the "grafters," suddenly had appeared before the committee with the most astounding figures and facts to support his charges of rottenness on the part of the "clique"; his unexpected descent upon the scene had thrown the opposing leaders into a panic; every one had been led to believe that he was sojourning in the east. As a matter of fact, it was soon revealed, he had been ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... connection with this speech that Mr. Adams speaks of "the rotten heart of Daniel Webster." How such a purely intellectual feat as this, one so entirely passionless and impersonal, should be referred to rottenness of heart, is one of the unexplained mysteries of the operations of Mr. Adams's understanding, when that understanding was ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... and issue from the womb, Surviving still the imperishable change That renovates the world; even as the leaves Which the keen frost-wind of the waning year 5 Has scattered on the forest soil, and heaped For many seasons there—though long they choke, Loading with loathsome rottenness the land, All germs of promise, yet when the tall trees From which they fell, shorn of their lovely shapes, 10 Lie level with the earth to moulder there, They fertilize the land they long deformed, Till from the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Roman empire itself, was that great city of Treves; but inwardly it was full of rottenness and weakness. The Roman empire had been, in spite of all its crimes, for four hundred years the salt of the earth: but now the salt had lost its savour; and in one generation more it would be trodden under foot and cast upon the ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... miracle of the blind seeing, and the lame walking, and the restoration of the dead to life, was the miracle that the poor had the Gospel preached to them. That while the poor were unnaturally and unnecessarily cut off by the thousand, in the prematurity of their age, or in the rottenness of their youth - for of flower or blossom such youth has none - the Gospel was NOT preached to them, saving in hollow and unmeaning voices. That of all wrongs, this was the first mighty wrong the Pestilence warned us to set right. ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... brand me as a criminal if you choose. It is what I am, guilty in the eyes of the law as well as in my own eyes and yours. I am not pleading innocence. I am pleading unqualified guilt. Understand that clearly. I knew what I was doing when I did it. I have known ever since. I've never been blind to the rottenness of the thing. At first I did it for the money because I was afraid of poverty and honest work. And then I went on with it for Tony, because I loved her and wouldn't give her up to you. Now I've given ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... to quote, with an added bitterness in his despair: "'Woe unto them that are mighty to drink, and men of strength to mingle strong drink ... their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust—' 'Awake, ye drunkards, and weep and howl, all ye drinkers of wine.' 'For while they are drunken as drunkards, they shall be devoured as stubble fully dry.'—Dry? Good Lord! Ring up a can of suds, ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... fish, strange dried land and marine plants, ducks and chickens, split, pressed thin and smoked; dried shellfish; cakes newly made, yellow, glutinous and fatty, stamped with tea-box characters; and great earthen jars filled with rottenness. I speak correctly if perhaps too forcibly, for when those imposing jars are opened to serve a customer with some manner of vegetable cut in long strips, the native-born American finds it expedient to hold his nose. American storekeepers in the mines deal largely in Chinese goods. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... near thee if thy love is given to Him; safe and untouched by evil thou shalt walk if thou walk with God. 'He that toucheth you toucheth the apple of Mine eye.' The soul that trusts Him He takes in charge, and before any evil can fall to it 'the pillared firmament must be rottenness, and earth be built on stubble.' 'He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day.' 'The Lord's portion is His people,' and 'none shall pluck them ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... untoward heat and precocity often argues rottenness and a falling-off. I myself remember several instances of this sort of unrestrained license of opinion and violent effervescence of sentiment in the first period of the French Revolution. Extremes meet: and the most furious anarchists have since ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... what a clearance he made in an hour. The existence of the fault helped him a good deal, as the percolation of water at this point had oxidized the stone to rottenness. To his great joy he discovered that a few prods with the pick laid bare a small cavity which could be easily enlarged. Here he contrived a niche where Iris could remain in absolute safety when barricaded by stores, ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... from one end to the other, as a whole and in detail, whatever may be its intermittences, exceptions and faults, the march from evil to good, from the unjust to the just, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. Point of departure: matter; point of arrival: the soul. The hydra at the beginning, the angel at ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... parts that are rotten give elasticity to those that are sound: they give them elasticity, elasticity, elasticity. If it were all sound, it would break by its own obstinate stiffness: the soundness is checked by the rottenness, and the stiffness is balanced by the elasticity. There is nothing so dangerous as innovation. See the waves in the equinoctial storms, dashing and clashing, roaring and pouring, spattering and battering, rattling and battling against it. I would not be so presumptious as to say, I could build ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... "Good God! the rottenness of it, Dick!" he groaned. And then: "I've got to get out of this and begin all over again in some corner of the world where at least one man in ten hasn't forgotten the meaning of common honesty and decency and fair dealing. Heaven knows I'm no saint, but if I stay here this cursed ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... rats for prizes in the sewers; or his crawling into an abandoned doorless house in St. Giles', where his hosts were three dead men, one pendant; into another of an alley nigh Houndsditch, where the crazy hovel, in phosphoric rottenness, fell sparkling on him one pitchy midnight, and he received that injury, which, excluding activity for no small part of the future, was an added cause of his prolongation of exile, besides not leaving his ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... carried by the elaborated descending sap down to the tubers, and as the largest tubers require the largest amount of elaborated sap for their development, they will, consequently, receive the greatest quantity of the vitiating principle, and will, on digging, be found a mass of rottenness, when the smaller ones are often but slightly affected. The Botrytis infestans can not gain a lodgment on vines that are truly healthy and vigorous, high authority ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... conflict upon conflict, not one of which appeared decisive. Yet, gradually, it seemed to him who waited, the standard of intellect rose high and shining over the white, luminous lines; while that of the animal grew frayed and faded, beginning to betray the rottenness of its material beneath the gaudy ornaments. Victory was finally acknowledged when, upon a November day of his year of disgrace,—1862, Ivan, braving scorn, rejection, even deliberate non-recognition, entered the doors of the Conservatoire ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... town-life," Mike said, "and all its artificiality and rottenness and needless accumulation ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... yields each particle its tongue Of elemental flame—no matter whence flame sprung, From gums and spice, or else from straw and rottenness." ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... the public demands a certain grade of rottenness in Western films, but I never believed that, down deep in my heart. I believe the public stands for that stuff because they don't see any better. This four-reeler I've got in mind will sure open the eyes of some ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... of the town, I think, is down by the landing-wharf: though it may be, that its being associated with a great deal of rottenness on the evening of our arrival, has stamped it deeper in my mind. Here, again, the houses are very high, and are of an infinite variety of deformed shapes, and have (as most of the houses have) something hanging out of a great many windows, and wafting its frowsy fragrance on the breeze. Sometimes, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... were made between the Balkan Allies for carrying on the war. The Bulgarian people had made up their minds to do the lion's share of the work and to have the lion's share of the spoils, for the Bulgarian people knew the state of corruption and rottenness to which the Turkish nation had come. When I reached Sofia, the Bulgarians told me they were going to be in Constantinople three weeks after the declaration of war. That was the view that they took of the possibilities ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... With his fair, open mind, he weighed the old method of monastic establishments, and, mutatis mutandis, he thought something of the kind might be very useful. He thought it unfair to judge of what these monasteries were in their periods of youth and vigor, from the rottenness of their decay. Modern missionary stations, indeed, with their churches, schools, and hospitals, were like Protestant monasteries, conducted on the more wholesome principle of family life; but they wanted stability; they had not farms like monasteries, ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... But the testimony that Renan bears on this point is irrefutable. Himself a renegade priest, he certainly would not have hesitated to expose the Order to which he had once belonged, and vindicate his broken vows by the revelation of any moral rottenness known within the walls of its seminaries. Far from this, he bears the most emphatic testimony in his autobiography that there is enough virtue in St. Sulpice alone to convert the world; and owns so strong was the impress made on his own soul by his training as a priest that personally ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... Bradlaugh on resuming the editorial chair of the National Reformer, was to indite a vigorous protest against the investment of national capital in the Suez Canal Shares. He exposed the financial condition of Egypt, gave detail after detail of the Khedive's indebtedness, unveiled the rottenness of the Egyptian Government, warned the people of the danger of taking the first steps in a path which must lead to continual interference in Egyptian finance, denounced the shameful job perpetrated by Mr. Disraeli in borrowing the money for the purchase from the Rothschilds at enormous ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... they meet, and supplicate and excite him to gratify their lustful passions, or who resort to means of sexual pollutions, which is impossible to describe without shuddering), together with spinal diseases and many disorders of the most distressing and disgusting character filling the bones with rottenness, and eating away the flesh by gangrenous ulcers, until the patient dies, a horrible ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... Ireland from the rule of the British Parliament which have been going on since the breakdown of Mr. Gladstone's political intelligence, their dread of foolish and scoundrelly fiscal adventurers is sufficiently strong to retain the Liberals in office. The recent exposures of the profound financial rottenness of the Liberal party have deepened the public resolve to permit no such enlarged possibilities of corruption as Tariff Reform would afford their at least equally dubitable opponents. And meanwhile, beneath those ridiculous alternatives, those sham issues, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... interested I had been in the whole business, puzzling out the effect of the winds on the tides, the set of the currents, and so on. I talked about my difficulties, too; the changes in the buoys, the prehistoric rottenness of the English charts. He drew me out as much as he could, and in the light of what followed I can see the point of scores ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers |
