"Meagreness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at hand. He had won an unconditional victory over every one of his opponents, and he was minded to use this victory for all that it was worth. It is matter of regret that practically no account is given us of the steps by which the measures that he sought to have enacted were attained. This very meagreness, however, is strong evidence that the measures were enacted without much friction. Apparently, the only object of the delegates now was to suit their action to the monarch's will. They therefore adopted as their guiding star the propositions ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... of sensual softness about his body, as if this might have been a man who loved comfort and ease, who had always chosen the primrose path, had never learned the salutary lesson of self-denial. The incipient stoutness of limb contrasted strangely with the drawn meagreness of his body, which was contracted by want of food. Paul Alexis was right. This man had died of starvation, within ten miles of the great Volga, within nine miles of the outskirts of Tver, a city second to Moscow, and once her rival. Therefore it could only ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... Europe may admire, and no one in Europe can equal." Turning aside from this "breathing marble," I examined the American exhibition of products and manufactures. I confess to you I felt mortified with the comparative meagreness of our show, because it contrasts poorly with the abundance exhibited by nations far inferior to us in skill and enterprise. Still, we have much to show; but the useful prevails over the beautiful. I am quite sure, too, that there are things here which will compel attention, and carry away ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... His head, without being large, was fine. His eyes were of a dark hazel, and possessed uncommon expression. His nose, mouth, and chin were symmetrically, if not elegantly formed, and came short of beauty only because of that meagreness which marked his whole person. His complexion, light without redness, inclined to sallow, and suggested a temperament somewhat bilious. His dark brown hair had become thin above the forehead, revealing to advantage that most striking feature of his countenance. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Harold Biffen, and, to judge from his appearance, he did not belong to the race of common mortals. His excessive meagreness would all but have qualified him to enter an exhibition in the capacity of living skeleton, and the garments which hung upon this framework would perhaps have sold for three-and-sixpence at an old-clothes ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... devotion of a dog for its master, as a devout Catholic gazes upon the image of the Virgin Mother. Since they had entered the tent he had scarcely spoken more than a single sentence at a time. Only once had he given a glimpse of himself. Then he had apologised for the meagreness of the meal. "To-morrow," he had said, "we will have game, the country is full of it; but to-day—" he had looked down as he had spoken—"to-day I felt somehow as though I could not kill anything. Life is too good ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... of every theatrical accessory;—of architecture, lighting, music, the illusion of decorations changing in a moment as if by enchantment, machinery and costume;—by all this, we are now so completely spoiled, that this earlier meagreness of stage decoration will in no wise satisfy us. Much, however, might be urged in favour of such a constitution of the theatre. Where the spectators are not allured by any splendid accessories, they will be the more difficult ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... and spindly. To any one not accustomed to the native build it would seem strange that the apparently puny lower limbs could support such a heavy frame. He was wearing khaki shorts and puttees; even the latter, tightly fitting, did little to disguise the meagreness of his calves. He was barefooted, for the West African soldier has a rooted dislike to boots, although issued as part of his equipment. On ceremonial parades he will wear them, outwardly uncomplainingly, but at the first opportunity he ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... the rapidly advancing dormitory and boarding hall at Pleasant Hill, Tenn., and for the slightly increased accommodations in the Grand View Normal Institute, but we see clearly that enlargement only necessitates greater enlargement. The meagreness of the supply renders the destitution more manifest. The little which has been done, and well done, only gives louder voice ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... say to herself in the dark, "My dress only?" Mrs. Penniman's announcement struck her by its richness, not by its meagreness. ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... though ignorant of my matrimonial plans, doubtless read disappointment in my face, for he resumed, as if to excuse the meagreness of ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... lines, and those in the hollow could occasionally see and hear a shell as it screeched past them overhead; but they gave not one-tenth the heed to it that they gave to the breakfast they were despatching. Indeed, their sole grumblings were at the meagreness of the ration which had been dealt out to them the night before ere they had been marched forward into their present position; and as a field officer, coming from the American camp, descended into the ravine, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... hair he possessed, carefully disposed to cover its meagreness, was grey, and its color permeated, suggested, the tone of his thin face. Surrounded by the cruel exuberance of the children, he seemed incalculably worn, permanently weary, although he was surprisingly sharp-eyed and adequate. It was, Lee thought unsympathetically, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... (particularly in one most charming passage, indicating Ovid's exile in the beautiful country which is the scene of the drama,) or the intense interest which the poet has known how to infuse into what would appear at first sight a subject simple even to meagreness. Poets of many nations have endeavoured, with various qualifications, and with no less various degrees of success, to represent the picturesque and striking features of the nomad life and wild superstitions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... when such scenes delighted Lily, when they gratified her sense of beauty and her craving for the external finish of life; there were others when they gave a sharper edge to the meagreness of her own opportunities. This was one of the moments when the sense of contrast was uppermost, and she turned away impatiently as Mrs. George Dorset, glittering in serpentine spangles, drew Percy Gryce in her wake to a confidential ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... because our knowledge is more than knowledge. It is an immediate consciousness of personality, any evaluation of which carries some emotion, joy or sorrow, shame or exaltation. But in a foreign land we try to find our compensation for the meagreness of our data by the compactness of the generalisation which our imperfect sympathy itself helps us to form. When a stranger from the West travels in the Eastern world he takes the facts that displease ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... them aside and tried the door-handle. It yielded, the door stood open, and the gust of cold wind entering the house extinguished the candle within. They entered and found themselves in a miserable stone-paved kitchen, furnished with poverty-stricken meagreness—a wooden chair or two, a dirty table, some broken crockery, old cooking utensils, a fly-blown missionary society almanac, and a fireless grate. Doyne set ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke
... I thought of my mission. All that wild day in the snow it had seemed the merest farce. The three words Harry Bullivant had scribbled had danced through my head in a crazy fandango. They were present to me now, but coolly and sanely in all their meagreness. ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... extraordinary flow and fund of stories, remarked to his neighbour, 'I could not afford to spend at that rate.' Violet Fane is certainly lavishly extravagant of incident, plot, and character. But we must not quarrel with richness of subject-matter at a time when tenuity of purpose and meagreness of motive seem to be becoming the dominant notes of contemporary fiction. The side-issues of the story are so complex that it is difficult, almost impossible, to describe the plot in any adequate manner. The interest centres ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the largeness of the works to which Paine has devoted himself chiefly, he can be excused for the meagreness and comparative unimportance of his smaller works for piano and vocal solo. The only song of his I care for particularly is "A Bird upon a Rosy Bough" (op. 40), which is old-fashioned, especially in accompaniment, yet at times ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... faith in which he lived before. One can add it without incongruity to one's former beliefs and practices. The believer in Shang-ti can be a Buddhist as well as the believer in Brahma.[6] The absence of any hierarchy or centralised organisation enabled it to spread freely, and the very meagreness of its doctrine, and its freedom from ritual, were also in ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... political significance have but the scantiest appreciation of the physical fact. The Australians, for instance, have no term to express the relationship between mother and child. This is because the physical fact is of no significance, and not as Mr. Thomas thinks because of the meagreness of the language.[325] Our field anthropologists do not quite understand the savage in this respect. It is of no use preparing a genealogical tree on the basis of civilised knowledge of genealogy if such a document is beyond the ken of the people to whom ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... as much in the background as anatomy in the Hippocratic collection. As a formal discipline and part of medical education we find no trace of these studies among the pre-Alexandrian physicians. But the meagreness of the number of ascertained facts did not prevent much speculation among a people eager to seek the causes of things. Of that speculation we learn much from the fragments of contemporary medical writers and philosophers, from the medical works of the Alexandrian period, and to some extent from ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the utmost his hereditary predisposition to the portly. His shoulders were vast, and his lower limbs thick-set, double-jointed, and slightly curved outward, in that formation which takes so much from beauty to give so largely to strength. But Lydon, except that he was slender even almost to meagreness, was beautifully and delicately proportioned; and the skillful might have perceived that with much less compass of muscle than his foe, that which he had was more seasoned—iron and compact. In proportion, too, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... level of religious thought and religious life. They carry in them the evidence of a great reaction and a scornful indignant rising up against what were going about and were currently received as adequate ideas of religion. The dryness and primness and meagreness of the common Church preaching, correct as it was in its outlines of doctrine, and sober and temperate in tone, struck cold on a mind which had caught sight, in the New Testament, of the spirit and life ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... and sterner path—I know not whether there be any now qualified to tread it—I am not sure that even one has ever followed it implicitly, in view of the certain meagerness of its temporal rewards and the haste wherewith any fame acquired in a sphere so thoroughly ephemeral as the editor's must be shrouded by the dark waters of oblivion. This path demands an ear ever open to the plaints of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... thin-nosed, unpractical Percy, with all his finicky sensibilities, with his high fastidious reticences, with his effete, inbred meagerness of bone and sinew, with his distinguished pride of distinguished race rather running to seed. And I stood marveling at the wisdom of old Mother Nature, who was so plainly propelling him toward this revitalizing, revivifying, ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... engine had fallen below expectations brought the Sun Planters' food problem into prominence again. When Elsa had begun housekeeping for the men she had protested over the meagerness and the simplicity of the food supplies. But Roger had explained their situation frankly and Elsa had proceeded to make good German magic over the canned food of which the ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... She still carried her violin, and slipped back to her room to put it away. Peter had a glimpse of its poverty and its meagerness. ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart |
