"Necessitous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Lawsuit possesses in an eminent degree. The plot of the play is an iniquitous suit; there can be no fitter persons to be concerned in the active part of it than low, necessitous lawyers of bad character, and profligates of desperate fortune. On the other hand, in the passive part, if an honest and virtuous man had been made the object of their designs, or a weak man of good intentions, every successful step they should take against him ought rather to fill the audience ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... specie to the amount of about three thousand pounds. They hired apartments in Whitcombe-street, and lived for some months quietly. In the same house there lodged a Portuguese woman named Blavary, who, being in necessitous circumstances, was engaged by the Count as interpreter. She was constantly admitted into his laboratory, where he spent much of his time in search of the philosopher's stone. She spread abroad the fame of her entertainer in return for his hospitality, and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... creditor to whom it is due; and hence it cannot always be abandoned at his pleasure. It is ordained, not merely for the ruler, but for the benefit and protection of all who are subject to its control. And hence, although a creditor may show his mercy by releasing his necessitous debtors; yet the ruler who undertakes to display his mercy by a free use of the pardoning power, may only betray a weak and yielding compassion for the individual, instead of manifesting that calm and enlightened benevolence ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... at Constantinople, though of a Roman family related to the imperial house of the Theodosiuses. From his childhood he served God in continual watching, fasting, and prayer, in imitation of St. John the Baptist; and for the relief of the necessitous he gave away immense occult alms. The time which was not employed in these charities, he spent in holy retirement and prayer. In the reign of the emperor Marcian, Anatolius the archbishop, offering violence to the saint's humility, ordained him priest. In this new state the saint saw himself under ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... CLERGY, who present us with the bright side of this picture, are fast verging to a situation of the most necessitous distress; and, notwithstanding the generous collections repeatedly raised, and the severest oeconomy unremittingly exercised in their distribution, if something further is not quickly obtained, all that has been done ...
— Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy (1793) • Frances Burney
... Christian charity, which has already given birth to many benefactions, for the help of churches, schools, and charitable institutions, and has spread amongst your compatriots the idea of relieving the poor and necessitous." Incited by these illustrious men, Jasmin at once took the field, and by his exertions did much towards the foundation ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... four days before. During the absence of her husband, Madame de Pechels, whose courage never abandoned her, chose rather to stoop to the most toilsome labours than to have recourse to the charity of the government, of which many, less self-helping, or perhaps more necessitous, did not ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... and pleasure of civilised life—to the life of fashionable society, where the refinements of luxury have multiplied their artificial wants beyond the proportion of the largest fortunes, and have brought most men into the class of the necessitous, inducing that churlish habit of the mind, in which every feeling is considered as a weakness, which terminates not in self, unlike those generous sympathies of the Arabs, where every individual seems impelled to seek, as they express it, (e dire el khere fie nes) "to do good to men." ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... Leipzig. Here were poor-houses, under most judicious regulations, where food, fire, and lodging, were afforded. These buildings were converted into hospitals, their inmates were obliged to turn out, and at length the necessitous were deprived of their scanty allowance—the funds were exhausted, and no fresh supplies received. The citizen sunk under the weight of his burdens; it was impossible to lay any new ones upon him. Among the different ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... to bow their necks to the yoke of civil government. In order to attain this end of security to property, a legislator will proceed with impartiality. He should not suppose that, when he has insured to their proprietors the possession of lands and movables against the depredation of the necessitous, nothing remains to be done. The history of all ages has demonstrated that wealth not only can secure itself, but includes even an oppressive principle. Aware of this, and that the extremes of poverty and riches have a necessary tendency to corrupt the human heart, he will ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... to a flaw in the title-deed of his house at 41 Skinner Street, which he had to forfeit, Godwin had come upon poverty greater than any he had previously suffered, although he had been always more or less necessitous. Lamb now lent him L50. In the following year, after being mainly instrumental in putting on foot a fund for Godwin's benefit, he transformed this loan into a gift. An appeal was issued in 1823 asking for; L600, the following postscript to which, in Lamb's hand, is ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... style and the diversion of his thought from strictly logical sequence by his excessive use of simile. He begins (ll. 1-4) by emphasising the paradoxical character of human affairs, in which only those escape poverty who are abnormal, while it is among the necessitous that worthily typical representatives of the race must be sought. The former class, under the designation of "great men," are then (after a parenthetical comparison with cedars waxing amidst tempests) likened to statuaries who are satisfied ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... called both him and Anaxagoras, and others of their profession, wise but not prudent, in not applying their study to more profitable things—though I do not well digest this verbal distinction—that will not, however, serve to excuse my pedants, for to see the low and necessitous fortune wherewith they are content, we have rather reason to pronounce that they are neither ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... which we were followed by most of the nobility and the rich citizens. This afforded considerable employment to different artificers. The first use I made of my own new vehicle was to visit, in company with the Duc de Penthievre, the necessitous poor families and our pensioners. In the course of our rounds we met ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Cot, with the Appurtenances, were worth about threescore Ounces of Gold: But as the Purchasers found I was necessitous, and drove to my last Shifts; the first whom I apply'd to, offer'd me thirty Ounces; the second, twenty; and the third, but ten: Just as I had come to Terms of Accommodation with one of them, the Prince of Hyrcania came to ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... correspondents of the English Press to back my father's signature were dismissed with disdain. When the colonel was reminded that he held a considerable amount of money voted by Parliament, he retorted: "That is for necessitous persons! But you ask me to lend you money!" "Quite so," my father replied; "I do not wish to be a charge on the Treasury. I simply want a loan, as I have a difficult and perhaps an expensive journey before me." "How much do you want?" snapped the colonel. "Well," said ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... instant, the fruit of his comedy of legal devotion to the necessitous classes. The choir of porters chanting his praises to the skies could alone have inspired this servant-woman with the boundless confidence of which he found himself the object. His thoughts reverted instantly to Dutocq and his notes, and he was ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... contented themselves with sending a colony to Canada, a cold, uncomfortable, uninviting region, from which nothing but furs and fish were to be had, and where the new inhabitants could only pass a laborious and necessitous life, in perpetual regret of the deliciousness and plenty of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... Mr. Fielding, and the rev. Mr. James Harvey, author of The Meditations. The former, in the beginning of his humorous History of Tom Jones, calls it an excellent poem. Mr. Harvey stiles it a pious and instructive piece; and that worthy gentleman, upon hearing that the author was in necessitous circumstances, deposited two guineas in the hands of a trusty person to be given him, whenever his occasions should press. This poem was written some years before Mr. Harvey or Mr. Fielding took any notice ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... that already prepared, so as to render the same more perfect; which machine, when completed, he is desirous of having tried in one of His Majesty's ships that shall be bound to the West Indies; but at the same time represented that he should not be able, by reason of his necessitous circumstances, to go on and finish his said machine without assistance, and requested that he may be furnished with the sum of 500L., to put him in a capacity to perform the same, and to ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... of necessitous gentlewomen is a new thing in the land. That is to say, there have always been ladies who have 'come down in the world'—not a seaside lodging-housekeeper but has known better days. There have always been girls who never expected to be poor; always ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... small windmill perched on the gable end of a wooden store. His attention was arrested by the beauty of its performance. He entered the store and asked who the maker was. He was told that he was a Northumbrian, then resident in the house—a man in necessitous circumstances, and wanting employment. A conference was held; the planter carried the machine to the Santee, pointed out the difficulties under which the planters labored, and the result was the rice pounding-mill. This man was the first Mr. Lucas, and to his genius South Carolina ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... half as many to Andros, a thousand to dwell among the Thracian tribe of the Bisaltae, and others to the new colony in Italy founded by the city of Sybaris, which was named Thurii. By this means he relieved the state of numerous idle agitators, assisted the necessitous, and overawed the allies of Athens by placing his colonists near ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... men dangerous members of society, quite as often as affluence makes them worthless ones. I am of opinion that many persons who become bad subjects because they are necessitous, because 'the world is not their friend, nor the world's law,' might be kept virtuous (or, at least, withheld from mischief) by being made happy, by early encouragement, by holding out to them a reasonable hope of obtaining, in good time, an honorable station and a competent income, as the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... political, social, and economical, had for more than a century unduly stimulated the population of a country which had no considerable resources except in the soil. That soil had become divided into minute allotments, held by a pauper tenantry, at exorbitant rents, of a class of middlemen, themselves necessitous, and who were mere traders in land. A fierce competition raged amid the squalid multitude for these strips of earth which were their sole means of existence. To regulate this fatal rivalry, and restrain this emulation of despair, the peasantry, enrolled ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... ourselves and before no other judge. Not to cleave to any person, be it even the dearest—every person is a prison and also a recess. Not to cleave to a fatherland, be it even the most suffering and necessitous—it is even less difficult to detach one's heart from a victorious fatherland. Not to cleave to a sympathy, be it even for higher men, into whose peculiar torture and helplessness chance has given us an insight. Not to cleave to a science, though ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of assent. On all sides we find the State making active provision for the poorer classes and not by any means for the destitute alone. We find it educating the children, providing medical inspection, authorizing the feeding of the necessitous at the expense of the ratepayers, helping them to obtain employment through free Labour Exchanges, seeking to organize the labour market with a view to the mitigation of unemployment, and providing old age pensions ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... evident, were only to be obtained by a process of bloodshed, war, and revolution. None will deny that those who set on foot military expeditions against foreign states by means like these are far more culpable than the ignorant and the necessitous whom they induce to go forth as the ostensible parties in the proceeding. These originators of the invasion of Cuba seem to have determined with coolness and system upon an undertaking which should disgrace their country, violate its laws, and put to hazard the lives of ill-informed ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... "Clifford!" who obtained the redress of such a public grievance, "Clifford!" who struggled for and won such a popular benefit, "Clifford!" In the gentler part of his projects and his undertakings—in that part, above all, which concerned the sick or the necessitous—this useful citizen was seconded, or rather excelled, by a being over whose surpassing loveliness Time seemed to have flown with a gentle and charming wing. There was something remarkable and touching in the love ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... such poor creatures as this. His heart was always open to the miserable, so that Goldsmith said that the fact of being miserable was enough to "ensure the protection of Johnson." Sir John Hawkins says that, when some one asked him how he could bear to have his house full of "necessitous and undeserving people," his reply was, "If I did not assist them no one else would, and they must be lost for want." He always declared that the true test of a nation's civilization was the state of its poor, and specially directed Boswell to report to him how the poor were maintained in Holland. ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... those rich faculties of enjoyment with which she was endowed, and which at once fascinated and frightened her. Marriage, in such an environment, offered no solution; marriage meant dependence, from which her very nature revolted: and in her existence, drab and necessitous though it were, was still a remnant of freedom that marriage would ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... without hunger. When there is no appetite do not eat. It is an example of conventional stupidity that we eat because it is 'meal time,' even though there be not the slightest feeling of genuine hunger. Leaving out of consideration the necessitous poor and those who for their living engage themselves in hard physical toil, it is safe to say that hardly one person in a thousand has ever felt real hunger. Yet no one was ever the worse for waiting upon appetite. No one was ever starved by not eating because of having no appetite. Loss ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... concur; every day he attended the emperor's levee together with his son, mixing with the other courtiers. By such marks of deference, he completely gained the heart of Napoleon. He was about to depart, poor. Unwilling that he should present himself to the Swedish throne in that necessitous state, like a mere adventurer, the emperor generously gave him two millions out of his own treasury; he even granted to his family the dotations which as a foreign prince he could no longer retain himself; and they parted on apparent ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... my relations, I have some thirty or forty, nephews and nieces and their children, the greater part of whom I have never seen, and from whom I have had no news for seven or eight years. Among them there may be some necessitous ones who would be proper objects of particular legacies, yet it would be impossible for me at this moment to know which they are. It was my intention, and still is if I live, to go to America, to make discrimination ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... even enthusiastically generous: Sydney's cup of cold water needed more self-denial; and I am well assured that many a Christian child of our day, himself well warmed and clad, meeting one naked and cold, would be ready enough to give the whole cloak off his own shoulders to the necessitous one, if his better-advised nurse, or mamma, would let him. But this Roman soldier was no Christian, and did his serene charity in ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... would be more unjust and tyrannical, than to prevent the generous and humane from contributing to the relief of the Poor and necessitous, yet, as giving alms to beggars tends so directly and so powerfully to encourage idleness and immorality, to discourage the industrious Poor, and perpetuate mendicity, with all its attendant evils, too much pains ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... young minion to gratify with pleasure, a necessitous family to supply with riches, were enterprises too great for the empty exchequer of James. In order to obtain a little money, the cautionary towns must be delivered up to the Dutch; a measure which has been severely blamed by almost all historians; and I may venture to affirm, that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... his quarterly allowance of fifteen guineas, instead of discharging his debts, he went out of town, hid his gown in a furze-bush, and walked to London; where, having no friend to advise him, he fell into bad company, soon spent his guineas, found no means of being introduced among the players, grew necessitous, pawned his clothes, and wanted bread. Walking the street, very hungry, not knowing what to do with himself, a crimp's bill was put into his hand, offering immediate entertainment and encouragement to such as would bind themselves to work in America. ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... his temperament. On one occasion, indeed, he wrote a violent and reproachful letter to Tycho, who had given him no just ground of offence; but the state of Kepler's health at that moment, and the necessitous circumstances in which he had been placed, present some palliation of his conduct. But, independent of this apology, his subsequent conduct was so truly noble as to reconcile even Tycho to his penitent friend. Kepler quickly saw the error ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... to places of fashionable resort. It was more common, for all who possessed landed property to secede to their estates, attended by whole troops of the indigent, to cut down their woods to erect temporary dwellings, and to portion out their parks, parterres and flower-gardens, to necessitous families. Many of these, of high rank in their own countries, now, with hoe in hand, turned up the soil. It was found necessary at last to check the spirit of sacrifice, and to remind those whose generosity proceeded to lavish ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... abuse sometimes committed by a necessitous Malster, who to come by Malt sooner than ordinary, makes use of Barley before it is thoroughly sweated in the Mow, and then it never makes right Malt, but will be steely and not yield a due quantity of wort, as I knew it once done by a Person that thrashed ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... with almost more respect than she might have desired. He was one of those self-chaperoning young men who spout anarchy and practise asceticism. Even in his poetry it was the necessitous limitations of rhyme-words that dragged him into his ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... rewarded all of them according to their desserts, thought it contrary to gentlemanly conduct and manliness of character to harbour enmity and strife towards a man like Hatim, from whom multitudes received happiness, and who, for the sake of the necessitous, did not even spare his own life, and was entirely devoted to the ways of God. He instantly seized Hatim's hand with great cordiality and friendship, and said to him, 'Why should it not be the case? [200] such a man as you are ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... terms and wages are unduly depressed. The individual laborer offers what he is forced to sell, and the employer is not forced to buy. Delay may mean privation for the one party and no great inconvenience or loss for the other. If there are within reach a body of necessitous men out of employment and available for filling the positions for which individual laborers are applying, the applicants ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark |
