"Rottenness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and moral stage of sentiment. It is part of the general system of purgation and cleansing which one feels one's self in need of, in order to be in right relations to one's deity. For him who confesses, shams are over and realities have begun; he has exteriorized his rottenness. If he has not actually got rid of it, he at least no longer smears it over with a hypocritical show of virtue—he lives at least upon a basis of veracity. The complete decay of the practice of confession in Anglo-Saxon communities is a little hard ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... effort. With his fair, open mind, he weighed the old method of monastic establishments, and, mutatis mutandis, he thought something of the kind might be very useful. He thought it unfair to judge of what these monasteries were in their periods of youth and vigor, from the rottenness of their decay. Modern missionary stations, indeed, with their churches, schools, and hospitals, were like Protestant monasteries, conducted on the more wholesome principle of family life; but they wanted stability; ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... trench rather too suddenly, she wheeled round for the advantage of coming down upon it more determinately, rode resolutely at it, and gained the opposite bank. The hind feet of her horse were sinking back from the rottenness of the ground; but the strong supporting bridle-hand of Kate carried him forward; and in ten minutes more they would be in Cuzco. This being seen by the vicious Alcalde, who had built great hopes on ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... disadvantage of the little country town lost in the immensity of the Texas prairie, Brann saw the world, and saw it with the blazing eye of righteous wrath. He saw the sins of high society in New York and London, the rottenness of autocracy in Russia, the world war boiling beneath the surface in the cauldron of Europe's misery. But he saw also, with mingled humor and anger, the trivial passing events of his own state and nation and the local affairs of his home town. Of all these things, great and small, he ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... coincide accurately with the principles of the New Testament? Will anybody tell me that the state of a hundred streets within a mile of this spot is what it would be if the Christian men of this nation lived the lives that they ought to live? Could there be such rottenness and corruption if the 'salt' had not 'lost his savour'? Will anybody tell me that the disgusting vice which our newspapers do not think themselves degraded by printing in loathsome detail, and so bringing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... Vaterlands."[40] The reason is not far to seek, especially when we consider the impossible demands of the poet's extravagant idealism. The conditions in Germany which had called forth the terrible arraignment of petty despotism, crushing militarism, and political rottenness generally, in the works of Lenz, Klinger and Schubart, had not abated. Schubart was one of Hoelderlin's earliest favorites, so that the latter was doubtless in this way imbued with sentiments which could only ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... ribbons. Listen well! Obey the command of this Shu[u]zen. 'Tis the choice between the jewelled palanquin of the favoured mistress, or torture for these two. The kind offices of the bed for Shu[u]zen, or the rottenness of the jail for these two criminals. The gift of Kiku's chastity secures for them oblivion.... You would ask time? To-morrow night, after the counting of the plates, the answer will be received." He ceased—to turn to Chu[u]dayu, who for a little time had ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... lady's room, were yet recognizable here and there, for everything in it was plainly as it had been left by the person who last occupied it. But the aspect of the whole was indescribably awful. The rottenness and dust and displacement by mere decay, looked enough to scare even the ghosts, if they had any scare left in them. No doubt the rats had at one time their share in the destruction, but it was long since they had forsaken the house. There was no disorder. The only thing that looked ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... wind being heavy and the vessels old and deep in the water, he anchored in a river never before entered, so far as was known, cutting away trees and branches to do so. When the fragata was safe, he sent the master-of-camp for the galleys, which were sinking because of their rottenness. At the same time a virrey was sent to look for the Sangley vessel. The virrey returned without news; and though Ronquillo was very anxious he kept on to the river toward which he was sailing, all assuring him that he would find ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume IX, 1593-1597 • E. H. Blair
... general corruption of the clergy is apparent, expect a fearful tempest to arise, which will clear the tree of its unsound branches, and enable it to put forth vigorous and healthy shoots. But while that rottenness is not total but partial, while some green boughs are still seen to extend a lovely and refreshing shade, what impious hand shall dare to assail the venerable queen of the forest, whose magnitude defends the saplings, which, ambitiously springing under its protection, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... painters have used the simplest palette—the fewest colours. Our own Wilson is said to have replied to one who told him a new brown was discovered, "I am sorry for it." But by far the most injurious of all our pigments is asphaltum; it always gives rather rottenness than depth. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... simply means doing disturbing things of one kind and another. And I saw that the ordinary crooks let their badness run their brains, while the get-on kind of people let their brains run their badness. You can be rotten—and sink lower and lower every day. Or you can gratify your natural taste for rottenness and at the same time get up in the world. I made up my mind to do the rotten things that get a man money ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... say anything! Look at your own Daniel Webster!" I wondered and began to look at and inquire about him, and soon discovered that his whole panoply of moral power was a shell—that his life was full of rottenness. Then I knew why I had come to Washington. I gathered the principal facts of his life at the Capitol, stated them to Dr. Snodgrass, a prominent Washington correspondent, whose anti-slavery paper had been suppressed ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... fair with the stern lustration of sleets and snows, And rottenness changes back to the breath and the cheek of the rose, And how gentle the wind that seems wild to each ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... state of general rottenness among subjects, and of delusion and false politics in princes, comes a new experiment. The king of France is in the hands of the chiefs of the regicide faction,—the Barnaves, Lameths, Fayettes, Perigords, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... feel that my situation in the country, my power, my popularity, my consequence, nay, my character, are all risked; but I have done right, and therefore in the end it must turn out to have been wise. If this fail me, the pillared firmament is rottenness, and ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... use them is a 'mendacity licence.' In 'Rome-bred law ... fiction' is a 'wart which here and there disfigures the face of justice. In English law fiction is a syphilis which runs into every vein and carries into every part of the system the principle of rottenness.'[425] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... graceless, amorous, stripling, goes wandering from Spain to the Greek islands and Constantinople, thence to St. Petersburg, and finally to England. Every-where his seductions are successful, and Byron uses him as a means of exposing the weakness of the human heart and the rottenness of society in all countries. In 1823, breaking away from his life of selfish indulgence in Italy, Byron threw himself into the cause of Grecian liberty, which he had sung so gloriously in the Isles of Greece. He died at Missolonghi, in the following year, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... petrified three yards away from the bed where Valerie lay dying, as she saw a priest from Saint-Thomas d'Aquin standing by her friend's pillow, and a sister of charity in attendance. Religion could find a soul to save in a mass of rottenness which, of the five senses of man, had now only that of sight. The sister of charity who alone had been found to nurse Valerie stood apart. Thus the Catholic religion, that divine institution, always actuated by ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... violence out of their mouths. So also thou, willing that there should be many to pay thee tribute and toll from land and water, pretendest to care for their welfare, but in truth bringest on them and above all on thyself eternal ruin; and simply to pile up gold, more worthless than dung or rottenness, thou hast been deluded into taking darkness for light. But recover thy wits from this earthly sleep: open thy sealed eyes, and behold the glory of God that shineth round about us all; and come at length to thyself. ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... the gross injustices, and inhumanity of the existing social disorder, he became convinced that it could not possibly last; it was bound to fall to pieces because of its own rottenness. It was not just, it was not common sense, and therefore it could not endure. But always after one of these arguments—or, rather, disputes—with his fellow workmen, he almost relapsed into hopelessness and despondency, for then he realized ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... the many. The first great shock to the belief in white superiority came from the triumph of Japan over Russia, the facing of a huge European Power by a comparatively small Eastern Nation, the exposure of the weakness and rottenness of the Russian leaders, and the contrast with their hardy virile opponents, ready to sacrifice everything for ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... overthrown by the Revolution, it seemed to be dead. But, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, behold it springing up again spontaneously, in one direct, new, strong and active jet and higher than the old one, free of the excrescences, rottenness and parasites which, under the ancient regime, disfigured and discolored it. No more compulsory vows, no "frocked" younger sons "to make an elder," no girls immured from infancy, kept in the convent throughout their youth, led on, urged, and then driven into ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the Lexow disclosures of inconceivable rottenness of a Tammany police; the woe unto you! of Christian priests calling vainly upon the chief of the city "to save its children from a living hell," and the contemptuous reply on the witness-stand of the head of the party of organized ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... existing folly will follow in the footsteps of the past, and after displaying a given amount of cunning and credulity in those deceiving and deceived, will drop from the public view like a fruit which has ripened into spontaneous rottenness, and be succeeded by the fresh bloom of some other delusion required by the same excitable portion of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... have adduced to prove that the yellow fever is not an American, but an African disease, imported in slave-ships, and periodically renewed from those cargoes of human rottenness and putrefaction, I hope ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... more speedily than a badly-made road. Every season is its enemy and works for its destruction. Fierce heat and intensest cold both strive for its undoing. And "the way of the ungodly" is an appallingly bad road. There is rottenness in its foundations, and there is built into it "wood, and hay, and stubble," How can it stand? "The Spirit of the Lord breatheth upon it," and it is surely brought to nought. All the forces of holiness are pledged to its destruction, and they shall ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... break up into ear-rings for wanton women! And they shall get themselves a new name, but the angel of ignominy, with the fiery brand, shall know them, and their heart shall be the tomb of dead desires that turn their life to rottenness." ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... them through the smiling peace of the Normandy pasture-lands on towards the brilliant "city enthroned in wickedness," which sparkles like a jewel on the borders of the Seine as gloriously as ever Babylon sparkled on the shores of Euphrates. As godless, as hollow to the very core of rottenness, as her sister of ancient days, wanton "Lutetia" shines,—with the ghastly and unnatural lustre of phosphorescent luminance arising from old graves—and as divinely determined as the destruction of the old-time city splendid, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... and be satisfied." But when he does reach the end, when every pleasure tried, every beauty of surrounding created, and he expects to eat the fruit of his work, instantly his mouth is filled with rottenness and decay. "Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do; and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit; and there was no profit under the sun." Thus he groans ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... gain, he resolved to return to his native land by sea; (for he was born, it is said, in the island of Ceos[32]). {Accordingly} he embarked in a ship, which a dreadful tempest, together with its own rottenness, caused to founder at sea. Some gathered together their girdles,[33] others their precious effects, {which formed} the support of their existence. One who was over inquisitive, {remarked}: "Are you going to save none of your property, ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... destroyed, the run of the sap having been stopped by "ringing" the bark; but they still stood like troops of skeletons, and would stand, very ugly to look at, till they fell, in the course of nature, by reason of their own rottenness. There was a man always at work about the place—Boscobel he was called—whose sole business was to destroy the timber after this fashion, so that the air might get through to the grasses, and that the soil might be relieved from the burden ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... work! Had not every man in Australia laughed with his pitiless cartoons at the dignified magnates of Society and the utter rottenness of ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... for instance, one thinks of the rottenness-to-the-core of Dean Farrar's Eric, or the spiritus vulgaritatis fortissimus of Mark Twain's A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur—one feels a little ashamed of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... no quarter is given, and where the merits of the deserving rather than the lapses of the blameworthy are torn as the most toothsome morsel in a furious feast. The Bible says that envy is the rottenness of the bones, meaning that utter corruption which has finally reached the framework of the structure. Society as now organized is really making progress toward the extinction of this hideous blemish. When, as ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... plead much greater affection for the lucubrations of Amiel than for Count Tolstoi's dealings with that odd compound of crudity and rottenness, the Russian nature; but Mr Arnold's "Amiel" is admirable. Never was there a more "gentlemanly correction," a more delicate and good-humoured setting to rights, than that which he administers to Amiel's two great ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... ideal which defeated you. Instead of wasting your strength in fighting against it, why not make use of it, side by side with your own, against the enemies of all ideals, the men who are exploiting your country and your wealth of ideas, the men who are bringing European civilization to rottenness?" ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... of Russia's alleged mobilization appeared and, probably with a view to encouraging Germans to stand fast, ghastly pictures of the weakness and unpreparedness of the Russian army, in a word Russian rottenness and corruption. Persistent rumours of revolutions in ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... these times. You'll have heard the talk of men who have been fools enough to marry choice specimens. When common sense has a chance of getting in a word with you, you'll understand what I now tell you. Wherever you look now-a-days there's sham and rottenness; but the most worthless creature living is one of these trashy, flashy girls,—the kind of girl you see everywhere, high and low,—calling themselves "ladies,"—thinking themselves too good for any honest, womanly work. Town ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... any parity of wisdom (for that were something reasonable), but out of a female pride! 'I suffer not,' saith Saint Paul, 'the woman to usurp authority over the man.' If the Apostle could not suffer it, into what mould is he mortified that can? Solomon saith that 'a bad wife is to her husband as rottenness to his bones, a continual dropping: better dwell in a corner of the house-top, or in the wilderness, than with such a one: whoso hideth her hideth the wind, and one of the four mischiefs that the earth cannot bear.' If the Spirit of God wrote such aggravations as these, and, as it may be guessed ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... the right,' returned he, '(excuse the paradox,) because they are all in the wrong. There is a rottenness in the whole theatrical system, which, unless it terminate, like manure thrown at the root of trees, in some new fructification of genius, will end by rendering the national theatres national nuisances. With reference to the interests ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... partly for his own sake, and yet more for the memory of the dear dead woman, his heart went out in a greater tenderness than that of cold sympathy. Human love in the individual has been the salt which has kept the body politic from utter rottenness. How to soften the blow to Stephen was his thought as he paced slowly through the cool darkness of the night: how to do more than that, how to link Stephen to his own fortunes, which would surely rise after the successful execution of this commission of tragedy. Slowly ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... I've heard before of planters being told to ferment and cure until the bean is cinnamon colour. Why, man, you couldn't get a pale brown interior with beans of the Forastero or Calabacillo type if you fermented them to rottenness. ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... belly trembled, My lips quivered at the voice; Rottenness entered into my bones, and I trembled in my place: That I should rest waiting for the day of trouble, When he that shall invade them in troops cometh up against the people. For though the fig tree shall not blossom, Neither shall ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... me nothing. 'Your new moons and Sabbaths—the calling of assemblies—I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting.' These are only as the whitewash of your sepulchres to hide the loathsomeness within—'the rottenness and dead men's bones!' If you had made no impious pretensions, I would not, peradventure, have dealt so sternly with you. If like the other trees you had confessed your nakedness, and stood with your leafless stems, waiting for summer suns, ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... to improve our country in peace, and defend it in war, without recurring either to new taxes or loans. But if the debt should once more be swelled to a formidable size, its entire discharge will be despaired of, and we shall be committed to the English career of debt, corruption, and rottenness, closing with revolution. The discharge of the debt, therefore, is vital to the destinies of our government, and it hangs on Mr. Madison and yourself alone. We shall never see another President and Secretary of the Treasury making all other objects subordinate to this. Were either ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... that covers the whole surface of the spiritual creation. We cannot point to every pious person as a Dorcas, who presents a singular fertility of some of the noblest graces; but of all it may be said, "the root of the matter is found in them," and "their root shall not be rottenness, nor their blossom go up ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... of stinking putrefaction. Here in the tropics, under a brazen sun, all unclean things turn to putrid filthy life within the hour; and in a native gaol the atmosphere is heavy with the fumes and rottenness of the offal of years, and the reeking pungency of offal that is new. No ventilation can penetrate into the fetid airless cells, nor could the veriest hurricane purge the ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... brings in its train, cynicism, pessimism, the drying up of the very springs of life. "The body chilled, jaded and ruined, the cup of pleasure drained to the dregs, the senses exhausted of their power to enjoy, the spirit of its wish to aspire, nothing left but loathing, craving and rottenness." See Spedding in 'Edinburgh Review' for April, 1843. The poem concludes by leaving as an answer to the awful question, "can there be final salvation for the poor wretch?" a reply undecipherable by man, and dawn breaking in angry splendour. The best commentary on the poem ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... proving its growth, its health, its progressive force, its certainty of final victory, by those very changes, disputes, mistakes, which the ignorant and the bigoted hold up to scorn, as proofs of its uncertainty and its rottenness; because they never have dared or cared to ask boldly—What are the facts of the case?—and have never discovered either the acuteness, the patience, the calm justice, necessary for ascertaining the facts, or their awful and divine ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... France as the greatest of men; he is confounded with his supporting element, even as the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias, that never spared a woman in his lust, seemed the holiest of deities when his rottenness was concealed by ivory and gold, and his libidinous head was lighted up by sunbeams from above. Here is Lord Byron connecting, in the portrait of some poor melodramatic hero possibly, some noble quality of courage or perseverance ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... interested I had been in the whole business, puzzling out the effect of the winds on the tides, the set of the currents, and so on. I talked about my difficulties, too; the changes in the buoys, the prehistoric rottenness of the English charts. He drew me out as much as he could, and in the light of what followed I can see the point of ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... of the three days following the dinner, on the cliffs beyond the Golden Gate. There was no great moral battle going on in his mind; he intended to marry Magdalena. One of his pet theories was that one secret of the rottenness underlying the social, and in natural sequence, the political structure of the United States was the absence of a convention. Men were on their knees to women so long as their pleasure was materially abetted ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... quivering flesh puffed above the strong bark cords, that he might die very soon, the living was placed by his side, his face to his till the very lips met, and extending along limb to limb and foot to foot, and nestled down into his couch of rottenness, to impede his breathing as far as possible ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... you think that four years' insanity is going to prove the remedy?" Vane laughed cynically. "Except that there are a few million less men to carry on the rottenness"— ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... and talked for a long time about the rottenness of the Cambridge bowling—which, by the way, I had never seen—and the runs Fred was sure to make in the 'Varsity match, until he tried very hard to stop me saying anything more about cricket, and Murray set me going on another subject ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... not fit for riches, being ignorant of their true function; self-indulgence and moral rottenness follow wealth; because of the abuse of the power which wealth brings, we are taught that it is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... Down obscure alleys, apparently never trodden now by the foot of man, and whose very existence seemed to be forgotten, there would jut into the path porticoes, oriels, doorways of enriched and florid middle-age design, their extinct air being accentuated by the rottenness of the stones. It seemed impossible that modern thought could house itself in such ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... all I'm going to hear. I've heard enough to make me sick. I hope nobody else in this town will ever hear it. It's worse than I had ever imagined—you allowing that woman to support you! And it's nauseating to think that you don't realize the rottenness of it. But you seem to be incapable of any decent feeling ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... responsible for the arrangements which were made between the Balkan Allies for carrying on the war. The Bulgarian people had made up their minds to do the lion's share of the work and to have the lion's share of the spoils, for the Bulgarian people knew the state of corruption and rottenness to which the Turkish nation had come. When I reached Sofia, the Bulgarians told me they were going to be in Constantinople three weeks after the declaration of war. That was the view that they took of the possibilities of the campaign. And they kept ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... Northern villages and towns, represents the highest civilization: the best Southern gentleman, that lord of plantations, that cotton, tobacco and slavemonger, at the best is somewhat polished, varnished; the varnish covers all kinds of barbarity and of rottenness. It is to be regretted that our army contains officers modelled on the Southern pattern, to whom human rights and civilization are as distasteful as they are to any ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... more adobe homes where the sand was not hot and shifting, a few ships in the bay when Spain had been compelled to relax her jealous vigilance—or—who knew?—perhaps!—a flourishing colony when the Russian bear had devoured the Spanish lion. She knew something and suspected more of the rottenness and inefficiency of Spain, and, were Russia a nation of Rezanovs, what opposition in California against the tide thundering down from the north? Then, perhaps, the city that had travelled from the brain of the Russian to hers when the fog had rolled over the ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... misdemeanors, what is to be done? The example and the consequence so pernicious! which could not be, "if our great pastors but exercise the wisdom of common shepherds, by parting with one to stop the infection of the whole flock, when his rottenness grows notorious. Or if our clergy would but use the instinct of other creatures, and chastise the blown deer out of their herd, such mischiefs might easily be remedied. In this case it is that I think a clergyman ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... like the Roman empire itself, was that great city of Treves; but inwardly it was full of rottenness and weakness. The Roman empire had been, in spite of all its crimes, for four hundred years the salt of the earth: but now the salt had lost its savour; and in one generation more it would be trodden ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... that doth make me sick. A lady So fair, and fasten'd to an empery Would make the great'st king double,—to be partner'd With tomboys hir'd with that self-exhibition Which your own coffers yield! with diseas'd ventures That play with all infirmities for gold Which rottenness can lend nature! such boil'd stuff As well might poison poison! Be reveng'd; Or she that bore you was no queen, and you Recoil from your ...
— Cymbeline • William Shakespeare [Tudor edition]
... "The very rottenness of the Country became an attraction for Friedrich; and henceforth West-Preussen was, what hitherto Silesia had been, his favorite child; which, with infinite care, like that of an anxious loving mother, he washed, brushed, new-dressed, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... down of its very weight and rottenness. The panic of 1873 reacted against the party in power. Dissatisfaction with Grant, which had not sufficed two years before to displace him, was growing apace. Favoritism bred corruption and corruption grew more and more flagrant. Succeeding scandals cast their ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... in which no vegetation can flourish, and above which, with the rapid growth of the ever-growing nuisance, no living thing will breathe with impunity. Look at our scientific machinery, which has destroyed domestic manufacture, which has substituted rottenness for strength in the thing made, and physical degradation in crowded towns for healthy and comfortable country life in the makers. The day would fail, if I should attempt to enumerate the evils which science has inflicted on mankind. I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... so long as he could work at his art. Forty years after his death, Gerard de Lairesse, a popular painter, now forgotten, wrote of Rembrandt—"In his efforts to attain a yellow manner, Rembrandt merely achieved an effect of rottenness.... The vulgar and prosaic aspects of a subject were the only ones he was capable of noting." Poor Gerard ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... him. "Our fathers have told us men may be made by the forces of Nature," said Correa. "It is the warmth of things, and moisture, and rottenness—rottenness." ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... often been predicted by writers on the state of Ireland, that, owing to the rottenness at the foundation of the social fabric, it would come down with a crash some day. The facts reported by the census commissioners of 1841 showed that this consummation could not be far off. Out of ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... Christlike; but only on condition that he yields to no temptation to drop his conduct to the level around him, and is never guilty of compromise. Once yield, and all is over. Flowers grow on a dunghill, and the very reeking rottenness may ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... the people, teeming with the distorted colliers. The same secret seemed to be working in the souls of all alike, Gudrun, Palmer, the rakish young bloods, the gaunt, middle-aged men. All had a secret sense of power, and of inexpressible destructiveness, and of fatal half-heartedness, a sort of rottenness in ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Amos began to walk the floor. "I'm still a young man. If I had the backing that land gives a man, I could clean out a lot of rottenness in the State. Even if I only did it by showing what a man with a clean record ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... distract their attention from their own grievances, and to draw them away from their Socialistic clubs and conventions, to the contemplation of a parade of Royal state and splendour. The careful student of History cannot fail to note that whenever the rottenness and inadequacy of a Government are most apparent, great 'shows' and Royal ceremonials are always resorted to, in order to divert the minds of the people from the bitter consideration of a deficient Exchequer and a diminishing National Honour. The authorities who organize these State masquerades ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... that night, I called it a frigid fire, a funeral light, illumining decay and death, an emblem of fame that gleams around the dead man without warming him, or of genius when it owes its brilliancy to moral rottenness, and was thinking that such ghostlike torches were just fit to light up this dead forest or to blaze coldly in tombs, when, starting from my abstraction, I looked up the canal. I recollected myself, and discovered the ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... men's bones and all uncleanness!" The first half of the, sermon was a denunciation of the morality of men. We made clean the outside of the platter, but the so-called purity of England was a smug sham built upon rottenness and sin! There were men among us, damned sensualists, left untouched by the idleness of the public conscience, who did not even know where their children were to be found. Let them go down into the gutters of life and look for their own faces, and—God forgive them!—their mothers' ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... was royalist, as was the scarcely less ignorant nobility. The bulk of the clergy and the army was also loyal. All this support made the Bourbon regime look not insecure to those on the spot, who failed to understand the complete rottenness of its foundations. ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... a certain grade of rottenness in Western films, but I never believed that, down deep in my heart. I believe the public stands for that stuff because they don't see any better. This four-reeler I've got in mind will sure open the eyes of some producers—or I'll buy ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... greed, lewdness and incapacity of Richelieu and Dubois, of Pompadour and du Barry. When {15} the effluvious corpse of Louis XV was hastily smuggled from Versailles to the Cathedral of St. Denis in 1774, that seemed to mark the final dissolution into rottenness of the Bourbon-Versailles regime. That regime already stank in the nostrils of public opinion, a new force which for half a century past had been ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... are the playthings of his pen. It is a ludicrous circumstance that he should have dedicated his Cain to the worthy Baronet! Did the latter ever acknowledge the obligation? We are not nice, not very nice; but we do not particularly approve those subjects that shine chiefly from their rottenness: nor do we wish to see the Muses drest out in the flounces of a false or questionable philosophy, like Portia and Nerissa in the garb of Doctors of Law. We like metaphysics as well as Lord Byron; but not to see them making flowery speeches, nor dancing a measure in the fetters of verse. ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... Enemy of Man as his best friend—his only comforter and refuge. But just when he deemed himself well armed, least vulnerable, and most secure, the awful reality of death—its horrible accompaniments—dissolution, corruption, rottenness, decay, and its still more awful and obscure uncertainties, started suddenly before him, and sent a sickening chill through every pore of his unnerved flesh. Then he retreated from his position—fled, as it were, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... You may compare it, for the purpose of illustration, to one of George Robins' patent filters, into which pours turbid torrents of Thames water, its sediment, mud, dirt, weeds, and rottenness; straining through the various strata, its grosser particles are arrested in their course, and nothing that is not pure, transparent, and limpid is transmitted. In the great filter of London life, conceit, pretension, small provincial abilities, pseudo-talent, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... Such rottenness obtains in Brazilian law that not long since a judge sued in court a man who had bribed him and sought to evade paying the bribe. Knowing this laxity, we did not anticipate that our murderous fellow-traveller would have to suffer much for his crime. The News, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... denounces every institution established for human development as a fraud. It stigmatizes law as the machinery of injustice; it sneers at society as hollow-hearted corruption and insincerity; it brands politics as a reeking mass of rottenness, and scoffs at morality as the tinsel of sin. Its disciples are those who rail and snarl at everything that is noble and good, to whom a joke is an assault and battery, a laugh is an insult to outraged dignity, and the provocation of a smile is like passing an electric current ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... "The old chap has forgiven her for every bit of her rottenness to him. He's insanely happy, just because she chooses to make much ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... another to see them by the light of this nineteenth century, in a city whose streets look much like the streets of any other, and where men and women appear much as they do any where else. Here we saw, in one morning, the splendor and the rottenness of the Romish system. From those majestic arches, that triumphant chant, there is but a step down to the worship of dead men's bones and ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... thoroughly accustomed to it. If weakened vitality were the only result, it would not be so serious a matter; but scrofula is soon fixed upon such constitutions, beginning with its milder form as in consumption, but ending in the absolute rottenness of bone and tissue. The invalid may live in the healthiest climate, pass hours each day in the open air, and yet undo or neutralize much of the good of this by sleeping in an unventilated room at night. Diseased joints, horrible affections of the eye or ear or ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... Russia, famines recur with dire frequency, with disease and riot in their train, while the ignominious termination of the Russo-Japanese war showed that even the magnificent morale of the Russian soldier had been undermined and was tainted by the rottenness of the authorities set over him. What in such circumstances as these can a handful of philanthropists achieve, and what avails alms-giving or the scattering of largesse to a people on ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... strange dried roots, strange dried fish, strange dried land and marine plants, ducks and chickens, split, pressed thin and smoked; dried shellfish; cakes newly made, yellow, glutinous and fatty, stamped with tea-box characters; and great earthen jars filled with rottenness. I speak correctly if perhaps too forcibly, for when those imposing jars are opened to serve a customer with some manner of vegetable cut in long strips, the native-born American finds it expedient to hold his nose. American storekeepers in the mines deal largely in Chinese goods. They ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... each is well content. Thus under Satan's all paternal care They brothers are, this royal bandit pair. Oh, noxious conquerors! with transient rule Chimera heads—ambition can but fool. Their misty minds but harbor rottenness Loathsome and fetid, and all barrenness— Their deeds to ashes turn, and, hydra-bred, The mystic skeleton is theirs to dread. The daring German and the cunning Pole Noted to-day a woman had control Of lands, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... to a room, the like of which for filth I had never slept in before, and shall never, I hope, sleep in again. It was a large chamber, the boards of which were furred with mildew, and the valance on the bed was dropping off with rottenness. Generations of cats had haunted it and slept on the coverlet. The dungeon at Brest was fresh and sweet compared to it. Yet Citizen Picquot smilingly demanded two francs a night and the price of ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... live, and far too long hang they on their branches. Would that a storm came and shook all this rottenness and ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the sort of mind that moves in circles. After contemplating for a time the rottenness of the world, he came back to the point from ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... and those great ones, which this book is calculated to instil into members of our own communion. Pre-eminently it shows the rottenness of that mere Act-of-Parliament foundation on which some, now-a-days, would rest our Church. Dr. Newman suggests, more than once, that such a course must rob us of all our present strength. Dr. Manning sings his paean with wild and premature delight, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... bloody-bluish tinge on all around. Leaning over the dead, the murderer, paler than the corpse itself, gazed unmovingly on his work; he forgot why he had come—he turned away his head from the reek of rottenness—his gorge rose within him when he saw the bloody-headed worms that crawled from under the clothes. Interrupted in their loathsome work, they, scared by the light, crept into a mass, and hid themselves beneath each other. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... account of the rich, and proves him a beggar; a naked beggar which hath interest in nothing but in the gravel that fills his mouth. He holds a glass before the eyes of the most beautiful and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness, and ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... answer. She felt stunned—beaten into helpless silence by the quiet, inexorable voice that, bit by bit, minute by minute, had drawn aside the veil of ignorance and revealed the dry bones and rottenness that lay hidden ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... reaction. It is a matter of profound regret that two infinitely more virile and progressive races, the German and the Jew, should be fighting their battles for them, and indeed bolstering up causes which would otherwise speedily collapse by reason of their own inward rottenness. It is the Triple Alliance which has made it possible for the iniquitous racial hegemony of the Magyars to survive in Hungary; it is the joint policy of Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin which has hampered the progress of the Balkan States, ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... question. By what law, admitting many exceptions, are men on the whole trying to change this situation at once indecent and impious? This is a yet more important query. Our world has obviously awakened to the rottenness in Denmark. But where are we turning for our remedy? Is it to the penitence and confession, the public-mindedness, the identification of the fate of the individual with the fate of the whole group which is the religious impulse? Is it ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... This shibboleth is the logical result of the attitude mentioned. Doubtless, the home is woman's sphere; but the home includes all that pertains to it—city, politics and taxes, laws relating to the protection of minors, municipal rottenness which may corrupt children, schools and playgrounds and museums which may educate them. Few doctrines have been productive of more pain than the "woman's sphere" argument. It is this which has, for a thousand years, made the unmarried woman, the Old Maid, the butt of the contemptible ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... envenomed and bloody democracy had been elicited in the very perfection of his stern and heartless tyranny. The unblushing excesses of the Regent and of Louis the Fifteenth, who gratuitously withdrew the last vail that concealed the utter rottenness of all that claimed popular obedience, under the names of religion, and authority, sufficed, though scarcely needed, to complete the discredit of the French monarchy; and, ascending his throne, surrounded ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... had been confined to royalty, some respect might yet be entertained for the virtue of the ancients; but the foul infection was not restrained within such narrow bounds. It invaded whole empires until they fell in pieces from very rottenness. What must have been the condition of a nation that could tolerate such a spectacle as its monarch riding through the streets of its metropolis in a state of nudity, drawn by women in the same condition? Such a deed did ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... and indulgence and moods of dubiety and remorse. I was not going on as the Baileys thought I was going on. There were times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated me intensely. Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between twenty-three and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcely any one but myself, grew and spread. My sense of the probability of a collapse intensified. I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had prophesied five years before, that I was entangling myself in something that might smother all ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... cupboard more fetid than the temple itself, and proved to be in the following condition:—(a) Face eaten by rats; (b) one bleeding eye hanging down by his mouth; (c) legs covered with gangrene, ulcers, and rottenness; (d) expression peaceful ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... that a grateful nation would before long acclaim its preservers, and enroll itself as a devoted ally against the "perfidious and tyrannical" supremacy of Great Britain. It is useless to speculate how far this dream would have been realized but for the utter rottenness of the instruments with which the reformers worked. The King's senility, the Queen's lust, Godoy's greed, Escoiquiz's self-seeking, Ferdinand's unreliability, Murat's ambition, made a poor armory of weapons wherewith to accomplish a beneficent revolution. But the one ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... vessel's strength. She is just as good as when she sailed, and could easily do it all over again without any repairs. We who were on board all knew perfectly well before we sailed how groundless and foolish these cries about her "rottenness" were; we knew, too, that there is scarcely a wooden ship afloat on which it is not necessary to use the pumps now and then. When the engine was stopped, we found it was sufficient to take a ten minutes' turn at the hand-pump every morning; that was all the "leaking" amounted to. Oh no! there ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... cure for rottenness." He was so beside himself with pain that he forgot that she was a woman, and ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... utter a reproach? Thy punishment; that bitter, miserable end; that long battling with poverty, debt, disease, all brought on by thyself; that abandonment in the hour of need, more bitter than them all; that awakening to the terrible truth of the hollowness of man and rottenness of the world!—surely this is enough: surely we may hope that a pardon followed. But now let us view thee in thy upward flight the genius, the wit, the monarch ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... to myself—it is the will of God To break me, prove me nothing of myself! This Almoner hath tasted Henry's gold. The cardinals have finger'd Henry's gold. And Rome is venal ev'n to rottenness. I see it, I see it. I am no soldier, as he said—at least No leader. Herbert, till I hear from the Pope I will suspend myself from all my functions. If fast and ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... get friends in New York. Dr. Charles Parkhurst, famous especially for his plucky exposure of the former rottenness of the police force of that city, had asked me to give an illustrated lecture at his mission in the Bowery. After my talk a gentleman present, to my blank astonishment, gave me a cheque for five hundred dollars. It ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... racing is rotten—as everything connected with losing money must be. Out here, in addition to its inherent rottenness, it has the merit of being two-thirds sham; looking pretty on paper only. Every one knows every one else far too well for business purposes. How on earth can you rack and harry and post a man for his losings, when you are fond of his wife, and live in the same Station with him? ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... is carried by the elaborated descending sap down to the tubers, and as the largest tubers require the largest amount of elaborated sap for their development, they will, consequently, receive the greatest quantity of the vitiating principle, and will, on digging, be found a mass of rottenness, when the smaller ones are often but slightly affected. The Botrytis infestans can not gain a lodgment on vines that are truly healthy and vigorous, high ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... and Necrosis.—Caries is a word which appears to be used with a considerable amount of looseness. In addition to the meaning implied by necrosis (namely, 'death' of the part), caries is generally used to indicate that there is also a condition of rottenness, decay, and stench. It is particularly applied, in fact, when the death of the bone is slowly progressive, and is due to the inroads made upon it ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... kept open in defiance of the law, and wickedness flaunted itself in the face of the public in a manner that was truly shocking. Occasionally a private citizen would try to do something to mend matters, but his complaint was generally "pigeon-holed," and that would be the end of the matter. The rottenness, as it was well called, extended from the highest places in the department to the lowest, so that it was said not even a policeman could secure his appointment without paying several hundred dollars ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... day among all English-writing peoples—of Tennyson, his poetry. I find it impossible, as I taste the sweetness of those lines, to escape the flavor, the conviction, the lush-ripening culmination, and last honey of decay (I dare not call it rottenness) of that feudalism which the mighty English dramatist painted in all the splendors of its noon and afternoon. And how they are chanted—both poets! Happy those kings and nobles to be so sung, so told! To run their course—to get their ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman |
