"Desecrate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... me. But to what? What nameless deed shall desecrate this hand? It must not be: the royal blood of twice two thousand years, it must not die, die like a dream. Oh! my heart is full of care, and my soul is dark ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... unconquerable. No evil act of his soldiery did he ever rebuke. Only two things he demanded of them—absolute obedience and unshaken daring. The man who flinched or disobeyed was executed on the instant. Otherwise the marauders might desecrate God's earth with whatsoever hideous crimes they would. His troops laughed at the idea of being Catholics or Protestants, Germans or Bohemians; they were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... says Love, "all that I ask, Is just thy hand clasp. Could I brush thy cheek As zephyrs brush a rose leaf, words are weak To tell the bliss in which my soul would bask. There is no language but would desecrate ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... will be with us too, for I promised to have luncheon with him again," she exclaimed, as Miss Lindsey began to insert her into an evening wrap made of a priceless old Paisley shawl which "Fashions" had also tempted Miss Elvira to desecrate with ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... drama, the privacy of the mails, in fact, our most intimate tastes, are at the mercy of this inexorable tyrant. Anthony Comstock, or some other equally ignorant policeman, has been given power to desecrate genius, to soil and mutilate the sublimest creation of nature—the human form. Books dealing with the most vital issues of our lives, and seeking to shed light upon dangerously obscured problems, are legally treated as criminal offenses, and their helpless authors thrown into prison or driven ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... the worshipers in King's Chapel, after that edifice was burned, for them to hold their Christmas services. It was with the implicit understanding that there was to be no spruce, holly, or other greens used on that occasion to desecrate their meeting-house. ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... glowered at the snarling men as at some repulsive beasts, horrified that they should thus desecrate the quiet of his Pascherette's death-bed. He was not the Milo of old now. His memory had flown back through the years to the time when he was a youth of position and great promise in his own land; when, instead of being the cast-off ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... gracious lips unsmiling, a little triste. Compunctions smote him; with his crude and clumsy banter he had contrived to tune her thoughts to sadness. He would have given worlds to undo that blunder; to show her that he had meant neither a rudeness nor a wish to desecrate her reticence, but only an indirect assurance of gratitude to her for suffering him and willingness to serve her within the compass of his poverty-stricken powers. For in retrospect his invitation assumed the proportions of an importunity, an egregious piece of presumption: so ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... harms those who have the hardihood of getting down to basic facts and classifying things and ideas according to their true value. Why should we be guided by the wit and sarcasm of indolent voluptuaries who daily desecrate ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... commercially on the civilized dead, arranged themselves, with black wands, in solemn Undertakers' order of procession on either side of the funeral vehicles. Those clumsy pomps of feathers and velvet, of strutting horses and marching mutes, which are still permitted among us to desecrate with grotesquely-shocking fiction the solemn fact of death, fluttered out in their blackest state grandeur and showed their most woeful state paces, as the procession started magnificently with its meager offering of one dead body more to the ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... you that I'd rather starve than desecrate the home of my ancestors—that I'd sooner end my days in a London garret than level a single wall for my own benefit—what then? Would you put me down as a madman for ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... another side to the question—the side of duty, and was too honest to hide it from her. She had said that she would have nothing to do with Edward Cossey, but she was well aware that the matter was still an open one. What should she do, what ought she to do? Abandon her love, desecrate herself and save her father and her house, or cling to her love and leave the rest to chance? It was a cruel position, nor did the lapse of time tend to make it less cruel. Her father went about the place pale and melancholy—all his jovial manner had vanished ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... when that great captain of the Gauls, Brennus, led his forces through Italy and Greece, there were in his troop two French nobles, one named Felsinus, the other named Bono, who seeing the wicked designs of Brennus to invade and desecrate the temple of Delphos, after his great conquests, withdrew their forces and passed into Asia with their ships ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... Ibn-Sadif. None in the camp knew of the Annunciation, of that fair, sacred day when the birds will not even build their nests lest their labour desecrate its holiness." ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... to think of the ambitious amateur in his bedroom, secretly practising hideous antics or gazing at his absurd apparel before a mirror. How loath must he have been to desecrate the lines he loved so dearly and had longed to declaim in all their beauty and their resonance! And then, what irony at the daily rehearsal! With how sad a smile must he have received the compliments of Mr. Dimonds on his fine performance, knowing how different it would all be 'on the night! ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... and personal intrusion of some ruffian or party of carousing blackguards. He will seek privacy amid the densest foliage, all in vain. Here are the very nooks where the unwashed most abound—here are the temples most desecrate. With sickness of the heart the wanderer will flee back to the polluted Paris as to a less odious because less incongruous sink of pollution. But if the vicinity of the city is so beset during the working days of the week, how much more so on the Sabbath! It is now especially that, released ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... sentiment, every passion, every prayer, is inter-related with every other thought, deed, word, sentiment, passion and prayer of every other living thing in all eternity. We have an ideal to maintain, and if we are untrue or fail, we interrupt, we desecrate the everlasting scheme of the universe. We will therefore be held responsible for our manner of living,—for the sum total of our existence. We have a purpose to fulfill, a responsibility to sustain. If we are false to that purpose, and fail in our ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... charlatanerie— Inventor of musical artillery— Barbarous rain and thunder maker— Unconscionable money taker— Travelling about both near and far, Toll to exact at every bar— What brings thee here again, To desecrate old Drury's fane? Egregious attitudiniser! Antic fifer! com'st to advise her 'Gainst intellect and sense to close her walls? To raze her benches, That Gallic wenches Might play their brazen antics ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... if you are dead and indifferent to your own miserable soul, think that in this sin you cannot sin alone; think that you are dragging down to the nethermost abyss others besides yourself. Remember the wretched victims of your infamous passions, and tremble while you desecrate and deface for ever God's image stamped on a fair human soul. Think of those whom your vileness dooms to a life of loathliness, a death of shame and anguish, perhaps an eternity of horrible despair. Learn something of the days they are forced to spend, that they may pander to the worst instincts ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... oh! that were impossible for the very basest fiend to do. But I was wrong to desecrate the word, and say I love her. No, no; I tell you I hate her, I loathe her; but in spite of hatred, in spite of loathing, she exercises over my imagination an irresistible fascination—a fascination you can never ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... just what we do when we take the powers of heart and mind and will, which are meant to be filled with affections, thoughts, and purposes, that are 'an odour of a sweet smell, well-pleasing to God,' and desecrate them by pouring from them libations before creatures. Is not love profaned when it is lavished on men or women without one reference to God? Is not the intellect desecrated when its force is spent on ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the chief justice, with somewhat of an old Puritan feeling in his breast. "No good can come of men who desecrate the house ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... irreverent allusion to his father would have. A slight tinge of shame was in his face; but I saw that he had not sufficient moral courage to resent the shameful desecration of a parent's name. How should he, when he was himself the first to desecrate that name? ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... wicked men were even then preparing to desecrate the beautiful land. A war-party of enemies had come down upon the tribe, with whom they dwelt. Scouts had brought in the news. All was commotion and excitement in the camp. Goods and chattels were being packed ...
— Silver Lake • R.M. Ballantyne
... dwelt in Elam, "a place not appointed her," and reinstated her in her own sanctuary "which she had delighted in." 1635 added to 645 make 2280, a date not to be disputed. Now if a successful Elamite invasion in 2280 found in Chaldea famous sanctuaries to desecrate, the religion to which these sanctuaries belonged, that of the Cushite, or Semitic colonists, must have been established in the country already for several, if not many, centuries. Indeed, quite recent discoveries show that it had ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... greater favorite with Landor, and one day, years after the story was published, he burst out with a tremendous emphasis, and declared the one mistake of his life was that he had not purchased the house in Bath, and then and there burned it to the ground, so that no meaner association should ever desecrate the birthplace ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... agony at the iniquities of the Puseyites. His aversion is carried to things outward as well as inward. His gall rises at a new church with a high-pitched roof; a full-breasted black silk waistcoat is with him a symbol of Satan; and a profane jest-book would not, in his view, more foully desecrate the church seat of a Christian than a book of prayer printed with red letters and ornamented with a cross on the back. Most active clergymen have their hobby, and Sunday observances are his. Sunday, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... most antimonial of emotions: it worships, yet it will not stop at sacrilege; it will build about its object a temple of adoration, then desecrate the fane; it will give all, yet ruthlessly seize everything; it delights in pleasing, yet it sometimes wittingly wounds; its ineffable tenderness often merges into an inclemency extraordinary; —symbol of universal duality, it is ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... Mr. Wheatman," he said. "You must meet them to-morrow. The young rascal cries out whenever I desecrate him with my touch. It would have served him right ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... Is wiser than his time. For him the hemlock shall distil; For him the axe be bared; For him the gibbet shall be built; For him the stake prepared. Him shall the scorn and wrath of men Pursue with deadly aim; And malice, envy, spite, and lies, Shall desecrate his name. But Truth shall conquer at the last, For round and round we run; And ever the Right comes uppermost, ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... fortune and the frowns of the world. Here his perplexed spirit finds inspirations of strength, and space for rest. There is no happiness in life, there is no misery, like that growing out of the dispositions which consecrate or desecrate a Home. ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... Albeit men mock thee with their similes And prate of being "happy as a clam!" What though thy shell protects thy fragile head From the sharp bailiffs of the briny sea? Thy valves are, sure, no safety-valves to thee, While rakes are free to desecrate thy bed, And bear thee off—as foemen take their spoil— Far from thy friends and family to roam; Forced, like a Hessian, from thy native home, To meet destruction in a foreign broil! Though thou art tender yet thy humble bard Declares, O clam! thy ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... dead. Three volleys were fired over the graves after the slain men had been laid in them. Bugler Swanson blew "taps," after which the graves were carefully filled and the tops sodded so that roving Moros would not afterwards find and desecrate these graves, sacred to the American people. All in good time the American military authorities would send and exhume these remains, transferring them to marked resting places ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Philippines - or, Following the Flag against the Moros • H. Irving Hancock
... with intent to annihilate the boaster. This the gods would not permit, however, and they quickly threw themselves between the irate Thunderer and their guest, imploring Thor to respect the sacred rights of hospitality, and not to desecrate their ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... written against him. Let us not commit the sacrilege, if he is ever made prisoner and is not shot for the murders and cruelties he and his subjects have committed on British men and women at sea and on land, of deporting the Kaiser to St. Helena to desecrate the ground made sacred for all time because of the great Emperor who was an exile there. Force of circumstances made Louis Philippe declare the truth to the world's new generations (doubtless to save his own precious skin) that "he was not only an emperor, but a king ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... should write of him, is this scribbling anonymuncule in grand old Massachusetts who scrawls and screams so glibly about what he cannot understand? This apostle of inhospitality, who delights to defile, to desecrate, and to defame the gracious courtesies he is unworthy to enjoy? Who are these scribes who, passing with purposeless alacrity from the Police News to the Parthenon, and from crime to criticism, sway with such serene ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... to the central storehouse. The new settlers showed a measureless cunning and industry in reclaiming worthless soil; and so eager were they for land at last, that the Cistercians were even said to desecrate churchyards, and to encroach on the borders of royal forests. They grew famous for the breeding of horses according to the exacting taste of the day, learned in the various species of palfreys and sumpter horses and knight's chargers and horses for ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... since I first met you. I feel now as though every thought, every hour, every event of the last five months has been a preparation for this moment. On one point, however, I have never wavered. We can't desecrate our love by some odious law-suit. If this life were all, it would be different. But it isn't all. It seems as though we are not to be everything to each other. Yet we can be more than everything—we can be one existence even if we cannot be man and ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... a Corilla!" mockingly exclaimed the pope. "Shall a Corilla desecrate the spot hallowed by the feet of Tasso and Petrarch? No, I say, no; when art becomes the plaything of a courtesan, then may the sacred Muses veil their heads and mourn in silence, but they must not degrade themselves by throwing away the crown which the best and noblest would give ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... than one reason why a man should torture himself and starve himself and maim and desecrate and horribly defile himself. At first sight, the reason sounds improbable, but consideration will confirm it. It is vanity, of an iron-bound kind, that makes ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... from that yet, thank God!—I should even then remain honest and true—faithful to one love, simply from pride. I should prefer," she added, in a voice deep and sustained, but somewhat strained, "I should prefer to desecrate ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... and the Viceroy of Italy were to march upon Vienna and make Austria tremble in the heart of her capital before the timid million of her Allies, who measured their steps as they approached Paris, should desecrate by their presence the capital of France. When informed of the vast project, which, however, was but the dream of a moment, I immediately recognised that eagle glance, that power of discovering great resources in great calamities, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... not afraid to desecrate such a place with your horrid vices—I mean the iron things—and furnace and litter?" asked Mary. She had sunk down upon an anvil, on which lay a newspaper, the first seat that she could find, and thence surveyed the strange, ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... notice his pleasantries, and he continued, addressing himself to Wyant: "They all come—they all come; but many are called and few are chosen." His voice sank to solemnity. "While I live," he said, "no unworthy eye shall desecrate that picture. But I will not do my friend Clyde the injustice to suppose that he would send an unworthy representative. He tells me he wishes a description of the picture for his book; and you shall describe it to ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... Because he was a stranger and an infidel, so has he been told of dark things done to those who desecrate ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... now in mourning, but tomorrow, covered with laurels, she will have extinguished the last of the tyrants who now desecrate her soil. Then she will invite you to a single association, so that our motto may be 'Unity in South America.' All Americans ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... breathed the general. "It is regrettable that you used this means when a word to me would have served the purpose, for—it is no trivial matter to desecrate a Mexican graveyard. My country, too, has a government. An officer of the State of Texas, under arms, has crossed the Rio Grande. What ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... mean the Terrorists and Anarchists of France, M. L'Abbe.... The Committee of Public Safety who pillage and murder, outrage women, and desecrate religion.... Is that ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... face would become peaked and pitiful, she would seem like a child of ten. Sometimes Thyrsis could laugh her out of such a mood by telling her of her "beady black eyes"; and she did not like to desecrate her eyes. ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... shall be guided entirely by Mr. Mitchell's opinion about the best manner of giving my readings; for, as I do it for money, I shall do it in the way most likely to be profitable. At the same time, I shall certainly use my best endeavor to have the business so arranged as to desecrate as little as possible the great works of the master, in the exposition and illustration of which I look for infinite pleasure and profit of the highest order, whatever my meaner gain by it ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... probably on the spot now occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and Eusebius, writing about A.D. 325, speaks of Constantine's church built on the site of this temple. It is claimed that Hadrian's heathen temple was erected to desecrate the place of Christ's entombment, and that Constantine's church, being erected on the site of the temple, and regarded as the place called Calvary, fixes this as the true site; but whether the church and temple were on the same ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... ever comes into my possession, it will be so guarded that no stray foot shall desecrate ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... that stretch up the hill behind Brackenhurst. Frida remembered it well afterwards. It was the day when an annual saturnalia of vulgar vice usurps and pollutes the open downs at Epsom. Bertram did not care to see it, he said—the rabble of a great town turned loose to desecrate the open face of nature—even regarded as a matter of popular custom; he had looked on at much the same orgies before in New Guinea and on the Zambesi, and they only depressed him: so he stopped at Brackenhurst, ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... of Pennsylvania, made surveys upon the north fork of the Licking. When Boone, therefore, in September, commenced his march for the West, (as we shall presently relate), the choice regions which he had examined three years before, were known to numbers, and settlers were preparing to desecrate the silent and beautiful woods. Nor did the prospects of the English colonists stop with the settlements of Kentucky. In 1773, General Lyman, with a number of military adventurers, went to Natchez and laid out several townships in that vicinity; to which point emigration ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... rooms again. This already has become a melancholy task; but we must choose it, or its sadder alternative,—the old buck-saw. True there are students among us who will have exercise if cramming professors are ever so vexed. They will not study on Sunday; they escape to the woods, admire nature—desecrate the Sabbath. They find relaxation at the billiard table, make effigies in the night to be burned in the morning, remove side-walks, dislocate gates, or arm-in-arm parade the side-walk singing: "Happy is the ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... thousands of lovely examples, transmitted to us as heirlooms from our ancient families, have been sacrificed. But let us congratulate ourselves that we have among us many who know better, who will not even let the binder desecrate a faultless copy of Tennyson, Byron, Shelley, or Keats ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... upon whom to vent his rage—it suddenly occurred to him to visit Mrs Allcraft, and to worry her with his complaints. He hurried to her house, and forced himself into her presence. We will not follow him, for grief is sacred; and who that had the heart of man, would desecrate the hearth hallowed by affliction, deep and terrible as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... Sundas—Bali, noted for its superb scenery and its alluring women; Lombok, the northernmost island whose flora and fauna are Australian; Sumbawa, where the sandalwood comes from; Flores, whose inhabitants consider the earth so holy that they will not desecrate it by digging wells or cultivation; Timor, the northeastern half of which, together with Goa in India and Macao in China, forms the last remnant of Portugal's once enormous Eastern empire; Rotti, Kei, and Aroo, the great chain thus formed linking New Guinea, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... Father, you shall take me to my mother's grave. One prayer there—one word with Estelle—and then I will go to Paris; it is the resort of every criminal, and thence it sends forth its crime-blackened ruffians to desecrate this fair earth with horror. Come, father, come—my mother's ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... and with various ceremonies it makes the round of the lodge. After many days of feasting and dancing the party is ready for a campaign, when they abandon the lodge, and it is death for any one else to enter, or by any means to desecrate it ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... beside Nelson on the doorstep. "I beg of you all to disperse to your homes and don't desecrate the Sabbath by such ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... pervert, desecrate, violate, profane; maltreat, mistreat; revile, reproach, vilify, vituperate, malign, traduce; violate, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... no slave being allowed to practise either. The reverence of the Indians for the graves of their fathers approaches the worship of ancestors among the Chinese. No outrage is greater to the Indians than to desecrate the burial-places of their dead. They often make sacrifices to them, and celebrate anniversaries of the dead with dancing and feasting. The Chinese feast their dead at regular intervals, and carry them thousands of miles across the ocean from foreign countries to rest in their own land at ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... Margaret," he said approaching the litter, "to have been able to save you from the power of these villains. Fortunately, word came to me that the outlaws in the forest were about to carry you off, and that they would not hesitate even to desecrate the walls of the convent. Assembling my men-at-arms, I at once rode to your rescue, and am doubly happy to have saved you, first, as a gentleman, secondly, as being the man to whom our gracious prince has assigned you as a wife. I am ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... that, and sign the pledge, and quit cigars, and go to work, and pay your debts, and gravitate back into Sunday-School, where you can make love to the preacher's daughter under the guise of religion, and desecrate the sanctity of the innermost pale of the church by confessions at Class of your 'thorough ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... of this recital, he again rubbed the stone for a while, and gave vent to some nonsensical utterances, after which he surrendered it to Chia Cheng. "This object," he said, "has already resumed its efficacy; but you shouldn't do anything to desecrate it. Hang it on the post of the door in his bed-room, and with the exception of his own relatives, you must not let any outside female pollute it. After the expiry of thirty-three days, he will, I can guarantee, be ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... a Sunday afternoon. The quiet of the holiday was noticeable even on the mountains where, hand in hand, the little comrades walked. They were nicely washed and arrayed in Sunday clothing, because Bacha Filina would not suffer anybody to desecrate Sunday. Everyone who could, had to go to the next town to church, though it was almost two hours' walk. He himself seldom went; he was not able to take long walks. Once a timber fell on his foot in the woods ...
— The Three Comrades • Kristina Roy
... enter a church with bared head and deferential mien, they have followed me to see that I did not steal the trinkets from the saints or desecrate the altar. If I have touched the font of holy water, instead of it purifying me, I have defiled it for their use; and when I have looked at the images of the saints the people have seen them frown at me. After my exit the priest would sprinkle holy water on the spots ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... religion to be the truth of humanity—its own truth that sets it free—not binds, and lops, and mutilates it! who see God to be the father of every human soul—the ideal Father, not an inventor of schemes, or the upholder of a court etiquette for whose use he has chosen to desecrate ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... up of this Council accompanied with an event so striking and characteristic, that I am tempted to give it at length in a translation. 'Who, exclaimed the King, when the Council was ended, shall first desecrate the altars and the temples? I, answered the Chief Priest; for who more fit than myself, through the wisdom which the true God hath given me, to destroy, for the good example of others, what in foolishness ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... set the example of desecrating churches, by using them as stables and hospitals, and for other secular purposes. It was a natural outcome of such practices that the succeeding generation should go a step further and do infinitely worse. If God-fearing men did not scruple to desecrate consecrated churches, was it likely that their godless successors would ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... that only at that moment sprung up in his mind? If it was real it came from the street parallel with the one he was in. Who could be driving out at this time? What other buggy than his own could be found to desecrate this Christian Sabbath? An irresistible thought impelled him at the risk of recognition to quicken his pace and turn the corner as Richard Demorest drove up to the Independence Hotel, sprang from his buggy, throwing the reins over the dashboard, and ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... take out this precious relic, but he was not able. It appeared as if some powerful spell held it firmly together; and it has remained unopened down to the present time. May it remain so until the last awful day, and may the impious hand of avarice or curiosity never desecrate these ...
— The Amber Witch • Wilhelm Meinhold
... those voices, so long slumbering, would break silence, that those forms which hang upon these walls behind me might come forth, and that the sabers so long sheathed would leap from their scabbards to drive from this sacred temple those who desecrate it as did the money-changers who sold doves in the ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... monks in finding the true character of the refugees whom they have sheltered in ignorance, contrary to the canons of the Church? Or will the still more devastating and ruthless storm of religious persecution seek the sanctuary in the clouds to desecrate it, to scatter its inmates ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... are given to the flames and the cursed army of Abolitionists exult at their demolition, does the hand of our Heavenly Father direct the work of destruction? When our temples are profaned by the bacchanalian orgies of the Northern hordes, does the Infinite invite them to desecrate His altars? They are not His works—they never were. These acts which the Christian world shudders at, are the machinations and promptings of Hell, and the Fiends who dwell therein triumph for awhile where the ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... dare to desecrate the name of love. You do not know what it means. I do—and this shall always remain with you as a remembrance. I love Amaryllis Ardayre. She is my ideal of a woman—tender and restrained and true—I shall always ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... silver; and as the king marched through the main aisle with his splendid retinue, every eye was bent upon him and every whisper hushed. Proceeding straight up to the high altar, he bent his knee before the God whose name he was now so soon to desecrate. Then the archbishop raised from the altar a crown of gold glittering with precious jewels, and placed it reverently upon the monarch's brow. The sacred rite of consecration over, the monarch rose and ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... it methodically," the orator continued. "To-day is Friday, and in an hour it will be ended. If we begin on Saturday, we may be tempted to desecrate the Sabbath; therefore, as good citizens, I pray that you will first consider your duty to your God, and not forget to keep holy His day. The soldiers will be here on Monday. Let us begin our work then, and finish it before ...
— Under the Liberty Tree - A Story of The 'Boston Massacre' • James Otis
... read that the fishermen on the shores of the Baltic are remarkably superstitious, and careful not to desecrate any of their saints' days. They never use their nets between All Saints' and St. Martin's, as they would be certain not to take any fish throughout the year. On Ash Wednesday the women neither sew nor knit, for fear ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... You silly baby! You wicked, horrible, sacrilegious girl!" Brinnaria stormed. "You irreligious, atheistical, blasphemous wretch! To save your hide you'd desecrate the temple, pollute the Altar, anger Vesta, make all our prayers in vain, bring down curses without count on Rome and all of us. Be silent! Don't you dare to speak another word! Off to bed ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... place on a Friday. Joshua knew it would pain the people deeply to be compelled to desecrate the holy Sabbath day. Besides, he noticed that the heathen were using sorcery to make the heavenly hosts intercede for them in the fight against the Israelites. He, therefore, pronounced the Name of the Lord, and the sun, moon ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... was the repugnance felt for the slayer of a Brahmana that to even talk with him was regarded a sin. To instruct such a man in the truths of the Vedas and of morality was to desecrate religion itself. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Ages, which depicted the devil fleeing from holy water, were not perhaps quite so benighted as our superior modern culture has led us to suppose. For that "hatred of goodness exaggerated to the point of paroxysm," that impulse to desecrate and defile which forms the basis of black magic and has manifested itself in successive phases of the world-revolution, springs from fear. So by their very hatred the powers of darkness proclaim the existence of the powers ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... others with their sordid cares And troubles enter here? Love hung about the rooms like smoke, And peace descended as a cloak, Should I allow the vulgar folk To desecrate that year? ...
— Poems of West & East • Vita Sackville-West
... take my thanks, ye reverend senators! That ye have lent your credence to these proofs; And if I be indeed the man whom I Protest myself, oh, then, endure not this Audacious robber should usurp my seat, Or longer desecrate that sceptre which To me, as the true Czarowitsch, belongs. Yes, justice lies with me,—you have the power. 'Tis the most dear concern of every state And throne, that right should everywhere prevail, ...
— Demetrius - A Play • Frederich Schiller
... of awakening, when your mind is free, you can so direct your attention as to receive joy instead of gloom, love instead of hate. You can exclude the thought of evil or you can yield and allow the tempter to desecrate your shrine. Whichever choice you make, these first moments of your day's living will color the whole course of the coming hours. The feeling first accepted and welcomed will more or less continue and form a background to all your ideas and determine ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... simple. The sum which you offered us is a fortune in itself—but we have no ambition for great wealth or to change our mode of life. Our associations with this place are so intimate and tender that money could not induce us to desecrate ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... sad old companion, who had taken his stand on the very site which they proposed to cover with a marble floor, shook his head and frowned, and the young man and the Lily deemed it almost enough to blight the spot and desecrate it for their airy temple that his dismal figure had thrown its shadow there. He pointed to some scattered stones, the remnants of a former structure, and to flowers such as young girls delight ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... prepare his food on the Sabbath, and you imagine yourselves better than he is. No, that will not do. The intention must decide. If any one bakes bread on the Sabbath, I should say to him: 'Is it for your own good or for gain?' In the first case you are acting rightly, in the last you desecrate the Sabbath." ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... the destruction of a corrupt and unworthy structure claiming the title of the law. In this strange, swift panorama there is all the story of the social system, all the picture of the building of that temple of the law which, as Americans, we now revere, or, at times, still despise and desecrate. ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... his congregation adorned the walls of Plymouth church with their private paintings. Their object, of course, in doing so was not to honor God, but their pastor. But if the portraits of men were no desecration to that church, how can the portraits of Saints desecrate ours?(279) And what can be more appropriate than to surround the Sanctuary of Jesus Christ with the portraits of the Saints, especially of Mary and of the Apostles, who, in their life, ministered to His sacred person? And is it not natural for children to adorn their homes with ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... explain it all: Yet have I drawn a lesson from the spot, And shrined it in these verses for my heart. Thenceforth those tranquil precincts I have sought Not less, and in all shades of various moods; But always shun to desecrate the spot By vain repinings, sickly sentiments, Or inconclusive sorrows. Nature, though Pure as she was in Eden when her breath Kissed the white brow of Eve, doth not refuse, In her own way and with a just reserve, To sympathize with human suffering; But for the pains, the fever, ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... a verity these be souls Such as in life were vile, Risen again from the nethermost coals To harry the earth a while; Versed in wickedness, old in sin, Never was hell could hold them in, And back they hasten in droves and shoals To desecrate and defile. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... Lesdiguieres represented to the King the ardent desire of the Protestants to conclude a peace, all their efforts were impotent to counteract the pernicious counsels of the Prince, which were destined to darken and desecrate all the after-reign of Louis XIII. Marie then endeavoured to dissuade the King from heading his troops in person; or, should he persist in this design, at least to forego that of leaving her in the capital, and of ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... fair and fashionable, and all that might be admitted fashionable without being fair—all that have the je ne sais quoi, which is than beauty dearer. As one conscious of his power to consecrate or desecrate, by one look of disdain or one word of praise, he stood; and beginning at the lowest conceivable point, his uttermost notion of want of beauty—his laid ideal, naming one whose image, no doubt, every charitable imagination will here supply, Horace next fixed upon another for his mediocrity ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... could not go with me (she always went with me when she could —I always did meet that kind of luck), I was going to Washington once, a long time ago, in Mr. Cleveland's first administration, and she could not go; but, in her anxiety that I should not desecrate the house, she made preparation. She knew that there was to be a reception of those authors at the White House at seven o'clock in the evening. She said, "If I should tell you now what I want to ask of you, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... exclaimed. "Damn it, Henry, he'd desecrate it! He'd tear up my cornfields and meadows and put factories and mills in their place! That's what he'd do!" He turned sideways and leant against the lintel of the window so that he was looking ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... for a moment outside the doorway gazing at her; hesitating to desecrate that revery, which seemed to him to have a touch of sadness in it. And then she turned her head, slowly, and saw him, and her lips parted, and a startled look came into her eyes, but she did not move. He came quickly into the room and stopped again, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Nobody seemed surprised at it; nobody noticed it as a thing out of the common course of events. And this, too, in a city where the Sabbath proprieties are sternly insisted upon; where some twenty pulpits deal out anathemas upon all who "desecrate the Lord's day;" where simple notices of meetings for moral purposes even can scarcely be read; where many count it wrong to speak on that day for the slave, who knows no Sabbath of rest, or for the drunkard, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... statue of the Emperor be placed in the temples of the people who inhabited the outlying parts of the Roman domains. This was a mere formality and it did not have any deep significance. But to the Jews such a thing seemed highly sacrilegious and they would not desecrate their Holiest of Holies by the carven image of a ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... rippling sound, in soft recurrent ways, The perfect song, or in remoter days Theocritus have hymned you in glad Greek; But I am not as they,—and dare not speak Of you unworthily, and dare not praise Perfection with imperfect roundelays, And desecrate the prize I dare ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... be even with the tutor, and threatened to desecrate his grave. When he heard of the threat, in order to prevent its execution he built this strange monument, and instead of being buried beneath it he was said to have been buried near the summit; but the ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... next day, Thursday the 11th, we left for Springfield. The meeting was held in the evening, at the Town Hall, as some of the Parish committee objected to its being held in the church, fearing it would desecrate the place. The Hall was crowded, and many could not gain admittance. Dr. Osgood opened the meeting with prayer, took several of the Mendians to his own house, and manifested a deep interest on their behalf, as did many of the other inhabitants. The Mendians were all ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... the silent little church and convent of St. Elizabeth. He looked up to where in the central tower a small grated window lighted from within showed the place where the last of the Bourbons was being taught to desecrate the traditions of his race, at the bidding of a mender of shoes—a naval officer cashiered for misconduct ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... it may, Richard Cameron with his followers asserted the principle which afterwards became law—namely, that the House of Stuart should no longer desecrate the throne. He did not, however, live to see ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... e celebrate desecrate supplement liquefy petroleum rarefy skeleton telescope tragedy gayety lineal renegade secretary deprecate execrate implement maleable promenade recreate stupefy tenement ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... with me, thinking you might need it—hoping you might, I mean;" and he smiled. "I have kept it always near me; partly because I wanted the comfort of it, partly because I was afraid some one else might find it, and desecrate our secret with ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill
... upon his glory, he kept a gig and a strong trotting-horse. With Fettes he was on terms of intimacy; indeed, their relative positions called for some community of life; and when subjects were scarce the pair would drive far into the country in Macfarlane's gig, visit and desecrate some lonely graveyard, and return before dawn with their booty to the door of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tragical one, like everything else about that place," Vic responded, grimly. "Old Lagonda, Chief of the Wahoos, I reckon, I don't know his tribe, did n't want to give up this valley to the sons and heirs of Sunrise to desecrate with salmon cans and pop bottles and Harvard-turned chaperons. He held out against putting his multiplication sign to the treaty, claiming that land was like water and air and could n't be bought and sold. But the white men with true missionary courtesy held his head ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... natural. One of the first efforts of nursery culture is to smear that white page with our self-made foulness. We labor conscientiously and with patience, to teach our babies shame. We degrade the human body, we befoul the habits of nature, we desecrate life, teaching evil and foolish falsehood to our defenceless little children. The "sex-taboos" of darkest savagery, the decencies and indecencies of primitive convention, we have preserved throughout the ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... — N. misuse, misusage, misemployment[obs3], misapplication, misappropriation. abuse, profanation, prostitution, desecration; waste &c. 638. V. misuse, misemploy, misapply, misappropriate. desecrate, abuse, profane, prostitute: waste &c. 638; overtask, overtax, overwork: squander &c. 818. cut blocks with a razor, employ a steam engine to crack a nut; catch at a straw. Adj. misused &c. v. Phr. ludere ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... intelligence, sound morality, and, in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and the laws; and then our country shall continue to improve, and our nation, revering his name, and permitting no hostile foot to pass or desecrate his resting-place, shall be the first to hear the last trump that shall awaken ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... will not tell in detail how the next few days passed. The little idyl concerns no one but myself—and one other—and there is no reason to desecrate them by bawling its delicate folds abroad. Suffice it to say that we went on through Deya to Soller, and then taking mules, climbed the mountain passes to the convent of ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... be no great merit. Her life was not so easy that she should fear this pure embrace. It would be better, far better, than to marry Owen Davies, than to desecrate their love and teach Geoffrey to despise her. And how else could she ward this trouble from him except by her death, or by a marriage that in her eyes was more ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... awaits me!) Why the cauldron? Why Not desecrate the dustbin? Here's the rub: All the endorsements specify my tub; The dustbin is not mentioned. Can ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... freethinkers, uniting with nobody and letting their children grow up in the same way. In brief, there are Germans here, and probably the most of them, who despise God's Word and all good outward order, blaspheme and frightfully and publicly desecrate the Sacraments. Spiritus enim errorum et sectarum asylum sibi hic constituit (For the spirit of errors and sects has here established his asylum). And the chief fault and cause of this is the lack of provision for an external visible church-communion. For since, as it were, the first thesis of natural ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... the abolition of worship, while, in other communes, we will get rid of this authoritatively through our missionary representatives. We will close the churches, demolish the steeples, melt down the bells, send all sacred vessels to the Mint, smash the images of the saints, desecrate relics, prohibit religious burials, impose the civil burial, prescribe rest during the decadi[2133] and labor on Sundays. No exception whatever. Since all positive religions deal in error, we will outlaw them all: we will exact from Protestant clergymen ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... is over, some restitution of his property is made to the dead, and odd articles, such as brass bowls or a gun or a shield or sword, are placed in a sacred cave, which none dare desecrate by entering to remove anything. These caves are high up on the mountain-sides, and are said to be full of sacred offerings, which have ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... has never stirred—sleeps like a stone. If he does not wake to-day we shall understand what kind of a sleep it is, and his body will then be borne to a place in one of the remote recesses of the cave where none will ever find it to desecrate it. As for the rest of us—well, it is agreed that if any one of us ever escapes alive from this place, he will write the fact here, and loyally hide this Manuscript with The Boss, our dear good chief, whose property it is, be he ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... often she appeared Majestic with celestial wrath, with eyes That shot forth fire, and a heavy brow, Portentous as the lowering front of heaven, When the reverberant, sullen thunder rolls Among the echoing clouds. Thus she denounced Her ancient, fickle worshippers, who left Her altars desecrate, her fires unfed, Her name forgotten. "But I reign, I reign!" She would shrill forth, triumphant; "yea, I reign. Men name me not, but worship me unnamed, Beauty and Love within their heart of hearts; Not with bent knees and empty breath of words, But ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... my cell to be picked by my industrious fingers had all been removed the previous evening, lest I should desecrate the sacred day by pursuing my ordinary avocation. My apartment was therefore clean and tidy, and by the aid of a bit of dubbin I managed to give an air of newness to my well-worn shoes. The attendants had, however, omitted ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... should be thinned rather than thronged; that Gideon must reject soldiers rather than recruit them. And it is partly, alas, the unhappy Progressive trying to be in front of his own religion, trying to destroy his own idol and even to desecrate his own tomb. But from whatever causes, this furious escape from popularity has involved Shaw in some perversities and refinements which are almost mere insincerities, and which make it necessary to disentangle the good he has done from the evil ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... forthwith into a volunteer ambulance company, proceeded immediately to lap up the honey from their dying brother. On the other hand it must be said, to the credit of the race, that (unlike the members of Arctic expeditions) they never desecrate the remains of the dead. When a honey-bearer dies at his post, a victim to his zeal for the common good, the workers carefully remove his cold corpse from the roof where it still clings, clip off the head and shoulders from the distended abdomen, and convey their deceased brother piecemeal, in ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... as a voluntary. Those who had heard the tune before and half remembered it decided that it must come from the "Mikado"; and one stern dowager went so far as to protest to the rector for permitting such a tune to desecrate ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... branches! To love! Oh! yes, they call it that at the altar—'joined together by God!' As likely as not two human creatures who hate each other, and are standing there swearing those impossibilities for some political purpose and advantage of their family. They desecrate the word love. Love is for us, Paul, who came together because our beings cried, 'This is my mate!' I should say nothing of it—oh no! if it had no pretence—marriage. If it were frankly a contract—'Yes, I give you my body ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... armlets of price, with the clasp set before. He is Saul, ye remember in glory,—ere error had bent The broad brow from the daily communion; and still, though much spent Be the life and the bearing that front you, the same, God did choose, To receive what a man may waste, desecrate, never quite lose. So sank he along by the tent-prop, till, stayed by the pile Of his armor and war-cloak and garments, he leaned there awhile, And sat out my singing,—one arm round the tent-prop, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... by turning in an iron cylinder over a fire of sticks and ground to the fineness of powder in a brass mill, is put into a small uncovered brass pot with a long handle. There it is boiled to a froth three times on a charcoal brazier, with or without sugar as you prefer. But to desecrate it by the admixture of milk is an unheard of sacrilege. Some kahvehjis replace the pot in the embers with a smart rap in order to settle the grounds. You in the meanwhile smoke. That also takes time, particularly if you "drink" a narguileh, as the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... was henceforth to have no sympathy with the future; the two worlds were distinct and separate—that which had been, from that which was to be. To what a bold and adventurous enterprise he had pledged his life!—to unveil the mysteries in which he had participated—to desecrate the altars he had served—to denounce the goddess whose ministering robe he wore! Slowly he became sensible of the hatred and the horror he should provoke amongst the pious, even if successful; if frustrated ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... is at our gates. Vaterland is in danger: my weiss is then for war. France, led by a despot, is about to desecrate the Rhine. His imperial bees are swarming, but we shall send him back with his bees in his bonnet, and a bee's mark (BISMARCK) on the end of his nasal organ. France wars for conquest; Prussia never. When FREDERICK the Great captured ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various
... Berkshire pigs slowly ripened and matured in the bright June sunshine. A stone sun-dial stood upon one of the velvet lawns, engraved with the legend "Tempus fugit," and various creaking basket and beehive chairs stood about, while no tennis net was permitted to desecrate the appearance of complete repose that the green garden presented ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... fortress in 1814, he did not desecrate or despoil the place: it was left for the Germans to do that, just a century later in the progress of civilization! My blood grew hot as I heard from our two men the story of what the new Vandals had done. Just for a moment I almost forgot the secret burning in my heart. ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... truth of the aphorism, he could comprehend that in magic there may be religion, for religion is an essential to art. His old ambition, freeing itself from the frigid prudence with which Mervale sought to desecrate all images less substantial than the golden calf of the world, revived, and stirred, and kindled. The subtle detection of what he conceived to be an error in the school he had hitherto adopted, made more manifest to him by the grinning commentary ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... burnt, his infant lost in the flames, his eldest son scourged for protesting against the wrong. And he returned, at the head of an army of Tatars, Socinians, Greeks, or what not, to set free the serfs, and exterminate Jesuits, Jews, and nobles, throughout Podolia, Volhynia, Red Russia; to desecrate the altars of God, and slay his servants; to destroy the nobles by lingering tortures; to strip noble ladies and maidens, and hunt them to death with the whips of his Cossacks; and after defeating the nobles in battle after battle, ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... His confident promise. He knows that in me He is able to restore to more than pristine beauty all which I, by my sin, have destroyed; to reconsecrate all which I, by my profanity, have polluted; to cast out the evil deities that desecrate and deform the shrine; and to make my poor heart, if only I will let Him come in to the ruined chamber, a fairer temple and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... man might never come to claim that place, and that, if she gave Tim the answer he so ardently desired, they would quite probably rub along together as well as most married folk—better, perhaps, than a good many. But she was very sure that she never intended to desecrate that inner temple by any ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... them, I mean—the kind that made the French revolutionists destroy everything their ancestors had set value on. There are plenty of Arabs so full of this disease of Bolshevism that they would make it easy for me to desecrate what others believe is holy ground. But these idiots of English are worse than the Turks! They have stopped all excavation. They are so afraid of Bolshevism that, if they could, they would imitate Joshua and make ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... and the demons of air, the malevolent spirits that lurk in water and wind, and all witches and evil doctors, are powerless. But the thought of the death-spancel must have come straight from the King of Fiends himself, for who else would harden the human heart to desecrate a new grave, and to cut from the helpless dead the strip of skin unbroken from head to heel which is the death-spancel? Very terrible is the passion of love when it takes full possession of a human heart, and no surer weapon ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... Glastonbury Abbey from Glastonbury. I can understand a man venerating it as a ruin; and I can understand a man despising it as a rubbish-heap. But it is senseless to insult a thing in order to idolatrise it; it is meaningless to desecrate the shrine in order to worship the stones. That sort of thing is the bad side of American appetite and ambition; and we are perfectly right to see it not only as a deliberate blasphemy but as an unconscious buffoonery. But there is another side to the ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... leaders, who are really no better than you are, generously admit you to a fellowship, and courteously acknowledge all such abandoned rascals to be their equals! Such men, to a great extent, now constitute the free-democracy of the country—they desecrate the ballot-box—disgust decent men wherever they come in contact with them—blaspheme the name of God—and swear that they will either rule or ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... volcano's crater, they take no prescribed channel, they flow into no immortal mould. It is this fiery gleam on the surface of matter hot from chaos, which the multitude honor as the highest manifestation of genius. But this is to desecrate a word which implies constructive power of the first order. Form is its highest expression. Without the shaping faculty, which artistically rounds to perfection, no glitter of decoration, nor even force and fire of expression, can keep the work from falling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... generations. They, however, have no influence on the course of worldly events. They are known only to silent eye-witnesses, and soon fall into oblivion. But hypocrisy, illusion, and bigotry stalk abroad undaunted; they desecrate what is noble, they pervert what is divine, to the unholy purposes of selfishness; which hurries along every good feeling in the false excitement of the age. Thus it was in the years of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the York Rite says, "it is necessary that there should be Wisdom to conceive, Strength to support, and Beauty to adorn, all great and important undertakings." "Know ye not," says the Apostle Paul, "that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man desecrate the temple of God, him shall God destroy, for the temple of God is ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... course, and that they will then like it naturally, just as they now like their follies and sins. Or those who are much engaged in worldly business, who confess they do not give that attention to religion which they ought to give; who neglect the ordinances of the Church; who desecrate the Lord's day; who give little or no time to the study of God's word; who allow themselves in various small transgressions of their conscience, and resolutely harden themselves against the remorse which such transgressions are ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... absentee,—This is Christmas-day 1815 with us; what it may be with you I don't know, the 12th of June next year perhaps; and if it should be the consecrated season with you, I don't see how you can keep it. You have no turkeys; you would not desecrate the festival by offering up a withered Chinese bantam, instead of the savoury grand Norfolcian holocaust, that smokes all around my nostrils at this moment from a thousand firesides. Then what puddings have you? Where will you get holly to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... past. The wave of reform passed even across the frontier and was borne into the Assyrian province of Samaria; the temple and image which Jeroboam had set up at Bethel were reduced to ashes, and human bones were burnt upon the altar to desecrate it beyond possibility ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... confound the rabble dissolute That desecrate thy poet's grave?'" read Otto, and the musical poem was at an end. All were enchanted with it. Otto alone made some small objections: "The Muses ought not to come with 'trumpets and drums,' and so many expressions similar to 'give a blow on the ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... the noise ceased. "Ye who thirst for mortal blood, desecrate not this holy building wherein I am master. What ye have to say must wait until after the ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa |
