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Ignoble   Listen
verb
Ignoble  v. t.  To make ignoble. (Obs.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Ignoble" Quotes from Famous Books



... depends? Not at all. He is meditating on suicide; and he finds that what stands in the way of it, and counterbalances its infinite attraction, is not any thought of a sacred unaccomplished duty, but the doubt, quite irrelevant to that issue, whether it is not ignoble in the mind to end its misery, and, still more, whether death would end it. Hamlet, that is to say, is here, in effect, precisely where he was at the time of his first soliloquy ('O that this too too solid flesh would melt') ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... The longing for ignoble things; The strife for triumph more than truth; The hardening of the heart, that brings Irreverence for ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... his long services, and despising his person, refused to admit him to her presence; and for the love of this lady who had so unkindly treated him, the noble Orsino, forsaking the sports of the held and all manly exercises in which he used to delight, passed his hours in ignoble sloth, listening to the effeminate sounds of soft music, gentle airs, and passionate love-songs; and neglecting the company of the wise and learned lords with whom he used to associate, he was now all day long conversing with young Cesario. Unmeet companion no doubt ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... me a bit. I feel that I have an ignoble share in the whole affair. I'm getting to be an old man; I can claim certain privileges on that score, and if life means anything past forty, it means sharing its experiences with a friend. I'm going to speak of ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock

... head was unbowed. She sullied her hands but not her conscience. A dirty act she could not perform. Aristocrat and anarchist, she was also an artist. With simple things and simple people, she was simple as you please. Stupidity and pretentiousness enraged her. The philistine and the ignoble ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... My white bread and purple wine! Once my soul hungered after knowledge; I took delight in fine thoughts finely expressed; I sought them carefully in printed books: now only this vile bodily hunger, this eager seeking for grubs and honey, and ignoble war with little things! ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson

... people, those which had no visible connection with what they said. And when he wanted to know whether it was rather beneath the apparent character of M. de Charlus, or of M. des Laumes, or of M. d'Orsan that he must place the untravelled region in which this ignoble action might have had its birth; as none of these men had ever, in conversation with Swann, suggested that he approved of anonymous letters, and as everything that they had ever said to him implied that they strongly disapproved, he saw no ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... composed, would have fashioned their sword-hilts into crosses, and themselves into a crusading chivalry? Let us not dishonour our great fathers with the dream of it. The Christians, like the Stoics and the Epicureans, would have lived their little day among the ignoble sects of an effete civilisation, and would have passed off and been heard of no more. It was in another spirit that those first preachers of righteousness went out upon their warfare with evil. They preached, not enlightened prudence, but purity, justice, goodness; ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... sensitive. I know that others of your colleagues look back on the inertia of your Church, and the intrusive and decisive heroism of Damien, with something almost to be called remorse. I am sure it is so with yourself; I am persuaded your letter was inspired by a certain envy, not essentially ignoble, and the one human trait to be espied in that performance. You were thinking of the lost chance, the past day; of that which should have been conceived and was not; of the service due and not rendered. Time was, said the voice in your ear, in your pleasant ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... vex us, And among us are new enemies— Cowards, weak, ignoble whiners, Esaus, placemen, low-browed livers, Traitors, salesmen of a nation. Some would have us drop despondent And convince us we are nothing. (Us of whom ten thousand heroes Hitherto to here have conquered And we must be faithful to ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall

... should almost be tempted to pass over in silence as incompatible with the gravity and dignity of history—that this worthy gentleman should likewise have been nicknamed from what in modern times is considered the most ignoble part of the dress; but in truth the small-clothes seem to have been a very dignified garment in the eyes ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... been lost under the pressures of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has always been spent in provision for the day that was passing over me; but I shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my assistance foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to the propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth; if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson

... who sought To guide his father's chariot of flame. What though he failed? No death ignoble his Who fared to meet it with such ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester

... breakfast- table at the sound of hoofs, and find the noble animal at the door, arching his neck and champing his bit, as if he felt proud to bear that other animal, bandy-legged, mendacious, and altogether ignoble who sits jauntily on his back, down to the moment when you walk round to the stable for a little quiet enjoyment of the sense of ownership, there is a high tide of mental elation running through the days. Then ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA

... trade of writing for bread, so he also is charged with venal flattery, than which nothing can be more ignoble and base. To praise a blockhead's wit because he is great, is too frequently practised by authors, and deservedly draws down contempt upon them. He who is favoured and patronized by a great man, at the expence of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber

... man was the supposed author of the "Essay on the Family," proving, as they do, that he passed his leisure among princes and scholars, and that he played some part in the public affairs of the State of Florence. Yet his view of human life is wholly bourgeois, though by no means ignoble. In his conception, the first of all virtues is thrift, which should regulate the use not only of money, but of all the gifts of nature and of fortune. The proper economy of the mind involves liberal studies, courteous manners, honest ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... of the majority of the members of any state," appears to be that passage which suggested to Bentham, according to his own acknowledgment, the famous "greatest happiness" formula, which by substituting "happiness" for "good," has converted a noble into an ignoble principle. But I do not call to mind that there is any utterance in Locke quite so outspoken as the following passage in the "Essay on the First Principles of Government." After laying down as "a fundamental maxim in all Governments," the proposition that "kings, senators, ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... the dust. If only he might make it all right with Clare, then he would see to it—Oh! yes he would see to it—that nothing of this kind ever happened again. From Mrs. Rossiter's standpoint he looked back upon his life and found it all one ignoble, selfish muddle. Dear Clare!—so eager to be happy and he had made ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... have been ignoble had it not been naive. The recluse of Kremenetz, passionately devoted to his people but wanting in political foresight, was calling Russian officialdom to aid in his fight against the bigotry of the Jewish masses, in the childish conviction that ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... nothing of the gallant fighting impulse we have learned to believe is characteristic of the British sailor. He lost Minorca, and disgraced the British flag because he was too dainty to face the stern discomforts of a fight. The corrupt and ignoble temper of English politics—the legacy of Walpole's evil regime—poisoned the blood of the navy. No one can have forgotten Macaulay's picture of Newcastle, at that moment Prime Minister of England; the sly, greedy, fawning politician, as corrupt as Walpole, without his genius; ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett

... built up, perhaps by the teachers and parents, certainly by the conventions of life. The result is that though there is more true religion in the schools than is acknowledged by those outside and than those within care to boast of, and though the standard of conduct is not ignoble, there is too little fusion; both components are brittle, they cannot stand the strain of sudden temptation, they lack enduring power. No one will forget how in those first months of war, consolation was offered even ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... from power himself, he still maintained a single regard for the honour of his country, and the last time his voice was heard in the Parliament of England was to protest against her degradation by an ignoble alliance with savages in the war with America; on this occasion he fell back in a faint into the arms of his friends around, and died little more than a month after; "for four years" (of his life), says Carlyle, "king of England; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... scepticism as if religion and marriage began their course together,' for both are the fruit of odious superstition. He was endeavouring to persuade Harriet Westbrook to join him in testifying by example against the obsolete and ignoble ceremony of the marriage service, which he held to be a degradation that no one could ask 'an amiable and beloved female' to undergo. In Shelley's case, as in Byron's, the letters are of inestimable biographical value as witnesses ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... of Mr. Adams, were shown to him, on which he remarked, "The thing is not new. From the nature of our institutions, competitors for public favor and their respective partisans seek success by slander of each other. I disdain the ignoble warfare, and neither wage it myself or encourage it in my friends. But, from appearances, they will decide the election to ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy

... and the nursing of these was usually added to the pitiless drudgery of her winter. But the bitter edge to all her suffering was the feeling which her husband spoke of in the pulpit as "false pride"—the feeling she prayed over fervently yet without avail in church every Sunday—and this was the ignoble terror of being seen on her knees in her old black calico dress before she had gone upstairs again, washed her hands with cornmeal, powdered her face with her pink flannel starchbag, and descended in her breakfast gown of black cashmere or lawn, with a ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... breast of woman And face so debonair Had the sleek false paws of a lion, That could furtively seize and tear. So far to the shoulders,—but if you took The Beast in reverse you would find The ignoble form of a craven cur Was all that ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay

... include in this the whole Irish peerage. God forbid. There are several of them not thus ignoble. Many of them worked, struggled, sacrificed for Ireland. Many of them were true to ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis

... any given moment—it is the memory which the soldier leaves behind him, like the long train of light that follows the sunken sun—that is all which is worth caring for, which distinguishes the death of the brave or the ignoble. When I think of death, Mr Morton, as a thing worth thinking of, it is in the hope of pressing one day some well-fought and hard-won field of battle, and dying with the shout of victory in my ear—that would be worth dying for, and more, it would ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... When the love precedes and the virtue or potency follows it, each is noble because in this case potency is the virtue of conjugial love; but if the potency precedes and the love follows, each is then ignoble; because in this case the love is subordinate to carnal potency; we therefore judge of the quality of each from the order in which the love descends or ascends, and thus proceeds from its origin to its proposed end." To this decision was subscribed ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... exclusiveness. Her first note he had been content to ignore,—she might have written it in a fit of pique—but the second had made him thoughtful. Her very persistence was characteristic. Perhaps after all she was in the right—he had arrived too hastily at an ignoble conclusion. Her attitude towards him was curiously unconventional; it was an attitude such as none of the few women with whom he had ever been brought into contact would have dreamed of assuming. But none the less it had for him a fascination ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... his folly, or whose beauty charms the eye to overlook his baseness—this too common hero is an object, an example fraught with perilous interest. Charles Duval, the polite; Paul Clifford, the handsome; Richard Turpin, brave and true; Jack Sheppard, no ignoble mind and loving still his mother; these, and such as these, with Schiller's 'Robbers' and the like, are dangerous to gaze on, as Germany, if not England too, remembers well. But, not more true to life, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... in fiercely, her voice shaking with passion, "you know what an ignoble canaille is this young man, without even enough decency of feeling to respect the troops of whom he has demanded such bloody sacrifices. At Metz we were near enough to the fighting to realize the blood and tears of this war. But the Prince thought of nothing, but his own amusement. ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams

... it now, it might have rendered her uneasy, but it could not have recalled her from the path down which she was just beginning to go. For her life had blunted her, had coarsened her nature. She had followed too many ignoble impulses, has succumbed too often to whim, to be the happy slave of delicacy, or to allow any sense of patriotism to keep ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens

... A crude one is that the pair, after much quarreling, decide to separate or become divorced, or on a still cruder, ignoble level, one or the other runs away, deserts the family. A common adjustment, of an anti-social kind, forms the basis of much of modern and ancient literature; the partners seek compensation elsewhere, enter into illicit love affairs and maintain a dual existence ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... the world cries for more sunshine; the world begs for a laugh. Mankind gloats over the depiction of deeds both noble and ignoble. The world delights in that which is novel. The Negro is a son of caloric. His presence is sunshine. He tells a story leaving nothing out. He is himself a novelty, and it will not be too far in the twentieth century before he will take pity on the world and ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... Nothing could be more ignoble than the conduct of the people of Lisbon as to the billeting of the very soldiers who had saved them from the enemy. On one occasion the Duke writes to order his wine, &c. to be removed from the house of a Signor Bandeira, and to have a house taken for him, "in order," he says, "to mortify ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

... Early the next morning I sent to him, and bade him seek me in the temple at the usual hour. He came, but it was only to blast my hopes— to disappoint the passion of the woman who doated upon him. He accused me of a vile intercourse with a slave, and almost maddened me with ignoble reproaches. It was in vain that I swore to him most solemnly, the man he had seen was my father; a being whom motives of prudence compelled me to receive in private, even although my heart abhorred and loathed the relationship between us. He treated my explanation with deriding contempt, ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson

... of gold, of silver, and iron; our internal improvements and meliorations; our national prestige; and finally, our greatness and glory as a nation,—ought to suffice for any reasonable conception of the marvellous, as they outstrip the more ignoble creations of fancy, and absolutely invade the former domain of fiction and romance. Hence the seeming puerility of fiction when contrasted with these more wondrous phenomena of fact. The substitution of fiction for ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit

... progressive State are necessary, that they are complementary one to the other. He will aspire after a free and self-reliant Ireland, and the first thing he will do in order to realize his aspirations will be to make himself self-reliant and free—free from everything that is shameful and ignoble, as he wishes to see his country free from the shame of foreign conquest and the ignominy of English rule. He will attempt to become himself among his neighbours what he wishes to see Ireland among the nations—conspicuous for honour ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard

... is a man of no ordinary intelligence. He had the misfortune to be born a slave, with the blood of a freeman in his veins; which, stirring him to discontent with his ignoble lot, at length forced him to become a fugitive. With a subtlety partly instinctive, but strengthened by many an act of injustice, he divines the object of the ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid

... clear gaze upon her uncle, "is the father's care you show an orphan child? This is the protection you extend to that other fatherless and motherless girl so lately left in your charge? Can it be that a De Roberval has sunk to so ignoble a breach of honour and faith? I pray God," she went on more softly, "that He may drive out the evil spirit which has possessed you, and restore your noble and generous nature. You are no longer the ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis

... could be throughly penetrated, as he ought, with this thought, that we are all in an especial manner sprung from God, and that God is the Father of men as well as of Gods, full surely he would never conceive aught ignoble or base of himself. Whereas if Caesar were to adopt you, your haughty looks would be intolerable; will you not be elated at knowing that you are the son of God? Now however it is not so with us: but seeing that in our birth these two things are commingled—the body which we ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus

... he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life?' ...
— Symposium • Plato

... regarded as sufficiently long to permit his overheated passions to cool down—the king sent to the Parliament of Paris an Edict absolutely prohibiting any exercise of the Art of Printing in France, on pain of the halter! It was no secret from whom the ignoble suggestion had come. A year and a half earlier (on the seventh of June, 1533), the theologians of the Sorbonne had presented Francis an urgent petition, in view of the multiplication of heretical books, wherein they set forth the absolute necessity of ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... these thoughts away from him. He must not think of such things—it was selfish and ignoble. He must think of the good that he would be able to do with all the money. He might help the poor at last. He and Miss Gladys would devote their lives to this. Perhaps some day he might even own the mill where the children worked, and he would ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair

... learns, moreover, that this little spot called Palestine is despised and scorned by those proud kingdoms, whose wise men would not for a moment allow themselves to imagine, that any speculation or tenet arising from so ignoble a quarter could have the slightest influence upon their belief, or affect, in the most minute degree, the general character of their ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell

... hindrances and bars, The bold, perhaps the intriguing, carry off Prizes the true and modest ought to win. And so we hear it coarsely said of husbands, 'Better a poor one far, than none at all!' A thought ignoble, and which no true woman Should harbor for a moment. Give her freedom, Freedom to seek, and she'll not harbor it! Because if woman, equally with man, Were privileged thus, she would discriminate Much more than now, and fewer sordid unions Would be the sure result. For what if man Were ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent

... both him and her shot up quick in my heart. I sensed their abandonment to the sheerly physical, till it took in their whole horizon. It was utterly ignoble. I had a vision of all humanity, living, for the most part, merely for food and sex, letting art and poetry and beauty and adventure pass by, content if they only achieved the bare opportunity of daily wallowing in ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... slaves, improved the occasion to read a lecture to his countrymen on the inconsistency and guilt of holding blacks in servitude. In the Missouri struggle of 1819- 20, the people of the free states, with a few ignoble exceptions, took issue with the South against the extension of slavery. Some ten years later, the present antislavery agitation commenced. It originated, beyond a question, in the democratic element. With the words of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... exactly determined; and as the agreement was not observed, the troopers were useless. Before Chalons four hours had been lost—not by accident, as the royalist legend tells, for Valory the outrider testifies that it took but a few minutes to repair. Bouille knew the ignoble cause of his own ruin and of so much sorrow, but never revealed it. When he came to England he misled questioners, and he exacted an oath from his son that he would keep the miserable secret for half a century. The younger Bouille was true to his word. In 1841 he confided to a friend ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... contempt; and, in consulting for the benign administration of life, will learn many a truth, and discharge many ant office, from which lesser beings, esteeming themselves greater, would shrink from as ignoble. But in truth, nothing is degrading which a high and graceful purpose ennobles; and offices the most menial cease to be menial, the moment they are wrought in love. What thousand services are rendered, ay, and by delicate hands, around ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur

... could speak again I began to talk, talking eloquently—as I could do in that life—talking to exalt love, to make the life we were living seem heroic and glorious; and the thing I was deserting something hard and enormously ignoble that it was a fine thing to set aside. I bent all my mind to throw that glamour upon it, seeking not only to convert her but myself to that. We talked, and she clung to me, torn too between all that she deemed noble and all that she knew was sweet. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... suspicious at the change of name and the accusation of theft, peremptorily refused to accept Charles's cheque, or anything else, as he phrased it, except "hard money." So we lingered on perforce at Lake George in ignoble inaction. ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen

... the Windbags. Let not us be like them. I hear among men so much vain speech, so much precious breath and precious time wasted in empty boasts, foolish anger, useless reiteration, blatant argument, ignoble mouthings, that I have learned to deem speech a curse, laid on man to weaken and envenom all his undertakings. For over two hundred years I have never spoken myself: you, I hear, are not so reticent. I only speak now because one of you said a beautiful thing that touched me. ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)

... that this was a farce which they two must play together. If his father had only winked at him! Surely he might have done that with safety! But not to be admitted to the secret,—not to be allowed to play the heroic part,—to be used as an ignoble tool by a father who neither loved him nor knew his courage,—that was too much! He would not betray his father—no, a thousand times, no! But the ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson

... doomed as it were to a 'life in death,' to a consciousness of agonised existence, without the consciousness of power which should accompany it. Happily, death, or entire fatuity, at length puts an end to such scenes of ignoble misery; which, however, ignoble as they are, we ought to view with ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... becoming seriously uneasy, as Kunz, in his fresh snowiness, was disposed to make researches among vulgar remains of crabs and hakes, and was with difficulty restrained from disputing them with a very ignoble and spiteful yellow ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge

... loveliness in life, Despite what cynics say; It is not all ignoble strife, That greets us on our way. Then prithee smooth that pretty brow, So exquisitely knitted; Mankind in general, I trow, Can do without ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 23, 1892 • Various

... he said to her, with an agitation he could not master. "Let me tell you something about myself. If you think I am a passably good fellow you are mistaken. I am a bad fellow, a poor fellow, an ignoble fellow. You don't understand?" as she gazed at him in bewilderment. "No, of course, you don't. God knows I didn't myself until within the last two weeks. It's folly to say such things to you; perhaps I say them half to satisfy ...
— Lodusky • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... 500 francs. And so, as we have said, the iron gate leading into the kitchen-garden had been closed up and left to the rust, which bade fair before long to eat off its hinges, while to prevent the ignoble glances of the diggers and delvers of the ground from presuming to sully the aristocratic enclosure belonging to the mansion, the gate had been boarded up to a height of six feet. True, the planks were not so closely adjusted but that a hasty peep might be obtained ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... mark the struggles of a brave spirit against the restrictions of an ignoble body, we pay admiring honors to every success that it achieves. It is the contest between human will and untoward fate. Each triumph is a victory of man's dearest heritage, spiritual power. Some have made themselves great captains despite physical ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... gallows, and then makes us hangmen for our sex. Women have crucified the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, the George Sands, the Fanny Kembles, of all ages; and now men mock us with the fact, and say we are ever cruel to each other. Let us end this ignoble record and henceforth stand by womanhood. If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified, let men drive the spikes and plait the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... committing some abominable and cowardly outrage. Next he flagellated Anarchism and its partisans. The Anarchists were a mere herd of vagabonds and thieves, said he. That had been shown by the recent robbery at the Princess de Harn's house. The ignoble gang that had been arrested for that affair had given the apostles of the Anarchist doctrine as their references! And that was what the application of Anarchist theories resulted in—burglary and filth, pending a favourable ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... all this was to make me feel, as I had never felt before, the intolerable nature of the yoke I was living under. When I looked into the future and saw nothing before me but years of this ignoble bondage, I told myself that nothing—no sacrament or contract, no law of church or state—could make me ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... myself! I am a vulgar soul, and have a low mind—anything you like. But the idea that that woman belongs to another drives me mad. I ought to hate her, but, notwithstanding everything, I cannot live without her. If she will come back to me I will forgive her. It is ignoble! I feel it, but it is too strong for me. ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... way, so had she. Her school-room days had been a horror to her, and also a terror, because she had often almost flung ink-bottles and heavy rulers at her silly, lying governesses, and once had dug a pair of scissors into one sneaking old maid fool's arm when she had made her "see red" by her ignoble trickeries. Perhaps she would be hanged some day herself. She once prayed for a week that she might be made better tempered, —not that she believed in prayer,—and of course ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... capable and the most self-conscious of artists; his observation was that of an inspired and very careful auctioneer; he was a visionary and a fanatic; he was gross, ignorant, morbid of mind, cruel in heart, vexed with a strain of Sadism that makes him on the whole corrupting and ignoble in effect. But he divined and invented prodigiously if he observed and recorded tediously, and his achievement remains a phantasmagoria of desperate suggestions and strange, affecting situations and ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... remains, as he remained from the beginning, beyond all hope of description—as it might be, a visible god sitting in the garden of a world made new. They sell photographs of him with tourists standing on his thumb nail, and, apparently, any brute of any gender can scrawl his or its ignoble name over the inside of the massive bronze plates that build him up. Think for a moment of the indignity and the insult! Imagine the ancient, orderly gardens with their clipped trees, shorn turf, and ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... end. In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live. The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe. And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide. For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... have sought to convey; elevated by the ideal which he exalts, and serenely dwelling in a glorious existence with the images born of his imagination,—in looking round for some such man, my thoughts rested upon you. Afar from our turbulent cabals; from the ignoble jealousy and the sordid strife which degrade and acerbate the ambition of Genius,—in your Roman Home, you have lived amidst all that is loveliest and least perishable in the past, and contributed with the noblest aims, and in the purest spirit, to the mighty heirlooms of the future. Your youth ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... thirty years? What will the poor authors do in the presence of this omnipotent union of booksellers? I will tell them what they will do. They will enter the employ of those whom they now treat as pirates; and, to secure an advantage, they will become wage laborers. A fit reward for ignoble avarice, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... power, where is the country in the civilized world in which to-day there is not want and suffering—where the masses are not condemned to toil that gives no leisure, and all classes are not pursued by a greed of gain that makes life an ignoble struggle to get and to keep? Three thousand years of advance, and still the moan goes up, "They have made our lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service!" Three thousand years of advance! Yet the piteous voices of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... interesting, as amusing, as sad, and as tragic as those depicted by our great dramatist, for the world is ever the same—human nature varies little, be time and fashion what they may; lovers love as truly and passionately as ever did Romeo and Juliet; and selfish ignoble feelings mar the beauty of mankind as of old. Yet, surely the world is improving—the sun of Christianity has long been struggling behind the dark clouds of the past, and we now surely begin to see its glorious silver lining, and find the world bursting into ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux

... from whatever side, was no less irksome than ignoble. One misfortune was with diabolic ingenuity dovetailed into another. It was bad enough to have killed a man; but the victim was his own uncle, and the father—at least the foster-father—of Gnulemah. And she, forsooth, must idolize the murderer; and, finally, his heart must leap forth in passionate ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble satire. He had never done that. Still, it was his own picture. He knew it, and he felt as if his blood had changed in a moment from fire to sluggish ice. His own picture! What did it mean? Why had it altered? He turned, and looked at Dorian Gray with the ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde

... fellows! they had fought their last fight—they were dead. Not a thing was found on board. A glance showed Mr Willis that it would be impossible to get the ship off, so he ordered us to set fire to her in every direction. Having done so, and left the dead bodies to be consumed in a not ignoble funeral pile, we hurried to the boats. We had been taught by a former catastrophe not to delay too long. As we pulled away, the flames, climbing up the masts and spars; to which the canvas still hung, formed ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston

... But he did not say so. Nor would he have said it had there been a chance of his doing so with success. He was a man from whom no very noble deed could be expected; but he was also one who would do no ignoble deed. ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope

... in the ground. The balls passed too high or too low, but they impressed the fact on enthusiasts, who had longed for battle, that one might die for one's country and not die gloriously. It seemed such an ignoble, such a dastardly, outrageous thing, that death could come to them from unseen hands, for as yet they had not seen a soul. But now they are at the foot of the hill—though it is not correct to so call it, for it was a long, winding valley, through which ran a ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... other hand, wherever men are ignoble and sensual, they endure without pain, and at last even come to like (especially if artists,) mud-colour and black, and to dislike rose-colour and white. And wherever it is unhealthy for {85} them to live, the poisonousness of the place is marked by some ghastly ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... the part he had assumed. He felt it to be a thing unworthy of him, a thing that derogated from his self-respect. Had he but had the justification of some high political aim, he might have endured it with a better resignation; the momentous end to be served might have sanctioned the ignoble means adopted. But here was a task in itself almost as unworthy of him as the methods by which he now set about accomplishing it. He was to black his face and dye his beard and hair, stain his skin and garb himself in filthy rags, for no better end than that he might compass the enlargement ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini

... about to embark; for I will now openly declare, what I have often before left you to infer, that I have no sympathies for those who come to oppress and enslave my country; nor will I ever aid or sanction their ignoble purposes—not even to the withholding any intelligence I may gain of their movements, which may avert disaster or peril from ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... forget your coercive and threatening proceedings, in order that I might only remember that I ought to be a devoted wife and to love you as much as it might be possible for me to love you, you became jealous, you, as no man has ever been before, with the base, ignoble jealousy of a spy, which was as degrading to you as it was to me. I had not been married eight months when you suspected me of every perfidiousness, and you even told me so. What a disgrace! And as you could not prevent me ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... is true that I used to think that sooner or later our beautiful pure friendship would come to be attacked by calumny and suspicion—not on Kroll's part, for I never would have believed such a thing of him—but on the part of the coarse-minded and ignoble-eyed crowd. Yes, indeed; I had good reason enough for so jealously drawing a veil of concealment over our compact. It ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen

... that any mustang in the plains could have traversed it in a day, but the cruel man had made up his mind that the captain's charger should do it in a few hours. It is not so much distance as pace that kills. Had any consideration whatever been extended to the noble creature by the ignoble brute who rode it, the good horse would have galloped to the head of the Trap almost without turning a hair. At first he strode out over the rolling prairie with the untiring vigour of a well-made frame and a splendid constitution, leaping the little cracks and inequalities of the ground in the ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne

... the enormous army of young women who, outside of the marriage relation altogether, lead a professional sex life, venal, furtive, ignoble, and debasing; an army which has existed since the beginning of time but which every postponement of the age of marriage causes to increase in relative numbers and to gain new strength for ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... feed our bodies, to clothe our bodies, to preserve our bodies, to minister to their passions. Now we know that our bodies are mere flimsy shells, in which our souls are paramount. We can fling them aside any minute; they become ignoble the moment the soul has departed. We have proof. Often at zero hour we have seen whole populations of cities go over the top and vanish, leaving behind them their bloody rags. We should go mad if we did not believe in immortality. We know that the physical is not the essential part. How better ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson

... easily look on her from afar. And so, if one comes to her from the country, or returns to her from her own hills, it is ever with a sense of loss, of sadness, of regret: she has lost her soul for the sake of the stranger, she has forgotten the splendid past for an ignoble present, a strangely wearying dream of ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton

... youth" strew thick confusions of a dreary age. Where youth garners up only such power as beauty or strength may bestow, where youth is but the revel of physical or frivolous delight, where youth aspires only with paltry and ignoble ambitions, where youth presses the wine of life into the cup of variety, there indeed Age comes, a thrice unwelcome guest. Put him off. Thrust him back. Weep for the early days: you have found no happiness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... meaner conditions than themselves; and they think themselves polluted, if they have but touched one in walking along; and supposing their nobility to be marvellously interested and injured in it, kill such as only approach a little too near them: insomuch that the ignoble are obliged to cry out as they walk, like the gondoliers of Venice, at the turnings of streets for fear of jostling; and the nobles command them to step aside to what part they please: by that means these avoid what they repute a perpetual ignominy, those certain death. No time, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... troubled all the time by mosquitoes. He slapped his face and his ears and the back of his neck. He succeeded in killing one insect upon the bridge of his nose, and left it there by mistake, a strangely ignoble corpse. Sarah Brown suspected Richard of some responsibility for ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson

... feeling that suddenly assailed him. He knew that the man was a scoundrel, and as unscrupulous as he was weak; a man who could forge a cheque, and plant the blame on another, is capable of anything; and Derrick scented a mystery, a base, ignoble one, with Heyton as its centre. He sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, the box in his hand, and stared frowningly before him. He could find no answer to the enigma. That he himself should march up to the Hall and restore the box to Heyton, was impossible. After all, the affair was ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice

... avarice could covet, with a certain prospect before him of all that ambition could crave. Happy in his domestic affections, incapable, from the benignity of his nature, of envy, hatred, or revenge, a life of "ignoble ease and indolent repose" seemed to be that which nature and fortune had combined to prepare before him. To men of ordinary mold this condition would have led to a life of luxurious apathy and sensual indulgence. ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... lives, and immeasurable geologic periods of time, for its high and beneficent consummation. There is nothing surprising, perhaps nothing deeply condemnable, in the burning anger for which this acquiescence is often changed in the more impatient natures. As against the ignoble host who think that the present ordering of men, with all its prodigious inequalities, is in foundation and substance the perfection of social blessedness, Rousseau was almost in the right. If the only alternative to the present social order remaining in perpetuity were a ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... to the garcon in his native tongue, or what I supposed to be that language. "Cinq sous," was his answer. By the laws of sentiment, I ought to have made the ignoble sum five francs, at least. But if I had done so, the waiter would undoubtedly have thought that I had just come from Charenton. Besides, why should I violate the simple habits and traditions of the place, where generation after generation ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... stands, And opes the deep, and spreads the moving sands; Then heaves them off the shoals. Where'er he guides His finny coursers and in triumph rides, The waves unruffle and the sea subsides. As, when in tumults rise th' ignoble crowd, Mad are their motions, and their tongues are loud; And stones and brands in rattling volleys fly, And all the rustic arms that fury can supply: If then some grave and pious man appear, They hush their noise, and lend a list'ning ear; He soothes with sober words ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil

... old-fashioned phrase—had been rouged and bewigged, and put into high-heeled boots, till she had lost the old majestic freedom of gait and energy of action. Let us go back to our ancient school, to Milton and Shakespeare and Spenser and Chaucer, and break the ignoble fetters imported from the pseudo-classicists of France. These and similar phrases, repeated and varied in a thousand forms, have become part of the stock-in-trade of literary historians, and are put forward so fluently that we sometimes ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... depression. His journal for 1850 says, 'This seems really the Nadir of my fortunes; and in hope, desire, or outlook, so far as common mortals reckon such, I never was more bankrupt. Lonely, shut up within my contemptible and yet not deliberately ignoble self, perhaps there never was, in modern literary or other history, a more solitary soul, capable of any friendship or honest relation to others.' By this time he was feeling the need of another task, and in 1851 he chose Frederick ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... as in other matters, important discoveries are sometimes made, and great events occasionally accomplished, by very ignoble agencies. Mat's deplorable ignorance of Painting in general, and grossly illiterate misunderstanding of the subject represented by Columbus in particular, seemed to mark him out as the last man in the world who could possibly be associated with Art Mystic in the ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins

... of self-justification was received with jibes and winks. Was not such the formula of every prisoner? They pressed her for her story. Looking at these ignoble spirits, the girl could not bear to acquaint them with her pure ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... the light of Allah shine upon thee in thy wisdom, may the houris of paradise make thy couch one of delight when thou art gathered to thy forefathers! In all ignorance I sent yon ignoble female to dance before my honoured guest—a great price I paid ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest

... not trying to turn your religious teaching to any ignoble purpose," said Crondall, quickly. "I am not asking you to introduce a single new word or thought ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... in a word; but somehow not as I had dreamed of its being. I stood regardful, I suppose, but with a peculiarly tempting blankness of visage, for in a moment I received half a bushel of flour on my too-philosophic head. Decidedly it was an ignoble form of humour. I shook my ears like an emergent diver, and had a sudden vision of how still and sunny and solemn, how peculiarly and undisturbedly themselves, how secure from any intrusion less sympathetic than one's ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... Historian, the Poet, the Divine, the Scientist, can here pursue their studies, and breathe forth inspired thoughts which the res angusta domi have so long stifled. In society congenial to their tastes, far from "the madding crowd's ignoble strife," they may succeed in accomplishing their life's work, and their happiness would be the happiness of ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield

... his contest were previously discharged, and despairing of his brother's aid, and shrinking from trespassing any further on his mother's resources, the future looked gloomy enough: indeed nothing but the frequent presence and the constant influence of Sybil had driven from his mind the ignoble melancholy which, relieved by no pensive fancy, is the invariable ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli

... answered, "and yet not so profoundly base as you suppose. Nay, believe me, I had never hoped to win even such scornful kindness as you might accord your lapdog. I have but dared to peep at heaven while I might, and only as lost Dives peeped. Ignoble as I am, I never dreamed to squire an angel down toward the mire and filth which ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al

... aftermath Of youth's vainglorious weeds, But up the steep, amid the wrath 110 And shock of deadly hostile creeds, Where the world's best hope and stay By battle's flashes gropes a desperate way, And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds. Peace hath her not ignoble wreath, 115 Ere yet the sharp, decisive word Lights the black lips of cannon, and the sword Dreams in its easeful sheath: But some day the live coal behind the thought. Whether from Baael's stone obscene, ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... little finger as their representative, we only laughed; and asked him, if he had been so destructive to the officers, how many men had fallen by the puissance of his arm. It seemed that these latter were too numerous and too ignoble to be counted; for that question was always answered with a bah! and a rapidly passing over the extended palm of his left hand with his open ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... "what we Americans give to our country demands no ignoble reward. Therefore, I offer none of any sort. Yet, because you have been a good comrade to me—and because now we are about to go our different ways into the world before us—I ask of you two things. May I ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... Major Benjy ought instantly to have challenged his ignoble friend to another duel for this insolent suggestion, but he did nothing of the kind, and his silence, which had some awful quality of consent about it, chilled her mind, even as the sea-mist, now thick and cold, made her ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson

... impure, spurious, alloyed, counterfeit; low-minded, unworthy, ignoble, mean, servile, groveling; despicable, discreditable, disgraceful, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... was Mr Henderson who deleted the first title, The Sea-Cook—appeared duly in Young Folks, where it figured in the ignoble midst without woodcuts, and attracted not the least attention. I did not care. I liked the tale myself, for much the same reason as my father liked the beginning: it was my kind of picturesque. I was not a little proud of John Silver also; and ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... to drive her into the only form of escape which once had been possible to friendless negroes. She became a runaway. With a bundle tied to the end of a stick over her shoulder, just as the old prints represent it, she fled from her homelessness and loneliness, from her ignoble past, and the heart-disappointing termination of it. Following a railroad track, journeying afoot, sleeping by the roadside, she lived on until she came to the one familiar landmark in life to her—a sick woman, but a white one. And so, ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King

... no ignoble form of poetry that is represented by the Sibyl's Song and the Lament of Gudrun. But it was not enough for the ambition of the poets. They preferred the composition of correct and elaborate poems in honour of great men, with much expenditure of mythology and without passion;[36] one of the forms ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker

... The roots delve deepest. Yes, I've trod thy halls, Scorned and derided midst their ribald crew, A licensed jester, save the cap and bells, I have borne this—and I have borne the death, The unavenged death, of a dear brother. I seemed, I was, a base, ignoble slave. What am I?—Peace, I say!—What am I now? Head of this great republic, chief of Rome— In all but name, her sovereign—last ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various

... errand which had taken him to The Retreat, and which the memory of what was no less than a personal triumph could not submerge. That he, Errol Banneker, whose dealings with all men had been on the straight and level status of self-respect, should have taken upon him the ignoble task of prying into intimate affairs, of meekly soliciting the most private information in order that he might make his living out of it—not different in kind from the mendicancy which, even as a hobo, he had scorned—and that, at the end, he should have discerned Io Welland ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... virtue that should clothe humanity, they have been decked with artificial graces that enable them to exercise a short-lived tyranny.... Their sole ambition is to be fair, to raise emotion instead of inspiring respect; and this ignoble desire, like the servility in absolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character. Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... spectators gaze In holy wonder fix'd, and still amaze. But chief the reverend sage admired; he took The hand of young Telemachus, and spoke: "Oh, happy youth! and favoured of the skies, Distinguished care of guardian deities! Whose early years for future worth engage, No vulgar manhood, no ignoble age. For lo! none other of the course above, Then she, the daughter of almighty Jove, Pallas herself, the war-triumphant maid; Confess'd is thine, as once thy fathers aid. So guide me, goddess! so propitious shine On me, my consort, and my royal line! A yearling bullock to thy name ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope

... that I have been a traitor—a base, ignoble, wretched traitor. I know it; you know it; she knows it"; and as he confessed his wretchedness, he put his bony hand to his forehead, and pushing back his long matted hair, showed more clearly than he had yet done the ineffable ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope

... matter of historical fact, the idea of such presence has generally been both ignoble and false, and confined to nations of inferior race, who are often condemned to remain for ages in conditions of vile terror, destitute of thought. Nearly all Indian architecture and Chinese design arise out of such a state: so also, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... of Giovanni Antonio was Bartolommeo Torri, the scion of a not ignoble family in Arezzo, who, making his way to Rome, and placing himself under Don Giulio Clovio, a most excellent miniaturist, devoted himself in so thorough a manner to design and to the study of the nude, ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari

... (I take it) one born with the God-like capacity to think and feel for others, irrespective of their rank or condition.... One who possesses an ideal so lofty, a mind so delicate, that it lifts him above all things ignoble and base, yet strengthens his hands to raise those who are ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... was right. There was nothing ignoble or mean in this Indiana pioneer life. It was rude, but it was only the rudeness which the ambitious are willing to endure in order to push on to a better condition than they otherwise could know. These people did not accept their hardships apathetically. They did not regard ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell

... office. In what is called the waist, or the centre of the ship, the landsmen and least skilful of the crew are placed. They have to pull and haul with the marines, and to clean the decks, and to do various ignoble duties below. From the part of the ship where they are stationed, they are called waisters. The after-guards are stationed on the quarter-deck, and have to tend the spanker and other after-sails, and ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston

... equipped for the field he occupied with such consummate skill, no power of prejudice could keep him from rising like a star of the first magnitude. Alas! how soon that star has been obscured and by what ignoble means! But, against great odds, its brief existence was characterized by a brilliancy that no prejudice or hatred ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... Borgne only laughed the harder, deep, guttural, contemptuous "huh-huh's!"—a fitting rebuke, methought, for the ignoble deception implied ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... and ceorl were the great distinctive appellations of noble and ignoble descent: none were or are admitted, it will be seen, to any important office in the coronation ceremonies but the former class. They were said to be "ethel-born," and every member of the royal family ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip

... is common, universal knowledge: to all men of all races and in all parts of the world it comes as a shock to hear that a person of a noble countenance has been guilty of an ignoble action. It is only the ugly (and bad) who fondly cherish the delusion that beauty doesn't matter, that it is only skin-deep and ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson

... immeasurable vanity and self-conceit,—the age of "finger-heroes." It is indeed a melancholy reflection, for all who retain their senses, that this charlatanry is made the solitary aim of numberless ignoble performers, sustained by the applause of teachers and composers equally base. It is sad to see how, engaged in artificial formalisms and in erroneous mechanical studies, players have forgotten the study of tone and of correct delivery, and that few teachers seek to improve either themselves ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck

... always thinking of the possibility of somebody else than the reader to whom they were addressed reading them. With nearly an equal presumption as to the fact in the case of Horace (though to do him justice he did not indulge in any ignoble tricks with them) this fact rarely occurs and never offends. An unkind critic with a turn for rather obvious epigram might say that the man's nature was so artificial that his artifice seems natural. ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury

... days I shall come back to you and tell you something. This Demos, I have heard, has in his wrist A pulse that no two doctors have as yet Counted and found the same, and in his mouth A tongue that has the like alacrity For saying or not for saying what most it is That pullulates in his ignoble mind. One of these days I shall appear again, To tell you more of him and his opinions; I shall not be so long out of your sight, Or take myself so far, that I may not, Like Alcibiades, come back again. He went away to ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson

... the human mind that the Pitch Lake was still unknown when Dante wrote that hideous poem of his—the opprobrium (as I hold) of the Middle Age. For if such were the dreams of its noblest and purest genius, what must have been the dreams of the ignoble and impure multitude? But had he seen this lake, how easy, how tempting too, it would have been to him to embody in imagery the surmise of a certain 'Father,' and heighten the torments of the lost beings, sinking slowly into that black Bolge ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... of God and the wish to "please Him" by leading an exemplary life is a motive offered by religion, and this inspires to purity and to self-sacrifice; again, this is no more ignoble than the wish to please the father, the mother, the friend. Many a lad keeps pure to please his mother, because he loves her. So religious men try to live nobly to please God, because they love Him. ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant

... interested his friends vastly—for they are as critical as the most fastidious could be of any singularity in attire, and they held the unfortunate juvenile in his embarrassing position for a long time, to his intense despair, until he was rescued from his ignoble position by some grown-up friend. Then, the young East is prone to the pleasures of tobacco. It was, I presume, before breakfast with most of the bathers, and smoking under those conditions is a trial even to the ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... Marguerite, calling her 'Margot,' about Maxime and Leonie de Villepreux, saying he's her lover, about all our affairs, about Gaston, about your marriage, about your sister and your dresses and your dimples, about our darling father, whose history it professes to relate in the most ignoble, the most revolting terms. Papa's in the most awful state!" and Mme. de Brecourt panted to take breath. She had spoken with the volubility of horror and passion. "You're outraged with us and you must suffer ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James

... terms," she suggested; "where there are robbers there must be victims. But one may despise the victims all the same. One may find their content, or rather their inaction, ignoble." ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... sight. "Ha! start ye back? Fool! coward! knave! Think ye my noble father's glaive, Could drink the life blood of a slave? The pearls that on the handle flame, Would blush to rubies in their shame. The blade would quiver in thy breast, Ashamed of such ignoble rest! No; thus I rend thy tyrant's chain, And fling him back a ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard

... that chose to die rather than to be dishonored: and, if we do not say, that it is her duty to do so, that is because the moralist must condescend to the weakness and infirmities of human nature: mean and ignoble natures must not be taxed up to the level of noble ones. Again, with regard to the other sex, corporal punishment is its peculiar and sexual degradation; and if ever the distinction of Donne can be applied safely to any case, it will be to the case of him who chooses ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... follows the incongruous; and to make a Grecian Deity call for a pot of half-and-half, or to ask a Fairy Princess if her mother has parted with her mangle, is to secure the laugh, though contempt may follow it. To our minds there is something melancholy in such spectacles. Degrading lofty images by ignoble associations must operate maleficiently on the spectator. And if it be absolutely necessary to appeal to the coarse tastes and vulgar appetites of the crowd, let it be done without at the same time dragging beautiful objects ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... Brahman female, a dancing girl, a weaver's daughter, a woman of ill fame, a washerwoman, a barber's wife, a milkmaid, and the daughter of a land-owner- choosing the darkest time of night and the most secret part of the house, he drank with them, was sprinkled and anointed, and went through many ignoble ceremonies, such as sitting nude upon a dead body. The teacher informed him that he was not to indulge shame, or aversion to anything, nor to prefer one thing to another, nor to regard caste, ceremonial cleanness or uncleanness, but freely to enjoy all the pleasures of sense-that ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton

... dear since his death. Sometimes we are not sorry to see men get the punishments which they have brought on themselves; yet we ought to be sorry for Mr. Adams. After all, his fault-finding was in part the result of his respect for virtue and his hatred of all that was ignoble and unworthy. If he despised a low standard, at least he held his own standard high, and himself lived by the rules by which he measured others. Men with vastly greater defects have been much more kindly served both by contemporaries and by posterity. There can be no question that Adams deserved ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse

... get this thought fully engrafted into your consciousness, it seems to me you can never willfully do wrong, can never condescend to a mean or ignoble deed, because you recognize your divine inheritance, and feel compelled by ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen

... their sword. Others are the descendants of those who, as courtiers, statesmen, or warriors, obtained great position, power, and wealth, during former reigns. Many owe their greatness to the fact that they are the offspring of the illegitimate children of kings, or the descendants of the ignoble minions of kings. Some few are enrolled in the peerage on account of their great wealth; and a still smaller number for the eminent services they have rendered their country like Wellington, Brougham, or Ellenborough. A vast majority can boast only the merit ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... sincerity disgraced, by the paradoxes of the truth. Not in the heavens nor in the sub-celestial landscape does this minor art find its refutation, but in the puzzle between a man and his gift; and in part the man is ignoble and leads us by distasteful paths, and compels us to a reluctant work of literary detection. Useful is the critical spirit, but it loses heart when (to take a very definite instance) it has to ask what literary sincerity—what value for ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell

... amazing paradox was revealed in the fact that Palla fascinated her; that she believed her to be as fine as she was perverse; as honest as she was beautiful; as spiritually chaste as she knew her to be mentally and bodily untainted by anything ignoble. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers

... Bernard dog and the English mastiff, and as remarkable for his good-nature as for his great strength and courage. Rambling out one day, accompanied by this trusty friend, they came upon a group of rustics engaged in the ignoble diversion of baiting a badger, an animal much in request among English dog-fanciers as a test for the pluck of their terriers. "Drawing a badger" is the proper sporting-phrase,—the animal being chained to a barrel, from the recesses of which he contends savagely with the fierce ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... design on the credulity of her friends, Lady Choicewest has several times strongly intimated that she was not quite sure that one or two of her ancestors in the male line of the family were not reigning dukes as far down as the noble reign of the ignoble Oliver Cromwell! The question, nevertheless, is whether the honour of the ancient Choicewest family descended from Mr. or Mrs. Choicewest. The vulgar mass have been known to say (smilingly) that Lady Choicewest's name was Brown, the father of which ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... grass, and all its glory fades Like the fair flower dishevelled in the wind; Riches have wings, and grandeur is a dream; The man we celebrate must find a tomb, And we that worship him, ignoble graves. Nothing is proof against the general curse Of vanity, that seizes all below. The only amaranthine flower on earth Is virtue; the only lasting treasure, truth. But what is truth? 'twas Pilate's question put To truth itself, that deigned him no reply. ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper

... the party which desired so to limit the powers and energies of the National Government as to produce mere paralysis. Under such conditions the national administration, instead of at once redoubling its efforts to ensure success by shock of arms, was driven to the ignoble necessity of yet again striving ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt

... This ignoble curiosity was likewise ignored by Miss Berta, who proceeded with dignified slowness to drop her valentines one by one into the caldron. Bea, with lingering care, deposited her contribution on the very top. One slid over the edge, and in rescuing ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz

... run! Oh, stay her! fly; Bring her back hither! [Exit PYLADES. I shudder! She is still His mother, and he must have pity on her. Yet only now she saw her children stand Upon the brink of an ignoble death; And was her sorrow and her daring then As great as they are now for him? At last The day so long desired has come; at last, Tyrant, thou diest; and once more I hear The palace all resound with wails ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... the little Duke of York, and pledged themselves to do every thing in their power to restore the king to his throne. They little knew that the unhappy princes were at that very time lying together in a corner of the court-yard of the prison in an ignoble grave. ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... history had he been elected President, but the mere fact that he was able to inspire so small a fraction of his party with full faith in his leadership is decisive evidence that he was not then the man of the hour. It is certain that his enemies believed his political life had been brought to an ignoble close. Clinton probably felt that he would have no difficulty in living down the opprobrium put upon him by partisan hostility; and to prove that he was still in the political arena, a little coterie of distinguished friends, led by Obadiah German and Pierre Van Cortlandt, made a circle about him. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander



Words linked to "Ignoble" :   base, magnanimousness, dishonourable, fearful, ungentle, meanspirited, noble, grandeur, lowborn, nobleness, untitled, nobility, cowardly, dishonorable, contemptible



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