"Vileness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not, dare not, sacrifice that future nor give it in pledge for our own happiness. Last night I came to you. I was weak—yes; more than that—I was ignorant. I did not know, even as late as last night, the monstrous vileness, the consummate wickedness of present-day conditions. I learned that today, this morning, and now. I learned that the morality of the Church was a pretense. Far deeper than it, and vastly more powerful, was the morality of the dollar. My father, ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... abasement, debasement; abjectness &c. adj.; degradation, dedecoration[obs3]; a long farewell to all my greatness [Henry VIII]; odium, obloquy, opprobrium, ignominy. dishonor, disgrace; shame, humiliation; scandal, baseness, vileness[obs3]; turpitude &c. (improbity) 940[obs3]; infamy. tarnish, taint, defilement, pollution. stain, blot, spot, blur, stigma, brand, reproach, imputation, slur. crying shame, burning shame; scandalum magnatum[Lat], badge of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Phidian goddess, nor a gambling casino that of a cathedral, nor the music to Wilde's Salome that of Brahms' German Requiem, yet whatever of beauty there may be in the shapes will divert the attention from the meanness or vileness of the non-aesthetic suggestion. We do not remember the mercenary and libertine allegory embodied in Correggio's Danae, or else we reinterpret that sorry piece of mythology in terms of cosmic occurrences, of the Earth's wealth increased by the fecundating sky. Similarly ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... Peter, a deeper glow to the tawdry little room, which could do for others if it had to do for her. She described herself as in a state of nervous muddle, exhausted, blinded, abrutie, with the rehearsals of the forthcoming piece—the first night was close at hand, and it was going to be of a vileness: they would all see!—but there was no correspondence between this account of the matter and her present bravery of mood. She sent her mother away—to "put on some clothes or something"—and, left ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... has suddenly turned wet, introducing us to a new vileness of the climate. I hope it won't last—it means ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... before, through a friend, to his brother Dmitri, that he loved him and expected him to keep his promise. Dmitri wondered, for he could not remember what he had promised, but he answered by letter that he would do his utmost not to let himself be provoked "by vileness," but that, although he had a deep respect for the elder and for his brother Ivan, he was convinced that the meeting was either a trap for him ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... this quality was rather less remarkable in those who had less to be selfish about. I do not say therefore that they had less of it.—I soon saw that their profanity had chiefly a negative significance; but it was long before I could get sufficiently accustomed to their vileness, their beastliness—I beg the beast's pardon!—to keep from leaving the room when a vein of that sort was opened. But I succeeded in schooling myself to bear it. 'For,' thought I, 'there must be some bond—some ascertainable ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... also concerning the vileness of what we had to eat—not fit for a dog; besides enlarging upon the imprudence of intrusting the vessel longer to a man of the mate's intemperate habits. With so many sick, too, what could we expect to do in the fishery? It was no use talking; come what come might, the ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... reined in his sweating mare and fell to cursing, his face distraught with agony and wet with blood and sweat and tears. So he stood, desperate—at bay, and taunted them with every vileness his furious tongue could frame. Then faltered at last with a great heartbroken sob, for they sat silent and still and would not ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... to wear and cover o'er your deeds; Your wrongs are pointed at you there, though none your presence heeds. Your vileness would itself deny in falsest hate of hers; Gaze at yourself with inward eye, ...
— Selected Poems • William Francis Barnard
... dwell upon them; but, maintaining holy reserve, speak not to them at all. Then fail not to whisper unto your own hearts, 'Lo, we are Cramanas, whose duty it is to remain uncontaminated by the corruptions of this world, even as the Lotos, which suffereth no vileness to cling unto its leaves, though it blossom amid the refuse of the wayside ditch.'" Then also came to his memory, but with a new and terrible meaning, the words of the ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... rich and voluptuous. Both private and public life were utterly corrupt. Even the religious practises of the Ephesians were unspeakably vile. This city was a moral bog, a sink of pollution, filled with all corruption, and reeking with vileness. It was a second Sodom. Vice stalked abroad everywhere and was ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... baseness and cruelty. I was told some of his deeds of cruelty, which are simply sickening. They made me long for an opportunity of helping to drive him back to hell. You might think to look at him that you could measure in some way the extent of his vileness; but it would be a vain hope. Monsters such as he is belong to an earlier and more rudimentary stage of barbarism. He is in his way a clever fellow—for a nigger; but is none the less dangerous or the less hateful for that. The men in the ship told ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... most ungratefully, 'it might be posted on the church door for what I care, except for its intrinsic vileness.' ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Isle of Wight, and the man grew to his surroundings. A soul ready to accept the impress of every stamp of depravity in the mint of vice was soon well beyond the reach of any possible redemption in contact with the moral vileness of the prisons on what was, but for their contamination, one of the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... feel it in the terrible looking for of judgment. I feel it in that I do not love my neighbor. If I did, would I not sympathize in his happiness? Would this wretched self for ever interpose? I never knew myself before. I now know the unutterable vileness of my heart. I would hide it from Thee, my God. I would hide it from Thy holy ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... is the same in all ages; you can't change that. If it is evil and full of vileness, it is bound to hate the good. Surely ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... kirk, and went to the manse, and destroyed the communion elements in a most profane manner, Mr. Semple being then from home. The next day he complained to the commanding officer, in such a pathetical manner representing the horrible vileness of such an action, that the officer not only regretted the action, but also gave money for furnishing them again:—he moreover told them, He was sorry for the errand they were going upon, for it would not prosper, and the profanity of that ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... and curious analysist who rends the soul aside with merciless cruelty, and puts away the quivering nerves with cold indifference, once he has seen their secrets?—this a poet? Then so was Nero harping! Accursed be the book and all the polished vileness that his verses ever palmed off on men by their mere tricks of sound. This a poet! As soon are the swine that rout the garbage, the lions of the Apocalypse by the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Friday, intimacy among us men made but a few advances. We discussed the probable duration of the voyage, we exchanged pieces of information, naming our trades, what we hoped to find in the new world, or what we were fleeing from in the old; and, above all, we condoled together over the food and the vileness of the steerage. One or two had been so near famine that you may say they had run into the ship with the devil at their heels; and to these all seemed for the best in the best of possible steamers. But the majority ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... guardian more abundantly and carefully. And he thought too that, if his guardian had ever smitten him in wrath, and had then said to him with tears that it had grieved him bitterly to hurt him, but that thus and thus only could he learn the vileness of the place, then he would have not only forgiven the ill-usage, but would even have loved to endure it patiently. But what the child could not understand was that his guardian should now be tender and gracious, and at another time hard and cruel, explaining nothing ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... English. True. But it does not better the case for his countryman that, being an accomplice in the crime, making himself the leader in the persecution against the helpless girl, he was willing to be all this in the spirit, and with the conscious vileness of a cat's-paw. Never from the foundations of the earth was there such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all its beauty of defence and all its hellishness of attack. Oh, child of France! shepherdess, peasant girl! trodden ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... gavest me thine own strength with deathless days, and beauty above every daughter of this Star. But I sinned against thee sore, and for my sin I paid in endless centuries of solitude, in the vileness that makes me loathsome to my lover's eyes, and for its diadem of perfect power sets upon my brow this crown of naked mockery. Yet in thy breath, the swift essence that brought me light, that brought me gloom, thou ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... papers which, from the habit of a quarter of a century, he still took in. He wished to hear no more about denunciations by which, with the aid of police and magistrates, every kind of cowardice and vileness, social envy and religious hatred, rivalry, spite, and inborn malevolence, sought a riskless gratification, and usually found it in full measure. But it took away all pleasure in social intercourse. One learned to be cautious and suspicious. One grew accustomed to ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... second and third mob, prompters, clerks, executioners, who stand with their axe on their shoulders by the wheel, grinners in the pantomime, murderers in tragedies, who make ugly faces under black wigs,—in short, the very scum and refuse of the theatre; and it was of course that the contrast of the vileness of the actors with the pomp of their habits naturally excited ideas of contempt ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... blasphemy of science, the assertion of its own virtue and dignity against the always implied, and often asserted, vileness of all men and—Gods,—heretofore, is the most wonderful phenomenon, so far as I can read or perceive, that hitherto has arisen in the always marvelous course of the ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... soul of John Norton had long slumbered, but now it awoke in remorse and pain, and, repulsing its habitual exaltations as if they were sins, he turned to the primal idea of the vileness of this life, and its sole utility in enabling man to gain heaven. A pessimist he admitted himself to be so far as this world was concerned. But the manifestations of modern pessimism were checked by constitutional mysticity. Schopenhauer, when he overstepped the line ruled by the Church, ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... the personality—it is the ideal part that would be caught in this canvas. It is a sympathy for "substance"—the over-value together with a consciousness that there must be a lower value—the "Demosthenic part of the Philippics"—the "Ciceronic part of the Catiline," the sublimity, against the vileness of Rousseau's Confessions. It is something akin to, but something more than these predominant partial tones of Hawthorne—"the grand old countenance of Homer; the decrepit form, but vivid face of Aesop; the dark presence of Dante; ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... younger lover Those who have the careless chatter, the ready laugh Those who know little and dread much Thus are we stricken by the days of our youth Tighter than ever I was tight I'll be to-night To most men women are knaves or ninnies Touch sin and you accommodate yourself to its vileness Truth is, they have taken a stain from the life they lead Very little parleying between determined men Wakening to the claims of others—Youth's infant conscience Warm, is hardly the word—Winter's warm ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... some good paper made now, it is never used except for very expensive books, although it would not materially increase the cost in all but the very cheapest. The paper that is used for ordinary books is exceedingly bad even in this country, but is beaten in the race for vileness by that made in America, which is the worst conceivable. There seems to be no reason why ordinary paper should not be better made, even allowing the necessity for a very low price; but any improvement must be based on showing openly that the cheap article is cheap, e. g., the cheap paper should ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... straight to Kharkhov. At Kharkhov I have a friend, a literary man. I shall go to him and I shall say, 'now, my friend, give up your rotten little love-stories and descriptions of nature, and expose the vileness of the human biped.... ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... from her point of view. Even though he found himself powerless to resist the love that was regaining strength enough to batter down the wall of prejudice her marriage had created in his mind, there would still stand between them his conviction that it would be an act of vileness to claim or even covet the wife of the man whose life he had taken, not in anger or reprisal ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... seemed even more alien and terrible than the actual tale she told. It was one thing—and heaven knew it was bad enough!—to learn that one's sister's husband was a drug-fiend; it was another, and much worse thing, to learn from that sister's pallid lips what vileness lay behind the word. ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... lowest depths of vileness, become an unspeakable cipher of cowardice and servility—she signed endless lists of crimes which she had never committed. Was she worth the trouble of burning? Many had given up that idea, but the ruthless Penitentiary clung to it still. He offered money to ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... of the truth concerning itself must kill the soul, if there be one, with disgust at its own vileness, and the miserable contrast between its aspirations and attainments, its pretences and its efforts. At least, that would be the death fit for a life like mine—a death of disgust at itself. We claim immortality; ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... is on them, are so apprehensive of this; that they are very industrious to weaken the force of that Revelation which darts it's rays so strongly against them, and discovers the vileness of that, they wou'd have Men admire. Redeemer and Saviour are Titles bestow'd upon infamous persons, which shews what sense they have of the want of him to whom they belong: And for what they are pleas'd to mention as Sins, they are sure to find as slight ...
— A Letter to A.H. Esq.; Concerning the Stage (1698) and The - Occasional Paper No. IX (1698) • Anonymous
... ancient faith at which all her own courtiers were sneering, and as brave as a young lioness. Frederick hated her as he hated everything German and everything good. He sets forth in his own memoirs, with that clearness which adds something almost superhuman to the mysterious vileness of his character, how he calculated on her youth, her inexperience and her lack of friends as proof that she could be despoiled with safety. He invaded Silesia in advance of his own declaration of war (as if he had run on ahead to say it was coming) and this new anarchic trick, combined with ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... cried Abogin, laughing, crying, and still brandishing his fists. "She is not ill, but accursed! The baseness! The vileness! The devil himself could not have imagined anything more loathsome! She sent me off that she might run away with a buffoon, a dull-witted clown, an Alphonse! Oh God, better she had died! I cannot bear it! I cannot ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... still, house-Amish pure Old Order though my people are, I married you, from love and youngness and girlish ignorance. But I do not care, even in this wilderness you've brought us to in that big English ship, to hear such vileness spoke out ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... guilty of that Sin, which administer'd neither Profit nor Pleasure, and might draw upon them a severe Punishment: That if they had a just Idea of that great Being, they wou'd never mention him, but they wou'd immediately reflect on his Purity and their own Vileness. That we so easily took Impression from our Company, that the Spanish Proverb says, let a Hermit and a Thief live together, the Thief wou'd become Hermit, or the Hermit Thief: That he saw this verified in his Ship, ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... wretch whom I hold dear to me as my own brother, was like in one hour to have left not one man of that army alive, and after to have taken me and the rest at Armagh. The fame of the English army, so hardly gotten, is now vanished, and I, wretched and dishonoured, by the vileness of other men's deeds.' ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... This he had foretold. When man, guilty man, cast Himself upon the willing victim, all the wickedness and vileness and cruelty man is capable of committing was brought out and spent upon the blessed Son of God. The scourging, the buffeting, the mocking, the spitting and the shame connected with it, the shame of the cross, He despised. ...
— The Work Of Christ - Past, Present and Future • A. C. Gaebelein
... despise the weakness of your enemy. Who knows what cunning and hatred may do? They can usurp the place of the just and cast him out on the dung-heap; they can fasten their crimes on others and sully the robe of innocence with their vileness. Maybe you have not yet finished with ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... position as your ambassadors—though they would have to meet you and look you in the face, and pass the remainder of their lives among you, and render before you an account of their actions—they, I say, undertook the task of deceiving you. How could vileness or desperation go further ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... love to sweeten it? Nothing, worse than nothing. It is that gentle sympathy of hearts, that strange fever of the soul, those sweet hopes and joyous transports, and tremors scarce less pleasing, that render life endurable, and reconcile man to the vileness of mortality. The nearest approach to paradise on earth, is found in bright eyes that beam for us alone—in gentle lips that murmur to our ears words of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... clear to the young that they have nothing whatever to fear if they yield to their voluptuousness but make careful use of their new physiological knowledge. From my psychotherapeutic activity, I know too well how much vileness and perversity are gently covered by the term flirtation nowadays in the circle of those who have learned early to conceal the traces. The French type of the demi-vierge is just beginning to play its role in the new world. The new policy will bring in the great day for ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to heed a strong will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... catholic, which in all ages has been, and ever will be, close and native to the heart of man,—parental anguish from filial ingratitude, the genuineness of worth, though coffined in bluntness, and the execrable vileness of a smooth iniquity. Perhaps I ought to have added the Merchant of Venice; but here too the same remarks apply. It was an old tale; and substitute any other danger than that of the pound of flesh (the circumstance ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... their dissembling, Their flattering countenance, their ingratitude, Inconstancy, false witness, feigned weeping: Their vain-glory, and how they can delude: Their foolishness, their jangling not mew'd: Their lecherous lust and vileness therefore: Witchcrafts and charms to make men to their lore: Their embalming[36] and their unshamefacedness: Their bawdry, their subtlety, and fresh attiring! What trimming, what painting, to make fairness! Their false intents and flickering smiling: ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... naughty wanton! I have long suspected thee to be what thou art, yet for lack of proof spoke not of it to my mistress. But now thy vileness is so clearly shown that I shall in no sort conceal it; and thou, foul renegade, who hast wrought such shame in this house by the undoing of this poor wench, if it were not for the fear of God, I would e'en cudgel thee where ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. V. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... letters are twisted snakes; there is scarcely a wreathed ornament, employed in Christian dress, or architecture, which cannot be traced back to the serpent's coil; and there is rarely a piece of monkish decorated writing in the world that is not tainted with some ill-meant vileness of grotesque,— nay, the very leaves of the twisted ivy-pattern of the fourteenth century can be followed back to wreaths for the foreheads of bacchanalian gods. And truly, it seems to me, as I gather in my ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... veil was over, and Teresa's senses were faint from incense and hunger, ecstasy and a new and exquisite terror, Sister Dominica had led her to her cell and kissing her lightly on the brow, exclaimed that she had never been happier in a conquest for the Church against the vileness of the world. Then she had dropped the conventional speech of her calling, and said with an expression that made her look so young, so curiously virginal, that the novice had held her breath: "Remember that here there is nothing to interrupt the life ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... me you did not hesitate to strike at them with the spiritual weapons that are yours. To master you I do not hesitate to strike at your nephews with the lethal weapons that are mine. When you shall have seen them hang you will understand the things that argument could not make clear to you. In the vileness of my act you will see a reflection of the vileness of your own, and perhaps your heart will be ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... fierce and his face hardened, but he stooped and drew the ears of the hound through his hand softly. 'Marmette was my cousin's son, and had lived with me,' he said. 'A brave lad, and he had a nice hatred of vileness—else he had not died.' A strange smile played on his lips for a moment, then he looked at Falise steadily. Who can tell what was working in his mind! 'War is war,' he went on, 'and Bigot was your master, Garoche; but the man pays ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. What do you make of a case like that, amateur psychologist? You call it an altogether serious thing to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke,—horrible to angels perhaps, to them ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... Blanchflower agent had come to him in dismay reporting the decision of Miss Blanchflower with regard to the half-witted girl whose third illegitimate child by a quite uncertain father had finally proved her need of protection both from men's vileness, and her own helplessness. Miss Dempsey had taken the girl first into her own house, and then, persuading and comforting the old father, had placed her in one of the Homes where such victims ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the fragments of what was once the guiding glory of an ideal. She was brought so low, was so humbled, so uncertain of herself, that she felt it would bring her peace if she might go down to Mrs. Morrison and acknowledge all her vileness; tell her how wrong she had been, ask her forgiveness for her rudeness, beg her for pity, for help, for counsel. She needed some kind older woman,—oh she needed some kind older woman to hold out cool hands of wisdom and show her the way. But ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... a minute, then she said, earnestly: "My dear friend, if you could see all the wickedness, and cruelty, and vileness, that is practiced in this little town of ours in one night, you could not rest ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... violent that it nearly made me sick then and there; and if some one had seized me by the nape of my neck, and landed me straightway at my desk in Uncle Henry's office, would, I believe, have left me tamed for life. For if this unutterable vileness of sights and sounds and smells which hung around the dark entry of the slop shop were indeed the world, I felt a sudden and most vehement conviction that I would willingly renounce the world for ever. As it happened, I had not at that moment the choice. ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... are the words learnt for all this vileness; but by their means the vileness is committed with less shame. Not that I blame the words, being, as it were, choice and precious vessels; but that wine of error which is drunk to us in them by intoxicated teachers; and if we, too, drink not, we are beaten, and have no sober judge ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... earth were vomiting up the vilest of its creatures. And in the same light it was consuming others of equal vileness. Down into the red maws of the shaft an endless chain of men and women and ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... best of his commentators, who has viewed his labors in a kindred spirit, speaking of one of his most elaborate and varied works, the "Election Entertainment," asks, "What is the result left on the mind? Is it an impression of the vileness and worthlessness of our species? Or is not the general feeling which remains after the individual faces have ceased to act sensibly on the mind, a kindly one in favor of the species?" Leslie speaks of his "high species of humor, pregnant with moral meanings," and no ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... pains; while Tartuffe, in recompense for the injury done to his feelings, is presented with a gift-deed of Orgon's estate. But now Orgon's wife contrives to let her husband see and hear for himself the vileness of Tartuffe. This done, Orgon confronts the villain, and, with just indignation, orders him out of his house. Tartuffe reminds Orgon that the shoe is on the other foot; that he is himself now owner there, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... moves for war on Mexico, though to Van Revel the war is an evil madness. In The Conquest of Canaan Louden plays Prince Hal among the lowest his town affords, only to mount with a rush to the mayoralty when he is ready. The Guest of Quesnay takes a hero who is soiled with every vileness, smashes his head in an automobile accident, and thus transforms him into that glorious kind of creature known as a "Greek god"—beautiful and innocent beyond belief or endurance. The Turmoil is really not much more veracious, with its ugly duckling, Bibbs Sheridan, who has ideas, ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... only to be a man, to know what he wanted, and conquer it. And I felt rising in me like a tide the feeling that I was now a man. The reader who has believed of me that I passed through that canal life unspotted by its vileness has asked too much of me. The thing was not possible. I now thought of the irregular companionships of that old time as inexplicable no longer. They were the things for which men lived—the inevitable things ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... work which I had to do in the world, which nothing but one hardened against all sense of honesty or religion could go through; and yet, even in this state of original wickedness, I entertained such a settled abhorrence of the abandoned vileness of the Portuguese, that I could not but hate them most heartily from the beginning, and all my life afterwards. They were so brutishly wicked, so base and perfidious, not only to strangers but to one another, so meanly submissive when subjected, so insolent, or barbarous and tyrannical, ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... worth and true design of its first founders; one thing to estimate the intention and sincerity of a movement, when it first stirred the hearts of men, and another thing to pass sentence upon it in the days of its degradation. The vileness into which Jesuitism eventually sank is a poor reason why we should malign and curse those who, centuries before, found in the rules and discipline and aims of that system an acceptable expression for their own disinterested social aspirations. It is childish ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... within the scope of the present narrative to attempt any detailed account of the days and scenes that followed. They have been described by many writers; and the reader who bears in mind what Rome was—her vileness, her cowardice, her imbecility, her wealth, her arts, her monuments, her memories, her helpless population of religious communities of both sexes, and the sacred character of her high places and splendors, which served to give an additional zest to the violence of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... of the historical conscience was as unknown to him as it is always to orthodox apologists. It is to be said, moreover, that he had less excuse for being without it, for he rested on the goodness of men, and not, as theologians rest, on their vileness. It is a most interesting thing, we may notice in passing, to consider what was the effect upon the Revolution of this artfulness or prudence with which its theoretic precursors sowed the seed. Was it as truly wise as Condorcet supposed? Or ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... of sin in itself should also be considered. It is no trifling affair. From the habit of observing only its outward effects, we overlook its rancorous principle. The propensity to extenuate sin arises from ignorance of its vileness. We judge of every thing by comparison, and self-flattery always renders the comparison favorable to ourselves. But small and large are terms which, though we have chosen to adopt them, do not properly belong to the subject. The divine mind contemplates sin in its principle; ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... abominable. There were old houses, as a matter of course; but who can appreciate antiquities when his legs are wet about the knees and his boots are squirting water? Nevertheless, I tried to notice a few things besides the vileness underfoot. One was a rudely-carved image of the Virgin in a niche covered by a grating. This was in such a dark little street that it seemed as if the sun had given up all hope of ever shining there again. I struggled through the slush to the church, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... put a fine edge to passages of admirable prose, coined the just yet startling epithet, perfected the flow of some graceful period, and ransacked the English language for fearless words in which to portray the mingled splendour and vileness of a barbaric oriental Court, the naked terrors of tribal ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... 13. These live on your charities, and are vileness itself, while they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear; clouds they are without water, driven about by the wind; barren, fruitless trees, twice dead and plucked up by the roots; wild waves of the sea, which foam out their own shame; wandering stars, for whom is reserved the ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... Paragot to have employment like a man behind a shop-counter. I remembered acquaintances of my mother's who were "out of employment" and their unspeakable vileness. Then, echo of Paragot (for what else could I be?), I added: "We just walk about Europe for the sake of my education. My master said I was to learn Life from the ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... child's mistake, should cruelly punish her for it; what would you think of him? and what would he think of you, were he to know that you asserted that he could be so contemptibly unjust and cruel? The child's utterance would not in the slightest offend him, but your imputation to him of such vileness ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... tried hard to care for him, but her heart seemed to be buried in that vast grave of the West. She was obedient, dutiful, passive, but she could not care for him. And there came a day when she realized that he did not believe she had come unscathed through the wilds of the gold-fields and the vileness of the construction camps. She bore this patiently, though it stung her. But the loss of respect for her father did not come until she heard men in his study, loud-voiced and furious, wrangle over contracts ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... sunset were gloom; For they temper'd the self of the tyrant with love of the land, Some touch of the heart, some remorse, refraining the grip of the hand. But John's was blackness of darkness, a day of vileness and shame; Shrieks of the tortured, and silence, and outrage the mouth cannot name. —O that cry of the helpless, the weak that writhe under the foe, Wrong man-wrought upon man, dumb unwritten annals of woe! Cry ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... genial sunshine of national favor and bounty. Truly did Senator Wilson say that Congress approached Kansas at once with a bribe and a threat. Never was the devilish cunning of Slaveholding politics more strikingly illustrated than by the insidious vileness of this proposition. It had been bad enough, surely, had we been called upon to rejoice, as over a great triumph of the right, at the concession to Kansas of the sovereignty of settling her own institutions in her own way, had such been granted. Nothing could be more simple ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... thousand spies (so that, when in company with six persons, one has reason to dread the presence of one spy), proclaims at once the morality of the governors and that of the governed: were the former just, and the latter good, this mass of vileness would never be employed; or, if employed, wickedness would expire for want of fuel, and the hydra of tyranny perish by ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... to. That promise, of course, was binding on Germany for just so long as it suited her to keep it, and it suited her to keep it, on the whole, during the Armenian massacres. And in that matter her refusal to interfere is, among all her crimes, the very flower and felicity of her vileness. ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... dead Should still be near us at our side? Is there no baseness we would hide? No inner vileness that ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... fame and infamy gathered into so short a space. Suffice it to say that when Pope wanted a man to hold up to the scorn of the world, as a sample of wasted abilities, it was Wharton that he chose, and his lines rise in grandeur in proportion to the vileness ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... Then another rustled by, and yet another going the other way. The audience about the band had broken up, and were entering the alley in small conversing groups. The Count sat up straight and tried to think calmly of what had happened to him. The vileness of it took his breath away again. As far as I can make it out he was disgusted with himself. I do not mean to say with his behaviour. Indeed, if his pantomimic rendering of it for my information was to be trusted, it was simply perfect. No, it was not that. He was not ashamed. He was shocked at ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... undoubtedly, was the philosophy of the ineradicable hostility of matter and spirit, the doctrine, so prevalent in the East from the earliest times, that matter is wholly corrupt and evil, the essential root and source of all vileness. An old, unknown Greek poet embodies the very soul of this faith in a few verses which we find in the Anthology. Literally rendered, they ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... waking, found Arrowhead lighting a fire from a little load of sticks from the sledges. And between murderer and captor there sprang up the companionship of the open road which brings all men to a certain land of faith and understanding, unless they are perverted and vile. There was no vileness in Arrowhead. There were no handcuffs on his hands, no sign of captivity; they two ate out of the same dish, drank from the same basin, broke from the same bread. The crime of Arrowhead, the gallows waiting for him, seemed ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... also suspected him then. This crushed my last faint hope that, after all, it might turn out to be only a trick of the pupils; and, overpowered by the utter vileness and depravity of him who was set in authority over me, I buried my face in the pillow, feeling a strong inclination to renew the lamentations of the preceding night. Not many minutes had elapsed when the sound of a heavy footstep slowly ascending the stairs attracted ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... purity, tenderness, goodness; what capacities of vileness, bitterness and evil. Nature must needs be lavish with the mother and creator of men, and centre in her all the possibilities of life. And a few critical years can decide whether her life is to be full of sweetness and light, whether she is to be the vestal of a holy temple, or whether she ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... by it of thy sins, and that thy sins might indeed appear very sinful unto thee, which is done by the law these ways—(1.) By showing of thee what a holy God He is that did give the law; and, (2.) By showing thee thy vileness and wickedness, in that thou, contrary to this holy God, hast transgressed against and broken this His holy Law; therefore, saith Paul, "the law entered, that the offence might abound," that is, by showing the creature ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... undertaking involved, was borne by the country to the last penny. Mr. Froude says it was proposed that the "worst money might be sent to Ireland, as the general dust-heap for the outcasting of England's vileness."[440] The standard for Ireland had always been under that of England, but the base proposal above-mentioned was happily not carried into execution. Still there were enough causes of misery in Ireland apart from its normal ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... thus ourselves open our house, the day will come when a roaring blast of His wind, or the flame of His keen lightning, will destroy every defense of darkness, and set us shivering before the universe in our naked vileness; for there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known. Ah! well for man that he can not hide! What vaults of uncleanness, what sinks of dreadful horrors, would not the souls of some of us grow! But for every ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... unexpected trial, fear and confusion assailed my untaught judgement, and that by remaining in the ship I appeared to deny my commander, it was in appearance only—it was the sin of my head—for I solemnly assure you before God, that it was not the vileness of my heart. ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... all bounds as the vileness of these iniquitous schemes pressed upon me. I heard the bands of music from those who had prostituted their talent to ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... meekness She seemed really a soaring bird brought down by the fowler She stood with a dignity that the word did not express There is no driver like stomach Touch sin and you accommodate yourself to its vileness You played for gain, and that was ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... impeachments against Washington. By his own account, this writer maintained, "Mr. Washington has been twice a traitor," has "authorized the robbery and ruin of the remnants of his own army," has "broke the constitution," and Callender fumes over "the vileness of the adulation which has been paid" to him, claiming that "the extravagant popularity possessed by this citizen reflects the utmost ridicule ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... a savage pleasure in taunting him about his wife's depravity, until the very mention of her name was hateful to him. He acknowledged that he himself was bad enough, but her conduct had reached the extreme of vileness. The result was what might have been foreseen. Quarrels and recriminations were perpetual. The man hated the woman because of her vicious life; he hated himself because, as his conscience reminded him in lucid intervals, he was responsible ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... you say indeed that you do seriously and heartily desire to see, and to be more deeply and powerfully convinced of your own vileness and sinfulness, of your own weakness and wretchedness, and of your wants and unworthiness? and that, in order to your deep and spiritual humiliation and self-debasing, that you may be more vile in your own eyes, and Jesus Christ and free grace more precious and ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... one thought of comfort: Cuthbert was not far away. Since her father had openly accused her of vileness, deceit, and treachery; since he had struck her down so cruelly, and had not even come to see her in her helplessness and weakness, must not Cuthbert's surmise be the true one—must he not surely ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... meal, and for a while silence reigned, broken only by a few desultory remarks as to the vileness of the food produced by the officer responsible for the mess catering, and the exorbitant price he demanded for it—statements which had staled ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... manuscripts been paper boomerangs they could not have returned with greater accuracy to their unhappy dispatcher. Oh, the vileness and utter degradation of the moment when the stale little cylinder of closely written pages, which seemed so fresh and full of promise a few days ago, is handed in by a remorseless postman! And what moral depravity shines through the editor's ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... her girlhood, the rending aside of a veil of maiden mystery only vaguely instinctively guessed, the barren, sordid truth of her life as seen by her enlightened eyes, the bitter realization of the vileness of men of her clan in contrast to the manliness and chivalry of an enemy, the hard facts of unalterable repute as created by slander and fostered by low minds, all these were forces in a cataclysm that had suddenly caught her heart and whirled her through changes immense and agonizing, ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... Nature and the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions have been trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; one who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to esteem others ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... and sanctity of life—the true preaching that moves and converts this race. They do not recognize or know that the fault is not in the law, nor can it be attributed to it, but to those who do not observe it, because of their necessities—or rather their baseness, vileness, and greed which they excuse under the name of poverty and lack of support. Therefore, a great part of the reformation in this matter—which is so important, and demands reformation, but without having it—will be effected by having fewer offices and larger jurisdictions. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair
... circumstances, loses all independence and singleness of character, and degenerates so rapidly from the primitive dignity of his sylvan origin, that it is scarcely possible to indulge in any other expectation, than that the whole species must at length be exterminated by its own infinite imbecility and vileness." ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... Rector implored, "control yourself! I know better than you—every man knows who has been a parish priest—what vileness a man can be guilty of to save his skin. Reserve your wrath for Leicester, but let this poor creature be—he has an awful expiation before him—and consider with me if the worst of this evil cannot be remedied." He turned to the curate. "You have the registers—the parish papers? Where ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of indignation swept over Lily. She felt herself in the presence of something vile, as yet but dimly conjectured—the kind of vileness of which people whispered, but which she had never thought of as touching her own life. She drew back with a motion of disgust, but her withdrawal was checked by a sudden discovery: under the glare of Mrs. Peniston's chandelier ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... live with them that slew my father; and that every day I see this base AEgisthus sitting upon that which was his throne, and wearing the selfsame robes; and how he is husband to this mother of mine, if indeed she be a mother who can stoop to such vileness. And know that every month on the day on which she slew my father she maketh festival and offereth sacrifice to the Gods. And all this am I constrained to see, weeping in secret, for indeed it is not permitted to me publicly to show such sorrow as ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church
... the baseness and the goodness of human nature, and will impress that lesson with a searching force, such as no borrowed experience ever can approach. Most probable it is that Shakspeare drew some of his powerful scenes in the Timon of Athens, those which exhibit the vileness of ingratitude and the impassioned frenzy of misanthropy, from his personal recollections connected with the case of his own father. Possibly, though a cloud of two hundred and seventy years now veils it, this very Master Sadler, who was ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... can thought of sin In all its vileness bring no tears? And canst thou hear God's thunders speak, And weep not though the reckoning nears?" I had no weeping to control, For sorrow came not to ...
— Hymns from the Greek Office Books - Together with Centos and Suggestions • John Brownlie
... you. You have suffered and in your pain you think me vile, but remember that for ages the virtue of to-morrow has been the vileness of to-day. That which outstrips one, one calls vile. My virtue lies in gaining my end. Pity for you would have been a crime for me. You have suffered. And then? What are you to me? As I came among you I am to-day; that is where I am triumphant and virtuous. I have ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... clean-limbed, placid brute, she can give peace to his tormented conscience; and, while he has suffered and struggled and lashed himself for every seeming baseness of desire, and loathed himself for every imagined microscopic soiling, she has walked through good and evil, letting the vileness of sin trickle off her unhidden soul, so quietly and majestically that all thought of evil vanishes; and the self-tormenting wretch, with macerated flesh hidden beneath the heavy garments of mysticism and philosophy, suddenly feels, in the presence ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... with a malicious snarl, "but the Earth man shall suffer for the indignities he has put upon the holy of holies, nor shall any vileness be too vile to inflict upon his princess. Would that it were in my power to force him to witness the humiliation and degradation of the ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the idea of love which she has placed so high, with I know not what horrors of the hospitals. He has tainted her in her dignity and her modesty, in her love as well as in her baby. He has struck her down with physical and moral decay, he has overwhelmed her with vileness. And yet the law is such, the customs of society are such, that the woman cannot separate herself from that man save by the aid of legal proceedings whose scandal will fall upon herself ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... for my loss. Give me your prayers, for he is past your prayers, Not past the living fount of pity in Heaven. But I that thought myself long-suffering, meek, Exceeding "poor in spirit"—how the words Have twisted back upon themselves, and mean Vileness, we are grown so proud—I wish'd my voice A rushing tempest of the wrath of God To blow these sacrifices thro' the world— Sent like the twelve-divided concubine To inflame the tribes: but there—out yonder—earth ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... that wert alone To my God, bed, cradle, throne! Whilst thy glorious vileness I View with divine fancy's eye, Sordid filth seems all the cost, State, and splendor, ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... this paper in, my lord. Your lordship will notice the vileness of the incendiarism contained in it. I specially draw your attention to this article by one Bax, who as you will see, is familiar with the use of dynamite to a fearful extent. (J. N. reads, muttering "Curse of Civilisation.") ...
— The Tables Turned - or, Nupkins Awakened. A Socialist Interlude • William Morris
... I had no deep sense of sin, of my sin. Since then I believe that I have passed through almost every phase of Christian experience that I have ever read or heard of; and now I have such a sight of my own utter vileness and unworthiness, that I feel that the great and holy God might well set His heel on me, so to speak, and crush me into nothing." This sense of absolute unworthiness was always a feature of her life. "A useless log" was the term she ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... these women were vile. There was no measure to the vileness that Ellen had brought on him. For it was all her fault, since he never would have gone with that woman in London if it had not been for the way she had carried on the evening before. At the thought of that night in Piccadilly he began to hurry ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... the Epistle to the Philippians: Rejoice in the Lord. This is after all the only safe temper for tempted men. By preachers of a theology as narrow as their experience, it is often said that our guilt and native vileness, our unquestioned peril and instability, are such that no man of us can afford to be exultant in this life. But surely, just because of these, we cannot afford to be anything else. Whether from the fascination or from the despair of sin, nothing saves like an ardent ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith
... themselves to be swept along as by a torrent. You need but will" he says, "and it is done; but if you relax your efforts, you will be ruined; for ruin and recovery are both from within.—And what will you gain by all this? You will gain modesty for inpudence, purity for vileness, moderation for drunkenness. If you think there are any better ends than these, then by all means go on in sin, for you are beyond the power of ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... prayer because I was so bad, my badness became more abandoned than ever it had been before. Rely on the waiting and abounding goodness of God, which is infinitely greater than all the evil you can do. When we acknowledge our vileness, He remembers it no more. I grew weary of sinning before God grew weary of forgiving my sin. He is never weary of giving grace, nor are his compassions to be exhausted. May He be blessed for ever, amen: and may all ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... is satiated with conquests and exterminations; and a longing seizes him to plunge into every kind of vileness. Moreover, the degradation wherewith men are terrified is an outrage done to their souls, a means still more of stupefying them; and, as nothing is lower than a brute beast, Antony falls upon four paws on the table, and ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... Sin, which administer'd neither Profit nor Pleasure, and might draw upon them a severe Punishment: That if they had a just Idea of that great Being, they wou'd never mention him, but they wou'd immediately reflect on his Purity, and their own Vileness. That we so easily took Impression from our Company, that the Spanish Proverb says: 'Let a Hermit and a Thief live together, the Thief wou'd become Hermit, or the Hermit thief': That he saw this verified in his ship, for he cou'd attribute the Oaths and Curses he had heard among his brave Companions, ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... are of many varieties; but they are one in fatness, in pampered, diseased vileness of temper, in insolent, snarling capriciousness of behaviour. They tug at the leash fractiously, they make leisurely nasal inventory of every door step, railing, and post. They sit down to rest when they choose; they wheeze ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... martyr," said Mme. Chantelouve. "His body was so transparent that he could see through his chest the vileness of his heart. His kind of 'vileness' at least we can stand. But I must admit that this utter disregard of cleanliness makes me suspicious of the monasteries and renders your beloved Middle Ages odious ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... "stiff-necked generation" of the Hebrew prophets. They betray and even confess to standards that seem hopelessly base to us. They show themselves incapable of any disinterested enthusiasm for beauty or truth or goodness. They are altogether remote from intelligent sacrifice. To every test they betray vileness of texture; they are mean, cold, wicked. There are people who seem to cheat with a private self-approval, who are ever ready to do harsh and cruel things, whose use for social feeling is the malignant boycott, and for prosperity, monopolisation and humiliating display; who seize upon religion ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... the chief evil genius of the Prisoners-of-War. American history has no other character approaching his in vileness. I doubt if the history of the world can show another man, so insignificant in abilities and position, at whose door can be laid such a terrible load of human misery. There have been many great conquerors and warriors ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... anything without your sanction?" He was always thinking of the disgrace attaching to himself by reason of his nephew's vileness, and now, if a daughter of the family should also go astray, so as to be exiled from the bosom of the Whartons, how manifest would it be that all the glory ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... jailer's daughter, or servant, or something of the sort. I never knew, and my ignorance does not matter. She brought me my food, spake or spake not, according to the degree of vileness in her prevailing humour, and went off, leaving me to my thoughts and my painful ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... early rising, and they usually found themselves together waiting impatiently for the cup of coffee, ingenuously bad, which they served on the Cupania not earlier than half past six, in strict observance of a rule of the line discouraging to people of their habits. March admired the vileness of the decoction, which he said could not be got anywhere out of the British Empire, and he asked Eltwin the first morning if he had noticed how instantly on the Channel boat they had dropped to it and to the sour, heavy, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... many paths to knowledge already discovered; and no enlightened man doubts that there are many more waiting to be discovered. Indeed, all paths lead to knowledge; because even the vilest and stupidest action teaches us something about vileness and stupidity, and may accidentally teach us a good deal more: for instance, a cutthroat learns (and perhaps teaches) the anatomy of the carotid artery and jugular vein; and there can be no question that the burning ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... inclined. Here in this home of my childhood, this sacred atmosphere that my mother breathed, I would besmirch the character of one who as yet is pure and good, with a nature like a white hyacinth in spring. I see the vileness of the act, I loathe it, and yet it fascinates me, and I have no power to resist. Why should a stern, condemning voice declare in recesses of my soul, 'You could and should resist'? For years I have been daily yielding to temptation, and conscience as often ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... blame you in some degree for bearing the wicked Jewkes in your sight, after her most impudent assistance in his lewd attempt; much less, we think, ought you to have left her in her place, and rewarded her; for her vileness could hardly be equalled by the worst actions of the ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... chambermaid, they would consider themselves insulted. Yet they come here and talk with other Irish girls every whit as ignorant and unattractive as the servants at home—only the latter are virtuous and these are infamous. Thus does one touch of vileness ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... to others, and found much pleasure in penetrating what she took to be disguise, and laying bare the despicable motives which her own character enabled her either to discover or imagine, and which, in other people, she hated. Moderately good people have no idea of the vileness of which their own nature is capable, or which has been developed in not a few who pass as respectable persons, and have not yet been accused either of theft or poisoning. Such as St. Paul alone can fully understand the abyss of moral misery from which the ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... silence. There was a curious shamed look upon his face, as if some secret sin within himself had suddenly been laid bare in all its vileness to the light of day. The golden crucifix he wore moved restlessly with a certain agitated quickness in his breathing, and he did not raise his eyes, when, after a ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... intoxicating perfume of womanliness, like a crushed herb. Yet she was to be worshipped, rather than loved—a sacrament to be approached kneeling, an incarnate breath of heaven, the more lovely from the vileness into which her life had been cast and the slanders that were about her name.... More marvellous than all was that those who knew her best and longest loved her most; her servants wept or groaned themselves into fevers if they were excluded from her too long; of ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... was distressingly perplexed between two humours; twenty times an uncontrollable burst of laughter kept my anger back, and twenty times the anger that was rising from the bottom of my soul suddenly ended in a burst of laughter. I was confounded by so much shrewdness and so much vileness, by ideas now so just and then so false, by such general perversity of sentiments, such complete turpitude, and such marvellously uncommon frankness. He perceived the struggle going on within me:] What ails you? ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... and free and unconfined, between exhortation and prayer, Elder Cossey finally merged into a recital of his own weakness and vileness as a miserable sinner. ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... "no slave-dealer of any kind. They cannot make him so. He is perfectly conservative, Colonel, as to that vileness. I believe he ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... remedy, at least during the ages of transition while the brute is still at large. But since most acts of this sort done under conditions that neither torture nor exasperate, point to an essential vileness in the perpetrator, I am inclined to think that even in these cases the men of the coming time will be far less disposed to torture than to kill. They will have another aspect to consider. The conscious infliction of pain ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... should he behave himself, who is not a true principally invited guest, but as it were a bastard and supposititious intruder? For whether he is free or not, he lies open to the exception of the company. Besides, the very meanness and vileness of the name is no small evil to those who do not resent it but can quietly endure to be called and answer to the name of shadows. For, by enduring such base names, men are insensibly accustomed and drawn on to base actions. Therefore, when I make an invitation, for it is hard to break ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... appeared to me a shameful action. In order to insure the happiness of my future life, I was beginning to be the executioner of my present felicity, and the tormentor of my heart. I revolted against such a necessity which I judged fictitious, and which I could not admit unless I stood guilty of vileness before the tribunal of my own reason. I thought that Father Georgi, if he wished to forbid my visiting that family, ought not to have said that it was worthy of respect; my sorrow would not have been ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... passed, and the snows of winter had lain heavily for weeks upon all the region surrounding New Laodicea. It spread soft mantles over lawns and roofs in the city, and only in the streets was its white purity turned by the traffic of man into vileness. On a sharp, clear morning Hubert Gray walked through the cutting air toward ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock |
