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More "Cringe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Suppose I don't cringe," said the outcast, dropping the fawning tone of the mendicant for the threatening ferocity of the social wolf; "you'd better give me a trifle to keep body and soul together for the next few weeks. I'm a ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... I; "things are better as they are. Those mountains of bread and beef, and those rivers of ale merely encouraged vassalage, fawning and idleness; better to pay for one's dinner proudly and independently at one's inn, than to go and cringe for it at a great ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... for their adulation and their doctrine of passive obedience, he would never have ventured to be guilty of such tyranny. Their chief business, during a quarter of a century, had been to teach the people to cringe and the prince to domineer. They were guilty of the blood of Russell, of Sidney, of every brave and honest Englishman who had been put to death for attempting to save the realm from Popery and despotism. Never had they breathed ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the dust, lick the dust; be at one's feet, fall at one's feet; craven; crouch before, throw oneself at the feet of; swallow the leek, swallow the pill; kiss the rod; turn the other cheek; avaler les couleuvres [Fr.], gulp down. obey &c 743; kneel to, bow to, pay homage to, cringe to, truckle to; bend the neck, bend the knee; kneel, fall on one's knees, bow submission, courtesy, curtsy, kowtow. pocket the affront; make the best of, make a virtue of necessity; grin and abide, grin and bear it, shrug ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... voluntary act Without man's motion, and must move just so In spight of their creation: one that weighs His breath between his teeth, and dares not smile Beyond a point, for fear t'unstarch his look; Hath travell'd to make legs, and seen the cringe Of several courts, and courtiers; knows the time Of giving titles, and of taking walls; Hath read court common-places; made them his: Studied the grammar of state, and all the rules Each formal usher in that politic school Can teach a man. A third comes, giving nods To his repenting ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... hundreds of wee lights began dancing outside the window, making the room bright; the hands of the clock began chasing each other round the dial, and the bolt of the door drew itself out. Slowly, without a creak or a cringe, the door opened, and in there trooped a crowd of the Good People. Their wee green cloaks were folded close about them, and each ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... have been beggared by you, and scores of other families too. The whole of Kadampur and Simulgachi are clamouring for your blood, and Allah has appointed me to be the minister of his vengeance. Time was when I had to cringe to you, just as you are doing to me, but never did I receive mercy from you. Now the tables are turned. I might kill you, and who would dare to inform the police folk?" (Here Karim made a vicious prod with his talwar, which passed within half an inch of the terror-stricken victim's throat.) ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... dogs, and a hireling will turn our Princes from the gate lest the soles of our shoes should defile their sacred places. And are they not right, Huzoor?" he asked cunningly. "Since we submit to it, since we cringe at their indignities and fawn upon them for their insults, are ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... they could not make any arrangements with him to get the money back, together with interest thereon, but the people of this country are intelligent enough to know what that means, and they will be patriotic enough to see to it that no man needs to bow or bend or cringe to the rich ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... life gave to me. Let that pass! It perish'd, and all perish'd with it. Ambition? Wealth left nothing to add to my social condition. Fame? But fame in itself presupposes some great Field wherein to pursue and attain it. The State? I, to cringe to an upstart? The Camp? I, to draw From its sheath the old sword of the Dukes of Luvois To defend usurpation? Books, then? Science, Art? But, alas! I was fashion'd for action: my heart, Wither'd thing though it be, I should hardly compress 'Twixt the leaves of a treatise ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... fear and before whom I used to humiliate myself because of my poverty. I thought of the time when I had already entered the cloak business, but was struggling and squirming and constantly racking my brains for some way of raising a hundred dollars; when I would cringe with a certain East Side banker and vainly beg him to extend a small note of mine, and come away in a sickening ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... slender hand in his broad, white-swathed palm and pressed it fervently, regardless of the pain which would have caused him to cringe if engaged ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... baffling ones who remain enthusiastically ignorant of my existence; to the moral ones upon whom Beauty exercises a lascivious and corrupting influence; to the moral ones who have relentlessly chased God out of their bedrooms; to the moral ones who cringe before Nature, who flatten themselves upon prayer rugs, who shut their eyes, stuff their ears, bind, gag and truss themselves and offer their mutilations to the idiot God they have invented (the Devil take them, I grow bored with laughing ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... infancy Doth heaven with all its splendors lie; Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... lash the long lean winds are laid on the back of the land, Curling over the breast of the hills and cutting the feet of the plain, Till the naked limbs of the forest host cringe at the lift of the hand, And the white-ribbed waves on the granite shore moan and ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... What, cringe to Europe! Band it all in one, Stilt its decrepit strength, renew its age, Wipe out its debts, contract a loan to wage Its venal battles,—and, by yon bright sun, Our God is false, and liberty undone, If slaves have power to win your heritage! ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... be, woman. No bastard shall reign here as Mother of the Trees while the nations round cringe before her feet. I have spells; I have poisons; I have slaves who can ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... she wants to herself, under cover of the bolder efforts of these nobler spirits, then settles back upon the ease and comfort of that position, and turns her small artillery on her own sisters? I feel a sense of shame for American literature, when I think how our literary women shrink, and cringe, and apologize, and dodge to avoid being taken for "strong-minded women." Oh, there's no danger. I don't wonder that their literary efforts are stricken with the palsy of weakness from the beginning. I don't ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Jerry came back. As any screaming creature of the jungle, he hysterically squalled his indignation. But he made no whimper. Nor did he wince or cringe to the blows. He bored straight in, striving, without avoiding a blow, to beat and meet the blow with his teeth. So hard was he flung down the last time that his side smashed painfully against the rail, ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... changed them, they say in a wonderful way, To toys, for his Christmas cheer. The big dolls stare with a goblin air, The small ones cringe with fear. ...
— The Goblins' Christmas • Elizabeth Anderson
... the gods that England, in the majesty of her State, in the sovereignty of her chartered weal, must abase herself to then. To the vices of tyranny, to low companions and their companions, and their kindred, the State must cringe and kneel then. To these,—men who meddled with affairs of State,—who took, even at such a time, the State to be their business,—must address themselves; for these were the councils in which England's peace and war were settled then, and the Tribune could enter them only in disguise. His ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... waiting outside," answered the boy, with trepidation. It was part of the law that the lion of the ante-room should cringe like a cold monkey, more or less, as soon as he was out of his private jungle. "Oh, Tallerman," cried the Sunday editor, "here's this Arctic man come to arrange about his illustration. I wish you'd go and talk it over with ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... now. Fairchild went to a junk yard or two, searching for the materials which Harry had ordered, and failed to find them. Then he sought a hotel, once more to struggle with the problems which the interview with Barnham had created and to cringe at a thought which arose like a ghost ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... can help it," he said, "don't make me see the brand I have put on you. Don't, for Heaven's sake, cringe to me if you can ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... temple that might have sanctified the gold is of no account. This worship of mere wealth has, it is true, this advantage over the old adoration of birth, that something may possibly be got out of it; to cringe and fawn upon the people that have blue blood is manifestly futile, since the peculiarity is not communicable, but it is hoped that, by being shaken up in the same social bag with millionaires, something may be attained ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... forsooth to southern rule? What! cringe and crawl to souther's clay, And be the base, the supple ...
— The Anti-Slavery Harp • Various
... itinerant tinker was also an itinerant political preacher, and seeing that he could prevail nothing by secular pleas, he betook himself to his spiritual armory, and in a voice of sour derision that made Bessie Fairfax cringe asked the doctor if he had yet received the Devil's Decalogue according to h'act of Parliament and justices' notices that might be read on every wall?—and he proceeded to recite it: "Thou shalt remove ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... his full height. His eyes blazed with anger and he raised his arm to strike Alyrus, who did not cringe but faced him boldly, though ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... been killed, but the rapidity of his action saved him, for the spear passed his shoulder so close that it tore away a shred of his coat, and stuck in the wall behind him. In another instant Doltaire had his sword-point at Voban's throat. The man did not cringe, did not speak a word, but his hands clinched, and the muscles of his face worked painfully. There was at first a fury in Doltaire's face and a metallic hardness in his eyes, and I was sure he meant to pass his sword through the other's body; but after standing for a moment, death hanging on his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... pleasure in letting them feel the weight of his authority, and sometimes of his fist. It was amusing to see the various ways in which they behaved toward him. Some would try to plead with him, for the sake of old times; some would cringe and whine to him; some would try to reason with him, to touch his conscience. But mostly they would be haughty, they would glare at him with hate, or put a sneer of contempt on their faces. So Peter would set his "bulls" to work to improve their manners, and a little thumb-bending and ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... Lopez to embark on his career of international madness and prosecute it with the rage of a demon is not entirely clear. A vision of himself as the Napoleon of southern South America, who might cause Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay to cringe before his footstool, while he disposed at will of their territory and fortunes, doubtless stirred his imagination. So, too, the thought of his country, wedged in between two huge neighbors and threatened with suffocation between their overlapping folds, may well have suggested the wisdom of ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... early Beams attract and warm, So Ladies with their easie glances Charm; Vain Coxcombs cringe with transport and surprize, Feel kindling Fire, and feed upon their Eyes; 'Till like the Sun, the dazling Nymphs display Meridian heat, and ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... back and knelt beside the bed, and prayed as her mother had taught her to pray. And not all of her petition was for her mother. Every lightning flash, every crack, every distant boom of the thunder made her cringe. Lance—Lance was out in the storm, at the mercy of its terrible sword-thrusts that seemed to smite even the innocent. Her mother—even her own mother, who had held unswervingly to her faith—even she had ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... in her clenched hand as she said that, and arose, fastening her steady eyes on the crouching form of the cripple, who appeared to cringe under the blast of the storm. He had tried to be prepared, but he failed utterly when he attempted to speak. He was seen to raise his hand and elevate his eyebrows, but now words were impossible; a low murmur and heavy breathing, an effort to stand and a surrender ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... Taxes on inhabited houses, windows, male servants, horses, carriages, etc. The trebling of these imposts took the House by surprise, and drew from Tierney, now, in the absence of Fox, the leader of Opposition, the taunt that Pitt had to cringe to the Bank for help. A few days later Pitt explained that the triple duty would fall only upon those who already paid L3 or more on that score. If the sum paid were less than L1 it would be halved. Those who paid L3 or more would be charged at an ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... world from the eyes of the immigrant who has lost all his illusions of the land where dollars grow on the street and where everyone has an equal chance to be president, and if you do not cringe in abject humility, you are not unlikely to be insufferably self-asserting, considering that the world has robbed you and that now it is your turn to get all that is coming to you. So you make loud demands in a rude, ordering ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... his way hunting trouble. Totally dissatisfied with any answer I could make, he kept roaring louder and louder. There was no doubt that he was venting his spleen upon an unprotected and humble civilian, and that he was thoroughly enjoying seeing me cringe under his bulldozing. It flashed upon me that he might be a self-appointed guardian of the way. So when he began to wax still more arrogant, I simply said, "Take me ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... What was new was that the turncoat should try to throw his own guilt and shame on the Church of England, and should proclaim that she had taught him to turn against the weak who were in the right, and to cringe to the powerful who were in the wrong. Had such indeed been her doctrine or her practice in evil days? Had she abandoned her Royal Martyr in the prison or on the scaffold? Had she enjoined her children ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... enough: they stood aloof then, Shaking their dripping ears upon the shore, All roaring "Help!" but offering none; and as For duty (as you call it)—I did mine then, 440 Now do yours. Hence, and bow and cringe him here! ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... something over and over, but when her cousin appealed to her to leave the scene she seemed not to hear him. She only stood and stared at the exhausted man until he could bear it no longer and, hiding his face in his hands, he began to shiver and cringe and sob. ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... he felt, within, "is it not enough to create us so unequal that we must also cringe in spirit, and acknowledge it! I expected to feel triumphant when I lodged my despised hat in this man's house, but I feel meaner ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... law-shielded ruffians slay The men who fain would win their own! the heroes of to-day! Are we pledged to craven silence? O, fling it to the wind, The parchment wall that bars us from the least of human kind! That makes us cringe, and temporize, and dumbly stand at rest, While Pity's burning flood of words is red-hot in ...
— The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 9, An Appeal To The Legislators Of Massachusetts • Lydia Maria Child
... Earth, or in mid Aire; 940 Though for possession put to try once more What thou and thy gay Legions dare against; Whose easier business were to serve thir Lord High up in Heav'n, with songs to hymne his Throne, And practis'd distances to cringe, not fight. To whom the warriour Angel soon repli'd. To say and strait unsay, pretending first Wise to flie pain, professing next the Spie, Argues no Leader, but a lyar trac't, Satan, and couldst thou faithful add? O name, 950 O sacred name of faithfulness profan'd! ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Sivad fitted the first arrow to the string, and Stern was about to apply the torch, a rattling crash from above caused all to cringe ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... his nephew by the collar of his jacket, gave him a hearty shake; "rare fun would it be,—and what do you call this? You dare twit your sister with cowardice!—you who sneaked off yesterday like a fox because you had not the spirit to look an old man in the face!—you who bully the weak and cringe to the strong!—you who have the manners of a bear with the heart of a pigeon!" Every sentence was accompanied by a violent shake, which almost took the breath from the boy; and Jonas, red with passion, concluded ...
— False Friends, and The Sailor's Resolve • Unknown
... esteem "open rebuke better than secret love" (Proverbs xxvii. 5). They believe that the Lord has yet many things to say unto them, and they are willing and glad for Him to say them by whom He will, but especially by their leaders and their brethren. While they do not fawn and cringe before men, nor believe everything that is said to them, without proving it by the word and Spirit of God, they believe that God "gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... his cringe, and shrink back, and looking down saw the look upon her sweet frightened face; following her glance his own face hardened into what might have been termed righteous wrath. But not a word did he say, and ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... a unit of the dumb creation. That he should feel so, humiliated and angered Granger. Was there not enough of ignominy for him to endure without that? He drew his revolver, took aim at this yellow devil—but could not fire. The beast did not cringe and run away, zigzagging to avoid the bullets, stooping low on its legs, as is the habit of huskies when firearms are pointed at them; it sat there patiently blinking, a little in advance of its four grey comrades, with a mingled expression of amusement and boredom ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... you, mother," said Florence, whose own eyes had a suspicion of tears in them. "It was just a passing weakness, and I am all right now. Yes, I will get the Scholarship, and I will stoop to Aunt Susan's ways—I will cringe to her if necessary; I will do my best to propitiate Sir John Wallis, and I will act like a snob in every sense of the word. There now, Mummy, I see you are dying to have the box opened. We will open it and ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... 'There is Jones; he is worth $500,000; he lives with a display and extravagance I cannot equal. I must increase my fortune to half a million.' Jones, on the other hand, is measuring himself against Brown, who has a million. He knows that men cringe lower to Brown than they do to him. He must have a million—half a million is nothing. And Brown feels that he is overshadowed by Smith, with his ten millions; and so the childish emulation continues. Men are valued, not for ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... that unceasing roars, While cringe the trees from its wrath in vain, And the lightning-flash, And the thunder-crash, And skies, from whose Erebus depths outpours In slanting ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... his breath. "A woman! I know nothing of women. In all my life I have seen but two—my mother and a nautch-girl—who cringed to me. I should not like my wife to cringe to me. Are there not such as could be my companion, my comrade? Or are they all ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... and every sentence stung like the lash of a whip, "those are cowardly words, unworthy a French gentleman and soldier. Did you leave all your courtesy behind in Montreal, or dream that in this wilderness I should cringe to any words you might speak? You wish the truth; you shall have it. Three days ago, through an accident, I drifted, in an oarless boat, out from the river-mouth at Fort Dearborn to the open lake. None knew of my predicament. A storm blew me helpless ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... embodied impertinence, and the floor manager who allows it an offender against every law of propriety; and thus it happens that seats are slipped out of sight, and exhausted women smile and ask, as the purchase is made, "And what is the next pleasure?" in a tone that makes the American hearer cringe for the abject humility that is the first condition of ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... said Pratinas, who knew perfectly how to cringe low, yet preserve his ascendency; "first of all, it is very necessary that the murderers of the amiable Drusus should receive a meet reward for their crime—that justice should be speedy ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... I'd hit you down for that," he said, clenching his fists. "What do you know about things to talk to me like that? Who are you to take his side and cringe to him? If you can't judge him, there's plenty that can, and it's you who are pig-headed, not me, because you don't see I'm fighting your battle for you. It may seem too late to fight for you; but it's never too late to hate a wicked beast, and if I can help to keep him from getting ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... before he would have confided all this to any living soul, but the secret thought that was growing more and more in his heart he told to Baree. The dog came into their camps now, but not until the Missioner and Mukoki had gone to bed. He would cringe down near David's feet, lying there motionless, oblivious of the other dogs and showing no inclination to disturb them. He was there on the tenth night, looking steadily at David with his two bloodshot eyes, wondering what it was that his master held in his ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... not looking at her. Something else seemed to have caught his attention. For the moment he had ceased to cringe and implore. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... I believe that there lived Others like thee in the past. Not like the men of the crowd. Who all around me to-day, Bluster, or cringe, and make life Hideous, and arid, and vile, But souls temper'd with fire, Fervent, heroic, and good; Helpers, and friends ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... echoes of their lord and master. She had behaved badly, of course; in a few days she supposed the report of her outburst would be all over the place. She did not care. Even for Roger's sake she was not going to cringe to these ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... my doubts on the subject were well founded or not. Enough for me to know that my yeomen ancestors did their duty in war and peace, were honest, straightforward, God-fearing men and women, who owned their own lands, and never knew what it was to cringe before any human being. ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... his aspect was nearly that of a man. He held his head erect, the cringe disappeared from his back, the obsequiousness from his manner. Then while an eye might wink, he took on the appearance of a snake with high-held ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... under heaven Stab one for getting it? Had he wished power, The thing was in the market-place for sale At stated rates—so much for a man's soul! His was a haughty spirit that bent not, And one to rise had need to cringe and creep. So had his brother into favor crawled, Like slug into the bosom of a rose, And battened in the sun. At thought of him, Forgotten for a moment, Wyndham winced, And felt his wound. "Why bides he not in Town With ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... buy this Coward's Comfort, quickly buy; what Fop would be abus'd, mimick'd and scorn'd, for fear of Wounds can be so easily cured? Who is't wou'd bear the Insolence and Pride of domineering great Men, proud Officers or Magistrates? or who wou'd cringe to Statesmen out of Fear? What Cully wou'd be cuckolded? What foolish Heir undone by cheating Gamesters? What Lord wou'd be lampoon'd? What Poet fear the Malice of his satirical Brother, or Atheist fear to fight for fear of Death? Come buy ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... Tush! these be but dreams of poets, or imaginings of children!—the commons be but slaves to the nobles; the nobles to the senate; the senate to their creditors, their purchasers, their consuls; the last at once their tools, and their tyrants! Go, young man, go. Salute, cringe, fawn upon your consul! Nathless, for thou hast mind enough to mark and note the truth of what I tell thee; thou wilt think upon this, and perchance one day, when the time shall have come, wilt speak, act, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... you fool!" she said fiercely, panting for breath with which to end me. "Oh, you dream-child, you moonraker, what are you doing in a world where men work for their pleasures and women have to cringe for the scraps? What was I to do when Porfirio shut me out of doors, and you—you, who had caused it, refused to come with me? Was I to spread my wings and fly straight into the lap of the Madonna? You would say ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... laugh, Rod thought, and that very thought made him hunch closer to the fire. The young hunter was not superstitious, or at least he was not unnaturally so; but what man or boy is there in this whole wide world of ours who does not, at some time, inwardly cringe from something in the air—something that does not exist and never did exist, but which holds a peculiar and nameless fear for the soul ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... said Holmes sternly. "It is very well to cringe and crawl now, but you thought little enough of this poor Horner in the dock for a crime of which he ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... themselves to tread these tortuous ways, to stoop, to cringe, and creep through the mire of these cloacas, where the presence of a fine mind only alarmed the other denizens. The ambitious man of genius grows old in obtaining his triple crown; he does not follow in the steps of Sixtus the Fifth merely to become head of a bureau. No one comes or ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... Could touch with unclean transformation, or alter To the likeness of courtiers whose consciences falter At the smile or the frown, at the mirth or the rage, Of a master whom chance could inflame or assuage, Our Lady of Laughter, invoked in no psalter, Adored of no faithful that cringe and that palter, Praise be with thee yet from a ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... things as I am telling leaves marks upon the flesh and spirit. I remember little children in Polotzk with old, old faces and eyes glazed with secrets. I knew how to dodge and cringe and dissemble before I knew the names of the seasons. And I had plenty of time to ponder on these things, because I was so idle. If they had let me go to school, now—But of course ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... if I seem crotchety, dear. Indeed, it is no pretense on my part. You cannot imagine how that man Ventana persecuted me. The mere suggestion of any one's paying me compliments and trying to be fascinating is so repellent that I cringe at the thought. And even our sailor-like captain will think it necessary to play the society clown, I suppose, seeing that we are young and ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... mob cringe before Coriolanus. When he appears, the stage directions show that the "citizens steal away." ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... companion but his mules and his dog. This last-named animal is such as may be met in Spain or even in France at any street corner—not a retriever, nor a foxhound, nor anything at all but a dog as distinguished from a cat or a goat, living a troubled and uncertain life in a world that will always cringe to a pedigree, but has no respect for nondescripts. It was on these journeys that the Mule had so much leisure for thought. For even he could think, according to his dim lights. He was only conscious, however, of an ever-increasing feeling of a sickness—a physical nausea (for he was, of course, ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... You let me go I keel you," shrieked Pedro. But the words, that would have made the bear cringe and skulk a few hours before, held no terror for him. He was master now, and this man who had clubbed and prodded, sworn at, and outraged him, was a pigmy in his arms. His powerful jaw too was close to the man's neck. One ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... barrage crash; The bullets whine and the bullets sing From the mad machine-guns chattering; Black smoke rolling across the mud, Trenches plastered with flesh and blood— The blue ranks lock with the ranks of gray, Stab and stagger and sob and sway; The living cringe from the shrapnel bursts, The dying moan of their burning thirsts, Moan and die in the gulping slough— Where ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... this day I resolve me,—for King Raedwald will cringe not, nor lie!— I will bring back the altar of Woden; in the temple will have it, hard by The new altar of this your white Christ. As my mood may ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... the cringe of a nervous woman suddenly frightened, Commines, the man of iron nerves, turned to the door, the colour rushing in a flood to his face. Neither had heard its latch click nor seen it open, but the broad figure of a burly man was massed in the gloom ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... is no joke at all," Lind said, gloomily. "Those Swiss people are craven. What can you expect from a nation of hotel-waiters? They cringe before every bully in Europe; you will find that, if Bismarck insists, the Federal Council will expel Armfeldt from Switzerland directly. No; the only safe refuge nowadays for the reformers, the Protestants the pioneers of Europe, is England; and the English do not know it; they do not think of ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... throne. If aught in prophecy deserves belief, 'Tis certain, whom thou favourest, those shall win. Now by the wells whereof our fathers drank And by the Gods they worshipped, hear our prayer, Grant this petition: since alike in woe, Alike in poverty and banishment, Partakers of one destiny, thou and I Cringe to the stranger for a dwelling place. Whilst he at home, the tyrant, woe is me, Laughs at us both in soft luxurious pride. Whose might, so thou wilt favour my design, I will lightly scatter in one little hour; And plant thee in thy ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... wide round eyes turning and twisting in their sockets, ever watchful for food and danger. Without warning a terrific splash scatters them, and when the ripples and bubbles cease, five frightened sunfish cringe in terror among the water plants of the bottom mud. Off to her nest goes the kingfisher, bearing to ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... souls honor'd and blest By former ages, who else— Such, so soulless, so poor, Is the race of men whom I see— Seem'd but a dream of the heart, Seem'd but a cry of desire. Yes! I believe that there liv'd Others like thee in the past, Not like the men of the crowd Who all round me to-day Bluster or cringe, and make life Hideous, and arid, and vile; But souls temper'd with fire, Fervent, heroic, and good, Helpers and ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... one on the brink of the grave," said the boy, "and so my words may be prophetic. Before many weeks are over, you shall kneel and sue for mercy to my father, and it will be denied you. You will grovel in the dirt, and crawl and cringe in abject misery; but it will be hopeless, and in the bitterness of your despair you will think of this moment, and curse the hour you ever molested one of my race, or anyone in whom ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... Did Thomas Paine recant? Mr. Paine had prophesied that fanatics would crawl and cringe around him during his last moments. He believed that they would put a lie in the mouth of death. When the shadow of the coming dissolution was upon him, two clergymen, Messrs. Milledollar and Cunningham, called to annoy the dying man. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... I mingle in Fashion's full herd? Why crouch to her leaders, or cringe to her rules? Why bend to the proud, or applaud the absurd, Why search for delight ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... and her almost painful shrinking from it appears in a letter of March 25, 1911, to Mr. Charles Scribner: "With this note I send the introduction to Father Damien. I didn't see how to touch upon the others when I know so little about them. I know this thing is about as bad as anything can be. I cringe whenever I think of it, but I seem incapable of doing better. If, however, it is beyond the pale, write and tell me, please, and I will try once again. Louis's work was so mixed up with his home life that it is hard to see just where to draw the line between telling enough and yet ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... among men will long continue in its stability and integrity, can only be matter of conjecture, but certain it is, the Chinese are greatly dissatisfied, and not without reason, at the imperious tone now openly assumed by the Tartars; and though they are obliged to cringe and submit, in order to rise to any distinction in the state, yet they unanimously ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... was bound to struggle, an' never to cringe or fall— Still I worked for Charley, for Charley was now my all; And Charley was pretty good to me, with scarce a word or frown, Till at last he went a-courtin', and brought a wife ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... the gloom of the canyon's womb; in the valley's lap we lie; From the white foam-fringe, where the breakers cringe to the peaks that tusk the sky, We climb, and we peer in the crag-locked mere that ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... things is the grovelling tendency of that section of human nature which has not yet been educated sufficiently to lift itself up above temporary trappings and ornaments; pitiful it is to see men, gifted in intellect, or distinguished for bravery, flinch and cringe before one of their own flesh and blood, who, having neither cleverness nor courage, but only a Title, presumes upon that foolish appendage so far as to consider himself superior to both valour and ability. As well might a stuffed boar's head assume ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... put forward by the German spy, Lieut. Carl Lody, at his court-martial in London, was that "he would not cringe for mercy. He was not ashamed of anything that he had done; he was in honour bound not to give away the names of those who had employed him on this mission; he was not paid for it, he did it for his country's good, and ...
— My Adventures as a Spy • Robert Baden-Powell
... does not matter now what he said or I said. We fenced round and about a quarrel during the whole interview. I was meek, because I wanted him to let me have part of the money at all events on loan again; and he was blatant and insolent because he fancied I cringed to him—and I did cringe. ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... as he walked afield Deep thoughts of the world and the folk of Gosh. He saw the idols to which they kneeled; He marked them cringe to the name of Splosli. Is it meet," he asked, "that a soul should crawl To a purple robe or a gilded chair?" But his father walked to the garden's wall And stooped to a rose-bush ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... decisive note in the affairs of that great department store known as "The Colossus," may not by design have carried an air that would indicate the man to whom small tradesman regarded it as a mark of good breeding to cringe, but even in a place where his name was not known his appearance would strongly have appealed to commercial confidence. That instinct which in earlier life had prompted fearless speculation, now crystalized into ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... guardian of the rock, custodian of the Cave of Terrible Things, bone of contention for the jealous and terror of the strongest, filled the entrance with his colossal frame and looked out with a calm dignity that made the whites cringe with hatred. Slowly, with stately grace, the giant advanced until he stood before Dolores, and in his coal-black eyes shone the light of limitless devotion. He knelt, kissed the sequins on her tunic's hem, then, with both hands pressed to his forehead, he bowed his face ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... withhold its wealth sometimes? Very well then, she can serve God without it, in spite of her rights. If men whine and cringe, or bully and shout, for the jewels with which their forefathers honoured God, she will fling them back again down her altar stairs and worship God in a barn or a catacomb without them. For, though she does not serve God and Mammon, she yet makes to herself friends of the Mammon of iniquity. ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... heroes seek renown in arms, Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms; To shining palaces let fools resort And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court. Mine be the pleasure of a rural life, From noise remote and ignorant of strife, Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau, The lawless masquerade and midnight show; From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of mankind is this: Calm and serene and unconcerned to court Fate's heaviest blows, and then, when these have fallen, To whine and cringe, bewailing one's sad lot.— Such folly we will none of, thou and I. For now I seek King Creon, to proclaim My right as guest-friend, and to clear away These clouds of dark distrust that threaten storm.— Meanwhile, take thou the babes and get ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... men become more independent themselves, and sympathise more with the independence of others. The feeling which makes the modern gentleman tell the labourer standing bareheaded before him to put on his hat—the feeling which gives us a dislike to those who cringe and fawn—the feeling which makes us alike assert our own dignity and respect that of others—the feeling which thus leads us more and more to discountenance all forms and names which confess inferiority and submission; is the same feeling which resists despotic power and inaugurates ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... stir: Do you mark, I will not. Let me see the wretch That dares attempt to force me. Why, you slaves Created only to make legs, and cringe; To carry in a dish, and shift a trencher; That have not souls to hope a blessing Beyond your master's leavings; you that were born Only to consume meat and drink; Who advances? Who ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... They want no pecuniary aid, being used to self-help, and liking it best. Stiff in opinion, they know their own minds, and are accustomed to victory. They do not in turn threaten and complain and cringe and curse and fawn. They keep a level course and run on an even keel. They are bad to beat, and can do with much letting alone. They are pious in their way, and talk like Cromwell's Puritans. They abhor Popery, judging the tree by its fruits, a test recommended by their chiefest ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... delay. New guns were seeking position, which was scarcely taken before there was a puff of smoke and their iron message. Heavens! what a vicious sound those shells had! something between a whiz and a shriek. Even the horses would cringe and shudder when one passed over them, and the men would duck their heads, though the missile was thirty feet in the air. I suppose there was some awfully wild firing on both sides; but I saw several of our men carried to the rear. But ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... unresisting hinge Threw wide her hospitable door, To one whose spirit did not cringe Though he was weak, and knew he bore No right ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... "Cringe—why, he doesn't know the meaning of the word. Hatchments! To commemorate that sniveling tramp and his, fraternal duplicate. And he is going to send me the remains. The late Claimant was a fool, but plainly this new one's a maniac. What a name! Mulberry ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and contempt for slackers of all kinds, and when she let it loose on that audience in her one grand outburst she electrified it. Susan always vows she is no suffragette, but she gave womanhood its due that night, and she literally made those men cringe. When she finished with them they were ready to eat out of her hand. She wound up by ordering them—yes, ordering them—to march up to the platform forthwith and subscribe for Victory Bonds. And after wild applause most of them did ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... menace!—when the band Of feeble spirits cringe and plead To the gigantic strength of Greed, And fawn upon ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... beggar asks for, does not at all represent their idea of charity. They expect any fairly well-to-do person, such as a shopkeeper, to give sufficient food for the whole community for one day, and they sit in his house till they get it. They do not stand at the door and salaam and cringe, like the ordinary mendicant. They boldly enter in uninvited and demand alms. They are much disliked on account of the largeness of their wants. But they are also feared on account of the terrible nature of their denunciations if they do not get what they ask for. They profess to be celibates, but ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... Galahad, Parsifal, and Marcus Aurelius might have done it, but to an ordinary erring man, conscious of things done which should not have been done, and other things equally numerous left undone, he was too oppressive. One conscience is enough for any man. The employer of Master Bean had to cringe before two. Nobody can last long against an office-boy whose eyes shine with quiet, respectful reproof through gold-rimmed spectacles, whose manner is that of a middle-aged saint, and who obviously knows all the Plod and ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Empress. M. de Remusat remained in the Emperor's service until the fall of the Empire, and then went over to Louis XVIII. Both of these sycophants were content to accept the favours of the Imperial couple and eat their bread and cringe at their feet while they plotted with the ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... about it! And there was the soul of Corydon calling to him, there were all the heights of music and poetry—and instead of climbing, he must torture his brain with hack-writing! He must go down to the editors, and fawn and cringe, and try to get books to review; he must study the imbecilities of the magazines and watch out for topics for articles; he must rack his brains for jokes and jingles—he, the master of life, the bearer of a new religion, the proud, high-soaring eagle, whose foot had ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... servant over-presumptuous? Your scorn will soon teach him his duty. Is the slave disobedient? Blows will cure him of his faults. Does your dog fawn upon you too familiarly? Thrust him from you with your foot and he will cringe and cower till you smile again. Your friendship—I have no words ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... in regard to money. What does it come to? That you are to cringe at his heels for a beggarly allowance which he has been pleased to bestow upon you without your asking. 'Very well, my dear fellow,' I should say to him, 'you can stop it the moment you please. For certain objects of your own,—that ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... be a slave, when Freedom smiling stands, To strike the gyves from of his fettered hands? Who'd be a slave, and cringe, and bow the knee, And kiss the hand that steals his liberty? Behold the bird that flits from bough to bough; What though at times the wintry blasts may blow,— Happier it feels, half frozen in its nest, Than caged, though fed and fondled and caressed. ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... Ulyth tragically. "I've had the shock of my life. She's—oh, she's too terrible for words! Her voice makes me cringe. And she pawed all my things. She snatched up my photos, and turned over my books with sticky fingers; she even opened my drawers and ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... depressed. The gentry gave themselves airs of superiority, really as if their characters were as good as their manners; but they did not impose upon the people, who despised them for their veneer. Each class displayed its contempt for the other openly when it could safely do so, but was ready to cringe when it suited its own convenience, the workers for employment, and the gentry for political purposes. But human beings are too dependent on each other for such differences to exist without detriment to the whole community. Society must cohere if it is to prosper; individuals ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... from a catapult,—rules a church with iron rods, organizes, denounces, intrigues, executes, keeps an unarmed soldiery to do his behests, and hurls ecclesiastic thunders at kings and emperors with the grand audacity of a commission presumedly divine, while Greeks cringe, and Jews blaspheme, and heathen flee into, or away from, conversion; and the Church itself canonizes this spiritual father, this Sphinx-son of an instinct ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... who insulted one another shrilly.... But the white horse plodded on. On a stretch of level road he passed a pair talking, noting casually that the woman was a lady from her carriage, and from his threatening cringe that the man was a cad. Italian riff-raff of ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... but pardonable in a man trying in the Tower to get out of that doleful prison. But all his writings are thirty years too late; they express the creed of a buried generation, of the men who defied Spain in the name of a God of righteousness,—not of men who cringe before her in the name of a God of power and cunning. The captive eagle has written with a quill from his own wing—a quill which has been wont ere now to soar to heaven. Every line smacks of the memories of Nombre and of Zutphen, of Tilbury Fort and of Calais Roads; and many a gray-headed veteran, ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... sees himself surrounded by admirers, and whose vanity is hourly feasted with all the luxuries of studied praise, is easily persuaded that his influence will be extended beyond his life; that they who cringe in his presence will reverence his memory, and that those who are proud to be numbered among his friends, will endeavour to vindicate his choice ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... to myself, when night comes round me, And the soft chain of thought has bound me, I whisper, "Sir, your eyes are killing— You owe no mortal man a shilling— You never cringe for star or garter, You're much too wise to be a martyr— And since you must, be food for vermin, You don't feel much desire for ermine!" Wisdom is a mine, no doubt, If one can but find it out— But whate'er I think or say, I'm an April ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... he'd been using threats because my father, himself, was almost paralyzed with fear. And then I lost my head—in blind rage, I suppose. I must have talked like a common fish woman, but my one desire was to see them cringe. So I told about leaving the message for you, pretending to 've written a great deal more—twisting the knife all I knew how, and being thoroughly catty. It must have been a disgusting exhibition," she gave a sigh of despair, as if for ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... of Carthage, nor even Rachel weeping for her Hebrew children. But there were on every hand manifestations of adherence to the Southern cause, except among a few males who feared unutterable things, and were disposed to cringe and prevaricate. The women were not generally handsome; their face was indolent, their dress slovenly, and their manner embarrassed. They lopped off the beginnings and the ends of their sentences, generally commencing with a verb, as thus: "Told soldiers not to carr' ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... as profane and carnal; and some even, when pretending to call themselves men of science, have stooped to the miserable policy, of tampering with the truth, investing the real facts in false disguises, to cringe to the prejudices of the many, and to pervert science into a seeming accordance with popular prepossessions." I cannot believe that this will be regarded as justifiable language: it seems scarce worthy of a man of ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... contentment assured her that this trial of her courage and self-control was not without one blessed result. He would rest for several days in the pleasure of what he had done or thought he had done. She need not cringe before that image of Dread for two, three days at least. Meanwhile, he would grow strong in body, and she, perhaps, in spirit. Only one precaution she must take. No hint of Mr. Challoner's presence in town must reach him. He must be guarded from a knowledge of that fact as certainly as from ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... the letter of application. The applicant should state simply his qualifications for the place he wants. He should not make an appeal to sympathy (sob stuff) nor should he beg or cringe. He should not demand a certain salary, though he may state what salary he would like, and he should not say "Salary no object." It would probably not be true. There are comparatively few people with whom money is no object. If it is the first ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... not. It still held strong, and though with the Renaissance there came about a strange mingling of crime and corruption, aestheticism and immorality, yet the Church was never abandoned for an hour. When enlightenment came, people began to doubt the spiritual power of the Papacy. They did not cringe to it so servilely as before. Religion was not violently embraced as in the Middle Ages, but there was no revolt. The Church held the power and was still the patron of art. The painter's subjects extended over nature, the antique, the fable, allegory, history, portraiture; but ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... only around our infancy Doth heaven with all its splendors lie; 10 Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais[2] climb and know it not; Over our manhood bond the skies, Against our fallen and traitor lives The great winds utter prophecies; 15 With our faint hearts the mountain strives; Its arms outstretched, the druid[3] wood Waits with its benedicite:[4] And ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... from the gloom of the canyon's womb; in the valley's lap we lie; From the white foam-fringe, where the breakers cringe to the peaks that tusk the sky, We climb, and we peer in the crag-locked mere that gleams like a ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... know, madam, what is and what is not disreputable in this conventional world. It is not considered disreputable to cringe to the vices of a court, or to accept a pension wrung from the industry of the nation, in return for base servility. It is not considered disreputable to take tithes, intended for the service of God, and lavish them away at watering-places or elsewhere, seeking pleasure instead ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... to prune. Sneeshin mill, a snuff-box. Snell, bitter, biting. Snick, a latch; snick-drawing scheming; he weel a snick can draw he is good at cheating. Snirtle, to snigger. Snoods, fillets worn by maids. Snool, to cringe, to snub. Snoove, to go slowly. Snowkit, snuffed. Sodger, soger, a soldier. Sonsie, sonsy, pleasant, good-natured, jolly. Soom, to swim. Soor, sour. Sough, v. sugh. Souk, suck. Soupe, sup, liquid. Souple, supple. Souter, cobbler. Sowens, porridge of oat ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... sycophants bend their base knees in the court And servilely cringe round the gate, And barter their honour to earn the support Of the wealthy, the titled, the great; Their guilt piled possessions I loathe, while I scorn The knaves, the vile knaves who possess 'em; I love not to pamper ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... who wills to please, Must humbly crawl upon his knees, And kiss the hand that beats him; Or, if he dare attempt to walk, Must toe the mark that others chalk, And cringe ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... barony or county to repel The rushing river from his gurgling throat. He has valets now enough: they stood aloof then, Shaking their dripping ears upon the shore, All roaring "Help!" but offering none; and as For duty (as you call it)—I did mine then, 440 Now do yours. Hence, and bow and cringe him here! ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... unconfined, No politics disturb their mind; They eat their meals, and take their sport Nor know who's in or out at court. They never to the levee go To treat, as dearest friend, a foe: They never importune his grace, Nor ever cringe to men in place: Nor undertake a dirty job, Nor draw the quill to write for Bob.[1] Fraught with invective, they ne'er go To folks at Paternoster Row. No judges, fiddlers, dancing-masters, No pickpockets, or poetasters, Are known to honest quadrupeds; No single brute his fellow ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... the far side of the rope-ladder doorway. Carmena had bent her head to pass under the massive lintel. Lennon followed Elsie to the side of the doorway opposite Farley. The lawyer-ranchman appeared to cringe, yet he held to his position and even attempted an ingratiating smile as he rasped out a ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... me. Let that pass! It perish'd, and all perish'd with it. Ambition? Wealth left nothing to add to my social condition. Fame? But fame in itself presupposes some great Field wherein to pursue and attain it. The State? I, to cringe to an upstart? The Camp? I, to draw From its sheath the old sword of the Dukes of Luvois To defend usurpation? Books, then? Science, Art? But, alas! I was fashion'd for action: my heart, Wither'd thing though it be, I should hardly compress 'Twixt the leaves of a treatise on Statics: ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... an itinerant tinker was also an itinerant political preacher, and seeing that he could prevail nothing by secular pleas, he betook himself to his spiritual armory, and in a voice of sour derision that made Bessie Fairfax cringe asked the doctor if he had yet received the Devil's Decalogue according to h'act of Parliament and justices' notices that might be read on every wall?—and he proceeded to recite it: "Thou shalt remove the old landmarks, ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... should complaint be made of him at Rome, his corruption and cruelties, his extortions and the unjustifiable slaughter he had caused would all be brought against him. He was the Roman ruler, but the people over whom he exercized official dominion delighted in seeing him cringe, when they cracked, with vicious snap above his head, the whip of a threatened report about him to his ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... a bore than they. They were almost always solemn and portentous, and they were for the most part of a deathly respectability. She wasn't necessarily snobbish, unless it was snobbish to want the best. She didn't cringe, she didn't make herself smaller than she was; she took on the contrary a stand of her own and attracted things to herself. Naturally she was possible only in America—only in a country where whole ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... from the rest, betokening, by their grave countenances and moody whispers, how sensitively they felt the slight to Lord Warwick's embassy in the visit of the Count de la Roche, and how little they were disposed to cringe to the rising sun of the Woodvilles. There, collected into a puissance whose discontent hard sufficed to shake a firmer throne (the young Raoul de Fulke, the idolater of Warwick, the impersonation in himself of the old Norman seignorie, in their centre), with folded arms and lowering brows, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in the canyons of dismal unrest; I cringe — I'm so weak and so small. I can't get my bearings, I'm crushed and oppressed With the haste and the waste of it all. The slaves and the madman, the lust and the sweat, The fear in the faces I see; The getting, the spending, the fever, ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... by such a spirit—as to my lords and masters; that I shall have no other God but this congregation; that I shall deny my own conscience for theirs; that I shall go about the trivial, nonsensical things they call my pastoral duties, in fear and trembling; that my ministry is to cringe when they speak, and do their will regardless of what I feel to be the will of Christ! Faugh!" Big Dan drew himself erect. "If this is what the call to the ministry means, I am beginning to understand some things that ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... another attempt upon the girl's part to carry her point, he stamped his foot imperatively, to emphasize some command, and, with a look which made her cringe like a whipped cur before him; when, shooting a glance of fire and hate at Edith, she turned away, with a crestfallen air, and went, ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... or imaginings of children!—the commons be but slaves to the nobles; the nobles to the senate; the senate to their creditors, their purchasers, their consuls; the last at once their tools, and their tyrants! Go, young man, go. Salute, cringe, fawn upon your consul! Nathless, for thou hast mind enough to mark and note the truth of what I tell thee; thou wilt think upon this, and perchance one day, when the time shall have come, wilt speak, act, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... Majesty my person, my sword, my castle, and my lands. I will, at your word, prostrate myself at your feet, and humbly beg pardon for any offence I have committed against you, but to tell the Archbishop I am sorry when I am not, and to cringe before him and supplicate his grace, well, your Majesty, as between man and man, ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... better than secret love" (Proverbs xxvii. 5). They believe that the Lord has yet many things to say unto them, and they are willing and glad for Him to say them by whom He will, but especially by their leaders and their brethren. While they do not fawn and cringe before men, nor believe everything that is said to them, without proving it by the word and Spirit of God, they believe that God "gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... said warmly, "though for you the promotion is perilous. To be Nero's friend is to be condemned beforehand to death, though for a time he may shower favours upon you. He is fickle and inconstant, and you have not learned to cringe and flatter, and are as likely as not to anger him by ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... comparatively lucky. Mister Lynch, our officer, was what I may call a normal bucko. He hazed for the results rather than for the pleasure of hazing, though I think he did get some satisfaction out of thumping the men. You feel a fine thrill when you see a half dozen huskies cringe away before you with fear in their eyes. I imagine it is the same thrill a wild animal tamer feels as he faces his beasts. I felt this fascinating sensation many times after I had become a mate of ships. Lynch had no mercy on the stiffs ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... "Ay, shrink and cringe, sir saint," she sneered. "Having cast me off and taken up holiness, you have the right, of course." And with that she moved past me, and down the terrace-steps without ever turning her head to look at me again. ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... said with another chilling smile. "You do well to cringe, for I'm death itself. Even in death I could kill you, like a snake." And with that his voice took on the tones of a circus barker. "Yes, I'm a freak, as the gentleman so wisely said. That's what one doctor who dared talk ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... which was to continue through life, I considered deeply on the humours of the spectators. I saw that the character of the English was servile to rank, and yielding to pretension—they admire you for your acquaintance, and cringe to you for your conceit. The first thing, therefore, was to know great people—the second to controul them. I dressed well, and had good horses—that was sufficient to make me sought by the young of my own sex. I talked scandal, and was never abashed—that was more than enough ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... you now by offering to undertake a special business mission for my employer at Paris. It is drudgery, at my time of life, after all I have gone through—but my hard work is innocent work. I am not obliged to cringe for every crown-piece I put in my pocket—not bound to denounce, deceive, and dog to death other men, before I can earn my bread, and scrape together money enough to bury me. I am ending a bad, base life harmlessly ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... and to reverence our tormentor is repulsive and despicable, and since we refuse to allow man to tyrannize over man, what degradation it is for the human race to cringe and bow down unconditionally to the imagination in the great realm ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... the house Amos smiled and stroked his beard. "Truly," he thought, "these Christians hate us, but we have them in our power. It is pleasant to be hated and yet to know that it is to us they must cringe when they are in need; and it is very pleasant to refuse. My friend Gregorio is not happy now that he is ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... Esmond, and condescended to be very civil to him; and some days after his arrival, Harry, laughing, told this story to Lady Esmond, remarking how strange it was that men famous for learning and renowned over Europe, should, nevertheless, so bow down to a title, and cringe to a nobleman ever so poor. At this, Mistress Beatrix flung up her head, and said, it became those of low origin to respect their betters; that the parsons made themselves a great deal too proud, she ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... can cringe, and fawn, eh? back with you!—the girl, I say." For poor Emily, wild with fear, was clinging to that weak ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... pyramids and empires, trampling crowns beneath thy hoofs; All men respect thee; nay, adore thee! To invoke thy favour, popes offer thee their triple crowns, and kings their sceptres; peoples, their secret sorrows; poets, their renown. All cringe and kneel before thee, yet thou rushest on over ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... fool, Owre fast for thought, owre hot for rule, [Too] Owre blate to seek, owre proud to snool, [bashful, cringe] Let him draw near; And owre this grassy heap sing dool, [woe] And drap ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... had made him a prisoner. She was wonderful. She was panting in her excitement. From the floor Blake had noticed that her little white finger was pressing gently against the trigger of the rifle. It had made him shudder. It made the Eskimo cringe a bit now as Philip tied his hands behind him. And Philip saw it, and his heart thumped. Celie ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... made her cringe in the deep chair. She was losing her clear, sweet vision of that blessed night when Gaston and she had stood transfigured! If only she could have held to that, all would have been so simple—but with that fading glory gone she would be ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... the orchard a girl, walking slowly to the house, had stopped, terrified; shrinking for him, not for herself, as with the unerring instinct of her sex she realized how his pride would cringe before such ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... stumps; the fields on each side stretched burnt and bare. And then came the climax: something passed us,—high above our heads, I fancy, though its frightful winds seemed brushing us,—a ghost of the night, an aerial demon, a shrieking thing that made the man beside me cringe and shudder. It was new to me, but I could not mistake it. It was what the French call an obus, a word that in some subtle manner seems more menacing and dreadful than our own term ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... filial affection which should have blessed all these empty years? A wickedly ludicrous memory forbade the solemnity of a reconciliation: below any attempt the father might make, there would be a grin, somewhere; below any attempt the son might make, there would be a cringe, somewhere. The only possible hope was in absolute, flat commonplace. Play-writing, as a subject of conversation, was ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... of Israel was over—the bitter centuries of the badge and the byword, slaughter and spoliation; no longer, O God! to cringe in false humility, the scoff of the street-boy, the mockery of mankind, penned in Ghettos, branded with the wheel or the cap—but restored to divine favor as every Prophet had predicted, and uplifted to the sovereignty ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Lady Dorinda's belongings, numbered among the goods of the household, were also placed near the gate. She sat within the hall, wrapped for her journey, composed and silent. For when the evil day actually overtook Lady Dorinda, she was too thorough a Briton to cringe. She met her second repulse from Acadia as she had met her first, when Claude La Tour found her his only consolation. In this violent uprooting of family life so long grown to one place, Le Rossignol was scarcely missed. Each one thought of the person dearest to himself ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... hate him and his trade: Who bade us so to cringe and bend, And all God's peaceful people made To such as ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... responsible for all the blunders of his subordinates. A rich man, and the scion of an historic house, he has led the life of a galley-slave; an honest man, he has been doomed to perpetual prevarication; a humane man, he has had to condone every atrocity; an independent man, he must cringe before his master; a peaceful man, he must submit to the continuation of insensate slaughter; a highly gifted intellectual, he has had to pursue a policy of insane stupidity. Twenty-five years ago a professor of the University of Munich, Dr. Quidde, compared the Kaiser to Caligula. The analogy ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... town, and townspeople going out to the country.... And children who insulted one another shrilly.... But the white horse plodded on. On a stretch of level road he passed a pair talking, noting casually that the woman was a lady from her carriage, and from his threatening cringe that the man was a cad. Italian riff-raff ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... glint in his eye, and was ready to go out of his way hunting trouble. Totally dissatisfied with any answer I could make, he kept roaring louder and louder. There was no doubt that he was venting his spleen upon an unprotected and humble civilian, and that he was thoroughly enjoying seeing me cringe under his bulldozing. It flashed upon me that he might be a self-appointed guardian of the way. So when he began to wax still more arrogant, I simply said, "Take me ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... Psyche plunging in the sun; Uncrowned three lilies with a backward swinge; And standing somewhat widely, like to one More used to "Boot and Saddle" than to cringe ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... therefore 'twas, to gall thee, that I named him. That thing, that nothing, but a cringe and smile; That woman, but more daubed; or, if a man, Corrupted ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... to the rum power in America. That is the god I mean. The most heartless, depraved monopoly on earth, yet men and governments grovel in the dust at its feet and cringe like dogs ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... letter of March 25, 1911, to Mr. Charles Scribner: "With this note I send the introduction to Father Damien. I didn't see how to touch upon the others when I know so little about them. I know this thing is about as bad as anything can be. I cringe whenever I think of it, but I seem incapable of doing better. If, however, it is beyond the pale, write and tell me, please, and I will try once again. Louis's work was so mixed up with his home life that it is hard to see ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... disliking me; to the baffling ones who remain enthusiastically ignorant of my existence; to the moral ones upon whom Beauty exercises a lascivious and corrupting influence; to the moral ones who have relentlessly chased God out of their bedrooms; to the moral ones who cringe before Nature, who flatten themselves upon prayer rugs, who shut their eyes, stuff their ears, bind, gag and truss themselves and offer their mutilations to the idiot God they have invented (the Devil take them, I grow bored with laughing at them); to the anointed ones who identify their ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... coward." The woman's cheeks flamed red. "Some men shut their eyes and cringe when there comes a flash of lightning. But that don't make them cowards. He might have been frightened at the time, and not known what he was doing, but he is not a coward. I guess I know that as well as anybody can tell me. He is my boy—my only child. ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... which, for more than seven years has sought our destruction, should now cringe to solicit our protection, is adding the wretchedness of disgrace to the misery of disappointment; and if England has the least spark of supposed honor left, that spark must be darkened by asking, and extinguished by receiving, the smallest favor from America; for the criminal ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... on his career of international madness and prosecute it with the rage of a demon is not entirely clear. A vision of himself as the Napoleon of southern South America, who might cause Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay to cringe before his footstool, while he disposed at will of their territory and fortunes, doubtless stirred his imagination. So, too, the thought of his country, wedged in between two huge neighbors and threatened with suffocation ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... of this was not apparent. Harwood had assumed on general principles that the Honorable Isaac Pettit, of the "Fraser County Democrat," was an humble and obedient servant of the Honorable Morton Bassett, and would cringe at the mention of his name. To be sure, Mr. Pettit had said nothing to disturb this belief; but neither had the editor manifested that meek submission for which the reporter had been prepared. The editor's Gargantuan girth trembled again. ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... in the first fast furious throes of her latest, which is some form of psychomania, whereof the high priest is one Beverley, a plausible ringletted charlatan of alcoholic tendencies (Sludge the Medium, without his cringe and snarl), who ekes out his spasmodic visitations of genuine psychic illumination with the most shameless spoof. This ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... soulless, so poor, Is the race of men whom I see— Seem'd but a dream of the heart, Seem'd but a cry of desire. Yes! I believe that there liv'd Others like thee in the past, Not like the men of the crowd Who all round me to-day Bluster or cringe, and make life Hideous, and arid, and vile; But souls temper'd with fire, Fervent, heroic, and good, Helpers and friends ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... hard usage. Perhaps her husband might have had mercy on her, but they were both cowed by the pitiless brute of a step-son, whose only view was to goad her into driving their profitable traffic to her last gasp. But there was no outbreak between them and Harold. The father's nature was to cringe and fawn, and the son estimated those thews and muscles too well to gratify his hatred by open provocation, and was only surly and dogged, keeping himself almost entirely out of the way. Alice wanted nothing but to look at ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... looks," he was saying. "I desire them up yonder to think that I abuse you. Look as a man would who were being abused. Cringe or snarl, but listen. Do you remember once when as lads we swam together from Penarrow to ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... appealed to her to leave the scene she seemed not to hear him. She only stood and stared at the exhausted man until he could bear it no longer and, hiding his face in his hands, he began to shiver and cringe and sob. ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... from the train, the dog was led through crowds of people and bustling, noisy streets that made Jan cringe and cower. At last they reached a place where water stretched so far that it touched the sky, and the water kept moving all the time. This frightened him, for he had never seen any water excepting in the little lake at the Hospice, and that water did not ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... slave, when Freedom smiling stands, To strike the gyves from of his fettered hands? Who'd be a slave, and cringe, and bow the knee, And kiss the hand that steals his liberty? Behold the bird that flits from bough to bough; What though at times the wintry blasts may blow,— Happier it feels, half frozen in its nest, Than caged, though fed and fondled and caressed. 'Tis said, 'on Briton's shore ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... England, in the majesty of her State, in the sovereignty of her chartered weal, must abase herself to then. To the vices of tyranny, to low companions and their companions, and their kindred, the State must cringe and kneel then. To these,—men who meddled with affairs of State,—who took, even at such a time, the State to be their business,—must address themselves; for these were the councils in which England's peace and war were settled then, and the Tribune could enter them only in disguise. ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... said Mr. Starkweather, and interrupted himself long enough to kiss her, "I'll say Henry's got a darned sight better judgment 'n you have.... Go on and blush. Make a good job of it. Ashamed of yourself? So 'm I. Sit down there and cringe. You too, Henry." He himself remained on his feet. "Funny thing," he said, after a pause. "Only chance I ever had to get married myself was somethin' like this is—oh, I wasn't a gilt loafer, like Henry is; I was workin' sixteen hours a ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... the man to slink away like a whipped dog—for the mean are ever the first to cringe—my friend turned from the window. Meeting my eyes as he went back to his seat, he laughed. 'Well,' he ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... or a German would be incapable of envisaging and understanding all its peculiarities and differences, for his tone in speaking to a millionaire differs but little from that which he employs towards a small tobacconist—and that in spite of the circumstance that he is accustomed to cringe before the former. With us, however, things are different. In Russian society there exist clever folk who can speak in one manner to a landowner possessed of two hundred peasant souls, and in another to a landowner possessed of three hundred, and in another to a landowner possessed of ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... sort of a man father is," replied Rufe. "Peakslow would have found out, if he had drawn a bead on you. How quick he stopped, and changed countenance! He can govern his temper when he finds he must; and he can cringe and crawl when he sees it's for his interest. Think of his asking you at last,—after you had got your horse in spite of him, and at the risk of your life,—think of his begging you to give ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... of Anathoth, and the murder in your hearts. Ye that have worshipped the shameful thing and burned incense to Baal—shall I cringe that ye devise against me, or not rather pray to the Lord of Hosts, 'Let me see Thy vengeance on them'? And He answereth, 'I will bring evil upon the men of Anathoth, even the ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... front of us half a dozen sets of false teeth, arranged in a horrid circle around a cigar-box full of extracted molars such as made one cringe, grinned bitingly out of a glass case before the dentist's office door. The effect was of ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... on afterward," replied Mr. Reed, with a stunned look; but in an instant, he turned his eyes full upon Slade, causing the miserable creature to cringe ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... Thetis' wat'ry lap Hastens in prone career, with friends select Swiftly we hie to Devil,* young or old, *[Footnote: The Devil's Tavern, Temple Bar.] Jocund and boon; where at the entrance stands A stripling, who with scrapes and humil cringe Greets us in winning speech, and accent bland: With lightest bound, and safe unerring step, He skips before, and nimbly climbs the stairs. Melampus thus, panting with lolling tongue, And wagging tail, gambols and frisks before His sequent lord, from pensive ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... gibe germ tinge edge urge huge serge judge singe ledge large barge fudge lodge dodge ridge cringe lunge budge hedge badge sledge nudge wedge fringe range bridge merge grudge trudge mange smudge charge ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... had been greatly soured by the infamous treatment of her poor mother, and, conceiving that this said young Dutch upstart had not paid her mother proper respect and attention, but that he was more disposed to fawn and cringe to the will of her father, it is said that she dismissed him from her presence, and peremptorily refused to marry him. This drove her Royal Papa into a great passion, and our magnanimous Prince Regent went suddenly to Warwick ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... of the decisive note in the affairs of that great department store known as "The Colossus," may not by design have carried an air that would indicate the man to whom small tradesman regarded it as a mark of good breeding to cringe, but even in a place where his name was not known his appearance would strongly have appealed to commercial confidence. That instinct which in earlier life had prompted fearless speculation, now crystalized into conscious force, gave unconscious authority to his countenance. He was tall ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... I neither want to cringe to the mob, nor be its master; I prefer to go my own way alone . ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... could flash as of old; the voice would presently once more ring harsh and servant and equal alike would cringe before him; for still he held half Moscow in the iron grip of his terrible omniscience. But Ivan noted the color of his hair—that dead white that is not the snow of years but the ashen colorlessness borne of continuous ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... to gain a little fame, And have each rascal that prowls under heaven Stab one for getting it? Had he wished power, The thing was in the market-place for sale At stated rates—so much for a man's soul! His was a haughty spirit that bent not, And one to rise had need to cringe and creep. So had his brother into favor crawled, Like slug into the bosom of a rose, And battened in the sun. At thought of him, Forgotten for a moment, Wyndham winced, And felt his wound. "Why bides he not in Town With his blond lovelock and wench-luring ways— There runs his fox! What foul fiend ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... mingle in Fashion's full herd? Why crouch to her leaders, or cringe to her rules? Why bend to the proud, or applaud the absurd? Why search for delight, in ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... misfortune of mankind is this: Calm and serene and unconcerned to court Fate's heaviest blows, and then, when these have fallen, To whine and cringe, bewailing one's sad lot.— Such folly we will none of, thou and I. For now I seek King Creon, to proclaim My right as guest-friend, and to clear away These clouds of dark distrust that threaten storm.— Meanwhile, take thou the babes and get thee ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... in his broad, white-swathed palm and pressed it fervently, regardless of the pain which would have caused him to cringe if engaged ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... of being which his father had hardly crushed in his own heart? For what, forsooth, shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied humiliations of fifty million fellows? Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow. Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... it was who ordered our seizure. I have always been on good terms with him, and must try and induce him not to detain us. It will not do, however, to approach him on horseback. We must show him some respect, though we need not bow and cringe as that ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... him; at least she would not crouch and cringe and hide her eyes. She would watch him as he rode, watch him as he fought, watch him to the end even though ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... him. Stephen felt him cringe. Directly he felt something else. It was a cold hand groping to find his own. The whole thing was queer, uncanny, and he was glad when ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... shouted exultingly as they beheld the feat, and when he had lowered the weapon and silence was restored, he continued, defiantly, while his breath came quick and short: "And where do the talkers, the parleyers seek to lead us? To cringe like dogs, who lick their masters' feet, before the men who cheat us. Count Mannsfeld will come to-day; I know it, and I have also learned that he will bring everything except what is our due, what we need, what we intend to demand, what we require for ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... them the self-evident truth that all men were born free and equal, that the master, with his white skin, was in the sight of God no whit better than his black slaves, and that for himself he would not cringe like that to ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... spirits shall not cringe and grovel, Stooping lowly to a low thoughts door, As if Heaven were straitened to a hovel, All its star-worlds set to rise no more, And our genius had ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... feet; craven; crouch before, throw oneself at the feet of; swallow the leek, swallow the pill; kiss the rod; turn the other cheek; avaler les couleuvres [Fr.], gulp down. obey &c 743; kneel to, bow to, pay homage to, cringe to, truckle to; bend the neck, bend the knee; kneel, fall on one's knees, bow submission, courtesy, curtsy, kowtow. pocket the affront; make the best of, make a virtue of necessity; grin and abide, grin ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... born under a fortunate star! He had written a great deal in his day—and he had not succeeded in seeing a single one of his compositions published; he had not understood how to set about the matter in the proper way, to cringe opportunely, to bustle at the right moment. Once, long, long ago, one of his admirers and friends, also a German and also poor, had published two of his sonatas at his own expense,—and the whole edition remained in the cellars of the musical shops; they had vanished dully, ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... rhinoceros, chewing a straw as it came; then appeared the Swine-woman and two Wolf-women; then the Fox-bear witch, with her red eyes in her peaked red face, and then others,—all hurrying eagerly. As they came forward they began to cringe towards Moreau and chant, quite regardless of one another, fragments of the latter half of the litany of the Law,—"His is the Hand that wounds; His is the Hand that heals," and so forth. As soon as they had ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... known, is a manly and very independent personage. As a rule his master is more afraid of him than he is of his master. Yet, according to the picture drawn of him by the Socialists, he is a timorous, cowardly, whining, pitiful creature who has to cringe ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... least address their flatteries to the girls whom they are eager to marry, whereas the Greek and Roman poets sought merely to beguile a class of women whose charms were for sale to anyone. One of these profligate men might cringe and wail and cajole, to gain the good will of a capricious courtesan, but he never dreamed of bending his knees to win the honest love of the maid he took to be his wife (that he might have male offspring.) Roman love was not romantic, nor was ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... to each other. The very breath each drew was a challenge and a menace to the other. Their hate bound them together as love could never bind. Leclere was bent on the coming of the day when Batard should wilt in spirit and cringe and whimper at his feet. And Batard—Leclere knew what was in Batard's mind, and more than once had read it in Batard's eyes. And so clearly had he read, that when Batard was at his back, he made it a point to glance often over ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... to Sym as he walked afield Deep thoughts of the world and the folk of Gosh. He saw the idols to which they kneeled; He marked them cringe to the name of Splosli. Is it meet," he asked, "that a soul should crawl To a purple robe or a gilded chair?" But his father walked to the garden's wall And stooped to a ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... piteous things is the grovelling tendency of that section of human nature which has not yet been educated sufficiently to lift itself up above temporary trappings and ornaments; pitiful it is to see men, gifted in intellect, or distinguished for bravery, flinch and cringe before one of their own flesh and blood, who, having neither cleverness nor courage, but only a Title, presumes upon that foolish appendage so far as to consider himself superior to both valour and ability. As well might a stuffed ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... hiding place in a crotch of the spruce Neewa looked down on the first great tragedy of his life, and the advent of man. The two-legged beast made him cringe deeper into his refuge, and his little heart was near breaking with the terror that had seized upon him. He did not reason. It was by no miracle of mental process that he knew something terrible had happened, and that this tall, two-legged creature was the cause of it. ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... done to social institutions, may at one time have mingled with the lovers' remorse and the lovers' temptations,—had now been completely forgotten. We have seen how, more than once, love, however self-restrained, had induced Alfieri to put aside all his Republican sternness and truthfulness, and to cringe before people whom he thoroughly despised; we cannot easily forget that ignominious stroking of the Brutus poet's cheek by Pope Pius VI. We shall now see how this peculiar sort of Roman and stoical virtue, cultivated ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... hestitating. Perhaps, too, I will give him shelter, a kindness never to be despised. A moment ago, before I whistled, this dog was tranquil and happy in the rain. Now he has changed. He turns fully around and approaches me, a slight cringe in his walk. The tranquillity has left him. At the sound of my whistle he has grown suddenly tired and lonely and the night and rain no longer lure him. ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... with lies and flattery? O'er plains they ramble unconfin'd, No politics disturb their mind; They eat their meals, and take their sport, 25 Nor know who's in or out at court; They never to the levee go To treat as dearest friend, a foe; They never importune his grace, Nor ever cringe to men in place; 30 Nor undertake a dirty job, Nor draw the quill to write for B—b. Fraught with invective they ne'er go To folks at Pater-Noster-Row; No judges, fiddlers, dancing-masters, 35 No pick-pockets, or poetasters, Are known to honest quadrupeds; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... incidentally, but purposely. We have met here to show the world that times have changed, that the earth revolves, and to prove to ourselves in an impressive and undeniable way that the power of superstition is crippled, and at last Science and Free Speech need no longer cringe and crawl. We respect the Church for what she is, but our manhood must now realize that it is no longer the slave and tool of entrenched force and power that abrogates to itself the name ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... young," he said, "O sister; thou wert called a mighty queen When the nurses first upraised thee and first thy body was seen: If thou bide with these toiling women when a great king bids thee to wife, Then first is it seen of the Niblungs that they cringe and cower from strife: By the deeds of the Golden Sigurd I charge thee hinder us not, When the Norns have dight the way-beasts, and our hearts for the ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... their blasphemy made him cringe. He wrapped the little broken body tighter in his arms. Was she, then, what she was by a loving God's decree? He kissed her hair and groaned in righteous anger. Did that Outcast Emperor dare call himself the representative of God on earth, and thereupon urge his menials to do evil for ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... bravado had vanished from the farmer by now. He seemed to fairly cringe before the girl. Afterwards the boys learned that there was good reason for this, since her father was Mayor Stephens, the richest man in Hazenhurst, and the farmer a tenant who was forever behind in his rents, and heavily in the debt of ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy
... pretty to cringe in this way, but Peter thought it his due, and he would answer condescendingly, 'It is good. Peter ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... the shout is taken up by undergraduates, and tradesmen, and horse-dealers, and cricket-cads, and dog-fanciers 'Come to us, and us, and us, and we will be your toadies!' Let them; let them toady and cringe to their precious idols, till they bring this noble old place down about their ears. Down it will come, down it must come, for down it ought to come, if it can find nothing better to worship than rank, money, and intellect. But to live in the place and love it too, and to see all this going ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... stout-hearted heroes who will not fail me in the fray. These valiant souls have chosen me their lord. With such peers one may ponder counsel, and gain a following. Devoted are these friends and faithful-hearted; and I may be their lord and rule this realm. It seemeth no wise right to me that I should cringe a whit to God for any good. I ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... band Of feeble spirits cringe and plead To the gigantic strength of Greed, And fawn upon ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... 630 And Beowulf spake forth, the Ecgtheow's bairn: E'en that in mind had I when up on holm strode I, And in sea-boat sat down with a band of my men, That for once and for all the will of your people Would I set me to work, or on slaughter-field cringe Fast in grip of the fiend; yea and now shall I frame The valour of earl-folk, or else be abiding The day of mine end, here down in the mead-hall. To the wife those his words well liking they were, The big ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous
... despicable race, Like wand'ring Arabs shift from place to place. Vagrants by law, to Justice open laid, They tremble, of the beadle's lash afraid, And fawning cringe, for wretched means of life, To Madam May'ress, or his ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... this new attitude her face was in complete shadow, Perris felt her eyes burning out at him. His dismissal was at hand, he knew, and then the carelessly defiant speech which was forming in his throat died away. Sick at heart, he realized that he must cringe under the hand which was about to strike and be humble under the very eye of Hervey. He was no longer free and the chain which held him was the conviction that he could never be happy until he had met and conquered wild Alcatraz, that he was as incomplete as a holster without a gun ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... I distinctly saw him cringe at my shot," hotly said another. "There's always a peculiar look a tiger has when he gets his death-wound: it's unmistakable when you ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... surely, but it takes two to make a bargain. I think I know just the sort of people mamma and sisters are. He told me she read him a lecture every time he danced twice with a poor girl, and now I am expected to walk into the same trap, and cringe to her ladyship, for the sin of being poor. I guess not! I'll teach school till I die first, and he can think of me as having a 'slab of granite so gray' ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... her that this trial of her courage and self-control was not without one blessed result. He would rest for several days in the pleasure of what he had done or thought he had done. She need not cringe before that image of Dread for two, three days at least. Meanwhile, he would grow strong in body, and she, perhaps, in spirit. Only one precaution she must take. No hint of Mr. Challoner's presence in town must reach him. ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... in itself. But when I look on the world at large, when I see of what poor stuff those men are made who contrive to uphold their rule and what sort of antagonists we are likely to find in them, then I can only feel how disgraceful it would be to cringe before them and not to face them myself and try conclusions with them on the field. All of them, I perceive," he added, "beginning with our own friends here, hold to it that the ruler should only differ from his subjects by the splendour of his banquets, the wealth of ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... seemed to reach down and touch the very tops of the trees. The reddish soil of the fields grew dark under the continuous downpour; the roads, winding deep between the mudwalls and the fences of the orchards, were changed to rushing streams. The weeping orange-trees seemed to shrink and cringe under the deluge, as if in aggrieved protest at the sudden anger of that kindly, ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... burden forth to drink? You herd your oxen, each one in his stall? You whip and goad until they heed your call? You own, and use? Are these your cattle? Think! Although the while they cringe to you and shrink. And watch their fate in your least finger fall, Mistake not, lest they rise and ravage all, And your vast piled-up ...
— Selected Poems • William Francis Barnard
... there could be no right understanding betwixt prince and people, lord and servant, tutor and pupil, friend and friend, man and wife, buyer and seller, or any persons however otherwise related, if they did not cowardly put up small abuses, sneakingly cringe and submit, or after all fawningly scratch and flatter each other. This you will say is much, but you shall yet hear what is more; tell me then, can any one love another that first hates himself? Is it likely any one should agree with ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... upon that action, sorrowfully considering it. "I thought it very affable of him to shake hands," he said, "but he had a very final way of doing it. And, besides, I didn't care to make a tale of my private affairs, and seem to cringe. I didn't ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... such blundering, well-meant assistance as her mother could give her. She had found out that the world cannot pause to help the stricken, or to give a hand to the fallen, but that it always has leisure to cringe and make way for ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... Huntington, a son of somebody at the financial head of things. While sacrificing none of his steady self-reliance or self-respect, Ben Tillson decided to treat his new fireman, assistant to the old, with all due civility. He would cringe or kowtow to no one, but, like the sturdy citizen he was, Ben deemed it wise to keep on the good side of the powers. It was necessary, however, that the new-comer should understand who was boss on that engine, and even as they stood waiting at the Chimney ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... seek renown in arms, Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms; To shining palaces let fools resort And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court. Mine be the pleasure of a rural life, From noise remote and ignorant of strife, Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau, The lawless masquerade and midnight show; From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars, Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... man of two characters—one for public, one for private life. His manners to his superiors, and generally to his equals, were bland and insinuating; to his inferiors he was overbearing, haughty, and severe, except when he had some particular point to carry, and then he could cringe to and fawn upon the vilest. He had a peculiar method of entering into men's hearts, and worming from each whatever best suited his purpose; but the principle upon which he invariably acted, was, to extract the honey from the rose, and then scatter ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... flame, but our brothers have neither hope nor fire. Your mouth is cut of granite, but our brothers are soft and humble. Your head is high, but our brothers cringe. You walk, but our brothers crawl. We wish to be damned with you, rather than [-pleased-] {be blessed} with all our brothers. Do as you please with us, but do not send us ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand
... laird? My eyes are na gude.—Eh, laird, I remember the sermons of your grandfather, Gawin Elliot! Aye, aye! he was a lion against sinners! I hae seen them cringe!... It is the ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... week the boys put up with the cruelty of their tutor, who at once took an immense dislike to them on finding that they did not, like the other boys, cringe before him, and that no trashing could extract a cry ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... in their very midst, a ghastly heap of mangled flesh and shattered limbs were scattered to right and left. Two unhappy lads were blown to unrecognisable fragments. No words can convey the heart-rending cries of those whose bodies cringe and writhe from the hell-hot agony of searing shrapnel. There is an unmistakable appeal for pity that stirs the depth of feeling until a wild frenzy to right matters sends Berserk passion to the brain. Oh, you German ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... heroes seek renown to arms, Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms; To shining palaces let fools resort, And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court. Mine be the pleasure of a rural life, From noise remote and ignorant of strife, Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau, The lawless masquerade and midnight show; From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars, Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... match hedge sward bought stitch hatch ledge swarm bright fitch latch wedge thwart plight hitch patch fledge bilge budge fosse breadth twinge bridge judge thong breast print ridge drudge notch cleanse fling hinge grudge blotch friend string cringe plunge prompt ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... strained and overworked compared to the few basking in idleness, dying from rich living; and with all of them, whether fat or lean, the soul is more spoiled than the body. A superstitious respect keeps them cowed under their burden, or makes them cringe before their master. Servile, slothful, gluttonous, feeble, incapable of resisting adversity, if they have acquired the miserable skills of slavery, they have also contracted its needs, weaknesses and vices. A crust of absurd habits and perverse inclinations, a sort of artificial and supplementary ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... you to your Business, and I to mine. [Speaks as the rest go out. Let the dull trading Fool by Business live, Statesmen by Plots; the Courtier cringe to thrive; The Fop of Noise and Wealth be cullied on, And purchase no one Joy by being undone, Whilst I by nobler careless ways advance, Since Love and Fortune are acquir'd ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... slave kotoo; You love not such display; Let courtiers cringe and creatures "boo." 'Tis not our English way, My Prince, 'Tis not ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... they had marched a distance unknown to him, although it seemed long, they commenced to beat their drum, and raise the scalp halloo. The next village was near; they were calling for the gauntlet, and the stake. This made his flesh cringe, and pricked him to action. Now, or never! With a great spring and a wild whoop he bolted ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... "Ay! quail and cringe and crook the supple knee, And beg thy life of me, thine enemy, Whom thou, a moment since, didst doom to death. I will not breathe suspicion's lightest breath Against thy vaunted fame: and even though Before all men thou'st ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... haughty, resolute, zealous about their genealogies; extremely sober, ready to promise everything and do nothing, vindictive and highly suspicious of a stranger's intentions. Their bearing towards the Christian, whom they call the infidel, is full of contempt. They know no gratitude, and they would not cringe to the greatest Christian potentate. They are very long-suffering in adversity, hesitating in attack, and the bravest of the brave in defence. They disdain work as degrading and only a fit occupation ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... was not clever; she was simple and childish, with no complexity of passions or devious ways of intellect. It was her elemental jealousy which suggested the cunning plan for the unmasking of Juliette. She would make the girl cringe and fear, threaten her with discovery, and through her very terror shame ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... night had overcome all his boasted self-control, his gambler's coolness, and the real underlying brutality of his nature demanded expression. He yearned to crush, and hurt something—something that would cringe before him. I ventured to raise my head cautiously, so as to gain a glimpse of the man, and was surprised to note the change in his face. It was as though he had removed a mask. Heretofore, always holding the winning hand, ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... nor hear any melting apostrophies. Marius was not mouthing by the ruins of Carthage, nor even Rachel weeping for her Hebrew children. But there were on every hand manifestations of adherence to the Southern cause, except among a few males who feared unutterable things, and were disposed to cringe and prevaricate. The women were not generally handsome; their face was indolent, their dress slovenly, and their manner embarrassed. They lopped off the beginnings and the ends of their sentences, generally commencing with a verb, as thus: "Told soldiers not to carr' off ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Assessed Taxes on inhabited houses, windows, male servants, horses, carriages, etc. The trebling of these imposts took the House by surprise, and drew from Tierney, now, in the absence of Fox, the leader of Opposition, the taunt that Pitt had to cringe to the Bank for help. A few days later Pitt explained that the triple duty would fall only upon those who already paid L3 or more on that score. If the sum paid were less than L1 it would be halved. Those who paid L3 or ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... her with mingled anger and fascination. Here was certainly a new species of woman! Never before had any teacher at William Penn failed to cringe to his authority as ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... tend to do nothing in the days of the gospel but to find out how to be clothed in purple and fine linen, and to fare sumptuously every day, was by God brought so down, and laid so low at last, that he could crouch, and cringe, and beg for one small drop of water to cool his tongue—a thing, that but a little before he would have thought scorn to have done, when he also thought scorn to stoop to the grace and mercy of the gospel (Luke 16:19,24). But God was resolved to break his spirit, and the pride ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... in Nueva Cordoba," went on the Spaniard, "play the earthquake and the wave—then sail away, sail away, marauders! and leave the fortress virgin, and the treasure no lighter by one piece, and Luiz de Guardiola to find a day when English dogs shall cringe before him!" ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... The creature stood leering at me over his shoulder, and I knew he'd been using threats because my father, himself, was almost paralyzed with fear. And then I lost my head—in blind rage, I suppose. I must have talked like a common fish woman, but my one desire was to see them cringe. So I told about leaving the message for you, pretending to 've written a great deal more—twisting the knife all I knew how, and being thoroughly catty. It must have been a disgusting exhibition," she gave a ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... 'Remember Evelyn!' That startled the old man even more than the sight on the floor had done. He turned round, and I saw his fist rise as if against some menacing intruder, but it quickly fell again as his eyes encountered the picture which hung before him, and with a cringe painful to see in one of his years, he sidled back till he reached the doorway. Here he paused a minute to give another look at the man outstretched at his feet, and ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... surging through my mind came one after another the explanations of the hitherto inexplicable. Denison seemed almost to cringe in the chair, weak already ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... she shouted. "You can lie in the dock when you stand there and tell them you never murdered Douglas Romilly! That makes you cringe, doesn't it? I don't want to make a scene, but the woman you're in love with had better hear what I have to say. Are you going to give me back ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lightly. Skirl, squeal, scream. Skriech, screech. Slaes, sloes. Slap, gap in a fence. Slea, slay. Sleekit, sleek. Slid, smooth. Smeddum, powder. Smethe, smoke. Smoor, smother. Smothe, vapor. Snaw, snow. Snell, bitter. Snooded, bound up with a fillet. Snool, cringe. Solan, gannet. Soote, sweet. Souter, cobbler. Spak, spoke. Spean, wean. Speel, climb. Spier, ask, inquire. Spraing, stripe. Sprattle, scramble. Spreckled, speckled. Spryte, spirit. Squattle, squat. Stacher, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... 'what time so fit to do this in as now, when he has the bridle of Mansoul in his hand?' And this I took special notice of, that the inhabitants, notwithstanding all this, could not—no, they could not, when they see him march through the town, but cringe, bow, bend, and were ready to lick the dust of his feet. They also wished a thousand times over that he would become their Prince and Captain, and would become their protection. They would also one to another talk of the comeliness of his person, and how much for ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... on, till they came within sight of the lions. Now Mr. Great-heart was a strong man, So he was not afraid of a lion; but yet when they were come up to the place where the lions were, the boys that went before were glad when to cringe behind, for they were afraid of the lions; so they stepped back, and went behind. At this their guide smiled, and said, How now, my boys, do you love to go before, when no danger doth approach, and love to come behind so soon ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... man of mark. He has his friends and his foes. To those whom he deems worthy of conciliating, will he fawn and cringe. Those whom he despairs of making his friends, or those whose friendship may do him no good, he alienates determinedly, and ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... German noblesse and the vassalage of the other classes, I must say, from experience, that the German nobility show far less hauteur and have in general more really liberal ideas than most part of our English aristocracy, and a German burgher or shop-keeper would disdain to cringe before a nobleman as many shopkeepers, aye, and even gentry, are sometimes known to do in England. Another circumstance too proves on how much more liberal a footing Leipzig and other German Universities are than our English ones, which is, ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... contribution to the study of sociology and race characteristics, in which they have taken a lively interest of late. We know how it is ourselves, they said; we used to be thin-skinned and self-conscious and sensitive. We used to wince and cringe under English criticism, and try to strike back in a blind fury. We have learned that criticism is good for us, and we are grateful for it from any source. We have learned that English criticism is dictated by love for us, by a warm interest in our intellectual ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... perverse will made him watch his father drawn over the borders of life. And yet, now, every day, the great red-hot stroke of horrified fear through the bowels of the son struck a further inflammation. Gerald went about all day with a tendency to cringe, as if there were the point of a sword of Damocles pricking ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... may call a normal bucko. He hazed for the results rather than for the pleasure of hazing, though I think he did get some satisfaction out of thumping the men. You feel a fine thrill when you see a half dozen huskies cringe away before you with fear in their eyes. I imagine it is the same thrill a wild animal tamer feels as he faces his beasts. I felt this fascinating sensation many times after I had become a mate of ships. Lynch had no mercy on the stiffs ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... poor creatures who got so that in time they didn't even want to go over the side, who might have grown into honest, free men, but who, instead of that, learned only to live for the day when they too would have the power to make their inferiors stand around and cringe and whine." ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... the auld laird? My eyes are na gude.—Eh, laird, I remember the sermons of your grandfather, Gawin Elliot! Aye, aye! he was a lion against sinners! I hae seen them cringe!... It is ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... at the same time, the dismissal of the East. "No longer my masters" a voice seemed to cry from the very heart of that multitude. "No longer will we halt at your command, no longer will your words be wisdom to us, no longer shall we smile with pleasure at your stories, and cringe with fear at your displeasure; you may hate our defection, you may lament our disloyalty, you may bribe us and smile upon us, you may preach to us and bewail our sins. We are no longer yours—WE ARE OUR OWN—Salute a new world, for it is nothing ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... to struggle, an' never to cringe or fall— Still I worked for Charley, for Charley was now my all; And Charley was pretty good to me, with scarce a word or frown, Till at last he went a-courtin', and ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... Aurelius might have done it, but to an ordinary erring man, conscious of things done which should not have been done, and other things equally numerous left undone, he was too oppressive. One conscience is enough for any man. The employer of Master Bean had to cringe before two. Nobody can last long against an office-boy whose eyes shine with quiet, respectful reproof through gold-rimmed spectacles, whose manner is that of a middle-aged saint, and who obviously knows all the Plod and Punctuality books ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... hinge Threw wide her hospitable door, To one whose spirit did not cringe Though he was weak, and knew he bore No right ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... utterances, their blasphemy made him cringe. He wrapped the little broken body tighter in his arms. Was she, then, what she was by a loving God's decree? He kissed her hair and groaned in righteous anger. Did that Outcast Emperor dare call himself the representative of God on earth, and thereupon urge his menials to do evil for the sake ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... a quiver in the black forest of Boone's beard, and if Pierre was cold before, he was sick at heart to see the big man cringe before McGurk. ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... pretty little wife, who would sit on his knee and kiss him, saying, "Poor old boy, you are tired now;" therefore an emotional and distorted apprehension of things, a tendency to think himself a wronged and persecuted person, and under much bravado and swagger the cringe that is so inveterate ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... flowing wave of Taddle, Horrors! Why, I shall be a freshman! If they touch me I'll scream! ah—ha, I'll scream! Scream, and betray my sex? No, that won't do; At Rome I'll have to be a Roman; And, to escape that dread ordeal, I Shall cringe and crawl, and in the presence of A fourth year man step soft and bow, And smile if he but condescend to nod. Oh, yes, I'll do't. In tableaux once I played Uriah Heep, and made the character So "'umble" and so crawly, that for days I loathed my hands, ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... should I mingle in Fashion's full herd? Why crouch to her leaders, or cringe to her rules? Why bend to the proud, or applaud the absurd? Why search for delight, in ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... God but this congregation; that I shall deny my own conscience for theirs; that I shall go about the trivial, nonsensical things they call my pastoral duties, in fear and trembling; that my ministry is to cringe when they speak, and do their will regardless of what I feel to be the will of Christ! Faugh!" Big Dan drew himself erect. "If this is what the call to the ministry means, I am beginning to understand some things that have always ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... townspeople going out to the country.... And children who insulted one another shrilly.... But the white horse plodded on. On a stretch of level road he passed a pair talking, noting casually that the woman was a lady from her carriage, and from his threatening cringe that the man was a cad. Italian ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... beginning to wear away, and now the buccaneer sat up, rubbed his head in a bewildered fashion and looked around him. When he saw Rob he gave a shout of rage and drew his knife, but one motion of the electric tube made him cringe and slip away to the cabin, where ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... a bargain. I think I know just the sort of people mamma and sisters are. He told me she read him a lecture every time he danced twice with a poor girl, and now I am expected to walk into the same trap, and cringe to her ladyship, for the sin of being poor. I guess not! I'll teach school till I die first, and he can think of me as having a 'slab of granite so gray' to keep me ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... Pixley took him from the train, the dog was led through crowds of people and bustling, noisy streets that made Jan cringe and cower. At last they reached a place where water stretched so far that it touched the sky, and the water kept moving all the time. This frightened him, for he had never seen any water excepting ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... her you were drunk." Kent nodded gravely, and his lips curled as he watched the other cringe. "She called me a liar," he added, ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... attempt upon the girl's part to carry her point, he stamped his foot imperatively, to emphasize some command, and, with a look which made her cringe like a whipped cur before him; when, shooting a glance of fire and hate at Edith, she turned away, with a crestfallen air, and ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... heartless of you, Dorothy. Don't you see I'm in deadly earnest? Must my former frivolity dog my steps through life? When I call to mind that I made fun to you of his serious purpose in life, the thought makes me cringe and ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... night comes round me, And the soft chain of thought has bound me, I whisper, "Sir, your eyes are killing— You owe no mortal man a shilling— You never cringe for star or garter, You're much too wise to be a martyr— And since you must, be food for vermin, You don't feel much desire for ermine!" Wisdom is a mine, no doubt, If one can but find it out— But whate'er I think or say, I'm an April fool to-day, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... this token. In my hand At least it shall lie safe, nor be a god: I worship not the bullet.... But beware What mummer's part you play in this strange scene. For by the victory I have won of late, I am your master! And in grovelling dust Before me you shall cringe, though all the world Shun me, your conqueror. Vilest of slaves! ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... cloaks with huge hoods. Their heads are shaved, and their faces covered with short, grisly, fierce beards. They are silent mostly, looking out of their eyes ferociously, as though murder were in their thoughts, and rapine. But they never slouch, or cringe in their bodies, or shuffle in their gait. Dirty, fierce-looking, uncouth, repellent as they are, there is always about them a something of personal dignity which is not compatible with an Englishman's ordinary hat ...
— A Ride Across Palestine • Anthony Trollope
... moving along lightly. Skirl, squeal, scream. Skriech, screech. Slaes, sloes. Slap, gap in a fence. Slea, slay. Sleekit, sleek. Slid, smooth. Smeddum, powder. Smethe, smoke. Smoor, smother. Smothe, vapor. Snaw, snow. Snell, bitter. Snooded, bound up with a fillet. Snool, cringe. Solan, gannet. Soote, sweet. Souter, cobbler. Spak, spoke. Spean, wean. Speel, climb. Spier, ask, inquire. Spraing, stripe. Sprattle, scramble. Spreckled, speckled. Spryte, spirit. Squattle, squat. Stacher, stagger, totter. Stane, stone. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... (Proverbs xxvii. 5). They believe that the Lord has yet many things to say unto them, and they are willing and glad for Him to say them by whom He will, but especially by their leaders and their brethren. While they do not fawn and cringe before men, nor believe everything that is said to them, without proving it by the word and Spirit of God, they believe that God "gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... rose to his full height. His eyes blazed with anger and he raised his arm to strike Alyrus, who did not cringe but faced him boldly, though ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... to embark on his career of international madness and prosecute it with the rage of a demon is not entirely clear. A vision of himself as the Napoleon of southern South America, who might cause Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay to cringe before his footstool, while he disposed at will of their territory and fortunes, doubtless stirred his imagination. So, too, the thought of his country, wedged in between two huge neighbors and threatened with suffocation between their overlapping folds, ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... again? No, she owed him a letter, and if she loved him, would doubtless answer it as soon as circumstances would permit; and he 'would let that haughty old aristocrat, her father, see that Philip Hayforth, the merchant, had more of the spirit of a man in him than to cringe to the proudest blood in England. And as for Emily, she was his betrothed bride—the same as his wife; and if he was not more to her than any father on earth, she was unworthy of the love he had given her. Let her only ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... successful always, until my holdings grew to what they are to-day—the wonder of the twentieth century. What do I care for the world's respect when my money makes the world my slave? What respect can I have for a people that cringe before money and let it rule them? Are you aware that not a factory wheel turns, not a vote is counted, not a judge is appointed, not a legislator seated, not a president elected without my consent? ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... You love not such display; Let courtiers cringe and creatures "boo." 'Tis not our English way, My Prince, 'Tis not our ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... ardent heroes seek renown in arms, Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms; To shining palaces let fools resort And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court. Mine be the pleasure of a rural life, From noise remote and ignorant of strife, Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau, The lawless masquerade and midnight show; From ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... it appears in a letter of March 25, 1911, to Mr. Charles Scribner: "With this note I send the introduction to Father Damien. I didn't see how to touch upon the others when I know so little about them. I know this thing is about as bad as anything can be. I cringe whenever I think of it, but I seem incapable of doing better. If, however, it is beyond the pale, write and tell me, please, and I will try once again. Louis's work was so mixed up with his home life that it is hard to see just where to draw the line between telling enough ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... new pressure prodding him as he goes, until he dies and his final form will be that predestined of the many pressures. An exchange of cradle-babes, and the base-born slave may wear the purple imperially, and the royal infant begs an alms as wheedlingly or cringe to the lash as abjectly as his meanest subject. A Chesterfield, with an empty belly, chancing upon good fare, will gorge as faithfully as the swine in the next sty. And an Epicurus, in the dirt-igloo of the Eskimos, will wax eloquent over the whale oil ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... he thought, too, of his newly arrived brother, and the hatefulness of personal comparison made him almost cringe beneath their flagellations. Bill, so big of heart and body, so lacking in the many abilities which go to make up the man in men's eyes, but which count for so little in a woman's, so strong in the buoyancy and fearlessness that was his. He felt ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... was languidly occupied in making brushes, like the prisoners of the Alondiga, and two I saw whiling away the time making lace! Several of them tagged my footsteps, eager for some errand. One feels no great sense of security in a country whose boyish, uneducated, and ragged guardians of order cringe around like beggar ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... light thing, to be vouched in so serious a matter, but yet it expresseth well the deformity. There is a master of scoffing, that in his catalogue of books of a feigned library, sets down this title of a book, The Morris-Dance of Heretics. For indeed, every sect of them, hath a diverse posture, or cringe by themselves, which cannot but move derision in worldlings, and depraved politics, who are apt to ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... himself surrounded by admirers, and whose vanity is hourly feasted with all the luxuries of studied praise, is easily persuaded that his influence will be extended beyond his life; that they who cringe in his presence will reverence his memory, and that those who are proud to be numbered among his friends, will endeavour to vindicate his choice by zeal for ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... He is told to be pure in thought, word, and deed; to be temperate, chaste, and truthful; to offer prayer to Ormuzd and the powers that fight with him; to destroy all hurtful things; and to do all that will increase the well- being of mankind. Men were not to cringe before the powers of darkness as slaves crouch before a tyrant, they were to meet them upstanding, and confound them by unending opposition and the power of a holy life. 'Oh men, if you cling to these commandments which Mazda ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... characters—one for public, one for private life. His manners to his superiors, and generally to his equals, were bland and insinuating; to his inferiors he was overbearing, haughty, and severe, except when he had some particular point to carry, and then he could cringe to and fawn upon the vilest. He had a peculiar method of entering into men's hearts, and worming from each whatever best suited his purpose; but the principle upon which he invariably acted, was, to extract the honey from ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... become problems to each other. The very breath each drew was a challenge and a menace to the other. Their hate bound them together as love could never bind. Leclere was bent on the coming of the day when Batard should wilt in spirit and cringe and whimper at his feet. And Batard—Leclere knew what was in Batard's mind, and more than once had read it in Batard's eyes. And so clearly had he read, that when Batard was at his back, he made it a point to glance often ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... get out of that doleful prison. But all his writings are thirty years too late; they express the creed of a buried generation, of the men who defied Spain in the name of a God of righteousness,—not of men who cringe before her in the name of a God of power and cunning. The captive eagle has written with a quill from his own wing—a quill which has been wont ere now to soar to heaven. Every line smacks of the memories ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... impersonations—these were the gods that England, in the majesty of her State, in the sovereignty of her chartered weal, must abase herself to then. To the vices of tyranny, to low companions and their companions, and their kindred, the State must cringe and kneel then. To these,—men who meddled with affairs of State,—who took, even at such a time, the State to be their business,—must address themselves; for these were the councils in which England's peace and war were settled then, and the Tribune could enter them only in disguise. His veto ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... no hypocrite, Byron, nor will I, for your pleasure, ever suffer you to call me names, if you wish me to be your friend. If not, I cannot help it. I am sure no one can say that I will cringe to regain a friendship that you have rejected. Why should I do so? Am I not your equal? Therefore, what interest can I have in doing so? When we meet again in the world, (that is, if you choose it,) you cannot ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... had to bear the cross in the sight of thousands who regarded Him with scorn. To a noble spirit there is no trial more severe than shame—to be the object of cruel mirth and insolent triumph. Jesus had the lofty and refined self-consciousness of one who never once had needed to cringe or stoop. He loved and honoured men too much not to wish to be loved and honoured by them; He had enjoyed days of unbounded popularity, but now His soul was filled with reproach to the uttermost; and He could have appropriated the words of the ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... see— 150 Seem'd but a dream of the heart, Seem'd but a cry of desire. Yes! I believe that there lived Others like thee in the past, Not like the men of the crowd 155 Who all round me to-day Bluster or cringe, and make life Hideous, and arid, and vile; But souls temper'd with fire, Fervent, heroic, and good, 160 Helpers and friends ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... fraud," she cried. "Thief he calls me—well, it's bred in the bone. Set a thief to catch a thief. I've run him to earth. He'll have to lose hundreds of thousands, and more. It will send him wild with terror. Think what that'll mean! Think how he'll cringe and whine and implore! It'll be like plucking out his heart. I have the whip-hand of him now, and he shall dance to my tune. I shouldn't be surprised if compulsory honesty and the restoration of ill-gotten wealth ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... him," the Reverend Cecil told himself again and again; "that brought it home to him. He was quite cowed. He could do nothing but bow and cringe away. Yes, I ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... the money back, together with interest thereon, but the people of this country are intelligent enough to know what that means, and they will be patriotic enough to see to it that no man needs to bow or bend or cringe to the rich to attain ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... gill gem gibe germ tinge edge urge huge serge judge singe ledge large barge fudge lodge dodge ridge cringe lunge budge hedge badge sledge nudge wedge fringe range bridge merge grudge trudge mange ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... is nearer to us; he speaks our thoughts, not those of our fathers; he does not cringe before the gods and fate; he fights with them; he loves men, knows them, and laments them; his art is more elaborate, his feelings warmer, his pictures more life-like than those of the ancients. But now I should like to ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... than they. They were almost always solemn and portentous, and they were for the most part of a deathly respectability. She wasn't necessarily snobbish, unless it was snobbish to want the best. She didn't cringe, she didn't make herself smaller than she was; she took on the contrary a stand of her own and attracted things to herself. Naturally she was possible only in America—only in a country where whole ranges ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... of the young women round about her, gave Rebecca inexpressible pangs of envy. "What airs that girl gives herself, because she is an Earl's grand-daughter," she said of one. "How they cringe and bow to that Creole, because of her hundred thousand pounds! I am a thousand times cleverer and more charming than that creature, for all her wealth. I am as well bred as the Earl's grand-daughter, for all her fine pedigree; and yet every one passes ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... wept when he told her this. She was shaken with all she had undergone in London, poor woman, and this man, who could cringe to her for a large dole out of her pittance, was the beloved ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... Thomas Paine recant? Mr. Paine had prophesied that fanatics would crawl and cringe around him during his last moments. He believed that they would put a lie in the mouth of death. When the shadow of the coming dissolution was upon him, two clergymen, Messrs. Milledollar and Cunningham, ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... do anything for you, mother," said Florence, whose own eyes had a suspicion of tears in them. "It was just a passing weakness, and I am all right now. Yes, I will get the Scholarship, and I will stoop to Aunt Susan's ways—I will cringe to her if necessary; I will do my best to propitiate Sir John Wallis, and I will act like a snob in every sense of the word. There now, Mummy, I see you are dying to have the box opened. We will open it and see ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... with unclean transformation, or alter To the likeness of courtiers whose consciences falter At the smile or the frown, at the mirth or the rage, Of a master whom chance could inflame or assuage, Our Lady of Laughter, invoked in no psalter, Adored of no faithful that cringe and that palter, Praise be with thee yet from a ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... cock-of-the-roost sits aloft like Jupiter on an unsharable seat, holding your fate between two thongs of inconstant leather. Helpless, ridiculous, confined, bobbing like a toy mandarin, you sit like a rat in a trap—you, before whom butlers cringe on solid land—and must squeak upward through a slit in your peripatetic sarcophagus to make ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... No bastard shall reign here as Mother of the Trees while the nations round cringe before her feet. I have spells; I have poisons; I have slaves who can ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... "whenever I think of government in itself. But when I look on the world at large, when I see of what poor stuff those men are made who contrive to uphold their rule and what sort of antagonists we are likely to find in them, then I can only feel how disgraceful it would be to cringe before them and not to face them myself and try conclusions with them on the field. All of them, I perceive," he added, "beginning with our own friends here, hold to it that the ruler should only differ from his subjects by the splendour of his banquets, the wealth of gold ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... might be altered if I—" Her lips trembled despite the brave countenance she presented to him. In a second she had quelled the threatened weakness. "I have made this house a paradise. I have made it a place in which you may find happiness if you care to seek for it here. At night I shudder and cringe, because I am the coward you would try to reform. I hide nothing from myself. I am afraid to be alone in this house. But ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... one man, so vast his power, so august his dignity, absolute master of the lives and property of one hundred and twenty millions, for the people were now deprived of the election of magistrates and the creation of laws. How could the greatest nobles otherwise than cringe to the supreme captain of the armies, the prince of the Senate, and the high-priest of the national divinities—himself, the recipient of honors only paid to gods! But Augustus kept up the forms of ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... killed, but the rapidity of his action saved him, for the spear passed his shoulder so close that it tore away a shred of his coat, and stuck in the wall behind him. In another instant Doltaire had his sword-point at Voban's throat. The man did not cringe, did not speak a word, but his hands clinched, and the muscles of his face worked painfully. There was at first a fury in Doltaire's face and a metallic hardness in his eyes, and I was sure he meant to pass his sword through the other's body; but after standing ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... part which was to continue through life, I considered deeply on the humours of the spectators. I saw that the character of the English was servile to rank, and yielding to pretension—they admire you for your acquaintance, and cringe to you for your conceit. The first thing, therefore, was to know great people—the second to controul them. I dressed well, and had good horses—that was sufficient to make me sought by the young of my own ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... religion every few months and is now in the first fast furious throes of her latest, which is some form of psychomania, whereof the high priest is one Beverley, a plausible ringletted charlatan of alcoholic tendencies (Sludge the Medium, without his cringe and snarl), who ekes out his spasmodic visitations of genuine psychic illumination with the most shameless spoof. This is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... was a spirit in the world that would insult where it dared, but it would creep and cringe where it dared not. Let me remind you of a sentence of your own, the occasion for which I have forgotten: 'That little spirits will always accommodate themselves to the temper of those they would work upon: will fawn upon a sturdy-tempered person: will insult the meek:'—And another given to Miss ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... a flame, but our brothers have neither hope nor fire. Your mouth is cut of granite, but our brothers are soft and humble. Your head is high, but our brothers cringe. You walk, but our brothers crawl. We wish to be damned with you, rather than [-pleased-] {be blessed} with all our brothers. Do as you please with us, but do not send ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand
... Head if Earth rotative seems And close your Lids from these o'er wakeful Gleams - Although your Palate cringe you shall not shrink Within the Kitchen of the ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... was something in his manner which forbade her treating him as aught save an equal. He was not to be trampled down, and for once in her life Mrs. Livingstone had found a person who would neither cringe to her nor flatter. The children were not presented to him until dinner time, when, with the air of a young desperado, John Jr. marched into the dining-room, eying, his teacher askance, calculating his strength, and returning his ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... the course than he had done, because he wanted to find cannibals, and teach them, maybe, a needed lesson. Fred's theory was that we should surprise them and pen them into a cavern, discovering some means of talking with them when hunger brought them out to surrender and cringe. ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... outside," answered the boy, with trepidation. It was part of the law that the lion of the ante-room should cringe like a cold monkey, more or less, as soon as he was out of his private jungle. "Oh, Tallerman," cried the Sunday editor, "here's this Arctic man come to arrange about his illustration. I wish you'd go and talk it over with him." By chance he picked ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... that action, sorrowfully considering it. "I thought it very affable of him to shake hands," he said, "but he had a very final way of doing it. And, besides, I didn't care to make a tale of my private affairs, and seem to cringe. I didn't ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... rarely, nay, never, otherwise than wasteful in themselves. To put into their pockets or, like Marshall Villeroi ("a-t-on mis de l'or dans mes poches?"), have it put by their valets, to replace what was lost overnight, these proud and often honourable nobles would ante-chamber and cringe for sinecures, pensions, indemnities, privileges, importune and supplicate the King, the King's mistress, pandar or lacquey. And the sinecure, pension, indemnity or privilege was always deducted out of the bread—rye-bread, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... they beheld the feat, and when he had lowered the weapon and silence was restored, he continued, defiantly, while his breath came quick and short: "And where do the talkers, the parleyers seek to lead us? To cringe like dogs, who lick their masters' feet, before the men who cheat us. Count Mannsfeld will come to-day; I know it, and I have also learned that he will bring everything except what is our due, what we need, what we intend to demand, what we require for our bare feet, our ragged bodies; ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... prisoner. She was wonderful. She was panting in her excitement. From the floor Blake had noticed that her little white finger was pressing gently against the trigger of the rifle. It had made him shudder. It made the Eskimo cringe a bit now as Philip tied his hands behind him. And Philip saw it, and his heart ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... what, forsooth, shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied humiliations of fifty million fellows? Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow. Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... that should complaint be made of him at Rome, his corruption and cruelties, his extortions and the unjustifiable slaughter he had caused would all be brought against him. He was the Roman ruler, but the people over whom he exercized official dominion delighted in seeing him cringe, when they cracked, with vicious snap above his head, the whip of a threatened report about him to his imperial ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... their base knees in the court And servilely cringe round the gate, And barter their honour to earn the support Of the wealthy, the titled, the great; Their guilt piled possessions I loathe, while I scorn The knaves, the vile knaves who possess 'em; I love not to pamper oppression, but mourn For the poor, ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... motion from Elsa, whose trust returns when she sees her beloved in danger, permits Lohengrin to parry the first blow with his sword, and Frederick of Telramund soon lies dead upon the floor, while his accomplices cringe at Lohengrin's feet imploring his pardon. Day is dawning, and Lohengrin, after caring tenderly for the half-fainting Elsa, bids the would-be assassins bear the corpse into the presence of the king, where he promises to meet Elsa and satisfy all ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... used to humiliate myself because of my poverty. I thought of the time when I had already entered the cloak business, but was struggling and squirming and constantly racking my brains for some way of raising a hundred dollars; when I would cringe with a certain East Side banker and vainly beg him to extend a small note of mine, and come away in a sickening ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... of this merchant I am corresponding clerk, and am only able to come and see you now by offering to undertake a special business mission for my employer at Paris. It is drudgery, at my time of life, after all I have gone through—but my hard work is innocent work. I am not obliged to cringe for every crown-piece I put in my pocket—not bound to denounce, deceive, and dog to death other men, before I can earn my bread, and scrape together money enough to bury me. I am ending a bad, base life harmlessly at last. It is a poor thing to do, but it is something done—and ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... was generously kept in her service after Marie Louise had become Empress. M. de Remusat remained in the Emperor's service until the fall of the Empire, and then went over to Louis XVIII. Both of these sycophants were content to accept the favours of the Imperial couple and eat their bread and cringe at their feet while they plotted with the plotters for the ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... slink away like a whipped dog—for the mean are ever the first to cringe—my friend turned from the window. Meeting my eyes as he went back to his seat, he laughed. 'Well,' he ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... believe that there lived Others like thee in the past. Not like the men of the crowd. Who all around me to-day, Bluster, or cringe, and make life Hideous, and arid, and vile, But souls temper'd with fire, Fervent, heroic, and good; Helpers, and friends of ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... his bond, for he hated a lie, An sickophants doubly despised; He wor ne'er know to cringe to a rich fly-bi-sky, It wor worth an net wealth 'at he prized. Aw shall ne'er meet another soa honest an true, As aw write ther's a tear i' mi ee; Nah he's gooan to his rest, an aw'll give him his due,— He wor allus a gooid ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... heroes seek renown in arms, Pant after fame, and rush to war's alarms; To shining palaces let fools resort, And dunces cringe to be esteem'd at court: Mine be the pleasure of a rural life, From noise remote, and ignorant of strife; Far from the painted belle, and white-glov'd beau, The lawless masquerade and midnight show; From ladies, lap-dogs, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... a flaming torch, and he waved it before him and laughed to see the warriors cringe. A cloud of smoke was billowing about him—he leaped to safety through a rising ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... whine and the bullets sing From the mad machine-guns chattering; Black smoke rolling across the mud, Trenches plastered with flesh and blood— The blue ranks lock with the ranks of gray, Stab and stagger and sob and sway; The living cringe from the shrapnel bursts, The dying moan of their burning thirsts, Moan and die in the gulping slough— Where are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... that spring From fatherhood so fair as Deity? Fleas are no sons of men, although they be Flesh-born: brave thoughts and deeds this honour bring. If princes great or small seek anything Adverse to good and God's authority, Which of you dares refuse? Nay, who is he That doth not cringe to do their pleasuring? So then with soul and blood in verity You serve base gold, vices, and worthless men— God with lip-service only and with lies, Sunk in the slough of dire idolatry: If Ignorance begat these errors, ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... saints on each side, with crowns in their hands, intended, I suppose, for a representation of Our Saviour's coming to judgment. Some of the company espying this, cry out and say, 'Lo, this is the God these people bow and cringe unto; this is the idol they worship and adore.' Hereupon several souldiers charged their muskets, (amongst whom one Daniel Wood, of Captain Roper's company was the chief) and discharge them at it: and by the many shots they made, at length do quite deface ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... round eyes turning and twisting in their sockets, ever watchful for food and danger. Without warning a terrific splash scatters them, and when the ripples and bubbles cease, five frightened sunfish cringe in terror among the water plants of the bottom mud. Off to her nest goes the kingfisher, bearing to her brood the ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... found themselves as definitely threatened by the law as were the Supervisors. But wealth is made of sterner stuff. It did not cringe nor huddle; could not seek immunity through the confessional. Famous lawyers found themselves in high demand. From New York, where he had fought a winning fight for Harry Thaw, came Delphin Delmas. T.C. Coogan, another famous ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... black, And the wail of the South wings forth; Will ye cringe to the hot tornado's rack, And the vampires of the North? Strike! ye can win a martyr's goal, Strike! with a ruthless hand— Strike! with the vengeance of the soul, For your bright, beleaguered land! To arms! to arms! for the South needs help, ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... thing made her cringe in the deep chair. She was losing her clear, sweet vision of that blessed night when Gaston and she had stood transfigured! If only she could have held to that, all would have been so simple—but with that fading glory gone she would be alone in a barren, cheerless place to act not ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... angel of such men, prayed for and adored her husband as if he had been the best and tenderest of gentlemen. Providence has its mysteries; but if there be one that taxes faith and staggers patience more than another, it is the long misery that makes a good woman cringe and writhe and agonize in silence under the utter rule and life-long sovereignty of a bad man. Perhaps such women do not suffer as we fancy; for after much trial every woman learns that it is possible to love where neither respect nor admiration can find foothold,—that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... at the far side of the rope-ladder doorway. Carmena had bent her head to pass under the massive lintel. Lennon followed Elsie to the side of the doorway opposite Farley. The lawyer-ranchman appeared to cringe, yet he held to his position and even attempted an ingratiating smile as he rasped ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... to tyrants; her sons will never cringe to France; neither a supercilious, five-headed Directory, nor the gasconading pilgrim of Egypt will ever dictate terms to sovereign America. The thunder of our cannon shall insure the performance of our treaties, and fulminate destruction on Frenchmen, till old ocean is crimsoned ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... about his cell seeking refuge in motion and finding none; then he threw himself on the floor and struggled for sleep. Sleep would not come so sought; and now his spirits were quite cowed. He would cringe to Hawes; he would lick the dust at his feet to get out of this horrible place; who could he get to go and tell the governor he was penitent. He listened at the door; he rapped; no one came. He put his ear to the ground and listened; no sound—blackness, ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... north cringe beneath the corrupting influence of slavery, and their moral courage is borne down by it. Not the hypocritical and unprincipled alone, but even such as can hardly be supposed ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... impressed upon their mind inversely by the birch? Do not they there receive their first lesson in slavery with the first lesson in A B C; and are not their minds thereby prostrated, so as never to rise again, but ever to bow to despotism, to cringe to rank, to think and act by the precepts of others, and to tacitly disavow that sacred equality which is our birthright? No, sir, without they can teach without resorting to such a fundamental error as flogging, my boy shall never go ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... among the great composers of his country, if only his life had been of a different nature. But he was not born under a lucky star. He had written much in his time, and yet he had never been fortunate enough to see any of his compositions published. He did not know how to set to work, how to cringe at the right moment, how to proffer a request at the fitting time. Once, it is true, a very long time ago, one of his friends and admirers, also a German, and also poor, published at his own expense two of Lemm's sonatas. But they remained untouched on the shelves of the music shops; silently they ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... Whip him.—Were't twenty of the greatest tributaries That do acknowledge Caesar, should I find them So saucy with the hand of she here,—what's her name Since she was Cleopatra?—Whip him, fellows, Till like a boy you see him cringe his face, And whine aloud ...
— Antony and Cleopatra • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... inclination. A Malay servant, should his master threaten to strike him, will say: "Cut my pay, sir, or turn me away if I am in fault, but (emphatically) don't strike me." A Bengalee, under similar circumstances, would cringe under his master's feet, salaam to the ground, beg to be whipped, but "Oh," would be his cry, "don't cut my pay, sir." Nothing used to annoy me so much as this excessive servility of the Bengalee servants: they will do any thing for pice, pice; ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... thing happened: hundreds and hundreds of wee lights began dancing outside the window, making the room bright; the hands of the clock began chasing each other round the dial, and the bolt of the door drew itself out. Slowly, without a creak or a cringe, the door opened, and in there trooped a crowd of the Good People. Their wee green cloaks were folded close about them, and ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... polite names. For instance, the former, when kept within polite boundaries, is usually known as Love. As Avarice makes but a sorry theme for the romantic writer, Love is the subject that must principally claim your attention. All the world loves a lover, while the miser is despised even by those who cringe beneath the power of his gold. Study the women, my lad, and when you know them thoroughly begin your great ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... will not stir: Do you mark, I will not. Let me see the wretch That dares attempt to force me. Why, you slaves Created only to make legs, and cringe; To carry in a dish, and shift a trencher; That have not souls to hope a blessing Beyond your master's leavings; you that were born Only to consume meat and drink; Who advances? ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... makes the mob cringe before Coriolanus. When he appears, the stage directions show that the "citizens steal away." ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... disturb their mind; They eat their meals, and take their sport Nor know who's in or out at court. They never to the levee go To treat, as dearest friend, a foe: They never importune his grace, Nor ever cringe to men in place: Nor undertake a dirty job, Nor draw the quill to write for Bob.[1] Fraught with invective, they ne'er go To folks at Paternoster Row. No judges, fiddlers, dancing-masters, No pickpockets, or poetasters, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... had the shock of my life. She's—oh, she's too terrible for words! Her voice makes me cringe. And she pawed all my things. She snatched up my photos, and turned over my books with sticky fingers; she even opened my ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... marched a distance unknown to him, although it seemed long, they commenced to beat their drum, and raise the scalp halloo. The next village was near; they were calling for the gauntlet, and the stake. This made his flesh cringe, and pricked him to action. Now, or never! With a great spring and a wild whoop he bolted ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... he shouted, "one rascal leading another! Trust a man to find his mate! A plague on you, swineherd, where are you taking that pitiful wretch? Another beggar, I suppose, to hang about the doors and cringe for the scraps and spoil our feasts? Now if you would only let me have him to watch my farm and sweep out my stalls and fetch fodder for my kids, he could drink as much whey as he liked and get some flesh on his bones. But no! His tricks have spoilt ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... race, Like wand'ring Arabs shift from place to place. Vagrants by law, to Justice open laid, They tremble, of the beadle's lash afraid, And fawning cringe, for wretched means of life, To Madam May'ress, or his ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... in this town," replied Mrs. Belloc. "But usually rich men are timid and stingy. If they weren't, they'd make us all cringe. As it is, I've heard some awful stories of how men and women who've got some powerful person down on them have ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... know not. The latter, however, is not improbable; for proud, and haughty, and dignified, as the colonel NOW is, such was not THEN the character of the ensign; who seemed thrown out of one of Nature's supplest moulds, to fawn, and cringe, and worm his way to favour by the wily speciousness of his manners. Oh God!" pursued Wacousta, after a momentary pause, and striking his palm against his forehead, "that I ever should have been the dupe of such a ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... polite,' growled Jill, who had been reading the letter over my shoulder. 'How can you cringe so ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... don't cringe," said the outcast, dropping the fawning tone of the mendicant for the threatening ferocity of the social wolf; "you'd better give me a trifle to keep body and soul together for the next few weeks. I'm a desperate man, George! You and I are alone up here. You are pretty sure to have ready ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... no! I neither want to cringe to the mob, nor be its master; I prefer to go my own way alone . . ." answered ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... roll of gray stocking from the hall table and flung it into Ursula's room. Ursula knew she would have to follow it, or be picked up and carried in like a naughty child. So she gave the miserable Ramsay a look that made him cringe, and swept into her room with her head in the air. The next moment she heard the door locked behind her. Her first proceeding was to have a cry of anger and shame and disappointment. That did no good, and then she took to marching up and down ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... was lurking a mighty fear. His brain was scourged by thoughts of impending disgrace. The princess had plainly threatened his degradation. After all these years, he was to tremble with shame and humiliation; he was to cringe where he had always boasted of domineering power. And besides all this, Marlanx had a bullet wound in his left shoulder! The world could not have known, for he knew ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... spirit is ever pointing the vision upward to what we may become, instead of allowing it to grovel around in the very unpleasant circumstances in which some people are liable to find themselves. The outward vision is transient, the inner vision can build eternal realities. "Are we to beg and cringe and hang on the outer edge of life,—we who should walk grandly? Is it for man to tremble and quake—man who in his spiritual capacity becomes the interpreter of God's message,—the focus ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... Miranda, to whom opposition served as a tonic, "and move that flat-iron on to the front o' the stove. Rebecca, set down in that low chair beside the board, and Jane, you spread out her hair on it and cover it up with brown paper. Don't cringe, Rebecca; the worst's over, and you've borne up real good! I'll be careful not to pull your hair nor scorch you, and oh, HOW I'd like to have Alice Robinson acrost my knee and a good strip o' shingle in my right hand! There, ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... at one's feet; craven; crouch before, throw oneself at the feet of; swallow the leek, swallow the pill; kiss the rod; turn the other cheek; avaler les couleuvres [Fr.], gulp down. obey &c 743; kneel to, bow to, pay homage to, cringe to, truckle to; bend the neck, bend the knee; kneel, fall on one's knees, bow submission, courtesy, curtsy, kowtow. pocket the affront; make the best of, make a virtue of necessity; grin and abide, grin and ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... high and low, Church and State. Let any one make a move to tear that idol down from its altar, made of dead men's bones, and see what a flutter there is in the camp, how new laws are made and old laws shoved aside, and new laws fixed over, and the highest and the lowest will lie and cringe and drag themselves on their knees in front of it to protect it and worship it. Don't talk to me about your wood idols; they hain't nothin' to be compared to it. They stay where they're put, they don't rare round and kill their worshippers as this Whiskey idol duz. I'd think enough sight more ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... seem crotchety, dear. Indeed, it is no pretense on my part. You cannot imagine how that man Ventana persecuted me. The mere suggestion of any one's paying me compliments and trying to be fascinating is so repellent that I cringe at the thought. And even our sailor-like captain will think it necessary to play the society clown, I suppose, seeing that we are young ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... tinker was also an itinerant political preacher, and seeing that he could prevail nothing by secular pleas, he betook himself to his spiritual armory, and in a voice of sour derision that made Bessie Fairfax cringe asked the doctor if he had yet received the Devil's Decalogue according to h'act of Parliament and justices' notices that might be read on every wall?—and he proceeded to recite it: "Thou shalt remove the old landmarks, and enter into the fields ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... could not write it, he could not even think about it! And there was the soul of Corydon calling to him, there were all the heights of music and poetry—and instead of climbing, he must torture his brain with hack-writing! He must go down to the editors, and fawn and cringe, and try to get books to review; he must study the imbecilities of the magazines and watch out for topics for articles; he must rack his brains for jokes and jingles—he, the master of life, the bearer of a new religion, the proud, high-soaring eagle, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... of letting people get ever so little out of hand! No, this democratic rabble, with its quintets, is a poor foundation; what we want is one magnificent, despotic will, like an idol, resting on something fundamental and external.... Then the quintets will cringe into obedience and be obsequiously ready on occasion. But, anyway, though, they are all crying out now that Stavrogin wanted his wife to be burnt and that that's what caused the fire ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... indifferent tone shocked her. She was not without an unphrased feeling that death was so sacred or at least so solemn a subject that it should be treated with reverence. Any jesting upon it made her cringe, and the light mention of it seemed to her ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... waving. They drift upward nearer the surface, the wide round eyes turning and twisting in their sockets, ever watchful for food and danger. Without warning a terrific splash scatters them, and when the ripples and bubbles cease, five frightened sunfish cringe in terror among the water plants of the bottom mud. Off to her nest goes the kingfisher, bearing to her ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... thus," said she, "should be my joy, and thy joy, and Pentavalon's salvation, mayhap. O, see you not, Beltane? Thou should'st be henceforth my lord, my knight-at-arms to lead my powers 'gainst Duke Ivo, teaching Mortain to cringe no more to a usurper—to free Pentavalon from her sorrows—ah, see ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... used to be scared of nobody. Well, it's different now. She rides me with a Spanish bit, and my soul ain't my own." With a sudden lightening of his gloom, he added: "Say, you're going to stay right here with us as long as you're in town; I want you to see how I cringe." In spite of Blaze's plaintive tone it was patent that he was inordinately proud of Paloma and ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... the truth, Let us not cringe so much in fear That foes may whisper to our youth That we have failed in courage here. Lord, strengthen us, that they may know Our spirits follow ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... far side of the rope-ladder doorway. Carmena had bent her head to pass under the massive lintel. Lennon followed Elsie to the side of the doorway opposite Farley. The lawyer-ranchman appeared to cringe, yet he held to his position and even attempted an ingratiating smile as he ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... latter, however, is not improbable; for proud, and haughty, and dignified, as the colonel NOW is, such was not THEN the character of the ensign; who seemed thrown out of one of Nature's supplest moulds, to fawn, and cringe, and worm his way to favour by the wily speciousness of his manners. Oh God!" pursued Wacousta, after a momentary pause, and striking his palm against his forehead, "that I ever should have been the dupe of ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... growled Jill, who had been reading the letter over my shoulder. 'How can you cringe so ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... said, ignoring him, "who would ordinarily cringe at the sight of a wounded beetle sit through bloody murders and go home with ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in a crotch of the spruce Neewa looked down on the first great tragedy of his life, and the advent of man. The two-legged beast made him cringe deeper into his refuge, and his little heart was near breaking with the terror that had seized upon him. He did not reason. It was by no miracle of mental process that he knew something terrible had happened, ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... his power to induce the man to work and to cease drinking. I demurred strongly to all this, and extended the argument which I had made during our previous walk, telling him that by such giving he did two wrongs: first, to the beggar himself, since it led him to cringe and lie in order to obtain as a favor that which, if he did his duty in working, he could claim as a right; and, secondly, to society by encouraging such a multitude to prey upon it who might be giving it aid and strength; and I again called his attention to the hordes of sturdy beggars in ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... a vain man, I hope; but I would rather be deprived of the right of suffrage, high punishment as it is, I would rather suffer all the penalties that would be inflicted even by the most malignant lawgiver, than to cower or cringe or yield to anything of mortal mould on this planet, except by duress and by force. No man dare charge me with that. I have endeavored to act here as an honest man feeling his own responsibilities, feeling the responsibilities of the oath upon him when he took it; obliged to interpret the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... room was of warmth and good manners. The furniture was of oak and stamped leather. The low book-cases were covered with bronzes, casts, and figurines, of a quality so uniformly good that none seemed to feel the temptation either to snub or to cringe to its neighbor. The Owari pots felt no false shame beside the royal Satsuma; and Barbedienne's bronzes, the vases of Limoges and Lambeth and bowls from Nankin and Corea dwelt together in the harmony of a ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... stars! Whip him.—Were't twenty of the greatest tributaries That do acknowledge Caesar, should I find them So saucy with the hand of she here,—what's her name Since she was Cleopatra?—Whip him, fellows, Till like a boy you see him cringe his face, And whine aloud for ...
— Antony and Cleopatra • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... another, he was not idle; for if his companion bowed to a white person, he would rebuke him, and observe that all men were born equal, and that he was surprised that any one would degrade himself by such conduct,—that he would never cringe to the whites, nor ought any one who had the feelings of a man. When answered, 'We are slaves,' he would sarcastically and indignantly reply, 'You deserve to remain slaves'; and if he were further asked, 'What can we do?' he would remark, 'Go and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... advantages of the young women round about her, gave Rebecca inexpressible pangs of envy. "What airs that girl gives herself, because she is an Earl's granddaughter," she said of one. "How they cringe and bow to the Creole, because of her hundred thousand pounds. I am a thousand times cleverer and more charming than that creature, for all her wealth. I am as well bred as the Earl's granddaughter, for all her fine pedigree; and yet ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... struck him that had he spoken this at first he would have given it a wording more persuasive with the farmer and more worthy of his own pride: more honest, in fact: for a sense of the dishonesty of what he was saying caused him to cringe and simulate humility to deceive the farmer, and the more he said the less he felt his words, and, feeling them less, he inflated them more. "So kind," he stammered, "so kind" (fancy a Feverel asking this big brute to be so kind!) "as to do me the favour" (me the favour!) "to exert yourself" ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ignorant of my existence; to the moral ones upon whom Beauty exercises a lascivious and corrupting influence; to the moral ones who have relentlessly chased God out of their bedrooms; to the moral ones who cringe before Nature, who flatten themselves upon prayer rugs, who shut their eyes, stuff their ears, bind, gag and truss themselves and offer their mutilations to the idiot God they have invented (the Devil take them, I grow bored ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... bare supposition is an insult to his memory. That his sense of probity and honor was most acute, that he was far above any, the slightest, meanness of thought or action, of a noble and magnanimous order of mind, utterly destitute of any feeling of servility which rendered it possible for him to cringe to the rich and the great, and that he ever acted from a deep sense of moral obligation,—all this his whole subsequent history proves. His merit, both as an artist and a man, met at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... his thin hands in deprecation. He cringed a little as he stood. He had Jewish blood in his veins, which, while it raised him above his fellows in Osterno, carried with it the usual tendency to cringe. It is in the blood; it is part of what the people who stood without Pilate's palace took upon ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... Sometimes a metaphor consists in a reference or allusion to a well known passage in literature or a fact of history. Examples: Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, we Sinais climb and know it not. (Reference to Moses on Mt. Sinai). He received the lion's share of the profits. (Reference to the fable of the lion's share). Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed by a kiss. (Reference to the betrayal of ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... execution were hawked about the streets. But the authorities in Paris evidently disapproved of the proceeding, for the governor of the colony and the commander of the military forces were promptly recalled in disgrace. The terrible object-lesson doubtless had the desired effect, for the natives cringe like whipped dogs when a Frenchman speaks to them. But there is that in their manner which bodes ill for their masters if a crisis ever arises in Indo-China. I should not like to see our own brown ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... it but to cringe and submit to thickheads like Matifat and Camusot, as actresses bow down to journalists, and ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... abuse. Snaw, snow. Snaw-broo, snow-brew (melted snow). Sned, to lop, to prune. Sneeshin mill, a snuff-box. Snell, bitter, biting. Snick, a latch; snick-drawing scheming; he weel a snick can draw he is good at cheating. Snirtle, to snigger. Snoods, fillets worn by maids. Snool, to cringe, to snub. Snoove, to go slowly. Snowkit, snuffed. Sodger, soger, a soldier. Sonsie, sonsy, pleasant, good-natured, jolly. Soom, to swim. Soor, sour. Sough, v. sugh. Souk, suck. Soupe, sup, liquid. Souple, supple. Souter, cobbler. Sowens, porridge of oat flour. Sowps, sups. Sowth, to hum ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... cudgels more firmly to give him a good drubbing. What fun it will be to bring them down upon his broad shoulders, and see him cringe! ...
— Harper's Young People, October 5, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... he said, "don't make me see the brand I have put on you. Don't, for Heaven's sake, cringe to me if ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... "—he waved his hand with the pistol in it around at the circle of uncowering men, although the mere movement made Nehemiah cringe with the thought that an accidental discharge might as effectually settle his case as premeditated and deliberate murder. "Ye dun'no' none o' us. ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... become distasteful in proportion as men become more independent themselves, and sympathise more with the independence of others. The feeling which makes the modern gentleman tell the labourer standing bareheaded before him to put on his hat—the feeling which gives us a dislike to those who cringe and fawn—the feeling which makes us alike assert our own dignity and respect that of others—the feeling which thus leads us more and more to discountenance all forms and names which confess inferiority and submission; is the same feeling which resists despotic power ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... my looks," he was saying. "I desire them up yonder to think that I abuse you. Look as a man would who were being abused. Cringe or snarl, but listen. Do you remember once when as lads we swam together from Penarrow to ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... like vultures if I were weak fool enough to let them," she said to Anne. "They cringe and grovel like spaniels, and flatter till 'tis like to make one sick. 'Tis always so with toadies; they have not the wit to see that their flattery is an insolence, since it supposes adulation so rare that one may be moved by it. The men with empty pockets would ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... you fool, you fool!" she said fiercely, panting for breath with which to end me. "Oh, you dream-child, you moonraker, what are you doing in a world where men work for their pleasures and women have to cringe for the scraps? What was I to do when Porfirio shut me out of doors, and you—you, who had caused it, refused to come with me? Was I to spread my wings and fly straight into the lap of the Madonna? You would say so, I suppose! Your flights were very fine, but one cannot live on the wind. Any ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... craven; crouch before, throw oneself at the feet of; swallow the leek, swallow the pill; kiss the rod; turn the other cheek; avaler les couleuvres [Fr.], gulp down. obey &c 743; kneel to, bow to, pay homage to, cringe to, truckle to; bend the neck, bend the knee; kneel, fall on one's knees, bow submission, courtesy, curtsy, kowtow. pocket the affront; make the best of, make a virtue of necessity; grin and abide, grin and bear it, shrug the shoulders, resign ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... gave him a hearty shake; "rare fun would it be,—and what do you call this? You dare twit your sister with cowardice!—you who sneaked off yesterday like a fox because you had not the spirit to look an old man in the face!—you who bully the weak and cringe to the strong!—you who have the manners of a bear with the heart of a pigeon!" Every sentence was accompanied by a violent shake, which almost took the breath from the boy; and Jonas, red with passion, ...
— False Friends, and The Sailor's Resolve • Unknown
... and desires to know what he shall do. He is told to be pure in thought, word, and deed; to be temperate, chaste, and truthful; to offer prayer to Ormuzd and the powers that fight with him; to destroy all hurtful things; and to do all that will increase the well- being of mankind. Men were not to cringe before the powers of darkness as slaves crouch before a tyrant, they were to meet them upstanding, and confound them by unending opposition and the power of a holy life. 'Oh men, if you cling to these commandments which Mazda has given, which are ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... back. As any screaming creature of the jungle, he hysterically squalled his indignation. But he made no whimper. Nor did he wince or cringe to the blows. He bored straight in, striving, without avoiding a blow, to beat and meet the blow with his teeth. So hard was he flung down the last time that his side smashed painfully against the rail, ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... his lightest whim with the unconscious tyranny of one who had always been accustomed to command. He ruled his unruly followers despotically, and it was obvious that while they loved him they feared him equally. She had even seen Yusef, his lieutenant, cringe from the heavy scowl that she ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... effects of the British bayonet charges and the way the Germans—Uhlans, Guards, and artillerymen—recoil from them. "If you go near them with the bayonet they squeal like pigs," "they beg for mercy on their knees," "the way they cringe before the bayonet is pitiful"—such are examples of the hundreds of references to this ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... rum power in America. That is the god I mean. The most heartless, depraved monopoly on earth, yet men and governments grovel in the dust at its feet and cringe like ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... expresseth well the deformity. There is a master of scoffing, that in his catalogue of books of a feigned library, sets down this title of a book, The Morris-Dance of Heretics. For indeed, every sect of them, hath a diverse posture, or cringe by themselves, which cannot but move derision in worldlings, and depraved politics, who are apt to contemn ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... "while others around you grow rich by fraud and disloyalty; be without place or power while others beg their way upwards; bear the pain of disappointed hopes, while others gain the accomplishment of theirs by flattery; forego the gracious pressure of the hand, for which others cringe and crawl. Wrap yourself in your own virtue, and seek a friend and your daily bread. If you have in your own cause grown gray with unbleached honour, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... in fearful strength Resist attack! Lo! when he slakes his thirst The rivers dwindle, and he thinks to draw The depths of Jordan dry. Wilt cast thy hook And take Leviathan? Wilt bind thy yoke Upon him, as a vassal? Will he cringe Unto thy maidens? See the barbed spear The dart and the habergeon, are his scorn. Sling-stones are stubble, keenest arrows foil'd, And from the plaited armor of his scales The glittering sword ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... that elephant going toward the palace with the messenger. Mukna knew why! It was to fetch the elephant master, who would punish him! Even a dog that has been naughty will cringe and whine at the sight of a whip, because it knows that its ...
— The Wonders of the Jungle, Book Two • Prince Sarath Ghosh
... Kogmollock's breast and hold it there until he had made him a prisoner. She was wonderful. She was panting in her excitement. From the floor Blake had noticed that her little white finger was pressing gently against the trigger of the rifle. It had made him shudder. It made the Eskimo cringe a bit now as Philip tied his hands behind him. And Philip saw it, and his heart ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... were here he would exact no such promise, I am sure; he would not at least make me appear as a coward in outlandish eyes, and cringe ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... never once, since Pee-Wee went, have I actually punished either of my children. It may be wrong, but I can't help it. I don't want memories of violence to be left corroding and rankling in my mind. And I'd hate to see any child of mine cringe, like an ill-treated dog, at every lift of the hand. There are better ways of controlling them, I begin to feel, than through fear. Their father, I know, will never agree with me on this matter. He will always insist on mastery, open ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... that I shall have no other God but this congregation; that I shall deny my own conscience for theirs; that I shall go about the trivial, nonsensical things they call my pastoral duties, in fear and trembling; that my ministry is to cringe when they speak, and do their will regardless of what I feel to be the will of Christ! Faugh!" Big Dan drew himself erect. "If this is what the call to the ministry means, I am beginning to understand some things that have always puzzled ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... By chance it was I heard your conversation.— Come you from Allobrogia far away? Justice you think to find in Rome? Ah, never! Turn home again! Here tyranny holds sway, And rank injustice lords it more than ever. Republic to be sure it is in name; And yet all men are slaves who cringe and cower, Vassals involved in debt, who must acclaim A venal senate—ruled by greed and power. Gone is the social consciousness of old, The magnanimity of former ages;— Security and life are favors sold, Which must be bargained for with hire and wages. Not righteousness, but power here ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... ordinary erring man, conscious of things done which should not have been done, and other things equally numerous left undone, he was too oppressive. One conscience is enough for any man. The employer of Master Bean had to cringe before two. Nobody can last long against an office-boy whose eyes shine with quiet, respectful reproof through gold-rimmed spectacles, whose manner is that of a middle-aged saint, and who obviously knows all the Plod and Punctuality books by heart and orders his life by their precepts. Master Bean ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... neither your menial nor your superior; whereas in the East he or she is nearly always one or the other, and sometimes both at once. This particular type of Westerner doesn't patronize you; neither does he cringe to you in expectation of a tip. He gives you the best he has in stock, meanwhile retaining his own self-respect and expecting you to do the same. He ennobles ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... virtuous? Nations have made an idol of Liberty, but what nation on the face of the earth is free? My youth is still like a blue and cloudless sky. If I set myself to obtain wealth or power, does it mean that I must make up my mind to lie, and fawn, and cringe, and swagger, and flatter, and dissemble? To consent to be the servant of others who have likewise fawned, and lied, and flattered? Must I cringe to them before I can hope to be their accomplice? Well, then, I decline. I mean to work nobly and with a single heart. I will work ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... a globe in the other, attended with the four evangelists, and saints on each side, with crowns in their hands, intended, I suppose, for a representation of Our Saviour's coming to judgment. Some of the company espying this, cry out and say, 'Lo, this is the God these people bow and cringe unto; this is the idol they worship and adore.' Hereupon several souldiers charged their muskets, (amongst whom one Daniel Wood, of Captain Roper's company was the chief) and discharge them at it: and by the many shots they made, at length do quite deface ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... shoulder, and I knew he'd been using threats because my father, himself, was almost paralyzed with fear. And then I lost my head—in blind rage, I suppose. I must have talked like a common fish woman, but my one desire was to see them cringe. So I told about leaving the message for you, pretending to 've written a great deal more—twisting the knife all I knew how, and being thoroughly catty. It must have been a disgusting exhibition," she gave a sigh of despair, as if for that ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... be checked. We must rebuke the proud Briton on the very scene of his abominations. We must triumph over him on the tossing ocean, and teach him that America, not Britannia, rules the waves. Would that we all stood on some staunch ship, to do battle with our young right-arms. Then should Englishmen cringe before us; then would we doom to sudden destruction their boasted admirals and flimsy fleets. Down with the English! down with ...
— The Boy Patriot • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... dispensers of the good things of this Realm, come to our colleges and all shall be made pleasant!' and the shout is taken up by undergraduates, and tradesmen, and horse-dealers, and cricket-cads, and dog-fanciers 'Come to us, and us, and us, and we will be your toadies!' Let them; let them toady and cringe to their precious idols, till they bring this noble old place down about their ears. Down it will come, down it must come, for down it ought to come, if it can find nothing better to worship than rank, money, and intellect. But to ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... seek renown in arms, Pant after fame, and rush to war's alarms; To shining palaces let fools resort, And dunces cringe to be esteem'd at court: Mine be the pleasure of a rural life, From noise remote, and ignorant of strife; Far from the painted belle, and white-glov'd beau, The lawless masquerade and midnight show; From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars, Fops, fiddlers, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... of gray stocking from the hall table and flung it into Ursula's room. Ursula knew she would have to follow it, or be picked up and carried in like a naughty child. So she gave the miserable Ramsay a look that made him cringe, and swept into her room with her head in the air. The next moment she heard the door locked behind her. Her first proceeding was to have a cry of anger and shame and disappointment. That did no good, and then she took to marching up and down her room. It did not calm her to hear the rumble ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... renown in arms, Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms; To shining palaces let fools resort And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court. Mine be the pleasure of a rural life, From noise remote and ignorant of strife, Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau, The lawless masquerade and midnight show; From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the contrary, had been as carefully brought up in the opposite conviction. To him it was the Gentile who was the refuse of humanity, and it was a perpetual humiliation to be forced to cringe to, and wait upon, such contemptible creatures. Moreover, the day was coming when their positions should be reversed; and who could say how near it was at hand? Then the proud Christian noble would be the slave ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... going straight into the jaws of death! My comrade stands just there beside that tree. I would gladly have given Reynard the wink, or signaled to him, if I could. It did seem a pity to shoot him, now he was out of my reach. I cringe for him, when crack goes the gun! The fox squalls, picks himself up, and plunges over the brink of the mountain. The hunter has not missed his aim, but the oil in his gun, he says, has weakened the ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... his father had hardly crushed in his own heart? For what, forsooth, shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied humiliations of fifty million fellows? Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow. Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... I think of government in itself. But when I look on the world at large, when I see of what poor stuff those men are made who contrive to uphold their rule and what sort of antagonists we are likely to find in them, then I can only feel how disgraceful it would be to cringe before them and not to face them myself and try conclusions with them on the field. All of them, I perceive," he added, "beginning with our own friends here, hold to it that the ruler should only differ ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... over, but when her cousin appealed to her to leave the scene she seemed not to hear him. She only stood and stared at the exhausted man until he could bear it no longer and, hiding his face in his hands, he began to shiver and cringe and sob. ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... supremacy is acknowledged through your servility. Your submission turns their gall to honey—converts their vinegar to milk—to the very cream of human complaisance. Mr Bellamy acted his part in this respect, as in every other—well; a tiger to such as would not cringe, he could become a playful lamb to all who were content to fawn. Planner and he were on the best possible terms. Looking into what is called the nature of things, we shall think it very natural on the part of Mr Bellamy, when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... tears, and watched him earnestly for a moment. In that confused instant she exulted in the strong, generous, kindly manhood that would not cringe even to omnipotence when apparently cruel. She said, gently, "Graydon, you are ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... said father, in precisely the same voice he always said, "This is a fine day we are having." "Now why are you coming here in such a shape?" This was a little cross. "I'm not the man to cringe before you!" This was quite boastful. "You'll get bullet for bullet, if you attempt to invade my house with a gun." This pinged as if father ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... one make a move to tear that idol down from its altar, made of dead men's bones, and see what a flutter there is in the camp, how new laws are made and old laws shoved aside, and new laws fixed over, and the highest and the lowest will lie and cringe and drag themselves on their knees in front of it to protect it and worship it. Don't talk to me about your wood idols; they hain't nothin' to be compared to it. They stay where they're put, they don't rare round and kill their worshippers as this Whiskey idol duz. I'd think enough sight ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... Ana a terrible glance, which caused the latter to cringe. Evidently, the duenna stood in considerable awe ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... catapult,—rules a church with iron rods, organizes, denounces, intrigues, executes, keeps an unarmed soldiery to do his behests, and hurls ecclesiastic thunders at kings and emperors with the grand audacity of a commission presumedly divine, while Greeks cringe, and Jews blaspheme, and heathen flee into, or away from, conversion; and the Church itself canonizes this spiritual father, this Sphinx-son of an ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... her features are unlit by any glimmer of feeling or thought, or even good nature—a slothful, empty sort of prettiness. She makes him walk a chalk-line, and it is contemptible and ridiculous and pitiful to see that big man cringe before this poor, pretty, empty little thing. Once in a while he tears himself away, and a glimmer of his old self returns; for an hour or two he plays his old role again, but if she finds out about it, it is very unpleasant ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... propriety; and thus it happens that seats are slipped out of sight, and exhausted women smile and ask, as the purchase is made, "And what is the next pleasure?" in a tone that makes the American hearer cringe for the abject humility that is the first ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... answered the boy, with trepidation. It was part of the law that the lion of the ante-room should cringe like a cold monkey, more or less, as soon as he was out of his private jungle. "Oh, Tallerman," cried the Sunday editor, "here's this Arctic man come to arrange about his illustration. I wish you'd go and talk it over with him." By chance he picked ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... made me cringe all over, but I couldn't deny it, for so far as I knew Florence Lloyd, Parmalee's ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... editor. Suppose, once in a while, they do, in expressing their own honest views, say something that conflicts a little with your own starved or plethoric notions. Suppose they do dare to tell you the truth sometimes in a way that makes you cringe, and you say to yourself, "he has no business to be personal," when the poor man never thought that his homely coats would fit; don't grow cold, and cast sheep's eyes, and nudge somebody's elbow in a corner, and whisper all ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... Patrick said with another chilling smile. "You do well to cringe, for I'm death itself. Even in death I could kill you, like a snake." And with that his voice took on the tones of a circus barker. "Yes, I'm a freak, as the gentleman so wisely said. That's what one doctor who dared talk with me for a minute told me before he kicked me out. He couldn't ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... you not one of those who fawn and lie, and cringe like spaniels to those a little higher, and take revenge by ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... instance, the former, when kept within polite boundaries, is usually known as Love. As Avarice makes but a sorry theme for the romantic writer, Love is the subject that must principally claim your attention. All the world loves a lover, while the miser is despised even by those who cringe beneath the power of his gold. Study the women, my lad, and when you know them thoroughly begin your great ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... the past, its good and ill, and we all have a touch of superstition, like a syphilitic taint. To eradicate this tyranny of fear and get the cringe and crawl out of our natures, seems the one desirable thing to lofty minds. But the revivalist, knowing human nature, as all confidence men do, banks on our superstitious fears and makes his appeal to our acquisitiveness, offering us absolution and life eternal for a consideration—to cover ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... through. Some perverse will made him watch his father drawn over the borders of life. And yet, now, every day, the great red-hot stroke of horrified fear through the bowels of the son struck a further inflammation. Gerald went about all day with a tendency to cringe, as if there were the point of a sword of Damocles pricking the nape of ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... to humiliate myself because of my poverty. I thought of the time when I had already entered the cloak business, but was struggling and squirming and constantly racking my brains for some way of raising a hundred dollars; when I would cringe with a certain East Side banker and vainly beg him to extend a small note of mine, and come away in a sickening ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... or flood' goes Death on drum, And storms bugle his fame. But we dream we are rooted in earth—Dust! Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same, Wave with the meadow, forget that there must The sour scythe cringe, and the blear ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... complete shadow, Perris felt her eyes burning out at him. His dismissal was at hand, he knew, and then the carelessly defiant speech which was forming in his throat died away. Sick at heart, he realized that he must cringe under the hand which was about to strike and be humble under the very eye of Hervey. He was no longer free and the chain which held him was the conviction that he could never be happy until he had met and conquered wild Alcatraz, that he was as incomplete as a holster ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... love" (Proverbs xxvii. 5). They believe that the Lord has yet many things to say unto them, and they are willing and glad for Him to say them by whom He will, but especially by their leaders and their brethren. While they do not fawn and cringe before men, nor believe everything that is said to them, without proving it by the word and Spirit of God, they believe that God "gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... imaginings of children!—the commons be but slaves to the nobles; the nobles to the senate; the senate to their creditors, their purchasers, their consuls; the last at once their tools, and their tyrants! Go, young man, go. Salute, cringe, fawn upon your consul! Nathless, for thou hast mind enough to mark and note the truth of what I tell thee; thou wilt think upon this, and perchance one day, when the time shall have come, wilt ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... cease." For everywhere men would crack a rustic jest or two, unhurriedly. Virid fields would heave brownly under their ploughs; they would find that with practice it was almost as easy to chuckle as it was to cringe. ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... were bright. "Yes, we flee, we cringe, we hide under stones, we break up our lives and uproot our families, running like frightened animals in the shadows of night and secrecy." He gulped a breath, and his eyes sought Nehmon's angrily. "Why do we ...
— The Link • Alan Edward Nourse
... bolder efforts of these nobler spirits, then settles back upon the ease and comfort of that position, and turns her small artillery on her own sisters? I feel a sense of shame for American literature, when I think how our literary women shrink, and cringe, and apologize, and dodge to avoid being taken for "strong-minded women." Oh, there's no danger. I don't wonder that their literary efforts are stricken with the palsy of weakness from the beginning. I don't wonder that our ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Mortimer, with a determined manner, that made the old outlaw cower and cringe. Felix Mortimer possessed the stronger character of the two, and, now he was aroused, Gunwagner was subservient ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... does he cringe and cower at sight of me? I tell you he scuttled the Proserpine, and the great auger he did it with I have seen and handled. Yes, sir, you destroyed a ship, and the lives of many innocent persons, whose ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... rode, he thought, too, of his newly arrived brother, and the hatefulness of personal comparison made him almost cringe beneath their flagellations. Bill, so big of heart and body, so lacking in the many abilities which go to make up the man in men's eyes, but which count for so little in a woman's, so strong in the buoyancy and fearlessness that was his. He felt he could almost ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... mechanism and continue the movement, they were suspended by their arms, and at each revolution of the wheel received new wounds on their members, until, in the language of that law so grossly outraged in their persons, they "languished and died." Ask you if a cringe of this murderous nature went unvisited, and if no inquiry was made respecting its circumstances? The forms of justice were observed; the handmaid was present, but the sacred mistress was far away. A coroner's inquest was called; for the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... You would have me Cozen, intrigue, and cheat, and play the huckster, As your republicans, peace on their lips And subtle scheming treaties, till the moment When it is safe to spring? Would you have me cringe To the ignorant mob of churls, through whose sweet voices The road to greatness lies? Nay, nay; I am A King's son, and of Bosphorus, not Cherson— A Scythian ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... to which he would give rein by night, it was always with dauntless ferocity that the tortured Wolfhound faced his enemy, the Professor. Short of starving him to death, or killing him outright with the iron bar, the Professor could see no way of making the Giant Wolf cringe to him; he could devise no method of breaking that fierce spirit, though he exhausted every kind of severity and every sort of cruelty that his wide experience in the handling of fierce animals could furnish. For any one who could have comprehended the true inwardness ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... freshmen and immerse them in The flowing wave of Taddle, Horrors! Why, I shall be a freshman! If they touch me I'll scream! ah—ha, I'll scream! Scream, and betray my sex? No, that won't do; At Rome I'll have to be a Roman; And, to escape that dread ordeal, I Shall cringe and crawl, and in the presence of A fourth year man step soft and bow, And smile if he but condescend to nod. Oh, yes, I'll do't. In tableaux once I played Uriah Heep, and made the character So "'umble" and so crawly, that for days I loathed my hands, and slapped my fingers well For having knuckles. ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... the black forest of Boone's beard, and if Pierre was cold before, he was sick at heart to see the big man cringe before McGurk. ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... to come and see you now by offering to undertake a special business mission for my employer at Paris. It is drudgery, at my time of life, after all I have gone through—but my hard work is innocent work. I am not obliged to cringe for every crown-piece I put in my pocket—not bound to denounce, deceive, and dog to death other men, before I can earn my bread, and scrape together money enough to bury me. I am ending a bad, base life harmlessly at last. It is a poor thing to do, but it ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... to the shoals, the squalls and tempests of the pit, and above all (for what does a mere failure matter?) to the wretched bickerings of the wings; of having entered that shifting, foggy, stormy atmosphere, where ignorance dogmatises, where envy hisses, where cabals cringe and crawl, where the probity of talent has so often been misrepresented, where the noble innocence of genius is sometimes so out of place, where mediocrity triumphs in lowering to its level the superiority which obscures it, where one finds so many small men for a single great one, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... carry my head high?" Mr. Vimpany went on. "When calamity strikes at a man, don't let him cringe and cry for pity—let him hit back again! Those are my principles. Look at me. Now do look at me. Here I am, a cultivated person, a member of an honourable profession, a man of art and accomplishment—stripped of every blessed thing belonging ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... a high chair, surveying the scene. He cultivates a grim and awful aspect, for he is under no delusion that "his pupils love him." "He sits aloft," we are told, "like a juryman, with an expression of implacable wrath, before which the pupil must tremble and cringe."[] ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... else— Such, so soulless, so poor, Is the race of men whom I see— 150 Seem'd but a dream of the heart, Seem'd but a cry of desire. Yes! I believe that there lived Others like thee in the past, Not like the men of the crowd 155 Who all round me to-day Bluster or cringe, and make life Hideous, and arid, and vile; But souls temper'd with fire, Fervent, heroic, and good, 160 ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... happen, kings and emperors would have to cringe and crawl to me, like my hordes of serfs all over this broad land. Statesmen and diplomats, president and judges, lawmakers and captains of industry, all would fall into bondage; and for the first time in history ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... by hypocritically pretending to be religious: and the greater the hypocrite, the greater the quantity of coal and groceries. These 'charitable' people went into the wretched homes of the poor and—in effect—said: 'Abandon every particle of self-respect: cringe and fawn: come to church: bow down and grovel to us, and in return we'll give you a ticket that you can take to a certain shop and exchange for a shillingsworth of groceries. And, if you're very servile and humble we may give ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... ruddy insolent flesh, Had hoped she did not hear. His barrel chest Gave a slight cringe, as though the glint of her eyes Prickt him. But he stood up to her awkwardly bold, One elbow on the counter, gripping his mug Like a man holding on to a post ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... daughter!—mere echoes of their lord and master. She had behaved badly, of course; in a few days she supposed the report of her outburst would be all over the place. She did not care. Even for Roger's sake she was not going to cringe to these ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... them, they say in a wonderful way, To toys, for his Christmas cheer. The big dolls stare with a goblin air, The small ones cringe with fear. ...
— The Goblins' Christmas • Elizabeth Anderson
... pointing the vision upward to what we may become, instead of allowing it to grovel around in the very unpleasant circumstances in which some people are liable to find themselves. The outward vision is transient, the inner vision can build eternal realities. "Are we to beg and cringe and hang on the outer edge of life,—we who should walk grandly? Is it for man to tremble and quake—man who in his spiritual capacity becomes the interpreter of God's message,—the focus of ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... came a monstrous lout, a thing of horse and rhinoceros, chewing a straw as it came; then appeared the Swine-woman and two Wolf-women; then the Fox-bear witch, with her red eyes in her peaked red face, and then others,—all hurrying eagerly. As they came forward they began to cringe towards Moreau and chant, quite regardless of one another, fragments of the latter half of the litany of the Law,—"His is the Hand that wounds; His is the Hand that heals," and so forth. As soon as they had approached ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... paradice of the earth, and the Epicures heauen, how doth it forme our yong master? It makes him to kisse his hand like an ape, cringe his neck like a starueling, and play at hey passe repasse come aloft when hee salutes a man. From thence he brings the art of atheisme, the art of epicurising, the art of whoring, the art of poysoning, the art of Sodomitrie. The onely probable good thing they haue ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... during your trial and sentence these persons have used every effort to spread a feeling against me. How wide it is I can not tell, but I know it is strong. It may end my work here, for I will not cringe to them. ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... piping, but distinctly audible voice, began a sharp practical address. Everyone listened with the utmost attention; none dared to interrupt him. He spoke for five minutes, nervously pounding the air from time to time, and sometimes howling his words at the listeners in a manner that made them cringe. He counselled moderation, accord, decency, but above all, instant action. 'The settlement of the Alsace-Lorraine question,' said he, 'will virtually decide whether we have peace or continued war with Prussia.' Then, with an imperious ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... spring from the gloom of the canyon's womb; in the valley's lap we lie; From the white foam-fringe, where the breakers cringe to the peaks that tusk the sky, We climb, and we peer in the crag-locked mere that gleams like a ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... cowardice.—Man is meant to be superior to things outside him. When we see him bowing down to somebody whom he does not really believe in; when we see him yielding to forces which he does not himself respect; when living is more to him than living well; when there is a threat which can make him cringe, or a bribe that can make his tongue speak false—then we feel that the manhood has gone out of him, and we cannot help looking on his fall with sorrow and with shame. The penalty which follows moral cowardice is nowhere more ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... Was the sole love that life gave to me. Let that pass! It perish'd, and all perish'd with it. Ambition? Wealth left nothing to add to my social condition. Fame? But fame in itself presupposes some great Field wherein to pursue and attain it. The State? I, to cringe to an upstart? The Camp? I, to draw From its sheath the old sword of the Dukes of Luvois To defend usurpation? Books, then? Science, Art? But, alas! I was fashion'd for action: my heart, Wither'd thing though it be, I should hardly ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... woman should who have loved each other, and have had a right to love? What have we done of which we should be ashamed? Let it be told. Let it all be known. Have you not been good and pure? Have not I been true to you? Bear up your courage, and let the man do his worst. Not to save even you would I cringe before such a man as that. And were I to do so, I should save you ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... seeking position, which was scarcely taken before there was a puff of smoke and their iron message. Heavens! what a vicious sound those shells had! something between a whiz and a shriek. Even the horses would cringe and shudder when one passed over them, and the men would duck their heads, though the missile was thirty feet in the air. I suppose there was some awfully wild firing on both sides; but I saw several of our men carried to the rear. But all this detail is ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... to him. In a second she had quelled the threatened weakness. "I have made this house a paradise. I have made it a place in which you may find happiness if you care to seek for it here. At night I shudder and cringe, because I am the coward you would try to reform. I hide nothing from myself. I am afraid to be alone in this house. But I shall ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... bearer of arms. He walked like a man accustomed to command; he turned a cold eye upon too-familiar wayfarers and startled them into silence by the level blackness of his low brows. Wealth, beauty, age nor rank won servility or superciliousness from him. The Egyptian soldier was not obliged to cringe, and this one abode ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... a world, a world of power, opinion, wealth, opportunity; and he, the one, must cringe and bear in silence lest the world crash about the ears of his people. He slowly plodded on in bitter silence toward the swamp. But the day was balmy, the way was beautiful; contempt slowly succeeded ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... pressure prodding him as he goes, until he dies and his final form will be that predestined of the many pressures. An exchange of cradle-babes, and the base-born slave may wear the purple imperially, and the royal infant begs an alms as wheedlingly or cringe to the lash as abjectly as his meanest subject. A Chesterfield, with an empty belly, chancing upon good fare, will gorge as faithfully as the swine in the next sty. And an Epicurus, in the dirt-igloo of the Eskimos, will wax eloquent over the whale ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... spirits. Should he write to her again? No, she owed him a letter, and if she loved him, would doubtless answer it as soon as circumstances would permit; and he 'would let that haughty old aristocrat, her father, see that Philip Hayforth, the merchant, had more of the spirit of a man in him than to cringe to the proudest blood in England. And as for Emily, she was his betrothed bride—the same as his wife; and if he was not more to her than any father on earth, she was unworthy of the love he had given her. Let her only be true to him, and he was ready to devote his life to her—to ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... He seemed to cringe for a moment, and then, like some old leader of a pack who knows he is about to die and defies his death, he darted for the river and flung himself ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... God!" he felt, within, "is it not enough to create us so unequal that we must also cringe in spirit, and acknowledge it! I expected to feel triumphant when I lodged my despised hat in this man's house, but I ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... bore, she was at her worst less of a bore than they. They were almost always solemn and portentous, and they were for the most part of a deathly respectability. She wasn't necessarily snobbish, unless it was snobbish to want the best. She didn't cringe, she didn't make herself smaller than she was; she took on the contrary a stand of her own and attracted things to herself. Naturally she was possible only in America—only in a country where whole ranges of competition and comparison ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... the soul of Corydon calling to him, there were all the heights of music and poetry—and instead of climbing, he must torture his brain with hack-writing! He must go down to the editors, and fawn and cringe, and try to get books to review; he must study the imbecilities of the magazines and watch out for topics for articles; he must rack his brains for jokes and jingles—he, the master of life, the bearer of a new religion, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... the Exclusion Bill, he never would have been King, and that, but for their adulation and their doctrine of passive obedience, he would never have ventured to be guilty of such tyranny. Their chief business, during a quarter of a century, had been to teach the people to cringe and the prince to domineer. They were guilty of the blood of Russell, of Sidney, of every brave and honest Englishman who had been put to death for attempting to save the realm from Popery and despotism. Never had ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... miserable contrast between its aspirations and attainments, its pretences and its efforts. At least, that would be the death fit for a life like mine—a death of disgust at itself. We claim immortality; we cringe and cower with the fear that immortality may not be the destiny of man; and yet we—I—do things unworthy not merely of immortality, but unworthy of the butterfly existence of a single day in ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... everything and do nothing, vindictive and highly suspicious of a stranger's intentions. Their bearing towards the Christian, whom they call the infidel, is full of contempt. They know no gratitude, and they would not cringe to the greatest Christian potentate. They are very long-suffering in adversity, hesitating in attack, and the bravest of the brave in defence. They disdain work as degrading and only a fit occupation for slaves, whilst warfare is, to their minds, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
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