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Sordidness   Listen
Sordidness

noun
1.
Sordid dirtiness.  Synonyms: squalidness, squalor.
2.
Unworthiness by virtue of lacking higher values.  Synonyms: baseness, contemptibility, despicability, despicableness.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Sordidness" Quotes from Famous Books



... of expression. He felt the illicit pleasure of a schoolboy playing truant. The big gambling table of San Francisco seemed very far away. But there was more than illicit pleasure in his mood. It was as though he were going through a sort of cleansing bath. No room here for all the sordidness, meanness, and viciousness that filled the dirty pool of city existence. Without pondering in detail upon the matter at all, his sensations were of purification and uplift. Had he been asked to state how he felt, ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... pipe, spat expertly, and voiced the opinion that the winter wheat was a fine prospect. Ben Westerveld, listening tolerantly to the boy's opinions, felt a great surge of joy that he did not show. Here, at last, was compensation for all the misery and sordidness and bitter ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber

... habitual reference made throughout these pages to national interest as the test or standard of national policy has (it may be suggested) a touch of sordidness and selfishness, and implies that statesmanship has nothing ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey

... you will lead a more correct course of life, by neither always pursuing the main ocean, nor, while you cautiously are in dread of storms, by pressing too much upon the hazardous shore. Whosoever loves the golden mean, is secure from the sordidness of an antiquated cell, and is too prudent to have a palace that might expose him to envy, if the lofty pine is more frequently agitated with winds, and high towers fall down with a heavier ruin, and lightnings strike the summits of the mountains. A well-provided ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace

... all his gay solicitude, his gentle self-reproach, that she had angered and perplexed him, that she made him feel a little at a loss with her talk of sordidness, that, perhaps, she wearied him. And, seeing this, she was frightened—frightened, and angry that she should be afraid. But fear predominated, and she forced herself to smile at him and to talk with him during the long drive, as ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... heart she knew that he spoke at last the truth; that this was the real Ramon whom she had never before seen. To every woman must come sometime the bitter awakening from her dreamworld to the real world in all its sordidness and selfishness. Annie-Many-Ponies, standing there looking at Ramon—Ramon who laughed at her goodness—knew now what the future that had lain behind the mountains held in store for her. Not happiness, surely; not the wide ring of gold that would say she was Ramon's wife. Luis ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower

... our souls shrivel, our sensibilities wither. And just as stagnant water soon becomes impure, and swarms with low forms of vegetable and animal life, so the stagnant soul, which refuses to reflect the beauty of sun and star and sky, soon becomes polluted with sordidness and ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde

... mosque, high above the mean village which clustered round it, rising as a flame rises against a windless sky, while beneath this shining Giralda lay half-ruined houses rejuvenated with whitewash or coats of vivid blue. They passed up a narrow street redeemed from sordidness by a domed koubbah or two; and from the roofed balconies of cafes maures, Arabs looked down on them with large, dreamy eyes like clouded stars. All the glory and pride of the village was concentrated in the tomb and beautiful mosque of the saint whose name falls sweet ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... many queer side-speeches like the chotee bolee of the women, and held grave converse with shopkeepers and Hill-coolies alike. He was precocious for his age, and his mixing with natives had taught him some of the more bitter truths of life: the meanness and the sordidness of it. He used, over his bread and milk, to deliver solemn and serious aphorisms, translated from the vernacular into the English, that made his Mamma jump and vow that Tods must go Home next hot weather. Just when Tods was in the bloom of his power, the Supreme Legislature were hacking out ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling

... in want, and is more anxious for the morrow than the poorest of the poor. The only redeeming point in his character is his self-denial—a truly noble characteristic when associated with a generous disposition—which, however, in his case, loses its value through the sordidness of its aim. Yes, he is a worldly man, beyond the shadow of a doubt. But this is equally true of the man whose manner of life is the very opposite of this—the spendthrift. He values money only in so far as it enables him to ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... take away death, the inhuman transcendent death. Oh, let us ask no question of it, what it is or is not. To know is human, and in death we do not know, we are not human. And the joy of this compensates for all the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our humanity. In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know. The promise of this is our heritage, we look forward like heirs ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... which marks the true adventurer, he was on the whole exceeding happy. There was no more use in sailing for Javan and Gadire; but at home there were highways in abundance, and what is your genuine tramp but a dry-land sailor? The Red Man is exhausted of everything but sordidness; but under that round-shouldered little tent at the bend of the road, beside that fire artistically built beneath that kettle of the comfortable odours, among those horses and colts at graze hard by, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley



Words linked to "Sordidness" :   uncleanness, sordid, contemptibility, unworthiness, dirtiness



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