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Hideousness

noun
1.
Dreadful ugliness; horrible repulsiveness.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Hideousness" Quotes from Famous Books



... herself free, two rabbits bolted, and hell broke loose. One would not have thought that the great calm evening under its stooping sky, the peaceful, omniscient trees, the grave, contented colours, could have tolerated such hideousness. The women and children shrieked with the best, and Hazel stood alone—the single representative, in a callous world, of God. Or was the world His representative, and she something alien, a dissentient voice ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... self-discipline necessary for the best results. She writes vehemently to assert the often-neglected rights of women and children or to denounce negro slavery and all oppression; and sometimes, as when in 'The Cry of the Children' she revealed the hideousness of child-labor in the factories, she is genuine and irresistible; but more frequently she produces highly romantic or mystical imaginary narrations (often in medieval settings). She not seldom mistakes enthusiasm or indignation for artistic inspiration, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... this evil thing. Though these festivals were indissolubly intertwined with idolatry, and besmirched with much sensuous evil, yet he deals with them as he does with war and with slavery; points to the disguised nobility that lay beneath the hideousness, and holds up even these low things as a pattern for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... in this land of the imagination that they had first met, and formed their friendship. Revisiting it in one another's company, the hideousness of what had happened was, for the time being, blotted out; they renewed their former intimacy and passion. With the mention of familiar names, kind associations of bygone pleasures were aroused, and the old affection ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson

... The man who would trifle with this girl, I felt, was playing fast and loose with her very life. I thought then, and I said to Kennedy afterward: "If this Dr. Dixon is guilty, you have no right to hide it from that girl. Anything less than the truth will only blacken the hideousness of the crime ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... might be, and Edmund felt all its hideousness, he felt every moment more and more convinced that it was the only safe way. He had suffered too much already to venture willingly back into the torture-chamber from which he had just escaped, even if he could safely have regained ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday

... point of marrying him, and might have had Fanny with her. Mary also speaks of her drawing lessons, and how (thank God!) she had finished "that tedious, ugly picture" she had been so long about. This points to that terrible way of teaching Art, by accustoming its students to hideousness and vulgarity, till Art itself might become an unknown quantity. Mary also tells, what is more interesting, that she has finished the fourth chapter, a very long one, of her Frankenstein, which she thinks Shelley will like. She wishes for his return. On December 13 Mary receives a letter from Shelley, ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti

... blue-cotton frock, which marked her for a plantation-negro. Large hoops were in her flat, enormous ears, that seemed to suspend her shoulders as they touched them, drawn up and narrowed as these were, even beyond their natural hideousness, by her attitude, one which she maintained as stolidly as ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... its chivalry and its pageantry, it has also revolting hideousness and demoniac woe. The young, the noble, the sanguine were writhing there in agony. Bullets respect not beauty. They tear out the eye, and shatter the jaw, and rend the cheek, and transform the human face divine into an aspect upon which one can not gaze ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott

... wicked and cruel scheme, worked out to the smallest particular. But, though I understood its hideousness intellectually, it aroused in mo no corresponding emotion; my sensitiveness to right arid wrong seemed stupefied or inoperative. I could say, "This is wicked," but I could not awaken in myself a horror of committing ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne

... gloom and more dismal funeral pomp than have the votaries of any other creed. What can be more depressing than the darkness in which a house is kept shrouded, while the dead body is awaiting sepulture? What more repellent than the sweeping robes of lustreless crape, and the purposed hideousness of the heavy cap in which the widow laments the "deliverance" of her husband "from the burden of the flesh"? What more revolting than the artificially long faces of the undertaker's men, the drooping "weepers", the carefully-arranged white handkerchiefs, ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant

... was the flayed caricature of a man done so cunningly that through the abortive hideousness of its outlines, its human character ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht

... lion roaring, though it's a pretty good imitation; it's only a camel cursing and snarling with all his might while his owner piles a few bushels' weight on his back. He doesn't really mind it, but it is the immemorial custom of camels to protest with hideousness and confused noise, and if he didn't do it his trade union would be down ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton

... hoofs, goggle eyes, and scaly tail, that was held up to many yet living as the avenger of childish disobedience in their earlier days, together perhaps with some strength of conviction of the moral hideousness of the evil he was intended, in a rough way, to typify; but this hazily retained impression of the Author of Evil was the universal and entirely credited conception of the ordinary appearance of those bad spirits who were so real to our ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding

... dung-hill." Such was the outcome of St. Bernard's cloistered Meditationes Piissimae.[45] Sometimes, indeed, these mediaeval monks would admit that the skin possessed a certain superficial beauty, but they only made that admission in order to emphasize the hideousness of the body when deprived of this film of loveliness, and strained all their perverse intellectual acumen, and their ferocious irony, as they eagerly pointed the finger of mockery at every detail of what seemed ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... They are wonderfully beautiful as pictures, without thought of the thousands of tiny mosaics used in making the pictures, and that each one was placed in by hand. Some of the other pictures are wonderful, too—wonderful in their hideousness. No two artists seem to have the same idea of the features of Columbus. There seemed to be but one thing that they agreed upon fully, and that was that Columbus wore his hair chopped off on his neck. There is a great likeness there. Ferdinand and Isabella looked painfully disturbed ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')

... I landed in Normandy, is a hideous seaport; but its hideousness was almost turned to beauty, on that golden afternoon, by the bright French atmosphere, which can do for bad scenery what French cookery does for bad meat. The royal and imperial roads of France are as despotically straight as those of the Roman Empire. But it was a pleasant evening drive ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various

... the leper's living blotch of bale: Uncoiling monstrous into street on street Paven with perils, teeming with mischance, Where man and beast go blindfold and in dread, Working with oaths and threats and faltering feet Somewhither in the hideousness ahead; Working through wicked airs and deadly dews That make the laden robber grin askance At the good places in his black romance, And the poor, loitering harlot rather choose Go pinched and pined to bed Than lurk and ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley

... your story to yourself," he wrote, "laying all hideousness utterly bare, reserving nothing. Banish the idea of the audience and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... is the natural evil of the human mind, and not the supernatural agency in the story of its development, that makes Macbeth so terrible; it is the hideousness of a wicked soul, into which enter more foul ingredients than are held in the witches' caldron of abominations, that makes the play so tremendous. I wish we had read that great work together. How it contrasts with what we did read, the "Tempest," that brightest creation of a wholesome genius ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... will scarcely be supposed that the picture has been overdrawn in the act books of the Consistory courts; and as we see it there it is almost too deplorable for belief, as well in its own intrinsic hideousness as in the unconscious connivance of the authorities. Brothels were kept in London for the especial use of priests;[199] the "confessional" was abused in the most open and abominable manner.[200] Cases occurred of the same ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... glittering as it went, was a long monster-looking object. It was a huge serpent—a snake of the most venomous kind—the dreaded 'moccason.' It was one of the largest of its species; and its great flat head, protruding sockets, and sparkling eyes, added to the hideousness of its appearance. Every now and then, as it advanced, it threw out its forked tongue, which, moist with poisonous saliva, flashed under the sunbeam like jets of fire. It was crawling directly for the tree on which ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... had been startling. It completely shattered all her convictions, placing her misfortunes in a new and horrible light. The Viscount was innocent as he had steadily asserted, and her parent stood revealed to her in all his moral hideousness; he was a monster, a demon; he had made his fearful revelations only when death was upon him and reparation was impossible; besides, there was nothing noble or elevating about his remorse—it was thoroughly ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg

... Draw near to God if you would see sin's awful hideousness. Unlike most other things, the farther you are away from sin the more clearly you can see it ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr

... a butterfly; to-day he roams on gilded wings, to-morrow he will show his hideousness ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 327, August 16, 1828 • Various

... Harry. We shall be eat up alive! Them there woods swarms with snakes—I know they do. And just look there!" he cried, splashing fiercely with his paddle to frighten a huge reptile, but without effect; for the great beast came slowly floating down in all its native hideousness, its rugged bark-like back and the rough prominences above its eyes out of the muddy water, one eye peering at us with the baleful look peculiar ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn

... source of Ham's sin, its hideousness first appears in its true light. One never becomes an adulterer or commits murder until he has first cast out of his heart the fear of God. A pupil does not rebel against his teacher unless he has first lost due reverence for that teacher. The ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther

... told in all its hideousness, without palliation or reserve, without comment or heightening, in that stern judicial fashion so characteristic of the Bible records of its greatest characters. Every step is narrated without a trace of softening, and without a word of emotion. Not a single ugly detail is spared. ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren

... false delights. Now, kneeling in his cell, before the image of that holy cross on which hung, as in a balance, the ransom of the world, Paphnutius began to think of Thais, because Thais was a sin to him, and he meditated long, according to ascetic rules, on the fearful hideousness of the carnal delights with which this woman had inspired him in the days of his sin and ignorance. After some hours of meditation the image of Thais appeared to him clearly and distinctly. He saw her again, as he had seen her when she tempted ...
— Thais • Anatole France

... "working for a living," without feeling that the boyish bravado of his insolent wit is based upon a deep and universal emotion. What we note here is an affiliation in revolt between the artist and the masses. And this affiliation indicates that the hideousness of our industrial system is far more offensive than any ancient despotism or slave-owning tyranny to the natural passion for light and air and leisure and freedom in ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... reached its climax and did its worst. What was done there against Christ, and against God in Him, was a kind of embodiment and quintessence of the sin of the whole world. And undoubtedly it was this which was pressing on Jesus; this was "the travail of His soul." He was looking close at sin's utmost hideousness; He was sickened with its contact; He was crushed with its brutality—crushed to death. Yet this human nature was His own; He was identified with it—bone of its bone, flesh of its flesh; and, as in a reprobate ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker

... anything will come of it. Harrie belongs to a type of humanity beyond awakening to a realization of moral degeneracy; a type that believes so confidently in the divine right of class privilege that it believes little else. Harrie's failure to appreciate the hideousness of certain recent experiences has made them all the more keenly felt by his brother. I have rarely seen a man suffer as the latter has suffered in the past few days, but ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher

... noblest. The countenances of his Madonnas are full of ineffable sweetness and pathos. 'At the same time he analysed the monstrous and misshapen, and has left us caricatures in which he seems to have gloated over hideousness half human, half brute. He altered and retouched without ceasing, always deferring the conclusion of the task which he executed with untiring labour and ceaseless dissatisfaction.' The wonder is not that he should have left so little, but that he left enough to prove the transcendent nature of his ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler

... that he had never seen him with his eyes, never having gone down alive into Hell, like Messer Dante Alighieri; but that, in depicting him as he had done, he was for expressing in visible lines and colours the hideousness of sin. ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France

... cold skeleton hands The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath Blew for a little life, and made a flame Which was a mockery; then they lifted up Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld[58] Each other's aspects—saw, and shrieked, and died— Even of their mutual hideousness they died, Unknowing who he was upon whose brow Famine had written Fiend. The World was void, The populous and the powerful was a lump, 70 Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless— A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay. The rivers, lakes, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... The hideousness of the animal, and the mingled terror and bravery of Jack, gave us subject of conversation for some time. We placed our booty on the sledge, and continued to go on through the wood. Our path became every instant more intricate, from the amazing ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss

... they certainly were, they yet had enough of human nature in them to be shocked at their own hideousness; and still intending to groan, they uttered a viler grunt and squeal than before. So harsh and ear-piercing it was, that you would have fancied a butcher was sticking his knife into each of their throats, or, at the very least, that somebody was pulling every hog ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various

... on the other side of the house. From her window nothing was visible but a dreary expanse of bog-land and mudbanks stretching down to the sea. At high tide this enormous waste of dreariness and filth was covered by the water, but at present it lay before her in all its naked hideousness, the very type of dullness and desolation. Here and there a few scattered reeds, or an unhealthy greenish scum upon the mud, gave a touch of colour to the scene; but for the most part the great plain was all of the same sombre mud tint, with its monotony broken ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... on them, and then You started back in horror to survey The wondrous hideousness of those small men, Whose colour was not black, nor white, nor grey, But an extraneous mixture, which no pen Can trace, although perhaps the pencil may; They were mis-shapen pigmies, deaf and dumb— Monsters, who cost ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... there seemed to be no doubt about that. He despised himself; his offence, stripped by her of all extenuation, appeared to him in its own naked hideousness; ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers

... Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only rises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... the real Giton, Tryphaena was moved to tears, and then for the first time she gave the boy a real love-kiss. I was overjoyed, now that the lad was restored to his own handsome self, but I hid my own face all the more assiduously, realizing that I was disfigured by no ordinary hideousness since not even Lycas would bestow a word upon me. The maid rescued me from this misfortune finally, however, and calling me aside, she decked me out with a head of hair which was none the less becoming; my face ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... upon the beautiful landscape, with its exquisite lawns and shrubbery, its picturesque hills, and romantic walks and drives, its sparkling lakes, cascades and fountains, it is hard to realize that so much loveliness was preceded by such hideousness. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... monstrosity, an anomaly in the history of types of female hideousness, had succeeded in showing itself in the light of magnanimity. But false as was this high quality in Lady Byron, so did it shine out in him true and admirable. The position in which Lady Byron had placed him, and where she continued to keep him by her harshness, silence, and strange refusals, was ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... in the very hideousness of our statues. The fear of what the sculptors will do for them after they are gone may deter those who are careful of their memories from talking themselves into greatness. It is plain that Mr. Caleb Cushing has begun to feel a wholesome dread of this posthumous retribution. I cannot in any other ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... he went on, "if you're right about her, and I fancy you are, that her taste isn't negative, but bad, and that it's the very hideousness of the things she likes. No, she won't be convinced, and if I know Goldsmith, he'll say his wife's taste is good enough for him. So if we want a change, we've a ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... dialect is three-parts French pronounced as it is written; and whose force and frankness strike you with a special charm after the ha-haing of the Florentines, the sonorousness of the Romans and the sing-song of the Neapolitans; to say nothing of the hideousness of the Genoese and the chaos of the Sicilians; that city of ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various

... should differ somewhat from that entertained by the speculative author of "The Light of Asia." In brief Sir Edwin knows all about the beauty, wealth and success which make earth a Paradise for the few; I something of that hideousness, poverty and despair that make it a Purgatory for the many. That world to which Sir Edwin belongs, and which he contemplates so approvingly, is but the gold-leaf on the graven image, the bright foam on the bosom ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... his first service in England after ten years, would have carried him back to the days when he knew nothing of the Tree of Knowledge; but, instead of that, it had made no appeal to him. Its poetry was destroyed by the hideousness of the surroundings; whilst even the glorious words of the Benediction seemed but a perfunctory dismissal, giving the congregation leave to hasten away to the heavy dinners which ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt

... taken back to her cell. The next day the four judges of the tribunal took their seats in the court. Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, a man whose greed of blood stamped him with an especial hideousness, even in those days of universal barbarity, took his seat before them; and eleven men, the greater part of whom had been carefully picked from the very dregs of the people—journeymen carpenters, tailors, blacksmiths, and discharged policemen—were ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge

... tank self-satisfied and ridiculous. Women must and will trim, as spiders spin webs, and bees make honeycombs. They even trim bathing-dresses: one would think that nothing could redeem them from their hideousness. But they obey a law of their being. The special aptitudes of the lower animals are brought into play when no other reason can be given than the necessity for discharging an accumulation of the inward energy,—a saying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... blood to seek a wife. Only two kinds of men search for a wife; one is the Turk, and the other is his antithesis, who is advised to marry for hygienic, prudential or sociologic reasons. John Ruskin was "advised" to marry and the matter was duly arranged for him. In a week he awoke to the hideousness of the condition. Six years elapsed before John Millais and Chief Justice Coleridge collaborated to set him free, but the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard

... There it lay—a gaunt, gigantic form, wasted to a skeleton, half-clad, foul with dust and clotted gore, its huge limbs flung upon the couch as if at random, its shaggy hair streaming over the pillows like a lion's mane. His face was toward me. Oh, the wild hideousness of that face, even in sleep! In features it was human, even through its horrid mask of mud and half-dried bloody gouts, but the expression was brutish and savagely fierce; the white teeth were visible between the parted lips, in a malignant ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... the appearance of the figure was in itself sufficiently appalling. It was above the ordinary stature, and was enveloped in a long black cloak, while a tall, conical black cap, which added to its height, and increased the hideousness of its features, covered ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth

... of living for an hour or two out of its natural element. It deserves the bad eminence to which it has been raised by the blacks on accounts of looks alone, and if the poisonous qualities are in line with its hideousness, one can but pause and ponder why and wherefore such a creature has existence in "this best of all possible worlds." But it is known that to the Chinese it is dainty. They pay for it with good grace as much as 2s. 6d. per lb., and the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... tranquillities of the tropical sea, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... no comparison. How could one compare his beautiful coat with the smooth and naked hideousness of Tarzan's bare hide? Who could see beauty in the stingy nose of the Tarmangani after looking at Taug's broad nostrils? And Tarzan's eyes! Hideous things, showing white about them, and entirely unrimmed with red. Taug knew that his own blood-shot eyes ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... down beside me, and I impulsively threw my arms around her neck and sobbed forth my troubles in a string. How there was no good in the world, no use for me there, no one loved me or ever could on account of my hideousness. ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin

... watched the door through which they had filed out, and there came upon him in the dying daylight a terrible moment, such as all uncontrolled natures must at times know. A sense of the futility of all things, a knowledge that life has lost its taste, the hideousness ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard

... the sight was worse than I had dreaded. There are horrors beyond horrors, and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy few. Out of the fungus-ridden earth steamed up a vaporous corpse-light, yellow and diseased, which bubbled and lapped to a gigantic height in vague outlines half human and half monstrous, through which I could see the chimney and fireplace ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... shrunken form which so despondingly waits the coming of a messenger of mercy. That system of cruelty to prisoners which so disgraced England during the last century, and which for her name she would were erased from her history, we preserve here in all its hideousness. The Governor knows nothing, and cares nothing about the prison; the Attorney-General never darkens its doors; the public scarce give a thought for those within its walls-and to one man, Mr. Hardscrabble, is the fate of these wretched beings entrusted. And so ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... or still more in that puissant and splendid production, The Jolly Beggars, his world may be what it will, his poetic genius triumphs over it. In the world of The Jolly Beggars there is more than hideousness and squalor, there is bestiality; yet the piece is a superb poetic success. It has a breadth, truth, and power which make the famous scene in Auerbach's Cellar, of Goethe's Faust, seem artificial and tame beside it, and which are only matched by ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... itself under cover of being a bribe for sight of a mirror interdicted by the implacable Kiomi. I wanted to have a look at my face. Now that the familiar scenes were beginning to wear their original features to me, my dread of personal hideousness was distressing, though Eveleen declared the bad blood in my cheeks and eyes 'had been sucked by pounds of red meat.' I wondered, whether if I stood up and walked to either one of the three great halls ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... bantering in which the preceding conversation had taken place had been assumed on his part. For the last few weeks evil dreams had tortured his sleep and cast their shadow upon his waking hours. They had ever increased in reality, in intensity and in hideousness. Even now he could see the long, tapering fingers that every night were groping in the windings of his brain. It was a well-formed, manicured hand that seemed to reach under his skull, carefully feeling its way through the myriad convolutions ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck

... the vampire bats. I imagine this repulsive aspect originates from the features being placed in positions, with respect to each other, somewhat proportional to those of the human face; and thus we obtain a scale of hideousness. ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... all that was beautiful, and, as so frequently happens in such natures as Angela's, she had an overwhelming pity for all that were unhappy. To her God made the world beautiful: man was responsible for its hideousness. From her heart she pitied mankind for abusing the gifts God ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners

... huge form odorous of gin and cigar smoke, and the great, hairy hands marked with their purplish veinings. It seemed like a ghost out of some long-past and only half-remembered life. It came back to her with all the hideousness of a momentarily forgotten nightmare, made newly hideous by the sanities of ordered design and open daylight in which it intruded. And her heart sank and hope burned ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... been expecting to see something disgusting, something grotesque and horrible, his mind was wholly unprepared for the real hideousness of these creatures, now seen by the ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... waiting for somebody. By the light of a lamp that was burning before an image of the Virgin, he clearly distinguished its features as well as its strange garb. It was an old woman of the uttermost hideousness, which struck the eye the more from being brought out by its extravagant contrast with a scarlet bodice embroidered with gold; the gown she wore was dark, and the cap on her head shone likewise with gold. Emilius fancied at first it must be ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... swore at himself for this weakness before the salesman, and yet, year by year he had been cheated in the same way. For the first time, however, he saw his clothing in all its hideousness. Those cruel girls and grinning boys had shown him that clothes made the man, even in a western school. The worst part of it was that he had been humiliated by a girl and there was no redress. His strength of ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland

... him, this might be seen: there was a shade more of deference—the boy was merged in "the young master." But we must leave the house of mourning for the present, and follow the Widow Rooney, who, as she tramped her way homeward, was increasing in hideousness of visage every hour. Her nose was twice its usual dimensions, and one eye was perfectly useless in showing her the road. At last, however, as evening was closing, she reached her cabin, and there was Andy, arrived before her, and telling Oonah, ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover

... by the way thou camest down!" So I fled up the staircase; but, in the excess of my fear, I forgot sandals and hatchet. And when I had mounted two steps I turned to look for them, and lo! I saw the earth cleave asunder, and there arose from it an Ifrit, a monster of hideousness, who said to the damsel "What trouble and posher be this wherewith thou disturbest me? What mishap hath betided thee?" "No mishap hath befallen me" she answered, "save that my breast was straitened[FN210] ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... select school. The social ambitions of the wealthy Mrs. Hawley-Crowles threw wide the portals of the world to Carmen, and she entered, wide-eyed and wondering. Nor did she return until the deepest recesses of the human mind had revealed to her their abysmal hideousness, their ghastly emptiness of reality, and their ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... movement whatever was allowed to them—a slave, so runs one of Cato's maxims, must either work or sleep—and no attempt was ever made to attach the slaves to the estate or to their master by any bond of human sympathy. The letter of the law in all its naked hideousness regulated the relation, and the Romans indulged no illusions as to the consequences. "So many slaves, so many foes," said a Roman proverb. It was an economic maxim, that dissensions among the slaves ought rather to be fostered than suppressed. In the same spirit Plato and Aristotle, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... where a pathetic subject will not risk an unintentionally comic treatment. If a stone-breaker's face corrupts in purple spots at a certain period after death, we would prefer him painted before corruption, and consequently hideousness, had begun. If women will wear gowns ugly in color and form, and will sit or stand in graceless positions, we can readily avoid such subjects, and bestow our careful finish upon more ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... like burrs on the mantles of Dorking's prophets, the dullest and prosiest has stuck to the richest. "Conversation" is a pretty severe burden for a man named plain Richard Sharp to carry; the hideousness of the baulked elision of "Sylva" Evelyn sets the teeth on edge (he developed into "Sylvie" as well as "Silver" Evelyn, poor man); "Capability" Brown, the gardener, must have been buttonholed by a thousand bores; but "Anastasius" ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... her husband. He was perhaps twenty-five years younger; a quarter-century less soaked in hideousness. Her yellow, concave-sided teeth were bared at him, her mouth drew up on one side above the gums. "Pete, if I hear one word more out of you, out you go. Lady! Huh! Where d' you ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... afternoon they had nothing to say to him, and after a few minutes, impatiently, he wandered out of the room. There were too many people, provincials with foolish faces, foreigners poring over guide-books; their hideousness besmirched the everlasting masterpieces, their restlessness troubled the god's immortal repose. He went into another room and here there was hardly anyone. Philip sat down wearily. His nerves were on edge. He could not get the people out of his mind. Sometimes at Lynn's ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... Grail, has often walked and sought solace from the bitterness of his accursed lot, where he has thought of a young girl who lives above him in the house, and who, as often as she passes him, is like a gleam of southern sky somehow slipped into the blank hideousness of a London winter. Hither he has doubtless come to try and realise that fate has been so merciful to him that he longs to thank some unknown deity and cry that all is good. Hither he will come again, with one whom he ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing

... her, cruel yet indifferent, indolent and passionate, cold yet sensual; unnatural secrets dwelt in his mind, and mysterious crimes, and a lust for the knowledge that was arcane. Oliver Haddo was attracted by all that was unusual, deformed, and monstrous, by the pictures that represented the hideousness of man or that reminded you of his mortality. He summoned before Margaret the whole array of Ribera's ghoulish dwarfs, with their cunning smile, the insane light of their eyes, and their malice: he dwelt with a horrible fascination upon their ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham

... rep curtains of vivid green, while the floor was covered with an Aubusson carpet exquisite in its colour and design. And between the green woollen bell-ropes on each side of the fireplace and above the cold hideousness of the marble mantelpiece hung a portrait by Romney of a lady as beautiful ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan

... by concentrating our attention upon what in the narrow sense we call the beautiful or the distinguished or the lovely. But there is yet a third form the aesthetic sense may assume. Not only can it visualize the whole chaotic struggle between beauty and hideousness as itself a beautiful drama; not only can it so concentrate upon beauty that we forget the hideousness; it is also able to see the world ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... since the days of Henry VIII, when those things happened of which we have to tell, for here no large town has arisen, nor have mines been dug or factories built to affront the earth and defile the air with their hideousness ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard

... journeys back and forth between Boston and Cambridge. I have not the least notion where I went or what I saw, but I suppose that it was up and down the ugly east and west avenues, then lying open to the eye in all the hideousness now partly concealed by the elevated roads, and that I found them very stately and handsome. Indeed, New York was really handsomer then than it is now, when it has so many more pieces of beautiful architecture, for at that day the skyscrapers were not yet, and there was a fine regularity ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... grandmother gave you the amethysts to be reset; and of course she would wish it to be done in an artistic manner. Otherwise, as Mr. Cabochon judiciously says, why have the stones reset at all? Better wear them in all their present hideousness.' ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... lozenge. But the days of which I speak are such as you must endure patiently unto the end. 'They come like shadows, so depart,' but the cloud that gives the shadow is beyond your reach. A new doubt or apprehension, or an old one with an uglier face than usual; a hideousness not before seen, a devilishness of malice flashing upon you for the first time, or even an unkind word, added to your previous gathering of materiel, may tip the balance of your pleasant thoughts, and then, all colors changing into one, the black cloud ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... of Rousseau's imagination, but to the past of recorded history. The single epoch in the annals of Europe since the rise of Christianity, for which no good word could be found, was the epoch of Voltaire. The hideousness of the Christian church in the ninth and tenth centuries was passed lightly over by men who had only eyes for the moral obliquity of the church of the Encyclopaedia. The brilliant but profoundly inadequate ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... creations of Salvator Rosa. The poem is a bitter indictment of the utter corruption of all classes in the society of his period. Like Juvenal, to whose school he belongs, he softens nothing, tones down nothing. The evil is presented in all its native hideousness. Lyndsay, on the other hand, would have been more vigorous had he been less diffuse, and used the pruning-knife more unsparingly. His finest satiric pictures often lose their point by verbosity and tediousness. Brevity is the soul of satire as well ...
— English Satires • Various

... turned away and shut the door. She sat down on the edge of her bed, very still. In that little passage of wits she had won, she could win in many such; but the full hideousness of things had come to her. Lies! lies! That was to be her life! That; or to say farewell to all she now cared for, to cause despair not only in herself, but in her lover, and—for what? In order ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... I perfectly hideous?" she asked gaily, launching out one hand in search of the folds of muslin on her inaccessible bosom. "My daughters tell me it doesn't matter at my age—as if hideousness didn't matter all the more the harder it ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton

... Robert and Miss Noel being vividly interested in many things en route, Ethel and Mr. Heathcote pleased by a few, Mrs. Sykes grumbling ceaselessly about the length, monotony, bareness, aridity, stupidity, and general hideousness of the journey. The only thing that really amused her was a quarrel that she got up with a lady who sat near her. The acquaintance promised to be friendly enough for a while, for the lady was an amiable soul,—the wife of "a dry-goods merchant in Topeka," she told Mrs. Sykes. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various

... Her terrible aspect is not to be ignored or covered up with shams; but it is not the only one. If the optimism of Leibnitz is a foolish though pleasant dream, the pessimism of Schopenhauer is a nightmare, the more foolish because of its hideousness. Error which is not pleasant is surely the worst ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... good. The Greeks believed there were dragons, and they had many tales of how Hercules or this or that hero slew a dragon. To the Christian of the Middle Ages the dragon stood at one end of the scale, an archangel at the other; for as the dragon was all darkness and hideousness, the archangel was all light and beauty and gloriousness. It thrilled every one to think of the angel of light fighting with and overcoming the beast of darkness; for every one knew that sort of struggle was going on in the world, ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll

... the skilled workmanship many of these specimens disclose.) It is common for him, when at work upon the elaborate carving in wood that he practises, to engrave some hideous human figure, intended, obviously, to represent an idol. Does it not excite wonder with us that such refinements upon hideousness and repulsiveness could ever have provoked the worship or adoration ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie

... to him with a case of conscience, had so confused him in her presence as to make him answer her wildly, not because he was really tempted to the wickedness, but because he realized so vividly the hideousness of the impossible temptation. In some such sort he now trembled before old Hilbrook, thinking how dreadful it would be if he were suddenly to begin undoing the work of faith in him, and putting back in its place the doubts which ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells

... on the Khitroff market-place. On the market-place, women both old and young, of the same description, in tattered cloaks and jackets of various shapes, in ragged shoes and overshoes, and equally unconcerned, notwithstanding the hideousness of their attire, sat, bargained for something, strolled about, and scolded. There were not many people in the market itself. Evidently market-hours were over, and the majority of the people were ascending the rise beyond the market ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi

... perilous gift; and, oh, Friedrich! Friedrich! promise me just this:—that thou wilt never, never write anything against the faith or the teaching of the Saviour, and that thou wilt never use the graces of poetry to cover the hideousness of any of those sins which it is the work of a lifetime to see justly, and to fight against manfully. ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... execrable policy which has been pursued disappear before the progress of Christian sentiment. Then will governments extend to each other an open, and not a closed or mailed, hand. Then will war stand forth before their view in all its hideousness, its features distorted by rage, and its garments dripping with blood,—a mournful and a fearful spectacle. Oh! when shall the time come, that the true character of War—its horrors, its vices, its crimes, unredeemed by a single trait properly its own,—shall be understood. Almost ...
— The Religion of Politics • Ezra S. Gannett

... She was chilled under a blazing sun that had no power to warm her. But her terror was not for Will. It was for herself. For the hideousness of the disgrace to which he had brought her. In fancy she saw him food for carrion at the end of a rope; she saw his body swaying to the night breeze, an ominous, hideous shadow, a warning to all of the fate awaiting those who sinned against the unwritten laws of the cattle ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum

... seemed tolerable. The keynote of the literature of the period was one of compassion for the poor and unfortunate, and indignant outcry against the failure of the social machinery to ameliorate the miseries of men. It is plain from these outbursts that the moral hideousness of the spectacle about them was, at least by flashes, fully realized by the best of the men of that time, and that the lives of some of the more sensitive and generous hearted of them were rendered wellnigh unendurable by the intensity ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... whitened in warning to visiting pilgrims. In the sky—clear, fair, inviting—one would think she might have found some relief to her ache of mind; but, alas! in making the beautiful elsewhere the sun served her never so unfriendly—it did but disclose her growing hideousness. But for the sun she would not have been the horror she was to herself, nor been waked so cruelly from dreams of Tirzah as she used to be. The gift of seeing can ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace

... could bear it no longer; she put her hands to her ears to shut out the hideousness of it. After an interminable wait she took them down. He had stopped—there was silence—but she heard footsteps outside, and she literally cowered into the darkest corner of the spring house. But it was only Aunt Dolcey, her lips set ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... former display and carriage of these now obscene symbols in the popular celebrations; of the behavior of even respectable citizens during the excitement and frenzy of the festivals; of their presence in the wayside shrines; of the philosophy, hideousness or pathos of the subject, we cannot here enter. We simply call attention to their existence, and to a form of thought, if not of religion, properly so-called, which has survived all imported systems of faith and which shows what the native or ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... chatting quite friendly together, and gazed languidly over the portfolio, as I was endeavouring to get the likeness of one or two of these comfortable malefactors. One old and wrinkled she- criminal, whom I had selected on account of the peculiar hideousness of her countenance, covered it up with a dirty cloth, at which there was a general roar of laughter among this good- humoured auditory of cut-throats, pickpockets, and policemen. The only symptom of a prison about the ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray

... soul, arise thoughts of futurity. The Holy Spirit would speak to our heart of God, of heaven, of Christ and the blood; he would hold before us in a beautiful picture the life of a Christian journeying onward to a glory world. He would also disclose to our view the hideousness and awfulness of sin, and the uneasiness, discontentments, trouble and fear attending the wicked as they journey onward to ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr

... one of the Dix' nurses I saw in Fredericksburg, and her large, flat, flabby face was almost hideous with its lack of eye-brows and lashes; but this hideousness must have been her recommendation, as she could not have been ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm

... truth, the truth that he would not let himself recognize. Her depredations probably had much wider scope than he guessed. He must save her from herself; he must somehow reach the submerged personality and awaken it to the hideousness of that other, the soulless, heartless automaton that schemed and executed crimes with mechanical exactitude. He took a long breath of determination, and again grinned at the farce he was playing for his own benefit. Through ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford

... Marat wore a soiled handkerchief bound round his head, increasing his natural hideousness. A coarse covering was thrown across the bath; a board, likewise, placed transversely, supported his papers. Laying down his pen, he asked Charlotte the purport of her visit. The closet was so ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various

... short, the letters should be designed by an artist, and not an engineer. As to the forms of letters in England (I mean Great Britain), there has been much progress within the last forty years. The sweltering hideousness of the Bodoni letter, the most illegible type that was ever cut, with its preposterous thicks and thins, has been mostly relegated to works that do not profess anything but the baldest utilitarianism (though why ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris

... in the religion of humanity—of good and generous deeds. For many centuries the church had painted virtue so ugly, sour and cold that vice was regarded as beautiful. Voltaire taught the beauty of the useful, the hatefulness and hideousness of superstition. He was not the greatest of poets, or of dramatists, but he was the greatest man of his time, the greatest friend of freedom, and the deadliest foe of superstition. He wrote the best French plays—but they were not wonderful. He wrote verses ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... streamers overhead, and flanks her doors with legends in saffron and gold; even its window panes have a foreign look, and within is a glimmering of tinsel, a subdued light, and china lamps flickering before graven images of barbaric hideousness. The air is laden with the fumes of smoking sandal-wood and strange odors of the East; and the streets, swarming with coolies, resound with the echoes of an unknown tongue. There is hardly room for us to pass; we pick our way, and are sometimes curiously regarded ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard

... not like frogging in person. The creature smiles. Also he appeals because he is ugly and complacent. But for the grace of God I might have looked so. He sits in supreme hideousness frozen to the end of a wet log, with his desirable hind legs spread in view, and smiles his bronze smile of confidence in his own charm and my friendship. It is more than I can do to betray that smile. So, hating to destroy the beast yet liking to eat the ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... addition to these artful customers, one occasionally comes across small colonies of lepers, who, being compelled to isolate themselves from their fellows, have taken up their abode in rude hovels or caves by the road-side, and sally forth in all their hideousness to beset the traveller with piteous cries for assistance. Some of these poor lepers are loathsome in appearance to the last degree; their scanty coverings of rags and tatters conceals nothing of the ravages of ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... tongue, I would have got drunk had I known that that drunk would have plunged my soul into hell and eternal torments. O appetite, cold, cruel, heartless, accursed, consuming, devouring appetite! No other malady like thee ever afflicted man. Would that I could paint thee, in all thy accursed hideousness, in letters of unfading fire, and write them in the vaulted firmament to flame forth to all generations to come ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson

... attached to Lionel, or ever could. But Lionel dared not seek his brother in this matter. In his heart he was ashamed of his fears; in his heart he knew himself for a craven. He realized to the full the hideousness of his selfishness, and yet, as before, he was not strong enough to conquer it. In short, his love of himself was greater than his love of his ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini

... seems to woo its loathsome follower,— Yet ever from his foul embraces flies. And on his brow his name is written, "Lust!" Dismiss the spectre, for it blasts my sight, And sears my brain with its dark hideousness! ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands

... this size and of this poverty in an American village," was Betty's thought, "would be a bare and straggling hideousness, with old tomato cans in the front yard. Here is one of the things we ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... Nora had been sitting eating the hatful of berries that she had gathered, gazing off over the rugged landscape and enjoying the mountain scenery bathed in the early morning sunlight. The mountains, in that softening light, lost their hideousness and were really beautiful to look upon. Nora's eyes, slowly absorbing the scene before her, suddenly paused in their roving and fixed their gaze on a point some twenty yards below her. Nora was looking down ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders Among the Kentucky Mountaineers • Jessie Graham Flower

... a stroll round the room. It was so high, so enormous, with so much satin on the walls, so many looking-glasses, so much white paint, so many cabinets full of Dresden china, that it recalled, by the very extremity of the contrast of its bright hideousness, that other ugly, dismal little room, also filled with false gods, of a cheap and very different kind, in which he had had so much ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson

... hear the signals of the bugle nor see the manoeuvring of the guns. Of course, even to this part a superior actress like Miss Neilson can impart a certain dignity and interest which would be lacking in an inferior performer. She strikes a certain horror to the spectator by the very hideousness of her terror displayed. It is natural that a young girl about to be laid out alive in a tomb should be tormented with fearful imaginings; but then that young girl cherishes an all-pervading love for a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various

... probably, had taken to this working girl who in her plain black dress queened them all. He looked round the room and hated it. To his sickened soul its beauty blasphemed the lot of the toilers, insulted the wretchedness, the foulness, the hideousness, that he had seen this very day, that he had known and struggled against, all unconsciously, throughout his wayward life. And Geisner, Geisner at whom Nellie was looking fondly, Geisner who he supposed had written a book or a bit of poetry or could play the flute, ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller

... participation in industrial life, but that it was reflected in the industrial development itself; that industry had fallen back into old habits, and repeated traditional mistakes until American cities exhibited stupendous extensions of the medievalisms in the traditional Ghetto, and of the hideousness in the ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams

... without degradation! Such majestic creatures cannot be sullied. The gods bathe themselves pure in light; and this goddess who came to him knew what she was doing. She was not ignorant of the incarnate hideousness of Gwynplaine. She had seen the mask which was his face; and that mask had not caused her to draw back. Gwynplaine ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... miscalled "committee of public safety." Even the representatives of the people, which thought itself called to liberate the world, and with them the whole people, trembled before these few tyrants, who, elevated from the dust by the power of accidents more than by that of genius, displayed a hideousness never yet beheld. "The whole people was in fearful excitement by anger, by fear, and love of liberty; and the terrorists, grasping at the terrible as the only means of salvation, manifested hereby the fever convulsions of the nation." The prisons in Paris were, during this year, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... myself, in the morning of childhood, the evil doctrine was a mist through which the light came struggling, a cloud-phantom of repellent mien—requiring maturer thought and truer knowledge to dissipate it. But it requires neither much knowledge nor much insight to stand up against its hideousness; it needs but love that will not be denied, and courage ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... invaders of Italy were of Teutonic origin, but the Huns were Mongols—of such perfect hideousness that Jornandes regarded them as the offspring of witches and demons. Attila, son of Mundzuk, "the scourge of God," resembled his soldiers in his flat, swarthy features, deep-set, fierce, rolling ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various

... spears in another, I saw a different aspect of the garden. I, naked among the coral and the plants, must have looked to them like a frightful demon, white and without scales, a horrible devil-fish, my arms and legs glabrous tentacles, and the lunette and spears adding to my hideousness and foul menace. I know that was the impression I made on the rainbow-fish, for they fled within the caves, and only by peeping in through the glass could I see them to drive the spear into them. These slender spears were a dozen feet of light, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... of torture that the young woman suffered were so merged into one long, unbroken nightmare of hideousness that she soon lost all track of time. Whether they had been wandering for days or years she could not tell. The one bright spot in that eternity of fear and suffering was the little child whose tiny hands had long since fastened their softly groping fingers ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest, peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... say that any honest and prudent wight must needs be sore offended and scandalized by all this appalling array of armour and bucklers and the horde of warriors Homer calls Corythaioloi (glancing-helmed) by reason of the terrifying hideousness of their head-gear, and that the portrayal of these same fighting fellows was in very truth unseemly, as contrarie to good and peaceable manners, immodest, no thing in the world being more shameful ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France

... which are mere ugly faggots, we find others just as often of exquisite beauty and composed entirely of tiny shells. Do they come from the same workshop? It takes very convincing proofs to make us believe this. Here is order with its charm, there disorder with its hideousness; on the one hand a dainty mosaic of shells, on the other a clumsy heap of sticks. And yet it is all produced by the ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... she should think of him as a spirit, divested of the covering that made him a loathsome mortal! Even if he could know that her every affection clung to him, he would pray to go hence before her eyes could be so cleared of the mists of love as to see the hideousness of his imperfections. He had seen her shudder as her cousin's arm was placed around her; and was he not more repulsive still? Oh, how could he ever dream of allying himself ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... Cussedness of the Roman Priestcraft," and each page would be as black as the shadows of hell, but I deem it unnecessary, as I have confidence in those who may read this book that they will believe every word of what I have written, therefore it is unnecessary for me to dwell longer upon the hideousness of celibacy. ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg

... Sorrow was the ligament that united them. For years had he known Holden, but it was only within a short time, namely, since an awakened conscience (so he judged, himself) had revealed to him his own hideousness, that he had been attracted to the Solitary. Should Holden recover his son, should his heart expand once more to admit worldly joys, would it not be closed to him? As he once felt indifference towards Holden, so would not Holden, by a change of circumstances, ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... with this passion to hide its hideousness under the disguise of love, and thus this most sacred and hallowed name is prostituted to signify that which is most vile and loathsome. Depravity? No. Goodness of heart, generosity of affections, the very quintessence of good nature! But God is love, and love that does ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton

... the missionary and Wampum graciously, but his people scowled and looked menacingly at the sight of "The Black Coat," then continued their dancing. The great Delaware idol was there in all its hideousness, life size, in the form of a woman, and carved from one solid block of wood, then painted and stained the Indian copper color. It stood on a slight elevation in the centre of the big log "church," grotesque and repulsive as an image could well be made. Wampum hated the thing, and found ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... outward hideousness, And speak off half a dozen dang'rous words, How they might hurt their enemies, if they durst; ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr

... Edward I. turned back from the lilies of France, and, forgetting their ancient hate, stood before him with placid dignity. The man who built the Pyramids lifted his ungainly features from the ingulfing centuries; souls of blood—thirsty men, duly forced into the shape of fleas, lent their hideousness to his night; and the Evil One himself did not disdain to sit for his portrait to this undismayed magician. That these are actual portraits of concrete object? is not to be affirmed. That they are portraits of what Blake saw is as little to be denied. We are assured that his whole manner ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various



Words linked to "Hideousness" :   ugliness, hideous



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