"Filth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of us got such pretty clo'es as you," stammered Tobias, much confused by this unlooked-for reception, and he thrust both grimy hands behind his back as if that would hide all his filth. ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... worse than a prison; and it contained nothing which could contribute to the recovery of the sick, or the preservation of those who were yet unaffected. The huts which served for hospitals were surrounded with filth, and with the putrefying hides of slaughtered cattle—almost sufficient of themselves to have engendered pestilence; and when at last orders were given to erect a convenient hospital, the contagion had become so general that there were none who could ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... from the main road, with a cart track, slushy and muddy running across the fields to the very door. The whole aspect of the place is forbidding, it looks squalid and dilapidated, and smells of decaying vegetable matter, of manure and every other filth that can find a resting place in the vicinity of an unclean dwelling-place. But it is not dirty; its home-made bread and beer are excellent, the new-laid eggs are delightful for breakfast, the milk and butter, fresh and pure, are dainties that an epicure ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... wisest of women; went then the strong-hearted band To make known to their master that the maiden of God Was brought to his bower. Then blithe was the chief in his heart, The builder of burg-steads; the bright maiden he planned With loathsome filth to defile, but the Father of heaven knew 60 His purpose, the Prince of goodness and with power he restrained him, God, the Wielder of Glory. Glad then the hateful one Went with his riotous rout of retainers Baleful to his bedside, where his ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... made up my mind," answered Thomas. "If she dies it is so decreed, and the spells and filth of a heathen ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... to breed in dirt or other filth around the house, nor allow them to walk on your food. This is possible by burning, burying or otherwise removing the dirt or filth, and by using fly traps, ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... and wanderers of a seaport. Kind, generous, forsooth! as harlots are, or thieves. And the gold, flowing in torrents through that tainted and luxurious world, splashing the very walls, seemed to him now to be loaded with all the dross, all the filth of its impure and muddy source. There remained, then, for him, de Gery, but one thing to do, to go away, to quit with all possible speed this situation in which he risked the compromising of his good name, the one heritage from his father. Doubtless. But the two ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... of a foul stale smell, and a cloud of nasty flies; it had been left, besides, in some disorder, or else the birds, during their time of tenancy, had knocked the things about; and the floor, like the deck before we washed it, was spread with pasty filth. Against the wall, in the far corner, I found a handsome chest of camphor-wood bound with brass, such as Chinamen and sailors love, and indeed all of mankind that plies in the Pacific. From its outside view I could thus make ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... disappointed nor cast down by my defeat. The political canvass served the purpose of giving me a new sensation, and introducing me to new phases of human nature—a subject which I had always great delight in studying. The filth and scandal, the slanders and vindictiveness, the plottings and fawnings, the fidelity, meanness and manliness,: which by turns exhibited themselves in the exciting scenes preceding the election, were novel to me, and ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... was in a terrible condition. Shot and shell and explosions had destroyed everything. A horrible smell rose from the numerous corpses buried everywhere under the rubbish. Wherever battle had not done its work the most revolting filth reigned supreme, and all this under an equatorial sun and in the midst of the yellow fever. The crew of the Creole was at once set to sanitary work, in company with the detachment of engineer sappers attached to the expedition. ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... being insulted by scholars in the Press; but what was it to me that the scum of the medical profession, which is the scum of God's whole creation, called me words I did not know the meaning of, and flung the dirt of their streets, and the filth of their souls, after me? I was frightened a little, that is all. But that these reptiles could wound my darling old lion's heart across the ocean! Sir, he was a man who could be keen and even severe with men, but every virtuous woman was a sacred thing to him. Had he seen ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... of a typhoid character, and ague from malaria, are the usual types; outbreaks of small-pox have been reduced by general vaccination. The improvement in sanitary regulations will no doubt diminish the occurrence of typhoid fevers, which even now are rare considering the filth of the villages and the generally ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... light of the grey dawn, on the white coverlet of snow, with his anguished face, wide-open eyes, and drooping tongue on which the teeth had closed firmly. There were blue patches on his skin, and he was covered with filth from ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... the use of fire, they are all provided with chimneys, which was a feature remarkable at once, it being unusual on the southern coast. From these houses, as you approach the city, you enter upon a scene of filth and dirt indescribable, and have to pass through a line of beggars, who exhibit the most loathsome and revolting sores, to excite the ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... in paint. The decks are methodically chipped and scraped of their corroding rust, ventilators are washed and painted, and all the deck-houses are cleansed of a coating of coal-dust which seems appalling. As the days drone by the filth disappears; pots of red, white, brown, and black paint come out of the Mate's secret store in the "fore-peak," and one hears satirical approval from those below. "Like a little yacht, she is," says one, and the Second Mate is asked if he has a R. Y. S. flag in the chart-room. I ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... 1533 he experienced a "conversion" such as stands at the head of many a religious career. A sudden beam of light, he says, came to him at this time from God, putting him to the proof and showing him in how deep an abyss of error and of filth he had been living. He thereupon abandoned his former ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... great and sudden changes in the exterior temperature of the heels. The feet of the horse may be alternately heated by the bedding and cooled by draft from the open stable door; or they may first be made hot and sensitive by the irritating action of the urine and filth on the stable floor, and then violently reacted on by the cold breezes of the open air, or they may be moist and reeking when the horse is led out to work, and then chilled for a long period by the slow evaporation of the moisture from them amid the clods and soil of the field; ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... itself is a poor one, containing perhaps sixty houses, but these are divided into three or four groups; the houses, with the exception of three or four stone and lime ones, are of the usual build, viz. of bamboo, and raised on muchauns. Filth and dirt abound every where, and the places immediately contiguous to the huts are furnished ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... dissents. 'My feeling is that if society gets its grip on the collar of such a fellow, it should say to him, "You dirty fellow, it may be a question whether you should be suffered to remain in your native filth untouched, or whether my opinion should be printed by the lash on your bare back. That question will be determined without the smallest reference to your wishes or feelings, but as to the nature of my opinion about you ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... and life. You have raised hundreds—as you raised me—out of misery and filth. Think of all the children you have sent away from this poison into the green fields and the ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... vermin from your rags! Get rid of your filth! Your God is not a Moloch who requires flesh ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... Filth, poorness of living, and the want of linen, made this horrible disease formerly very common in Scotland. Robert Bruce died of the leprosy; and, through all Scotland, there were hospitals erected for the reception of lepers, to ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... beautiful and holy, nor pity for what is sad,—no more sense of sacred misery, sanctifying the human shape in which it embodies itself,—than if Satan were the father of them all! Goaded by their taunts, their loud, shrill cries, and cruel laughter,—insulted by the filth of the public ways, which they would fling upon him,—or, as it might well be, distracted by the mere strangeness of his situation, though nobody should afflict him with so much as a thoughtless word,—what wonder if Clifford were to break into some wild extravagance which was certain to be ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... blue sky. Snow-white fringed curtains, and a bed, with furniture to correspond, a carpeted floor, and a large pot of green boughs on the hearthstone, gave an air of comfort and cleanliness to a room which, only a few hours before, had been a loathsome den of filth and impurity. ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... o'clock in the afternoon we reached Norman Bay, where we found a miserable hut unoccupied save by an abundance of filth, two cats, and one hen. As there were no tracks visible in the snow, the people evidently had been away since the storm began on Saturday night. We built a fire in the stove, made tea and fed ourselves, the cats, and the hen from ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... ferocity of laws which made 235 offenses—punishable with death,—most of which we should now call misdemeanors. But perhaps death was better than the prisons, which were the abode of vermin, disease and filth unspeakable. Jailers asked for no pay, but depended upon the money they could wring from the wretched beings in their charge for food and small alleviations to their misery. In 1773 John Howard commenced ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... Cholera kept along the sea-shore, now it goes far inland, and will spread all over Africa; this we get from Mecca filth, for nothing was done to prevent the place being made a perfect cesspool of animals' guts and ordure of men.[11] A piece of skin bound round the chest of a man, and half of it hanging down, prevents waste of strength, and ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... course of traducing persons under these odious names of Separatists, and enemies of Church and State, for fear lest their own tongues fall upon themselves by the justice of His hand who will not fail to clear the innocency of the just, and to cast back into the bosom of every slanderer the filth that he rakes up to throw into other men's faces. As for men of more indifferent and better minds, they would be seriously advised to beware of entertaining or admitting, much more countenancing and crediting, such uncharitable persons as discover themselves by their carriage, and that ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... prevented him from enjoying either Rome or his books. The sights of Rome were very different fifty years ago from those that instruct and fascinate us to-day. Except the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and a few pillars covered thick with the filth of the modern city, the traveller found the ancient Rome an undistinguishable heap of bricks. Still, when we reflect on the profound and undying impression that Rome even then had made on such men as Goethe, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... acrimony and vehemence. When satire ceases to smile, it should be momentarily, and for the purpose of inculcating a moral. Juvenal is hardly more a satirist than Lucan: he is indeed a vigorous and bold declaimer, but he stamps too often, and splashes up too much filth. We Italians have no delicacy in wit: we have indeed no conception of it; we fancy we must be weak if we are not offensive. The scream of Pulcinello is imitated more easily than the masterly strokes of Plautus, or the sly insinuations of Catullus ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... But perhaps some spectator, some beardless youth, who thinks himself a sage, will say, "What is this? What does the beetle mean?" And then an Ionian,(1) sitting next him, will add, "I think 'tis an allusion to Cleon, who so shamelessly feeds on filth all by himself."—But now I'm going indoors to fetch ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... hand, and the great toe of his right foot"; because it is in these parts that leprosy is first diagnosed and felt. In this rite, moreover, three liquids were employed: viz. blood, against the corruption of the blood; oil, to denote the healing of the disease; and living waters, to wash away the filth. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... this childish fearlessness as the poor student of the Conservatoire; went alone all over Paris with her maiden skirts untarnished by the gilded dust of the boulevards or the filth of by-ways; knew all the best shops for her friends, and the cheapest for her own scant purchases; discovered breakfasts for a few sous with pale sempstresses, whose sadness she understood, and reckless chorus girls, whose gayety she didn't; she knew where the earliest ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... shocked; the men with whom I had for years foregathered were much given to realism of speech, as well as to picturesquely lurid verbal illustration. But this was different; the language of these men was crammed with filth for filth's sake, and flat, pointless profanity. I have no doubt that my inability to avoid expressing disgust made them worse than they ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... regardless of expense. The crystal chandeliers in the reception-rooms are magnificent, and must alone represent fabulous sums. Near by the palace are a number of lions, now kept in proper cages, but I must say from the smell and filth not under very sanitary conditions. These lions he had imported from abroad and turned loose to furnish sport to his shooting friends; but they killed so many of the peasantry that they had to be recaptured and confined. The town ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... healthy-looking children roll about on the grass. These people live in the open air, regardless of everybody, setting their pots boiling, eating nameless things, freely displaying their tattered garments, and sleeping, fighting, kissing, and reeking with mingled filth and misery. ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... dismal rags or finery worse yet; crying children; scolding mothers; a population of boys and girls of all ages, who evidently knew no Sabbath, and to judge by appearances had no home; and streets and houses and doorways so squalid, so encumbered with garbage and filth, so morally distant from peace and purity, that Matilda felt as if she were walking with an angel through regions where angels never stay. Perhaps Mr. Wharncliffe noticed the tightening clasp of her fingers upon his. He paused at length; it was ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... proved, a commonwealth in which such a monster could rise to consequence was not a commonwealth at all, but a frightful mockery which he and every honest man were called on to abhor. Instead of scolding and flinging impotent filth, he should have withdrawn out of public life when he could only remain in it among such companions, or should have attached himself with all his soul to those who had will and power to ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... Arras are uncommonly dirty, and the lacemakers do not in this matter differ from their fellow-citizens; yet at the door of a house, which, but for the surrounding ones, you would suppose the common receptacle of all the filth in the vicinage, is often seated a female artizan, whose fingers are forming a point of unblemished whiteness. It is inconceivable how fast the bobbins move under their hands; and they seem to bestow so little attention on their work, that it looks more like the amusement of idleness than an effort ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... the recumbent position, as the abdomen is more pendent and there is less obstruction to the return. It may, however, be necessary to put hobbles on the hind limbs to prevent the mare from kicking. A clean sheet should be held beneath the womb, and all filth, straw, and foreign bodies washed from its surface. Then with a broad, elastic (india-rubber) band, or in default of that a long strip of calico 4 or 5 inches wide, wind the womb as tightly as possible, beginning ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... heel, than those victims of destitution and of their own passions? War! did the Jew behold any hosts more terrible pressing into Jerusalem, than you and I might see if we looked about us? The entrenched filth that all day long sends its steaming rot through lane and dwelling, through bone and marrow, and saps away the life. Cold that encamps itself in the empty fire-place, and blows through the broken door, and paralyzes the naked limbs. Hunger ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... firmament till night, Could he in this wide world descry the stair. He stood not, he, to mark the bulwark's plight Nor if the fosse of certain bottom were. He past, ran, — rather flew across the moat, Plunging in filth and water ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... joys of the lusts of evil and the joys of the affections of good. Inwardly in the former is the devil, in the latter the Lord. If comparisons are to be ventured, the pleasures of the lusts of evil can only be compared to the lewd pleasures of frogs in stagnant ponds or to those of snakes in filth, while the pleasures of the affections of good must be likened to the delights which the mind takes in gardens and flower beds. For things like those which affect frogs and snakes affect those in the hells who are in lusts of evil; and things like those which affect the mind in gardens and flower ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... history. lie and his sister were found in Sachsenhausen, by a Frankfort merchant, in a horrible condition. Their mother had died about two years and a half before, and during all that time their father had neglected them till they were near dead through privation and filth. The boy was placed in this Institute, and the girl in that of the Orphans. He soon began to show a talent for modelling figures, and for some time he has been taking lessons of the sculptor Launitz. I saw a beautiful copy of a bas-relief of ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... suppose that, if women had equal representation with men in the municipal laws of New York, its reputation for filth during the last year would have gone so far beyond that of Cologne, or any other city renowned for bad smells? I trow not. I believe a lady mayoress would have brought in a dispensation of brooms and whitewash, and made a terrible searching into dark holes and vile corners, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... beef steaks they were. I wish you could see our room; a bed in an open recess, one just moved from the other corner. Raynsford packing his trunk; Maber shaving himself; tables and chairs; looking-glass hung too high even for a Patagonian, the four evangelists, &c. &c. the floor beyond all filth, most filthy. ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... a mighty heap, rising pell-mell to the ceiling. Here, one is likely to get a glimpse into such enchanted worlds as the name of a Dickens or a Balzac might suggest. Here, too, is Shakespeare in lamentable state; there is Carlyle in rags, still crying, as it were, against the filth and beastliness of this underworld. And look at my lord Tennyson shivering in his nakedness and doomed to keep company with the meanest of poetasters. Observe how Emerson is wriggled and ruffled in this crushing crowd. Does he not seem to be still ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... idea of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, listening to the vespers of the Franciscan friars in the dim church of Ara Coeli in the neighbourhood, the Forum was an unsightly piece of ground, covered with rubbish-heaps, with only a pillar or two emerging from the general filth. When Byron stood beside the "nameless column with the buried base," commemorated in Childe Harold, he little dreamt what a rich collection of the relics of imperial times lay under his feet, as completely buried by the wrecks of ages as Pompeii and ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... which were covered with a sort of slime, and then, by striking a light, found themselves in front of a closed door. Opening this, they entered a vile hole where it could scarcely be said to be daylight, so thickly was the little window patched with filth. Groping about in the stifling atmosphere, they discovered in one corner a mass of indescribable matter, from which arose, seemingly, the worst of ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... pound for sugar at the company store. They had continued until they made the discovery that the water supply had run short, and that the water for which they were paying the company a dollar a month was being pumped from the bottom of the mine, where the filth of mules ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... round and spat an awful curse at the sick man. 'Keep your damned money!' she went on, while the thick veins in her neck grew to dark ridges. 'D'you think you can buy everything? You've sold your life and your innocence for filth—d'you suppose it's all to buy? You an' me's in the same box, my boy—bad 'ems both, but you don't make a dog ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... the familiar one of Grubb's Court that Gillie's eyes enlarged with surprise, and he looked involuntarily back for his soapy mother and the babe in the mud. There were, however, strong points of dissimilarity, inasmuch as there was no mud or filth of any kind near the new building except lime; and the stair, instead of leading like that of the Tower of Babel an interminable distance upwards, ended abruptly at the second floor. Here, however, there was a passage exactly similar to the passage leading to Mrs Roby's ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... regard for the proprieties of Christian or civilized life. Scandal is so rampant among the natives of Africa that even men of high character have sometimes suffered from its lying tongue; but in the case of Livingstone there was such an enamel of purity upon his character that no filth could stick to it, and none was thrown. What Livingstone did in order to keep his word to his poor attendants was a wonder in Africa, as it was the admiration of the world. His way of trusting them, too, was singularly winning. He would go up to a fierce chief, surrounded by his ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... peculiarly offensive. Owing to the gale, the cattle that ought to be pasturing in the high alp were crowded there in reeking filth. Yesterday, not long before this hour, he was humming verses of cow songs to Helen, and beguiling the way to the Forno with a recital of the customs and idyls of the hills. What a spiteful thing was Fate! Why had this doting peasant risen from the dead ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... words to his master, who at first wished to have the monk thrown into the big trough of the castle among the other filth. But the lady of Cande, who had great authority over her spouse, and was respected by him, because through her he expected a large inheritance, and because she was a little tyrannical, reprimanded him, saying, that it was possible this monk was a Christian; ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... were marching in a dank world belonging to an earlier age than ours. They were in the age of the coal strata, among wet, green things, in a silence only broken by the sound of dropping or by the bellow of an alligator. They were there in the filth, in the heat haze, in a mist of miasma and mosquitoes. In all probability they were swearing at ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... the sacraments are not immediate conditions of pardon is finally evident from the declaration of the apostle Peter, "The like figure whereunto baptism doth now save us; not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, that is, not the mere outward rite of applying the water, but the answer of a good conscience toward God." [Note 21] that is, the faithful performance of the duties to which our Christian profession, made in baptism, obligated ...
— American Lutheranism Vindicated; or, Examination of the Lutheran Symbols, on Certain Disputed Topics • Samuel Simon Schmucker
... his German mercenaries. A printing-press was established in the place, whence satirical pamphlets, hymn-books, and other pestiferous productions, were constantly issuing to the annoyance of government. Many lawless and uproarious individuals enjoyed the Count's hospitality. All the dregs and filth of the provinces, according to Doctor Viglius, were accumulated at Viane as in a cesspool. Along the placid banks of the Lech, on which river the city stands, the "hydra of rebellion" lay ever ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... killers, instead of keeping it pure and sweet by flooding it with fresh air and sunshine and applying freely and vigorously broom, brush and plenty of soap and water. Instead of purifying it, the antiseptics and germ killers would only add to the filth in the house. ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... these works the product of a man who had imperfect control over his material, who, in stumbling towards the light, dwelt inevitably upon much darkness, who sought for beauty and found ugliness, who looked for purity and found filth—even then one might be silent and hope for better things to come. But here, apparently, unless my whole reading is ludicrously wrong, he delights in deformity and glories in degradation.... He brings to the world of art a new gospel, a black gospel, ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... do me justice, and as to my style everyone has a style of their own. I am furious, and I wrote furiously. Look at this place; I have no bed, the floor is covered with filth, and I am obliged to sleep on a narrow bench. Don't you think it is natural that I should desire to eat the hearts of the scoundrels who have placed me here? If I do not leave this hell by tomorrow, I shall kill myself, or ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... fact to all the little shopkeeper traditions of her youth, and the untidy home in which she went about from early morn in elaborate costumes and astonishingly dressed hair, recalled the back-shops so dear to her heart, rooms black with filth and want of air, where in the short intervals of rest from commercial life, badly cooked meals were hurriedly eaten, at a bare wooden table, listening all the while for the tinkle of the shop-bell. With this class, nothing has importance but the street, the street ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... meaning of Flaubert's fiction, a meaning more amply expressed in Salammbo, where not one foolish woman alone but thousands on thousands of men, women, and children, mingled with charging elephants and vipers, flounder and fight in indescribable welters of blood and filth, and go down to rot in a common pit. If I read Flaubert's meaning right, all human history is there; you may show it by painting on broad canvas a Carthaginian battle-scene or by photographing the details of a modern bedroom: ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... to Pope (August 11th, 1729) was in every place strewn with beggars. The poor labourer, had work been found for him, was too weak in body to undertake it. Thousands had already died of starvation and the diseases consequent on hunger. Those that managed to exist did so in filth, and dying every day, as Swift wrote on another occasion, "and rotting, by cold and famine, and ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... tableland behind the river Passarge. There they found better cantonments, but the food was neither better nor more abundant. The Emperor had only a thatched hovel for his headquarters at Osterode, and, as he wrote to his brother Joseph, lived in snow and filth, without wine, brandy, or bread. "We shall be in fine condition when we get bread," he said to Soult. "My position would be fine if I had food; the lack of food makes it only moderate," he wrote, on ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... always in filth and rags, scarred and disfigured by disease, their numbers decimated many times over by an ever-present plague, what could they know of the sanctity of life? Death walked and talked with them continually; a familiar guest, eating and drinking by their side like a trusty ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... of action and every random word aimed at Jesus for the purpose of injuring and dishonouring Him so turned, instead, to honour, that in our eyes, now looking back, it shines on Him like a star. As a fire catches the lump of dirty coal or clot of filth that is flung into it, and converts it into a mass of light, so at this time there was that about Christ which transmuted the very insults hurled at Him into honours and charged even the incidents of His crucifixion which were most trivial in themselves with unspeakable meaning. The crown of thorns, ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... has nothing to do, but look about the room; and when every thing is neat and in order, a feeling of comfort is induced, while disorder, filth, and neglect, are constant objects of annoyance, which, if not complained ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... he saw a great many other immaterial Essences[25], which resembled rusty Looking-glasses, cover'd over with Filth, and besides, turn'd their Backs upon, and had their Faces averted from those polish'd Looking-glasses that had the Image of the Sun imprinted upon them; and he saw that these Essences had so much Filthiness adhering to them, and such manifold Defects as he could not have conceived. And ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... catching?" asked a wild goose. "It's a stickleback. It's Oeland stickleback. It's the best stickleback in the world," said a gull. "Won't you taste of it?" And he flew up to the goose, with his mouth full of the little fishes, and wanted to give her some. "Ugh! Do you think that I eat such filth?" said the ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... I feel very sorry for our mission brethren, but I am glad Chinatown is in ashes. We were all getting sick from the impure air. Some of the boys had been sick for months on account, I think, of the filth surrounding our mission rooms, and I believe it was the Lord's will that it should burn, and besides I am certain that we can do a better work where we are. The Chinamen are driven from their nests, and I believe many will come to school now. They ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 48, No. 7, July, 1894 • Various
... prayers[2] let. Those that bee good, shee prizes most, Noe time with them shee counteth lost. 30 Her chast delights, her mind, aduance Above Lot-games or mixed dance. Shee cares not for an enterlude, Or idly will one day conclude. The looser toungs that filth disclose 35 Are graueolencie to her nose. But when a vertuous man shall court Her virgin thoughts in nuptiall sort: Her faire depor[t]ment, neyther coy Nor yet too forward, fits his ioy, 40 And giues ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... war-path in the brave days of old; gorges where currents of hot air breathe in your face like the breath of some fierce animal. There are brilliant and noisy cataracts and cascades that silver the rocks with spray; and a huge winding cavern filled with mice and filth and the blackness of darkness, and out of which one emerges looking like a tramp and feeling like—well! There are springs bubbling and steeping and stagnating by the wayside; springs containing carbonates of soda, lithia, lime, magnesia, ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... Majuba Day—February 27—appears to have influenced both parties, hastening the issue. The Boers, huddled in the narrow and loathsome bed of {p.289} the river, with senses sickened by the disgusting accumulations of filth and decay inevitable in the circumstances, clamoured for deliverance even at the cost of surrender. Cronje, obstinately bent to prolong to the utmost the chance of succour, is reported to have promised at last to surrender on the 28th, but by no means on the date illustrated ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... often squalor, poverty, dust, filth, and uncomeliness within these old and beautiful homes. Doubtless often the dwellers therein were housed like cattle and slept like pigs, and looked but once out to the woods and waters of the landscapes round for one hundred times that they looked at ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... said Hemstead, with increasing annoyance; "I did not mean to assert any moral qualities of smoking-cars, though with then filth and fumes there would be no question in your mind about them whatever, Miss Marsden. What I meant to say was, that in such places as smoking-cars, hotel lobbies, and through the open doors of saloons, are caught glimpses of a life which we all should unite in condemning ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... had stamped the town: the masonry of the quay was in many places broken down, the waves had undermined certain houses, and in the holes thus washed out by the action of water were accumulations of recent filth. Nevertheless, enormous improvements had taken place since the English occupation. An engineer was already employed in repairing the quay, and large blocks of carefully faced stone (a sedimentary limestone rock of very recent formation) were being laid upon a ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... by taking into the mouth in some form the discharges from some previous case. There is no other way. It is, therefore, a disease of filth and someone is at fault somewhere for every case of typhoid fever ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... nothing except as they are driven to it by blows, and perpetrate what wrong and detraction they can behind each other's back; therefore God also punishes them, that they sink into all kinds of filth and misery. As a rule, the parents, too, are themselves stupid and ignorant; one fool trains [teaches] another, and as they have lived, so live their children after ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... The bailiff and his attendants. They bound a man's hand's behind his back; they dragged him through the streets like an odious criminal; the people cast filth and dirt upon the prisoner, and cried out, 'Murderer!' What did I see? A scaffold, and on this scaffold an executioner and one condemned to death; then a sword glittered in the sunlight, it fell, a stream of blood flowed, and a head ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... were not wanting in endeavors to keep these cities clean, to judge, at least, by the published 'regulations for the police.' Every householder was obliged to put the Scotch proverbs in force, and keep clean and 'free from filth, mud, dirt, rubbish straw or hay' one-half of the street opposite his own house The 'cleanings' were to be deposited on the beach, as they still are in portions of Montreal and Quebec which border on the river. Treasure-trove in the shape of stray ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... only water supply came from polluted streams and wells. There were no sewers and no sidewalks. People piled up their refuse in the backyard or flung it into the street, to be devoured by the dogs and pigs which served as scavengers. The holes in the pavement collected all manner of filth, and the unpaved lanes, in wet weather, became deep pits of mud. We can understand why the townspeople wore overshoes when they went out, and why even the saints in the pictures were represented with them on. The living were crowded ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... treading it to mortar. It is mixed with slops from the houses and straw from the stables. You are reminded of the Slough of Despond described by Bunyan in the Pilgrim's Progress,—a place for all the filth, sin, and slime of this world. Christian was mired there, and Pliable nearly lost his life. If Bunyan had seen Cairo, he might have made the picture still more graphic. There are old houses, shanties, sheds, stables, pig-sties, wood-piles, carts, wagons, barrels, boxes, and all the ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... body, this dear body, will come to such an end! No, no, my body, precious above all other treasures, I swear to you that I will spare you that ignominy; you shall not rot under a registered number in the filth of a suburban cemetery. Your brothers in love, the fifty knights of orichalch, await you, mute and grave, in the red marble hall. I shall take you ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... things divine, And wallowed in filth as doth a swine, When she betook herself unto his arms, Fought her Emmanuel, despised his charms; Then was I there and did rejoice to see Diabolus and ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... institution of slavery, or grossly violated under the slightest pretext. All well-organized society or government rests upon this sacred relation. But slavery, with lecherous grasp and avaricious greed, trailed the immaculate robes of marriage in the moral filth of the traffic in human beings. True, there never was any prohibition against the marriage of one slave to another slave,—for they tried to breed slaves in Massachusetts!—but there never was any law encouraging the lawful ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... vices which they portray. Their depravity is of too black a hue to have the least attraction, even to beings only removed a few degrees from the same guilt. Vice may have her admirers when she glitters in gold and scarlet; but when exposed in filth and nakedness, her most reckless devotees shrink back from her in disgust and horror. Vice, without her mask, is a spectacle too appalling for humanity; it exhibits the hideousness, and breathes ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... saturnine applications are spoken of in gutta rosea, Class II. 1. 4. 6. The real calx of bismuth would probably have the same ill effect. As the red paint is prepared from cochineal, which is an animal body, less if any injury arises from its use, as it only lies on the skin like other filth. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... always been raining there ever since the creation of the world. The water streamed from the soaking wood of it as if it were not water at all, but some loathsome liquid corruption of the wood itself; as if the solid station were eternally falling to pieces and pouring away in filth. It took me nearly ten minutes to find a man in the station. When I did he was a dull one, and when I asked him if there was a train to Paddington his answer was sleepy and vague. As far as I understood him, he said ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... had violated the above-mentioned regulation, stopped in the middle of one of his sublimest flights, repeated sonorously the notice, called the culprit by name, informed him that his endeavour to dissipate his filth into infinity by the sole of his shoe was useless, and ordered him forthwith to take his handkerchief out and wipe it up clean. Disobedience was expulsion: with crimson cheek he expiated his offence by obedience to the order, and doubtless during the hushed silence in which he ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... I have guarded my secret well! And who would dream as I speak In a tribal tongue like a rogue unhung, 'mid the ranch-house filth and reek, I could roll to bed with a Latin phrase, and rise with a verse ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... reject our self-love. The others, because they love and esteem themselves, are despicable and unacceptable in the sight of God. Again, we are chosen of God for the reason that we despise ourselves as filth. Such God chooses, and has chosen from eternity. Because the would-be saints elect themselves, God will reject them, as indeed he has from eternity. Now, this is what Paul means ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... great honour and glory. For like as the sun exceeds in brightness all other works of God, and is beautiful in the eyes of every man; so shall all the faithful be beautiful and endued with honour and glory: although in this world they are but outcasts, and accounted as "The dross and filth of the world;" but in the other world, when the angels shall gather together the wicked, and cast them into the fire, then shall the elect shine as the sun in the kingdom of God. For no man can express the honour and glory that ...
— The Pulpit Of The Reformation, Nos. 1, 2 and 3. • John Welch, Bishop Latimer and John Knox
... of the sun, and of fire as his emblem, the Parsee grew into a sort of reverence for the elements of air, earth and water. The air must not be contaminated by foul odors, and of necessity no filth could be tolerated anywhere in house, street or suburb; and to this reverence for the purity of the atmosphere may be traced the absolute cleanliness for which Fire-worshipers are everywhere noted. As the earth must receive no defilement, the Parsees would deem it sacrilege ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... less the significance and power of the nobility, the more purely and exclusively the patrician spirit developed itself. The haughtiness of the "Ramnians" survived the last of their class-privileges for centuries; after they had steadfastly striven "to rescue the consulate from the plebeian filth" and had at length become reluctantly convinced of the impossibility of such an achievement, they continued at least rudely and spitefully to display their aristocratic spirit. To understand rightly the history of Rome in the fifth and sixth centuries, we must never overlook this sulking ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper. After all, short words must mean something, even if they mean filth or lies; but long words may sometimes mean literally nothing, especially if they are used (as they mostly are in modern books and magazine articles) to balance and modify each other. A plain figure 4, scrawled in chalk anywhere, must always mean ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... was by a filthy steamer, the Regos Ferreos, which had become, from her very looks, a byword in the port. On board of her some friends of ours had lately been glad to sleep in a dog-hutch on deck, to escape the filth and vermin of the berths; and went hungry for want of decent food. Caraccas itself was going through one of its periodic revolutions— it has not got through the fever fit yet—and neither life nor property ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... brick floor clean enough to eat off, as the saying goes. And this cleanliness was not so common in those days of partial civilization as it is now: there were farmhouses enough and to spare in the England of that day where men and animals herded together amid filth that we should hardly condemn pigs to in this enlightened age. Wherefore Paul was both pleased and surprised by all he saw, and his dim ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... have any effect on him, it was worthless. A man's religion must make him a new creature, he argued. He declared that salvation makes a man love even his enemies. He said salvation cleanses a man from inward and outward filth. ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... away over broken roof and chimney, away beyond the maze of squalid courts and alleys that hemmed him in to where, across the River, the sun was setting in a blaze of glory, yet a glory that served only to make more apparent all the filth and decay, all the sordid ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... make a merit of their infamy, and provoke a legend of their sordid lives, I think they must be gratified at last; and though I will not take the scavenger's employment from him, yet I may be persuaded to point at some men's doors, who have heaps of filth before them. But this must be when they have a little angered me; for hitherto I am provoked no further than to smile at them. And indeed, to look upon the whole faction in a lump, never was a more pleasant sight than to behold these builders of a new Babel, how ridiculously they ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... are the eight or ten thousand Chinese who control the trade of North Mongolia. Apparently they make a good living, for there is a prosperous bustle about the place, and as you pick your way over the mud and filth of the streets, through open doorways you catch glimpses of courts gay with flowers and gaudily decorated houses such as the well-to-do Chinese build. But for the most part dull blank walls shut you out—or in. The Chinese is an unwelcomed alien in ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... slow down. It was morning—somewhere. Jimmy looked furtively out of the slit at the edge of the door to see that the train was passing through a region of cottages dusted black by smoke, through areas of warehouse and factory, through squalor and filth and slum; and vacant lots where the spread of the blight area had been so fast that the outward improvement had not time to build. Eventually the scene changed to solid areas of railroad track, and the trains parked there thickened until he could no longer see ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... was burning all the papers which might have compromised every one who had served his ministry (Police). I congratulated him sincerely on this loyal occupation: fire alone could purify the mass of filth and denunciations which encumbered ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... furniture and convenience, where they beheld the wretched hero of these memoirs stretched almost naked upon straw, insensible, convulsed, and seemingly in the grasp of death. He was worn to the bone either by famine or distemper; his face was overshadowed with hair and filth; his eyes were sunk, glazed, and distorted; his nostrils dilated; his lips covered with a black slough; and his complexion faded into a pale clay-colour, tending to a yellow hue. In a word, the extremity ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... greater number could not walk without assistance, and were carried on deck in the strong arms of the seamen. With the greatest tenderness and care did those gallant fellows carry their helpless burdens, notwithstanding the mass of filth with which they were covered, in consequence of their long imprisonment in the ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... of good inclinations finds his office filled with such corruption by the iniquity of his predecessors, that he may despair of being capable of purging it; and so sits down contented, as Augeas did with the filth of his stables, not because he thought them the better, or that such filth was really necessary to a stable, but that he despaired of ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... conspicuous enough in her prim New England gown and bonneted head, but doubly remarkable as she skipped from stone to stone to avoid the mud and filth of the unpaved streets, and swinging in one hand her little black satchel and in the ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... time have furnished the microscopic malice of botanists with providentially disgusting reasons, or demoniacally nasty necessities, for every possible spur, spike, jag, sting, rent, blotch, flaw, freckle, filth, or venom, which can be detected in the construction, or distilled from the dissolution, of vegetable organism. But with these obscene processes and prurient apparitions the gentle and happy scholar ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... nausea. Three more torturing hours never dragged their slow length along for me than those I spent on board her coming over. Try and call up to yourself three hours in a low-class cook-shop, coated an inch thick with filth, and fitted over the boiler of a penny steamer dancing a marine break-down on the Thames, opposite the outlet of the main-drainage pipes. That, intensified by strange oaths and slop-basins, was the passage by the Alcorta. But dreary, lonely San Sebastian ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... serious mood, ashamed, perhaps, of being rich and fortunate, unhappy at feeling themselves envied and hated. Bruce, Adrian Savage, and Barbara were in the leading cab, a brand-new one smelling of leather, and of the gardenia which Barbara was wearing. The filth of the East Side came no nearer to them than the tires of the cab. They were, you may say, insulated, enfortressed against squalor, poverty, crime, and discontent. They were almost free to do as they pleased, as indeed their expedition ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... gathered together, and the dark interior of the ship was filled with a steaming mass of human beings densely huddled together, the captains set sail for Queensland, where they landed those of their living cargoes who had escaped the deadly pestilence which filth and confinement always engendered ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... law, therefore, is a work of the flesh, a work of sinful flesh, and therefore must needs be as filth, and dung, and abominable as to that for which this man hath produced it and presented it ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... of Mr. Hastings, you would imagine, from many expressions very deliberately used by him, that the Company's service was made out of the very filth and dregs of human corruption; but if you examine his conduct towards the corrupt body he describes, you would imagine he had lived in the speculative schemes of visionary perfection. He was fourteen years ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... walls, its castles, are level with the ground. But, if I may borrow the pun of which old Peter Heylin is guilty when, describing Paris, Rouen is still a strong city, "for it taketh you by the nose." The filth is extreme; villainous smells overcome you in every quarter, and from every quarter. The streets are gloomy, narrow, and crooked, and the houses at once mean and lofty. Even on the quay, where all the activity of commerce is visible, and where the outward signs of opulence might ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... fields," continued the doctor, "scattered here and there about the metropolis, but lying chiefly in the city and on the banks of the Thames. They comprise many picture-galleries, too, and museums; the latter containing wonderful specimens of old bones and fossil remains, filth, and miscellaneous abominations, in which the gold and diamonds are imbedded—sometimes buried,—and the former being hung with subjects—chiefly interiors—incomparably superior, in respect of graphic power, to ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne |
