"Bankrupt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Durand. "My mother," said she, "kept a large grocer's shop, and my father was a man of some consequence; he belonged to the Six Corps, and that, as everybody knows, is an excellent thing. He was twice very near being head-bailiff." Her mother had become bankrupt at her father's death, but the Count had come to her assistance, and settled upon her fifteen hundred francs a year, besides giving her six thousand francs down. On the sixth day, she was brought to bed, and, according to my instructions, ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 1 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... of William of Lorris and the advent of John of Meung, a short half-century (1250-1300), the Woman and the Rose became bankrupt. Satire took the place of worship. Man, with his usual monkey-like malice, took pleasure in pulling down what he had built up. The Frenchman had made what he called "fausse route." William of Lorris was first to see it, and say it, with more sadness and less bitterness than Villon ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... wardrobe, for some garment or touch of colour, novelty of any sort, to help her. But she had tried them all—those little tricks—was bankrupt. And such a discouraged, heavy mood came on her, that she did not even "change," but went back in her nurse's dress and lay down on the divan, pretending to sleep, while the maid set out the supper. She lay there moody and motionless, trying to summon ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... colonized it, back at the end of the Fourth Century A.E., went bankrupt in ten years, and it wouldn't have taken that long if communication between Terra and Fenris hadn't been a matter of six months each way. When the smash finally came, two hundred and fifty thousand colonists were left stranded. They lost everything they'd put into the company, which, for most ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... to the porters not to admit him again. About two o'clock on a subsequent night, which happened to be Saturday, he sought admittance, and was refused. A warm altercation ensued in the passage between him and the porters, which brought down some of the proprietors. One of them—a powerful man—a bankrupt butcher—struck him a tremendous blow, which broke the bridge of his nose, covered his face with blood, and knocked him down. On getting up he was knocked down again. He arose once more, and instantly received another ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... educated in France, and to marry his daughter to a General. And whether in his office or at the Exchange, he would stop any friend whom he encountered and carry him off to a tavern to drink, and spend whole days thus employed. But at last he became bankrupt, and God sent him other misfortunes also. His son! Ah, well! Ivan Potapitch is now my steward, for he had to begin life over again. Yet once more his affairs are in order, and, had it been his wish, he could have restarted in business with a capital of half a million roubles. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... jail once, but merely for debt; and he had carried this off with flying colours by pushing past the startled usher in church and squatting his great flabby bulk in the governor's pew of the next Sunday morning. He was a thief, a chronic bankrupt, a counterfeiter, an illicit liquor seller. It was all perfectly well known; but not once had a constable brought an offense home to him. He had once been arrested for theft, it is true, and taken to St. John's by the constables; but on the way he ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... trumpet through the world With noisy wind to swell a fool's renown, Joined with some truth be stumbled blindly o'er, Or coupled with some single shining deed That in the great account of all his days Will stand alone upon the bankrupt sheet His pitying angel shows the clerk of Heaven. The noblest service comes from nameless hands, And the best servant does his work unseen. Who found the seeds of fire and made them shoot, Fed by his breath, in buds and flowers ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... groom behind him. Georgy, on his side, was in the constant habit of hearing coarse abuse and vulgar satire levelled at John Sedley by his pitiless old enemy, Mr. Osborne. Osborne used to call the other the old pauper, the old coal-man, the old bankrupt, and by many other such names of brutal contumely. How was little George to respect a man so prostrate? A few months after he was with his paternal grandfather, Mrs. Sedley died. There had been little love between her and the child. He did not ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the sensations which a woman yields to her lover, she gives in exchange; they return to her always intensified; they are as rich in what they give as in what they receive. This is the kind of commerce in which almost all husbands end by being bankrupt. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... style, and even went so far as to aspire to a seat in the House of Commons. For a time all appeared to go well; but suspicions gradually arose with regard to his character and his resources, and he was declared a bankrupt. Deserting his wife and her two children, he fled from his creditors. For some time nothing was heard of him, but in July 1802 he arrived in Keswick, in a carriage, but without any servant, and assumed the name of the Honourable Alexander Augustus Hope, ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... never raised the veil of nature while living, nor saw it waver tremulous with the hidden glory before his eyes? The Holy Breath from the past communes no more with him, and if he is oblivious of these things, though a thousand workman call him master, within he is bankrupt, his effects sequestered, a poor shadow, an outcast ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... papers—the Tuileries' papers—the caricatures of Badinguet—portraits of the heroic Uhrich, and infallible cures for the small-pox or for worms, are offered for sale by stentorian lungs. Citizens, too, equally bankrupt alike in voice and in purse, place four lighted candles on the pavement, and from the midst of this circle of light dismally croak the "Marseillaise" and other patriotic songs. As for beggars, their name is legion; ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... his wealth around him, in a great house and spacious and beautiful demesne, he may live as blank a life as any tattered ditcher. Without an appetite, without an aspiration, void of appreciation, bankrupt of desire and hope, there, in his great house, let him sit and look upon his fingers. It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire. Although ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... within the walls; this, when his sin was confessed, when conscience had no power to appal him, when the world and the pride of the world were beneath his feet, and he was going forth from a prison cell, hand in hand with the fallen woman by his side, to face the future with their bankrupt lives. ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... Levy, the great toll-contractor; while the blushing bride will be attended to the altar by her mother-in-law, the well-known laundress of Tash-street. The trousseau, consisting of a selection from a bankrupt's stock of damaged de laines, has been purchased at Lambeth House; and a parasol carefully chosen from a lot of 500, all at one-and-ninepence, will be presented by the happy bridegroom on the morning of the marriage. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... some; "In her the flower o' the sex is found!" And all the swaggerers were dumb. And now!—I could tear my hair with vexation. And dash out my brains in desperation! With turned-up nose each scamp may face me, With sneers and stinging taunts disgrace me, And, like a bankrupt debtor sitting, A chance-dropped word may set me sweating! Yet, though I thresh them all together, I cannot call them ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... in 1994 to increase control over banking policies to neutralize the impact of foreign inflows on the money supply. Although Czech unemployment is currently the lowest in Central Europe, it will probably increase 1-2 percentage points in 1995 as large state firms go bankrupt or are restructured and ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... were more numerous. Every now and then in the course of English history treasures have been unearthed, many of them buried in Roman times. Stories of lucky finds had of course gained wide circulation. Here was the opportunity of the bankrupt adventurer and the stranded promoter. The treasures could be found by the science of magic. The notion was closely akin to the still current idea that wells can be located by the use of hazel wands. But none ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... sufferings of disease. For three months, I watched unceasingly beside her; a heavenly resignation smoothed the bed of sickness, and her wearied spirit was gently loosed from earth, and prepared for its upward flight. You were the last cord that bound her to a world which she had found so bankrupt in its promises, and this was too strong to be severed, but by the iron grasp of death. As the moment of her departure approached, she expressed a wish to receive the last offices of religion; and a messenger was sent to a neighbouring monastery of Jesuits to request ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... obeyed me, and I observed as I worked that there were others still in the way he looked wonderingly, with his head thrown back, about the high studio. He might have been crossing himself in Saint Peter's. Before I finished I said to myself "The fellow's a bankrupt ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... breakfast. The direction of all the nervous energies to the support of the muscular system, and the necessary draft upon the digestive and nutritive functions to supply the muscular waste, leave the mind temporarily a bankrupt. I have never seen a man who was really remarkable for acquired muscular power, and, at the same time, remarkable for mental power. A man may be born into the world with a fine muscular system and a fine brain, and in early life his muscular system may have a fine development. Such ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... down hill he finds it greased for the occasion." And certainly the case of Richard Ashton illustrated the truth of the aphorism, for when he once began to go down hill his descent was so rapid that he soon reached the bottom; and became bankrupt in capital and character. He now began to talk of selling out and going to America: "There," he said, with much emphasis, "I shall ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... saves his finest effect for the fall of the curtain, so we have saved for the last the most remarkable giver in history—Andrew Carnegie, whose total benefactions amount to at least one hundred millions of dollars. A sum so stupendous would bankrupt many a nation, yet Mr. Carnegie is so far from bankrupt that his gifts show no sign of diminution. The story of how, starting out as a poor boy, on the lowest round of the ladder, he acquired this immense fortune, ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... tempt them. It is but of later years that they have condescended to go to the bar, and since the same time only that we see some of them following trades. I know an English lord's son, who is, or was, a wine-merchant (he may have been a bankrupt for what I know). As for bankers, several partners in banking-houses have four balls to their coronets, and I have no doubt that another sort of banking, viz, that practised by gentlemen who lend small sums of money upon ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... XIV, urged by his confessor to take one stand and by his ministers to take the other, was sorely puzzled. He wanted to do his duty as a Most Christian King, yet he did not want to have on his hands a bankrupt colony. Bishop Laval pleaded with Colbert that brandy would spell the ruin of all religion in the new world, but the subtle minister calmly retorted that the eau-de-vie had not yet overcome the ancient church in older lands. To set his conscience right, the King referred ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... don't desire to change anything in England except the weather," he answered. "I am quite content with philosophic contemplation. But, as the nineteenth century has gone bankrupt through an over-expenditure of sympathy, I would suggest that we should appeal to Science to put us straight. The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of Science is ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... the Ministry beg me to stay: however, when this Parliament lurry(9) is over, I will endeavour to steal away; by which time I hope the First-Fruit business will be done. This kingdom is certainly ruined as much as was ever any bankrupt merchant. We must have peace, let it be a bad or a good one, though nobody dares talk of it. The nearer I look upon things, the worse I like them. I believe the confederacy will soon break to pieces, and our factions at home increase. The Ministry is upon a very narrow bottom, and stand like ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... is that, every thirty years or so, science, literature, and art, as expressed in the spirit of the time, are declared bankrupt. The errors which appear from time to time amount to such a height in that period that the mere weight of their absurdity makes the fabric fall; whilst the opposition to them has been gathering force at the same time. So an upset takes place, often followed by an error in the ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... got no lan', yer got no cash, Yer only got some debts; Yer couldn't take de bankrupt law 'Cos ye hain't got no 'assets.' De chillen dey mus' hev dere bread; De mudder's gettin' ole, So darkey, you mus' skirmish roun' An' pay up ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... be good-humored this night, having found a way of escape from difficulties which have threatened to ruin his new career at its very beginning. For a line of the P. D. building into this territory has been held up by the Great Southwest, which warns openly that it will bankrupt and destroy the town of Barlow if its competitor is granted right of way or terminals. To avoid long delay in the courts Regan himself, with the prestige of old command in this territory, has been sent to open the way. But never a friend has he found in his old headquarters town; the politicians ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... wrathful, three years before when the dining Frenchmen for whom I wanted to fight thrust me forth from their company. Three wasted years! Then I had one cent in my pocket, I remembered. To-day I had not even so much. I was bankrupt in hope and purpose. Nothing had gone right; and worse, I did not care. I drummed moodily upon my book. Wasted! Yes, that was right. My ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... in a field in Northumberland, when a thought struck him. The man who was walking was named Thomas Edmonson. He had been, though a Friend, not a very successful man in life. He was a man of integrity and honour, as he afterwards abundantly proved, but he had been a bankrupt, and was maintaining himself as a clerk at a small station on the Newcastle and Carlisle line. In the course of his duties in this situation, he found it irksome to have to write on every railway ticket that he delivered. He saw the clumsiness of the method of tearing the bit of ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... external evidence—partly, I daresay, on both—that men cannot thrive, either as individuals or as world-citizens, without some relation of reverence and affection to something outside and above themselves. He foresees that Christianity will come bankrupt out of the War, and yet that the huge, shattering experience will throw the minds of men open to spiritual influences. At the same time (of this one could point to several incidental evidences) he has come a good deal in contact with Indian religiosity, and learnt to know ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... threadbare, that people, who have sense, avoid them, for fear of being suspected to have none. It calls the good name of their wit in question as it does the credit of a citizen when his shop is filled with trumperies and painted titles, instead of wares: We conclude them bankrupt to all manner of understanding; and that to use blasphemy, is a kind of applying pigeons to the soles of the feet; it proclaims their fancy, as well as judgment, to be in a desperate condition. I am sure, for your own particular, if any of these judges had once the happiness to converse with you,—to ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... country, the property, yes, the property (excuse the word, it is the true one) of the debauchees, their purchasers. And remark here that the virtues of the master are a weak guarantee: he may die, he may become bankrupt, and nothing then can hinder his slaves from being sold into the hands of the buyer who scours the country and ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... fell to Douglass were less empty than the presidency of a bankrupt bank. In 1870 he was appointed by President Grant a member of the Santo Domingo Commission, the object of which was to arrange terms for the annexation of the mulatto republic to the Union. Some of the best friends of the colored ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... only reparation in his power; namely, to yield up the goods obtained of the importer, on the latter's cancelling the notes given therefor. The Yankee at first demurred; but on the Frenchman insisting that he was a bankrupt, and that he feared the moment he opened in the morning the sheriff would pounce upon him with a writ that would swallow up every thing, he finally agreed to the proposition. 'Half a loaf was better than no bread,' he thought; and so the notes and the bill of sale were accordingly ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... determination to put little faith in the optimistic confidence of her husband in regard to the profits to be expected from the operations of the National Machine Company. A year's business was sufficient to demonstrate that the Mapleton branch of the National Machine Company was bankrupt. By every law of life it ought to be bankrupt. With all his many excellent qualities Mr. Gwynne possessed certain fatal defects as a business man. With him the supreme consideration was simply the getting rid of the machines purchased by him as rapidly and in such large numbers ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... said to be but half-truths, but 'give a dog a bad name and hang him' is a saying almost as veracious as it is felicitous; and to no one can it possibly be applied with greater force than to Thomas Paine, the rebellious staymaker, the bankrupt tobacconist, the amazing author of Common-sense, The Rights of Man, and The ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... one of the slopsellers at the East End became bankrupt, and the poor people lost all the money that had been deposited as security for work in his hands. The journeymen who get the security of householders are enabled to do so by a system which is now in general practice at the East End. Several bakers, publicans, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... who taught me to distinguish between the true and the false, and although she was [not?] what you call educated, she taught me that no magnificence of fortune would atone for meanness of spirit, that without character the most wealthy and talented man is a bankrupt in soul. And she taught me how to be worthy of a true ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... fair lady. What do you think?—just as I was standing ready to pour out the contents of my horn in plenty, I made the painful discovery that I was bankrupt. ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... guillotined. But if, for any political conviction whatsoever, you take five hundred lives, political crimes are respected. You take five thousand francs out of my desk; to the hulks you go. But with a sop cleverly pushed into the jaws of a thousand speculators, you can cram the stock of any bankrupt republic or monarchy down their throats; even if the loan has been floated, as Couture says, to pay the interest on that very same national debt. Nobody can complain. These are the real principles of the ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... that define her status in the community. Among them are laws regulating marriage and divorce, defining the legitimacy of children, defining married women's property rights, exemption and homestead laws which protect her when her husband is bankrupt. Then there are the laws regulating her functions as mother ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... makes it serve to cook a pot of mojadderah. In this extraordinary and outrageous manner, barbarously capricious, he would baptise the ideal in the fire of the real. And thus, glowing with health and confidence and conceit, he enters another Park from which he escapes in the end, sad and wan and bankrupt. Of a truth, many attractions and distractions are here; else he could not forget the peddling-box and the light-heeled, heavy-haunched women of Battery Park. Here are swings for the mind; toboggan-chutes for the soul; merry-go-rounds for the fancy; ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... happened; instead of replying, the neighbor turned away, as though not wishing to recognize him. Croisilles repeated his questions; he learned that his father, his affairs having long been in an embarrassed condition, had just become bankrupt, and had fled to America, abandoning to his creditors all ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... translate," I have hitherto refrained, but now have a very small illustrated narrative in the press, another also illustrated in manuscript, and other two not illustrated in contemplation. If I find funds—the Peking branch of the Tract Society is bankrupt just now—and get them out, you shall have specimens. Probably they won't look well, being first attempts, but you need not be ashamed of the Mongol of them, as they have been written under my direction by a "crack" native scholar, and carefully revised by Schereschewsky, ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... close economy is not the best thing; but, on the other hand, George, how are we to perform our part with Longworth? His ideas of economy and yours may be vastly different. What is a mere trifle to him would bankrupt us!' ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... preacher's son, of New York, worked his way about the same time to the lower Mississippi country, and in a few years was receiving an annual income of forty thousand dollars. John Slidell left New York City a bankrupt in 1819, but soon became a great lawyer and slave-owner in ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... fact. Judge for yourself. Why, I tell you he begins bawling for heaven and earth to witness that he's bankrupt, gone to everlasting smash, the moment a puff of smoke from his beggarly fire manages to get out of his house. Why, when he goes to bed he strings ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... danger of falling. Baldwin used his new recruits in gaining possession of the country for a distance of three days' journey round his capital—about sixty miles in all—which was something. But how was the position to be maintained or to be improved? There were no revenues in that bankrupt city, from whose port the trade had passed away, and which had lost the command of the narrow seas. What was the condition of the citizens we know not. That of the imperial household was such that the Emperor's servants were fain to demolish empty ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... Bankruptcy. Had I occupied the office, I should have been too strongly tempted to urge this view, and carry it out, but it was a responsibility I did not wish to take upon myself before God and man. Yet, I felt as I said, that to declare the State bankrupt would be the wisest course, and I am bold enough to think, that there is not a man, having no personal interest in the continuance of imposts, who of two evils, viz., vastly increased taxation, and national failure, would not prefer the latter. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... always entertained for that distinguished general an honest, unswerving, and infinite hatred, which was not susceptible of increase or diminution by any act or word. Pelham, too, whose days were numbered, and who was dying bankrupt and broken-hearted, at the close of the, Earl's administration, had always been regarded by him with tenderness and affection. But Pelham had never thwarted him, had exposed his life for him, and was always proud ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... The farms could not pay even the interest on my present mortgage; the forests come in for that. If a contractor for the yearly sale of the woods was bankrupt and did not pay, how could I get my ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... favourite exhibitions. The ostensible author was the witty George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham whose dissipation was marked with shades of the darkest profligacy. He lived an unprincipled statesman, a fickle projector, a wavering friend, a steady enemy; and died a bankrupt, an outcast, and a proverb. The Duke was unequal to that masculine satire, which depends for edge and vigour upon the conception and expression of the author.[6] But he appears to have possessed considerable powers ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... and he That with bare-headed and obsequious bows Begs a warm office, doomed to a cold jail And groat per diem if his patron frown. The levee swarms, as if in golden pomp Were charactered on every statesman's door, 'BATTERED AND BANKRUPT FORTUNES MENDED HERE.' These are the charms that sully and eclipse The charms of nature. 'Tis the cruel gripe That lean hard-handed poverty inflicts, The hope of better things, the chance to win, The wish to shine, the thirst ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... potter at Bristol, migrated to Bath about the year 1780. For the last six years of his life he was owner and manager of a coal wharf. He had inherited a small fortune, and his wife brought him money, but he died bankrupt, and left his family destitute. His widow returned to Bristol, and kept a school. In a letter to Murray, dated September 11, 1822 (Letters, 1901, vi. 113), Byron quotes the authority of "Luttrell," and "his friend Mr. Nugent," for the statement that Mrs. Southey and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... office as chancellor of the exchequer I began to learn that the state held in the face of the Bank and the City an essentially false position as to finance. When those relations began, the state was justly in ill odour as a fraudulent bankrupt who was ready on occasion to add force to fraud. After the revolution it adopted better methods though often for unwise purposes, and in order to induce monied men to be lenders it came forward under the countenance of the Bank as its sponsor. Hence a position ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... willing to wait, eh? Well, Effie is very young, and she's charming. But she won't be charming if she has an ugly appendage in the shape of a poor unsuccessful American artist (not even a good one), whose father went bankrupt, for a brother-in-law. That won't smooth the way, of course; and if a prince is to come into the family, the family must be kept tidy to receive him.' Dora got up quickly, as if she could bear his lucidity no longer, but he kept close to her as she walked away. ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... not take) the advice of Sir W. Scott, and entered into an arrangement with Miller of the Burlington Arcade, and in February 1820 the first four numbers were published in a volume. Miller shortly after became bankrupt, the sale of the book (of which one thousand had been printed) was interrupted, and Irving's hopes of profit were dashed to the ground. At this juncture, Walter Scott, who was then in London, came ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... year Tiberius' legacy, a sum that amounted to four hundred million of our money, was spent. Caligula had achieved the impossible; he was a bankrupt god, an emperor without a copper. But the very splendor of that triumph demanded a climax. If Caligula hesitated, no one knew it. On the morrow the palace of the Caesars was turned into a lupanar, a little larger, a little handsomer ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... fellow. The old tendency to make things cheaper, instead of better, in the book line is a fallacy, as shown in the fact that within ten years there have been a dozen failures of big publishing-houses in the United States. The liabilities of these bankrupt concerns footed the fine total of fourteen million dollars. The man who made more books and cheaper books than any one concern ever made, had the felicity to fail very shortly, with liabilities of something ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... when she entered the hotel; pros were talking with a mysterious air. There was muttering in the corners, a piece of news was going round: the Bijou Theater had closed, that very day; the treasury was empty, bankrupt; everything sealed up; just on ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... standards are reinstated, common sense is as rare as genius,—is the basis of genius, and experience is hands and feet to every enterprise;—and yet, he who should do his business on this understanding would be quickly bankrupt. Power keeps quite another road than the turnpikes of choice and will; namely the subterranean and invisible tunnels and channels of life. It is ridiculous that we are diplomatists, and doctors, ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of Bertha Cross, and smiled. For a day or two the toil of the shop was less irksome. Then came sordid troubles which again overcast the sky. Acting against his trusty henchman's advice, Will had made a considerable purchase of goods from a bankrupt stock; and what seemed to be a great bargain was beginning to prove a serious loss. Customers grumbled about the quality of articles supplied to them out of this unlucky venture, and among the dissatisfied was Mrs. Cross, who came and talked for twenty minutes about some tapioca that had been ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... conclusion. When the nation owns the railways, trains will run into union depots, the equipment will become uniform and of the best character, and so sufficient that the traffic of no part of the country would have to wait while the worthless locomotives of some bankrupt corporation were being patched up, nor would there be the present difficulties in obtaining freight cars, growing out of the poverty of corporations which have been plundered by the manipulators, and improvements would not be hindered by the diverse ideas of the managers of various lines ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... presence of all the merchants. This was a mild derivation of the old Roman proverb—solvere aut in aere aut in cute, to pay either with one's money or one's skin. But this custom no longer exists; creditors have preferred their money to a bankrupt's ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... Shakspeare's Rialto—the ancient Exchange of Venice, where its large Commercial and Moneyed transactions took place prior to the last three centuries. Here is seen the ancient Bank of Venice—the first, I believe, established in the world; here also the "stone of shame"—an elevated post which each bankrupt was compelled to take and hold for a certain time, exposed to the derision of the confronting thousands. (Now-a-days it is the bankrupt who flouts, and his too confiding creditors who are jeered and laughed at.) This ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... Prince Charles Edward. At the parish school, taught by one Irving, an ingenious and learned person of eccentric habits, he received a respectable ground-work of education; but the early deprivation of his father, who died bankrupt, compelled him to relinquish the pursuit of learning. At the age of fifteen, with the view of aiding in the support of his widowed mother, with her destitute family of other five children, he accepted manual employment ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... hundred thousand livres income, which is not sufficient for him. We know the debts of the Cardinal de Rohan and of the Comte Artois;[1348] their millions of income were vainly thrown into this gulf. The Prince de Guemenee happens to become bankrupt on thirty-five millions. The Duke of Orleans, the richest proprietor in the kingdom, owed at his death seventy-four millions. When became necessary to pay the creditors of the emigrants out of the proceeds of their ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... She's not Spanish at all. She had rather a blow last week, poor girl. Her father nearly went bankrupt; she was quite in despair. It seems your friend Valdez came to the rescue in the most generous ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... taken up with their distant and laborious migrations, then with the building of their nests and the collection of food for their brood, which itself has to play the same role the following year; and so all work constantly for the future, which afterwards makes bankrupt—then we cannot avoid looking round for the reward of all this skill and trouble, for the end which these animals have before their eyes, which strive so ceaselessly—in short, we are driven to ask: What is the result? What is attained by the animal existence which ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... I didn't lie for nothing," she declared. "I didn't quite tumble to the Douglas Romilly stunt, though. They say he has left his business bankrupt in England and brought a fortune out here. You don't look as though you were overdone ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... properly equipped and is ready for service when wanted. Even at some extra cost, it should be made possible to secure hot water promptly, and without agitating the whole household, at any reasonable hour of any day of the week. No family that we ever knew went bankrupt on account of the cost of hot water for bathing, and if they did they would have ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... rum here, old bloat. The mother having you for a son is to be pitied-you are to be pitied, too; but the jail is bankrupt, without a shilling to relieve you in the liquor line," interposes another, as one by one the prisoners begin to leave and seek their ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... placed on the steadiness of its measures for paying? The loans it might be able to procure would be as limited in their extent as burdensome in their conditions. They would be made upon the same principles that usurers commonly lend to bankrupt and fraudulent debtors, with a sparing ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... take possession. He had borrowed a great amount of money from her when he bought the island at Mobile; and the rapid coming on of the end of the rebellion destroyed all prospect of the success of his salt works scheme, even before his death, and really rendered him bankrupt. Hence the transfer of the Memphis property to her was the only way he could make good what he owed her. The madam now had no home, but was compelled to stay with her father, old Master Jack. She was sadly ...
— Thirty Years a Slave • Louis Hughes
... here, broken in health and bankrupt in fortune, awaiting my fate, whatever it may be. I can do no more. If ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... money obtained from the sale of his patrimony he went to work on his coal-mine. A very trifle of a beginning had been made on it before the war, so he had not actually to break the first ground. The previous owner had died bankrupt from lack of capital, and his minor daughter had inherited it. It was from the minor daughter that the elder Carroll had purchased it, partly with a view to assisting the child, who had been left penniless except for the ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... hold, and embarked it in his own sinking business. His failure soon followed, and ingulfed the little fortune of his ward; and, as the hereditary plate of the thrifty householders was sold along with the bankrupt's effects, if he had ever felt the pride of being born with a silver spoon in his mouth, the poor scholar must have felt some pathos in seeing both spoon and tankard in the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... burgomaster of Soevenhagen, who afterwards married his mother. He was born about 1508, apprenticed to a tailor, became infected with the opinions of Thomas Muenzer, travelled in pursuit of his trade (being four years in London), married a widow, became bankrupt, and in September 1533 joined the Anabaptist movement under Johann Matthysz (Matthyszoon), baker of Haarlem. He had little education, but some literary faculty, and had written plays. On the 13th of January 1534 he appeared in Muenster as an apostle of Matthysz. Good-looking ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... point, according to Valori, that the King burst forth into audible ejaculations of a lamentable nature. There is no getting over, then, even to Brandenburg, and in an insolvent condition. Not open insolvency and bankrupt disgrace; no, ruin, and an Austrian jail, is the one outlook. "O MON DIEU, O God, it is too much (C'EN EST TROP)!" with other the like snatches of lamentation; [Valori, i. 104.] which are not inconceivable ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Which boys do flout us with;—but yet I love thee, Thou giant rose, wrapped in a green surtout. Doubtless in Eden thou didst blush as bright As these, thy puny brethren; and thy breath Sweetened the fragrance of her spicy air; But now thou seemest like a bankrupt beau, Stripped of his gaudy hues and essences, And growing portly in his ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... returned Conrad. 'Old Grant will have to leave the farm and go to the poorhouse, or, at any rate, to some small place like the Sam Martin house. It contains four rooms, and is good enough for a bankrupt.' ...
— Andy Grant's Pluck • Horatio Alger
... fiercely. "I might as well tell you myself. Plenty of others will be willing to, as soon as they know you are—my friend.... As I told you, my father"—her voice broke—"my father went bankrupt, but before the courts knew it he had sent some securities to a—to a woman in New York, and when he—left us, he went to her, because he left Mother a note saying so. His defrauded creditors here have tried to—to catch him, ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... his throat. "Really," he said in an intensely aggrieved tone, "you must try to see it from our point of view. This production's cost us thousands of dollars. If we bankrupt ourselves before the opening night it will be a bad business for everybody. You ought to see that. The costumes are very nice, I admit that. But remember we took a chance on it. We waited for them with the idea that you'd cooperate with us ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... visionary enthusiast. Then he indulges in golden dreams of national greatness and prosperity. He discovers that 'liberty is power,' and not content with vast schemes of improvement at home, which it would bankrupt the treasury of the world to execute, he flies to foreign lands to fulfil 'obligations to the human race, by inculcating the principles of civil and religious liberty,' &c. This spirit had long been ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... five-and-twenty, and she is not yet nineteen! so you may judge what a prudent, well-managed establishment it will be. He is in a good enough business at present, but in these times who can tell what's to happen? He may be wallowing in wealth to-day, and bankrupt to-morrow. His sister's marriage with Fairplay is now quite off, and her prospects for life, poor thing, completely wrecked! Her looks are entirely gone, and her spirits quite broken. She is not like ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... Sebastopol, and I was too hard worked not to feel their effects; for a little labour fatigues me now—I cannot watch by sick-beds as I could—a week's want of rest quite knocks me up now. Then I returned bankrupt in fortune. Whereas others in my position may have come back to England rich and prosperous, I found myself poor—beggared. So few words can tell ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... daughter of a London merchant, who was once very wealthy, but became bankrupt and died, leaving his daughter L200 a year. This annuity, however, she loses through the knavery of her man of business. When reduced to penury, her old lover, Henry Morland (supposed to have perished at sea), makes his appearance and marries her, by which she becomes the Lady ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... cries imploringly; "it is my unhappy love for you that has driven me to speak thus! Why is Adrian to have all, and I nothing? He has title, lands, position—above and beyond everything, the priceless treasure of your love, whilst I am bankrupt in all. Show ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... as long as we could. My father died during the Wall Street panic. He'd gone bankrupt. Since you want to know how I lived, I lived for some time by selling my ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... southern railroads; that there were debts estimated, when the war began, at three hundred millions of dollars due the merchants of the North; that they compounded with their southern debtors, abating more than half their dues, and extending time for the payment of the remainder; that a bankrupt act was passed enabling those hopelessly involved to begin business anew. Sound institutions took the places of the old broken banks, and United States currency that of ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... tenacity with which the Anglo-Saxon race has preserved, and still preserves, the vestiges of its ancient subjection to a foreign yoke. The crier of a country town, in any of England's fertile provinces, never proclaims the loss of a yeoman's sporting-dog, the auction of a bankrupt dealer's stock-in-trade, or the impounding of a strayed cow, until he has commanded, in Norman-French, the attention of the sleepy rustics. The language of the stable and the kennel is rich in traces of ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... disinterested. So it is with famine again. Famines come by a nation's own fault—they are God's plainly spoken opinion of what HE thinks of breaking His laws of industry and thrift, by improvidence and bad farming. So when a nation becomes poor and bankrupt, it is its own fault; that nation has broken the laws of political economy which God has appointed for nations, and its ruin is God's judgment, God's plain-spoken opinion again of the sins of ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... knew his refined tastes and sensitiveness to the social amenities. Though a man of honor, his circumstances had become embarrassed. In his emergencies he had recourse to his old friends, whose aid was not withheld, but, a crisis arriving, he was declared bankrupt. Eugenio, instead of assisting his brother, upbraided with being a disgrace to his own respectability, publicly disowned him, and, with the view of forcing him to abandon the country, spread injurious reports concerning him amongst many of the merchants who would otherwise have been willing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... which about a year before the present time had broken out between Greece and Turkey, brought about many reverses of fortune. Her husband became bankrupt, and then in a tumult and threatened massacre on the part of the Turks, they were obliged to fly at midnight, and reached in an open boat an English vessel under sail, which brought them immediately to this island. The few jewels they had saved, supported them awhile. The whole strength ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... any bankrupt's paper," she pleaded, catching hold of his hand as he turned to leave her, "what would ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... Heaven you're not going to make a fool of yourself with her," she exclaimed at length. "She'll wear you out, spoil your work, make you bankrupt in a month——" ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... membership was further enlarged, as was the society of the city in general, by the dependents, or retinue, of a few of the richest and most respected houses. These proteges, half of them poor relatives, half bankrupt merchants, were not always invited, but were, on all important convivial occasions, designed to produce a deep impression, and their function then was to submit to what the Englishmen call practical jokes, during the second half ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... filled in, payable to A.V.R. Todd at St. Amory's Post-office, but there was not the slightest clue as to the sender. Gus looked at the blue and white slip in an ecstasy of astonishment. Now, Gus knew that no one was aware of his bankrupt exchequer save Cotton, and he knew that Jim was not likely to have said anything about it for one or two very good reasons, and would now keep it darker than ever. If it were known that Gus had been practically ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... the lofty houses, thickly-packed cities, great manufacturies (sic), the beautiful public and private edifices? If the new period of disturbance were to commence by some great earthquake in the dead of night, how terrific would be the carnage! England would be at once bankrupt; all papers, records, and accounts would from that moment be lost. Government being unable to collect the taxes, and failing to maintain its authority, the hand of violence and rapine would go uncontrolled. In every large town famine would be proclaimed, pestilence and death following in its train." ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... we had forgotten an obstacle in our way, when we distributed our photographs of the knife. We had none of us remembered that a certain proportion of cutlers might be placed, by circumstances, out of our reach—either by retiring from business or by becoming bankrupt. I always carried a copy of the photograph about me; and I thought to myself, "Here is the ghost of a chance of tracing the knife ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... deputations thronged to Rome. In the porticoes, and on the steps of the temples, in the area of the Forum, in the colonnade that surrounded it, on the housetops and on the overlooking declivities, were stationed dense and eager crowds of impoverished heirs and their guardians, bankrupt tax-farmers and corn merchants, fathers bewailing their children carried off to the praetor's harem, children mourning for their parents dead in the praetor's dungeons, Greek nobles whose descent was traced to Cecrops or Eurysthenes, or to the great Ionian and Minyan houses, ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... too, whose deeds of fame renewed Bankrupt a nation's gratitude, To thine own noble heart must owe More than the meed she can bestow. For not a people's just acclaim, Not the full hail of Europe's fame, Thy Prince's smiles, the State's decree, The ducal rank, the gartered knee, Not these such pure delight afford As ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... my income was derived from interest on money lent to a cousin. Without any warning I had a letter to say that he was bankrupt, and that his estate would probably not pay eighteenpence in the pound. It was quite clear that I must economise, and what to do and whither to go was an insoluble problem to me. By chance I met an old City acquaintance who told me of a 'good thing' in Spanish bonds ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... became a bankrupt, and soon after died of grief," continued the stranger. "I was called back from boarding-school, and thrown upon the ...
— The Young Outlaw - or, Adrift in the Streets • Horatio Alger
... standard for us. There is no reason, Mr. Harran, why a dollar invested in a railroad should not earn as much as a dollar represented by a promissory note—seven per cent. By applying your schedule of rates we would not earn a cent; we would be bankrupt." ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... friend?" Leigh Hunt improved upon this in his "Examiner" by describing the Prince as "a corpulent Adonis of fifty." For this Hunt was sentenced to imprisonment for two years and fined L500. After George IV. became king, Brummel fell into disfavor and had to leave London. Years later, the bankrupt beau, who had been cheated out of a snuff-box by Prince George, presented the King with another in token of submission. In the words of Thackeray, "the King took the snuff, and ordered his horses, and drove on, and had not ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... away Dolly's arm and coming ill-humoredly towards the operating chair). That wretched bankrupt ivory snatcher makes a compliment of allowing us to stand him a lunch - probably the first square meal he has had for months. (He gives the chair a kick, as if ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... despairing survivors of an age-long accumulation of monotonous defeats; but Joan of Arc, a mere child in years, ignorant, unlettered, a poor village girl unknown and without influence, found a great nation lying in chains, helpless and hopeless under an alien domination, its treasury bankrupt, its soldiers disheartened and dispersed, all spirit torpid, all courage dead in the hearts of the people through long years of foreign and domestic outrage and oppression, their King cowed, resigned to its fate, and preparing to fly the country; and she laid ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... donkey-rides, picnics of the small and early type. An air of slow respectability pervades the place; the bulk of the colonists are people well-to-do, who can afford the expense of a winter away from home and of a villa at L150 the season. The bankrupt element of Boulogne, the half-pay element of Dinan or Avranches, is as rare on the Riviera as the loungers who rejoice in the many-changing toilets of Arcachon or Biarritz. The quiet humdrum tone of the parson best harmonises with that of the winter ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... ever to be resident in him, to which the admiring eyes of men should look up even in the declining and bankrupt state of his pride. Fain would I see him, fain talk with him; but that a sense of respect, which is violated, when without deliberation we press into the society of the unhappy, checks and holds me back. How, think you, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... steel, or those leaden missiles of which thou hast told me. Oh! Leo, when the nations are beggared and their golden god is down; when the usurer and the fat merchant tremble and turn white as chalk because their hoards are but useless dross; when I have made the bankrupt Exchanges of the world my mock, and laugh across the ruin of its richest markets, why, then, will not true worth ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... will notice is the business lie. The business lie is a very matter of fact lie. It sounds well. There are some genuine bankrupt sales, of course; there are a few bona fide smoke, fire and water mark-downs undoubtedly, but there are more advertised in a week than there are failures and fires in a year. Good, staple merchandise will usually bring its value, and he who advertises ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins |
