"Frailty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of existence at Newport demand the exposure of every frailty and every folly; the skeleton must sit at the feast. There is no room for gossip where the facts are known. Nothing is whispered; the megaphone carries the tale. What a ghastly society, where no amount of finery hides the bald, the literal truth; where each night the same ones meet and, ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... it was not wasted. The sinews and muscles, which had once denoted great strength, though shrunken, were still visible; and his whole figure had attained an appearance of induration, which, if it were not for the well known frailty of humanity, would have seemed to bid defiance to the further approaches of decay. His dress was chiefly of skins, worn with the hair to the weather; a pouch and horn were suspended from his shoulders; and he leaned on a rifle of uncommon length, but which, ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... human hearth; For with a gentle courage she doth strive In thought and word and feeling so to live As to make earth next heaven; and her heart Herein doth show its most exceeding worth, That, bearing in our frailty her just part, 80 She hath not shrunk from evils of this life, But hath gone calmly forth into the strife, And all its sins and sorrows hath withstood With lofty strength of patient womanhood: For this I love her great ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... each. A singularly good boy, so far as the customary temptations of power and high station are concerned—temperate, simple, and virtuous in tastes, dress, and habits,—he was, as one of his biographers has remarked, "the only one among kings who had lived without a single frailty." ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... ladies who desire to be pleasing in the eyes of men to "avoid a light rollicking manner, and to cultivate a sweet plaintiveness, as of hidden sorrow bravely borne." It also declares that if any young lady has a robust frame, she must be careful to dissemble it, for it is in her frailty that woman can make her greatest appeal to man. No man wishes to marry an Amazon. It also earnestly commends a piece of sewing to be ever in the hand of the young lady who would attract the opposite sex! The use of large words or any show of learning or of unseemly ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... dames, Tied up in godly laces, Before ye gie poor Frailty names, Suppose a change o' cases; A dear-loved lad, convenience snug, A treacherous inclination,— But, let me whisper i' your lug, Ye're aiblins ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... of being a spoiled hero. In a moment of asperity Jefferson had alluded to Lafayette's love of approbation. If, indeed, Lafayette did yield to that always imminent human frailty, and if Olmuetz had not been able to eradicate or subdue it, the itinerary of 1824 must have been to him a period of torture. He must have suffered from satiety to an unbearable degree, for praise and admiration were poured out ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... of the sun. These seven and ten kinds of foolish men are as follow: he who seeketh to control a person that is incapable of being controlled; he who is content with small gains; he who humbly pays court to enemies; he who seeks to restrain women's frailty; he who asketh him for gifts who should never be asked; he who boasteth, having done anything; he who, born in a high family, perpetrateth an improper deed; he who being weak always wageth hostilities with one that is powerful; he who talketh to a person listening scoffingly; ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... better principles. But this (say they) seems not sufficient ground for those strong and stinging reproaches he casts upon himself, nor for Eudocia's rejecting him with so much severity. It would have been a better ground of distress, considering the frailty of human nature, and the violent temptations he lay under; if he had been at last prevailed upon to profess himself a Mahometan: For then his remorse, and self-condemnation, would have been natural, his punishment just, and the character of Eudocia placed in a more amiable ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... bone not far from his heart to put him in minde of dilection and loue to the woman. Lastly, a bone from the left side, to put the woman in minde, that by reason of her frailty and infirmity she standeth in need of both the one and the other ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 44, Saturday, August 31, 1850 • Various
... this searching analysis and the biting wit which accompanies it, I cannot think the epithet cynical, which I have heard ascribed to Earle, is defensible. There is a vast difference between recognising our frailty which is a fact, and insisting that our nature is made up of nothing else, which is not a fact. The severe critic and the cynic differ chiefly in this: the first reports distressing facts, the second invents disgraceful ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... age but slender and her pink and white coloring gave her an appearance of frailty, but when she used her paddle, Kit was fascinated to watch the swelling of the muscles of her arms. She seemed made of springs as she plied the paddle first at one side then the other, with ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... the hierarchy of brutes, that we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings; and here also, in his ordered polities and rigorous justice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact of individual sin. Does it stop, then, with the ant? Rather this desire of welldoing and this doom of frailty run through all the grades of life: rather is this earth, from the frosty top of Everest to the next margin of the internal fire, one stage of ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tears and perseverance. The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Lena, had intended to stand by her, even to marry her; and he was struck by her pitiful humility. Evidently it had not occurred to her mind that he might get a divorce. Too late he wished he had been frank with her and had asked her to wait. In reality, he was no sensualist, and Lena's frailty had not made him a cynic; on the contrary, he regarded it as a proof of her love alone. In his agony, he did not judge her; he judged only himself. He had taught her duplicity, but he was aghast at her skill in practising ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... thee to be no better than thou art in reality. Many will pardon thee for thy folly, Frank, and admit that it was natural—very natural. Our hero did not return to his hotel until an hour after daybreak. The interval was passed with the young lady of frailty and beauty. He shared her couch; but neither of them slumbered, for at Frank's request, his fair friend occupied the time in narrating the particulars of her history, which we ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... the deep, colorful woods in autumn. There he lost himself. He learned. Silence and solitude taught him. From there he had vision of the horde of men righting down the false impossible trails of the world. He felt the sweetness, the frailty, the dependence, the glory and the doom of women battling with life. He realized the hopeless traits of human nature. Like dead scales his egotism dropped from him. He divined the weaving of chances, the unknown and unnamed, the pondering fates in store. The dominance ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... of heaven, and surveying the whole scheme of created things. Yet on the other hand there fell the sense of a baffling and miserable impotence, a despairing knowledge that one's consciousness of the right to live, and to live happily, was conditioned by one's utter frailty, the sense that one was surrounded by a thousand dangers, any one of which might at any moment deprive one of the only thing of which one was sure. How, and by what subtle process of faith and imagination, could the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... philosophical sense, for we act not only under external compulsion, but also by inner necessity.... I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modelled after our own, a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... have seemed comic communicated in that matter-of-fact tone, but somehow it struck me as tragic. That this vain, self-contained, and reticent man should confess to the frailty of humanity to a man he disliked was ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... Press on! if Fortune play thee false To-day, to-morrow she'll be true; Whom now she sinks, she now exalts Taking old gifts, and granting new. The wisdom of the present hour Makes up for follies past and gone;— To weakness strength succeeds, and power From frailty springs,—press ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... but this is not what she saw; she saw nothing of the budding plants and the glowing afternoon. She saw, in the crude light of that revelation which had already become a part of experience and to which the very frailty of the vessel in which it had been offered her only gave an intrinsic price, the dry staring fact that she had been an applied handled hung-up tool, as senseless and convenient as mere shaped wood and iron. All the ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... insight into his character which I obtained, on my side, widened the distance between us to its last limits. He was a confirmed opium-eater in secret—a prodigal in laudanum, though a miser in all besides. He never confessed his frailty, and I never told him I had found it out. He had his pleasure apart from me, and I had my pleasure apart from him. Week after week, month after month, there we sat, without a friendly word ever passing between us—I, alone with my book at the counter; he, alone with his ledger ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... own humour, we find it to be, by his Book, more fickle than even the Wind, or Feminine frailty in its highest Inconstancy. One while he's for Instructing our Stage, Modelling our Plays, Correcting the Drama, the Unity, Time and Place, and acts as very a Poet as ever writ an ill Play, or slept at an ill Sermon; ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow. ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the human species was delicately vivisected in one act; human frailty exposed, human motives detected, human desire quenched in all the brilliancy of perverted epigram and the scalpel analysis of the astigmatic. Life, love, and folly were portrayed with the remorseless accuracy of an eye doubly sensitive through ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... by the individual mind with its individual peculiarities or idiosyncrasies, its weaknesses and vanities, its whims and eccentricities; nor is it to be confused with the still wider acquaintance with those that make up our common human nature in all its folly and frailty which is sometimes called 'knowledge of human nature'; no, nor with such knowledge as psychological science, with its methods of observation and induction and experiment, offers or supplies. It is knowledge of something ...
— Progress and History • Various
... her visitor, "granting this in a measure, I should still like to know of some of these popular good-doers. We must make considerable allowance for human frailty. Perhaps I shall be able to pick out a real jewel, where you have believed them to be ...
— Working in the Shade - Lowly Sowing brings Glorious Reaping • Theodore P Wilson
... their bodies, the delicacy of their molding, the tendril thinness of their fingers, the sagacity of their tiny aristocratic heads, the seduction of their soft red mouths, the poetry of the fringe of golden lashes in which the pathos of their eyes hung enmeshed—their intrusive, penetrating frailty, which supplicated, denounced and astounded. They were so weak and yet so strong. A man could crush them with one arm. But they could slay a man's soul with their sweetness. They were equipped in every detail by their ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... review of these two years of blundering, bullying, and failure in a little isle of the Pacific, he seems magnanimously to have owned his policy was in the wrong. He left Fangalii unexpiated; suffered that house of cards, the Tamasese government, to fall by its own frailty and without remark or lamentation; left the Samoan question openly and fairly to the conference: and in the meanwhile, to allay the local heats engendered by Becker and Knappe, he sent to Apia that invaluable public servant, Dr. Stuebel. I should be a dishonest man if I did not bear testimony to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all things in nature except the mistletoe, which, on account of its frailty and insignificance, was scornfully neglected. Asa Loke, the evil principle of the Norse faith, taking advantage of this fatal exception, had a spear made of mistletoe, and with it armed Hodur, a strong but blind god. Freya, rejoicing in fancied security, to convince Balder of his charmed exemption ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... well acquainted with her soul's history. The imperfections which she so bitterly deplored were, then, only an occasional infidelity to the grace which had called her from early years to perfect detachment from creatures and from self, or, at most, they were but the faults of frailty, ignorance, surprise and inadvertence, from which even the saints are not exempt in this life; but, viewed as they now were in their closer contrast with the sanctity of God, they assumed a more serious aspect than ever before. Her ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... sacrifices, in which the blood of the victims flowed like water. Days of sorrow and mourning alternated with these days of joy, during which the people and the magnates gave themselves up to severe fasting and acts of penitence. The Chaldeans had a lively sense of human frailty, and of the risks entailed upon the sinner by disobedience to the gods. The dread of sinning haunted them during their whole life; they continually subjected the motives of their actions to a strict scrutiny, and once ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... of human frailty, which one accepts on the part of him who is judged, and from which familiar conversation is not altogether free. In evidence of this, it is to be known that man is stained in many parts; and, as says St. Augustine, "none is without spot." Now, the man is stained ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... deep there still yawns a lower deep; and in the vast halls of man's frailty, there are separate and more gloomy chambers of a frailty more exquisite and consummate. We account it frailty that threescore years and ten make the upshot of man's pleasurable existence, and that, far before that ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... thing worth living for! Enjoy your present, rooks and all, as I do!'' Why, indeed, should he alone be insensible to the golden influence of the hour? More than one supple waist (alas! for universal masculine frailty!) has been circled by that tattered sleeve in days gone by; a throbbing heart once beat where sodden straw now fails to give a manly curve to the chest. Why should the coat survive, and not a particle of the passion that inspired ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... literary superstitions of the time; none who took his own road with more sturdiness and self-reliance. This was enough for Johnson, who persistently depreciated both the man and his work. Something of this should doubtless be set down to disapproval of the free speech and readiness to allow for human frailty, which could not but give offence to a moralist so unbending as Johnson. But that will hardly account for the assertion that "Harry Fielding knew nothing but the outer shell of life"; still less ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... equally righteous. A man who styles himself devout resembles a commoner who styles himself a marquis; he arrogates to himself a quality he does not possess. He thinks himself more worthy than his neighbour. One can forgive such foolishness in women; their frailty and their frivolity render them excusable; the poor creatures pass from a lover to a director in good faith: but one cannot pardon the rogues who direct them, who abuse their ignorance, who establish the throne of their pride on the credulity of the sex. They ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... eloquence, opens his coffers to the poor and needy, and dispenses the accumulated store with a liberal hand! The voluptuary, too, is snatched from the pleasures of the table; ambition flies at my command to the wholesome discipline of the monastic cell; while female frailty, tottering on the brink of ruin, with one ear open to the siren voice of the seducer and the other to my saintly correctives, is restored to domestic happiness and the approving smile of heaven, by the timely warnings ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... sullenness, and for a little moment was proud of her victory. Then she began to suffer, too. She understood the frailty of her hold on Cheever. His loyalty to her was in the eyes of the world a treachery, and his disloyalty to her would be applauded as a holy deed. She was becoming an old story with him, as Charity had ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... body. From then until early dawn they watched her, the life flickering like a spent torch in the wind. The doctor had taken extreme measures to combat the disease, and his greatest fear was that his efforts to cure might have a contrary effect by reason of the frailty of the child. Once he despaired, but, looking up, caught a momentary glint of steel in Nancy's eyes. His very fear that she might detect his weakness compelled him to continue. For ten hours she sat with the child on a pillow in her lap, apparently ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... who was without an heir, I gave away as much as what remains in acts of mercy and in providing refuge for the homeless and the suffering. Thomas Wingfield, for the most part this money has come to me as the fruit of human folly and human wretchedness, frailty and sin. Use it for the purposes of wisdom and the advancing of right and liberty. May it prosper you, and remind you of me, your old master, the Spanish quack, till at last you pass it on to your children ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... smart, comely, upstanding young woman. Even my father, a dismal sceptic anent human frailty, said that he would freely trust her around the farthest corner in Christendom. And I gathered from the talk of my elders and betters that Mary was very pretty. People said it was a real joy to see a creature so young, so smiling, so pink and white, ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... She saw it all—Madame Cassandra playing on Mildred's wounded affections, the broker on both that and her desire to be independent—and Drummond pulling the wires that all might take advantage of her woman's frailty. ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... see," growled Harwood. "It's an ugly idea." And then, with sudden scorn for Thatcher's views on man's frailty, he said with emphasis: "Now, Allen, it's all right for you to talk to me about Marian, and your wish to marry her; but don't mix scandal up in it. I'm not for that. I don't want to hear any stories of that kind ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... my heaven, which, after all, is within myself. The stuff that composes me, that is I, is so made that it finds its supreme realization in the love of woman. It is the vindication of being. Yes, and it is the wages of being, the payment in full for all the brittleness and frailty of flesh and breath. ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... smudged and spotted bill of fare propped up, in its wooden frame, against an armour-plate-china sugar-bowl. She was deeply intrigued by the mystery of human frailty as exemplified by her reckless extravagance in ordering that superfluous bit of pastry. Miss Manvers's purse contained a single coin of silver, the quarter of a dollar; being precisely the sum of her ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... perceptions at least, it presents even in its best estate a picture of such abortive aims, such woful short-comings, such clouded brightness, that even in those better natures, where we feel sure that the sun of virtue does shine, the noxious vapors of human frailty, pride in all its various ramifications, selfishness under its many disguises, prejudice with its endless excuses, etc., etc., do so envelope it that we cannot hope to feel the warmth of its rays until some wholesome trial, some aptly-apportioned ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... pity with the sad and sinning. He had himself suffered so much, and been so tempted and tested, and had retained throughout his trials so much of the serenity of a child, that all his writings breathe compassion for frailty and failure with something of a schoolboy sense of brotherhood which softens even his satire. The flames of London's fiery furnace had blazed and raged about him, but he passed through them unconsumed. The age in which ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... that tragical scene of fanaticism, in which seven persons lost their lives, one was killed, two were murdered, and four executed for the murders. A signal and melancholy instance of the weakness and frailty of human nature, and to what giddy heights of extravagance and madness, an inflamed imagination will carry unfortunate mortals. It is hard for the wisdom of men to conceive a remedy for a distemper such as religious infatuation. ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... understood. But since we are explaining this epistle, you will not mind if we repeat what we have so often explained elsewhere. The article of justification must be sounded in our ears incessantly because the frailty of our flesh will not permit us to take hold of it perfectly and to believe it with all ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... one not prominently engaged in journalism knows how widely spread is the human conviction that, failing all else, any one can "write for the papers," making a lucrative living on easy terms, amid agreeable circumstances. I have often wondered how Dickens, familiar as he was with this frailty, did not make use of it in the closing epoch of Micawber's life before he quitted England. Knowing what he did, as letters coming to light at this day testify, it would seem to be the most natural thing in the world that ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... where he might observe them closely; the game turning still, irresistibly, to conversation, the last and sweetest if somewhat drowsy relics of this long day's recreations.—Was Circe's castle here? If Circe could turn men into swine, could she also release them again? It was frailty, certainly, that Gaston remained here week after week, scarce knowing why; the conversation begun that morning lasting for nine months, over books, meals, in free rambles chiefly on horseback, as if in the waking intervals of ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... happiness, and my heart seems as if it could not beat without them; and yet—-if I were to die, if I were to be summoned from the midst of this circle, would they feel—or how long would they feel the void which my loss would make in their existence? How long! Yes, such is the frailty of man, that even there, where he has the greatest consciousness of his own being, where he makes the strongest and most forcible impression, even in the memory, in the heart, of his beloved, there also ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... in commercial thrift, in mechanical and agricultural enterprise, in the development of the national resources, the progress had been steady and rapid. The politicians of Europe had been amazed to find that their unanimous prediction of the frailty of our political system had totally failed. The idea of a political centre combined with separate State organizations was as firmly fixed as ever. The General Government wielded an undiminished power in aid of the general ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Lenehan. Such is life in an outhouse. Throwaway, says he. Takes the biscuit, and talking about bunions. Frailty, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... all the glory of their youth, of perfect physical beauty and splendid strength and fullness of life; and the wonder was not their beauty more than a kind of dryad delicacy of that beauty, which was yet not frailty but a look of angelic strength. But they were not remote—they were gloriously human, almost, one would say, divinely human, all gentle movement and warmth and tender breath. They were not remote, save as one's own soul would be remote by its very excess of intimacy with life, ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... hands—"He putteth no trust in his saints" (Job 15:15). Grace can pardon our ungodliness, justify us with Christ's righteousness; it can put the spirit of Jesus Christ within us, it can help us up when we are down, it can heal us when we are wounded, it can multiply pardons, as we, through frailty, multiply transgressions. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... a wonderfully graceful shadow, reclining in this dark place, and no judge of the human form could have passed without a quick breath of admiration for its delicate blending of strength and frailty, its stamp of being thoroughbred. And it was along the line of thoroughbreds that her ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... delicate, fragile, and threatened with disease—knows how I feel whenever I pass between these two sentries at the gate. I am full of admiration for the glorious strength of Gog; I am touched to tenderness by the comparative frailty of poor Magog. It is odd that two trees of the same age, growing together under precisely identical conditions, should have turned out so differently. There must be a reason for ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... confirmation than the tones of a mother's voice, and found God everywhere in the soft pressure of her love; and when his steps begin to hesitate, and he finds himself among the long shadows, and the frailty and fear of the body overcome the prophecies of the soul, and no religious assurance lights and lifts up his mind, how he wishes for some fountain of restoration that shall bring back his bloom and his strength, and make him always young! "Why have such ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... attribute—infallibility—for any human authority, however exalted; or claim it for any amount of proof, presumptive or positive. 'It is because humanity even when most cautious and discriminating is so mournfully fallible and prone to error, that in judging its own frailty, we require the aid and reverently invoke the guidance of Jehovah.' In your solemn deliberations bear in mind this epitome of an opinion, entitled to more than a passing consideration: 'Perhaps strong circumstantial ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... uncalculating spirit that lands people in debt is a more engaging frailty than the calculating spirit of the miser. I know a delightful man who seems to have no more knowledge of the relation of income and expenditure than a kitten. If he gets L100 unexpectedly he does not look at it in ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that "decent drapery" which time or indulgence to human frailty may have drawn over them; accordingly, the greater part of our confessions (that is, spontaneous and extra-judicial confessions) proceed from demireps, adventurers, or swindlers: and for any such acts of gratuitous self-humiliation from those who can be supposed ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... that one of the quaintest spectacles of human frailty is an outbreak of hysterics in a girls' school. It starts without warning, generally on a hot afternoon among the elder pupils. A girl giggles till the giggle gets beyond control. Then she throws ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... lets you into the secrets of its organization, he conceives his whole work is performed. This criticism applies even to his tragedy of "Women beware Women," a drama which shows a deep study of the sources of human frailty, considerable skill in exhibiting the passions in their consecutive, if not in their conflicting action, and a firm hold upon character; but it lacks pathos, tenderness, and humanity; its power is out of all proportion to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... Verona, Duke Guidobaldo's favourite and carpet-count. The lady is Madonna Maria, daughter of Rome's Prefect, widow of Venanzio Varano, whom the Borgia strangled. On their discourse a tale will hang of woman's frailty and man's boldness—Camerino's Duchess yielding to a low-born suitor's stalwart charms. And more will follow, when that lady's brother, furious Francesco Maria della Rovere, shall stab the bravo in torch-litten ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... body and mind, she began to look forward with distinct pleasure to her occasional meetings with Samuel, pleasure which perhaps was enhanced by the air of condescension wherewith he tempered his courtesy. Morbid miseries brought out the frailty of her character. Desiring to be highly esteemed by Mr. Barmby, she found herself no less willing to join his sisters in a chorus of humbly feminine admiration, when he discoursed to them from an altitude. At moments, ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... which he held grasp his own with incredible power, and the old man, supported on either side by his friends, rose upright to his feet. For a moment he looked about him, as if to invite all in presence to listen (the lingering remnant of human frailty), and then, with a fine military elevation of the head, and with a voice that might be heard in every part of that numerous assembly, he pronounced the ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... you are mistaken, Bergenheim; my boyish love adventures have disposed me to indulgence. 'Debilis caro', you know! Shakespeare has translated it, 'Frailty, thy ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... general frailty of her sex, has a peculiar softness, beauty, and propriety. She admits the imputation with all the sympathy of woman for woman; yet with all the dignity of one who felt her own superiority ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... became fidgety about her personal appearance,—a female frailty which had never much prevailed with her,—and was anxious even about her ribbons and her dress. "He does think so much about a woman being neat," she ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... the count, "to those golden tablets which you hold in your hand? Give me leave to look at them. They might suit my pedantic way of life. But," added he, as he examined their delicate workmanship, "came you honestly by this toy, my lord? What fair frailty have you cheated of this knack, that never, I will be sworn, was a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... conditions of charity; and then they shall be moved with the good Spirit of GOD for to examine oft and diligently their conscience, that neither wilfully nor wittingly they err in any Article of Belief, having continually (as frailty will suffer) all their business to dread and to flee the offence of GOD, and to love over all things and to seek ever to do ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... courageous virtue, Faith. Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith is built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in Christian days, and early learnt ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "The very frailty of such a girl, her dependence upon her intuitions and emotions, the triumph of feeling over intellect, place her in greater danger than her brothers, even were their responsibility to society the same. But, add to this the fact that in yielding to sexual temptation she has the burden ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... mouth, that its tender leaves were crushed and tarnished. He laughed scornfully. "Thus is it," he exclaimed, "with woman's love; as fair and as fragile as this poor blossom. Begone, then! Wither, and become dust, thou perishable emblem of frailty!" Approaching the open window, he was about to throw away the flower, when something flew into the room, struck his breast, and rolled upon the ground. Federico started back, and his eye fell upon the clock that regulated his studies. The hands ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... throne, so grotesque, so mystical, so strange in all its aspects; your mouth wide open and your head thrown back—what hope can there be? To be hurt is an inevitable thing. We are in the clutches of a fate, and must realize our mortal frailty. To march to this with a whistle; neither to kick the smaller dogs on our route, nor to thrust little children aside spitefully; to take our usual interest in the occurrences of the street as we pass along to execution; to ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... of humorous tolerance of all human frailty had suffused Poindexter's black eyes with mischievous moisture. "If you think it quite safe to confide to your wife this prospect of her improvement by widowhood, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... especially if there be a fortune. Beauty will change, intellect may be too much for you, but ugliness will be true to you as to itself; besides its advantage of preserving you from the effects of conjugal frailty. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 360 - Vol. XIII. No. 360, Saturday, March 14, 1829 • Various
... Canadian tribes in war, and with stone hatchets of their own making. The allies remained on the lake, a bowshot from the hostile barricade, their canoes made fast together by poles lasht across. All night they danced with as much vigor as the frailty of their vessels would permit, their throats making amends for the enforced restraint of their limbs. It was agreed on both sides that the fight should be deferred till daybreak; but meanwhile a commerce of abuse, sarcasm, menace, and boasting gave ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... thus laid on the divine worth and dignity of human love is balanced by the stress which the poet places on the frailty and finitude of every other human attribute. Having elevated the ideal, he degrades the actual. Knowledge and the intellectual energy which produces it; art and the love of beauty from which it springs: every power and every gift, physical and spiritual, other than love, has in it the fatal ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... Firedrake,' and to leave it at that. I speak very cautiously because the manner of the late Professor Freeman, in especial, had a knack of provoking in gentle breasts a resentment which the mind in its frailty too easily converted to a prejudice against his matter: while to men trained to admire Thucydides and Tacitus and acquainted with Lucian's 'Way to Write History' ([Greek: Pos dei istorian suggraphein]) his loud insistence that the art was ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... who were not defiled with women, for they are virgins." The notion that procreation is "impure" and that renunciation of it is "purity" is present here. Cf. Levit. xv. 16-18. In 1 Cor. vii the doctrine is that renunciation of marriage is best; that marriage is a concession to human frailty; that all sex relation outside of marriage is sin. If there is a technical definition of sin, virtue, purity, etc., it can only be satisfied by arbitrary acts which are ascetic in character. The definitions also produce grades of goodness and merit ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... There is no one waiting at the door, Whene'er I wander in at half-past four, No one to question, no one to accuse, No one, my shocking frailty to deplore! ...
— The Rubaiyat of a Bachelor • Helen Rowland
... Prelude. I think the poem is saved by its picturesqueness, but that otherwise the story up to the point reached is too purely repellent. I have the sequel quite clear in my mind, and in it the mere passionate frailty of Aloyse's first love would be followed by a true and noble love, rendered calamitous by Urscelyn, who then (having become a powerful soldier of fortune) solicits the hand of Aloyse. Thus the horror ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... remain virtuous in France, our enumeration of the celibates and the predestined, our remarks upon the education of girls, and our rapid survey of the difficulties which attend the choice of a wife will explain up to a certain point this national frailty. Thus, after indicating frankly the aching malady under which the social slate is laboring, we have sought for the causes in the imperfection of the laws, in the irrational condition of our manners, in the ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... come to the rescue, they would not suffer the fate of the Yugoslavs who in the Great War had managed to desert to Italy, had valiantly fought and won many decorations and—after the War—been ignominiously interned. And they had given no grounds for charges of financial frailty. ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... own chamber that night, he could not help recalling to his memory the proud elevation of her character as it had appeared in that interview. The recollection really gave him pain, since along with it arose the memory also of that unfortunate frailty, which became more prominent as a crime in connection with that intellectual merit which, it is erroneously assumed, should have ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... a strong sense that Providence had erred in not making her a saint, a king, or anything else that demands a resolute repression of human infirmities. Some people are content to triumph over their own weaknesses; my mother had an eye also for the frailty of others. ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... forgot all about his whales, as he had forgotten to make out the strange way the Lord had discovered to fasten His stars to the sky; moved by a long contemplation of my mother's frailty, ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... to the obstinacy of individuals, who have credit enough to make their passions and their caprices interesting to mankind. Perhaps the question now before the public may, in its consequences, afford melancholy proofs of the effects of this despicable frailty, or rather detestable vice, in the human character. Upon the principles of a free government, inconveniences from the source just mentioned must necessarily be submitted to in the formation of the legislature; ...
— The Federalist Papers
... hears the case with bland surprise, And over human frailty sighs, The while he reads between the lies? ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton
... Forget-Good, thy forgetfulness of good was not simply of frailty, but of purpose, and for that thou didst loathe to keep virtuous things in thy mind. What was bad thou couldst retain, but what was good thou couldst not abide to think of; thy age, therefore, and thy ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... whole sense, however, is not congruous with the fervid beliefs and soaring ambitions of eighteen. Your sense of humour, that delicate percipience of proportion, that subrident check on impulse, that touch of the divine fellowship with human frailty, is a thing of mellower growth. It is a solvent and not an excitant. It does not stimulate to sublime effort; but it can cool raging passion. It can take the salt from tears, the bitterness from judgment, the keenness from ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... confused, its fate unknown, The world stood trembling at Jove's throne; While each pale sinner hung his head, Jove, nodding, shook the heavens and said: 'Offending race of human kind, By nature, reason, learning, blind; You who through frailty stepped aside, And you who never err'd through pride; You who in different sects were shamm'd, And come to see each other damn'd (So some folk told you, but they knew No more of Jove's designs than you). The world's mad business now is o'er, And ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... flat slabs of stone, the lines being filled in with enamelled metals. Thorton Abbey, Lincolnshire, and Brading, in the Isle of Wight, have examples of this work. But the great expense of these enamels, and also their frailty when exposed in the pavements of churches, led to the use of brass; and hence arose the introduction of memorial brasses for which our country ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... When modesty and frailty go hand in hand, there is no more delectable combination known to men; and Aphrodite has not the subtle charm of a Cynthia. Perhaps ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... beautiful priestess of Athene, golden-haired and very lovely, whose life had been devoted to virgin service of the goddess. Her golden locks, which set her above all other women in the desire of Neptune, had been her undoing: and when Athene knew of the frailty of her priestess, her vengeance was indeed appalling. Each lock of the golden hair was transformed into a venomous snake. The eyes that had been so love-inspiring were now bloodshot and ferocious. The skin, with its rose and milk-white tenderness, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... pure and unmixed to others (not friends or relatives), whom we have no obligation to, nor hope or expect anything-from.' The counterfeit of true charity is pity or compassion, which is a fellow-feeling for the sufferings of others. Pity is as much a frailty of our nature as anger, pride, or fear. The weakest minds (e.g., women and children) have generally the greatest share of it. It is excited through the eye or the ear; when the suffering does not strike our senses, the feeling is weak, ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... over medium height, and slender Even to frailty. Her great, wistful eyes Were like the deep blue of autumnal skies; And through them looked her soul, large, loving, tender. Her long, light hair was lustreless, except Upon the ends, where burnished ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of hesitation but of completing a thought, before he looked up and rose to his feet. In that moment, John Wingfield, Sr. had his own shock over the change in the room. The muscles of his face twitched in irritation, as if his wife's very frailty were baffling invulnerability. Straightening his features into a mask, his eyes still spoke his emotion in a kind of stare of ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... youth, aware of the frailty of matches, wisely resolved to penetrate as far as possible into the interior of the cupboard, in the direction in which he knew his particular boots to be, before striking ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... we may still take comfort each in his mortal frailty, because of the hopeful promise preached to men long since by the son of Sirach, "A faithful friend is the Medicine of life; they that fear the Lord shall ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie |
