"Hard-won" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of renunciation, the exhaustion of wrenching effort, the trembling triumph of hard-won victory, were in the boy's face, and the thought, as he looked at it, dear and familiar in every shadow, that he had never seen spirit shine through clay more transparently. Never in their lives had the two been as close, never had the son so unveiled his soul ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... their toil would find their comrade dead or severely wounded, the camp rifled of everything it contained, and the horses speared; and the hardy and adventurous pioneers would have to retreat to one of the main mining camps, situated perhaps fifty miles away, with nothing left to them but the hard-won gold they had saved and their mining tools, but ready and eager to venture ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... event of a cabinet crisis, and within the domain of foreign relations, the royal power may be said to be brought to bear in direct manner upon the affairs of state only incidentally. As head of the nation, however, and visible token of its hard-won unification, the monarch fulfills a distinctly useful function. The reigning family, and especially the present sovereign, Victor Emmanuel III., is extremely popular throughout the country; so that, although ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... believe in the greatness of America? How can we not do what is right and needed to preserve this last best hope of man on Earth? After all our struggles to restore America, to revive confidence in our country, hope for our future, after all our hard-won victories earned through the patience and courage of every citizen, we cannot, must not, and will not turn back. We will finish our job. How could we ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... they have forgotten Gettysburg! That the presence of United States troops at the polls is an abuse no sober man will deny; but to attempt to remedy it at this time, when the war is so lately over, when the North is naturally sensitive as to securing the hard-won results of it, when, consequently, every squeak of a penny whistle is easily interpreted into a rebel yell by the artful devices of Mr. Blaine and his crew, — this was simply to invade the North again as we did in '64. And we have met precisely another Gettysburg. The whole ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... and soon I heard the heavy thud that told me the boat had touched the beach, and the harsh grating of the shingle as the men dragged it up. I roused myself, and, after lending them a hand in hauling up their boat, I lingered yet awhile to watch them disembark a goodly assortment of the hard-won 'treasures ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... have startled his age,—"it is the people who build cities, while the madness of princes destroys them." The sovereigns of his time appeared to him like ravenous birds pouncing with beak and claw on the hard-won wealth and knowledge of mankind. "Kings who are scarcely men," he exclaimed in bitter irony, "are called 'divine'; they are 'invincible' though they fly from every battle-field; 'serene' though they turn the world upside down in a storm of war; 'illustrious' though they grovel ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... the hard-won successes of the war has been a victory for well-placed high explosives. In the last fight around Przemysl the Germans fired in one hour, from field guns, 200,000 ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... His paper was one of the most influential country papers in the state. He was proud of its reputation and anxious to do nothing that would injure its hard-won prestige. ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... language into microscopic atoms at a single blow. He is more fond of women, horses, and prize-fighting than is good for him. He will steal when he is hungry, lie to save his skin, curse most terribly on trifling provocation, and spend, to his last sou markee, his hard-won ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... services to human welfare, health, and happiness which can be rendered by the destruction of the living external causes of disease and the prevention of contagion, our most permanent and substantial victories are won by appealing to and increasing this long-descended and hard-won power ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... Clay wrested his education from books, experience, and downright hard thinking; and we Americans still like to tell of the immortal Lincoln poring over the pages of his few and hard-won volumes before the glare of the wood-fire on the hearth, or the uncertain light of the tallow dip. Benjamin Franklin got his education ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... am too poor a man to throw away so much hard-won gold. I am keeping it until I can see Mr. McFarlane and ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... horses, and ammunition to their forces, grave tidings came from Mexico. The Indians of Tenochtitlan had arisen, assaulted the fortifications of the Spaniards on all sides, and unless Cortes desired to see all his work undone, his people massacred, and his hard-won prestige ruined, he must make his way as fast as God would let him again to the city on the ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... fight for them, And set upon their battle-flag a fair New constellation as a diadem! Along the blood-stained banks of Brandywine The ragged troops were rallied to this sign; Through Saratoga's woods it fluttered bright Amid the perils of the hard-won fight; O'er Yorktown's meadows broad and green It hailed the glory of the final scene; And when at length Manhattan saw The last invaders' line of scarlet coats Pass Bowling Green, and fill the waiting boats And sullenly withdraw, The flag that proudly ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... tore a paper across and tossed it into the flame. "Tom, Tom, don't look so woe-begone! Life is long, and now and then a battle will be lost. A battle—a campaign, a war! But given the fighter, all wars will not be lost. Somewhere, there awaits Victory, hard-won, but laurel-crowned!" He tore and burned another paper. "This fat's in the fire, this chance has gone by, this road's barricaded, and we must across country to another! Well, I shall make it serve, the smooth, green, country road that jog-trots ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... Mary-Clare's hard-won philosophy of life stood her in poor stead now. She felt an insane desire to give way and laugh. It was a maddening thing to contemplate, but she seemed to see things so cruelly real and Larry seemed shouting to her from a distance that she could never retrace. For a moment ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... two men jointly attempted to argue Lilas out of her black despondency, and when they left it was with a hard-won promise that she would do nothing ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... immediately planted opposing palisadoes, and established strong outposts near to the retreat of the Moors, while at the same time King Ferdinand ordered that his encampment should be pitched within the hard-won orchards. ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... civic government and the battle-ground of many a hard-won fight for civil and religious liberty, was built anew by the self-denying efforts of a generation of London citizens just five hundred years ago. This great work took ten years and more in building, and, like its ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... strenuous endeavors had this sentence been commuted by the King to life punishment. Geoffrey fled to Scotland, whilst the Squire had been exercising himself on his erring son's behalf. It was the last straw, and George Montfichet disinherited his son. The hard-won Manor of Gamewell must pass from ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... conceive, he is from time to time aided by the zealous amateur, though I find very little in his dispositions to show that he relies on that amateur's hard-won information. There exists—unlike some other publication, it is not bound in lead boards—a work by one "M. de C.," based on the absolutely unadorned performances of one of our well-known Acolyte type of cruisers. It contains nothing that did not happen. It covers a period ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... this country, and the youngest son is frequently heir to that land on which the older ones have borne the "heat and burthen of the day," and rendered valuable by their toil, until each chooses his own portion in the world, by taking unto himself a wife and a lot of forest land, and thus another hard-won homestead is raised, and sons enough to choose among for heirs. Melancthon Grey had wedded his cousin, a custom common among the "blue noses," and which most likely had its origin in the patriarchal days of the earlier settlers, when the inhabitants ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... in the mud of some November day for the honour of their school or house. Small wonder that when school-fellows meet after years of separation, the memories to which they most gladly return, are the memories of hard-won victories ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... beside him on his coach, and took charge with Lady Lucy of his army of women canvassers; though she faced the mob with him at Hartingfield, on the occasion of the first disturbance there in June, and had stood beside him, vindictively triumphant on the day of his first hard-won victory, she would wear no ring, and she baffled all inquiries, whether of her relations or her girl friends. Her friendship with her cousin Oliver was nobody's concern but her own, she declared, and all they both wanted was ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for in Adam Warwick justice was stronger than mercy, reason than impulse, head than heart. Experience was a teacher whom he trusted; he had weighed this woman and found her wanting; truth was not in her; the patient endeavor, the hard-won success so possible to many was hardly so to her, and a union between them could bring no lasting good to either. He knew this; had decided it in a calmer hour than the present, and by that decision he would now abide proof against ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... or Providence, or whatever it is that presides at the destinies of nations, has a way of setting aside with ironical smile the most deliberate actions of men. And so, on this occasion, it turned out that the hard-won victory of Messrs. Randolph, Bland, Pendleton, and Wythe was of no avail. William Gordon tells us, without mentioning the source of his information, that "a manuscript of the unrevised resolves soon reached Philadelphia, having been sent off immediately upon their passing, ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... cost; they feel vaguely that in the decay of religion the bases of society have been somehow weakened. Now, much of this sort of talk is as old as history, and has no special significance. We are prone to forget that civilization has always been a tour de force, so to speak, a little hard-won area of order and self-subordination amidst a vast wilderness of anarchy and barbarism that are with difficulty held in check and are continually threatening to overrun their bounds. But that is equally no reason for over-confidence. Civilization ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... with oil, escaped in disorder from his marvellously shaped top hat, and the massive crowbar that had brought him his hard-won victory stood upright on one end, grasped in his gigantic hand. He smiled round on the gathering crowd, and the procession moved proudly up the streets till within half an hour the people following and cheering ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... invincible in love. Love? Do I not know it? Can I not understand how that splendid fighting animal, Antony, quartered the globe with his sword and pillowed his head between the slim breasts of Egyptian Cleopatra while that hard-won world ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... after years the future statesman enjoyed many a hard-won victory. Sweet is the breath of fame! Sweet the praise of nations! But I question whether, in all the vicissitudes, successes, failures, trials, and triumphs of his future life, Ishmael Worth ever tasted such keen joy as he did this night in ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... not of old; Our patient hands distil The shining spheres of chemic gold With hard-won, fruitless skill; But that red drop still seems to be ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... and turned Nancy's hard-won philosophy to ashes. She did not want to be idle, and she did not want to be rich, but when she saw women younger than herself, in no visible way inferior, who were both, her calm was shattered for ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... their strength and their fame, and their hard-won treasures upon eating and drinking, and fine clothes, and ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... rescued from death in the Sound to become the instrument of the discovery of a plot to beat the boys to the Sargasso and the treasure ship. Gritting his teeth he resolved to do all he could to frustrate the man who had tried to outwit the Boy Aviators in Africa and steal their hard-won ivory. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... moderated considerably, and at 7 A.M. we started but met a rough sea and so stiff a wind we barely succeeded in rounding the cape by all hands pulling their best. Thence we struggled down the coast, creeping close to the shore and taking advantage of the shelter of protecting rocks, making slow, hard-won progress until about the middle of the afternoon, when the sky opened and the blessed sun shone out over the beautiful waters and forests with rich amber light; and the high, glacier-laden mountains, adorned with fresh snow, slowly came to view in all their grandeur, ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... even as the little maid protested. Massive, silent, contemptuous, his small eyes under the wolfish skull cold and alight with a look that sent shuddering from him the timid,—thus he had been in his hard-fought and hard-won supremacy, a great, mysterious beast brought full-grown from the snowbound wilderness of the forest one famine-time by old Aquamis and sold to Bois DesCaut ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... with joy, for was there not given to her here unquestionable evidence of her success in the application of loving-kindness? Assuredly it was no small triumph to have brought drunken, riotous, close-fisted, miserly, fierce Mrs Rampy to pour her hard-won savings at her feet, for which on her knees she thanked God that night fervently. Meanwhile, however, she said, with a grave shake of ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... sweet Brunhild. May you dwell among us so content that regret for Issland will never trouble you," she cried. Then taking Brunhild's hand she kissed her with gracious good will. Queen Uta likewise made known her gladness in receiving the hard-won bride of Gunther. For days thereafter all the court, with the knights and ladies gathered from every part of that realm, made merry continually, and never was a time more memorable for chivalrous deeds and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... [40] first tinged with melancholy, as if in entering the town he had put off his country peace. The other Olympians are above sorrow. Dionysus, like a strenuous mortal hero, like Hercules or Perseus, has his alternations of joy and sorrow, of struggle and hard-won triumph. It is out of the sorrows of Dionysus, then,—of Dionysus in winter—that all Greek tragedy grows; out of the song of the sorrows of Dionysus, sung at his winter feast by the chorus of satyrs, singers clad in goat-skins, in memory ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... ability to indulge himself however fast his fancies shifted; she reasoned that because so many good things were his, he need not necessarily hold them in light esteem. Yet the thought persisted that he knew neither his own mind nor his own heart; there had been no discipline there, no hard-won ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... writing of this very letter—it was done without his knowledge and without the remotest suggestion of such a thing from him. This should be made clear: that Amerigo Vespucci had no thought of depriving his friend, Christopher Columbus, of a single leaf of his laurels, hard-won and well-deserved as ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... all about him in this his short triumph of love; that a flower's heart beat against his own, that a flower's lips caressed the lean darkness of his cheek. There were threads of gold in the soft brown tangle of hair—gold unalloyed as was the hard-won happiness that made him feel himself invincible, panoplied in an armour of joy that should defend them from all slings and arrows. He was happy, and so the world seemed full of music; there was harmony ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... profoundly affecting the opinions of many of the most influential people in the South as to the capacity of the negro, and to do anything which would make the work in these brigade schools less extensive, or less thorough, will push him and his friends off this hard-won vantage-ground." ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... not the sense to profit by their hard-won liberty. The lower classes, who in this revolution had become aware of their strength, determined to follow out the victory by taking possession of the property of the nobles. The latter took refuge ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... did not go. The mystery and companionship of the sub-tropical night was upon them with its sensuous caresses. All of Payne's hard-won man-strength seemed to leave him: he felt as weak as a child; and ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... climbed beside him, and who fought And suffered and was glad? Is she a lesser thing than he, Who stained the slopes with bloody feet, or stood Beside him on some hard-won eminence of hope Exulting as the bold dawn swept A harper hand along the ringing hills? Flesh of his flesh, and of his soul the soul, Hath she not ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... happiness and life, shut in shame and death. Out yonder, with Adrian, was the fresh bright world, the sea, the sunshine, the dear ones; here the prison smells, the gloom, the constraint, the inflicted dreadful death. All his hard-won calm fled from him; all his youth, his immense vitality woke up and cried out in him again. He raised his hands and pulled fiercely at his collar as if already the rope were round his neck strangling him. His blood hammered in his ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... It was a hard-won victory. Even then he experienced a sort of satisfaction in knowing that Pearce Tallam must feel humiliated and of small account to be thus utterly dependent for his bread upon the boy whom he had so persistently ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... all that was antiquated, formal, and stupid. Among the young generation it was used most disrespectfully as equivalent to "pompous blockhead." Zealous officials who had lately regarded the acquisition of Stars and Orders as among the chief ends of man, were fain to conceal those hard-won trophies, lest some cynical "Liberal" might notice them and make them the butt of his satire. "Look at the depth of humiliation to which you have brought the country"—such was the chorus of reproach that was ever ringing in ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... almost terrified exclusiveness reminds me only of our own social groups balancing on the very tip of the pyramid and clutching one another lest some intruder topple them off, or cast the faintest shadow on their hard-won prestige, are working in small groups composed of their own friends, I could not meet one of them if I pitched ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... ten, but even at thirty it would be foolishness to retrace all that hard-won distance merely for the sake of keeping in sight of this muddy stream, the very water of which is unfit for Christian stomach, and of no value otherwise. 'Tis my vote we strike directly east and north, following as straight a trail as possible until we find ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... Lessing, whom Goethe in a moment of caprice had neglected to visit in Leipzig. Already, moreover, he had produced work in literary criticism which by its suggestiveness and originality had attracted much attention, and notably among the youth of Germany. In hard-won experience, in extent of knowledge and range of ideas, therefore, Herder, as Goethe himself speedily saw and acknowledged, was far ahead of him along those very paths where he ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... October, and during this period great battles between bulls frequently occur before the victor walks off with his hard-won spouse. The young—either one or two, but generally two after the mother's first experience—are born in May, in some secluded spot, and the calves soon begin to follow their mother about, and they follow her, too, into their second ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... poetry of Wordsworth, is to discover how greatly England was influenced by matters that appeared beyond her borders. The famous Reform Bill (1832) which established manhood suffrage, the emancipation of the slaves in all British colonies, the hard-won freedom of the press, the plan of popular education,—these and numberless other reforms of the age may be regarded as part of a general movement, as the attempt to fulfill in England a promise made to the world by two events which occurred earlier and on foreign soil. These two events, which profoundly ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... on record that she ever taught one single woman anything about economy, their hard-won knowledge beginning about where hers left off—which wasn't fur from where it started; but she did bring a lot of wholesome pleasure ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... down, he sat pale, motionless, almost inanimate. From the hard-won sunny heights, he was once more cast down into the shadow of death. The second storm of his life began, howling and raging, with yet more awful lulls between. "Is she not mine?" he said, in agony. "Do I not feel that she is mine? Who will watch over ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... performance, political intrigue and allegations of corruption continued to swirl in 2003, with the TOLEDO administration growing increasingly unpopular, and local and foreign concern rising that the political turmoil could place the country's hard-won fiscal and financial stability at risk. Moreover, as of late 2003, unemployment had yet to respond to the strong growth in economic activity, owing in part to rigid labor market regulations that act as ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the Shenandoah Valley into the Northern States. But at Gettysburg he met the reorganized Union army, under Meade. The collision of one hundred and sixty thousand men, lasting for three days, resulted in that hard-won Union victory which proved the turning-point of the war. On the day of Lee's retreat from Gettysburg, the Fourth of July, Vicksburg was surrendered to Grant. Soon after, Port Hudson fell, and the Mississippi was opened to the passage of troops. Then the ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... drying of the herbs in sunny, quiet botanical gardens, and the sorting and mingling of earths and metals among the furnaces of the laboratory; not merely the first tremendous tragic fight between the sudden sickness and the physician, and the first pathetic, hard-won victory, the first weary but rapturous return out of doors of the convalescent; but the life of the men on whose science our power for life against death is based: the botanists knee-deep in the pale spring woods; the geologists in the snowy hollows ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... in the middle of the night an alarm. Our neighbors had allowed themselves to be driven out of our hard-won position, and the 6th Company, with the 8th and 5th, had to make good the lost ground. A hasty march through the communication trenches up to the front, the night lit up far and wide with searchlights and flares and ourselves ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... bilge didn't hurt it, as I tugged at the plank on my hands and knees, but I should have myself preferred a more accessible and less humid wine-cellar than the cavities among slimy ballast from which I dug the bottles. I regarded my hard-won and ill-favoured pledges of a meal with ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... achievement, a small gold pin in the shape of a rocket ship. He, too, had had his difficulties with the Polaris unit, and while he had never been heard to compliment anyone on anything, expecting nothing but the best all the time, he nevertheless congratulated them heartily as he gave them their hard-won trophy. ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... for our brothers brave that fell On that field so stern and gory; But their spirits rose with our triumph yell To the heavenly realms of glory. And their bodies rest on the hard-won field— By their love so true and tender, We'll keep the prize they would not yield, We'll die, but we'll ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... broke and fled. The victory was complete. The archduke only just escaped capture, and of his army 5000 perished and a large number were taken prisoners, among these the Admiral of Aragon. Almost by a miracle was the States' army thus rescued from a desperate position. Maurice's hard-won triumph greatly enhanced his fame, for the battle of Nieuport destroyed the legend of the invincibility of the Spanish infantry in the open field. The victorious general, however, was not disposed to run any further risks. He accordingly retreated to Ostend and there embarked his troops for the ports ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... of hoofs, a rush of excited steeds up the gentle slope, a glad outburst of cheers as they sweep across the ridge and out of sight, then the clamor and yell of frantic battle; and when at last it dies away, the Riflers are panting over the hard-won position and shaking hands with some few silent cavalrymen. They have carried the ridge, captured the migrating village, squaws, ponies, travois, and pappooses; their "long Toms" have sent many a stalwart warrior to the mythical hunting-grounds, and the peppery ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... learn that moving alphabet, Each smallest silver character inscribed Upon the skies themselves, noting them down, Till on a day we find them taking shape In phrases, with a meaning; and, at last, The hard-won beauty of that celestial book With all its epic harmonies unfold Like some ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... prison-houses, in far-separate Russian cities, wherein a youth and a maiden lie nightly dreaming the same dreams: one of them a spirit already bonded to the service of mind under the whip of circumstance: destined to storm rocky heights, from which hard-won eminences he shall command great views of sweeping plains and far-off mountain ranges; the other a pretty chrysalis on the eve of her change into a butterfly of butterflies; who is, nevertheless, to attempt flights overhigh and overfar for her frail wings; venturing ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... express-boxes; and once a week a treasure coach armored with boiler plate, carrying no passengers, and guarded by six or eight "messengers" or "sawed-off shotgun men," conveyed often as high as two hundred thousand dollars of hard-won Black ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... after I had once been incited to a stubborn, desperate but successful resistance against the attempt of robbing me of it, it had become dearer to me. Now I was determined to know everything there is to be known concerning the value of this hard-won treasure. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... herself embarrassed by the mulatto's services. She now perceived sadness beneath the quiet lines of his face and hard-won culture in the tones of his voice. The essential tragedy of his defeat grew more poignant to her as she watched him getting the trunks strapped, surrounded by maids and porters. How could she have misread his manner? He was performing ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland |
