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More "Weakness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... no one ventured to blame a system invented by mediocrity to please minds of its own calibre. The Restoration, like the Polish revolution, proved to nations as to princes the true value of a Man, and what will happen if that necessary man is wanting. The last and the greatest weakness of the public men of the Restoration was their honesty, in a struggle in which their adversaries employed the resources of political dishonesty, lies, and calumnies, and let loose upon them, by all subversive means, the clamor of the unintelligent ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... be made to serve as burden-carriers, and they doubtless would be continued to be used for saddle purposes in one way or another but for the wide use of the horse, a creature very much better adapted for carrying weight. The cloven foot of the bulls and buffaloes gives a weakness to the extremities which will quickly lead to disease in case they are forced to carry heavy loads such as the horse or ass may ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... his addiction to alcohol Mr. Gavel had a weakness, it was the equally British one of worshipping a title. Flattered by the honest baronet's invitation, he had met it almost more than half-way; and had dispatched six of his shabbiest horses to Birmingham ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to tears now; fearful that he might be caught in a moment of weakness, he fled to the barn and helped Pablo hitch a team of draft horses to an old spring wagon. Pablo's customary taciturnity and primitive stoicism had again descended upon him like a protecting garment; his madness had passed and he moved around the team briskly and efficiently. Parker ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... clearer investigation to rest upon a totally insecure foundation."[75] "It is not natural science itself which leads to naturalism, for, indeed, no natural science could arise if reality exhausted itself in the measurements of naturalism; but it is rather the weakness of the conviction of the spiritual life; it is the failure of certitude in regard to the presence of a spiritual existence; it is the unclearness concerning the inner conditions of all mental and spiritual activity which a shallow and popular ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... before I was out—in my mother's time—there was a man named Mallory who was tried for murder, the murder of a friend, who everyone knew was his rival. Well, he got off, but only after a long trial, and only by a little weakness in the chain of evidence, which even his friends at the time thought providential. He went abroad for a long time. Then he came into a title and returned to England. He was obliged to take up his position, and people were willing enough to forget the past. He opened ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... some reason he had haunted her thoughts more than she could explain. This was partly due to the fact that he was so much talked of at the fortress and so idolized by his soldiers. He was said to be without fear, or any human weakness, but after today Mildred ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook
... not," said General Belch; "but there may be some breakers ahead. If we lose the Grant it won't be the first cause or man that has been betrayed by the bottle. Condor, let me fill your glass. It is clear that if our dear friend Newt has a weakness it is the bottle; and if our enemies at Washington, who want to head off this Grant, have a strength, it is finding out an adversary's soft spot. We may find in this case that it's dangerous playing with edged tools. But I've great faith ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... haughty revellers, in evening dress and opera capes, appear among the humbler voyagers. For a time they stay on their dignity: sit bravely upright and talk with apparent intelligence. Then the drowsy poison of that stifled atmosphere overcomes them, too, and they fall into the weakness of their brethren. They turn over the opposing seat, elevate their nobler shins, and droop languid heads over the ticklish plush chair-back. Strange aliens lie spread over the seats. Nowhere will you see so many faces of curious foreign carving. It seems as though many desperate exiles, ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... presence. And, mind! don't stop on the way; go straight through: you'll find the trains fit in. I won't add, 'Keep your mouth shut'; you'll do that; unless"—he nodded significantly at the empty glass—"you take too much of that. That's rather a weakness of yours, Lord Heyton: master it, or it'll master you. Now, there's no time to lose. I'll order a brougham for you. Come, pull yourself together. Man!"—his disgust, impatience broke out, for the first time—"try to think what you're running away from! ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... vows and then asks that he may be absolved from his vow by the priest or other ecclesiastical authority. His mouth—that is, his spoken promise—leads him into sin, if he does not fulfil it (comp. Deut. xxiii, 21, 22). He asks release from his promise on the ground that it is a sin of weakness. The 'angel' is best understood as the priest (messenger), as in Malachi ii.7. Such a wriggling out of a vow will bring God's anger; for the 'voice' which promised what the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a woman—a young girl especially. It means the breaking of old ties, the beginning of a new life, the setting out into an unknown world on a voyage from which there can be no return. In her weakness and her helplessness she leaves one dependency for another, the shelter of a father for the shelter of a husband. What does she bring to the man she marries? Herself, everything she is, everything she can be, to be made or marred by him, and never, never, never to be the same to any other ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... performed by a handful of cavalry. To the distinguished Alexander of Parma, who improvised so striking and complete a victory out of a fortuitous circumstance, belonged the whole credit of the day, for his quick eye detected a passing weakness of the enemy, and turned it to terrible account with the promptness which comes from genius alone. A whole army was overthrown. Everything belonging to the enemy fell into the hands of the Spaniards. Thirty-four standards, many ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... fated to incur such unmerited odium? He savagely laved his face and neck. The fresh cool water was delightful at first, but it caused his injured nail to throb dreadfully. When he drew near to the fire he experienced an unaccountable sensation of weakness. Could it be possible that he was going to faint? It was too absurd. He sank to the ground. Trees, rocks, and sand-strewn earth indulged in a mad dance. Iris's voice sounded weak and indistinct. It seemed to travel in waves from a great distance. He tried ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... are all prepared to admire; but while we do this, how often we are tempted to declare it an impossible thing to live up to a high standard. God, recognising the weakness of human nature, sent His only-begotten Son to reveal the Father, and show us a life of goodness in human form. He has further descended to our weakness by permitting us from time to time to see in our midst living examples of how Christians can follow out the principles of Christ. ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... But Moliere has a weakness, too, for the bourgeois, and he has made M. Jourdain immortally delightful. There is not a really cruel touch in the whole character; we laugh at him so freely because Moliere lets us laugh with such kindliness. M. Jourdain has a robust joy in life; ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... despair, in moist eyes and trembling hands. It was impossible to leave her alone at such a time. . . . Then had come the farewell. "God be with you, my son! Do your duty, but be prudent." Not a tear nor a sign of weakness. All her family had advised her not to accompany her son to the railway station, so his sister had gone with him. And upon returning home, Marguerite had found her mother rigid in her arm chair, with a set ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... certain sort of self-reproach in all this. I feel it is a weakness perhaps, but I feel that we are all of us too hard on these organ fellows—for, after all, are they not, in a certain sense, the type and embodiment of our age? Is not repetition, reiteration, our boldest characteristic? Is there, I ask, such a "Grind" in the world ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... patient, X., 23 years of age, belongs to a family which he himself describes as nervous. His mother, who is anaemic, has long suffered from almost periodical attacks of excitement, weakness, syncope and palpitation. A brother of the mother died in a lunatic asylum, and several other brothers complain much of their nerves. The mother's sisters are very good-natured, but liable to break out in furious passions; this they inherit from their father. There appears to be no nervous ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... not,' said Manston absently. 'But I am going to set about it.' He hesitated, as if ashamed of some weakness he was about to betray. 'My object in calling was to ask if you had heard any tidings from Budmouth of my—Cytherea. You used to speak of her as one you ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... your piece," said Marilla, who would have scorned to be betrayed into such weakness by any poetry stuff. "I just couldn't help thinking of the little girl you used to be, Anne. And I was wishing you could have stayed a little girl, even with all your queer ways. You've grown up now and you're ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... he was encouraged in this, and that a self-indulgent man is only too liable to have the nicety of his sensitiveness spoiled. Certainly, he had a kind heart and good principles. He would lend any man money, or give any man help,—even to the extent of weakness and imprudence. This was one reason why he died no better off,—and one reason why his friends have so much exerted themselves to pay a tribute to his memory in the shape of an addition to the provision he had made for his family. The quickness of feeling which belonged ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... made few campaigns." There are mistakes and mistakes; errors of judgment, such as the most capable man makes in the course of a life, and errors of conduct which demonstrate essential unfitness for office. Of the latter class was that of Admiral Byng, when he retired from Minorca; a weakness not unparalleled in later times, but which, whatever the indulgence accorded to the offender, is a military sin that should for itself receive no condonement of judgment. As instances of the former, both Nelson and Napoleon admitted, to quote the latter's ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... have it no more. And what is it when we have it? Decidedly a confession of inferiority! That is, the desire to be distinguished is an acknowledgement of insufficiency. But I have still the craving for my dearest friends to think well of me. A weakness? Call it so. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... America was given by the Criterion Independent Theatre of New York on November 18, 1897, Mr. E. J. Henley playing Borkman, Mr. John Blair Erhart, Miss Maude Banks Gunhild, and Miss Ann Warrington Ella. For some reason, which I can only conjecture to be the weakness of the the third act, the play seems nowhere to have taken a very ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen
... girls read little stories to her. This she viewed as a surprising accomplishment, as she could only spell her way along, not being able to read well enough to enjoy it. So in one way or another they entertained her, making her forget her weakness. ...
— A Missionary Twig • Emma L. Burnett
... truth of the German atrocities, have appealed to education. We knew that Tacitus said, nearly two thousand years ago, that "the German treats women with cruelty, tortures his enemies, and associates kindness with weakness." But nineteen centuries of education have not changed the German one whit. The mere catalogue of the crimes committed by German officers and soldiers and set forth in more than twenty volumes of proofs destroys the ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... about it. The thing had been done, she considered, in an underhand manner; and Lady Maulevrier, who had begun by strenuously opposing the match, had been talked over in a way that proved the latent weakness of that great lady's character. Secondly, Miss Mueller, having herself for some reason missed such joys as are involved in being wooed and won, was disposed to look sourly upon all love affairs, and to take a despondent view of ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... audience of the Russia Embassadors; which [took place] after long waiting and fear of the falling of the gallery (it being so full, and part of it being parted from the rest, for nobody to come up merely from the weakness thereof): and very handsome it was. After they were come in, I went down and got through the croude almost as high as the King and the Embassadors, where I saw all the presents, being rich furs, hawks, carpets, cloths ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... of this weakness. Many fatherly precepts to correct such passionate tendency had been uttered. However, this deliberate, cold-blooded man had found his son's hasty temper of service, and in emergency did not hesitate to fan its ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... some act of their ministry; every chapel into which a new convert had been admitted was to be pulled down, and the pastor was to be banished. It was found necessary to set a guard at the doors of the places of worship to drive away the poor wretches who repented of a moment's weakness; the number of "places of exercise," as the phrase then was, received a gradual reduction; "a single minister had the charge of six, eight, and ten thousand persons," says Elias Benoit, author of the Histoire de l'Edit de Nantes, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... only to look at you," she added, a little wistfully, "to be sure there is something—something vital in Christianity, if we could only get at it, something that does not depend upon what we have been led to believe is indispensable. George, and men like him, can only show the weakness in the old supports. I don't mean that they aren't doing the world a service in revealing errors, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... threaten a charge. To meet this Colonel Broadwood sent one of his squadrons from the centre to join those under Captain Baring, so that at about a quarter to ten the reconnoitring force was formed with four squadrons towards the desert, two with the guns, and two towards the river. The weakness of the river flank of the troops encouraged the Dervish horse lurking in the scrub to make a bold attempt to capture the guns. The movement was shrewd and daring, but the cavalry commander met it with ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... will come back willingly. When you did want me, I was quite happy to come; there was no merit in it. I think you must be afraid, that, now you are getting well, I may be troublesome to you; but I should not have been, indeed. I should have come no longer than your weakness and confinement lasted. You owe me nothing; but it is right that you should deal as justly by me as if I was a lady—even the very lady that you love; and if you suspect me of meanly making much of the little I ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... justice to a living one. I cannot but condemn the dubious policy which she adopted, as unjust to my father, and highly perilous to herself and me.—But peace be with her ashes! her actions were guided by the heart rather than the head; and shall her daughter, who inherits all her weakness, be the first to withdraw the veil ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... he is on dangerous ground morally. For good morals must finally become habits, so ingrained in us that the right decision comes largely without effort and without struggle. Otherwise the strain is too great, and defeat will occasionally come; and defeat means weakness and at last disaster, after the spirit has tired of the constant conflict. And so on in a hundred lines. Good habits are more to be coveted than individual victories in special cases, much as these are to be desired. For good habits mean victories ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... might be said that a person died for want of medical advice: though this would not be likely to be said, unless the person was already understood to be ill, and in order to indicate that this negative circumstance was what made the illness fatal, and not the weakness of his constitution, or the original virulence of the disease. It might be said that a person was drowned because he could not swim; the positive condition, namely, that he fell into the water, being already implied in the word drowned. And here let me remark, that his falling ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... bare simplicity of my menu, had it been previously disclosed, would doubtless have disappointed more than one of my dinner-giving patronesses; but each item had been perfected to an extent never achieved by them. Their weakness had ever been to serve a profusion of neutral dishes, pleasing enough to the eye, but unedifying except as a spectacle. I mean to say, as food it was noncommittal; it ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... a deplorable commonplace, and, on the physician applying a stethoscope and begging her to attempt some verse, she could give us nothing better than a sonnet upon the expansion of the Empire. Her weakness was such that she could do no more than awake, and that feebly, while she professed herself totally unable to arise, to expand, to soar, to haunt, or to perform any of those exercises which ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... I said (station-masters have a weakness for tie-pins), "and a watch and a cigarette case. I shall be happy to lend you any ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... of October Jackson himself reached the rendezvous. He was still a mere wreck, thin as a shadow, tottering with weakness, and needing to be lifted bodily to his horse. His arm was closely bound and in a sling. His wounds were so sensitive that the least jar or wrench gave him agony. His stomach was in such a state that he was in danger of dying from starvation. Several times during ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... pitied," proceeded Valentine. "That isn't all"—he sighed again—"I was born with a bad French accent, and without a single tooth in my head, or, out of it, while such was my weakness, that it took two strong men, both masters of arts, to drag me through the rudiments of the ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... parlor when Mr. Carnegie and Bessie Fairfax stopped at the gate. He came out with flushed brow and ruffled hair to keep Bessie company and hold the doctor's horse while he went up stairs with Mr. Moxon to visit his wife. That room where she lay in pain often, in weakness always, was a mean, poorly-furnished room, with a window in the thatch, and just a glimpse of heaven beyond, but that glimpse was all reflected in the blessedness of her peaceful face. Mr. Moxon's threadbare coat hung loosely ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... where the people are as dumb as cattle and are capable only of the emotion of awe and need professional gentlemen to excite it, and to feed upon their substance. Here the people have their moments of weakness, but mostly they are pretty level-headed. They judge men by what they do, not by what they look like. The professional gentleman is first an object of curiosity and then an object of scorn. He's not for ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... you find here a Prince of less Fortitude and Vertue than your self, charge his Miscarriages on Love: a Weakness of that Nature you will easily excuse, (being so great a Friend to the Fair;) though possibly, he gave a Proof of it too Fatal to his Honour. Had I been to have form'd his Character, perhaps I had made him something more worthy of the Honour of your Protection: ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... Maya's good nature for weakness. For now something unusual happened to the little bee. Suddenly her depression passed and gave way, not to alarm or timidity, but to a calm courage. She straightened up, lifted her lovely, transparent wings, uttered ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... named Jar, who was condemned to twelve years' hard labour, came out with consumption contracted through the rigour of his imprisonment. Many others were reduced to such weakness through starvation that they had to be carried out of ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... form, produces an impression, of deep refinement. The whole monu- ment is a proof of exquisitely careful study; but I am not sure that this impression on the part of the spec- tator is altogether a happy one. It explains much of its great beauty, and it also explains, perhaps, a little of a certain weakness. That word, however, is scarcely in place; I only mean that M. Dubois has made a vi- sible effort, which has been most fruitful. Simplicity is not always strength, and our complicated modern genius contains treasures of intention. This ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... rest grumbling over the weakness of women in these days, to which even his sturdy lass now succumbed; but Barbara threw herself on her knees beside the bed in her room, buried her face in the pillows, and sobbed aloud. Another feeling, however, soon ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Colonel Fougas. "But gold has no attractions for my eyes. Wealth engenders weakness. Me, to languish in the sluggish idleness of Sybaris!—to enervate my senses on a bed of roses! Never! The smell of powder is dearer to me than all the perfumes of Arabia. Life would have no charm or zest for me, if I had to give up the inspiriting ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... were the men passing by, at whose coming Zeus' oracle had declared to him that he should have joy of his food. And he rose from his couch, like a lifeless dream, bowed over his staff, and crept to the door on his withered feet, feeling the walls; and as he moved, his limbs trembled for weakness and age; and his parched skin was caked with dirt, and naught but the skill held his bones together. And he came forth from the hall with wearied knees and sat on the threshold of the courtyard; and a dark stupor covered him, ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... Through her thin blouse he could feel her blood burning against his breast. He felt his senses going, a painful weakness seemed to stifle him, as if only a violent movement could give him breath. Feverishly he clenched his left hand, that was round her waist; with his right beneath her chin he ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... such a monstrous abstraction we are asked to give up the full rich world of sense, with all it means to us. It is surely not an intellectual weakness to say: "Tell us what you will of existence above and beyond that which is known to us; but do not deny some measure of ultimate Reality to that which falls within our ken. Leave us not alone with the Absolute of the orthodox mystic, or we perish of inanity! Clearly the elan vital—the ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... the feelings of others that he never expressed the anguish he felt, and seldom gave vent to the indignation roused by the persecutions he underwent; while the course of deep unexpressed passion, and the sense of injury, engendered the desire to embody themselves in forms defecated of all the weakness and evil which ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... the young man. "You've suited—God knows what!—your pride, your despair, your resentment." As he looked at her, the secret history of her weakness seemed to become plain to him, and he felt a mighty rage against the man who had taken a base advantage of it. "Gertrude!" he cried, "I entreat you to go back. It's not for my sake,—I'll give you up,—I'll ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... it is, we still preserve our dignity, our precedence, the priority of our position, but this arises from the former reputation of the government, which has now continued fifty years; and whenever we come to the proof, or they discover our weakness we shall lose it. If you were to say, the justice of our cause ought to augment our influence and diminish theirs I answer, that this justice requires to be perceived and believed by others as well as by ourselves, but this is not the case; for the justice of our ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... answered. "I'm his cousin," he went on, with another glance at the still figure. "And, my conscience, I never thought to find him like this! I never heard of any weakness on his part—I always thought him a particularly ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... the fleeting censure of aristocratic friends he left in the lurch the simple barbarian maiden who loved him with ardent passion, it was no evidence of resolute strength of soul, but of pitiful, reprehensible weakness. No, no! He must take the nocturnal voyage in order not to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... conceived when he created them. In this picture, the idea that most impressed me was, the representation of that more refined and subtle torture of martyrdom which consists in the incertitude and weakness of an individual against whom is arrayed the whole weight of the religious community. If against the martyr only the worldly and dissolute stood arrayed, he could bear it; but when the church, claiming ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... live under a ban for your sake. Miss Oliphant has lost her money. You say that you spent some time in her room; the purse was on her bureau. Miss Oliphant is rich, she is also generous; she says openly that she does not intend to investigate the matter. No doubt, if you confess your weakness and return the money, she will forgive you and not report this disgraceful ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... passive that I was no more aware of the pain than was I aware of the floor beneath me or the walls around me. Never was a man in better mental and spiritual condition for such an experiment. Of course, this was largely due to my extreme weakness. But there was more to it. I had long schooled myself to be oblivious to pain. I had neither doubts nor fears. All the content of my mind seemed to be an absolute faith in the over-lordship of the mind. This passivity was ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... Semyonitch as he was called even in his mistress's house, to which he often went and invariably on Sundays after mass—would have been excellent in all respects—if he had not had one weakness which has been the ruin of many men on earth, and was in the end the ruin of him, too—a weakness for the fair sex. Akim's susceptibility was extreme, his heart could never resist a woman's glance: he melted before it like the first snow of autumn in the ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... DEAR ARMAND—You are a dangerous advocate when you plead against Monsieur de Villeroy. I need to exaggerate your talents to diminish my weakness. You had, in my heart, a judge, interested in your gaining your cause. Come to-morrow to plead again, and I will give you ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... principle do we plunder the coasts of Africa, and bring away its wretched inhabitants as slaves than that, by which the greater fish swallows up the lesser. Superior power seems only to produce superior brutality; and that weakness and imbecility, which ought to engage our protection, and interest the feelings of social benevolence in behalf of the defenceless, seems only to provoke us to acts of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... by water to St. James's (having by the way shown Symson Sir W. Coventry's chimney-pieces, in order to the making me one;) and there, after the Duke of York was ready, he called me to his closet; and there I did long and largely show him the weakness of our office, and did give him advice to call us to account for our duties; which he did take mighty well, and desired me to draw up what I would have him write to the office. I did lay open the whole failings of the office, and how it was ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... gratitude to a Divine Providence that had supported us in sickness, and guided us through all dangers. There had been moments of hopelessness and despair; days of misery, when the future had appeared dark and fatal; but we had been strengthened in our weakness, and led, when apparently lost, by an unseen hand. I felt no triumph, but with a feeling of calm contentment and satisfaction we floated down the Nile. My great joy was in the meeting that I contemplated with Speke in England, ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... a joint is seldom as strong as it was formerly, although for all practical purposes the limb may be as useful as ever. Some degree of stiffness, of limited movement, or of muscular weakness, and occasional arthritic changes and a liability to re-dislocation, are the commonest sequelae. Prolonged immobilisation is liable to lead to stiffness by permitting of the formation of adhesions; while too early movement tends to produce a laxity of the ligaments which ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... city which has not been much better told by graver travellers. I, with them, could see (perhaps it was the preaching of the politicians that warned me of the fact) that we are looking on at the last days of an empire; and heard many stories of weakness, disorder, and oppression. I even saw a Turkish lady drive up to Sultan Achmet's mosque IN A BROUGHAM. Is not that a subject to moralise upon? And might one not draw endless conclusions from it, that the knell of the Turkish dominion is rung; ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with sex-relationship in the effort to put "love" on the throne, but experience shows that in all the intimate relationships of life some stay from without the individual desire is needed to restrain from impulsive change and lessen frictional expression of temperamental weakness. On reason and a sense of obligation are based all successful human arrangements, and ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... changed colour when she looked at it. It must have reminded her of some unhung scoundrel she's met with in the course of her career, and she took it out of me. She knows I like to suffer for my friends. That's my great weakness. I hope you'll make a better ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... hand, and then closed his eyes again, from weakness. We were now nearly abreast of the two batteries on the points, the guns of which had been trained so as to bear upon our boats that were towing out the brig. The first shot went through the bottom of the launch, and sank her; fortunately, all ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... Cushin. The success of this ignorant and notorious quack, who managed for a series of years to extract a magnificent income of some L10,000 or L12,000 per annum by trading on the credulity of his fellow-creatures, forms a curious commentary on the weakness of contemporary "society." It is said that he commenced life as a house-painter, and afterwards acquired some slight knowledge of art in the humble capacity of colour grinder to Sir Thomas Lawrence, and while colouring ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... soul's immortality is rather a natural feeling, an adjunct of self-consciousness, than a dogma belonging to any particular age or country. It gives eternity to man's nature, and reconciles its seeming anomalies and contradictions; it makes him strong in weakness and perfectable in imperfection; and it alone gives an adequate object for his hopes and energies, and value and dignity to his pursuits. It is concurrent with the belief in an infinite, eternal Spirit, since it is chiefly through consciousness of the dignity of the mind within us, that we learn ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... afternoon of the flower-show Juliet scarcely left Vera Fielding's side. During those five days Vera lay at the point of death, and though her husband was constantly with her it was to Juliet that she clung through all the terrible phases of weakness, breathlessness, and pain that she passed. Through the dark nights—though a trained nurse was in attendance—it was Juliet's hand that held her up, Juliet's low calm voice that reassured her in the Valley of the Shadow through which she wandered. Often too spent for ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... the Rhine into Germany. Access to the sea down the Scheldt was closed by the fleets of the Sea Beggars, and the commerce and industry of the first commercial port of western Europe passed to Amsterdam and Middelburg. Meanwhile there had been no signs of weakness or of yielding on the part of the sturdy burghers of Holland and Zeeland. On the fatal July 10, 1584, the Estates of Holland were in session at Delft. They at once took energetic action under the able leadership of Paul Buys, Advocate of Holland, and John ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... a glass will do me good. Where did you get it?" I asked, thinking it strange the Colonel should leave his brandy-bottle within reach of the negroes, who have an universal weakness for spirits. ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... great in the greatest way; and he also knew that his own gift was second to none. But would she link her lot with his? He yearned for some assurance. He had no ambition whatever for himself, but he would have toiled to succeed for her. It was his weakness to require someone to work for as he was working for the Boy; a purely personal ambition seemed to him a vexing, vain, and insufficient motive for action. All selfless people suffer from indolence when only their ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Bruce's abstract of the Abyssinian chronicles, the royal line was superseded in the 10th century by Falasha Jews, then by other Christian families, and three centuries of weakness and disorder succeeded. In 1268, according to Bruce's chronology, Icon Amlac of the House of Solomon, which had continued to rule in Shoa, regained the empire, and was followed by seven other princes whose reigns come down to 1312. The history of this period is very obscure, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Templars became a menace to Church and Society, 815-l. Templars concealed themselves under the name of Brethren Masons, 816-m. Templars, dead long ago, haunt the Vatican and disturb the Papacy, 814-l. Templars' decay due to inherent weakness, haughty ambition, ignorance, 819-m. Templars disappeared at once and their wealth confiscated, 821-u. Templars' dogma connected with Oriental philosophy by symbols used, 235-m. Templars encouraged new worship, promising liberty of conscience, 818-l. Templars initiated in the mysterious ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the sunshine and the finest days, as that which has conquered and prevailed, commends itself to us by its very antiquity and apparent solidity and necessity. Our weakness needs it, and our strength uses it. We cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it. If there were but one erect and solid standing tree in the woods, all creatures would go to rub against it and make sure of their footing. During the many ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... Mr. Vine," he said, "that you are developing an insular weakness. You are forgetting to be candid, and you are ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... hails Kandinsky, as a visual musician. The methods and ideas of each rival are so different that the title cannot be accorded to both. In his book, Kandinsky states his opinion of Cubism and its fatal weakness, and history goes to support his contention. The origin of Cubism in Cezanne, in a structural art that owes its very existence to matter, makes its claim to pure emotionalism seem untenable. Emotions are not composed of strata and conflicting pressures. Once abandon reality and the ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... said Mary French. "But wait till he seems to you a great strong archangel—an archangel with only the weakness of dabbling his wings in the dirt—and you will withhold from him nothing, no one, that may be of use to him. If he wants to put me by for a while, it is his will. You cannot take my place. I ...
— The King Of Beaver, and Beaver Lights - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... misfortune, and would hardly show his face to any one; for it is a peculiarity of weak natures that they feel their strength, not in their own self-respect, but always wish to show how much they can really do by some visible achievement. Misfortune they regard as evidence of their own weakness, and if they cannot ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... city mobs is a thing peculiar to no time or place. Rural Southern lynch law in that period, however, was in large part a special product of the sparseness of population and the resulting weakness of legal machinery, for as Olmsted justly remarked in the middle 'fifties, the whole South was virtually still in a frontier condition.[42] In post bellum decades, on the other hand, an increase of racial antipathy has offset the effect of the densification of ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... brothers have lent me money—assisted my return;—for their own ends, it is true: but the seeming obligation gives them real power. These Northern swordsmen would cut my throat if the Great Captain bade them. He counts on my supposed weakness. I know him of old. I suspect—nay I read, his projects; but I cannot prove them. Without proof, I cannot desert Palestrina in order to accuse and seize him. Thou art shrewd, thoughtful, acute;—couldst thou go to Rome?—watch day and night ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... where he was interested neither his eye nor his language had any weakness; but, as a rule, he is not interested either in nature or, if the truth be told, in Cynthia, but wholly in himself. He ranks among the most learned of the Augustan poets; but, for want of the rigorous training and self-criticism in ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... his sight, that, to this day, he knows not it is there. Indeed, I have, since, heartily repented that I read any of the book to him, for I found it a much more awkward thing than I had expected : my voice quite faltered when I began it, which, however, I passed off for the effect of remaining weakness of lungs; and, in short, from an invincible embarrassment, which I could not for a page together repress, the book, by my reading, lost ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... profound changes in the mind that receives them. Thus the wrong conception of self-immolation will be faithfully worked out by the unconscious—and has been too often in the past—in terms of misery, weakness, or disease. We remember how the idea of herself as a victim of love worked physical destruction in Therese de L'Enfant Jesus: and we shall never perhaps know all the havoc wrought by the once fashionable doctrines of predestination and of the total depravity of human nature. All this shows how ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... caution. He called out with a feeble, tremulous, but cheery voice, "Come in, Stunner—come in, Warrington. I knew it was you—by the—by the smoke, old boy," he said, as holding his worn hand out, and with tears at once of weakness and pleasure in his ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the army; Murat, whose courage had become proverbial; Murat, who might well have been taken by a sculptor as a model for the god of war; Murat, on one occasion, when he must have slept ill or breakfasted badly, had a moment of weakness. ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... condition of a soul cast down by the knowledge of the difficulty of the operation, the amount of the labour, the vastness of the work on one side, and on the other the ignorance, want of knowledge of the way, weakness of nerves and peril of death. He has no knowledge suitable to the business, he does not know where and how to turn, no place of flight or refuge presents itself; and he sees that, from every side, the waves threaten, with frightful, fatal impetus. ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... confessed, or declared, that words failed him. This, however, may be thought to have been uttered as a mere figure of speech; and some may say, that the imperfection I speak of, is but an incident of the common weakness or ignorance of human nature; and that if a man always knew what to say to an other in order to persuade or confute, to encourage or terrify him, he would always succeed, and no insufficiency of this kind would ever be felt or imagined. This also is plausible; ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... knows we struggled. We did not give in without agony. In our hopeless, staring eyes there was the anguish of the great temptation. We looked in each other's death's-head faces. We clasped skeleton hands round our rickety knees, and swayed as we tried to sit upright. Vermin crawled over us in our weakness. We were half-crazy, and ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... thoughts of those two sick officers, Captain Maryon and Lieutenant Linderwood, when I saw them, then and there. The spirit in those two gentlemen beat down their illness (and very ill I knew them to be) like Saint George beating down the Dragon. Pain and weakness, want of ease and want of rest, had no more place in their minds than fear itself. Meaning now to express for my lady to write down, exactly what I felt then and there, I felt this: "You two brave fellows that I had been so grudgeful of, I know that if you were dying you would put it ...
— The Perils of Certain English Prisoners • Charles Dickens
... the Man!' cried Jabez, after a solemn pause, leaning over his cushion. 'Seventy times seven times didst thou gapingly contort thy visage—seventy times seven did I take counsel with my soul—Lo, this is human weakness: this also may be absolved! The First of the Seventy-First is come. Brethren, execute upon him the judgment written. Such ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... day. She had seen that his strength steadily failed; he suffered paroxysms of pain; he lost consciousness more than once; and although he insisted to the last on acting as though he were well, his weakness increased until he could no longer sit out a game of whist, but was forced to lie on the sofa in his library where he liked to see every visitor who came to the house. He required that every thing about him should go on as usual, and not only made Esther go regularly to her work, but ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... glory into which he would enter by his enthronement at God's right hand. As Luther pointedly puts it: "Therefore do I go, he saith, where I shall be greater than I now am, that is, to the Father, and it is better that I shall pass out of this obscurity and weakness into the power and glory in which the Father is." In the light of this interpretation the meaning of our Lord's words above quoted does not seem difficult. The Paraclete was to communicate Christ to his church,—his life, his power, his riches, his glory. In his ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... feet lay a short descent to the ledge on which the cap had rested, and after that another precipice. It was not a pleasant position in which to be left alone with this strange companion, but I was helpless, and perhaps the trace of weakness and a something not altogether evil in his face, gave me some courage. Little enough it was, however, and in mere desperation I sat down on the side by the path. My companion flung himself down on the other side, with his legs dangling over the ledge, ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... at their ignorance of themselves. But Plato seems to think further that he has explained the feeling of the spectator in comedy sufficiently by a theory which only applies to comedy in so far as in comedy we laugh at the conceit or weakness of others. He has certainly given a very partial explanation of the ridiculous.) Having shown how sorrow, anger, envy are feelings of a mixed nature, I will reserve the consideration of ...
— Philebus • Plato
... time before the tumult had subsided, so far as to permit him to proceed. Indeed, judging by the usual, but fallacious standard of my own weakness, I began to be very uneasy for the situation of the preacher. For I could not conceive how he would be able to let his audience down from the height to which he had wound them, without impairing the solemnity and dignity of his subject, or perhaps shocking them by the ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... there is not a maudlin fibre in his whole body. He would not be the man to cry over a dead donkey whilst children are in want of bread. He would be slower than the excellent Dr. Primrose to believe in the reformation of a villain by fine phrases, and if he fell into such a weakness, his biographer would not, like Goldsmith, be inclined to sanction the error. A villain is induced to reform, indeed, by the sight of Amelia's excellence, but Fielding is careful to tell us that the change was illusory, and that the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... divine, born at Newark; was bishop of Gloucester; was author of the famous "Divine Legation of Moses," characterised by Gibbon as a "monument of the vigour and weakness of the human mind"; is a distracted waste of misapplied logic and learning; a singular friendship subsisted between the author ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... It might almost (borrowing a second title from the Index) call itself "Jeanne; ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu." The heroine is perfectly innocent, though both a femmelette and a fool. She never does any harm, nor, except through weakness and folly, deserves that any should be done to her. But she has an unwise and not blameless though affectionate and generous father, with a mother who is an invalid, and whom, after her death, the daughter ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... my earliest remembrance, to suppress a deadly and bitter hatred. This has made me secret and revengeful. I have been always tyrannically held down by the strong hand. This has driven me, in my weakness, to the resource of being false and mean. I have been stinted of education, liberty, money, dress, the very necessaries of life, the commonest pleasures of childhood, the commonest possessions of youth. This has caused me to be utterly wanting in I don't know what emotions, or remembrances, ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... at the saddle-bow of the knight or of the bishop in armor. Passive obedience by force supports thrones and oligarchies, Spanish kings, and Venetian senates. Might, in an army wielded by tyranny, is the enormous sum total of utter weakness; and so Humanity wages war against Humanity, in despite of Humanity. So a people willingly submits to despotism, and its workmen submit to be despised, and its soldiers to be whipped; therefore it is that battles lost by a nation are ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... gratitude moved us both to tears. Her action had the intolerable pathos of a child's weakness united with a kind of delirium. To watch her feeble hands exhibiting a head-dress which I feared she would never again wear—displaying it with a pitiful smile of pride and joy—was almost more than I could bear. Her face shone with happiness as she strove to tell ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... in haste. A vertigo was upon her like that dizzy weakness of one very sick, seeking prematurely to rise from bed. She had experienced a shock from which she could rally only gradually; she looked broken. Her eyes appeared to see nothing about her but stared off into the distance ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... strength of body and strength of mind to control your Sympathy and your Knowledge. Unless you control your emotions they run over and you stand in the slop. Sympathy must not run riot, or it is valueless and tokens weakness instead of strength. In every hospital for nervous disorders are to be found many instances of this loss of control. The individual has Sympathy, but not Poise, and therefore his life is worthless to himself and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... be weak; for everyone there is a strength though it may be only a little peculiar strength or an undeveloped potentiality. The unconverted man uses his strength egotistically, emphasizes himself harshly against the man who is weak where he is strong, and hates and conceals his own weakness. The Believer, in the measure of his belief, respects and seeks to understand the different strength of others and to use his own distinctive power with and not against his fellow men, in the common service of that synthesis to ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... and precocity He adopts the profession of the law His popularity as an orator Elected Quaestor; his Aedileship Prosecution of Verres His letters to Atticus; his vanity His Praetorship; declines a province His Consulship; conspiracy of Catiline Banishment of Cicero: his weakness; his recall His law practice; his eloquence His provincial government His return to Rome His fears in view of the rivalry between Caesar and Pompey Sides with Pompey Death of Tullia and divorce of Terentia Second marriage of Cicero Literary labors: his philosophical writings His detestation ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... by his pulse; but that certainly seems to me to be stronger. I gave him a few drops of laudanum a couple of hours ago, and it seems to me he has been dozing since; at any rate his eyes have been half-closed. I think that it is extreme weakness more than anything else; he has overtaxed his strength, and is worn-out with fatigue and starvation. I shouldn't be surprised if he gets round all right with quiet and food." The opening of the tent, and the sound of voices ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... him to himself immediately; with a little gesture of impatience as if annoyed at his own weakness, he put from him these morbid memories of the past. ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... but he was the first to achieve great success with it, and Arthur Sketchley, Artemus Ward, Mr. Deputy Bedford ("Robert"), and all the American humorists who have adopted the same idea, are but followers where the great Titmarsh led. Jeames's weakness became a strength in Thackeray's hands, and at one time was turned with effect upon Sir Isaac Pitman's "Spelling Reform," which was then a novel butt for the satirist. The incident has been thus gravely recorded in the pages of the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... of weakness the Persians (A.D. 590) had conquered Asia Minor. Bethlehem, Gethsemane, and Calvary were profaned; the Holy Sepulchre had been burned, and the cross carried off amid shouts of laughter. Magianism had insulted Christianity, and no miracle ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... her behavior, why it will somehow be my fault. Why do you make me responsible when you know Miss McMurtry and most of the other girls are just as opposed to having her with us as I am?" said Betty, realizing that her defense was a sign of weakness and yet feeling that Polly had somehow driven her to ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... bountiful one, and sit a little amongst us and examine my wife, who has the itch, and give her something to cure it." But I got wary, and I said, "If I were to give her any medicine, she will presently die of weakness, and I shall be blamed for her death." However, I did what I could. In some of the cases I asked my maid to come and help me; but she turned away in disgust, and said, "No thank you; I have the nose of a princess, and cannot do such work." And really it was horrible, for many came to me daily ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... Bragadin, who had the weakness to believe in the occult sciences, told me one day that, for a young man of my age, he thought my learning too extensive, and that he was certain I was the possessor of some supernatural endowment. He entreated me ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Here is her weakness and her strength again: "In the love-novels all the heroines are very desperate. Isabella will not allow me to speak about lovers and heroins, and 'tis too refined for my taste." "Miss Egward's (Edgeworth's) tails are very ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... old creatures who were paralyzed when they had been dumped into the car were now apparently dying; several of the children swayed with weakness as they stood, clutching at the biscuits and sweet chocolate which we drew from our pockets. Five of them were grandchildren of one of the paralytics, three designated one of the wrinkled flour-makers by the Polish equivalent of "granny," but none ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... be an old friend of Mr. Armadale's," she said. "Does he—?" Her voice failed her, and her eyes fell before the doctor's steady scrutiny. She mastered the momentary weakness, and finished her question. "Does he, ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... county where he does not meet at least a dozen gentlemen returned upon every grand jury, every one of whom have better estates than he himself has—And these not during pleasure, which last consideration, saves me the trouble of shewing the weakness of the objection ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... God appeared to Abraham, that Abraham fell on his face, feeling his utter weakness and nothingness, and then God talked with him. When a man is laid low in the dust then God can talk to him. And God said to Abraham, "I will make my covenant between Me and thee." [Footnote: Gen. xvii. 2.] A covenant is a promise made under solemn conditions, and it is God's covenant of grace which ...
— The One Great Reality • Louisa Clayton
... spoken these words than he found himself outside the cave, of which no sign was to be seen on the surface of the earth. He lost no time in making his way home, where he fainted from weakness, and afterwards told his mother of his strange adventure. They were both very bitter against the cruel magician, but this did not prevent Aladdin from sleeping soundly until late the next morning. As there was nothing for breakfast, ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... the tree are not very numerous, but it has a few, white ants among the number. They seldom attack a vigorous plant; it is upon the first symptoms of weakness or decay that they commence their operations. Their nests may be dislodged from the roots of the plant by a dose of solution of pig dung, to which they have a ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... effects of this neglect result in the passing of sentences of too great severity on first offenders and the young; and of too much leniency on hardened and habitual criminals. Leniency, says Grotius, should be exercised with discernment, otherwise it is not a virtue, but a weakness and a scandal. ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... extortion and peculation, his orders were not so punctiliously obeyed, but in this disobedience there was no open opposition—no assertion of a right to pilfer and extort. As the disobedience proceeded, not from a feeling of insubordination, but merely from the weakness that official flesh is heir to, it was not regarded as very heinous. In the aristocratic circles of St. Petersburg and Moscow there was the same indifference to political questions and public affairs. All strove to have the reputation ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Endor with again the hidden laugh in her voice, 'some men have a hidden weakness for witches which conflicts with their duty,—and some ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... return, went so far as to strike Pica in punishment for her weakness. Then, unable to tolerate the thought of seeing his son the jest of the whole city, he tried to procure his expulsion from the territory of Assisi. Going to St. Damian he summoned him to leave the country. This time Francis did not try to hide. Boldly presenting himself before his ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... in the field, and fighting by the side of, and in concert with, foreign allies, he observed—'Your inquiry will never take place as a real inquiry; or, if it did, it would lead to nothing but confusion and disturbance, increased disasters, shame at home and weakness abroad; it would convey no consolation to those whom you seek to aid, but it would carry malignant joy to the hearts of the enemies of England; and, for my part, I shall ever rejoice, if this motion is carried to-night, that my own last words as a member of the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... a lie?" she cried fiercely. "Is not my whole marriage a lie? I despise myself for my weakness in yielding, and yet, God help me, what else could I do when Garvington's fair fame was in question? Think of the disgrace, had he been prosecuted by Hubert. And Hubert knows that you and I loved; ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... supplanting, though He did occasionally lose His temper with their more bigoted and narrow supporters. Especially one loves His readiness to get at the spirit of religion, sweeping aside the texts and the forms. Never had anyone such a robust common sense, or such a sympathy for weakness. It was this most wonderful and uncommon life, and not his death, which is the true centre ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... indeed, lives and moves and has its very being in the bosom of public order. On the other hand, that public order alone which cherishes the true liberty of the individual is strong in the approbation of God and in the moral sentiments of mankind. All else is weakness, and death, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... above. He had been right, overwhelmingly right, as to the felicity of his tenderness and the degree of her sensibility, but even while she felt these things sweep all others away she tasted of a sort of terror of the weakness they produced in her. It was still, for her, that she had positively something to do, and that she mustn't be weak for this, must much rather be strong. For many hours after, none the less, she ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... so many lives? Is the inmost chamber of thy soul still closed in rebellion against the precepts of the High Gods? No more of thy poor little mummeries for the deception of the ignorant! Go, and without further display of the weakness which thou hast presumptuously mistaken for strength. ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... whose feelings were as tender and as delicate as this. He did not know, but it was this in her, after all, which attracted him. He never attempted to analyse the nature of his affection. It was sufficient that there was tenderness in her eye, weakness in her manner, good nature and hope in her thoughts. He drew near this lily, which had sucked its waxen beauty and perfume from below a depth of waters which he had never penetrated, and out of ooze and mould which he could ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... Jerry Morton?" Ruth's tone was rather scandalized, for Ruth did not share Peggy's faculty for finding all kinds of people interesting, and had a not uncommon weakness for ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... sacrificed his Brother Clarence, to pave his Way to the Throne. Nor better fared it with Edward the Fifth, who, by all the Arts of Seduction and Delusion, which his unnatural Uncle and Guardian, Richard, practised on the Fears and Weakness of the Queen Dowager; was, with his Brother the Duke of York, conveyed with great Pomp to the Tower; where the bloody Tyrant, aided by the Duke of Buckingham, soon sacrificed those young, innocent and hopeful Princes to his wicked and boundless Ambition. But he soon after lost his ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... deserves to carry the buckler unto Samson; yet is all this of an easy possibility, if we con- ceive a divine concourse, or an influence from the little finger of the Almighty. It is impossible that, either in the discourse of man or in the infallible voice of God, to the weakness of our apprehensions there should not appear irregularities, contradictions, and antino- mies: myself could show a catalogue of doubts, never yet imagined nor questioned, as I know, which are not resolved at the first hearing; not fantastick queries or objections of air; for I cannot ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... obliged to you," he interrupted her quietly, still meditative. He was evidently sincere. His attitude was dignified. Many men would have been ashamed, humiliated, even though aware of innocence. But he contrived to rise above such weakness. She was glad; she admired him. And she was very glad also that he did not deign to asseverate that he had been ignorant of his half-sister's plight. Naturally he ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... matter, whether it be of God. Unhappily we are so weak that we find it easier to believe and speak evil of others, rather than good. But they that are perfect, do not give ready heed to every news-bearer, for they know man's weakness that it is prone to ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... panic. "Abundance of people," writes Mr. Maxwell, "friends as well as enemies, had made it their business to find out the number of the Prince's army, but to no purpose. Great pains had been taken to conceal its weakness."[56] ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... money is to be recovered for the Company, (as he says,) he forgets to recover it: so that the accuracy with which he begins a bribe, acribus initiis et soporosa fine, and the carelessness with which he ends it, are things that characterize, not weakness and stupidity, but fraud. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... have frequently caused great distress to the young lady of your affections by your exhibition of this weakness. Exactly. There is nothing a girl dislikes or despises more than jealousy. Be a man, Arthur W. Fight against it. You may find it hard at first, but persevere. Keep a smiling face. If she seems to enjoy talking to other men, show no resentment. Be merry and bright. Believe ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... not afford to do without the stimulating effect derived from meat. I propose making a test of the two methods, but should like to hear from you in reply to the above query. Another new feature I have noticed on the new diet is a thinness of the teeth and a feeling of weakness in them generally. ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... It all looked very formidable to the Eastern youth. Thunderous clouds hung low upon the peaks, and the great crags to left and right of the notch were stern and barren. "I think I'll wait for the stage," he said, with candid weakness. "I ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... She felt very cold, even upon that August day of sunlight. But the presence of Captain Willoughby, one of the three men whom she never would forgive, helped her to command herself. She would give no exhibition of weakness before any one of the detested three, and with an effort she recovered herself when she was on the ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... record his sentence. It was well known that he looked with repugnance and horror upon the sanguinary scenes with which the Revolution had been deformed, and that he had often avowed his sympathy for the hard fate of a prince whose greatest crime was weakness. His vote would unquestionably be the index of that of the whole party, and thus the life or death of the king appeared to be suspended from his lips. It was known that the very evening before, while supping with a lady who expressed much commiseration ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... forth, hither and thither on their return journeys, followed what he supposed to be Miss Tucker's route; at least, it was her route on Saturday and Sunday, and he could not suppose her to harbor caprice or any other feminine weakness. ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... his Invisible King; but I hope the reader has not wholly lost the clue. Let us recapitulate. Starting from the idea that its total renunciation of metaphysics, its incuriousness as to causation, was a weakness in Mr. Wells's system, inasmuch as an eager curiosity as to these matters is an inseparable part of our intellectual outfit, we set about enquiring whether it might not be possible to abandon the notions of omnipotence, omniscience and omni-benevolence, ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... Indian leaf doth briefly burn; So doth man's strength to weakness turn The fire of youth extinguished quite, Comes age, like embers, dry and white. Think of this ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... every precaution taken, was a possible attempt of the English to pick a quarrel over some small matter and bring on a renewal of the war. Fortunately for the Americans, this did not happen. Washington knew our weakness so well that he could see how easy it would be for a bold and determined enemy to do us great if not fatal harm. But he did not know that the English themselves were in an almost desperate plight. By Rodney's decisive victory at sea they began to recover their ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... Germain l'Auxerrois, proceeding along the site of the colonnade which was subsequently built there by Perrault. In a very short time she reached the quays. Her steps were rapid and agitated; she scarcely felt the weakness which reminded her of having sprained her foot when very young, and which obliged her to limp slightly. At any other hour in the day her countenance would have awakened the suspicions of the least clear-sighted, attracted ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to the guidance of those to whom his welfare was really dear. Philip, obliged to rouse himself from his indolence, and exert himself to earn his living, became a far wiser and more estimable man than he would ever have been as the heir to a fortune; and he never forgot the lesson which pain, weakness, and shame had taught him,—that the way of evil is also the way of sorrow. Thorns and snares are in the way of ...
— False Friends, and The Sailor's Resolve • Unknown
... should have been thus able to subdue it. But I considered that in reality the original blame was mine. Though your suspicion was groundless, it was not absurd. We have been trifling too much in the face of danger. I ought not, under the present weakness of our nature and forms of society, to have been so assiduous in my attendance upon this enchanting woman. It would have been little wonder, if, having so many opportunities, and playing the preceptor with her as I have done, I had been entangled before I was aware, and harboured ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... rigor of the law, and least apt to yield to considerations which were calculated to shelter a fit object of its vengeance. The reflection that the fate of a fellow-creature depended on his sole fiat, would naturally inspire scrupulousness and caution; the dread of being accused of weakness or connivance, would beget equal circumspection, though of a different kind. On the other hand, as men generally derive confidence from their numbers, they might often encourage each other in an act of obduracy, ...
— The Federalist Papers
... permitted. In her distress she went to Father Vassili, to ask him to set her doubts at rest. She had heard that kind priests were willing to release people from their vows or to allow substituted vows, where weakness of body hindered ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... and drunken, dissolute men, and from all venomous, stinging, creeping, nasty, horrid things—did we not see that they were no longer the same beings we had previously known, that in their long flights in heat and cold and rain and wind and dust they had shaken off some ancient weakness that was theirs, that without loss of femininity they had become more like ourselves in the sense that they were more self-centred ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... North before undertaking any further great effort in the field. The North was not really ready for determined war, indeed, until later in the year. Meanwhile many were the moralizations in the British press upon Bull Run's revelation of Northern military weakness. ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... America's overwhelming military and economic strength, because of the weakness of other major free world powers and the inability of scores of newly independent nations to defend, or even govern, themselves, America had to assume the major burden for the defense of freedom ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... sleeping, poor fellow, lulled by the very fulness of comfort, his sick hunger appeased, and his bones no longer aching with cold. A fair moustache covered his mouth, but Olivia, who prided herself on reading character, soon decided that the chin and lower part of the face showed signs of weakness, but as the thought passed through her mind a pair of deep blue eyes opened full on her face, and gazed ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... his rider also was no horseman, it being thirty years, as he at length confessed to me, since he last mounted in a saddle. Horses soon become aware of the powers of their riders, and the brute in question was disposed to take great advantage of the fears and weakness of the old man. There is a remedy, however, for most things in this world. I became so wearied at last at the snail's pace at which we were proceeding, that I fastened the bridle of the sluggish horse to the crupper of mine, then sparing neither ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... more cheerful than she had been, assumed the care of Piney. Only Mother Shipton—once the strongest of the party—seemed to sicken and fade. At midnight on the tenth day she called Oakhurst to her side. "I'm going," she said, in a voice of querulous weakness, "but don't say anything about it. Don't waken the kids. Take the bundle from under my head, and open it." Mr. Oakhurst did so. It contained Mother Shipton's rations for the last week, untouched. "Give 'em to the child," she said, pointing ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... power was great enough to induce certain ambitious men to submit to these hard conditions, such as two famous royalist bankers, M. de Nucingen and Ferdinand du Tillet. She had so thoroughly studied the strength and the weakness of Paris life, that her conduct had never given any man the smallest advantage over her. An enormous price might have been set on a note or letter by which she might have compromised herself, without ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... this, showing all my weakness of thought. You know it is the truth, too.... But I tell you I know, so that our two selves' knowing may make it ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... of the intelligent classes, and by the necessity of directing every energy toward carrying on hostilities against the bourgeoisie and the Allies, that there has been little opportunity to remodel the institutions inherited from the previous regime, therefore neither the strength nor the weakness of these institutions is to any great extent due to the present regime. Two of the institutions I visited were of this type, one happened to be very good and the other very bad, and in neither case did I feel ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt
... agents!—alas! everything seemed possible to the anxious, the ridiculous, the sublime heart of the doting mother, and when that living mass of golden ripples glimmered in the noonday sun, Menecreta—forgetting her timidity, her fears, her weakness—pushed her way through the crowd with all the strength of her despair, and with a cry of agonised entreaty, threw herself at the feet ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... significant sigh of relief at being delivered from this plague by his years? Is it without a deeper meaning that Dante on the summit of the mount of redemption lets his dearest and most honored poets do penance for this very weakness - Arnaut de Verigord, Guittons of Arezzo and also Guido Guinicello his father and the father ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... he wandered on foot through Lombardy and across the Alps. He slept on hard beds in order to keep his hot blood in check, and lived on bread and cheese. His attacks of weakness, sometimes of complete exhaustion, did not worry him at first; he paid no attention to them. But in Augsburg he swooned, falling headlong on the street. He was taken to a hospital, where he lay for ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... foreign policy, the separation of people from government has been in the past a source of weakness and error. In a democratic system like ours, foreign policy decisions must be able to stand the test of public examination and public debate. If we make a mistake in this administration, it will be on the side of frankness and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Jimmy Carter • Jimmy Carter
... it be difficult to obliterate the reproach of miscarriages by any subsequent achievement, however illustrious, yet the reputation raised by a long train of success may be finally ruined by a single failure; for weakness or errour will be always remembered by that malice and envy ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... replaced the shade, and sat down in the chair at the foot of the bed. She looked at him. His whole frame trembled; his eyes were blurred with tears; the parted lips drooped with weakness, bitterness, and unappeased desire. Did she know that in that moment the hunger and thirst after righteousness raged more fiercely than any earthly appetite? It seemed to him that in her look he read pity and perfect comprehension. He hid his face ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... district. Kumodini Babu also thought of discontinuing the market which had been the fount and origin of his misfortunes. Here again his brother objected that such a course would be taken to indicate weakness and encourage further attacks. His advice was followed. The new market throve amazingly, while Ramani Babu's was ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... a child's attempts to walk, we meet with sufferings in various forms in our life every day, showing the imperfections in our knowledge and our available power, and in the application of our will. But if these revealed our weakness to us only, we should die of utter depression. When we select for observation a limited area of our activities, our individual failures and miseries loom large in our minds; but our life leads us instinctively to take a wider view. ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... ethereally before? Where the song out of the flesh, but too subtle for the ears of flesh? Yet I drew her closer to me, folded her tightly against my breast. My imaginative strength was more and more absorbed in self-analysis, into wonder as to what weakness had taken place in me. For here was Isabel dissolved in my arms and how could I continue this futile demonstration? But why also desist? The sweat began to stand out on my forehead. What should I say? Uncle Tom no longer stood ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... dwell on the weakness of genius, as of a point of least resistance in human nature, an opening through which the force of Nature might enter the human world. "Where there is nothing there is God," and it may be that this weakness is no accident but an essential fact in the very structure of genius. ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... man replies) Against Ulysses shall thy anger rise? Loved and adored, O goddess as thou art, Forgive the weakness of a human heart. Though well I see thy graces far above The dear, though mortal, object of my love, Of youth eternal well the difference know, And the short date of fading charms below; Yet every day, while absent thus I roam, I ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... only a part of life. We may lose it and yet live on. There is another world; and if we can only keep that in our minds we sha'n't be so ready to sink into despair—that is, I sha'n't. Despair is my weakness; you ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... gently from the ground and, finding his knees unstable, from fright or weakness, stood him against a house wall. Peter Niburg, with rolling eyes, felt for his letter, and, the saints be praised, ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... inflammatory, and dangerously so, the seat being the diaphragm. They only gave way to very profuse bleeding and blistering, which under higher assistance saved my life. My recovery was slow and tedious from the state of exhaustion. I could neither stir for weakness and giddiness, nor read for dazzling in my eyes, nor listen for a whizzing sound in my ears, nor even think for lack of the power of arranging my ideas. So I had a comfortless time of it for about a week. Even yet I by no means feel, as ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... sentry posts to the garrison living in the tunnels, so that warning could be given immediately in case of an enemy attack. These tunnels served an excellent purpose, but there is no question that had they been in use to any extent they might easily have become a great source of weakness, as they undoubtedly had a very demoralising effect on the troops who had to live ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... regiment at Auxonne (February, 1791). It was high time; for his furlough, though prolonged on the plea of ill-health, had expired in the preceding October, and he was therefore liable to six months' imprisonment. But the young officer rightly gauged the weakness of the moribund monarchy; and the officers of his almost mutinous regiment were glad to get him back on any terms. Everywhere in his journey through Provence and Dauphine, Buonaparte saw the triumph of revolutionary principles. He notes ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... for these men, because of their temper and their weakness; but I am thankful that the good Lord has given to the vicious ox short horns, for if their physical courage were equal to their vicious disposition, some of us in this neck of the woods ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... Love, how regarded. As a Mystery. Burns' lament. As an Illusion. An Impulse. A Weakness. A Disease. Romantic views of Love. A Fatalism. "Matches made in Heaven." Some say, "Love can be Suppressed." Associated with Lower Propensities. A theme for Jesting and Sport. Quotation, shewing its holy nature. The mind not to dwell ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... for the very different fate attending this third exemplar, the readiest theory is to suppose that Gideon admired the tale. How to explain that admiration might appear (to those who have perused the work) more difficult; but the weakness of a parent is extreme, and Gideon (and not his uncle, whose initials he had humorously borrowed) was the author of "Who Put Back the Clock?" He had never acknowledged it, or only to some intimate friends while it was still in proof; after its appearance and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... intellectual life in them, or some hidden charm in the nature, or something to love; and if he finds what he seeks, we are sure, not always of a complete picture, but of a poetic illumination, a revelation of character, a secret sweetness for which we forgive the weakness or indecision manifest here and there, and which are relics of the hours before the final ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... efficiency abandons its local liberties, and all that is bound up with their enjoyment. No practice in the exercise of public right armed a later generation of Frenchmen against the audacity of a common usurper: no immortality of youth secured the institutions framed by Napoleon against the weakness and corruption which at some period undermine all despotisms. The historian who has exhausted every term of praise upon the political system of the Consulate lived to declare, as Chief of the State himself, that the first need of France was ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... the strange condition of a soul cast down by the knowledge of the difficulty of the operation, the amount of the labour, the vastness of the work on one side, and on the other the ignorance, want of knowledge of the way, weakness of nerves and peril of death. He has no knowledge suitable to the business, he does not know where and how to turn, no place of flight or refuge presents itself; and he sees that, from every side, the waves threaten, with frightful, fatal impetus. ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... affairs of the past, and left him floundering vaguely in seas that looked old and yet were new. Hourly, he sought for the first sign of love in her eyes, for the first touch of sentiment; but if there was a point of weakness in her defence, it was not revealed to the hungry perception of the would-be conqueror. And so they drifted on through the February chill, that seemed warm to them, through the light hours and the dark ones, quickly and surely to the day which was to call him cured of one ill and ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... wonderful sparkling whimsical mirth that had in it no touch of bitterness or of cynicism. Even the last years of life, when the need to work hard for an income that would sufficiently maintain his household, made brain work, under conditions of physical weakness, often peculiarly trying, were largely full of the same marvellous pluck and illumined by ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... typewriting business, and found she had just flung a pair of spectacles belonging to her sister into the middle of the floor and stamped on them. She was already in the rapids of an ethical tirade about the "sickly medical notions" and the morbid admission of weakness implied in such an apparatus. She dared her sister to bring such artificial, unhealthy rubbish into the place again. She asked if she was expected to wear wooden legs or false hair or glass eyes; and as she spoke her eyes sparkled like ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... on briefly to explain how Pepin was a man renowned for his great wisdom and his cunning, as well as for the bodily strength which had once enabled him to strangle a bear. Still, his one great weakness was conceit of his personal appearance, and his belief that every woman was making a dead set at him. He also prided himself upon his manners, which were either absurdly elaborate or rough to a startling degree, ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... De Mirac possessed to its fullest extent the present fine lady's taste for bric-a-brac. So much I had learned in my inquiries concerning her. Remembering this, I took the bold resolution of profiting by this weakness of hers to gain admission to her presence, she being the only one sharing Mr. Blake's mysterious secret. Borrowing a valuable antique from a friend of mine at that time in the business, I made my appearance the very next day at her apartments, and sending in an urgent request ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... more imperious in proportion to the facility with which the Government yielded to them in their earnest, but mistaken, desire to put an end to the agitation of M. Papineau and his party. Mistaking the forbearance of the English government for weakness, M. Papineau issued his inflammatory appeals; the people were incited to rebellion; but even this conduct did not seem to rouse the Government at home, who had probably formed the idea that the French Canadian ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... saltpeter one-half ounce, and powdered colchicum, one-half dram, to be repeated twice daily. A laxative may be repeated in three or four days should the bowels seem to demand it, and as the nervous excitement disappears any remaining muscular weakness or paralysis may be treated by one-half dram doses of nux vomica twice a day and a stimulating liniment (aqua ammonia and sweet oil in equal proportions) ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... write that my ideal is laziness. No, it is not laziness. I despise laziness as I despise weakness and lack of mental and moral energy. I was not talking of laziness but of leisure, and I did not say leisure was an ideal but only one of the essential conditions of ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... too near them. Sometimes I dropped to all fours and gave an imitation of a playful pup; stopping to sniff loudly at a chipmunk's hole or to dig furiously with both hands. The sheep crowded forward appreciatively. Evidently they had a weakness for vaudeville. No acrobat, no contortionist, ever had a more flatteringly attentive audience. I laughed at my foolishness, but ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... fairly represent even that, would fail of political, much more of popular, support. And certainly no one ever entered upon office with so few resources of power in the past, and so many materials of weakness in the present, as Mr. Lincoln. Even in that half of the Union which acknowledged him as President, there was a large, and at that time dangerous minority, that hardly admitted his claim to the office, and even in the party that elected him ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... again the next morning; and as he spoke to his wife, and she answered him, there jumped each time out of her mouth a toad instead of the piece of gold as heretofore. Then he asked why that should be, and the old woman said it was because of her great weakness, and that it ...
— Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... testing of character inevitable to such a work. The concealing habits of civilization were dropped. Kindly, useful conventionalities were lost. Face to face with the unconquered forces of nature, nothing remained but the real strength or weakness of the individual himself. In some there were developed unguessed powers of endurance that bore the hard days without flinching; cheerful optimism that laughed at the appalling immensity of the task; strength of spirit that made a jest of ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... this tree." In the action we feel that Judas is not so much wicked as weak. He has little faith and little imagination, and his folly of avarice hurries him into betrayal. Those who see the play feel as the actors feel, that Christ knows the weakness of man. He would have forgiven Judas, just as he ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... an arrow to the mark, and pierced right through the armour of dense stupidity in which the boy was clad. Lobster! That fitted with his father's weakness and the jeering remarks he had often heard made by neighbours; and ever after the name stuck, and irritated him whenever ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... the fact that some of the holiest lives and some of the sweetest songs are the growth of the infirmity which unfits its subject for the rougher duties of life. When one reads the life of Cowper, or of Keats, or of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson,—of so many gentle, sweet natures, born to weakness, and mostly dying before their time,—one cannot help thinking that the human race dies out singing, like the swan in the old story. The French poet, Gilbert, who died at the Hotel Dieu, at the age of twenty-nine,—(killed by a key in his throat, which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... frankness to which it gives birth, and it merits indulgence by its privations. She who writes this, is not insensible to the merit of men of this bold calling. Admiration for the sea, and for those who live on it has been her weakness through life; and her visions of the future, like her recollections of the past, are not entirely exempt from a contemplation of its pleasures. The usages of different nations—glory in arms—change of scene—with constancy in the affections, all sweetened by affluence, are temptations ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... him to understand that she was still in doubt, and therefore might possibly be talked over. She must teach him at once, as well as she could, that such was not her character, and that she had come to a resolution which left him no chance. And she was guilty of one weakness which was almost unworthy of her. When the time came she changed her dress, and put on an old shabby frock, in which she was wont to call upon the Carrolls. Her best dresses were all kept for her father,—and, perhaps, accounted for that ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... logs to be found everywhere in the primeval forest, and his breath came in long painful sobs. He was just a little too stout for wilderness work, that is for the marching part of it, and he was hurt cruelly in both body and spirit. As his general weakness grew, the cry of the owl directly in their path and not far away was like fire ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... night excursion had filled Eve with new misgivings. It was the act of a madman; and we know the fears that beset her on that head, and their ground. He had come home shivering, and she had forced him to keep his bed all that day. He was not well now, and bodily weakness, added to his other afflictions, bore his spirit down, though ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... hesitatingly. She would not for worlds have hurt his feelings—no princess would so treat a trusty adherent—yet she could not pretend to a weakness for red hair. "I think we'd like ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... sort of shelter from the storm, however, the place would hardly have appealed to Harvey and Henry Burns. The aged building seemed to creak and sway in the wind, as though it might fall apart from weakness and topple into the water. The stream plunged over the dam with a sullen roar, much as if it chafed at the barrier and longed to sweep it altogether from its course and carry its timbers with it. Once the lightning ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... salad at the supper table: on turning his head, however, in quest of his first glass of wine, he observed Peter standing quietly by the sideboard with the favorite goggles over his eyes. Now Peter was troubled with two kinds of debility about his organs of vision; one was age and natural weakness, while the other proceeded more directly from the heart. His master knew of these facts, and he took the alarm. Again the wine-glass dropped from his nerveless hand, as he said in ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... place proved itself a true Paraclete to them, making all those who dwelt round about feel pity and kindliness for the sisterhood. So that, methinks, they prospered more through gifts in a single year than I should have done if I had stayed there a hundred. True it is that the weakness of womankind makes their needs and sufferings appeal strongly to people's feelings, as likewise it makes their virtue all the more pleasing to God and man. And God granted such favour in the eyes of all to her who was now ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... and empty portrait, now in the great gallery of the Prado, was long since dead. He consented, basing his picture upon a likeness of much earlier date, to paint Isabella d'Este Gonzaga as a young woman when she was already an old one, thereby flattering an amiable and natural weakness in this great princess and unrivalled dilettante, but impairing his own position as an artist of supreme rank.[7] It is not necessary to include in this category the popular Caterina Cornaro of the Uffizi, since it is confessedly nothing but a fancy portrait, making ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... use our guns in their defense. Anderson would do nothing—not even send a communication to the governor on the subject, although the latter, without authority from the State Legislature, was thus wielding all the powers of a military dictator. The enemy were greatly emboldened at our weakness or timidity, and with good reason, for they saw us stand by with folded arms, and allow steamboat loads of ammunition and war material to pass us, on their way to Morris Island, to be used in the erection and arming of batteries to ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... of investigation and of accurate thinking is claimed as a peculiar product of nature study. It is called, par excellence, "the scientific spirit." The undue reverence for authority produced by literary studies is not a weakness of natural science pursuits. But intense interest and devotion are combined with scientific accuracy and fidelity to nature and ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... fellow-passenger on the roof by occasionally falling against him when the coach gave a lurch to his: side; and indeed, if the road had been less smooth and level than it is, I should have fallen off from weakness. Of this annoyance he complained heavily, as perhaps, in the same circumstances, most people would; he expressed his complaint, however, more morosely than the occasion seemed to warrant, and if I had parted with him at that moment I should have thought of him (if I had considered it worth ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... boots and flung them one by one over the wall. Then he pulled off his coat at the cost of some pain and an added weakness, for the coat was stuck to his wounds and had roughly staunched them. He could feel the blood again soaking his shirt. There was all the more need, then, for hurry. He stood up, jammed his back ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... certain homely picturesqueness that contrasts favorably with the suburban sordidness of the abode before us. The narrow lane, the paving-stones, and the contiguity of wretched hovels are depressing to remember; and the steam of them (such is our human weakness) might almost make ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... pride rebelled against the imputation of such weakness. "No, it was not mere outward beauty," he said to himself. "True, I had no opportunity of becoming acquainted with the qualities of her soul, but her countenance unmistakably expressed sweetness, modesty, and ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... than our fellows, Lord, we are but weak and human men. When our devils do deviltry, curse Thou the doer and the deed: curse them as we curse them, do to them all and more than ever they have done to innocence and weakness, to womanhood and home. Have ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... weakness, cannot reap in strength, That which we plant, we gather in at length. Great God of Justice, be Thou just to me, And as my thoughts, so ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Pete; get out of here before there's any trouble," commanded Code. He knew the mate's weakness ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... all the virtues. He expatiated upon the great common sense of the jury (as though they were fools), relied on their sound judgment and denounced the conduct of Mr. Bumpkin in the witness-box as a piece of artful acting, intended to appeal to the weakness of the jury. But all was useless. Snooks made a sorry figure in the box. He was too emphatic, too positive, too abusive. Mr. Ricochet could not get over his own cross-examination. The ridiculous counterclaim with its pettifogging innuendoes vanished before that common sense of the jury ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... sometimes in a frosty air When my heels hammered out a melody From pavements of a city left behind, I never would acknowledge my own glee Because it was less mighty than my mind Had dreamed of. Since I could not boast of strength Great as I wished, weakness was all my boast. I sought yet hated pity till at length I earned it. Oh, too heavy was the cost. But now that there is something I could use My youth and strength for, I deny the age, The care and weakness that I know—refuse To admit I ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... of chariots before facing the enemy basely allowed themselves to be overthrown at once or leaped down from the cars, so that these being no longer under control injured the Persians more than the enemy. For the rest, the Persians do not disguise their military weakness, they concede their inferiority and do not dare to take the field except there are Greeks in their army. They have for their maxim 'never to fight Greeks without Greek ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... days of Tacitus against the Germans.[54] (What Tacitus said in their favour is not considered.) Perhaps on the other side there are investigators searching their history books for ancient opinions of the English. "Strike well these English," said Duke William to his Normans, "show no weakness towards these English, for they will have no pity for you. Neither the coward for running well, nor the bold man for fighting well will be better liked by the English, nor will any be more spared on either account." Butler approved this verdict. We shall not readily agree with him. Yet he did ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... and marked with the initials of the temporary occupants, with scarcely an exception. I never knew a Yankee boy who was not the possessor of a knife of some kind, nor one who could resist the temptation of using it for such unlawful purposes. Even our hero shared the common weakness, and his desk was distinguished from the rest by "H. W." rudely ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger
... alters all this. He takes into account that some people commit crimes through ignorance, some through weakness, and some through wickedness. He thinks that the first two classes of convicts should be carefully separated from ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 19, March 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... is in the sunshine and the finest days, as that which has conquered and prevailed, commends itself to us by its very antiquity and apparent solidity and necessity. Our weakness needs it, and our strength uses it. We cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it. If there were but one erect and solid standing tree in the woods, all creatures would go to rub ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... The belle of the place was this Visanteta: tiny, malicious, with a clever tongue, and no other good looks than that of youthful health; but she had a pair of penetrating eyes and a trick of pretending timidity, weakness and interest, which simply turned the heads of the village youths. Her sweetheart was Carafosca, a brave fisherman who was capable of sailing on a stick of wood. On the sea he was admired by all ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... him! Even from childhood he has been well acquainted with poverty: his father was a poor minister in Haynichen, with thirteen children; and Gellert, when quite a little fellow, was obliged to be a copying office-clerk: who can tell whether he did n't then contract that physical weakness of his? And now that he 's an old man, things will never go better with him; he has often no wood, and must be pinched with cold. It is with him, perhaps, as with that student of whom your brother has told us, who is as poor as a rat, and yet must read; and so in winter ...
— Christian Gellert's Last Christmas - From "German Tales" Published by the American Publishers' Corporation • Berthold Auerbach
... shook Heaven's whole circumference confirmed. Thither let us bend all our thoughts, to learn What creatures there inhabit, of what mould Or substance, how endued, and what their power And where their weakness: how attempted best, By force of subtlety. Though Heaven be shut, And Heaven's high Arbitrator sit secure In his own strength, this place may lie exposed, The utmost border of his kingdom, left To their ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... hand tightened convulsively over mine; years had elapsed since he left our native town; he had drunk of the cup of pleasure, and cultivated the resources of literature and science in this their great centre; but now, in the hour of physical weakness, the yearning for domestic and home scenes filled his heart; and his mind reacted from the blandishments of a luxurious materialism and a refined egotism of life. It was like falling back upon the normal conditions of existence thus to behold the 'ills that flesh is heir to' in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... came the fear that if I was once more permitted to mingle as a free man, away from the immediate pressure of danger, with the busy throng of life, I would forget my prison-made vows, and thus lose my claim to a world of never-fading light. Such a sense of weakness and helplessness came over me, that it was with a feeling almost of relief that I returned once more to my dark and narrow room, where the contrast between freedom and bondage was less palpably forced on ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... I shall doubt nothing. After my own disgraceful failure any interpretation will seem to me to be a work of genius. Believe me any interpretation of yours will only fill me with a sense of my own weakness." ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... think—you must think of your child and draw to it all the good forces, so that it may come to life unhampered by any weakness of balance in you. That must be your constant self-discipline. Keep serene and try to live in a world of noble ideals and serenity. Now I am ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd, Lets in new light through chinks that Time has made.[221-2] Stronger by weakness, wiser men become As they draw near to their eternal home: Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view That stand upon the ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... little affectation of greater weakness and lassitude than she really felt. But she wished to be weak, so that her Roberto might be strong—to be quite dependent on his care and tenderness. And she let her daughters embrace her so prettily, and then offered her hand to Dare and Luis with so much grace and true kindness ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... year which had elapsed since they had met she had ripened, or rather softened, into a prettier girl. Whether it was the milder Southern climate in which she had been living, or the result of physical weakness left by her attack of illness in the preceding spring, at any rate her bloom was more delicate, the lines of her small, pronounced face more finished and melting. As for her, now that she had paused a moment in her flow of complaint, she was busy puzzling out the change in him. David became ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... down when they was depending on me and then I would feel like a rummy so I guess I better not try and show up so good in practice even when I do feel O. K. because they might make a snipper out of me without knowing my weakness and I figure its something the matter with my eyes. Besides Al it don't seem like its a fair game to be pecking away at somebody that they can't see you and aren't looking for no supprise and its a whole lot different then fighting with a bayonet where its man ...
— The Real Dope • Ring Lardner
... said to Staines, the actual information startled her, and gave her a turn. She was obliged to sit down, for her knees seemed to give way. It was but a momentary weakness. She was now a wife and a mother, and had her rights. She said to herself, "My rogue has turned that poor woman's head long before this, no doubt. But I shall go down and just bring ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... part of the plan, their indefatigable Randolph was dispatched to Great-Britain to communicate it to the fraternity there, in order that it might be ripen'd and bro't to perfection: But even before his embarkation, he could not help discovering his own weakness, by giving a broad hint of the design - This parricide pretended that his intention in making a voyage to England at that time, was to settle a private affair of his own; that he had nothing else in view; and that having settled that private affair, he should immediately ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... more than twenty years to live, but he never cured himself of this hankering after une bonne speculation. Sometimes it was ordinary stock-exchange gambling; but his special weakness was, to do him justice, for schemes that had something more grandiose in them. Thus, to finish here with the subject, though the chapter of it never actually finished till his death, he made years afterwards, when he was a successful and a desperately busy author, ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... woods, others to Merindol. Unable to defend them against a force so greatly superior in number and equipment, a part of the men are said to have left their wives, old men, and children in their forest retreat, confident that if discovered, feminine weakness and the helplessness of infancy or of extreme old age would secure better terms for them than could be hoped for in case of a brave, but ineffectual defence by unarmed men.[490] It was a confidence misplaced. Unresisting, gray-headed men were despatched ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... shaking continually her leaves, which sounded as if she was tittering at everything around. Old Lord Elm was hurt at it, and often hinted to her ladyship how improper such behaviour would have been deemed in former times. It was, poor thing, in her a natural weakness which she could not amend, and it had been copied by some inferior plants who had ignorantly supposed it the height ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... the unfolding truth, to ostracize whatever uplifts mankind, is of course out of the question. Such an attempt indicates weakness, fear, or malice; and such efforts arise from a spiritual lack, felt, ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... it is equally true that drinks above blood-heat are not healthful. If a person should bathe in warm water every day, debility would inevitably follow; for the frequent application of the stimulus of heat, like all other stimulants, eventually causes relaxation and weakness. If, therefore, a person is in the habit of drinking hot drinks twice a day, the teeth, throat, and stomach are gradually debilitated. This, most probably, is one of the causes of an early decay of the teeth, which is observed to be much more common among American ladies, than among those ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... from her moment of weakness, glared at the new arrival dumbly. She could not place Jane. She had the air of a nurse, and yet she ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... before me Mr. Forsyth's elaborate and very accurate account of this letter. "Now, however," says the biographer, "the future lay dark before him; and not the most sagacious politician at Rome could have divined the series of events—blundering weakness on the one side and unscrupulous ambition on the other—which led to the Dictatorship of Caesar and the overthrow of the constitution." Nothing can be more true. Cicero was probably the most sagacious politician in Rome; and he, though he did understand much of the weakness—and, ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... stood on the steps waving farewell to Arthur, without a trace of ill-humour. And he, though vaguely uncomfortable, had submitted at last to what he felt was her fixed purpose of avoiding a scene. Moreover, the "eternal child" in him, which made both his charm and his weakness, had already scattered his compunctions of the preceding day, and was now aglow with the sheer joy of holiday and change. He had worked very hard, he had had a great success, and now he was going to live for three weeks in the lap of luxury; intellectual luxury first and ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... are wakefulness, restless nights, headache, indolence, melancholy, indisposition to study, forgetfulness, despondency, weakness in the back and private organs, no confidence in one's own abilities, a desire for seclusion from society; whites, hysterics, and inability to look any one in the face. Sometimes the muscles are relaxed, ...
— Treatise on the Diseases of Women • Lydia E. Pinkham
... well say it now. Gomez and that land-lubber, Hernandez, are layin' claim to them, as if they had a right. Now they haven't, no more than any o' the rest o' us. Some others may have fancies, too. I confess to havin' a weakness for the one wi' the copper-coloured hair, which is she as Gil Gomez wants to 'propriate. I made no objection to his takin' her into the boat. But soon's we get ashore, I intend to stan' out for my rights to ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... lament her unlooked-for death with tears and groans of bitterness such as I had never before witnessed in any one,—his head sinking down on his heaving breast. When he revived, (and this agonizing scene took place every morning,) he implored me to pity him, and not heed his weakness,—that in his great misfortunes, in all their complications, he had looked forward to Rome and his dear Lady Northampton as his last and certain hope of repose; she was to be his comfort in the winding-up of life's pilgrimage: now, on his arrival, his life and fortune almost exhausted, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... time must elapse before the missionary, however zealous and able, can acquire such an acquaintance with the language and people as will enable him to do his work in a satisfactory manner. When one has fully entered on the work, there is frequent interruption from illness and weakness induced by the severity of the climate. When I transfer myself in thought to my first two years in Benares, and from my vivid remembrance of the vicissitudes of our mission during these years look down through all the succeeding ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... no holy service But hath its secret bliss: Yet, of all blessed ministries, Is one so dear as this? The ministry that cannot be A wondering seraph's dower, Enduing mortal weakness With more than angel-power; The ministry of purest love Uncrossed by any fear, That bids us meet At the Master's feet And keeps ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... sign of our weakness, also, that we commonly assume Nature to be a rather fragile and merely ornamental thing, and suited for a model of the graces only. But her seductive softness is the last climax of magnificent strength. The same mathematical law winds the leaves around the stem and the planets round the sun. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... without bodily strength. Accordingly not only are we not forced to do what we cannot do; we are not even obliged to do as much as we can. But, it will be said, many old men are so feeble that they cannot perform any duty in life of any sort or kind. That is not a weakness to be set down as peculiar to old age: it is one shared by ill health. How feeble was the son of P. Africanus, who adopted you! What weak health he had, or rather no health at all! If that had not been the case, we ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... aside the book, he began to meditate upon what he would do under like circumstances, if Lois' love for him were as deep as that of Margaret for Gerard. He blamed Gerard for what he considered weakness on his part. Why did he not arouse himself and throw off the shackles which bound him? What right had any Church to separate two loving ones, and make their young lives ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... temperament. There was refinement too in his slightly puckered eyes, his dainty gold-rimmed pince-nez glasses, and in the black velveteen coat which caught the light so richly upon its shoulder. In his mouth only there was something—a suspicion of coarseness, a possibility of weakness—which in the eyes of some, and of his sister among them, marred the grace and beauty of his features. Yet, as he was wont himself to say, when one thinks that each poor mortal is heir to a legacy of every evil trait or bodily taint ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... deny it; but I shall not allow it to be so," said Nanna with a glance that immediately cooled Gottlieb's sudden ardor. "My heart is my own, and should not be an object of trouble to you; and I assure you Mr. Gottlieb that I shall not allow any weakness on my part to cause you to break the judicious ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... protection of all possessory rights on the public lands. Thus, in Coryell vs. Cain, I said, speaking for the court: "It is undoubtedly true, as a general rule, that the claimant in ejectment must recover upon the strength of his own title, and not upon the weakness of his adversary's, and that it is a sufficient answer to his action to show title out of him and in a third party. But this general rule has, in this State, from the anomalous condition of things arising from the peculiar character of the mining and landed interests of the country, been, to a certain ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... last her voice faltered, at last her eye fell to the ground, at last her hand trembled. Had she stood firm through this trial all might have been well; but though she could bear herself right manfully before stranger eyes, she could not alone support his gaze; one touch of tenderness, one sign of weakness was enough—and that touch was there, that ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... such a weakness in the back sinews of his Neck, that oft times he could not look up before him, unless he clapped his hand hard upon his forehead, and held up his head that way, ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... all things according to rule in the day of the church's affliction, because of the weakness and fearfulness of some, and because possibly those who have most skill in that matter may for a time be laid up in chains. But when the church has rest and quietness, then as she praises God, so she conceives and brings forth governors and good government and rule among her members. David, a ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... molar, a small quantity of cayenne pepper introduced into the cavity will often give immediate relief. The tincture or infusion given in small doses has proved useful to determine outwardly the eruption of measles and scarlet fever, when imperfectly developed because of weakness. Also for a scrofulous discharge of matter from the ears, Capsicum tincture, of a weak strength, four drops with a tablespoonful of cold water three times a day, to a ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... vanquishing and destroying their moral as well as their religious instincts, and then they embrace the most revolting doctrines, and reconcile themselves to the most appalling deeds. They look on marriage as irrational, and regard modesty and chastity as vices. Shame is a weakness in their eyes, and natural affections are irrational prejudices. Scruples against lying, theft and murder, when any great good is to be gained by those practices, are insanity. Gratitude, even to parents, is an absurdity. Free indulgence, unlimited license, is a ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... when The hearts of those within are quivering. 130 Are ye not brave? Yes, yet the Ausonian soil Hath hearts, and hands, and arms, and hosts to bring Against Oppression; but how vain the toil, While still Division sows the seeds of woe And weakness, till the Stranger reaps the spoil.[300] Oh! my own beauteous land! so long laid low, So long the grave of thy own children's hopes, When there is but required a single blow To break the chain, yet—yet the Avenger stops, And Doubt and Discord ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... turned out, and hooted and yelled at the prisoner; and it was with the greatest difficulty that the chief protected him from personal violence. William himself was scarce conscious of what was passing. The swinging action of the camel added to his great weakness, and he would not have been able to keep his seat on its back, had not his captors fastened him with ropes to the saddle. Although the snow had only just melted on the Shatur-Gardan Pass, in the valleys ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... remedial and sanitary quality. They contain noble thoughts in noble forms. They show the strength of self-restraint. They breathe the air of clearness and candor. They set forth ideals of character and conduct which are elevating. They also disclose the weakness and the ugliness of things mean and base. They have the broad and generous spirit of the true literae humaniores. They reveal the springs ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... patron had many follies, which, as his discernment easily discovered, his imagination might sometimes incite him to mention too ludicrously. A little knowledge of the world is sufficient to discover that such weakness is very common, and that there are few who do not sometimes, in the wantonness of thoughtless mirth, or the heat of transient resentment, speak of their friends and benefactors with levity and contempt, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... about 30,000 troops in Lebanon. These troops are based mainly in Beirut, North Lebanon, and the Bekaa Valley. Syria's deployment was legitimized by the Arab League early in Lebanon's civil war and in the Ta'if accord. Citing the continued weakness of the LAF, Beirut's requests, and failure of the Lebanese Government to implement all of the constitutional reforms in the Ta'if accord, Damascus has so far refused to withdraw its ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... give, a fervent heart when it is fervent, a heart firm and faithful in its aridity, when He deprives it of sensible fervor. It does not always depend on you to feel; but it is necessary to wish to feel. Leave it to God to choose to make you feel sometimes, in order to sustain your weakness and infancy in Christian life; sometimes weaning you from that sweet and consoling sentiment which is the milk of babes, in order to humble you, to make you grow, and to make you robust in the violent exercise of faith, by causing you to sweat the bread of the ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... will, at the same time declared that both strength and will were constantly employed in the doing of good and the avoidance of evil. No dark furrows of hesitation, cowardice, cunning, meanness or weakness marred the expressive dignity and openness of the Cardinal's countenance,—the very poise of his straight spare figure and the manner in which he moved, silently asserted that inward grace of spirit without which there is no true grace of body,—and as he paused in his slow pacing to and fro ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... to me that there are two spirits in machinery—the spirit of weariness, weakness, of inventing ways of getting out of work; and there is the spirit in the machines, too, of moving mountains, conquering the sea and air, of working harder and lifting one's work over to more heroic, to more splendid and difficult, and almost impossible things. It is these two spirits that ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... that it was futile to attempt to divert the President from the single purpose which he had in mind. His fidelity to his own convictions and his unswerving determination to attain what he sought are characteristics of Mr. Wilson which are sources of weakness as well as of strength. Through them success has generally crowned his efforts, success which in some instances has been more disastrous than ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... female relations who knew of his hiding-place were caught, convicted, if we may so put it, of Christianity! and put to the torture. Although true-hearted, these poor girls were so agonised by suffering and terror that, in a moment of weakness, they disclosed the secret. But even among prison authorities there were found followers of Jesus— secretly, however, for fear of the tyrant Queen—and one of these sent a swift messenger to Laihova to warn him. Had the youth been an ordinary ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... like Scrooge, is a developing character. He did not have as far to go as Scrooge and his development was differently wrought; but both passed from weakness to strength and from isolation to service, the one through the ministry of a single profound experience, the other through the constant challenge of a high ideal. The other characters fall below ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... revenue and cost L7000 to maintain, manned by officials who sold flags of truce to traders carrying ammunition and supplies to the enemy, was seen to be but an expensive luxury in time of peace and a military weakness in time of war. The assistance which Pitt, and Pitt alone, could induce the colonists to render, however adequate, was purchased at the price of concessions which deprived the governors of all but nominal influence, while placing in the assemblies the effective ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... Duke was among friends, and would have been glad to trust him to a woman; but Richard had but one instinct left in all his weakness and exhaustion—to cling close to Osmond, as if he felt him his only friend and protector; for he was, as yet, too much worn out to understand that he was in Normandy and safe. For two or three hours, therefore, Osmond and the Seneschal's wife watched on each side of ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... will say something stupid." Hence the well-wishers of England can feel nothing but regret when they find her clear and cold light of reason obscured, as it has been, upon the negro question by the mists and clouds of sentimental passion, and their first desire is to see this weakness pass away. ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Christians are agreed; it is the one point on which they all feel alike. So inherent is the idea of sexual continence in the Western hemisphere that even those whose practice does not coincide with their theory rarely impugn the wisdom of the law which they break; they prefer to plead the weakness of the flesh as their excuse, and it is with reluctance that they admit that without an appeal to conscience it would be impossible to prove that it is wrong for two unmarried people to live together. It is not perceived ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... noticed only the chief events of its history, without stopping to gather any instruction from facts. Let it suffice to say that the same causes made the Arabs victorious over the Byzantine emperor and the Persian Shah-in-Shah, and that these causes were the weakness and exhaustion of the national dynasties in the presence of the vital elements of the conquerors. The people suffered from the carelessness of their kings; individual energy was powerless against the invasion of disciplined and fanatical tribes, commanded by generals ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... personal pique which did him credit, he determined to take the first opportunity to warn Mr. Lincoln of the dangers of his position. Douglas knew Lincoln far better than the average Washington politician. To an acquaintance who lamented the apparent weakness of the President-elect, Douglas said emphatically, "No, he is not that, Sir; but he is eminently a man of the atmosphere which surrounds him. He has not yet got out of Springfield, Sir.... He he does not know that he is President-elect of the United States, Sir, he does not see that the shadow ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... bear it. I can not look at him. I lose all self-command when he is near. I should make a fool of myself. He would look at me with a smile of pity. Could I endure that? No, Kitty; my weakness must never ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... sayin', all at once the lookout calls out, 'Land ho!'—leastways he croaked it, 'cos what with weakness and little water our throats was as dry ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... pursuits are greatly beneath us; or to make confidants and companions of servants. Their offers of service to a young man, against the wishes of his parent, cannot be sincere; if they will deceive their master, think not they will spare his son; but, taking advantage of his weakness, they will not only render him a tool to their own vices, but too often prove his ...
— The Little Quaker - or, the Triumph of Virtue. A Tale for the Instruction of Youth • Susan Moodie
... It reaches the young people of a considerable area, and is an influence for large good among them. Among the speeches or essays presented at the closing exercises, was one entitled: "The South, Her Strength and Weakness." It is a hopeful sign that the young men of the South, who are to be the leaders in their section, are seriously considering these problems. In the "New South," a large element of strength and progress will come from the educated young men of the Highlands. ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 3, July, 1900 • Various
... your misfortune that you're a sentimentalist with a habit of exaggerating things; but if you don't indulge in your weakness too much, you'll go a long way. You showed the true Challoner pluck when you smoked out that robbers' nest in the hills, and the pacification of the frontier valley was a smart piece of work. When I read ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... are patients, both among those of the private and among those of the pauper class, whom it is undesirable, and whom it would also be wrong, to engage in work. There are cases, for instance, in which, for various reasons, such as physical weakness, it would be directly injurious to the patients to be engaged in active or fatiguing work; and it would be unsatisfactory if it were found that the efforts to develop the industrial system in asylums led to such patients being pressed ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... in the scientific analysis of business is to provide for more ample analysis of facts on the outside. Weakness at this point explains the defects in many plans for the welfare of employees, it explains the defects in scientific management, mentioned above, and it explains many other shortcomings in projects for increasing the ...
— Higher Education and Business Standards • Willard Eugene Hotchkiss
... judges, he wept like a child—he who was always so brave, courageous and manly. This is a touching instance—an instance of a poor soul striving to do right, striving to be faithful, amid daily temptation, to a sister who had gone before, yet because in a moment of weakness he was overtaken in a fault, he was treated in such a harsh and cruel manner. Certainly discipline must be maintained in the service, and had the matter been settled by the captain, his punishment would have been very lenient in comparison ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling
... them on their infidel platform, and he presents a resolution declaring that "by their absence, they had openly declared their infidelity to their professions of theological faith, and had thus confessed the weakness and folly of their arrogant assumptions, and proved that they loved popular favour more than common good; and they are therefore moral cowards, pharisees of this nineteenth century, seeking to enslave more and more the mind of man," &c. Another orator then ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... noticing the interruption, 'that's a wery different thing. You know what the counsel said, Sammy, as defended the gen'l'm'n as beat his wife with the poker, venever he got jolly. "And arter all, my Lord," says he, "it's a amiable weakness." So I says respectin' widders, Sammy, and so you'll say, ven you gets as ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... than that which betrayed monarchs usually inflict? Would the Flemings, at that critical moment, have deserved their freedom had they not taken swift and signal vengeance for this first infraction of their newly recognized rights? Had it not been weakness to spare the traitors who had thus stained the childhood of the national joy at ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... his prayers he fell as it were, into a stupor, and as he was afterwards wont to relate, felt a large and broad hand touch his head where the pain lay, and by that touch all the part of his body which had been affected with the distemper, was delivered from the weakness, and restored to health down to his feet. He then awoke, and rose up in perfect health, and returning thanks to God for his recovery, told the brothers what had happened to him; and to the joy of them all, returned the more zealously, as if chastened by his affliction, ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... in every department. I encouraged religion and punished heresy; I kept each of the four castes in their proper sphere, and without oppressing the people, I collected a large revenue, for there is nothing worse than weakness in a ruler, and without money he ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... Plymouth? Their imperfect shelter, their insufficient supply of bread, their salted food, now in unwholesome condition, account too well for the diseases and the mortality that marked this first dreadful season; weakness, swelling of the limbs, and other signs of scurvy, betrayed the want of proper nourishment and protection from the elements. In December six of their number died, in January eight, in February, seventeen, in March thirteen. With ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... each flow'ret a protecting veil To shelter it from trial's rougher gale, And clear'd, with strenuous and unceasing toil, From each insidious weed th' improving soil. His patient diligence had won at length A partial triumph over nature's strength: Tho' unsuppress'd th' internal weakness still With frequent bias pois'd the wavering will, Still losing ground, it seem'd to die away, Like nightly storms before advancing day: When thrice seven rolling years matured his age, And call'd him forth to ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... mean time he rose, and, invigorated by his bath, his thoughts became in a slight degree more mundane. They recurred to the events of the last few days of his life, but in a spirit of self-reproach and of conscious vanity and weakness. Why, he had not known her a week! This was Sunday morning, and last Sunday he had attended St. Mary's and offered up his earnest supplications for the unity of Christendom. That was then his sovereign hope and thought. Singular that a casual acquaintance with a stranger, ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... these words, being by no means accustomed to signs of womanly weakness in the Professor. I caught his trembling hands in mine and gave them a gentle pressure. He allowed me to do so without resistance, looking at me kindly all the time. His ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... ruling passion, strong in death, of the Son of Thunder; who in youth asked if he should call down fire from heaven upon a hamlet which did not welcome Jesus, and was well rebuked for his zeal by the gracious Master. It is part of the human weakness through which the voice of God speaks, taking its tone from the defects of the instrument. This imprecation had reference, in all probability, solely to the copyists, against whose carelessness the author sought ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... certain lack of sympathy and tenderness towards their unhappy parent. They seemed to him not only to have caught that dry, curious toleration of helplessness which characterizes even relationship in its attendance upon chronic suffering and weakness, but to have acquired an unconscious habit of turning it to account. In his present sensitive condition, he even fancied that they flirted mildly ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... carried its doleful message. The mournful notes had reached the ears of the wounded lad in the canoe. Its message was plain to him. Walter was a captive, or in great danger. And now began a contest between will-power and pain and weakness from which many ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... and, what is more, even the sacred memories of your father and mother might feel the slur cast on them." This exaggerated language—like all exaggerated language, a mischievous weapon in the arsenal of weakness and prejudice—had its effect on Isabel. Reluctantly and sadly, ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... who protects Weakness wins heaven, while he who persecutes it goes to hell. Weakness, thus, is a great thing. Its power, so to say, is such that it can lead to heaven and hell everyone with whom it ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... to regret—although he certainly would have preferred, from the point of view of his principles, to have displayed a somewhat less childish weakness. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... ruling, guiding, teaching, improving men; the light who lighteth every man who cometh into the world. He proclaims Himself by acts of wondrous power to be the internecine foe and conqueror of every form of sorrow, slavery, barbarism, weakness, sickness, death itself. He proclaims Himself as One who is come to give His life for His sheep— One who is come to restore to men the likeness in which they were originally created, the likeness of their Father in ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... the physical inspiration passing through a diluted medium; and yet, even when truth, imparted, as it were, by intuition, has been specious, or at least imperfect, the intoxication of sudden discovery has ever claimed it as full, infallible, and divine. And while human weakness needed ever to recur to the pure and perfect source, the revelations once popularly accepted and valued assumed an independent substantiality, perpetuating not themselves only, but the whole mass of derivitive forms accidentally ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... That weakness smoothed the path of sin, In half the slips our youth has known; And whatsoe'er its blame has been, That ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... families; and when the punishment for it comes, everybody rejoices. People say contemptuously, "Is this the man that made the earth to tremble?" There is seldom pity for a fallen greatness that rejoiced in its strength, and despised the weakness of the unfortunate. If anything is foreign to the spirit of Christianity it is boastful pride, and yet it is one of those things which it is difficult for conscience to reach, as it is generally baptized ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... not add for Dorothy's edification, that try as she would, she (Eleanor) had never been able to make Polly confess whether she preferred one swain to another. As Eleanor considered this a weakness in her own powers of persuasion, she never allowed anyone to ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... nobody," she reasoned, in piteous argument. Her gnarled hands trembled as she worked, and now, with nobody to note her weakness, tears fell unregarded down her face. "There's things I wouldn't ask for, whether or no. Mebbe they'd have to be took away from somebody else; an' I never was one to plead up poverty. But there's plenty o' flowers in the world. 'Twouldn't upset nothin' for ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
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