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Nakedness   Listen
noun
Nakedness  n.  
1.
The condition of being naked.
2.
(Script.) The privy parts; the genitals. "Ham... saw the nakedness of his father."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Nakedness" Quotes from Famous Books



... them; and he said unto them: "Whence come ye?" And they said: "From the land of Canaan to buy food." And Joseph knew his brethren, but they knew not him. And Joseph remembered the dreams which he dreamed of them, and said unto them: "Ye are spies; to see the nakedness of the land ye are come." And they said unto him: "Nay, my lord, but to buy food are thy servants come. We are all one man's sons; we are true men, thy servants are no spies." And he said unto them: "Nay, but to see the nakedness of the land ye are come." And ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... lovers throw back the scented coverlet And are afraid. Seeing Death in their own nakedness, They shroud it ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott

... and meanness wear no fine clothes and masquerade under no smooth speeches in the slums. Often enough it is the very nakedness of the virtues that makes us stumble in our judgment. I have in mind the "difficult case" that confronted some philanthropic friends of mine in a rear tenement on Twelfth Street, in the person of an aged widow, quite seventy I should think, who worked uncomplainingly for a sweater all ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis

... floods, in peril of thieves, in peril by the Jews, in perils by the pagans, in perils in the city, in perils in the desert, in perils in the sea, perils by false brethren, in labour and misery, in many nights' watch, in hunger and thirst, in many fastings, in cold and nakedness; beside those things that are outward, my daily instant labour, I mean my care and solicitude about all the churches," and yet saith he more of his tribulations, which for the length I let pass. ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More

... now divided into barracks and a prison, and the nakedness of its appearance upon a nearer view make its lofty proportions more striking. We were expressing to each other our wonder at its size, when our guide interrupted us with an original observation of his own:—"The reason of its size, sir, is quite ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes

... figures—we have the same white and solid flesh tints, strong and delicate; the same warm and always luminous shadows. Indeed, Jesus is confounded with Mary, so to speak, so that the two forms together make one and the same body, and, moreover, the Saviour at need may get rid of his majestic nakedness beneath the veil and in ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton

... a sleep and a forgetting. The soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson

... for something; and she came round by the prostrate trees that would have been invisible but for the white nakedness which enabled her to avoid them easily. Thus she approached the heap of ashes, and acting upon what was suggested by a still shining ember or two, she took a stick and stirred the heap, which thereupon burst into a flame. On looking ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... building blow, and end just about the time the sun is going down. If the people who are on the outside and who are engaged in the labor of love of sending the food that is keeping strength in Johnstown's tired arms and the clothing that is covering her nakedness could understand the situation as it is they would redouble their efforts. Johnstown cannot draw on the country immediately around about her, for that was drained days ago. To be safe, there should be a week's supply ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... They rarely obtrude their idiosyncrasies on their readers. They have nothing in common with those modern beggars for fame who extort a pittance from the compassion of the inexperienced by exposing the nakedness and sores of their minds. Yet it would be difficult to name two writers whose works have been more completely, though undesignedly, colored by their ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... consists barely in the mad opinion of men; and he boldly censures the insatiable rapaciousness and unbounded prodigality of the rich, in their sumptuous palaces, marble pillars, and splendid clothes and equipages. Houses are only intended to defend us from the weather, and raiment to cover our nakedness. All vanities he shows to be contrary to the designs of nature, which is ever content with little. In Hom. 12, we have an excellent instruction on that important maxim in a spiritual life, That we must never think how far we have run, but what remains of our course, as in a race ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... the center of the color-splashed town rose the square tower of the ancient cathedral, white in a coat of plaster for two-thirds of its height, but gray at its top in the nakedness of mossy stone. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck

... to him in a voice of anger, and said: "Nay, what is this? It is growing in my mind that thou deemest the gift of me unworthy! Thou, an alien, an outcast; one endowed with the little wisdom of the World without the Wood! And here I stand before thee, all glorious in my nakedness, and so fulfilled of wisdom, that I can make this wilderness to any whom I love more full of joy than the kingdoms and cities of the world—and thou!—Ah, but it is the Enemy that hath done this, and made the guileless guileful! Yet will I ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris

... Colonel no longer felt vigorous enough to leap the ditch. He had seen the truth in all its nakedness. The Countess' speech and Delbecq's reply had revealed the conspiracy of which he was to be the victim. The care taken of him was but a bait to entrap him in a snare. That speech was like a drop of subtle poison, bringing on in the old soldier a return of all his sufferings, ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac

... but it disappears in the north. There is no mistaking that sign. This unmusical "conk" is sweeter than the "kerchunk" of the bull-frog. Probably these birds are not idiots, and probably they turned back south again after spying out the nakedness of the land; but they have made their sign. Next day there is a rumor that somebody has seen a bluebird. This rumor, unhappily for the bird (which will freeze to death), is confirmed. In less than three days everybody has seen a bluebird; and favored people have heard ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... dangerous consequences of, an idle curiosity and researches into vain and useless Things, and to make them sensible, that all they could acquire thereby would be pain and misery, the necessary consequences of the loss of virtue and innocence, and a shameful sense of their own nakedness; that is, the corruption and depravity of human nature. This interpretation is not only deducible in a very obvious manner from the fable itself, but is likewise agreeable to experience. It is certain, ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous

... the veil. By one breath of an uttered word he destroyed the serene charm, and uncovered the truth in its ugly nakedness. No thought was clearly defined in his mind, when his lips smilingly asked: "Why do you not tell us, Lazarus, what was There?" And all became silent, struck with the question. Only now it seemed to have occurred to them that for three days Lazarus had been dead; and they looked ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... I'll grime with filth, Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots And with presented nakedness outface The winds ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... done as tidily, her lace cuffs were less fresh than they had used to be. About her whole presence there was a troubling hint of let-down, something obscurely slovenly, a kind of awkward and unlovely nakedness. ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... fallen in many places, and lay in fragments upon the terrace beneath; the portico of the door was half tumbling; and the architraves of the windows were broken and dismantled; the tall and once richly ornamented chimnies, were bereft of all their tracery, and stood bolt upright in all their nakedness above the high pitched roof. A straggling "jet d'eau" was vigorously fighting its way amid a mass of creeping shrubs and luxuriant lichens that had grown around and above a richly carved fountain, and fell in a shower of sparkling dew upon the rank grass and tall weeds around. ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... the distinctive characters of the different varieties of trees in their winter nakedness, and copying, with a spirited, though delicate touch, their various ramifications. She did not talk much, but I stood and watched the progress of her pencil: it was a pleasure to behold it so dexterously guided by those fair and graceful fingers. But ere long their dexterity became impaired, ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... of Nada, and awakening soft at heart, bethought himself that he would learn tidings concerning me, his father, Mopo, and what had befallen me and her whom he deemed his mother, and Nada, his sister, and his other brethren. So he clothed himself, hiding his nakedness, and, leaving Galazi, descended to that kraal where the old woman had dwelt, and there gave it out that he was a young man, a chief's son from a far place, who sought a wife. The people of the ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard

... country, he saw several large plantations of pine, planted by gentlemen near their seats; and, in this respect, such a laudable spirit prevails, that, in another half-century, it never shall be said, "To spy the nakedness of the land are you come." Johnson could not wait for that half-century, and, therefore, mentioned things as he found them. If, in any thing, he has been mistaken, he has made a fair apology, in the last paragraph of his book, avowing with candour: "That he may have ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... be well if all Catholics took to heart these noble words of the great English Cardinal, who was himself once an Archdeacon in the Anglican Church. Real charity urges us to set forth the truth in all its nakedness and beauty. This must be done, even though it may sometimes give pain and cause irritation. If a man be walking in a trance towards the crumbling edge of some ghastly precipice, who—let me ask—acts with the greater charity, he who is afraid to ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan

... could to obey him, but it was entirely impossible. On this account I was displeased with myself, because I believed M. Bertot rather than my experience. Through this whole retreat my inclination, which I discerned only by my resistance to it, was to rest in silence and nakedness of thought. In the settling of my mind therein I feared I was disobeying the orders of my director. This made me think that I had fallen from grace. I kept myself in a state of nothingness, content with my poor ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon

... sabre, a bayonet, or any accepted weapon, and been visited by no such sickness of remorse. And to this feeling every unusual circumstance of our rencounter, the darkness in which we had fought, our nakedness, even the resin on the twine, appeared to contribute. I ran to my fallen adversary, kneeled by him, and could only sob ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... seen at any time. Alas! its ruthless keepers have refused them bread, shut them into the street, and left them in rags scarce sufficient to cover their nakedness, to sleep upon the cold stones, a mute but terrible rebuke to those hearts that bleed over the sorrows of Africa, but have no blood to give out when the object of pity is a poor, heart-sick girl, forced to make the cold pavement her bed. The stranger shudders. ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... parted only wide enough for the creek to disappear through a narrow portal. Through small openings in the southern wall, I caught glimpses of the summer cottages on the sandy shore. To the north stretched the pasture-lands with shade-trees happy to hide their nakedness with thick foliage. Here, too, a large elm displayed all its grace. To the east was a bridge and a long lane. From behind a misty outline of trees, the sun's crimson reflections suffused the western sky. Two men paddled a boat ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... finest qualities. It had no need of sustained and frequent intercourse with men and women. For it worked with an incredible rapidity. It took at a touch and with a glance of the eye the thing it wanted. It was an eye that unstripped, a hand that plunged under all coverings to the essential nakedness. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair

... they have the charity to bear with me.—I often bow at the foot-stool of divine mercy, that I may obtain strength to overcome corrupt nature.—None knows but myself my strivings to walk in the narrow way, in which the poor worm has no desire to rob God of his honor. I see the beauty of nakedness to be far superior than to be clothed with rags ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various

... their arms—they carried little treasure with them, because treasure would be of no use to them on their way—their wives and children, ladies as delicate and as helpless as any of our own time—children as unfit as our own to face the miseries of cold and hunger and nakedness—and they went out by the gate of Watling Street, not altogether, not the whole population, but in small companies, for greater safety. They left the City by the gate; they did not journey along the road, ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant

... horrible parasite in their hearts in the place where God should be. They are afraid, afraid, afraid; they dare not be kindly to formal sinners, they dare not abandon a hundred foolish observances; they dare not look at the causes of things. They are afraid of sunshine, of nakedness, of health, of adventure, of science, lest that old watching spider take offence. The voice of the true God whispers in their hearts, echoes in speech and writing, but they avert themselves, fear-driven. ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... masters and to their 'betters' generally. All their lives they had been true to this teaching, they had always had blind, unreasoning faith in the wisdom and humanity of their pastors and masters. That was the reason why they and their children had been all their lives on the verge of starvation and nakedness, whilst their 'betters'—who did nothing but the thinking—went clothed in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... hurt her, too, with the well-meant platitudes with which they strove to cover the nakedness of bereavement. A letter from Phil Blake was an added sting. Phil had heard of the baby's birth, but not of its death, and she wrote Anne a congratulatory letter of sweet mirth which hurt ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... situated one of the huge naval shipbuilding plants. Huge steam derricks rear their arms along the masonry walls of the harbour on the left, and in several places the huge ribs of warships in course of erection disclose their nakedness. On the wharves could be seen enormous guns like giant pine logs heaped up ready to be put on board the warships when ready. Several large men-of-war were in the dock, among them one that had knocked a few plates off its bottom in running over a German submarine in the North Sea. Further and ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie

... Hicks' Creek, meanwhile, formed a camp of repose. This was necessary, as well as time and training, to its usefulness. It was sadly deficient in all the munitions and materials of war—the mere skeleton of an army, thin in numbers, and in a melancholy state of nakedness. "Were you to arrive," says Greene, in a letter to Lafayette, dated December 29, "you would find a few ragged, half-starved troops in the wilderness, destitute of everything necessary for either the comfort or convenience of soldiers." The department was not only in a deplorable ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms

... to Jesus, praise His power, Praise His sweet allurements. Praise to Jesus, when His goodness Reduces me to nakedness; Praise to Jesus when He says to me, My sister, my dove, my beautiful one! Praise to Jesus in all my steps, Praise to His amorous charms. Praise to Jesus when His loving mouth Touches mine in a loving kiss. Praise to Jesus when His gentle caresses ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... the doctor cried. "Mark my word, the day of the common people has dawned. This mudsill of the world has learned to read and write and begun to think. He has tasted of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and begins dimly to see his own nakedness. He will never be content again until he turns the world upside down. My country will lead the way as ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon

... Should that lie in spurning me with her heel I must endure it; should she bid me go and receive public chastisement from her dangerous husband, I would assuredly go. Tears, stripes, hunger, thirst, cold, heat, loneliness, nakedness, unjust accusation, ridicule, malicious persecution—all these I would cheerfully undergo; and if one or any of them could repair her misfortunes, then they would be repaired. The custode said that he believed they could not, but I bade him be silent and begone. ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... any of the Islands, the traveler hourly comes upon parties of dusky maidens bathing in the streams or in the sea without any clothing on and exhibiting no very intemperate zeal in the matter of hiding their nakedness. When the missionaries first took up their residence in Honolulu, the native women would pay their families frequent friendly visits, day by day, not even clothed with a blush. It was found a hard matter to convince them that this was rather indelicate. Finally ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... that we remained here, I walked out into the surrounding country to catch insects, shoot birds, and spy out the nakedness or fertility of the land. I was both astonished and delighted; for as my visit to Java was some years later, I had never beheld so beautiful and well cultivated a district out of Europe. A slightly undulating plain extends from the seacoast about ten or twelve miles inland, where ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... but otherwise he could not be consoled—poor man. I assure you, Miss Haldin, that he was very lovable, but I had not the strength to weep. I was nearly dead myself. But there were kind hearts to take care of me. A dress was found to clothe my nakedness. I tell you, I was not decent—and after a time the revolutionists placed me with a Jewish family going abroad, as governess. Of course I could teach the children, I finished the sixth class of the Lyceum; but the real object was, that I should carry some important papers across the frontier. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

... no they built on all the old French Revolution traditions, or perhaps it is that every Revolution produces of necessity the same clothing with which to cover its nakedness. A strange mixture of farce and terror were those detachments of so-called justice. At their head there was, as a rule, a student, often smiling and bespectacled. The soldiers themselves, from one of the Petrograd regiments, were frankly out for a good time and enjoyed themselves thoroughly, ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... against the walls of trap or glacis of evergreen, and this upon nearer approach or by the glass was resolved into a group of river Indians,—part with the curiously compressed foreheads of the Flat-head tribe, their serene nakedness draped with blankets of every variety of hue, from fresh flaming red to weather-beaten army-blue, and adorned as to their cheeks with smutches of the cinnabar-rouge which from time immemorial has been a prime article of import among the fashionable native circles of the Columbia,—the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... that when he visited the Clonmel Asylum in 1814-15, the patients were not clothed; some were lying in the yard on the straw in a state of nakedness. At Limerick he found the accommodation for the patients "such as we should not appropriate for our dog-kennels." There was one open arcade, behind which cells were constructed with stone floors, without any mode of ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke

... and Mercoeur stood out a good while and higgled hard for conditions. "These people put such a high price on themselves," said one of Henry's diplomatists, "that one loses almost more than one gains in buying them. They strip and plunder us even in our nakedness, and we are obliged, in order to conciliate such harpies, to employ all that we can scrape out of our substance and our blood. I think, however, that we ought to gain them by whatever means ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... and Grace Magor (as she now was) for a wedding-gift, but that the young woman had cried out against it as immodest and, besides, unlucky. On the first count I could understand her rejecting such a gift; for the folk of these parts know nothing of statuary and count all nakedness immodest. Indeed, I wondered that the bridegroom had not taken Luke's freedom in ill part, and I said so: to which he answered, smiling, that no man ever quarrelled with him or could quarrel. "And now, sir," he went on, "my apprenticeship is up, and I am going ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... between camp and fort, was an alluvial spot in which the shovel found no rock. A rough line of piled stones severed it from surrounding lands, and a few trees stood there, promising summer shade, though, darkly moist along every budded twig, they now swayed in tuneless nakedness. Here the dead of Fort St. John were buried; and those approaching figures entered a gap of the inclosure instead of going on to the camp. Three of La Tour's soldiers, with Father Jogues and his donne, had come to bury the outcast baby. One of the men ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... part in human development. Thus, moreover, we must be on our guard against the impetuosity of the revolutionary spirit and all rash rupture with the past. To cast old clothes aside before new clothes are ready—this does not mean progress, but sansculottism, or a lapse into nakedness and anarchy. ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... hangs clouding on their brow, No bloodless malady empales their face, No age drops on their hairs his silver snow, No nakedness their bodies doth embase, No poverty themselves, and theirs disgrace, No fear of death the joy of life devours, No unchaste sleep their precious time deflowers, No loss, no grief, no change wait on their ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... environment; from physiognomy he began to learn history, and from Monday's streets a commentary on the linked sweetness long drawn out of Jewish followed by Christian sabbath. He became inured to smells, to the breathing of foul atmosphere, to contact with foul bodies, to a nakedness of speech such as he had not dreamed of, to a class-hatred that struck from eye to eye like murder, to an apathy of dead hopelessness that revolted him yet more. From Sister Jenifer he learned ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... much in the three days we spent in this town. Men and women for instance! That nakedness of the body, that free and public mingling, going about work and adventure and play together, worked, thought Juan Lepe no harm. Later on in this vast adventure of a new world, some of our churchmen were given to asserting that they lived like animals, though ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston

... Leonidas, we are happy when we have attained what we have needed a long time, and which we have been a long time without. It has occurred to me that the cave-man, in all his primitive nakedness, must have had some thrilling moments, moments of pleasures of the body, the mind and the imagination allied, which ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler

... mainly constructed of brick. In reality there was no building so composed. The flat triangular bricks, or rather tiles, which are so much in evidence, are but inserted in the face of concrete to cover the nakedness of that material. Concrete alone might serve for cores and substructures, but those parts of the building which showed were required to present a more pleasing surface. At the date of Nero this might be achieved by ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

... in place where I cause my name to be honoured will I come unto and will bless thee. Or if thou wilt make me an altar of stones, thou shalt not build it of hewn stones, for if thou hast lifted up thy tool upon it thou hast polluted it. And thou shalt not go up to mine altar by steps, that thy nakedness be not discovered before it." Unquestionably it is not the altar of the tabernacle, which was made of wood and plated over with brass, nor that of Solomon's temple, which on its eastern side had a flight ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... evidence derived from classical writers as to the nakedness of some of the inhabitants of early Britain, it is possible to add the evidence of the memorial stone. This example is reproduced from Sir Arthur Mitchell's Past in the Present, and there is at least one ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... mind apparently as little capable of being seated as a bladder charged with gas. I thanked him for getting rid of Edbury, and a touch of remorse pricked me, it is true, on his turning abruptly and saying: 'You see me in my nakedness, Richie. To you and my valet, the heart, the body!' He was too sympathetic not to have a keen apprehension of a state of hostility in one whom he loved. If I had inclined to melt, however, his next ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... and equal, in a camaraderie of personal effort. In this primitive democracy, every man demanded for himself what he saw others getting. The pretender, the hypocrite, the sham, the humbug soon went to the wall, exposed in the nakedness of his own impotency. Humour is a salutary aid in the struggle of the individual with the contrasts of life; indeed it may be said to be born of the perception of those contrasts. In a degree no whit ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... thanks me. He jumps out of bed, runs to his breakfast, satisfies all his wants, but does not even think of me, the Giver of all his blessings. I will do nothing more for him. After this he shall be a poor, homeless wanderer, suffering from hunger and thirst, from cold and nakedness. I do hate people who don't thank me for the ...
— The Lost Kitty • Harriette Newell Woods Baker (AKA Aunt Hattie)

... still be objected, that though Canaan is the only one named in the curse, yet the 22d and 23d verses show that it was pronounced upon the posterity of Ham in general. "And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without."—Verse 22. In verse 23, Shem and Japhet cover their father with a garment. Verse 24, "And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his YOUNGER son had done unto him, and ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... looked up at the Gray Mahatma curiously, but did not challenge. I suppose his nakedness was his passport. They eyed King and me with a butcher's-eye appraisal, nodded, and resumed their consultation of the hand-written roll. The characters on it looked ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy

... reward, or wage, or even hope. He knew now that it could spring up without sowing, endure without rain, come to its blossoming in utter darkness. And yet he did not have the courage of these revelations. He felt their beauty, but it was the beauty of nakedness, and he had no skill to weave a philosophy with which to clothe them. If it had been possible a year ago for him to have admitted so cruel a love he knew what he would have done. He would have waited for ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... counter-marches, in assassinations, and skirmishes, and battles. The fields of the husbandmen were trampled under the hoofs of horses. Villages were burned to the ground, and their wretched inhabitants driven out in nakedness and starvation to meet the storms of merciless winter. Noble ladies and refined and beautiful maidens fled shrieking from the pursuit of brutal and licentious soldiers. Still neither party gained any decisive victory. The storms ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... 9:14 14 Wherefore, we shall have a perfect knowledge of all our guilt, and our uncleanness, and our nakedness; and the righteous shall have a perfect knowledge of their enjoyment, and their righteousness, being clothed with purity, yea, even with the ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous

... that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked: I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried by fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness may not appear; and to anoint thine eyes with eye-salve, that thou mayest see. As many as I love, I rebuke and chastise: be fervent therefore, and repent. Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss

... drew. No social culture can make a mother's face more than a mother's, as no wealth can make a nursery more than a place where children dwell. Lavish thousands of dollars on your baby-clothes, and after all the child is prettiest when every garment is laid aside. That becoming nakedness, at least, may adorn the chubby darling of ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... self-respect of the individual in the systematic surrender of his personal action, interest, and power, to a political connection in which his own judgment may never once be allowed to count for anything. It is like the surrender of the right of private judgment to the authority of the Church, but with its nakedness not concealed by a mystic doctrine. Nothing is more easy to demolish by the bare logical reason. But Burke cared nothing about the bare logical reason, until it had been clothed in convenience and custom, in the affections ...
— Burke • John Morley

... had known hundreds of such stories at home. As I realized their facts I forgot where I was; I felt that I was back again in that horror, where it sometimes seemed to me I had no right to be fed or clothed or warm or clean in the midst of the hunger and cold and nakedness and dirt, and where I could only reconcile myself to my comfort because I knew my discomfort ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells

... Nakedness therefore, the want of houses, and of all these unnecessaries, which we consider as so very necessary, are not such mighty evils in respect to these primitive men, and much less still any obstacle to their preservation. Their skins, it is true, ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... mutilated beyond semblance to humanity. Would that I had strength and skill to paint that dead figure as it was! Then would those, who glory in the shedding of blood, glory to their shame; and the pageant of war be stripped of all its false toggery revealing carnage and slaughter in their revolting nakedness. ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... our surprise, mingled with horror, when we saw first an arm, then a leg, then a trunk, then a head appear, forming a human body, not in a state of nakedness, but clothed ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne

... hold, and I was free to breathe once more. Then commenced a struggle of awful intensity. Immersed in the most profound darkness, totally ignorant of the nature of the Thing by which I was so suddenly attacked, finding my grasp slipping every moment, by reason, it seemed to me, of the entire nakedness of my assailant, bitten with sharp teeth in the shoulder, neck, and chest, having every moment to protect my throat against a pair of sinewy, agile hands, which my utmost efforts could not confine—these were a combination of circumstances to combat which required all the strength, skill, ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... Dr. Neal's 'History of New England,' its nakedness is laid open in the businesses of the Quakers, Anabaptists, witchcraft. The judges' names are mentioned p. 502; my confession, p. 536, vol. ii. The good and gracious God be pleased to save New England and me, and ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... inhabitants; for the bohea tea used by a Northern freeman, will pay more tax than the whole consumption of the miserable slave, which consists of nothing more than his physical subsistence and the rag that covers his nakedness. On the other side the Southern States are not to be restrained from importing fresh supplies of wretched Africans, at once to increase the danger of attack, and the difficulty of defence; nay they are to be encouraged to it by an assurance of having their votes in the Natl Govt increased ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various

... royalty which even the Parliament dared not question. With a new loathing I loathed it all, for it seemed now to lay aside its trappings of pomp and brilliancy, of jest and wit, and display itself before me in ugly nakedness, all unashamed. In sudden frenzy I sat up in my bed, crying, "Heaven will find a way!" For surely heaven could find one, where the devil found so many! Ah, righteous wert thou, Simon Dale, so soon as unrighteousness hurt thee! But Phineas ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope

... whole days he subsisted on his shilling; when that was spent, he parted with some of the clothes from his back, until, reduced almost to nakedness, he was four-and-twenty hours without food, insomuch that he declared a handful of gray peas, given to him by a girl at a wake, was one of the most delicious repasts he had ever tasted. Hunger, fatigue, and destitution brought down his spirit and calmed ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving

... nothing and seemingly was lost in thought. When they had entered the kitchen Carolyn June and he had spoken and for a moment he looked into her eyes with an expression that caused her own to drop and the warm blood to rush over her throat and face. She had felt that same sensation of "soul-nakedness" she experienced when she looked into his eyes that first time when she was at the circular corral and he was lying under the shed. Neither spoke of the incidents of the ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman

... several reasons against it. In the first place, I should tell all my secrets, and I maintain that verse is the proper medium for such revelations. Rhythm and rhyme and the harmonies of musical language, the play of fancy, the fire of imagination, the flashes of passion, so hide the nakedness of a heart laid open, that hardly any confession, transfigured in the luminous halo of poetry, is reproached as self-exposure. A beauty shows herself under the chandeliers, protected by the glitter of her diamonds, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... [4]arose and[4] marched out, [5]and these are the names of those queens: Sgamalus and Sgannlach and Sgiathan, Feidlim and Deigtini Finnchas, and Finngheal and Fidniam and Niam, daughter of Celtchar son of Uthechar[5]; and they discovered their nakedness and all their shame to him. [6]"These are the warriors that will meet thee to-day," quoth Mugain, wife of Conchobar son of Ness.[6] The lad hid his face from them and turned his gaze on the chariot, that he might not see the nakedness or the shame of the women.[c] Then the lad ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown

... down, the great singers bowed, and Siegmund felt the spattering roar of applause quicken his pulse. It was hoarse, and savage, and startling on his inflamed soul, making him shiver with anticipation, as if something had brushed his hot nakedness. Quickly, with hands of habitual tenderness, he ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence

... men did so baste his bones and so soundly bethwack him that they made him both black and blue with strokes; then stripping him of all his clothes, gave him a scurvy old canvas jacket wherewith to cover his nakedness. Thus went along this poor choleric wretch, who, passing the water at Port-Huaulx, and relating his misadventurous disasters, was foretold by an old Lourpidon hag that his kingdom should be restored to him at the coming of the Cocklicranes, which she called Coquecigrues. What is become of him ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... LIVID VEINS. Their hair is black and coarse like a horse's mane. They have no beard, during their lives, or hairs of puberty. Nor have they hair on any part of their persons, except the head and eye-brows. They wear a girdle on which is a small skin to cover their nakedness. They form their speech with their lips. No religion. THEIR BOAT IS OF BARK and a man may carry it with one hand on his shoulders. Their weapons are bows drawn with a string made of the intestines or sinews ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy

... gift, and it is given to us according to His own fulness indeed, but also according to the measure of our faith. Blessed be His name! we have nothing to do but to accept His gift. The garment with which He clothes our nakedness and hides our filth is woven in no earthly looms. As with the first sinful pair, so with all their children since, 'the Lord God made them' the covering which they cannot make for themselves. But we ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... did not want to look at so much wheat. There was something vaguely indecent in the sight, this food of the people, this elemental force, this basic energy, weltering here under the sun in all the unconscious nakedness of a sprawling, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... did even more, for she took all his clothes, even to his shoes, stockings, and small clothes, nay, everything he had, along with her! Thus situated, he was under the necessity of doing something to cover his nakedness; and this, he himself acknowledged, was the first cause of his seriously applying himself to the profession which has since made his ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... detail through which my hearers must be carried, I thought advisable to begin with an outline statement of the general political and military conditions, and of their sequences; a rudimentary figure, a skeleton, the nakedness of which should render easy to understand the mutual bearings of the several parts, and their articulations. So most surely could the relation of sea power to the other members be seen, and its influence upon them and upon the ultimate issue be appreciated. Before I began, I remember ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan

... her father so well that she guessed the motive of this solicitude; she felt sure he had contracted debts in the town which he wished to pay before his departure. She observed him carefully for a time, and saw the human heart in all its nakedness. Balthazar had dwindled from his true self. The consciousness of his abasement, and the isolation of his life in the pursuit of science made him timid and childish in all matters not connected with his favorite occupations. His daughter awed him; the remembrance of her past devotion, of the energy ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac

... enough to cling to the door, and, when the first spasm of the cramp had passed, to sprawl himself upon it. There he lay for a while, lapped by the water that came over the door, and writhing in his fat nakedness. ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... allusions or symbols demanding interpretation. All the defects of great men, all the extravagant notions written or spoken by them were covered with the magic veil of glory; and there was no innocent little child, as in Andersen's charming story, to tell the world of the nakedness of geniuses. ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... them, and that something is the government itself. It is you yourselves who pitilessly ridicule the uncultured Indian and deny him his rights, on the ground that he is ignorant. You strip him and then scoff at his nakedness." ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... where men lie, When once the moment's past In which the dim and glazing eye Has looked on earth its last,— Whether beneath the sculptured urn The coffined form shall rest, Or in its nakedness return Back ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... earnestly presented themselves in the garb of moral humility, rendering their familiar professions conformable to their general tenets, and stood before us as destitute of self-esteem as they are of ornament, one might not so much feel the nakedness of their rites; but, as a rule, the less graceful the forms and the more intense the spirituality of the minister of the altar become, the higher is his tone of denunciation and the more palpable his self-righteousness. In point of fact, when the proper spirit ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper

... matter, now I've gotten ye roused. Do ye no see the haill street in a bleeze of flames? Bad is the best; we maun either be burned to death, or out of house and hall, without a rag to cover our nakedness. Where's my son?—where's ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir

... reflection brings. Natural life takes the goodness of things for granted; but reflection disturbs the placid contentment and sets man at variance with his world. The fruit of the tree of knowledge always reveals his nakedness to man; he is turned out of the paradise of unconsciousness and doomed to force Nature, now conceived as a step-dame, to satisfy needs which are now first felt. Optimism is the expression of man's new reconciliation with his world; as the opposite doctrine of pessimism is the consciousness ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... publicly whipped, in being thrown into dark dungeons and stenchful prison cells than you and I have. He no more delighted in being ridiculed and ostracized than you and I would delight in these things. Paul took no more pleasure in hunger and cold, in peril and nakedness, in agony and tears than you and I ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell

... was equally assiduous with his other six masters, and even more successful; so that, in addition to being starved, there was every possibility of our being reduced to nakedness. This was no pleasant prospect, running out of tropical latitudes towards England, in the month of January. In the course of six weeks, such a ragged, woebegone, gaunt, and famished gang of reefers was never before huddled together in one of his Majesty's vessels of war. The shifts we ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... Sally arrived. She had not come to spy out the nakedness of the land,—not for the purpose of making contrasts between her own condition in life and that of Mr. Cartwright,—but from pure love. She had always been warmly attached to her cousin; and the years during which new life-associations had separated them had increased rather than diminished this ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur

... protection, affluence, splendour, or even a competency. The slights, and hatred of men, and even pretended friends, gloomy prisons, and tortures, the society of barbarians of uncouth speech, miserable accommodations in wretched wildernesses, hunger, and thirst, nakedness, weariness, and painfulness, hard work, and but little worldly encouragement, should rather be the objects of their expectation. Thus the apostles acted, in the primitive times, and endured hardness, as good ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith

... the mind of the commuter as he surveys the dark form of his furnace, standing cold and dusty in the warm spring weather, and he cleans and drains it for the summer vacation. He remembers the lusty shout of winter winds, the clean and silver nakedness of January weather, the shining glow of the golden coals, the comfortable rustling and chuckle of the boiler when alive with a strong urgency of steam, the soft thud and click of the pipes when the pressure was rising before ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... Generall, with all his company, used all meanes possible gently to intreate them, bestowing upon each of them liberally good and necessary things to cover their nakedness, withall signifying unto them we were no Gods but men, and had need of such things to cover our owne shame, teaching them to use them to the same ends, for which cause also we did eate and drinke in their presence, ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut

... incessant struggle against the delays and the jealousies of Congress; it was by dint of unheard-of efforts and of unwavering perseverance that he succeeded in obtaining the necessary supplies for his army. "To see men without clothes to cover their nakedness," he exclaimed, "without blankets to lie upon, without victuals and often without shoes (for you might follow their track by the blood that trickled from their feet), advancing through ice and snow, and taking up their winter-quarters, at Christmas, less than ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... the Elizabethan translator of Homer, expressing himself in his preface thus: 'Though truth in her very nakedness sits in so deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora and Ganges few eyes can sound her, I hope yet those few here will so discover and confirm that, the date being out of her darkness in this morning of our poet, he shall ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... "rags and jags," and the face of the eldest was in "jags" also. It was torn and scarred by time and weather; wrinkled, and in a manner twisted like the fantastic turns of a gnarled tree-trunk, hollow and decayed. Through these jags and tearings of weather, wind, and work, the nakedness of the countenance—the barren framework—was visible; the cheekbones like knuckles, the chin of brown stoneware, the upper-lip smooth, and without the short groove which should appear between lip and nostrils. Black shadows dwelt ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies

... the upper part of the dense hawthorn growth into a gap, through which he pulled the nest with its contents, four half-fledged birds, looking, with the loose down at the back of their heads, their great goggle eyes and wide gapes, combined with the spiky, undeveloped feathers and general nakedness, about as ugly, goblin-like creatures as a painter could ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn

... garment and ornament from her body, and the dead steed lay a few paces off with its trappings riven and scattered around it.[831] Death by a thunderbolt had always a meaning, which was sometimes hard to find; but here the gods had not left the inquiring votary utterly in doubt. The nakedness of the stricken maiden was a riddle that the priests could read. It was a manifest sign that a virginal vow had been broken, and that some of the keepers of the eternal fire were tainted with the sin of unchastity. The destruction of the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... at present in the Sixtine chapel; in which the yellow colour of the candles and torches, the nakedness of the Pope's throne and of the seats of the church denote the desolation of the church at the sufferings and death of her divine founder. The Cardinals do not wear their rings; their dress is of purple, which is their mourning colour; in like manner the Bishops do not wear rings ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs

... growth; but it withers even more quickly under the scorching sun of the market and business affairs. It also would be the height of folly to conclude that religion contributed nothing to a man's moral worth, because the morally worthless seek to hide their nakedness by wearing it as ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope

... are, so must I be," replied his friend, "for when I saw you last you had not taken to half-nakedness as a costume!" ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne

... themselves aprons," or, as the Revised Version expresses it, "girdles". The girdle of fig-leaves, however, was originally a surrogate of the girdle of cowries: it was an amulet to give fertility. The consciousness of nakedness was part of the knowledge acquired as the result of the wearing of such girdles (and the clothing into which they developed), and was not originally the motive that impelled our remote ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... the most simple and open fashion—which ought always to be done. 'Cabinets,' cupboards, casings and wood finish, no matter how full of conveniences, or how elegantly made, are worse than useless in connection with plumbing fixtures, which, for all reasons, should stand forth in absolute nakedness. They must be so strongly and simply made that no ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner

... ashamed to be seen in linsey-wolsey, woven in the same domestic loom. Knitting was then not only an accomplishment, but a useful art; and the size which a "yarn" stocking gave to a pretty ankle, was not suffered to overbalance the consideration of its comfort. The verge of nakedness was not then the region of modesty: the neck and its adjacent parts were covered in preference to the hands; and, in their barbarous ignorance, the women thought it more shame to appear in public half-dressed, than to wear a ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... first rise of the great plain which declines towards Theveste and the group of the Aures Mountains. Coming from the woodland country of Thagaste, the nakedness of it is startling. Here and there, thin cows crop starveling shrubs which have grown on the bank of some oued run dry. Little asses, turned loose, save themselves at a gallop towards the tents of the nomads, spread out, black and ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... impalpable and unperceived Of others' sight familiar were to hers. And this the world calls frenzy; but the wise Have a far deeper madness, and the glance Of melancholy is a fearful gift; What is it but the telescope of truth, Which strips the distance of its fantasies, And brings life near in utter nakedness, Making the cold ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... Your eagle's feather of blank verse, and lit His Friar Bacon's little magic lamp At the Promethean fire of Faustus. Jove, It was a faery buck, indeed, that Will Poached in that greenwood." "Ben, see that you walk Like Adam, naked! Nay, in nakedness Adam was first. Trust me, you'll not escape This calumny! Vergil is damned—he wears A hen-coop round his waist, nicked in the night From Homer! Plato is branded for a thief, Why, he wrote Greek! And old Prometheus, too, Who stole his fire from ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... those, with whom yet you see God hath communion, because they yet see not a shadow with you; produce the scripture for such order, that we may believe it is the order of God. But deal fairly, lest we shew your nakedness, and others see your shame. You tell me of the order of the Colossians (2:5). But if you can prove that that church refused to hold communion with that saint whom they knew to be received by Christ, and held communion with him [Christ], ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... up Arnold, startling both men, "the human unconscious can't help but equate nakedness with savagery, we have armed our mighty planet to the teeth, convinced that ...
— Unspecialist • Murray F. Yaco

... spurned his euthanasia. By your own devious path, you come at last To where all facts are vain, all visions fade, And your old wager is a laughing-stock, So valueless your will, so vain your power To shape one end of hope. Life crumbles, falls, Around you; and your kind with horror see Your utter nakedness. But I have brought A little present for you: not so nice As two the Devil once offered in its place; Yet 'twill suffice. Men who would cheat the Devil Come, with a curious unanimity, To where the lump of lead becomes a boon Unto the soul rejecting easier sleep. The Devil ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke

... naked? Did you eat of the tree whereof I commanded you not to eat?" Of course, we realize that because of sin, they knew they were naked. Before they had sinned, they didn't think anything about their nakedness. But after they sinned they made themselves clothes of fig leaves. No doubt they thought quickly of something or they would have chosen something more substantial than leaves. The leaves would soon dry and crack, but they were so ashamed of their nakedness because ...
— The Key To Peace • A. Marie Miles

... a lightning-like mechanical response at the sharp cry from the officer overhead. Mechanism, the pure mechanical action of obedience at the guns. Pure mechanical action at the guns. It left the soul unburdened, brooding in dark nakedness. In the end, the soul is alone, brooding on the face of the uncreated flux, as a bird on a ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence

... only by the things that come between them—children, duties, visits, bores, relations—the things that protect married people from each other. We've been too close together—that has been our sin. We've seen the nakedness of ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton

... naked, or in rags that afforded little more protection than nakedness, thrust their starved, red-smeared faces up at him, and gibed ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts

... than to make winding-sheets in Lent for pilchers." With this last stroke Milton is so well pleased that he repeats the same prediction in an elaborated form over the works of Salmasius, and even celebrates in numerous verse the forethought and bounty of one who has thus taken pity on the nakedness of fishes. ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... thy forest?—thy "shadowy groves and unfrequented glens"? Rosalind, Jaques, Orlando, have you indeed a being upon earth! Ah! this is true enchantment! and when we turn back to life, we turn from the colours which the Claude glass breathes over a winter's landscape to the nakedness of the landscape itself! ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... he fallen in a more happy age, and had followed better models, was capable of producing. The ancient satirists often used great liberties in their expressions; but their free-* *dom no more resembles the licentiousness of Rochester, than the nakedness of an Indian does that of a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume

... own hand, might have slain him. She must go to him. She would defy the very sun, and go in the face of the universe. Was he not her brother?—Was there no help anywhere? no mantle for this sense of soul-nakedness that had made her feel as if her awful secret might be read a mile away, lying crimson and livid in the bottom of her heart. She dared hardly think of it, lest the very act should betray the thing of darkness to the world of light around ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... lighting a cigarette. 'No, I haven't had breakfast. The skipper thought we'd better get another anti-aircraft battery up this way, and I was superintendin' the job. He's afraid of the Hun gettin' over your lines and spying out the nakedness of the land. For, you know, we're uncommon naked, sir. Also,' and Archie's face became grave, 'the Hun's pourin' divisions down on this sector. As I judge, he's blowin' up for a thunderin' big drive on ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan

... has given the public what they desire, given them what they like. Of course it made one cry horribly; but then of course one cries when one hears of people reduced by sheer craving to eat nettles and cabbage-stalks. Destitution, absolute hunger, cold and nakedness, are no more subjects for artistic representation than sickness, disease, and the real details of idiotcy, madness, and death. All art should be an idealized; elevated representation (not imitation) of nature; and when beggary and low vice are made the themes of the ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... of Thomas Paine A Two Hours' Ice-Sail Spring Overtures—Recreations One of the Human Kinks An Afternoon Scene The Gates Opening The Common Earth, the Soil Birds and Birds and Birds Full-Starr'd Nights Mulleins and Mulleins Distant Sounds A Sun-Bath—Nakedness The Oaks and I A Quintette The First Frost—Mems Three Young Men's Deaths February Days A Meadow Lark Sundown Lights Thoughts Under an Oak—A Dream Clover and Hay Perfume An Unknown Bird Whistling Horse-Mint Three of Us Death of William Cullen Bryant ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... certain aphorisms in the marriage catechism from which you will see that you are violating its most sacred precepts. Whether a woman yields, or does not yield, this institution of twin beds gives to marriage such an element of roughness and nakedness that the most chaste wife and the most intelligent husband ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac

... others were drawn up on the strand, and then the first thing I chanced upon was a group of people—youthful, of course, with the eternal Martian bloom—and in the splendid simplicity of almost complete nakedness. My first idea was that they were bathing, and fixing my eyes on the tree-tops with great propriety, I gave a warning cough. At that sound instead of getting to cover, or clothes, all started up and stood staring for a time like a herd of startled cattle. ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... at one side of the room gazing in rapt attention at the slaughter of the helpless marines. One by one he watched them emerge from the air-lock bloated and white in their nakedness with their convulsed limbs already growing rigid in the icy cold of space. Out in the open space between the two ships they hung motionless a few minutes, then swiftly dissolved and vanished under the ray of a small disintegrator ...
— The Space Rover • Edwin K. Sloat

... clad in starlight, riseth Night— Thy nakedness clad on with loveliness! So shalt thou see him, like the god Delight, Breast through the foam and climb the cliff to press Hot lips to thine and lead thee in before Love's awful ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein

... is but a man, as I am; the violet smells to him as it does to me; the element shows to him as it doth to me; all his senses have but human conditions; his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with the ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... to pass; but while it lasted it was black indeed. The implacable reality, obscured at first by the emotion and excitement of farewells, and then by a brief spring of hope and returning vigour, showed itself now in all its stern nakedness—sat down, as it were, eye to eye with Elsmere—immovable, ineluctable. There were certain features of the disease itself which were specially trying to such a nature. The long silences it enforced were so unlike him, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... carry on their depredations on a more magnificent scale. Having ascertained the weakness of some neighboring colony, through the sly intrusions of those who have entered the hive to spy out all "the nakedness of the land," they prepare themselves for war, in the shape of a pitched battle. The well-armed warriors sally out by thousands, to attack the feeble hive against which they have so unjustly declared a remorseless warfare. A furious onset is at once made, and the ground in front of the ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... overpowering as the year progressed towards its old age. The shaking tundra, treacherous and hideous with rank growths of the summer. The river facets of broken crags awaiting the cloak of winter to conceal their crude nakedness. Then the trail, so slight, so faint. The work of sleds and moccasined feet through centuries of native traffic, with the occasional variation of the hard shod feet ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... life easily and lazily, and his greatest horror is the probability of falling into the hands of the police, and being sent to Blackwell's Island as a vagrant. All that he desires is money enough to gratify a few actual wants, food enough to eat, clothing to cover his nakedness, and a place where he can enjoy the warmth of a fire in the winter. He has great faith in the charitableness of New York, and thinks that any of the necessities of life may be had here for the asking, and he does not hesitate ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... slops should be served out to all who needed them; but as their acceptance was held to set up a contract between the recipient and the Crown, the pressed man was not unnaturally averse from drawing upon such a source of supply as long as any chance of escape remained to him.] wherewith to cover his nakedness or shield him from the cold, and before the Sunday muster came round the garments had vanished—not into thin air, indeed, but in tobacco and rum, for which forbidden luxuries he invariably bartered them with the bumboat ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson

... uninhabited wilderness the hotel buildings loomed at last with startling conventionality. Even before their discreetly shuttered windows Barton winced back again with a sudden horrid new realization of his half-nakedness. ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... Excellency will find some of his poems in Von der Hagen's four immense volumes, but I recommend you to take your notions of Ritter Tannhaeuser's poetry rather from Wagner. Certain it is that the Pagan divinities lasted much longer than we suspect, sometimes in their own nakedness, sometimes in the stolen garb of the Madonna or the saints. Who knows whether they do not exist to this day? And, indeed, is it possible they should not? For the awfulness of the deep woods, with their filtered green light, the creak of the swaying, solitary reeds, exists, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... strength of the council lay not in itself but in the circumstances that had quickened its intelligence, dispelled its vanities, and emancipated it from traditional ambitions and antagonisms. It was stripped of the accumulation of centuries, a naked government with all that freedom of action that nakedness affords. And its problems were set before it with a plainness that was out of all comparison with the complicated and perplexing intimations of ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... lived so long in the toil and heat that your senses are dulled, your souls are numbed; but realize once in your lives this world in which you dwell—tear off the rags of its customs and conventions—behold it as it is, in all its hideous nakedness! Realize it, realize it! Realize that out upon the plains of Manchuria tonight two hostile armies are facing each other—that now, while we are seated here, a million human beings may be hurled at each other's throats, striving with the ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... This time he appeared more determined and certain of success. There was that expression in his hideous face, combined with the extreme of rage and fury. His lips were drawn back, and his white teeth and red frothy tongue were displayed in all their horrid nakedness; a hideous sight to behold. We trembled as ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid

... measure it was my own hand that laid the train which eventually blew James' hidden smoulder of fire into the blazing beacon of wickedness, in which my friend's Satanic soul is visible in all its lurid nakedness. ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse

... stores of gold, And all he loved and lived for left behind, The friends that nature gave him turned to foes, Dependents whom his greed had wronged and crushed Shrinking away as from a deadly foe; No generous wish, no gentle, tender, thought To hide his nakedness, his shriveled soul Stood stark and bare, the gaze of passers-by; Nothing within to draw him on and up, He slinks away, and wanders on and down, Till in the desert, groveling in the dust, He digs ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles

... doctrines, books, church-goings—not to the dearest earthly friend—not to his own experiences, faith's assurances, frames and feelings. The matter was too terrible to be plastered over in that way, or in any way. He was face to face with God alone, and in utter weakness, in utter nakedness of soul, he cried to God Himself. There was the lesson. God took away from him all things, that he might have no one to cry ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley

... recognized the guernsey as the property of the boatswain. Ichi was clad in shirt and trousers belonging to Little Billy—not a bad fit. The ju-jitsu man sported a complete outfit of his, Martin's. Obviously, the belongings of the Cohasset's crew had been looted to cover the scarecrow nakedness of the captors. ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer

... Dutch far into the Netherlands, was really almost naked. The shoes of the soldiers were worn out, and so they had to wrap their feet in wisps of straw to keep them from freezing. Many of the men had not clothing enough to cover their nakedness, and, for decency's sake, had to plait straw into mats which they wore around their shoulders like blankets. They had no tents to sleep in, but, nearly naked as they were, had to lie down in the snow or on the hard ...
— Strange Stories from History for Young People • George Cary Eggleston

... and thug in that part of the State. My bar'l was tapped, and well tapped. The stubs in my check-book are mutely eloquent. Then the press got in its fine work. When the opposition sheets were through with me not a shred of character had I left. I shivered in my moral nakedness, one enterprising journal said, and that is just about what I did. My public appearances—on the stump, and on the rostrum—afforded rare fun for the other side. I was not an orator—never claimed to be one—and of course they made the most of it. I spoke my little piece as well ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald

... married woman, and do not occupy yourselves with the affairs of women. Had I not seen Bilhah bathe in a secluded spot, I had not fallen into the great sin I committed, for after my thoughts had once grasped the nakedness of woman, I could not sleep until I had accomplished the abominable deed. For when our father Jacob went to his father Isaac, while we sojourned in Eder, not far from Ephrath, which is Beth-lehem, Bilhah was drunken with wine, and she lay asleep, uncovered, ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... comrades," said Pizarro, as he turned toward the south, after tracing with his sword upon the sand a line from east to west, "on that side are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion, and death; on this side, ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its riches: here, Panama and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best becomes a brave Castilian. For my part, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... shrubs and flowers within the rough paling fence that enclosed the house and garden. A new-made garden, for ornament rather than for use, for the staple produce was grown in the Chinaman's garden by the lagoon. Young passion-fruit vines barely concealing the fences' nakedness, a mango, a few small orange trees now in flower. A Brazilian cherry, two or three flat-stone peach trees and loquets—all looking thirsty for rain—that was all. The Old Humpey, as it was called, had creepers overgrowing its roof, a nesting-place for frogs, lizards, ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed

... art galleries; and went with him to concerts, popular and otherwise; and took long trolley rides with him on suffocating evenings when the poor slept on the grass in the parks and the slums, east and west, presented endless vistas of panting nakedness prostrate under ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers

... garden and grotto. Here was a fine old plane tree. Unluckily the colonel said, there was but this and another large tree in the county. This assertion was an excellent cue for Dr Johnson, who laughed enormously, calling to me to hear it. He had expatiated to me on the nakedness of that part of Scotland which he had seen. His Journey has been violently abused, for what he has said upon this subject. But let it be considered, that, when Dr Johnson talks of trees, he means trees of good size, such as he was accustomed ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... composed of hills covered with dark forest and separated by narrow valleys. Here and there the white rock stands out from the enveloping woods of oak, ilex, and chestnut, or the arid slope shows its waste of stones, whose nakedness the dry lavender vainly tries to cover with a light mantle of blue-gray tufts. It is these sterile places which yield the best truffles of Prigord. Sometimes trained dogs are used to hunt for the cryptogams, but, as in the Quercy, the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... the kitchen and in the spacious hall, where great fires of pine logs were piled up for their comfort; and for the remainder of the day they abode there in various states of nakedness, relieved by blankets and straw capotes, what time the house was filled with the steam and stench of their drying garments. Rations had been short of late on the Agueda, and, in addition, their weary ride through the rain had made the men sharp-set. Abundance of food was placed before ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini

... to impress upon their hearers that David was a man after God's own heart. He also knew that the majority of clergymen preached annual sermons in aid of the missionaries who did some yachting in the South Seas, and had brought into existence the sin of nakedness among the natives, in order that they might be the more easily swindled by those Christians who sold them shoddy for calico, to purge them of their sin. George Holland could not see his way to follow the example of his brethren ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore

... universe; the point of view is cosmic rather than personal or philanthropic. What charity is this!—the charity of sunlight that spares nothing and turns away from nothing. What "heroic nudity"! like the nakedness of rocks and winter trees. What sexuality! like the lust of spring or the push of tides. What welcome to death, as only the ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs

... what remained of a neckcloth, and then looked in disgust at my boots. My boots! Two and a half months' work and sleep in them—my only pair—had not improved their appearance. Yet I had not even suspected that before; the evil fruit of relief had made my nakedness clear.... ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... may be running mad without waiting for the moon; mad in broad day; absolutely stripping off, not merely the royal livery, which she wore for the last five hundred years with so much the look of a well-bred footman; but tearing away the last coverture of the national nakedness. Well; in a week or two of this process, she will have got rid not only of church and king, but of laws, property, and personal freedom. But, I ask, what business have we to interfere? If she is madder than the maddest of March hares, she is only the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... far they would go, and he had seen. Was this the old barbarian of the north risen to earth again, his rude garments of hide torn off, exposing him in his pristine, fighting nakedness? Where was the German under it all—the German who was taken to be civilized in heart and spirit as other men are? These law-abiding, stay-at-home people had deliberately grown in Villa Elsa this robust plant of contempt, ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry

... but upon their making signs of friendship, they passed by quietly, the men finely bedecked with feathers of divers colours about their heads, and lances in their hands; the women had no ornament about them, nor anything to cover their nakedness but a bunch of small green boughs before and behind, stuck under a string which came round their waists. They carried large baskets on their heads, full of yams. And this I have observed amongst all the wild natives I have known, that they make their women carry ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton

... of the town, and everybody, from the oldest to the youngest, knew him and his story. He injured no one, he offended no one, and he never failed, somehow or somewhere, to find food to eat, lodging for his head, and clothing to cover his nakedness. He had been among the very first to enter the Refuge, and now, in November, he was the last one left within its walls. He was the only one of the guests who returned, and perhaps he would not have done so had not his aching restlessness driven ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various



Words linked to "Nakedness" :   nude, bleakness, raw, undress, condition, glumness, openness, sociability, closeness, altogether, sociableness



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