"Vileness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unnecessary words. My mother's vileness and Aegisthus' waste, Draining and squandering with spendthrift hand Our patrimony, tell me not anew. Such talk might stifle opportunity. But teach me, as befits the present need, What place may serve by lurking vigilance ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... retain some angles about one's person is a desire common to all those human beings who do not set their ultimate hopes upon looking like Humpty-Dumpty. Our angles are simply our shapes. I cannot imagine any phrase more full of the subtle and exquisite vileness which is poisoning and weakening our country than such a phrase as this, about the desirability of rubbing down the angularities of poor men. Reduced to permanent and practical human speech, it means nothing whatever except ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... ordered to join it and become one of the most active agents. He brought letters of recommendation from an old gentleman in Lorraine who had held a distinguished rank in the army of Conde." After this, what more can be wanted? A hundred examples could not better show the vileness of such a system. Napoleon, when fallen, himself thus disclosed the scandalous means employed by ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... real fact of the crime, when consciously committed, in the numbers reached by its injury, in the degree of suffering it causes to those whom it ruins, in the baseness of its calculated betrayal of implicit trust, in the yet more perfect vileness of the obtaining such trust by misrepresentation, only that it may be betrayed, and in the impossibility that the crime should be at all committed, except by persons of good position and large knowledge of ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... since his return from London. He found less satisfaction in his religious exercises; was not unfrequently clouded in temper, occasionally even to sullenness; referred things oftener than formerly to the vileness of the human nature, but was far less willing than before to allow that he might himself be wrong; while somehow the Bible had no more the same plenitude of relation to the wants of his being, and he ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... and reared in the midst of evil. I grew up without the knowledge of any good thing. I have been instructed by Americans, and taught to read and write. This I found to be good. I became acquainted with the Sacred Writings, and there learned my vileness. At the present time, I have fallen into great evil and affliction, but have escaped from it; and with fifty-four men, women, and children, without moccasins, without food, and without a blanket, I have arrived in the midst of a great people, and now ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... paths to knowledge already discovered; and no enlightened man doubts that there are many more waiting to be discovered. Indeed, all paths lead to knowledge; because even the vilest and stupidest action teaches us something about vileness and stupidity, and may accidentally teach us a good deal more: for instance, a cutthroat learns (and perhaps teaches) the anatomy of the carotid artery and jugular vein; and there can be no question that the burning of St. Joan of Arc must have been a most ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... marshalled themselves again for review. Could it be possible? Was it only yesterday that she listened to his tender love words, beneath the old tree in Oakley woods? Only yesterday that her step-father was revealed in all his vileness,—his plots, his hopes, his fears. Her mother's sad life laid bare before her; Aunt Hagar's story; her defiance of the two men at Oakley; her flight; Clarence Vaughan; the strange, great city; Olive Girard; and now—now, just a dead blank, with ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... proceeds from five abominable causes: the first is blindness of discretion; the second, mischievous self-justification; the third, greed of vainglory; the fourth, an invention of envy; the fifth and last, vileness of mind, that is, cowardice. And each one of these grave faults has a great following, for few are those who are free ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... get to Odessa and thence I shall go straight to Kharkhov. At Kharkhov I have a friend, a literary man. I shall go to him and I shall say, 'now, my friend, give up your rotten little love-stories and descriptions of nature, and expose the vileness of the human biped.... There's a ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... known, for instance, that the stage manager was addicted to obscene talk; and when, one day, just as in the middle of a rehearsal he was about to step from the wings on to the stage, he was arrested by a torrent of vileness that came from that same individual, he was not very much surprised at the mere fact. But he was vexed and disgusted that the fellow should not have restrained himself in the presence of Cleo. What was worse, Cleo herself seemed to be perfectly ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... is full of life and fire, but whose passions have been trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; one who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... professions, a peculiarity, however, that belongs rather to his class than to the individual member of it. Ultra as a democrat and an American, Mr. Dodge had a sneaking predilection in favour of foreign opinions. Although practice had made him intimately acquainted with all the frauds, deceptions, and vileness of the ordinary arts of paragraph-making, he never failed to believe religiously in the veracity, judgment, good faith, honesty and talents of anything that was imported in the form of types. He had ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... you have never guessed at? Although you destroyed me long ago, I have returned. Throw away your puny weapon. I am of the lower dimension and am invulnerable to your engines of destruction. You bloated...." His words trailed off into a stream of vileness that could never have occurred ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... eyes! Golden circlets, with their adornments of coloured and lustrous gems, have bound the brow of infamy as well as that of honour—a mockery to both; as though virtue required a reward beyond the fulfilment of its own high purposes, or that infamy could be cheated into the forgetfulness of its vileness by the weight around its temples! Gilded coaches have glided before us, in which sat men who thought the buzz and shouts of crowds a guerdon for the toils, the anxieties, and, too often, the peculations of a life. Our ears have rung with the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... its power does not alter its ugliness, for power can only make ugliness uglier. And in this poem there is little or nothing of the revelation of that secret wealth of valour and patience in humanity which makes real and redeems the revelation of its secret vileness in The Ring and the Book. It almost looks at first sight as if Browning had for a moment surrendered the whole of his impregnable philosophical position and admitted the strange heresy that a human story can be sordid. ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... gets restless, like a bird, for want of a perch, and casts about for any possible means of getting out and away. And even if it be fixed, by an effort, on the business in hand, that business becomes itself repulsive, more than it need be, by the vileness of its associations; and many a study appears dull or painful to a boy, when it is pursued on a blotted deal desk, under a wall with nothing on it but scratches and pegs, which would have been pursued pleasantly enough in a curtained corner of his father's library, or at the ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... the sacred name of friend, And worn it into vileness! With how secure a brow, and specious form, He gilds the secret villain! Sure that face Was meant for honesty; but Heaven mismatched it, And furnished treason out with nature's pomp, To make its work ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... weapons that are yours. To master you I do not hesitate to strike at your nephews with the lethal weapons that are mine. When you shall have seen them hang you will understand the things that argument could not make clear to you. In the vileness of my act you will see a reflection of the vileness of your own, and perhaps your heart will be touched, your ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... descending from those high and heavenly speculations, the poor farmer depicted the grandeur, the wealth, and the choicest pleasures of the world in their true colours, showing their intrinsic vileness, and how in reality they are vanity and vexation of spirit, so as to inspire Blessed Francis himself with increased contempt for them. The Saint, nevertheless, did no more than silently acquiesce in the ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... tongues secure. Thus, the noble, the vile, the excellent, or the beautiful, may be put for three extra constructions: first, for noble persons, vile persons, &c.; secondly, for the noble man, the vile man, &c.; thirdly, for the abstract qualities, nobility, vileness, excellence, beauty. The last-named usage forms an exception to the rule; in the other two the noun is understood, and should be supplied by the parser. Such terms, if elliptical, are most commonly of the plural number, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... whosoever came to Jesus Christ should he saved; but I had no deep sense of sin, of my sin. Since then I believe that I have passed through almost every phase of Christian experience that I have ever read or heard of; and now I have such a sight of my own utter vileness and unworthiness, that I feel that the great and holy God might well set His heel on me, so to speak, and crush me into nothing." This sense of absolute unworthiness was always a feature of her life. "A useless log" was the term she applied ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... he to say also concerning the vileness of what we had to eat—not fit for a dog; besides enlarging upon the imprudence of intrusting the vessel longer to a man of the mate's intemperate habits. With so many sick, too, what could we expect to do in the fishery? It was no use talking; come what come might, the ship ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... the ashes of fires burnt out....She was shocked to find that she had even built upon the evil spot! Almost word for word she repeated Hetty's own story of her meeting with Challis Wrandall, and how she went, step by step and blindly, to the last scene in the tragedy, when his vileness, his true nature was revealed to her. The girl had told her everything. She had thought herself to be in love with Wrandall. She was carried away by his protestations. She was infatuated. (Sara smiled to herself as she spoke of this. She knew Challis Wrandall's ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... Arrowhead lighting a fire from a little load of sticks from the sledges. And between murderer and captor there sprang up the companionship of the open road which brings all men to a certain land of faith and understanding, unless they are perverted and vile. There was no vileness in Arrowhead. There were no handcuffs on his hands, no sign of captivity; they two ate out of the same dish, drank from the same basin, broke from the same bread. The crime of Arrowhead, the gallows waiting for him, seemed very far away. They were only two silent ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... religious aestheticisms the soul of John Norton had long slumbered, but now it awoke in remorse and pain, and, repulsing its habitual exaltations as if they were sins, he turned to the primal idea of the vileness of this life, and its sole utility in enabling man to gain heaven. A pessimist he admitted himself to be so far as this world was concerned. But the manifestations of modern pessimism were checked by constitutional mysticity. Schopenhauer, when he overstepped ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... and branch for their purposes, they addressed a letter to Preston, remonstrating with him for his servile attachment to the minister; on which he confidently returned an answer, assuring them that he was as fully convinced of the vileness and profligacy of the Duke of Buckingham's character as any man could be, but that there was no way to come at him but by the lowest flattery, and that it was necessary for the glory of God that such instruments should be made use of as could be had; and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... "I, too," she said, and rose. The man on the settee groaned and heaved his shoulders theatrically; she stood, viewing in quiet curiosity that countenance of impotent vileness. Other failures had left her with a sense of defenselessness in a world so largely populated by men who glanced up from their desks to refuse her plea for work. But now she had resources of power over fate and circumstance; the streets, the night, the river, whatever of fear and destruction ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... only cried out against his swearing, lying, and other outward notorious sins; but was in great horror for the sin of his nature; the vileness and original corruption of his heart. For this he was in so great anguish that the trouble of his spirit made him forget ...
— Stories of Boys and Girls Who Loved the Saviour - A Token for Children • John Wesley
... in respect of action, sleep, haughtiness, fear, cupidity, grief, censure of good acts, loss of memory,—unripeness of judgment, absence of faith, violation of all rules of conduct, want of discrimination, blindness, vileness of behaviour, boastful assertions of performance when there has been no performance, presumption of knowledge in ignorance, unfriendliness (or hostility), evilness of disposition, absence of faith, stupid reasoning, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... reached me, O auspicious King, that Salih con tinued: "So I acquainted the Commander of the Faithful with all that passed and Al-Rashid marvelled at the generosity and benevolence of Yahya and the vileness and ingratitude of Mansur, and bade restore the jewel to Yahya, saying, 'Whatso we have given it befitteth us not to take again.' After that Salih returned to Yahya and acquainted him with the tale of Mansur and his ill-conduct; whereupon replied he, 'O Salih, when a man is ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... without your sanction?" He was always thinking of the disgrace attaching to himself by reason of his nephew's vileness, and now, if a daughter of the family should also go astray, so as to be exiled from the bosom of the Whartons, how manifest would it be that all the glory was departing ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... and we have a hell that leaves no need of other torture to check the course of the erring soul. And yet there is no suffering that is not self-imposed. It is both consistent and just that a man should associate with his kind and look upon himself in others until he grows sick of his own vileness and cries out in agony of spirit against his own moral offenses. It must not be assumed that every person dying with considerable matter belonging to the lower astral level still within his emotional body ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... she can give peace to his tormented conscience; and, while he has suffered and struggled and lashed himself for every seeming baseness of desire, and loathed himself for every imagined microscopic soiling, she has walked through good and evil, letting the vileness of sin trickle off her unhidden soul, so quietly and majestically that all thought of evil vanishes; and the self-tormenting wretch, with macerated flesh hidden beneath the heavy garments of mysticism and philosophy, suddenly feels, in the presence of her unabashed ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... everybody better than himself. Humility is the exact opposite of pride; as the one man counted himself better than all, the other counted himself worse than all. When he obtained a sight of his own vileness before God, his feeling was that even his brother would be polluted by his presence. As love of God, when we have tasted his grace, carries love to men after it, like a shadow; so shame before God, because of ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... what are words? Corentin! he is my life, my soul, my breath!" She flung herself at the feet of the man, whose silence terrified her. "Soul of vileness!" she cried, "I would rather degrade myself to save his life than degrade myself by betraying him. I will save him at the cost of my own blood. Speak, what price must ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... belongs to them, and we must not, dare not, sacrifice that future nor give it in pledge for our own happiness. Last night I came to you. I was weak—yes; more than that—I was ignorant. I did not know, even as late as last night, the monstrous vileness, the consummate wickedness of present-day conditions. I learned that today, this morning, and now. I learned that the morality of the Church was a pretense. Far deeper than it, and vastly more powerful, was the morality of the dollar. My father, my family, my husband, were willing ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... was the object of Love. "Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world" (John xvii: 24). And then He knew us and His Love was even then set upon us, before we ever were in existence. He knew our sinfulness, our enmity, our vileness, and in Love which passeth knowledge He looked forward to the time, when He would manifest this Love to us His fallen creatures. "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high I cannot attain ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein
... animal had entered into their midst. His massive, herculean figure was clad in a doublet of black leather, and his face, in which could be seen no trace of intelligence, expressed, on the contrary, nothing but vileness and villainy; a great scar, running right across his face and losing itself in a bushy beard, added still further to the natural brutality of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... saw at Evian made me additionally certain. When I was in the trenches I never had any hatred of the Boche. Probably I shall lose my hatred in pity for him when I get to the Front again—but for the present I hate him. It's here in France that one sees what a vileness he has created in the ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... him, but her heart seemed to be buried in that vast grave of the West. She was obedient, dutiful, passive, but she could not care for him. And there came a day when she realized that he did not believe she had come unscathed through the wilds of the gold-fields and the vileness of the construction camps. She bore this patiently, though it stung her. But the loss of respect for her father did not come until she heard men in his study, loud-voiced and furious, wrangle over contracts and accuse him ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... gently. "Before the war is just a different age." For a while she was silent; then she drew a deep breath. "Don't you feel it as I feel it?" she whispered. "The bigness of it, the wonder of it. Underneath all the horror, underlying all the vileness—the splendour of it all. The glory of human endurance. . . . People wondered that I could stand it—I with my idealism. But it seems to me that out of the sordid brutality an ideal has been born which is almost the greatest the ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... a wife behind, the woman who loves me and sees something more in me than vileness. Shall I tell you how I left her, Monsieur? Dying—in a hospital at Charenton. I shall never see her again. I shall never again take her thin white face in my dirty hands and say, 'You and I have tasted the goodness of life, my little one, while we have starved ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... her girlhood, the rending aside of a veil of maiden mystery only vaguely instinctively guessed, the barren, sordid truth of her life as seen by her enlightened eyes, the bitter realization of the vileness of men of her clan in contrast to the manliness and chivalry of an enemy, the hard facts of unalterable repute as created by slander and fostered by low minds, all these were forces in a cataclysm that had suddenly caught her heart and whirled her through ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... by two depraved women belonging to it, Theodora, and her daughter Maria (or Marozia). The scandals belonging to this dismal period in the history of the papal institution are to be ascribed to the anarchy prevailing in Italy, and to the vileness of the individuals who ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the unhappy hero, now fairly face to face with the business he had chosen. "I have been reading some of your cases. I was present while Jopp was tried. It was a hideous business. Father, it was a hideous thing! Grant he was vile, why should you hunt him with a vileness equal to his own? It was done with glee - that is the word - you did it with glee; and I looked on, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a loquacious meal, and for a while silence reigned, broken only by a few desultory remarks as to the vileness of the food produced by the officer responsible for the mess catering, and the exorbitant price he demanded for it—statements which had staled ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... the immorality of mythology which first drew the attention of believers in polytheism to the inconsistency between the goodness, which was felt to be of the essence of the divine nature, and the vileness, which was imputed to them in some myths; but it is the irrationality and absurdity of mythology that seems, to the modern mind, to be its most uniform characteristic. So long as the only mythology that was studied was the mythology of ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... all had to restrain the feeling of disgust and anger this spy aroused in their breasts. It was for the sake of the safety of their homes, for the lives that were dear to them, that they did this. And he, entirely unconscious in his vileness, was suave and polite, played the man about town, recalled one thing or another, mentioned ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... accomplish their wanton delights! It is a wonder to see their dissembling, Their flattering countenance, their ingratitude, Inconstancy, false witness, feigned weeping: Their vain-glory, and how they can delude: Their foolishness, their jangling not mew'd: Their lecherous lust and vileness therefore: Witchcrafts and charms to make men to their lore: Their embalming[36] and their unshamefacedness: Their bawdry, their subtlety, and fresh attiring! What trimming, what painting, to make fairness! Their false intents and flickering smiling: Therefore lo! it is an old saying That ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... I perceived myself behind the logic of this Frankenstein. For it was I—I, Mallare—that was attacking myself with this hatred. It was Mallare who was arranging this little plot for himself. And why? Because then the head of Mallare, nauseated by the vileness of the assault, would disgorge forever the hallucination of Rita. It was an emetic Mallare had found necessary ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... an official position as your ambassadors—though they would have to meet you and look you in the face, and pass the remainder of their lives among you, and render before you an account of their actions—they, I say, undertook the task of deceiving you. How could vileness or desperation ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... sought in Judas of Kerioth. This wretch, actuated by motives impossible to explain, betrayed his Master, gave all the necessary information, and even undertook himself (although such an excess of vileness is scarcely credible) to guide the troop which was to effect his arrest. The remembrance of horror which the folly or the wickedness of this man has left in the Christian tradition has doubtless given rise ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... beauty, and yet more exquisite in her pain; she exuded a faint and intoxicating perfume of womanliness, like a crushed herb. Yet she was to be worshipped, rather than loved—a sacrament to be approached kneeling, an incarnate breath of heaven, the more lovely from the vileness into which her life had been cast and the slanders that were about her name.... More marvellous than all was that those who knew her best and longest loved her most; her servants wept or groaned themselves into fevers if they were excluded from her too long; of her ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... what would he think of you, were he to know that you asserted that he could be so contemptibly unjust and cruel? The child's utterance would not in the slightest offend him, but your imputation to him of such vileness would ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... they clothe their conceptions. The doctrines of predestination, of original sin, of the innate depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgus subordinate to a benevolent Almighty, who has only lately revealed himself, faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth than the "liberal" popular illusions that babies are all born good, and that the example of a corrupt society is ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... found himself powerless to resist the love that was regaining strength enough to batter down the wall of prejudice her marriage had created in his mind, there would still stand between them his conviction that it would be an act of vileness to claim or even covet the wife of the man whose life he had taken, not in anger or reprisal but ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... to convince me how easily a man who has never been in any great distress may pass through life without knowing, in his own person at least, anything of the possible goodness of the human heart—or, as I must add with a sigh, of its possible vileness. So thick a curtain of manners is drawn over the features and expression of men's natures, that to the ordinary observer the two extremities, and the infinite field of varieties which lie between them, are all confounded; the vast and multitudinous compass of their several harmonies ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... needful to the "poor in spirit." Religious poetry and music were, of all the arts, the only ones deserving of any cultivation. The education of Pietism endeavored, by means of a carefully arranged series of representations, to create in its disciples the feeling of their absolute nothingness, vileness, godlessness, and abandonment by God, in order to displace the torment of despair as to themselves and the world by a warm, dramatic, and living relation to Christ—a relation in which all the Eroticism ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... degenerates so rapidly from the primitive dignity of his sylvan origin, that it is scarcely possible to indulge in any other expectation, than that the whole species must at length be exterminated by its own infinite imbecility and vileness." ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... stopped although the engine was still throbbing wildly, and the dainty veil of blue smoke still streamed forward from the back of the car before a gentle breeze. The doctor got out almost precipitately, followed by a gaunt madman, mouthing vileness, who had only a minute or so before been a decent British citizen. He made some blind lunges at the tremulous but obdurate car, but rather as if he looked for offences and accusations than for ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... mentioned a specific event in which a blueskin had at any named time taken part. But everybody was afraid of blueskins. It was a patterned, an inculcated, a stage-directed fixed idea. And it found expression in shocked references to the vileness, the depravity, the monstrousness of the blueskin inhabitants of Dara, from whom Weald must at all costs ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... filth of the body! vileness of the spirit! unfathomable depths of human folly! What am I and what are we, and whom do we ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... dismay reporting the decision of Miss Blanchflower with regard to the half-witted girl whose third illegitimate child by a quite uncertain father had finally proved her need of protection both from men's vileness, and her own helplessness. Miss Dempsey had taken the girl first into her own house, and then, persuading and comforting the old father, had placed her in one of the Homes where ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cried out in hot remonstrance, adding that I had yet another vileness to confess—for it was now that for the first time I realized it. And I related to him how last night I had repudiated her, cast her off and fled, leaving her to bear the ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... or said over a glass of wine, how should he behave himself, who is not a true principally invited guest, but as it were a bastard and supposititious intruder? For whether he is free or not, he lies open to the exception of the company. Besides, the very meanness and vileness of the name is no small evil to those who do not resent it but can quietly endure to be called and answer to the name of shadows. For, by enduring such base names, men are insensibly accustomed and drawn on ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... brother, was like in one hour to have left not one man of that army alive, and after to have taken me and the rest at Armagh. The fame of the English army, so hardly gotten, is now vanished, and I, wretched and dishonoured, by the vileness of other ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... the Incorrigible. Some intelligent persons, whom I have asked to interpret it, think, as Webster had accused our Congress of corrupting the English language, the respondent meant to accuse the British Parliament of doing the same thing in a greater degree,—of descending yet lower into the vileness of slang. But this is hardly a probable conjecture. Webster might be right in acknowledging a very depraving abuse of the tongue in the two Houses of Congress; but could it be "courteous," or proper, for the answerer to jump the Atlantic, and pounce upon the English Lords and Commons, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... white veil was over, and Teresa's senses were faint from incense and hunger, ecstasy and a new and exquisite terror, Sister Dominica had led her to her cell and kissing her lightly on the brow, exclaimed that she had never been happier in a conquest for the Church against the vileness of the world. Then she had dropped the conventional speech of her calling, and said with an expression that made her look so young, so curiously virginal, that the novice had held her breath: "Remember that ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... justice to the abused, enslaved, and persecuted, to unravel the mysteries of guilt, and hold up the workers of iniquity in the severe light of truth stripped of their disguise and covered with the confusion of their own vileness,— these are victories more glorious than any which have ever reddened ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the looseness, the vulgar splendour, the base standards of judgment of the Imperial Court infected each branch of the public services of France, and worked perhaps not least on those who were in military command. But the catastrophe of 1870 seemed to those who witnessed it to tell of more than the vileness of an administration; in England, not less than in Germany, voices of influence spoke of the doom that had overtaken the depravity of a sunken nation; of the triumph of simple manliness, of Godfearing virtue itself, in the victories ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... life, I was beginning to be the executioner of my present felicity, and the tormentor of my heart. I revolted against such a necessity which I judged fictitious, and which I could not admit unless I stood guilty of vileness before the tribunal of my own reason. I thought that Father Georgi, if he wished to forbid my visiting that family, ought not to have said that it was worthy of respect; my sorrow would not have been so intense. The day and the whole of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... cucumbers, and garlic, and lentils, and onions; Moses answered, Will ye exchange that which is better, for that which is worse? Get ye down into Egypt, for there shall ye find what ye desire; and they were smitten with vileness and misery, and drew on themselves indignation from God. This they suffered, because they believed not in the signs of God, and killed the prophets unjustly; this, because they rebelled and transgressed. Surely those who believe, and those who Judaize, and ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... his own Men guilty of that Sin, which administer'd neither Profit nor Pleasure, and might draw upon them a severe Punishment: That if they had a just Idea of that great Being, they wou'd never mention him, but they wou'd immediately reflect on his Purity and their own Vileness. That we so easily took Impression from our Company, that the Spanish Proverb says, let a Hermit and a Thief live together, the Thief wou'd become Hermit, or the Hermit Thief: That he saw this verified in his Ship, for he cou'd attribute the Oaths ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... a most infamous creature from her own accounts, and we are to sympathize with her vileness, for she has no other traits of character described. Tom converts her, but I am sorry to see she steals money and goods, and fibs tremendously afterwards. We hope the rest of his converts did ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... and festive orgies, could not but prove very injurious to habits of study. The youth had imbibed the venal corruption everywhere prevalent. Hence it not seldom happened that Roman scholars conspired to rob their master of his salary and desert his class in a body. Roman vileness and baseness disgusted Augustine even more than Punic insubordination. He therefore took advantage of a request made by the citizens of Milan of Symmachus who was then Prefect of Rome, that he would procure for them a professor ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... all their protestations and refusals were for effect only; that a man need only to be a man, to know what he wanted, and conquer it. And I felt rising in me like a tide the feeling that I was now a man. The reader who has believed of me that I passed through that canal life unspotted by its vileness has asked too much of me. The thing was not possible. I now thought of the irregular companionships of that old time as inexplicable no longer. They were the things for which men lived—the inevitable things ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... well as among the teachers, no one can well doubt who has sent a little child into them, as guiltless of evil or unclean thoughts as a newly fallen snowflake, and had him come home, in a short time, contaminated almost beyond belief by the vileness and filth which he has seen, and heard, and learned there."—(Hathe Tyng Griswold, in Old and New, for March; or Boston ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... all mankind, he ran to an excess of blood-guiltiness,] killing four of the vestal virgins, one of whom—so far as he was able—he had forcibly outraged. For latterly all his sexual power had disappeared, as a result of which it was reported that he satisfied his vileness in a different way; and associated with him were others of similar inclinations, who not only admitted that they were given to such practices but maintained that they did so for the ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... of course that men, and newspapers, are equally stupid in time of peace; and I fear that fundamentally this is true. War does not change their nature, but only brings to the bubbling surface the dregs and vileness and scum. War does not change any one's nature; and that is why it is vain to expect that under its influence those crowds will love their country who never loved anything before. But if war cannot create it may at least be supposed to ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... book—rather, to put it the other way, no one of his books reveals ideal construction. The multiplicity of details, of descriptions weary the reader. A coarse spirit his, he revelled in scenes of lust, bloodshed, vileness, and cruelty. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... by it. He had steeled himself to get through a hateful job; but for him—like most men of his race—beauty held a strong appeal. Suddenly he wished to save the boy with the fair curly hair and arched dark brows. Here was a German—a Bavarian—who could have no vileness ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... purity, tenderness, goodness; what capacities of vileness, bitterness and evil. Nature must needs be lavish with the mother and creator of men, and centre in her all the possibilities of life. And a few critical years can decide whether her life is to be full of sweetness ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... were vile. There was no measure to the vileness that Ellen had brought on him. For it was all her fault, since he never would have gone with that woman in London if it had not been for the way she had carried on the evening before. At the thought of that night in Piccadilly he began to hurry along the street, pushing ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. What do you make of a case like that, amateur psychologist? You call it an altogether serious thing to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke,—horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of such ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... must beg forgiveness of my body for the vileness through which I have dragged it, and forgiveness of my stomach for the vileness which I have thrust into it. I have been to the spike, and slept in the spike, and eaten in the spike; also, I have run away ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... Saint Lucius the martyr," said Mme. Chantelouve. "His body was so transparent that he could see through his chest the vileness of his heart. His kind of 'vileness' at least we can stand. But I must admit that this utter disregard of cleanliness makes me suspicious of the monasteries and renders your beloved Middle Ages odious ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... to this dear and tranquil speaking, Edward Maudelain's raised hands had fallen like so much lead, and remembering his own nature, he longed for annihilation, before she had appraised his vileness. ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... gad, your cheeks were as smooth as a girl's, too!" the Colonel's voice dropped to the softness of reminiscence, growing harsh again as he added: "If I temporarily forget the rules of honorable warfare, it's because my memory has been corrupted by the vileness of those Outcasts who, in their ego-mania, blaspheme the Almighty God by claiming kinship with Him. I wish you and I could go over there and clean up that pestilential Prussian herd! By gad, sir, they've the hoof and mouth disease, each confounded one of them! Whenever I think of them I get ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... gavest me thine own strength with deathless days, and beauty above every daughter of this Star. But I sinned against thee sore, and for my sin I paid in endless centuries of solitude, in the vileness that makes me loathsome to my lover's eyes, and for its diadem of perfect power sets upon my brow this crown of naked mockery. Yet in thy breath, the swift essence that brought me light, that brought me gloom, thou didst vow to me that I who cannot die should ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... fast becoming ashamed of those infernal sacrifices called executions, so it shall also soon forbear to make its most gifted sons pass through the fire to Moloch, till it has tested their thorough and ineradicable vileness. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... lack of mother's control, (e) early and intimate acquaintance with atrocious sex knowledge and sex habits, and (f) recently becoming the center of interest in a group of friends made through her statement of the vileness of ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... field be rich and mellow And no good seed be sown, With tangled mass of vileness ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... not all that I could do Would stop the current of my woe; Conviction still my vileness shew'd; How great my ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... of all palliating facts. We have outraged the common feelings of humanity by remaining blind to the virtues of noble and holy men because they were Papists, as if a good deed was not good in Italy as well as in England. We have talked as if God had doomed to hopeless vileness in this world and reprobation in the next millions of Christian people, simply because they were born of Romish and not of Protestant fathers. And we have our reward; we have fared like the old woman who would not tell ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... are not clean in His sight, and He is so just that He cannot forgive sin; we only mock Him when we ask Him to forgive us our sins, if we plead our own merits, because, as I have shown you, we cannot possibly have any merits to plead—all our merits are but as filthy rags, they cannot cover up our vileness and sinfulness. But then Jehovah is all merciful as well as just, and He has, therefore, formed that blessed plan of salvation, the gospel plan, just suited to our wants, by which we can take advantage of the all perfect merits of Jesus Christ, ...
— Mary Liddiard - The Missionary's Daughter • W.H.G. Kingston
... rank, and freely told you all I knew or thought of public affairs; and I must ever confess, whatever may be the event, that you generously gave me such opening, as I now think I ought to have embraced: but the true cause of my not doing it was the vileness and treachery of many persons around you, who, I supposed, ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... races or to animals, so long as yet another spot in virgin beauty smiles before him. Here, again, in selfish pursuit of profit, and, consciously or unconsciously, following the abominable principle of the great moral vileness which one man has expressed— "Apres nous le deluge"—he begins anew the work of destruction. Thus did cultivation, driven out, leave the East, and perhaps the Deserts formerly robbed of their coverings: like the wild hordes of old over beautiful Greece, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... would not seem to thrust ourselves upon him. Greeting, lord Timon; pray let me warn you against these abominable flatterers; they are your humble servants during meal-times, and else about as useful as carrion crows. Perfidy is the order of the day; everywhere ingratitude and vileness. I was just bringing a couple of hundred pounds, for your immediate necessities, and was nearly here before I heard of your splendid fortune. So I just came on to give you this word of caution; though indeed you are wise enough (I would take your advice before Nestor's ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... tender endurance, or the heroic chant of undiscouraged labor. The poor slave-woman, last night parted from her only boy, and weary with the cotton-picking,—the captive pining in his cell,—the patient wife of the drunkard, saddened by a consciousness of the growing vileness of one so dear to her once,—the delicate spirit doomed to harsh and uncongenial surroundings,—all in such hours feel the soothings of a celestial harmony, the tenderness of more than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... alone To my God, bed, cradle, throne! Whilst thy glorious vileness I View with divine fancy's eye, Sordid filth seems all the cost, State, and ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... voice and deep sorrow stripped the tale of half its vileness. At times her voice fell to a breath. Then she bent towards him humbly, and a perfume swept over him like a breeze from the tropics. The tale turned him to stone. Sister Claire undoubtedly drew upon her imagination and her reading for the facts, since it ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... say indeed that you do seriously and heartily desire to see, and to be more deeply and powerfully convinced of your own vileness and sinfulness, of your own weakness and wretchedness, and of your wants and unworthiness? and that, in order to your deep and spiritual humiliation and self-debasing, that you may be more vile in your own eyes, and Jesus Christ and free grace more precious and excellent, more high and ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... phantom of his own imagination made visible by some prodigy to him. For a still briefer space Rosette shared Albert's dream, and man and wife remained faithful to each other. It is easy to imagine the vileness which a prosecuting counsel could extract from these beautiful pages made entirely of vision and ecstasy. How false and shameful is the whole business. We are allowed to state that we prefer pagan morality to Christian, but are interdicted from illustrating our beliefs by incident. So ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... system, however accurate. It must be more or less influenced by what is visible, or by what is easily known and understood of the actual atrocities which accompany slavery, wherever it is left to its own proper operation. Let it be seen in its native vileness and cruelty, as exhibited when not interfered with by the hand of authority, and it excites universal and unqualified detestation. But let its harsher asperities be rubbed off; take away the more prominent parts of its iniquity; ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... lovable characters who live at peace with God and man it is far from me to wish to convey. Such men there are, and women, who seem lifted above the meaner elements of human existence, without envy, without reproach, untouched by its iniquities, unsullied by its vileness. Pure themselves and self-contained they see no guile in others, or if they see it they notice it not. Who has not met with such? who has not felt their power? When such innate purity of soul is united with high intellectual gifts we have the noblest creation of ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... chambermaid, they would consider themselves insulted. Yet they come here and talk with other Irish girls every whit as ignorant and unattractive as the servants at home—only the latter are virtuous and these are infamous. Thus does one touch of vileness ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... happens?" "The second time he beats me with a rod." "Does the priest ask you about anything else?" I inquired. "Yes," he rejoined; "he asks me about my father and my mother." "What does he ask you about them?" "He asks me if they do dirty actions," said the boy. Now, here the enormity and vileness of the confessional peeped out. Here one can see how the confessor can look into every hearth, and into every heart, in Rome. The priests had dragged this young boy into their den, and taught him to play the spy on his father and mother. The hand that fed him, the bosom that ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... hypocrite to Orgon, with the result of being himself expelled from the house for his pains; while Tartuffe, in recompense for the injury done to his feelings, is presented with a gift-deed of Orgon's estate. But now Orgon's wife contrives to let her husband see and hear for himself the vileness of Tartuffe. This done, Orgon confronts the villain, and, with just indignation, orders him out of his house. Tartuffe reminds Orgon that the shoe is on the other foot; that he is himself now owner ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... o' Mill End turned greedily to the fount of wisdom seeking justification for his deep contempt for his fellows, corroboration of his opinions as to the stupidity, ignorance, and vileness of mankind, He read greedily, finding justification everywhere. Poets, philosophers, novelists, historians—they had all found man out, just as he had done. Discovering an echo of his beliefs, he thrilled with hot delight. He met allies amongst the poets, ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... promised not to. That promise, of course, was binding on Germany for just so long as it suited her to keep it, and it suited her to keep it, on the whole, during the Armenian massacres. And in that matter her refusal to interfere is, among all her crimes, the very flower and felicity of her vileness. ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... with the living image of Babylon, the royal Prostitute of the Apocalypse, garbed like her in jewels and purple, and painted like her; for she was not hurled by a fatidical power, by a supreme force, into the alluring vileness ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... the public! It only proves that the public is idiotic to make a success of such vileness!" And he disappeared without having ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... and disorderly, and their firing of pistols, destruction of property and theft of edibles was not as bad as their outrageous profanity and obscenity on the cars in the hearing of ladies. Clearly they are brutes when sober and whiskey only developed the vileness already ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... had a better heart than I had. I could have changed heart with anybody. I thought none but the devil himself could equalise me for inward wickedness and pollution of mind. I fell, therefore, at the sight of my own vileness, deeply into despair, for I concluded that this condition in which I was in could not stand with a life of grace. Sure, thought I, I am forsaken of God; sure I am given up to the devil, and to ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... are the words learnt for all this vileness; but by their means the vileness is committed with less shame. Not that I blame the words, being, as it were, choice and precious vessels; but that wine of error which is drunk to us in them by intoxicated teachers; and if we, too, drink not, we are beaten, and ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... hurt you. You have suffered and in your pain you think me vile, but remember that for ages the virtue of to-morrow has been the vileness of to-day. That which outstrips one, one calls vile. My virtue lies in gaining my end. Pity for you would have been a crime for me. You have suffered. And then? What are you to me? As I came among you I am to-day; that is where I am triumphant ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... curiosity, if it do not lead to this end,—to frame and fashion thy soul to an union and communion with him in love; if it do not discover thyself unto thyself, that in that light of God's glorious majesty thou mayest distinctly behold thy own vileness and wretched misery, thy darkness and deadness and utter impotency. The angels that Isaiah saw attending God in the temple, had wings covering their faces, and wings covering their feet. Those excellent spirits who must cover their feet from us, because ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... is vileness, or where will you find a virtuous man?' he asked. 'Maybe you will find some among the bones of your old Romans. Yet your Seneca, in his day, did play the villain. Or maybe some at the Court of Mahound. I know not, for ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... by expressing a desire to die, and be with Christ; but he checked himself by saying, 'Not my will, but thine be done.' He then proceeded in a most humble and penitent strain, to speak of his own vileness, and to adore the sovereign love of God in calling him to be an heir ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... prejudices and opinions. Everything is prepared in advance—his political and religious convictions, his judgments of people, his sense of honour, his ideas of women, his whole view of life. He is taught to see vileness and corruption in every one not of his own way of thinking, and in every idea that does not directly serve the religious and political purposes of his class. The truth isn't a fixed thing: it's not used to test actions by, it's tested by them, and made to fit in with them. And this ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... to the bad? How should the likes of you not go to the bad? Who teaches you? What do you see? What do you hear? Only vileness! I, though I've not been taught much, still know a thing or two. I'm not quite like a peasant woman. A peasant woman, what is she? Just mud! There are many millions of the likes of you in Russia, and all as blind as moles—knowing nothing! All sorts of spells: how to stop the cattle-plague with ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... Nothing, worse than nothing. It is that gentle sympathy of hearts, that strange fever of the soul, those sweet hopes and joyous transports, and tremors scarce less pleasing, that render life endurable, and reconcile man to the vileness of mortality. The nearest approach to paradise on earth, is found in bright eyes that beam for us alone—in gentle lips that murmur to our ears words of pure tenderness and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... even while many sincere and self-devoted workers in this cause still hold to the view that God can, and will, if the faith be strong enough, change a man in an instant of time, and with no co-operation of his own beyond this act of faith, from vileness to purity—from a love of evil to a love of good—the sounder, safer and more Scriptural doctrine that, if a man would be saved from the enemies of his soul, he must fight and overcome them in the strength which God gives to all who will ask and receive, is the one now more generally preached ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... uncontrollable burst of laughter kept my anger back, and twenty times the anger that was rising from the bottom of my soul suddenly ended in a burst of laughter. I was confounded by so much shrewdness and so much vileness, by ideas now so just and then so false, by such general perversity of sentiments, such complete turpitude, and such marvellously uncommon frankness. He perceived the struggle going on within me:] ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... alien and terrible than the actual tale she told. It was one thing—and heaven knew it was bad enough!—to learn that one's sister's husband was a drug-fiend; it was another, and much worse thing, to learn from that sister's pallid lips what vileness lay behind ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton |
