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Nakedness

noun
1.
The state of being without clothing or covering of any kind.  Synonyms: nudeness, nudity.
2.
A bleak and desolate atmosphere.  Synonyms: bareness, bleakness, desolation.
3.
Characterized by an attitude of ready accessibility (especially about one's actions or purposes); without concealment; not secretive.  Synonym: openness.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Nakedness" Quotes from Famous Books



... of the madness which had come upon Jan—the madness which comes upon a man who has stripped off the raw skin of earth and grovelled long in primal nakedness, and before whose eyes rises the fat vales of the homeland, and into whose nostrils steals the whiff of bay, and grass, and flower, and new-turned soil. Through five frigid years Jan had sown the seed. Stuart River, Forty Mile, Circle City, Koyokuk, Kotzebue, ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London

... benediction, between St. John Baptist and the Virgin, with angels on both sides singing and playing on various instruments. On the extreme right and left of the upper panels, excluded, so to speak, from the company of heaven, stand Adam and Eve, in all the realistic weakness of their nakedness. Below, in the midst of a flowery meadow, behind the fountain of life, surrounded by groups of holy virgins, martyrs and saints, in the New Paradise, under the walls of the New Jerusalem, stands the Lamb, directly under the figure of Christ and the symbol of the Holy Ghost, the centre towards which ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts

... Had to sell our land. 'Spect us would have starved, as us too proud to beg. Thank God, Mr. Roosevelt come 'long. Him never ask whether us democrat or 'publican nor was us black or white; him just clothe our nakedness and ease de pains of hunger, and goin' further, us goin' to be took care of in our old age. Oh, how I love dat man; though they do ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration

... cost that had been expended might be counted as waste. We should be seen, and it would not be long before some one put a name to Nais; and then it would be an easy matter to guess at Deucalion under the beard and the shaggy hair and the browned nakedness of the savage who attended on her. Tell of fright? By the Gods! I was scared as the veriest trembler who blundered amongst the dust-clouds that night when the thought came ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

... better than bunting) and thread as would make a frock and a pair of trousers, and a proportion to the women and children. These gurrahs had been brought from India in some of the speculative voyages to this country, and were now found useful in covering the nakedness ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins

... Justice is a perplexing maze of buildings piled one above another, some fine and dignified, others very mean, the whole disfigured by its lack of unity. The Salle des Pas-Perdus is the largest known hall, but its nakedness is hideous, and distresses the eye. This vast Cathedral of the Law crushes the Supreme Court. The Galerie Marchande ends in two drain-like passages. From this corridor there is a double staircase, a little ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... like humour that communities very young should occupy themselves almost altogether with matters of grave and serious import. The vision of life at that period is no doubt unimpeded and clear; its conditions offer themselves with a certain nakedness and force, both as to this world and to that which is to come. The town of Elgin thus knew two controlling interests—the interest of politics and the interest of religion. Both are terms we must nevertheless circumscribe. Politics ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... roughly unto them; and he said unto them: "Whence come ye?" And they said: "From the land of Canaan to buy food." And Joseph knew his brethren, but they knew not him. And Joseph remembered the dreams which he dreamed of them, and said unto them: "Ye are spies; to see the nakedness of the land ye are come." And they said unto him: "Nay, my lord, but to buy food are thy servants come. We are all one man's sons; we are true men, thy servants are no spies." And he said unto them: "Nay, but to see the nakedness of the land ye ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... is, how contrary in every way to God. I had little thought that God, my loving Father, would hear the prayers of so wicked, wayward a child as I was, and as I am indeed still, if left to myself in my own nakedness; but I know now that He does not look at me as I am in myself, but as I am clothed with Christ's righteousness. Trusting in Him, I am no longer naked, but dressed in His pure and spotless robe, at which ...
— The Trapper's Son • W.H.G. Kingston

... desire, given them what they like. Of course it made one cry horribly; but then of course one cries when one hears of people reduced by sheer craving to eat nettles and cabbage-stalks. Destitution, absolute hunger, cold and nakedness, are no more subjects for artistic representation than sickness, disease, and the real details of idiotcy, madness, and death. All art should be an idealized; elevated representation (not imitation) of nature; and when beggary and low vice are made the themes of ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... at length was somewhat recovered, he said with a broken voice, which was often checkt by violent sobs: "No, no, noblest, most upright of mankind, never, never could you have sunk down into a miserable thief! No want, not even hunger and nakedness, no opportunity however tempting, could have degraded your lofty mind so low. You only say it to quiet me. O heavens! this man, who treated me with the warmest affection and with unbounded confidence, who placed large sums in my hands, without ever inquiring about ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck

... habit, and environment; from physiognomy he began to learn history, and from Monday's streets a commentary on the linked sweetness long drawn out of Jewish followed by Christian sabbath. He became inured to smells, to the breathing of foul atmosphere, to contact with foul bodies, to a nakedness of speech such as he had not dreamed of, to a class-hatred that struck from eye to eye like murder, to an apathy of dead hopelessness that revolted him yet more. From Sister Jenifer he learned the hardest lesson of all, that to understand social conditions he must refrain from gifts of ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... darkly overpowering as the year progressed towards its old age. The shaking tundra, treacherous and hideous with rank growths of the summer. The river facets of broken crags awaiting the cloak of winter to conceal their crude nakedness. Then the trail, so slight, so faint. The work of sleds and moccasined feet through centuries of native traffic, with the occasional variation of the hard shod feet ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... have compared these mountains to the Alps in Switzerland, and speak of the glittering peaks which rise in icy majesty amidst the eternal glaciers nine or ten thousand feet into the region of eternal snows. The nakedness of the river was relieved by groves of willows, where we encamped at night, after a march of twenty-six miles; and numerous bright-colored flowers had made the river bottom look gay as a garden. We found here a horse, which had been abandoned ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont

... all. My heart beats none the less joyously when I feel myself another being, different from them, without any community with them. Not to be of them, my God! not to be of them! It is a breath of pure air; it is what gives me the courage to have them all here, to put them, in all their nakedness, in their envelopes, and still to find ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola

... shining abilities. This noble lord, in a letter dated September 10, 1712, addressed to Mr. Prior, while he was the Queen's minister, and plenipotentiary at the court of France, pays him the following compliment; 'For God's sake, Matt. hide the nakedness of thy country, and give the best turn thy fertile brain will furnish thee with, to the blunders of thy countrymen, who are not much better politicians, than the French are poets.' His lordship thus ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber

... conscious of impending danger, think of beloved ones at home; unconsciously they hum a melody, and comfort is restored. The emigrant, forced by various circumstances to leave his native land, where, instead of inheriting food and raiment, he had experienced hunger, nakedness, and cold, endeavours to express his feelings, and is discovered crooning over the tune that correctly interprets his emotions, and thrills his heart with gladness. The poet's song has become incorporated with the poor man's nature. You may see that ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... trousers belonging to Little Billy—not a bad fit. The ju-jitsu man sported a complete outfit of his, Martin's. Obviously, the belongings of the Cohasset's crew had been looted to cover the scarecrow nakedness of the captors. ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer

... the king and queen differ in little or nothing from the other idolaters, all going naked, barefooted, and bareheaded, except a small piece of silk or cotton to cover their nakedness; but the Mahometans wear single garments in a more seemly manner, their women being dressed like the men except that their hair is very long. The king and nobles eat no kind of flesh, except having first got permission of the priests; but the common people may eat any flesh they ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr

... interlacings of the limbs —lithe swayings —coyings —flutterings! lip! heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye, else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? ( Nudging.) Tahitan Sailor ( Reclining on a mat.) Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls! —the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat! green the first day i brought ye thence; now worn and wilted quite. Ah me! —not thou nor I can ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... ought to have concealed the characters, but was much too short and too narrow for that purpose. Its legs, thighs, and body, were cased in long loose drawers, which did not, however, entirely conceal its nakedness. A huge doctorial hat covered its bald head, which was marked with the scratches worn by its long nails in provoking deep reflection. Its shoes were made after the European fashion, and sprinkled with the finest dust of the schools and universities. After it had gazed a considerable ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger

... roof tank in its falling tore out the very heart of the stricken building. Hawley Street, farther on, was no barrier at all to a fire of such fury as this, and the unprotected windows at the rear of the Franklin Street row added their helpless nakedness to a situation in ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... His thrill is not so much in symbol or mysterious emblem as in the absence of interventions and protections between mind and mind. It is not mystery: it is rather a sort of terror at knowing too much. He lives in glass houses; he is akin to Maeterlinck in a feeling of the nakedness of souls. None of the Meredithian things, wind or wine or sex or stark nonsense, ever gets between Mr. James and his prey. But the thing is a deficiency as well as a talent: we cannot but admire the figures that walk about in his ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... there were Christmas trees everywhere, crying aloud in bushy nakedness for their rightful fruit. The old peasant women, rolled in shawls, with large handkerchiefs tied over their caps, warmed their numb and withered hands over little braziers while they guarded the gaily decked treasure-laden booths, ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless

... marched out, [5]and these are the names of those queens: Sgamalus and Sgannlach and Sgiathan, Feidlim and Deigtini Finnchas, and Finngheal and Fidniam and Niam, daughter of Celtchar son of Uthechar[5]; and they discovered their nakedness and all their shame to him. [6]"These are the warriors that will meet thee to-day," quoth Mugain, wife of Conchobar son of Ness.[6] The lad hid his face from them and turned his gaze on the chariot, that he might not see the nakedness or the shame of the women.[c] Then the ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown

... lesson; and his epitaph sums up the dream which lured the men of Italy in the Renaissance to their doom. We see before us sculptured in this marble the ideal of the humanistic poet-scholar's life: Love, Grace, the Muse, and Nakedness, and Glory. There is not a single intrusive thought derived from Christianity. The end for which the man lived was Pagan. His hope was earthly fame. Yet his name survives, if this indeed be a survival, not in those winged verses which were to carry him abroad across the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... left in her track. Her footprints were not in the sea, soon obliterated, nor in the snow, quickly melting, but in fields and forests. This unseen friend, passing by the tree blackened by a thunderbolt, stayed her step; lo! the woodbine sprang up and covered the tree's nakedness. She lingered by the stagnant pool—the pool became a flowing spring. She rested upon a fallen log—from decay and death came moss, the snowdrop and the anemone. At the crossing of the brook were her footprints; not in mud downward, but in violets that sprang up ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis

... but a sleep and a forgetting. The soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson

... ago, the incubus which lay heavy on the slumbers of England was the Pope; of whom Swift remarked, that constantly his holiness was seen incog. under one disguise or other, drinking at gin-shops in Wapping, and clearly proved to be spying out the nakedness of the land. In our days the Pope has vanished to the rear of the English phantasmagoria, and now lies amongst the [Greek: neknon amenena kasena]. But not, therefore, is England without her pet nightmare; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... aphorisms in the marriage catechism from which you will see that you are violating its most sacred precepts. Whether a woman yields, or does not yield, this institution of twin beds gives to marriage such an element of roughness and nakedness that the most chaste wife and the most intelligent husband are led ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac

... it seemed as if Fortune did him as much wrong in not supplying them as in withholding a sufficiency of vital breath from ordinary men. All kinds of mild magnificence, tempered by his taste, would have become him well; but he had not the grim dignity that assumes nakedness as the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... much as general impersonations of men and women, abstract types made up of telling catchwords or surface traits, though with such accumulation upon them of a wonderful wealth of humorous illustration, itself filled with minute and accurate knowledge of life, that the real nakedness of the land of character is hidden. Well, what can be rejoined to this, but that the poverty or richness of any territory worth survey will for the most part lie in the kind of observation brought to it. There was no ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... before I came to them. Likely young ones they were too, and handsome, what would they have done if I hadn't been there to put them out of the way when O'Brien was drunk, and knocking them round, or to put a bit of stuff together to keep them from nakedness? ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall

... Directors, and had entirely shook off their authority, he resolved that the native powers should know that they were not to look to the Court of Directors, but to look to his arbitrary will in all things; and therefore, to the astonishment of the world, and as if it were designedly to expose the nakedness of the Parliament of Great Britain, to expose the nakedness of the laws of Great Britain, and the nakedness of the authority of the Court of Directors to the country powers, he wrote a letter, which your Lordships will find in page 795 of the printed Minutes. In this letter the secret ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... open day into the Balcone and showed his nakedness,.... and abusing of scripture and as it were from thence preaching a mountebank sermon from the pulpit, saying that there he had to sell such a powder as should make all the [women] in town run after him, 1000 people standing ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... at length I see Pure daybreak lighten again on Eden's tree? Loosed from remorse and hope and love's distress, Enrobe me again in my lost nakedness? No more with wordless grief a loved one grieve, But to Heaven's ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare

... countryside, barred his path—a queer, twisted line of long, gray tentacles that had once sucked sustenance from the soil, but now reached up idly into a barren element, where the wild grape was covering their grotesque nakedness with masses of kindly beauty. Below him he saw lights shining clearly like the planets, or faintly like the mere star-dust of the sky, while between the two degrees of brightness he knew there must lie the bosom ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King

... perplexity of his studies. To these he was perpetually reverting, which he showed when after a lapse of several years, he could not rest till he had burned his ill-fated odes. And what was the result of his literary life? He returned to his native city of Chichester in a state almost of nakedness, destitute, diseased, and wild in despair, to hide himself in the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... such a doctrine, held up in its nakedness, need hardly be attacked, for no man, not maddened by the fanaticism of party, would be found willing to defend it; yet if not defended, the disposition of the Louisiana case must be pronounced as unsound in law as it was injurious in policy ...
— The Vote That Made the President • David Dudley Field

... cowards among you. But even a brave man's heart may fail him at whiles, when, instead of the enemy's balls and bayonets, he has to face delay, and disappointment, and fatigue, and sickness, and hunger, and cold, and nakedness; as you have, my brave brothers, and faced them as well as man ever did on earth. Ah! it must be fearful work to sit still, and shiver and starve in a foreign land, and to think of those who are in comfort and plenty at home; and worse, to think ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley

... that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. If Glennard did not hate his wife it was slowly, sufferingly, that there was born in him that profounder passion which made his earlier feeling seem a mere commotion of the blood. He was like a child coming ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton

... dearly for remedies, the inefficacy of which every thing tends to prove? Priests resemble these alchymists, who boldly tell us, they have the secret of making gold, while they have scarcely clothes to cover their nakedness. ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach

... ability to get through life easily and lazily, and his greatest horror is the probability of falling into the hands of the police, and being sent to Blackwell's Island as a vagrant. All that he desires is money enough to gratify a few actual wants, food enough to eat, clothing to cover his nakedness, and a place where he can enjoy the warmth of a fire in the winter. He has great faith in the charitableness of New York, and thinks that any of the necessities of life may be had here for the asking, and he does not hesitate to ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... true. The Church, as well as Puritanism, has fought the flesh as something evil; it had to be subdued and hidden at all cost. The result of this vicious attitude is only now beginning to be recognized by modern thinkers and educators. They realize that "nakedness has a hygienic value as well as a spiritual significance, far beyond its influences in allaying the natural inquisitiveness of the young or acting as a preventative of morbid emotion. It is an inspiration ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... stripped every garment and ornament from her body, and the dead steed lay a few paces off with its trappings riven and scattered around it.[831] Death by a thunderbolt had always a meaning, which was sometimes hard to find; but here the gods had not left the inquiring votary utterly in doubt. The nakedness of the stricken maiden was a riddle that the priests could read. It was a manifest sign that a virginal vow had been broken, and that some of the keepers of the eternal fire were tainted with the sin of unchastity. The destruction of ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... everybody, from the oldest to the youngest, knew him and his story. He injured no one, he offended no one, and he never failed, somehow or somewhere, to find food to eat, lodging for his head, and clothing to cover his nakedness. He had been among the very first to enter the Refuge, and now, in November, he was the last one left within its walls. He was the only one of the guests who returned, and perhaps he would not have done so ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various

... when not with the fishermen Grenfell was usually to be found with his gun stalking curlew, oyster diggers, or some other of the numerous birds that frequented the marshes and shores. Barefooted, until the weather grew too cold in autumn, and wearing barely enough clothing to cover his nakedness, he would set out in early morning and not return ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace

... some woods in a newly settled township, the township of Seymour West, in the Newcastle district of Upper Canada, with a view to see the nakedness of the land, which had been represented to me as flowing with milk and honey, as all new settlements of course are said to do. I wandered into the lonely but beautiful forest, with a companion who owned the soil, and who had told me that the ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... the old assured laugh of brutality—he had stripped himself so bare that at last he was aware of his own nakedness. ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock

... knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds' nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... difference in the yield of a "caprified" and non-caprified tree is that between two hundred and eighty and twenty-five pounds, cannot do better than borrow a leaf from the Kabyle book, should it only be a fig-leaf to aid in clothing the nakedness of bare sands and galled hillsides. The United States Department of Agriculture should by all means introduce the dokhar. Some of our agricultural machinery would be an exchange in the highest degree beneficial to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various

... have no sort of clothes but a piece of the rind of a tree tied like a girdle about their waists, and a handful of long grass, or three or four small green boughs full of leaves thrust under their girdle to cover their nakedness. They. have no houses, but lie in the open air without covering, the earth being their bed and heaven ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc

... of them will excite anger among some Irish patriots, who don't like to have the nakedness of our land abused, and are angry if the whole truth be told concerning it. But bah! it was a poor provincial place, Dublin, in the old days of which I speak; and many a tenth-rate German residency is more genteel. ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray

... been in peril of floods, in peril of thieves, in peril by the Jews, in perils by the pagans, in perils in the city, in perils in the desert, in perils in the sea, perils by false brethren, in labour and misery, in many nights' watch, in hunger and thirst, in many fastings, in cold and nakedness; beside those things that are outward, my daily instant labour, I mean my care and solicitude about all the churches," and yet saith he more of his tribulations, which for the length I let pass. This blessed apostle, I say, for all these tribulations that he ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More

... and flee, not because she was frightened of what he would do, but because she did not wish to hear what he would say. She shrank from the uprolling of the curtain of the last thirteen years, from the grim exposure of the nakedness of their life together. Her indolent nature in repose wanted the dust of existence swept into a corner out of sight; yet when she was roused, and there were no corners into which the dust could be swept, she could be as bold as any ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... hardened to her shameful calling, they would for ever hold their tongues and pens in supporting the practice. Is not clothedness a distinct type and feature of our Christian faith? All art representations of nakedness are out of harmony ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler

... felt it in my mouth, my throat, my chest, my belly, Burning of powerful salt, burning, eating through my defenceless nakedness, I have been thrust into white sharp crystals, Writhing, twisting, superpenetrated, Ah, Lot's wife, Lot's wife! The pillar of salt, the whirling, horrible column of salt, like a waterspout That has ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... heard that gangs were at work clearing the streets and collecting the dead; at first burying them laboriously after the third day, burning them in stacks. As the Penitent had said, in an earthquake one gets down to nakedness. During those next ten days Ruth lived hourly face to face with her kind, men and ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... was past, when their colloquy ended and the merchant returned to his own house and Ali went up to his wife and children and after saluting them, said, "What hath befallen you in my absence all this time?" So she told him what they had suffered of hunger and nakedness and travail, and he said, "Praised be Allah for safety! How did ye come?" Answered she, "O my lord, I was asleep with my children yesternight, when suddenly and unexpectedly one raised us from the ground and flew with us ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... difficulties, the embarrassments of trade, the distress of merchants, but here you have what is far worse, the distress of the poor—not merely mental sufferings, but the absolute miseries of nature: hunger, nakedness, wretchedness of all kinds that the laboring people in this country are liable to. In the best of times they do but subsist, but in adverse times they starve. How the country is to extricate itself from its present embarrassment, how it is ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner

... may still be objected, that though Canaan is the only one named in the curse, yet the 22d and 23d verses show that it was pronounced upon the posterity of Ham in general. "And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without."—Verse 22. In verse 23, Shem and Japhet cover their father with a garment. Verse 24, "And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his YOUNGER son had done ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... every colour, shape, and size. Green and blue and brown and grey; some were of red, though not a little soiled, being evidently of ancient date, while there were long coats and great coats and short coats and spencers and cloaks; indeed, every species of covering invented to hide the nakedness of the human body. While the men themselves were tall and short and thin and stout and straight and crooked. No one had been refused admission into the corps. Their arms were as various in construction as their costumes. There were muskets and rifles ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston

... might have thrown aside, with the same scorn, the mass of ecclesiastical fiction which envelops the early history of the church, stripped off the legendary romance, and brought out the facts in their primitive nakedness and simplicity—if he had but allowed those facts the benefit of the glowing eloquence which he denied to them alone. He might have annihilated the whole fabric of post-apostolic miracles, if he had left uninjured by sarcastic insinuation those of the New Testament; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... now set to work, by what stratagems he might best succeed. The first that occurred to his thoughts was that of equipping himself with an old pair of trowsers, enough of a jacket to cover his nakedness, stockings such as nature gave, shoes (or rather the body of shoes, for soles they had none) which had leaks enough to sink a first rate man of war, and a woollen cap, so black that one might more safely swear it had not been washed since Noah's flood, than any electors ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown

... and closed into a divan. At first Mary rejected this Janus- faced machine unequivocally, but became a convert when Miss Mason showed her how cretonne (she pronounced it "creeton") or rugs would soften its nakedness to dignity, and how bed-clothes and pillows were swallowed in its maw by day to be released when the studio became a sleeping ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... where the osiers, stood stark and stiff in their winter nakedness, was a group of dark figures waiting for them with horses. In the pallid moonlight Myles recognized the well-known face of Father Edward, the Prior of ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle

... thought is for the wretched Hetty; and all energy is concentrated on the one present object, of arresting so far as it can be arrested the irremediable loss to her. The wrong stands up before him in its own nakedness as a wrong. This is repentance; and with repentance restoration ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown

... winter, until the return of spring. In this interval of time, the Indians are usually deterred from penetrating into them, as well because of their great exposure to discovery and observation in consequence of the nakedness of the woods and the increased facility of pursuing their trail in the snows which then usually covered the earth, as of the suffering produced by their lying in wait and travelling, in their partially unclothed condition, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... of some eighty tons' burthen, but, viewed from a short distance, not looking more than half that size, so snug was her build, as well as from the absence of every kind of hamper; her shrouds were without ratlins, and her deck without even the protection of a rough-tree—a nakedness I should by no means like in bad weather. The afterpart, however, or stern-sheets, is sunk about four feet; and as the bowsprit is a mere stump, and the sheets of both foresail and jib lead aft, all the work may be done here when under ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power

... Our Generall, with all his company, used all meanes possible gently to intreate them, bestowing upon each of them liberally good and necessary things to cover their nakedness, withall signifying unto them we were no Gods but men, and had need of such things to cover our owne shame, teaching them to use them to the same ends, for which cause also we did eate and drinke in their presence, . . . they bestowed upon our Generall ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut

... part of his person was decorated with a piece of a garment that had once been a coat, and of which there yet remained a sleeve and a half; the rest was suspended over his shoulders in shreds. A few tatters were arranged around his nether parts, but they could scarcely be said to cover his nakedness; and as for shoes, stockings, and shirt, they doubtless had been neglected, as being of no professional use. A kind of a hat (which, from a piece of the flap still remaining, showed that it had once possessed a brim) ornamented as villanous a looking ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown

... Whilst deep-mouth'd slaughter, bellowing at her heels, 630 Wades deep in blood new-spilt; yet for to-morrow Shapes out new work of great uncommon daring, And inly pines till the dread blow is struck. But, hold! I've gone too far; too much discover'd My father's nakedness, and nature's shame. Here let me pause, and drop an honest tear, One burst of filial duty and condolence, O'er all those ample deserts Death hath spread, This chaos of mankind.—O great man-eater! Whose every day is carnival, not sated yet! 640 Unheard-of ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... Aubrey, pointing to a passage in the book before him, "see what a preacher of the word has said!" and Aubrey recited one of the most dangerous maxims in priestcraft, as reverently as if he were quoting from the Scripture itself. "'The nakedness of truth should never be too openly exposed to the eyes of the vulgar. It was wisely feigned by the ancients that Truth did lie concealed in ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... undifferentiated Being from which your diverse faculties emerge. Presently you will find yourself, emptied and freed, in a place stripped bare of all the machinery of thought; and achieve the condition of simplicity which those same specialists call nakedness of spirit or "Wayless Love," and which they declare to be above all human images and ideas—a state of consciousness in which "all the workings of the reason fail." Then you will observe that you have entered into an intense and vivid silence: a silence ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill

... threw away shirt and singlet as well. A Turkish army order was captured which stated that the Australians were running short of supplies, as they made one pair of trousers do for three men. Evidently Johnny Turk could not understand the Australian disregard for conventionality and his taking to nakedness when it meant comfort and there were no women within hundreds of miles to make him conscious of indecency. Clothes that couldn't be washed wouldn't keep one's body clean and became the home of an army that had no interest in the fight for democracy. The Australian showed his practical common ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett

... at the Gray Mahatma curiously, but did not challenge. I suppose his nakedness was his passport. They eyed King and me with a butcher's-eye appraisal, nodded, and resumed their consultation of the hand-written roll. The characters on ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy

... hands the winds caress, With frothy lips the amorous sea, As welcoming the nakedness Of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... play 'Mid tumbled flowers shall match the death of day. I love that virginal fury—ah, the wild Thrill when a maiden body shrinks, defiled, Shuddering like arctic light, from lips that sear Its nakedness ... the flesh in secret fear! Contagiously through my linked pair it flies Where innocence in either, struggling, dies, Wet with fond tears or some less piteous dew. Gay in the conquest of these fears, I grew So rash that I must needs the sheaf divide Of ruffled kisses ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley

... Abydos, White Denderah stands apart from habitations, in a still solitude upon a blackened mound. From far off I saw the facade, large, bare, and sober, rising, in a nakedness as complete as that of Aphrodite rising from the wave, out of the plain of brown, alluvial soil that was broken here and there by a sharp green of growing things. There was something of sadness in the scene, and again I thought of Hathor as the "Lady of the Underworld," ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... begins to wear his band is about 10 or 12, or in the case of a chief's son 16 or 17; but that girls assume their bands at a somewhat earlier age, say at 7 or 8. So far as my personal observation went I should have thought that the usual maximum age of nakedness for both boys and girls was rather younger, and I never saw a naked boy of ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson

... protection, affluence, splendor, or even a competency. The flights, and hatred of men, and even pretended friends, gloomy prisons, and tortures, the society of barbarians of uncouth speech, miserable accommodations in wretched wildernesses, hunger, and thirst, nakedness, weariness, and painfulness, hard work, and but little worldly encouragement, should rather be the objects of their expectation. Thus the apostles acted, in the primitive times, and endured hardness, as good soldiers of Jesus ...
— An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens • William Carey

... and fixing of time and place for a cool turn in the morning, it had never been my good fortune to witness before or since. My wig! thought I, a precious country, where a man's life may be periled by the fashion of the covering to his nakedness! ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... beams through the clearer air, how beautiful, in some obscurest dell[18] of that lone land, led by the music of an unseen river to see fair flowers, with light-awakened buds, salute the spring tide. Happily, they smile in the midst of nakedness, like sweet memories of laughing infancy, beaming around the desolation ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... Nakedness therefore, the want of houses, and of all these unnecessaries, which we consider as so very necessary, are not such mighty evils in respect to these primitive men, and much less still any obstacle to their preservation. ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... Band-and-Glee-Club, covering their nakedness by pooling their rags, were a musical rabble. Kevin MacHenery, carrying a saber captured from one of the BSG-OCS-men, shouted to a tuba-player, the bell of whose horn had been dimpled by a hard-cored snowball. "Play the National Anthem," he yelled. The ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang

... were practically not to be had; so of coffee, sugar, salt, and the small rations generally. This, however, was the least part of the trouble, for the condition of the army as to clothing and shoes was simply appalling. When many had not even rags to cover their nakedness, and none were clad as civilized men should be to face the winter's snows and rains, it was nonsense to talk of campaigning. Grant saw this at a glance when he reached our camps. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 19, 43.] We have not the whole situation when even this ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... of the General Court forbidding 'short sleeves whereby the nakedness of the arms may be discovered.' Women's sleeves were not to be more than half an ell wide. There were to be no 'immoderate great sleeves, immoderate ... knots of ryban, broad shoulder bands and rayles, silk ruses, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday

... her hair and began to take off her plain, unlovely clothes. Thus she approached the common human basis, the nakedness and simplicity of life. Her eyes lingered thoughtfully on her body; she touched herself as she unbuttoned, unlaced, cast aside the armor of convention and ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... river Sindh, whose banks are, like those of all rivers in this part of India, bordered to a great distance by these deep and ugly inequalities. Here they are almost without grass or shrubs to clothe their hideous nakedness, and have been formed by the torrents, which, in the season of the rains, rush from the extensive plain, as from a wide ocean, down to the deep channel of the river in narrow streams. These streams cut their way easily through the soft alluvial soil, which must ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... to perceive that the so-called "wrongs" did not lie all on one side, but that there was a pretty large class of the so-called "lords" who went about the world habitually in a sad and disgraceful state of moral semi-nakedness, in consequence of their trousers having been appropriated and put on by their better-halves, and that therefore it was only meet that men and women should be united (as indeed they were from the first intended ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne

... must hope to do so, even if they do not expect it; for the great themes are not exhausted or ever to be exhausted; and the storehouse of the great thought and action of the past is ever open to us to clothe our nakedness and enrich our poverty; we need only ask ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall

... naturally buoyant temperament reasserted itself. She had brought some bright patterns of distemper with her which she gave to Hastings with precise instructions. She had visions of casement curtains to hide the nakedness of the big windows with warm serge curtains to draw over them in the winter. The floors must be stained. There should be a deep Indian-red drugget in the sitting-room, with pigeon-blue walls, and she ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Despond is upon thee; but that slough is the beginning of the sorrows that do attend those that go on in that way. Hear me, I am older than thou; thou art like to meet with, in the way which thou goest, wearisomeness, painfulness, hunger, perils, nakedness, sword, lions, dragons, darkness, and, in a word, death, and what not! These things are certainly true, having been confirmed by many testimonies. And why should a man so carelessly cast away himself, by giving heed to ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan

... anchored host I trust to honest voice conditions here. Carpen: Sire! dost thou seek a true, unvarnished tale, Or rather wouldst a colored picture please? Francos: Truth is so hidden in her various garbs That nakedness alone presents her fair; Hence ornament and furbelow disdain, And Hebe-like unbedecked let her stand forth. Carpen: It were indeed a most stupendous mind Which, as the argonaut with mining pan Doth sift pure gold from ever present dross, Can Truth unmesh from ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)

... better; must they of necessity be thrown to the dogs? The truth is, Teufelsdrockh, though a Sansculottist, is no Adamite; and much perhaps as he might wish to go forth before this degenerate age "as a Sign," would nowise wish to do it, as those old Adamites did, in a state of Nakedness. The utility of Clothes is altogether apparent to him: nay perhaps he has an insight into their more recondite, and almost mystic qualities, what we might call the omnipotent virtue of Clothes, such as was never before vouchsafed to ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... now broad day, and I, presently, perceived that a figure, clad in some queer coloured garment, was standing at my side, looking down at me. It stooped, then knelt. My only covering was unceremoniously thrown from off me, so that I lay there in my nakedness. Fingers prodded me then and there, as if I had been some beast ready for the butcher's stall. A face looked into mine, and, in front of me, were those dreadful eyes. Then, whether I was dead or living, I said to myself that ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... now hangs clouding on their brow, No bloodless malady empales their face, No age drops on their hairs his silver snow, No nakedness their bodies doth embase, No poverty themselves, and theirs disgrace, No fear of death the joy of life devours, No unchaste sleep their precious time deflowers, No loss, no grief, no change wait on their ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... 'we live in a world where men and women are actually starving. How can we reconcile to our consciences the spending of one penny on one useless thing when others are dying of sheer want, and cold, and nakedness? That's the great question that's always oppressing ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... said Fleurieu, "we shall vainly look in this narrative for any sign of learning on the part of Roggewein's sergeant-major." After describing the Banana, of which the leaves are six or eight feet high, and two or three wide, he adds that this was the leaf with which our first parents covered their nakedness after the Fall; and to make it clearer, further remarks that those who accept this view, do so on account of this leaf being the largest of all the plants growing either in eastern or western countries, thereby plainly indicating his notion of the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne

... life. Yes, Padre, there is something that impels them, and that something is the government itself. It is you yourselves who pitilessly ridicule the uncultured Indian and deny him his rights, on the ground that he is ignorant. You strip him and then scoff at his nakedness." ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... well-bred man, apologizing for an offence he regrets; while the "excuse me" of the habitually rude man is like the botched patch of the sloven or the beggar, who wears it because the laws of the land forbid nakedness. ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler

... by marauding soldiers or other villains, seeing that I was a weak old man and unable to defend her; item, wherewithal should we shield ourselves from the frost, as the winter was setting in, and the enemy had robbed us of our clothes, so that we had scarce enough left to cover our nakedness?" All this I had not considered, and was forced to own that she was right; so after much discussion we determined to leave it this night to the Lord, and to do whatever He should put into our hearts next morning. At any rate, we saw that ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold

... of their bodies, as they were unceremoniously tumbled over the side, had become of as frequent occurrence as the ringing of the watch bells. Over the side were they pitched in all their ghastly nakedness—just as a dead dog would have been thrown—with not even a shot or a stone tied to them to sink their corpses below the surface of the water. On the contrary, many of their bodies, swollen in an unnatural manner after death, ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid

... than is that unto which he hath directed thee. Thou hast met with some danger already, for I see the mud of the Slough of Despond is upon thee. Hear me, I am older than thou. Thou art likely to meet with, in the way which thou goest, painfulness, hunger, nakedness, sword, lions, ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various

... the Colonel no longer felt vigorous enough to leap the ditch. He had seen the truth in all its nakedness. The Countess' speech and Delbecq's reply had revealed the conspiracy of which he was to be the victim. The care taken of him was but a bait to entrap him in a snare. That speech was like a drop of subtle poison, bringing on in the old soldier a return of all his sufferings, ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac

... of the father all the time; but when he preferred his will to the will of his father, his way to the way of his father, his management of his share in the property to his father's management, it issued but in ruin and misery—in hunger and nakedness and shame. The fact that he was a son was of no avail to him in the "far country," in the place of self-will and self-management. But as soon as he arose, and with true repentance and submission came back ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor

... himself, in order to proceed. His voice took a gentle tone and a soft accent; he spoke of the chaste happiness of the two first of human beings. He described their majestic nakedness, the ingenuous command of their looks, their walk among lions and tigers, which gambolled at their feet; he spoke of the purity of their morning prayer, of their enchanting smile, the playful tenderness of their youth, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... a moment's silence; the boys all felt intensely uncomfortable, not so much even at Hilaria's presence as at this sudden nakedness of thought and emotion. Doughty, set on justifying himself at least as far as accuracy went, held on. "I heard it at once when I went to my uncle's at Penzance last holidays. Everyone knows it down there. Of course Ruan knew it all along; he's ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... lower than the lowest slave. The habits of the Hungarian Gipsies are abominable; their hovels appear sinks of the vilest poverty and filth; their dress is at best rags; their food frequently of the vilest carrion, and occasionally, if report be true, still worse: thus they live in filth, in rags, in nakedness. The women are fortune-tellers. Of course both sexes are thieves of the first water. ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... hid themselves in the shadows when they heard the holy voice of God, and were afraid. Then the Lord of heaven began to call the warden of the world, and bade His son come quickly unto Him. And he made answer unto God, and spake of his nakedness with shame: ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown

... present themselves to the Deity in the state in which He formed them, than in the disguise invented by man. It is possible that they showed everything out of piety. There are so few well-made persons of both sexes, that nakedness might have inspired chastity, or rather ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire

... Washington, whose worship, with that of such dii minores as Gufferson, Jaxon and Lincon (identical probably with the Hebru Abrem) runs like a shining thread through all the warp and woof of the stuff that garmented their moral nakedness. Some stones, very curiously inscribed in many tongues, were found by the explorer Droyhors in the wilderness bordering the river Bhitt (supposed by him to be the ancient Potomac) as lately as the reign of Barukam IV. These stones appear to be fragments ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce

... was in Glen-Garry the other week, and quite felt that look of nakedness, and as if it just came from the Maker's hand; it was ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... rolled darkly between that and Bellevue. She threaded her way through the enclosures which we have mentioned. The light was just sufficient to reveal a few spring flowers, starting up from the soil, and the soft foliage of an old vine or two that covered the nakedness ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens

... should be. They are afraid, afraid, afraid; they dare not be kindly to formal sinners, they dare not abandon a hundred foolish observances; they dare not look at the causes of things. They are afraid of sunshine, of nakedness, of health, of adventure, of science, lest that old watching spider take offence. The voice of the true God whispers in their hearts, echoes in speech and writing, but they avert themselves, fear-driven. ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... back to a period when huts and garments, even of bark, were newly acquired things, and when the Sakai suffered both ungladly after the manner of all wild jungle creatures? Did they, in those days, cast aside their bark loin clothes, and revel once more in pristine nakedness, and in the green things of the forest, on all occasions of rejoicing? We can only speculate, and none can tell us whether we guess aright. But year after year, in a hundred camps throughout the broad Sakai country, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... purple-gray. The wondrous dryness and clearness of the air lent to these modest tints a tone and dazzling brilliance that surprised the eye with a revelation of possibilities never before suspected in them. But the mountains were the greatest wonder. It was as if the skies, taking pity on their nakedness, had draped their majestic shoulders in imperial purple, while at this hour the westering sun tipped their pinnacles with gilt. In the distance half a dozen sand-spouts, swiftly-moving white pillars, looking like desert genii with too ...
— Deserted - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... Sieyes and Roederer, with an air as composed as if the former had still been an Abbe and the confessor of the latter. Next came Madame Murat, whom three hours before I had seen in the Bois de Boulogne in all the disgusting display of fashionable nakedness, now clothed and covered to her chin. She was followed by the pious Madame Le Clerc, now Princesse Borghese, who was sighing deeply and loudly. After her came limping the godly Talleyrand, dragging his pure moiety by his side, both ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... regarded as the best man of the two. To her multiform duties she added that of assistant in the diggings, squatting beside her husband in the mud, keeping the rocker going, and when Glen was worked out, not above taking a hand at the shovel. Her camp showed a comfortable neatness, and the children's nakedness was covered with garments fashioned by the firelight from old ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... array of gaudy silver-plated faucets. Above the rows of bottled "bitters," the fiery drink of the temperance frauds, high over the three score jars of "nervines" and pick-me-up preparations, towered a life-size marble statue of Hygeia, glowing in a voluptuous Parian nakedness. ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... his anonymous Chinese author, gives a quaint legend as to the nakedness of these islanders. Sakya Muni, having arrived from Ceylon, stopped at the islands to bathe. Whilst he was in the water the natives stole his clothes, upon which the Buddha cursed them; and they have ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... faults of his production. I have wasted much eloquence and more breath in assuring him that I was no tried favorite of the public, who dared take liberties with them; that the small rag of reputation I enjoyed, was a very scanty covering for my own nakedness; that the plank which swam with one, would most inevitably sink with two; and lastly, that the indulgence so often bestowed upon a first effort is as frequently converted into censure on the older offender. My arguments have, however, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... on her side slightly, her thighs and backside were naked, she hid her face, and shuddered at the thunder unheeding her nakedness, then buried her face in a pillow, and so we both dozed for a minute or two. Her backside was still naked, when I looked at her in all ways as she lay, and saw traces of sperm on her thighs and chemise. A little lay on the bed, but no trace of red, no signs of a bloody rupture of a virgin ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous

... of things I can't express about this and want to. There's this difference that has always been between us, that you like nakedness and wildness, and I, clothing and restraint. It goes through everything. You are always TALKING of order and system, and the splendid dream of the order that might replace the muddled system you hate, but by a sort ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... fort, was an alluvial spot in which the shovel found no rock. A rough line of piled stones severed it from surrounding lands, and a few trees stood there, promising summer shade, though, darkly moist along every budded twig, they now swayed in tuneless nakedness. Here the dead of Fort St. John were buried; and those approaching figures entered a gap of the inclosure instead of going on to the camp. Three of La Tour's soldiers, with Father Jogues and his donne, had come to bury the outcast baby. ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... solemn meeting.' These are only as the whitewash of your sepulchres to hide the loathsomeness within—'the rottenness and dead men's bones!' If you had made no impious pretensions, I would not, peradventure, have dealt so sternly with you. If like the other trees you had confessed your nakedness, and stood with your leafless stems, waiting for summer suns, and dews, and rains, to fructify you, and to bring your fruit to perfection—all well; but you have sought to mock and deceive me by your falsity, and thus precipitated the doom of the cumberer. ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff

... white and abstract, unnatural, Gerald was smiling with a constant bright, amused, cold light in his eyes, leaning a little protectively towards the Pussum, who was very handsome, and soft, unfolded like some red lotus in dreadful flowering nakedness, vainglorious now, flushed with wine and with the excitement of men. Halliday looked foolish. One glass of wine was enough to make him drunk and giggling. Yet there was always a pleasant, warm naivete about ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... with paint and palettes and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed comfortlessly on it; an easel, with a strip of some faded mediaeval silk trailing from it; a lay figure simpering in incomplete nakedness, with its head on one side, and a stocking on one leg, and a Japanese dress dropped before it; dusty rugs and skins kicking over the varnished floor; canvases faced to the mop-board; an open trunk overflowing with costumes: these features one might notice anywhere. But, besides, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... that. He said, "Oh! once I thought The little children would make bright for me The crown they wear who have won many souls For righteousness; but oh, this evil place! Hard lines it gives them, cold and dirt abhorred,— Hunger and nakedness, in lieu of love, And ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow

... solemn magniloquent style was simulated as Eastern cant applied to common business in Rejected Addresses, by the clever humorists, Horace and James Smith, 1812. The tree which produces this fruit belongs to the history of mankind. In Paradise Adam partook of figs, and covered his nakedness with the leaves. ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... not with the smallest prospect of conquering a foot of land from France, Spain, or Holland. No; we are at war on the defensive to protect what is left, or more truly to stave off, for a year perhaps, a peace that must proclaim our nakedness and impotence. I would not willingly recur to that womanish vision of something may turn up in our favour! That something must be a naval victory that will annihilate at once all the squadrons of ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... through which my hearers must be carried, I thought advisable to begin with an outline statement of the general political and military conditions, and of their sequences; a rudimentary figure, a skeleton, the nakedness of which should render easy to understand the mutual bearings of the several parts, and their articulations. So most surely could the relation of sea power to the other members be seen, and its influence upon them and upon the ultimate issue be appreciated. Before I began, I remember explaining ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan

... to write down to the comprehension of those who could not understand or feel a highly imaginative style; but they show his earnestness, and with what heart-felt compassion he went home to the direct point of injury—that oppression is detestable as being the parent of starvation, nakedness, and ignorance. Besides these outpourings of compassion and indignation, he had meant to adorn the cause he loved with loftier poetry of glory and triumph: such is the scope of the "Ode to the Assertors ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley

... An ample portion of the spoils assign. But this I tell thee, and will make it good, If e'er I find thee play the fool, as now, Then may these shoulders cease this head to bear, And may my son Telemachus no more Own me his father, if I strip not off Thy mantle and thy garments, aye, expose Thy nakedness, and flog thee to the ships Howling, and scourg'd with ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... the bush beneath which he had slept, broke off a thick bough so as to cover his nakedness, and advanced towards Nausicaa and her maids; these last all ran away, but Nausicaa stood her ground, for Minerva had put courage into her heart, so she kept quite still, and Ulysses could not make up his mind whether it would be better to go up to her, throw himself at her feet, and embrace ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... which Moses taught the nation: 'Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, by reason of the abundance of all things: therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the Lord shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things, and He shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck' (Deut. xxviii. 47, 48). The blind Samson, chained, at the mill, has a warning for us, too. That is what God's heroes come to, if once they prostitute the God-given strength to the base loves of self and the flattering ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... Our lances round thee have hover'd, Have seen where thy fellows bide; Thy weakness we have discover'd, Thy nakedness we have spied. ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon

... the business will stop there. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, these are the words; enunciative and prophetic. Republic for the respectable washed Middle Classes, how can that be the fulfilment thereof? Hunger and nakedness, and nightmare oppression lying heavy on Twenty-five million hearts; this, not the wounded vanities or contradicted philosophies of philosophical Advocates, rich Shopkeepers, rural Noblesse, was the prime mover in the French Revolution; as the like will be in all such Revolutions, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... Though nakedness might, as usual, be given as the pervading character of the spot, whither it is now necessary to transfer the scene of the tale, it was not entirely without the signs of human life. Amid the monotonous rolling of the prairie, a single naked and ragged rock arose on ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... weeks ago, however, all uncertainty had ended. The sword had fallen. Propertius had published a series of poems boasting of his love, scorning all the ideals of courage and manhood in which she had tried to nurture him, exhibiting to Rome in unashamed nakedness the spectacle of his defeated youth. Since the day when her slave had brought home the volume from the book-store and she had read it at night in the privacy of her bedroom, she had found no words in which to speak to him about his poetry. Any hope that she had ever had of again appealing ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... after we ran out of the Basque country and into the austere landscape of old Castile. The hills retreated and swelled into mountains that were not less than terrible in their savage nakedness. The fields of corn and the orchards ceased, and the green of the pastures changed to the tawny gray of the measureless wheat-lands into which the valleys flattened and widened. There were no longer any factory chimneys; the villages seemed to turn from stone to mud; ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... to do so now, if my proposal prove inacceptable. We are made of the same stuff, you and I; we are brothers in spirit; we may therefore disclose our souls to one another without false shame, proud in our nakedness. Here are my two thousand ducats. Call them yours, if you enable me to spend to-night in your place with Marcolina.—Let us not stand still, if you please, Lorenzi. Let us continue our walk." They walked through the fields, beneath the ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler

... well-chosen kinds are in leaf two-thirds of the year, and their leafless branches and twigs are a pleasing relief to the structure's cold nakedness even through the winter. I have seen a house, whose mistress was too exclusively fond of annuals, stand waiting for its shoes and stockings from October clear round to August, and then barefooted again in October. In such gardening there is too much of love's ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable

... ridiculed with indifference? Did they promise for us that our meekness and patience should be insulted; our coasts harassed, our towns demolished and plundered, and our wives and offspring exposed to nakedness, hunger, and death, without our feeling the resentment of men, and exerting those powers of self-preservation which God has given us? No man had once a greater veneration for Englishmen than I entertained. They were dear to me as branches of the same parental trunk, and partakers of ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... Chambers and yet we are an educated country. Undoubtedly too much so; others are not cleverer but they have not the childish self-confidence with which our political leaders publish their incapacity in its complete nakedness as a model and pattern. How have we Germans got the reputation of retiring modesty? There is not a single one of us who does not think that he understands everything, from strategy to picking the fleas off a dog, better than professionals who ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam

... Riverfield, which nestles in a bend of the Cumberland River and sleeps time away under its huge old oak and elm and hackberry trees, kept perpetually green by the gnarled old cedars that throw blue-berried green fronds around their winter nakedness. As we rode slowly along, with a leisure I am sure all the motor-car world has forgotten exists, the two old boys on the front seat hummed and chuckled happily while I breathed in great gulps of ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess

... his fifty thousand pounds had gone to." He could obtain no tidings of a single farthing on the Atlantic side of that continent; but he learned one thing most thoroughly and satisfactorily, as thousands have done besides him, that if he had gone there in the first place, and seen the nakedness of the land, and the deplorable and remediless ignorance and superstition of the people, his fifty thousand pounds would have snugly remained in the three per cents. and India bonds. He was determined, however, now that he was fairly afloat, to "go the whole figure," and ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames

... freshets of effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean's immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God's throne. Well that Ahab's quadrant was furnished with coloured glasses, through which to take sight of that solar fire. So, swinging his seated form to the roll ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... The extreme nakedness of the entire tract was likewise very extraordinary. Elsewhere, in various quarters of the globe, there may be sterile rocks, but there are none so adamant as to be altogether unfurrowed by the filaments engendered in the moist residuum of the condensed vapor; ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne

... would be more in place in a lunatic asylum than in a gathering of presumably responsible men and women. In the end one is made to feel how far more purifying and ennobling than this is the spectacle of absolute nakedness, even on the stage, yes, ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... way, however, that it has been supposed that no man could be a great poet unless he wrote a very big poem, the tradition is kept up among the painters, and we have here a vast number of large canvases, with figures of the proper heroical length and nakedness. The anticlassicists did not arise in France until about 1827; and, in consequence, up to that period, we have here the old classical faith in full vigor. There is Brutus, having chopped his son's head off, with all the agony of a father, and then, calling ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... the population and the number of those engaged in cultivating the soil and in other useful labour. Was not this alone sufficient to explain the deplorable state of the economy of the Spanish Peninsula, the paucity of its inhabitants, the backwardness of its agriculture, its want of capital, and the nakedness and poverty of its fields and its towns? Indolence being, so to speak, thus sanctified, what stimulus could there be for productive labour? Why should men have fatigued themselves by arduous employments, when ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous

... side is seen to be composed of hills covered with dark forest and separated by narrow valleys. Here and there the white rock stands out from the enveloping woods of oak, ilex, and chestnut, or the arid slope shows its waste of stones, whose nakedness the dry lavender vainly tries to cover with a light mantle of blue-gray tufts. It is these sterile places which yield the best truffles of Prigord. Sometimes trained dogs are used to hunt for the cryptogams, but, as in ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker



Words linked to "Nakedness" :   closeness, sociableness, altogether, gloominess, birthday suit, naked, gloom, status, undress, condition, glumness, nude, sociability, raw



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