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More "Frailty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... body he was tied down to earth, his whole conversation was in Heaven. His life, from day to day, was hid with Christ in God. Prayer, praise, love, and zeal, all ardent, elevated above what one would think attainable in this state of frailty, were the element in which he continually lived. As to others, his one employment was to call, entreat and urge them to ascend with him to the glorious source of being and blessedness. He had leisure, ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... Some sort of action of the lungs was kept up, and complete asphyxia prevented; and, having smiled myself nearly to death, I smiled myself back to life again. Ever since, my convives, apprised of this mortal frailty of mine, time their remarks more prudently, and allow me to take alternately a joke and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... said Madame de Frontignac, who, with the airy frailty of her race, never lost her appreciation of the fine points of anything that went on under her eyes. But, nevertheless, she was inwardly resolved, that, picturesque as this "sublime of duty" was, it must not be allowed to pass beyond the limits of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... vanity, selfishness, self-righteousness, hypocrisy and human frailty are the Outside ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... (what though it may be construed in my favour?*) make me unhappy, when novelty has lost its charms, and when, mind and person, she is all my own? Libertines are nicer, if at all nice, than other men. They seldom meet with the stand of virtue in the women whom they attempt. And, by the frailty of those they have triumphed over, they judge of all the rest. 'Importunity and opportunity no woman is proof against, especially from the persevering lover, who knows how to suit temptations to inclinations:' This, thou knowest, is a prime article ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... wrong if they do not 'feel washed out after each drawing,' he still urges them to 'put a new piece of goods in the window' every morning. In fact, he is quite severe on Mr. Ruskin for not recognising that 'a picture should denote the frailty of man,' and remarks with pleasing courtesy and felicitous grace that 'many phases of feeling . . . are as much a dead letter to this great art teacher, as Sanskrit to an Islington cabman.' Nor is Mr. Quilter one of those who fails to practice what ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... and here also, in his ordered polities and rigorous justice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact of individual sin. Does it stop, then, with the ant? Rather this desire of welldoing and this doom of frailty run through all the grades of life: rather is this earth, from the frosty top of Everest to the next margin of the internal fire, one stage of ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tears and perseverance. The whole creation groaneth and travaileth ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... expressing in terms of unpleasant frankness his irritation at the faults and mistakes of others. But really after his death as during his life we have been far too busy in trying to help in accomplishing his great lifework to note these details of human frailty. ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... equally righteous. A man who styles himself devout resembles a commoner who styles himself a marquis; he arrogates to himself a quality he does not possess. He thinks himself more worthy than his neighbour. One can forgive such foolishness in women; their frailty and their frivolity render them excusable; the poor creatures pass from a lover to a director in good faith: but one cannot pardon the rogues who direct them, who abuse their ignorance, who establish the throne of their pride on the credulity of ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... From ancient times, at least from the days of Greece and Rome, Democracy as a political ideal had been dreamed of, and had even been put into practice on a small scale here and there. But its shortcomings and the frailty of human nature made it the despair of practical men and the laughing stock of philosophers and ironists. Nevertheless, the conviction that no man has a right to enslave another would not die. And in modern times the English sense of justice and the English belief that a ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... ten kinds of foolish men are as follow: he who seeketh to control a person that is incapable of being controlled; he who is content with small gains; he who humbly pays court to enemies; he who seeks to restrain women's frailty; he who asketh him for gifts who should never be asked; he who boasteth, having done anything; he who, born in a high family, perpetrateth an improper deed; he who being weak always wageth hostilities with one that is powerful; he who talketh to a person listening scoffingly; he who desireth ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... indeed, for any of us to make good resolutions when one contemplates the grand pageant of human frailty? Observe what I noticed the other day in the Lost and Found column of the ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... him at bay; maintaining well even his reputation; anxious not for himself but for others, ready to sacrifice self indeed at any moment, cheerfully, for the sake of those whom he had undertaken to rescue; struggling on against fanatic courage without, and weakness, frailty, half-heartedness within; seeing the hearts of those in whom he was forced to trust grow fainter and fainter by degrees, in spite of his constant struggles against the effects ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... had abased herself before them, had cast herself down and had writhed and screamed and implored her to consent; and the mother was driven to do this by the lash of his threats. He had stood there and demanded, and the woman on the floor had confessed her frailty, owned to her misdeeds, acknowledged her debt, and had frantically begged her ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... this poem, and, in a sense, its culmination. There is the same strength of satire, but now it is more delicate and the language more dignified. There is the same condemnation of pharisaism; but the poem rises to a higher level in its appeal for charitable views of human frailty, and its kindly counsel to silence; judgment is to be ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... door's only fastening; and the girl stood long, with a hand upon it, considering its frailty. How easy it would be for a big man like Deveny to force the door. One shove of his giant shoulder and the bolt ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... fatal was my first, To this one error I might yield again; For, since Sichaeus was untimely slain, This only man is able to subvert The fix'd foundations of my stubborn heart. And, to confess my frailty, to my shame, Somewhat I find within, if not the same, Too like the sparkles of my former flame. But first let yawning earth a passage rend, And let me thro' the dark abyss descend; First let avenging Jove, with flames from high, Drive down this ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... Pity human frailty, you that read of a woman reduced in her youth and prime to the utmost misery and distress, and raised again, as above, by the unexpected and surprising bounty of a stranger; I say, pity her if she was not able, after all these things, to make any ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... reminder. On safe arrival on the northern shore, the story goes, he was politely escorted by an official to a table laid for one, and was courteously requested to elect whether he would have the engine roast or boiled. Alas! for the frailty of human nature, more especially where a sense of humour might stand us in good stead. The sceptic, disillusioned, is stated to have failed to appreciate ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... conduct unbecoming a gentleman may not there be resented if to resent is to cut down one's income. The time was, as the dignified and nicely honorable Sanders observed, when these and many similar low standards did not prevail in the legal profession. But such is the frailty of human nature—or so savage the pressure of the need of the material necessities of civilized life, let a profession become profitable or develop possibilities of profit—even the profession of statesman, even ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... in this sense, only the earliest or the most powerful, an Aristotle or a Spinoza, need to be remembered, in that they stamp their language and temper upon human reason itself. The rest of the orthodox are justly lost in the crowd and relegated to the chorus. The frailty of heretical philosophers is more conspicuous and interesting: it makes up the chronique scandaleuse of the mind, or the history of philosophy. Locke belongs to both camps: he was restive in his orthodoxy and timid in his heresies; and like so many other initiators of revolutions, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... I am silent, yet, Lady, though your rare beauties prompt my rhyme, When first I saw thee I recall the time Such as again no other can be met. But, with such burthen on my shoulders set. My mind, its frailty feeling, cannot climb, And shrinks alike from polish'd and sublime, While my vain utterance frozen terrors let. Often already have I sought to sing, But midway in my breast the voice was stay'd, For ah! so high what praise ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... judgment, by which he spares some, and sore afflicts others again in this life; his judgment is to be adored, trembled at, not to be searched or inquired after by mortal men: he hath reasons reserved to himself, which our frailty cannot apprehend. He may punish all if he will, and that justly for sin; in that he doth it in some, is to make a way for his mercy that they repent and be saved, to heal them, to try them, exercise their patience, and make them call ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... for thirty-one shillings and threepence, I obtained the only authentic account of how the frailty of the illustrious Senora Dona Sodina was indirectly the means of raising her husband to the highest dignities ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... I said at last in a heavy voice, "that thou, too, art not betrayed, but art still here to taunt me, thou who once didst swear that thou didst love me? Being a woman, hast thou no pity for the frailty of man?" ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... consternation. Carmen tried desperately to be discreet. Even Harris advised her to listen much, but say little; and she strove hard to obey. But she would forget and hurl the newspapers from her with exclamations of horror over their red-inked depictions of mortal frailty—she would flatly refuse to discuss crime or disease—and she would comment disparagingly at too frequent intervals on the littleness of human aims and the emptiness of the peacock-life which she saw ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... established that the proportion of certifiable mental defectives, and of a much larger class, the subnormal but not certifiable class, is progressing by leaps and bounds. It is perhaps the most absurd frailty of our present system of education that it takes almost no account of innate differences in educability. To spend money upon the teaching of these children along lines where they are unteachable is not only waste pure and simple, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... it is my opinion there needs no other care to prevent intriguing than to keep the men effectually away. For though inclination, which we prettily call love, does sometimes move a little too visibly in the sex, and frailty often follows, yet I think verily custom, which we miscall modesty, has so far the ascendant over the sex that solicitation always ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... golden standard' were not there, classing the monarch with his 'poorest subject;'—the fact that this charmed 'round of sovereignty,' did not after all secure the least exemption from the common individual human frailty, and helplessness,—this would, of course, strike the usurper who had purchased the crown at such an expense, as a fact in natural history worth communicating, if it were only for the benefit of future princes, who might be disposed to ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... makes their rulers fear and hate us. It may often, and uniformly, happen that any given individual is unconscious of the Spirit that moves within him; for it is the way of that Spirit to subordinate its manifestations to its ends, knowing the frailty of humanity. But it is there, and its gradual and cumulative results are seen in the retrospect, and it may perhaps be divined as to the outline of some of its ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... The irrepressible look of humorous tolerance of all human frailty had suffused Poindexter's black eyes with mischievous moisture. "If you think it quite safe to confide to your wife this prospect of her improvement by ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... them belonged to the Frailty Theatre, and their usual talk was of the "stars" engaged there. Chief among these were the "Sisters Bellman," a trio of singers in burlesque, and a frequent subject of innuendo and rapartee was one Betty, of that ilk, whose name Glory ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... rage flared all the frustration of months, of years, all the disappointments of all his chase, all the defeat of all his career. Even as she sat there in her pink and white frailty she knew and nursed the secret for which he had girdled the world. He felt that he must tear it from her, that he must crush it out of her body as the pit is squeezed from a cherry. And the corroding part of it was that he had been outwitted by a woman, ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... with God upon the rampart of heaven, and surveying the whole scheme of created things. Yet on the other hand there fell the sense of a baffling and miserable impotence, a despairing knowledge that one's consciousness of the right to live, and to live happily, was conditioned by one's utter frailty, the sense that one was surrounded by a thousand dangers, any one of which might at any moment deprive one of the only thing of which one was sure. How, and by what subtle process of faith and imagination, could the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that tragical scene of fanaticism, in which seven persons lost their lives, one was killed, two were murdered, and four executed for the murders. A signal and melancholy instance of the weakness and frailty of human nature, and to what giddy heights of extravagance and madness, an inflamed imagination will carry unfortunate mortals. It is hard for the wisdom of men to conceive a remedy for a distemper such as religious infatuation. Severity and ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... taking, then, my final leave of this bar, and of this honorable court, I can only ejaculate a fervent petition to Heaven that every member of it may go to his final account with as little of earthly frailty to answer for as those illustrious dead; and that every one, after the close of a long and virtuous career in this world, may be received at the portals of the next with the approving sentence, 'Well done, ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... knew them wrong." He could not but be very sensible of the unhappy consequences which may follow on attacking the characters of men, especially of those who are ministers of the gospel; and if, through a mixture of human frailty, from which the best of men, in the best of their meanings and intentions, are not entirely free, he had ever, in the warmth of his heart, dropped a word which might be injurious to any on that account, (which ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... thereof. She found much matter for wonder and for fear. Visible Nature had grown to be a smiling curtain behind which raged eternal struggles for life. Every leaf sheltered a tragedy, every bough was a battlefield. The awful frailty of all existence began to dawn upon Joan Tregenza, and the discovery left her helpless, lonely, longing for new gods. She knew not where to turn. Any brightness from any ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... that Providence had erred in not making her a saint, a king, or anything else that demands a resolute repression of human infirmities. Some people are content to triumph over their own weaknesses; my mother had an eye also for the frailty ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... to his own humour, we find it to be, by his Book, more fickle than even the Wind, or Feminine frailty in its highest Inconstancy. One while he's for Instructing our Stage, Modelling our Plays, Correcting the Drama, the Unity, Time and Place, and acts as very a Poet as ever writ an ill Play, or slept at ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... old frailty they all of them trip in! Eve in her daughters is ever the same; Give her all Eden, she sighs for a pippin; Give her an Empire, she pines ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... me without a word or a movement; only, every now and then, her long, dark lashes, tipped with gold, would flicker for a moment and then droop discreetly on her cool, fresh cheeks. But the thought of her own frailty suggested an objection; ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... hear her but continued at the window, his relaxed shoulders giving an unwonted aspect of frailty to his body. She tiptoed out of the room, crept back again to look through brimming eyes at the lonely figure silhouetted against the darkening window, then stumbled into her own room and closed ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... clairvoyants'. She saw it all—Madame Cassandra playing on Mildred's wounded affections, the broker on both that and her desire to be independent—and Drummond pulling the wires that all might take advantage of her woman's frailty. ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... superior men—viz. Anastasius; or, the Memoirs of a Modern Greek: published in the year 1819. There are, indeed, few books in the English language which contain passages of greater power, feeling, and eloquence than this work, which delineate frailty and vice with more energy and acuteness, or describe historical scenes with such bold imagery and such glowing language. We remember the opinion of a writer in the Edinburgh Review, soon after the publication of Anastasius. With ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... to the primitive and genuine rule of simplicity; and that all those enormities may be corrected into which the lives and profession of the monks for a long time had deplorably lapsed, have, as far as human frailty will permit, endeavoured to the utmost that for the future the pure word of God may be taught in that ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... revising it; he therefore begs of the candid reader to accept of it in its present state, and to excuse any inaccuracies of expression, or of conclusion, into which the intricacy of his subject, the general imperfection of language, or the frailty he has in common with other men, may have betrayed him; and from which he has not the vanity to believe ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... burned incense to her in her prosperity) to revenge his quarrel. My reason for this opinion is grounded on a letter of Richard extant in the Museum, by which it appears that the fair, unfortunate, and aimable Jane (for her virtues far outweighed her frailty) being a prisoner, by Richard's order, in Ludgate, had captivated the king's solicitor, who contracted to marry her. Here ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... the possibility of her frailty. She turned her face to the window. Through the lace curtains shone the moonlight, the gleaming path along which she had so often flown out to be a fairy. But to-night she didn't wish to be a fairy; ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... the natural humours and normal animal instincts of the human race, this refusal ever to leave the broad and beaten path of human frailty, gives a tone to his writings, even when he is dealing with art and literature, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... cautious youth, aware of the frailty of matches, wisely resolved to penetrate as far as possible into the interior of the cupboard, in the direction in which he knew his particular boots to be, ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... investigation, (not without some blame, for which of us is faultless, but) with a character unsullied even in this respect, and in all other respects irreproachable." Mankind are, more or less, the children of error; but their propensity to exaggerate human frailty deserves to be reprobated for its cruelty ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - No. 291 - Supplement to Vol 10 • Various
... alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe. ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... out but a few pounds. But the novices are improving. They will yet lead the world, for we have a new country full of God's wonderful works, and a composite population whose loves and hates reproduce in new scenes all the passions of the Old World. They are the same pictures of human goodness and frailty in new frames—and my business is to judge the workmanship of ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... put the questions. Something had happened between him and Ellie, that was evident-one of those hideous unforeseeable blunders that may cause one's cleverest plans to crumble at a stroke; and again Susy shuddered at the frailty of her bliss. But her old training stood her in good stead. There had been more than one moment in her past when everything-somebody else's everything-had depended on her keeping a cool head and a clear glance. It would have ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... make. Yet so great was the spell upon her that she was not aware she had climbed the steep slope until the dog yelped his welcome. Then with all the flood of her emotion surging and resurging she knelt to allay the parching thirst of this dying enemy whose words had changed frailty to strength, hate to love, and, the gloomy hell of despair to something unutterable. But she had returned too late. Bill Isbel ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... sole proprietor of the luxury of woe, and may he not draw edifying lessons from contemplating the transient sorrows of his pets and domestic animals? Is he to confine his schooling on the wholesome theme of the frailty of flesh solely to his own species? It is not to be denied that animals lower in the scale than mankind have acute sense of bereavement, though it is equally certain that in their case the healing influences of time ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... memory of that sign which they had in baptism a kind of bar or prevention to keep them even from apostasy, whereinto the frailty of flesh and blood, overmuch fearing to endure shame, might peradventure the more easily otherwise ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... hate possessed, Left not a chance untaken to obtain A reeking scalp; and fiercely they oppressed The little band, whose suffering and pain, In Montreal and all throughout the land, Seemed more than human frailty ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... paradoxical doctrine of the Stoics), from taking a half-view of this subject, and considering man as amenable only to the dictates of his understanding and his conscience, and not excusable from the temptations and frailty of human ignorance and passion. The mixing up of religion and morality together, or the making us accountable for every word, thought, or action, under no less a responsibility than our everlasting future welfare or misery, has also added incalculably to the difficulties ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... age. God never inspired a holier picture than the wrinkled face of a good old mother. The old eyes, with the peering promise of a near peace in them; the toothless mouth, whose words of cheer are records of the past; the wrinkled face, the sad token of human frailty; the gentle word of welcome which age trustingly bestows, all speak to younger hearts with hungry words, and we hope that their lot is one of peace ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... of the general frailty of her sex, has a peculiar softness, beauty, and propriety. She admits the imputation with all the sympathy of woman for woman; yet with all the dignity of one who felt her own superiority to the weakness ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... which she knew to be in his power, and believed to be in his inclination. Was it natural—was it reasonable—was it fair, to expect that she should in the interim, become felo de se of her own character, and proclaim her frailty to the world, when she had every reason to expect, that, by concealing it for a season, it might be veiled for ever? Was it not, on the contrary, pardonable, that, in such an emergency, a young ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of the non-progressency of the nation, and of its retrograde motion of late, in liberty and spiritual truths. It is much to be bewailed; but, yet, let us pity human frailty. When those who had made deep protestations of their zeal for our liberty, both spiritual and civil, and made the fairest offers to be the asserters thereof, and whom we thereupon trusted,—when these, being instated in power, shall betray the good thing committed to them, and lead us back ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... has afforded nothing among the French but some lively lampoons, and that those who have the highest respect for the mysteries of the Christian religion cannot forbear now and then making free with the devil, the serpent, the frailty of our first parents, and the rib that was stolen from Adam. "I have often admired," he goes on, "how barren the subject appears, and how fruitful it ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... amber-tinted flight, resolved at rest into a delicate medley of green and white and saffron. It was the orange-tip, and the dormouse rejoiced, for the orange-tip meant spring. Such dainty frailty could ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... Paris with her two children. Their intelligence and vivacity had deeply interested Alexander and other royal guests, who had cordially paid their tribute of respect and sympathy to their mother. Napoleon had taken a deep interest in the education of the two princes, as he was aware of the frailty of life, and as the death of the King of Rome would bring them in the direct line to ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... hardly enough attention has been given to the prominence which he gave to a searching analysis of conscience. He found little to help him in the court religion of the age, but he was immensely impressed with the Jansenist conception of the frailty and worthlessness of the natural man. Hence, his persistency in cultivating almost exclusively the society of those men and women of Port Royal with whom we might suppose that he had very little ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... grasp his own with incredible power, and the old man, supported on either side by his friends, rose upright to his feet. For a moment he looked about him, as if to invite all in presence to listen (the lingering remnant of human frailty), and then, with a fine military elevation of the head, and with a voice that might be heard in every part of that numerous assembly, ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... upon the stage, the human species was delicately vivisected in one act; human frailty exposed, human motives detected, human desire quenched in all the brilliancy of perverted epigram and the scalpel analysis of the astigmatic. Life, love, and folly were portrayed with the remorseless accuracy of an eye doubly sensitive ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... claim it for any amount of proof, presumptive or positive. 'It is because humanity even when most cautious and discriminating is so mournfully fallible and prone to error, that in judging its own frailty, we require the aid and reverently invoke the guidance of Jehovah.' In your solemn deliberations bear in mind this epitome of an opinion, entitled to more than a passing consideration: 'Perhaps strong circumstantial evidence in cases of crime, committed ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... to burst with the heat. Timbers were cracking. All the stories they had heard of the frailty of the building came now to goad them as they hurtled from one end of their pen to the other, while intermittent clouds of smoke and darting flames conspired to ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" Shelley dwells on the inconstancy and evanescence of the manifestation of beauty, which imparts to it an appearance of frailty and unreality: ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... acknowledging the sensuous element in marriage, He lifts it up into the spiritual realm and transmutes it into a symbol of soul-communion. Our Lord does not derive the sanction of wedded life from Mosaic legislation. Still less does He permit it as a concession to human frailty. It has its ground in creation itself, and while therefore it is the most natural of earthly relationships it is of God's making. To the true ideal of marriage there are several features which our Lord regards as indispensable. ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... comely, upstanding young woman. Even my father, a dismal sceptic anent human frailty, said that he would freely trust her around the farthest corner in Christendom. And I gathered from the talk of my elders and betters that Mary was very pretty. People said it was a real joy to see a creature so young, so smiling, ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... uncle's assistance in forwarding his wishes, it was his own ambition and his own impulse that even at this early day gave direction to his course, and obtained opportunities which would scarcely have been offered spontaneously to one of his physical frailty. In this Arctic expedition he underwent the experiences common to all who tempt those icebound seas. During it occurred an incident illustrative of Nelson's recklessness of personal danger,—a very different thing from official recklessness, which he never ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... is thy triumph!" exclaimed Mrs Delvile, flying up to Cecilia, and folding her in her arms; "Noble, incomparable young creature! I knew not that so much worth was compatible with human frailty!" ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... laudably, upon better principles. But this (say they) seems not sufficient ground for those strong and stinging reproaches he casts upon himself, nor for Eudocia's rejecting him with so much severity. It would have been a better ground of distress, considering the frailty of human nature, and the violent temptations he lay under; if he had been at last prevailed upon to profess himself a Mahometan: For then his remorse, and self-condemnation, would have been natural, his ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... use-making or application of Christ; "for the whole need not the physician, but the sick;" and Christ is "not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance," Matt. ix. 12. Mark ii. 17. Yea, believers themselves would live within the sight of this, and not forget their frailty; for though there be a change wrought in them, yet they are not perfect, but will have need of Christ as the way, the truth, and the life, till he bring them in, and set them down upon the throne, and crown them with the crown of life. And, O happy they, who must not walk on foot ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... Further, his mind may be so prejudiced that he still counts the beam on which he stands secure, although a neighbour has faithfully given warning that it is about to fall; it may be that because he stands on it he cannot see its frailty. Let some friend who knows his danger, but wishes him well, approach the spot and hold a mirror in such a position that the infatuated man shall see reflected in it the under and ailing side of the beam that lies between him and the ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... contribute. He will send 10 pounds to buy an article from some competent writer, but will not himself write. "It would be seriously injurious to me if the author of 'Eothen' were affiched as contributing to a magazine. My frailty in publishing a book has, I fear, already hurt me in my profession, and a small sin of this kind would bring on me still deeper ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... thousands to Father Lasse, and saw how great a world this tender-hearted old man had supported. He had always been old and worn-out so long as Pelle could remember. Labor so soon robs the poor man of his youth and makes his age so long! But this very frailty endowed him with a superhuman power—that of the father! He had borne his poverty greatly, without becoming wicked or self-seeking or narrow; his heart had always been full of the cheerfulness of sacrifice, and full of tenderness; ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... according to an odious practice of Spanish despotism introduced into the country during the reign of Mary. Under the terror of such a surprise the awful alternative "Comply or burn" was laid before him. Human frailty under these trying circumstances prevailed; and in an evil hour this champion of light and learning was tempted to subscribe his false assent to the doctrine of the real presence and the whole list of Romish articles. This was but the beginning of humiliations: he was now required ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... and vainly desired while under her roof. Miss Ainsworth had never been given to the reading of novels. Her life had been quite too busy for such frivolities, and now her eyes were making it impossible for her to read without using glasses, which, as a confession of frailty, she despised. So the books stood, new and unopened, in a fascinating row upon the "secretary" shelf. No one so far had ventured to ask for them. It had been reserved for these young adventurers to demand them in ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... of others. Half the words in the book are quaint, grotesque phrasings of two ideas—ideas which most people on our side of the water are hardly inclined to joke about: one is the idea of death, and the other the frailty or falseness of women. One is specially struck by the wealth of words and the sameness of ideas, and, above all, by the quickwittedness that must belong to the people who can all catch a verbal allusion or suggestion as Anglo-Saxons might a plump, square hit. Sometimes a little unconscious ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... whence came the fierce and cruel courage with which he dominated his liege burghers and harassed the country round about for a hundred leagues? The cunning of a weak man? Say, rather, the contrivance of a strong servant to hide the frailty of ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... all compact. Some lay of amour, I venture, breathing the hot passion of the Viennese Jew who wrote it. But so heard, filtered through that golden haze, echoed back from that lovely panorama of stone and water, all flavour of human frailty has been taken out of it. There is, indeed, something wholly chastening and dephlogisticating in the scene, something which makes the joys and tumults of the flesh seem trivial and debasing. A man must be fed, of course, to yield himself to the suggestion, for hunger is frankly a brute; ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... of the head and a whisper, "I'm going!" It was, though attenuated by the frailty of the dying body, the exact movement, the exact gesture that she had used when, on her husband's death, she had greeted the news that she and her daughter had been left with seventy pounds a year. ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... the despised and ridiculed vagrant of Sierra Flat, who had not even the manliness to stand up in his own defence, was not only evidence of inherent moral depravity, but was an insult to the community. Colonel Starbottle saw in it only another instance of the extreme frailty of the sex; he had known similar cases; and remembered distinctly, sir, how a well-known Philadelphia heiress, one of the finest women that ever rode in her kerridge, that, gad, sir! had thrown over a Southern member of Congress to consort with a d——d nigger. The Colonel had also ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... really an exemplification of the saying, that 'les Rois et les Valets' are made of the refuse clay of creation, for though such things sometimes happen in the servants' hall, and housekeepers charge still-room and kitchen-maids with frailty, they are unprecedented and unheard of in good society, and among people in high or even in respectable stations. It is inconceivable how Melbourne can have permitted this disgraceful and mischievous scandal, which cannot ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... wandered through the various gambling houses, drinking moderately, meeting an occasional acquaintance from Texas, and in the course of our rounds landed in the Dew-Drop-In dance hall. Here might be seen the frailty of women in every grade and condition. From girls in their teens, launching out on a life of shame, to the adventuress who had once had youth and beauty in her favor, but was now discarded and ready for the final ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... be as wonderful about their women as about all other matters. The sage of Bharat Khanda guards the frail sex strictly, knowing its frailty, and avoids teaching it to read and write, which it will assuredly use for a bad purpose. For women are ever subject to the god[FN178] with the sugar-cane bow and string of bees, and arrows tipped with heating blossoms, and to him they will ever surrender man, dhan, tan—mind, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... much injustice and iniquity. The scheme of engaging the abbots to surrender their monasteries had been conducted, as may easily be imagined, with many invidious circumstances: arts of all kinds had been employed; every motive that could work on the frailty of human nature had been set before them; and it was with great difficulty that these dignified conventuals were brought to make a concession, which most of them regarded as destructive of their interests, as well as sacrilegious and criminal in itself.[**] Three abbots ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... friend of her whom he was pleased to call, sometimes, the "Littlepage gal." It was easy to see he felt the force of this circumstance; and it is to be hoped that, as he was certainly a wiser, he also became a better man, on one of the most common of the weaknesses of human frailty. ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... atonement, the doctrine of personal immortality. If he knows that Christ died for him, that there is a future beyond the grave, it makes all the difference between despair and hope, between misery and consolation, between the helpless frailty of a being that is puffed out like a candle, and the joyful power of ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... the conversation; and Lady Laura went in to say a few words to Mr. Lovel. They were very melancholy words—all about the dead, and his innumerable virtues—which seemed really at this stage of his history to have been alloyed by no human frailty or shortcoming. Mr. Lovel was sympathetic to the last degree—sighed in unison with his visitor, and brushed some stray drops of moisture from his own eyelids when Lady Laura wept. And then he went out to the carriage with my lady, ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... sounding from heaven or earth is as uncertain as is the person to whom it is addressed, authoritatively commands a third to 'cry,' and, on being asked what is to be the burden of the call, answers. This new herald is to proclaim man's frailty and the immortal vigour of God's word, which secures the fulfilment of His promises. Is it the questioning voice, or the commanding one, which says, 'All flesh is grass,... the people is grass'? If the former, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... wives of this subordinate class, though they are in reality no better than concubines, and are subject to the power and caprices of their lords, are yet allowed, in the eye of the severest moralists, to have some excuse for their frailty and their weakness; and they accordingly always do find a degree of favor in this world, and become the object ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... there the wish that his wife should be as worldly-wise and as eager to please as the married lady whose charms had held his fancy through two mildly agitated years; without, of course, any hint of the frailty which had so nearly marred that unhappy being's life, and had disarranged his own ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... individually some quality widely common to men in addition to that limited quality they possess by their conception. Some touch of weakness in an angel, some touch of pity in a devil, some unmerited misfortune in an Ariel, bring them home to our bosoms; just as the frailty of the hero, however great he be, humanizes him at a stroke. Thus these abstract fragments also are reunited with humanity, with the whole of life ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... that may well command the eyes of Angels, when, though deaf to earthly laws and considerations, the angry heart, in the first heat of its wild career, still stops obedient to the voice of religion. Amid the dross of human frailty, the pure metal shines with the lustre that surrounds the sinner in ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... next and succeeding ones. Our friends, our families, our business associates, our nation, are determined by what we have thought and felt and done in the past and by the lessons it is necessary we shall learn. Our wealth or poverty, our fame or obscurity, our strength or frailty, our intelligence or stupidity, our good or bad environment, our freedom or limitations, all grow out of the thoughts and emotions and acts in the past. From their consequences there is ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... But of this frailty I shall speak no further; indeed, I do not understand how I happened to be led into this line of discourse, for it is quite at a tangent with the subject I had in mind—namely, ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... see her and sends letters to her (II. i. 109). What really happens is that Ophelia suddenly repels his visits and letters. Now, we know that she is simply obeying her father's order; but how would her action appear to Hamlet, already sick at heart because of his mother's frailty,[71] and now finding that, the moment fortune has turned against him, the woman who had welcomed his love turns against him too? Even if he divined (as his insults to Polonius suggest) that her father was concerned in this change, would he not still, in that morbid condition ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... he welcomes every temptation to go astray—and, not content with shaking hands with old Worldly Wiseman, he must, before climbing Mount Difficulty, explore both the way of Danger and that of Destruction. It may be inquired, if this arise from the fertility or from the frailty of his genius—from his knowledge of, and dominion over every province of thought, or from his natural or acquired inability to resist "right-hand or left-hand defections," provided they promise to interest himself and to amuse his readers. Judging from Coleridge's similar practice, we are ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... must have been about twenty-five hundred miles long, and when we consider the smallness of the party, the frailty of their two boats and the savage wildness of both the country and its inhabitants, the accomplishment seems one of the greatest in ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... sometimes dealt with human frailty, I have treated it gently. I have never betrayed ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... pale with passion, and once wring your lips out upon hers, would it not be a small thing to die? Not that there is not a passion of a quite other sort, much less epic, far more dramatic and intimate, that comes out of the very frailty of perishable women; out of the lines of suffering that we see written about their eyes, and that we may wipe out if it were but for a moment; out of the thin hands, wrought and tempered in agony to a fineness of perception, that the indifferent ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... {dry} grass laid up in stacks. Her beauty, indeed, is worthy {of love}; but inbred lust, as well, urges him on, and the people in those regions are {naturally} much inclined to lustfulness. He burns, both by his own frailty and that of his nation. He has a desire to corrupt the care of her attendants, and the fidelity of her nurse, and {besides}, to tempt herself with large presents, and to spend his whole kingdom {in so doing}; or else, to seize her, and, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... looked as though a moderate breeze would have overthrown her, but she also looked, to the enlightened observer, as though she would recoil before no cruelty and no suffering in pursuit of her vision. The blind dreaming force behind her apparent frailty would strike terror into the heart of any man intelligent enough to understand it. Edward Henry had an inward shudder. "Great Scott!" he reflected. "I shouldn't like to be ill and have Isabel for ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... preaching "sin and redemption," the infinite grace of God and His pardon for human frailty. He was very much in earnest, and he meant well, but Jurgis, as he listened, found his soul filled with hatred. What did he know about sin and suffering—with his smooth, black coat and his neatly starched ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... leaves were crushed and tarnished. He laughed scornfully. "Thus is it," he exclaimed, "with woman's love; as fair and as fragile as this poor blossom. Begone, then! Wither, and become dust, thou perishable emblem of frailty!" Approaching the open window, he was about to throw away the flower, when something flew into the room, struck his breast, and rolled upon the ground. Federico started back, and his eye fell upon the clock that regulated his studies. The hands were on the stroke of midnight, and for a moment, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... you doing? Writing—reading—or musing of either? Are you a reviewer-man—in opposition to the writer? Once, reviewing was my besetting sin, but now it is only my frailty. Now that I lie here at the mercy of every reviewer, I save myself by an instinct of self-preservation from that 'gnawing tooth' (as Homer and Aeschylus did rightly call it), and spring forward into definite work and thought. Else, I should perish. Do you understand ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... rapidly, and with a prescient insight into the mazes of human frailty that made it seem as if the doors of all hearts were open to him: the Pharisee, who paid tithes—mint, anise and cummin—and prayed daily on the street corners, and saw no need for repentance; the youth and the maiden, with ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... government, and in which it has even superadded a new and powerful guard unknown to any of them? If, on the contrary, he happened to be a man of calm and dispassionate feelings, he would indulge a sigh for the frailty of human nature, and would lament, that in a matter so interesting to the happiness of millions, the true merits of the question should be perplexed and entangled by expedients so unfriendly to an impartial and right determination. Even ...
— The Federalist Papers
... And to those dainty limms which nature lent 680 For gentle usage, and soft delicacy? But you invert the cov'nants of her trust, And harshly deal like an ill borrower With that which you receiv'd on other terms, Scorning the unexempt condition By which all mortal frailty must subsist, Refreshment after toil, ease after pain, That have been tir'd all day without repast, And timely rest have wanted, but fair Virgin ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... my hands lying on the rude coverlet which had been flung over me. Emaciated they had been for some months now. But at present they were as white as snow and almost as translucent in their extraordinary frailty. I became increasingly conscious, too, of the great weakness of my body and the great lassitude ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... he might not beteene the windes of heauen [Sidenote: beteeme[5]] Visit her face too roughly. Heauen and Earth Must I remember: why she would hang on him, [Sidenote: should] As if encrease of Appetite had growne By what it fed on; and yet within a month? Let me not thinke on't: Frailty, thy name is woman.[6] A little Month, or ere those shooes were old, With which she followed my poore Fathers body Like Niobe, all teares. Why she, euen she.[7] (O Heauen! A beast that wants discourse[8] of Reason ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... the clothes quite o'er his head; And, stung with fear Of my own frailty, dropped down many a tear Upon his bed; Then sighing, whispered, Happy are the dead! What peace doth ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... shocked many of his own partisans. The recollection of it preyed long on his own mind. But it was reserved for historians who lived some centuries later to discover that his conduct was a glorious display of virtue, and to lament that, from the frailty of human nature, a man who could perform so great an exploit could repent ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this day our daily bread." And remembering that we are unprofitable and faithless and disloyal servants we ask forgiveness for our sins, well knowing that we can only be forgiven as we ourselves are ready to forgive. And so looking to the future and mindful of our frailty we pray that GOD will not lead us into "temptation" or trial, without at the same time providing a way of deliverance from the assaults of evil. The prayer customarily ends with an ascription of praise and ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... tribunes, Iago, and (in this play) Octavius Caesar are such souls. All of them profit by the soul they help to destroy. They leave upon the mind the impression that they have a tact for the gaining of profit from human frailty. All of them show the basest ingratitude under a colourable ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... this in a measure, I should still like to know of some of these popular good-doers. We must make considerable allowance for human frailty. Perhaps I shall be able to pick out a real jewel, where you have believed them to be only coloured ...
— Working in the Shade - Lowly Sowing brings Glorious Reaping • Theodore P Wilson
... taint, and strengthen the weakness; but do not pour blackguard and unfair abuse on business men who are in no way answerable for human frailty. ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... pravity[obs3], depravity, pollution; hardness of heart; brutality &c. (malevolence) 907; corruption &c. (debasement) 659; knavery &c. (improbity) 940[obs3]; profligacy; flagrancy, atrocity; cannibalism; lesbianism, Sadism. infirmity; weakness &c. adj.; weakness of the flesh, frailty, imperfection; error; weak side; foible; failing, failure; crying sin, besetting sin; defect, deficiency; cloven foot. lowest dregs of vice, sink of iniquity, Alsatian den[obs3]; gusto picaresco[It]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... shadow, reclining in this dark place, and no judge of the human form could have passed without a quick breath of admiration for its delicate blending of strength and frailty, its stamp of being thoroughbred. And it was along the line of thoroughbreds ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... lost in giving the order; but the lot was sold, and the proprietors did not even know who had bought it. I comforted myself as the fox did. Yet such is the frailty of one's nature, that one cannot refrain, after long, long years, from sentimentalising over it. There is something so taking in the notion of a tattered, semi-illegible, unappropriated fractional relic, not a trunk even; it fascinates ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... Memoirs of a Modern Greek: published in the year 1819. There are, indeed, few books in the English language which contain passages of greater power, feeling, and eloquence than this work, which delineate frailty and vice with more energy and acuteness, or describe historical scenes with such bold imagery and such glowing language. We remember the opinion of a writer in the Edinburgh Review, soon after the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... be the frailty of such men, was fastidiousness. The same sensitive consciousness which is said to have all but lost us the Aeneid, and which certainly all but lost us the Apologia, dominated his otherwise vigorous soul. It is more than forty years since his first verse, written just upon achieving ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... process and sometimes a crashing fall from the top. These accidents were understood. The result was the creation of a living atmosphere, not perhaps highly civilized, but highly sympathetic, charged with the comprehension of human frailty, into which one could carry one's dishonor, not wholly with equanimity, but at least with the knowledge that such burdens were not objects for astonishment. As she descended the hill, therefore, she felt, as she had never felt before, the comforting assurance ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... come on the wrong side as to birth, I admit; but if I clutch the property and title, I'll thank heaven every day I live for my mother's frailty." ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... man who styles himself devout resembles a commoner who styles himself a marquis; he arrogates to himself a quality he does not possess. He thinks himself more worthy than his neighbour. One can forgive such foolishness in women; their frailty and their frivolity render them excusable; the poor creatures pass from a lover to a director in good faith: but one cannot pardon the rogues who direct them, who abuse their ignorance, who establish the throne of their pride on the credulity ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... firmly, cause it to move, so that a huge bronze bell swung in the servants' passage and eventually gave tongue (if the athlete continued pulling) with vibrations so sonorous that the white-wash from the ceiling fell down in flakes. She had therefore made another concession to the frailty of the present generation and the inconveniences of having whitewash falling into salads and puddings on their way to the dining room, and now at the back of the mermaid's tail was a potent little bone button, coloured black and practically ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... spoke in low tones, cast furtive glances as each other, or exchanged some barbarous word, remaining impassive, without even a frown. But this mute and reticent expression of the doctor and magistrate, this solemnity with which science and justice hedge themselves about to hide their frailty or ignorance, had no power ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... comparison made him at once see the truth. Stamboul and Welsley were beautiful; each possessed an enticing quality; but the one enticed by its grandiose mystery, by its sharp contrasts of marble stability and matchboard frailty, by its melancholy silences and spaces, by its obscure peace and its dangerous passion; the other by its delightful simplicity, its noble homeliness, its dignity and charm of an old faith and a smiling unworldliness, its harmonies of gray and of green, of stone and verdure, its ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... qualities made him significant. From ancient times, at least from the days of Greece and Rome, Democracy as a political ideal had been dreamed of, and had even been put into practice on a small scale here and there. But its shortcomings and the frailty of human nature made it the despair of practical men and the laughing stock of philosophers and ironists. Nevertheless, the conviction that no man has a right to enslave another would not die. And in modern times the English sense of justice ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... known to our kind and kingly Shepherd! How keenly did He appreciate our frailty and inability to walk alone the paths which He had trodden! Not unmindful, therefore, was He constantly to teach and direct the way which leads to unending life. When going before his flock and ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... which is published[75] with all formality:) 'Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his life time and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.' Let Dr. Smith consider: Was not Mr. Hume blest with good health, good spirits, good friends, a competent and increasing fortune? And had he not also a perpetual feast of fame[76]? But, as a learned friend ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... unconstitutional power on subjects, and shield its exercise from the light and safeguard of Publicity, affix any penalty to the abuse of that power, if by one chance in a thousand detected. In Lunacy Law extremes of intellect meet; the British senator plays at Satan; and tempts human frailty and cupidity beyond what they are ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... a petty pique, Enwraps in gloom, or bursts in storm; She questions all that love may speak, And weighs its tone, and marks its form, Or yields her frailty to a freak ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... melancholy, and a fearful sign Of human frailty, folly, also crime, That love and marriage rarely can combine, Although they both are born in the same clime; Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine— A sad, sour, sober beverage—by time Is sharpen'd from its ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... victory he is sent into exile, and appeases the State by means of prayers and sacrifices and good life ensuing. They do not torture those named by the accused person, but they warn them. Sins of frailty and ignorance are punished only with blaming, and with compulsory continuation as learners under the law and discipline of those sciences or arts against which they have sinned. And all these things they have mutually among themselves, since they seem to ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... Farewell, my light and life! but not in him, 145 In mine owne dark love and light bent to another. Alas! that in the wane of our affections We should supply it with a full dissembling, In which each youngest maid is grown a mother. Frailty is fruitfull, one sinne gets another: 150 Our loves like sparkles are that brightest shine When they goe out; most vice shewes most divine. Goe, maid, to bed; lend me your book, I pray, Not, like your selfe, for forme. Ile this night trouble None of your ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... internal frailty is even greater. As soon as discussion begins the savage propensities of men break forth; even in modern communities, where those propensities, too, have been weakened by ages of culture, and repressed by ages of obedience, as soon as a vital topic for discussion ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... ungodliness and justify us with Christ's righteousness; it can put the Spirit of Jesus Christ within us; it can help us when we are down; it can heal us when we are wounded; it can multiply pardons, as we through frailty multiply transgressions. ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... left a trace Of human frailty in their onward race, Nor o'er their pathway written, as they ran, One dark memorial of the crimes of man; If every age, in new unconscious prime, Rose, like a phenix, from the fires of time, To wing its way unguided and alone, The future ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... The frailty of all things here, Why choose you the frailest For your cradle, your home, and ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... exemplification of the saying, that 'les Rois et les Valets' are made of the refuse clay of creation, for though such things sometimes happen in the servants' hall, and housekeepers charge still-room and kitchen-maids with frailty, they are unprecedented and unheard of in good society, and among people in high or even in respectable stations. It is inconceivable how Melbourne can have permitted this disgraceful and mischievous ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... familiarity and child-like confidence, that made me feel as if the God to whom he prayed was a father and a friend, in a much higher sense than we are accustomed to regard the Creator of the universe. It was a child soliciting mercies from a kind and considerate parent—conscious of much frailty and ill desert, but relying too with a perfect trust, both upon the equity and benignity of the God of his faith. I received an impression also from the quiet and breathless silence of the apartment, from the low and ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... Marianus O'Dunain, Archbishop of Cashel, were present. Attention had already been directed to certain abuses in ecclesiastical discipline. Such abuses must always arise from time to time in the Church, through the frailty of her members; but these abuses are always carefully reprehended as they arise, so that she is no longer responsible for them. It is remarkable that men of more than ordinary sanctity have usually been given to the Church at such periods. ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... Writing—reading—or musing of either? Are you a reviewer-man—in opposition to the writer? Once, reviewing was my besetting sin, but now it is only my frailty. Now that I lie here at the mercy of every reviewer, I save myself by an instinct of self-preservation from that 'gnawing tooth' (as Homer and Aeschylus did rightly call it), and spring forward into definite work and thought. Else, I should ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... lost its charms, and when, mind and person, she is all my own? Libertines are nicer, if at all nice, than other men. They seldom meet with the stand of virtue in the women whom they attempt. And, by the frailty of those they have triumphed over, they judge of all the rest. 'Importunity and opportunity no woman is proof against, especially from the persevering lover, who knows how to suit temptations to inclinations:' This, thou knowest, is a ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... hearts and minds of men issue in a still further return, in a further correction of errors, a further sweeping away of additions, which are not integral to the Christian creeds, but which were left behind, through natural and necessary human frailty, by our great Reformers? Wise they were,—good and great,—as giants on the earth, while we are but as dwarfs; but, as the hackneyed proverb tells us, the dwarf on the giant's shoulders may see further ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... been staring with all a woman's intentness at this sister whose strength consisted of her frailty, and now inquired: ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... times that I am silent, yet, Lady, though your rare beauties prompt my rhyme, When first I saw thee I recall the time Such as again no other can be met. But, with such burthen on my shoulders set. My mind, its frailty feeling, cannot climb, And shrinks alike from polish'd and sublime, While my vain utterance frozen terrors let. Often already have I sought to sing, But midway in my breast the voice was stay'd, For ah! so high what praise may ever spring? And oft have I the tender verse essay'd, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... recommend his person and qualifications by the sure methods of contradiction, comparisons, revilings, and reproach; how to watch the paroxysms of her disposition, inflame her passions, and improve, for his advantage, those moments of frailty from which no woman is exempted. In short, this consummate politician taught his agent to poison the young lady's mind with insidious conversation, tending to inspire her with the love of guilty pleasure, to debauch her sentiments, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... exercise is the chief cause. As to the second objection, the injury to the womanliness of woman, the answer depends on what is meant by the essential feature of "womanliness." I am afraid most people, including most men, say with Hamlet, "Frailty, thy name is woman." Womanliness to most men implies just frailty. They may perhaps call it "delicacy," and refer to the "weaker sex," but they mean that just as a man's glory is his strength, so a woman's glory ...
— Lawn Tennis for Ladies • Mrs. Lambert Chambers
... the count, "to those golden tablets which you hold in your hand? Give me leave to look at them. They might suit my pedantic way of life. But," added he, as he examined their delicate workmanship, "came you honestly by this toy, my lord? What fair frailty have you cheated of this knack, that never, I will be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... place; there was something almost startling in the coincidence that brought it round on such a day, and there was significance in the words—"O God, Who knowest us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright; grant to us such strength and protection as may support us in all dangers and carry us through, all temptations." Thus prayed the Captain, the Chief ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... a cautious youth, aware of the frailty of matches, wisely resolved to penetrate as far as possible into the interior of the cupboard, in the direction in which he knew his particular boots to be, before striking ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... (for otherwayes I cannot stile him), Major Weir, for most horrible witchcraft, Incest, Bestiality, and other enorme crymes, at first confest by himselfe (his conscience being awakned by the terrors of the Almightie), but afterwards faintly denied by him, brunt. So sad a spectacle he was of humane frailty that I think no history can parallell the like. We saw him the fornoon before he died, but he could be drawen to no sense of a mercifull God, yea sometimes would he scarse confesse their was a God, so horribly was he lost to himselfe. The thing that aggravated ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... entirely to Him, and covet not nor seek but Him: then He gives Himself to them in sweetness and delight, in burning of love, and in joy and melody and dwells aye with them, in their soul, so that the comfort of Him departs never from them. And if they any time begin to err, through ignorance or frailty; soon He shews them the right way; and all that they have need of, He teaches them. No man to such revelation and grace on the first day may come; but through long travel and carefulness to love JESUS Christ, as thou shall here-afterward. Nevertheless, ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... on the divine worth and dignity of human love is balanced by the stress which the poet places on the frailty and finitude of every other human attribute. Having elevated the ideal, he degrades the actual. Knowledge and the intellectual energy which produces it; art and the love of beauty from which it springs: ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... attached, the herald and forerunner of the coming King and God. When the echoes of it have died away, another is heard, commanding yet another unnamed to 'cry,' and, in response to the latter's asking what is to be the burden of his message, bidding him peal out the frailty of man and the eternal vigour of the word of the Lord, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... an eye doth he look down Upon these lower regions of turmoil! Where all the storms of passions mainly beat On flesh and blood; where honour, power, renown, Are only gay afflictions, golden toil; Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet As frailty doth; and only great doth seem To little minds, ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... pleasing in the eyes of men to "avoid a light rollicking manner, and to cultivate a sweet plaintiveness, as of hidden sorrow bravely borne." It also declares that if any young lady has a robust frame, she must be careful to dissemble it, for it is in her frailty that woman can make her greatest appeal to man. No man wishes to marry an Amazon. It also earnestly commends a piece of sewing to be ever in the hand of the young lady who would attract the opposite sex! The use of large words or any show of learning or of unseemly intelligence ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... beetling brows, your air of indifference, your intolerance of the world, they're the defensive armor for your shrinking susceptibilities—you a painter of beautiful women! Every sitter in your studio an enemy in the house—every tube of paint a silent witness of your frailty—every brush stroke a delicious pain—the ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... given to the prominence which he gave to a searching analysis of conscience. He found little to help him in the court religion of the age, but he was immensely impressed with the Jansenist conception of the frailty and worthlessness of the natural man. Hence, his persistency in cultivating almost exclusively the society of those men and women of Port Royal with whom we might suppose that he had very little in common. But, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... never stopped short by difficulties? When he acts, does he never succumb to the temptations of pleasure? When he lives, is he free from pain? Do the diseases not claim him as their prey? When he dies, can he escape the common grave? Pride is not the heritage of man. Humility should dwell with frailty, and atone for ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... a wonderfully graceful shadow, reclining in this dark place, and no judge of the human form could have passed without a quick breath of admiration for its delicate blending of strength and frailty, its stamp of being thoroughbred. And it was along the line of thoroughbreds that her ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... flatter yourself too far," replied the Hermit, "with the hope that I will positively yield to the frailty of pity. Why should I snatch a dupe, so well fitted to endure the miseries of life as you are, from the wretchedness which his own visions, and the villainy of the world, are preparing for him? Why should I play the compassionate ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... in his life-processes Life itself sang the siren song of its own majesty, ever a-whisper and urgent, counseling him that he could achieve more than other men, win out where they failed, ride to success where they perished. It was the urge of Life healthy and strong, unaware of frailty and decay, drunken with sublime complacence, ego-mad, enchanted by ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... end now,—and the great Word never mentioned! It is good for you to be put upon maigre fare, for once. I hold my pen back with both hands: it wants so much to give you the forbidden treat. Oh, the serpent in the garden! See where it has underlined its meaning. Frailty, thy pen is ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... indeed would wrong him. The world is full of slander; and every wretch that knows himself unjust, charges his neighbour with like passions; and by the general frailty, hides his own. If you are wise, and would be happy, turn a deaf ear to such reports: 'tis ruin to ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... let it have its natural duties and powers at its command; but, if not good, let it be made so. . . . We follow, therefore, the true course in looking first for the true idea, or abstract conception of a government, of course with allowance for the evil and frailty that are in man, and then in examining whether there be comprised in that idea a capacity and consequent duty on the part of a government to lay down any laws or devote any means for the purposes of religion,—in short, to exercise a ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... glowed with a spark of the genuine literary fire. But Shakespeare was the sun in the firmament: when his light shone, the fires of all contemporaries paled in the contemporary playgoer's eye. There is forcible and humorous portrayal of human frailty and eccentricity in plays of Shakespeare's contemporary, Ben Jonson. Ben Jonson was a classical scholar, which Shakespeare was not. Jonson was as well versed in Roman history as a college tutor. But when Shakespeare and Ben Jonson both tried their hands at ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... laughs easily. He knows the History of every Mode, and can inform you from which of the French King's Wenches our Wives and Daughters had this Manner of curling their Hair, that Way of placing their Hoods; whose Frailty was covered by such a Sort of Petticoat, and whose Vanity to show her Foot made that Part of the Dress so short in such a Year. In a Word, all his Conversation and Knowledge has been in the female World: As other ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... different forms of government, and in which it has even superadded a new and powerful guard unknown to any of them? If, on the contrary, he happened to be a man of calm and dispassionate feelings, he would indulge a sigh for the frailty of human nature, and would lament, that in a matter so interesting to the happiness of millions, the true merits of the question should be perplexed and entangled by expedients so unfriendly to an impartial and right determination. Even such a man could hardly forbear remarking, that a conduct ...
— The Federalist Papers
... the keeping of the executioner. It was not until Escovedo acquired his perilous knowledge of the debaucheries of Perez and the Princess of Eboli, and had avowed his still more perilous resolution of publishing their frailty in a quarter where detection was ruin, that Perez plied with inflexible diligence artifice and violence, poison and dagger—to satisfy, coincidently, himself and his sovereign. By a similar infusion of emotions, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... did mean, when he placed the white rose, plucked from the heart of Dream-dell, in the little trembling hand which rested on his shoulder, and murmured "Fanny, darling, ere this bud hath scarce withered, I shall be with you again," that it should be even as he said. Alas! alas! for the frailty of human nature! ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... rightfully insist it was his duty and prerogative to do so. The question was, how would the "commanding officer's lady" like and take it? Mullins therefore shook his head. "I hadn't the nerve," as he expressed it, long afterwards. But no such frailty oppressed the occupant of the adjoining house. Just as the two had reached the rear of Wren's quarters, and were barely fifty steps from safety, the captain himself, issuing again from the doorway, suddenly appeared upon the scene, and in low, ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... bonny creature! Thou jewel among thy fellows. Ah, but you possess a masculine frailty. Ah, yes, I've detected it. Oh, Shashai, Shashai, is thy heart reached only through thy stomach?" for now the colt was nozzling most insinuatingly at one of the ample pockets of the old gentleman's top coat. Never had those pockets failed him ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... all— A homeless pilgrim, with dubious name Blown about on the winds of fame; Now as an angel of blessing classed, And now as a mad enthusiast. Called in his youth to sound and gauge The moral lapse of his race and age, And, sharp as truth, the contrast draw Of human frailty and perfect law; Possessed by the one dread thought that lent Its goad to his fiery temperament, Up and down the world he went, A John ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... women, and so well acquainted with men, that it is my opinion there needs no other care to prevent intriguing than to keep the men effectually away. For though inclination, which we prettily call love, does sometimes move a little too visibly in the sex, and frailty often follows, yet I think verily custom, which we miscall modesty, has so far the ascendant over the sex that solicitation ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... hand was quite healed. If my plight was not quite so terrible as the newspapers—which announced that I had been bitten by a mad dog—made out, it was still conducive to serious reflection on human frailty. To complete my task, therefore, I needed, not only a sound mind and good ideas, irrespective of any required skill, but also a healthy thumb to write with, as my work was not a libretto I could dictate, but music which no one but myself could ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... arose from her own convictions, and that even to the acquittal of those, because revered characters, whom no one else would acquit, and to whose much greater faults her errors were owing, and not to a weak or reproachable heart. As far as it is consistent with human frailty, and as far as she could be perfect, considering the people she had to deal with, and those with whom she was inseparably connected, she is perfect. To have been impeccable, must have left nothing for the Divine Grace and a purified state to do, and ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... Sherard came in; she was staying with Miss Abingdon for a few days to console her for Jane's absence. Miss Abingdon did not quite approve of her, but, alas for the frailty of humanity, a little lightness and amusement are sometimes lacking in our otherwise admirable English homes, and the man or woman who can provide them is readily forgiven and easily excused. Miss Sherard was amusing; no one ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... that the assurance from Jasper's lips was not superfluous. He might have weighed profit against other considerations, and have written in that way of her father; she had not felt that absolute confidence which defies every argument from human frailty. And now she asked herself if faith of that unassailable kind is ever possible; is it not only the ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... virtue, I could not have believed (excuse me, Ladies) that there ever was a woman who gave, or could have given, such illustrious, such uniform proofs of it: for, in her whole conduct, she has shown herself to be equally above temptation and art; and, I had almost said, human frailty. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... world, and he made it as nauseous and astringent as he could, for he was not inclined to be one of those physicians who mix jam with their julep. There was no other writer of genius in the nineteenth century who was so bitter in dealing with human frailty as Ibsen was. By the side of his cruel clearness the satire of Carlyle is bluster, the diatribes of Leopardi shrill and thin. All other reformers seem angry and benevolent by turns, Ibsen is uniformly and impartially stern. That he probed deeper into the problems ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... receive a startling reminder. On safe arrival on the northern shore, the story goes, he was politely escorted by an official to a table laid for one, and was courteously requested to elect whether he would have the engine roast or boiled. Alas! for the frailty of human nature, more especially where a sense of humour might stand us in good stead. The sceptic, disillusioned, is stated to have failed to ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... praises should seem rather the effect of self-love than to be founded on reason and justice. I am fearful that, like Themistocles, I should appear to admire their eloquence the most who are most forward to praise me. It is the usual frailty of our sex to be fond of flattery. I blame this in other women, and should wish not to be chargeable with it myself. Yet I confess that I take a pride in being painted by the hand of so able a master, however flattering the likeness may be. If I ever were ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... that, notwithstanding the austerity of the Chair, your good-nature will incline you to some degree of indulgence towards human frailty. You will not think it unnatural, that those who have an object depending, which strongly engages their hopes and fears, should be somewhat inclined to superstition. As I came into the House, full of anxiety about the event of my motion, I found, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... wild as the dreams of madmen; though they may present a mixture of the furious and the ridiculous, still they are to be treated with the greatest lenity and tenderness; and if, after all, you fail, the frailty is to be lamented as a misfortune, and not punished as a fault, seeing that it must have its foundation in a feeling towards you, which it would be the basest of ingratitude, and the most ferocious of cruelty, to repay by harshness of ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... Now I don't think, like all penny-book manufacturers, that 'tis absolutely necessary that the good boys and girls should be rewarded and the naughty ones punished. Yet I think, where there is much tribulation, 'tis fitter it should be the consequence rather than the cause of misconduct or frailty. You'll say that rule is absurd, inasmuch as it is not observed in human life: that I allow, but we know the inflictions of Providence are for wise purposes, therefore our reason willingly submits to them. But as the only good purpose of ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... (not without some blame, for which of us is faultless, but) with a character unsullied even in this respect, and in all other respects irreproachable." Mankind are, more or less, the children of error; but their propensity to exaggerate human frailty deserves to be reprobated for its ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - No. 291 - Supplement to Vol 10 • Various
... mountains, shall not be utterly lost, as one of the children of darkness. Trow ye, that in this day of bitterness and calamity, nothing is required at our hands but to keep the moral law as far as our carnal frailty will permit? Think ye our conquests must be only over our corrupt and evil affections and passions? No; we are called upon, when we have girded up our loins, to run the race boldly, and when we have drawn the sword, we are enjoined to smite ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... not until a spell of exhaustingly hot weather set in in early July that Hal saw a still more noticeable frailty ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... in that fire which reneweth the world, but shall passe through it to Salvation; but so, as to see, and relinquish their former Errours. The Builders, are the Pastors; the Foundation, that Jesus Is The Christ; the Stubble and Hay, False Consequences Drawn From It Through Ignorance, Or Frailty; the Gold, Silver, and pretious Stones, are their True Doctrines; and their Refining or Purging, the Relinquishing Of Their Errors. In all which there is no colour at all for the burning of Incorporeall, that is to say, ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... misdeeds of their ancestors-of the specific crimes they committed-the punishments they suffered. From personalities of their own time they descend forth into jeering each other on matters of family frailty, setting what their just deserts would have entitled them to receive. They continue in this strain of jargon for some time, until at length it becomes evident the storm of war is fast approaching a crisis. Mr. M'Fadden is mentally ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... to remain virtuous in France, our enumeration of the celibates and the predestined, our remarks upon the education of girls, and our rapid survey of the difficulties which attend the choice of a wife will explain up to a certain point this national frailty. Thus, after indicating frankly the aching malady under which the social slate is laboring, we have sought for the causes in the imperfection of the laws, in the irrational condition of our manners, in the incapacity of our minds, and in the contradictions which characterize our habits. ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... "granting this in a measure, I should still like to know of some of these popular good-doers. We must make considerable allowance for human frailty. Perhaps I shall be able to pick out a real jewel, where you have believed them to be only coloured ...
— Working in the Shade - Lowly Sowing brings Glorious Reaping • Theodore P Wilson
... lacks this special feature of the chansons de geste. Arthur may or may not be a greater figure in himself than Charlemagne; but when the genius of Map (or of some one else) had hit upon the real knotting and unknotting of the story—the connection of the frailty of Guinevere with the Quest for the Grail—complete developments of the fates of minor heroes, elaborate closings of minor incidents, became futile. Endless stories could be keyed or geared on to different ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... worldling, and the light dalliance of the daughters of music, are offered every hour upon a thousand Baal-altars within this very parish. I would ask some of you who spend your evenings in the playhouses which multiply around us like weeds sown in the rank soil of human frailty, what justification you make to yourselves when you are alone in the watches of the night, and your conscience saith, 'What went ye out for to see?' You will then complain of the bitterness of life, and prate of the refining ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... gardens and orchards, infinitely lovable and capable of the noblest tenderness. On the contrary, Seward was precise, self-restrained, possessing the gravity and stillness of a youth who husbanded his resources as if conscious of physical frailty, yet wholesome and generous, and once, at least, splendidly reckless in his race for independence of a father who denied him the means of dressing in the fashion of other college students. By the time he reached the age of nineteen, he had run away to Georgia, taught school six ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... darling?" He gathered her close with a compassionate tenderness for the frailty of the little throbbing ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... him, which was mixed so vitally into the intellectual fervour of his love, suffered from the loss almost as if it had been some fresh physical hurt. Was it possible that his avowal of renunciation had sought to keep back some particular treasure? some darling frailty? Or was his suffering at the moment but the first involuntary quiver of the nerves which would pass presently leaving him at one with his fate again? "Was I content to give her up only so long as she belonged to no other man?" he asked. "Could I have ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... much loveliness of person and sweetness of conversation; and the master, from the frailty of human nature, was enamoured of his blooming skin. Like his other scholars, he would not admonish and correct him, but when he found him in a corner he would whisper in his ear:—"I am not, O celestial creature! so occupied with thee, that I am harboring in my ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... wonder! That was what made life worth while. To see moral grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself and first glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud-dripping eyes; to see out of weakness, and frailty, and viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness, arising strength, and truth, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... represent thee to be no better than thou art in reality. Many will pardon thee for thy folly, Frank, and admit that it was natural—very natural. Our hero did not return to his hotel until an hour after daybreak. The interval was passed with the young lady of frailty and beauty. He shared her couch; but neither of them slumbered, for at Frank's request, his fair friend occupied the time in narrating the particulars of her history, which we ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... seems, his pen had hardly realized the cruel frailty of the tenure by which a home in a parsonage is held. Of the family of Berkhampstead Rectory there was now left besides himself only his brother John Cowper, Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, whose birth ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... goal which the grave Sir Thomas pointed out to the noble youth of his land at the beginning of England's greatness, and such, within the bounds of human frailty, has been the ideal even until now which the two universities have held before them. Naturally the method of training prescribed in the sixteenth century for the attainment of this goal is antiquated in some of its details, but it is no exaggeration, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... little or nothing? Because defendit numerus; take the first ten thousand men you meet, and I believe you would be no loser if you betted ten to one that every single sinner of them, one with another, had been guilty of the same frailty.'[208] But here he seemeth not to have done justice to himself: the man is sure enough a hero who hath his lady at fourscore. How doth his modesty herein lessen the merit of a whole well-spent life: not taking to himself the commendation (which Horace accounted the greatest in a theatrical ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... men, as I ever met with; but what is the more remarkable is that these two old men, who have lived, or rather but just existed under such privations, were as good-tempered, kind-hearted old persons, as it is capable for human frailty to attain; and when we consider that each day is a day of penance, and that, too, a monotonous penance, with not a prospect beyond their walls, and none within, save their burial-ground, perhaps there is nothing in the character ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... drinking a glass of punch, from which I inferred his true conscience drew perceptible distinctions between the acts and the penalties he had been accustomed to see inflicted on them. He was much disposed to a certain sort of frailty; but it was a sneaking disposition to ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... instant her indifference, self-control, wisdom vanished. It was a sad exhibition of frailty; but she enjoyed it, she revelled in it, giving play to everything in herself that was barbaric. The marsh around them was probably as it had been before the vikings had sailed into it, and Audrey rushed back with inconceivable speed into ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... confused, its fate unknown, The world stood trembling at Jove's throne; While each pale sinner hung his head, Jove, nodding, shook the heavens and said: 'Offending race of human kind, By nature, reason, learning, blind; You who through frailty stepped aside, And you who never err'd through pride; You who in different sects were shamm'd, And come to see each other damn'd (So some folk told you, but they knew No more of Jove's designs than you). The world's mad business now is o'er, And ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... it at the time! The poor fellow gratefully kissed my hand when I offered it to him—he was not able to speak. I wonder whether I am weak about Arthur? Say a kind word for him, when his conduct comes under notice—but pray don't mention this little frailty of mine; and don't suppose I have any sympathy with his weak-minded submission to Mrs. Romayne's prejudices. If I ever felt the smallest consideration for her (and I cannot call to mind any amiable emotion of that sort), her letter ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... her soul's history. The imperfections which she so bitterly deplored were, then, only an occasional infidelity to the grace which had called her from early years to perfect detachment from creatures and from self, or, at most, they were but the faults of frailty, ignorance, surprise and inadvertence, from which even the saints are not exempt in this life; but, viewed as they now were in their closer contrast with the sanctity of God, they assumed a more serious aspect than ever before. Her habitual ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... seemed very lovely. Here was a world created by Eternal Love that people might serve love in it not all unworthily. Here were anguishes to be endured, and time and human frailty and temporal hardship—all for love to mock at; a sea or two for love to sever, a man-made law or so for love to override, a shallow wisdom for love to deny, in exultance that these ills at most were only corporal hindrances. This done, you have earned ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... watching principally the epic development of America. But I was later to awake as from a day dream or from a life in a shell, to the consciousness of a brighter world of sunlight and of wings. I was at peace now, and with Dorothy, whose frailty required my watchfulness and my care, and whom I delighted to please with lovely things. That was the extent of my emotional life. And so we drove, and visited the shops in Opispo Street. For I was waiting for ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... very many men in London are the slaves of women whom they fear. All of us are human, and the woman with evil heart is, alas! only too ready to seize the opportunity of the frailty of the opposite sex, and whatever may be the secret she learns, of business or of private life, she will most certainly turn it ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... of Scotland, and one of the ablest who ever swayed the sceptre." The House of Mar, not inferior in antiquity or grandeur to that of Drummond, would then have also boasted a Queen among its daughters, and escaped the stain attached to female frailty, even when it has a royal lover for its apology. While such feelings preyed on a bosom naturally proud and severe, they had a corresponding effect on her countenance, where, with the remains of great beauty, ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... how can we understand that such a man as Lord Bacon, the chancellor, the philosopher, the statesman, the man of learning, genius, and wisdom, should have bowed down to the dust, in vile subserviency, to this infamous favorite of the king. Surely, what lessons of the frailty of human nature does the reign of James teach us! The most melancholy instance of all the singular cases of human inconsistency, at this time, is the conduct of the great Bacon himself, who reached the zenith of his power during this reign. It is not the receiving ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... for the appearance, the white beard, and the mysterious scroll of the old hermit, and perceived that his conversation was that of a superior mind. The old man spoke of destiny, of justice, of morality, of the chief good of life, of human frailty, of virtue, and of vice, with so much power and eloquence, that Zadig felt himself attracted by a kind of charm, and besought the hermit not to leave him until they ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... sunset's old age. God never inspired a holier picture than the wrinkled face of a good old mother. The old eyes, with the peering promise of a near peace in them; the toothless mouth, whose words of cheer are records of the past; the wrinkled face, the sad token of human frailty; the gentle word of welcome which age trustingly bestows, all speak to younger hearts with hungry words, and we hope that their lot is one of peace ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... will perceive the poetry of words. Thus to wheedle is to wag the tail and to patter is to hurry through one's prayers (paternoster). What a picture of the frailty of men even in their holiness flashes on us from that word patter! Breakfast is the breaking of the fast of the night. Routine (the most humdrum of words) is travel along a way already broken. Goodby is an abridged form of "God ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the frailty and suspicion of human nature! The self-centered and self-satisfied citizens of San Pasqual had condemned the vegetable venture from the start. It had been too radical a departure from the desert order of things, and the fact that a mere stranger had conceived the idea sufficed to damn the ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... that night, he could not help recalling to his memory the proud elevation of her character as it had appeared in that interview. The recollection really gave him pain, since along with it arose the memory also of that unfortunate frailty, which became more prominent as a crime in connection with that intellectual merit which, it is erroneously assumed, should ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... things never unfavorably affected her life and manners, for she was as prudent in her deportment (ill-natured people say prudish) as if some ancestress of hers had been deceived, and left in the family a tradition of man's perfidy and woman's frailty. ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... said the beautiful creature, standing at her full great height, and smiling down at this blue and white piece of frailty with the ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... for her age but slender and her pink and white coloring gave her an appearance of frailty, but when she used her paddle, Kit was fascinated to watch the swelling of the muscles of her arms. She seemed made of springs as she plied the paddle first at one side then the other, with quick, ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... justice; Judicia Dei occulta, non injusta: his secret counsel and just judgment, by which he spares some, and sore afflicts others again in this life; his judgment is to be adored, trembled at, not to be searched or inquired after by mortal men: he hath reasons reserved to himself, which our frailty cannot apprehend. He may punish all if he will, and that justly for sin; in that he doth it in some, is to make a way for his mercy that they repent and be saved, to heal them, to try them, exercise their patience, and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... marriage, He lifts it up into the spiritual realm and transmutes it into a symbol of soul-communion. Our Lord does not derive the sanction of wedded life from Mosaic legislation. Still less does He permit it as a concession to human frailty. It has its ground in creation itself, and while therefore it is the most natural of earthly relationships it is of God's making. To the true ideal of marriage there are several features which our ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... forgot all about his whales, as he had forgotten to make out the strange way the Lord had discovered to fasten His stars to the sky; moved by a long contemplation of my mother's frailty, he ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... forgetting or else, that they may redress it and amend it. For things passed out of long time from a man's mind or from his sight, turn soon into forgetting; because that mind of man ne may not be comprehended ne withholden, for the frailty ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... inherited and acquired standards of right and wrong. Doubt, uncertainty, inward friction, double motives, have been unknown to him; he has moved freely in accordance with the laws of his being, and, despite the anxieties of his profession and the frailty of his health, there is no mistaking the tone of happiness and contentment which sounds without a jarring note throughout his correspondence. A change was now at hand. As the sails of the "Vanguard" dip below the horizon of England, a brief interlude begins, and when the curtain rises again, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... are a pair of moralising Davids gravely descanting upon the frailty of woman to the accompaniment of a windy accordion and a gueiro ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... a veil over this frailty of my unfortunate parent; but, being conscious that veracity is the very soul and essence of history, I feel myself imperatively called upon neither to disguise ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... frailty: with a favouring eye, And melting heart, behold'st a brother's fall; Who, unenslaved by custom's narrow tie, With ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... spread is the human conviction that, failing all else, any one can "write for the papers," making a lucrative living on easy terms, amid agreeable circumstances. I have often wondered how Dickens, familiar as he was with this frailty, did not make use of it in the closing epoch of Micawber's life before he quitted England. Knowing what he did, as letters coming to light at this day testify, it would seem to be the most natural thing in the world that finally, nothing else having ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... intangible rays of the sun. These seven and ten kinds of foolish men are as follow: he who seeketh to control a person that is incapable of being controlled; he who is content with small gains; he who humbly pays court to enemies; he who seeks to restrain women's frailty; he who asketh him for gifts who should never be asked; he who boasteth, having done anything; he who, born in a high family, perpetrateth an improper deed; he who being weak always wageth hostilities with one that is powerful; ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... his silence. He returned to that city where he had lorded it in his ambitious youth; lived there alone, seeing few; striving to retrieve the irretrievable; at times still grappling with that mortal frailty that had brought him down; still joying in his friend's successes; his laugh still ready, but with a kindlier music; and over all his thoughts the shadow of that unalterable law which he had disavowed and which had brought him low. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... scorn of herself for having loved such a thing. It was long since she had seen the gentle light in his face which had won her heart two years ago. She was familiar with his genius, and it no longer surprised her into overlooking his frailty. His fame no longer flattered her. His gentleness was gone, and had left, not hardness nor violence, in its place, but a sort of irritable palsy of discontent. That was what she called it as ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... great religion, we may be satisfied that Buddhism, which changed the aspect not only of India, but of nearly the whole of Asia, had a real founder; that he was not a Brahman by birth, but belonged to the second or royal caste; that being of a meditative turn of mind, and deeply impressed with the frailty of all created things, he became a recluse, and sought for light and comfort in the different systems of Brahman philosophy and theology. Dissatisfied with the artificial systems of their priests and philosophers, convinced of the uselessness, nay of the pernicious ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... personal attendance chained down to poverty—he probably thought often how lightly he should tread the path of life without his burthen. Of this thought the admission was unavoidable, and the indulgence might be forgiven to frailty and distress. His wife died at last, and before she was buried he was seized by a fever, and is now going to the grave. Such miscarriages when they happen to those on whom many eyes are fixed, fill histories ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... might exercise a passive and more arduous resolution; and a cousin of Mahomet is celebrated for refusing, after an abstinence of three days, the wine and pork, the only nourishment that was allowed by the malice of the infidels. The frailty of some weaker brethren exasperated the implacable spirit of fanaticism; and the father of Amer deplored, in pathetic strains, the apostasy and damnation of a son, who had renounced the promises of God, and the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... comprehend his doings; and here also, in his ordered polities and rigorous justice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact of individual sin. Does it stop, then, with the ant? Rather this desire of welldoing and this doom of frailty run through all the grades of life: rather is this earth, from the frosty top of Everest to the next margin of the internal fire, one stage of ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tears and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been brought to the Tower muffled, according to an odious practice of Spanish despotism introduced into the country during the reign of Mary. Under the terror of such a surprise the awful alternative "Comply or burn" was laid before him. Human frailty under these trying circumstances prevailed; and in an evil hour this champion of light and learning was tempted to subscribe his false assent to the doctrine of the real presence and the whole list of Romish articles. This ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... behold, and even when degraded it is like a diamond in the dust. So far as the love of natural things is concerned, there is but little danger of abuse. Nature is always lovely, and always to be admired. She always reminds us of God and our duty; always teaches us our own littleness and frailty, and works upon all our ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... analysis and the biting wit which accompanies it, I cannot think the epithet cynical, which I have heard ascribed to Earle, is defensible. There is a vast difference between recognising our frailty which is a fact, and insisting that our nature is made up of nothing else, which is not a fact. The severe critic and the cynic differ chiefly in this: the first reports distressing facts, the second invents disgraceful fictions; ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... able to say whether it is true that Mademoiselle Duchesnois had the naivete to exclaim before a hundred people in reference to this departure, "Lafon will never be consoled; it will kill him!" but what I myself know of the frailty of this princess leads me to believe that ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... small amount of physical courage for a person of Mrs. Toomey's frailty to face such a gale. But with her thin lips in a determined line and her gaze straight ahead, she managed, by tacking judiciously and stopping at intervals to clasp a telephone pole while she recovered her breath, to reach the iron fence imported from Omaha which gave ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... a perfect or consummate pattern of human excellence, but rather, by faithfully recording some little imperfections which shadowed over the lustre of those great qualities which we shall here record, to teach the lesson we have above mentioned, to induce our reader with us to lament the frailty of human nature, and to convince him that no mortal, after a thorough scrutiny, can be a proper object of ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... man, and bade him sin no more lest a worse thing should befall the sinner. We had been limited and shut up in a narrow space by the commandment of innocence. Nor should the infirmity and weakness of human frailty have anything it might do, unless the divine mercy, coming again in aid, should open some way of securing salvation by pointing out works of justice and mercy, so that by almsgiving we may wash away ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... over this portion of my narrative. It is sad to dwell upon the history of human frailty, or to relate the oft-told tale of passion and villainy triumphant over virtue. A few days before Christmas, when the marriage ceremony was to be performed, they unfortunately spent one evening together alone, and ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith is built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wonderfully contriv'd to influence the Reader with Pity and Compassion towards them. Tho Adam involves the whole Species in Misery, his Crime proceeds from a Weakness which every Man is inclined to pardon and commiserate, as it seems rather the Frailty of Human Nature, than of the Person who offended. Every one is apt to excuse a Fault which he himself might have fallen into. It was the Excess of Love for Eve, that ruin'd Adam, and his Posterity. I need not add, that the Author is justify'd in this Particular by many of the Fathers, and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... she had given thee the last embrace, did she not gather thee to her bosom once more! At length, raising her eyes to heaven, she said, 'O Thou that seest into the hearts of mortals, and knowest in this matter the spotlessness of mine, dark though it be otherwise with frailty and with sin, save, I pray thee, this innocent creature who is denied the milk of its mother's breast. Vouchsafe that she resemble her hapless parent in nothing but a chaste life. And thou, celestial warrior, that didst ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... comforted: your crime, morally or religiously considered, has no very deep dye of turpitude. It corrupted no man's principles; it attacked no man's life. It involved only a temporary and reparable injury. Of this, and of all other sins, you are earnestly to repent; and may GOD, who knoweth our frailty, and desireth not our death, accept your repentance, for the sake of his ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... heads appear'd, and up their stature grew Till on the level height their steps found ease: Then Thea spread abroad her trembling arms Upon the precincts of this nest of pain, 90 And sidelong fix'd her eye on Saturn's face: There saw she direst strife; the supreme God At war with all the frailty of grief, Of rage, of fear, anxiety, revenge, Remorse, spleen, hope, but most of all despair. Against these plagues he strove in vain; for Fate Had pour'd a mortal oil upon his head, A disanointing poison: so that Thea, Affrighted, kept her still, and let him pass First onwards in, among ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... she had been the beautiful priestess of Athene, golden-haired and very lovely, whose life had been devoted to virgin service of the goddess. Her golden locks, which set her above all other women in the desire of Neptune, had been her undoing: and when Athene knew of the frailty of her priestess, her vengeance was indeed appalling. Each lock of the golden hair was transformed into a venomous snake. The eyes that had been so love-inspiring were now bloodshot and ferocious. The skin, with its rose and milk-white tenderness, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... landmark all over the surrounding fen-lands and even out at sea. It seems strangely slight when one is standing within the tower and notices that no floor breaks the great sweep of walls for a great height. The large perpendicular windows also help to give an impression of frailty. The foundation stone, however, was laid as long ago as 1309, and the structure is not ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... Death. How lonely they looked as they lay there, and how ill assorted! That little heap had been for two thousand years the wisest, loveliest, proudest creature—I can hardly call her woman—in the whole universe. She had been wicked, too, in her way; but, alas! such is the frailty of the human heart, her wickedness had not detracted from her charm. Indeed, I am by no means certain that it did not add to it. It was after all of a grand order, there was nothing ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... spend eternity In heaven's unclouded light! From sorrow, sin, and frailty free, Beholding and resembling thee,— O too transporting sight! Prospect too fair For flesh to bear! Haste! haste! my Lord, and ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... Cyprian was first apprehended, Galerius Maximus, proconsul of Africa, received the Imperial warrant for the execution of the Christian teachers. The bishop of Carthage was sensible that he should be singled out for one of the first victims; and the frailty of nature tempted him to withdraw himself, by a secret flight, from the danger and the honor of martyrdom; * but soon recovering that fortitude which his character required, he returned to his gardens, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... shatters the reed, leaves it lying upon the ground, all bruised and bleeding, and ready to die. Such is God's gentleness that, though man make himself as worthless as a bruised reed; though by his ignorance, frailty and sin he expel all the manhood from his heart and life, and make himself of no more value than one of the myriad reeds in the world's swamps, still doth God say: "My gentleness is such that I will direct upon this wounded life thoughts that shall recuperate ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... passion. The elegance of dress, of motion, and of manners, gives a lustre to beauty, and inflames the senses through the imagination. Luxurious entertainments, midnight dances, and licentious spectacles, present at once temptation and opportunity to female frailty. [57] From such dangers the unpolished wives of the barbarians were secured by poverty, solitude, and the painful cares of a domestic life. The German huts, open, on every side, to the eye of indiscretion or jealousy, were a better safeguard ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... said: "I am convinced we shall die"; he answered stoutly, "No, we shall live, for God has not brought us thus far to desert us now"; at which Tangaloa was comforted and went to sleep, while O'olo watched and watched beside him, his heart much troubled by the evil of their situation, and the frailty of the old chief, and the assailing doubts as to whether, after ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... rather to invention and improvement than to the direct physical handling of machinery. The following brief story of the struggles of Elias Howe[7] should be an inspiration to every individual who fights physical frailty; also, a lesson to him as to the way in which he should ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... that the mother must breathe for two, and in order to dress healthily the garments should be worn loose, so as to give plenty of room for respiration. Tight clothes only cause disease, or produce frailty ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... the glass of reflection, and by remembrance of human frailty destroy the vices which ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... the Court, 'Forget-Good, Forget-Good, thy forgetfulness of good was not simply of frailty, but of purpose, and for that thou didst loathe to keep virtuous things in thy mind. What was bad thou couldst retain, but what was good thou couldst not abide to think of; thy age, therefore, and thy pretended craziness, thou makest ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... times; and so many kings. After all these, where Eudoxus, Hipparchus, Archimedes; where so many other sharp, generous, industrious, subtile, peremptory dispositions; and among others, even they, that have been the greatest scoffers and deriders of the frailty and brevity of this our human life; as Menippus, and others, as many as there have been such as he. Of all these consider, that they long since are all dead, and gone. And what do they suffer by it! Nay ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... the fact that the sins punished inside the walls of the city (sins which, it will be seen, are not represented in Purgatory at all) are to be regarded as the result of a will obstinately set against the will of God; while the sins arising from the frailty of human nature may be checked by the "right judgement" recalling, before it is too late, what the will of God is. This, however, is a different question, and we must not here pursue it too far. To revert to that of Dante's various demeanour, it will be seen that, with the limitation indicated ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
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