"Abject" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of 1848 lay banked along the Vermilion in utter and abject confusion. Organization there now was none. But for Banion's work with the back fires the entire train would have been wiped out. The effects of the storm were not so capable of evasion. Sodden, wretched, miserable, chilled, ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... Burrard's command was a short one, for on the following morning Sir Hew Dalrymple superseded him. Thus in twenty-four hours a battle had been fought and the command of the army had been three times changed, a striking proof of the abject folly and incapacity of the ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... separation, certainly for years, perhaps for ever, from all that happiness: the hopelessness of his condition as a prisoner of war at a time when war seemed chronic in Europe, without prospect of cessation. And in the abject misery of his soul—misery all the more intense because of his peculiar sensitiveness of nature—he thus bewailed in secret and with ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... weaknesses and their meannesses, as elsewhere in their glory and beauty. And not so much their meanness and weakness, as that of those who have distorted these innocent servants of truth to become tools of falsehood and the abject instruments of the extinction of all ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was the most abject-looking specimen of humanity imaginable. My camera in its case was securely fastened on my shoulders as a knapsack, and so, with the exception of a slight derangement, which I soon readjusted, no damage was done. But the motor-cycle suffered ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... had gone yawning to bed, he returned and sat at the window for a little, smoking hard and puzzling out the knots which confronted him. He had a dismal anticipation of failure. Not defeat—that was a little matter; but an abject show of incompetence. His feelings pulled him hither and thither. He could not utter moral platitudes to checkmate his opponent's rhetoric, for, after all, he was honest; nor could he fill the part of the cold critic ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... home, and there found Dr. Rush and Dr. Glentworth, who was later to be the physician of Mr. Washington. My aunt, preceding me, had taken possession. Mr. Warder was reduced to a condition of abject obedience, and for a month and more my aunt hardly left her girl-boy's pillow. Indeed, it was long before I was let to see him, and then he was but a spectre of himself, with not enough blood to blush with. Our officers very promptly left for New York the day ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... tale to relate all their follies, surrounded as they were by a bountiful nature and a kindly people, and yet soon reduced to abject want. In the party there were brawling soldiers and piratical sailors, with only a few quiet, decent artisans and shop-keepers, but with a swarm of reckless young nobles, who had nothing to recommend them but a long name, and who expected to prove themselves Pizarros in fighting and treasure-getting. ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... Stavrogin will come later. But I will note now as a curious fact that of all the impressions made on him by his stay in our town, the one most sharply imprinted on his memory was the unsightly and almost abject figure of the little provincial official, the coarse and jealous family despot, the miserly money-lender who picked up the candle-ends and scraps left from dinner, and was at the same time a passionate believer in some visionary future "social harmony," who at ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... On his return to the capital Peter, in order to see what progress his son had made in mechanics and mathematics, asked him to draw something of a technical nature for his inspection. Alexius, in order to escape such an ordeal, resorted to the abject expedient of disabling his right hand by a pistol-shot. In no other way could the tsarevich have offended his father so deeply. He had behaved like a cowardly recruit who mutilates himself to escape military service. After this, Peter seemed for a time to take no ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sailor handed him a note from Captain Fitz-Roy, full of abject apology for having so forgotten himself. Darwin was then but twenty-two years old, but the poise and patience of the young man won the respect and then the admiration and finally the affection of every man on board ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... of the population lives in abject poverty. Nearly 70% of all Haitians depend on the agriculture sector, which consists mainly of small-scale subsistence farming and employs about two-thirds of the economically active work force. The country has experienced little or no job creation since President PREVAL ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... an interpreter, came to say that I must go to Newgate. This is a prison where the most wretched and abject criminals are kept. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... be acknowledged this unduly dependent spirit has been often shown. A greater wrong could not be done to orphans, when grown to maturity, than to treat them as children, unable to make their own way in the world. This would be to destroy all strength of character, and turn them into abject, and at the same time discontented, paupers. Few have been so destitute of common sense as to have supposed that in this way they were to be supported, but there has been a tendency to expect the missionaries to set them out on a career of self-support, and remove ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... for him, also, there is no respect of King or Pope; he has placed himself above law, and substituted his own will for justice. With his pen, as Cellini with his dagger, he assassinates; his cynicism serves him for a coat of armour. And so abject is society, so natural has tyranny become, that he extorts blackmail from monarchs, makes princes tremble, and receives smooth answers to his insults from Buonarroti. These three men, Machiavelli, Cellini, and Aretino, each in his own line, and with the proper differences ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... of the most pitiful objects in nature is a man or an animal in a condition of abject fear; and an examination of Plate XIV. in Man Visible and Invisible shows that under such circumstances the astral body presents no better appearance than the physical. When a man's astral body is thus in a state of frenzied palpitation, its natural tendency ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... perhaps the strongest instance of his externality. His wife may do what she pleases, and though he may groan, it will never occur to him to blame her; he has no weapon left but tears and the most abject submission. We should perhaps have respected him more had he not given way so utterly - above all, had he refused to write, under his wife's dictation, an insulting letter to his unhappy fellow-culprit, Miss Willet; but somehow I believe ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and shuddered, twisted to his side, and at last sat up weakly. In his eyes there was now a great terror, while in place of his drunkenness was only fear and faintness—abject fear of the great bulk that sat and smoked and stared at him so fishily. He felt uncertainly of his throat, ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... compensation for her loss. Poland was surrounded by Austria, Russia and Prussia. The population consisted of two classes—the nobles who possessed all the power, and the people who were in a state of the most abject feudal vassalage. By the laws of Poland every person was a noble who was not engaged in any industrial occupation and who owned any land, or who had descended from those who ever had held any land. The ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... principally in answering objections on the present occasion) that the three first cases are not strictly analogous to that of our West Indian slaves, whose emancipation we are seeking. It will be contended, that the slaves in our West Indian colonies have been constantly in an abject and degraded state. Their faculties are benumbed. They have contracted all the vices of slavery. They are become habitually thieves and liars. Their bosoms burn with revenge against the whites. How then can persons in such a state be fit to receive their freedom? The slaves, on the other ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... without resorting to malodorous measures—stamping his little feet in rage, jumping up, spluttering and hissing and flourishing his brush like a warlike banner above his head—then hardly could I restrain my dog from turning tail and flying home in abject terror. My cruel persistence was rewarded at last. Continued shouts, cheers, and hand-clappings began to stir the brute to a kind of frenzy. Torn by conflicting emotions, he began to revolve about the skunk at a lumbering gallop, barking, howling, and bristling up his hair; and at ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... with an impossible desire, I saw Xerxes and his army, tossed and glittering, rank upon rank, multitude upon multitude, out of sight, but ever regularly advancing, and with confused roar of ceaseless music, prostrating themselves in abject homage. Or, as with arms outstretched and hair streaming on the wind, he chanted full lines of the resounding Iliad, I saw Homer pacing the Aegean sands of the ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... convincing her; that in fact she could not comprehend the drift of his arguments. Philip, it is manifest, must already have made use of very harsh language towards the queen respecting her conduct in this affair, for she deprecates his further displeasure in very abject terms; but yet persists in her resolution with laudable firmness. Her husband was so far, however, from yielding with a good grace a point on which he had certainly no right to dictate either to Mary or to her sister, that soon afterwards he sent ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... all the attempts made on this plantation to improve the moral nature of these men and women, Governor Aiken, during a yellow-fever season in Savannah after the war, while visiting the poor sufferers, intent upon charitable works, found in the lowest quarter of the city, sunk in the most abject depths of vice, men and women who had once been ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... been most mutinous and turbulent during the voyage were now most devoted and enthusiastic. Some begged favors of him, as if he had already wealth and honors in his gift. Many abject spirits, who had outraged him by their insolence, now crouched at his feet, begging pardon for all the trouble they had caused him and promising the blindest obedience for ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... affect us? where then is the remedy but in the philosophy I have mentioned, which, when once by a long course of meditation it is reduced to a habit, teaches us to set a just value on everything, and cures at once all eager wishes and abject fears, all violent joy and grief concerning objects which cannot endure long, and ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... Demosthenes to make his fellow citizens accept this proposition.[35] In 1779 Laurens said: "I would advance those who are unjustly deprived of the rights of mankind to a state which would be a proper gradation between abject slavery and perfect liberty, and besides I am persuaded that if I could obtain authority for the purpose, I would have a corps of such men trained, uniformly clad, equipped and ready in every respect to act at the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... plan it is to praise servants too highly for doing well what they are expressly paid to do, I intimated my satisfaction to my landlord by a mere careless nod and smile of approval. He, who waited on my every gesture with abject humility, received this sign of condescension with as much delight as though it had come from the king himself, and I could easily see that the very fact of my showing no enthusiasm at the result of his labors, made him consider me a greater man than ever. I now went to my own ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... never existed. And now, my dear boy, I must request that you call for your discharge, and come home as soon as possible. I cannot exist without you, and I require your assistance in the grand work I have in contemplation. The time is at hand, the cause of equality will soon triumph; the abject slaves now hold up their heads; I have electrified them with my speeches, but I am getting old and feeble; I require my son to leave my mantle to, as one prophet did to another, and then I will, like him, ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... Soul, by casting me away from you to Antonio!—Ha! (cry'd he, starting) what said you, Madam? What did Ardelia say? That I had bless'd your Soul with Hopes! That I would cast you away to Antonio!—Can they who safely arrive in their wish'd-for Port, be said to be shipwreck'd? Or, can an abject indigent Wretch make a King?—These are more than Riddles, Madam; and I must not think to expound 'em. No, (said she) let it alone, Don Henrique; I'll ease you of that Trouble, and tell you plainly that I love you. Ah! (cry'd he) now all my Fears ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... his ear, distinct, though softened by distance. "I am an appointed minister. It seems as if I were the one of whom I myself have spoken as likely to arise—not, as Laveaux says, after Raynal, to avenge, but to repair the wrongs of my colour. Low, indeed, are we sunk, deep is our ignorance, abject are our wills, if such a one as I am to be the leader of thousands—I, whose will is yet unexercised—I, who shrink ashamed before the knowledge of the meanest white—I, so lately a slave—so long dependent that I am an oppression to myself—am at this hour the ruler over ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... were obstinate, but unable to restrain his ambition: his ambition was still less dangerous than the tyranny and violence of his temper. An implacable enemy, but a lukewarm friend; insolent to his inferiors, but abject to his superiors; though in his whole character and deportment he was almost diametrically opposite to the king, he had the fortune, beyond any other minister, to maintain, during the greater part of his reign, an ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... the stuff they gave him, loathed it, paid and staggered on. When he reached his hotel he crept upstairs, dreading to meet any of the harsh-faced people who frowned as he passed them. He had done abject things these last three days to conciliate them—tipped the waiter, ordered food, not that he might eat it but that he might pay for it, bowed to the landlady—all to save the shrinking of his sore and quivering nerves. In vain! It seemed to him ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hesitation &c. (irresolution) 605. nervousness, restlessness &c. adj.; inquietude, disquietude, worry, concern; batophobia[obs3]; heartquake[obs3]; flutter, trepidation, fear and trembling, perturbation, tremor, quivering, shaking, trembling, throbbing heart, palpitation, ague fit, cold sweat; abject fear &c. (cowardice) 862; mortal funk, heartsinking[obs3], despondency; despair &c. 859. fright; affright, affrightment[obs3]; boof alarm[obs3][U.S.], dread, awe, terror, horror, dismay, consternation, panic, scare, stampede [of horses]. intimidation, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... but yesterday I rescued him From abject wretchedness. Let that go by; I never reckon'd yet on gratitude. And wherein doth he wrong in going from me? He follows still the god whom all his life He has worship'd at the gaming-table. With My fortune, and my seeming destiny, He made the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... elapsed before their arrival, the court was in a state of abject alarm, but at one o'clock the Swiss arrived; and two hours later the court set out, under their protection, for Paris. The Prince of Conde, who had with him but some four hundred gentlemen, for the most part armed only with swords, met ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... explained Dallas. 'That sort of thing has been going on the whole term. If the head of a House is an abject lunatic, there's bound to be ructions. Fags simply live for the sake of kicking up rows. It's meat and ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... years have passed; and where The Gallic bugles stirred the air, And, through breached batteries, side by side, To victory stormed the hosts allied, And brave foes grounded, pale with pain, The arms they might not lift again, As abject as in that old day The slave still ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... however abject its inhabitants may appear, where the most daring and ambitious can venture to usurp the supreme power without first obtaining a hold on public opinion; we cannot have a stronger proof of this fact, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... hope that Gabriella will never marry," replied Mrs. Carr with the uncompromising bitterness of abject despair; "the Carrs all seem to marry ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... abject mind so basely bent As of thy Muse to maken Merchandize? (And well I wote this is no strange intent.) The hopefull glimps of gold from chattering Pies, From Daws and Crows, and Parots oft hath ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... interrupting him, "his blood is noble; nor is he that abject thing, my Lord, you speak him. He is my lawful son, and Sicily can boast of few houses more ancient than that of Falconara. But alas! my Lord, what is blood! what is nobility! We are all reptiles, miserable, sinful creatures. ...
— The Castle of Otranto • Horace Walpole
... to the streaming, shivering wretch he made a noose in the rope he held, manipulating it as if he were really going to hang the abject creature, in whom the fire of rage had quite become extinct. Then the sailors took hold of him, and he uttered a despairing shriek; but he cooled down as he found that he was only to be made a prisoner, and was thrust below, with ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... error be possible—thereupon rising again at once in the organ charged to repair this error. Turn where we may, it towers high over our heads. It is the circular ocean, the tideless water, whereon our boldest and most independent thoughts will never be more than mere abject bubbles. We call it Nature to-day; to-morrow, perhaps, we shall give it another name, softer or more alarming. In the meanwhile it holds simultaneous, impartial sway over life and death; furnishing the two irreconcilable sisters with the magnificent and familiar weapons that adorn ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... one word," she answered, with an air of abject confession. "It don't interest me a mite! I give because it's my bounden duty, but I'll be whipped if I want to knit warm mittens all my life, an' fill poor barrels. Sometimes I wisht I could git a chance to provide ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... followed her into the room, carrying her impedimenta, wore the bored expression of the R.A. who is expected to admire the work of an outsider. He was the abject slave of his good-natured wife—she was good-natured, in spite of her love of scandal—and his only fault from her point of view, and his greatest one in the eyes of people in general, lay in an unfortunate habit of thinking aloud, a dangerous characteristic, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... upon by Captain Mathews, who in the name of Conway demanded an abject apology. This, of course, was refused, and a formal challenge was delivered. Calhoun at once accepted it, and referred Mathews to his ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn
... Kaiser and Crown Prince had fled for safety to Holland, a nation they had asserted existed only by the long sufferance of Germany. Before the fatal day (November 11, 1918) of the armistice—like the falling of a house of cards—had occurred a succession of abject surrenders, as one by one of the nations composing the Teutonic Alliance had fallen before the crushing blows of the ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... fortify his body against infection, half to fortify his heart against conscience. Tom had never reproached him for his share in the public folly. Indeed, Tom had never reproached a single soul. Poor wretches who had insulted him had sent for him, with abject shrieks. "Oh, doctor, doctor, save me! Oh, forgive me! oh, if I'd minded what you said! Oh, don't think of what I said!" And Tom had answered cheerfully, "Tut-tut; never mind what might have been; let's feel ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... lowpower magnifying glass: 2 erotic photocards showing a) buccal coition between nude senorita (rere presentation, superior position) and nude torero (fore presentation, inferior position) b) anal violation by male religious (fully clothed, eyes abject) of female religious (partly clothed, eyes direct), purchased by post from Box 32, P. O., Charing Cross, London, W. C.: a press cutting of recipe for renovation of old tan boots: a Id adhesive stamp, lavender, of the reign of Queen Victoria: a chart of the measurements of Leopold Bloom compiled ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... evil, I have learnt that he cannot keep the good out of him. When the boy found himself in my clutches, he turned on me a look of such terror that it disarmed me at once, and, confounded and distressed to see a human being in such abject fear, a state which in my own experience I knew to be horrible, ashamed also that it should be before such a one as myself, I would have let him go instantly, but that I could not without first having comforted him. But not a word of mine could ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... a long time over dinner. Eve was between a cousin of mine—who was a member of Parliament, a master of foxhounds, and in his way quite a distinguished person—and the old Earl of Enterdean, my godfather; and they were both of them obviously her abject slaves. No one seemed in the least inclined to move and it was nearly eleven o'clock before we passed into the private room I had engaged, where coffee and some bridge tables awaited us. We broke up there into little ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Ajib and smote him with his mace a smashing blow and a swashing, that went nigh to beat in his ribs, and seizing him by the mail gorges tore him from the saddle and cast him to the ground; whereupon the two Marids pounced upon him and binding him fast, dragged him off dejected and abject; whilst Gharib rejoiced in the capture of his enemy and repeated these ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... work in a half-hearted way. He was still a sick man, and I more than once observed him creeping painfully aloft to a topsail, or drooping wearily as he stood at the wheel. But, still worse, it seemed that his spirit was broken. He was abject before Wolf Larsen and almost grovelled to Johansen. Not so was the conduct of Leach. He went about the deck like a tiger cub, glaring his hatred openly at Wolf Larsen ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... such hours at any rate for some. Whether they come to all mankind I know not; whether the squalid Andaman or the hideous Fuegian ever feel them I know not; nay, I know not whether they ever come, whether they ever can come, to the wretched outcasts of earth's abject poverty and fathomless degradation; whether they ever come, whether they ever can come, to the cruel and the proud, to the malicious and the mean, to the cynical and discontented; yet, if they come not to these, God ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... slightly under the strain of the control she was forcing upon herself, and the pupils of her eyes were strangely dilated, looking like bits of night sky set in a moon circle; but she spoke and moved quickly as the man, having brought the foot-gear and unwound the cut hair from the abject dog, leant down and picked up ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... of hostility to abject admiration and worship was embarrassing. His mind was all in a whirl, and when the others knelt before him and kissed his paw he could find no words to say. He simply smiled as graciously as he could, and accepted the homage ...
— Bumper, The White Rabbit • George Ethelbert Walsh
... lady whose humanity overstepped the bounds of discretion: for though she knew Miss La Rue had eloped from a convent with a young officer, and, on coming to England, had lived with several different men in open defiance of all moral and religious duties; yet, finding her reduced to the most abject want, and believing the penitence which she professed to be sincere, she took her into her own family, and from thence recommended her to Madame Du Pont, as thinking the situation more suitable for a woman of her abilities. But Mademoiselle possessed too much of the spirit ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... a vigor of her own. It was not in spiritual deference only that she differed from the country of her birth. Whatever she had caught of its corruptions, she had caught nothing of its effeminacy. The mass of her people lived in a rude poverty,—not abject, like the peasant of old France, nor ground down by the tax-gatherer; while those of the higher ranks—all more or less engaged in pursuits of war or adventure, and inured to rough journeyings and forest exposures—were rugged as their climate. Even the French regular troops, sent ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... bad faith came from so deeply wounded a spirit as he would have them believe, he was not likely to tell; but he claimed the prisoner as his own, and declined to say what he meant to do. When, however, they saw the abject terror of the Faith Healer as he begged not to be left alone with Tim—for they had not meant death, and Ingles thought he read death in Tim's ferocious eyes—they laughed cynically, and left it to Tim to uphold the honor of Jansen and ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... compensation for the expenditures he made for the relief of the early settlers of California. His death occurred at Washington, D. C., on the eighteenth day of June, 1880, and his remains were laid at rest in Litiz, Pennsylvania. The termination of this grand, heroic life, under circumstances of abject poverty and destitution, forms as strange and mournful a story as can be found in the ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... ceased to hum and flutter, left to await the coming of this awful creature. The stammering step came round the bend of the lane, and I saw for the first time a person whom I grew to respect and pity later on, but who struck me then with such an abject sense of terror as I have sometimes since ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... his private character is very amiable and respectable, but how any man possessed of common feelings, can suffer such humiliations from those around him, I cannot conceive. When any person approaches the general to speak to him, his behaviour and address must be the most abject imaginable, and the respect and profound submission which every servant of the company, and every inhabitant must necessarily assume on these occasions, are little short of the adoration paid to the Divinity: this homage is carried to so great a height, that when the general enters the church, although ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... know by experience, that those who labor sleep more sweetly and soundly than those who are labored for, and could fail to see by comparing the Persians' manner of living with their own, that it was the most abject and slavish condition to be voluptuous, but the most noble arid royal to undergo pain and labor. He argued with them further, how it was possible for anyone who pretended to be a soldier, either to look well after ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... indicate the extent to which judgment may be influenced by familiarity with perversions of the taxing power. And when we seek to reinstate the self-confidence and business enterprise of our citizens by discrediting an abject dependence upon governmental favor, we strive to stimulate those elements of American character which support the hope of ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... Isabelle, "it is to be hoped she is! I have the most abject horror of fevers and that is enough to make me catch it. Fancy having one's head shorn like a convict! The very idea ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... the dog listened. Whether these two dependents understood that they were being reproached for living at his expense, I don't know, but their stomachs looked more pinched than ever, and their whole figures shrivelled up, grew gloomier and more abject than before. . . . Their submissive air exasperated Zotov ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... my father and mother. I felt ashamed to admit that I was a foundling,—a child picked up in the streets! I knew how the children from the Foundlings' Hospital had been scorned. It seemed to me that it was the most abject thing in the world to be a foundling. I did not want Mrs. Milligan and Arthur to know. Would they not have turned from me ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... application. But although the question of slavery seems to be incidental and subordinate to the former, virtually the question of slavery is twin to the former. Slavery serves as a basis, as a nurse, for the most infamous and abject aristocracy or oligarchy that was ever built up in history, and any, even the best, the mildest, and the most honest oligarchy or aristocracy kills and destroys man ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... lowest courts? [6:3]Know you not that we shall judge angels? Much more then things pertaining to this life? [6:4]If then you have courts for the business of this life, do you constitute them of the most abject in the church? [6:5]I speak to your shame. Is there not now a wise man among you? not one who can judge between his brothers? [6:6]But brother goes to law with brother, and that before unbelievers. [6:7]Now therefore there is a great fault among you, ...
— The New Testament • Various
... sat perched upon the broad back. Forgotten were all parish cares as the venerable man gave himself up to the little waif. He had become a child again, and had entered that kingdom where children are the uncrowned monarchs, and the strong and the aged are willing subjects, yea, even most abject slaves. ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... man was wiser than his fellow. He had been given several minutes grace in which to meditate upon the unwisdom of defiance; and he had seen the bug-killer change abruptly from sullenness to terror, and afterward to abject obedience. He did not know what they had said to him, or what they had done; but he knew the bug-killer was a hard man to stampede. And he was one man, and they were many; also he judged that, being human, and this being the third offense of the Dot sheep under his care, it ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... one thing," continued the suspected man, "that the record will not tell you; that, disgusted with this abject life, I was tempted to suicide. It will not tell you anything of my desperate attempts, my repentance, my relapses. At last, I was able in part to reform. I got work; and after being in four situations, engaged myself here. I found myself well off. ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... I do not know. It must have been several minutes. Blood of Christ, how vividly I remember the vision! The sunny radiance of the girl's hair was darkened and dead. Her bending attitude was one of abject grief. Her hands covered her face, and she was the image of woe. Suddenly she lifted her head with the quick impulsive movement so familiar in her, and with a cry eloquent as a child's wail for its mother called, "John," and held out her arms imploringly ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... King of Waters! Such delightful three days in hospitable New Orleans! Might it not be possible to tarry even here? "No," cried the inexorable George. "We have put our hand to the plough. Who will turn back?" Two days of abject wretchedness on the Gulf of Mexico. "Why were we born? Why did we not die before we left solid land?" And then the light-house ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... that he would cast the emperor's head at the feet of his neighbours. When, however, the plot was discovered, he did not exhibit any firmness of mind. A confession was wrung from him without much difficulty; and, humbling himself to the most abject entreaties, he even named his innocent mother as one of the conspirators [980]; hoping that his want of natural affection would give him favour in the eyes of a parricidal prince. Having obtained permission to choose his mode of death [981], ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... a woman finds that out about her husband, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for. I say nothing about the social mistake, which would have been abject, which, of course, I would not have allowed, but I assure you that in any case the whole thing would have been an ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... her thus miserably abject and humbled, I grew abashed also and fain would have loosed me from her clasp but she held me only the faster; and thus, my hand coming upon her head, she caught that hand and kissed it passionately, wetting it with ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... went to Florence, to Rome, to Naples; thence I passed to Toulon, and at length reached what had long been the bourne of my wishes, Paris. There was wild work in Paris then. The poor king, Charles the Sixth, now sane, now mad, now a monarch, now an abject slave, was the very mockery of humanity. The queen, the dauphin, the Duke of Burgundy, alternately friends and foes—now meeting in prodigal feasts, now shedding blood in rivalry—were blind to the miserable state of their country, and the dangers that impended over it, and gave themselves wholly ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... the time and take Eleanor's attention from herself for the moment. He gave a short account of the people in question; a people of fine physical and even fine mental development, for savages; inhabiting a country of great beauty and rich natural resources; but at the same time sunk in the most abject depths of moral debasement. A country where the "works of the devil" had reached their utmost vigour; where men lived but for vile ends, and took the lives of their fellow-men and each other with the utmost ruthlessness ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... deepest in the divine heart, the desire which God has most for every one of us. And when the Old Testament tells us that the great motive of the divine action is for 'My own Name's sake,' that expression might be so regarded as to disclose an ugly despot, who only wants to be reverenced by abject and submissive subjects. But what it really means is this, that the divine love which hovers over its poor, prodigal children because it is love, and, therefore, lovingly delights in a loving recognition and response, desires most ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... in this dependent state, was the very reverse of what it should have been. In place of directing his studies to some useful acquisition, so as to support himself and family, he spent his time in the most abject trifling, and drew many heavy expences upon his father, who had no other means of supporting himself than what his congregation afforded, and a small estate of fourscore pounds a ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... of affluence to that of penury. An illustration of this proposition was afforded in the family of Mr. Wheelwright. It appeared that after the change recorded in the last chapter, from a condition of the most abject misery, to that of comparative comfort, the Doctor's lady, elated by her prosperity, began to take airs upon herself, and her carriage was such as to excite the jealousy of her neighbors up stairs. The consequences were a speedy and open rupture, so that occasional ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... lay the forms of the woman and the children; I could see their dull eyes, unblinking, looking up at me in abject terror. Still the patter of footsteps sounded from without, with now and then an interval ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... listened for the noise of a fall or a cry or the crash of a piece of the handrail of the upper landing; but none of these things came. She was spared. Apparently her rival suffered her to crawl abject and beaten away. Oleron heard the passing of her steps under his window; ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... and to kill a viper and foster its young, would not be the acts of rational beings. Though the clouds pour down the water of vegetation, thou canst never gather fruit from a willow twig. Exalt not the fortune of the abject, for thou canst never extract sugar from a mat or ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... advance or retrogression; and, with few exceptions indeed, the prevailing and conspicuous element in all publications of more than a century ago is a tacit acceptance of irresponsible lordship and abject inferiority as Divine ordinances. Brutal indifference, utter contempt, or more insulting condescension, toward the rank and file, was an article of the fine old English gentleman's religion— "a point of our faith," as the pious Sir Thomas Browne seriously puts it— ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... am always looking for. To me all of them told the full story of what went before and necessitated the great French revolution—the long precedent crushing of the masses of a heroic people into the earth, in abject poverty, hunger—every right denied, humanity attempted to be put back for generations—yet Nature's force, titanic here, the stronger and hardier for that repression—waiting terribly to break forth, revengeful—the pressure on the dykes, and the bursting ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... say unnatural—way. In the early days of the siege, you see, some poor wretch who lived near our hospital possessed, as is almost always the case with a Frenchman removed a quarter of a degree, say, above abject poverty, a favorite dog. One day his beast and house were made glad by the appearance of two pups. They were tawny, bright-eyed little fellows, and the Frenchman loved them with a love that the Anglo-Saxon knows not of, especially in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... France, upon the brother of her favourite Leonora,[52] an unhappy being who was not only deformed in person, but so wholly deficient in intellect that every effort even to teach him to read had proved ineffectual. So abject was he, indeed, that Concini had been careful never to allow him to come into contact with Henri IV lest he should be banished from the Court; and this ill-advised donation consequently excited great disapprobation, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... before him. The body of Sir Rowland was then laid on the large table. Opposite to it was placed the Jew. Seeing from the threatening looks of his captors, that they were about to wreak their vengeance upon him, the miserable wretch besought mercy in abject terms, and charged his master with the most atrocious crimes. His relation of the murder of Sir Rowland petrified even his ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... steward, whom love and zealous affection to his master had led to seek him out at his wretched dwelling and to offer his services; and the first sight of his master, the once noble Timon, in that abject condition, naked as he was born, living in the manner of a beast among beasts, looking like his own sad ruins and a monument of decay, so affected this good servant that he stood speechless, wrapped up in horror and confounded. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... have a warning! Slowly I have developed a new sense that needs not eyes, nor ears, nor sense of touch—no antennae even, such as I once possessed—but unites and transcends all these! And I beg of you in my most abject humility, do not venture to remove even one formic-acid wall, either from above or from its depth into the ground. Rather build more! Perceptively I shudder in the awful remembrance of their occasion, and the day may come when they ...
— Walls of Acid • Henry Hasse
... superseded by some more mastering passion or emotion. This passion or emotion, according to those who deny her attachment to Bothwell, was simply terror—the blind and irrational prostration of an abject spirit before the cruel force of circumstances and the crafty wickedness of men. Hitherto, according to all evidence, she had shown herself on all occasions, as on all subsequent occasions she indisputably showed herself, the most fearless, the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... betrayed my abject despair. I was so completely knocked over that I offered no opposition when the Colonel impudently took the telegram out of my ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... given no sign of life, and I, at least, had supposed him to be still lying in a faint; but he replied at once, and in such tones as I have never heard elsewhere, save from a delirious patient, adjured and besought us not to desert him. It was the most hideous and abject performance that my imagination ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ought to receive him," said her sister, and accordingly Jimmy was conducted to the drawing-room, where he at once began to make an almost abject apology. ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... shoulders, or he would have fallen. The man's eyes opened and closed again, and he swayed weakly backward and forward, and choked as if his throat were dry and burning. Even to such a hardened connoisseur in crime as Gallegher, who stood closely by, drinking it in, there was something so abject in the man's terror that he regarded him with what was ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... pranced, kicked, savaged the air—not an item of all his pentup wickedness being undemonstrated. Then George dismounted suddenly, and calling in soothing tones, Christmas realised that the appalling creature was but a temporary compound of his playmate and the abject Jonah. Cautiously advancing in a series of contours dislocated with staccato stops and starts and frothy exclamations, he seemed to recognise the whole episode as a practical joke, of which he had been the victim, and to promise retaliation upon ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... nation, and was clearly only an instrument by which the Council of the Army might exercise its power. "The name of the Protector was no longer heard but in derision." [Footnote: Richard Cromwell submitted himself, with abject and craven weakness, to the will of this so-called Parliament. Nor did his younger brother, Henry, the Lieutenant of Ireland, prove to have any larger share of his father's courage.] But nothing was established to take the place of the ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... with his glasses. Thousands of men were running like frightened rabbits down the Cimatario slope, and spreading as a fan over the grassy plain. Mountain pieces boomed farewell behind them, until in abject panic they cast away carbines and scrambled the faster. But other troops were pushing up the slope opposite the town, and these were ordered ranks of infantry. Up and up they climbed, to trench after trench, and the howitzers one by one stopped ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... baron!" burst out Kranitski. "Lili and superhumanity, the ideal! Why, she is a little beast that sings abject ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... be at all morbid. Certainly it is morbid when a man allows himself to be insulted, bound and flogged, but it is fairly normal when his passionate admiration is roused by an imperious woman, who passes him by like a queen without even noticing his abject adoration; when he longs to kneel down before her and kiss her feet, which in reward would spurn him. Quite normal, too, is the boyish happiness in serving an admired and adored woman (Kraft-Ebbing calls this pageism) described so beautifully in Dostoievsky's ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... varied and numerous, and easy of proof. He had received bribes; he had given false judgments for money; he had perverted justice to secure the smiles of Buckingham, the favorite; and when a commission was appointed to examine these charges he was convicted. With abject humility, he acknowledged his guilt, and implored the pity of his judges. The annals of biography present no sorrier picture than this. "Upon advised consideration of the charges," he wrote, "descending into my own conscience, and calling my memory to account ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... it is clear to me, clearer perhaps than it ever was to her, that she, with her resentment at being in any sense property, her self-reliant thought, her independence of standard, was the very prototype of that sister-lover who must replace the seductive and abject womanhood, owned, mastered and deceiving, who waste the world to-day. And she was owned, she was mastered, she was forced into concealment. What alternative was there for her? What alternative is there for any woman? She might perhaps have kept her freedom by ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... could I continue to administer Sacraments that I ceased to believe in. I can imagine nothing more shameful than the life of a man who continues his administrations after he has ceased to believe in them, especially a Catholic priest, so precise and explicit are the Roman Sacraments. A very abject life it is to murmur Absolve te over the heads of parishioners, and to place wafers on their tongues, when we have ceased to believe that we have power to forgive sins and to turn biscuits into God. A layman may have doubts, and continue to live his life as before, without troubling to take the ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... as strictly defined as a word could have, being the proper legal designation for those persons who were the subjects of the less onerous forms of feudal bondage. The scorn of the semi-barbarous military aristocracy for these their abject dependants, rendered the act of likening any person to this class of people a mark of the greatest contumely; the same scorn led them to ascribe to the same people all manner of hateful qualities, which doubtless also, in the degrading situation in which they were held, were often not unjustly ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... finally. "I give it up. I haven't succeeded in getting within ten yards of a nigger woman to-day. If I went in at the front door, every occupant in a house would bolt out at the back one, and run for dear life. They will listen to no overtures of friendship. Our very faces fill them with abject terror. We had just as well throw up the insurance business and quit, as far as Wilmington is concerned. God's curse on the men who are responsible for this blight upon the good name of this city. One woman ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... of the Roman cities under the popular rule of their Bishops is illustrated by Milan, second only to Rome in the last days of the Empire. Milan had been reduced to the condition of abject misery by the Kings, who spared no pains to exalt Pavia at the expense of her elder sister. After the dissolution of the kingdom, she started into a new life, and in 1037 her archbishop, Heribert, was singled out by Conrad II. as the protagonist of the episcopal ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... it meant to her. In her bedroom she dismissed her maid and went to an open window. She was very tired, but restless, and disinclined for bed. Dropping down on the low seat she stared out over the moonlit landscape. The repentant Mouston, abject at her continued neglect, crawled from his basket and crept tentatively to her, and as absently her hand went out to him gained courage and climbed up beside her. Inch by inch he sidled nearer, and unrepulsed grew bolder until he finally ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... take the word of its administrative head, especially since he desires the same freedom. This was actually the case in Sacramento, Cal., where the commission plan was tried for fifteen years and given up as an abject failure. Says the Hon. Clinton White of that city: "In almost every instance, the board soon came to the understanding that each man was to be let alone in the management of the department assigned to him. This resulted in there being in fact ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... occupied by Union troops; abject terror of inhabitants; guarded by General Cox; measures taken to prevent outbreak on ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... Osborne—about himself. He was just as cordial and friendly as ever with her. If Cynthia had not been there all would have gone on as she had anticipated; but of all the victims to Cynthia's charms he fell most prone and abject. Molly saw it all, as she was sitting next to Miss Phoebe at the tea-table, acting right- hand, and passing cake, cream, sugar, with such busy assiduity that every one besides herself thought that her mind, as well as her hands, was fully occupied. ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... was a miserable dancer on the public squares in the presence of these high-born maidens? They seemed to take no heed of her presence, and talked of her aloud, to her face, as of something unclean, abject, and yet, at the same time, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... first words Winter started as if a pike had been thrust into his side. On his face was written blank astonishment, which expression, as she proceeded, gave way to one of abject fear. It would have been difficult to say which of the two was the more agitated. He dashed a hand to his brow as if to drive away the fumes of liquor which had mounted to his brain; looked at the kneeling figure; gazed on the tapers burning upon the table; and tried to form some ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... method of correspondence with the universe is not to be identified with "mere feeling" in its lowest and least orderly forms. Contemplation does not mean abject surrender to every "mystical" impression that comes in. It is no sentimental aestheticism or emotional piety to which you are being invited: nor shall the transcending of reason ever be achieved by way of spiritual ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... population, upon whose daily and yearly labor the great establishments they so much admired were sustained and supported. They failed to perceive that the scantily fed and half-clad operatives were not only in abject poverty, but were bound in chains of oppressive servitude for the benefit of favored classes, who were the exclusive objects of the care of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... House, anxious only to do his duty to his QUEEN and Country. Whereas it is clear he is a martinet of the severest type, a ruthless tyrant, a man who rules with a rod of iron, and keeps his followers in a condition of abject personal terror." ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 6, 1891 • Various
... she padded off after Eleseus up through the forest, shrunken with age, grey and abject, and for ever nosing after things, imperishable. Going to old Sivert now, to let him know how she, Oline, had managed ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun |
