"Blindness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stricken with blindness. Mrs. Sherwood was much affected. She took down her Bible and read to him. And she read the beautiful litanies of the Episcopal prayer-book. With her boys she knelt in prayer by his bedside. The blind eyes moistened; for the ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... with my eyes. Right along. I'm on the floe not eighty yards from Simms. No, not sixty! It was me killed the bear, an' we're goin' back to the schooner for a sled. I stayed behind to bleed the brute. All of a sudden, like it always hits you, snow-blindness gits me, an' I shouts to Honest Simms. I'm blind, with my eyeballs on fire, an' the fire burnin' back inter ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... son to be lost to me in this manner," cried Pricker; "and if in the blindness of his folly he has lost himself, I will bring him back with violence, if necessary, to the right path. Off, then, with this absurd coat! off with this fool's cap! off with all ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... light was turned on my eyes. There was no sound in the room save the muffled cry of the woman. The hands at my throat were released, and I was ordered to stand up. Some elementary tests of my blindness were tried, and I was told to give an account of my presence in the house. My story seemed to satisfy the man who questioned me. I was bidden to sit in a chair. I could hear the sound of men carrying a heavy ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... and afflictions. O Mary, thou restorer of lost grace to all men, restore unto me my lost time, my sinful and wasted life! O Mary, thou illuminator, who didst give birth to the eternal Light of the whole world, illumine my blindness and ignorance, lest I, poor sinner that I am, enter the darkness of eternal death. O Mary, thou advocate of all miserable men, be thou my advocate at my last end before the stern judgment of God, and obtain for me the grace and the fruit of thy womb, Jesus ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... dashes it to earth, spitting upon it with wrath. The Ashantis, as the story runs, once dug treasure near Sakanya; and, as the chiefs and people were becoming too independent of them, the high priests put the precious metal 'in fetish,' with the penalty of blindness to all who worked it. A Danish governor once filled his pockets, and recovered sight only by throwing away the plunder. A brother of the Ada chief offered to show this magic-fenced placer to the late Mr. Nicol Irvine, moyennant the trifle ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... it, as above a great liquid surface, and hung giddily over it—light, [165] simple, and absolute—ere he fell. Or there was a battle between light and darkness around him, with no way of escape from the baffling strokes, the lightning flashes; flashes of blindness one might rather call them. In truth, the intuitions of the night (for they worked still, or tried to work, by night) became the sickly nightmares of the day, in which Prior Saint-Jean slept, or tried to sleep, or lay sometimes in a trance without food for many hours, ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... in darkness while the spring sun struck a million sparkles from a world yet locked in winter. The wind chilled his back, and he spread his hands to the camp blaze. In the torment of snow-blindness he wondered whether Tonty was treading these white wastes, seeking him, or lying dead of Indian wounds under the snow crust. The talk of the other snow-blinded men, sitting about or stretched with their feet to the fire, was lost on his ear. Yet his one faithful servant, who went with him ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Establishment.] In 1829 Desplein was summoned on behalf of Vanda de Mergi, daughter of Baron de Bourlac. [The Seamy Side of History.] In the latter part of the same year he operated successfully upon Mme. Mignon for blindness. In February, 1830, on account of the foregoing, he was a witness at Modeste Mignon's wedding with Ernest de la Briere. [Modeste Mignon.] In the beginning of the same yaer, 1830, he was called by Corentin to visit Baron de Nucingen, love-sick for Esther Gobseck; and Mme. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... intelligence, the sodden stolidity of the traditional criminal type. Where it appears, as it sometimes does, in criminals of high intelligence, it is regarded by psychiatrists as a specific abnormality, comparable to color-blindness or ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... helpless child, to the mercy of Behar Singh's enemies. Then I had pity enough—but years after I held back the hand of friendship which I might have offered you. Well, I am punished, twice punished, for my prejudice and blindness. Is it too late for me to make ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... spawn of Ignorance, Begotten by the slaves they trample on, 110 Who, could they win a glimmer of the light, And see that Tyranny is always weakness, Or Fear with its own bosom ill at ease, Would laugh away in scorn the sand-wove chain Which their own blindness feigned for adamant. Wrong ever builds on quicksands, but the Right To the firm centre lays its moveless base. The tyrant trembles, if the air but stir The innocent ringlets of a child's free hair, And crouches, when the thought of some great spirit, 120 With ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... drive all negroes outside the military lines. It was only when Generals Fremont, Hunter and others declared the slaves free, that they might cripple the rebel armies and add them to our Union forces, that the cry of no law, no power was raised. Thus it is clear that the blindness and inability to find rightful authority, civil or military, first to emancipate, then to arm, and now to enfranchise the negroes, have the one source. Slavery perpetrated the "sum of all villainies" ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... they here so rigid and erect? What wait they for—and what do they expect? Blindness fills up the helm 'neath iron brows; Like sapless tree no soul the hero knows. Darkness is now where eyes with flame were fraught, And thrice-bored visor serves for mask of naught. Of empty void is spectral giant made, And each of these all-powerful knights displayed Is only rind of pride and ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... compassion for the girl who in this darkness of life, buffeted and despairing, had fallen into the grip of his stronger will, abandoning herself to his arms as on a night of shipwreck. Flora on her side with partial insight (for women are never blind with the complete masculine blindness) looked on him with some pity; and she felt pity for herself too. It was a rejection, a casting out; nothing new to her. But she who supposed all her sensibility dead by this time, discovered in herself a resentment of this ultimate betrayal. She had no resignation ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... interesting to note how radically one is often misunderstood. While one person anonymously accuses the writer of free thinking and heresy, another, and he generally gives his name, complains of his orthodox narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy, and blindness, which for the most part are attributed to poor Oxford, which, in foreign countries at least, still has the ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... our acts is to simulate blindness for snares that we know are set for us. We are never so easily deceived as ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... has compiled at least five singing books, and has written the Story of the Gospel Hymns. Until overtaken by blindness, in his later years he frequently appeared as a lecturer on sacred music. The manuscript of his story of the Gospel Hymns was destroyed by accident, but, undismayed by the ruin of his work, and the loss of his eye-sight, like Sir Isaac Newton and Thomas Carlyle, he began his task again. With the ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... England in the early part of June 1855. The Crimean war was then at its height, and the military authorities were beating up for recruits in every corner of the land. This summons for war was irresistible. I was suffering a little from blindness, brought on probably by my late losses and impoverishment of blood.[31] Still I lost no time in volunteering my services to take part in this great national object, thinking it was a duty, as a soldier, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... moved solely by a conscientious persuasion that he had no right to consider personal danger when the great interests of his country and his faith were at stake? The former view has not been without its advocates, some of whom have gloried in finding the proofs of a judicial blindness sent by Heaven to hasten the self-induced destruction of the Huguenots. A more careful consideration of all the circumstances of the case, illustrated by a better appreciation of Coligny's character, rather induces me to adopt the opposite conclusion. Certainly the noble language of Coligny in reply ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... Meles or, according to different accounts, Melesigenes or Altes. Some authorities say he was called Homer, because his father was given as a hostage to the Persians by the men of Cyprus; others, because of his blindness; for amongst the Aeolians the blind are so called. We will set down, however, what we have heard to have been said by the Pythia concerning Homer in the time of the most sacred Emperor Hadrian. When the monarch inquired from what city Homer came, and whose son he was, the priestess delivered ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... withdrew his head into the compartment Brindley and Mr. Garvin, the latter standing at the corridor door, observed that his spirits had shot up in the most astonishing manner, and in their blindness they attributed the phenomenon to Edward Henry's delight in a temporary ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... which Lamarck heard during his protracted old age, saddened alike by the weight of years and blindness; this was what people did not hesitate to utter over his grave yet barely closed, and what indeed they are still saying—commonly too without any knowledge of what Lamarck maintained, but merely repeating at secondhand bad ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... I went through his letters and went through him, too. He hasn't got anything we want. I've been through with Governor Harper a long while. We're asleep at the switch in here. And let me tell you, if I catch sight of that causes-of-blindness-in-babies woman around here again, I'll do something violent. Clear them out, Miss Devine! Clear them out! We need a traffic policeman in this office. Have you got that article on 'Stealing Our National Water Power' ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... expedition just now. Unfortunate man, his preparations were miserably inadequate; it seems to me to have been a reckless, unjustifiable proceeding to set out with such equipments. Almost all the dogs died of bad food; all the men had scurvy from the same cause, with snow-blindness, frost-bites, and all kinds of miseries. He learned a wholesome awe of the Arctic night, and one can hardly wonder at it. He writes on page 173: 'I feel that we are fighting the battle of life at disadvantage, and that an Arctic day and an Arctic night age a man more rapidly ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... toleration and affection. Bess could afford these benevolences, being now engaged in that most delightful of all Christian tasks to a woman, viz., superintending the love-romance of another woman. She swept sweetly down on Dorothy; and even Richard, albeit full to blindness of his own great passion, could not help but see that she was as graceful ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Merton was affected thereby. Yet it shall never be said that my pen passed close to a great man or a great thing without a word of homage and sympathy to set against the sneers of groveling criticasters, the blindness of self-singing poetasters, and the national itch for detraction of all great things and men that live, and deification of ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... was shooting in the neighborhood, people used to inquire after Francis, and Jacques would discourse on his steward's little ailments, and talk of his wife in the second place. So curious did this blindness seem in a man of jealous temper, that his greatest friends used to draw him out on the topic for the amusement of others who did not know of the mystery. M. du Hautoy was a finical dandy whose minute care of himself had degenerated into mincing affectation and ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... also on November 5 to a clerical correspondent who had written to him on the distinction between sheretz and rehmes, and accused him of "wilful blindness" in his theological controversy ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... things cannot be—perhaps they cannot; but they are! I know it—I have heard, seen, partaken all! But if you can be convinced only by seeing that the plans of men, whose every action is insanity and frenzy, are wise and reasonable, perish yourself in your blindness, and let Rome perish with you! I can no more. Farewell! I leave you ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... just then; for he knew that the Holy Ghost was descending, to effect the mysterious transubstantiation of the wine into blood and the bread into flesh, and that no mortal eye can look upon Him without being struck with blindness. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of formality.—The danger in this kind of education is that of blindness to the voice of God to be heard in everyday experience or in our own hearts as well as in the written Scripture. The result of this blindness is that goodness and religion are thought of as merely the keeping of the written law. It was such blind scribes whom Jesus denounced for ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... hands behind her back and stood facing me, somewhat defiantly, in all her magnificence. I smiled. Women, much as they scoff at the blindness of our sex, ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... compass, but it quivered hesitatingly. For awhile that wild bewilderment which seizes upon the minds of the strongest, when lost, mastered him, in spite of his struggles against it. He moved in a maze of half-blindness, half-delirium. He was lost in it, swayed by it. He began to wander about; and there grew upon his senses strange delights and reeling agonies. He heard church bells, he caught at butterflies, he tumbled in new-mown hay, he wandered in a tropic garden. But in the hay a wasp stung ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... between sentiments and actions, efforts and results; we contemplate enterprises at the same time serious and harebrained, patriotic ardour joined to moral levity, enthusiastic devotion combined with indifferent calculation, and the same blindness, the same perseverance, united to similar impotence in old and young, in the generals and the soldiers. On the 1st of January, 1822, M. de La Fayette arrived in the vicinity of Befort to place himself at the head of the insurrection in Alsace. He found ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Warde without loving him, being ambitious of his name and honours, when his future had seemed brilliant in the days of good King Henry. She had borne him an only son, who worshipped her with a chivalric devotion that was almost childlike in its blindness; but the most that she could feel, in return, was a sort of motherly vanity in his outward being; and this he accepted as love, though it was as far from that as devotion to self is from devotion to another— as greed is far from generosity. She had not been ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... particular expression of sex—vice—caused it to taboo the civilizing power of sex; its inability to see that wants require fine satisfactions and not prohibitions drove it into an undemocratic tyranny; its blindness to the social forces of our age shut off the ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... horrible. Maggie, if you loved me as I love you, we should throw everything else to the winds for the sake of belonging to each other. We should break all these mistaken ties that were made in blindness, and ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... majority of such combatants. For he would never have betrayed his ideal, as thousands of men do who drift with the demands of their laziness, their vanity, and their loves, into renunciation of their immortal souls. And, if he had done so, Jacqueline would have despised him. But, in her blindness, she strove to destroy that force in Olivier, which was hers also, their common safeguard: and by an instinctive strategical movement she undermined the friendship by which ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... mere self-interest) Bjoernson has happily satirized in the scene before the Noblemen's Club in the third act. But, I fancy, it looks to him only as a sinister power, which for its own base purposes has smitten humanity with blindness to its own welfare. Though not intending to enter into a discussion, I am also tempted to put a respectful little interrogation mark after the statement that the republic is so very much cheaper than the monarchy. If the experience of the two ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... North American slavery directed by Calhoun, to Lord Aberdeen, see the Allg. Zeitung, 1844, No. 145. In this document, we find a comparison instituted between the free negroes of the north and the slaves of the south. In the north, there was one deaf-mute, a case of blindness and of insanity in every 96; in the south, in every 672; a pauper, invalid and prisoner in every 6 at the north, in every 54 at the south. In Maine, 1/12th of the negroes were afflicted by disease; in Florida, 1/1105th(?). The fact that the slave population of the United States increased, between ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... mysteries were suspicious, that honest people seldom had need of secrecy, that idiots who, like me, consented to act blindfold would probably repent their blindness in sackcloth and ashes before long. But what use were these sage reflections? I had given my word to her. I was in for the ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... not have you trust to my blindness," said her father, stroking her head fondly: "I observe everything. I observe, for instance, that you are a grateful little girl, and that you are glad to be of use to those who have been kind to you; and for this I forgive you ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... a line drawn in one stroke by a master, with the prompt exactitude of an unerring subtlety. There is no breadth in it—no sense of colour and the concrete mass of things. One cannot wonder, as one reads her, that she hardly regretted her blindness. What did she lose ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... an open grassy valley, and overtook the Tibetans who had preceded us, and who had halted here to feed their sheep. A good-looking girl of the party came to ask me for medicine for her husband's eyes, which had suffered from snow-blindness: she brought me a present of snuff, and carried a little child, stark naked, yet warm from the powerful rays of the sun, at nearly 14,000 feet elevation, in December! I prescribed for the man, and gave the mother a bright farthing to hang round the child's neck, which delighted the party. My ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... began by admitting that after the operation for cataract there was no chance of the disease returning, but that there was a considerable risk of the crystalline humour evaporating, and the patient being left in a state of total blindness. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... years had been due in part to his knowing the time to yield, a knowledge that would have prolonged the sway of many a despot. He went up-stairs in a rebellious mood which found expression in invectives against womankind, its blindness, its wilfulness, its weak subservience to usage. But when he appeared at the breakfast table, the conventional shirt and trousers testified to the extent ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... uncontrollable passion for Dorothy had left me the heart to do so. Yet now, in the light of her unmistakable smile, of her beaming eyes, from which all troublous thoughts seemed to have fled for ever, a thousand recollections forced themselves upon my attention, which not only made me bewail my own blindness, but which served to explain the peculiar attitude always maintained towards me by Dorothy, and many other things which a moment before had seemed fraught with ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... extraordinary sensitiveness. As the course of events appears to us at present, there is much, though abstractedly within the compass of human sagacity to foresee, which yet the actors on the scene do not foresee: but the blindness and perplexity of short-sighted mortals must have been wonderfully increased, when ghosts and extraordinary appearances were conceived liable to cross the steps and confound the projects of men at every turn, and a malicious wizard or ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... and hints in support of a pet theory so eagerly as did Graydon scan the past for confirmation of his hope, that long years of companionship had given him a place in Madge's heart which no one else possessed, and that his blindness or indifference to the truth was the sorrow of her life. This view explained why she would not regard herself as his sister, and could not permit the ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... and blindness take their flight? If I could fly, what could I suffer worse, Secure of greater ills? [Noise ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... no right to take up their pages with minute anatomy and tediously detailed cases, while it is a question whether or not the "blackdeath" of child-bed is to be scattered broadcast by the agency of the mother's friend and adviser. Let the men who mould opinions look to it; if there is any voluntary blindness, any interested oversight, any culpable negligence, even, in such a matter, and the facts shall reach the public ear; the pestilence-carrier of the lying-in chamber must look to God for pardon, for man will ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and semi-blindness amid a chaos. Then as he began to recover his consciousness, he found himself standing by a pillar some distance from where he had been sitting: he saw a place where tables and chairs were all upside down, legs in the air, amid debris of glass ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... of a fortnight, after some fights between the Tunisians and the crusaders, so much political and military blindness produced its natural consequences. The re-enforcements promised to Louis, by his brother Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily, had not arrived; provisions were falling short; and the heats of an African summer were working havoc amongst the army with ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... doctor called a halt and gave orders. "Spectacles at once," he said, "or I shall be having cases of snow-blindness to attend." ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... compositions Homer displays great gratitude towards Mentor of Ithaca, in the Odyssey, whose name he has inserted in his poem as the companion of Ulysses,(13) in return for the care taken of him when afflicted with blindness. He also testifies his gratitude to Phemius, who had given him ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... brooks, and by similar expedients sustaining their miserable existence. Taking the two Jesuits on board, the voyagers steered for the Penobscot. A fog rose upon the sea. They sailed to and fro, groping their way in blindness, straining their eyes through the mist, and trembling each instant lest they should descry the black outline of some deadly reef and the ghostly death-dance of the breakers, But Heaven heard their prayers. At night they could see the stars. The sun rose resplendent ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... is that tae many of the laddies wull be tae tired to fit themselves tae be other than helpless creatures, despite their wounds or their blindness. They can do wonders, if we'll help them. We maun not encourage those laddies tae tak' it tae easy the noo. It's a cruel hard thing to tell a boy like yon that he should be fitting himself for life. It seems that he ought to rest a bit, and tak' things easy, and that it's a sma' ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... poison anybody, as many a regular physician's prescription has done, and he shall not be molested. He has voluntarily sought an ordeal which will determine his position before the world. If he cures the blindness of my little protege, Therese, I shall give in my adherence with the rest; for he who restores the blind to sight, holds his ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... just so in Divine things. Oh! we shall find out, by-and-by, that the laws of the spiritual kingdom are quite as certain and unerring in their operation as the laws of the natural kingdom, and, perhaps, a great deal more so; but, through the blindness and obtuseness and unbelief of our hearts, we could not, or would not find them out. People get up and fluster about, and expect to be able to work for God without any thought or care or trouble. For the learning of earthly ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... Cornells. The moon shone brightly forth for the first part of the march, but no sooner did it become obscured than a considerable number of the marines were seized with a temporary defective vision very common within the tropics, called, "Nyctalopia," or night blindness. The attack was sudden; the vision seldom became totally obscured, but so indistinct that the shape of objects could not be distinguished. While in this state the sufferers had to be led by their comrades. With some it lasted more ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... said the doctor, inattentively; and his blindness to Sarah's charms and her powers made her ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... singing may be physical or mental; in many cases, weak vocal organs and feeble nervous power, in others lack of pitch-perception— tonal blindness. ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... going to cause privation, and even suffering where there were large families. She felt the most unqualified dissent and indignation, and all the love which she had for the man only intensified it. Love, with a girl like this, tended to clearness of vision instead of blindness. She judged him as she would have judged herself. As she stood working at her machine, stitching linings to vamps, she kept a sharply listening ear for what went on about her, but there was very little to hear after work had fairly ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... passionate adjuration of Schiller: "Why hast thou cast me thus into the town of the ever-blind, to proclaim thine oracle with the opened sense? Take back this sad clear-sightedness; take from mine eyes this cruel light! Give me back my blindness—the happy darkness of my senses; take back thy dreadful gift!" This feeling is perhaps not an unnatural one in the earlier stages of the Path, yet higher sight and deeper knowledge soon bring to the student the perfect certainty that all things are working ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... the field of battle, lying in the direction taken by most of the fugitives, was almost choked and bridged over with the slain, the difficulty of the ground retarding the fugitive horsemen till the lancers were upon them. Others, and in great numbers, rushed into the river Forth, in the blindness of terror, and perished there. No less than twenty-seven Barons fell in the field; the Earl of Gloucester was at the head of the fatal list: young, brave, and high-born, when he saw the day was lost, he rode headlong on the Scottish spears, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 406, Saturday, December 26, 1829. • Various
... had more than a glimpse of what is meant by death and outer darkness, and the worm that dieth not—and that all the hell of the reprobate, is no more inconsistent with the love of God, than the blindness of one who has occasioned loathsome and guilty diseases to eat out his eyes, is inconsistent with the light of the sun. But the consolations, at least, the sensible sweetness of hope, I do not possess. On the contrary, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... dominion over him. She guessed herself to be his superior in certain qualities. He was revealed to her; she felt that she was not revealed to him, and that in spite of her wholehearted surrender she had not given all because of his blindness to what she offered. She could not completely respect him. But she was his. She was naught apart from him. She was the wife. His existence went on mainly as before; hers was diverted, narrowed—fundamentally altered. Never now could she be ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... truths against which I do not protest. But the connection and agreement between your truths of reason and my truths of sentiment must be found. France, alas! is neither on your side nor my side; she is on the side of blindness, ignorance and folly. Oh! that I do not deny, it is exactly that over ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... believing in God, or good, without bearing the fruits of goodness, not having reached its Science. Belief is virtually blindness, when it admits Truth without understanding it. Blind belief cannot say with the apostle, "I know whom I have believed." There is danger in this mental state called belief; for if Truth is admitted, but not ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... just before departure recognition and reason return to those who have been unconscious caused me for several hours to hold his right hand firmly within my grasp to let him in his blindness know, if possible, that he was in touch with humanity ...
— Lincoln's Last Hours • Charles A. Leale
... not in a state of dementia, whereas his eyesight was admittedly bad; and it seemed to me that the only conclusion deducible from the photograph was that it furnished a measure of the badness of the deceased man's vision—that it proved him to have been verging on total blindness. ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... together, and ere long they saw the old gray palmer walking slowly along in front of them. He turned, however, at the sound of their hoofs, and it was clear that his blindness was a cheat like all the rest of him, for he ran swiftly through a field and so into a wood, where none could follow him. They hurled their relics after him, and so rode back to the blacksmith's the poorer both ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... below them was, indeed, a desolate one. As far as the eye could reach was nothing but the great whiteness. Had it not been for the colored snow goggles they wore the boys might have been blinded by the brilliancy of the expanse, as cases of snow blindness are by no means uncommon in ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... believe that she must suffer his love because she was poor before she married and he has paid her with a life of luxury. Where are we to end if such logic in questions of sexual intercourse is to benumb common sense? England brought us "The Blindness of Virtue," the story of a boy and a girl whom we are to believe to be constantly in grave danger because they are ignorant, while in reality nothing happens, and everything suggests that the moral danger for this particular girl would have been much greater if she had known ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... Percivale asked who the aged king might be. Then he was told that it was none other than King Evelake who accompanied Joseph of Arimathea to Britain. And on a certain occasion, the king had approached the Holy Grail nigher than was reverent and, for his impiety, God had punished him with blindness. Thereupon he repented and, entreating God earnestly, had obtained his petition that he should not die until he had seen the spotless knight who should be descended from him in the ninth degree. (This his desire was fulfilled later when Sir Galahad came thither; after which, he died and was ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... blindness, must it be to compare the son of Sophroniscus to the Son of Mary! What an infinite disproportion there is between them! Socrates, dying without pain or ignominy, easily supported his character to the last; and if his death, however easy, had not crowned ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... exceedingly interesting, not only on its own account; not only for the eminence of his talents and attainments, and the incredible sottishness and blindness of understanding which marked his maturer years; but as strikingly illustrative of the credulity and superstitious faith of the time in which he lived. At a later period his miraculous stone which displayed such wonders, and was attended ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... intrigue was now their safest weapon, but their power was tottering to its fall. Too jealous of each other to submit to the supremacy of one, it only remained for them to be overthrown by some leader of the popular party, and the Republic was no more. Yet, as if smitten by judicial blindness, they proceeded to hasten on their own ruin by reactionary provocations to their opponents. [Sidenote: Gracchan laws remain in force.] They dared not interfere with the corn law of Caius, for now that every man had a vote, which he could give by ballot, they were dependent ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... of the merchant service. Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, U.S.N., a brother of Anna Pine Decatur, was a constant visitor at our house in Houston Street in my young days. During one of his cruises he was stricken with a serious illness which resulted in total blindness. He subsequently married but, although he never had the pleasure of seeing his wife and children, his genial nature was not changed by his affliction. In 1869 he became a Commodore on the retired list, but some of the family connection objected to his use of this title, as in their opinion the ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... panoplied in their blindness! Incapacity to see was their safety. What they could nowise be aware of, could ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... Hence, when Jupiter and Juno fell to wrangling on the comparative enjoyments of men and women, the question was referred to Tiresias, as a person of unusual experience and authority. He gave it in favour of the woman, and Juno, who was displeased at his answer, struck him with blindness. But Jupiter, to make amends, gave him the "liberty of prophesying" for seven, some say nine, generations. (See Ovid, Metam., iii. 320; and Thomas Muncker's notes on the Fabulae of Hyginus, No. lxxv. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... direct reply to this pitiable speech, but looked a scorn which, happily for the colonel, the darkness hid. Presently she said that bats did not express the blindness of men, for any bat could have ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... was sorry for Dove, who, in his blindness, had laid himself open to receive this snubbing; and he listened patiently, even a thought flattered by his confidence, until he learnt from Madeleine that Dove was making the round of his acquaintances, and behaving in the same way to anyone who would let him. Then he found that the openness ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... the lorry goes by. Long lines of transport pass continually. "Sempre Avanti Savoia!" "Sempre Avanti Italia!" I find my eyes wet with tears, for the beauty and the glory and the insidious danger of that intoxicating war-cry; for the blindness and the wickedness and the selfish greed that lurk behind it, exploiting the generous emotions of the young and brave; for the irony and bitter fatuity of any war-cry in a world that should be ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... without wounding my vanity, my father's carelessness in this important particular. My father, although he has no reason for doing so, begins to regard himself already in the light of Pepita's husband, and to share in that fatal blindness with which Asmodeus, or some other yet more malicious demon, afflicts husbands. Profane and ecclesiastical history is fall of instances of this blindness, which God permits, no doubt, for providential ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... had passed through the town early the same morning. When we learned, however, that he had been driving a car of the conventional shape with a tonneau body, we paid no further attention to the information, concluding that he was a sportsman, anxious like ourselves for a brush with the Pirate. Our blindness was to cost us ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... night, but the next day no day dawned, nor, for that matter, the day after the next. All the same the town was invisibly astir everywhere in a world which hesitated at moments between total and partial blindness. The usual motives and incentives were at work in the business of men, more like the mental operations of sleep than of waking. From the height of an upper window one could look down and feel the city's efforts to break the mesh of its weird captivity, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... dignities and moneys, and art set on thy world watch-tower solemnly, in sight of God, for such ends,—what a thought: that every unit of these masses is a miraculous Man, even as thyself art; struggling, with vision, or with blindness, for his infinite Kingdom (this life which he has got, once only, in the middle of Eternities); with a spark of the Divinity, what thou callest an immortal soul, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... against Egypt; and Damietta, which commanded the river Nile, was chosen as the first point of attack. Finding themselves unable to successfully defend the city, the Moslems offered to yield the whole of Palestine to the Christians upon the condition of the evacuation of Egypt. With a blindness almost incredible these terms were refused, and a last attack made on the walls of Damietta. The besieged made but slight resistance, and the Christians entered the city, to find out of seventy thousand but three thousand remaining, so fearful ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... had begun the quarrel by remarking that Happy Fear ought to be hanged once for his own sake and twice more "to show up that shyster Louden." Warm words followed, leading to extremely material conflict, in which, in spite of his blindness, the broom-maker had so much the best of it that he was removed from the triumphant attitude he had assumed toward the person of his adversary, which was an admirable imitation of the dismounted St. George ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... I had begun. Just then arrived a friend of my uncle, who had lately come to him from Spain; when he saw that we were sitting down—that I was even reading—he rebuked my mother for her patience, and me for my blindness to the danger. Still I bent myself as industriously as ever over my book. It was now seven o'clock in the morning, but the daylight was still faint and doubtful. The surrounding buildings were now so shattered, that in the ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... Insistence upon the impossible means delay in achieving the possible, exactly as, on the other hand, the stubborn defense alike of what is good and what is bad in the existing system, the resolute effort to obstruct any attempt at betterment, betrays blindness to the historic truth that wise evolution is the sure safeguard ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... love of the cross by a most severe affliction. Just as the vessel touched the port of Canea in the island of Candia, which she was the first to discern, she was in one instant struck with total blindness, to the inexpressible sorrow and consternation of her companions. The trial was a peculiarly painful one, and it served to display the heroism of her virtue in a clearer light than ever. She accepted it in the spirit of the saints, and refusing ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... whatsoever. Though more finished than the others, its style is also abrupt and full of surprises; the scene and characters are Oriental; the plot is a feeble invention. An ambitious and rebellious Ameer is struck with blindness, and has recourse to a silver mask to deceive his followers. Unsuccessful, he poisons them all, throws their corpses into pits of quicklime, then leaps in himself, to deceive the world and leave no trace of mortality ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... smitten with blindness, and mad with the rage The gods gave to all whom they wished to destroy, You would act a new Iliad, to darken the age With horrors beyond what ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... pretences, in order to conceal from view their own hateful deformity. This will be found particularly the case, when they prevail in persons who have acquired respectability and influence, and who are not given over to total blindness and hardness of heart. Artifice may sometimes conduce to success, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... and rapture and vast, vast responsibility, should be denied him. At the first, even knowing Kathryn as he did, he had looked for something else, had hoped that their loosening ties would tighten under the stress of the coming crisis. For Scott, beneath his proud reticence, his seeming blindness to the situation, was painfully aware of the gradual severance of interests between himself and Kathryn. This final lesson, though, rendered it unmistakable. Under its blow, his lined, lean cheeks whitened, his shoulders stooped a little more than usual when, after gently letting ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... so jealous and implacable that the least step from the straight path means exposure and ruin, it is almost impossible by any extravagance of misconduct to provoke society to relax its steady pretence of blindness, unless you do one or both of two fatal things. One is to get into the newspapers; and the other is to confess. If you confess misconduct to respectable men or women, they must either disown you or become virtually your accomplices: ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... election after election. It produced, we know, Mr. Joseph and Mr. Austen Chamberlain. It has, we know, something like a monopoly in the manufacture of the gods in wood and brass to which (in his blindness) the heathen bows down; and there are all sorts of cheap lines in which it can give the whole world points and a beating. But it has not yet got the conspicuous position of Manchester or Liverpool; and one feels that the enterprise of this anonymous ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... will not live together are in our midst, and tugging at each other's throats. They will search each other out, though you separate them a hundred times. And if by an insane blindness you shall contrive to put off the issue, and send this unsettled dispute down to your children, it will go down, gathering volume and strength at every step, to waste and desolate their heritage. Let it be settled now. Clear the place. Bring in ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... secretion, thinning and loss of hair in the regions involved, especially the eyebrows, and disorders of sensibility. Later results, are a nasal catarrh, atrophy of the sexual organs in both sexes, with impairment or loss of procreative power, hopeless blindness. However the course of the disease is very slow, and years may elapse before these several changes are accomplished. Often the disease appears quiescent for months at a time, after which fever occurs and with it acute or sub-acute manifestations ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... responded softly. "In spite of my blindness and your pride, fate seems to have appointed you to the permanent job of knight-errant to the maiden in distress, hasn't it, ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... at the impracticability of her sister-in-law and the blindness of fortune. But nobody could sigh long in the face of that Twelfth-day Christmas-tree. What need be said of it but that each member of the house of Brownlow, and each of its dependents, obtained the very thing that the bright-eyed fairy of the family had guessed ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... because they dare not risk my antagonism; but I have failed—miserably failed—in my efforts to instil into those associated with me the basic principles of a successful altruistic business. Oh, the pity of it! The greater the returns the greater the greed, and their blindness in killing the goose which lays the golden egg! But in you, John, at least, I ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... this, or some like contrivance, travelling in the Arctic regions is painful to the eyes, and the traveller often loses his sight. Indeed, one of the most common infirmities of both the Indians and Esquimaux of these parts is blindness or soreness of the eyes, caused by the reflexion of the sunbeams from the crystals of the frozen snow. Norman was aware of this, and had made the spectacles to guard ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... order public prayers and thanksgivings for the renewal of these pasquinades, this ridiculous mockery, can one be astonished, I say, at the state of religious ignorance and blindness of our peasantry? Such, with a few wretched prints representing Napoleon passing the Alps seated on an eagle; Poniatowsky and his white horse attempting to cross the Oder; Cambronne, with imperial moustachios, on his knees repeating ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... his work. I hated it—I expected to ridicule it. But I ended by infinitely respecting him. I learned through his hog-raising the real nobility of work.... Well, at last I found courage to ask him when he was coming back to New York. He said 'never!'... I realized then my blindness, my selfishness. I could not be his wife and live there. I could not. I was too small, too miserable, too comfort-loving—too spoiled. And all the time he knew this—knew I'd never be big enough to marry him.... That broke my heart. I left him free—and ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... somewhat similar manner in Book III., which opens with an address to Light—one of the most beautiful passages in the poem, in which he alludes to his blindness when expressing his thoughts and sentiments with regard to this ethereal medium, which conveys to us the pleasurable ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... increasing forces that are driving this way from over there—nothing to oppose to assault. England is in a state of siege, and doesn't seem to know it. She's so great—Hesketh, it's pathetic!—she offers an undefended shore to attack, and a stupid confidence, a kindly blindness, above all to Americans, whom ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... and sixteen years, and usually affects one eye before the other. It commences as a diffuse haziness or steaminess near the centre of the cornea, and as it spreads the entire cornea assumes the appearance of ground glass. The chief complaint is of dimness of sight, which may almost amount to blindness, but there is little pain or photophobia; a certain amount of conjunctival and ciliary congestion is usually present, and there may be iritis in addition. The cornea, or parts of it, may become of a deep ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... divine powers. An instance of this is seen in the case of Thamyris, a Thracian bard, who presumed to invite them to a trial of skill in music. Having vanquished him, they not only afflicted him with blindness, but deprived him also of the ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... You must try hard not to do it. We shall be of no use if we let our minds go. We must try to force ourselves into a sort of deafness and blindness in certain directions. I am trying—with ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the privy purse, and so far from lessening the taxes, would not even have been added to them, but served only as pocket money to the crown. The more I reflect on this matter, the more I am satisfied at the blindness and ill policy of my countrymen, whose wisdom seems to operate without discernment, and ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... much that is chiefly imaginary, but even imagination has got to have some physical basis as a starting-point. They may tell you much that is clearly and ludicrously irrelevant, or untrue, on account of inaccuracy of observation, confusion of cause and effect, or a mental color-blindness produced by the disease itself. But these things can all be brushed aside like the chaff from the wheat if checked up by the picture of the disease in plain sight ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... river Arun flows from the South Downs into the sea, and standing upon its banks is Arundel Castle, which gives the title of earl to the unfortunate infant son and heir of the Duke of Norfolk, whose blindness shows that even the greatest wealth and highest rank do not command all things in this world. A village of two steep streets mounts up the hill from the river-bank to the castle, which has unusual interest from its striking position and the long ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... sleep was impossible, the pain of his burns was still very great; especially in his eyes, the injury to which he feared must result in total blindness. How could he bear it? he asked himself, to go groping his way through life in utter darkness? Horrible! horrible! he would not endure it; they had put the means of self-destruction out of his way now, but on the first opportunity to get hold of a pistol, he would ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... results and that even Germany would swing into line. There were plans to hold a third conference in 1914 or 1915. As we look back upon the years between 1907 and 1914, it seems hard to understand the general blindness of the world to the certainty of the coming struggle. Armaments were piled up at a faster rate than ever. Naval armaments also entered into the race. From the point of view of bringing about permanent peace in the world ...
— A School History of the Great War • Albert E. McKinley, Charles A. Coulomb, and Armand J. Gerson
... of Marmora, a field of action which no British ship could have reached after the disastrous failure to force the Dardanelles. The Germans by employment of the same device sank at least two Russian ships in the Baltic and one British vessel in the North Sea. The blindness of the United States naval authorities to the merits of this invention was a matter arousing at once curiosity and indignation among observers during the early days of ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... geographical upheavals alike were manifestations of spiritual conflict physically reflected. Some of the German philosophers had perceived this dimly, but as one born in blindness fails to comprehend light, their vision was no more than hereditary memory of another pit of doom which had engulfed them. Those who spoke of casting down the spirit of Prussian militarism used metaphor ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... social regulations, and by the dissemination of knowledge of the organic laws of man, there is not a doubt; but whether the time has come, or ever will come, is another question. At any rate, to so enlightened a body[3] as I have the honor of addressing, suggestions of methods by which the extent of blindness may be limited will neither be misapplied, nor liable to offend a mawkish sensibility. That the blindness of a large proportion of society is a social evil will not be denied, nor will the right which society has to ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... with two great blotches of mud on his face, must walk through the streets of the city, out of the gate, and into the valley. He went, and felt his way down the steps into the pool of Siloam. There he washed, and then at once his life-long blindness passed away, and ...
— The Wonder Book of Bible Stories • Compiled by Logan Marshall
... the old days when he and Phil were together, and of the plans they had sometimes made for keeping if possible together even after they went out into the world to work. He had the impatience of one who has recently put a doctrine by for the blindness, as it seemed to him, which kept Phil still in the power of the old superstition; but with his friend's white face, marked with mental suffering, there to soften him, he dwelt little on this, and much on his affection for his ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates |
