"Ugliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ceaselessly, feeling herself born for all the delicacies and all the luxuries. She suffered from the poverty of her dwelling, from the wretched look of the walls, from the worn-out chairs, from the ugliness of the curtains. All those things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have been conscious, tortured her and made her angry. The sight of the little Breton peasant who did her humble housework aroused in her regrets which were despairing, and distracted dreams. ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... our success in this process of education will be the number of reactions we can induce to the right sort of stimuli. In this, we shall have occasion to make many substitutions. The boy who has been reacting to ugliness must be lured away by the substitution of beauty. The beautiful picture will take the place of the bizarre until nothing but such a picture will give pleasure and satisfaction. Indeed, the substitution ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... three-headed monster of loathly ugliness, with faces yellow with envy, crimson with rage, and black with ignorance; not haughty, splendid, defiant, but foul ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... thy homestead air! How on thy canvas even her dreams were truth! Magician! who from commonest elements Called up divine ideals, clothed upon By mystic lights soft blending into one Womanly grace and child-like innocence. Teacher I thy lesson was not given in vain. Beauty is goodness; ugliness is sin; Art's place is sacred: nothing foul therein May crawl or tread with bestial feet profane. If rightly choosing is the painter's test, Thy choice, O master, ever ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... smile on his countenance that completed his ugliness, and would have frightened any honest man from his side at once. Merely glancing my way, he shuffled up to my companion, and leading him aside, drew out a paper which he laid on a flat tombstone with ...
— The Staircase At The Hearts Delight - 1894 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... All this misshapen, jumbled, inharmonious ugliness must be wiped out! It must be ground down to smooth unbroken planes, harmonious curvings, shapeliness—harmonies of arc and ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... protruded his horny nose within a few yards of me. Knowing well that a front shot would not prove deadly, I sprang to my feet and ran behind the bush. Upon this the villain charged, blowing loudly, and chased me round the bush. Had his activity been equal to his ugliness, my wanderings would have terminated here, but by my superior agility I had the advantage in ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... sex hunger, manifesting itself in a hundred forms of beauty and ugliness, courtesy and insult, cultivated conversation and ribald jest, beautiful dancing and suggestive indecencies, honor and dishonor, self-repression and prostitution, love and lust, children of gladness and children of shame, that lifts us to such heights as we attain, or plunges ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... but strong line, in a twinkle he had tied one fore and one leg together, so that the bear, when he got again, could do little but hobble along. Then another pocket he drew a leather muzzle, which he buckled over the beast's head. But bear had had all of the ugliness knocked out him and was once more as ...
— The Rover Boys on the Ocean • Arthur M. Winfield
... The road had changed to narrow, parallel ribbons, with grass between. Cattle, some of which belonged to the Indians and some to white leasers, were grazing in the distance. Occasionally they could see an Indian habitation—generally a log cabin, with its ugliness emphasized by the grace of a flanking tepee. Everything relating to human affairs seemed dwarfed in such immensity. The voices of Indian herdsmen, calling to each other, were reduced to faint murmurs. The very sound of the motor ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... have died by stiffening at last into some routine. Thus the Gothic gaiety of the thirteenth century stiffening into the mere Gothic ugliness of the fifteenth. Thus the mighty wave of the Renaissance, whose crest was lifted to heaven, was touched by a wintry witchery of classicism and frozen for ever before it fell. Alone of all such ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... expected of her, and she went into the bathroom and again reveled in the warm, perfumed water. When she returned to the bedroom her clothing of the night before was arranged ready for her to put on, and as she dressed she felt for the first time the coarseness of the linen and the ugliness of ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper
... spirit so necessary to ensure the success of an intrigue. If the three companions of my charmer had had anything attractive about them, I might possibly have persevered and defied misfortune; but in the same measure as beauty cheers my heart, ugliness depresses it. Anticipating the melancholy which I foresaw would result from this disappointment, I went out with the idea of amusing myself, and happening to meet Giustiniani I told him of my misfortune, saying that I should not be sorry to make ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... breakfast. And that was a strange meal when she had finally put it on the table and bidden them to it. The sons sat in their places like chidden schoolboys, furtively studying their father's ravaged visage, looking at each other and muttering requests or replies. They were all aware of the ugliness of their several offences. Creed's strange disappearance, Blatch's failure to return, the utter collapse of their errand, these had shaken ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... adversity, just as you cannot have day without night, and the more Liverpool evidently flourished the more it plainly languished. I found no pleasure in the paradox, and I was not overjoyed by the inevitable ugliness of the brick villas of the suburbs into which these obdurate streets decayed. But then, after divers tram changes, came the consolation of beautiful riverside beaches, thronged with people who looked gay at that distance, ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... moment upon the threshold of the office, looking around him. A new and peculiar distaste for these familiar surroundings seemed suddenly to have sprung into life. For the first time he realized the intense ugliness of this scene of his daily labors. The long desk, ink-splashed and decrepit, was covered with untidy piles of papers, some of them thick with dust; the walls were hung with seedy-looking files and an array of tattered bills; there were cobwebs in every corner, gaps in the linoleum floor-covering. ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... subdominant, and so on. The double chant will give opportunities for more than one modulation being introduced at a time. This work will prepare the way for figured basses, and more formal harmony. The children will learn to avoid consecutive fifths and eighths because they gradually notice the ugliness of them, which seems a better plan than to learn to avoid them ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... victory: or by stealing hasty and repeated glances through the vista of the tables into the gayer scenes of the adjoining rooms, proved he was in duresse, and waited for an opportunity to make his escape from the tedium of cards and ugliness to the life of conversation ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... marriage took place. Charlotte Elizabeth of Bavaria, though aware of the sort of death that her predecessor died, agreed to marry Monsieur. Had she not been lucky enough to make this grand match, her extreme ugliness would assuredly have doomed her to celibacy, even in Bavaria and in Germany. It is surely not allowable to come into the world with such a face and form, such a voice, such eyes, such hands, and such feet, as this singular ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... symbolic, since every great work of art contains all these in some proportion. Love and fighting are not necessarily romance; nor are soup-kitchens and divorce courts necessarily realism.... Malice, futility and ugliness—the dreadful monotony of existence—are not necessarily real life; nor the tales of summer love and marriage ceremonies, successful fightings, or sacrifice and ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... soap-weed, the dark lines that betrayed the mesquite, the saccatone belts that marked the little guillies. Then there were the barrancas, the arid stretches where the sage-brush and the cactus grew. Snaky octilla dotted the space; the crabbed yucca had not lost its ugliness. ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... was vain of the society of ladies, and could make himself very agreeable to them, when he chose it; Sir Joshua Reynolds agreed with me that he could. Mr. Gibbon, with his usual sneer, controverted it, perhaps in resentment of Johnson's having talked with some disgust of his ugliness, which one would think a PHILOSOPHER would not mind. Dean Marlay wittily observed, 'A lady may be vain, when she can turn ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... because this particular art in the present crisis of human nature on this planet is the desperate, the almost reckless need of a world that the other nations of the world with all their dislike of us and their superiorities to us, with all our ugliness and heaviness and our galumphing in the arts, have been compelled in this huge, modern thicket of machines and crowds ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... no beauty, except in the intellectual severity of her outline, and she bears marks of race, that will grow stronger every year, and make her ugly at last. Still it will be a grandiose, gypsy, or rather Sibylline ugliness, well adapted to the expression of some tragic parts. Only it seems as if she could not live long; she expends force enough upon a part to furnish out a dozen ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... villagers came to offer them grain for sale; so that, had I not had the Wanguana a little under control, we should not have completed our distance that day, and so reached Manyonge, which reminded me, by its ugliness, of the sterile Somali land. Proceeding through the semi-desert rolling table-land—in one place occupied by men who build their villages in large open squares of flat-topped mud huts, which, when I have occasion to refer to them in future, I shall call by their native name tembe—we could ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... adventitious aid which the London atmosphere renders; her air is of such a helpless sincerity that nothing in it shows larger than it is; no mist clothes the sky-scraper in gigantic vagueness, the hideous tops soar into the clear heaven distinct in their naked ugliness; and the low buildings cower unrelieved about their bases. Nothing could be done in palliation of the comparative want of antiquity in New York, for the present, at least; but it is altogether probable that in the fulfilment ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... feast; she had come because she felt homesick and wanted to see her father and mother. However, she would go away back to her castle near the Light of Dawn, for there the desert, the trees, and the fountains never reproached her with her ugliness ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac
... of devils, and, indeed, to this day some of the African tribes believe that the best defence they have against their extremely ugly devil is a mirror. If they keep one at hand, the devil must see himself in it before he can touch them, and be so terrified at his own ugliness that he will ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... considerable wager (though by no means a positive man) that some such mitigated description would lead the beagles of the law into a much surer track for finding this ungracious varlet, than to set them upon a false scent after fictitious ugliness and fictitious shabbiness; though, to do those gentlemen justice, I have no doubt their experience has taught them in all such cases to abate a great deal of the deformity which they are instructed to expect, and has discovered to them that the Devil's agents upon this earth, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... beauty, some unknown charm and mystery in the various phenomena of nature. God only created coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, and who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude. He only seems to have made them in order that they may reproduce their species in a dirty manner, and then die like ephemeral insects. I said, reproduce their species in a dirty manner, and I adhere to that expression. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... drover, discussing his dinner or supper on the alehouse-bench; now catching a mouthful, flung to him in pure contempt by some scornful gentleman of the shoulder-knot, mounted on his throne, the coach-box, whose notice he had attracted by dint of ugliness; now sharing the commons of Master Keep the shoemaker's pigs; now succeeding to the reversion of the well-gnawed bone of Master Brow the shopkeeper's fierce house-dog; now filching the skim-milk of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... introduced Pegasus into his composition, but has been forced to reduce him to miniature size. The goddess Athena, the protectress of Perseus, occupies what remains of the field. There is no need of dwelling in words on the ugliness of this relief, an ugliness only in part accounted for by the subject. The student should note that the body of each of the three figures is seen from the front, while the legs are in profile. The same distortion ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... Duckling went. He swam on the surface of the water, he plunged beneath, but all animals passed him by, on account of his ugliness. And the autumn came, the leaves turned yellow and brown, the wind caught them and danced them about, the air was very cold, the clouds were heavy with hail or snow, and the Raven sat on the hedge and croaked. The poor Duckling was ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall
... if one cannot lay before him one's whole thoughts? To no one have I been able to unfold them but to thee, who already knowest them. I suffer, as a criminal and yet am I innocent,—just as the misshapen, the deformed man, is innocent of his ugliness!" ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... garden. He was gentle, timid, silent, and caressing. And she experienced a deep joy, a fresh joy at being embraced by him, without any apparent surprise or repugnance being exhibited by him on account of her ugliness. He called her "Aunt" and treated ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... as a claim," he said; "what was I born for except to be useful to you? But I love you so; if you could only make up your mind to endure my ugliness ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... his eyes wearily. "You can't make me suffer more than I have suffered," he said. "And now—I curse you. May that treasure be the death of you. May you live in torture like mine the rest of your days; may your beauty turn to ugliness such that men will spit at you; may you never know peace again until you die in ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... absence of anything spiritual, to seem that of the realities; the region of outside happenings, of the passions in all their ugly nakedness, of sorrow, misery, and despair. Such men may be essentially noble; we may read in them, under all the ugliness and misery they write down, just one quality of the Soul;—its unrest in and distaste for those conditions; but the mischief of it is that they make the sordidness seem the reality; and the truth about them is that their outlook and way of writing are simply the result ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... mud-bespattered, there would soon be lights, and the reflection of lights in damp pavements. She yielded, however, without even troubling to express her wish. But just because of the dirt and naked ugliness which met her, at every turn, she was voluble and excited; and an exaggerated hilarity seized her at trifles. Maurice, who had left the house in a more composed frame of mind than usual, gradually relapsed, at her want of restraint, into silence. He ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... borne upon sulphurous whirl-winds, Lucifer stood before him a second time. But He came not as when at Matilda's summons He borrowed the Seraph's form to deceive Ambrosio. He appeared in all that ugliness which since his fall from heaven had been his portion: His blasted limbs still bore marks of the Almighty's thunder: A swarthy darkness spread itself over his gigantic form: His hands and feet were ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... once more. One sentence seemed suddenly to have become particularly ominous—"if he squeals go the limit." He knew nothing as to the authorship of those words, but from what he knew of the Pippin there was a certain ugliness to the word "limit" that he did not like. The "limit" ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... changed all that. He was a river-driver of stalwart proportions, with a red handkerchief round his neck, and with loose corded trousers tucked into his boots. He had a face of natural ugliness made almost repulsive by marks of smallpox. Red, flabby lips and an overhanging brow made him a figure which men would avoid ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is quite as it should be, My Fool; for the hate makes the love but the more poignant; the ugliness is but a fair setting for the beauty; and sweetness in bitterness is far ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... water, and we are back aboard the ship again, in another atmosphere, another world. Passengers are talking as it might be they had just returned from their first visit to a Zoological Garden. Most of them have seen no more than the dirt and ugliness—their vision noted no other aspect—of the old-world port. The life that has not altered for centuries, the things that make it worth living to all the folk we leave behind,—these are matters in which casual visitors to Morocco have no concern. ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... her own sex baffled in the attempt at a selection. The tout ensemble defies particularising. It is too complete—too consistent, as we may say—to admit of these invidious reservations. It is not as if some Apelles had picked out here a lip—and there a chin—out of the collected ugliness of Greece, to frame a model by. It is a symmetrical whole. We challenge the minutest connoisseur to cavil at any part or parcel of the countenance in question; to say that this, or that, is improperly placed. We are convinced that true ugliness, no ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... with gold. Vasari gives a very graphic and animated account of the estimation in which this picture was held when first executed. Its colossal dimensions, though familiar in the great mosaics, were hitherto unknown in painting; and not less astonishing appeared the deviation, though slight, from ugliness and lifelessness into grace and nature. "And thus," he says, "it happened that this work was an object of so much admiration to the people of that day, they having never seen anything better, that it was ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... other mission than faithfully to reproduce this illusion, with all the elaborations of art which he may have learnt and have at his command. The illusion of beauty—which is merely a conventional term invented by man! The illusion of ugliness—which is a matter of varying opinion! The illusion of truth—never immutable! The illusion of depravity—which fascinates so many minds! All the great artists are those who can make other men ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... demand for the disciples (Luke 22:31). Are we to call these "visions"—the word is ambiguous—or are they imaginative presentments of evil, as it thrusts itself on the soul, with all its allurements and all its ugliness? "Visions" in the sense that is associated with trance, we shall hardly call them. They are pictures showing his ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... heavily. He was a middle-sized man, coarsely clad as became his calling, with a coloured shirt protruding through the rent in his tattered coat. He was, as the inspector had said, extremely dirty, but the grime which covered his face could not conceal its repulsive ugliness. A broad wheal from an old scar ran right across it from eye to chin, and by its contraction had turned up one side of the upper lip, so that three teeth were exposed in a perpetual snarl. A shock of very bright red hair grew low over his eyes ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... flattering; but all women cannot be equally beautiful. A kind heart is often better than a pretty face; and as for me, ugliness has always ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... into a Citizen.—It is important to enter into the spirit of the young people who prefer the streets and blocks of the town to the winding country roads, and are willing to sacrifice what there is of beauty and leisure in rural life for the ugliness, sordidness, and continuous drive of the city; to understand that a greater driving force, stirring in the soul of youth and thrusting upon him with every item of news from the city, is impelling him to disdain what the country can give him and to magnify the counter-attractions ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... was a little dried-up mummy of a man, the ugliness of whose countenance was, as it were, emphasized by a disagreeable leer which would ever and anon deepen into a broad grin; this man, with his dreary jokes and vapid small-talk, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... are!" Rawling gasped, sick of this ugliness, dizzy with the stench of powder and brandy. Death had never seemed so vile. He looked away to the guardian where she knelt at her post, her hands clasped on the breast of her coarse white robe as if she prayed, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... their indifference to all man-made moral standards. They are beyond all that goes by the name of good and evil, in that the two are used indifferently for the furtherance of a purely aesthetic end. The Beyond-man discovers beauty in the abyss, and ugliness in mere worldly rectitude. Leonardo painted the Medusa head, with its charnel pallor and its crown of writhing snakes, no less lovingly than the sweet-tender face of the Christ of the Cenacolo, and the beauty is not less, though of an opposite ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... was being faced by a general and a statesman who were pursuing a narrow and traditional but very intelligible line of policy. The policy was indeed sufficiently ugly even had there been no suspicion of personal corruption; its ugliness could be tested by the fact that even the sanguine and cynical Jugurtha could hardly credit the extent of the good fortune revealed to him by the progress of the negotiations. At first his diplomatic manoeuvres had been adopted ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... easily suppose how much this extraordinary dress sets off and improves the natural ugliness with which God Almighty has been pleased to endow them all generally. Even the lovely empress herself is obliged to comply, in some degree, with these absurd fashions, which they would not quit ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... grand fun, and by the time the puppies were six months old they were just as shapely as the mother was, or as unshapely, if you like it better, for after all perhaps the beauty of their bodies consisted in their ugliness. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... kissed, and almost snatched away from Felix, to be deposited on a sofa; and while the like kisses were bestowed on the two little girls, and hospitable offers showered on all, she was amused by perceiving that good Mrs. Harewood was endowed with exactly the same grotesque order of ugliness as her son William; but she was even more engaging, from an indescribably droll mixture of heedlessness, blundering, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Rodope but a queen loving Pteh, a man with a crocodile's head? She raised the third pyramid in his honour. Penthesilea loved the centaur, who, being now a star, is named Sagittarius. And what do you say about Anne of Austria? Mazarin was ugly enough! Now, you are not only ugly; you are deformed. Ugliness is mean, deformity is grand. Ugliness is the devil's grin behind beauty; deformity is the reverse of sublimity. It is the back view. Olympus has two aspects. One, by day, shows Apollo; the other, by night, shows Polyphemus. You—you are a Titan. You ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... this room; not here," she protested, with that peculiar suavity of tone which made her voice unforgettable, irresistible, no matter what she said. "Not after all this! I couldn't close my eyes in this place. It's full of corruption and ugliness all round, in me, too, everywhere except in your heart, which has nothing to do where I breathe. And here you may leave me. But wherever you go remember that I am not evil, I ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... solemnly into the grounds, in single file, each carrying a bright Chinese parasol and leading a prodigious dog by a string. It was a very imposing spectacle. Sometimes there would be as many dogs around the pavilion as students; and of all breeds and of all degrees of beauty and ugliness. These dogs had a rather dry time of it; for they were tied to the benches and had no amusement for an hour or two at a time except what they could get out of pawing at the gnats, or trying to sleep and not succeeding. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... might sack a city and dower himself and his men with sudden wealth. Such conditions, such a contact of new and old, of settled splendour beset by unbridled adventure, go to the making of a heroic age, its virtues and its vices, its obvious beauty and its hidden ugliness. In settled, social conditions, as has been well remarked, "most of the heroes would sooner or later have found ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... satirical, often coarse, and seldom rise above doggerel. Unlike his friend Addison, Swift saw, in the growing polish and decency of society, only a mask for hypocrisy; and he often used his verse to shock the new-born modesty by pointing out some native ugliness which his diseased mind discovered under every ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... master, as dat Black Thunder. It's 'you tickle me an' I tickle you' betwixt him an' de ol' Scratch. O you ol' Black Thunder!" with a sudden burst of energy, apostrophizing the absent brave; "jes' let de Fightin' Nigger git de whites uf his eyes on yo' red ugliness once, he'll give you thunder—gunpowder thunder, he will. Jes' let Betsy Grumbo git her muzzle on yo' red ugliness once, may be she won't bark an' bite! May be she won't make yo' fine feathers fly! May be she won't, now! O plague yo' red hide! Yug, yug, yug!" And with ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... Rede, there was a gentleman who inspired us with confidence. His amiable countenance is of the cast that commands respect, not fear. The ugliness of his eyes prejudices you against him at first; let him, however, turn them upon you in his own benevolent way, you are sure they mean no harm: within a pair of splendid whiskers, of the finest blond, there is such a genteel nose and mouth, ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... of Mr. Browning's widowed life was one of unutterable dreariness, in which the smallest and yet most unconquerable element was the prosaic ugliness of everything which surrounded him. It was fifteen years since he had spent a winter in England; he had never spent one in London. There had been nothing to break for him the transition from the stately beauty of Florence to the impressions and associations ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Euphrates, the jargon of tongues, the inequality of rights, the organization of justice and oppression, how wonderful the equity of the laws of Moses! How beautiful the faith of the fathers! How surely founded the laws of God. Henceforth idolatry, injustice and sin became as monstrous in their ugliness as they were wicked in their essence. Everything else might go, but not the faith of the fathers. Persecution was like fire on the vase; it burned the colors in. Little wonder that the tradition tells us that for the next hundred years, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... of shell, no rounded archways; but all is square and glaring and imposing, seeming to look coldly from its staring windows of glass at the stranger within its gates. It says loudly, "I am rich; it costs many thousands of taels to make my ugliness." For me, it is indeed a "foreign" house. Yet I will have justice within my heart and tell thee that there is much that we might copy with advantage. In place of floors of wide plain boards, and walls of wood with great wide cracks covered with embroideries ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... name of a Florentine family famous for the extraordinary ugliness of its men: whereby it came to pass that any grotesque or extremely ugly man was called a Baroncio. Fanfani, Vocab. della ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... bald. His back was bent, and his limbs were somewhat shrunken, but he did not appear in the least degree decrepit. His eyelids were very red, and his eyes, though dim, had a deep and intent look. Ugly as was the man—or perhaps by virtue of his ugliness—he exercised a ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be anything but the creation of magic. The tender snow had compassionated the beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains and ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the hands of the builder—or, better said, just from the brain of the architect. There was marvellous freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... crossed; they were shaggy and hoofed like the legs of a goat: but she would not look at these because of his wonderful, sad, grotesque face. Gaiety is good to look upon and an innocent face is delightful to our souls, but no woman can resist sadness or weakness, and ugliness she dare not resist. Her nature leaps to be the comforter. It is her reason. It exalts her to an ecstasy wherein nothing but the sacrifice of herself has any proportion. Men are not fathers by instinct but by chance, but women are mothers beyond thought, beyond instinct which is the father ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... that both intelligence and love ought to characterize His ideal for human life. Look then at these, and all the other things of the same kind. Look at our attitude towards prostitution, at the drink traffic, at the ugliness and injustice of the many institutions which we allow to endure. Look at them in the Universal Spirit; and then consider, whether a searching corporate repentance is not really the inevitable preliminary of a social and spiritual advance. All these things have happened ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... plain, still he could not help it, they retorted with a good deal of justice that that was his chief defect, and that there was no reason why one should admire a person because he was incurable; and, indeed, some of the Violets themselves felt that the ugliness of the little Dwarf was almost ostentatious, and that he would have shown much better taste if he had looked sad, or at least pensive, instead of jumping about merrily, and throwing himself into ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... the moss-grown roof had been swept by Fayette, standing barefooted and unsupported on the sloping shingles, while he vigorously attacked them. To Hallam this seemed a desecration. The moss had been the one redeeming feature of the roof's ugliness. ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... of the splendid ugliness. He testified, 'If I fail to thrust a knife between the shoulder-blades of Ajeet Singh may Bhowanee cast me as ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... preacher once said, 'There is nothing that is weaker than the devil stripped naked.' By which he meant exactly this—that we have to dress wrong in some fantastic costume or other, so as to hide its native ugliness, in order to tempt men to do it. So we have two sets of names for wrong things, one of which we apply to our brethren's sins, and the other to the same sins in ourselves. What I do is 'prudence,' what you do of the same sort is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... himself: gold was the handsomest of metals; a tawny yellow represented gold; the Romans were fond of red-haired women, and he turned Roman, etc. After two years of marriage what man would ever care about the color of his wife's hair? Beauty fades,—but ugliness remains! Money is one-half of all happiness. That night when he went to bed the painter had come to think Virginie ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... on him the question: Why should she marry him? At the minute when Conquest was leaving Miriam, he, Ford, was tramping the streets of New York, watching them grow alive with light, in glaring, imaginative ugliness—ugliness so dazzling in its audacity and so fanciful in its crude commercialism that it had the power to thrill. It was perhaps the electric stimulus of sheer light that quickened the pace of his slow mentality from the march of acceptance to the rush of protest, ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one. Indeed, in most other towns art has often to present herself in the form of a reaction against the sordid ugliness of ignoble lives, but at Oxford she comes to us as an exquisite flower born of the beauty of life and expressive of life's joy. She finds her home by the Isis as once she did by the Ilissus; the Magdalen walks and the Magdalen cloisters are as dear to her as ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... always the case with her, this moral repulsion found a physical outlet in a quickened distaste for her surroundings. She revolted from the complacent ugliness of Mrs. Peniston's black walnut, from the slippery gloss of the vestibule tiles, and the mingled odour of sapolio and furniture-polish that ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... the world in that part of the country was of opinion that the Marquis might have retracted his gift. After this Mr. Fenwick found no ground whatever on which he could fight his battle. He could only stand at his gateway, and look at the thing as it rose above the ground, fascinated by its ugliness. ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... the "Wild Yankee's". A breakfast with fresh butter and cream. Indian bucks, squaws, and papooses. Their curiosity. Pride of an Indian on his ability to repeat one line of a song. Indian women. Extreme beauty of their limbs; slender ankles and statuesque feet; haggardness of expression and ugliness of features. Girl of sixteen, a "wildwood Cleopatra," an exception to the general hideousness. The California Indian not the Indian of the Leatherstocking tales. A stop at the Buckeye Rancho. Start for Pleasant Valley Rancho. The trail again lost. ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... a thrill down my backbone—there seemed an infinite pathos and lovableness in her courageous recognition of facts. It dispensed me from the painful necessity of pretending to be unaware of her ugliness—nay, gave it almost a cachet—made it as possible a topic of light conversation as beauty itself. I pressed her more fervently to come, and at last she consented, stipulating only that I should call for her rather late, after she had quite finished her household duties and the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... the king. Young Monsieur, the king's brother, leaned forward towards his sister-in-law, and, "What does your Majesty think of this door?" he whispered. "I think it very nice and handsome," answered the young queen. The king had thought her handsome, "despite the ugliness of her head-dress and of her clothes, which had at first taken him by surprise." King Philip IV. kept looking at M. de Turenne, who had accompanied the king. "That man has given me dreadful times," he repeated twice or thrice. "You can judge whether M. de Turenne felt himself ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... from a quarter and from an ally entirely unexpected, young Bruce looked behind him and beheld, emerging from a hazel bush, through which it had just forced its way, the visage of Roaring Ralph Stackpole, its natural ugliness greatly increased by countless scratches and spots of blood, the result of his leap down the ledge of rocks, when first set upon by the Indians, and his eyes squinting daggers and ratsbane, especially while he was giving utterance to that gallinaceous ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... oh! my more than mother?" she cried. "Do we count for nothing, all the rest of us—your household, and tenants rich and poor, and Julius the faithful, and Ludovic the bland, and that queer lump of sagacity and ugliness, John Knott? Why will you kill yourself? Why will you die and leave us all, just because one person is perverse? That's hardly the way to make us—who love you—bear with and pity him and welcome him home.—Oh! I know I am treading ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... to-day vigorous and indignant minds who find in the ugliness and moral squalor of our situation, the unhappy influence of Christ and his saints. They are wrong. The history of Oscar Wilde's writings shows that they ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... it takes an artist to see beauty in a muddy road, and dripping branches, and drenching rain. How people cursed and grumbled on that rainy day we had last week; it made me sick to hear them. Now I saw the beauty under the ugliness of it all—the wonderful soft greys and browns, the tiny glints of silver between the leaves, the flashes of pearl and orpiment behind the shifting clouds. Do you know, I even see beauty in this wooden leg of mine, great beauty, though everybody ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... home Norah wrote frantically, demanding to know if I was the only woman in the house. I calmed her fears by assuring her that, while the men were interesting and ugly with the fascinating ugliness of a bulldog, the women were crushed looking and uninteresting and wore hopeless hats. I have written Norah and Max reams about this household, from the aborigines to Minna, who tidies my room and serves my meals, and admires my clothes. Minna is related to ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... to work toward the avoidance of a strike by means of their influence over their husbands. She observed the hat that had been the cause of McMahon's complaint, which was, in truth, a riot of variegated ugliness. Cicily believed, however, that in this instance the ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... The Jews' Market is a series of covered arcades with a square in the middle of it, and in the middle of the square a little church with some doll-like trees. These arcades are Western in their hideous covering of glass and the ugliness of the exterior of the wooden shops that line them, but the crowd that throngs them is Eastern, so that in the strange eyes and voices, the wild gestures, the laughs, the cries, the singing, and the ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... had no fear in trusting me with the execution of the fresco. I had long been in rebellion, practising in secret my lawless ideas, and I was seized with an uncontrollable aversion to marring those holy walls with the conventional ugliness commanded by the ritual. I assembled my ideas and dared. I worked rapidly and well. The work was done before my father discovered it." Kenkenes ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... king; "you shall not abuse this poor lady as well as refuse her. Mend your speech, or you shall be knight of mine no longer." Then he turned to the others and said: "Who will wed this lady and help me to keep my royal pledge? You must not all refuse, for my promise is given, and for a little ugliness and deformity you shall not make me break my plighted word of honour." As he spoke he watched them keenly, to see who would prove sufficiently devoted, but the knights all began to excuse themselves and to depart. They called their hounds, spurred their steeds, and pretended to search for ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... the misfortunes and calamities of life, or the imperfections of nature, may become the objects of ridicule. Surely he hath a very ill-framed mind who can look on ugliness, infirmity, or poverty, as ridiculous in themselves: nor do I believe any man living, who meets a dirty fellow riding through the streets in a cart, is struck with an idea of the Ridiculous from it; but if he should see the same figure descend ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... the plain truth about the painting of the nineteenth century—and after! The critics were unanimous in their violent condemnation of Delacroix's works: "the compositions of a sick man in delirium," "the fanaticism of ugliness," "barbarous execution," "an intoxicated broom"—such are some of the terms of abuse showered upon him. The gentlest among them commiserate the talent which here and there can be seen "struggling with the systematic bizarrerie and the disordered technique ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... thinking of. She had never seen a lakeside city before, and she was taken by surprise. "If ever we leave Boston," she said, "we will not live at Rochester, as I thought last night; we'll come to Buffalo." She found that the place had all the picturesqueness of a sea-port, without the ugliness that attends the rising and falling tides. A delicious freshness breathed from the lake, which lying so smooth, faded into the sky at last, with no line between sharper than that which divides drowsing from dreaming. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... was the thought which suddenly illumined Dr. McKenzie's troubled mind. Hilda was not beautiful. So beauty of body could offset the ugliness ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... pulled a face which, as far as ugliness went, was hardly an improvement on the one Nature had already bestowed upon him, and then pointed mockingly at the remains ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... dream! There was nothing for it now, but —progress! Progress! On with the dance! Let engines rip, and the little, squash-headed fellows with them! Commerce, literature, religion, science, politics, all taking a hand; what a glorious chance had money, ugliness, and ill will! Such were the reflections of Felix before the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... one day, when they had on their nice clothes, he covered them from head to foot with dirt and mud. In that sad plight John and Louisa went home crying. Their mother felt as badly as they did, when she saw the ugliness ...
— Charles Duran - Or, The Career of a Bad Boy • The Author of The Waldos
... resplendent and happy world. Ahriman instantly made deformity, impurity, and gloom, in opposition to it. All beauty, virtue, harmony, truth, blessedness, were the work of the former. All ugliness, vice, discord, falsehood, wretchedness, belonged to the latter. They grappled and mixed in a million hostile shapes. This universal battle is the ground of ethics, the clarion call to marshal out the hostile hosts of good and ill; and all other war is but a result and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... by my forefinger, and walking decorously along the pavement. She stopped to contemplate the monkey, and after a while, shocked by his horrible ugliness, began to cry. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... mischiefs that were most frequently imputed to them, was the changing the beautiful child of some doating parents, for a babe marked with ugliness and deformity. But this idea seems fraught with inconsistency. The natural stature of the fairy is of the smallest dimensions; and, though they could occasionally dilate their figure so as to imitate humanity, yet it is to be presumed that this was only for a special purpose, and, that ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... hiked across a bit of wet country that was all alike—all mud, in the dull light that grew only to accentuate the ugliness and dreariness of everything. Sunny France! And ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... Ugliness.—I do not know that she was virtuous; but she was always ugly, and with a woman, that is half the ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... beauty common to us all, neither greater nor less in any of us, which these childish hearts discover. Looking upon us, they are blind or of transcendent vision, as you will: the same in issue—so what matter?—since they find no ugliness anywhere. 'Tis the way, it may be, that God looks upon His world: either in the blindness of love forgiving us or in His greater wisdom knowing that the sins of men do serve His purpose and are like virtue in ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... 'there you are! There is not only NO NEED for our places of work to be ugly, but their ugliness ruins the work, in the end. Men will not go on submitting to such intolerable ugliness. In the end it will hurt too much, and they will wither because of it. And this will wither the WORK as well. They will think the work itself is ugly: ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... on the top of her long head; the hinder horn was not more than half a foot long, while the front horn, which inclined forward, was nearly four feet in length. She carried her strange, wrinkled head low down to the ground. In spite of her ugliness she seemed to ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... brawny Yorkshire Englishman, with a scar across one cheek, and, to add to the ugliness of his face, he had only one good eye. Over the other he always wore a ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... home. Both these ought to be beautiful, but as few women are artistic enough to design anything, they follow the fashion. In this way they escape criticism from their companions who are like them. But the moment ugly dress or furniture is out of fashion its ugliness is apparent. I suppose most of us must be content to be tyrannized over more or less by fashion, or by fashion and poverty combined, till we develop greater genius in working out the problem of how to make our surroundings beautiful. I would simply suggest that we should resist fashions ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... has found another creature, with whom she seems to have some strange understanding. It is a poor idiotic peasant-girl, who, in spite of her ugliness and stupidity, loved a man, a mason. The mason was willing to marry her, as she had some property. Poor Genevieve was happy for a year; she dressed in her best to dance with her lover on Sunday; she comprehended love; in ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... the sum of ugliness. These people do that too," said Killigrew, thinking of the hideous houses and chapels run up day by day; "and it's all so beautiful and looks so happy if one ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... prime function of art. Art informs us of life, its pursuit trains in precision and judgment; but above all, it opens our eyes to beauty. The man who is versed in the work of the masters can never after be content with the ugliness and squalor that our industrial civilization continually tends to increase. He has caught the vision of beauty, and must strive to shape his environment toward that high ideal. The artist sees what we had not ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... beautiful spot!" thought Frank as he gazed entranced at the scenery. "I've never seen anything like it. It looks like Heaven after the ugliness of Rohar. And how delightfully cool it is, too, up in the mountains! Well, with this climate and good shooting in the forest below life won't be as dreadful as I thought. I wish poor Violet were here out of the heat ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... and holy, appeared at my side to confound the other. 'O Virgil, Virgil, who is this?' she said proudly; and he advanced with his eyes fixed only on this modest woman." Virgil (Reason called by Conscience) comes to the rescue of the entranced poet and reveals the Siren in all her foul ugliness. At that Dante awakes from his dream more than ever convinced of the evil of sin and its hideousness. ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... this savage king of the forest stands there at bay, there is a something grand and majestic about him, something of barbaric and unconquerable pride and courage, despite his demoniac and ogre-like ugliness; but, I am afraid, no one sees anything but a big fierce pig, who must be slaughtered as speedily and cleverly ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... who were already on the high road to the coming ideal of universal ugliness, Antinous Lebeau was remarkable for his ugliness, and one might have said that he positively threw zeal, too much zeal, into the matter, though he was not hideous like Mirabeau, who made the people ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... to set off its ugliness properly, you should see yourself against the background of palms, with that great fan-like ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... Frobisher afterwards went ninety miles further on in the same strait, as far as a small island, which received the name of Smith's Island. There the English found two women, of whom they took one with her child, but left the other on account of her extreme ugliness. Suspecting, so much did superstition and ignorance flourish at this time, that this woman had cloven feet, they made her take the coverings off her feet, to satisfy themselves that they really were made like their own. Frobisher, now perceiving that the cold was increasing, and ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... Mahommed. Linforth clearly understood that this was the last letter he would write. "I am sitting writing this by the light of a candle. The tent door is open. In front of me I can see the great snow-mountains. All the ugliness of the lower shale slopes is hidden. By such a moonlight, my dear, may you always look back upon my memory. For it is over, Sybil. They are waiting until I fall asleep. I have been warned of it. But I shall fall asleep to-night. I have kept awake ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... admitted, saw a clear and undiscovered beauty in forms of existence which hitherto no artist had deigned seriously to examine. And I mean Huysmans, a case even more extreme. Possibly no works have been more abused for ugliness than Huysman's novel En Menage and his book of descriptive essays De Tout. Both reproduce with exasperation what is generally regarded as the sordid ugliness of commonplace daily life. Yet both exercise a unique charm ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... noble, but he is really the son of an innkeeper. I had so often heard of him, that I regarded with interest his pale face and grave, melancholy manner. He was accompanied by Camille Desmoulins, and by Danton; the latter a man almost terrible in his ugliness. David, the painter of Socrates, was there; he had his hair frizzed, and was dressed splendidly; and with him was Chenier, more tragic looking than any of his plays. The salons were filled with flowers and beautiful ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... repelling the idea.] No, no don't ask me. I will not look upon sickness and death. I loathe all sorts of ugliness. ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... conceits imaginable, characterised the jewellery designs of Birmingham until about 1854-55, when a little more intelligence and enterprise was introduced, and our manufacturers learned that work well designed sold even better than the old-styled ugliness. A great advance has taken place during the past thirty years, and Birmingham jewellers now stand foremost in all matters of taste and design, the workmen of to-day ranking as artists indeed, even the commonest gilt jewellery ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... said Ethel, with a little laugh. "Not at the coal-hole," Lesley answered, trying also to be merry, "but at the ugliness of it all. Don't you think this ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant |
