"Ignoble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... certainly by the conventions of life. The result is that though there is more true religion in the schools than is acknowledged by those outside and than those within care to boast of, and though the standard of conduct is not ignoble, there is too little fusion; both components are brittle, they cannot stand the strain of sudden temptation, they lack enduring power. No one will forget how in those first months of war, consolation ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... tore your heart, and made the treachery still more horrible by the contrast between the riches that eluded your outstretched hand and the ignoble mediocrity in which you were ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... with no attempt upon the beholder's emotions. In the process of time, I suspect that the Albert Memorial will not be the most despised among them, for it expresses, even if it over-expresses, a not ignoble idea, and if it somewhat stutters and stammers, it does at last get it out; it does not stand mum, like the different shy, bashful columns stuck here and there, and not able to say ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the fen-lights flit! Ignoble sediment of loftier lands, Thy humour clings about our hearts and hands And solves us to its softness, till we sit As we were ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... those events which led, by insensible steps, to my after tale of misery, for when I would account to myself for the birth of that passion which afterwards ruled my destiny I find it arise, like a mountain river, from ignoble and almost forgotten sources; but, swelling as it proceeded, it became the torrent which, in its course, has swept away all my hopes and joys. Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate; I desire, therefore, in this narration, to state those facts which ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... able-bodied men among them were few, as most of the attacks were made upon unprotected houses in the absence of the head of the family; and the only fortified place captured was the garrison-house at Winter Harbor, which surrendered on terms of capitulation. The instruments of this ignoble warfare and the revolting atrocities that accompanied it were all, or nearly all, converted Indians of the missions. Charlevoix has no word of disapproval for it, and seems to regard its partial success as a gratifying one ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... can almost hear the uncongenial stepmother, the feverish cook, and the infuriated directors, clamoring for a providence to remove her from their field of vision, and substitute some thoroughly practical and ignoble person in her stead." ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... standards! No, you cannot. Why should you? This little set of iron rules makes it very easy to judge, does it not? But why do you desire it to be easy to judge? You and I know how infinite are the gradations between the most noble kind of chastity and the most ignoble kind of immorality; but which of us is to create a rigid standard and measure our friends and acquaintances against it? We do not do it with the other virtues: why do we desire to do it with this one? Take such a virtue as ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... oars, oblivious of the weird unearthly melody around them, the clever King of Ithaca gained the honour of becoming the only mortal who had listened to that subtle song without paying the penalty of a hideous and ignoble death. ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... the best part of us. As I have said, it kills the soul. Who, indeed, can call that which is left in the confirmed gambler, a soul! It is rather, as one well describes it, "a shrunken, useless organ, a noble capacity sentenced to death by an ignoble passion, which droops as a withered hand by the side, and cumbers Nature like a ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... o'er the champaign came A numerous race of no ignoble name; Riddle and Rebus, Riddle's dearest son, And false Conundrum and insidious Pun. Fustian, who scarcely deigns to tread the ground, And Rondeau, wheeling in repeated round. On their fair standards, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... what he was about. To plunder the fish-pond and be impertinent to the lady was not the way to obtain patronage. The impudent painter collected his pencils together, and returned to London to enjoy his inelegant pleasures and ignoble company." ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... revolutions,—such as that, for instance, raging in the country of our miserable French neighbours. Save a very, very few indeed, the actors in those great tragedies do not bear to be scanned too closely; the chiefs are often no better than ranting quacks; the heroes ignoble puppets; the heroines anything but pure. The prize is not always to the brave. In our revolution it certainly did fall, for once and for a wonder, to the most deserving: but who knows his enemies now? His great and surprising triumphs were not in those rare ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... aside. The charwoman was right, they had broken his sleeping girl: that did not matter much, but the beautiful slenderness, the grace he had caught from Lucy's figure—those slendernesses, those flowing rhythms, all these were gone; the lovely knees were ugly clay. Yes, there was the ruin, the ignoble ruin, and he could not believe in it; he still hoped he would wake and find he had been dreaming, so difficult is it to believe that the living ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... Antonio and his Duchess; but they have belonged to each other and been happy; these two are eternally separate. Their passion is only heightened by its absolute freedom from desire; even the wicked and desperate Heathcliff has no ignoble love for Catharine; all he asks is that she live, and that he may see her; that she may be happy even if it be with Linton. "I would never have banished him from her society, while she desired his," asserts Heathcliff, and now she is mad with grief and dying. ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... I said that we looked like vessels which had come so far up the river with the tide; and now that it had turned we were stranded and fast in the mud. Sometimes I changed the figure to one not so ignoble, and likened ourselves to the stately vessels anchored in Falmouth harbour, which were there because the wind was contrary. We were wind-bound too, and dependent on circumstances; but my idea of true religion ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... Imperial tradition, but let them love its sublime and reject its ignoble side. It is sublime where it stands for liberty; ignoble—and none knew this better than the Ulster-American rebels—where it stands for government based on the ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... degrades men to the level of the brute creation. In his view, there is nothing admirable beyond this pleasure—no sensation or emotion of the mind, no soundness or health of body. And what is this pleasure which he makes of such high account? How short-lived while it lasts! how ignoble when we recall it afterwards! But even the common feeling and sentiments of men condemn so selfish a doctrine. We are naturally led to uphold truth and abhor deceit, to admire Regulus in his tortures, and to despise a lifetime of inglorious ease. And then follows ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... Sir Nigel, "it is a very small matter that I should be hanged, albeit the manner of death is somewhat more ignoble than I had hoped for. On the other hand, it would be a very grievous thing that you, the Prince of England and the flower of knighthood, should make a vow, whether in ignorance or no, and fail ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... straight and slender, her gray eyes full of fire, her face glowing like a rose. Perhaps she was of the enemy's country. Perhaps those she loved, those who made up her life, had set her feet in this path that she was treading. If she was a spy,—Lord! How the mere word hurt one!—it wasn't for ignoble motives; it wasn't ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... generous deed, of a single service rendered—even involuntarily—to the polity of nations. Other despotisms there have been, but none whose origin was so grimly fantastic in its baseness, and the beginning of whose end was so gruesomely ignoble. What is amazing is the myth of its irresistible strength which is ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... another new feeling came to him. The distinction of a familiar visit with a real "great lord" elated him as debutantes are elated by their first ball. He was no snob, only a very natural young man entering life. He dreamt that he was transferred from the ignoble class to the noble, and in the fancy felt himself lifted to some inconceivable level above the people who passed by. Half a dozen peasants, bronzed and sweaty and trudging in a group, meeting him, took off their hats. One of them said in his ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... thoroughly entertaining narrative. His ardor as a sportsman and a naturalist seems to have sprung from a stronger, independent love of "wild life," an instinctive preference for the haunts and habits of uncivilized races, apart from the pursuits for which they give scope. This may be thought to argue ignoble tastes; but the reverse conclusion would be more correct. Mr. Hornaday is a believer in the "gentle savage." The Dyak seems to him "the model man," not on account of his defects, which are few, but of his virtues, which are many. He is manly, truthful, honest, chaste, and even when ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... the murderers might not always be able to draw the line between orthodoxy and heresy. Things were fast getting beyond all control; the thirst for plunder was even keener than the thirst for blood. And it is certain that among the many ignoble motives by which Charles was induced to permit the massacre, was the hope of enriching himself and paying his debts out of the property of the murdered Huguenots. Nor were Anjou and others insensible ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... too have suffer'd; yet I know She is not cold, though she seems so. She is not cold, she is not light; But our ignoble souls lack might. ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... thoughts, to love again, to refrain from an ignoble strife—alas! that it could not be ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... in secret league with those Who from his hope the kingdom rent? A spy from his ignoble foes To track him in his banishment? And wouldst thou at his death rejoice? I know thou wouldst, or sure ere now When first thou heardst that well-known voice Thou shouldst have ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... one made entirely by Mr. Brown, who himself struck the bargain with the boy's father. Mr. Robinson was much ashamed of this affair, declaring that it would be better to abstain altogether from advertising in that line than to do it in so ignoble a manner; but Mr. Brown would not give way, and the magenta box was dragged about the streets till it was altogether ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... shall not understand the attraction which this naked immoralism in international affairs exercises over the minds of many who are not otherwise ignoble, if we do not remember that the repudiation of the Christian ethical standard has been equally thorough in commercial competition. The German officer believes himself to have chosen a morally nobler profession than that of the business-man; he serves (he thinks) ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... beloved by every body for the glorious action he had done; for those who did not before favor him did join themselves to him now, because of his marriage into the family of Hyrcanus; for as he had formerly married a wife out of his own country of no ignoble blood, who was called Doris, of whom he begat Antipater; so did he now marry Mariamne, the daughter of Alexander, the son of Aristobulus, and the granddaughter of Hyrcanus, and was become thereby a relation of ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... her presence; and for the love of this lady who had so unkindly treated him the noble Orsino, forsaking the sports of the field and all manly exercises in which he used to delight, passed his hours in ignoble sloth, listening to the effeminate sounds of soft music, gentle airs, and passionate love-songs; and neglecting the company of the wise and learned lords with whom he used to associate, he was now all day long conversing with young Cesario. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... while he talked or listened, take, in the bright air, singular positions. Sometimes the right was down and sometimes the left; never a happy equipoise—one or the other always kicking the beam. Thus was kept before him the question of whether it were more ignoble to ask a woman to take her chance with you, or to accept it from one's conscience that her chance could be at the best but one of the degrees of privation; whether, too, otherwise, marrying for money mightn't ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... delivering his lectures upon the deepest questions of philosophy, and laying it down as a fundamental principle that it is the place of art to represent everything whatever, which sinks or swells in the human spirit; not alone all the noble and the lovely, but also the ignoble, the vicious, the unworthy, and particularly the tragic—to the end that the soul may learn to know itself, and awaken to a deeper and better self-consciousness. Beethoven felt the mental movement of ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... suffer; that The Son of God Himself had to suffer. And he does not like suffering; he prefers comfort. The lazy, selfish man shrinks from the sight of Christ on His Cross; for it rebukes his laziness and selfishness. Christ's Cross says to him—Thou art ignoble and base, as long as thou art lazy and selfish. Rise up, do something, dare something, suffer something, if need be, for the sake of thy fellow- creatures. Be of use. Take trouble. Face discomfort, contradiction, ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... competitors found it impossible to outdo him. A current saying of him was that he made a fortune by "pinching the bellies of the soldiers"—that is, as an army contractor who defrauded in quantity and quality of supplies. By a multitude of underhand and ignoble artifices he finally found himself the lord of a manor sixteen miles long and twenty-four broad. On this estate he built flour and saw mills, a bakery and a brewery. In his advanced old age he exhibited great piety but held on grimly to every shilling that he could and as long ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... cause. They saw the chief office in their gift a mere pawn in the game of place-seekers, the time and energy of their President wasted in bickerings with congressmen over petty appointments, and the machinery of their Government dominated by the machinery of the party for ignoble ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... secured from interest in life itself. We slowly learn that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... that evening I was climbing for the second time the grand staircase of the Tuileries, in the midst of a dense and ignoble mob. One of the General's aides-de-camp tried in ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... part of the nation yet untainted, a part which deserves the utmost care of the legislature, and which must be endangered by a law like this before us. The children, my lords, to whom the affairs of the present generation must be transferred, and by whom the nation must be continued, are surely no ignoble part of the publick. They are yet innocent, and it is our province to take care that they may in time be virtuous; we ought, therefore, to remove from before them those examples that may infect, and those ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... and hence it cannot be pleasing to its object, for one cannot think of the Lord God as sacrificing decent feelings to mere vanity. This notion of abasement, like most of the other ideas that are general in the world, is obviously the invention of small and ignoble men. It is the pollution of theology ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... the wall, facing an array of salt-castors and catsup-bottles and one of those colored glass windows with a portrait of Washington which give to all lunch-wagons their air of sober refinement, Carl ate solemnly, meditatively.... It did not seem to him an ignoble setting for his grief; but he was depressed when he came out to a drab first light of day that made the street seem hopeless and unrested after the night. The shops were becoming visible, gray and chilly, like a just-awakened janitor in slippers, suspenders, and ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... "The Country Gentleman." I had never seen an agricultural paper before, though our little penny daily did occasionally contain extracts from some of them. I became immediately interested. The thought struck me that this bundle of old papers, now about to be used for such ignoble purposes as wrappers for groceries, must contain stores of the very information I was so laboriously seeking after. Hastily turning them over, my eye lighted on an article headed "Strawberries: how to plant and how to cultivate them." I was fairly dipping ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... the frequent and great toils which they had endured for the sake of the republic, had been so despised that he himself had been accused of treason in consequence of the examination of some slaves, and had been exposed to an ignoble trial; while Ursicinus had been brought over from the East, and placed at the mercy of his enemies; and these were the subjects of his incessant complaints both in ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... fact of their being addressed to persons of small intelligence which makes the guide-books of the eighteenth century seem ridiculous; another reason for their ignoble tone is the increased emphasis they lay on the material convenience of the traveller. Not the service of one's country or the perfecting of one's character is the note of Georgian injunctions, but the fear of being cheated and of being sick. Misson's instructions begin at once with praise ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... diligence as to acquire abilities possessed by few, and when once equipped for the field he occupied with such consummate skill, no power of prejudice could keep him from rising like a star of the first magnitude. Alas! how soon that star has been obscured and by what ignoble means! But, against great odds, its brief existence was characterized by a brilliancy that no prejudice ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... text from Jeremiah: "Why trimmest thou thy way?" With this entering wedge the parson clove into an analysis of practical politics which did not stick at instancing corruption near at hand, and whose climax was a bitter denunciation of ignoble leadership and the doubly ignoble laxity of the indifferent led. It was as pointed an attack on local conditions as he could frame without complications with his deacons, who were politically of divers minds, and the fusion managers might have ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... for the Plataeans who remained in the town if they had stood by their first purpose, and shared the fortunes of their brave comrades. Better far to have died, sword in hand, than to meet the ignoble fate which was now reserved for them. It was in the following summer, two years after the beginning of the siege, that the crisis arrived. The Plataeans had come to the end of their provisions, and were suffering severely from want of food. In this state of weakness they were ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... properly called Liberal. Unluckily the flattery of the working-man has come into fashion; we ignore his necessary limitations, and we deify the 'casual opinions and ineffectual public sentiments' of the half-educated. 'The great characteristic danger of our days is the growth of a quiet, ignoble littleness of character and spirit.' We should aim, therefore, at impressing our new masters 'with a lofty notion not merely of the splendour of the history of their country, but of the part which it has to play in the world, and of ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Superstition in its baneful form was largely due to the enforcement by the Church of arguments that involved a petitio principii, for it is the miserable necessity of all false logic to accept of very ignoble allies. Fear became at length its chief expedient for the maintenance of its power; and as there is a beneficent necessity laid upon a majority of mankind to sustain and perpetuate the order of things they are born into, and to make all ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... sorts of feelings come into your throat to choke you, as you watch a row of "heathen" Eskimo lads carry out an ungentle joust of this kind, for the blows are no child's play. Think of what this self-inflicted discipline means in the way of character-building, then think of the ignoble tactics that obtain on some of our race-courses, baseball diamonds, and "sport" carnivals, and then do some more thinking. A line of Tennyson came persistently to my mind last summer as I walked in and out among the camps of ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... bezonian^, panhandler [Slang], sundowner^, chiffonnier, Cinderella, cinderwench^, scrub, jade; gossoon^. Goth, Vandal, Hottentot, Zulu, savage, barbarian, Yahoo; unlicked cub^, rough diamond^. barbarousness, barbarism; boeotia. V. be ignoble &c adj., be nobody &c n.. Adj. ignoble, common, mean, low, base, vile, sorry, scrubby, beggarly; below par; no great shakes &c (unimportant) 643; homely, homespun; vulgar, low-minded; snobbish. plebeian, proletarian; of low parentage, of low origin, of low extraction, of mean parentage, of mean ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... those facts by strength of human intellect, so as to make them, for all who look upon them, to the utmost serviceable, memorable, and beautiful. And thus great art is nothing else than the type of strong and noble life; for, as the ignoble person, in his dealings with all that occurs in the world about him, first sees nothing clearly,—looks nothing fairly in the face, and then allows himself to be swept away by the trampling torrent, and unescapable force, of the things that he would not foresee, and could not understand: so ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... their future vocation. Lolling on their saddles, probably voting it all a bore, were two or three tufts, and their "tail;" and stuck into all sorts of vehicles, lawful and unlawful, buggies, drags, and tandems, were that ignoble herd, who, like myself, had come to the steeple-chase, just because it was the most convenient idleness at hand, and because other men were going. There were all sorts of people there besides, of course: carriages of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... beautiful man of his own times Ton chath eauton hathropon challei euprepestatos. He would therefore have looked the part admirably of the dying gladiator; and he would have died in his natural vocation. But it was ordered otherwise; his death was destined to private malice, and to an ignoble hand. And much obscurity still rests upon the motives of the assassins, though its circumstances are reported with unusual minuteness of detail. One thing is evident, that the public and patriotic motives assigned by the perpetrators as the remote causes ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... observations I elicited in the course of examining my witnesses, it appeared to me that the jealousy and rivalry existing between New Jersey, New York, and Philadelphia, have some little effect; at all events, it is an ignoble affair that it is suffered to remain. I have, however, no doubt that time will remedy this, as I trust it will many of the other inconveniences and wants of arrangement which the whole railway system in this country is at ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... noble souls—incomprehensible wealth. Deeply agitated, we watched during the memorable examination the touching spectacle of the greatest heart making itself the standard by which to measure what is petty and ignoble. But ere the second trial takes place the wanderers above, who know the future, bid me warn you once more; for that woman's every look was calculated, every word had its fixed purpose, every tone of her voice was intended to produce a certain ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... emotions that might have turned other men from their paths, he looked out over the city and "played his game" with all the cold impassiveness of a gambler operating an infallible system in roulette. No detail was too small to escape his notice, no agent too ignoble ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... made it his home; rarely entering it, except in his father's absence, and then chiefly to obtain largess from his mother, who loved and indulged him the more because others disliked or despised him. Reckless, stupid, savage; ignoble and stubborn; with thick, black, stubby hair, and dark, bushy, beetling brows; his protuberant eyes filled with cunning, and burning with a lustre like live coals; deep-chested, and with shoulders raised and rounded, giving him an air of pugnacity; snarl written upon his countenance, ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... the disadvantages as well as sinfulness of this habit, deprecates it with a qualification at which it is impossible to repress a smile. It savours so much of "beating the Devil round a bush." Thus he says—"May God preserve me from the indecent, ignoble, criminal slavery, to the mean delight of smoking a weed, which I see so many carried away with. And if ever I should smoke it, let me be so wise as to do it, not only with moderation, but also with such employment of my mind, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... terror, because she had often almost flung ink-bottles and heavy rulers at her silly, lying governesses, and once had dug a pair of scissors into one sneaking old maid fool's arm when she had made her "see red" by her ignoble trickeries. Perhaps she would be hanged some day herself. She once prayed for a week that she might be made better tempered, —not that she believed in prayer,—and of course nothing came ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... weaver's daughter, a woman of ill fame, a washerwoman, a barber's wife, a milkmaid, and the daughter of a land-owner- choosing the darkest time of night and the most secret part of the house, he drank with them, was sprinkled and anointed, and went through many ignoble ceremonies, such as sitting nude upon a dead body. The teacher informed him that he was not to indulge shame, or aversion to anything, nor to prefer one thing to another, nor to regard caste, ceremonial cleanness or uncleanness, but freely to enjoy all the pleasures of ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... windy and thunderous as a dog-day in Kansas. His collar had been torn away; his straw hat had been twisted and battered; his shirt with ox-blood stripes split to the waist. And from head to knee he was drenched with some vile and ignoble greasy fluid that loudly proclaimed to the nose its component leaven ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... Liberia. Had Mr. Mason, who was so original and bold in music, been only half as bold in creating a sensible, a humane public sentiment; had he, as he looked with pity upon this gifted and devoted young musician struggling against the ignoble spirit of caste to gain a place in art, thrown his great influence on the side of what he confessed was right; and had he, instead of advising Mr. Williams to bury himself in Africa, declared that the latter should ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... certainly not in accordance with Christian principles. No one ever addressed them but in the roughest manner, and they were kicked and cuffed about on every occasion; even the dirtiest little European cabin-boy on board was allowed to act in the most cruel manner, and play off the most ignoble practical jokes upon them. Unhappy creatures! how is it possible that they should feel ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... more impressive than the close of Wolsey's career. "The history of mankind is the history of great men," was Carlyle's motto, and Froude's. It is a noble one, and to discredit great men with low motives is the vice of ignoble minds. The reign of Henry VIII., after Wolsey's fall, was rich in horrors and in tragical catastrophes. But it was not a mere carnival of lust and blood. High principles were at stake, and profound issues divided ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Guards, eaten to the bone by the Syren—not even the gold lace on his uniform left. There was Merridew, once the hope of the party, now living in ignoble obscurity with an old and painted mistress, whom he detested, but to whom habit and sapped will-power kept him in thrall. There was Bullen, who blew his brains out. In a generous glow I waxed prophetic and ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... him, and he knew it. They must have noticed his ignoble retreat, and here was the way to redeem ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... entertains an ungovernable, all-absorbing love of it, gold is his curse and a mill-stone around his neck, drawing him down to earth. How much sorrow that love has caused! O, there is love that is angelic! But high and holy as love is when bestowed upon a worthy object, in like proportion is it base and ignoble when fixed upon that ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... for quarter came gaspingly out of puffed, blood-foamed lips. But there was no mercy in Slavin. He looked round at the wrecked bar, the glass-slashed bleeding faces of his men and the rest of the saloon's occupants. He thought upon many things—how near ignoble death many of them had been but a few minutes before—upon insult and threat flaunted at them by a drunken, ruffling braggadocio!—and he jerked the latter ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... has no rights invested in the future, offers also much of this ideal detachment. Like the savage, he may make his bed wherever his right arm can support him, and from his simple and athletic attitude of observation, the property-owner seems buried and smothered in ignoble externalities and trammels, "wading in straw and rubbish to his knees." The claims which THINGS make are corrupters of manhood, mortgages on the soul, and a drag anchor on our progress towards ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... is our little dove afraid of in her nest?" pinching Kitty's cheek as though she had been a dove very lately fledged indeed. She had always in fact the feeling when with Kitty that through her she suffered to live and patted on the back the whole ignoble, effete race of domestic women. Catharine caught sight of her satchel, which portended ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... without business. For thirty long years the placid surface of that parliamentary sea has been without one single ripple. If the Senator from Massachusetts desires a tribunal for a calm, judicial equilibrium and examination—a tribunal far from the 'madding crowd's ignoble strife'—a tribunal eminently respectable, dignified and unique; why not send this question to the Committee on Revolutionary Claims? It is eminently proper that this subject should go to that committee because, if there ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... ready trident stands, And opes the deep, and spreads the moving sands; Then heaves them off the shoals. Where'er he guides His finny coursers and in triumph rides, The waves unruffle and the sea subsides. As, when in tumults rise th' ignoble crowd, Mad are their motions, and their tongues are loud; And stones and brands in rattling volleys fly, And all the rustic arms that fury can supply: If then some grave and pious man appear, They hush their noise, ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... jealous husband from braining my precious fiance. There is to be blood on the hands and the brand of Cain on the brow of the last of the Kingslands, or my oath will not be kept; but it must not be the ignoble blood of ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... labors with the heaviest load, And the wolf dies in silence,—not bestow'd In vain should such example be; if they, Things of ignoble or of savage mood, Endure and shrink not, we of nobler clay May temper it to bear,—it ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... eye, as it rested fondly on his fair companion, or was turned abroad on the world, told alternately of a loving heart and a proud spirit. Philip Hayforth was one who would have scorned to commit an ignoble action, or to stain his soul with the shadow of a falsehood for all the treasures and the blessings the earth has to bestow; but he was quick to resent an injury, and slow to forget it, and not for all the world would he have been the first to sue for a reconciliation. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... cumulative, almost murderous intensity. He had mocked at the other, but how should he stand against him in fair field? It was he—Alan Massey—that was the outcast, his mother a woman of doubtful fame, himself a follower of false fires, his life ignoble, wayward, erratic, unclean? Would it not be John rather than Alan Massey Tony Holiday would choose, if she knew all? This ugly, venomous, sin-scarred old rascal held his fate in the hollow ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... coast, in the national gulf, and on the banks of the national river,—and this and much more would surely be demanded of us,—would place the United Fraction of America on a level with the Peruvian guano-islands, whose ignoble but coveted soil is open to be plundered by ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... flagitious. History charges herself willingly with a relation of the great crimes, and still more with that of the great virtues, of mankind; but she appears to fall from her dignity, when necessitated to dwell on such frivolous events and ignoble personages. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... that I do not meet you in the spirit which prompts your generous and manly kindness—no matter. Think that it proceeds from something ignoble in my nature, and be glad that you may in no way be involved in ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... and growth of those qualities on which thrift and forehandedness in the management of his affairs in future life, and, in consequence, his success and prosperity, depend; but, on the contrary, to cherish the growth of all the mean and ignoble propensities of human nature by accustoming him, so far as relates to this subject, to gain his ends by the arts of a sycophant, or ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... of genius, and when only ten years of age used to collect an audience in his father's shop, by his talent for improvisation. He thus attracted the notice of Gravina, a celebrated patron of letters, who adopted him as his son, changed his somewhat ignoble name of Trepassi to Metastasio, and had him educated in every branch necessary for a literary career. He still continued to improvise verses on any given subject for the amusement of company. His youth, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... capable of resisting these instincts. A vicious person begins to interest us as soon as he must risk his happiness and life to carry out his perverse designs; on the contrary, a virtuous person loses in proportion as he finds it useful to be virtuous. Vengeance, for instance, is certainly an ignoble and a vile affection, but this does not prevent it from becoming aesthetical, if to satisfy it we must endure painful sacrifice. Medea slaying her children aims at the heart of Jason, but at the same time she strikes a heavy blow at her own heart, and her vengeance aesthetically becomes ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the young woman towards the canvas, hiding behind her, so as to escape the gaze of the drowned man. But she escaped, and he wanted to brazen the matter out. Approaching the picture, he raised his hand in search of the nail, but the portrait gave such a long, crushing, ignoble look, that Laurent after seeking to stare it out, found himself vanquished, and started back overpowered, ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... be the last service ever performed by your obliged and affectionate friend." His old commander was naturally perturbed at the thought that the illustrious career, which he had done so much to foster, was to have the ignoble termination to be inferred from these words and the notorious facts. "Be assured, my dear Lord," he replied, "that every public[37] act of your life has been the subject of my admiration, which I should have sooner declared, but that I was appalled by the last sentence ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... vision of the Apocalypse has its meaning, but it is not the carnal, literal meaning of foolish men. It tells of the bright river of the water of life; of glorified cities, where nothing foul, or mean, or ignoble shall dwell; of the white robes of our stainless purity; of the crowns and palms, the emblems of victory over temptation, of the throne which indicates calm mastery over sin; of the song and music and gladsome feasting to image faintly the abounding happiness and the fervent thanksgiving for the ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... until I earn The wherewithal my debt to pay. Ignoble falsehood I will spurn. That steals the character ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... household for some time. Their father, Dr. Ewen Hooper, the holder of a recently founded classical readership, had once possessed a younger sister of considerable beauty, who, in the course of an independent and adventurous career, had captured—by no ignoble arts—a widower, who happened to be also an earl and a rich man. It happened while they were both wintering at Florence, the girl working at paleography, in the Ambrosian Library, while Lord Risborough, occupying a villa in the ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... have no thoughts of their own are the very ones who hate mortally to admit to themselves that any intelligence in the world is superior to their own. A noble nature is indeed never so delighted as when it finds something that may be lawfully reverenced; but all the ignoble keep up their self-complacence by shutting their eyes ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... the four cardinal points of the compass of suspicion, and govern the stormy sea of soliloquies. From these frightful tempests which ravage a woman's heart springs an ignoble, unworthy resolution, one which every woman, the duchess as well as the shopkeeper's wife, the baroness as well as the stockbroker's lady, the angel as well as the shrew, the indifferent as well as the passionate, at once puts into execution. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... How long the ignoble sloth, how long The trust in greatness not thine own? Surely the lion's brood is strong To front the ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... son-in-law, and to have turned his mind to the consideration of other matters. "There should be a year devoted to that final year to be passed within the college, so that, by degrees, the mind may be weaned from the ignoble art of money-making." I had once so spoken to him; but there he was, as intent as ever, with his mind fixed on the records of the price of wool as they came back to him from the English and American markets. "It is all for his daughter," I had said to ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... tea I've had, it wouldn't matter," said Flossie as if resenting an ignoble implication. Rickman laughed a little uncomfortably and blushed. Perhaps she had hardly given him the right to concern himself with these intimate matters. Yet from the very first his feeling for Flossie had shown itself ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... each of them stood a scantily attired woman with a dirty yashmak covering her face. The chamber which should have been very sacred if only because there the last of the Byzantine Emperors composedly resigned himself to the inevitable, had become a filthy den devoted to one of the most ignoble of uses. The shame is, of course, to the Greeks of Constantinople.] watching the movements of the Turks. The subtle prophet which sometimes mercifully goes before death had discharged its office with him. He had dismissed his last hope. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... still very far from distinctly. It did not occur to her once that such things could be temptations to the brilliant young leader whom every woman admired and every man flattered, and that only his devoted love for her had kept him out of ignoble adventures since he had grown to be a man. Had she seen that, she would have loved him even better, if it were possible. It was all, as she had said, shameless and abominable. She had thought that she knew much of evil, and she had even told him ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... is bad; to betray a woman, that is still worse; but to betray one's country!-to commit an act which shall place her at the mercy of her enemies! Ah, the ignoble deaths of the men who were guilty of this crime! And if men have souls, as we are told they have, how the souls of these men must writhe as they look into the minds of living men and behold the horror and contempt in which each ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... a donkey. She wrought her will with him, that is, she took her own gait. 'What that pace was there is no word mean enough to describe; it was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run.' He must belabor her incessantly. It was an ignoble toil, and he felt ashamed of himself besides, for he remembered her sex. 'The sound of my own blows sickened me. Once when I looked at her she had a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance who had formerly loaded me with kindness; ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... have risen to combat it. But now she neither repulsed it nor responded to it. She seemed submerged and smothered in a tide of terrible indifference. She even found herself weighing the meaning of that affront to all that was not ignoble in her. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... Scotch terrier at the sight of his shifty eyes in the glade between his tangled hair and beard. For one ignoble moment I felt ashamed of having been introduced as his friend in the presence of so much beauty in distress. But evidently Tripp meant to conduct the ceremonies, whatever they might be. I thought I detected in his actions and pose an intention of foisting the ...
— Options • O. Henry
... orchestral effects, the business of the drama, and of forming a chromatic commentary to the emotions of the soul and the motions of the body, has been shamefully neglected on the English stage. Ignorant composers and ignoble fiddlers have attempted to develop the dark mysteries and intricate horrors of the melo-drama; but unable to cope with the grandeur of their subject, they have been betrayed into the grossest absurdities. What, for instance, could be more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... in our soul, the visions rise Of that fair life we never led; They flash a splendor past our eyes, We start, and they are fled; They pass and leave us with blank gaze, Resigned to our ignoble days." ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... frightful eccentricities in art, accompanied by immeasurable vanity and self-conceit,—the age of "finger-heroes." It is indeed a melancholy reflection, for all who retain their senses, that this charlatanry is made the solitary aim of numberless ignoble performers, sustained by the applause of teachers and composers equally base. It is sad to see how, engaged in artificial formalisms and in erroneous mechanical studies, players have forgotten the study of tone and of correct delivery, and that few ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... richest spots, have been generally the soonest conquered, the soonest civilized, and therefore the soonest taken out of the sphere of romance and wild adventure, into that of order and law, hard work and common sense, as well as—too often—into the sphere of slavery, cowardice, luxury, and ignoble greed. The lowland populations, for the same reasons, have been generally the first to deteriorate, though not on account of the vices of civilization. The vices of incivilization are far worse, and ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... half-and-half, or to ask a Fairy Princess if her mother has parted with her mangle, is to secure the laugh, though contempt may follow it. To our minds there is something melancholy in such spectacles. Degrading lofty images by ignoble associations must operate maleficiently on the spectator. And if it be absolutely necessary to appeal to the coarse tastes and vulgar appetites of the crowd, let it be done without at the same time dragging ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... under pretence of vindicating the rights of humanity in some other country." The spectacle of a section in the United States apparently ready to step down from its pedestal of honourable neutrality, and run its head into the ignoble web of European complications, was indeed one to make both gods and mortals weep. But I do not believe it expressed the true attitude of the real American people. Perhaps the personal element enters ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... effect, the education that our spiritual guides have, unhappily for society, assumed the vocation of imparting to youth? Does it tend to make reasonable, courageous, and virtuous citizens? No; it is incontestable that it creates ignoble men, whose entire lives are tormented with imaginary terrors; it creates superstitious slaves, who only possess monastic virtues, and who, if they follow faithfully the instructions of their masters, must be perfectly useless to society; it forms intolerant devotees, ready to detest all those ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... which he had his nickname—were overshadowed, now, by the young man's inability to clothe his splendid body in that fashion which her culture demanded. His simple and primitive views of life—as natural as the instinct which governs all creatures in his God-cultivated world—were now unrefined, ignoble, inelegant. His fine nature and unembarrassed intelligence, which found in the wealth of realities amid which he lived abundant food for his intellectual life, and which enabled him to see clearly, observe closely and think with such ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... century.[209] The title-giver is a female, not a male, human dove, and of course a married one. Camus was a divine of views which one does not call "liberal," because the word has been almost more sullied by ignoble use in this connection than in any other—but unconventional and independent; and he provoked great wrath among his brethren by reflecting on the abuses of the conventual system. Palombe appears to be not uninteresting, but after all it is but one of those parasitic exercises which ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... this instant that I was visited by the idea of writing the book which ultimately became "The Old Wives' Tale." Of course I felt that the woman who caused the ignoble mirth in the restaurant would not serve me as a type of heroine. For she was much too old and obviously unsympathetic. It is an absolute rule that the principal character of a novel must not be unsympathetic, and the whole modern tendency ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... one other I had missed, or I should not have neglected reporting to Madame la Marquise. In speaking the father and daughter referred to matters not only already discussed but arranged. I learned that in desperation, through these ignoble creditors, Monsieur Moore had placed the ring not in the safe but in the Mont de Piete, which here is called the pawnbroker, or uncle. Mademoiselle had evidently regretted it, fearing that the procedure was not honest, but Monsieur had convinced her that, as ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... mortal Muse thy praise rehearse In no ignoble verse, But such as thy own voice did practise here, When thy first fruits of poesy were given, To make thyself a welcome inmate there; While yet a young ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... devil, who was the cause of it, died. I and the men came together again. We patched up our differences, covertly, so to speak. The men appeared at the gates one morning, and I let them in without referring by a single word to what had taken place. The principle of unionism is a noble thing, but ignoble men, like rust in girders, gnaw rapidly into principles and quickly and treacherously nullify ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... friends of all that their good-fellowship had to offer; then he had squeezed them to the last drop of their generosity; and at the last, Aaron-like, he had smitten the rock of their hardening bosoms for the scattering, ignoble drops of Charity itself. ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... above the horizon of contumely and oppression, prophetic of the destruction of slavery and the enfranchisement of the freedman. I was returning, and on touch of my country's soil to have a new baptism through the all-pervading genius of universal liberty. I had left politically ignoble; I was returning panoplied with the nobility of an American citizen. Hitherto regarded as a pariah, I had neither rejoiced at its achievement nor sorrowed for its adversity; now every patriotic pulse beat quicker and heart throb warmer, on realization that my country gave constitutional ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... Payne. "I don't know! I don't believe we are so stupid and so ignoble! As to mending it, that's another question. Writing is such a curious thing—it seems to represent anything in the world except the current of a man's thoughts. Reverie—has anyone ever tried to represent that? I have been out for a walk sometimes, and reflected when I came in ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson |
