"Ignoble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "If the issue is forced upon us," he interrupted, "there is, I think, nothing to do but to tell the truth." "Even then," replied his chief, "not butt end foremost." Cases of religious disbelief will occur to every one. While all hypocrisy and truckling to the majority opinion is ignoble, the blunt announcement of disbelief may do much more harm than good. Truth is not the only ideal; men live by their beliefs, and one who cannot accept a doctrine which is precious and inspiring to others should think twice before helping to destroy it. ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... strong beaks and black feathers adhered, much bedraggled and ruffled by weather. These crows had long been dead; the keeper when he shot a crow did not trouble to have it carried home, unless a nail was conspicuously vacant. The ignoble bird was left ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... differences, covertly, so to speak. The men appeared at the gates one morning, and I let them in without referring by a single word to what had taken place. The principle of unionism is a noble thing, but ignoble men, like rust in girders, gnaw rapidly into principles and quickly and treacherously nullify ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... Desiderating coal with little hope of its delivery; I realise that getting into tram or tube's improbable And pardon profiteers for robbing ev'ryone that's robable; I don't mind cleaning doorsteps in the view of all ignoble eyes (Now Mary, my domestic, has decided to demobilise); Though life is like a poker that you've handled at the vivid end And all my wretched companies have ceased to pay a dividend— All these and other worries, though they're very near ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... man rubbed up the tombstones? Certainly, for the last ten years the outcries of literature in this direction have not been superfluous; art is beginning to disguise beneath its floriated ornaments those ignoble facades of what are called in Paris "houses of product," which one of our poets has jocosely compared ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... nature rounded, integral, and complete. And when the work was closed, it left behind it a tender warmth that played around the heart of the reader, and vivified feelings that seemed unknown before. Randal laid the book down softly; and for five minutes the ignoble and base purposes to which his own knowledge was applied, stood before him, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... born spirit of immortal fire Is stranger to ignoble deeds, and shuns The name of cowardice. But well thy mind, Sage, and matur'd by long experience, weighs The perilous attempt, to storm the town, And rescue thence, the suff'ring citizens. For but one pass to that peninsula, On which the city stands, on all sides barr'd. And here what numbers ...
— The Battle of Bunkers-Hill • Hugh Henry Brackenridge
... course to the cottage of the herdsman, and, entering in at the front court, the dogs, of which Eumaeus kept many fierce ones for the protection of the cattle, flew with open mouths upon him, as those ignoble animals have oftentimes an antipathy to the sight of anything like a beggar, and would have rent him in pieces with their teeth, if Ulysses had not had the prudence to let fall his staff, which had chiefly ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... improved the occasion to read a lecture to his countrymen on the inconsistency and guilt of holding blacks in servitude. In the Missouri struggle of 1819- 20, the people of the free states, with a few ignoble exceptions, took issue with the South against the extension of slavery. Some ten years later, the present antislavery agitation commenced. It originated, beyond a question, in the democratic element. With the words of Jefferson on their lips, young, earnest, and enthusiastic ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... sentiment, builds the gallows, and then makes us hangmen for our sex. Women have crucified the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, the George Sands, the Fanny Kembles, of all ages; and now men mock us with the fact, and say we are ever cruel to each other. Let us end this ignoble record and henceforth stand by womanhood. If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified, let men drive the spikes and plait ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... that the countess should use her husband for the purpose of keeping me bound shocked me. It seemed to me ridiculous and ignoble that she should make her husband the guardian of her love. Did she think ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... forthwith proceeded to do. He rushed his opponent and clinched, though not until his right eye was in mourning and a stiff jolt in the short ribs had caused him to grunt in most ignoble fashion. But few men could withstand Mr. Gibney once he got to close quarters. Tabu-Tabu wrapped his long arms around the commodore and endeavoured to smother his blows, but Mr. Gibney would not be denied. His great fist shot upward from the hip and connected with the cannibal's ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... the monuments both as a beast of burden and also as ridden in war, but only by the enemies of the Assyrians. [PLATE XXX., Fig. 3.] The horse is used both for draught and for riding, but seems never degraded to ignoble purposes. His breed is good, though he is not so finely or delicately made as the modern Arab. The head is small and well shaped, the nostrils large and high, the neck arched, but somewhat thick, the body compact, the loins ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... breast of woman And face so debonair Had the sleek false paws of a lion, That could furtively seize and tear. So far to the shoulders,—but if you took The Beast in reverse you would find The ignoble form of a craven cur Was all ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... made to one who, rejecting his long services and despising his person, refused to admit him to her presence; and for the love of this lady who had so unkindly treated him the noble Orsino, forsaking the sports of the field and all manly exercises in which he used to delight, passed his hours in ignoble sloth, listening to the effeminate sounds of soft music, gentle airs, and passionate love-songs; and neglecting the company of the wise and learned lords with whom he used to associate, he was now all day long conversing with young Cesario. Unmeet ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Martyr" is, perhaps, as instructive an example as could be chosen of successful Idealism; because in it we have a marvellous presentation of reality as seen by a poetic mind. The figure of the flying monk might have been equally real if it had been an ignoble presentation of terror—the superb tree, which may almost be called an actor in the drama, might have been painted with even greater minuteness, though not perhaps with equal effect upon us, if it had arrested our attention by its details—the dying martyr and the noble assassin might have been ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... with a heart Absolved and pure, and cleansed in every part Of every thought that I might wish to hide From God, I come,—fit spirit to abide With such a soaring spirit as thou art, Whose eye transfixes with a fiery dart Presumptuous passion and ignoble pride. ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)
... one jarring note in the sweet melody of her love-story, this apprehension of Derek's regarding his mother. The Derek she loved was a strong man, with a strong man's contempt for other people's criticism; and there had been something ignoble and fussy in his attitude regarding Lady Underhill. She had tried to feel that the flaw in her idol did not exist. And here was Freddie Rooke, a man who admired Derek with all his hero-worshipping nature, pointing it out independently. ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... stopped, Alexis got out of the third carriage. In spite of the darkness and of his ignoble garb, the Countess and her daughters recognized him. One of the latter was about to call out his name; but her mother placed her hand on her mouth in time to prevent the imprudence, and the Count ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... vain: strike other chords; Fill high the cup with Samian wine! Leave battles to the Turkish hordes, And shed the blood of Scio's vine! Hark! rising to the ignoble call— How answers each ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... natural with the supernatural. Action, so far as respects cause and effect, takes the widest and wildest range, through the agency of good or evil influences, which are put in motion alike for noble or ignoble ends—alike by men, beasts, devils, or gods. Seeing something mysterious and wonderful, he believes all things mysterious and wonderful; and he is afloat without shore or compass, on the wildest sea of superstition and necromancy. He sees a god in every ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... shaken me a bit. I feel that I have an ignoble share in the whole affair. I'm getting to be an old man; I can claim certain privileges on that score, and if life means anything past forty, it means sharing its experiences with a friend. I'm going to speak of something that has never passed my lips ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... wealth and power for truth and service; others, who could draw upon no hidden source of strength, have been sustained in the midst of trials which have seemed heavy enough to crush; and, most wonderful of all, in spite of all vices and crimes, all darkness and ignorance, all bondage to ignoble ideals and slavery to commercialism and pleasure, the race of man has never been content with things as they have been. As the moon draws the tides by unseen attractions, so by unseen attractions the souls of men have been made dissatisfied, and drawn toward truth and beauty, ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... passion, or rather appetite, but most disgraceful, ignoble, shameful, but almost ferocious, ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... certainly permitted, if not encouraged, during one period of his reign, no one adopted the modern view of his character till more than a hundred years after his death, when belief in all nobleness and faith had died out among an ignoble and faithless generation, and the scandalous gossip of such a light rogue as Osborne was taken into the place of honest ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... Scott's day, or in ours, of persons who know and can recite variants of our traditional ballads. The strange song of The Bitter Withy, unknown to Professor Child, was recovered from recitation but lately, in several English counties. The ignoble lay of Johnny Johnston has also been recovered: it is widely diffused. I myself obtained a genuine version of Where Goudie rins, through the kindness of Lady Mary Glyn; and a friend of Lady Rosalind Northcote ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... night. A learned man should not discharge such arrows, for do they not touch the very vitals of others. He, to whom the gods ordain defeat, hath his senses taken away, and it is for this that he stoopeth to ignoble deeds. When the intellect becometh dim and destruction is nigh, wrong, looking like right, firmly sticketh to the heart. Thou dost not clearly see it, O bull of the Bharata race, that clouded intellect hath now possessed thy sons in consequence ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... spirit of sour misanthropy; but woe betide the ignoble prose-writer who should thus dare to compare notes with the world, or tax it roundly ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... fashion adopted by certain theatres—called lyric—of causing the cymbals and the long drum to be played by the same performer. The sound of the cymbals when attached to the drum—as they must be to render this economy feasible—is an ignoble noise, fit only for bands at tea-gardens. This custom, moreover, leads mediocre composers into the habit of never employing one of these instruments without the other, and considering their use as solely confined to forcibly marking ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... horror of her married life, she had remained a child. When the Comte de Verneuil had found her unforgiving in the matter of the false announcement of Paragot's death, he had left her pretty much to herself, and had gone after the strange goddesses, the ignoble Astaroths, beloved by a man of his type. Month had followed month and year had followed year, and she had not developed. His family, nationalist and devout, of the old school, regarded him, rightly, as a renegade from their traditions, and regarded Joanna, wrongly, ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... shows his good heart toward his own people; for toward one not his own was he guilty of an ignoble act. It was to that sailor Rodrigo, of the Pinta, who had been the first to sight land early on the morning of October 12. When Columbus was asked to whom the queen's promised reward of ten thousand maravedis should go, he replied, "To myself." Surely it could not have been ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... and in its advocacy shrinks not from any of the terrors the law may have in store for her. Mr. District Attorney, it is your duty to arrest Miss Anthony; to cross swords with an antagonist worthy of your steel. Your present action looks ignoble, and is unworthy of you or of the office ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... with a sort of odd shame and distress, to ask me why it was that he was subjected to so much suffering from what he called the lower and ignoble regions of his body; and I used to explain to him that he had made them suffer by long years of neglect, and that they were now having their revenge, and in their own way I have often found, that the more the nervous centres are employed in those offices of thought ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... school-room days had been a horror to her, and also a terror, because she had often almost flung ink-bottles and heavy rulers at her silly, lying governesses, and once had dug a pair of scissors into one sneaking old maid fool's arm when she had made her "see red" by her ignoble trickeries. Perhaps she would be hanged some day herself. She once prayed for a week that she might be made better tempered, —not that she believed in prayer,—and of course nothing came ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... not a single soul, Lady Lucille herself least of all, realized that this perfection was but the hollow husk and shell of beauty without heart or soul; that behind the lovely face, within the graceful form, lurked as selfish and ignoble a nature as that which stirs the blood of any ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... traversed it in a day, but the cruel man had made up his mind that the captain's charger should do it in a few hours. It is not so much distance as pace that kills. Had any consideration whatever been extended to the noble creature by the ignoble brute who rode it, the good horse would have galloped to the head of the Trap almost without turning a hair. At first he strode out over the rolling prairie with the untiring vigour of a well-made frame and a splendid constitution, leaping the little cracks and ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... endures through wrong, contents itself in abnegation, is of the imperishable things that draw weak man a little nearer to the angels. When Carlotta wept upon my shoulder during those few first moments of her return I knew that all resentment was gone from my heart, that it would have been a poor, ignoble thing. Had she come back to me leprous of body and abominable of spirit, it would not have mattered. I would have forgiven her, loved her, cherished her just the same. It was a question, not of reason, not of human pity, not of quixotism; not of any argument or sentiment for which ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... regard prudence as inferior in principle to purpose and good-will, or even as ignoble when confirmed in its narrowness. It {91} denotes an organization of life in which as yet no interest has risen above the rest; it bespeaks the common populace of interests, disciplined, but not moved to any eminent achievement. The fact that the validity ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... not so much its violence as its Machiavellian cunning. The art popularly known to-day as camouflage—of dressing-up one design under the guise of something quite different, of making black appear white by glorifying the most ignoble actions, of making white appear black by holding up all honourable traditions to contempt and ridicule, in a word perversion—has been reduced to a system by the secret directors of world revolution. ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Henry's individual will of such miraculous force that he could ride roughshod in insolent pride over public opinion at home and abroad? Or did his personal ends, dictated perhaps by selfish motives and ignoble passions, so far coincide with the interests and prejudices of the politically effective portion of his people, that they were willing to condone a violence and tyranny, the brunt of which fell after all on the few? Such is the riddle which propounds itself to every student of ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... "That ignoble peace! It was no peace at all, with that crime and shame at our very gates." She was conscious of parroting the current phrases of the newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose her words. She must sacrifice anything to the high ...
— Different Girls • Various
... most unfortunate speculation, as it turned out. All his speculation had a way of turning badly. That was because people, even people in Nicaragua, distrusted him for one reason or another; they said his whole existence was a tangle of shady and ignoble transactions—that he looked like a fraud, and behaved like one. He couldn't help his face; but his face, they soon discovered, was not the only, or even the most, evasive and fugitive ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... was her father issued his ultimatum. He had conveyed it to her, not verbally, but by means of a letter, which seemed to her a singularly ignoble method of prohibition. "He couldn't look me in the face and ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... trustworthy veterans are selected for the office. In what is called the waist, or the centre of the ship, the landsmen and least skilful of the crew are placed. They have to pull and haul with the marines, and to clean the decks, and to do various ignoble duties below. From the part of the ship where they are stationed, they are called waisters. The after-guards are stationed on the quarter-deck, and have to tend the spanker and other after-sails, and to haul ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... But secret spleen there must have been—a twist of a painter's wrist may expose his soul. He became a solitary and ate the bitter root of sin, for, cerebral as he is, his discovery of the human soul shows it as ill at ease before its maker. Flaubert has said that "the ignoble is the sublime of the lower slope." But no man may sun himself on this slope by the flames of hell without his soul shrivelling away. Rodin, who admires Rops and has been greatly influenced by him; Rodin, as an artist superior to the ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... brother's grief: Then virtuous Javali, chief Of twice-born sages, thus replied In words that virtue's law defied: "Hail, Raghu's princely son, dismiss A thought so weak and vain as this. Canst thou, with lofty heart endowed, Think with the dull ignoble crowd? For what are ties of kindred? can One profit by a brother man? Alone the babe first opes his eyes, And all alone at last he dies. The man, I ween, has little sense Who looks with foolish reverence On father's or on mother's name: In others, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... about preferment's gate, And press you down with all their weight; For as of old mathematicians Were by the vulgar thought magicians; So academic dull ale-drinkers Pronounce all men of wit free-thinkers. Wit, as the chief of virtue's friends, Disdains to serve ignoble ends. Observe what loads of stupid rhymes Oppress us in corrupted times; What pamphlets in a court's defence Show reason, grammar, truth, or sense? For though the Muse delights in fiction, She ne'er inspires against conviction. Then keep your virtue still unmixt, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... Paris, with his old dissatisfaction perhaps a trifle less bitter. He was seeking pleasure in whatever art, learning, literature, refinement, and luxury can do for a man who has them all at command; but there was something within him that spurned this ignoble existence, and called for higher aims and worthier exertion. He was not vicious, he never had been vicious, or, as somebody else said, his vices were all refined vices; but a life of mere self-indulgence, although pursued ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... know Christians are the only worshippers who kneel as if their lower legs were cut off and who "join hands" like the captive offering his wrists to be bound (dare manus). The posture, however, is not so ignoble as that of the Moslem "Sijdah" (prostration) which made certain North African tribes reject Al-Islam saying, "These men show their hind ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... night, however, was in accord with the spirit of his companions in arms, and of his chiefs. We may assure ourselves of this by consulting the Sixth Report of the Belgian Commission of Inquiry upon, the violation of the rules of the law of nations (Havre, Nov. 10, 1914) and the ignoble proclamations placarded by the Germans throughout Belgium. I will content myself ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... one cold on Wednesday last, another on Thursday, two on Friday, four on Saturday, and one at every station between this and Ingleborough on Monday. I never was in such ignoble misery of cold. I've no cough to speak of, nor anything worse than usual in the way of sneezing, but my hands are cold, my pulse nowhere, my nose tickles and wrings me, my ears sing—like kettles, my mouth has no taste, my heart no hope of ever being good for anything, any more. I never ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... felt that she had discharged her duty in resigning to his will, not alone her property in the world, but the dearest affections of her heart. But it was not surprising that I could not, at such a moment, fully appreciate these honourable motives; yet my spleen sought no ignoble ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... means necessary to point this out—that the truly eloquent must be free from base and ignoble (or ill-bred) thoughts. For it is not possible that men who live their lives with mean and servile aims and ideas should produce what is admirable and worthy of immortality. Great accents we expect to fall from the lips of those whose thoughts ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... said. There is a record of an argument with Germain, in which his tutor tries to test the strength of his purpose. Germain tells him that even in a monastery evil cannot be excluded, and that many even of the most austere monks live lives of petty jealousy and ignoble ambition. "There are many," Germain says, "who are saved in the struggle of the world who would be shipwrecked in a monastery." But Bernard is steadfast in his choice. "Happy are those who have chosen to dwell in God's court, and to sleep on His estate." Thus day and ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... only the fact of their being addressed to persons of small intelligence which makes the guide-books of the eighteenth century seem ridiculous; another reason for their ignoble tone is the increased emphasis they lay on the material convenience of the traveller. Not the service of one's country or the perfecting of one's character is the note of Georgian injunctions, but the fear of being cheated and of being sick. Misson's instructions ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... anything which makes the vicious more vicious, it is the "I-am-better-than-thou" expression on the face of conscious virtue. Now Shakespeare had none of this pride of superiority, either in its noble or ignoble form. Consider that, if his gigantic powers had been directed by antipathies instead of sympathies, he would have left few classes of human character untouched by his terrible scorn. Even if his antipathies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... up a superior smile. "Is passion—are passions bound to be ignoble? But you're making the ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... darkened minds than the salvation, by hook or crook, of the British Empire. The other faction, more patriotic in theory, cried aloud stinking fish, and by scurrilous over-statement defeated their own ends. In the general ignoble screech the pronouncements of the one or two dignified and thoughtful London newspapers ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... them efficiently, was a sort of religious cult with her, in the same way as it is nowadays with women of a certain position not to be dowdy. The peasant-cottager's wife could never think of herself as a mere charwoman or washerwoman; she had no such ignoble career. She was Mrs. This, or Dame That, with a recognized place in the village; and all the village traditions were her possession. The arts of her people—the flower-gardening, the songs and old sayings and superstitions, the customs of Harvest-time and Christmas—were ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... shouts; he would have pierced the whole line of the enemy with his shafts. Ah! but if you will not leave the aged in peace, decree that the advocates be matched; thus the old man will only be confronted with a toothless greybeard, the young will fight with the braggart, the ignoble with the son of Clinias[228]; make a law that in future, the old man can only be summoned and convicted at the courts by the aged and the ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... the trade of writing for bread, so he also is charged with venal flattery, than which nothing can be more ignoble and base. To praise a blockhead's wit because he is great, is too frequently practised by authors, and deservedly draws down contempt upon them. He who is favoured and patronized by a great man, at the expence of his integrity and honour, has paid a dear price for the purchase, a miserable exchange, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... fertility of the soil afford ample field for their encouragement. To hail their enslaved bondmen upon their deliverance, in the glorious kingdom of British Liberty, in the Canadas, we cordially invite the free and the bond, the noble and the ignoble—we have ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... were no indelicacy, this time, in watching him. Just as "pluck" comes of breeding, so is endurance especially an attribute of the artist. Because he can stand outside himself, and (if there be nothing ignoble in them) take a pleasure in his own sufferings, the artist has a huge advantage over you and me. The Duke, so soon as Zuleika's spell was broken, had become himself again—a highly self-conscious artist in life. And now, standing pensive on the doorstep, he was almost enviable ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... gigantic helmet-shells, a species of Cassis, suspended by a rattan handle, form the vessels in which fresh water is daily carried past my door. It is painful to a naturalist to see these splendid shells with their inner whorls ruthlessly broken away to fit them for their ignoble use. ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... birth and parentage. On the rock of ages he first opened his eyes to the sun, in noble instinct affronting and outstaring the light. The Great Glen of Scotland—hath it not been the inheritance of his ancestors for many thousand years? No polluting mixture of ignoble blood, from intermarriages of necessity or convenience with kite, buzzard, hawk, or falcon. No, the Golden Eagles of Glen-Falloch, surnamed the Sun-starers, have formed alliances with the Golden Eagles of Cruachan, Benlawers, Shehallion, and Lochnagair—the Lightning-Glints, the Flood-fallers, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... If we enter the hole, the mouse will destroy us; we remain where we are and the sky-ranging fire will destroy us. Reflecting upon both the calamities, a death by fire is preferable to a death by being eaten up. If we are devoured by the mouse within the hole, that death is certainly ignoble, whereas the destruction of the body in fire is approved ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... exponent of the national characteristics of a people,—the higher and nobler sort exemplifying the religious life and moral virtue in a nation, the debased variety, on the other hand, expressing the ignoble qualities of national vice and shame. The text of "The Stones" is Venice, and the design of the volumes, in the author's words, is to show that the Gothic architecture of Venice "had arisen out of, and indicated, a state ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... upon explaining all the ramifications of despotism, regal, aristocratical, and ecclesiastical, pervading the whole mass of the people; reaching, like a circulating fluid, the most distant capillary tubes of poverty and wretchedness? In these cases the sufferers are too ignoble to be known; and the mass too indiscriminate to be pitied. But should a philosopher feel and reason thus? Should he mistake the cause for the effect? and, giving all his pity to the few, feel no compassion for the many, because they suffer in his eyes not individually but by millions? ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... wisdom, and how luminous the intellect of Joan of Arc, you must study her there, where she fought out that long fight all alone—and not merely against the subtlest brains and deepest learning of France, but against the ignoble deceits, the meanest treacheries, and the hardest hearts to be found in any ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... as he sat there reviewing it his cheeks burned and his soul was steeped in humiliation. Look at her life—how fair it was, and tending ever upward; and look at his own—how frivolous, how charged with mean vanities, how selfish, how empty, how ignoble! And its trend—never upward, but downward, ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... this man as his insignificance permits, I should call him a "gabby" fellow—loud of resolution, ignoble of effort. Over his lager no man would be braver. His face is familiar to me from a review of those detective cabinets usually called "Rogues' Galleries." As a "sneak thief" or "bagman," I should ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... Buchanan for his tutor. Smollett, having compiled the popular accusations of the "vanity, the prejudices, the littleness of soul," of this abused monarch, surprises one in the same page by discovering enough good qualities to make something more than a tolerable king. "His reign, though ignoble to himself, was happy to his people, who were enriched by commerce, felt no severe impositions, while they made considerable progress in their liberties." So that, on the whole, the nation appears not to have had all the reason they have so fully ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... tramp, vagabond, bezonian[obs3], panhandler*, sundowner[obs3], chiffonnier, Cinderella, cinderwench[obs3], scrub, jade; gossoon[obs3]. Goth, Vandal, Hottentot, Zulu, savage, barbarian, Yahoo; unlicked cub[obs3], rough diamond|!. barbarousness, barbarism; boeotia. V. be ignoble &c. adj., be nobody &c. n. Adj. ignoble, common, mean, low, base, vile, sorry, scrubby, beggarly; below par; no great shakes &c. (unimportant) 643; homely, homespun; vulgar, low-minded; snobbish. plebeian, proletarian; of low parentage, of low origin, of low extraction, of mean parentage, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... service of the State during those terrible years (524 and 525) in which the failing intellect of Theodoric, goaded almost to madness by Justin's persecution of his Arian co-religionists, condescended to ignoble measures of retaliation, which brought him into collision with Senate and Pope, and in the end tarnished his fame by the judicial murder of Boethius and Symmachus. It was fortunate indeed for Cassiodorus if he was during this time, perhaps because of his unwillingness to help the King to his ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... work was all the more difficult when the character of the King is considered. Louis XIII. was a different kind of man from his father Henry IV. and his grandson Louis XIV. He had no striking characteristics but feebleness and timidity and love of ignoble pleasures. He had no ambitions or powerful passions; was feeble and sickly from a child,—ruled at one time by his mother, and then by a falconer; and apparently taking but little ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... wanders. There is a world of difference between the 'golden mean' of Horace, and the worship of virtue that redeems the obscurities of Persius. There is a still greater gulf between the high scorn manifested by Persius for all that is base and ignoble, and the fierce, almost petulant, indignation of Juvenal, that often seems to rend for the mere delight of rending, and is at times disfigured by such grossness of language that many an unsympathetic reader has wondered whether the indignation was genuine. Neither Horace nor Juvenal ever ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... all. He is meditating on suicide; and he finds that what stands in the way of it, and counterbalances its infinite attraction, is not any thought of a sacred unaccomplished duty, but the doubt, quite irrelevant to that issue, whether it is not ignoble in the mind to end its misery, and, still more, whether death would end it. Hamlet, that is to say, is here, in effect, precisely where he was at the time of his first soliloquy ('O that this too too solid flesh would ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... idea of the universal kingdom of God. Before this great idea, embodied in concrete form, and not a paper doctrine, partial scandals and abuses seemed to sink into insignificance. Objections seemed petty and ignoble; the pretence of rival systems impertinent and absurd. He resented almost with impatience anything in the way of theory or explanation which seemed to him narrow, technical, dialectical. He would look at nothing but what had on it the mark of greatness ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... be thoroughly penetrated, as he ought to be, with this thought, that we are all in an especial manner sprung from God, and that God is the Father of men as well as gods, full sure he would never conceive aught ignoble or base of himself.... Those few who hold that they are born for fidelity, modesty, and unerring rightness in dealing with the things of sense, never conceive aught base or ignoble of themselves." He means that, for the real Stoic, self-respect is the necessary consequence ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... grove that the traveller passes on that road was guarded once by a nymph, so now it is hallowed by a memory. In vain the air, heavy with death, creeps over the wood, the rivulet, and the shattered tower;—the mind will not recur to the risk of its ignoble tenement; it flies back; it is with the Past! A subtle and speechless rapture fills and exalts the spirit. There—far to the West—spreads that purple sea, haunted by a million reminiscences of glory; there the mountains, with their sharp and snowy crests, rise into the bosom of the heavens; ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fracas the lumber barons came out only second best—and they were bad losers. After the war-fever had died down—one year after the signing of the Armistice—they were still trying in Centralia to attain their ignoble ends by means of ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... challei euprepestatos. He would therefore have looked the part admirably of the dying gladiator; and he would have died in his natural vocation. But it was ordered otherwise; his death was destined to private malice, and to an ignoble hand. And much obscurity still rests upon the motives of the assassins, though its circumstances are reported with unusual minuteness of detail. One thing is evident, that the public and patriotic motives assigned by the perpetrators as the remote causes of their ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... it) one born with the God-like capacity to think and feel for others, irrespective of their rank or condition.... One who possesses an ideal so lofty, a mind so delicate, that it lifts him above all things ignoble and base, yet strengthens his hands to raise those who are fallen—no matter ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... to see (or conjure up rather) a dumb buffoon Fate, primeval, unfriendly and stupid, whom Man must defy. And Conrad defies it, but wearily, for he feels sick at heart,—because of his surety that Fate is ignoble, and blind. ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... she was younger than I, has been my ideal, and is still. She was the daughter of the Rev. Samuel Ware of Coniston, and a descendant of Captain Timothy Prescott, whom General Stark called 'Honest Tim.' She was, to me, all that a woman should be, in intellect, in her scorn of all that is ignoble and false, and in her loyalty to her friends." Here the handkerchief came out of the reticule. "She went to Boston to teach school, and some time afterward I was offered a position in New York, and I never saw her again. But she married in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Redfords abound, great sacrifices must be made to their existence." Such sacrifices, we presume, as abstaining from Latin quotations, of extremely moderate interest and applicability, which the wise and noble minority of the other sex would be quite as willing to dispense with as the foolish and ignoble majority. It is as little the custom of well-bred men as of well-bred women to quote Latin in mixed parties; they can contain their familiarity with "the humane Cicero" without allowing it to boil over in ordinary conversation, and even references to "the ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... sometimes compare herself with herself—her present self with her past self— provided it be done with due humility; but let her beware of measuring herself by others. Such a course is as perilous as it is ignoble and unprofitable. ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... in the Seine, where now stands the statue of Henry IV, between the King's garden on one side and the convent of the Augustinian monks on the other, the two pyres were raised—two out of the four had shrunk back into their ignoble confessions. It was the hour of vespers when these two aged and noble men were led out to be burned; they were tied each to the stake. The flames kindled dully and heavily; the wood, hastily piled up, was green or wet; or in cruel mercy the tardiness was designed that the victims might ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... sparkled on that of some venal beauty whose challenge to his admiration proceeded from the opposite pole of womanhood. Nevertheless he feels kindly towards him. The nobler love was not dishonoured by the more ignoble fancy, since it could not be touched by it. Duke Charles was still faithful as a man ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... features. The glance of his dark eye, as it rested fondly on his fair companion, or was turned abroad on the world, told alternately of a loving heart and a proud spirit. Philip Hayforth was one who would have scorned to commit an ignoble action, or to stain his soul with the shadow of a falsehood for all the treasures and the blessings the earth has to bestow; but he was quick to resent an injury, and slow to forget it, and not for ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... which he who has given up the world ought not to follow after—devotion, on the one hand, to those things whose attractions depend upon the passions, a low and pagan ideal, fit only for the worldly-minded, ignoble, unprofitable, and the practice on the other hand of asceticism, which is painful, ignoble, unprofitable. There is a Middle Path discovered by the Tath[a]gata[1]—a path which opens the eyes, and bestows understanding, which leads ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... in life devote his services to the expedition—but to be slaving through woods, rocks, and mountains, for the shadow of pay—" writes he, "I would rather toil like a day laborer for a maintenance, if reduced to the necessity, than serve on such ignoble terms." Parity of pay was indispensable to the dignity ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... Ill-fated, that, worn with proneness for the lord-ship of goodly things, Neither hear nor behold, in its oneness, the law that divinity brings; Which men with reason obeying, might attain unto glorious life, No longer aimlessly straying in the paths of ignoble strife. There are men with a zeal unblest, that are wearied with following of fame, And men with a baser quest, that are turned to lucre and shame. There are men too that pamper and pleasure the flesh with delicate stings: All these desire beyond measure to be other ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... reflexions were assuredly present, unknown to himself, in the midst of the many thoughts that crowded his brain in that supreme hour, and they must have influenced him in forming his ultimate decision, though he did not guess that they were at work. He saw only the alternative possibilities of an ignoble life or of an honourable death, and he chose the more pleasant, the easier, the quicker. In the twinkling of an eye it would be done, and here would be no more Rex. Those left behind would think kindly of him; they would suppose he had been mad, and in due time ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... sullied her hands but not her conscience. A dirty act she could not perform. Aristocrat and anarchist, she was also an artist. With simple things and simple people, she was simple as you please. Stupidity and pretentiousness enraged her. The philistine and the ignoble she loathed. ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... must be impossible for those who stoop their heads down, to give their figure any air of dignity, or grace of politeness. They must always retain something of ignoble in their manner. Nothing then is more recommendable than for those who are naturally inclined to this defect, to endeavor the avoiding it by a particular attention to this capital instruction in learning the minuet. It is also not enough to take the ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... more lucrative and yours the more dangerous rank, and there is a sense in which both may be made equally honourable to a good man. I had rather, strange as you may think it, be a detective of character and parts than a weak and ignoble sovereign." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which was contrary to the rules of war of all civilized nations, and one that had always been respected by the Indians. And thus, by the treachery or ignorance of the Winnebago interpreter on board of the Warrior, it was bought to a close in the same ignoble way it commenced—disregarding a flag of truce—and by which Black Hawk lost more than half of his army. But in justice to Lieut. Kingsbury, who commanded the troops on the Warrior, and to his credit it must be said, that Black Hawk's flag would ...
— Autobiography of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk • Black Hawk
... these rudely but patiently resident races, possessing fields and orchards, quiet herds, homes of a sort, moralities and memories not ignoble, dwelt, or rather drifted, and shook, a shattered chain of gloomier tribes, piratical mainly, and predatory, nomad essentially; homeless, of necessity, finding no stay nor comfort in earth, or bitter sky: desperately wandering along ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... two," they pay for one by one. Gentle and considerate feelings are lost, time is wasted, a vicious habit,—almost no habit is more vicious,—is acquired. Such gossip can never become a pure enjoyment; it remains at the best an ignoble, discreditable excitement. Rolling these sweet morsels under their tongues, a taste for ill-natured or exaggerated comment fixes itself in their mouths. Even if they have consciences that, like good mothers, will occasionally wash their mouths out with soap, ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... ranged upon the white and well-scoured dresser in just and gradual order, from the small egg-plate to the large and capacious dish, whereon, at Christmas and Easter, the substantial round of corned beef used to rear itself so proudly over the more ignoble joints at the lower end ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... not that of a loss of power, it is true, but it was that of a still more ignoble passion, covetousness. As Roswell proceeded, his mind represented one source of wealth after another released from his clutch, until it was with a tremulous voice, and a countenance from which all traces of animation had fled, that he ventured ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... relating to this part of the case was forgotten in destroying and removing secret papers when Manila passed into a democratic conqueror's hands, and now whoever wishes may read, in the Bureau of Archives, documents which the Conde de Caspe, to use a noble title for an ignoble man, considered safely hidden. As with Weyler's contidential letter to the friar landlords, these discoveries convict their writers of bad faith, with ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... began, "please don't consider it is at all ignoble to be financially embarrassed. In fact, more than half of our girls are continually 'rationed,' as they call a cut in allowance. And if it is only a matter of a ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... at least, are little to be envied, in whose hearts the great charities of the imagination lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to repress the importunity of painful impressions, or to raise what is ignoble, and disguise what is discordant, in a scene so rich in its remembrances, so surpassing in its beauty. But for this work of the imagination there must be no permission during the task which is before us. The impotent feeling of romance, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... had redeemed himself in a way. The day James Farraday came to tell her that Stefan had enlisted, some part of her load was eased. The father of her children was not all ignoble. ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... sudden assault, they exposed themselves to the most imminent danger; but it was better for them to die in the manly attempt to bring back the imperial power again into Persian hands, where it properly belonged, than to acquiesce any further in its continuance in the possession of the ignoble Median priests who had so treacherously ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... told to illustrate Hatto's cruelty and treachery. Facing the Mouse Tower, on the opposite bank of the Rhine, stands the castle of Ehrenfels, the scene of another of his ignoble deeds. ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... was not only justifiable, but absolutely essential; far from considering them as a makeshift, the Greeks would certainly, and with justice too, have looked upon it as a makeshift to be obliged to allow a player with vulgar, ignoble, or strongly marked features, to represent an Apollo or a Hercules; nay, rather they would have deemed it downright profanation. How little is it in the power of the most finished actor to change the character of his ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... circumference with praise. But I attempt the wondrous height in vain, And leave unfinish'd the too lofty strain: What boldly I begin, let others end; My strength exhausted, fainting I descend, And choose a less, but no ignoble, theme, Dissolving elements, and worlds, in flame. The fatal period, the great hour, is come, And nature shrinks at her approaching doom; Loud peals of thunder give the sign, and all Heaven's terrors in array surround the ball; Sharp lightnings with the meteor's blaze conspire, And, darted downward, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... well some day when she learned what it meant. She would never sing it again as she had sung it to-night. All the dross that Peter had worn in the world was stripped from him in that moment, all that was petty and ignoble in his heart driven forth and he stood with bowed head, in shame for what he had been, and in gentleness for this dear creature whose idols he had ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... shame of the errand which had taken him to The Retreat, and which the memory of what was no less than a personal triumph could not submerge. That he, Errol Banneker, whose dealings with all men had been on the straight and level status of self-respect, should have taken upon him the ignoble task of prying into intimate affairs, of meekly soliciting the most private information in order that he might make his living out of it—not different in kind from the mendicancy which, even as a hobo, he had scorned—and ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Cromwell's iron government. Once more a wretched formalism—that perpetual danger to the English Church—came to the front and exercised authority over the free churches. The House of Lords was largely increased by the creation of hereditary titles and estates for ignoble men and shameless women who had flattered the king's vanity. Even the Bench, that last strong refuge of English justice, was corrupted by the appointment of judges, like the brutal Jeffreys, whose aim, like that of their royal master, was to get money and to exercise power ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... English mastiff, and as remarkable for his good-nature as for his great strength and courage. Rambling out one day, accompanied by this trusty friend, they came upon a group of rustics engaged in the ignoble diversion of baiting a badger, an animal much in request among English dog-fanciers as a test for the pluck of their terriers. "Drawing a badger" is the proper sporting-phrase,—the animal being chained to a barrel, from the recesses of which he contends savagely ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... creatures. It may serve well enough as a recreation, but not as the business of a lifetime.' The life of the English and French chivalry in the country or in the woody fastnesses seems to him thoroughly ignoble, and worst of all the doings of the robber-knights of Germany. Lorenzo here begins to take the part of the nobility, but not— which is characteristic—appealing to any natural sentiment in its favour, but because Aristotle in the fifth book ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... the contrary, who, after lives of ignoble labor or despicable ease, die of sickness, sink from their beds to the dismal house of Hela. In this gigantic vaulted cavern the air smells like a newly stirred grave; damp fogs rise, hollow sighs are heard, the only light ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... noble music which forbids unreality, rebukes frivolity into silence, subdues ignoble passions, soothes the heart's sorrow, and summons to the soul high and holy thoughts. It was difficult to begin the conversation; the trivial themes of the earlier part of the evening seemed foreign ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... beholding him, was rarely better expended on a similar ambition. And ambition of this sort, relying on the genius of such a master to give it wings for perpetuity of time, is, pace Lionardo Bruni, not ignoble. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... was not much to separate them on the score of principle, they were widely apart in theory, and the sturdy denizens of the smaller village looked down upon the others as the ignoble slaves of a Saxon tyranny. The village in its entirety—for the division was a purely local and arbitrary one—belonged to Miss Betty O'Shea, forming the extreme edge of her estate as it merged into the vast ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... played with his, we should be certain that he was always thinking of the possibility of somebody else than the reader to whom they were addressed reading them. With nearly an equal presumption as to the fact in the case of Horace (though to do him justice he did not indulge in any ignoble tricks with them) this fact rarely occurs and never offends. An unkind critic with a turn for rather obvious epigram might say that the man's nature was so artificial that his artifice seems natural. If so, all the more credit to ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learned to stray; Along the cool, sequestered vale of life, They kept the noiseless tenor ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... not difficult for the well-informed in Paris to credit the ignoble rumor. The old feud between the house of Caylus, on the one hand, and the house of Nevers on the other, was familiar to those who made it their business to be familiar with the movements of high persons in high places; and when on the top of this ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... most unpleasant person, seemeth even of the most ravishing whiteness, in compare of the black bile which floateth within thy sable interior. Behold, then, my gauntlet! yet ere I deign to be the instrument of thy extirpation, O thou most mean and ignoble enemy! that the honour of Don Quixote De la Mancha may not be sullied by thy extinction, I do here confer upon thee the honour of knighthood, dubbing thee, by my own sword, Don Devil, ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... saying, "No, no!" but the gentleman paid no heed to him, and repeated to his son, "Beg his pardon. Repeat my words. 'I beg your pardon for the insulting, foolish, and ignoble words which I uttered against your father, whose hand my father would ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... How can you love me and listen to such wickedness? How can you still care for such a girl as I am—worse than mercenary, because I have a heart—or had, until you took it! Keep it; it is the only part of me not all ignoble." ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... addressed; but he had assented to an omission in this matter on the part of his daughter, recognizing the fact that there could be no falsehood in using a mode of language common to all the world. "If a plural pronoun of ignoble sound," so he said, "were used commonly for the singular because the singular was too grand and authoritative for ordinary use, it was no doubt a pity that the language should be so injured; but there could be no untruth in such usage; and it was better that ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... unworthy of him, a thing that derogated from his self-respect. Had he but had the justification of some high political aim, he might have endured it with a better resignation; the momentous end to be served might have sanctioned the ignoble means adopted. But here was a task in itself almost as unworthy of him as the methods by which he now set about accomplishing it. He was to black his face and dye his beard and hair, stain his skin and garb himself in filthy rags, for no better end than that ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... merely as an ignoble chore, a kind of hateful discipline which had to be undergone with knitted brow and brazen fortitude. When my wife went away the first time, I erected a reading stand and an electric light over the sink, and used to read while my hands went automatically through base gestures ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... as I thought what I had come to seek in a spot so well suited to my ignoble purpose. I fled from that old woman as from jealousy personified, and as if the stench of her cooking had come from ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... This ignoble curiosity was likewise ignored by Miss Berta, who proceeded with dignified slowness to drop her valentines one by one into the caldron. Bea, with lingering care, deposited her contribution on the very top. One slid over the edge, and in rescuing it she disturbed a fold of the portiere. A glimpse ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... when I went to examine them closely, I found them so damaged and effaced, that they did not at all answer my expectation. Whether this be owing to negligence or envy, I cannot say; I mention the latter, because it is notorious, that many of the modern painters have discovered ignoble marks of envy at a view of the inimitable productions Of the ancients. Instead of employing their art to preserve the master-pieces of antiquity, they have endeavoured to destroy and efface many of them. I have seen with my own eyes an evident ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... plaintive and sweet, this amen said: "We have done what we could, but ... but ..." And in the funereal silence which followed the clergy leaving the nave, there remained only the ignoble reality of the empty husk, lifted in the arms of men, thrust into a carriage, like the refuse of the shambles carted off each morning to be made into soap at ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... agreed that he was of very ordinary appearance; one says "ignoble and vulgar." The sum of the statements of contemporaries as to his personality, is that he was of sharp understanding, energetic, decided; coarse and sometimes brutal; enthusiastic; of great imaginative power. If a Picard, then a Frank, and if a Frank, then a ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... brutish, the melodramatic, and the comic; the magnificently drawn youth at the door of the prison in Filippino's "Liberation of St. Peter" is gradually going to sleep and collapsing in a fashion which is truly ignoble. ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... sharply, behold you, There was a novelty quick as surprising: 470 For first, she had shot up a full head in stature, And her step kept pace with mine nor faltered, As if age had foregone its usurpature, And the ignoble mien was wholly altered, And the face looked quite of another nature, And the change reached too, whatever the change meant, Her shaggy wolf-skin cloak's arrangement: For where its tatters hung loose ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... Flora Macdonald of a middle-aged Prince Charlie did not, however, evoke any ludicrous associations in her mind. Her feminine fancy exalted the escaped duelist and alleged assassin into a social martyr. His actual small political intrigues and ignoble aims of office seemed to her little different from those aspirations of royalty which she had read about—as perhaps they were. Indeed, it is to be feared that in foolish little Mrs. Bunker, Wynyard Marion had found the old feminine adoration of pretension and privilege ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... is a grave importance as well as a pleasant charm in the beginning of life. There is awe as well as excitement in it when rightly viewed. The possibilities that lie in it of noble or ignoble work—of happy self-sacrifice or ruinous self-indulgence—the capacities in the right use of which it may rise to heights of beautiful virtue, in the abuse of which it may sink to the depths of debasing vice—make the crisis one of fear as well ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... present moment was anxious rather to speak of Kate's ignoble father than of his own noble uncle. He had declared his intention of making inquiry of Father Marty, and he thought that he should do so with something of a high hand. He still had that scheme in his head, and he might ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... as if the delightful friendship cemented between herself and Miss Oliphant in the frosty air outside had fallen to pieces like a castle of cards the moment they entered the house. Prissie felt a chill. Her high spirits went down a very little. Then, resolving to banish the ignoble spirit of distrust, she prepared to run upstairs ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... sometimes broken up by an unpleasant smile, that merely widened the pale set lips without softening them, and disclosed a crooked row of smoke-coloured teeth, much decayed. He had small eyes, furtively hidden under a somewhat restricted frontal development,—his brows were narrow,—his forehead ignoble and retreating. But despite a general badness, or what may be called a 'smirchiness' of feature, he had learned to assume an air of superiority, which by its sheer audacity prevented a casual observer from setting him down as the vulgarian he undoubtedly was; and his amazing pluck, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... sordidities and poverties? The Great American Museum, the down-town scenery and aspects at large, and even the up-town improvements on them, as then flourishing?—why, they must have been for the most part of the last meanness: the Barnum picture above all ignoble and awful, its blatant face or frame stuck about with innumerable flags that waved, poor vulgar-sized ensigns, over spurious relics and catchpenny monsters in effigy, to say nothing of the promise within of the still more monstrous and abnormal living—from the total impression ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... innocent pleasures, its winsome affections,—so later, the temptations that would naturally beset a career so extraordinary fell harmlessly away from him, for a passion for knowledge burned within him, consuming all ignoble motives and keeping this young scholar, in friar's robes, in marvelous singleness of heart, in the midst of ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... which deserves the utmost care of the legislature, and which must be endangered by a law like this before us. The children, my lords, to whom the affairs of the present generation must be transferred, and by whom the nation must be continued, are surely no ignoble part of the publick. They are yet innocent, and it is our province to take care that they may in time be virtuous; we ought, therefore, to remove from before them those examples that may infect, and those temptations that may corrupt them. We ought to reform their parents, lest they should imitate ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... dust. If only he might make it all right with Clare, then he would see to it—Oh! yes he would see to it—that nothing of this kind ever happened again. From Mrs. Rossiter's standpoint he looked back upon his life and found it all one ignoble, selfish muddle. Dear Clare!—so eager to be happy and he had ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... red blood in her body would have risen to combat it. But now she neither repulsed it nor responded to it. She seemed submerged and smothered in a tide of terrible indifference. She even found herself weighing the meaning of that affront to all that was not ignoble in her. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... though such a history or catalogue might be—as to show the spirit of the age itself reflected most faithfully, even when it seems most caricatured or burlesqued, by their brush or graver or pencil; to watch the grotesque visage and ignoble form of Vice traced by Hogarth's genius from the homes of London's luxury to her dens of hidden crime; to study the more refined, if somewhat weaker, social satire of Henry William Bunbury; to admire those magnificent political cartoons of James Gillray—colossal and overwhelming, ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... be put before peace, and peace must be recognized as of value only when it is the hand-maiden of justice. The doctrine of national or individual neutrality between right and wrong is an ignoble doctrine, unworthy the support of any brave or honorable man. It is wicked to be neutral between right and wrong, and this statement can be successfully refuted only by men who are prepared to hold up Pontius Pilate, the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... seven-inch shelf attached to the wall, facing an array of salt-castors and catsup-bottles and one of those colored glass windows with a portrait of Washington which give to all lunch-wagons their air of sober refinement, Carl ate solemnly, meditatively.... It did not seem to him an ignoble setting for his grief; but he was depressed when he came out to a drab first light of day that made the street seem hopeless and unrested after the night. The shops were becoming visible, gray and chilly, like a just-awakened janitor in slippers, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... be read without fear by the young), the siege of Mlle. Cormon's mature affections by her two adroit suitors ('Une Vielle fille'), the intrigues against the peace of the d'Esgrignons and the sublime devotion to their interests of the notary Chesnel ('Le Cabinet des antiques'), and finally the ignoble passions that fought themselves out around the senile Jean Jacques Rouget, under the direction of the diabolical ex-soldier Philippe Brideau ('La Rabouilleuse,' sometimes entitled 'Un Menage de Garcon'), form the absorbing central themes of a group of novels—or rather stories, for few of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... of art, as in other matters, important discoveries are sometimes made, and great events occasionally accomplished, by very ignoble agencies. Mat's deplorable ignorance of Painting in general, and grossly illiterate misunderstanding of the subject represented by Columbus in particular, seemed to mark him out as the last man in the world who could possibly be associated with Art Mystic ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... that the only useful lesson a life so unimportant can teach is, the conflict between opposing influences, I might possibly be disposed to blink the avowal, that, as I rode along toward Nancy, a very great doubt occurred to me as to whether I ought not to desert! It is a very ignoble expression; but it must out. There were not in the French service any of those ignominious punishments which, once undergone, a man is dishonored forever, and no more admissible to rank with men of character than if convicted ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... all this ignoble clap-trap, written by European wiseacres concerning this country. Not one knows the people, not one knows the accidental agencies which neutralize what is grand ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski |
