|
|
|
More "Contemptible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Royal Society, there can be little doubt but that the judgment pronounced on Mr. Landells remains unaltered. He deserted his leader on the eve of the fight; and such an act, so subversive of all discipline, and so far from the thoughts of the smallest drummer-boy, renders all explanations contemptible. In the present instance, Mr. Landells' explanations make his act the more inexcusable. He is still of opinion that the camels are indispensable to the safety of the party, and that he is indispensable to the safety of the camels. The inference is, ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... remained as they were upon earth, but of more monstrous growth in all respects, resembling giants greater and more vicious than man. War and cannibalism still prevailed in heaven, and the character of the inhabitants seems to have been fiendish or contemptible as on earth; for the spirits of women who were not tattooed were unceasingly pursued by their more fortunate sisters, who tore their bodies with sharp shells, often making mince-meat of them for the gods to eat. Also the shade of any one whose ears had not been pierced was condemned to carry ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... wish to know the reason of their failure in these things, they need only turn to the opening of Pope's superb attack upon Addison. The Henleyite's idea of satirising a man is to express a violent contempt for him, and by the heat of this to persuade others and himself that the man is contemptible. I remember reading a satiric attack on Mr. Gladstone by one of the young anarchic Tories, which began by asserting that Mr. Gladstone was a bad public speaker. If these people would, as I have said, go quietly and ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... congenial to you in those lonely places you thought that the original must be the same? You were wrong. Physically and temperamentally we belong to different worlds. You couldn't rest in mine, and I couldn't enter yours. If you knew me," she added, in a hushed voice, "you'd find me contemptible, in all my weaknesses." She lowered her head, then, raising her eyes, which were full of fear, besought him, "Tear it out of ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... fierce,—the flaming Orator, if he is born for this alone, and only practices and applies himself to this, without tempering his copiousness with the two inferior characters of Eloquence, is of all others the most contemptible. For the plain and simple Orator, as speaking acutely and expertly, has an appearance of wisdom and good-sense; and the middle kind of Orator is sufficiently recommended by his sweetness:—but the copious and diffusive Speaker, if ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... an ill will to this inoffensive creature, and several times pricked him on the proboscis with their awls. The noble animal did not chastise them in the manner he might have done, and seemed to think they were too contemptible to be angry with them. But he took other means to punish them for their cruelty. He filled his trunk with water of a dirty quality, and advancing towards them in his ordinary manner, spouted the whole of the puddle over them. The punishment was highly applauded by those ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley
... Marlan[468] Colledge, also Balliols Colledge, which is not so pittiful and contemptible as many would have it. Before the utter gate is a pretty pallisade of tries. Within the building is tolerable; in their dining roome be battered[469] up Theses Moral, political, and out of all the others sciences. ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... to secure justice for others or justice for ourselves, save as conditioned upon the attitude we are willing to take toward our Army, and especially toward our Navy. It is not merely unwise, it is contemptible, for a nation, as for an individual, to use high-sounding language to proclaim its purposes, or to take positions which are ridiculous if unsupported by potential force, and then to refuse to provide this force. If there is no intention of providing ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... frontier in connection with Tories and Indians. The war thus assumed a more cruel character. This was chiefly due to the influence of Lord George Germaine, the secretary of state for the colonies. He was a contemptible creature, weak and cruel. He had been dismissed from the army in 1759 for cowardice at the battle of Minden, and he was so generally despised that when in 1782 the king was obliged to turn him out of office and tried to console him by raising him to the peerage ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... near New-York, and here he commenced his career as an author. His first book was Precaution. It was undertaken under circumstances purely accidental, and published under great disadvantages. Its success was moderate, though far from contemptible. It is a ludicrous evidence of the value of critical opinion in this country, that Precaution was thought to discover so much knowledge of English society, as to raise a question whether its alleged author could have written it. More reputation ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... the prowess of the mutineers, and proves that we had no contemptible foe to deal with, that so many sorties and attacks were made by them during the siege. They amounted in all to thirty-six—all of these being regularly organized actions and assaults—besides innumerable others ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... the march of those Teutonic folk, whose women were virile and could give birth to men; a folk among whom the woman received on the morning of her marriage, from the man who was to be her companion through life, no contemptible trinket to hang about her throat or limbs, but a shield, a spear, a sword, and a yoke of oxen, while she bestowed on him in return a suit of armour, in token that they two were henceforth to be one in toil and in the facing of danger; that she too should dare with him in war and suffer with him ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... than a modern tourist: audivi voces divinas. His memory was prodigious, his eloquence in the Latin language studied and yet forcible, his knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy far from contemptible. He enjoyed the society of Sophists and distinguished rhetoricians, and so far affected authorship as to win the unenviable title of Graeculus in his own lifetime: yet he never neglected state affairs. Owing to his untiring ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... all. But Micky had gone too far. His original weak good-nature was foundered in rum. Always blustery and frothy, he divided the world in two—superior officers, before whom he grovelled, and inferiors to whom he was a mouthy, foul-tongued, contemptible bully, in spite of a certain lingering kindness of heart that showed itself at such rare times when he was neither roaring drunk nor crucified by black reaction. His brother's child, fortunately, had inherited little of the paternal family traits, but in both body and brain favoured ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... were in my mind, the cringing, foul-mouthed, brutal, contemptible ruffian who had caused all this misery stood within two paces of me! I could have reached out my hand, and, with half an effort, have crushed him, and—I did not do it! Some invisible Power held my arm, for murder was in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... sea, and brought them all to the same camp. There he was informed that the enemies relied much upon an ancient oracle, that the family of the Scipios should be always victorious in Africa. There was in his army a man, otherwise mean and contemptible, but of the house of the Africani, and his name Scipio Sallutio. This man Caesar, (whether in raillery, to ridicule Scipio, who commended the enemy, or seriously to bring over the omen to his side, it were hard to say,) put at the head of his troops, as if he were general, in all ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... himself for having allowed himself to be made a fool of by "that little country goose," when he was well aware that there were hundreds of women of the best families of the land who would feel honored at receiving his attentions. But this sort of reasoning he knew to be both weak and contemptible, and his better self ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... why I allowed you to read it to the end. I was of the same mind as that English girl whose name we both know. I could not believe that a man, brave as I knew you to be, could outside his bravery be so contemptible." ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... pleases me to hear you say that. I should like to see you lose your water right, of course; it would mean much money in my pocket; but I'll not do contemptible things or crooked things to ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... married woman, on the contrary, breaks a most sacred engagement, and becomes a cruel mother when she is a false and faithless wife. If her husband has still an affection for her, the arts which she must practise to deceive him, will render her the most contemptible of human beings; and at any rate, the contrivances necessary to preserve appearances, will keep her mind in that childish or vicious tumult which destroys all its energy. Besides, in time, like those people who habitually take cordials to ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... man who threw a girl over as something contemptible, and he certainly did not want to appear to himself in that light; or, for her sake, that people should think he had tired of her, or found her wanting in any one particular. He knew only too well how people would talk. How they would say he had never really cared for her; that he didn't ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... is the head of passion. It is no anatomical knife, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it will not refute but destroy. For the spirit of the conditions has been refuted. In and for themselves they are no memorable objects, but existences as contemptible as they are despised. Criticism has already settled all accounts with this subject. It no longer figures as an end in itself, but only as a means. Its essential pathos is indignation, its essential ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... you expect your employer to hitch up his team every Saturday night and carry you home?" This seemed a poser, but it wasn't. "No," said the man promptly, "I wouldn't expect that; but if the farmer had his team hitched up and was going my way, I should call him a contemptible fellow if he would not let me ride." Mr. Employe came out three minutes afterwards with a pass ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... of wealth is bad enough; but the aristocracy of dress is perfectly contemptible. Could Raphael visit Canada in rags, he would be nothing in their eyes beyond ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... armies are badly disciplined, and want skill to attack, or temper to retreat; and therefore, I must confess, it seemed strange to me, when I came home, and heard our people say such fine things of the power, glory, magnificence, and trade of the Chinese; because, as far as I saw, they appeared to be a contemptible herd or crowd of ignorant, sordid slaves, subjected to a government qualified only to rule such a people; and were not its distance inconceivably, great from Muscovy, and that empire in a manner as rude, impotent, and ill governed as they, the Czar of Muscovy might with ease ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... his rule (which had kept peace in the country for a whole fifteen years) there was more fatuous imbecility, plenty of cruelty and suffering still, but much less of the old-time fierce and blindly ferocious political fanaticism. It was all more vile, more base, more contemptible, and infinitely more manageable in the very outspoken cynicism of motives. It was more clearly a brazen-faced scramble for a constantly diminishing quantity of booty; since all enterprise had been stupidly killed in the land. Thus it came to pass that the province of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... to kill more of our fellowmen than we can kill with existing appliances?' Is it a new engine, a new amalgam of metals, a new explosive, a new field of electrical energy, one hears the same vulture's cry— 'How many, how far, how safely can we slay?' I regard this lust for destruction as contemptible. It is a strange and ignominious feature of modern life. Forgive me, Mr. Theydon, if I speak strongly on this matter. The men who spread the bounds of science today are, nominally, at any rate, Christians. They tell of peace and goodwill to all, yet prepare unceasingly for some ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... now I have it, leave me; y'are infectious, the plague and leprosie of your baseness spreading on all that do come near you; such as you render the Throne of Majesty, the Court, suspected and contemptible; you are Scarabee's that batten in her dung, and have no palats to taste her curious Viands; and like Owles, can only see her night deformities, but with the glorious splendor of her beauties, you are struck blind as Moles, that undermine the sumptuous Building ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher - Vol. 2 of 10: Introduction to The Elder Brother • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... and yet you turned your head away. You thought"—here an actual oath escaped the girl's lips—"you were afraid of what that stuck-up fool of a woman would think. She knows about us—she's heard; she recognized me. I saw it in her eyes. She deliberately sneered at me, and you—you contemptible puppy!—you didn't even raise your hat to me after all your sickening, gushing protestations. I want to tell you right now, Dick Mostyn, that you can't walk over me. I'm ready for you, and I'm tired ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... first order. But not even the words of a Webster or an Everett could adequately express the profound emotion of the vast concourse of people then assembled. For it was one of those occasions when, as the elder Webster said, "Words have lost their power, rhetoric is vain, and all elaborate oratory contemptible." ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... strengthen me and dome good! Everything that surrounds me is so hollow, so insipid, so contemptible—what I hear is so small. A strong, highly spiced word, even if it is sharp, refreshes me—When you have finished a picture, do you like to hear nothing but how well your friends ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... no matter how base and contemptible, and whether by lying, bribery or treachery, all and every means were welcome to him if they led to the attainment of his ambitious desires." But Oom Paul was absolutely wrong in thinking that it was the personage he was thus describing who practised all these abominations. ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... power, by urging an incessant pressure of petty, vexatious, and provoking, but useless annoyances. Caesar's demands may have been unjust, but they were bold, manly, and undisguised. The eunuch may have been right in resisting them; but the mode was so mean and contemptible, that mankind have always taken part with Caesar in the sentiments which they have formed as spectators of ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... Should I say to him, "Look here, it is very nice, no doubt; but we, your neighbours, are simply crazy to know who and what you are?" That might strike him in various ways. He might take offence, and one could not blame him. He might see humour in it, and a proof of the contemptible meanness of human nature. I decided that I lacked courage to blurt out my desire that way. He was so very much like myself that I could not rid myself of the notion that he might prefer a milder way of approach. And as I sorted out my stock of ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... him. Figures seemed to have lost their value and plans their meaning. With the utmost determination he held himself to his task, not willing to believe that his judgment and nerve could be so disturbed as to render him unfit for any serious business. But the result was contemptible as compared with ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... sanction of an illiterate, ignorant, self-sufficient, and most contemptible old man; and much good may it ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... a popular fallacy, an exploded idea, a contemptible humbug, to live merely for your neighbors, the rabble world at large. Thousands do it, my dear, and I've no objection to their doing it; it's their own business, and none of mine. I have moved up town because I thought it would be more ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... not pretended, it is real. It arises from his total want of faith in all virtue; he is no more capable of conceiving goodness than she is capable of conceiving evil. To the brutish coarseness and fiendish malignity of this man, her gentleness appears only a contemptible weakness; her purity of affection, which saw "Othello's visage in his mind," only a perversion of taste; her bashful modesty, only a cloak for evil propensities; so he represents them with all the force of language and self-conviction, and we are obliged to listen to him. He rips ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... at all but his arrogance, since he was clearly incapable of hitting where he aimed. But his very presence and his swift escape, running beside the hart, made failure seem double; for the derision he excited recoiled on the deriders, who could not bring this contemptible foe to book. After that day many saw him, sometimes at a great distance, sometimes near enough to be lashed by his insolent tongue. He always kept beside the coveted quarry, as though to guard it, and ran when it ran, with incredible speed; but ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... A day or so before, when lamenting to Baltic that Dr Pendle had proved innocent, the man had rebuked him for his baseness, and had given him to understand that the bishop was fully aware of the contemptible part which he had acted. Deserted by his former ally, ignorant of Dr Pendle's secret, convinced of Mosk's guilt, the chaplain was in anything but a pleasant position. He was reaping what he had so industriously sown; he was caught in his own snare, ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... the German armies were receiving—we knew nothing about it at the time—undoubtedly was partly responsible for the harsh treatment extended to us. Unable to smash the "contemptible little army," which was certainly proving capable of looking after itself, vengeance was visited upon our ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... so genuinely surprised at this somewhat contemptible trick fate had played her that Hodder ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... you study the noble and beautiful stars for their own sakes to find out what they are, and what they are doing, what is their nature and what their place in the great scheme, or do you peek and pry at them through the keyhole of a contemptible curiosity in order to discover what you think they can do for you, to set you on high, to puff you out into a personage and cause you to be noticed of the foolish ones of this world? Which are you, sir, a young man of parts whose hand I can grasp fraternally, or an insulter of planets, sir, ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... king, protested "that he had not, and would never have desired to, put forward anything against the prince's honor, and that he had been neither the author nor the instigator of his imprisonment." "Sir," said Conde, "I consider wicked and contemptible him or them who caused it." "So I think, sir," answered Guise, "and it does not apply to me at all." Whereupon they embraced, and a report was drawn up of the ceremony, which was called their reconciliation. Just as it was ending, Marshal Francis de Montmorency, eldest son of the constable, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the patriot's, soldier's, and gentleman's language, is a very comprehensive word, of great honor, meaning, and import, and of which the generality of idle quidnuncs and coffee-house politicians can hardly form any but a very mean and contemptible idea. However having had the command of a body of hussars, I went upon several expeditions, with discretionary powers; and the success I then met with is, I think, fairly and only to be placed to my account, and to that of the brave fellows whom I led on to conquest and to victory. We ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... of consequence, enabled them to rule over others; thus the Assyrian and Egyptian empires were great, powerful, and extensive, while the nations that were beyond their reach were divided into small states or kingdoms, on the most contemptible scale. ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... expected an answer," he went on. "Accordingly, I'll proceed to name the men who I believe must know about this contemptible action, and notify them that they will ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... she could not but see something in his coarse eyes she had never seen before; could not but hear something in his brutal voice she had never heard before! Was it possible that somewhere in the depths of his sordid nature he had his own contemptible sense of honor? A hysterical feeling came over her hitherto passive disgust and scorn, but it disappeared with his next sentence in a haze of anxiety. "No!" he said hoarsely, "he had ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... the artless virtues of his successor, derived from his heart, and not borrowed from the schools. He despised and moderated the stately magnificence of the Byzantine court, so oppressive to the people, so contemptible to the eye of reason. Under such a prince, innocence had nothing to fear, and merit had every thing to hope; and, without assuming the tyrannic office of a censor, he introduced a gradual though visible reformation ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... But with these spurts of volcanic energy alternate moods of the deepest depression. His journal for 1850 says, 'This seems really the Nadir of my fortunes; and in hope, desire, or outlook, so far as common mortals reckon such, I never was more bankrupt. Lonely, shut up within my contemptible and yet not deliberately ignoble self, perhaps there never was, in modern literary or other history, a more solitary soul, capable of any friendship or honest relation to others.' By this time he was feeling the need of another task, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... mind of a general, there always exists some fear that his spies will not prove as diligent and self-sacrificing as they could be. I had not, in my treatment of General Morell, intentionally played upon this fear: such a course would have been contemptible; yet I could see at once the effect of my speech, and I endeavoured to set myself right in ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... by an allowance; have the legal right of speaking first in society, even to gentlemen rich in ideas but bad starters, instead of sitting mumchance and mock-modest; to be Mistress, instead of Miss—contemptible title; to be a woman, instead of a girl; and all this rational liberty, domestic power, and social dignity were to be obtained by merely wedding a dear fellow, who loved her, and was so nice; and the bright career to be ushered in ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... works of the philosopher of Sans Souci, or rather of the man who is no philosopher, and who had more Souci than any man now in Europe? How contemptible they are! Miserable poetry; not a new thought, nor an old one newly expressed.(60) I say nothing of the folly of publishing his aversion to the English, at the very time they are ruining themselves for ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... drewe nere he perceaved his longe eares, and made him a jeste unto all the beastes of the forrest. In like manner wee (upon perill of my life) shall make the Spaniarde ridiculous to all Europe, if with pierceinge eyes wee see into his contemptible weakenes in the West Indies, and with true stile painte hym oute ad vivum unto the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... greatest disaster in the death of Elizabeth. After ruling England so wisely and well for more than fifty years, she died on March 24th, 1603. This great queen left her throne to one of the most paltry and contemptible of men. ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... midst of an order of things which tempts them to close the eyes of their hearts and minds to all the real and unseen glories above and around them, and that might be within them, and to live for the comparatively contemptible and trivial things of this present. Just as when a man sleeps, he loses his consciousness of solid external realities, and passes into a fantastic world of his own imaginations, which have no correspondence in external facts, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... talked of Paris she always spoke in a tone of disdain, and referred to the city as though it were some ridiculous, contemptible, far-away place, in which she only condescended to ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... of our fathers is too manifest. It creates and lets loose upon their institutions the vandal spirit of innovation and overthrow; for, after the memory of our fathers shall have been rendered contemptible, who will uphold and sustain their institutions? The memory of our fathers should be the watch-word of liberty throughout the land; for, imperfect as they were, the world before had not seen their like, nor will it ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... allow. As I looked on I could scarcely refrain from rushing into the sable throng, and joining them in their frisks and jumps; though I dare say, had I done so they would have considered me a very contemptible performer. At length the Queen's chamberlain clapped his hands, and gave notice that the court must break up, as her majesty was desirous of retiring to attend to her duties in putting to bed the children of her mistress to whom she was nurse. The bearers of her palanquin came forward, ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... is positive. Every man surrenders his fancy to a general tone which is itself a surrender. And over all the heartless and fatuous unity spreads this new and wearisome and platitudinous press, incapable of invention, incapable of audacity, capable only of a servility all the more contemptible because it is not even a servility to the strong. But all who begin with force and conquest will ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... it part of the oath that the monarchy should be destroyed by murder without warning? You know it is not! You know that there is nothing more dastardly, more cowardly, more utterly loathsome and contemptible than to kill a man defenceless and unarmed! We speak of a Monarchy, not a King;—not one single individual,—for if he were killed, he has three sons to come after him. You have called me the Soul of an Ideal—good! But I am not, and will not be ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... measures for the promotion, and measures for the counteraction, of his own plans? When we find him ordaining all the contradictions and vacillations by which human conduct is diversified and disgraced?—when every example of the most contemptible folly that ever turned the laugh, or the sneer, or the frown, or the sentiment of pity upon its immediate perpetrators, can be traced to the free counsels and designs of God, and finds ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... variety used by the softer-hearted landlords—quite contemptible in their clemency. The jaws of these resembled the jaws of an old woman to whom time has left nothing but gums. There were also the intermediate or half-toothed sorts, probably devised by the middle-natured squires, or those under the influence of their wives: two inches of mercy, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... rulers, and her mighty men shall sleep a perpetual sleep and not wake, saith the King who is the Lord of Hosts." And truly it seemed as if the curse which had blighted the city's bygone splendor had doomed even its ruins to appear contemptible. ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Lake Whitney, and if, moreover, on coming off the lake there burned in you a thirst for ginger-beer—as is common in the gullet of a freshman—doubtless you have gone from the boathouse to a certain little white building across the road to gratify your hot desires. When you opened the door, your contemptible person—I speak with the vocabulary of a sophomore—is proclaimed to all within by the jangling of a bell. After due interval wherein you busy yourself in an inspection of the cakes and buns that beam upon you from a show-case—your ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... in belief leads almost inevitably to disintegration of morals, Jose had kept himself untainted. For his vital problems he had now, after many days, found "grace sufficient." In what he had regarded as the contemptible tricks of fate, he was beginning to discern the guiding hand of a wisdom greater than the world's. The danger threatened by Cartagena was, temporarily, at least, averted by Rosendo's magnificent spirit. Under the spur of that sacrifice his own courage ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... whom I allude, would be disgusted at the very mention of any thing so old-fashioned and city-like, as a visit to this famous cathedral. And even if that were not the case, it is proper to be provided with more than one scheme for the execution of so necessary a purpose. The question is of no contemptible magnitude, between instructions viva voce, and a circular letter. In favour of the first it may be said, that a letter is the worst and most definite evidence to a man's disadvantage that can be conceived. It may easily ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... it said, he appears not to have become inoculated with the same spirit of honesty and perseverance that characterizes the greater portion of his countrymen. He arrived here nearly twenty years ago, and since that time he has been a lazy, contemptible thief, a shocking contrast with ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... it in the creative mind of a Shakespeare, and how it looms up into "a dome of many-colored glass, staining the white radiance of eternity," under the magic touch of a Shelley! And yet how is it dwarfed down to a contemptible piece of "molecular machinery" by the scientist—one so utterly contemptible in its manifestations that it is ordered to take "a back seat" in this universe ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... young Brown, however ill-bred and disagreeable, are objects too contemptible for serious displeasure; yet I grieve much that my Evelina should be exposed ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... of runaways," and South Carolina "the delight of buccaneers and pirates," but Virginia "the happy retreat of true Britons and true Churchmen." Unluckily these Virginians, well nourished "by the plenty of the country," have "contemptible notions of England!" We shall hear from them again. In the meantime the witty William Byrd of Westover describes for us his amusing survey of the Dismal Swamp, and his excursions into North Carolina and to Governor Spotswood's iron mines, where he ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... hair, and soft, loving eyes and quiet ways. Where are they all now? Charley went to London, was first the favorite of the clubs, next a heartless rake, and finally, being worn out, and, like Solomon, convinced that all was vanity, went into the Church to become that most contemptible of all creatures, a fashionable preacher; my father and mother are laid side by side in the aisle of the old church on the hill, where their virtues are sculptured in marble, for the information of anxiously curious mankind; sister Mary no longer talks to dolls, though a flock ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... man who would have been a remarkable personality if he had not written a note of music. His faults—and he was far from being a paragon—were never petty or contemptible: they were truly the defects of his qualities—of his honesty, his courage, his passionate and often reckless zeal in the promotion of what he believed to be sound and fine in art and in life. Mr. Philip Hale, ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... in Madge, vehemently, 'to save anybody whom you love. Is a contemptible little two-foot measuring-tape to be applied to such ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... Betty's disappointment was not the worst thing. Betty would make other friends— find other interests. Dora Carlson was different; she had not the talent for making many friends, and in losing Eleanor she would lose all she had. For the first time Eleanor realized how mean and contemptible her action had been, because it did not concern herself alone, but involved every one of the people who cared about her—Jim and her father, Dora, Betty, Miss Ferris. It was a short list; perhaps Jean and Kate Denise cared a little too. She felt no resentment against Beatrice. There was no ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... reported that the Allies mean to strip this Museum [of sculpture and painting]. No! it cannot be, they never surely can be guilty of such an act of Vandalism and contemptible spite. I am aware that there is a great clamour amongst a certain description of English for restoring these statues and pictures to the countries from whence they came, and that it is the fashion to term the translation of them to Paris a revolutionary robbery; but let us ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... as beautiful and even pathetic, rather than contemptible, that he should humbly wish to learn of her the small refinements he had missed in the past—that mysterious past which mattered less and less to Annesley as the present became ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... of genius—a philosopher like the doctus Laurentius, not be contented with his fame as discoverer of the art of printing; but to leave his manuscripts, and pica, and pie, to strive for a contemptible triumph, to look with an eye of envy on a competitor for the applauses of a music room! Alas! too true. Who is the man, let me ask you, who can put bounds to his pretensions? Who is the man that does not feel as if the praises of his neighbour were an injury ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... potent adversaries: that seeing the plummet is now in the hands of our Zerubbabels, all mountaines may become plains, and they may bring forth the capstone of the Lords House with shoutings, crying, Grace, grace unto it: and that how weak and contemptible builders soever we be, the Lord would enable us to build with them, that none may have cause to despise the day of our small beginnings, nor to stop our progresse in the work which he hath given us to do, And as for us, who cannot but take notice of the ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... louder, "he's one of these grubstake sharks. He came to Nevada after the Tonopah excitement with a flunkey they call Flip Flappum. That's another dirty dog that I'm going to put my mark on when I get him in the door—one of the most low-down, contemptible curs that I know of—he makes his living by selling bum life insurance. Phillip F. Lapham is his name but we all call him Flip Flappum—he's the black-leg lawyer that drew up that contract that made me lose my mine. Did Dusty tell you about it—then ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... labour had produced. In every hamlet we heard the bells ringing, and saw the poor peasants crowding to the church to put up prayers against the coming hail, which at this season of the year is peculiarly fatal. If this be a superstition, it is surely not a contemptible or uninteresting one to witness: nor can one wonder at the influence gained over peasants thus instructed to associate Heaven with their daily hopes and fears. To our great satisfaction, after two or three vivid flashes of lightning, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a snake, and after a long fight the mouse prevailed and killed the snake. The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of it, gave this interpretation: that the snake was the devil, the mouse was a poor, contemptible people, which God had brought hither, which should overcome Satan here and dispossess him of his kingdom." The reader of Winthrop's Journal comes every-where upon hints which the imagination has since shaped into poetry and ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... to death, banish, or fine, not only those who were suspected or hated, but those also from whom he could obtain nothing else but plunder. The number of the fathers more especially being thus diminished, he determined to elect none into the senate, in order that the order might become contemptible by their very paucity, and that they might feel the less resentment at no business being transacted by them. For he was the first king who violated the custom derived from his predecessors of consulting the senate on all subjects; he administered ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... have been to blame. The sentiments thus expressed were not illegal or criminal; yet I will freely acknowledge that they were violent, intemperate, and reprehensible. For, by attempting to render the office contemptible, they tended to diminish that respect for the execution of the laws which is essential to the maintenance of a free government; but whilst I feel regret at the remembrance, though no hesitation in this open confession of that my ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... a fish—tippling in silence, and answering such questions as I put to him in abrupt monosyllables. The thing was intolerable, but I saw into it: Julia had played me false; the "Mountain" was the man of her choice, and I his despised and contemptible rival. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... should not molest us." To Hood he wrote a week later: "I believed ourselves safe under your Lordship's wing." At this moment he thought the French to be nine sail-of-the-line to the British thirteen,—no contemptible inferior force. Yet that he recognized the possible danger from such a detachment is also clear; for, writing two days earlier, under the same belief as to the enemy's strength, and speaking of the expected approach of an important convoy, he says: "I ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... of play-houses, in horses, in every thing else, is to be avoided, but in young men, extravagance in dress particularly. This sort of extravagance, this waste of money on the decoration of the body, arises solely from vanity, and from vanity of the most contemptible sort. It arises from the notion, that all the people in the street, for instance, will be looking at you, as soon as you walk out; and that they will, in a greater or less degree, think the better of you on ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... responding to the pope as their duty prompted; so that they resolved, after some deliberation on the subject, to lay the brief before Frederic, and to square their reply according to his remarks. These were a tissue of the most contemptible subterfuges and trifling,—as for example, "that he had issued no edict against his clergy passing into Italy as pilgrims, and all others that wished to go thither, on reasonable grounds, attested by their bishops, could still do so; that he was chiefly actuated ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... instead of sharing the honour with his consorts. I anticipated that, if he should yield to my blandishments, he would make a dash straight for the galleon without troubling himself about the schooner, the sluggish movements of which would render her in his eyes an altogether contemptible adversary, utterly beneath his notice, and only to be tackled and submitted to an exemplary punishment after the recapture of the galleon had been achieved. And, should I prove correct in this line of reasoning, he would run away to leeward after the galleon, ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... she cried. "You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry! You have had a mistress—I forgave you. My sister has a lover—you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? Stupid, hypocritical, cruel—oh, contemptible! —a man who insults his wife when she's alive and cants with her memory when she's dead. A man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible. These, man, are you. You can't ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... was seen hanging about this part of the world for years, spying into everybody's business: but I am the only one who has seen through him from the first—contemptible, double-faced, stick-at-nothing, dangerous fellow." ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... unprincipled, wicked, rascally, and quarrelsome scoundrels upon the face of the globe. I have sometimes, indeed, suspected that those papers are the manufacture of foreigners among you, who write with the view of disgracing your country, and making you appear contemptible and detestable all the world over; but then I wonder at the indiscretion of your printers in publishing such writings. There is, however, one of your inconsistencies that consoles me a little, which is that though, living, you give one another the character ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... dances, dresses, and spends his time in drawing rooms, instead of being a good lawyer, divine, or physician; Cleanthes is a down-right coxcomb, and will remain to all that knew him a contemptible example of talents misapplied. It is to this affectation the world owes its whole race of coxcombs; Nature in her whole drama never drew such a part; she has sometimes made a fool, but a coxcomb is always of a man's own making, by applying his talents ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... impossible to say where false principles may lead, when they are permitted to make head and to become widely disseminated, in a country like ours. Still, the disturbances, as such, are utterly contemptible, and could and would be put down by an energetic executive in ten days after he had time to collect a force to do it with. In some particulars, the present incumbent has behaved perfectly well; while in others, in my judgment, he has inflicted injuries on the right that it will ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... up the Euclid, "you can hold a corner of the book and listen to what I read, and perhaps you can repeat some of it after me, you contemptible boy." ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... American Government is seriously menaced. The storm will probably burst in New Orleans, where I shall meet it, and triumph or perish!" Just five days later he wrote a letter to the Viceroy of Mexico which proves him beyond doubt the most contemptible rascal who ever wore an American uniform. "A storm, a revolutionary tempest, an infernal plot threatens the destruction of the empire," he wrote; the first object of attack would be New Orleans, then Vera Cruz, then ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... in apologising for the crime of slavery. They get behind the contemptible subterfuge, that it was entailed upon the planters. As if the continuance of the horrid system were not criminal! as if the robberies of another generation justify the robberies of the present! as if the slaves had not an inalienable right to ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... senior brigadiers, to the rank of major general. These were evidences that, if the hold which the Commander-in-chief had taken of the affections and confidence of the army and of the nation could be loosened, the party in congress disposed to change their general, was far from being contemptible in point of numbers. But to loosen this hold was impossible. The indignation with which the idea of such a change was received even by the victorious troops who had conquered under Gates, forms the most conclusive proof of its strength. ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... that ends "si negat id quoque nego." Black was white, and white was black with toady, if his lordship pleased; he messed in the cabin, did much mischief in the ship, and only escaped kicking, because he was too contemptible to ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor doing himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him. And yet I have seen the moral of my own behavior very frequent in England since my return; where a little, contemptible varlet, without the least title to birth, person, wit, or common sense, shall presume to look with importance, and put himself upon a foot with the greatest ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... not the courage either to order a surrender, or to provoke real warfare by reinforcing the place. In vain did the unfortunate Major Anderson seek distinct instructions; the replies which he received were contradictory and more obscure than Delphic oracles. This unfair, vacillating, and contemptible conduct indicated the desire to lay upon him alone the whole responsibility of the situation, with a politic and selfish reservation to the government of the advantage of disavowing and discrediting him, whatever he might do. On January ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... uninterrupted and monotonous succession, he condescends to utter a single delightfully modulated strain. He often brings his tiresome extravaganzas to a magnificent climax of melody, and just as often concludes an inimitable chant with a most contemptible bathos. But the notes of the Robin are all melodious, all delightful,—loud without vociferation, mellow without monotony, fervent without ecstasy, and combining more of mellowness of tone, plaintiveness, cheerfulness, and propriety of execution, than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... a leader of men in battle, he may not be contemptible," answered the young lady, not quite liking Jack's remarks; "but, for my part, I should prefer acknowledging the sovereign 'who is every inch a king,' as ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... shorter.” Upon the whole, also, these Letters are less happy in style and manner. It is evident that Pascal, if he gave blows which made his opponents and the opponents of Port Royal wince, also received some bruises in return. The shamelessness of the attacks made upon his friends and himself, contemptible as they were in their nature, left scars upon a mind and temper so sensitive and reserved as his. The “insufferable audacity” with which “holy nuns and their directors” had been charged with disbelieving the mysteries of the faith was “a crime which God alone was capable of punishing.” To bear ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... and rejoice in those ceremonies, and say that the church of Christ was never in so flourishing a state, and that divine worship was never so well conducted as in this day; and that the first prelates were very contemptible preachers in comparison with those of modern times. They certainly had not so many golden miters, nor so many chalices; and they parted with those they had to relieve the necessities of the poor; our prelates get their chalices by taking that from the poor which is their support. But dost thou know ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... kept still about me," said Frank, "I should not have known you were in this town, but you tried to hurt me in a mean, contemptible manner, ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... the discussion, for a profitable sale of bones and relics, said to be those of saints but in reality obtained from the catacombs of Rome, had arisen. To the barbarian people of the north these gloomy objects proved more acceptable than images of wood, and the traffic, though contemptible, was more honourable than the slave-trade in vassals and peasant children which had been carried on with Jews and Mohammedans. Like all the great statesmen of antiquity, who were unable to comprehend the possibility of ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... grumbling, and looking for his hat. Magdalen sat down patiently to wait for him. She gratefully contrasted his treatment of her with the treatment she had received from the women. Resist it as firmly, despise it as proudly as we may, all studied unkindness—no matter how contemptible it may be—has a stinging power in it which reaches to the quick. Magdalen only knew how she had felt the small malice of the female servants, by the effect which the rough kindness of the old sailor produced on her afterward. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... believe, but do not act upon, the child will acquire also as a non-operative belief; their practices, habits, and prejudices will be enormously prepotent in his life. If, for example, the parent talks constantly of the contemptible dirtiness of Boers and foreigners, and of the extreme beauty of cleanliness and—even obviously—rarely washes, the child will grow to the same professions and the same practical denial. This home circle it is that will ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... owing to the real worth of its respectable members; and on the contrary, whatever contempt we fling upon the fashionable world, is the result of the misconduct of individuals of that order, prominently contemptible. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... of incredulity rose out of the crowd. To the forest man such a blow was the deadliest of insults. It was calling him an Iskwao—a woman—a weakling—a thing too contemptible to harden one's fist against. But the murmur died in an instant. For Reese Beaudin, making as if to step back, shot suddenly forward—straight through the giant's crooked arms—and it was his fist this time that landed squarely between the eyes of Dupont. The monster's head went back, ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... less than two months after his death married his brother Claudius, which was noted by all people at the tim for a strange act of indiscretion, or unfeelingness, or worse; for this Claudius did no way resemble her late husband in the qualities of his person or his mind, but was as contemptible in outward appearance as he was base and unworthy in disposition; and suspicions did not fail to arise in the minds of some that he had privately made away with his brother, the late king, with the view of marrying his widow and ascending the throne of Denmark, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... claim had Henry to her inheritance? This attachment of Rous to the house of Beauchamp, and the dedication of his work to Henry, Would make his testimony most suspicious, even if he had guarded his work within the rules of probability, and not rendered it a contemptible legend. ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... making a fortune out of an estate that is lying all but barren. Before the emancipation of the niggers, the Bahamas flourished wonderfully; now they are fallen to decay, and ruled, so far as I understand it, by a particularly contemptible crew of native whites, who ought all to be kicked into the sea. My friend's father is a man of no energy; he calls himself magistrate, coroner, superintendent of the customs, and a dozen other things, but seems ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... are, some of them, the most contemptible whelps upon earth. Hang me, but any fellow with a long-bodied coat, tight-kneed breeches, or stockings and pantaloons, with a watch in each fob, and a frizzled wig, is considered a perfect gentleman—a ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... too modest, honoured Sir!" I told him, seeing that flattery was requisite; "but I am not the ignoramus of how highly your character and virtues are esteemed, and I can assure you that you are not so contemptible a nonentity as you imagine. Listen to me; I am now to go to the Foreign Office, and shall there assume the liberty of mentioning your distinguished ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... good men with some turn for soldiering. But most were of the wastrel and wharf-rat kind. Wolfe expressed his opinion of them in very vigorous terms: 'About 500 Rangers are come, which, to appearance, are little better than la canaille. These Americans are in general the dirtiest, most contemptible, cowardly dogs that you can conceive. There is no depending upon 'em in action. They fall down dead in their own dirt, and desert by battalions, officers ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... and rolled out his Irish with gusto: "'Th' longer th' wurruld lasts th' more books does be comin' out. They's a publisher in ivry block an' in thousands iv happy homes some wan is plugging away at th' romantic novel or whalin' out a pome on th' typewriter upstairs. A fam'ly without an author is as contemptible as wan without a priest. Is Malachi near-sighted, peevish, averse to th' suds, an' can't tell whether th' three in th' front yard is blue or green? Make an author iv him! Does Miranda prisint no attraction to the young men iv th' neighbourhood, ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... fear. Now she was at liberty to fulfill her mission of winning souls to Christ. True, her children were widely scattered, a bare twenty-five thousand out of a population of about three millions, whose wants were administered to by no more than twenty-five priests. Yet out of this contemptible little body there emerged a people, honorable, respectable, and of such consequence as to deserve commendation from the First President for "the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of their Revolution and the establishment ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... individual in literature any more than it does in different periods as to fashions and manners. The world is pretty well agreed, and always has been, as to the qualities that make a gentleman. And yet there was a time when the vilest and perhaps the most contemptible man who ever occupied the English throne,—and that is saying a great deal,—George IV, was universally called the "First Gentleman of Europe." The reproach might be somewhat lightened by the fact that George was a foreigner, but for the wider fact that no person of English ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... guilty of no crimes, was the friend of men, was no deceiver of man or woman; that I first served my own country faithfully, and after, every other in which I found bread; that I was never, during life, once intoxicated; was no gamester, no night rambler, no contemptible idler; that yet, through envy and arbitrary power, I have fallen to misery such as none but the worst of criminals ought ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... county, Suffolk, with the exception of that part watered by the Waveney, is not famed for its fly-fishing: therefore I was no adept in the gentle art, but in ground-bait angling I consider myself no contemptible performer. ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... a ruinous misjudgment, too contemptible to be asserted, but not too contemptible to be acted upon, that the end of poetry is ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... old was learning to dance on the stage, which gave the ladies and mandarins infinite satisfaction. 'I am sorry,' said I, 'to see the pretty creature so early learning so bad a trade; dancing being, I presume, as contemptible here as in China.'—'Quite the reverse,' interrupted my companion; 'dancing is a very reputable and genteel employment here; men have a greater chance for encouragement from the merit of their heels than their heads. One who jumps ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... young man here to-night, "I have been told all my life that if a person has money he is very dishonest and dishonorable and mean and contemptible." My friend, that is the reason why you have none, because you have that idea of people. The foundation of your faith is altogether false. Let me say here clearly, and say it briefly, though subject to discussion which I have not time for here, ninety-eight out of ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... contemptible, is a sufficient defense against Indians, who have no cannon. Finding ourselves now posted securely, and having a place to retreat to on occasion, we ventur'd out in parties to scour the adjacent country. We met with no Indians, but we found the places on the neighbouring ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... "mingled yarn," spun from many-colored yet invisible threads, is it in the creative mind of a Shakespeare, and how it looms up into "a dome of many-colored glass, staining the white radiance of eternity," under the magic touch of a Shelley! And yet how is it dwarfed down to a contemptible piece of "molecular machinery" by the scientist—one so utterly contemptible in its manifestations that it is ordered to take "a back seat" in this universe of ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... calling it the Primrose Hill and the Devil's Dyke of Switzerland, the paradise of trippers, a mountain whose sides are hidden under cataracts of beer-bottles; but from our point of view, the vulgarities of the maligned mountain were mellowed by distance, and I neither could nor would look upon it as contemptible. ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... I can hardly restrain my anger, such fierce indignation fills my soul. That you, the most effeminate of men, should threaten any man with death at your hand! Your hand! What hand! The hand of Philomela or Medea or Clytemnestra? Why, when you dance in those characters you show such contemptible timidity, you are so frightened at the sight of steel, that you will not even carry a property sword? But I am digressing. Pudentilla, seeing to her astonishment that her son had fallen lower than she could have deemed possible, went into the country ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... flower growing in a carcass. Then at little intervals there are frequent prizes from the docks of Richmond, tugs, transports, barges, some of which show under our beautiful banner the Rebel cross, pale and contemptible. These malcontents committed as great crime against good taste in substituting for our starry emblem this artistic abomination, as against law and policy in changing the configuration of the Union. There is another flag, however, which we see, half ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... have played upon my good nature too long already; but the spell is at last dissolved. They would play me off with assurances of the personal and particular esteem of the King, to induce me to do what would render me contemptible, even in the eyes of my own servants! Accustomed to speak untruths themselves, they would also have me give, under my hand, that I am a liar and a scoundrel! They are mistaken, and I could tell them what you did your wayward servant, "We have too contemptible ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... perhaps you were an agent of the claimant; but I didn't know you were passing under a false name, that you were aware in whose house you were staying. I thought you an honest man, on the wrong side—nothing so contemptible ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... of any moral sustaining from her, any invisible thread of love binding him to the daughter of the Resident. He knew that until he parted from Bootea at Mandhatta his soul would be torn by a strife that was foolish, contemptible, that should never ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... buy whatever dresses she thought proper, instead of being crippled by an allowance; have the legal right of speaking first in society, even to gentlemen rich in ideas but bad starters, instead of sitting mumchance and mock-modest; to be Mistress, instead of Miss—contemptible title; to be a woman, instead of a girl; and all this rational liberty, domestic power, and social dignity were to be obtained by merely wedding a dear fellow, who loved her, and was so nice; and the bright career to be ushered in with several delights, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... spangled gold before him softly heaving and appearing to send the star reflections sweeping at last in a golden cream upon the sands, life seemed, after all, worth living, and his cares and sufferings petty and contemptible. ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... foregoing Mr. Burchard's indignation knew no bounds. He blamed himself for not having recollected the existence of that scurrilous journal, which now seemed more mean and contemptible than ever. Those persons who understood how great a control Mr. Burchard had over his passions could nevertheless see that an earthquake was pent up in his bosom. He was almost beside himself with rage. When his indignation had somewhat subsided his pride ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... perhaps more keenly. The enterprise that was to have glorified the name of McMurrough, that was to have raised that fallen race, that was to have made that distant province blessed among the provinces of Ireland, had come to an end, derisive and contemptible, before it was born. Her spirit, unbroken by experience and untrained to defeat, fearing before all things ridicule, dashed itself against the dreadful conviction, the dreadful fact. She could hardly believe that all was over. ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... at the end of his rule (which had kept peace in the country for a whole fifteen years) there was more fatuous imbecility, plenty of cruelty and suffering still, but much less of the old-time fierce and blindly ferocious political fanaticism. It was all more vile, more base, more contemptible, and infinitely more manageable in the very outspoken cynicism of motives. It was more clearly a brazen-faced scramble for a constantly diminishing quantity of booty; since all enterprise had been stupidly killed in the land. Thus it came to pass that the province of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... murders; rather, if anything, good; for the thought of death operates very powerfully with the poor in the creation of brotherhood and a sense of human dignity. I do not believe there is a pennyworth of harm in the police news, as such. Even divorce news, though contemptible enough, can really in most cases be left to the discretion of grown people; and how far children get hold of such things is a problem for the home and not for the nation. But there is a certain class of evils which a healthy man or woman can actually go through ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... and a real longing to help and joy in it that I do not feel in the face of suffering humanity. You can explain it any way. If all these crippled numberless that I have seen all these days had been maimed dogs, I don't know what I would have done. There is something in human nature that is so contemptible and poor that I ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... reflect how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor doing himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him. And yet I have seen the moral of my own behavior very frequent in England since my return; where a little, contemptible varlet, without the least title to birth, person, wit, or common sense, shall presume to look with importance, and put himself upon a foot with the greatest persons of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... depository and treasury of chivalry and highest notions. Marry, when somebody persuaded Cervantes that he meant only fun, and put him upon writing that unfortunate Second Part with the confederacies of that unworthy duke and most contemptible duchess, Cervantes sacrificed his instinct to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... singularly handsome man, surpassed by few among our nobility, and I had remarked how he dwarfed Vedius, how he made him appear stunted and contemptible. He had a head well shaped and well set, curly brown hair, fine and abundant, a high forehead, wide-set dark blue eyes, a chiseled nose, a perfect mouth and a fine, rounded chin. His neck was the envy of half our most beautiful women. His carriage was noble and he always ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... But men are not learned at the billiard table, nor in the barroom, nor by meeting them in an endless round of debauch, nor does a man know the world because he has been to Paris. It is a sad thing for a young man to seek applause by surpassing his companions in that which makes them contemptible. The best men of our own time have little leisure, and the best of other days have committed their better part to books, wherein we ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... if singular eagerness in pursuit of preferment, and singular homage to the influence of the queen's bed-chamber-woman, could stamp them with shame, the brand would be at once broad and indelible. But it must be remembered, that there are contemptible minds in every profession, that these men acted in direct violation of the principles of their religion, and that the church is no more accountable for the delinquencies of its members, than the courts of law for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... "A contemptible dreamer," I said. "Pity him, Sire. He has his uses. To remove him would be to remove a channel through which we can always obtain knowledge precisely of what ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... such delight in the act of venery? A. Because this act is such a contemptible thing in itself, that all creatures would naturally abhor it were there no pleasure in it; and therefore nature readily uses it, that all kinds of living things should ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... Mr. Burnett, there are miserable squabbles in the law practice, and contemptible pettifoggers and knaves, and men who will sell themselves for any dirty work, as there are in most professions and occupations, but the profession could not exist for a day if it was not on the whole on the side of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the aristocracy—they called them lackeys. This word "lackey" served as the strongest expression, when all others were exhausted, to designate human meanness. Under the old French monarchy, to denote by a single expression a low-spirited contemptible fellow, it was usual to say that he had the "soul of a lackey"; the term was enough to convey all that was intended. [Footnote a: If the principal opinions by which men are guided are examined closely and in detail, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... are successful. They never sight the returning Texans, nor these them. The Rangers go down the river; the savages up stream. Of all Apaches, of all Indians, the Jicarillas are the most contemptible cowards. Dastards to the last degree, the young "braves" who mutilated the slain lancers will return to their tribe to tell of scalps ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... make use of many of those lies, which, unfortunately for the virtuous part of these States, and the peace and happiness of the world, had too much success during the American rebellion: they will tell you that they are come to give you freedom—yes, the base slaves of the most contemptible faction that ever distracted the affairs of any nation—the minions of the very sycophants who lick the dust from the feet of Bonaparte will tell you that they are come to communicate the blessing of liberty to this province; but you have only to look at your ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... it to me. (He takes the caricature and looks at it, but shows no anger.) So you prefer to spend your time in an unamiable, contemptible occupation like this, to acquiring ...
— The Two Story Mittens and the Little Play Mittens - Being the Fourth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... Freelance" a power in the land. He set himself to found a school of journalists who wrote for the love of truth and scorned the mean and paltry things of life. As with "The Mercury," Denis Quirk made his new organ a censor of all that is contemptible. ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... a very contemptible liar," she said, disinterestedly, "and that is what makes it so queer that I should care for him more than I do for anything else in the ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... she said, speaking very steadily and distinctly, "that you will go back to South Africa without her after all. I mean that by your hateful and contemptible brutality you have driven her from you for ever. I mean that you have forced her into taking a step that will compel you to set her free from your tyranny. I mean that simply and solely to escape from you she has run away ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... succeeded him at Cordova. He was already King of Seville, and as he soon occupied many other cities he became the most independent and powerful sovereign of Mahometan Spain. His chief rival, Yahia Alkadia, King of Toledo, was so contemptible to his people that they expelled him. He appealed for aid to Alfonso VI, King of Leon [Alfonso of Castile]; but that Christian soldier was persuaded by Mahomet to oppose, instead of assisting, Yahia. The latter ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... extraordinary than all, that is that Shakespeare is a genius. The Italians, the French, the men of letters of all other countries, who have not spent some time in England, take him only for a clown, for a joker far inferior to Harlequin, for the most contemptible buffoon who has ever amused the populace. Nevertheless, it is in this same man that one finds pieces which exalt the imagination and which stir the heart to its depths. It is Truth, it is Nature herself who speaks her own language with no admixture of artifice. It is of the ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... men who waited their call to the work. Only a small proportion remain to see that justification with their own eyes; the Land has claimed the rest. Ypres, the Marne, Neuve Chapelle, Festubert—names well-nigh forgotten in the greater battles of to-day—in each and all of them the seed of "a contemptible little Army" has been sown. Thus it was ordained ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... mother good-by, and set out for Nashville to bring the mail; but he stopped on the way to have a talk with the owner of the privateer. Under almost any other circumstances Marcy would have thought he was playing a contemptible part; but being as certain as he wanted to be that Beardsley was trying to get a hold upon him for some purpose of his own, the boy thought himself justified in adopting heroic measures for self-defense. The ship-keeper was not the Union man ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... Club! our adventures, thus far, have not been altogether contemptible. We have a President and a Secretary; ought we not also to have a Recording ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... not bound to see that my girl be not united to a man who would disgrace her, misuse her, drag her into the dirt,"—that idea of dragging George out was strong in Emily's mind as she listened to this,—"make her wretched and contemptible, and degrade her? Surely this is a father's duty; and my child should not turn from me, and almost refuse to speak to me, because I do it ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... heard Boyd mutter to himself, as he stood slapping the dust from hunting-shirt and leggings and smoothing the fringe. And, "Damme, Loskiel," he said, "we're like to cut a most contemptible figure among such grand folk—what with our leather breeches, and saddle-reek for the only musk we wear. Lord! But yonder stands a handsome girl—and my condition mortifies me so that I could slink off to the mews for shame and lie on straw ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... a fine specimen of a savage, but his spirit was not equal to his body. Like his father he was over six feet high, and firmly knit, being of both larger and stronger build than Leo, whom he now regarded, and of course hated, as his rival—a contemptible one, no ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... ruled square, and chipped—(I am trying to give an idea of the strange flood of epithets he used)—and pranked out, and polished, and muscadined—until, for all honest purposes of true high poetry, it was mere unavailable and contemptible jargon. ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... roused from my writing by her cry that I am making strange faces again. It is my contemptible weakness that if I say a character smiled vacuously, I must smile vacuously; if he frowns or leers, I frown or leer; if he is a coward or given to contortions, I cringe, or twist my legs until I have ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... other hand, were at the proper time soundly berated. "The short campaign of fifteen days," wrote one of them, "made us ten years older." There was also danger in advancing beyond reach of the commissary department,—deficient and contemptible as it was in the hands of unscrupulous speculators,—and there was indeed little to be gained by such a pursuit as was possible, except prestige, which at that moment and at that distance from France was not a ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... his throne in Italy, and to revive the institutions of the Roman monarchy. But his successors only once in their lives appeared on the banks of the Tyber, to receive their crown in the Vatican. [140] Their absence was contemptible, their presence odious and formidable. They descended from the Alps, at the head of their barbarians, who were strangers and enemies to the country; and their transient visit was a scene of tumult and bloodshed. [141] A faint remembrance of their ancestors still tormented the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... raising the term of military service from three to three and a half years; France with a bill raising the term of service from two to three years (but this was not until in June, 1913). Great Britain, with voluntary service, still had a comparatively small army: in size "contemptible," as Kaiser Wilhelm called it later, but in morale and spirit unsurpassed. Evidently the military force of Germany, which lay like a glittering sword in her ruler's hand, was larger, better organized and equipped, than any other in ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... believe in and act upon; what they believe they believe, but do not act upon, the child will acquire also as a non-operative belief; their practices, habits, and prejudices will be enormously prepotent in his life. If, for example, the parent talks constantly of the contemptible dirtiness of Boers and foreigners, and of the extreme beauty of cleanliness and—even obviously—rarely washes, the child will grow to the same professions and the same practical denial. This home circle it is that will ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... of the insurgents was thus raised to about a hundred and fifty—a very small body of men, contemptible in point of numbers compared with the overwhelming forces by which they were opposed, but all animated by a determined spirit, and commanded by fearless and indomitable leaders. The band was divided into three ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... scathingly, as if to decline from a Bocardon to a Bondon was unthinkable. This Bondon was a regular client of the hotel, and such a client!—who never ordered a bottle of vin cachete or coffee or cognac. A contemptible creature. For a long time he had his suspicions. Now he was certain. He tossed off his glass of Dubonnet, ordered another, and spoke incoherently of the opening and shutting of doors, whisperings, of a dreadful incident, the central fact ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... "The contemptible greaser!" he muttered and leaped up. Throwing down the amount of his check on the cashier's desk he hurried from the restaurant. As he had supposed there was a hallway next door, where the talking he ...
— The Boy Land Boomer - Dick Arbuckle's Adventures in Oklahoma • Ralph Bonehill
... Second was a Roman Catholic, and Calvert, on that score alone, might have expected some sympathy and favor: he might, at least, have expected justice. But James was heartless and selfish. The Proprietary found nothing but cold neglect, and a contemptible jealousy of the prerogatives and power conferred by his charter. James himself claimed to be a proprietary on this continent by virtue of extensive royal grants, and was directly interested with William Penn in defeating the claims of the Baltimore ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... you come into the presence of a Princess inventing such slanderous monstrosities against your superior. A nephew, sir, of the Chevalier de Bailleul, acknowledged by him as such to myself in his own chateau, is above the aspersions of a contemptible plebeian. Let this be a lesson to you, and never dare again to enter my sight. Footmen, conduct him out of my presence and service. No reply! ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... spinister and the Friends, glad to be rid of that contemptible, mundane bevy, assailed the Professor with questions. Must he really not tell where the modern Catacombs were? How many people met there? Women also? What were the subjects of his discourses? What did the monks of Sant' ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... David's demise, and on his ransom being remitted, but in March 1364 his Estates rejected the proposal, to which Douglas had assented. Till 1369 all was poverty and internal disunion; the feud, to be so often renewed, of the Douglas and the Steward raged. David was made contemptible by a second marriage with Margaret Logie, but the war with France drove Edward III. to accept a fourteen years' truce with Scotland. On February 22, 1371, David died in Edinburgh Castle, being succeeded, without opposition, by the Steward, Robert II., son of Walter, ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... whose Muse began to bud with his Youth, which produced early Blossomes, of not altogether Contemptible Poetry, in a Collection of Poems entituled Fancys Theater; which was usher'd into the World by divers of the Chief Wits of that age. He was afterwards City Poet, making those Speeches and Representations used at the Lord Mayors show, and other Publick Meetings. ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... that," replied Ned, "and I'm awfully sorry it happened. It was a mean, contemptible trick under the circumstances. But what ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... believe, now. But the knowledge that you could change would be death to me—a death to die daily. Yes, I tell you again, it was an insult to offer a lot so miserable, so contemptible, to a woman you profess to love. How could you do it? If only you had never spoken the hateful words! If only you had left me the ideal I had of you—noble, glorious, above the whole world of men. But after all you are selfish,—cruel. If you had said 'I love you, yet we must part, for Duty ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... must have been awful—awful, as you say. It is impossible for us really to imagine quite what it was, or to picture up such scenes as you must have witnessed. I can understand that all this must seem frivolous and contemptible ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... time to chastise the Pope for his support of the enemies of France. The Papalini proved to be contemptible as soldiers. They fled before the republicans, and a military promenade brought the invaders to Ancona, and then inland to Tolentino, where Pius VI. sued for peace. The resulting treaty signed at that place (February 19th) ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... excellent at telling a story, and provided with a plentiful stock of them, which they can draw out upon occasion in all companies; and considering how low conversation runs now among us, it is not altogether a contemptible talent; however, it is subject to two unavoidable defects: frequent repetition, and being soon exhausted; so that whoever valueth this gift in himself hath need of a good memory, and ought frequently to shift his company, that he may not discover the weakness of his fund; for ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... him? O, well, they were all alike anyway! Even if she had not already done so, Helen would pass him by sooner or later, like so many of the others. But Will Fairmont had stuck to him. Maybe he had got his sister to pity him. Al winced at the thought. "I am getting contemptible. Will Fairmont would not do that. O, well, I might as well be done with them all right now!" His eyes flashed defiantly. Then he caught sight ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... own purse and magnanimity saves all the fugitive slaves that run to us, and protects our colored fellow-citizens, and leaves the other work to the government, so-called. Is not that government fast losing its occupation, and becoming contemptible to mankind? If private men are obliged to perform the offices of government, to protect the weak and dispense justice, then the government becomes only a hired man, or clerk, to perform menial or indifferent services. Of course, that is but the shadow of a government who existence necessitates ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau
... sustained by courage from on high, renouncing the dulcet, but transitory enjoyments of this life, to encounter, for the salvation of their souls, and of others, privation and sorrow, and painful death. Quoe terra non plena nostri laboris? Yet, O how contemptible is the suffering, when compared with the joy of the hope which is set before us—of the starry crown that awaits the willing martyr! Feed thy soul, my son, on these divine contemplations, until they become a part of thyself, and the path that leads to a bloody grave shall be strewed ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... sorrows of the vast majority condemned to keep starvation at bay by unceasing labour. His incapacity for speculation makes his pamphlets worthless beside Burke's philosophical discourses; but the treatment, if wrong and defective on the theoretical side, is never contemptible. Here, as elsewhere, he judges by his intuitive aversions. He rejects too hastily whatever seems insipid or ill-flavoured to his spiritual appetite. Like all the shrewd and sensible part of mankind he condemns as mere moonshine what may be really the first faint dawn of a new daylight. But then ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... tools on the premises; and that, as to this trumpery story of the poisoning a dog, four years before, apparently only for the purpose of showing some sort of animus, he regarded it as altogether contemptible. When a man meant to commit a burglary in a house, he did so in order to obtain possession of the goods, and not from any spite against the owner. Had this young fellow felt any malice, for this ridiculous charge ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... agitation must be considered quite as much a political as a moral warfare) the transition is natural to satire and humorous poetry. Here we find no lack of matter, but a grievous short-coming in quality. The Americans are no contemptible humorists in prose, but their fun cannot be set to verse. They are very fond of writing parodies, yet we have scarcely ever seen a good parody of American origin. And their satire is generally more distinguished for personality and buffoonery than wit. Halleck's ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... old," said Fakrash, "all men pursued wealth; nor could any amass enough to satisfy his desires. Have riches, then, become so contemptible in mortal eyes that thou findest them but an ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... himself with no better behavior than would most unquestionably have brought him and the sharpest particles of a birch-broom into close acquaintance in the present imperfect state of existence, could they also suppose a mere poor human being, such as I was, capable by those contemptible means of counteracting and limiting the powers of the disembodied spirits of the dead, or of any spirits?—I say I would become emphatic and cogent, not to say rather complacent, in such an address, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... were to his soul as a sword of fire might have been to his flesh. They scorched and shrivelled it. He saw himself as she would have him see himself—a mean, contemptible craven; a coward who made big talk in times of peace, but faced about and vanished into hiding at the first sign of danger. He felt himself the meanest, vilest thing a-crawl upon this sinful earth, and she—dear God!—had ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... everywhere rolling his eyes and waving his hands, now shrieking frantic denunciations against the selfish, the criminal, the traitorous nobles who had brought the war to Italy and sustained it there by their wicked machinations and contemptible cowardice; now congratulating his hearers that the people had at last taken the conspirators by the throat and had elected a fearless consul, an incorruptible consul, an able consul, one who would soon show the world that there were men outside of the ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... is not the blow I received from a wicked, perjured, and contemptible enemy that has broken in upon my spirit; which, as she well knows, has carried me on through greater disasters than these. But it has been the injustice, unkindness, and, I must say inhuman, dealing of my own son, which has both ruined my family, and in a word ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... going home she sprawled lazily on the sofa with her head upon one elbow, and settled in for some more talk. But her talk was different to-night. She usually talked about herself, but to-night she talked of us instead, of our contemptible content. And presently through her talk I felt that she had some surprise to spring. In a few moments Eleanore felt it too, I could tell that by the vigilant way she kept glancing up ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... or less parts of science. He should be above them all, save in so far as he can without effort reap renown from the labours of others. It is a lache in him that he should write music or books, or paint pictures at all; but if he must do so, his work should be at best contemptible. Much as we must condemn Marcus Aurelius, we condemn James ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... which has in it too many circumstances for your present consideration; let us take the case to be as the Gentleman states it, that the cheat in the case of Lazarus was detected; what consequence is to be expected? In all other cases, impostors, once discovered, grow odious and contemptible, and quite incapable of doing further mischief; so little are they regarded, that even when they tell the truth, they are neglected. Was it so in this case? No, says the Gentleman; the Jews were the more careful that Christ should not cheat them in his own resurrection. Surely this is a most ...
— The Trial of the Witnessses of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ • Thomas Sherlock
... I care?" she cried. "Because you accuse me in this letter of being the cause of your death—I, who have been your friend in spite of your dishonesty. Oh! it's despicable, contemptible! Above all, it's ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... estimation than among us. These men wore a sort of uniform, namely, high-crowned white hats, with flowers in the front, gray frocks, and half-boots; and their performance, I am bound to add, was by no means contemptible. They played one or two airs very sweetly under the burgomaster's window, which, as the said window looked out into the square, enabled us, as well as a multitude of the town's-people, ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... is an expression of contempt? and that uncommon, extraordinary, distinguished, denote approbation? Why is everything that is common contemptible? ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... law of war you are beaten again and again, but you never seem to know it!' This is, of course, not an original utterance, but derived from one of Napoleon's great Generals; but at all events it shows the estimate placed upon our fighting capacity by an enemy who at one time styled us as 'that contemptible little army.' There is sometimes a weird sense of disproportion revealed, as in the case of a Highlander who was visited by a brother chaplain at a Base hospital some two or three months ago, and who remarked to the patient, 'Well, Jock, ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... peace. It was your right, it was your duty to victimize us all in order that you might save a whole nation.... But what you now propose to do.... Oh, the shame of it!... Listen, if you did that ... I should think of you as one thinks of ... I don't know what ... as one thinks of the most contemptible, the most ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... war. He will be a restive fellow, knowing his own mind better, and possibly his real interest less well; he will play less for safety, since safety will have become to him a civilian sort of thing, rather contemptible. He will have at once a more interesting and a less reliable character from the social and political point ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... left to themselves, in fact, and treated with a sense of humour, were on the highroad to the greatest political fiasco the world had ever seen, and could only have made themselves ridiculous and contemptible in the eyes of their own countrymen ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... the housetopped philosopher, appears to be but a creeping, contemptible beetle. Brokers, poets, millionaires, bootblacks, beauties, hod-carriers and politicians become little black specks dodging bigger black specks in streets no ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... Gil Blas, in a very different and far more serious way. But the second part altogether will not bear enquiry. In the second part of Don Quixote are some of the finest things. But the second part of Robinson Crusoe is perfectly contemptible, in the glaring defect that it exhibits the man who was 30 years on that desert island with no visible effect made on his character by that experience. De Foe's women too—Robinson Crusoe's wife for instance—are terrible dull commonplace fellows without breeches; and I have no doubt he was ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... seemed a very trivial piece of information announcing the motions of a beggardly Scottish knight, than whom Thomas of Gilsland knew nothing within the circle of gentle blood more unimportant or contemptible; and despite his usual habit of passively beholding passing events, the baron's spirit toiled with unwonted attempts to form conjectures ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... company as, much above me, when I was with Mr. Addison and Mr. Pope, as if I had been with all the princes in Europe. What I mean by low company, which should by all means be avoided, is the company of those, who, absolutely insignificant and contemptible in themselves, think they are honored by being in your company; and who flatter every vice and every folly you have, in order to engage you to converse with them. The pride of being the first of the company is but too common; but it is ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... economy, and forecast has amassed a fortune, is not necessarily a successful man. If his object was to amass a fortune, he is so far successful; but it is a mean and miserable object, and his life would be a contemptible, if it were not a terrible, failure. We do not keep this sufficiently in mind. American society, and perhaps all society, is too apt to do homage to material prosperity; but material prosperity may be obtained by the sacrifice ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... would not have believed it if I hadn't seen it. I knew Jim was a bully and a tyrant, but I didn't think he was as contemptible as ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... must be impressed with the idea that a high moral character is absolutely essential to the highest development of every race, white quite as much as black. There is no creature so low and contemptible as he who does not seek first the approval of his own conscience and his God; for, after all, how poor is human recognition when you and your God are aware of your inward integrity of soul! If the Negro will keep clean hands and a pure heart, he can ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... frank enjoyment of his late and simple dinner. The conversation, with its pleasant assumption of untold wealth of power and travel and regal luxuriousness, burned its memory across Norma's mind like a corroding acid. They were not contemptible, they were not robbers or brutes or hideous old plutocrats who had grown wealthy upon the wrongs of the poor. No, they were normal pleasant girls whose code it was to be generous to maids and underlings, to speak ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... torments of despair and degradation; and yet once more did the absence of the abject in man and manner redeem him from the depths of either. In these moments of reaction he was pitiful, but not contemptible, much less unlovable. Indeed, I could see the qualities that had won the heart of Raffles as I had never seen them before. There is a native nobility not to be destroyed by a single descent into the ignoble, an essential honesty too bright ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... what was right, and watched her go in; and, as I did so, I loathed my errand, and the mean contemptible curiosity which it had planted in my mind, more than at any former time. These women—I could find it in my heart to hate them for their frankness, for their foolish confidence, and the silly trustfulness that made ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... that snug comfortable fellowship of yours? Do you suppose I'm so much in love with you, Herbert Walters, that I can't let you go without wanting to fawn upon you and run after you ever afterwards! Pah! you miserable, pitiable, contemptible cur and coward, are you afraid even of a woman! Go away, and don't be frightened. I never want to see you or speak to you again as long as I live, you wretched, lying, shuffling hypocrite. I'd rather go back to my own people ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... words, she believed he knew far more about than he did, mingled with her anger and feelings of repugnance. "Oh," she moaned, "it was just horrible; it was coming straight down from the sublime to the contemptible. That noble old colonel took me to the very gate of heaven. Now I'm fairly trembling with passion and fear. Oh, why will Cousin Mad always stir up the very worst of my feelings! I'd rather suffer and die as poor Yarry did than marry a man who WILL think ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... even Epicurean advice is only the way to ignominious, contemptible happiness. I must have an ideal life or else annihilation—splendid misery or ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... said he, "I have a piece of advice to give you, which you'll find useful through life. Never go and repeat what you hear about anybody. It's done by people through idleness sometimes, and often through ill-nature, or with a downright evil intention; but whatever is the cause, it's a contemptible propensity, and is certain to lead to harm." I promised that I would follow this advice, ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... without first of all demonstrating upon what grounds they have the right to be so. Satire is a wholly laudable thing if it is directed in a fair minded manner, but if it is only an excuse for bitter cynicism it is altogether contemptible. Thus he says of the Thackerean treatment of 'Vanity Fair,' 'he was attacking "Vanity Fair" from the inside.' It comes to this: if you want to make an extract from Thackeray you must dive about all over the place to ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... well-meaning governors, could in so short a space of time have produced such wide-spreading miseries. But the principles of evil have a fatal activity. With every exertion, the best of men can do but a moderate amount of good; but it seems in the power of the most contemptible ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... statement appears at first thought contradictory or absurd, while it may be really true. Anything is irrational when clearly contrary to sound reason, foolish when contrary to practical good sense, silly when petty and contemptible in its folly, erroneous when containing error that vitiates the result, unreasonable when there seems a perverse bias or an intent to go wrong. Monstrous and preposterous refer to what is overwhelmingly absurd; as, "O monstrous! ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... even in the history of Greece—could not but make the Cretan's rule both odious and despicable. What made it more hateful still in the eyes of the people was the fact {214} that it had been imposed upon them by foreign arms, and what made it more contemptible still was the fact that it functioned under false pretences. As free men, the Greeks resented the violence done to their liberty; but as intelligent men they would have resented open violence less ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... night, as he undressed, he wondered what contemptible impulse had forced from him his last words to Alexa Trent. It was bad enough to interfere with the girl's chances by hanging about her to the obvious exclusion of other men, but it was worse to seem to justify his weakness by dressing up the future in delusive ambiguities. He saw himself ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... demonstration in response to the secret stirring of the soul. The man in the far corner of the carriage turned and looked at her. When she heard this movement Domini remembered her irritation against him at El-Akbara. In this splendid moment the feeling seemed to her so paltry and contemptible that she had a lively impulse to make amends for the angry look she had cast at him. Possibly, had she been quite normal, she would have checked such an impulse. The voice of conventionality would have made itself heard. But Domini could act vigorously, and quite carelessly, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... Ackermann and Annie, and never met them but in public. His wickedness and her weakness made them both contemptible in my eyes. And my mind was occupied in other matters. Miriam resolved to make the tour of Europe, and I was to accompany her—for she would take no denial. For many weeks we were busied in preparations for our departure; Miriam had settled all her affairs satisfactorily, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... hopeless was the circumstance that the civilians accepted it with contemptible humility. It was almost pathetic to observe how people, just on the border-line, received with humble thankfulness such crumbs of recognition as were occasionally thrown to them. Snobbery increases in offensiveness when ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... birth must be produced, and such is the complex state of society, there are as many beliefs as masters and servants. How can there be unity of mind concerning spiritual offices and blessings with people so at variance upon trivial, contemptible worldly matters? True, there must be the various earthly stations, characters and employments; but it is heathenish, unchristian and worldly for one to entertain the absurd idea that God regards a certain individual a better Christian than another upon the contemptible grounds of ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... overcolouring the sufferings which await the spendthrift. It is painful to own that such cases are but too common in society. Think of an extravagant man married to an extravagant woman—the mean and contemptible conduct to which they are driven—the insolence and cruelty with which they are baited through large towns, hunted down into an obscure cottage in the country, or chased into exile. Think of the hateful reflections ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... speak like it, dear Tess! Distinction does not consist in the facile use of a contemptible set of conventions, but in being numbered among those who are true, and honest, and just, and pure, and lovely, and of good report—as you are, ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... to see that she is happy and has realized her heart's desire. Heigh-ho! I believe I am making you my confessor." He turned his face toward her now, and his smile was rather sad. "When I recall the worry I have given my poor old aunt, who loves me so, I feel like a contemptible scoundrel. How many countless sacrifices has she made for me, in the days when we had nothing! But she shall have all the comforts now, and all the love and kindness I am capable of giving her. I shall never leave ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... right, sir," I replied in an equally cheery tone, the old chief's genial address making me forget at once my anger at Spokeshave's contemptible nonsense. "Mr Stoddart directed me to tell the cap'en that he may go on ahead as usual, as he likes, for everything has been made taut and secure below and there need be no fear of another mishap. He says he intends driving the engines as they were never driven before, ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... ruffian. It was impossible to maintain an attitude of righteous iciness with him. I might loathe his mode of life, and hate him as a representative—and a leading representative—of one of the most contemptible trades on earth, but there was a sunny charm about the man himself which made it hard to feel hostile to him ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... further in his own estimation than he was before, by showing him infinite things and his own abasement, till he falls into the frame of mind that leads to the catastrophe, from mere internal irritation, not premeditation, or envy of Abel (which would have made him contemptible), but from the rage and fury against the inadequacy of his state to his conceptions, and which discharges itself rather against life, and the Author of life, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... nobleness is shadowed by an unequal yoke! Hapless am I, to whose pedigree is bound the lowliness of a peasant! Luckless issue of a king, to whom a common man is equal by law of marriage! Pitiable daughter of a prince, whose comeliness her spiritless father hath made over to base and contemptible embraces! Unhappy child of thy mother, with thy happiness marred by consorting with this bed! thy purity is handled by the impurity of a peasant, thy nobility is bowed down by ignoble commonness, thy high birth is impaired ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... houses in every part of the colony. It is cut into very thin slices, and eaten with bread and butter, or with bread and the melted fat of the sheep's tail, which is a common substitute for butter; either way it is no contemptible dish when one is a little hungry, and many a time I ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... in which humour dwells, are wanting in Browning. It is true he has the charity of humour, though not its pathetic power. But, all the same, he is too keen, too brilliant, too fierce at times for a humourist. The light in which we see the foolish, fantastic, amusing or contemptible things of life is too bright for humour. He is a Wit—with charity—not a humourist. As for Tennyson, save in his Lincolnshire poems and Will Waterproof's Soliloquy, he was strangely devoid either of humour ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Senate of the United States is the only legislative body in the world which cannot act when its majority is ready for action. A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... no reason to think the queen inventing here: what could she gain by it? the point indeed was rather against Hamlet, as showing it was not Polonius he had thought to kill. He was more than ever annoyed with the contemptible old man, who had by his meddlesomeness brought his death to his door; but he was very sorry nevertheless over Ophelia's father: those rough words in his last speech are spoken with the tears running down his face. We have seen the strange, almost ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... He took up his quarters in a low-class tavern—in the lowest kind of company, of course; drank, and stood drinks to others, as long as he had any money left; and then began to abuse the whole lot of them as a contemptible rabble—and, indeed, as far as that goes he was quite right. But the result was, that he got a thrashing and was ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... have been evolved—such is the worth of Nature's womb—there have been evolved intelligence and love, sacrifice, ideals; splendours which no splendour to come can utterly dim. These things are in the power of Nature. This is what "dead matter" can mother. So much the worse for our contemptible conceptions of matter, and That of which matter is the manifestation. But if it be that from the slime, by natural processes, there can grow a St. Francis, surely our dim notions of the potencies of Nature must ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... lot of valuable stuff under the water these days." I think he said that just so's to kind of make a joke about what he was saying, so as maybe it wouldn't seem so serious like. Anyway, he was awfully trice. "It seems pretty contemptible to be talking about money," he said, "after my pal's life was saved by you folks, but it's just because the money has to be paid out pretty soon that he's worrying about it. He didn't want me to come over ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... In the lower order of ladies' boarding-schools, and indeed, too much everywhere, the same sickening, mincing tone is too often found. Do, pray, good people, do talk in your natural tone, if you don't wish to be utterly ridiculous and contemptible." ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... as the end of 1818, he described the way in which Byron spent his life, after he had been partly exiled, partly emancipated from the ordinary restraints of society. At that time, "the Italian women were the most contemptible of all who existed under the moon,—an ordinary Englishman could not approach them"; "but," writes Shelley, "Lord Byron is familiar with the lowest sort of these women,—the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets." Byron's curiosity, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... the most dense part of a plumb-pudding, or steeped in a hogshead of thick English Port. Heavens! is it possible, that a man of some fame for joking, possessed of no unlaughable talent in punning, and endued with no contemptible degree of liveliness in letter-writing, should all of a sudden have become more impenetrably stupid than a Hottentot legislator, or a moderator of the general assembly of the Kirk of Scotland. By that smile which enlivens your black countenance, like a farthing candle ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... does in different periods as to fashions and manners. The world is pretty well agreed, and always has been, as to the qualities that make a gentleman. And yet there was a time when the vilest and perhaps the most contemptible man who ever occupied the English throne,—and that is saying a great deal,—George IV, was universally called the "First Gentleman of Europe." The reproach might be somewhat lightened by the fact that George was a foreigner, but for the wider fact that no person of English stock has ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the Work of the Propagation of the Faith was recommenced, and on this occasion still more distastefully to me. The priest asked me many questions as to the contemptible faith of my fathers, and received my replies with a kind ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... course—she would as soon have talked of her esophagus. Her formula was "charm," and she had taught Sylvia that the preservation of "charm" was the end of woman's existence, the thing by which she remained a lady, and without which she was more contemptible ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... to see Lear acted, to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm in which he goes out is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements than any actor can be to represent Lear. In the acted Othello, the black visage of the Moor is obtruded upon you; in the written ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... receive a single response. I wrote for an abstraction; and spoke to empty space. I cannot help claiming some pity and even respect for the class to which I belonged. I have heard them called all kinds of hard names, hacks, drudges, and something even more contemptible, but the injustice done to them is monstrous. Their wage is hardly earned; it is peculiarly precarious, depending altogether upon their health, and no matter how ill they may be they must maintain the liveliness of manner which ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... the kind, sir. If I had put in so contemptible a plea, you would have lost your cause. What I did was this: I asked what testimony he could adduce as to the original loan, and he gave me the name of one witness, a certain Count well known in this city, who was at breakfast ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... the eye—that is quite another matter. It was this sort of conquest that Jane Hastings delighted in—and sought to gain with any man who came within range. If the men had known what she was about, they would have denounced her conduct as contemptible and herself as immoral, even brazen. But in their innocence they accused only their sophisticated and superbly masculine selves and regarded her as the soul of innocence. This was the more absurd in them because she obviously excelled in the feminine art of inviting display of charm. ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... same line of reflection to this Holy Coat business. Contemptible as it is to the eye of reason, it excites the piety of millions of persons who never reasoned on religion in the whole course of their lives. Hundreds of thousands of men and women will visit these sham relics of a Savior whose own existence is open to dispute. Superstition ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... broke in, "where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... even to the Devils themselves most astonishing, That after all the rest of their Observations they should find this whole immense Work was adapted for, and made subservient to the Use, Delight and Blessing only of one poor Species, in itself small, and in Appearance contemptible; the meanest of all the Kinds supposed to inhabit so many glorious Worlds, as appeared now to be form'd; I mean, that Moon call'd the Earth, and the Creature call'd Man; that all was made for him, upheld by the wise Creator, on his account only, and would necessarily end and cease ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... our motive of examination will entirely alter the result. To paint birds that we may show how minutely we can paint, is among the most contemptible occupations of art. To paint them, that we may show how beautiful they are, is not indeed one of its highest, but quite one of its pleasantest and most useful; it is a skill within the reach of every student of average capacity, and ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... man render to the State adequate to such a compensation that the making of laws, upon which the happiness of millions is to depend, shall be lodged in him and his posterity, however depraved may be their principles, however contemptible their understandings? ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... The Jews, contemptible outcasts, have become great lords, and their pride and arrogance know no bounds.... Take not such men for thy ministers, but abandon them to curses, for the whole earth crieth out against them—ere long it will quake and we shall all perish. Turn thine eyes to other lands ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... calumny by an exact rehearsal of the facts; but should I justify myself in this manner by, so to speak, accusing the Emperor at a moment especially when the Emperor's enemies manifested much bitterness? When I saw such a great man made a mark for the shafts of calumny, I, who was so contemptible and insignificant among the crowd, could surely allow a few of these envenomed shafts to fall on me. To-day the time has come to tell the truth, and I have done so without restriction; not to excuse myself, for on the contrary I blame myself for not having completely ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... silence, not loud, but deep, succeeded this artful feeler. Father O'Murtagh (or words to that effect) to the rescue! The Rivirind Gintleman arose and delivered a bitter attack on Parnell, whom he characterised as mean, base, untruthful, treacherous, and contemptible. The foinest pisintry in the wuruld could not be soiled by contact with anybody like Parnell, and therefore the Catholic bishops had been compelled to give him up, and to say, Get thee behind me, Satanas. The ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... would be obliged to remain. Besides, he wished to go to court; and since his testimony would carry considerable weight with the jury, it was his duty to be present on account of Florentin. It would be a contemptible cowardice to fail in this duty, and more, it would be an imprudence. In the eyes of the world he must appear to have nothing to fear, and this assurance, this confidence in himself, was one of the conditions of his safety. Now, if he went to court, and from every point of ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... once sent to Paoli with a renewed request for such documents as would enable the writer to complete his pamphlet on Corsica. The patriot again replied in a very discouraging tone: Buttafuoco was too contemptible for notice, the desired papers he was unable to send, and such a boy could not in any case be a historian. Buonaparte was undismayed and continued his researches. Joseph was persuaded to add his solicitations for ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... questions immediately raised was how we might gain our liberty if arrested in a raid on an immoral resort which we might be investigating. This was a vital and serious question, in Philadelphia. There vice is a thousand times too abundant, but it is contemptible, suspicious, ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... till she was thirty; and I thought myself so with her when she was forty. I never felt a stronger passion; which she returned with equal ardour.... She had been sacrificed, almost before she was a woman, to one whose mind and body were equally contemptible in the scale of creation; and on whom she bestowed a numerous family, to which the law gave him the right to be called father. Strange as it may seem, she gained (as all women do) an influence over me ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... After the tragical catastrophe of her misguided husband and of lady Jane Grey her eldest daughter, the duchess was suffered to remain in unmolested privacy, and she had since rendered herself utterly insignificant, not to say contemptible, by an obscure marriage with one Stoke, a young man who was her master of the horse. There is a tradition, that on Elizabeth's exclaiming with surprise and indignation when the news of this connexion reached her ears, "What, hath she married her horse keeper?" Cecil replied, "Yes, madam, and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... As he sat with Gloria and found little to say, he was conscious of her eyes probing at him when she thought that he did not see. He looked away, a shadow in his eyes, and chanced to see Gratton. Gratton, who had struck him as contemptible in the woods, a misfit and a poor sort of man at best, was here on his own heath. He carried himself well, he talked well; he bore himself with a certain distinction. Clearly he was much in favour among the girls and women, much envied by the younger men. Yes; Gloria was ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... champagne, and did not let me depart until I had promised to dine with him again. Others, when I would ask information about various things, would hardly answer me, as if they were trying to show me that I was troublesome, so that I would say to myself, "How contemptible they are!" But the next day they would send me all the details neatly and clearly written out, and minute in a higher degree than I desired. One evening I asked a gentleman to point out to me something in that ocean ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... corps from France. It was this interference with their vital plans in France, coupled with the panic produced by the Belgian advance, which provoked the Germans into their barbarities at Louvain, Malines, and Termonde. Schrecklichkeit was to deter the contemptible Belgian Army from spoiling a mighty German success. That was the view of the German staff, and a soldiery prone as ever to pillage and rapine, needed little encouragement to extend to civilians, women, and children the violence which their leaders organized against cathedrals ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... care little for a custom in which there was no manifest utility. He had declared that the gewgaws of office delighted him not; and I dare say he would fain bring his mind to believe that all ceremonial was idle, perhaps contemptible. But it is the greatest mistake to suppose that Lord Brougham is inattentive to the ceremonies with which his high place is surrounded. A careful observer will see clearly that imposing forms are perfectly agreeable to his mind; nobody ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 496 - Vol. 17, No. 496, June 27, 1831 • Various
... out of the crowd. To the forest man such a blow was the deadliest of insults. It was calling him an Iskwao—a woman—a weakling—a thing too contemptible to harden one's fist against. But the murmur died in an instant. For Reese Beaudin, making as if to step back, shot suddenly forward—straight through the giant's crooked arms—and it was his fist this time ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... do it!" leered again the same contemptible fellow. "Yer a city kid an' hain't got sand 'nuff to make an ant-hill. I hearn tell yer get the old man to button yer clothes, and yer cry in the dark—guess it's so, ain't ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... when he seems fully resolved to sink them in dejection, and mollify them with tender emotions by the fall of greatness, the danger of innocence, or the crosses of love. He is not long soft and pathetick without some idle conceit, or contemptible equivocation. He no sooner begins to move, than he counteracts himself; and terrour and pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... poetry. Our traveller, partly by way of practice in the Tartar language, and partly to inspire his eastern friend with greater respect for the bards of the Occident, used to translate English and German songs into Tartar. Mirza Shaffy, the name of the Tartar sage and poet, proved himself no contemptible critic of these foreign productions. Not once could he be induced to tolerate a poem whose only merit was the beauty and melody of its language in the original, nor to swallow the mere sentimentalism which plays so great a part in German poetry especially. This sentimentalism, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... reward waiting at Salem for every man here. What's more, it'll be an honest reward, with credit from the owners and all law-abiding men. But enough of that! It's a matter of ordinary decency—of common honesty! The man who will conspire against the owners of this ship is a contemptible cur, a fit shipmate with the brute who horsed poor ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... thinking whither his own follies had driven him; he was thinking of his own utter failure as a man, a strong, big-principled man. He was wondering, too, what this kindly soul would think and feel when he realized how little he was changed from the contemptible creature his father had turned out of doors, and when he finally learned of the horrors of degradation his ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... reason, John Derringham felt annoyed; but it was too contemptible to be annoyed by a child, so he laughed as ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... afraid to tell you the truth about yourselves, or who were so like you that they couldn't see the truth—products of the same code of morals—a code truly European! In a word, then, I think you are both blackguards—blackguards of the most nasty and contemptible kind—the kind that preys upon women! I may add that you have deeply shaken my faith in human nature, for, to look at you, one would mistake you ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... Christ will be so strong, and the things that are not seen will so overwhelmingly outweigh the things that are seen, that the solemn majesty of the eternal will make the temporal look to our awed eyes the contemptible unreality which it really is. They who humbly receive and faithfully use that engrafted word, have in it a sure touchstone against which their own sins and errors are shivered. It is for the Christian ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... at an enormously high valuation—the honest old man!—that he might be sure to err on the right side, he forced Theodore to go with him to the stand, and pay Matty for the stolen fruit. He endeavored, too, to make him apologize to Jim, both for the theft of his property, and also for his contemptible meanness in keeping silent on the occasion of Jim's attack on the playground. But here he was powerless: Theodore absolutely and doggedly refused to do it; and his grandfather was obliged to content himself with relieving his own feelings, and further expressing his sentiments on the ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
Copyright © 2026 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
