"Grossness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... body loses its grossness after use of certain PRANAYAMAS. Then it will levitate or hop about like a leaping frog. Even saints who do not practice a formal yoga {FN7-4} have been known to levitate during a state of intense ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... the day, the moon and the stars to cheer the night; and that by all these, times should be marked and signified. We behold on all sides a moist element, replenished with fishes, beasts, and birds; because the grossness of the air, which bears up the flights of birds, thickeneth itself by the exhalation of the waters. We behold the face of the earth decked out with earthly creatures, and man, created after Thy image and likeness, even through that Thy very image and likeness (that is the power of reason ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... almost all the schools of Europe and America. In this country it seems to have had less attention paid to it than it deserved, because its influence was counteracted by the arrogance and profligacy of its author, as if the grossness of a man's manner affected the conclusiveness of his arguments; but this influence did not extend beyond Britain, while the light of his theory illuminated the opposite hemisphere. And when the manner in which he was persecuted is recollected, ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... following plan. Knowing that the latter can tolerate no ordure near his home, he chooses as a place of retirement one of the passages which lead to the chamber of the peaceful recluse. He insists repeatedly, until at last the Badger, insulted by this grossness, and suffocated by the odour, decides to move elsewhere and hollow a fresh palace. The Fox is only waiting for this, and installs himself ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... made. We are led to believe that all the wrong is set right. Now, I doubt this. I believe the cause which brought the first marriage to such painful disaster was not dependent only on the evident unsuitability of the partners to live with one another; the grossness of the man and the believed refinement of the woman need not necessarily have failed in finding happiness in union. No, the cause of failure was deeper, within themselves, dependent on the blind egoism of both the husband ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... of tact and taste, the Cardinal Bibbiena introduces an elaborate discussion of the different sorts of jokes, which proves the high value attached in Italy to all displays of wit. It appears that even practical jokes were not considered in bad taste, but that irreverence and grossness were tabooed as boorish. Mere obscenity is especially condemned, though it must be admitted that many jests approved of at that time would now appear intolerable. But the essential point to be aimed at then, as now, was the promotion of mirth by cleverness, and not by mere ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... the view that had determined his start in the morning; yet also that he himself would have taken it all, as he might say, less hard. He could have lived in such a place; but it wasn't given to those of his complexion, so to speak, to be exiled anywhere. It was by their comparative grossness that they could somehow make shift. His natural, his inevitable, his ultimate home—left, that is, to itself—wasn't at all unlikely to be as queer and impossible as what was just round them, though doubtless ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... a Lecturer, that I must pass it by. Only as far as Shakspeare is concerned, I own, I can with less pain admit a fault in him than beg an excuse for it. I will not, therefore, attempt to palliate the grossness that actually exists in his plays by the customs of his age, or by the far greater coarseness of all his contemporaries, excepting Spenser, who is himself not wholly blameless, though nearly so;—for I place Shakspeare's merit on being of no age. But I would clear away ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... great vigour of conception, and admirable power of execution; but the whole possesses no general character, and produces no permanent emotion. There is a mixture of allegory and truth in many of his greatest works, which is always painful; a grossness in his conception of the female form, which destroys the symmetry of female beauty; and a wildness of imagination in his general design, which violates the feelings of ordinary taste. You survey his pictures with astonishment—at the power ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... Maintenance of your Health, by preventing Infirmities and Grossness of Humours, you compose your Kennel; consult first your own Ability for this Exercise; and if you think you are able to foot it away, then the Biggest and slowest Dogs you can get are best; which you may bring so to your Command, as to make them Hunt ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... Salpetriere prison, "all the pimps of Paris, former spies,... libertines, the rascals of France and all Europe, prepare beforehand for the operation," and rape alternates with massacre.[31121]—Thus far, at least, slaughter has been seasoned with robbery, and the grossness of eating and drinking; at Bicetre, however, it is crude butchery, the carnivorous instinct alone satisfying itself. Among other prisoners are 43 youths of the lowest class, from 17 to 19 years of age, placed there for correction ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... them. Meat pies and puddings cannot be recommended, but strong stomachs may sustain but little inconvenience from them. It is a confined mode of cookery, and the meat therefore is not at all purified of its grossness. When meat pies and puddings are used, they should be moderately seasoned. Baking meat, instead of roasting it, is a worse manner of dressing it, from the closeness of the oven, and the great variety of ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... the hostile language, often exaggerated and unjust, in which those antipathies find vent, secures in his more chastened mode of utterance an exact reproduction none the less injurious because divested of grossness. ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... with the task of revising his "Essay upon Satire:" a poem which contained dishonourable mention of many courtiers of the time, and was particularly severe on Sir Car Scrope and Rochester. The last of these is taxed with cowardice, and a thousand odious and mean vices; upbraided with the grossness and scurrility of his writings, and with the infamous profligacy of his life.[19] The versification of the poem is as flat and inharmonious, as the plan is careless and ill-arranged; and though the imputation ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Expurgated of much grossness and profanity, the discursive talk, in this hiding place of criminals, may be partially reproduced as follows. The chief is first ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... coloring, in some degree, from thescenery, circumstances, and experience amidst which they were conceived and born. Sometimes these figments were consciously entertained as wilful inventions, distinctly contemplated as poetry. Sometimes they were superstitiously credited in all their grossness with full assent of soul. Sometimes all coexisted in vague bewilderment. These lines of separation unquestionably existed: the difficulty is to know where, in given instances, to draw them. A few examples will serve at ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... has often been given to arguments of this kind, which deserves a few moments' consideration. It is said, 'the grossness of the old play-writers was their misfortune, not their crime. It was the fashion of the age. It is not our fashion, certainly; but they meant no harm by it. The age was a free-spoken one; and perhaps none the worse for that.' Mr. Dyce, indeed, the editor of Webster's plays, seems inclined ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... planet each herb or flower is governed. Has our sentiment for the flowers of the field increased now we no longer drink their essence, or use them in our dishes? I doubt it. It is surely a pardonable grossness that we should desire the sweet fresh things to become part of us—like children, who do indeed love flowers, and eat them. In the Appendix I have transcribed a list of the plants referred to. Most cooks would be unable to tell one from another; and even modern herbalists ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... which opened the heart to tenderness, making himself a refuge from the petty vexations of her work. He talked to her of the relations between his friends in Paris and the fair ladies they admired. The life he described had a charm, an easy gaiety, in which was no grossness. Weaving into his own recollections the adventures of Mimi and Rodolphe, of Musette and the rest of them, he poured into Mildred's ears a story of poverty made picturesque by song and laughter, of lawless love made ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... the stage of Rowley's fancy. On the other hand, the martyrdom of St. Winifred and St. Hugh is an abject tragic failure; an abortive attempt at cheap terror and jingling pity, followed up by doggrel farce of intolerable grossness. ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... be compelled to take up. The atoms of Democritus seem to us gross, even for chemistry, and their quality would have to undergo great transformation if they were to support intelligibly psychic being as well; but that very grossness and false simplicity had its merits, and science must be for ever grateful to the man who at its inception could so clearly formulate its mechanical ideal. That the world is not so intelligible as we could wish is not to be wondered at. In other respects also it fails to respond to our ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... absorbedly at her; I saw aged, infirm men hang upon her charms with a pathetic interest. How I should like to describe her—just to see what a holy indignation I could stir up in the world—just to hear the unreflecting average man deliver himself about my grossness and coarseness, and all that. The world says that no worded description of a moving spectacle is a hundredth part as moving as the same spectacle seen with one's own eyes—yet the world is willing to let its son and its daughter ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... her very coldness and aloofness stirred desire in the man, and she shrank as she saw a spark of passion kindling in his eyes. She recognized that there was a strain of grossness in him. ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... such anomalies I take to be, that there is among us a general want of earnestness. We do not believe in ourselves, or our duties, or our destinies. Our life has no theory, and we care only for outward forms and symbols. Our taste is shocked by the grossness of vice, but we have no quarrel with the thing itself; and if the people around us will only preserve a polished, or at least inoffensive exterior, that is all we demand. Why should we look below the surface in their case, when we do no such thing ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... I made to him. There were times when I was tempted to stop his mouth with some small change; but whether it was from shame or pride—whether it was for my own sake or Catriona's—whether it was because I thought him no fit father for his daughter, or because I resented that grossness of immediate falsity that clung about the man himself—the thing was clean beyond me. And I was still being wheedled and preached to, and still being marched to and fro, three steps and a turn, in that small chamber, and had already, by some very short replies, highly incensed, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and definitions are yet more supportable than the grossness of historical remarks, which are scattered so plentifully in his book, that it would be tedious to enumerate, or to shew the fraud and ignorance of them. I beg the reader's leave to take notice of one here just in my way; and, the rather, because I design for the future to let hundreds of them ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... "over-compensation" for what is unconsciously felt to be danger woman increases her feeling of safety by setting up a taboo on the whole subject of sex. It is time that we freed our minds from the artificial and perverted attitude toward this dominant impulse; time to rescue the word "sex" from its implications of grossness and sensuousness, and to recognize the instinct in its true light as one of the necessary and holy forces of life, a force capable of causing great damage, but also holding infinite possibilities for ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... desire the spleen, and will laugh yourselves into stitches, follow me. Yond gull Malvolio is turn'd heathen, a very renegado; for there is no Christian, that means to be sav'd by believing rightly, can ever believe such impossible passages of grossness. He's in yellow stockings. ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... mirror, she paused and looked at the reflection there. Was her soul, its purity and beauty symbolized by her very dress, to be united to that other soul in its grossness and deformity? Her cheek blanched with horror at the thought. No! that fair body should perish first, rather than soul or body ever be ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... Who shall depict its bliss and bale? Who shall tell how He between whom and the Woman God put enmity forged deadly plots to break the bond or defile its purity? Who shall record the long strife between Serpent and Seraph:—How still the Father of Lies insinuated evil into good, pride into wisdom, grossness into glory, pain into bliss, poison into passion? How the "dreadless Angel" defied, resisted, and repelled? How again and again he refined the polluted cup, exalted the debased emotion, rectified the perverted impulse, detected the lurking ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... miracle, in English a miracle play, is a kind of Interlude compiled in Cornish out of some scripture history with that grossness which accompanied the Romans' vetus comedia. For representing it they raise an earthen amphitheatre in some open field, having the diameter of this inclosed plain some forty or fifty foot. The country people flock from all sides, ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Bellingham's smile grew vaguer, and his two hands touched finger-tips in front of his magisterial stomach—an adequate stomach but well on the right side of grossness. He glanced at his fellow-magistrates right and left. ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... "Alas, the grossness of the commercial classes, the brutality of the tired business man! We Americans are a rude folk my friend; the courtesies are absent from our manners. Now, I am a young man with tender feelings, both mental and—er, physical. And these ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... reached the gate now, and she laid her hand on his arm to stop him. He looked down at the slender gloved hand on his arm, feeling as if a giant had grasped him; then he raised his eyes to her face, flushing a purplish red as he remembered his grossness. It seemed monstrous in the presence of this girl-advocate. Her face was like silver; her eyes seemed ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... hardly a great poet who has achieved fame who has not been in a degree spoilt by the consciousness of worth and influence. Tennyson, Pope, Byron, Wordsworth—how their lives were injured by vanity and self-conceit! Even Scott was touched by the grossness of prosperity, though he purged his fault in despair and tears. But such poets as did not guess their own greatness, and remained humble and peaceable, how much sweeter and gentler is their example, walking humbly in the company of the mighty, and ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... effect of flesh and blood. Flogging and fagging, are the education for a footman; they disgrace the common sense, and offend the feelings of a manly people. The pugilist must be expelled, and the puppy must follow him. The detestable grossness of classical impurity, must be no longer the price at which Latin "quantities" are to be learned. The last lesson of the "prodigal son," must not be the first learned by the son of the gentleman of England—to be fed on the "husks" fit only for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... Sympathy, in 1657. "Now it is a poor kind of pusillanimity and faint-heartedness, or rather, a gross weakness of the Understanding, to pretend any effects of charm or magick herein, or to confine all the actions of Nature to the grossness of our Senses, when we have not sufficiently consider'd nor examined the true causes and principles whereon 'tis fitting we should ground our judgment: we need not have recourse to a Demon or Angel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... stranger to Waldegrave's sister. I knew merely that he had such a relation. There was nothing, therefore, to outbalance this unfavourable report, but the apparent malignity and grossness of those who gave it. It was not, however, her character about which I was solicitous, but merely the place where she might be found and the suitable inquiries respecting her deceased brother be answered. On ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... to penal servitude but for an explosion of public indignation, which had for result that he was immediately set at liberty by the Chief of the State. The honourable character given the condemned man by all his fellow-citizens made the grossness of the blunder self-evident. The magistrates themselves admitted it, and yet out of caste considerations they did all they could to prevent the pardon being signed. In all similar affairs the jury, confronted with technical ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... on occasion of the birth of the King's daughter Maria. There is no action in the play, and King Manuel would perhaps have yawned at these shepherds' quarrels, relieved not at all by the parvo's wit or the hermit's grossness and only occasionally by a touch of lyric poetry; but perhaps these simple scenes were welcome to the growing artificiality of the Court. For us the beautiful cossante Um amigo que eu havia stands out like a single orange gleaming from a dark-foliaged tree. ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... stimulate their pride to expenses beyond their means. Parsimony is, therefore, in these places, the governing law; and pleasure, not less fervently wooed than at Oxford or at Cambridge, putting off her robes of elegance and ceremony, descends to grossness, and not seldom ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... under her clear gaze, a confused comprehension began to stir in him—at first only a sort of chagrin, then something more—a consciousness of his own heaviness of intellect and grossness of figure—the fatness of mind and body which had developed so rapidly within the ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... machinery, and other poetical beauties, is written in the very finest strain of morality. In this latter respect it is evidently superior to the works of the ancients, the moral of which is frequently tainted by the grossness of their mythology. Something of the purity of the Christian religion may be discovered even in Fenelon's heathens, and they catch a tincture of piety in passing through the hands of that ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... own Somersetshire and Devonshire. Their officers were polite and well-bred men in whom I saw no sign of fiendish lusts and cruelties. In normal moods they are a good-natured people, with a little touch of Teuton grossness perhaps, which makes them swill overmuch beer, and with an arrogance towards their womenfolk which is not tolerable to Englishmen, unless they have revolted from the older courtesies of English life because the Suffragettes have ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... prison; and the public prejudices had already pronounced their doom. Against charges of this nature, thus conducted, no defence could possibly be made. To be accused was to be found guilty. The very grossness of the imposition seemed to secure its success, and the absurdity of the accusation to establish ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... the beautiful face. "You talk as foolishly as a child," she said with contempt. "You know nothing of the subject you are discussing, therefore anything I might say would sound incomprehensible. The grossness of the flesh stifles and kills the subtle workings of the spirit. To you life is only a pleasure ground, and the more your own personal satisfaction is obtainable, the more you cling to its spurious ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... of dress, of bearing. He transmits these things in greater proportion than he found them—whether for love of the humour of them, or by a kind of inverted disgust that is as eager as delight—one is not sure which is the impulse. The grossness of the vulgarities is rendered with a completeness that goes far to convince us of a certain sensitiveness of apprehension in the designer; and then again we get convinced that real apprehension—real apprehensiveness—would not have insisted upon such things, could not have lived ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... ane, et la femme de Darius buvant avec des goujats dans un cabaret.' Johnson, perhaps, had this attack in mind when, in his Life of Pope (Works, viii. 275), he thus wrote of Voltaire:—'He had been entertained by Pope at his table, when he talked with so much grossness, that Mrs. Pope was driven from the room. Pope discovered by a trick that he was a spy for the court, and never considered him as ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... resolute line of the mouth under the trifling upturned mustache, with its lips at the same time thin and sensual. To be fat and sensual is to appear to mitigate the latter evil with at least a pretence at good humor; to be thin and sensual is to be a devil. This man was evil, not with the grossness of a debauchee but with the thinness of the devotee. And he was an old man, too. Sixty odd years of vicious life, glossed over in the last two decades by an assumption of respectability, had swept over the gray hairs, which ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the source of human life, was placed beyond the limits of our visible universe; and in order for human life to return thither at death and to enjoy immortality, it was only necessary to refine away corporeal grossness according to the doctrines of Lao Tzu. Later on, this One came to be regarded as a fixed point of dazzling luminosity, in remote ether, around which circled for ever and ever, in the supremest glory of motion, the souls of those who had successfully passed through the ordeal ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... tainted and corrupt, But, being season'd with a gracious voice,[83] Obscures the show of evil? In religion, What damned error, but some sober brow Will bless it and approve it[84] with a text, Hiding the grossness with lair ornament? There is no vice so simple, but assumes Some mark of virtue on his outward parts. Thus ornament is but the guiled[85] shore To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf Veiling an Indian beauty. Therefore, thou gaudy gold, Hard food for Midas, ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... anybody accused him of saintliness he would have resented the charge, quite justifiably, and if the wit of The Gay Spark had been witty, he would have enjoyed it without a qualm. What distressed him, what utterly desolated him, was the grossness, the poorness, the cheapness, the dullness, and the uninventive monotony of the interminable entertainment. He yawned, he could not help yawning; he yawned his soul away. Lois must have heard him yawning, but she did not move. He looked at her curiously, pitifully, speculating how much ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... their apparel, their children, or by common fame, except my wife." He calls not only men, but angels, nay, even God Himself, to bear testimony to his innocence in this respect. But though they were so absolutely baseless, nay, the rather because they were so baseless, the grossness of these charges evidently stung Bunyan ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... centers only, from the centers of the breast, in the mode of what we call pure or spiritual love. Then the child will be all gentle, all tender and tender-radiant, always enfolded with gentleness and forbearance, always shielded from grossness or pain or roughness. Now the father's instinct is to be rough and crude, good-naturedly brutal with the child, calling the deeper centers, the sensual centers, into play. "What do you want? My watch? Well, you can't have it, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... enjoyed at any rate the patronage of many noble lords. The effect of this was to give the prestige of social usage to the verse in which they wrote and the language they used. "There was," said Dr. Johnson, "before the time of Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts. Words too familiar or too remote to defeat the purpose of a poet." This poetic diction, refined from the grossness of domestic use, was the standard poetic speech of the eighteenth century. The heroic ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... changes the objects of its thought. The mind passes from China to Peru without any conscious change in the local tensions of the body. This illusion of disembodiment is very exhilarating, while immersion in the flesh and confinement to some organ gives a tone of grossness and selfishness to our consciousness. The generally meaner associations of physical pleasures also help ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... once or twice mortified us sensibly by slipping out an oath; but that appeared to me as the surest symptom of their distinction, (tho' I am since informed that swearing is perfectly unfashionable.) Their finery, however, threw a veil over any grossness in their conversation. My daughters seemed to regard their superior accomplishments with envy; and what appeared amiss was ascribed to tip-top quality breeding. But the condescension of the ladies was still superior to their other accomplishments. One of them observed, ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... intelligent and brave,—but he's gross; and grossness delays one's achievement, it takes so much time. The snake too, though wise, has a way of eating himself into stupors. If super-snake-men had had banquets they would have been too vast to describe. Each little snake family could have eaten a herd of ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... regardless of the feelings of others. Governed, like most women, solely by her feelings, Lady Devine had at first been prodigal of her affection to the man she believed to be her injured son. But his rash acts of selfishness, his habits of grossness and self-indulgence, gradually disgusted her. For some time she—poor woman—fought against this feeling, endeavouring to overcome her instincts of distaste, and arguing with herself that to permit a detestation of her unfortunate son to arise in her ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... all, she blossomed, physically as well as mentally, into a fuller revelation of gracious loveliness than before, sweeter and more exquisite, indeed, than anything life had yet shown to me. Moreover, having captured me, she changed; the grossness I had discerned, that which had led me to my own undoing, vanished completely as though it were transmuted into desires and emotions of a loftier kind. Some purpose, some intention, a hope immensely resolute shone out of her, and of such spiritual loveliness, it seemed to me, that I watched ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... "Rudeness and Grossness matter, and I've shown both, and already I'm sorry, and I hope she'll let me apologize. But from the selfish point of view it doesn't matter a straw. She's no more to us than the Wonham boy or the ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... and what he needs to eat in order to reduce his bulk and yet keep his powers and his bodily vigor unimpaired. I am not speaking now, understand me, of those unfortunates with whom obesity is a disease, but of those who owe their grossness of outline to gluttony. Lacking vital statistics on the subject, I nevertheless dare assert that these latter constitute fully 90 per cent of those among the American people who are distinctly and uncomfortably ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... It is hardly possible to maintain this thesis in view of such passages as Mahabh. XIII. 14 and the innumerable figures in which there are both a linga and a Yoni. But it is true that in its later forms the worship is purged of all grossness and that in its earlier forms the symbol adored was often a stupa-like column or a ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... pure. No one can walk along our streets and not see how debased and sensual our tastes have become. The saying of Burke (so unworthy of a great man), that vice loses half its evil by losing all its grossness, is practically acted upon, and voluptuous and seductive figures, recommended only by a soft effeminacy, swarm our shop-windows and defile our drawing-rooms. It is impossible to over-state the extent to ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... following the profession of the press, a change of politics is an infringement of the point of honor, and a man must FIGHT as well as apostatize. A very curious table might be made, signalizing the difference of the moral standard between us and the French. Why is the grossness and indelicacy, publicly permitted in England, unknown in France, where private morality is certainly at a lower ebb? Why is the point of private honor now more rigidly maintained among the French? Why is ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... is taken to Auerbach's Cellar, where four jolly companions are assembled for a drinking-bout. He is simply disgusted with the grossness and vulgarity of it all. He is too old—so the Devil concludes—for the role he is playing and must have his youth renewed. So they repair to an old witch, who gives Faust an elixir that makes him young again. The scene in the witch's kitchen was written in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... ever once enjoyed the pleasure of knowing this fairest flower in the parterre of England's aristocracy of beauty, would, in a spirit of revenge and disappointed avarice, have had the grossness to insult her as the Marquis of Papon—the depository of all her secrets—has insulted the Countess of Landsfeld with the loathsome name of "courtesan," because, yielding to the confidence of her woman's heart, she had been the adored of two previous lovers? Never did Lord Petersham, afterwards ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... a man of low intellect, of a fierce countenance, a saucy, swaggering, insolent manner, debauched in his morals beyond the grossness of that indecent age,—ostentatiously living in public concubinage,—a notorious swearer in public and private. But he knew no law above the will of the hand that fed and could advance him, no justice which ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... doubt but the committee in this Parliament, appointed by the ministers themselves, will justify the grounds upon which the last Parliament proceeded, and will lay open to the world the dreadful state of the Company's affairs, and the grossness of their own calumnies upon this head. By delay the new assembly is come into the disgraceful situation of allowing a dividend of eight per cent by act of Parliament, without the least matter before them to justify the granting of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... forth, made a most vivid and indelible impression upon my memory: 'We, at the same time,' he said, 'have our eye perfectly open to that great external improvement which has taken place, of late years, in the manners of society. There is not the same grossness of conversation. There is not the same impatience for the withdrawment of him who, asked to grace the outset of an assembled party, is compelled, at a certain step in the process of conviviality, by the obligations ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... the name of the laws of the country, and even of God, that they should take part in murder. Men see that there is some inconsistency here, but not being able to analyze it, involuntarily assume that this apparent inconsistency is only the result of their ignorance. The very grossness and obviousness of the inconsistency confirms them in ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... the way the irregular life sat upon Bilham and Miss Barrace that was the insidious, the delicate marvel. He was eager to concede that their relation to it was all indirect, for anything else in him would have shown the grossness of bad manners; but the indirectness was none the less consonant—THAT was striking-with a grateful enjoyment of everything that was Chad's. They spoke of him repeatedly, invoking his good name and good nature, and the worst confusion of mind ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... purpose. Grant, again, that his cruelty to Ophelia was partly due to misunderstanding, partly forced on him, partly feigned; still one surely cannot altogether so account for it, and still less can one so account for the disgusting and insulting grossness of his language to her in the play-scene. I know this is said to be merely an example of the custom of Shakespeare's time. But it is not so. It is such language as you will find addressed to a woman by no other hero of Shakespeare's, not ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... wanderings—that as separation grows greater she commences to know pain, and, becoming anxious therefrom to return to the source of her remembered joys, she finds herself unable to accomplish this because of the weight and grossness of the nature of the loves to which she has hired herself, and from which she is totally unable to free herself, and yet which she must by some means overcome that she may rise again to sanctity and return ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... fevers in my own family cured by this medicinal water, drunk copiously." And to finish these extracts with a most important suggestion for the improvement of the British nation: "It is much to be lamented that our Insulars who act and think so much for themselves, should yet, from grossness of air and diet, grow stupid or doat sooner than other people, who, by virtue of elastic air, water-drinking, and light food, preserve their faculties to extreme old age; an advantage which may perhaps be approached, if not equaled, even in these regions, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Julie d'Angennes, who bestowed not her hand on the Duc de Montausier until he had served as many years in seeking it as Jacob had served to gain that of Rachel, and until she had passed her thirtieth year (in order that his passion should become as purified from all grossness, as was the language spoken among the circle in which she lived), receiving with dignified reserve the finely painted flowers and poems to illustrate them, which formed the celebrated Guirlande de Julie, presented to her ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... there is little sense of awe and mystery. In harmony with the realistic instincts of the nation, everything is dramatically, very humanly conceived; at times, indeed, the personages of the Nativity scenes quite lose their sacred character, and the treatment degenerates into grossness. At its best, however, the French Noel has a gaiety and a grace, joined to a genuine, if not very deep, piety, that are extremely charming. Reading these rustic songs, we are carried in imagination ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... space thereon, so that rays from different points become mixed and confused together. This is opposed to a distinct vision, and attends near objects. Faint vision is when by reason of the distance of the object or grossness of the interjacent medium few rays arrive from the object to the eye. This is opposed to vigorous or clear vision, and attends remote ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley
... intrinsically sweet and pure, and it happens that when the dance has fallen to their shaping and direction, as in religious rites, then it has received its most objectionable development and perversion. But the grossness of dances devised by the secular mind for purposes of aesthetic pleasure is all in the censorious critic, who deserves the same kind of rebuke administered by Dr. Johnson to Boswell, who asked the Doctor if he considered ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... clear understanding of the relationship between the soul and the body. The physical body in each incarnation is the material expression of the soul, of its moral power or weakness, of its wisdom or ignorance, of its purity or its grossness, just as one's face is, at each moment the expression of one's thought and emotion in physical matter. Every change of consciousness registers itself in matter. A man has emotions. He feels a thrill of joy and his face proclaims the fact. He becomes angry, and ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... he pleases to use it; but it may not be amiss to inform your Readers, that there is a false Delicacy as well as a true one. True Delicacy, as I take it, consists in Exactness of Judgment and Dignity of Sentiment, or if you will, Purity of Affection, as this is opposed to Corruption and Grossness. There are Pedants in Breeding as well as in Learning. The Eye that cannot bear the Light is not delicate but sore. A good Constitution appears in the Soundness and Vigour of the Parts, not in the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... but an abridgment of the French nation, the sublimate and "proof" essence of French character? Not one, of all the great men of history, has possessed, so far as we know, a physical constitution more perfectly representing, even in its advancing grossness, both the strength and weakness of the people ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... least as the member of a college; that is, he can only take a degree at Oxford or Cambridge under the implied and wholly unmerited stigma applying to the non-collegiate student. And these iniquities apply not only to the great anthropoids whose strength and grossness we might legitimately fear, but to the most delicately organized types—to the Barbary Ape, the Lemur, and the Ring-tailed Baboon. Finally—and this is the worst feature in the whole matter—a Monkey, by a legal fiction at least as old as the fourteenth ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... wine. Shu[u]zen turned to him impatiently—"The speech of the overlord is without effect. Chu[u]dayu, try your hand, and bend Kiku to consent to my wishes, to become my concubine." Shamed before the whole household? O'Kiku had grown used to this grossness in the determined pursuit of Shu[u]zen. Now openly addressed before the chamberlain and others she looked down; a little flushed, and hearing with astonishment the words which came from such a quarter. Chu[u]dayu spoke ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... beauty then more than the feasting does now. It was a lovelier sight to see the guests of those Italian houses conversing together without the grossness of feeding or being fed—the sort of thing one saw at our houses when people went out ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... acquirements. With respect to the former, man shares them, though in a higher degree, with the brute creation;—but morals are altogether peculiar to higher intelligences. To man, in particular, the value of moral discipline is beyond calculation:—For, however much the present ignorance and grossness of men's minds may deceive them in weighing their respective worth, yet it would be easy to shew, that the knowledge and practice of but one additional truth in morals, are of more real value to a child, than a whole lifetime of physical enjoyment. Nature has accordingly implanted in his constitution, ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... as its shade, pursue; But, like a shadow, proves the substance true: For envy'd wit, like Sol eclips'd, makes known Th' opposing body's grossness, not its own. When first that sun too pow'rful beams displays, It draws up vapour, which obscures its rays; But ev'n those clouds at last adorn its way, Reflect new glories, ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... religion? I don't mean to say anything sacrilegious, but it seems to me that even if one has ceased to believe some parts of the Bible, even if one does not always obey the Ten Commandments, one is bound, not as a believer but as a gentleman, to remember the difference between grossness and refinement, between excess and restraint—that one can have and keep just as the pagan Greeks did, ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... can just drop you on the way to Clay's," said he; and the big swell grunted up to a box seat, while I took a position in the body of the vehicle commanding a clear view of the grossness of the highly coloured neck rolling over ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... anger then the bird exprest: "Sure, since the day I left the nest, I ne'er heard folly utter'd So fit to move a sky-lark's mirth, As what this little son of earth Hath in his grossness mutter'd. ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... distance, after and yet next to Shakespeare. It is a test of the greatness of Don Juan that its reputation has slowly increased and that, in spite of its supposed immoral tendency, in spite of occasional grossness and voluptuousness, it has come to be recognized as Byron's masterpiece. Don Juan will be read for its own sake, for its beauty, its humour, its faithfulness. It is a "hymn to the earth," but it is a human sequence to "its own ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... and so, in the twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror. It is my common practice when a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such grossness, such partiality, and such wearing iteration, as at length shall spur him up in its defence. In a moment he transmigrates, dons the required character, and with moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in question. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... English poetry. He is not infected with the wilful provincialism of Lamb nor with the spirit of John Bullishness which seriously proclaims in its rivals "equally a want of books and men."[57] "We may be sure of this," says Hazlitt, "that when we see nothing but grossness and barbarism, or insipidity and verbiage in a writer that is the God of a nation's idolatry, it is we and not they who want true taste and feeling."[58] Having this wholesome counsel ever before him, he can be more generously appreciative of the genius of Moliere, more justly discerning in ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... slightly altered a few of those passages which French readers take as a thing of course, but English ones, because of their different training, are supposed to eschew. A Frenchman, in short, writes for men, an Englishman rather for drawing-room ladies, who tolerate grossness only in the theatres and the columns of the newspapers. Mr. Michelet's subject, and his late researches, lead him into details, moral and physical, which among ourselves are seldom mixed up with ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... spent with Aunt Debby had been of the greatest benefit to Harry Glen. Since his parting with Rachel Bond, there had been going on in his spirit a fermentation like that with which good wine discharges itself of its grossness and impurities, and becomes clear and fine. In this process had vanished the absorbing selfishness of a much-indulged only son, and teh supercilious egotism which came as an almost necessary result of his college curriculum. This spiritual ripening received its perfecting color and bloom from the ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... gross and material epoch. People had a pretty taste in clothes, and a nice feeling for good architecture, graceful furniture, and artistic house decoration, but this was a veneer only, and under the veneer lay an ingrained grossness of mind, just as the gorgeous satins and dainty brocades covered dirty, unwashed bodies. Even the complexions of the women were artificial to mask the defects of a sparing use of soap and water, and they drenched themselves with perfumes to hide the unpleasant effects ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... exalting animal strength developed a living passion for tyranny and grossness. We have seen it evidenced in the orgies that ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... that is so popular even among appreciative critics. It is easy to characterize Courbet as brutal and material, but what is easy is generally not exact. What one glibly stigmatizes as brutality and grossness may, after all, be something of a particularly strong savor, enjoyed by the painter himself with a gusto too sterling and instinctive to be justifiably neglected, much less contemned. The first thing to do in estimating ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... Sire; kings and people, every thing seems to unite in our favour. The Saxons, the Genoese, the Belgians, the inhabitants of the banks of the Rhine, the Polanders, all refuse the new sovereigns to whom they are to be given. Italy, tired of the avarice and the grossness of the Austrians, pants for the moment of withdrawing from their sovereignty. Experience has taught the King of Naples that you are his surest protector, and he will assist the rising of the Italians whenever you wish it. The princes of the confederation ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... dazzling, the smile of a woman triumphant in her mastery of the situation. Her face was radiant, luminous with honest mirth. There was something simple and genuine in her beauty that thrilled the man before her, the man trying so vindictively to trap her to her own undoing. For all his grossness, Burke was of shrewd perceptions, and somewhere, half-submerged under the sordid nature of his calling, was a love of things esthetic, a responsiveness to the appeals of beauty. Now, as his glance searched the ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... be; others that it is better. At any rate it is bad enough, and a disgrace to our civilization. We have murderers by the thousand and thieves by the million, of all kinds and sizes; we have what we tenderly call "immorality," from the "errors of youth" to the sodden grossness of old age; married, single, and mixed. We have all the old kinds of wickedness and a lot of new ones, until one marvels at the purity and power of human nature, that it should carry so much disease and still grow on to ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... three oldish men, fully clad in the dark-blue uniform which in old times had signaled the Engineer Corps; one dozed with his head on his arm, the other two were stretched out flat in the mysterious grossness of sleep. A door from the cellar to a sunken garden was open, and through this opening streamed the intense radiance of the rising fire. At the opening stood three men, my visitor of the evening, a little, wrinkled man with Napoleon III whiskers and imperial, and an old, dwarfish ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... merit which I have spoken of as the mark of Hawthorne's best things—an indefinable purity and lightness of conception, a quality which in a work of art affects one in the same way as the absence of grossness does in a human being. His fancy, as I just now said, had evidently brooded over the subject for a long time; the situation to be represented had disclosed itself to him in all its phases. When I say in all its phases, the sentence demands modification; ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... this, I may further observe that the bringing of lions, serpents, palm-trees, rustic shepherds, and banished noblemen together in the Forest of Arden, is a strange piece of geographical license, which certain critics have not failed to make merry withal. Perhaps they did not see that the very grossness of the thing proves it to have been designed. The Poet keeps his geography true enough whenever he has cause to do so. He knew, at all events, that lions did not roam at large in France. By this irregular ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... sermon, and afterwards, accompanied by his attendants, went about singing and collecting his pence: to such theatrical processions in collegiate bodies, Warton attributes the custom, still existing at Eton, of going ad montem.[132] But this was a tame mummery, compared with the grossness elsewhere allowed in burlesquing religious ceremonies. The English, more particularly after the Reformation, seem not to have polluted the churches with such abuses. The relish for the Saturnalia was not, however, less lively here than on the Continent; but it took a more innocent direction, and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... guilty of no such supineness. The project was ignominiously shelved, with some sort of explanation that the springing of it on the professors was due to an error or misunderstanding. But that the attempt should have been made, and in a manner that argued so total a lack of any sense of its grossness and crudity, is a significant warning of the extent to which the notions underlying it have ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... simplicity of the times, prepared to quit the house. A friendly voice, however, exerting itself above the clamour, informed us that the offensive objects were a cloak and a shawl which hung over the front of the box.—You will scarcely suppose such grossness possible among a civilized people; but the fact is, our friends are of the proscribed class, and we were insulted because in their society.—I have before noticed, that the guards which were stationed in the theatre before the revolution ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... felt he could say for himself, when once it had come, or even, already, just as it was coming, that it turned on, as if she had moved an electric switch, the very brightest light of his own very reasons. There she was, in all the grossness of her native indelicacy, in all her essential excess of will and destitution of scruple; and it was the woman capable of that ignoble threat who, his sharper sense of her quality having become so quite deterrent, was ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... you, we would not have woman exposed to the grossness and vulgarity of public life, or encounter what she must at the polls. When you talk, gentlemen, of sheltering woman from the rough winds and revolting scenes of real life, you must be either talking for effect, or wholly ignorant of what the facts of life are. The man, whatever he is, is ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... put her book quite completely down. She wanted to convey certain things quite clearly but without grossness. ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... drinks in public and places opposite him a flower he has plucked or hopes to pluck. He drugs himself deliberately. Half the time when he should be soaring in his thoughts, he descends of deliberate intent. Instead of his flower, he makes his woman the partner of his grossness." ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to strike; the Breeches, in modest simplicity, depend at ease, and now at last have a graceful flow; the Waistcoat hides no evil passion, no riotous desire; hunger or thirst now dwells not in it. Thus all is purged from the grossness of sense, from the carking cares and foul vices of the World; and rides there, on its Clothes-horse; as, on a Pegasus, might some skyey Messenger, or purified ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... translating Othello in consequence of the importance given to such a vulgar thing as a handkerchief, and his attempt to soften its grossness by making the Moor reiterate 'Le bandeau! le bandeau!' may be taken as an example of the difference between la tragedie philosophique and the drama of real life; and the introduction for the first time of the word mouchoir at the Theatre Francais ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... or on his dithyrambs about Dorothea's charm, in all which Will joined, but with a difference. No sooner did Naumann mention any detail of Dorothea's beauty, than Will got exasperated at his presumption: there was grossness in his choice of the most ordinary words, and what business had he to talk of her lips? She was not a woman to be spoken of as other women were. Will could not say just what he thought, but he became irritable. And yet, when after some resistance he had consented to take the Casaubons ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... imagination is not always gratified, at least the powers of reflection and comparison are employed; and in the mass of materials which ingenious absurdity has thrown together, genuine wit and useful knowledge may be sometimes found, buried perhaps in grossness of expression, but useful to those who know their value; and such as, when they are expanded to perspicuity and polished to elegance, may give lustre to works which have more propriety though less copiousness ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Young Chevalier. I am afraid my touch is a little broad in a love story; I can't mean one thing and write another. As for women, I am no more in any fear of them; I can do a sort all right; age makes me less afraid of a petticoat, but I am a little in fear of grossness. However, this David Balfour's love affair, that's all right—might be read out to a mother's meeting—or a daughters' meeting. The difficulty in a love yarn, which dwells at all on love, is the dwelling on one string; it is manifold, I grant, but the root fact is there ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... borrowed avowedly from the Spanish, and partakes of the unnatural incongruity, common to the dramatic pieces of that nation, as also of the bustle and intrigue, with which they are usually embroiled. Few modern audiences would endure the absurd grossness of the deceit practised on Lord Nonsuch in the fourth act; nor is the plot of Lady Constance, to gain her lover, by marrying him in the disguise of a heathen divinity, more grotesque than unnatural.—Yet, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... of the Heidelberg professor, on the open countenance of the Hungarian architect, on the weak, narrow lineaments of the neurotic Hebrew poet; it gives dignity to red hair and freckles, tones down the grossness of too-fleshy cheeks, and lends an added ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... hopeless to point out that one of the most recognizable characteristics of life is its unrecognizableness, and that the very token of its spiritual nature lies in its being beyond the grossness of our ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... had some shocks in his life. This was the greatest. He could feel his cheeks and his hands growing dully hot, and his eyes smarting; and he was suddenly animated by an almost murderous hatred and an inexpressible disgust for his father, who in the grossness of his perceptions and his notions had imagined his son to be a thief. "Loathsome ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... ends the thrush-hunt. One word at parting, to qualify any too sweeping commendation we may have bestowed on M. Dumas in the early part of this paper. While we fully exonerate his writings from the charge of grossness, and recognise the absence of those immoral and pernicious tendencies which disfigure the works of many gifted French writers of the day, we would yet gladly see him abstain from the somewhat too Decameronian incidents and narratives ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... thought is the after-swell from an argument with Cullingworth this evening. He holds that the human race is deteriorating mentally and morally. He calls out at the grossness which confounds the Creator with a young Jewish Philosopher. I tried to show him that this is no proof of degeneration, since the Jewish Philosopher at least represented a moral idea, and was therefore on an infinitely higher plane ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... texture of disposition is formed, independently of schooling, by such influences. What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to free the capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to purge them of some of their grossness, and to furnish objects which make their activity ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... service to the cause of superstition. If the event turned out to be such as could in no way be twisted to come within the scope of the response, the pious suitor only concluded that the failure was owing to the grossness and carnality of his own apprehension, and not to any deficiency in the institution. Thus the oracle by no means lost credit, even when its meaning remained for ever in its original obscurity. But, when, by any fortunate chance, its predictions seemed to be verified, then the ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... a man of such extraordinary power of body and mind, such a remarkable combination of common sense, mental activity, advanced ideas, and determination to lift Russia to a high place among the nations, with cruelty, grossness, and infirmities of vice and passion, that his reign of forty-three years fills as large a place in Russian history as do the annals of all the preceding centuries, and the progress of Russia during this ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... hundred years ago. The folly of cramming a child with words representing no ideas, instead of giving him ideas to find themselves words, is no new discovery. Milton, in his letter to Master Hartlib, assails that "scholastic grossness of barbarous ages" from which we nineteenth-century citizens have by no means escaped. "We do amiss," exclaims the eloquent scholar, "to spend seven or eight years in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek as might otherwise be learned easily and pleasantly in one year." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... found free from that grossness which is unavoidable in a strictly literal translation of the original into English; and which has rendered the splendid translations of Sir R. Burton and Mr. J. Payne quite unsuitable as the basis of a popular edition, though at the same time stamping ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... compassion, to bestow on him." Though forty-eight hours had elapsed after this furious sally before he met with the Austrian Ambassador, Count Von Cobenzl, his passion was still so furious, that, observing his grossness and violence, all the members of the diplomatic corps trembled, both for this their respected member, and for the honour of our nation ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... creatures; the trees, in lieu of leaves or blossoms, shed upon the ground a frosty rime that sparkled as it fell, and might have been the dust of diamonds. So it was to Tom. From cottage chimneys, smoke went streaming up high, high, as if the earth had lost its grossness, being so fair, and must not be oppressed by heavy vapour. The crust of ice on the else rippling brook was so transparent, and so thin in texture, that the lively water might of its own free will have stopped—in ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... of the Novella has the attraction of graceful naughtiness in which vice, as Burke put it, loses half its evil by losing all its grossness. At all times, and for all time probably, similar tales, more broad than long, will form favourite talk or reading of adolescent males. They are, so to speak, pimples of the soul which synchronise with similar excrescences ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... use to her in grace?" wept the Fairy Eglantine; "the Spark will melt away all mortal grossness, till she is light and graceful as the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... pocket, he looked about him at the women with happy eyes, flinging his head back in three-quarters profile with all the airs of a king of the poultry-yard, airs which were prodigiously admired by the aristocratic circle of which he was the beau. There was a strain of eighteenth century grossness, as a rule, in his talk; a detestable kind of conversation which procured him some success with women—he made them laugh. M. du Chatelet was beginning to give this gentleman some uneasiness; and, as a ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... best understood if we realize that Leaves of Grass is an autobiography—and an extraordinarily candid one—of a man whose peculiar temperament found expression in prose-verse. His gentleness, his brusqueness, his egotism, his humility, his grossness, his finer nature, his crudeness, his eloquence, are all here. To him they were the attributes of ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... that on the Magi's altars glowed Spake to his soul in symbols and expressed The immortal purity that without rest Strives with the mortal grossness whose abode Is in the heart. Their symboled fire showed One Whose spirit on the altar of the world Burns ceaselessly,—where, if all vice be hurled, It shall be purged with fire that shall atone,— Christ's love the flame, man's ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... senses. What was it that enabled him, short of being a monster with visibly cloven feet and exhaling brimstone, to misprize so cruelly a nature like his wife's and to walk about the world with such a handsome invincible grin? It was the essential grossness of his imagination, which had nevertheless helped him to such a store of neat speeches. He could be highly polite and could doubtless be damnably impertinent, but the life of the spirit was a world as closed to him as the world of great music to a man without an ear. It ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... such things," exclaimed the haughty Sarah, alluding to the grossness of the language attributed to her, adding, "Won't your Majesty give me leave to tell ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... well," he told her, nodding again in his solemn, weighty fashion; "everybody that amounts to anything has this fever of unrest. Back home we used to stack the wheat to let it sweat and harden. You're going through that. It takes the grossness ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... religion? That, of course, is the great question. Mr. Beecher says: Religion is the slow, laborious, self-conducted EDUCATION of the whole man, from grossness to refinement, from sickliness to health, from ignorance to knowledge, from selfishness to justice, from justice to nobleness, from cowardice to valor. In treating this topic, whatever he may pray or read or assent to, he preaches cause and ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... against his will, forced to the office by the nobleman who had cared for and educated him. In the duke's fool he had found his other self; a man who like himself lent dignity to the gentle art of jesting; who could turn a rhyme and raise a laugh without resorting to grossness. ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... was certainly as beautiful as the lilies, he himself wasn't like those tragic sellers. It was only that he was so very ordinary,—a little man compact, apparently, of grossness, and the music he was making was so divine. It was that marvellous French and Russian stuff. I must play it to you, and play it to you, till you love it. It's like nothing there has ever been. It is of an exquisite youth,—untouched, fearless, quite heedless ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... colts' teeth yellow, and of the colour of saffron, when they are young, and become white when they grow up? A. Because horses have abundance of watery humours in them, which in their youth are digested and converted into grossness; but in old age heat diminishes, and the watery humours remain, whose ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... afterward Queen of Prussia, has left us some curious notes about the Czar, then twenty-seven years of age. He astonished her by the vivacity of his mind and the promptitude and point of his answers, not less than by the grossness of his manners, his bad habits at table, his wild timidity, like that of a badly brought-up child, his grimaces, and a frightful twitching which at times convulsed his whole face. Peter had then a beautiful brown skin, with great piercing eyes, but his features ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... mellow tones? Her unconstrained and inevitable manifestation, I said often to myself, was that of a woman to whom wedlock had thrown wide the gates of mystery. Yet sometimes I strove to be ashamed of these conjectures. I acknowledged it as a masculine grossness—a sin of wicked interpretation, of which man is often guilty towards the other sex—thus to mistake the sweet, liberal, but womanly frankness of a noble and generous disposition. Still, it was of no avail to reason ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... theatres paid, and they had a much finer opera than at Ephesus or at Halicarnassus. Their cookery was so refined, that one of the least sentimental ceremonies in the world was not only deprived of all its grossness, but was actually converted into an elegant amusement, and so famous that their artists were even required at Olympus. If their dinners were admirable, which is rare, their assemblies were amusing, which ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... remembered walks, green trees, cool skies, and all, than to lose my images of suppers eaten on Sabbath evenings at the end of those walks. I make no apology to the spiritually minded, to whom this statement must be a revelation of grossness. I am content to tell the truth as well as I am able. I do not even need to console myself with the reflection that what is dross to the dreamy ascetic may be gold to the psychologist. The fact is that I ate, even as a delicate child, with considerable relish; ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... climate, soon obliterate all intellectual characteristics. His face was well formed for an African's. His high and broad brow arched over a straight nose, while his lips had nothing of that vulgar grossness which gives so sensual an expression to his countrymen. Ahmah's manners to strangers or superiors were refined and courteous in a remarkable degree; but to the mob of the coast and inferiors generally, he manifested that harsh and peremptory tone ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... was one, he thought, who would soon put his master on the right way, and matters would come to a head and they would find the wars. But far from concerning himself with the wars of that age, the Slave of Orion explained that as events came nearer they became grosser or more material, and that their grossness did not leave them until they were some while passed away; so that to one whose studies were with aetherial things, near events were opaque and dim. He had a window, he explained, through which Rodriguez should see clearly the ancient wars, while another window ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... grossness of the vice of gluttony makes it happily rare, at least in its most repulsive form; for, be it said, it is here question of the excessive use of ordinary food and drink, and not of intoxicants to which latter form of gluttony we shall pay ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Two Excellent Princes, Grimello's Fortunes (1604), Strange News out of Divers Countries (1622), etc. His mother married E. Gascoigne, the poet (q.v.). His lyrics are pure and fresh, and his romances, though full of conceits, are pleasant reading, remarkably free from grossness. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... evening when they were together there, and I heard what they said. I am ashamed of it now, though I suppose I was only exercising a legal right. I found from their manner that an extraordinary affinity, or sympathy, entered into their attachment, which somehow took away all flavour of grossness. Their supreme desire is to be together—to share each other's ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy |
