"Degraded" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... their merits. There is Kiss-my-breech-Can, my favourite; Adulation-Can, lord treasurer; Prerogative-Can, head of the law; and Blasphemy-Can, high-priest. Whoever speaks truth, corrupts his blood, and is ipso facto degraded. In Europe you allow a man to be noble because one of his ancestors was a flatterer. But every thing degenerates, the farther it is removed from its source. I will not hear a word of any of your race before your father: ...
— Hieroglyphic Tales • Horace Walpole
... clinging to it with fright. It was a more bitter moment for Mr. Chantrey than even for her. The comparison thrust upon him was too terrible. His delicate, tender, beloved wife, and this coarse, brutal, degraded man! Was it possible that both were bound by the chains ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... with the discharge of his Parliamentary duty, nor yet in the further benefit of relaxing the rigorous laws which thrust the honest debtor into prisons which seemed to garner up disease in its most loathsome forms—crime in its most fiend-like works—humanity in its most shameless and degraded aspect; but it prompted still further efforts—efforts to combine present relief with permanent benefits, by which honest but unfortunate industry could be protected, and the laboring poor be enabled to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... the novelty of its obliterating tide. It deepened immeasurably, sweeping her far from the security of old positions of indifference and critical self-possession. Linda became enraged at a world that had concentrated all its degraded ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... an advocate for an educated man joining Temperance Societies, and look upon them as very great humbugs in many instances; but, with the uneducated, it is another affair altogether. If an educated man has not sufficient confidence in himself, and wishes to reduce himself to the degraded condition of an habitual drunkard, all the temperance pledges and sanctimonious tea-parties in the world will not eventually prevent him from wallowing in the mire. Father Matthew deserves canonizing for his ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... time. It was one of the terrible things about Tommy that he could bide his time. Pym was the only person he called upon. He took Pym out to dinner and conducted him home again. His kindness to Pym, the delicacy with which he pretended not to see that poor old Pym was degraded and done for—they would have been pretty even in a woman, and we treat Tommy unfairly in passing ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... service, and so on. What arrested my researches was the maiden name of the wife, which, in accordance with the northern custom, had been entered as a part of her legal description. The name awoke in me a recollection of a painful incident within my experience. I saw before me the puffed, degraded face of one to whom I had given chance after chance of redeeming himself from thraldom to the whisky bottle, one who had promised again and again to amend his ways. At last, wearied, I had cast him out. He had been looking ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... Ernest's father sits, the personification of silent gloom, like a nightmare on my spirits; Martha holds me in disfavor and contempt; Ernest is absorbed in his profession, and I hardly see him. If he wants advice he asks it of Martha, while I sit, humbled, degraded and ashamed, wondering why he ever married me at all. And then come interludes of wild joy when he appears just as he did in the happy days of our bridal trip, and I forget every grievance and hang on his words and looks like ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... forbidden—For days, sometimes, there is not the slightest desire; then something stirs it up in me, begins to annoy me; or the desire comes sometimes when I am excited or very happy, or very miserable. There seems to be some degraded instinct in me that seeks for it whenever my emotions are aroused.... I must be honest with you; I—I feel that way now—because, I suppose, I ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... so much of exceptional delinquency as of exceptional sensitiveness to ethical considerations. By the baser and more degraded souls it is rarely experienced. The greatest criminals usually meet their doom, untouched by any feeling of remorse. Perhaps it does not greatly matter how this infinite regret is ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... who had seen a good deal of service and had a high reputation for courage. Of his origin we are ignorant, but, unless I am mistaken, he was not of gentle birth or breeding.[109] He does not strike one as a degraded man of culture: for all his great powers, he is vulgar, and his probable want of military science may well be significant. He was married to a wife who evidently lacked refinement, and who appears in the drama almost in the relation of a servant to Desdemona. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... twelfth century. The structure is square, and is surmounted by a gilt dragon. It contains a chime of bells, and a huge bell weighing five tons. The records of the city were formerly kept in the lower part of the building, which is now degraded into a prison. The entrance to the tower is through a shop, and the view from the top is ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... be too painful to follow her through all her wretched life, and tell how each succeeding year she grew more degraded and more miserable, until at length having run a fearful career of vice she sank into a dishonored and early grave. No mother's hand wiped the cold death-dew from her brow; no kind voice whispered hope and consolation. Alone, poor, degraded, utterly ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... to a total stranger and leave the man transfixed with grateful emotions. The last thing you can do to a man is to burthen him with an obligation, and it is what we propose to begin with! But let us not be deceived: unless he is totally degraded to his trade, anger jars in his inside, and he grates his teeth at ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... yellowed walls of a certain apartment which I need not now further designate, and the sun and his flaming clouds became no more nor less than a certain half dozen of commonplace pictures upon these same yellowish walls; and the boat wherefrom I was about to view the birth of continents degraded itself into a certain—or, I had more accurately said, a very uncertain—cane chair, wherein I sit writing these lines and mourning ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... mouth of a fool that would not amuse us in that of a gentleman; a fact which shows how little incongruity and degradation have to do with our pleasure in the comic. In fact, there is a kind of congruity and method even in fooling. The incongruous and the degraded displease us even there, as by their nature they must at all times. The shock which they bring may sometimes be the occasion of a subsequent pleasure, by attracting our attention, or by stimulating passions, such as scorn, ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... contempt for himself, he asked whether he did not deserve to be degraded publicly, and drummed out ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... the back of the envelope—would it not leave marks, a rumpling or discoloration? Even to be suspected of such dishonour would be more bitter to her than death. Could she even think of it? How she was degraded by this hateful passion, which wrought ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... or grace imparted directly from above, and which is in her keeping. She has it in charge to rescue human nature from its misery, but not simply by raising it upon its own level, but by lifting it up to a higher level than its own. She recognises in it real moral excellence though degraded, but she cannot set it free from earth except by exalting it towards heaven. It was for this end that a renovating grace was put into her hands, and therefore from the nature of the gift, as well as from the reasonableness of the case, ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... end, but I do maintain this, that in good old language, 'Man's chief end is to glorify God,' and that anything which I do, unless it is motived by this regard to Him as its 'chief end,' loses its noblest consecration, and is degraded from its loftiest beauty. The Altar sanctifies, and not only sanctifies but ennobles, the gift. That which has in it the taint of self-regard so pronouncedly and dominantly as that God is shut out, is like some vegetation down in low levels at the bottom of a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... recorded in "The Battle of Otterburn," "The Hunting of the Cheviot," "Johnnie Armstrong," "Kinmont Willie," "The Rising in the North" and "Northumberland Betrayed by Douglas." Of the fictitious class, some were shortened, popularized, and generally degraded versions of the chivalry romances, which were passing out of favor among educated readers in the sixteenth century and fell into the hands of the ballad-makers. Such, to name only a few included in the "Reliques," were "Sir Lancelot du Lake," "The Legend of Sir Guy," ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Plato, in his solicitude to reduce his ideal state to a harmonious whole, answering to his idea of Justice, sacrificed the individual. He superseded private property, broke up the sacred relations of family and home, degraded woman, and tolerated slavery. Selfishness was to be overcome, and political order maintained, by a rigid communism. To harmonize individual rights and national interests, was the wisdom reserved for the fishermen of Galilee. The whole method of Plato's "Politeia," breathes the spirit of ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... seemed to give admission to those abodes of murder, the plan of which is handed to the jury at the assizes. As she went on, there were gloomy little gardens, crooked buildings, architecture in its most degraded form, tall, mouldy portes-cocheres, hedge-rows, within which could be vaguely seen the uncanny whiteness of stones in the darkness, corners of unfinished buildings from which arose the stench of nitrification, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... Degraded in my own estimation, I longed, yet dreaded to confide to Harrison, that the man he attended with such devotion was capable of such base degeneracy—of entertaining sentiments only worthy of ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... positions can be sustained. The one plainly contradicts our observation and experience; the other needs the proof of science that inferiority is determined by physical structure. We must face the fact of the negro's present degraded condition; and we must accept the equal fact of his being a man, with a soul as precious, in the sight of God, as the soul of his white brother. For the day when the sublime exordium of the Declaration of Independence could ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the bare outlines of the story, as told by Don Hermoso, but there were details of words said and deeds done that caused Jack Singleton to "see red", and to wonder how it was that a man, made in God's image, could ever become degraded to a condition so much lower than that of the beasts that perish; and how it was that such fiends in human form were permitted to live and to work their wicked will upon others. "However," he comforted ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... Randall had gone on from bad to worse, until he had become the degraded creature of whom his wife had caught a momentary glimpse under the glare of gas lamp on her departure from the Amity street lodgings. The woman who supposed herself to be his wife had informed him that a strange lady had called and been very kind to her, but she had ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... both public and private, which his faculties enable him to perpetrate. . . .He draws largely on the rich stores of another mountain poet, to whose religious mind it must be matter of perpetual sorrow to see the philosophy, which comes pure and holy from his pen, degraded and perverted by this miserable crew of ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... and the gaping doorways with rags, and occupying now an entire princely flat and now a few small rooms, according to its taste. Horrid-looking linen hung drying from the carved balconies, foul stains already degraded the white walls, and from the magnificent porches, intended for sumptuous equipages, there poured a stream of filth which rotted in stagnant pools in the roads, where there was neither pavement ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... is in itself an ancient type of the religious sentiment in its progress towards spiritual elevation. As soon as a nation emerged, in the world's progress, out of Fetichism, or the worship of visible objects,—the most degraded form of idolatry,—its people began to establish a priesthood and to erect temples.[54] The Scandinavians, the Celts, the Egyptians, and the Greeks, however much they may have differed in the ritual and the objects of their ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... be in the spirit of duty. It cannot present duty to us as an object of desire. Desire can be only a form of self-love. In the end it reckons with the advantage of having done one's duty. It thus becomes selfish and degraded. The identification of duty and interest was particularly offensive to Kant. He was at war with every form of hedonism. To do one's duty because one expects to reap advantage is not to have done one's ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... increase his popularity, degraded and committed to prison Ralph Flambard, Bishop of Durham, who had been the chief instrument of oppresion under his brother [k]: but this act was followed by another, which was a direct violation of his own ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... adder." Nothing is more ruinous to a child and disastrous to the hopes and happiness of home, than such relaxation of discipline. "A child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame." How many mothers have bitterly experienced this, and wept bitter tears over the memory of their degraded and wretched offspring! It is ruinous to the parent. He will both curse and despise thee. Your unlawful indulgence, therefore, is infanticide. Your cruel embraces are hugging your child to death. ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... render men patient under the deprivation of all the rights of human nature, every thing which could give them a knowledge and feeling of those rights was rationally forbidden. To render humanity fit to be insulted, it was fit that it should be degraded." ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... known respectively as Nephites and Lamanites. The former cultivated the arts of industry and refinement, and preserved a record embodying both history and scripture, while the latter became degenerate and debased. The Nephites suffered extinction about 400 A.D., but the Lamanites lived on in their degraded course, and are today extant upon the land ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... not permitted to sell their lands, and the greater portion of the area of Fiji is still held by the natives. The Hawaiian Islands now under our own rule furnish a sad contrast, for here the natives are reduced by poverty to a degraded state but little above that of peonage. The Fijians. on the other hand, may not sell, but may with the consent of the commissioner of native affairs lease their lands for a period of not more than ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... he offends against the people, and attacks the foundations of that authority from whence he derived his own. We esteem him to be legally chosen tribune who is elected only by the majority of votes; and is not therefore the same person much more lawfully degraded, when by a general consent of them all, they agree to depose him? Nothing is so sacred as religious offerings; yet the people were never prohibited to make use of them, but suffered to remove and carry them wherever they pleased; so likewise, as it were some sacred present, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... as to be almost startling, "as soon as I take full Orders, it is my purpose, with God's help and under Father Philip's advice, to become a missionary, not a missionary to the heathen, as we are pleased to call them, or to the infinitely more degraded heathen of our own country, but to such people as you, you who are really living in sin without knowing it. Has it ever struck you, Canon, how great a work the Church has left undone in what are called the upper ranks of Society? You know the vast majority of them really and honestly ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... State prison, or the gallows. While, on the other hand, take a man who has been accustomed to labor and toil for his daily food, and see how much more he is respected, and what a difference there is in the lives of those two men. The one is beloved and respected, and the other is miserable and degraded. ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... See some sensible remarks in the Gentleman's Magazine for March, 1793, by D. H., that is, says the courteous Ritson, by Gough, "the scurrilous and malignant editor of that degraded publication."] ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... resolved, under the advice of his ministers, to treat all his uncles as his enemies, and he sent his officers with armies at their back to depose them, and bring them as prisoners to his court. Five of his uncles were thus summarily dealt with, one committed suicide, and the other four were degraded to the rank of the people. But the Prince of Yen was too formidable to be tackled in this fashion. Taking warning from the fate of his brothers, he collected all the troops he could, prepared to defend his position against the emperor, and issued a proclamation stating ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... in some visible object, which is the home or most treasured possession of a god or demon. The object may be a building, a tree, an animal, a particular kind of food, or indeed anything. Unfortunately this belief is not peculiar to savages. A degraded form of it is exhibited by the so-called neo-mystical school of modern France, and in the baser ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... and the unequal division of property, are, that the lower ranks, though expensively maintained, become degraded, disorderly, and uncomfortable, while the middling classes disappear by degrees. Discontent pervades the great mass of the people, and the supporters of the government, though powerful, are too few in number, and too inefficient in character to preserve ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... the noble souls at that day rejoicing in the success of their labors at Mackinac, anticipate that in less than a quarter of a century there would remain of all these numerous tribes but a few scattered bands, squalid, degraded, with scarce a vestige remaining of their former lofty character—their lands cajoled or wrested from them, the graves of their fathers turned up by the ploughshare—themselves chased farther and farther towards the setting sun, until they were literally grudged a resting-place ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... passage in his writings seems to have in mind his own days as a schoolmaster. Thus in the Life of Milton he says:—'This is the period of his life from which all his biographers seem inclined to shrink. They are unwilling that Milton should be degraded to a schoolmaster; but, since it cannot be denied that he taught boys, one finds out that he taught for nothing, and another that his motive was only zeal for the propagation of learning and virtue; and all tell what they do not know to be true, only ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... countries where all is joy for the senses, where all recollections are a feast for the soul, and where his love of moral beauty is as strongly marked in his praise of olden Greece, as is his condemnation of modern degraded Greece. Byron speaks again in his own name when he puts invectives in the mouth of the Mussulman fisherman, and makes him curse so strongly the crime of the Giaour and the criminal himself, whose despair ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Prester John, or the Christian Priest-king, had been sought for in vain among the wandering tribes of eastern Tartary. The Portuguese now absurdly gave that appellation to the Negus of Habesh, or Emperor of the Abyssinians; where a degraded species of Christianity prevails among a barbarous race, continually engaged in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... hardy in enduring fatigue and the inclemency of weather, the British soldier always deteriorates rapidly when his back is turned to the enemy. Confident in his bravery, regarding victory as assured, he is unable to understand the necessity for retreat, and considers himself degraded by being ordered to retire, and regards prudence on the part of his general as equivalent ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... other woman had been "planted there" (she thought of it with a fierce joy), and the master had come back to her for ever and ever, in saeculo saeculorum, amen. Like many peasant women of strong nature, she had the terrible passion of possession. In her soul she would rather have had the most degraded of Paragots in her arms, as her own unalienable property, than have seen him honourable and prosperous in the arms of another. Had she been of a nervous and emotional temperament there might have been tragedy in the Rue des Saladiers, and the newspapers of Paris might ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... folds aided her in looking prosperous and fit for all social occasions. She lived alone, and was a busy and unprocrastinating housekeeper. She may have made less raspberry jam than in her earlier days, but it was always pound for pound; while her sponge-cake was never degraded in its ingredients from the royal standard of twelve eggs. The honest English and French stuffs that had been used in the furnishing of the captain's house so many years before faded a little as the years passed by, but they never wore out. Yet one cannot ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... degraded, and oppressed as France now is, I do not despair of her ultimate success in establishing her independence and a free form of government." But it was not till half a century later that Gambetta, ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... self-respect. He haunts his Clubs less and less frequently, and seems to wither under the open dislike of those who are repelled by the mean and sordid details of his despicable story. And thus he drags on his life, a degraded and comparatively impoverished outcast, untidy, haggard and shunned, having forfeited by the restriction of his spending powers even the good-natured contempt of those who were not too proud to be at one time mistaken for ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... sickness with unwearied devotion; and one day when I was convalescent, finding me depressed in spirits and crying, she said laughingly to me, "Why, child, there is nothing the matter with you; but you are weak in body and mind." This seemed to me the most degraded of all conceivable conditions, and I fell into a redoublement of weeping over my own abasement ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... suffered in the late reign. The sentence of Samuel Johnson was taken into consideration by the House of Commons. It was resolved that the scourging which he had undergone was cruel, and that his degradation was of no legal effect. The latter proposition admitted of no dispute: for he had been degraded by the prelates who had been appointed to govern the diocese of London during Compton's suspension. Compton had been suspended by a decree of the High Commission, and the decrees of the High Commission were universally acknowledged to be nullities. Johnson ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of God and man. The word is used for minor evil spirits in much the same sense as "demon." From the various characteristics associated with this idea, the term has come to be applied by analogy in many different senses. From the idea of evil as degraded, contemptible and doomed to failure, the term is applied to persons in evil plight, or of slight consideration. In English legal phraseology "devil" and "devilling" are used of barristers who act as substitutes for others. Any remuneration ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... of the street, I saw the figure of a man, stiff like a ramrod, moving with small steps, a slight girlish figure by his side. And the gloom was like the gloom of villainous slums, of misery, of wretchedness, of a starved and degraded existence. It was a relief that I could see only their shabby hopeless backs. He was an awful ghost. But indeed to call him a ghost was only a refinement of polite speech, and a manner of concealing one's terror of such things. Prisons are wonderful ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... unfortunate circumstance was its getting all about the city that she was a cold, soulless thing, who declared that sooner than yield to be the abject wretch men sought to make her, she would die that only death. She had but one life, and it were better to yield that up virtuously than die degraded. Graspum, then, is the only safe channel in which to dispose of the like. That functionary assures Mr. Blackmore Blackett that the girl is beautiful, delicate, and an exceedingly sweet creature yet! but that during the four months she has depreciated more than ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... mysterious railroads and steamboats and telegraphs; who would see undone in Egypt all that great Mehemet Ali achieved, and would prefer rather to forget than emulate him; a man who found his great empire a blot upon the earth—a degraded, poverty-stricken, miserable, infamous agglomeration of ignorance, crime, and brutality—and will idle away the allotted days of his trivial life and then pass to the dust and the worms and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the president of a bank, and an editor of a daily newspaper. All my life I had moved in the highest circles of society, surrounded by the best and purest of both sexes, and now, here I was, in the deplorable condition of having been hurled from that high social position, down to the low degraded plane of a convict. As I sat there in that desolate abode of the disgraced, I tried to look out down the future. All was dark. For a time it seemed as if that sweet angel we call hope had spread her wings and taken her departure from me forever. ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... peacocks' feathers the climax of barbarism—marabouts and kalydor the acme of refinement. A ring through the nose calls forth their deepest pity—a diamond drop to the ear commands their highest respect. To them, nothing can show a more degraded state of nature than a New Zealand chief, with his distinctive coat of arms emblazoned on the skin of his face; nor anything of greater social elevation than an English peer, with the glittering label of his "nobility" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... his suggestions for her reading had given him dignity and romantic charm. "He was nice then," she said to herself. "If only he had stopped there." When he fell at her feet in the attempt to rouse her pity he had been degraded in her eyes. His whole manner towards her became that of suppliant—beseeching the "guides" to sanction their ultimate union. She burned with shame as she thought of her tacit acquiescence in this arrangement. "You have no right to interfere ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... Architecture," and in this my father was of important use to him. He executed the greater number of the illustrations for this beautiful work. The book when published had a considerable influence in restoring the taste of architects to a style which they had heretofore either neglected or degraded. ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... The Southern element there wanted to make it a slave State. The Northerners, including both Whigs and Democrats, wanted it free. They did not want to be brought in competition with slave labor in the mines, and have their occupation degraded in that way. Their pride, as well as interest, was at stake, and there was great feeling on the subject. Meetings were called all through the mines and addresses made and candidates nominated. The average of intelligence there was away above ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... kept clear of native women. As one can't suspect him of moral delicacy, I surmise that it must have been from prudence. And he, too, was no longer young. There were many white hairs in his valuable black beard by then. He may have simply longed for some kind of companionship in his queer, degraded existence. Whatever their motives, they vanished from Saigon together. And of course nobody cared what had become ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... over my heart. I wished to play my part in the drama of life to the end; I wished to honor my royal birth to which fate had condemned me. But it appears I was a bad actor. I was cast out from my service, my gay uniform and royal star torn from my breast. I, a prince, was sent home a humiliated, degraded, ragged beggar. I crept with my misery and my shame into this corner, and no one followed me. No one showed a spark of love for the poor, spurned cast-away. Love would have enabled me to overcome ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... moments of violence was something new in her—probably depending, if the truth were known, on some obscure physical misery. She felt that they degraded her, yet ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... pulled off. But he dared not report her. She knew too much about him, and she was moved a few days afterwards to look after the sick. She it was who spoke to Zachariah. She, however, was not by any means the worst. Worse than her were the old, degraded, sodden, gin-drinking hags, who had all their lives breathed pauper air and pauper contamination; women with not one single vestige of their Maker's hand left upon them, and incapable, even under the greatest provocation, of any human emotion; who would see a dying mother ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... respectively," to appoint one or more persons to execute their warrants. So it seems we are to have an unlimited number of judges and executioners. These executioners, expressly appointed to catch slaves, and of course among the most worthless and degraded of the community, are one and all invested with the power of a high sheriff to call out the posse comitatus, not merely in his own county, but in every hamlet in the State, and require "good citizens," under pain of fine and imprisonment, to join him in his execrable hunt. Really, Sir, your ...
— A Letter to the Hon. Samuel Eliot, Representative in Congress From the City of Boston, In Reply to His Apology For Voting For the Fugitive Slave Bill. • Hancock
... ultimately adopt—and all of them are destined for work-a-day lives—an observer feels quite sure that they are more likely to raise the character of their several employments, than to be themselves degraded to lower social levels, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... Generation and Regeneration (1) and appropriated by the individual to his own private pleasure—no sooner was its religious character as a tribal service (2), (often rendered within the Temple precincts) lost sight of or degraded into a commercial transaction—than every kind of evil fell upon mankind. Corruptio optimi pessima. It must be remembered too that simultaneous with this sexual disruption occurred the disruption of other ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... the West, of paganism and of Christianity, founded on their respective idealistic and realistic tendencies. (2) The divining or necromantic faculties have been generally regarded in the East as honourable properties; whereas in the West they have been degraded into the criminal follies of an infernal compact. The magical art is a noble cultivated science—a prerogative of the priestly caste: witchcraft, in its strict sense, was mostly abandoned to the lowest, and, ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... cried, stopping short in his rapid pacing up and down the room. "How comes it that that miserable, degraded wretch has not been despatched before this? I gave the most explicit orders about it to that good-for-nothing Merindol. In spite of what Vidalinc says, I am convinced that I shall succeed with Isabelle when once that cursed lover ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... proclamation to be made, that of any man has been wronged by the viceroy or governor, or by any of his relations or officers, or any other person, he shall receive ample justice. A viceroy or governor is never degraded, except by letters issued from the council, or divan of kings, and this is done only for some flagrant malversation, or for the refusal or delay of justice. The posts of judicature being conferred upon none but men of probity and justice, good ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... sounded like an echo. It came from the young lady, who had sprung forward indignantly, and was holding out a hand for the letter. "The servants! Have you not degraded me enough?" ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... directed with almost equal vehemence against Mr. Reeve for his having published "such an abominable book," and she charged Sir Arthur Helps to convey to him her deep displeasure. Mr. Reeve, however, was impenitent. When Sir Arthur told him that, in the Queen's opinion, "the book degraded royalty," he replied: "Not at all; it elevates it by the contrast it offers between the present and the defunct state of affairs." But this adroit defence failed to make any impression upon Victoria; and Mr. Reeve, ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... arms, is there a man among you, who can bear the thought of living to see his dear country and friends in so degraded and wretched a state as this? If there be, then let that man leave me and retire to his home. I ask not his aid. But, thanks to God, I have now no fears about you: judging by your looks, I feel that there ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... alleged promiscuity ever did prevail—and it may have obtained to some extent in certain degraded portions of humanity—its prevalence was not its justification. The practice cannot have been befitting in any stage of the evolution of human society. As in all things we suppose our readers to have understanding, we leave it to them to think out ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... to meet at the headquarters of their respective departments, and await the verdict of a national jury. In short, in accordance with the very democratic creed, "nothing was visible amid the ruins of the Convention," mutilated and degraded, but interloping "attorneys." "The people's workmen" are summoned "to return to obedience and do justice to the reproaches addressed to them by their legitimate master;"[1153] the nation canceled the pay of its clerks at the capital, withdrew the mandate they had misused, and declared them ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... they are pariahs, debarred from every fellowship save with their own despised race, scorned by the lowest white ruffian in your streets, not tolerated even by the foreign menials in your kitchen. They are free certainly, but they are also degraded, rejected, the offscum and the offscouring of the very dregs of your society.... All hands are extended to thrust them out, all fingers point at their dusky skin, all tongues, the most vulgar as well as the self-styled most refined, have learned to turn the very name of their race into an ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... plans every day to confess all to Corkey. Every day, too, there is a plan to meet Esther. But as David Lockwin grows small, Esther grows grand. Talking with the servants of her mother's home has degraded, declassed, the husband. He has hungered to meet her, yet months intervene without that ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... tendency of a person to allow himself to be degraded, robbed, deceived, and exploited might be the diffidence ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... construction is: 'As (being) loth to leave the body that it loved, and (as having) linked itself to a degenerate and degraded state.' it: by syntax this pronoun refers to 'shadows,' or (in thought) 'such shadow.' It seems best, however, to connect ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... wife and daughter professed an utter contempt for all white persons who degraded themselves to any kind of toil. Of course, their hostility to the North was very great. Beyond a slight supervision, they left every thing to the care of the negroes. A gentleman who was with me sought to make himself acquainted with the family, and succeeded admirably until, ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... go on like this, you two," Hermione exclaimed, "you will make me feel as if it were degraded to wish to live anywhere except at Clapham Junction or the North Pole. Let us be happy as we are, where we are, to-day and—yes, call me weak ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... to a condition of unbounded liberty. Whatever, to her imagination, marriage may fail to mean, it at least means freedom and consideration. It does not mean, as it so often means in America, being socially shelved—and it is not too much to say, in certain circles, degraded; it means being socially launched and consecrated. It means becoming that exalted personage, a mere de famille. To be a mere de famille is to occupy not simply (as is rather the case with us) a sentimental, but a really official ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... followers of Fnelon believe that men are degraded Intelligences who had all once existed together in a paradisiacal or perhaps heavenly state. The first four lines express a feeling which I have often had—the present has appeared like a vivid dream or exact similitude ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... too humiliating to dwell on. I feel for myself, I feel for human nature, when I see the fastidiousness of wealth, the more liberal pride of birth, and the yet more allowable pretensions of beauty, degraded into the most abject submission to such a being as Dumont. Are our principles every where the mere children of circumstance, or is it in this country only that nothing is stable? For my own part I love inflexibility of character; and pride, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... it may have been the odour of iris. I am mad over perfume. I think it a neglected art, degraded to the function of anointment. I have often dreamed of an art by which a dazzling and novel synthesis of fragrant perfumes would be invented by some genius, some latter-day Rimmel or Lubin whom we could hail as a peer of Chopin or Richard Strauss—two composers who have expressed perfume ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... are so various, and present such lively contrasts, that the term African loses all its application. From the Mandingo, the Foulah, the Jolof, through the Felatahs, the Eboes, the Mokos, the Feloups, the Coromantines, the Bissagos, all the sullen and degraded tribes of the marshy districts and islands of the Slave Coast, and inland to the Shangallas, who border upon Southwestern Abyssinia, the characters are as distinct as the profiles or the colors. The physical qualities ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... though there are about one hundred and fifty in the district of Montreal. There was a difference in their conduct; though I believe every one of them was guilty of licentiousness; while not one did I ever see who maintained a character any way becoming the profession of a priest. Some were gross and degraded in a degree which few of my readers can ever have imagined; and I should be unwilling to offend the eye, and corrupt the heart of any one, by an account of their words and actions. Few imaginations can conceive deeds so abominable as they practised, and often required of some of the poor ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... unexpected gratification; for I hated the fact of my being compelled to wear Ralph's discarded clothes. It had been gall and wormwood to me. I loathed myself for having to put them on, and loathed him as the malicious instrument that caused me to be so degraded—the more especially as my cousin would in "a friendly sort of way" frequently allude to the circumstance of the clothes having been formerly his, calling attention to my want of ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... have mothers and wives; you may, perhaps, some day have daughters. Defend the honor of woman! Do not permit it to be degraded in your presence. Marat has insulted a woman; we owe her satisfaction for it. Join with me in the cry, 'Long live the ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... mastering his difficulties, and as this necessitated fresh failures, every single punishment became frightfully accumulative, and, alas! before three weeks were over, Walter was "sent up for bad" to the headmaster. By this he felt degraded and discouraged to the last degree. Moreover, harm was done to him in many other ways. Conscious that all this disgrace had come upon him without any serious fault of his own, and even in spite of his direct and strenuous efforts, he became oppressed with a sense of injustice ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... last twenty or thirty years, the foremost humorist of our language has, from time to time, casually touched on the removal of natural and acquired dirt by means of bathing; but however lightly and racily this subject might leave his pen, it has been degraded into repulsiveness by the clumsy handling of imitators. Some things look best when merely implied in the dim background, and recent literature certainly proves this to be one of them. There is nothing dainty or picturesque ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... neighboring ones, and with corruptions of French and English words. Mr. Swan, among others, has been led into this error. The place of his residence, Shoalwater Bay, is common ground of the Chinook and Chihalis Indians, and the degraded remnants of the two tribes are closely intermarried, and use ...
— Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, or, Trade Language of Oregon • George Gibbs
... little light came through the doorway. Darkness, indeed, was his only comfort. He would not shake hands with me, for he has, withal, the instincts of a gentleman, and it seemed as if the shame of his whole degraded life lay with him before me in his misery. His tragedy will have been played out in a day or two, I think; and I wish the memory of it might also pass from my mind. What shall I do with the goblin boy? The hatefulness ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... moral views, they were enough to make one shudder. She had got past the argumentative amours of Ibsen's idiotic, rebellious heroines, and had now reached the theory of pure intangible beauty. She deemed Santerre's last creation, Anne-Marie, to be far too material and degraded, because in one deplorable passage the author remarked that Norbert's kisses had left their trace on the Countess's brow. Santerre disputed the quotation, whereupon she rushed upon the volume and sought the page to which she ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... recognized the soul to be of more importance than the material body, and made its welfare paramount over all other interests. This recognition doubtless contributed to elevate the morals of the people, and to make them religious, despite their false and degraded views of God, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... contribute, in any degree, to awaken the sympathy of the Christian world in behalf of the wretched and degraded Aborigines of this vast territory; should it tend in any way to expose, or to reform the abuses in the management of the Hudson's Bay Company, or to render its monopoly less injurious to the natives than hitherto it has been; the writer's labour will have been amply compensated. Interested ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... indolent, proud, and inefficient. They think it a disgrace to work by the side of the negro, and therefore will allow things to be left in a very careless, untidy way, rather than put forth their energy to alter or improve them. And as it is impossible for slaves, untaught and degraded as they are, to give a neat and thrifty appearance to their homes, we, who have been brought up at the North, accustomed to work ourselves, assisted by well-trained domestics, can scarcely realize the many discomforts often to be experienced in Southern houses. But Miss Lee was unusually energetic ...
— Step by Step - or, Tidy's Way to Freedom • The American Tract Society
... consistent of physicists, who reduces all philosophy to a cosmology, and consider whether, the author of "Ecce Homo" himself being judge, the religion of the one can be maintained to be purer or that of the other to be happier, than the most degraded form of popular Christianity. I proceed to his declaration, which naturally follows from what has been said, that the essence of religion is not in theological dogma nor in ethical practice. The really religious man, as we are henceforth to conceive of him, is, apparently, the man of sentiment. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... years. Its features seemed to them as natural and unalterable as the features of a cave to a cave-dweller. It had been repapered twice in their lives, and each papering stood out in their memories like an epoch; a third epoch was due to the replacing of a drugget by a resplendent old carpet degraded from the drawing-room. There was only one bed, the bedstead being of painted iron; they never interfered with each other in that bed, sleeping with a detachment as perfect as if they had slept on opposite sides of St. Luke's Square; yet if Constance ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... ugly face; but the countenance of an ugly animal is pleasanter to look upon than that of an ugly degraded human being, and as I saw the rough stubbly jaws open, displaying some yellow and blackened teeth that glistened in the light as their owner yawned widely, I began to think our dog ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... the foulest, darkest, and most oppressive stage of history, had precisely the same foundation in truth as the love of the French court during the days of the Regency for a shepherd's life and child-like rural pleasures. A wicked and degraded age seeks for relief in contemplating its opposite; a healthy one—like the Greek—glories in itself, and strives to raise self to the highest standard of truth and beauty. None of the symbolisms of the middle ages grew directly from Nature—it was based on second-hand reveries, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... all of them do not take place, as we rejoice to say that in many instances, through the influence of the principles of humanity and religion on the minds of masters, they do not, still the slave is deprived of his natural right, degraded as a human being, and exposed to the danger of passing into the hands of a master who may inflict upon him all the hardships and injuries which inhumanity and avarice ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... absorbed his interest, was the only good he had got out of his visit to London. The beauty of his own beautiful poems, I felt in disgust, should have made such vicious sordidness impossible. It revolted me that a man so degraded and hideous physically could write the verse I had loved ever since his Romances sans Paroles first fell into my hands, or, writing it, could be content to remain what he was. To be sure, the genius is rare whom it is not a disappointment to meet, and the hero-worshipper may ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Michael Amory said. "I want to let people know how wonderfully beautiful life can be, even without wealth and worldly power, and why it is beautiful. I want them to realize the essence of things, to let those poor, crowded, degraded wretches in London know the sweetness of work in God's open spaces. I feel that I must do my little bit in helping things forward. I want to let in a few chinks of light. . ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... these I am descended; but though we refused to transmit this knowledge to them, they treated us with great care, hoping that after a lapse of time we would amalgamate with them. But we were made of sterner stuff than that. We could see our race and nation blotted from existence, but not degraded. After the lapse of many centuries we were forgotten in the struggles of a half civilized race and the savages for supremacy, and my people dying out year by year, are all gone save myself, the last of the rightful owners of ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... problem. The rule of the dictators, which the allied powers specifically covenanted among themselves to destroy, has ended, probably for ever. When the war closed with the death of Lopez, chaos prevailed in Paraguay, and the people were both bankrupt in fortune and degraded in morals. The reign of outlaws commenced, and it was dangerous to go beyond Asuncion and into the interior. But the Brazilians and the Argentines occupied the capital with a force strong enough to maintain order, and to convince the Paraguayans that their rule must be respected. To-day Paraguay ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... patriotism to do except to seek for the removal, by constitutional means, of some of the cruel grievances that pressed on the people. Emancipation of the Catholics from the large remainder of the penal laws that still degraded and despoiled them was one of the baits held out by Mr. Pitt when playing his cards for the Union; but not long had the Irish parliament been numbered with the things that were, when it became evident that the ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... that abuts upon the great fall, and standing in whose gallery you actually hang suspended over the abyss; not but that the tower is in itself rudely simple, and in good taste perhaps, but that one feels this place needs no such accessories, and, instead of deriving advantage from them, is degraded into a mere show by their presence; and, in saying this much, I feel as though the application of the ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... I seemed to have belonged to the world of business, to the same class as the rich, the refined, while now, behold! I was a workman, a laborer, one of the masses. I pitied myself for a degraded wretch. And when some of my shopmates indulged in coarse pleasantry in the hearing of the finisher girls it would hurt me personally, as a confirmation of my disgrace. "And this is the kind of people with whom I am doomed to associate!" ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... adventurers did not examine the river, and more than a century elapsed before any further record of the visit of white men occurred. The north-eastern counties had, however, been partially settled by refugees from Virginia, where in the absence of law and gospel they became as degraded a community as there was on the continent. Their descendants have, to a considerable extent, overrun the South to the Mississippi and on ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... many, independence of thought is crushed down, talent is bribed to do service to tyranny, education is confined to a privileged class and denied to the people, property is sometimes pillaged and sometimes flattered, and even virtue is degraded by lowering its field and making subservience appear to be patience and loyalty, and religion is not unfrequently made the handmaid of oppression. Taxes fall heavily on the poor for the benefit of the rich, and the only check proceeds from the ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... only insults,[122] dangers, persecutions, and poverty. To such indignities, O bravest of men, how long will you submit? Is it not better to die in a glorious attempt, than, after having been the sport of other men's insolence, to resign a wretched and degraded existence ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... itself in Cyrus's passion to possess the Dinwiddie and Central Railroad. Though the ends were different, the quality which moved father and daughter towards these different ends was precisely the same. In Cyrus, it was force degraded; in Susan, it was force refined; but the peculiar attribute which distinguished and united them was the possession of the power to ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... the native races of South Africa, and to the people of the West Indies, to the weak who had been crushed and enslaved by the strong, it came with loving smiles as deliverer and friend. By the devil-worshipper of Travancore, ignorant, degraded, friendless, afraid of malignant spirits, it was welcomed for its kindness. To the caste-ridden people of the great cities and towns, to the sudra of South India, to the Brahmins everywhere, it came as an enemy, ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... so universally diffused. Thus, though all the officers of the army, and well-informed citizens, both in Rome and Carthage, anticipated and understood Hannibal's designs, his own soldiers, ignorant and degraded, knew nothing except that they were to go on some distant and dangerous service. They, very likely, had no idea whatever of Italy or of Rome, or of the magnitude of the possessions, or of the power held by the vast empire which they were ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... face has the largest, most inspiring possibilities; and there are no eyes so dull, no faces so void of light and life, no skin degraded to a parchment, for a public display of an assorted collection of evidences of physical poverty, in which these changes to a higher life are not in some ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... put her fingers in her ears. He would not whip her, of course; but what would he do? And this horrid man, who was of the class of her father's coachman, had called her a "greaser." She had all the pride of her race. The insult stifled her. She felt smirched and degraded. ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... greatest obstacles were found, not in the hopeless paganism of the degraded tribes of the Dark Continent, but in the apathy, if not antipathy, of the representatives of Christian governments. The British governor would have penned him up within the bounds of Cape Colony, lest he should complicate ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... at the time he was attached to the fiscus; he had then been driven out to an island for betraying some interest, was subsequently restored, together with the rest, by Tarautas, had taken charge of his decisions and letters, and finally had been degraded to the position of senator, with ex-consular rank, because he had admitted overgrown lads into the army. Triccianus served in the rank and file of the Pannonian contingent, had once been porter to the governor of that country, and was at this ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... shall be admitted on the same terms with the original States. But the Legislature may make conditions with the new States concerning the public debt which shall be subsisting."[222] Opposing this action, Madison insisted that "the Western States neither would nor ought to submit to a union which degraded them from an equal rank with the other States."[223] Nonetheless, after further expressions of opinion pro and con, the Convention voted nine States to two to delete the requirement of equality.[224] Prior to this time, however, Georgia ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... to this man who roused all the repulsion of his nature. His efforts had been useless. He had prayed to be given the sympathy for this man that the true Christian ought to feel towards every human being, even the most degraded. But he felt that his prayers had not been answered. With every day his antipathy for Androvsky increased. Yet he was entirely unable to ground it upon any definite fact in Androvsky's character. He did not know ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... incomplete. New every springtime, fresh every summer, the earth comes forth as a bride adorned for her husband. Not only in the gray dawn of our history, but now in the full brightness of its noon-day, may we hear the voice of the Lord walking in the garden. I look out upon the gray degraded fields left naked of the kindly snow, and inwardly ask: Can these dry bones live again? And while the question is yet trembling on my lips, lo! a Spirit breathes upon the earth, and beauty thrills into bloom. Who shall lack faith in man's redemption, when every year the earth is redeemed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... than care to take part in it. The money-markets of the world are ramparts that few men care to storm, but, if the independent and the intelligent do not withstand this semitization of our institutions, the ignorant and the degraded will one day take the matter into their own hands, as they have done before, and as they do to this day in some parts ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... difference of opinion as to what that equality should mean; and there seems to be a danger in some quarters of overlooking the essential difference of the sexes. No people can achieve what it ought while its wives and mothers are degraded or denied their rights. For her own sake, as well as for the weal of the race, whatever is needful to enable woman to attain to her noblest womanhood must ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... my name so loud! it is disgraced and degraded. How the nobles and the ladies will rejoice! Now envy can point at us with spiteful joy—and a minute ago I was praising this day! They say one should exhibit one's happiness in the streets, and conceal one's misery; on the contrary, on the contrary! Even the Gods ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... hope of her recovery, but while she lived he gave himself to her service as to that of a living soul capable of justice and love. The night was more than warm, but she had fits of shivering. He wrapped his coat round her, and wiped from the poor degraded face the damps of suffering. The woman-heart was alive still, for she took the hand that ministered to her and kissed it with a moan. When the morning came she fell asleep. He crept out and went to his grandmother's, where he roused Betty, and ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... revolution and conscription has leveled all those distinctions. Many a youth of good birth and education is made to bear his musket in the ranks, and does not elevate his comrades to his standard, but is soon degraded to the level of their sentiments and habits. Many a French general, for instance Junot, has been raised from the ranks. Military merit or accident has elevated them to command without a corresponding elevation ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... such distinguished services to his country as to merit the gratitude and reverence of every loyal American; a man who has spent the best years of his life in fighting his country's battles and in studying and obeying her laws, was insulted and degraded by men who, so far as true moral worth is concerned, are unworthy to sit at the same table ...
— The Battle of the Big Hole • G. O. Shields
... a place of quakes, all thunder-scarred, Helpless, degraded, desolate, Peace, the White Angel, comes. Her eyes are as a mother's. Her good hands Are comforting, and helping; and her voice Falls on the heart, as, after Winter, Spring Falls on the World, and there is no more pain. And, in her influence, hope returns, and life, And the passion of endeavour: ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... over the globe, if we fix our eyes on those places where wealth formerly was accumulated, and where commerce flourished, we see them, at the present day, peculiarly desolated and degraded. ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... never been painted, which had no flower garden in front of it, and which, in a word, was quite far from being a palace. A great many very nice city folks would not have considered it fit to live in, would have turned up their noses at it, and wondered that any human beings could be so degraded as to live in such a miserable house. But the widow Bright, Bobby's mother, thought it was a very comfortable house, and considered herself very fortunate in being able to get so good a dwelling. ...
— Now or Never - The Adventures of Bobby Bright • Oliver Optic
... sensible experience which James might have acquired of the unsurmountable antipathy entertained by his subjects against an alliance with Catholics, he still persevered in the opinion, that his son would be degraded by receiving into his bed a princess of less than royal extraction. After the rupture, therefore, with Spain, nothing remained but an alliance with France; and to that court he immediately applied himself.[*] The same allurements had not here place, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... this globe and all mankind; the most refined and the most degraded, the cleverest and the most stupid, are all liable to become his faithful subjects. He can alike command the devotion of an archbishop and a South-Sea Islander, of the most immaculate maiden lady (whatever her age) and of the savage Zulu girl. From the pole to the equator, and from the equator ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... is a degraded South Sea Islander making a crude intoxicant from a sugary plant, a Japanese preparing his favorite alcoholic beverage from the fermentation of rice by means of a fungus plant grown for the purpose, ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... creative impulse, that divine imagination of hers, his own appeared as something imitative and secondhand, and his art essentially degraded. He was nothing better than a ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... countenance those who, being in the same circumstances as to comfort and liberal education, are also under the same ban of rejection from the "nobility," or born gentry. The legal profession is equally degraded; even a barrister or advocate holds a place in the public esteem little differing from that of an Old Bailey attorney of the worst class. And this result is the less liable to modification from personal qualities, inasmuch as there is no great theatre (as with us) for individual display. Forensic ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Landor's "Gebir," are examples of romantic themes with classical or, at least, unromantic handling. The last of them was the same in subject, indeed, with Landor's drama, "Count Julian." I have spoken of "Thalaba" and "The Curse of Kehama" as epics; but Southey rejected "the degraded title of epic" and scouted the rules of Aristotle. Nevertheless, the best qualities of these blank verse narratives are of the classic-epic kind. The story is not badly told; the measure is correct if not distinguished; and the style is simple, clear, and in pure taste. But the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... grace!) Among the men I saw some very strong and capable faces; but the majority had not much character in their looks,—indeed, differed little in that regard from any average crowd of men anywhere. Among the women, to my surprise, I found no really degraded faces, though many stolid ones,—only one deeply dejected, (this belonged to the wife of a hitherto monogamic husband, who had left her alone in the dress-circle, while he was dancing with a chubby young Mormoness, likely to be added to the family in a month ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... not to punish his wife. It was very difficult for him to obey. This bitterness against the degraded wretch was roused to its highest pitch by her last outbreak. If she would only die out of his life—die in any sense, so that he might hear and see her no more—he would not ask for her punishment. If she would cease ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... wonderful what shreds of personality, what tags and rags of the ideal, the most degraded may retain. Was there ever a soul that did not think some one action beneath its dignity? An absolutely unscrupulous person is a contradiction in terms. To be unscrupulous were to cease to be a person, to have become a bundle of instincts and impulses. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill |
