"Worse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one of fascination, behind which was the chilly thought: This is my choice; here is where I will have to live for a short while that can seem ages. Space looks tame, now. Can I make it all right? Worse—how about Lester? ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... would have been wiser if I had stuck to the profession," Poppy commented to herself. "I should have been a leading lady by now, drawing my thirty to forty pounds a week. I had the root of the matter in me. Have it still, worse luck; for it's the sort of root which asserts its continued existence by aching at times like that of a broken tooth. It was a wrench to give it all up. But then those rotten plays of his, inflated impossible stuff, which would never act— couldn't act!—and ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... snobs by society. But the middle-class Jew has been more jealous of his caste, and for caste reasons. To exchange hospitalities with the Christian when you cannot eat his dinners were to get the worse of the bargain; to invite his sons to your house when they cannot marry your daughters were to solicit awkward complications. In business, in civic affairs, in politics, the Jew has mixed freely with his fellow-citizens, but indiscriminate social relations ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... about the place, and it certainly was very far from being a cheerful one; but he was poor, and the rooms were cheap, and that would have been quite a sufficient reason for him, if they had been ten times worse than they really were. He was obliged to take some mouldering fixtures that were on the place, and, among the rest, was a great lumbering wooden press for papers, with large glass doors, and a green curtain inside; a pretty useless thing for him, for he had ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... only a rose after all, however sweet and beautiful it may be. And a weed is no worse than a weed, however noxious or deadly its exhalations. Neither can reach into the realm of the other or invade the world of its supremacy. Stick to the world in which you are born, and throw no bouquets at the impossible ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... prostituted, as when it was used for slaves. Never was the word "right" so prostituted, not even when "the rights of man" were talked of; as when the right to trade in man's blood was asserted, by the members of an enlightened assembly. Never was the right of importing these labourers worse defended than when the antiquity, of the Slave Trade, and its foundation on the ancient acts of parliament, were brought forward in its support. We had been cautioned not to lay our unhallowed hands on the ancient ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... going—I'm sure I can't tell where; One comfort is, this world's so hard, I can't be worse off there: If I might but be a sea-dove, I'd fly across the main, To the pleasant Isle of Aves, to look at it ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... as 500 is to 1. The average big-game sportsman cheerfully expends from $500 to $1,000 on a hunting trip, but resents the suggestion that he should subscribe from $50 to $100 for wild life preservation. If he puts down $10, he thinks he has done a Big Thing. Worse than this, I am forced to believe that at least 75 per cent of the big-game sportsmen of the world never have contributed one dollar in money, or one hour of effort, to that cause. But there are exceptions; ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... life and blessedness: and this is the death often spoken of, "You who were dead in sins and trespasses," &c. Eph. ii. 1. "Being past feeling," and "alienated from the life of God," Eph. iv. 18, 19. And truly this is worse in itself than the death of the body simply, though not so sensible, because spiritual. The corruption of the best part in man, in all reason, is worse than the corruption of his worst part. But this death, which consists especially ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... freely then to my home, as you say, to live there always, to give up the life I have led on the Continent. It has been a foolish life—a dog's life—and I have no one to blame for it but myself. I made it worse than it need to have been. But if we win, I have promised myself that I will not return to it; and if we fall I shall not return to it, for the reason that I shall have been killed. I shall have much power if we win. When I say much ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... Brahminists in creed. They are not, however, the true natives of the island. These latter use a Hindu tongue, called the Singhalese. Its philological relations are exactly those of the Mahratta, Bengali, and Udiya,—neither better nor worse defined, more or less unequivocal. Some make it out to be of Sanskrit, others of Tamulian origin. All that is certain is, that it is more Sanskritic than the proper Tamul, and more Tamul than the Bengali. It is written; ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... still a small boy, but a bad one, and at that moment hard as a rock. 'Surely he will fall in and will drown,' I consoled myself. 'Nobody will give him any more apples, and people will love me and me only.' No old criminal could have felt worse than I felt then. I began to run still faster till my legs broke down under me and my breath failed. Yes; I ran through the woods alone, forsaken, as once Cain did when he killed his brother and ran away from the face of God. Suddenly a great pain gripped me that could not be ...
— The Three Comrades • Kristina Roy
... an energetic people, we must toil or be beaten: and besides, 'night brings counsel,' men are cooler and wiser by night. Any amount of work can be performed by careful feeders: it is the stomach that kills the Englishman. Brains are never the worse for activity; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Horatio Fizkin in the person of my opponent, Mr Alderman Stridge, Wholesale Provision Merchant and Italian Warehouseman. His selection as Liberal Candidate was a blow to us: we had hoped for nothing worse than a briefless carpet-bagger from the Temple, as on previous occasions. However, the Alderman on our introduction was extremely affable, and expressed a hope, with the air of one discovering the sentiment ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... cat, in her cold and hunger, think of the nice bright fire on her old mistress's hearth, and her brown bread and milk, till she was ready to cry her eyes out with vexation at her own folly—and what was still worse, her own ingratitude—in being willing to leave the good old woman, her best friend, who had taken care of her all her life long, merely because she fancied it would be very grand to live in a palace. People sometimes find out their mistakes ...
— Tales From Catland, for Little Kittens • Tabitha Grimalkin
... to Demetrius prospects of preferment and grandeur, while he assured him that, in a few days, Damascus must to a certainty surrender, in which case his mistress must fall into the power of a fierce soldiery, and be left to a fate full of dishonour, and worse than death itself; but, if he assumed the turban, he pledged his royal word that especial care should be taken that no harm should alight on ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... fashion the crewmen were worse off than the colonists. The colonists had at least the colorful prospect of death before them. They could prepare for it in their several ways. But the members of the Warlock's crew had nothing ahead ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... were a great strain and there was little comfort to be derived from Violet Grey. She was even more nervous than himself, and so pale and altered that he was afraid she would be too ill to act. It was settled between them that they made each other worse and that he had now much better leave her alone. They had pulled Nona so to pieces that nothing seemed left of her— she must at least have time to grow together again. He left Violet Grey alone, to the best of his ability, ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... New Year, 1896, she became rapidly worse, and her one wish was to recover sufficiently to go home. One of the last letters she ever wrote was to her friend ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... mustn't say that!" she said brokenly. "It isn't finished for you, Jack. There's a chance to get out, and the colonel has told you there's a chance. He meant it. He knows much more than we do. If you've got murder on your soul, or something worse; if you feel that you're altogether so bad that there isn't a chance for you, that there's no goodness in your life which can be expanded, why, just wait and take what's coming. But for God's sake know your mind, and if you feel that in another land, ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... word more, sat down by the pillar and looked vacantly before him while the new prisoners told their story. Ben Aboo was a villain. The people of Tetuan had found him out. His wife was a harlot whose heart was a deep pit. Between them they were demoralising the entire bashalic. The town was worse than Sodom. Hardly a child in the streets was safe, and no woman, whether wife or daughter, whom God had made comely, dare show herself on the roofs. Their own women had been carried off to the palace at the Kasbah. That was why they ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... it is puffed out into two bosoms, which are used as pockets" (no doubt the sinus of the Romans). "... Some things which in company we do as seldom as possible, such as to blow the nose, or (worse still) to spit, seem to be utterly forbidden here.... The natives are reserved in the use of a pocket-handkerchief as the most fastidious English lady.... I believe Xenophon praises the Persians for never spitting ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... framed in the infancy of men's knowledge of nature; for history shows us quite the contrary. Religious feeling has survived the heliocentric theory and the discoveries of geologists; and it will be none the worse for the establishment of Darwinism. It is the merest truism to say that religion strikes its roots deeper down into human nature than speculative opinion, and is accordingly independent of any particular set of beliefs. Since, then, the scientific innovator does not, either ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... Place d'Armes fronting the palace, desolation worse than that of the beggars faced us. That vast noble pile, untenanted and sacked, symbolized the vanished monarchy of France. Doors stood wide. The court was strewn with litter and filth; and grass started rank betwixt the stones where the proudest ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... itch," growled Dirtovitch, "Bog spavin and lumbago." "I'm never dry," swore Goshallski, "I smell worse than a Dago." ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... that after Christmas the King called a (p. 307) parliament (on the morrow of the Purification, February 3,) to the end of which he did not survive. During his illness, which became much worse from about Christmas, he gave most excellent advice to Henry; the particulars of which, as recorded by Stowe, are probably more the fruits of the writer's imagination than the faithful transcript of any recorded ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... on him!" shouted the landlord, getting red in the face. "And if he's a friend of yours you'd better settle for him, or it will be the worse ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... I like your nerve," Jeff cut in, emphasizing his approval with a slap on Bud's shoulder as he bent to lift Smoky's leg. "I've saw worse horses than this one come in ahead—it wouldn't be no sport o' kings if ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... setting out for Stafford; however, he forced himself from his bed of sickness, and slowly crept along the frozen snow-covered road. He reached at length the well-known shop in the High Street; but was surprised, on coming face to face with Mr. Gilchrist to see that he was far worse than himself. Mr. Gilchrist received Clare with a smile, yet was scarcely able to speak, lying on his couch in utter prostration, physical and mental. Clare felt moved by infinite compassion, and, forgetting all his own sufferings, ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... the question, what more convenient way of punishment can be found? I think it is much more easier to find out that, than to invent anything that is worse; why should we doubt but the way that was so long in use among the old Romans, who understood so well the arts of government, was very proper for their punishment? They condemned such as they found guilty of great crimes, to work their whole lives in quarries, or to dig in mines ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... great as that which was spent, and in the end it was an irresistible tide which broke down the last barriers and swept through in a rush to victory, which we gained at the cost of nearly a million dead, and a high sum of living agony, and all our wealth, and a spiritual bankruptcy worse than material loss, so that now England is for a time sick to death and drained of her old ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... with sciatic neuritis, and there was no improvement in his physical condition when he entered upon his duties in 1907-08. His ability to attend to the arduous labors of the managing directorate was questioned. Worse than this, the air for months had been full of whispers of scandalous doings in the business department, and the chorus of dissatisfaction with the artistic results of his directorate, which had begun in the first season, had been swelling ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... "The villain! the worse than villain! who would, with a thousand artifices, make himself beloved by a young, unsuspecting, and beautiful girl, but then to leave her to the bitterness of regret, that she had ever given such a man a place in her ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... his immediate future depended for better or for worse entirely on the native intelligence of the Force. If they were the bright, alert men he hoped they were, they would see all that junk in the bedroom and, deducing from it that their quarry had stood not upon the order of his going but had hopped it, would not waste time in searching ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... like a death-knell into the hearts of the hunters, for they knew that if the savages refused to make peace, they would scalp them all and appropriate their goods. To make things worse, a dark-visaged Indian suddenly caught hold of Henri's rifle, and, ere he was aware, had plucked it from his hand. The blood rushed to the gigantic hunter's forehead, and he was on the point of springing at the man, when Joe said in a ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... "Never shall my uncle be made aware of the dread secret. He would be quite capable of undertaking the terrible journey. Nothing would check him, nothing stop him. Worse, he would compel me to accompany him, and we should be lost forever. But no; such folly and madness ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... brothers are good for nothing to sisters after they are married—worse! they are tantalizing. You are obliged to see what you used to have in somebody else's possession—and much more than ever you used to have; and it's tiresome. I'm glad I've no brothers. Basil is a good deal like a brother, and I ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... worked up now and then at the thought of that house with the stricken wombats in it. It simply wasn't nice. But the editors were unanimous in leaving it alone; they said the thing had been done before and done worse, and that the market for that sort of work was ...
— Reginald • Saki
... critical condition of the patient. Already I was regretting that I had not taken more energetic measures to rouse him and restore his flagging vitality; for it would be a terrible thing if he should take a turn for the worse and die before the coachman returned with the remedies. Spurred on by this alarming thought, I made up the medicines quickly and carried the hastily wrapped bottles out to the man, whom I found standing by ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... I cried on first entering the cars, and now—would you believe it?—I got terribly embarrassed. It seemed as if everything I did or said made matters worse. I was scarcely able to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... cyclone, I reckon, is some worse. A cyclone is a twister. They say if a cyclone hits a pig end to, and the wrong way, it twists his tail to the left instead of to the right and he's never the same ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... that competition is not an "original power, which can of itself do anything;" further, that "it cannot act except in the presence of some possibility of a better or worse;" and that this "possibility of a better or worse" implies a "world pre-arranged for progress," "a directing Will intent upon the good." Had Mr. Martineau looked more closely into the matter, he would have found that, though the words and phrases he quotes ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... then, sir, that although I have lived so long with you, and during all that time you have taken so much pains to improve me in everything, and teach me to act well to everybody, I had no sooner quitted your sight than I became, I think, a worse boy than ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... queer place enough for anybody, if you come to that; but no worse for them than for others; and it is they make the scene so pretty as ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... and the only class where "elegance and refinement, beauty and grace" were found, was inaccessible to Light. In both classes he found free scope for his doctrine of Delicacy, one day remonstrating with a correspondent for "living in a place with the absurd, and worse, name of 'Marine Retreat'"; another, preaching that "a piano in a Quaker's drawing-room is a step for him to more humane life;" and again "liking and respecting polite tastes in a grandee," when ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... I, that these remedies wouldn't cure the faults that we can see. We know that in Russia they're worse off for the way they've heeded Lenine and Trotzky and their crew. We know that you can't alter human nature that way, and that when customs and institutions have grown up for thousands of years it's because most people have found them good and useful. But here's puir Jock! What interests ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... should enter the Holy Sepulchre would be lucky if he escaped with his life. Not long since, an English gentleman, who was taken by the monks for a Jew, was so severely beaten that he was confined to his bed for two months. What worse than scandal, what abomination, that the spot looked upon by so many Christians as the most awfully sacred on earth, should be the scene of such brutish intolerance! I never pass the group of Turkish officers, quietly smoking their long pipes and sipping their ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... the banks, they may call in and pay off their paper by degrees. But no remedy is ever to be expected while it rests with the State legislatures. Personal motives can be excited through so many avenues to their will, that, in their hands, it will continue to go on from bad to worse, until the catastrophe overwhelms us. I still believe, however, that on proper representations of the subject, a great proportion of these legislatures would cede to Congress their power of establishing banks, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... worse! Can't you stand it? Are you retreating? Is this hour with the living too dead ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... canary-bird; or over a mouse, that the cat haply had seized upon; or over the end of a novel, were it ever so stupid; and as for saying an unkind word to her, were any persons hard-hearted enough to do so—why, so much the worse for them. Even Miss Pinkerton, that austere and godlike woman, ceased scolding her after the first time, and though she no more comprehended sensibility than she did Algebra, gave all masters and teachers particular orders to treat Miss Sedley with the utmost gentleness, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pulled my teeth out: you're worse than the Star of the North. [To Catherine.] Darling Little Mother: you have a kind heart, the kindest in Europe. Have pity. Have mercy. I love you. [Claire bursts into ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... a schoolmaster laboriously prompting and urging an indolent class, is worse than his who drives lazy horses ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... has never seen them must live unacquainted with much of the face of nature, and with one of the great scenes of human existence.' Johnson's Works, ix. 36. 'All travel has its advantages. If the traveller visits better countries he may learn to improve his own; and if fortune carries him to worse he may learn to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... secretions surcharged the tongue and took away the power of speech; now the sick one spoke, but in speaking had foresight of death. When the violence of the disease approached the heart, the gums were blackened. The sleep broken, troubled by convulsions, or by frightful visions, was worse than the waking hours; and when the reason sank under a delirium which had its seat in the brain, repose utterly forsook the patient's couch. The progress of the fever within was marked by yellowish spots, ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... Daisy; "and it has been growing worse and worse. But Juanita, I shall have to finish the play now I cannot help it. How shall I keep good? ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... putting into the teaching of Scripture our own human theories or prejudices. And consider—Is not man a kind? And has not mankind varied, physically, intellectually, spiritually? Is not the Bible, from beginning to end, a history of the variations of mankind, for worse or for better, from their original type? Let us rather look with calmness, and even with hope and goodwill, on these new theories; for, correct or incorrect, they surely mark a tendency towards a more, not a less, Scriptural view of Nature. Are they not attempts, whether ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... civilized nations of Europe. Shall the white race despair of escaping from this hell? The only way of escape in sight is the establishment of a rational international community. Should the enterprise fail after fair trial, the world will be no worse off than it was in July, 1914, or ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... that to dress well is a duty which she owes to society; but that to make it her idol is to commit something worse than a folly. Fashion is made for woman; not woman ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... May, 1915, between the second and third battle of Ypres, I was on guard duty at field headquarters in the trenches. The Staff was located in an old two-story building that was much the worse for wear from German calling cards. My "go" was from eight to ten P.M. Promptly at ten o'clock a rap came to the door and, blowing out the light, I inquired who it was. It was my relief, Dave Evans, one of the best pals whom it has ever been my lot to soldier with. Dave was ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... committed," replied Morton, "when I gave unhappily a night's lodging and concealment to one of those rash and cruel men, the ancient friend and comrade of my father. But my ignorance will avail me little; for who, Miss Bellenden, save you, will believe it? And, what is worse, I am at least uncertain whether, even if I had known the crime, I could have brought my mind, under all the circumstances, to refuse a ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... already noticed the dislike entertained against me by this young fellow, who, as he had rather more sense, had also a much worse temper, than any of his brethren. Sullen, dogged, and quarrelsome, he regarded my residence at Osbaldistone Hall as an intrusion, and viewed with envious and jealous eyes my intimacy with Diana Vernon, whom the effect proposed to be given to a certain family-compact ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... residences of the town, a family inheritance; the Vaughans, an old Rockland race, descended from its first settlers, Toryish in tendency in Revolutionary times, and barely escaping confiscation or worse; the Dunhams, a new family, dating its gentility only as far back as the Honorable Washington Dunham, M.C., but turning out a clever boy or two that went to college, and some showy girls with white necks and fat arms who had picked up professional husbands: these were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. 'Imperishable monuments' and 'immortal deeds,' death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or be worse for all that the labor, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless generations ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the Turk used worse than ever, testified the same inclination under the government of Castro; and it was on that occasion that he sent a fleet towards the Strait of Mecca, under the command of his son Alvarez de Castro. Eight foysts of Goa, full of soldiers, set out for the expedition of Aden. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... the Republican party, but I have been going with it, and when it goes wrong I shall quit, unless the other is worse. There is no office, no place, that I want, and as it does not cost anything to be right, I think it ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... very feeble. This affair of yesterday had told on him. The gossip of the Court was that the day had seen a change for the worse. His heart was centered on ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... short a time as a good man. He cannot make himself as others. "That which cometh into your mind shall not be at all, in that ye say, We will be as the families of the nations, which serve wood and stone." Old habits quickly reassert their force, conscience soon lifts again its solemn voice; and while worse men are enjoying the strong-flavoured meats on sin's table, the servant of God, who has been seduced to prefer them for a moment to the "light bread" from heaven, tastes them already bitter in his ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... it be. Why then, Young Senor, he will learn that it will be many years before he finds out whether the man to whom he is paying the rent is really the owner of the land. And if he wishes to buy, it is worse than a lottery. In this part of the island no surveys have been made—except a circular survey with no edges marked—and land titles are all confused. Then the ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... now," he observed, "but it will be much worse should a gale spring up and cause the ship to ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... outweigh the virtues, a dark and frightful image, featured with ugliness and exhaling a noisome smell, meets the condemned soul, and cries, "I am thy evil spirit: bad myself, thy crimes have made me worse." Then the culprit staggers on his uncertain foothold, is hurled from the dizzy causeway, and precipitated into the gulf which yawns horribly below. A sufficient reason for believing these last details no late and foreign ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Wage-earning, therefore, was no new thing in the village; only, the need to earn became more insistent, when so many more things than before had to be bought with the wages. Consequently, it had to be approached in a more businesslike, a more commercial, spirit. Unemployment, hitherto not much worse than a regrettable inconvenience, became a calamity. Every hour's work acquired a market value. The sense of taking part in time-honoured duties of the countryside disappeared before the idea—so very important now—of getting shillings ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... fever is worse and my mind becomes confused. But a pipe clears my thoughts. Truly, did you say that you had escaped from dervish captivity and are hiding in ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... twenty millions is necessarily better than that of a few or of one; but it is quite certain that the despotism of those who neither hear, nor see, nor know any thing about their subjects, has many chances of being worse than that of those who do. It is not usually thought that the immediate agents of authority govern better because they govern in the name of an absent master, and of one who has a thousand more pressing interests to attend to. The master may hold them to a strict ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... master, all things have not been as we might wish, and yet they could easily have run worse. When your dictator let the invaders out of Campania, there was much complaint among the people that he was protracting the war for his own advantage; but when he came to Rome for the sacrifices and left Minucius in command, ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... darkling women and the white glistening houses; but she came with me, she that had died. I would be seeing her rising before the bows o' the ship, rising from the sea, and waving on me to follow, and the weather was worse and worse at her every coming. An' there was a man o' the Western Isles in the crew, and he had the sight, and would be telling o' the woman rising from the sea, and her hair blowing over the yeast o' the waves, and her eyes staring, staring, and the ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... the workman's eyes; and, observing that his sister appeared rather pale and dejected, he said to her husband, in a slyly cruel way, as he took his departure: "Have a care, my sister was always sickly, and I find her much changed for the worse; you ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... despise the thing, and yet at the same time they like very well to take it, but they pretend not to want it in [Page 229] order to get it a little reduced in price. I don't think the goods were any dearer or any worse than in most country shops in Shetland, because they came from the south country, and from the same men from whom most country ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... this capture and recapture occurred several times. A single regiment even would dash forward, and actually drive the Rebels back, only to lose a few moments later what they had gained. Never was there braver fighting, never worse tactics. The repeated successes of small bodies of troops proved that a compact battle line could have swept the ridge, and not only retaken the guns, but made them effective in the conflict. As it was, the two sides worried and tore each other like great dogs, ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... Jesus (Luke ix. 51-56); they were frequently contending among themselves as to which should be the greatest, and when the supreme test came they all forsook Him and fled. Certainly, they were not only afflicted with darkness in their heads, but, far worse, carnality in their hearts; they were His, and they were very dear to Him, but they were not yet holy, they were yet impure ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... a heap better. I has worked for $7 a month. Now some can get $18 to $20 a week. But the young generation throwin' it away. They ain't going to save a bit of it. The present condition is worse morally. They used to could depend on a man. You can't hardly depend on the younger generation. They is so tricky. Folks going too much. I recollect when I was a child I went to town one or two times a year. I didn't want all I seen ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... 'Oh, that's on, worse than ever! I guess they're engaged. Tony talks about him like he was president of the railroad. Everybody laughs about it, because she was never a girl to be soft. She won't hear a word against him. ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... these Germans had been receiving but a scant ration of sugar, but their lot had been no worse than that of the French soldiers guarding them previously, who got no sugar either. American soldiers then guarding those prisoners reported only a few of them for confinement for these ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... wailed Slim weakly, his head hanging over the side of his bunk. "I never felt worse in all my life. I never felt ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... threading a needle: I always had. I could never read fine print, never read through a long sentence without shutting my eyes for an instant or looking off the book. It has always been an effort to see, and now I am forced to use my eyes so constantly they grow worse and pain me very much. At times a mist comes over them so that I cannot see at all until I rest them a little. Indeed I often seem to be going blind and I'm afraid I shall," she added, with a tremble in her tones, a tear rolling down her cheek. But she hastily ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... monarchy. Nor was this to be wondered at. This monarchy began and grew in barbarism; the cessation of barbarism naturally curtailed and threatened it with extinction. This we already see in Germany and France; but Spain and Italy are still subject to barbarism. Legal studies sink daily from bad to worse. The Roman Curia opposes every branch of learning which savors of polite literature, while it defends its barbarism with tooth and nail. How can it do otherwise? Abolish those books on Papal Supremacy, and where shall they find that the Pope is another God, that he is ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... March 27th, six yards of ice had been cleared, twelve feet only remaining to be cleared away. There was yet forty-eight hours' work. The air could not be renewed in the interior of the Nautilus. And this day would make it worse. An intolerable weight oppressed me. Towards three o'clock in the evening this feeling rose to a violent degree. Yawns dislocated my jaws. My lungs panted as they inhaled this burning fluid, which became rarefied more and more. A moral torpor took hold of me. I was powerless, ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... they would thus detract from their rank as chiefs. Islanders of this caste are almost never seen in the service of Europeans. When their patron, the high chief of the family, has made them feel the weight of his displeasure, these inferior chiefs become notoriously miserable, worse than the lowest of the Kanakas (generic name of ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... chill and dampness of the weather had done his health no good. His blood was thin from long years of Indian sun, and he found it a constant effort to resist. The gloom seemed even worse than the cold, and, although he had thought that he should never wish for sun again, after India, he did wish for it now, wished for it until it became a sheer physical need. For the first time in his life he began ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... is a sort of Themistocles. He is a man of wealth, and can snap his fingers at Fortune; can sneer that little sneer of his at things generally, and be none the worse; but what he cannot do is, to shake off an incubus that sits upon his life in the shape of old Habit severe as Fate. This man, with apparently all that is necessary in the world to keep one at peace with it, and to ease declining life with comforts, and cheer with the serener pleasures, is condemned ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... It was worse than anything she could have conceived possible. That a FitzHerbert should apostatise was incredible enough; but that one should sell ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... first place," she said, "because I despise him and hate him worse than any young man I ever knew; I would not marry Calvaster if he were the only man left alive. In the second place, because, if all the men on earth were courting me at once, all rich and all fascinating and Caius were poor and ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... De Faria, III. 347—364. Both as in a great measure unconnected with the Portuguese transactions, and as not improbably derived from the worse than suspicious source of Fernand Mendez de Pinro, these very problematical occurrences have been kept by themselves, which indeed they are in de Faria. After this opinion respecting their more than ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... drifted into a roulette parlor, and Jurgis, who was never lucky at gambling, dropped about fifteen dollars. To console himself he had to drink a good deal, and he went back to Packingtown about two o'clock in the morning, very much the worse for his excursion, and, it must be confessed, entirely deserving the calamity that was in store ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... Uncle Dick, "that's true, and I don't know that you'll be the worse for a little trip into it, although you come from a man's country back there in Alaska yourselves, for the matter of that. Well, this is the northern end of your trail for this year, my sons. Here's where ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Trail • Emerson Hough
... Scots, several degrees further gone than the rest of the company—which is saying a good deal—were hurled in. If the assemblage had all been of one way of thinking we might have reached Perth with nothing worse than bad headaches, but unfortunately some supporters of the other team were present, and in the midst of a heated and alcoholic debate on the rights and wrongs of the last free kick, two rival orators suddenly ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... spirit of enterprise which was congenial to their feelings; but from the time of his death the royal authority began to decline, as Timour, his son and successor, had neither the sense nor enterprise necessary to uphold it. Affairs became still worse under the sons of Timour. Shah Zumaun was of a cruel disposition, and wanted the education necessary to the situation he was called upon to fill; his brothers, Mahmood and Shah Shooja, were not better disposed; ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth
... part of the preacher's training—the training of his own heart to tenderness. If he fail in giving attention to this, all other education will be worse than fruitless. The age needs the pitiful Church. The age and the Church need the pitiful ministry. This is not to say that men look to the pulpit for nothing but softly spoken indulgences. Conscience has taught them that the message should hurt where hurt is salutary. They will ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... the reign of Valerian's son there was no bridle upon them;—for I served under the general Carinus, and what Carinus was and is, most of you know. O the double horrors of those years! I was older, and yet worse and worse. God! I marvel that thou didst not interpose and strike me dead! But thy mercy spared me, and now the lowest, lowest hell shall not be mine.' Tears, forced by these recollections, flowed down his cheeks, and for ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... from the General Head-quarters carried us to Sainte Menehould on the edge of the Argonne, where we had to apply to the Head-quarters of the division for a farther extension. The Staff are lodged in a house considerably the worse for German occupancy, where offices have been improvised by means of wooden hoardings, and where, sitting in a bare passage on a frayed damask sofa surmounted by theatrical posters and faced by a bed with a plum-coloured counterpane, we listened for a ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... now, boys, in rags and disgrace, With my bleared, haggard eyes, and my red, bloated face; Mark my faltering step and my weak, palsied hand, And the mark on my brow that is worse than Cain's brand; See my crownless old hat, and my elbows and knees, Alike, warmed by the sun, or chilled by the breeze. Why, even the children will hoot as I pass;— But I've drank my last glass, boys, I have drank my ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... half the neighbourhood looking on, and anyhow not worse than this Saturday-to-Tuesday business of dying by inches; and then I should go on into something else. If I had been a moderately good otter I suppose I should get back into human shape of some sort; probably something rather primitive—a little brown, unclothed ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... never said worse in a cathedral than what I have said here, I should be content to meet my eternal judge without absolution. Your uncle asked me this ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... up over it, but George McCloud took it quietly. "I'm no worse off here than I was back there, Morris." Blood, at that, plucked up courage to ask George to take a job in the Cold Springs mines, and George jumped at it. It was impossible to get a white man to live at Cold Springs after he could save money enough ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... to conquer and cut off from the disaster of re-birth. Christianity opens a path of usefulness, holiness, and happiness in this life, and a career of triumph and glory in the endless ages to come. Both Buddhism and Hinduism are worse than other pessimistic systems in their fearful law of entailment through countless transmigrations, each of which must ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... moved, with the strange sense that this was another death—a worse one than Briscoe's. He ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... briskish little trot and hastened to make known his wishes to them; they, however, it seemed, preferred their pasture to him, and received him with their heels and teeth to such effect that they soon broke his girths and left him naked without a saddle to cover him; but what must have been worse to him was that the carriers, seeing the violence he was offering to their mares, came running up armed with stakes, and so belaboured him that they brought him ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Kate would not have thought her dangerous to the peace of Karl Wander. If the wind were wild and the leaves driving, he might have kissed her in some mad mood. So much might be granted—and none, not even Elena, be the worse for it. But to live side by side with Honora Fulham, to face danger with her, to have the exhilaration of conflict, they two together, the mountains above them, the treacherous foe below, a fortune lost or gained in a day, all the ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... matters it, that a man be poor, if he carry into his poverty the spirit, energy, reason, and virtues of a man? What matters it, that a man must, for a few years, live on bread and water? How many of the richest are reduced, by disease, to a worse condition than this? Honest, virtuous, noble-minded poverty, is comparatively a light evil. The ancient philosopher chose it, as a condition of virtue. It has been the lot of ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... interrupted Kenelm. "Take care of yourself. My poor friend with whom you found me is a grave warning against petticoat interest, from which I hope to profit. He is passing through a great sorrow; it might have been worse than sorrow. My friend is going to stay in this town. If you are staying here too, pray let him see something of you. It will do him a wondrous good if you can beguile him from this real life into the gardens of poetland; but do not sing or talk ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... England farms—on side hills, where springs burst out, or at the foot of declivities, where the land is flat, or in runs, which receive the natural drainage of higher lands—many places which are absolutely unfit for cultivation, and worse than useless, because they separate those parts of the farm which can be cultivated. If, of these wet portions, we make by draining, good, warm, arable land, it is not a mere question of per centage or profit; it is simply the question whether the land, when drained, is ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... Lady George became very tired of it all. The chair was hard and the room was full of dust, and she could not get up. It was worse than the longest and the worst sermon she had ever heard. It seemed to her at last that there was no reason why the Baroness should not go on for ever. The woman liked it, and the people applauded her. ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... is what we can call Revolutionary; and some men are 'a la hauteur,' on a level with the circumstances; and others are not a la hauteur,—so much the worse for them. But the Anarchy, we may say, has organised itself: Society is literally overset; its old forces working with mad activity, but in the inverse ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... the backwoods for more than a month, ostensibly to fish and look at coal lands, but, really, to get away for a while, as his custom was, from his worse self to the better self that he was when he was in the mountains—alone. As usual, he had gone in with bitterness and, as usual, he had set his face homeward with but half a heart for the old fight against fate and himself that seemed destined always to end in defeat. At dusk, he heard the word ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... within the icy chill Of the long sleep, thou wert— My faithful grief could find thee still A life within my heart;— But, oh, the worse despair to see Thee live to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... but still kept his eyes on the treasure beneath him, and swore worse than before. ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... Greek hyper, beyond, and ballein, to throw), is an exaggerated form of statement and simply consists in representing things to be either greater or less, better or worse than they really are. Its object is to make the thought more effective by overstating it. Here are some examples:—"He was so tall his head touched the clouds." "He was as thin as a poker." "He was so light that a breath might have blown him away." Most people are liable to overwork ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... Well, I must say if you meant to be anything else, you botched the job! But I suppose, in fact, you didn't mean anything at all.—So much the worse for you. (Aside: I must do a little cat ...
— The Tables Turned - or, Nupkins Awakened. A Socialist Interlude • William Morris
... one and then another began to hunt the captain to question him, but only to obtain short polite answers, that officer being too busy to gossip after the fashion wished. They fared worse with the chief and second officers, who were quite short; and then one of the most enterprising news-seekers on board captured old Bostock, literally button-holing him with ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... Pecksniff. 'No! Heaven forbid that I should say, nothing can be expected from Mr Pinch; or that I should say, nothing can be expected from any man alive (even the most degraded, which Mr Pinch is not, no, really); but Mr Pinch has disappointed me; he has hurt me; I think a little the worse of him on this account, but not if human nature. Oh, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... both ideas with disgust. To make her a wanton woman would be dreadful. It would be murder. To turn her into a fine lady, the wife of Dmitri Andreich Olenin, like a Cossack woman here who is married to one of our officers, would be still worse. Now could I turn Cossack like Lukashka, and steal horses, get drunk on chikhir, sing rollicking songs, kill people, and when drunk climb in at her window for the night without a thought of who and what I am, it would be ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... had better return home at once to find out how she is progressing. Let me know if she grows worse and I will send Hriday Doctor. Don't trouble about his fees; I will pay them myself. Why did you not ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... which it was impossible that water could rest; while the general appearance of the interior showed how much it had suffered from drought. On the other hand, although the waters of the river had become worse to the taste, the river itself had increased in size, and stretched away to the westward, with all the uniformity of a magnificent canal, and gave every promise of increasing importance; while the pelicans were in such numbers upon it as to be quite dazzling to the eye. Considering, however, ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... for the act—above Union Square, and not a mile away from the exemplary ruins of City Hall. This occurred late in the afternoon, between five and six. By that time the weather had changed very much for the worse, and the operations of the airships were embarrassed by the necessity they were under of keeping head on to the gusts. A series of squalls, with hail and thunder, followed one another from the south by south-east, and in order to avoid these as much as possible, the air-fleet ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... means, in working that stupendous miracle. When Jesus asked for the five barley loaves and two small fishes, to feed the five thousand, even an apostle said: "What are these among so many?" Yes, what are they? In the hands of a mere man, nothing—nay, worse than nothing; only enough to taunt the hungry thousands and become a cause of strife and riot. But in the hands of the Son of God, with His blessing on them, taken from His hands, and distributed according to His Word, they became a feast in ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... regained the equanimity which he had sat down on the fallen tree to recover—arose, and returned to his apartment in the palace for the double purpose of feeding and meditation. Being a robust man, he did not feel much the worse for the events of the morning, and attacked a rib of roast beef with gusto. Hearing, with great surprise, that his late antagonist was no other than Bladud, the long-lost son of the king, he comforted himself with another rib of roast beef, and with the reflection that a prince, not less than ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne |
