"Viciousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the handkerchief; steel rang upon steel, and no buttons tipped their foils. It was careful fencing at first, thrust and parry, parry and thrust, until Simon lost patience at length and put all his viciousness into one ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... with virtue, and best of all, a greater capacity for sustained and consistent effort in practical undertakings. These transformations are the successive steps of a real reformation, and every step puts the man at a greater and safer distance from past shiftlessness and viciousness. "The virtues," says Felix Adler, "depend in no small degree on the power of serial and complex thinking," but, continues that practical philosopher, "the ordinary studies of the school exercise and develop this faculty of serial ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... the other's glory, a man's share appertained to all the soldiers who conquered along with him; that in his victory no man living was a sharer. His mind puffed by these notions, and moreover, from a viciousness of disposition being vehement and headstrong, when he perceived that his influence among the patricians did not stand forth as prominent as he thought it should, he, the first of all the patricians, became ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... between the High Commissionerships of Frere and Milner. The events which followed the recall of Frere were accepted by the British inhabitants of South Africa as a practical demonstration of the inherent viciousness of the system under which the decision of cardinal questions of South African administration was left in the hands of the House of Commons, a body in which they were not represented; which met 6,000 miles away; whose ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... a man as any half-dozen young mates that may be caught by casting a net upon the waters; and though he had been somewhat taken aback by the startling viciousness of the first squall, he had pulled himself together on the instant, had called out the hands and had rushed them along to secure such openings about the deck as had not been already battened down earlier in the evening. Shouting in his fresh, stentorian voice, "Jump, boys, and bear a hand!" ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... were full of the sensational robbery, the prominence of the victim and the viciousness of the attack. Elias Droom read the accounts eagerly as he breakfasted in the dingy little restaurant near his home, bright and early. He grinned appreciably over the share of glory that fell to him; ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... now begun to give me a great deal of trouble. Timour Melek, the old villain, sat on his chair, snarling and striking at me, but still going through his paces; Empress Khatoun was a perfect devil of viciousness, and refused to jump her hoops; even poor little Aicha, my pet, fed by me soon after her foster-mother, a big Newfoundland, had weaned her, turned sullen in the pyramid scene. I roped her and trimmed her claws; ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... become great when he doth so confuse justice with viciousness;—but, nurse, I would have thee haste. Tell my lord that I beg his presence, if for a moment only; he surely would not ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... Nelson's time. If that be the case, it ought to be wrestled with until every vestige of the ugly thing is strangled. The letters of Nelson to personal friends, to the Admiralty, and in his reported conversations, are all full of resentment at the viciousness of it, though he obviously struggles to curb the vehemence of his feelings. No one felt the dagger of the reticent stabber more quickly and sensitively than he. Invisible though the libeller might be, Nelson knew he was there. ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... manifest itself depends largely on the temperament of the individual and the circumstances of the case. In some men it results in paralysis of the energies, changing the character into shiftlessness. In other cases it results in destroying the moral sense, but does not amount to positive viciousness, while on the other hand it may result as it unquestionably did in this case, in absolutely perverting the affections so as to render the man incapable of the natural feelings of a husband and father, and supplying motives which seem to be of the most inhuman ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... attack is upon the policy pursued by the President in rewarding his followers with office,—a policy in accord with the principles laid down in the inaugural. We are accustomed nowadays to strong statements of the viciousness of the spoils system, but no advocate of civil service reform has attacked the full-grown system of party rewards with any more vigor than Webster showed at the beginning of the system. "No, sir!" he exclaims indignantly, "no individual or party has a claim or right to any office ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... living and true and busy teaching of priests; these things, Sir, were sufficient books and kalendars to know GOD by, and His Saints: without any images made with man's hand: but, certes, the vicious living of priests and their covetousness are [the] chief cause of this error and all other viciousness that reigneth ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... pitied the bereavement to which widowhood in the most cruel of forms was now added. But among them she unfortunately counted a peon woman of the upper Mexican plateau, one of the class which took from the Conquest only Spanish viciousness to add to Aztec cruelty. Jealous of Andrea's luck—as they had deemed it—in marriage, Pancha had thirsted for the opportunity which came as they drew water together that morning from the brink of ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... seeing his protean hostess in a new role. Would her proteanness never end? he wondered, as he glanced over the magnificent, sweating, mastered creature she bestrode. Mountain Lad, despite his hugeness, was a mild-mannered pet beside this squealing, biting, striking Fop who advertised all the spirited viciousness of the most ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... or the blackamoor is lynched. And why? Not because the stoneheads, normally virtuous, are suddenly criminally insane. Nay, but because they are suddenly conscious of the power lying in their numbers—because they suddenly realize that their natural viciousness and insanity may be safely ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... mongrel origin more than he did. There seemed in many of them a tendency to combine the defects of the grades from which he sprung rather than their good points. In some, the quietness of the Short-horn degenerated into stupidity, and in others the activity of the Devon into nervous viciousness. Take them together they perhaps paid for rearing, or nearly so. After using him another year, he was killed, ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... suggesting that there may be a connection between sound health and what society, in its latest fit of peevish self-maceration, is pleased to call viciousness?" ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... for Clancy's rush. He had been prepared for this by Flynn, who knew the fighter's methods. For before the seconds were well out of the ring Clancy had crossed toward Jerry's corner, planning by sheer bulk and viciousness to sap some of Jerry's strength. But Jerry avoided the rush, stinging Clancy's stomach with a terrific blow as he got out of danger. With the whole of the ring back of him he stood up and shifting suddenly got inside ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... that choosing and opining best always go together, but that some opine the better course and yet by reason of viciousness choose not the ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... demoralizing fact of her belief that he could do almost no wrong, and she clung to the modifying almost with a passionate fervour born of her clerical ancestry and her consequent belief in the inherent viciousness of unconverted man. Moreover, her inherited notions of conversion included spiritual writhings and physical night-sweats and penitential tears by way of its accomplishment. According to the creed of all the Parson Wheelers since the Puritan migration, one ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... or an ex-soldier is found slandering the Army service it is invariably safe to set him down as a man who, through very poor soldierly qualities, or actual viciousness, got "in the bad books" of his officers. There is every desire on the part of regimental and company officers to make it pleasant for a truly good soldier, and to keep him in the service until he has ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock
... came to hear him "say things,"- -witty observations on the particular fad of the hour—sharp polemics on the political situation—or what was still more charming, neat remarks in the style of Rochefoucauld or Montaigne, which covered and found excuses for vice while seemingly condemning viciousness. There is nothing perhaps so satisfactory to persons who pride themselves on their intellectuality, as a certain kind of spurious philosophy which balances virtue and vice as it were on the point of a finger, and argues prettily on the way the two can be easily merged into each other, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... not fast, frivolous though not dissipated. His errors were errors of unprofitableness, but never of viciousness. Even in his most frivolous moments he had never been anything but a gentleman and a good fellow. Still, it had been unsatisfactory, and he knew it to be so in his ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... in charge overlooked all her viciousness in consideration of her youth and beauty, and afforded her every indulgence which their own duty and her safe-keeping permitted. They gave her a cell and a clean cot to herself; and one of them, to whom she gave ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... the country, Dr. Max Schlapp, of New York. As a specialist in nervous diseases he has been connected with the Children's Society and the Children's Court, where he has had wide opportunities for observing the relation between delinquence and mental defectiveness. In cases of viciousness or feeble-mindedness exhaustive studies have been made by Dr. Schlapp. And the extent to which society is daily at the mercy of uncontrolled potential ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... that was the everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while. To see moral grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself and first glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud-dripping eyes; to see out of weakness, and frailty, and viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness, arising strength, and truth, and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... speaking Royston was tearing up the paper he held into the smallest shreds, and dropping them one by one. The act might have been involuntary, but seemed to have a savage viciousness about it, as if a living thing were being tortured by those cruel fingers. (The poor letter! whatever its faults might have been, it surely deserved a better fate: it was doubtless not a model of composition, but some of the epistles which have moved ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... "might have been endured, so far as mere superciliousness and hauteur to the professional musician were involved, if these people had possessed any real feeling or love for music; but it was their total want of all taste, their utter viciousness, that rendered them hateful to Mozart. He was ready to make any sacrifice for his family, but longed to escape from the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... worse than his father," returned Dick. "There is a certain viciousness about him that is lacking in ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... inconceivable relation to the Church of England, or to Protestantism, would not be more extravagant than the attempt to fasten upon an oriental prince the charge of debauchery and a dissolute life. The very viciousness of Asiatic institutions protects him from such reproaches. The effeminate delicacy of easterns, and the morbid principle of seclusion on which they build their domestic honour, will for ever secure both Hindoo Pagans and Mussulmans from blame of this kind, until they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... into a gentle gallop, "he can't kick at my batch of bills. When he gets on a high horse, I know how to fix him." He laughed. Jarvis Thornton turned a curious eye on his companion. Just this kind of intimacy in families he had never experienced—an armed neutrality of viciousness. He was anxious to get on, to reach his Camberton rooms, where the Sunday forlornness was peace after this swinish atmosphere. Once back in his arm-chair, in the familiar confusion of books and papers and letters lying about, he wondered again what curious freak had led him to ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... as one of the most honest and honourable of men, disinterested, frank, without any reserve, always ready to help, the very peculiar appearance of his eyes, which were small, deep-set, green, and glittering, might have drawn upon him the suspicion of lurking malice and viciousness. ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... may be capable of great viciousness and violence when irritated: and this is especially true of ...
— Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... of to-day be the result not only of the ruthless command from the official higher up but also of the de-souling, materialistic influence of Socialism on the common people of Germany during the past twenty-five years? Is not the viciousness of Prussian militarism plus the demoralizing influence of ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... say; are we to be blamed for that viciousness? The nature of things has not given us any knowledge of ends, so as to enable us, in any subject whatever, to say how far we can go. Nor is this the case only in respect of the heap of wheat, from which ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... black and the air was stale and thick with the stench of rodents. Stanton stood still, trying to probe the luminescent gloom that the goggles he wore brought to his eyes. The tunnel stretched out before him—on and on. Around him was the smell of viciousness and ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... display, being conducted upon imported ideas, was very like such a ceremony in America, save that the cavalry was small in numbers, riding upon the merest caricatures of horses,—ponies about the size of Newfoundland dogs; but what they lacked in size they made up in viciousness, so that it was about all the gallant cavalry could do to keep in their saddles. Indeed, many of them came to grief, spread out like galvanized bullfrogs upon the greensward, while their horses ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... quantities, etc., so that philosophic morality is clearly not for children or teachers. Secondly, evolution encourages too often the doubt whether virtue can be taught, when it should have the opposite effect. Perversity and viciousness of will are too often treated as constitutional disease; and insubordination or obstinacy, especially in school, are secretly admired as strength, instead of being vigorously treated as crampy disorders of will, and the child is coddled into flaccidity. Becomes the lowest develops first, there ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... encourage, but yet to give warning strong and clear that these frightful catastrophes were in great measure the effect of our sins, our fostering of heathenism, our recognition of caste, and were especially a judgment on the viciousness and irreligion that had been the curse of English life in India. It was in open Christianity alone that he ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge |
