"Wretchedness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Merely to know that our wretched pain is known to some one besides ourselves is an incredible relief. Merely to know that some sort of superhuman being, even without special preoccupation with human fate, can turn an amused or an indulgent clairvoyance towards our wretchedness, can "note" it with dispassionate sympathy, as we note the hurts of animals or plants, is a sort of consolation. It is a relief to know that what we feel when we are hurt to the breaking-point is not absolutely wasted and lost in the void, but is stored up in an immortal memory along with many other ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... such wretched helots as misfortune had flung in the way of their common masters. The men, mostly idle,—ludicrously nonchalant,—reclining on their saddle-pads, or skins, inhaling the narcotic weed, apparently proud in the possession of that lordship of wretchedness that ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... came in, his misery had grown to acuteness. His old passive wretchedness had given way to a settled nervous dread which wore the ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... were in high glee. They drank and played cards with men worth millions; spoke of the inclemency of the season, and expressed great surprise that so much poverty and wretchedness existed, with one breath, and with the next extolled the wines and administered justice to the eatables. Editors were there who had that morning written long "leaders" about the oppression of the poor by the rich, and longer ones about the inconsistencies of ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... concern whatever. It was a pretty and touching sight, I say, to see how these very simple pleasures delighted her. But I very soon learned that this experience must not be repeated. Indeed, it was in this wise that I obtained my first inklings of the real wretchedness of Fanny's life. She had to suffer constant humiliations for a week or more, as the price of the little jaunt she had with me. Her mother found it hard to forget or forgive the fact that her daughter had had ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... to bear grew the fierce throbbing in his head and eyes, but his wretchedness of mind ran a good race with his bodily suffering; and had he been asked, suddenly, the nature of the pain which tormented him he would have found ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... that time. For then I still had the courage of a free will. I had no one else to consider, nothing to turn me from my path. But then began what has broken down my will and filled the whole of my life with dread and wretchedness. ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... work was published in 1744, which merits notice as indicating a slight alteration in the mode of attack on the part of the deists. It was entitled, The Resurrection of Jesus considered, and is attributed to P. Annet, who died in the wretchedness of poverty.(466) It was designed in reply to some of the defences of this subject which the writings of Woolston and others had provoked. Its object was to show that the writings which record the statement of Christ's prediction of his own death ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Tarbert, on the Shannon, by the stage-coach, passing through several old, but uninteresting towns, and seeing a great deal of barrenness and wretchedness on our way. At Tarbert, we took a steamer, to ascend the river to Limerick, and as the weather that afternoon was clear and bright, we had one of the most delightful ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... nothing! What a hubbub of questions which waited for no reply, of replies which answered no question! The old woman herself shared in the wild merriment of the little ones! I have always been struck at the ease with which the poor forget their wretchedness. Being used to live only for the present, they make a gain of every pleasure as soon as it offers itself. But the surfeited rich are more difficult to satisfy: they require time and everything to suit before they will ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... fails to rear At this dread sign the ready spear! For, as the flames this symbol sear, His home, the refuge of his fear, A kindred fate shall know; Far o'er its roof the volumed flame Clan-Alpine's vengeance shall proclaim, While maids and matrons on his name Shall call down wretchedness and shame, And infamy and woe.' Then rose the cry of females, shrill As goshawk's whistle on the hill, Denouncing misery and ill, Mingled with childhood's babbling trill Of curses stammered slow; Answering with imprecation dread, 'Sunk be his ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... matter; and, raising herself languidly on the sofa, said she would try to play. "Nothing can make matters worse than they are," she thought, despairingly, as Arnold dealt the cards for her. "Nothing can justify my inflicting my own wretchedness on this kind-hearted boy!" ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... heard his distant steps. She listened to the sounds, as they sunk fainter and fainter, till the melancholy stillness of night alone remained; and then hurried to her chamber, to seek repose, which, alas! was fled from her wretchedness. ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... young creature, and yet you cry out as if I were going to bring you to dishonour. Fie upon you!" (My child still remembers all this—verbolenus; I myself should have forgot it a hundred times over in all the wretchedness I since underwent.) But she was offended at his words, and, jumping up from her seat, she answered shortly, "I thank your lordship for the honour, but will only keep house for my papa, which is a better honour for me;" whereupon he turned to me and asked what I said to that. ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... beautiful maiden, "art thou the vile Bennaskar, or the still more vile Mahoud? Oh, let me sleep till death, and never more behold the wretchedness of life!" ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... Moreover, they reasoned of the suggestions and temptations of Satan in particular; and told to each other by which they had been afflicted, and how they were borne up under his assaults. They also discoursed of their own wretchedness of heart, of their unbelief; and did contemn, slight, and abhor their own righteousness, as filthy and insufficient ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... for the happiness of the souls of the dead, in the opinion of the Chinese, as is the saying of the mass in the opinion of a Roman Catholic. Without these attentions the souls of the deceased are in a sort of purgatory; wandering about in want and wretchedness. But if the desire of rendering their ancestors happy be not sufficient to secure attention to these rites, a still more powerful motive addresses itself to their minds. These wandering spirits are supposed ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... me to thy holy conversation, which the example of our blessed Saviour taught. Lord, pardon me; O God, forgive whatsoever is amiss in me; break not a bruised reed. I humbly submit to thy justice; I confess my wretchedness, and know I have deserved not only this but everlasting punishment; but, O my God, look upon me through the merits of my Saviour, and for his sake save me: do with me and for me what thou pleasest, for I do wholly rely on thy mercy, beseeching thee ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... pen the author tells of the horrors of war; not alone the desolation of battlefields, but the scourges of typhus and cholera that follow in their wake, and the wretchedness, misery, and poverty brought to countless homes. The story in itself is simple but pathetic.... The book, which is sound and calm in its logic and reasoning, has made a grand impression upon military circles of Europe, and its ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... peace. This anguish, and these tears, these are the legacies His fatal love has left me. Thou wilt see me, Believe me, my Alicia, thou wilt see me, Ere yet a few short days pass o'er my head, Abandon'd to the very utmost wretchedness. The hand of pow'r has seiz'd almost the whole Of what was left for needy life's support; Shortly thou will behold me poor, and kneeling Before thy ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe
... have crossed my track, and I remember every one of them, but I never could haul back one from the fate toward which he shambled so blindly; what could I do when Drink was driving him? If I could not shake off the memories of squalor, hunger, poverty—well-deserved poverty—despair, crime, abject wretchedness, then life could not be borne. I can always call to mind the wrung hands and drawn faces of well-nurtured and sweet ladies who saw the dull mask of loathsome degradation sliding downward over their loved one's face. Of all the mental trials that are cruel, that must ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... This further bond of blood and even class relationship also bound the farmers and labourers together—the labourers of to-day were, in countless cases, the farmers of yesterday, whom the Great Clearances had reduced to the lowest form of servitude and who dragged out an existence of appalling wretchedness in sight of their former homes, now, alas, razed to the ground. My mind carries me back to the time when the agricultural labourer in Munster was working for four shillings a week, and trying to rear a family on it! I vowed ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... he applied, when once again his anger got the better of his wretchedness, met him with taunts, others with contempt, others with positive unkindness; and after a week Stephen gave it up and retired in dudgeon to the territory of the Guinea-pigs and Tadpoles, determined that there at least he would, at the edge of the ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... women, and children were used to operate machinery, children being apprenticed to the mills at about eight years of age and working ten to twelve hours a day. This soon worked the life out of human beings, and in consequence sickness, wretchedness, juvenile delinquency, ignorance, drunkenness, pauperism, and crime increased greatly as cities grew and the factory system drew thousands from the farms to the towns. When Queen Victoria came to the throne (1837) one person in twelve in England was a pauper, and the lot ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... like this. I'm young and strong, and I've a filthy crooked hunchback for a husband, worse than Dyudya himself, curse him! When I was a girl, I hadn't bread to eat, or a shoe to my foot, and to get away from that wretchedness I was tempted by Alyoshka's money, and got caught like a fish in a net, and I'd rather have a viper for my bedfellow than that scurvy Alyoshka. And what's your life? It makes me sick to look at it. Your Fyodor sent you packing from the factory and he's taken up with another woman. They have ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... contrast, when one reaches the lights of Wicklow, is singularly abrupt. The town itself after nightfall is gloomy and squalid. Half-drunken men and women stand about, wrangling and disputing in the dull light from the windows, which is only strong enough to show the wretchedness of the figures which pass continually across them. I did my business quickly and turned back to the hills, passing for the first few miles the same noisy groups and couples on the roadway. After a while I stopped at a lonely public-house to get a drink and rest for a moment before I came to ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... ultimately finds that the real womanhood within her has no corresponding part in him. Her deepest voice lacks a response; the deeper her cry, the more dead his silence. The fault may be none of his; he cannot give her what never lived within his soul. But the wretchedness on her side, and the moral deterioration attendant on a false and shallow life, without strength enough to keep itself sweet, are among the most pitiable ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... always possible that the remnant of the Amakoba might attempt pursuit. This, however, they did not do, for very many of them were dead or wounded, and those who remained had no heart left in them. They went back to their mountain home and lived there in shame and wretchedness, for I do not believe there were fifty head of cattle left among the tribe, and Kafirs without cattle are nothing. Still, they did not starve, since there were plenty of women to work the fields, and we had not touched their corn. The end of them was that Panda gave ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... many opponents of papal Rome have allowed themselves to run; but no one can feel a more anxious desire than myself to preserve our Church and people from a return of such spiritual degradation and wretchedness; and to keep far from us the most distant approaches of such lamentable and ensnaring superstitions. In this feeling moreover I am assured that I am joined by many of the most respected and influential members of the Roman Catholic Church among us. {195} Still what ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... booksellers can carry on a trade in blasphemy. Infidelity is bred in 'the filth and corruption of large towns and manufacturing districts.'[162] The disappearance of clerical influence has led to 'a mass of ignorance, vice, and wretchedness which no generous heart can contemplate without grief.'[163] It is not surprising that, in Southey's opinion, it is doubtful whether the bulk of the people has gained or lost in the last thousand years.[164] Macaulay takes all this as mere sentimentalism and preference of a picturesque outside ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... the pathos of poetry which lies often in the mere tracing of the succession of changes in meaning which certain words have undergone. Thus 'elend' in German, a beautiful word, now signifies wretchedness, but at first it signified exile or banishment. [Footnote: On this word there is an interesting discussion in Weigand's Etym. Dict., and compare Pott, Etym. Forsch. i. 302. Ellinge, an English provincial word of infinite pathos, still common ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... would not even shake hands with me; so I rode back; discomfited, to hear from F—— that he had made many attempts to befriend him, but without success. "In fact," concluded F——, with some embarrassment, "he drinks dreadfully, poor fellow. Of course that is the secret of all his wretchedness, but I believe despair drove him to it in the ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... violates nature, and so shocks us, and by the very shock we are reconciled with nature, from which we had parted in thought. "The Christmas Banquet" is one of the most artistically conceived of all the tales, though its subject repels us; the wretchedness of life is shown in the persons of numerous guests through a succession of years, with the effect of a multiplicity of instances; yet at the end it is found that the worst wretch of all is the constant guest with the cold, unfeeling heart,—the ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... pursuing their business, or lounge about, watching passengers to obtain charity. Thus their faces and necks are always of a copper color, and, at an advanced age, more dusky still; so that, for the anatomy and coloring of witches, a painter needs look no further. Their wretchedness is strongly contrasted by the gaiety of the higher classes. The military, who, I suppose, as usual in France, hold the first place, appear in all possible variety of keeping and costume, with their well-proportioned figures, clean apparel, decided gait, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... filled with the same agreeable delusion, and I painfully retraced my steps back into my dungeon. I thought that solitude would now be a relief to me; that to weep would somewhat ease my burdened heart? yet, strange to say, I could not shed a tear. The extreme wretchedness of feeling this inability even to shed tears excites, under some of the heaviest calamities, is the severest trial of all, and I ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... her babe hurried from the room. Swiftly down the stairs she ran, heedless of the cries of the woman she had left behind, and out into the wind and rain of the dreary street—fit emblem, in its forlorn wretchedness, of the future ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... vile. Unless your faith be deep-rooted and of most vigorous growth, it is the safer way not to turn aside into this region so suggestive of miserable doubt. It was a place "with dreadful faces thronged," wrinkled and grim with vice and wretchedness; and, thinking over the line of Milton here quoted, I come to the conclusion that those ugly lineaments which startled Adam and Eve, as they looked backward to the closed gate of Paradise, were no fiends from the pit, but the more terrible foreshadowings of what so many of their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... fought not for Orleans, or Anjou, or Britanny, or Lorraine, but for France. In fact, she made France a nation again. Before she appeared everywhere was murder, revenge, robbery, burning of towns, slaughter of peaceful people, wretchedness, and despair. It was to redeem France from this ruin that Joan came, just when, in 1429, the English were besieging Orleans. Had they taken the strong city of Orleans, they could have overrun all southern ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... low wretchedness of Life, your Servant, Sir—was destin'd by his Parents, and am yet this bound ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... said, in a low voice, "God knows I have suffered since I saw you, but I deserve to suffer for having so far forgotten myself last night. That is not what is troubling me now; it is the thought of the sorrow and wretchedness I have brought into your pure, innocent life,—that you must suffer for my ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... genius and sensibility are the most treacherous gifts of heaven. Why should we cultivate talents merely to gratify the caprice of tyrants? Why seek for knowledge, which can prove only that our wretchedness is irremediable? If a ray of light break in upon us, it is but to make darkness more visible; to show us the narrow limits, the Gothic structure, the impenetrable barriers of our prison. Forgive me if on this subject I cannot speak—if I cannot think—with patience. Is it not fabled, that the gods, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... of the vile, discordant instruments which are the bane of city people. They earn comparatively little but kicks and curses. They are ordered off by irate householders, and receive but little or no consideration from the police. They live in wretchedness and want. Their homes are vile and filthy, and they are the perpetrators of a great many of the crimes that disgrace the city. They are frequent visitors at the Tombs, and are ready to be employed ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... lifting above the city and touching all the roofs with silver. From where he lay he looked out and up, trying to forget his wretchedness, but living the coming encounter again and again. His ears grew hot as Barber seized one of them and wrung it, or brushed his face with a hard, sweaty hand. Imagining insult upon insult, his chest heaved and ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... soulless "Southern Chivalry" thrust into their place; they would have seen red-handed vengeance doom that city of blood to destruction, and the glaring tongues of fire lap up the costly goods and edifices of its vile and relentless citizens; and those who had no mercy for them in their wretchedness and famine, now awe-struck on finding that the men they had so barbarously trampled upon had now the power and the will to retort upon them with interest; they would have seen brothers in arms, who until now had ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... to be added. "Time, the consoler," passes not in vain even over the abodes of wretchedness and misery. The sufferings of that year of famine we have endeavored to bring before those who may have the power in their hands of assuaging the similar horrors which are likely to visit this. The pictures we have given are not exaggerated, but drawn ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... to Italy, to help in freeing her from all this slavery and wretchedness, and in driving out the Austrians, that she may be a free republic, with no ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... Yankeedom, with milk and rum. Rum was, forsooth, a very decent devil, if judged by the exalted character of the company it kept. It stood high on the rungs of the social ladder and pulled and pushed men from it by thousands to wretchedness and ruin. So flagrant and universal was the drinking customs of Boston then that dealers offered on the commons during holidays, without let or hindrance, the drunkard's glass to the crowds thronging by ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... sleep as nature's sweet restorer, sought to stimulate their flagging energies in the enticing cup, they with the advantages of wealth, culture and refinement could not plead the excuses of extreme wretchedness, or ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... general head of string, I might enumerate a long list of this world's miseries. Shoe-strings alone comprehend an amount of wretchedness, which is but feebly described in the tragical story of Jemmy String. Bonnet-strings and apron-strings, dickey-strings and watch-guards, curtain-cord, bed-cord, and cod-line, each and all have furnished ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... his ecclesiastical vows, became not only the admirer, but the lover of the queen, addressing her in the most impassioned words of endearment. Thus years of intrigue and domestic wretchedness passed away until 1624. The queen had then been married nine years, and was twenty years of age. She ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... captured; to engage the interest of this haughty fine lady for the mother of her lover's children; to appeal to her and make her the instrument of her future happiness, since she was the cause of her present wretchedness. ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... one knee before it, and a swarm of flies zooned angrily away. He put out his hand, but he was afraid to touch, and he only added panic to the bird's wretchedness. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... to solve the problem of sin and wretchedness. What can you expect when the people are ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... might hear no more the cruel taunts of the populace. The ranks became less dense, and this terrible procession passed by—the street was once more unobstructed. The prince rushed onward regardless of the direction he was taking, crushed as he was by the disgrace and wretchedness brought upon Prussia. He was again suddenly in front of a large gathering. He looked about him wonderingly and in dismay. Without knowing it, he had gone down to the large square in front of the Brandenburg Gate, where ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... his preeminent position, the First Hall-man was reputed to be quite wealthy. In addition to his miscellaneous grafts, he grafted on us. We farmed the general wretchedness, and the First Hall-man was Farmer-General over all of us. We held our particular grafts by his permission, and we had to pay for that permission. As I say, he was reputed to be wealthy; but we never saw his money, and he lived in a cell all to ...
— The Road • Jack London
... his father's health, his present home, and the occasion of his own removal to New York. The narrative was so wonderful, so full of pathos, so tragic, so out of all proportion in its revelation of wretchedness to the little life at her side, that the lady was dumb. Unconsciously to herself—almost unconsciously to the boy—her arms closed around him, and she lifted him into her lap. There, with his head against her breast, he concluded his story; and there ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... though it were the largest tenant of all. For this snuff-box was a present from the lady at the great house, who took an interest in poor old Luke's infirmities, and gave him the snuff-box, a really good piece of workmanship, well filled with the finest snuff, to console his wretchedness. ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... when they spoke of salvation for the thief, neither did that appeal to me. Then one night they said salvation is for the Jew. I said to myself, 'That means me.' I came forward that night and got rid of my wretchedness and my misery; I came for salvation, ...
— The Personal Touch • J. Wilbur Chapman
... my own little fight for a long time, partly because I was very much affected by the sight of his wretchedness, and partly because I did not at first realize how necessary it was for him to find out just how far my self-control could be depended upon. As soon as this became clear to me I determined to seize the first favorable opportunity which presented itself of getting into my intrenchments ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... tone—a hint of dreary disappointment, of a wretchedness hitherto well concealed, made Barry feel compunction for his own rough handling of what must have been in reality a sore subject; and quite suddenly he abandoned his own superior, not to say condemnatory, attitude for a more human, more sympathetic ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Red Insect, or Red Devil; the term may mean both), and family and followers, twelve persons in all, visited the office. His personal appearance, and that of his family, bespoke wretchedness, and appeared to give force to his strong complaints against the traders who visit Ottowa Lake and the headwaters of Chippewa River of the Mississippi. He observed that the prices they are compelled to pay are extortionate, that their lands are quite destitute of the larger animals, and that ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world—those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so many of these common, coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Douglas were well-born. Cass's father was a thrifty soldier-farmer who made for his family a comfortable home at Zanesville, Ohio; Douglas's father was a successful physician. Lincoln was born in obscurity and wretchedness. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was a ne'er-do-well Kentucky carpenter, grossly illiterate, unable or unwilling to rise above the lowest level of existence in the pioneer settlements. His mother, Nancy Hanks, whatever her antecedents may have been, was ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... intervenient days, and, perhaps, weeks void of pain, and overflowing with comfort. So that in short, to return to the subject, human life, as far as I can perceive from experience or observation, is not that state of constant wretchedness which Johnson always insisted it was; which misrepresentation, (for such it surely is,) his Biographer has not corrected, I suppose, because, unhappily, he has himself a large portion of melancholy in his constitution, and fancied the portrait a ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... mission of consoling, edifying, exhorting, and teaching a nation suffering the pangs, and threatened with the spiritual stagnation, of exile; of proclaiming that the glories of the past prefigured a future of equal brilliancy, and that the very wretchedness of the present was part of the divine plan outlined in the Bible. If the simile is accurate that likens the Halacha to the ramparts about Israel's sanctuary, which every Jew was ready to defend with his last drop of blood, then the Haggada ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... some sadness, at the very moment that a more important sorrow oppresses me. Yes, I have received unexpectedly the news of a very great misfortune; the report of the death of the Countess Inez has filled my heart with so much wretchedness, that there is no room ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere
... solace in her love of literature. With pen in hand, extracting beautiful passages and expanding suggested thoughts, she forgot her griefs and beguiled many hours, which would otherwise have been burdened with intolerable wretchedness. Maria Antoinette, woe-worn and weary, in tones of despair uttered the exclamation, "Oh! what a resource, amid the casualties of life, must there be in a highly-cultivated mind." The plebeian maiden could utter the same exclamation ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... in a few minutes after Salaman and the others had finished their duties with all the assiduity of Hindu servants; and then as I sat in the handsome apartment arranged in its simple, rich, Eastern luxury, a feeling of wretchedness and misery came over me. I looked round at the rich carpets, soft cushions, and costly curtains; and then at my magnificent uniform, and began thinking of the old, old fable I had read as a child, of the jackdaw in borrowed plumes, ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... cannot state until I have made a preamble. Like hundreds of thousands of others, I have worked in other fields, striving to organize the mass of mankind into movements for the purpose of ameliorating its own wretchedness and misery. Difficult as this is to accomplish, it is still more difficult to persuade the human into any organised effort to alleviate the ill conditions of the ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... but Jane, the poor, poor thing! With her talent she could have had a brilliant life, and reign everywhere like a queen if it were not for the terrible past. Like a spectre, it stands in our path, and while she is innocent, the curse of being the cause of both our wretchedness strikes me. I—" ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... thousands of our women lose their fathers, their husbands, and their sons. With every victory (as they call it) peace, which should be nearer at hand, seems to retire further and further away, and only sorrow and wretchedness come close to us. And that is not all. Our food, like everything else we have to buy, is so dear that we women find it above all things difficult to provide ourselves with what we need for our daily life, and the worst of it, they say, has not yet come. I could understand that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... not safe if I am left at liberty," he exclaimed, frantically tearing his hair. "I have looked at the past. I look at the future. I am miserable. I see nothing but wretchedness before me. I contemplated self-destruction. I purposed dropping quietly over the stern into the water. I did not wish to create confusion. If I had jumped overboard before you all, a boat would have been lowered, and I should have ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... treated with every courtesy. Some of the men had gone forward, but I felt no inclination to leave the deck. I sat down on a gun-carriage, turning my eyes in the direction of the shore on which I had hoped so soon to land, and which now I might not visit for many a day. I cannot picture my wretchedness. I only hope that none of my readers may feel the same. I rested my head upon my hands in a vain endeavour to drive away thought. It was truly a dark moment of my existence. I felt even as if I could not pray. I had sat thus for ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... heartily, and begged him to lead her back through the canon. No; it could not be traversed by night, he asserted; they would certainly break their necks among the bowlders. At last the girl suffered herself to be wrapped in the blankets, and made an endeavor to forget her wretchedness and vexation in slumber. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Corn-laws; there is dearth, real, or were it even 'factitious;' an indubitable scarcity of bread. And so, on the second day of May 1775, these waste multitudes do here, at Versailles Chateau, in wide-spread wretchedness, in sallow faces, squalor, winged raggedness, present, as in legible hieroglyphic writing, their Petition of Grievances. The Chateau gates have to be shut; but the King will appear on the balcony, and speak to them. They ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... diet bordering on starvation. To the passers-by this ragged misanthrope indulged in contemptuous language, and offended them by the indecency of his gestures. Abandoned at last by every one except Diogenes of Sinope, he expired in extreme wretchedness. It had been a favourite doctrine with him that friendship and patriotism are altogether worthless; and in his last agony, Diogenes asking him whether he needed a friend, "Will a friend release me from this ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... soup-shops of late invention, and certainly well intended, bear some resemblance to these days of Roman wretchedness and magnificence. ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... universal, admitting of no exceptions, and explaining every phenomenon. Superficial generalizations were construed into immutable decrees; the God of this world was just and righteous, and temporal prosperity or wretchedness were dealt out by him immediately by his own will to his subjects, according to their behaviour. Thus the same disposition towards completeness which was the ruin of paganism, here, too, was found generating the same evils; the half truth rounding itself out with falsehoods. Not only the consequence ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... looking in this impossible place and that; of groping among moon-lit ruins and touching strange creatures in the black shadows; at last, of lying on the ground near the sphinx and weeping with absolute wretchedness. I had nothing left but misery. Then I slept, and when I woke again it was full day, and a couple of sparrows were hopping round me on the turf ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... understanding of every phase of the love life, and such an understanding alone, can reveal it in its purity—in its power of upliftment. Force and fear have failed from the beginning of time. Their fruits are wrecks and wretchedness. Knowledge and freedom to choose or reject the sexual embrace, according as it is lovely or unlovely, and these alone, can solve the problem. These alone make possible between man and woman that indissoluble tie and mutual passion, and common understanding, in which ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... first received thee as my pupil, I promised Zanoni, if convinced by thy first trials that thou couldst but swell, not the number of our order, but the list of the victims who have aspired to it in vain, I would not rear thee to thine own wretchedness and doom,—I would dismiss thee back to the world. I fulfil my promise. Thine ordeal has been the easiest that neophyte ever knew. I asked for nothing but abstinence from the sensual, and a brief experiment of thy patience ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... agonizing scenes, the months of wretchedness which succeeded this separation, this sudden dissolution of the most sacred and endearing ties. All attempts to discover De Courcy's retreat were unavailing, though it was long before your mother could relinquish the delusive hope, that he would be again restored to her. ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... that you have had time to think over your plan of leaving your old home, I hope you have come to see how foolish it is. Reflect that, if carried out, a life of poverty and squalid wretchedness amid homely and uncongenial surroundings awaits you; while, as my wife, you will live a life of luxury and high social position. There are many young ladies who would be glad to accept the chance which you so recklessly reject. By ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... Mr. Everett. And what is their advice to us? That we should come down from the high place we have built for ourselves, and be even as they are. They screech at us from the low depths in which they are wallowing in their misery, and call on us to join them in their wretchedness. I am not quoting Mr. Everett's very words, for I have not them by me; but I am not making them stronger, nor so strong as he made them. As I thought of Mr. Everett's reputation, and of his years of study, of his long political ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... some poor covering for our bodies. We set our streams to work for us, and choke the air with fire, to turn our spinning-wheels—and,—ARE WE YET CLOTHED? Are not the streets of the capitals of Europe foul with sale of cast clouts and rotten rags? Is not the beauty of your sweet children left in wretchedness of disgrace, while, with better honour, nature clothes the brood of the bird in its nest, and the suckling of the wolf in her den? And does not every winter's snow robe what you have not robed, and shroud what you have not shrouded; and every ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... before the eye of man, we travelled; but all seemed wasting away in the inertness of bad government. A narrow policy had spread weeds where fruitful vines would have hung blessings for mankind. Things called men revelled in what to them seemed luxury, but in poverty and wretchedness a people struggled; men walked to and fro in tattered garments, colored like unto their moral and physical degradation. But they heeded it not, and were careless because no one cared for them. There is no slavery so abhorrent as that of the menial who has no thought ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... society in the Middle Ages will allow, are left to their own eloquence. And eloquent they are. Little beyond the citation of them is needed to show the brutality of chivalry, the selfish cruelty of sacerdotalism, and the wretchedness of the masses enslaved by political and religious superstition, until Roman law had a second time, after an interval of a thousand years, effected a conquest of the Northern barbarians. The work does not confine itself, historically, to that period nor to Europe, but what excursions ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... by the fire in the sitting-room, as was customary each evening, their pleasant home seemed utterly desolate, and the tall clock in the hall ticked with far deeper solemnity. Liddy in fact was, as she felt herself to be, walking "through the valley and shadow of death." To add to her utter wretchedness, if that were possible, she had received no letter from Manson for three weeks, and there were no rifts of sunshine in her horizon. She wrote him a long account of her loss and all the misery of mind she was experiencing and then, as she had no address to mail it to, ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... dwelling in plague-stricken cities where the sick were languishing in the bitter companionship of helpless misery. He visited the oppressed and the afflicted in the gloom of subterranean prisons, and the crowded wretchedness of slave-markets, and the weary toil of galley-ships. In all this populous and intricate world of anguish, though he found none to worship, he found many to help. He fed the hungry, and clothed the naked, and healed the ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... Miriam, affrighted out of the scornful control which she had hitherto held over her companion, by the fierceness that he so suddenly developed. "O, have pity on me, Donatello, if for nothing else, yet because in the midst of my wretchedness I let myself be your playmate for this one wild hour! Follow me no farther. Henceforth leave me to my doom. Dear friend,—kind, simple, loving friend,—make me not more wretched by the remembrance of having thrown fierce hates or loves into the ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Hell come to an end, they take birth in the order of humanity, in families that are entirely destitute of wealth. Always suffering from hunger and thirst, excluded from all decent society, hopeless of ever enjoying good things, they lead lives of great wretchedness. Born in families that are destitute of all articles of enjoyment, these men never succeed in enjoying the good things of the world. Indeed, O goddess, it is through their acts that persons become wretched and poor. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... truly, France came first. It was his one justification for the unjustifiable. No! Never such a nation-builder and never a man so feared and hated for valid cause. He was the King of the greatest, the most powerful France Europe had ever known, but it was a miserable France, a France seething with wretchedness, with discontent, and each hour he went in terror for his life. Only a few, such as Commines himself, could foresee how great would one day be the power of these weak, antagonistic states he had so ruthlessly welded into one. For the rest, ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... the bookseller, I visited this hospital, in which, however, I did not remain long; the wretchedness and uncleanliness which I observed speedily driving me away. Saint James, indeed, is the grand lazar-house for all the rest of Galicia, which accounts for the prodigious number of horrible objects to be seen in its streets, who have for the most part arrived in the hope of procuring medical ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... But, blessed Mary! we shall become the curse of all Europe, the malediction of every one, from the Pope on his throne to the very beggar at the church gate, who, ragged and leprous, in the last extremity of human wretchedness, shall bless himself that he is neither Giles ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... contribute not a little to the sweetening their blood and correcting their juices, for the inhabitants of mountainous districts to this day are still liable to the itch and other cutaneous disorders, from a wretchedness and ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... time when he had met Diggle in the street at Market Drayton to his last encounter with him at the Battle of the Carts, he had been the mark of his enmity, malice, spite, trickery. But Desmond thought less of his own wrongs than of the sorrow of his friend, Mr. Merriman, and the harrowing wretchedness which must have been the lot of the ladies while they were in Diggle's power. The man had brought misery into so many lives that it would be a good deed if, in the fortune of war, Desmond's sword could rid the ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... More. Enfeebled by suffering, he was then brought before Stokesley, and terrified by the cold merciless eyes of his judge, he gave way, not about his friends, but about himself: he abjured, and was dismissed heartbroken. This was on the seventeenth of February. He was only able to endure his wretchedness for a month. At the end of it, he appeared at a secret meeting of the Christian Brothers, in "a warehouse in Bow Lane," where he asked forgiveness of God and all the world for what he had done; and then went out to take again upon his shoulders the ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... director. The condition of the hospitals in the city was, however, much better than that of the hospitals and convalescent camps over the river, in Virginia. A visit which she made to one of these, significantly named by the soldiers, "Camp Misery," in September, 1862, revealed to her, wretchedness, suffering and neglect, such as she had not before witnessed; and she promptly secured from the Sanitary Commission such supplies as were needed, and in her frequent visits there for the next three months, distributed them with her own hands, while she encouraged and ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... the ghost of autumn in that smell Of underground, or God's blank heart grown kind, That sent a happy dream to him in hell?— Where men are crushed like clods, and crawl to find Some crater for their wretchedness; who lie In outcast immolation, doomed to die Far from clean things or any hope of cheer, Cowed anger in their eyes, till darkness brims And roars into their heads, and they can hear Old childish talk, and ...
— Counter-Attack and Other Poems • Siegfried Sassoon
... may ensue for her and her offspring. As for the child, it becomes anemic, sometimes crippled; besides, it helps to keep wages down by being taken to work at a low scale of remuneration. Then the doctor went on to speak of the prolificness of wretchedness, the swarming of the lower classes. Was not the most hateful natality of all that which meant the endless increase of ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... curse me, the utterly accursed, while the darkness crept and gathered round us, till at length the dead and I were alone in the black silence. Oh, how tell the misery of that hour! Imagination cannot dream it, nor words paint it forth. Once more in my wretchedness I bethought me of death. A knife was at my girdle, with which I might cut the thread of sorrow and set my spirit free. Free? ay, free to fly and face the last vengeance of the Holy Gods! Alas! and alas! I did not dare to die. Better the earth with all its woes than the quick approach ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... depravity and misery are too common; nor can it be otherwise expected, while they are destitute of the knowledge of salvation in a crucified and ascended Saviour. One poor Gipsy, who had wandered in a state of wretchedness, bordering on despair, for nearly forty years, had not in all that time, heard of the Name which is above every name; for there is salvation in no other; till in his last days some Christian directed him to the Bible, as a book that tells poor sinners the way to ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... human love and jealousy no philosophy can explain. Secret wretchedness was gnawing at the heart of Napoleon. He loved Josephine with intensest passion, and all the pride of his nature was roused by the conviction that she had trifled with him. With these conflicting ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... little light in that." A first glance at this fellow would call up the reflection, "Here is the result of bad education, and bad example, induced perhaps by natural misfortunes, but the inevitable growth of filth and wretchedness in ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... deserts of sorrow, Our hearts are the ashes of hope, And madly from gladness we borrow The brightness where sadness may grope; My raptures in wretchedness vanish, My bosom is weeping with wrongs; Then sing me the old songs, mother, Then sing me the ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... hours, you see upon the bright sea-shore, where the waves of the bay sparkle merrily. But, lovers and hunters of the picturesque, let us not keep too studiously out of view the miserable depravity, degradation, and wretchedness, with which this gay Neapolitan life is inseparably associated! It is not well to find Saint Giles's so repulsive, and the Porta Capuana so attractive. A pair of naked legs and a ragged red scarf, do not make ALL the difference ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... them meddle with Robert, or Robert's mill, or Robert's interests, and I shall hate them. At present I am no patrician, nor do I regard the poor around me as plebeians; but if once they violently wrong me or mine, and then presume to dictate to us, I shall quite forget pity for their wretchedness and respect for their poverty, in scorn of their ignorance and wrath ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... ever fresh and changing, she was better enabled to judge how far such a person as Hiram Meeker could ultimately make her happy. Day by day she saw his character more clearly and in a truer light, and could thus fully appreciate the narrow escape she had from a life of wretchedness. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... sleepless grief, and the maddening impulse of vengeance now comes upon him, so that he is wasted almost to death. He will not, however, abandon his quest for the secret of his art. He may die of hunger and wretchedness; he will not yield. At the last moment of his trial and his misery—alone—at night—in the alternate lurid blaze and murky gloom of his firing-house—success is conquered: the secret is found. This climax, to which the preliminaries ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... the more rich and elevated his soul, the more must his torments have been bitter and redoubled; for the very preciousness of the gifts of nature, the charms of society, even the friendship of those that surrounded him, must have turned but to the increase of his wretchedness! ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... passions of Mrs. Rushworth especially were made known to him only in their sad result. She was not to be prevailed on to leave Mr. Crawford. She hoped to marry him, and they continued together till she was obliged to be convinced that such hope was vain, and till the disappointment and wretchedness arising from the conviction rendered her temper so bad, and her feelings for him so like hatred, as to make them for a while each other's punishment, and then induce ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... actually beggared to the last farthing, and cast upon the world to shift as they might. To detail the domestic desolation caused by this iniquitous affair, would require the space of a large volume. It has wrought nothing but wretchedness and ruin to those to whom it promised unexampled prosperity, and it is yet working still more—nor is it likely to stop, for aught that we can see, so long as it presents a mark for legal cupidity. All that could be got for ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... were young, they were happy. The evil days arrived—and they were wretched, and lacked strength to bear their wretchedness. They are gone where ONE alone must judge them—may HE have ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... Burns; neither was the solemn mandate, "Love one another, bear one another's burdens," given to the rich only, but to all men. True, we shall find no Burns to relieve, to assuage by our aid or pity: but celestial natures, groaning under the fardels of a weary life, we shall still find; and that wretchedness which Fate has rendered voiceless and tuneless, is not the least ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... yea, and at noon days; as who should say, here no cost can be too great; whereas in the mean time we see Christ's faithful and lively images, bought with no less price than with his most precious blood (alas, alas!) to be an hungred, a-thirst, a-cold, and to lie in darkness, wrapped in all wretchedness, yea, to lie there till death take away their miseries: while they preached these will-works, that come but of our own devotion, although they be not so necessary as the works of mercy, and the precepts of God, yet they said, and in the pulpit, that ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... II., Document 33. On the other hand, some later English descriptions are not as pleasant; but the wretchedness the writers saw during the war was what the ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... be the humble suppliant's friend, And bring him where his suit may be obtain'd? When wilt thou sort an hour great strifes to end? Or free that soul which wretchedness hath chain'd? Give physic to the sick, ease to the pain'd? The poor, lame, blind, halt, creep, cry out for thee; But they ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... I have read the history of those times and have read it very differently. I am forced to understand that the inextricable and utter embarrassment of the French finances, the selfish and insolent luxury of the nobles, the desperate wretchedness of the lower orders of the people, and the profligate licentiousness of the Court, were the causes and the only causes of that great event. If the finances of that country had been in order, the nobles moderate, the poor unoppressed, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... cannot go: I live not in the land I have reduced beneath such wretchedness: And who could leave the brave, whose lives and fortunes ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... 'Regret him!' she said, and, for her, almost violently, the opportunity was an outlet for her wretchedness; 'I can't conceive how a man's money can make any difference. I couldn't have married Franklin if he'd ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... November, for relief from violent nervous pains; and near the close of the Stowey period, in May, 1798, when the vagaries of Lloyd, the estrangement from Lamb, domestic anxiety, and physical suffering had reduced him to a state of extreme nervous wretchedness, he again took refuge in opiates, of which "Kubla Khan" is partly the result. He returned from Germany in 1799, worked for a while on a newspaper in London and on a translation of Schiller's "Wallenstein," and in the summer of 1800 removed to Keswick in Cumberland, in the Lake Country, where ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... In his wretchedness of feeling, Ben-Hur barely observed the royal liberality which marked the construction of the road. Nor more did he at first notice the crowd going with him. He treated the processional displays with like indifference. To say truth, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... influence, the sovereign decision would confirm, even if it did not aggravate, the sentence of the previous judges. In the mean while the peasants' land remained uncultivated, his wife and children bewailed their wretchedness, and the last resources of the family were consumed in proceedings and delays: it would have been better for him at the outset to have made up his mind to submit without resistance to a fate from which ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... crushing wretchedness! And I a vainer fool than one who yearns Clutching at rainbows spanned across the sky! Ah, hope diseased! My spirit lured astray By siren hope drifts hard by some dark fate: And hope alternating despair has mixed My life so long with charnelled ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch—as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness?—from ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... me when sober, but gradually the constraint wore off, and he seemed disposed to draw nearer to me, as in the old days. His struggle went on, days of drunkenness following weeks of soberness, his haggard face after each debauch wearing a look of unspeakable weariness and wretchedness. One of the lawyers who had led him into the mazes of doubt—a man of large and versatile gifts, whose lips were touched with a noble and persuasive eloquence—sunk deeper and deeper into the black depths of drunkenness, ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... knew now himself what it was to be rejected and deserted. He thought how the daughter he had disliked, of them all, had never changed in her love for him. And by his own act he had lost her for ever. His son, his wife, his fortune, all had gone, and now at last in his wretchedness he knew that Florence would always have been true to him if he had only ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... I received stripes without number, the object of which was to degrade and keep me in subordination. I can truly say, that I drank deeply of the bitter cup of suffering and woe. I have been dragged down to the lowest depths of human degradation and wretchedness, ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... say indeed that you do seriously and heartily desire to see, and to be more deeply and powerfully convinced of your own vileness and sinfulness, of your own weakness and wretchedness, and of your wants and unworthiness? and that, in order to your deep and spiritual humiliation and self-debasing, that you may be more vile in your own eyes, and Jesus Christ and free grace more precious and excellent, more ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... that he longed to make somebody or something else miserable too, so instead of a pat, he gave the dog a kick that sent it limping off with a yelp of pain and remonstrance. He had made another creature as miserable as himself, but somehow it didn't seem to lessen his own wretchedness. Indeed, he couldn't help feeling that he had done a mean, cowardly thing, and Tode never liked to feel himself a coward. He looked after the dog. It had crawled into a corner and was licking the injured paw. Tode ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... union, between your daughter and my son, especially as you seem to wish it so anxiously. To tell you the truth, I fear very much that you are, contrary to remonstrance, and with your eyes open to the consequences, precipitating your charming and admirable Lucy upon wretchedness and disconsolation for the remainder of her life; and I can tell her, and would if I were allowed, that the coronet of a countess, however highly either she or you may appreciate it, will be found but a poor substitute for the want of that affection and esteem, upon which only can be ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... again, and pressed it within his own. It was night before I was tolerably composed; and as I threw myself on my couch within the hut, I wept bitterly as a child, till sleep came to relieve my misery. I must not dwell on the anguish I felt on waking—the utter wretchedness of the next day. I was too ill to move, though I prayed for strength to enable me to prosecute my search. Strength and health came again at last; and in four days after I had heard the account given by Manco, I insisted that I was able to undergo the fatigue to which I must be exposed. ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... had once well conceived, he had no other care at first, but faithfully to reject every other thought, that he might perform all his actions for the love of GOD. That when sometimes he had not thought of GOD for a good while, he did not disquiet himself for it; but after having acknowledged his wretchedness to GOD, he returned to Him with so much the greater trust in Him, as he had found himself wretched ...
— The Practice of the Presence of God the Best Rule of a Holy Life • Herman Nicholas
... morning, she longed to do that which he dreaded she would try to do—attempt his reformation. Not that she cared for him personally, or that she had grown sentimentally interested in his Byronic style of wretchedness. So far from it, her happy and healthful nature was repelled by his diseased and morbid one. She found him what girls call a "disagreeable man." But she yearned toward a sinning, suffering soul, found in any guise. It ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... seen. I told him who I was, and what she had been to me. She had, almost in her last moments, as he assured me, expressed her sense of, what she called, my generosity to her, and had shown deep contrition for her infidelity. She died in extreme poverty and wretchedness, with no human being who was, or even seemed, interested for her, but a maid-servant (the woman whose voice I recollected), whose services were purchased to the last, by presents of whatever clothes or trinkets were left from the wreck of her mistress's fortune. Crawley, it seems, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... were sullen and depressed—cast down by the wretchedness of earth and sky, and embittered against their officers and each other for the blood uselessly shed—oppressed with hunger and weariness, and momentarily fearful that new misfortunes were about to descend upon them. ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... the death of her husband has been so extremely unpleasant and painful, that she has spent much of her time—indeed, at least nine months of the year—in foreign travel. The imperial family, the court and the people, hold her responsible for that domestic wretchedness which drove her so universally popular husband to his tragic death at Mayerling. Of a jealous disposition and of a temper that even at its best is difficult, she is generally understood to have driven him by her violence and injustice to seek, away from ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... of extremity they gather moss from the rocks, that is called by the Canadians 'tripe de roche,' which boils into a clammy substance, and has something of a nutritious quality. The general appearance of these Indians is that of wretchedness and want, and excited in my mind much sympathy towards them. I shook hands with them, in the hope that ere the rising generation at least had passed away, the light of Christianity, like the aurora borealis relieving the gloom of their winter night, would shed around them its heavenly lustre, ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... Peace, let him be: it is the chamber of Death! Sir, you are tenfold more a gentleman, A hundred times more worth a woman's love, Than this, this—but I waste no words upon him: His wickedness is like my wretchedness— Beyond all language. (To HAROLD.) You—you see her there! Only fifteen when first you came on her, And then the sweetest flower of all the wolds, So lovely in the promise of her May, So winsome in her grace and gaiety, So loved by all the village people here, So happy ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... train of employing his talents, and of operating on the subjects around him, all situations are equally natural. If we are told, that vice, at least, is contrary to nature; we may answer, it is worse; it is folly and wretchedness. But if nature is only opposed to art, in what situation of the human race are the footsteps of art unknown? In the condition of the savage, as well as in that of the citizen, are many proofs of human invention; and in either is not any permanent station, but a mere stage through which ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... audience. While the choristers sang sweetly, and the organ poured forth its melodious thunder, the deacons passed up and down the aisles, and along the galleries, presenting their mahogany boxes, in which each person deposited whatever sum he deemed it safe to lend to the Lord, in aid of human wretchedness. Charity became audible,—chink, chink, chink,—as it fell, drop by drop, into the common receptacle. There was a hum,—a stir,—the subdued bustle of people putting their hands into their pockets; while, ever ...
— Other Tales and Sketches - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets"; while on the other hand he saw the Pyramids, marble angels sculptured on the cathedral tower, and the gold-covered statue of the Prince of the Palace of the Care-Free. Wilde also suggests a remedy for the starvation and wretchedness that exist, especially among children, in most cities where great wealth is displayed. The important thing in presenting this story to children is to get the full sympathetic response due to the sacrifice made by the Happy Prince and the little swallow. So much of the effect ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... mere worldly goals is too often eaten up with the canker-worm of disappointed ambition. To all will come a time when the love of glory will be seen to be but a splendid delusion, riches empty, rank vain, power dependent, and all outward advantages without inward peace a mere mockery of wretchedness. The wisest men have taken care to uproot selfish ambition from their breasts. Shakespeare considered it so near a vice as to need extenuating circumstances to make it ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... against you. You have grown grey betimes because of me. But all this shall be atoned for by a death, my death. You never loved me, you drove me away from your house as you would never have driven a dog, you let me perish in want and wretchedness; from my childish years upwards I have never had a good word from you, had it been otherwise things might have been very different. Those whom you loved God took away from you, those you did not love you drove away yourself, and now you are alone ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... their freedom. There was much happiness in our English villages in those days, and "Merry England" was not a misnomer. There were, however, two causes of suffering which for a time produced untold wretchedness—two unwelcome visitors who came very frequently and were much dreaded—famine and pestilence. There is necessarily a sameness in the records of ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... miserable will, of their own accord, come to them. It is their first duty too—if they be clergymen—to rebuke, and if possible, to cure, open vice, open heathendom, as well as to relieve present want and wretchedness: and may God's blessing be on all who do that work. But in doing it they are dealing daily—and ought to deal, and must deal—with the exceptional, and not with the normal; with cases of palpable and shocking disease, and not with cases of at least seeming ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... because I do love you, and you bring me only wretchedness. I have never been happy since the miserable day I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... innocent life, yet far astray! And Ruth will, long before her day, [32] 230 Be broken down and old: Sore aches she needs must have! but less Of mind, than body's wretchedness, From damp, and rain, and ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... pause now, during which I could count every throb of my heart, and throat, and temples—my whole frame was transfigured into an anvil, on which a thousand tiny hammers seemed to ring. Yet I could not move, nor speak, nor weep—no wretchedness was ever more supreme than this cataleptic seizure. Evelyn was the first to ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... will dare thy verse to chide! Wouldst re-enact the Barmecide, And taunt our wretchedness With visioned feast, and song, and dance,— While, daily, our grim ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... to commemorate this extraordinary instance of true worth; which should make some people in Scotland blush, while, though mean themselves, they strut about under the protection of great alliance conscious of the wretchedness of numbers who have lost by them, to whom they never think of making reparation, but indulge themselves and their families in most unsuitable expence.] There was a fair at Strichen; and he had several of his neighbours from it at dinner. One of them, Dr Fraser, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... proletariat, peasant and artisan alike, have increased with their numbers. Freedom has taught the myriads of workers new desires. Heightened intelligence has given them the power to contrast their own wretchedness with the seeming happiness of others, and a standard by which to measure their own degradation, and to sound the depths of ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... on the whole, was pleasant, but we had some drenching rain- storms; and then the spirits of some of the party went down, and they wondered whatever possessed them to leave their happy homes for such exile and wretchedness as this. There was one fearful, tornado-like storm that assailed us when we were encamped for the night on the western bank of Red River. Tents were instantly blown down. Heavy waggons were driven before it, and for a time confusion reigned supreme. Fortunately nobody was hurt, and most of ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... so hopeless, so—so broken as now. Where was the good of having been an upright, conscientious, self-respecting woman all her life long, if it only led to this utter, degrading poverty and wretchedness? She and Bunting were just past the age which gentlefolk think proper in a married couple seeking to enter service together, unless, that is, the wife happens to be a professed cook. A cook and a butler can always get a nice situation. But Mrs. Bunting was no cook. She could do all ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... dignify the bowl from which he feeds!—how can this king, after having hidden under folds of muslin covered with diamonds, studded with rubies, and buried under linen, under folds of cotton, under the rich hues of silk, under the fairy patterns of lace, the partner of his wretchedness, how can he induce her to make shipwreck in the midst of all this luxury on the decks of two beds. What advantage is it that we have made the whole universe subserve our existence, our delusions, the poesy of our life? What good is it to have instituted law, morals and religion, if the invention ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... walk; that his was, in short, altogether a very comfortable situation compared to that which I occupy in Ilchester Bastile. He was here before the walls were lowered, and consequently, he saw the place in all its native wretchedness. ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... for. G. took the bread and fed her children and to-day up on the top floor of the tenement in Plymouth Court, again deserted and hungry and helpless, she cries and prays and makes button-holes, and waits and waits with fear and wretchedness the coming of another ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... father consented. It was on the wedding-day that he gave my informant the shooting-flask as a remembrance, just before he and his wife went away southward. Long months afterwards Sinnamenta returned heart-stricken, woebegone, about to become a mother, with nothing but wretchedness in the future, and even her happy ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... I shall have gone to my room before he comes. I'll not keep you long. It's enough that you've proved you cared to come. It's a crumb of comfort in my wretchedness." ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... that past felicity. The paradise lost is to be regained. How it is to be done the sages are not agreed. But they of old were unanimous that some divinity must lend his aid, that some god-sent guide is needed to rescue man from the slough of wretchedness in which ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton |
