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More "Meanness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for—all were forgotten. And now they are returning to me—only that I may see the hollowness and vanity of them, and taste the bitterness for which I have sacrificed you. And here, on this last night of my exile, I am confronted with only the jealousy, the doubt, the meanness and selfishness that is to ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... this simple unaffected air; this serene face, whose calmness irritated me; this gentleness which seemed servile; this wisdom which I thought pedantry; this pliancy of disposition which I took for the meanness of a crouching dog. All this I can it really be the same man!" He was silent for a moment and then continued in a ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... when Montsurry first tells her of the suspicions which Monsieur has excited in him, she protests with artfully calculated indignation against the charge of wrong-doing with this "serpent." But the brutal and deliberate violence of her husband when he knows the truth, and the perfidious meanness with which he makes her the reluctant instrument of her lover's ruin, win back for her much of our alienated sympathy. Yet at the close her position is curiously equivocal. It is at her prayer that Bussy has ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... time or cause. He was himself too simple-hearted to reflect that it is seldom a great fault which destroys liking for a person. A great fault can be forgiven. It is small personal offences constantly repeated; little acts of meanness, and, above all, the petty plans and provisions of a selfish nature. Besides which, the soul has often marvellous intuitions, unmasking men and things; premonitions, warnings, intelligences, that it ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... habituated to actions of meanness and injustice, commits them without reflection, or with a very partial one; for on what other ground than this, can we account for the declaration of war against the Dutch? To gain an idea of the politics which actuated the British Ministry to ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... must necessarily be dignified and variegated and alive with metaphors and figures.... This selection will form a distinction ... and will entirely separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life." ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... used for repairing the British squadron which Hawkins had pronounced as being composed of the finest ships in the world for him to hand over to Philip, even though they had been neglected owing to the Queen's meanness. The plausible way in which the great seaman put this proposition caught the imagination of the negotiators. They were captivated by him. He had caused them to believe that he was a genuine seceder from heresy and from ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... week, he did not decline the week's pay directed to be paid to him, but placed the money in his vest pocket and went out with assumed nonchalance, though, in reality, deeply mortified at the unexpected discovery of his meanness. ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... in Opinion, and both mean well. You, Sir, think it for the Good of Society, that human Nature should be extoll'd as much as possible: I think, the real Meanness and Deformity of it to be more instructive. Your Design is, to make Men copy after the beautiful Original, and endeavour to live up to the Dignity of it: Mine is, to enforce the Necessity of Education, and mortify Pride. I was very much delighted with what you say in your First Dialogue of Apple-trees ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... from conceiving that rivalship authorizes a latitude not otherwise justifiable, always feels greater delicacy in such cases, and would think it meanness to speak of a rival but in terms of respect; to do justice to his merits; to be silent of his foibles. Such has invariably been his conduct towards Jay, Adams, and Hamilton; the only three who can be supposed to have stood ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... has too bitter a disdain of meanness ever to wish her child to sacrifice the truth and integrity of her soul, by accepting the hand of one for whom she has ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... so. Perhaps that was because she seldom thought them absurd, and understood something of the ambitions with which their heads were filled. They were not, indeed, unlike those with which her own was overflowing. Whenever she was angry it was at any meanness or injustice, which seemed to arouse in her a ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... authors and sponsors of these misrepresentations, which at the time were full of interest to me. But it would be a dreary thing now to go over the record of exploded mendacity, or to expose the meanness and malice shown by some men of high official position. A favorite argument was to call the reform Chinese, because the Chinese had constructed an inefficient governmental system based in part on the theory of written competitive examinations. The argument was simple. There had been written ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... and when I have sold my cabbages, I shall have another dollar. I shall soon have enough," and his heart bounded joyfully, his step recovered its elasticity and his pace quickened, as the pleasant thought removed the sting which the accusation of meanness had inflicted on his ...
— The Nest in the Honeysuckles, and other Stories • Various
... Cecilia the next morning obeyed the summons of Mr Delvile, and for the first time went to St James'- square in a humour to look for evil instead of good, and meanness instead of nobleness. ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... Millicent said, "much more. And will you tell him that I never reached the hills, that I am not guilty of that one meanness?" ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... men who had fallen, among whom was the Duc de Mayenne, and bitterly complained of the dishonour to which he had been subjected; while in order to revenge himself at once upon De Luynes and the Duchess, he condescended to the meanness of informing the former that the Prince de Joinville was enamoured of his wife, and subsequently boasted to Bassompierre that he had done so. The Marquis listened in astonishment to this extraordinary communication, and in reply ventured to assure his Majesty that ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... model boy, but I cannot exactly define in what his wickedness consisted. He had no inclination to steal, nor much to lie; and he despised "meanness" and stinginess, and had a chivalrous feeling toward little girls. Probably it never occurred to him that there was any virtue in not stealing and lying, for honesty and veracity were in the atmosphere about him. He hated work, and he "got mad" easily; but ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... typical joke about Scots' meanness appeals to Englishmen because Englishmen are mean themselves. No joke appeals to a man unless it releases some repressed wish of his own. No one expects a devout Roman Catholic to see the point of a joke about extreme unction. The professional comedian to be a success ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... his father that he could speak well, and it may be said of him that he could write well, the only thing he could do which was worth doing, always supposing that there is any merit in being able to write. He was of a mean appearance, and, like his father, pusillanimous to a degree. The meanness of his appearance disgusted, and his pusillanimity discouraged the Scotch when he made his appearance amongst them in the year 1715, some time after the standard of rebellion had been hoisted by Mar. He only stayed a short time in Scotland, and then, seized with panic, retreated ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... man born under Sol, that loveth honour; nor under Jupiter, that loveth business (for the contemplative planet carrieth me away wholly); but as a man born under an excellent sovereign, that deserveth the dedication of all men's abilities.... Again the meanness of my estate doth somewhat move me; for though I cannot accuse myself that I am either prodigal or slothful, yet my health is not to spend, nor my course to get. Lastly, I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends as I have moderate civil ends; for I have taken all knowledge to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... to know why? You started with just foolishness, but you've ended up with meanness, Virginia Bascom. You've taken your revenge on people who've done you nothin' but kindness. I know pretty well who it was that suggested to your father that the mortgage on the rectory should be foreclosed, and the Maxwells turned out ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... Yudhishthira, O Madhava, that "Thy virtue, O son, is daily decreasing. Act thou, therefore, in such a way that thy religious merit may not diminish." Fie to them that live, O Janardana, by dependence on others. Even death is better than a livelihood gained by meanness. Thou must also say unto Dhananjaya and the ever-ready Vrikodara that—"The time for that event is come in view of which a Kshatriya woman bringeth forth a son. If you allow the time to slip without ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... bosom," she said, "to imagine that cowardice or meanness of soul must needs be its guests, because I have censured the fantastic chivalry. Would to Heaven that the shedding of mine own blood, drop by drop, could redeem the captivity of Judah! Nay, would to God it could avail to set free my father, and this his benefactor, from ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... was pale and slender. He was very quiet and studious, and had such a love of honesty and truth, and such detestation of meanness and wrong, that we boys had dubbed ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... or age. Besides, Fanny thought that Lord Kilcullen had behaved generously to her when she so violently repudiated his love: she believed that it had been sincere; she had not even to herself accused him of meanness or treachery; and she spoke of him as one to be pitied, liked, and regarded; not as one to be execrated ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... Nature hath giv'n no outward mark to note The generous mind; the qualities of men To sense are indistinct. I oft have seen One of no worth a noble father shame, And from vile parents worthy children spring, Meanness oft grov'lling in the rich man's mind, And oft exalted spirits in the poor. How then discerning shall we judge aright? By riches? ill would they abide the test. By poverty? on poverty awaits This ill, through want it prompts to sordid deeds. Shall we pronounce by arms? but who can judge By looking ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... only respect in which Becky's course gives us pain is when it locks itself into that of another, and more genuine child of this earth. No one can regret those being entangled in her nets whose vanity and meanness of spirit alone led them into its meshes—such are rightly served; but we do grudge her that real sacred thing called love, even of a Rawdon Crawley, who has more of that self-forgetting, all-purifying feeling for his little evil spirit than many a better ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... against material foes, and largely for material ends. It is the glory of the Church militant that its conquests are spiritual and its victories are eternal. Its fight is chiefly against the inner, not the outer foe—against sin and wrong-doing, impatience, strife, anger, clamor, meanness, evil-speaking, wrath. It is the foe of tyranny and its heel is upon the head of the oppressor and the avenger. Its banner flies over every country and has been carried through tribulation, through sorrow, through ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... misinterpreted as fear, will probably enough operate as a snare for such a person by tempting him into excesses calculated to rouse that courage with which all genuine forbearance is associated. If the early moderation of Government did really entrap any man, that man has himself, and his own meanness of heart, to thank for his delusion. But were it otherwise, and the Government became properly responsible for any possible misinterpretation of their own lenity—even in that case, it will remain to be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... Oakford and her daughter; and, being pressed to stay to tea, I could not well help it. Before tea I sat talking with Mrs. Oakford and a friend of hers, Miss Clinch, about the Americans and the English, especially dwelling on the defects of the latter,—among which we reckoned a wretched meanness in money transactions, a lack of any embroidery of honor and liberality in their dealings, so that they require close watching, or they will be sure to take you at advantage. I hear this character of them ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... often a traffic of mutual meanness, where, although both parties intend deception, neither are deceived, since words that cost little are exchanged for hopes ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... suddenly opening the wicket, fling them one after another, into the crowd, with all the force he possessed. Many were knocked down, and many received hurts which resulted in fatal gangrene. If he had left the clubs lying where thrown, there would have been some compensation for his meanness, but he always came in and carefully gathered up such as he could get, as ammunition ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... blame ought to rest, and on whom it will rest, only nobody seems to take the least interest in the dispute, and he brazens it out in a very unblushing manner. I am more particularly struck with the meanness here exhibited, from having just been reading Lord Chatham's correspondence, in which his noble and lofty character, so abhorrent of everything like trickery, shabbiness, and underhand dealing, shines forth with peculiar lustre. It ...
— 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
... him away, and his hearers went with him like so many straws on the flood, and in the exercise of this great gift the whole man seemed transfigured; abroad, he was a languid, rather slouching priest, who crept about, a picture of delicate humility, but with a shade of meanness; for, religious prejudice apart, it is ignoble to sweep the wall in passing as he did, and eye the ground: but, once in the pulpit, his figure rose and swelled majestically, and seemed to fly over them all like a guardian angel's; his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the English language. If there is a word in the English language that means treachery, servility, and cowardice, it is that word 'conservative.' It ought never hereafter to be on the lips of an American statesman. For twenty years it has stood in America the synonym of meanness and baseness. I have studied somewhat carefully the political history of the country during the last fifteen or twenty years, and I have always noticed that when I heard a man prate about being a conservative and about conservatism, he was about to do some mean thing. [Laughter.] ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... energies, the same will to great vices, had given force to great virtues. Do we provide the opportunity? Do we believe in Good? If we are ourselves deceived in any one, is not all, thenceforth, deceit? if treated with contempt, is not the whole world clouded with scorn? if visited with meanness, are not all selfish? And if from one of our frailer fellow-creatures we receive the blow, we cease to believe in women. Not the breast at which we have drank life—not the sisterly hands that have guided ours—not the one voice ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... the buildings which they needed for their common life, besides temples, but there was no adorning of them with gold and silver, for they made no use of these for any purpose; they took a middle course between meanness and ostentation, and built modest houses in which they and their children's children grew old, and they handed them down to others who were like themselves, always the same. But in summer-time they left their gardens ...
— Critias • Plato
... long-suffering with me and professed even gratitude, and was just (in a sense) to her son, and showed here and there moments of genuine and not undignified emotion; but O! on the other side, what lapses—what a mechanical movement of the brain, what occasional trap-door devils of meanness, what a wooden front of pride! I came out damped and saddened and (to say truth) a trifle sick. My wife had better luck with the daughter; but O, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... highway robbery. And you have spent the afternoon in putting me in the wrong about them—in assuming that it was I who wanted to steal YOUR letters—in explaining that it all came about through my meanness and selfishness, and your goodness, your devotion, your ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... government; but it is a dangerous attitude for any people to assume toward another nation. It does not turn the soul-searchings in on self. It does not get down beneath the skin of things; down, for instance, beneath a hide of self-righteousness to meanness or nobility of motive. A big ship always has barnacles; the United States is a big ship, and she keeps her engine going and her speed up and in the main her prow headed to a big destiny. It ill becomes a little ship to bark out—but let it ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... thinking. He is so much in earnest that his English is badly wrenched in the effort to convey his views, but I give his words very nearly as he wrote them. "What I think and what often I observed is that the Chinese very meanness and sordidness, just exactly what were the Jews. Scatter all round the world, and still they feel very proud of their country, despise the foreigners, close all their sea-ports, would not allow the poor celestial to go out or have civilized men to enter the happy country. On ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various
... mere subsistence. The sting of animal wants is his chief motive of action, and the full gratification of animal wants his highest ideal of happiness. The "noble savage," as sketched by poets, weary of the hollowness, the insincerity, and the meanness of artificial life, is really a very ignoble creature, when seen in the "open daylight" of truth. He is selfish, sensual, cruel, indolent, and impassive. The highest graces of character, the sweetest emotions, the finest sensibilities,—which make up the novelist's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... but it would help to keep us more select for the future. (Cheers.) In fact, I don't see, gentlemen, why we shouldn't make the club big enough to take in any fellow who, like all of you, hates cowardice, and meanness, and dirtiness, and that sort of thing. (Cheers, not unmixed with blushes.) We may not all think alike about everything, but, if we are all agreed it's good form to be gentlemen, and honest and brave, I don't see why we can't be 'Select Sociables' still. We pride ourselves ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... is trying to ruin me, but that kind of meanness isn't in his line. Perhaps I'd better say that I never had clothes like those and that I sold no land ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... strip the wretch of his last claim to manhood. Then followed the brutal instant of extinction, and the paltry dangling of the remains like a broken jumping-jack. He had been prepared for something terrible, not for this tragic meanness. He stood a moment silent, and then - "I denounce this God-defying murder," he shouted; and his father, if he must have disclaimed the sentiment, might have owned the stentorian voice with which it ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a virtuous love to plant a blister there!' What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others and ignorance of ourselves—seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy—mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... great credit among his neighbours.' He soon became a respectable member of civil as well as religious society; for, by the time that he joined the church, his Christian character was so fully established, that, notwithstanding the meanness of his origin and employment, he was considered worthy of uniting in a memorial to the Lord Protector. It was to recommend two gentlemen to form part of the council, after Cromwell had dissolved the Long Parliament. It is a curious document, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Thus the eye turned round to look at you without turning the head indicates generally slyness or suspicion; but if this is combined with large expanded eyelids or fixed eyebrows, as we see it in Titian's pictures, it will denote calm contemplation or piercing sagacity, without anything of meanness or fear of being observed. In other cases it may imply merely indolent, enticing voluptuousness, as in Lely's portraits of women. The languor and weakness of the eyelids give the amorous turn to the expression. How ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... paused, inherent meanness struggling with a snobbish desire to emulate the Duchess; and finally she gave ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Gosport," said Cecilia, "who seem to make the minutiae of absurd characters your study, can explain to me, perhaps, why Mr Briggs seems to have as much pleasure in proclaiming his meanness, as ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... of "mine" and "thine" will ensure unity, because it abolishes the primary cause of discord; common maintenance by the state removes all temptation either to meanness or cringing. Our guardians will be uncommonly happy. As to practicability: communism is suitable for war. The youngsters will be taken to watch any fighting; cowards will be degraded; valour will be honoured, and death on the field, with other supreme services to the state, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... I deliver myself to be, provided it be such as I really am, I have my end; neither will I make any excuse for committing to paper such mean and frivolous things as these; the meanness of the subject compels me to it.'—'Human reason is a two-edged and a dangerous sword. Observe, in the hand of Socrates, her most intimate and familiar friend, how many points it has. Thus, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... shape, by obliging them to conform to the rules of politeness and proper behavior, as understood by their class. For this purpose the senior lieutenant of each regiment was the chief of the regimental club, and there was a general chief for the whole army. Offenses against good manners, faults of meanness, or oddity of behavior, were discouraged by admonitions, given privately by the chief, or publicly in the convivial meetings of the club. Moral pressure might be carried so far in an aggravated case, as to cause the culprit to resign ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... makes one believe in the adage: "God gives children." Augustine was little, or, to describe her more truly, delicately made. Full of gracious candor, a man of the world could have found no fault in the charming girl beyond a certain meanness of gesture or vulgarity of attitude, and sometimes a want of ease. Her silent and placid face was full of the transient melancholy which comes over all young girls who are too weak to dare ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... can hate, others.' CHAP. IV. The Master said, 'If the will be set on virtue, there will be no practice of wickedness.' CHAP. V. 1. The Master said, 'Riches and honours are what men desire. If it cannot be obtained in the proper way, they should not be held. Poverty and meanness are what men dislike. If it cannot be avoided in the proper way, they should not be avoided. 2. 'If a superior man abandon virtue, how can he fulfil the requirements of that name? 3. 'The superior man does not, even for the space ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... that most depressing companion—the sense of his own meanness. He was unable to help knowing that the exercise of force against weakness is the most ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... House. The captivating work is not without its faults, chief among which is the curious awkwardness of design which makes of the composition, cut in two by a central tree, two pictures instead of one. Undeniably, too, there is a certain meanness and triviality in the little nymph or mortal of the foreground, which may, however, be due to the intervention of an assistant. But then, with an elasticity truly astounding in a man of his great age, the master has momentarily ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... to read the words, for I did not realise the full meanness of what I was doing until the end came, and I woke with a shock to see myself as I really am. All these last ten days I have been acting a part to myself as well as to others, pretending to be unconscious ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... plain, strong-minded women, who had about as little to do with Fashion as with the changing clouds. I have given considerable attention to this fact. It is worthy of the deepest thoughtfulness. Oh, it is a solemn fact that we descend into our children, in our weakness or strength, in our meanness or majesty, as we have lived. And what a lean, meagre, moonshine inheritance does a fashionable mother convey to her offspring! I confess that to me there is something grand in being the mother of a noble son or daughter, of a strong and virtuous family of children. If there is a just ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... was brought to bear in the right direction. The girl who could do or think meanly avoided the expression of Annabel's beautiful eyes. It was impossible for her to think badly of her fellow-creatures, but meanness and sin made her sorrowful. There was not a girl in Heath Hall who would willingly give ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... Ariosto's or Spenser's knights-errant might have done in the fairy country of old romance. In the sordid tale of "Irish Artifice," printed in Curll's "Female Dunciad" (1728), no reader could distinguish in the romantic names Aglaura and Merovius the nationality or the meanness of a villainous Irish housekeeper and her son. And though the tale is the very reverse of romantic, it contains no hint of actual circumstance. The characters in Mrs. Haywood's early fiction move in an imaginary world, sometimes, it is true, marked with ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... times it happens that the meanness and trifling nature of a cause not very obvious to observation has occasioned it to be entirely overlooked, even on account of that very meanness, since no one is willing to acknowledge that he has been alarmed by a cause of little consequence, and which he would ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... This act of meanness had been brought to light by an explanation between the lady and the Englishman. On his saying to the princess that he was ready to do anything for her, and that the two hundred sequins he had given her were as nothing in comparison ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... chief and none was demanded. For a time Hamilton was bitterly disgusted and wounded. He shrugged his shoulders, finally, and accepted his new enemy with philosophy, though by no means with amiability and forgiveness; but he had seen too much of the selfishness and meanness of human nature to remain pained or ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... may this lead to? Ah, none for him, for Bonython now steps in and plies him with flattery and drink, gaining from the chief, at last, his signature—the bow totem—to a transfer of the land for which he is willing to sell his daughter. Ruth, maddened at her father's meanness and the Indian's brutality, rushes on the imbruted savage, grasps from his belt the knife that has slain her lover, cleaves his heart in twain, and flies into the wood, leaving Bonython ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... The meanness of his vices prejudices the grandeur of his crimes. What would you have? Peter the Cruel massacred, but he did not steal; Henry III assassinated, but he did not swindle; Timour crushed children under horses' hoofs, much as M. Bonaparte exterminated women and old men on the boulevard, ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... Reginald, you will not Get any Presents from Santa Claus this Year; but you, my son James, will get Oodles of Presents, because you have Been Good. Will you Believe it, Children, that Bad boy Reginald said he didn't Care a Darn and he Kicked three Feet of Veneering off the Piano just for Meanness. Poor James was so sorry for Reginald that he cried for Half an Hour after he Went to Bed that Night. Reginald lay wide Awake until he saw James was Asleep and then he Said if these people think they can ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... on religious subjects are worthy of a liberal and enlarged mind. He could discern clearly enough the folly and meanness of all bigotry except his own. When he spoke of the scruples of the Puritans, he spoke like a person who had really obtained an insight into the divine philosophy of the New Testament, and who considered Christianity as a noble ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... sentiments from those which I entertain, I trust, I shall be always liberal enough to tolerate in any one, without prejudice to previous intimacy; but I cannot remain on terms of friendship with a man who has the meanness to seek to conciliate the party he opposes, by concealing his adherence to that which he ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... she could prove to her friend that no such beginning was possible. In the first place there was the falsehood, the base falsehood, which Sir Francis had told. In order to save himself he had declared that he had rejected her. It was very mean. At this moment its peculiar meanness made her feel doubly sure that the man was altogether unfitted to be her husband. But she would allow the false assertion to pass unnoticed. If he could find a comfort in that let him have it. Perhaps upon the whole it would be better ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... course, he spoke Urdu, but he had also mastered many queer side-speeches like the chotee bolee of the women, and held grave converse with shopkeepers and Hill-coolies alike. He was precocious for his age, and his mixing with natives had taught him some of the more bitter truths of life: the meanness and the sordidness of it. He used, over his bread and milk, to deliver solemn and serious aphorisms, translated from the vernacular into the English, that made his Mamma jump and vow that Tods must go Home next hot weather. Just ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... that. Breaking trust. Meanness. It was mean and dishonorable of you when you knew you ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... Mr. Middleton, who had been an attentive listener, "what's all this about? Tempest, do you write down your task? Good reason why you don't bring home your books. Speak, girl, quick—are you guilty of such meanness?" ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... sashes and neckerchiefs and some fine jewels, they devoured us with their eyes, and one of them, speaking to her papa, that most hospitable gentleman invited us to enter his house. By that time we were once more upon our saddles and ready to start. Roche felt indignant at the meanness of the fellow, who had received our seventy-five cents for the water before he invited us into the house. We refused, and Roche told him that he was an old scoundrel to sell for money that which even a savage will never refuse to his ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... which all men admire in a Sickingen or a Cid. Even his vices, his hatred of an enemy, his contempt for a foreigner, his jealousy of rivals, his implacable love of revenge, have in them a dash of barbaric greatness, and nothing of the petty meanness of the vices of civilization and ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... 'Well, speakin' of tricks and meanness, I've allers heard tell that there was some of them things hitched to the tail of the stock market. What makes the stock market price of—well, ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the parallel ends. In Jackson, even as a cadet, self was subordinate to duty. Pride was foreign to his nature. He was incapable of pretence, and his simplicity was inspired by that disdain of all meanness which had been his characteristic from a child. His brain was disturbed by no wild visions; no intemperate ambition confused his sense of right and wrong. "The essence of his mind," as has been said of another of like mould, "was clearness, healthy ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... softly smoothing back the hair from her forehead, said in kind, fatherly tones, "I am not displeased with you, daughter. I understand that it was quite accidental, and I am sure my little girl is entirely above the meanness of intentionally listening to what is evidently not meant for her ear. And in fact, now that I think of it, I am not sorry that you know I did not, and do not now, approve of the treatment you received at that time. Yet that was the first time I had ever mentioned it to any one, and I should ...
— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... galleys filled every port, whose merchandise crowded every city, who divided with Cosmo de Medici the commerce of the world. Here did Jacques Coeur reflect, with bitter disappointment, on all the selfishness, cruelty, meanness, and ingratitude, of the man he had mainly assisted to regain the throne of his ancestors. It was here he was told that the falsehood of the charge against him had been proved; but when he quitted this, the first prison which the gratitude of the king had ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... the soldiers with every thing of which they were in need, he brought them all easily into his measures, believing that the most effectual means of succeeding in his mission, was by acting gently and in a conciliating manner with every one: yet in all this he acted without meanness or servility, constantly preserving the dignity becoming his rank and authority. In all his negociations, the president was ably and faithfully seconded by his major-general Alfonzo de Alvarado, who was exceedingly serviceable ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... most public virtues always accompany it. Truth, sincerity, all the cardinal virtues are fostered most where there is most independence. This takes away the source of all corruption, all temptation. This seeks dependence, and victimizes its creatures to every purpose of corruption and meanness. ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... faces turned up to the sky, and their hands so small in death, and when I see wounded men, and hear of soldiers going out of the trenches with a laugh and a joke to cut wire entanglements, knowing they will not come back, then I am ashamed of meanness and petty spite. So my poor young woman got a "fair dose of it" this morning, and when she had gulped once or twice I ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... marriage with some neighbour's daughter, I would do it with all my heart; and even then they would expect you should have some little estate, or be of some trade. When such poor folks as we are wish to marry, the first thing they ought to think of, is how to live. But without reflecting on the meanness of your birth, and the little fortune you have to recommend you, you aim at the highest pitch of exaltation; and your pretensions are no less than to demand in marriage the daughter of your sovereign, who with one single word can crush you ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... discovery of new countries and nations, or of new species and sources of commerce, the advantages thence arising must ultimately redound to the emolument of Great Britain. Since, as our fleets are at present superior to those of the whole world united, it must be a matchless degree of supineness or meanness of spirit, if we permit any of the advantages deriveable from new discoveries, or from a more extended navigation, to be ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... destin'd never to be read. Fain would I view thee, with prophetic eyes, Exalted more among the good and wise; 60 A glorious and a long career pursue, As first in Rank, the first in Talent too: Spurn every vice, each little meanness shun; Not Fortune's minion, but her noblest son. Turn to the annals of a former day; Bright are the deeds thine earlier Sires display; One, though a courtier, lived a man of worth, And call'd, proud boast! the British drama forth. [4] Another view! not less renown'd for Wit; Alike for courts, and ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... left it to Mackenzie's imagination to fix his identity, not bending to reveal his name. Hector Hall, Mackenzie knew him to be, on account of his pistols, on account of the cold meanness of his eyes which Dad Frazer had described as holding such a throat-cutting look. But armed as he was, severe and flash-tempered as he seemed, Mackenzie was not in any sort of a flurry to give ground before him. He looked up at him coolly, ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... is corrupted like stagnant water, and passion dwindles, frittered away upon the infinitely small objects which it strives to exalt. Herein lies the secret of the avarice and tittle-tattle that poison provincial life. The contagion of narrow-mindedness and meanness affects the noblest natures; and in such ways as these, men born to be great, and women who would have been charming if they had fallen under the forming influence of greater minds, are balked of ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... she faced about now a second time she would indeed attract attention. So, while her cheeks flamed hot at the meanness, the miserable ridiculousness of the imposture, she assumed a brisk, determined gait, as though she knew just where she were going, and, turning out of the square down a by-street, walked around the block, even stopping ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... deal of the gaiety in the trenches, but the wounded are not gay. Neither are they sad, however. They are calm, meditative, strangely purified and matured. It is as though their great experience had purged them of pettiness, meanness and frivolity, burning them down to the bare bones of character, the fundamental substance of the soul, and shaping that substance into something so strong and finely tempered that for a long time to come Paris will not ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... Middlesex. The last record ought to be preferred, because it was made upon oath. It is observable, that, as a native of Winborne, he is styled filius Georgii Prior, generosi; not consistently with the common account of the meanness ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... him see that he does not fall Heidelberg Catechism were declared to be infallible Highborn demagogues in that as in every age affect adulation History has not too many really important and emblematic men Human nature in its meanness and shame I hope and I fear I know how to console myself If he has deserved it, let them strike off his head Implication there was much, of assertion very little In this he was much behind his age or before it It had not yet occurred ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... deepening daily. He had even addressed a small meeting of miners on the subject of the rights of the people, and he was no pusillanimous reformer. He declared the diggers had reached that point at which toleration meant meanness of spirit. The thought of civil war was appalling, but not so much so as the degradation of a nation in which the manhood plodded meekly under the whip, like driven cattle yoked ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... 100 in the house of representatives, but that majority voted directly against its convictions. It was told that it would get no jobs for constitutents until it had surrendered its honesty. American history contains no such pitiful instance of cowardice and grovelling meanness. Instead of one Benedict Arnold selling his soul for temporary gain, we had fifty. It did the soul of me good to read the returns of the next Congressional election and to know that the truckling, craven ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... termed the scatalogical group, with the two subdivisions of urolagnia and Coprolagnia.[24] Inter faeces et urinam nascimur is an ancient text which has served the ascetic preachers of old for many discourses on the littleness of man and the meanness of that reproductive power which plays so large a part in man's life. "The stupid bungle of Nature," a correspondent writes, "whereby the generative organs serve as a means of relieving the bladder, is doubtless responsible for much of the disgust which those organs ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the Spanish usurpation, when robbed of her commerce by Holland and by England, united against her will to a decaying power, she was unable to finish her last great work, while such buildings as she did herself finish—for it must not be forgotten that Mafra was designed by a foreigner—show a meanness of invention and design scarcely to be equalled in any other land, a strange contrast to the exuberance of fancy lavished on the buildings of a ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... he was close and hard with others. He paid small wages to his employes and never gave more than the man bargained for, no matter what extra service might be rendered. He carried his economy to a degree of meanness painful to contemplate. At his death, out of his vast estate, he left to his friend and faithful manager an annuity of only two hundred dollars, which his ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... Whether third or fourth rate attorney, counselor, surgeon, journalist, cure, artist, or author, the Jacobin is like the shepherd that has just found, in one corner of his hut, a lot of old parchments which entitle him to the throne. What a contrasts between the meanness of his calling and the importance with which the theory invests him! With what rapture he accepts a dogma that raises him so high in his own estimation! Diligently conning the Declaration of Rights, the Constitution, all the official documents ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... to illustrious persons, and antient and noble families; several occurrences in which the Public is interested, and other matters of a more private nature, can only be found in works of this kind. History cannot stoop to the meanness of examining the materials of which Memoirs ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... triumphantly; "now you'll come back with me to our camp, and explain what sort of meanness you were up to, ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... her sober young face there was no hint of discontent, nothing of meanness or envy to narrow the blue eyes, nothing of bitterness to touch the sensitive lips, nothing, even, of sadness; only a gravity—like the seriousness of a youthful goddess musing alone on mysteries unexplained even ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... him behind the broom bushes. He had ceased to love her, she knew, and although he had never freed her from her promise, Morva had too much common sense to feel bound for ever to a man who had so evidently forgotten her. If sometimes the meanness and selfishness of his conduct dawned upon her mind, the feeling was instantly repressed, and as far as possible banished, in obedience to the instinct of loyalty to Garthowen, which was so strong a trait in ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... not be maintained. They were followed by a meanness and a descent of the mind into lower levels; the loss of wings; no high speculation. Locke, to whom the meaning of ideas was unknown, became the type of philosophy, and his "understanding" the measure, in all nations, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... self-forgetfulness. All his devotion, his self-abjection, had been the mere qualms of a craving, the flush of eager courtship. Do as she would to overcome these realizations, forces within her stronger than herself, primordial forces with the welfare of all life in their keeping, cried out upon the meanness of his face, the ugly pointed nose and the thin compressed lips, the weak neck, the clammy hands, the ungainly nervous gestures, the tuneless whistling between the clenched teeth. He would not let her forget a single detail. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... proclaim and emphasize the faults of a poor, unfortunate, demented man. We can hardly blame them; for, in their eyes, Rousseau appeared as a kind of mad dog—a pest to society, deserving of no quarter. They did not realize—they could not—that beneath the meanness and the frenzy that were so obvious to them was the soul of a poet and a seer. The wretched man wandered for long in Switzerland, in Germany, in England, pursued by the ever-deepening shadows of his maniacal ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... fire it was always cold. The carpet was very dingy, and the mirrors were much spotted; but the poverty of the room was the respectable poverty of age: old furniture had become fashionable just in time to save it from being metamorphosed by its mistress into a show of gay meanness and costly ugliness. A good fire of mingled peat and coal burned bright in the barrel-fronted steel grate, and shone in the brass fender. The face of the boy continued to look very red in the glow, but still its colour came more from within than from without: he cherished the memory of his ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... had been very well pleased with him in London, but he was dissatisfied at hearing heavy complaints of rents racked, and the people driven to emigration.' Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 2, 1773. He reproached him also with meanness as a host. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... state, with all due deference to your correspondent's term 'bolt,' that Madame Lola Montez left quietly and unostentatiously.... The attempt to stop her leaving Sydney and prevent her engagement in Melbourne was an exhibition of meanness at which every honest heart must feel disgusted. Alone, in a strange land, without friends or protector, her position as a woman should in itself have saved her from the unmanly abuse heaped upon her and the contemptible attitude manifested by ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... welcome; and so my service to you; and may the squire, and all such sneaking rascals, go to the devil together."—"O fie!" says Adams, "O fie! He is indeed a wicked man; but G— will, I hope, turn his heart to repentance. Nay, if he could but once see the meanness of this detestable vice; would he but once reflect that he is one of the most scandalous as well as pernicious lyars; sure he must despise himself to so intolerable a degree, that it would be impossible for him to continue a moment in ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... have done us an injury will callous the heart and harden the affections. When we have been slighted by some one or misjudged, oh, how Satan strives to get us to thinking much about this, and to work a "hurt" feeling into our heart. Even to think about the meanness of others will bring a harshness and coldness into the inner life. That which we condemn in others will, if we think and talk much about it, creep into our ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... to accuse me of meanness. You shall not say that I left you on your wedding-day without a shilling in your pocket, as your friend was left ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... Assembly. M. Dupin had answered, "I cannot, I am guarded." Jerome Bonaparte burst out laughing. In fact, no one had deigned to place a sentinel at M. Dupin's door; they knew that it was guarded by his meanness. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... scrupulous fear must damp the heat and retard the impetuosity of speaking, while at the same time it prevents the mind from attending to thoughts which are of greater moment. As, therefore, it is carelessness to yield to these faults, so it is meanness to be ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... generally was supposed to be. And during the whole Trent affair, Lord Lyons's conduct was discreet, delicate, and generous. Events may transform Lord Lyons into an official enemy of the Union; but a mind soured by human meanness is soothingly impressioned by such true nobleness in a diplomat and ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... Now, though they were but lodgings, and the street not in fashion, Olivier Dalibard's apartments had an air of refinement, and even elegance, that contrasted both the wretched squalor of the abode Gabriel had just left and the meanness of Dalibard's former quarters in London, The change seemed to imply that the Provencal had already made some way in the world. And, truth to say, at all times, even in the lowest ebb of his fortunes, there was that indescribable neatness and formality ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of ethics. In his conception, virtue is the mean, vice the excess lying on either side—courage, for example, the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice, temperance, between incontinence and insensibility, generosity, between extravagance and meanness. The various phases of feeling and the various kinds of action he analyses minutely on this principle, understanding always by "the mean" that which adapts itself in the due proportion to the circumstances and requirements of ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... murmured about his extravagant way of life. Though he became the favourite and leader of young men who were much his superiors in wealth and station, he was much too generous to endeavour to propitiate them by any meanness or cringing on his own part, and would not neglect the humblest man of his acquaintance in order to curry favour with the richest young grandee in the university. His name is still remembered at the Union Debating Club, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... calculated to deprive Flinders of the credit that he had won. Both Peron and Freycinet knew, too, when they issued their volume and atlas, that Flinders was being held in captivity in Mauritius; and the dead captain was certainly not guilty of the meanness and mendacity of hurrying forward the issue of books that pretended to discoveries never made, while the real discoverer was prevented from ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... related the particulars of the event at Green Point, which had procured him the whipping. Lily expressed her horror at the meanness of Master Archy, and poured out her sympathy in unmeasured fulness upon ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... theorist, but the individuality of a broad-minded, high-minded, chivalrous gentleman. With a soul open to the finest sentiments and ideas of the age in which he lives, tolerant of frailty, but intolerant of meanness, falsehood, and malignity, and writing with the frankness with which a cultivated man of decided opinions might speak to a company of chosen associates, the most obstinate bigot can hardly fail to feel the charm of his free and cordial manner of expression. Hume, Gibbon, Hallam, and Macaulay, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... be opened after long knocking. The round campanile that towers and seems to totter in its strange dilapidation beside the church is so beautiful that it surprises one at once by its melancholy nobility in the midst of so much meanness and desolation. It is a building of the ninth century, and may well have been used as much as a watch tower as a bell tower. Till recently it had at its base a sacristy, but this has been swept away. Of old the church too had before it a great narthex of which certain ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... fair count; but then it shows his insatiable vanity. Vanity is one of the capital sins; it is hard to tell into what meanness it may not lead a man.' With this sententious denunciation, the Mexican, who had clearly misinterpreted my indignant ejaculation, raised his hat, with an air of extreme politeness, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... never fear it, it cannot be. And O, fellow-Christians, what a day will that be when we, who have been kept prisoners by sin and the grave, shall be fetched out by the Lord Himself! It will not be such a coming as His first was—in meanness and poverty and contempt. He will not come, O careless world, to be slighted and neglected by you any more. To think and speak of that day with horror doth well beseem the impenitent sinner, but ill the believing saint. How full ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... prescribed by his law, prompted Mary to perform this act of religion, though evidently exempt from the precept. Being poor herself, she made the offering appointed for the poor: accordingly is this part of the law mentioned by St. Luke,[4] as best agreeing with the meanness of her worldly condition. But her offering, however mean in itself, was made with a perfect heart, which is what God chiefly regards in all that is offered to him. The King of Glory would appear everywhere ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... her there, alone and fierce—thrawn, as the Scotch say—bent upon a course of conduct that she knew would hold her up to the hatred of every right-thinking person of her acquaintance, and bitterly triumphant in the knowledge. The meanness of her errand never struck her. On the contrary, she would have argued it was one well worthy of her, a part of the scheme in the consummation of which she had spent her married life and her whole indomitable energy, losing actually her own identity in the process, ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... were pale with indignation, and asked whether she recognized the tablets as her property; Paula, after convincing herself, replied with a flaming glance of scorn and aversion at Horapollo: "Yes, my lord. It is mine. That base old man has taken it with atrocious meanness from among my things." For an instant her voice failed her; then, turning to the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... enlightened, hardened, sharpened, as to evil; he sees it where others do not.—MOZLEY, Essays, i. 308. All satirists, of course, work in the direction of Christian doctrine, by the support they give to the doctrine of original sin, making a sort of meanness and badness a law of society.—MOZLEY, Letters, 333. Les critiques, meme malveillants, sont plus pres de la verite derniere que les admirateurs.—NISARD, Lit. fr., Conclusion. Les hommes superieurs ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... a-countin' of 'em up and a-gloryin' in it all the tother night, takin' credit to myself for givin' away a few victuals after I had had plenty myself. Think of a man gittin' self-righteous over givin' to some poor fellow-critters what he couldn't eat himself! If that ain't meanness, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... he whispered savagely between his teeth; "and I will contradict you to your face! If you are desperate, I am desperate too. I don't care what meanness I am guilty of! I will deny it on my honor; I will deny it on my oath. You heard what she said about you at Browndown. She will ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... conferring on him a new trust and commission, was deemed an instance of cruelty and injustice. To sacrifice to a concealed enemy of England the life of the only man in the nation who had a high reputation for valor and military experience, was regarded as meanness and indiscretion; and the intimate connections which the king was now entering into with Spain, being universally distasteful, rendered this proof of his complaisance still ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Meantime, Ferdusi's poem of Yussuf, and his magnificent verses on several subjects, had received the fame they deserved. Shah Mahmud's late remorse awoke. Thinking by a tardy act of liberality to repair his former meanness, he dispatched to the author of the Shah Namah the sixty thousand pieces he had promised, a robe of state, and many apologies and expressions of friendship and admiration, requesting his return, and professing ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... men of his time. He was of an eminently social temper, although averse to large companies and shy and silent in their presence. "There is no such thing," he once said, "as real conversation but between two persons." He was free from malice, meanness, or jealousy, Pope to the contrary notwithstanding. He was absolutely loyal to his principles and to his friends, in a time when many men changed both with as little compunction as they changed wigs and swords. His personality was ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... from within, it is far otherwise. Alongside of these warblings of a heart grateful to the first of Kings, there goes on a series of utterances to Niece Denis, remarkable for the misery driven into meanness, that can be read in them. Ill-health, discontent, vague terror, suspicion that dare not go to sleep; a strange vague terror, shapeless or taking all shapes—a body diseased and a mind diseased. Fear, quaking continually for nothing at all, is not to be borne in a handsome ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... Company's affairs, more might be said to his prejudice—not in respect of his integrity, for, I believe him to have been a most honourable man, and incapable of any meanness—but in regard to his management. Although, as the original projector of the Canada Company, he evinced much cleverness, and afterwards displayed considerable judgment in the choice of the best situations ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... abide by law and order, I came safely past them and turned up the less-frequented street that held my inn, when at the corner, under the big lamp, a young man with something of a swagger about him, in spite of the meanness of his dress, came out from the shadow of the wall and looked ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... to let her fall into the hands of France; but the vast majority of the house seemed to think that the entrance of France into the quarrel rendered all present thought of negociation an absurdity and a meanness; and that no future friendship could be hoped from a people who, though descended from us and bound to us by the strong ties of community of descent, language, and religion, had united themselves with the most ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... "I thought everybody had to begin with the first question. All the rest of us took so long over it, that we hadn't time for the parsing, and yet we got bad marks, and you, who hadn't even tried, got a good mark. It's just like Miss Rowe's meanness." ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... Kingdom of England;" the monarchical title our commonwealth men had not yet had time enough to obliterate from their colloquial style. This writer called himself, in his barbarous English, The Moderate! It would be hard to conceive the meanness and illiteracy to which the English language was reduced under the pens of the rabble-writers of these days, had we not witnessed in the present time a parallel to their compositions. "The Moderate!" was a title assumed on the principle on which Marat denominated ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... and love of learning, the house of Este, among its other contradictory qualities, was distinguished for capriciousness and meanness. Even Muratori, their ardent panegyrist, does not attempt to conceal this blemish. We must deduct a good deal from the high-sounding praise which the courtly writers of Italy bestowed upon this house for its splendid patronage of literature, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... endues her, at her best, with a sweet and subtle fragrance of humanity that is, perhaps, unique. Free from any sense of inherited or conventional superiority or inferiority, as devoid of the brutality of condescension as of the meanness of toadyism, she combines in a strangely attractive way the charm of eternal womanliness with the latest aroma of a progressive century. It is, doubtless, this quality that M. Bourget has in view when he speaks of the incomparable delicacy of the American girl, or M. Paul Blouet when he asserts ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... low, and though the terms they employed were usually common and popular and conveying no impression of refinement, by the mere harmony of their composition have attained dignity and elevation, and avoided the appearance of meanness. Such among many others are Philistus, Aristophanes ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... were[8] these old Romans!" He who suffers a single feature of amiableness to screen the general misconstruction of social relations, may easily find a spirit of chivalrous courtesy in what, after all, was only a self-protecting meanness, applied to one special case of private intercourse under a brutalizing system applied to all other intercourse between men of public distinction. It is certain that the prevailing relations upon the Continent between master and servant, did, before the French Revolution, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... as a poppy, as he flashed up in honest anger that such paltry meanness should be ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... curse is nothing to her. She scorns even to mention the gods.[169] Horrible as she is, she is almost awful. But, to set against Regan's inferiority in power, there is nothing: she is superior only in a venomous meanness which is almost as hateful as her cruelty. She is the most hideous human being (if she is one) that ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... no clashing of arms, no valiant deeds, no suggestion of the heroic. The King's enemies are, for the most part, contemptible persons; the King himself is a cold-blooded, long-headed ruler, merciful indeed, but from policy, not from generosity, and of a meanness in money matters very far from royal. Yet he was not without virtues. He was not unjust; he was a statesman more loyal to his pledges than most of his contemporaries or their successors. He gave something like order and rest to a distracted land, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... "That just shows the meanness of this slander. They have allowed all this time to elapse, and then all of a sudden rake up events which have been forgotten to furnish materials for scandal, in order to tarnish the lustre of our high position. I inherit ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to be the model nation, and the German petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing the "brutally destructive" tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... of the other peddlers made fun of my piety and it could not last long. Moreover, I was in contact with life now, and the daily surprises it had in store for me dealt my former ideas of the world blow after blow. I saw the cunning and the meanness of some of my customers, of the tradespeople of whom I bought my wares, and of the peddlers who did business by my side. Nor was I unaware of certain unlovable traits that were unavoidably developing in my own self under ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... futility of Strafford's sentimental love of the king, whom he despises while he loves him; Strafford's blustering weakness and blindness when he forces his way into the Parliament House, and the contemptible meanness of Charles. The low intrigues of the Court leave the strongest impression on the mind, not the mighty struggle, not the fate of the Monarchy and its ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... and her followers to revolt: the refusal to women of a generous education, of a living wage, of opportunities for professional distinction; the social habit of amused contempt at women's doings; the meanness that used a woman's capacity for mating and motherhood to bind her a slave either of the kitchen or of the streets. All these things Ellen knew to be true, because she was poor and had had to drink life with the chill on, but it did not sadden ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... profession, Without trust of public money, And without bribeworthy service, He acquired, or more properly created, A Ministerial Estate: He was the only person of his time Who could cheat without the mask of honesty, Retain his primeval meanness When possessed of ten thousand a year: And having daily deserved the gibbet for what he did, Was at last condemned for what he could not do. Oh! indignant reader! Think not his life useless to mankind! Providence connived at his execrable designs, To give to after ages A conspicuous ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... de Geste, wherein Eadgar (Otkerus or Otgerus) gets what belonged to Holger (Holge), the Helga of "Beowulf's Lay". The caprices of the Fates, where one corrects or spoils the others' endowments, are seen in Saxo, when beauty, bounty, and meanness are given together. They sometimes meet heroes, as they met Helgi in the Eddic Lay (Helgi and Sigrun Lay), and help or begift them; they prepare the magic broth for Balder, are charmed with Hother's lute-playing, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... west of the little town, and then walked briskly forward. The country looked poor and mean—on my right was a field of oats, on my left a Methodist chapel—oats and Methodism! what better symbols of poverty and meanness? ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... 3-4. Drusus. 'Generous and free from all selfishness and meanness, but without political experience, adroitness and knowledge of men, he aspired to a task which surpassed his strength.' —Ihne. 4-6. By the Sempronian Laws of C. Gracchus 123 B.C. exclusive judicial rights had been given ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... to plant a blister there!' What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others and ignorance of ourselves—seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy—mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... editor of The Athenaeum. In historic biography he appears as a champion of men who have been maligned by former writers. He vindicates William Penn from the aspersions of Lord Macaulay, and Bacon from the charges of meanness ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... can stand most any talk o' yourn but your pious talk,—that kills me right up. After all, what's the odds between me and you? 'Tan't that you care one bit more, or have a bit more feelin'—it's clean, sheer, dog meanness, wanting to cheat the devil and save your own skin; don't I see through it? And your 'gettin' religion,' as you call it, arter all, is too p'isin mean for any crittur;—run up a bill with the devil all your life, and then sneak out when pay time ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... barren meads Mr. Roberts rented as the summer declined, he would have said that a living could only be gained from them as the mouse gains it in frost-time. By sharp-set nibbling and paring; by the keenest frost-bitten meanness of living; by scraping a little bit here, and saving another trifle yonder, a farmer might possibly get through the year. At the end of each year he would be rather worse off than before, descending a step annually. He must ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... a certain aspect he is," I said, dismissing my remark lightly. "As I was saying, Mr. Razumov, when you have lived long enough, you will learn to discriminate between the noble trustfulness of a nature foreign to every meanness and the flattered credulity of some women; though even the credulous, silly as they may be, unhappy as they are sure to be, are never absolute fools. It is my belief that no woman is ever completely deceived. Those that are lost leap into the abyss with ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... flashed as, without a word, he took out a currency note from his box and handed it to the station master. When they brought my father his change he flung it disdainfully back at them, while the station master stood abashed at this exposure of the meanness of his ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... he, "the passage of the 'Memoires de D'Aubigny,' in which that devoted servant, a Gascon like myself, poor as myself, and, I was going to add, brave as myself, relates instances of the meanness of Henry IV.? My father always told me, I remember, that D'Aubigny was a liar. But, nevertheless, examine how all the princes, the issue of the great Henry, keep up the character of ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... does not apply to much of what, to the outer world, may seem far better entitled to be remembered. She had it in her to hurt you, help you, pity you, mock or amuse you, and back of it all was the honesty and truth of a womanhood capable of courageous conduct, and despising all forms of meanness. That she was variously regarded was natural. Margaret Shippen said she cared only for dress and the men; and the witty Miss Franks, seeing further, but not all, said that Darthea Peniston was an actress ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... after day, and take all you would give, and at the end of a year feel no tie; he could hear you slandered, and not take your defence; he could make a joke at your expense, if one came into his mind that he thought sufficiently witty, and never have a sense of meanness! He would have had nothing to overcome. He would only learn better if he perceived some loss of consideration, and consequent advantage to himself. That would make him more cautious, but not make him more aware. And you cannot call him wicked any more than upon any occasion you could call ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... his speech,—and though he was short, he was very fiery and energetic. Quick as lightning words of wrath and scorn flew from him, in which he painted the cowardice, the meanness, the falsehood of the ballot. "The ballot-box," he said, "was the grave of all true political opinion." Though he spoke hardly for ten minutes, he seemed to say more than enough, ten times enough, to slaughter the argument of the former speaker. At every hot ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... France, in particular, might have been expected to protest against it; but the imbecility and dotage of Louis XV, and the weakness of his minister, paid too little attention to the interests of their own nation to be likely to think of others. They made the most frivolous excuses, and even had the meanness to attempt to shift the blame on the shoulders of their ambassador at Vienna, pretending that he amused himself with hunting instead of politics, and had no knowledge of the design of partition until it was consummated. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... original meaning of low, and low as the earth; and this is also the sense which humilis always bears in classical Latin, though Christianity (which first recognised humility as a virtue, instead of stigmatising it as a meanness) attached to it the sense which its derivatives in all modern Romance languages, with the exception of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various
... extremely clean; upon proper occasions fine. Your carriage genteel, and your motions graceful. Take particular care of your manner and address, when you present yourself in company. Let them be respectful without meanness, easy without too much familiarity, genteel without affectation, and insinuating without ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... which had been withheld by Mahmud. Meantime, Ferdusi's poem of Yussuf, and his magnificent verses on several subjects, had received the fame they deserved. Shah Mahmud's late remorse awoke. Thinking by a tardy act of liberality to repair his former meanness, he dispatched to the author of the Shah Namah the sixty thousand pieces he had promised, a robe of state, and many apologies and expressions of friendship and admiration, requesting his return, and professing great sorrow ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... affection or some great self-sacrifice, and I respect and admire them, and think they are like that all through. And the day comes when they are not quite straightforward, or are guilty of some petty meanness, which a man who is not fit to black their boots would ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... love of the beautiful itself is moral—that is to say, what we love in it is virtue. A perfect form or a delicate colour are the expression of something which is destroyed in us by subjugation to the baser desires or meanness, and he who has been unjust to man or woman misses the true interpretation of a ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... and take delight in doing it, and so we should walk in the light. Dark thoughts would pass away from our minds, dark feelings from our hearts, dark looks from our faces. We should look our neighbours cheerfully and boldly in the face; for our consciences would be clear of any ill-will or meanness toward them. We should look cheerfully and boldly up to God our Father; for we should know that He was with us, guiding and teaching us, well- pleased with all our endeavours to see things as He sees them, and to live and work on earth after His image, and in His likeness. We should look ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... seems the life, the only moving principle of the Borneons. It may truly be said of the latter, that they would tell a lie when the truth would serve them better. They will employ duplicity and treachery on every slight occasion; defeat their own purpose by their meanness, and yet continue in the same crooked paths. They will conspire without any object, or one too mysterious to arrive at; and, while they raise a cloud of doubts in the mind of the poor, their own equals ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... all that, or is it that they don't want to see? And they are pleased, pleased! And to think that this is only the first blossoming, and that the real fruits are to come! But what really matters is not the stinginess, is not the meanness, but the tone of the whole thing. For that will be the tone after marriage, it's a foretaste of it. And mother too, why should she be so lavish? What will she have by the time she gets to Petersburg? Three silver roubles or two 'paper ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... particulars of the event at Green Point, which had procured him the whipping. Lily expressed her horror at the meanness of Master Archy, and poured out her sympathy in ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... but all her influence was brought to bear in the right direction. The girl who could do or think meanly avoided the expression of Annabel's beautiful eyes. It was impossible for her to think badly of her fellow-creatures, but meanness and sin made her sorrowful. There was not a girl in Heath Hall who would ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... many particulars relating to illustrious persons, and antient and noble families; several occurrences in which the Public is interested, and other matters of a more private nature, can only be found in works of this kind. History cannot stoop to the meanness of examining the materials of which Memoirs are ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... gets the less you will get, and vice versa. We preach the gospel of hatred, because in the circumstances it seems the only righteous thing we can preach. The talk about the 'Gospel of Love' is simply solemn rubbish. It is right to hate stealing, right to hate lying, it is right to hate meanness and uncleanness, right to hate hypocrisy, greed, and tyranny. Those who talk of the Gospel of Love with landlordism and capitalism for its objects want us to make our peace with iniquity."[238] "The Class War is inevitable under the present form of property-holding, and for it there can ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... still discoursed whimperingly upon the subject of his ruined coat and the meanness of mankind, and there was no weaning his interest for a moment, try as Weary would. And fifteen miles away in a picturesque creek-bottom a man lay dying in great pain for want of one little part of the wisdom stored uselessly away in the brain of ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... of some under the specious guise of economy may not impose upon you as a well-disposed youth. And so, out of pure good-will to you, I draw instances from my experience to advise or warn you. There is nothing to be more carefully avoided than that upstart society compounded of meanness and luxury, for these twain, bad enough apart, are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... strait-laced. And he knew nothing of common Christian morality. All the people on Bora Bora were Christians; but he was a heathen, the only unbeliever on the island, a gross materialist, who believed that when he died he was dead. He believed merely in fair play and square dealing. Petty meanness, in his code, was almost as serious as wanton homicide; and I do believe that he respected a murderer more than a ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... give orders for having it shown that nothing said against him was true, but that then he must change politics and come over to the Tory party. Lord Byron replied that he would prefer death and all kinds of tortures to such meanness. Hereupon the person in question said that he must suffer the consequences, which would be heavy, since his colleagues were determined on his ruin, out of party spirit and political hatred. It was at this time that, going one day to the House, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... others then urged upon the commandant the absurdity and meanness of requiring it. It was clear to us and must have been so to him that it was for his interest to separate the three or four hundred officers from the thousands of prisoners accustomed to obey our orders. He finally consented that we should ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... thrifty man, whose thrift extended to meanness, and his wife was thoroughly selfish. They had but one child—a daughter—who bade fair to be an ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... not seem to him that Father O'Grady would stoop to such meanness, but there seemed to be no other explanation, and he fell to thinking of what manner of man was Father O'Grady—an old man he knew him to be, and from the tone of his letters he had judged him a clever man, experienced in the human weakness ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... at this time all the principal men and rulers went up out of the cities of Syria and Phoenicia, to bid for their taxes; for every year the king sold them to the men of the greatest power in every city. So these men saw Joseph journeying on the way, and laughed at him for his poverty and meanness. But when he came to Alexandria, and heard that king Ptolemy was at Memphis, he went up thither to meet with him; which happened as the king was sitting in his chariot, with his wife, and with his friend Athenion, who was the very person who had been ambassador at Jerusalem, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... concerning their footmen's calves. Nevertheless, to the end he was not kinder to Dives' oppression, less sympathetic towards the troubles of Lazarus, nor more indulgent to the vulgarity of the snob; nor a whit more tolerant of viciousness, affectation, or meanness of ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... flashes out in each of his portraits, enthusiasm runs over in each chapter, unexpected allusions form deep reservoirs of thought between the lines; but after all Hello was so little of an artist that the fairest legends fade when his fingers touch them; the meanness of his style impoverishes the miracles and renders them ineffectual. The art is lacking which would rescue the book from the category of ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... spirit. It was JEALOUSY. I returned home, and hastened to have an interview with Martha. Hitherto I had been of a quiet, timid disposition—I was now bold from frenzy and betrayed affection. I upbraided my cousin with duplicity, with meanness in receiving the addresses of the man betrothed to her relative. She retorted by drawing comparisons between our attractions, personal as well as pecuniary. At these I smiled—bitterly perhaps, but still I smiled. She scoffed at my pleas that Barnard was my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... is very salutary, because in studying them one gets so detached from them that one can perceive their emptiness, their meanness, and their puerile, nay, even bestial character. It might even be added that the mere thought of studying them is already an act of detachment in reference to them. "Thou wouldst not seek Me, hadst thou not already found Me," said God to Pascal. "Thou wouldst not make investigations ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... in Skinner's eyes. "So he did promise it," he explained. "He writ Tess a letter. He said as how he were sorry for his meanness an' would give me the deed. ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... convenient part of the proscenium, which an unsuccessful author should be required to mount, and stand his hour, exposed to the apples and oranges of the pit. This amende honorable would well suit with the meanness of some authors, who in their prologues fairly prostrate their skulls to the audience, and seem to invite ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... rate, without giving Andre time to gradually approach the subject weighing on his mind, she began to complain of the hard times, the scarcity of money, and the grasping meanness of ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... was not merely fighting solitude, she was beating her passionate little fists against the granite of her mother's nature. And I fancy that at an early age (she was very mature, mind), Emily came to hate her mother quite earnestly and conscientiously, and, so to speak, without meanness or malice. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... meanness," Quin ventured. "She'd give you all she had if it came to a showdown. But none of 'em realize you are grown up; they are ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... every grove. By sports like these are all their cares beguil'd, The sports of children satisfy the child; Each nobler aim, repress'd by long control, 155 Now sinks at last, or feebly mans the soul; While low delights, succeeding fast behind, In happier meanness occupy the mind: As in those domes, where Caesars once bore sway, Defac'd by time and tottering in decay, 160 There in the ruin, heedless of the dead, The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed, And, wond'ring man could want the larger pile, Exults, and owns his cottage ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... which he began to preach, shows in all his teachings and dealings with men an enduring patience under their rebuffs, a brotherly sympathy with their weakness, and a divine pity for their sorrows. Something, too, of divine anger with the pettiness and meanness of the unworthy ones among his followers, as when, after preaching with parable and exhortation to the wrangling brothers of the monastery of Kosamb[i], he left them, saying, "'Truly these fools are infatuate; it is no easy ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... to show to what a detail of meanness and cunning the reverend person descends, I must tell you that he brought from Washington a paper which he copied from the original memorial there; which memorial was a testimony of the merchants of Salem in favor of Colonel Miller's being ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... Indignation and Desire; her burning Heart is bursting with Despair, her Eyes grow fierce, and from Grief she rises to a Storm; and in her Agony of Passion, with Looks all disdainful, haughty, and full of Rage, she began to revile him, as the poorest of Animals; tells him his Soul was dwindled to the Meanness of his Habit, and his Vows of Poverty were suited to his degenerate Mind. 'And (said she) since all my nobler Ways have fail'd me; and that, for a little Hypocritical Devotion, you resolve to lose the greatest Blessings of Life, and to sacrifice me to your ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... Flinders of the credit that he had won. Both Peron and Freycinet knew, too, when they issued their volume and atlas, that Flinders was being held in captivity in Mauritius; and the dead captain was certainly not guilty of the meanness and mendacity of hurrying forward the issue of books that pretended to discoveries never made, while the real discoverer was prevented from ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... the fine new theatre, they had quite forgotten to increase the number of these instruments in proportion to the enlarged space. In this, as well as in the general equipment of the stage, which was materially deficient in many respects, I was impressed by the sense of a certain meanness about theatrical enterprise in Germany, which became most noticeable when reproductions were given, often with wretched translations of the text, of the Paris opera repertoire. If even in Paris my dissatisfaction with this treatment of opera had been great, the feeling which ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... expense of Captain Nance, of the Third. It must be remembered that the privates played many practical jokes upon their officers in camps, when at other times and on other occasions such would be no joke at all, but a bit of downright rascality and meanness—but in the army such was called fun. A nice chicken, but too old to fry, so it must be stewed. As the wagons were not up, cooking utensils were scarce—about one oven to twenty-five men. Captain Nance ordered Jess to bake the biscuit at night and put away till ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... outrageously duped and cheated. She had come to the shop and expressed herself to this effect, in no moderate terms; and Mrs. Bundlecombe, whilst returning the twopence, had made some disparaging remarks on the other lady's manners, meanness, dress, age, and general inferiority. The affront had never been quite forgotten on either side, and it was not without much ruffling of their mental plumage that the two old bodies found themselves established within a few yards ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... conceal his disgust. 'I leave you,' he says, the 'indelible disgrace of abandoning the garrisons.' [Major-General Gordon to Sir E. Baring (telegraphic), received at Cairo April 16.] Such abandonment is, he declares, 'the climax of meanness.' [Ibid, despatched April 8.] He reiterates his determination to abide with the garrison of Khartoum. 'I will not leave these people after all they have gone through.' [Major-General Gordon to Sir E. Baring, Khartoum, July 30; received at Cairo October 15.] He tosses ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... to pay Martell back for his meanness!" said Fred a little later. "This joke of Randy's is all right as far as it goes, but I think I'm going to go him one better—that is, if I can get ...
— The Rover Boys at Colby Hall - or The Struggles of the Young Cadets • Arthur M. Winfield
... is not uncommon among our nobler natures. That which was most uncommon in Houghton's character was his willingness to befriend a man even when he knew that the disgrace into which he had fallen was not undeserved. He could be severe—as severe as anybody I have ever known—upon vice and meanness; but if the sinner needed help he pitied him at once, and was ready to aid him to the best of ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... listened, in the meanness and meagerness of his soul, he kept thinking, "I will let her down ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... very lively couple as they walked up. He trickled sympathy when she told of the selfishness of the factory girls under her and the meanness of the superintendent over her, and he laughed several times as she remarked that the superintendent "ought to be boiled alive—that's what all lobsters ought to be," so she repeated the epigram with such increased jollity that they swung up to the theater in a gale; and, once facing the ennuied ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... Alberoni had snatched from contending suitors, it was concealed, and the most cheerful hilarity prevailed. Yet, amid the general expression of happiness, there were two persons who, attracting notice by the meanness of their attire, and the melancholy gloom upon their countenances, seemed to be out of place in so stately and so joyous an assembly. They were brother and sister, the descendants of Ghibellines who had died in exile, and distant relations of the Count, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... two remained invisible in the garret, the third, at any rate, appeared decently at the coffee-house, and paid his twopence like a gentleman. It was Pope that dragged into light all this poverty and meanness, and held up those wretched shifts and rags to public ridicule. It was Pope that has made generations of the reading world (delighted with the mischief, as who would not be that reads it?) believe that author and wretch, author ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... rain, and chilly winds, a bed of rock, and fare both hard and scanty. This was not what had troubled him in the old days. What had vexed his heart had been unclean words and deeds, greediness, hardness, cruel taunts, the lack of love, and the meanness and baseness of the petty life. All that was behind him now; he felt free and strong, and while he moved about to spy out his new kingdom, he sang loudly to himself a song of praise. The place pleased ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... degree of consequence in the eyes of the Frank invaders and those of his own subjects. The means with, which he acted were of various kinds, and, rather from policy than inclination, were often stained with falsehood or meanness; therefore it follows that the measures of the Emperor resembled those of the snake, who twines himself through the grass, with the purpose of stinging insidiously those whom he fears to approach with the step of the bold and generous ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... the minute, Heaven only knows how, but I knew it, and a desperate thrill of loneliness swept over me, a spasm of comprehension of the horrible void dividing us. Never did yearning babe stretch arms more wistfully to an unattainable mother than I at that moment to my mother earth. All her meanness and prosaicness was forgotten, all her imperfections and shortcomings; it was home, the one tangible thing in the glittering emptiness of the spheres. All my soul went into my eyes, and then I sneezed violently, and turning ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... unknown, and benevolence anticipated the demands of poverty.[I] Every misfortune was relieved, as it were, before it could be felt, without ostentation on the one hand, and without meanness on the other. It was, in short, a society of brethren; every individual of which was equally ready to give, and to receive, what he thought the common right of mankind. So perfect a harmony naturally prevented all those ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... our eyes and soften our hearts, is also the one consolation which we have when our sense of 'all the ills that flesh is heir to' becomes deep nearly to despair. When one thinks of the real facts of human life, and tries to conceive of the frightful meanness and passion and hate and wretchedness that have been howling and shrieking and gibbering and groaning through dreary millenniums, one's brain reels, and hope seems to be absurdity, and joy a sin against our fellows, as a feast would be in a house next door to where was a funeral. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... would soften the lad into penitence for some mad prank or reckless outrage, one hint of cold blame from his father would suffice to make him hardened and impenitent; and so things drifted from bad to worse. In all Hereward's lawless deeds, however, there was no meanness or crafty malice. He hated monks and played many a rough trick upon them, but took his punishment, when it came, with equable cheerfulness; he robbed merchants with a high hand, but made reparation liberally, counting ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... political warfare has equalled, in meanness and moral turpitude, this assassin-stab at the character of a public man. Washington, with proper dignity, treated it as he had done other slanders, with that contemptuous silence which it deserved. But that ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... Umbrians, and various other races, so the Scythic incursion may have, really benefited, rather than injured, Media, by weakening the great power to whose empire she aspired to succeed. The exhaustion of Assyria's resources at the time is remarkably illustrated by the poverty and meanness of the palace which the last king, Saracus, built for himself at Calah. She lay, apparently, at the mercy of the first bold assailant, her prestige lost, her army dispirited or disorganized, her defences injured, her high spirit broken ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... one generation ahead of the colored heads of our people. We may, if we please, refuse to emigrate, and crouch like spaniels, to lick the hand that beats us; but children's children at the farthest, will have outgrown such pitiful meanness, and will dare to do all that others have dared and done for the sake of freedom and independence. Then all this cowardly cant about the unhealthy climate, the voracious beasts, and venomous reptiles of Africa, will be at a discount, instead ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... with the use he would make of those documents, we think it best to track this Scotch slanderer throughout his slimy course, and expose his astounding mixture of ignorance, impudence and meanness. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... studio door closed upon the emissary of the trust company, the young couple looked at each other a little ruefully. Archie kicked over a chair or two and expressed himself volubly, now that it was safe, upon the priggishness and meanness of such folks as Mr. Solomon Smith. Adelle might wish that he had expressed himself in these vigorous terms earlier, when there could have been discussion and a chance of modifying Mr. Smith's decision. But she realized how raw he was feeling from the old gentleman's contempt ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... shiver to read the words, for I did not realise the full meanness of what I was doing until the end came, and I woke with a shock to see myself as I really am. All these last ten days I have been acting a part to myself as well as to others, pretending to be unconscious of danger, but I knew—oh, I knew perfectly well! I think ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... enough to spoil our temper. From morning till night, wherever we go, the people we meet are hurried, worried, preoccupied. Some have spilt their good blood in the miserable conflicts of petty politics: others are disheartened by the meanness and jealousy they have encountered in the world of literature or art. Commercial competition troubles the sleep of not a few. The crowded curricula of study and the exigencies of their opening careers, spoil life for young men. The ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... years I have borne poverty and meanness, sickness, heat, cold, toil—that I might make myself an artist. The indignities, the degradations—I could not tell them, if I spent all the time I have in writing a journal. I have lived in garrets—among dirty people—vulgar ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... it is far otherwise. Alongside of these warblings of a heart grateful to the first of Kings, there goes on a series of utterances to Niece Denis, remarkable for the misery driven into meanness, that can be read in them. Ill-health, discontent, vague terror, suspicion that dare not go to sleep; a strange vague terror, shapeless or taking all shapes—a body diseased and a mind diseased. Fear, quaking continually for nothing at all, is not to be borne in a handsome manner. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... sordidities and poverties? The Great American Museum, the down-town scenery and aspects at large, and even the up-town improvements on them, as then flourishing?—why, they must have been for the most part of the last meanness: the Barnum picture above all ignoble and awful, its blatant face or frame stuck about with innumerable flags that waved, poor vulgar-sized ensigns, over spurious relics and catchpenny monsters in effigy, to say nothing of the promise within ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... driving. You have already owned, that her outward eye was from the first struck with the figure and address of the man whom she pretends to despise, and who, 'tis certain, thoroughly despises her: but you have not told me, that still she loves him of all men. Bell has a meanness in her very pride; that meanness rises with her pride, and goes hand in hand with it; and no one is so proud as Bell. She has owned her love, her uneasy days, and sleepless nights, and her revenge grafted upon her love, to her favourite Betty Barnes—To lay herself ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... rapids of Niagara, and lay it on our unmoistened paper without breaking a bubble or losing a speck of foam. We steal a landscape from its lawful owners, and defy the charge of dishonesty. We skin the flints by the wayside, and nobody accuses us of meanness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... has dabbled, or still dabbles, in journalism is under the painful necessity of bowing to men he despises, of smiling at his dearest foe, of compounding the foulest meanness, of soiling his fingers to pay his aggressors in their own coin. He becomes used to seeing evil done, and passing it over; he begins by condoning it, and ends by committing it. In the long run the soul, constantly strained by shameful and perpetual compromise, ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... abominable house. To be constrained as I have been constrained! to be stopt by your vile agents! to be brought up by force, and be bruised in my own defence against such illegal violence! —I dare to die, Lovelace—and she who fears not death, is not to be intimidated into a meanness unworthy of ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... but slide around the wall of the house, get down on his hands and knees, and creep right under that open window, where he could hear every word that was said. What do you think of that for meanness, the skunk; now, it never occurred to me to try ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... he was at his step-mother's selfishness in keeping Dainty by her side the whole evening, and leaving him to be entertained by the other two girls, whom he secretly despised for their meanness to Dainty. ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... administration should be as pure as the angels in heaven," it should be overthrown. Did he exhibit the plain simplicity of a true republican in his dress and manners, and economy in all his expenditures, it was attributed to parsimony and meanness! A majority of his countrymen had been deceived as to his principles and character, and sacrificed him politically on the altar of prejudice and ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... of animal wants is his chief motive of action, and the full gratification of animal wants his highest ideal of happiness. The "noble savage," as sketched by poets, weary of the hollowness, the insincerity, and the meanness of artificial life, is really a very ignoble creature, when seen in the "open daylight" of truth. He is selfish, sensual, cruel, indolent, and impassive. The highest graces of character, the sweetest emotions, the finest sensibilities,—which make ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... "There would be no meanness and treachery and despicable underhand doings. Marcus, you must forgive me—I was a desperate woman fighting for my life's happiness. I thought I would try one forlorn hope. I kept you out of the way ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... from the public, and the companies unite in declaring that the expenses of operating their roads are too heavy to admit of even a moderate profit. This they do, no doubt, to excuse in some degree the meanness with which they conduct their enterprises; for it is a striking fact that the heavier such a company's business grows, and the more its profits increase, the more parsimonious it becomes towards its employees and ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... but of meanness—was in the gesture with which she gathered up the notes and pressed them into his shrinking hands. And yet Cyrus Treadwell was a rich man—the richest man living in Dinwiddie! Oliver understood now why she was crushed—why she had become the hopeless victim of the little troubles of life. ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... the plotter, 'but there I fail to follow you. You may, if you please, enact the part of Judas; but if, as I suppose, you recoil from that extremity of meanness, I am, on my side, far too intelligent to leave these lodgings, in which I please myself exceedingly, and from which you lack the power to drive me. No, no, dear sir; here I am, and here ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... spite of his meanness. He was a great church man, an' more'n half supported the Baptist church over there. Seemed as if he was willin' to give money to the Lord an' no one else, not even his own family. Mary was the first of the girls to get married, she bein' the eldest. She married ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... be any preference in occupation, let woman have it. God knows her trials are the severest. By her acuter sensitiveness to misfortune, by her hour of anguish, I demand that no one hedge up her pathway to a livelihood. O the meanness, the despicability of men who begrudge a woman the right to work anywhere, in any ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... dishonour to the splendour of their body by the blackness of their hearts; while those who regarded themselves as less than handsome in personal appearance might take especial pains to conceal the meanness of their body by the glory of their virtue? You see; the wisest man of his day actually went so far as to use the mirror as an instrument of moral discipline. Again, who is ignorant of the fact that Demosthenes, the ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... of all artists, Nature finds him most vulnerable. Donatello's last work shows the fatigue of hand and eye, though the intellect never lost its ardent and strenuous activity. There was no petulance or meanness in his old age, no decadence; he merely grew old, and his personality was ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... sung and dignified the humble pleasures of the poor. "The Cotter's Saturday Night" will be remembered when many a scientific tome and eloquent poem writ in long words is dust and ashes. And the scathing irony and wit satirizing the ignorant rich, the scorn of meanness and bigotry, the love of liberty and justice the melting tenderness of his love poems, the People he loved and wrote ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... drew her to a seat upon his knee, and softly smoothing back the hair from her forehead, said in kind, fatherly tones, "I am not displeased with you, daughter. I understand that it was quite accidental, and I am sure my little girl is entirely above the meanness of intentionally listening to what is evidently not meant for her ear. And in fact, now that I think of it, I am not sorry that you know I did not, and do not now, approve of the treatment you received at that time. Yet that was the first time I had ever mentioned ...
— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... wideness of ungraded streets and the waste of shanties propped upon poles above abysses of vacant lots, where two drunken soldiers are pummelling each other, towers the marvellous dome with its airy genius firmly planted above, like the ruins of Palmyra above contemporary meanness. Moving up the streets, in dust and mud-puddle, you see shabbily ambitious churches, with wooden towers; hotels, the curbs whereof are speckled with human blemishes, sustaining like hip-shotten caryatides the sandstone-wooden columns. Within there is a pandemonium of legs in the air, and an agglomeration ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... to the test by rough and angry times, as Waller was, may be pitied, but meanness is nothing but contemptible under any circumstances. If it be true that "every conqueror creates a Muse," Cromwell was unfortunate. Even Milton's sonnet, though dignified, is reserved if not distrustful. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... hearn him and Mrs. Ostrich giggling about something, and she has a reg'lar tantrum, and jest fur meanness goes out and falls down on the race track, pertending she has fainted, and they can't move her no ways, not even roll her. But finally they rousted her out of that by one of these here sprinkling carts backing up agin her and ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... Barbara's first recollection had been, "I must be a sport." With theoretical sporting instincts she knew herself the kind of sport who doesn't always run true to form. Hating meanness she could lapse into the mean, and toward Letty herself had so lapsed. That accident she must guard against. The issues were so big that whatever happened, she couldn't afford to reproach herself. Self-reproach would not only magnify defeat but poison success, since, if she availed herself ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... changing clouds. I have given considerable attention to this fact. It is worthy of the deepest thoughtfulness. Oh, it is a solemn fact that we descend into our children, in our weakness or strength, in our meanness or majesty, as we have lived. And what a lean, meagre, moonshine inheritance does a fashionable mother convey to her offspring! I confess that to me there is something grand in being the mother of a noble son or daughter, of a strong and virtuous family of children. If there ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... answer: 'Their wages were left unpaid, they were docked of their food, and served with poisonous drink, while for the sick and wounded no hospitals were provided. More of them were killed by the Queen's meanness than by the enemy.' ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... possession of us, and ours of Him, and display the short memory which ingratitude has. All have that other feature hinted at here—the contrast, so absurd if it were not so sad, between the worth and power of the God who is left and the other gods who are preferred. The essential meanness and folly of Israel are repeated by every heart departing from the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... sober young face there was no hint of discontent, nothing of meanness or envy to narrow the blue eyes, nothing of bitterness to touch the sensitive lips, nothing, even, of sadness; only a gravity—like the seriousness of a youthful goddess musing alone on ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... this as an insult to his daughter's memory, and, as the tomb was much smaller than many which had been erected in the cemetery by families to whom the Janseniuses claimed superiority, cited it as an example of the widower's meanness. But by other persons it was so much admired that Trefusis hoped it would ensure the prosperity of its designer. The contrary happened. When the mason attempted to return to his ordinary work he was informed that he had contravened trade usage, and that his former employers would have nothing ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... politeness and proper behavior, as understood by their class. For this purpose the senior lieutenant of each regiment was the chief of the regimental club, and there was a general chief for the whole army. Offenses against good manners, faults of meanness, or oddity of behavior, were discouraged by admonitions, given privately by the chief, or publicly in the convivial meetings of the club. Moral pressure might be carried so far in an aggravated case, as to ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... him. We meet with the like behaviour in Caesar's army in the midst of his march against Ariovistus. Let us therefore observe the conduct of our two generals in so nice an affair: and here we find Alexander at the head of his army, upbraiding them with their cowardice, and meanness of spirit; and in the end, telling them plainly, he would go forward himself, though not a man followed him. This showed indeed an excessive bravery; but how would the commander have come off, if the speech had not succeeded, and the soldiers had taken him at his word? ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... high-minded, charming-mannered, honourable and trustworthy woman in the world than a well-bred Englishwoman; but, on the other hand, there can be nothing more vulgar-minded, coarse, and despicable than women of fashion tend to become. There is no meanness nor shabbiness, not to mention fraud, that they will not stoop to when it suits themselves, from tricking a tradesman and sweating a servant, to neglecting their children, deceiving their husbands, and slandering their friends. They are sheep running hither and thither ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... her, as the New Zealanders have done, and to claim their ancient rights with tears now unheeded. I can see along the vista of the future, truth and righteousness in Britain's hands, and the inhabitants of New Guinea yet unborn blessing her for her rule; if otherwise, God help the British meanness, for they will rise to pronounce a curse ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... concern with the publication. It is Palmerston on whom the blame ought to rest, and on whom it will rest, only nobody seems to take the least interest in the dispute, and he brazens it out in a very unblushing manner. I am more particularly struck with the meanness here exhibited, from having just been reading Lord Chatham's correspondence, in which his noble and lofty character, so abhorrent of everything like trickery, shabbiness, and underhand dealing, shines forth with peculiar lustre. It is animating ...
— 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
... rank, yet, when they came to argument, maintained that manliness which becomes the force and vigour of his understanding. To shew external deference to our superiors, is proper: to seem to yield to them in opinion, is meanness[318]. The earl said grace, both before and after supper, with much decency. He told us a story of a man who was executed at Perth, some years ago, for murdering a woman who was with child by him, and a former child he had by ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... harsh now when the old Tories no longer look very dreadful and we can appreciate the sincerity of conviction which no doubt controlled most of them. But they were dangerous then, and Washington, with his honest hatred of all that seemed to him to partake of meanness or treason, proposed to put them down and render them harmless, being well convinced, after his clear-sighted fashion, that war was not peace, and that mildness to domestic ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... labor. "It lulls the social underdog with a sham consolation for the oppression and exploitation which are his lot, and furnishes the exploiter and oppressor with graceful distraction and absolution from his daily practice and meanness. This is the actual basis of Church activity to-day. The religion of labor is godless, for it seeks to restore ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... a person's temper by his size. There is more meanness in the head of a Weasel than in the whole of a ...
— Mrs. Peter Rabbit • Thornton W. Burgess
... while it lay in state, fell asleep one night, and let the tapers catch fire of the rich velvet mantle lined with ermine and powdered with gold flower-de-luces, which melted the lead coffin, and burnt off the feet of the deceased before it wakened them. The French love show; but there is a meanness reigns through it all. At the house where I stood to see this procession, the room was hung with crimson damask and gold, and the windows were mended in ten or a dozen places with paper. At dinner they give you three courses; but a third of the dishes is patched up with salads, butter, puff-paste, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... taken them, and, with a relentlessness which Swift could hardly have exceeded, and a good-nature which Swift rarely or never attained, has held them up to us as dissected preparations of half-innocent meanness, scoundrelism, and vanity, such as are hardly anywhere else to be found. I have used the word "preparations," and it in part indicates Fielding's virtue, a virtue shown, I think, in this book as much as anywhere. But it does not fully indicate it; for the preparation, wet or dry, is a dead thing, ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... this threat, Leicester's better angel called his pride to his aid, and reproached him with the utter extremity of meanness which would overwhelm him for ever if he stooped to take shelter under the generous interposition of his wife, and abandoned her, in return for her kindness, to the resentment of the Queen. He had already raised his head ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... brave its sternest will, When fenced by power and master of the world. Thou art sincere and good; of resolute mind, Free from heart-withering custom's cold control, 585 Of passion lofty, pure and unsubdued. Earth's pride and meanness could not vanquish thee, And therefore art thou worthy of the boon Which thou hast now received: virtue shall keep Thy footsteps in the path that thou hast trod, 590 And many days of beaming hope shall bless Thy spotless life of sweet and ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... matters to an extreme, and exaggerate his merit or demerit with regard to the public. His enemies are sure to charge him with the greatest enormities, both in domestic and foreign management; and there is no meanness or crime, of which, in their judgment, he is not capable. Unnecessary wars, scandalous treaties, profusion of public treasure, oppressive taxes, every kind of maladministration is ascribed to him. To aggravate the ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... the words, the more of artifice, of duplicity, of ingratitude, of insult, of meanness she discovered in them. In her cold fits of ill-humour, this lady was prone to degrade, as monsters below the standard of humanity, those whom, in the warmth of her enthusiasm, she had exalted to the state of angelic perfection. Emilie, though ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... irony, the meanness, of the trade of life that virtue may prove vicious in effect; and viciousness may produce good fruit. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... subject, referring the civil servant to her uncle, to Squire Carruthers, and to her solicitor, Mr. Coristine. The lawyer was disposed to be liberal in politics, although his friend Wilkinson was a strong Conservative; but the contemptible meanness of a Government department attempting to retire property deeded and paid for in order to gain a few hundred dollars or a new constituent, aroused his vehement indignation, and his determination to fight Lamb and his masters to the bitter end of the ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... Amphipolis and the Cardian territory, and is even turning Euboea into a hostile post, and advancing to attack Byzantium, it is safe to speak on Philip's behalf. Yea, among these men, some have risen rapidly from poverty to wealth, from meanness and obscurity to repute and honor, while you, on the contrary, have fallen from honor to obscurity, from wealth to indigence. For the riches of a state I consider to be allies, confidence, good-will; of all which you are destitute. And by your neglecting these things and suffering ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... the friend of Burke, and he found pleasure in an acquaintance with Wilkes. Nor, in all his admiration for rank and fortune, is there a single element of meanness. The man who wrote the letter to Lord Chesterfield need never fear the charge of abasement. He knew that there was "a remedy in human nature that will keep us safe under every form of government." ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... duties when the news arrived—taking preparation. Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes; perhaps they will attain to a woman's tenderness. Though they despised Rickie, and had suffered under Agnes's meanness, their one thought this term was to be gentle and ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... thought of the cost of keeping the promise, of exaggeration and untruthfulness. Some one must help her see the utter folly of snobbishness and false pride. In some way she must be taught the cruelty and meanness of gossip, the results of a sharp tongue and a critical spirit. She must be shown the sin of ingratitude and the curse of jealousy and envy. In fact the old ten commandments are needed by the girlhood of today as truly as they were needed ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... annually taken off! There is something in the horror of it, that surpasses all the bounds of imagination. Admitting that there exists in Africa something like to courts of justice; yet what an office of humiliation and meanness is it in us, to take upon ourselves to carry into execution the partial, the cruel, iniquitous sentences of such courts, as if we also were strangers to all religion, and to the ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... concerning me, may render one more meeting necessary; and so, sir, here ends our acquaintance."—Saying which, Sheringham, whose friendship even to my enlightened eye was nearly as sincere as any other man's, quitted my room, fully convinced of my meanness and unworthiness; my heart sank within me when I heard the door close upon him for the last time. I now possessed the power I had so long desired, and in less than an hour had lost a valued friend and a faithful servant. Nevertheless, Barton had told me a falsehood, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... the turn of one of these cut-throats' haunts, "they" would leap from the shadow and fall on his back. I warrant you, "they" would have been warmly received, though; but, alack! by reason of some nasty meanness of destiny, never indeed did Tartarin of Tarascon enjoy the luck to meet any ugly customers—not so much as a dog or a drunken man—nothing ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... to recall, even when he turned away to journey homewards. There, in that lonely place, it seemed to him to remain for ever—a link connecting him with the spirit of nature, and ever and anon drawing him back into her domain from the meanness, and folly, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... type of character, with the lines deepened, re-appears in Captain Booth, in Amelia, 1751, the heroine of which is a portrait of Fielding's wife. With Tom Jones is contrasted Blifil, the embodiment of meanness, hypocrisy, and cowardice. Sophia Western, the heroine, is one of Fielding's most admirable creations. For the regulated morality of Richardson, with its somewhat old-grannified air, Fielding substituted instinct. His virtuous ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... rough scorn—'it's not me that bothers. But it's the nasty meanness of it—me writing him such loving letters'—she put her hand before her face and laughed malevolently—'and sending him parcels all the time. You bet he fed that gurrl on my parcels—I know he did. It's just like him. I'll bet they laughed together over my letters. I ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... woman and brats who are in that hutch of an after-castle. It's long enough since I sailed in such a small old-fashioned ship as this. She's no machines, and she's not even a steering mannikin. Look at the meanness of her furniture and (in your ear) I've suspicions that there's rottenness in her bottom. But she's the best I'd the means to buy, and if she reaches the place at the farther end I've got my eye on, we shall have to make a home there, or be content ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... night when they had reached the plains a real blue blizzard struck them. "Mis' Lane" had been in pain all day and soon she knew what was the matter. They were alone and it was a day's travel back to the last house. The team had given out and the wind and sleet were seeing which could do the most meanness. At last the poor man got a fire started and a wagon sheet stretched in such a manner that it kept off the sleet. He fixed a bed under the poor shelter and did all he could to keep the fire from blowing away, and ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... goods, as usual. Then Mr. Traveling Man opened on politics. He remarked that all over the State there was a good show for burying the d—d Republicans that election. Luce glared at him in speechless wonder. Then Mr. Drummer launched out on the infernal meanness of the Republican leaders, but by this time Luce was ready for him, and the way that poor devil was talked to would make you sorry. When he next saw his friend there came pretty near being a fight, but the friend thought it too ...
— A Man of Samples • Wm. H. Maher
... weak girl, broken and suffering, and looking so small beside her, and she was angry that Gilbert should have chosen anything so pitiful against her own lofty beauty. But presently her anger ceased, not because it was unopposed, but because she was too large-hearted for any meanness. ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... friends and the wrath of his enemies Depths theological party spirit could descend Extraordinary capacity for yielding to gentle violence Human nature in its meanness and shame It had not yet occurred to him that he was married Make the very name of man a term of reproach Never lack of fishers in troubled waters Opposed the subjection of the magistracy by the priesthood Pot-valiant hero Resolve ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... exquisitely serene and beautiful creations of fiction—and Seth and Adam Bede present to us, variously modified, the aspect of that life which is aiming toward the highest good. On the other hand, Arthur Donnithorne and Hetty Sorrel—poor little vain and shallow-hearted Hetty—bring before us the meanness, the debasement, and, if unarrested, the spiritual and remediless death inevitably associated with and accruing from that "self- pleasing" which, under one form or other, is the essence of all evil and sin. Of these, Arthur Donnithorne and Adam Bede seem to us the two who are most ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... somethin' another man says is all right, doesn't that make it look as ef it was meanness in me? An' he goin' to work with me, too! What's the use o' sayin' that you ain't forcin' my hand? Givin' advice, Bob-Cat, ain't any go-as-you-please proposition; it's got to be thought out. Feelin's don't allers point the right trail to jedgment, an', as often as not, the blazes lead the wrong ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... from them. Mark Twain in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg had more recently put it bitterly on record that villages which prided themselves upon their simple virtues might from lack of temptation have become a hospitable soil for meanness and falsehood, merely waiting for the proper seed. And Clarence Darrow in his elegiac Farmington had insisted that one village at least had been the seat of as much restless longing as of simple bliss. Spoon River Anthology in its different ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... contentment. Perhaps this was a weakness; but it was certainly a harmless and amiable one, and not so offensive as intellectual pride. Scott indeed, while without vanity, had pride; but it was of a lofty kind, disdaining meanness and cowardice as worse even than transgressions which have their ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... find in the human heart a case of the fulcrum and lever. We commonly keep the departments of experience distinct; we think that different principles hold in each and that the dignity of spirit is inconsistent with the explanation of it by physical analogy, and the meanness of matter unworthy of being an illustration of moral truths. Love must not be classed under physical cravings, nor faith under hypnotization. When, therefore, an original mind overleaps these boundaries, and recasts its categories, mixing up ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... splendid presents, scent bottles, photograph albums, glove boxes, and other things of beauty, albeit his means were supposed to be nil. It was evident that Clara disapproved of Mr. Hammond's conduct in this matter, and even suspected him of meanness. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... walk then," said Dymock, "nay, I would gladly carry you on my back, rather than descend to the meanness of driving a bargain with a testy old fellow like that; by the bye, Shanty, ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... of jealousy Beth discovered that her husband pried upon her continually. He was very high and mighty on the subject of women spying upon men, but there seemed no meanness he would not compass in order to spy upon a woman. He had duplicate keys to her drawers and boxes, and rummaged through all her possessions when she went out. One day she came upon him standing before her wardrobe, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... soul's loins with a resolute hand, he thrust The base thought from him: "Nauhaught, be a man Starve, if need be; but, while you live, look out From honest eyes on all men, unashamed. God help me! I am deacon of the church, A baptized, praying Indian! Should I do This secret meanness, even the barken knots Of the old trees would turn to eyes to see it, The birds would tell of it, and all the leaves Whisper above me: 'Nauhaught is a thief!' The sun would know it, and the stars that hide Behind his light would watch me, and at night Follow me ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... being, think and aspire, only in the material world. The lesson of a common tie of brotherhood among all men. Lessons of manly self-reliance, of equanimity in breasting whatsoever of good or ill may happen. Lessons of the meanness of the rewards, the pettiness of the misfortunes of a shifting world of illusions. Lessons of the necessity for avoiding every species of evil thought and word, and for doing, speaking and thinking everything that is good, and for the bringing of the mind into subjection ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... the King, and he talked vehemently of his regret for the brave men who had fallen, among whom was the Duc de Mayenne, and bitterly complained of the dishonour to which he had been subjected; while in order to revenge himself at once upon De Luynes and the Duchess, he condescended to the meanness of informing the former that the Prince de Joinville was enamoured of his wife, and subsequently boasted to Bassompierre that he had done so. The Marquis listened in astonishment to this extraordinary communication, and in reply ventured to assure his Majesty that he had committed a serious ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... of chivalry [36] betrayed the meanness of his birth, and degraded the importance of his office; and the equestrian tribune was not less odious to the nobles, whom he adopted, than to the plebeians, whom he deserted. All that yet remained of treasure, or luxury, or art, was exhausted on that solemn day. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... look at, that same Richard when on foot. Therefore it was with an oddly mingled relief and sense of playing traitor, that she rose with the rest of the little company and left him by himself. She was thankful to escape, though all the while her inherent loyalty tormented her with accusation of meanness, as of one who deserts ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
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