"Destitution" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pen; although from the little we can glean of his history, the inference is, he was improvident, and easily led away by gay, dissipated companions. One of his biographers gives a melancholy account of the destitution of his latter days, and states, that he was reduced to the necessity of borrowing a shilling, to satisfy the cravings of hunger, from a gentleman, who, shocked at the distress of the author of "Venice Preserved," put a guinea into his hands; ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Thomas Otway
... evidence against him; while many of the most respectable families in the districts were ashamed to place on record the suffering and dishonour inflicted on their female members; and still more had been reduced by them to utter destitution, and driven in despair into other districts. To use his own words—"The once flourishing districts of Gonda and Bahraetch, so noted for fertility and beauty, are now, for the greater part, uncultivated; villages completely deserted in the midst of lands devoid ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... anguish, agony, torture, sorrow, grief; misery, affliction, adversity, disaster, calamity, misfortune; straits, poverty, destitution, indigence. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the many talents that clustered around this quiet little garden was the brilliant Paul Verlaine, the most Bohemian of all inhabitants of modern Prague, whose death has left a void, difficult to fill. Fame and honors came too late. He died in destitution, if not absolutely of hunger; to-day his admirers are erecting a bronze bust of him in the Garden of the Luxembourg, with money that would have gone far toward making ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... the poor boy who, without any fault of his mother, had come into the world with a stigma on his birth, now, without any neglect of his father, was left in a state of complete destitution as well as ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... from his wife.' He adds that, 'while he was in a lodging in Fleet Street, she was harboured by a friend near the Tower.' This separation, he insinuates, rose by an estrangement caused by Johnson's 'indifference in the discharge of the domestic virtues.' It is far more likely that it rose from destitution. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... so resenting the dishonour suffered at our hands by his beautiful tongue, to which, as the great field of elocution, he was patriotically devoted. I think he fairly loathed our closed English vowels and confused consonants, our destitution of sounds that he recognised as sounds; though why in this connection he put up best with our own compatriots, embroiled at that time often in even stranger vocables than now, is more than I can say. I think that would be explained perhaps ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... of Elijah—or, my faith! if anything went wrong with the commissariat, helping myself with the best grace in the world from the next peasant! And now I began to feel at the same time the burthen of riches and the fear of destitution. There were ten thousand pounds in the despatch-box, but I reckoned in French money, and had two hundred and fifty thousand agonies; I kept it under my hand all day, I dreamed of it at night. In the inns, I ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that she had no choice between these long walks and utter destitution for herself and her children; but she said, cheerfully, that it was only since the weather had become so warm that she had found the walk at all beyond her strength, and the hot weather ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... at the door of the police station, what we grasp in that moment of pure observation on which we pride ourselves, is not alien to the principle of classification, but deeper. We could, if we liked, make excellent comment upon the nature of provincial Spaniards, or of destitution (as misery is called by the philanthropists), or on homes for working girls. But such is not our intention. We aim at experience in the particular centres in which alone it is evil. We avoid classification. We do not deny it. ...
— Eeldrop and Appleplex • T.S. Eliot
... professors of wisdom in Greece did pretend to teach an universal SAPIENCE and knowledge both of matter and words, Socrates divorced them and withdrew philosophy and left rhetoric to itself, which by that destitution became but a barren and unnoble science. And in particular sciences we see that if men fall to subdivide their labours, as to be an oculist in physic, or to be perfect in some one title of the law, or the like, they may prove ready and subtile, but not deep or sufficient, no not in that subject ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... to rouse the benevolence of their countrymen on behalf of the Highlands. We are by no means prepared to join in this view. It is impossible to describe the consequences of a coming famine with mathematical precision. Besides, the destitution is not yet over. And it is at least clear, even as to the past, that except for the exertions of the proprietors, which might or might not have been so largely made, the destitution would have fully borne out the predictions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... money thus obtained was spent extravagantly by a people used to Confederate rag money and for four years deprived of the luxuries of life. The poorer whites who had lost all were close to starvation. In the white counties which had sent so large a proportion of men to the army, the destitution was most acute. In many families the breadwinner had been killed in war. After 1862, relief systems had been organized in nearly all the Confederate States for the purpose of aiding the poor whites, but these organizations were disbanded in 1865. ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... pruning-hooks, and most of them accepted a state not far removed from actual want, rather than stain their martial hands with manual labour. The leisured class thus became the starving class, and the King's annual subsidies alone kept these families from destitution. Many of them were also in receipt of the bounties granted to large families—an ineffective resource, inasmuch as hungry children but consumed the supply and renewed the demand. Disdaining work of any sort, the Canadian gentilhomme ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... argued some divine compensation somewhere that a thing so destitute should remain unaware of its destitution, that a creature so futile and diminutive should be sustained by this conviction of his greatness. For he was certain. Nothing could annihilate the illusion by which Nicky lived. But it was enough to destroy all certainty in anybody else, and there were ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... son jointly occupied a dreary room on the fifth floor of a dilapidated house, which might have made a fit adjunct to the home of Mariette and her god-mother. The same wretchedness, the same destitution was visible everywhere. A thin mattress in one corner for the father, a straw bed in the other for the son, a mouldy table, a few chairs and an old wardrobe, composed the entire furniture ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... realization only in a Christian society cut off from the world, or in a world become dominantly Christian. To give to all who ask, to lend indiscriminately without expecting any return, would in society as at present constituted not only speedily reduce ourselves to destitution; it would also pauperize and demoralize those into whose hands our squandered wealth should pass. To take no thought for the morrow, and to refuse to lay up treasure on earth, would under existing economic conditions ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... wage-workers for insurance of this kind. It is believed that at least 4 per cent of the income of wage-workers now is expended for the care of sickness and for burial insurance. The losses of wages meantime remain unequalized by insurance indemnities. A large proportion of the cases of temporary destitution in ordinarily self-supporting families is due to sickness. The German experience shows that 4 per cent of wages, collected in part from employers and in part from wage-workers, is sufficient to give a far better medical service than can be had through private effort, to give some indemnity for ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... Forces in the great caverns of evil beneath society; in the hideous degradation, squalor, wretchedness and destitution, vices and crimes that reek and simmer in the darkness in that populace below the people, of great cities. There disinterestedness vanishes, every one howls, searches, gropes, and gnaws for himself. Ideas are ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... knowledge of anatomy, and in 1543, when his work appeared, he was condemned to death by the Inquisition as a magician. He escaped this fate by undertaking a pilgrimage to Jerusalem only to be shipwrecked on the Island of Zante when he attempted to return, and there died in misery and destitution. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... arranged a conference at the Copper Mines in New Mexico with Victorio, Nane, Acosta, and other chiefs, among whom were Pasquin, Cassari, and Salvador, sons of Mangas Coloradas, through which he learned of the existence of dire destitution among the Apache and a desire for peace on condition that they be permitted to occupy their native haunts. But the Government had adopted a policy of removal by which the Arizona Apache desiring peace should join the Mescaleros at the Bosque Redondo in New Mexico. To this they flatly ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... that the wounds inflicted by such extortions, or, as I should rather call them, confiscations, are incurable, and have often reduced provinces to extreme destitution. Indeed, such conduct, as will be related ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... any man with honesty and determination can make his living at any time; another speaks of the numbers of skilled artisans who cannot get employment. But if some of these latter have the fastidious tastes above mentioned, it will be seen that the destitution is to a certain extent artificial. But reasoning on these subjects speedily merges in the ocean of Free Trade v. Protection, upon which I will not further touch. Sydney is the oldest town in the Colonies, having been founded in 1788. It has quite the air of an old established place—the ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... had entered one of those dismal houses and had taken from thence a woman who, squalid and degraded as she was, had evidently once been in the higher walks of life. As he passed her dwelling, the remembrance of this woman sent a thrill of mingled pity and disgust through his heart. The miserable destitution of her home, the glimpses of refinement that broke through her outbursts of passion, the state of revolting intoxication in which she was plunged—all arose vividly to his mind. He paused before the house with a feeling of vague interest. The night before, a scene of perfect ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... and at last the death of a plant, in its natural course, proceeds from the want of that balsamick saline juice; which, I have said, makes it swell, germinate, and augment itself. This want may proceed either from a destitution of it in the place where the plant grows, as when it is in a barren soil or bad air, or from a defect in the plant itself, that hath not vigour sufficient to attract it, though it be within the sphere of it; as when the ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... a whisper, she asked him for a little money. In old days she used to save the halfpence to slip them into the "little lad's " hand; now, grown feebler than the child, she trembled at the idea of destitution; she hoarded, and asked charity of the priests. The fact is, her wits were weakening. Very often she would inform her brother that she did not mean to let the week pass without going to see the Brideaus. Now the Brideaus, jobbing tailors at Montrouge in their lifetime, had been dead, ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... than usually earnest in pleading for her plan,—not merely on the strength of her own deep, prophetic conviction of her fitness for a dramatic career, but on the ground of an urgent and bitter necessity for exertion on her part, to ward off actual destitution and suffering,—he exclaimed, somewhat impatiently,—"Why, Zelma, it is an impossibility, almost an absurdity, you urge! You could never make an actress. You are too hopelessly natural, erratic, and impulsive. You would follow no teaching implicitly, but, when you saw ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... for the benefit of the distressed members of their body. Not that they entertain any exaggerated idea of the consoling powers of the musical art, or hope to relieve the positive sufferings of poverty and destitution by any combination of sounds, no matter how harmonious; but this festival being held in the church of St. Eustache, the largest in Paris, and all lovers of music being so eager to gain admission, that the immense aisles of this grand old pile (which ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... present time by the constantly increasing requirements of the concentration camps. Not only has the number of people in these camps increased, with overwhelming rapidity, to an extent never contemplated when they were first started, but the extreme state of destitution in which many of the people arrived, and the deplorable amount of sickness which has all along existed among them, create a demand for a great deal more than mere primary necessities, such as food and shelter, if the condition of the camps is to be anything ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... few branches stuck in the ground and tied at the top. The sides are left open. Very often even this most primitive of dwellings is dispensed with, and the degraded beings crawl under the shelter of the bushes. Furniture of any kind they are, of course, wit-out, and their destitution is only equalled by the African pigmy ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... to deserve more notice than is usually bestowed on the most ordinary vicissitudes of human nature. I have thrown these few notes together, because the subject of them was well known to me for many years. I traced his progress downwards, step by step, until at last he reached that excess of destitution from which he ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... house, I noticed a sad subject for one of these histories. A man was sitting in the darkest corner, with his head bare, and holding out his hat for the charity of those who passed. His threadbare coat had that look of neatness which marks that destitution has been met by a long struggle. He had carefully buttoned it up to hide the want of a shirt. His face was half hid under his gray hair, and his eyes were closed, as if he wished to escape the sight of his own ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... a hired servant to help her spend his limited earnings. Ten years afterward, you will find him struggling on under a double load of debts and children, wondering why the luck was always against him, while his friends regret his unhappy destitution of financial ability. Had they, from the first, been frank and honest, he need not have ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... live coal held against the wick, often swelling our cheeks and reddening our faces until we were on the verge of apoplexy. I love to tell of our stage-coach experiences, of our sailing-packet voyages, of the semi-barbarous destitution of all modern comforts and conveniences through which we bravely lived and came out the estimable ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... grandmother was foolishly, inconsistently proud, and though compelled to sew for our daily bread, she dressed me in a style incompatible with our poverty, and contrived to send me to school. Finally her eyes failed, and with destitution staring open-jawed upon us, she reluctantly consented to do the washing and mending for three college boys. She was well educated, and inordinately vain of her blood, and how this galling necessity humiliated her! We of course could employ no servant, and once when she was confined to her bed ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... subscribed to a Ladies' Charity in London, you know Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite as well as I do. He was a barrister by profession; a ladies' man by temperament; and a good Samaritan by choice. Female benevolence and female destitution could do nothing without him. Maternal societies for confining poor women; Magdalen societies for rescuing poor women; strong-minded societies for putting poor women into poor men's places, and leaving the men to shift for themselves;—he was vice-president, manager, ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... but that everything was over in just twenty-four hours is an exact statement. Fyne was able to tell me all about it; and the phrase that would depict the nature of the change best is: an instant and complete destitution. I don't understand these matters very well, but from Fyne's narrative it seemed as if the creditors or the depositors, or the competent authorities, had got hold in the twinkling of an eye of everything de Barral possessed in the world, down to his watch ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... them by the hand to the Sabbath-school teacher's humble seat, on the tract distributor's patient circuit, or on errands of mercy into the homes of sickness and destitution,—into the busy sewing-circle, or the little group gathered for social prayer. It is well too that they should have such a guide, for the offense of the Cross has not yet ceased, and the example of an accomplished and highly educated young female will not fail of its influence ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... of the place fittingly explained the habits and manners of the inmates. What sinister fears must have haunted them! for how could this extreme destitution in one part of the establishment be reconciled with the luxury noticeable in the other, except by the fact that a desperate struggle to keep up appearances was constantly going on? And this constant anxiety made out-door noise, excitement, and gayety ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... his heart. He felt a yearning—not very intelligent as yet—to be himself a messenger to the nations, and frequent praying deepened and confirmed the impression. As his knowledge of the world-field enlarged, new facts as to the destitution and the desolation of heathen peoples became as fuel to feed this flame of ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... been for my inseparable friend Anna, a noble-hearted English girl, who landed on our shores in destitution and sorrow, and clave to me as Ruth to Naomi, I had never lived through all the trials which this uncertainty and want of domestic service imposed on both: you may imagine, therefore, how glad I was when, our seminary property being divided ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... from the illegal persecutions [in the form of pogroms] to the legal persecutions of the third of May? Maltreated, plundered, reduced to beggary, put to shame, slandered, and dispirited, the Jews have been cast out of the community of human beings. Their destitution, amounting to beggary, has been firmly established and definitely affixed to them. Gloomy darkness, without a ray of light, has descended upon that bewitched and narrow world in which this unhappy tribe has been languishing so long, gasping ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... acknowledge her, and, having squandered the property that should have been applied to her support, absconded from the country. In after years, however, conscience drove him back, but only to find her dying of destitution and a broken heart, and to learn from her last words that the offspring of their connection, a male infant, had been thrown unacknowledged on the charity of the public. Aroused by a new sense of duty, he diligently sought for the child—followed it from its first lodgment to its next asylum in the ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... The entire destitution of religious privileges which Mills had witnessed in the West and South, and the great desire of the people for the word of God, with their inability to supply themselves, made him eager for the formation of a National Bible Society, which should be large enough ...
— A Story of One Short Life, 1783 to 1818 - [Samuel John Mills] • Elisabeth G. Stryker
... corroborative evidence. There is no use in inquiring about Violet Strachan; she is dead three years ago. I paid her, on Hogarth's account, a small weekly sum, that she used to come to my office for to keep her from destitution, but that payment is at an end. The other witness could only prove the irregular marriage, which there is no doubt about, as Henry Hogarth owns to it in his will. The only evidence that would be worth anything ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... the suffering poor! How prone are the wealthy, by warm, glowing grates, to forget their cheerless habitations, and turn inhumanly from their pitiful tales of want and destitution! ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... population on its banks would have appeared, (if we could have forgotten the ability of God to raise up children to himself, and to provide them with spiritual food even from the stones of the desert,) to be abandoned to inevitable destitution, both they and their children. But it has pleased the Almighty to cause the prospect to brighten, and now (in 1839) there will be seven clergymen dispensing the pure ordinances and inculcating the salutary principles of ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... lady of the house and her little child came down to see us. She stood for a moment and looked around her and at the two small children on the blankets, and we could hear her murmur mucha pobre (very poor.) She could see our ragged clothes and dirty faces and everything told her of our extreme destitution. After seeing our oxen and mule which were so poor she said to herself "flaco, flaco" (so thin.) She then turned to us, Rogers and I, whom she had seen before, and as her lively little youngster clung to her dress, as if in fear of such queer looking people ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... complacency in his complete hoodwinking of all concerned at home, almost thanking Edward for the facilities his absence had given him. After this, he went abroad, taking Maria lest she should betray him on being cast off; and they lived in such style at German gambling places that destitution brought them back again to England, where he could better play the lecturer, and the artist in search of subscriptions. Edward could not help smiling over some of his good stories, rather as 'the lord' may have 'commended the wisdom of ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... evils afflicting society spring from want, but this is only partially true. A small number of crimes are probably due to sheer lack of food, but it has to be borne in mind that crime would still remain an evil of enormous magnitude even if there were no such calamities as destitution and distress. As a matter of fact easy circumstances have less influence on conduct than is generally believed; prosperity generates criminal inclinations as well as adversity, and on the whole the rich are just ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... gifts of Unionism to Ireland have been, as all the world knows, poverty and police. Soon after 1830, that is to say when the first harvest of government from Westminster was ripe to the sickle, Irish destitution had assumed what politicians call men-acing proportions. One person in every three of the population never had any other alimentary experience than the difference between hunger and starvation. In these circumstances a Royal Commission was appointed to consider the advisability of extending the ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... notion of struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. This new conception, in which competition appears as a fundamental process in all life, has been a powerful prop to the laissez faire policy and has led to its continuance regardless of the misery and destitution which, if it did not create, it certainly did not remedy. The works of Herbert Spencer, the greatest expounder of the doctrine of evolution, contain a powerful massing of evidence in favor of laissez faire as a conclusion to be drawn from a scientific study ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... readily at the suggestion, and, although at the moment I was almost in a state of destitution, I gave him promises far beyond his desires. I considered that it would be at all times easy to recompense a man of his description. 'Be assured, my friend,' said I to him, 'that there is nothing I will not be ready to do for you, and that your fortune ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... laid under a tribute to the great industry. As a system it was far from perfect. It contained in itself all kinds of gross injustices, demands that were too great, wages that were too small; in spite of the splendour of the foreground, poverty and destitution hovered behind the scenes. But such as it was, the system worked: and it was the only one that ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... indolence and self-indulgence, is cut off from all decent associations, and sinks, under the combined influence of these things and of fell disease, into a loathsome creature whom not the lowest wants; sinks into destitution, misery, suicide, or the outcast's early grave. Writing of the young man who is familiar with London, the Headmaster of Eton says: "He cannot fail to see around him a whole world of ruined life—a ghastly varnish of ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... government to jealous resentment against all comers to the Pacific? Ledyard was mad with impatience. Days slipped into weeks, weeks into months, and no passport came. He was out of clothes, out of money, out of food. A draft on his English friends kept him from destitution. Just a year before, Billings, the astronomer of Cook's vessel, had gone across Siberia on the way to America for the Russian government. If Ledyard could only catch up to Billings's expedition, that might be a chance to cross the Pacific. ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... be neglected, because it is based upon the misconception that Lord Wharncliffe, Lady Mary's greatgrandson, and not Lady Stuart, her granddaughter, was the writer of the foregoing account. But as a set-off to the extreme destitution alleged, Mr. Keightley very justly observes that Mrs. Fielding must for some time have had a maid, since it was a maid who had been devotedly attached to her whom Fielding subsequently married. He also argues that "living in a garret and skulking in out o' the way retreats," are incompatible ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... produced in the garden. It was one of the glories of Belgium before the war that many of her wage-earners lived in the country and grew a good part of their own food. They kept hens and pigs; and there was almost no unemployment or destitution in Belgium. ...
— The Canadian Girl at Work - A Book of Vocational Guidance • Marjory MacMurchy
... into utter destitution; his haughty patron well knew the depths into which he had ...
— Z. Marcas • Honore de Balzac
... infirmity arrived, when old age surprised them, after fifty or sixty years of a narrow and precarious existence, it was not merely poverty that awaited them; for many there was nothing but the blackest destitution. A little later, when they began to entertain a vague hope of deliverance, the retiring pension which was held up to their gaze, in the distant future, was at first no more than forty francs, and they had to await the advent of Duruy, ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... where one might have seen two hundred thousand people of all ranks and degrees, dispersed and lying along by their heaps of what they could save from the fire, deploring their loss, and, though ready to perish for hunger and destitution, yet not asking one penny for relief, which to me appeared a stranger sight than any I ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... exposing himself to the operation of the penal laws by holding conventicles and preaching, he was deeply afflicted at the thought of the suffering and destitution to which his wife and children might be exposed by his death or imprisonment. Nothing can be more touching than his simple and earnest words on this point. They show how warm and deep were his human affections, and what a tender and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... It is in these places, in these months, that the epithet Sansculotte first gets applied to indigent Patriotism; in the last age we had Gilbert Sansculotte, the indigent Poet. (Mercier, Nouveau Paris, iii. 204.) Destitute-of-Breeches: a mournful Destitution; which however, if Twenty millions share it, may become more ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... of destitution, my new mistress sent for a seamstress, and at once ordered wherewith to dress ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... most terrible among all the horrors of destitution is that it gives ground for calumny and the triumph ...
— The Resources of Quinola • Honore de Balzac
... Conquest was a saint. The last archbishop of Dublin appointed before the invasion was a saint. Neither of the invasions can be explained simply by the demoralisation of the clergy, or by the spiritual destitution of the people. ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... English country gentleman of the good old- fashioned kind. It was pitiful to think of a man of his stamp forced by the vile exigencies of a narrow purse to scheme and fight against the advancing tide of destitution. And Ida, too,—Ida, who was equipped with every attribute that can make wealth and power what they should be—a frame to show off her worth and state. Well, it was the way of the world, and he could ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... dropping in and joining us, and many more, as we found later, had made their way back to Fort Edward. But nowhere could we learn news of you. Come in, come in; you will be welcomed warmly by my kind hostess, Mrs. Schuyler. She has been the friend and mother of all English fugitives in their destitution and need. I have a home with her here for the present, till the army from England and the levies from the provinces arrive. Come in, good comrades, and do not fear; there will be a warm welcome ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... return to the forsaken spouse.—Left in this abrupt destitution and distress, Mrs. Lester had only the resource of applying to her brother-in-law, whom indeed the fugitive had before seized many opportunities of not leaving wholly unprepared for such an application. Rowland promptly ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had been engaged in the rebellion of 1745; and his estates, in consequence, were confiscated, and he paid with his life the forfeit of his rashness. His widow and child, after many years of sorrow and destitution, and living as dependents upon the charity of poor relatives, were enabled to break through this painful bondage, and procure ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... on their shoulders; small black boys learned on their back little brothers equally inky, and, gravely depositing them, shook hands. Never had I seen human beings so clad, or rather so unclad, in such amazing squalid-ness and destitution of garments. I recall one small urchin without a rag of clothing save the basque waist of a lady's dress, bristling with whalebones, and worn wrong side before, beneath which his smooth ebony legs emerged like those of an ostrich from its plumage. How weak ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners. Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command. Here comes to me Roland, with a delicacy of sentiment leading and inwrapping him like a divine cloud or holy ghost. Tis a great destitution to both that this should not be entertained with large leisures, but, contrariwise, should ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... for hope! that was the message of Vereeniging—a message which struck a chill in every heart. One after another we painted the destitution, the misery of our districts, and each picture was more gloomy than the last. At length the moment of decision came, and what course remained open to us? This only—to resign ourselves to our fate, intolerable though it appeared, to accept the British ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... What is Poverty? Not destitution, but poverty? It has many shapes,— aspects almost as various as the minds and circumstances of those whom it visits. It is famine to the savage in the wilds; it is hardship to the labourer in the cottage; it is disgrace to the proud; and to the miser despair. It is a spectre ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... that he had reference to the kind of anguish that comes with destitution, that is so endlessly bitter and cruel, and yet so sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliating—unredeemed by the slightest touch of dignity or even of pathos. It is a kind of anguish that poets have not ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... England to have transplanted the one artist who might have saved Germany from the artistic destitution from which ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... comptroller of the Cirque-Olympique, and employed during the Restoration in Rabourdin's bureau, of the minister of finance. He was attached to his chief, who had saved him from destitution. A subscriber, but a poor payer, to "Victories and Conquests." A zealous Bonapartist and Liberal. His three great men were Napoleon, Bolivar and Beranger, all of whose ballads he knew by heart, and sang in a sweet, sonorous voice. He was swamped ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... indeed, such being the power of the generative force, it overpasses the means of subsistence, establishing a constant pressure upon them. Under these circumstances, it necessarily happens that a certain amount of destitution must occur. Individuals have come into ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... is no real destitution, for a farmer can always raise enough produce to feed his family, and in a wooded country he can get fuel, even if he has to lift it between the dawn ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... became so marked that she decided to make her school exclusively Colored. She was a woman of strong religious convictions, and being English, with none of the ideas peculiar to slave society, when she saw the peculiar destitution of the Colored children in the community around her, she resolved to give her life to the class who seemed most to need her services. She established a Colored school about 1810, in a brick house still standing on ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... education of any kind; still they are Christians, and carry their infants to the Greek Church in Nabloos for baptism. What a deplorable state of things! Since the date of this journey the Church Missionary Society's agents have in some degree ministered to the spiritual destitution of these poor people by supplying some at least with copies of ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... sleep of betrayed husbands, but against the property of murdered victims! Now, then, thou hast a notable occasion for displaying those illustrious qualities of thine, that wonderful endurance of hunger, of cold, of destitution, by which ere long thou shalt feel thyself undone, and ruined. This much, however, I did accomplish, when I defeated thee in the comitia, that thou shouldst strike at the republic as an exile, rather than ravage it as a consul; and that the warfare, so villanously evoked by ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... employ him in the situations in which he really was useful." In the "memoirs" this is more than supported: "The man who might have earned with ease and comfort from six to seven hundred a year, was reduced to such a dreadful state of destitution and filth . . . In fact, at one time, it was thought he ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... very few indeed could do so. But suppose, which is quite possible, that he were to purchase, with the first L12 he could save, a deferred annuity of L1 for his child, and so with the next L12, and so with the next, until he had placed her beyond the reach of actual destitution; and suppose, again, that his conscience was so much awakened to the duty of thus providing for her that amusement and pleasure would be postponed or curtailed until this duty was performed, just as ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... impulse of civilisation had caused windows to be mended and railings to be tidied, and Richard promoted, to the utmost, cottage gardening, so that, though there was an air of poverty, there was no longer an appearance of reckless destitution and ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... people. They had nothing but the poorest of robes on their backs, and they were nearly destitute of everything in the shape of traps, weapons, and canoes. The village was strangely silent, for even the dogs, that generally are around in such numbers, had disappeared. When Nanahboozhoo saw this destitution and poverty he at once inquired the reason, and was surprised and very angry to hear that they ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... become shyer than it used to be in the days before slumming (now itself of the past) began to exploit it. At any rate, I thought that in my present London sojourn I found less unblushing destitution than in the more hopeless or more shameless days of 1882-3. In those days I remember being taken by a friend, much concerned for my knowledge of that side of London, to some dreadful purlieu where ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... and thirst tormented me fearfully. Happily, after two long hours' march, a beautiful country spread out before us, covered by olives, pomegranates, and vines, which appeared to belong to anybody and everybody. In any event, in the state of destitution into which we had fallen, we were not in a mood to ponder ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... crafty, resourceful general, quick in action, magnetic in personality, a linguist who could command his polyglot mob. He was also a successful press agent who exploited fully the unpalatable drinking water provided by the companies, the inadequate sewerage, the unpaved streets, and the practical destitution of many of the workers. The strikers made an attempt to send children to other towns so that they might be better cared for. After several groups had thus been taken away, the city of Lawrence interfered, claiming that many children had been sent without their parents' ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... pleadings kept some sparks of feeling alive in the breast of the people of this money-getting age, and stimulated somewhat their benevolence, the laboring classes of England and America would long since have sunk to utter destitution. Nor would this have been all. For when the mass of the people reach such a point; when they are driven to despair, as they are now fast being driven, and would long ago have been driven but for the circumstances stated, then comes the terrible reaction, the frightful revolution, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... often, when Mildred was at his side, received a whole handful of copper coins amongst them, now excited not the least commiseration, called forth nothing but some passing execration upon the slovenly government that could permit human life to sink down into all the wildness, and more than the destitution ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... in London, in his day the prince of dandies; patronised by the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV.; quarrelled with the prince; fled from his creditors to Calais, where, reduced to destitution, he lived some years in the same reckless fashion; settled at length in Caen, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... chiefs resolved to go and lay siege to Nicaea, the first place, of importance, in possession of the Turks. Whilst marching towards the place they saw coming to meet then, with every appearance of the most woful destitution, Peter the Hermit, followed by a small band of pilgrims escaped from the disasters of their expedition, who had passed the winter, as he had, in Bithynia, waiting for more fortunate crusaders. Peter, affectionately welcomed by the chiefs of the army, recounted to them "in detail," says William ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... made an end of biting small sandwiches, and settled down like a dust-storm refreshed, to discuss one of the fashionably prevalent topics of the moment, the prevention of destitution. ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... broken-down, cringing, crafty look, thus sueing for a sovereign. For he had the air of a ruined gentleman, not of an ordinary beggar, and the signs of refinement in his face and bearing made his state of abasement and destitution more apparent. But Oliver was not touched by any such sentimental considerations. He looked at first as if he were about to refuse his brother's request; but policy dictated another course. He must not drive to desperation the man in whose ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the new Poor-Law led to investigations which revealed the true conditions of the peasant's life—its destitution, recklessness, and dependence. We tried to mend matters by inducing families to emigrate, but this renewed the distrust which had at first beheld in the schools an attempt to enslave the children. Even accounts, sent home by the exceptionally enterprising who ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... periodically, until 1798, under the title of the 'Cheap Repository Tracts.' Hannah More was well fitted for this latter work by her practical experience among the poor. Like most of the Evangelicals, she was a thorough worker. The spiritual destitution of Cheddar and the neighbourhood so affected her, that she formed the benevolent design of establishing schools for the children and religious instruction for the grown-up. Such efforts are happily so common at the present day, that it ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... transferring the wretched Ludovico from the fortress of Pierre-Eucise to Lys-Saint-George he relegated him for good and all to the castle of Loches, where he lived for ten years in solitude and utter destitution, and there died, cursing the day when the idea first came into his head of ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... prematurely artful, wicked and cruel[1]; woman, the victim of a wretched and debasing bigotry, has yet so little of the feminine adjuncts, that the fountains of our sympathies are almost closed; and man, tyrannizing over the sex he was bound to protect, in its helpless destitution and enfeebled decline, seems lost in prejudice and superstition and only strong in oppression. If we turn from the common herd to the luminaries of the age, to those whose works are the landmarks of literature and science, ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... the daughter of an old and faithful servant, whose very life-blood had been poured forth in his defence, should not have been a safeguard in his eyes, was indeed incredible and revolting. But it was this orphan helplessness, this afflicting destitution which marked ...
— Theresa Marchmont • Mrs Charles Gore
... did, and afterwards saw the burial completed in a decent manner. When the solemnity was over, he asked if the deceased had left a wife or family, and learned that he had left a wife, an old woman, in a state of perfect destitution. "Well, then, gentlemen," said the provost, addressing those around him, "we met in rather a singular manner, and we cannot part without doing something creditable for the benefit of the helpless widow; let each give a trifle, ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... to action, its actual condition is in reality coupled with every natural incentive to alliance and adhesion to the National Government. It has drunk the bitter cup of calamity in rebellion. It has tasted the dregs of treason that lie at the bottom of political vice, and been victimized by destitution, by the diseases of camp-life, by the casualties of the battle-field, and by the widowhood and orphanage that have followed the train of rebellion. This population is a natural element of national strength, having the same incentives as its brotherhood ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... manes of the Bubble! Silence and destitution are upon thy walls, proud house, for a memorial! Situated as thou art in the very heart of stirring and living commerce, amid the fret and fever of speculation—with the Bank, and the 'Change, and the India House about thee, in the hey-day of present prosperity, with their important faces, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Britain, before the looms could be set up and a market found for their industry, the exiles were reduced to the last extremity of destitution and hunger. Looking about them for anything that could be utilized for food, they discovered that the owners of English slaughter-houses threw away as worthless, the tails of the cattle they killed. Like all the poor in France, these wanderers ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... great mass of discontented feeling in the country arising from the actual state of society. It arises from the distress and destitution which will fall at times upon a great manufacturing population, and from the wild and extravagant opinions which are naturally generated in an advanced and speculative ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... material prosperity, and scarce anything more. The only lumps of pure ore are the Idea which the Pilgrims were possessed with and its gradual incarnation in events and institutions. Beyond this all is barren. There is a fearful destitution of the picturesque elements. It is true that our local historians commonly avoid all romance as if it were of the Enemy; but if we compare their labors with "The Beauties of England and Wales," for example, the work certainly of uninspired men, we shall be convinced ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... parsimony of these men is disappointed terribly when any crisis happens. They are forced to eat their savings, to turn their clothing and their tools into food, and, by the revolution of eighteen hundred and forty-eight, were reduced to such great destitution, that in some of the houses occupied by them one dress was all that remained to all the lodgers. They wore it in turn, one going out in it to seek for work while all the rest remained at home in bed. The poor fellows thanked ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... articles on "Scientific Destitution in New York" and "The Scientific Value of the Central Park," have called forth numerous letters from correspondents, and have been extensively noticed by the press. We now learn that the legislature of the State ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... Irish peasant, when a seafaring man, whom I had sailed with about two years before, entered the cabin. The meeting was equally unexpected on either side. My acquaintance was the master of a smuggling lugger then on the coast; and on acquainting him with the details of my disaster, and the state of destitution to which it had reduced me, he kindly proposed that I should accompany him on his voyage to the west coast of Scotland, for which he was then on the eve of sailing. "You will run some little risk," he said, "as the companion of a man who has now been thrice outlawed for firing on his Majesty's ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... plants. The top of the mountain was found to consist of a fragment of original table-land, very marshy, and full of deep sloughs, intersected with small rills of water, pure and pellucid as crystal, and a profusion of wild parsley and celery. The prospect was one dreary scene of destitution, without a single ray of hope to relieve the misery of the desponding crew. After some days, the dead cow, hams, and cheese, were consumed; and from one end of the island to the other, not a morsel of food could be ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... not only of the works, but of the characters of her favorite authors,—Goldsmith, the author of Obermann, Charles Nodier, Maturin. The poorest and the most suffering among them were her deities; she guessed their trials, initiated herself into a destitution where the thoughts of genius brooded, and poured upon it the treasures of her heart; she fancied herself the giver of material comfort to these great men, martyrs to their own faculty. This noble compassion, this intuition of the ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... too great to arrange between a widow and a son who had succeeded his father; he was often harassed and perplexed by tales of hardship; and I find him writing, almost in despair, of their improvident habits and the destitution that awaited their families upon a death. "The house being completely furnished, they come into possession without necessaries, and they go out NAKED. The insurance seems to have failed, and what next is to be tried?" While they lived he wrote behind their backs ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... make rapid progress in her studies, and grew hopeful over the fact. If her father would give her the chance she could make a place for herself among skilled workers within a year, and be able, if there were need, to provide for the entire family. Great and prolonged destitution rarely occurs, even in a crowded city, unless there is much sickness or some destructive vice. Wise economy, patient and well-directed effort, as a rule, secure comfort and independence, if not affluence; but continued illness, disaster, and especially sin, often bring ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... enough to seem a native of the country, and I knew how I must behave if I wished to be let alone. Although the landlady was a worthy woman, her house was not exactly suitable for me; my stay in England might be protracted, and if I came to destitution I should be wretched indeed; so I resolved to leave the house. I received no visitors, but I could not prevent the inquisitive from hovering round my door, and the more it became known that I saw no one, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... intercession, I asked him for cash. What do you suppose the old skinflint answered? "I'll pay your debts," says he, "if you like. Up to twenty-five roubles inclusive!" Do you hear, inclusive! No, sir, this was a gift from God in my destitution. ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... informed of my intention to buy a man out of the Turkish Army had pronounced it madness. I did not know the people of the land as they did. I should be pillaged, brought to destitution, perhaps murdered. They, who had lived in the country twenty, thirty years, were better qualified to judge than I was. For peace and quiet I pretended acquiescence, and my purpose thus acquired a taste of stealth. It was with the feelings of a kind of truant that I had set out at length ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... From the bosom of His own fulness He saw that being without beauty, without form, without life, without name, that being without being which we call non-existence: He heard the cry of worlds which were not, the cry of a measureless destitution calling to a measureless goodness. Eternity was troubled, she said to ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... they would live on the bark of trees rather than abandon his cause. Pompey's soldiers, at one time, coming near to the walls of a town which they occupied, taunted and jeered them on account of their wretched destitution of food. Caesar's soldiers threw loaves of this bread at them in return, by way of symbol that they ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... violence, not flinching from the foulest crimes, that in many instances they had driven the masters to close their factories rather than submit to their mandates; and in others had compelled the workmen themselves to discontinue their labors, thus spreading destitution among thousands whose earnings, if they had been allowed to consult their own wishes, would have been amply sufficient for the support of their families;[245] and the evil had grown to such a height, that in 1838 ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... o'clock. In the letter which you will take to father, I have told him our destitution; and that the money spent for your railway ticket has been obtained by the sacrifice of the diamonds and pearls, that were set around my mother's picture; that cameo, which he had cut in Rome and ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... The devotion of all to the Southern cause was wonderful. Jackson, a Valley man by reason of his residence at Lexington, south of Staunton, was their hero and idol. The women sent husbands, sons, lovers, to battle as cheerfully as to marriage feasts. No oppression, no destitution could abate their zeal. Upon a march I was accosted by two elderly sisters, who told me they had secreted a large quantity of bacon in a well on their estate, hard by. Federals had been in possession of the country, and, fearing the indiscretion of ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... family nurse, Beth, to whom Hugh was as the apple of her eye, used to make him little presents of things that he needed—his wardrobe was always scanty and threadbare—and would at intervals lament his state of destitution. "I can't bear to think of the greedy creatures taking away ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... scourge beggared the land, as in all other respects, so in learning and in all the liberal arts. We who had formerly sent instructors to other nations, were now suitors for help in our destitution. The same national deliverer who rid us of the destroyer, was also the restorer of education. If he cannot be said to have effectually restored learning, at least he laboured with so much earnestness at the task that he may be said to have bespoken an ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... also be neglected. The criminal law, in so far as by putting to death or by subjecting to long periods of imprisonment, those who infringe its provisions, prevents the propagation of hereditary criminal tendencies; and the poor-law, in so far as it separates married couples, whose destitution arises from hereditary defects of character, are doubtless selective agents operating in favour of the non-criminal and the more effective members of society. But the proportion of the population which they influence ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... intelligence pervaded the company; for the speaker, one of the most substantial householders in the settlement, was always taken with distressing symptoms of poverty and destitution when any allusion to public or religious charity ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... destitution, While there are means to save A nation of strong-hearted men From famine and the grave. Thanks, thanks for riches! but a woe To this our earth they bring, So long as they shall fail to ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams
... feeling produced by excitement, they all experienced thirst, though no one murmured. So utterly without means of relieving this necessity did each person know them all to be, that no one spoke on the subject at all. In fact, shipwreck never produced a more complete destitution of all the ordinary agents of helping themselves, in any form or manner, than was the case here. So sudden and complete had been the disaster, that not a single article, beyond those on the persons of the sufferers, came even in view. The masts, sails, rigging, spare spars, in a word, everything ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... farther into the depths, until at a moment when she was in her distress and saddest plight, her manufacturing system broke down, "protection, having destroyed home trade by reducing," as Mr. Atkinson says, "the entire population to beggary, destitution, and want." Mr. Cobden and his friends providentially appeared, and after a hard struggle established a principle for all time and for all the world, and straightway England enjoyed the sum of human happiness. Hence all ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... illegitimate children, even if allowance is made for the many instances when the children are legitimatized by their fathers! Suicide by women and infanticide are to a large extent traceable to the destitution and wretchedness in which the women are left when deserted. The trials for child murder cast a dark and instructive picture upon the canvas. To cite just one case, in the fall of 1894, a young girl, who, eight days after her delivery, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... to distinguish its claims, and to "render homage where homage is due." Many are the shifts, and crude the inventions in the bush, when emergencies call forth the application of the old proverb respecting the relationship that exists between destitution and genius; and when to be minus the support of the Virginian weed, is considered a greater misfortune than to be wanting of the necessaries of life. Hence, when requested by John Ferguson to go up to the hut, the draymen had not the remotest intention of disturbing themselves, at ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... the vicar's wife, "how is she to be told? It is heart-rending to look at her and to think,—nothing but luxury all her life, and now, in a moment, destitution. I am very glad to have her with me: she is a dear little thing, and so nice with the children. And if some good ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... witness. It was remarkable what bright prospects were just then in the very act of opening before each of that little company of youths, and what pious consideration for the feelings of their families began now to well from them. Each, moreover, was in an odd state of destitution. Not one could bear his share of the fine; not one but evinced a wonderful twinkle of hope that each of the others (in succession) was the very man who could step in to make good the deficit. One took a high hand; he could not pay his share; if it went to a trial, he should ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Adam's case of destitution,that's one thing!' was Dr. Arthur's comment, as his friend sprang past him into the cabin. Then however, like a wise man, postponing other things to business, Rollo only demanded calmly what the matter was? Hazel had not expected him, and there was a look of surprise and a minute's flush; ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... changed the humble mediocrity of my parents into comparative want. When on Sundays I went to see my mother, she spoke of her distress, and before me shed tears that she concealed from my father and my sisters. I, too, was reduced to extreme destitution. I lived at the little farm on brown bread, milk, and eggs, and had in secret sold successively in the neighboring town all the books and clothes I had brought from Paris, to procure wherewithal to pay the postage ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... brought to perfection. Universities, libraries and other benefactions will abound, pleading for recognition of the money-making dyspeptics. Human ingenuity will have contrived some means for freeing men's minds from the dread of destitution. ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... is told. It only remains to add that, some six months later, Dick Maitland arrived safely in England, with all his treasure intact, just in time to rescue his mother from the grip of destitution that was on the point of closing relentlessly upon her, and to place her in a position of such absolute safety and luxury that it was months before the dear old lady could persuade herself it was not all a tantalising dream, from which she ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... the destitution of beauty clear. I believe there is an absolute lack of every form or sight that might inspire or cause a soul to awake. There is nothing to lift these people from the earth and from labour. There should be a complete readjustment of this system. I have been interested ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... the destitution that prevails in a Koom-Posh, THAT is impossible with us, unless an An has, by some extraordinary process, got rid of all his means, cannot or will not emigrate, and has either tired out the affectionate aid of this relations ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... indication of what may come in the future in regard to all the problems of production and distribution of necessities, if we really mean anything by our internationalism. Apparently we hold within our hands the means of alleviating most, if not all, the destitution of the world. Organization and education in efficiency are the necessary and ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... the defeated party had the knack of turning up again on the coast with half a steamer's load of small arms and ammunition. Such resourcefulness Captain Mitchell considered as perfectly wonderful in view of their utter destitution at the time of flight. He had observed that "they never seemed to have enough change about them to pay for their passage ticket out of the country." And he could speak with knowledge; for on a memorable occasion he had been called upon to save the life ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... nursery surpasses belief. They were discovered in all sorts of places, and in all imaginable circumstances— under beds, tables, upturned baths, and basin-stands; in closets, trunks, and cupboards, and always in a condition of woeful weakness and melancholy destitution. The part of grandmother was invariably assigned to Dolly, because, although the youngest of the group, that little creature possessed a power of acting and of self-control which none of the others could equal. At first ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... building churches, and the great sums of money that were being spent on religion were not fairly divided. And passing rapidly on, Ned very adroitly touched upon the relative positions of the bishops and the priests and the curates. He told harrowing stories of the destitution of the curates, and he managed so well that his audience had not time to stop him. Everything he thought that they could not agree with he sandwiched between things that he ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... amused herself with the supernatural gifts to which Dee advanced his claim, and consoled the adversity and destitution to which the old man, once so extensively honoured, was now reduced, a scene of a very different complexion was played in the northern part of the island. Trials for sorcery were numerous in the reign of Mary queen of Scots; the comparative darkness and ignorance of the sister kingdom ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... keeps up missionary work abroad? Mainly the Christian Churches. There is a vast deal of unreality in that objection. Just think of the disproportion between the embarrassment of riches in our Christian appliances here in England and the destitution in these distant lands. Here the ships are crammed into a dock, close up against one another, rubbing their yards upon each other; and away out yonder on the waters there are leagues of loneliness, where never a sail is seen. Here, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... attendant anaemia, may be induced by bad habits, destitution, or constitutional depravity. Sickly forms, wrecks of health, address our senses on every side. All these subjects evidently once had a capital in life, sufficient, if properly and carefully husbanded, to comfortably afford them vital stamina and length ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the poor in New York were not owing to the rich, but mainly to themselves; that there was ordinarily remunerative labor enough for them; and that, but in exceptional cases of sickness and especial misfortune, those who fell into utter destitution and beggary came to that pass through their idleness, their recklessness, or their vices. That was always my opinion. They besieged our door from morning till night, and I was obliged to help them, to look after them, to go to their houses; my family was worn out with these offices. But I looked ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... phrase in Oldport, "What New-Yorkers call poverty: to be reduced to a pony phaeton." In consequence of a November gale, I am reduced To a similar state of destitution, from a sail-boat to a wherry; and, like others of the deserving poor, I have found many compensations in my humbler condition. Which is the more enjoyable, rowing or sailing? If you sail before the wind, there ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... who visited him in prison, "that I ever saw, consisting only of two books—the Bible, and Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs.'" "But with these two books," writes Mr. Froude, "he had no cause to complain of intellectual destitution." Bunyan's mode of composition, though certainly exceedingly rapid,—thoughts succeeding one another with a quickness akin to inspiration,—was anything but careless. The "limae labor" with him was unsparing. It was, he tells us, "first with doing, and then with undoing, and after that with ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... who live in the country the circle widens naturally and beautifully. If a neighbor is ill, one sends in delicacies to the invalid, another offers to take care of the children, and a third acts as watcher. When a drunkard reduces his family to destitution, one neighbor sends a breakfast to them, another flannel for the baby, another finds work for the oldest girl, and another pays the boys a trifle for bringing wood and water. The cases of actual destitution are so few that they can all be met in this way unless ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... Under the rule of their de facto government they took part in repressing the uprising of the Piedmontese against the French at Carmagnola. And when three hundred wounded soldiers, fleeing from the Austrian army, who pursued them to the Vaudois frontiers, reached Bobbio in a state of appalling destitution, M. Rostaing, the pastor, and his people, fed them out of their scanty stores, dressed their wounds, and carried them on their shoulders over frightful precipices, and along snow-covered defiles impassable to ordinary traffic. ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold |
