"Filth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... powerful appeals to the senses, suited the taste of the age far better than sprinkling, so that not only did it become the common mode, but the subjects were completely undressed, without any distinction, to denote the putting off the old man and the putting on of the new, and the putting away of the filth of the flesh.[5] Public sentiment finally abolished this practice. After a considerable time affusion, or sprinkling, returned, and became the prevailing mode, without any special enactment, or any formal renunciation of the late mode. The Eastern church, however, ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... continued, their various theories mingling or clashing till they passed from politics to the press, and grew excited over the denunciations which poured each morning from Sagnier's newspaper, like filth from the mouth of a sewer. Thereupon Guillaume, who had become absorbed in reverie while pacing to and fro according to his habit, suddenly exclaimed: "Ah! what dirty work it is that Sagnier does! Before long there won't be a single ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... truly what they pretend to be. God knows men's longings, and God will meet them so far as meeting them is for men's good. But the characteristics of the prophet are set in strong contrast to those of the diviners and magicians, and lift the order high above all the filth and folly of these others. First, the prophet is 'raised up' by God; the individual holder of the office has his 'call' and does not 'prophesy out of his own heart.' The man who takes this office on himself without such a call is ipso facto branded ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the filth within these croupier types that makes them surround themselves with the aseptic immaculacy of iridium and glass. Their office was in a penthouse perched on the slanting roof shakes of the casino. It was big as a squash court, ...
— Vigorish • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Assembly, by one of its destructive decrees, closed those establishments all over France, such of them as by their laxity deserved to die, ceased at once to exist, and poured forth their inmates to swell the ranks of a corrupt society, and add religious degradation to the immoral filth of the world. Those religious houses, within whose walls the spirit of God had not ceased to dwell, were indeed closed and emptied; but their inmates endeavored to live their lives of religion in some unknown and obscure spot, until the madness ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... hole was choked up with rotten leaves, dead animals, birds, and all imaginable sorts of filth. On poking a stick down into it, seething bubbles aerated through the putrid mass, and yet the natives had evidently been living upon this fluid for some time; some of the fires in their camp were yet alight. I had very great difficulty in reaching down to bale any of this fluid into my canvas bucket. ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... she had finished. Then he helped her down from her perch, and made a way for her through the crowd. She looked at him in astonishment. "Thank you, Sir,—don't trouble! Last night I was pelted with filth. Are ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... shall come to pass, that he that is left in Zion shall be called holy: when the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, by the spirit of judgment and the spirit of ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... pavement dealt out their wares from the gutter. It was a raw, gloomy day of the early spring; and the grimy sky, the mud of the streets, the rags of the dirty men, harmonised excellently with the eruption of the damp, rubbishy sheets of paper soiled with printers' ink. The posters, maculated with filth, garnished like tapestry the sweep of the curbstone. The trade in afternoon papers was brisk, yet, in comparison with the swift, constant march of foot traffic, the effect was of indifference, of a disregarded distribution. Ossipon looked hurriedly both ways before stepping out into the cross-currents, ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... feature of Chicago that from the day of his arrival to the day of his departure to that land where dust troubleth not and soot and filth are unknown, filled his New England soul and nostrils with ineffable disgust. He never became reconciled to a condition in which the motto in hoc signo vinces on a bar of soap had no power to inspire a ray of hope. He had not been here a month ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... recruiting known as the press-gang. His existence on board the mighty and beautiful men-of-war was a life that at its best was a life of the severest hardship, and that at its worst was hard indeed to endure. He and his fellows were herded together under conditions of indescribable filth, squalor, and discomfort, often foolishly ill-fed, often cruelly ill-treated, often the victims of intolerable tyranny from brutal superiors. It is sometimes little short of marvellous that the sailors on whose faith the safety of England depended should have ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... "impressionism," the "sensationalism," the vague futilities of every sort, the "great poets" wallowing in the mud of Paris, the "great musicians" making night hideous in German concert-halls, the "great painters" of various countries mixing their colors with as much filth as the police will allow. His keen thrusts at these incarnations of folly and obscenity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and especially at those who seek to hide the poverty of their ideas ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... the towering screen of the lifted drawbridge, Emlyn and the strong Jeffrey rolled the kegs of powder over planks laid across the moat, into the mouth of the big drain and twenty feet down it, till they lay under the gateway towers! Then, lying there in the stinking filth, they drew the spigots out of holes that they had made in them, and in their place set the slow-matches. Jeffrey struck a flint, blew the tinder to a glow, and handed ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... by the ideas that we prefer. I don't blame the rich or the political tyrants—the mob has to be educated, the unhappy proletarians, who have so long submitted to the crack of the whip that they wouldn't know what to do with their freedom if they had it. All mobs believe alike in filth and fire, whether antique slaves free for their day's Saturnalia, or the Paris crowds of '93. Their ideas of happiness are pillage, bloodshed, drunkenness, revenge. Every popular uprising sinks the people deeper in their misery. Every ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... good work, for that is contrary to St. Paul, Phil. 1, 6; but the cause is that they wilfully turn away again from the holy commandment, grieve and embitter the Holy Ghost, implicate themselves again in the filth of the world, and garnish again the habitation of the heart for the devil. With them the last state is worse than the first." (1077 41f.; ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... he hailed. 'Cestui a comforter!' The thin men made to break away, halted, hesitated, and then with dragging feet made through the pools and filth to the gateway. ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... dogs to Thames, The king of dykes! than whom, no sluice of mud With deeper sable blots the silver flood. 'Here strip, my children! here at once leap in, Here prove who best can dash through thick and thin, And who the most in love of dirt excel, Or dark dexterity of groping well: Who flings most filth, and wide pollutes around The stream, be his the Weekly Journals bound; A pig of lead to him who dives the best; A peck of coals a-piece shall glad the rest.' "In naked majesty Oldmixon stands, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... with moil and toil enough to wear a bear to death, I did only five miles a day. After the day's work I would crawl with a dying sigh into the sleeping-bag, clad still in the load of skins which stuck to me a mere filth of grease, to sleep the sleep of a swine, indifferent ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... walls—found work for the idle hands of the women, and succeeded in forming a Committee of Ladies who were willing to help in the reformation of the female prisoners. It soon became evident that the labour was not in vain. A marked difference in the habits of the women was apparent. Instead of the riot and filth which were the accompaniments of idleness, order, neatness, and decency, were maintained. Nor did she rest when Newgate had shown some improvement. Her thoughts were turned to the condition of the poor wretches who had been sentenced to transportation. The foreign prisons were in ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... with their altars quite beaten downe, the Christian churches againe set open, and the name of Christ eftsoones called vpon amongest the people, coueting now rather to die in him with hope of resurrection in the world to come, than to liue in the seruice of idols, spotted with the filth of errors and false beleefe. And thus when bishop Iaroman had accomplished the thing for the which he was sent, ...
— Chronicles 1 (of 6): The Historie of England 5 (of 8) - The Fift Booke of the Historie of England. • Raphael Holinshed
... could not go on. And so of course,—stammering and writhing, as I always do when I have my nose pushed into this kind of filth—I had to speak to the landlady about ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... gentry of leisure obeying her commands, Mother scoured the dishes, picked up refuse, then penetrated the sleeping-shack and was appalled by the filth on the floor and by the gunny-sacking mattresses thrown in ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... whole Portuguese population. Their habits are idle and dirty. I am not aware, indeed, of ever having seen a more filthy town than Macao. No one seems to think that the streets were made for any other purpose than to serve as reservoirs for all the filth of the houses that line them. Heaps of abominable rubbish are seen here and there, which would be still more numerous, were it not for the occasional heavy rains, which wash down the steep streets, and carry off the accumulated masses to the sea. A few ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... morning—somewhere. Jimmy looked furtively out of the slit at the edge of the door to see that the train was passing through a region of cottages dusted black by smoke, through areas of warehouse and factory, through squalor and filth and slum; and vacant lots where the spread of the blight area had been so fast that the outward improvement had not time to build. Eventually the scene changed to solid areas of railroad track, and the trains parked there thickened ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... not trouble us very much by their importunities, although they were to be seen everywhere in filth and rags. Street peddlers, however, were persistent in offering wares and trinkets for sale, and bright Arab boys, who had learned a few sentences of English ran after us ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... or deny the truth of the charges brought against him. Jerome protested against such cruelty and injustice. "You have held me shut up three hundred and forty days in a frightful prison," he said, "in the midst of filth, noisomeness, stench, and the utmost want of everything; you then bring me out before you, and lending an ear to my mortal enemies, you refuse to hear me.... If you be really wise men, and the lights of the world, take care not to sin against justice. As to me, I am only a ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... ridge of stones and earth upon it to keep out the air, fastening with wooden skewers the flap of hide that covered the entrance, and keeping a constant fire, they could pass a winter endurable to Indians, though smoke, filth, vermin, bad air, the crowd, and the total absence of privacy, would make it a purgatory to any civilized ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... connected with the shore by narrow bridges of bamboo. The style of building in Sulu does not differ materially from that of the Malays. The houses are rather larger, and they surpass the others in filth. ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... mildew, dry rot, mucor, rubigo|. slovenry[obs3]; slovenliness &c. Adj. squalor. dowdy, drab, slut, malkin[obs3], slattern, sloven, slammerkin|, slammock[obs3], slummock[obs3], scrub, draggle-tail, mudlark[obs3], dust- man, sweep; beast. dirt, filth, soil, slop; dust, cobweb, flue; smoke, soot, smudge, smut, grit, grime, raff[obs3]; sossle[obs3], sozzle[obs3]. sordes[obs3], dregs, grounds, lees; argol[obs3]; sediment, settlement heeltap[obs3]; dross, drossiness[obs3]; mother|, precipitate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... lively, noisy dispute ensued. To-day we were to learn at last how far pure and inaccessible to filth was the urn wherein we had placed all that was best in us. This morning we felt for the first time that we were really playing a big game, that this test of our godling's purity might destroy our idol. We had been told all these days that the soldier was following Tanya ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... Albert, however, gave the answer demanded by Luther, in a short letter of December 21. He assured him that the subject of his complaint had been removed; that as to himself, he did not deny that he was a miserable sinner, the very filth of the earth, as bad as anyone. Christian chastisement he could well endure; he looked to God for grace and strength, to live according to His will. So abjectly did this magnate quail before the Word, with which Luther threatened to expose his ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... Dock street. She would dismount, leave her horse to the groom, and, with a heavily mounted, silver-topped whip in hand, and her riding-petticoat gathered up, would march along, picking her way through mud and filth. Here she contrived to find the queer china things she desired, or in some mysterious way she secured cordials and such liquors as ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... Altogether, fifty men had been killed, or had died from fright, or succumbed directly they were lifted on deck from their wounds. Charley proposed having the survivors up, so that the slave-deck might be washed and cleaned from the mass of gore and filth collected upon it, but Mr Hallton replied that it was perfectly unnecessary, and that if the slaves should break loose, we might have to kill them all, or be ourselves overpowered. This I thought very likely to happen, though I felt ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... playeth in a man's mind like a wanton child in a garden, bringing his filth to choke each open path, uprooting the tender plants, and trampling the buds that should have ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... "conversion" such as stands at the head of many a religious career. A sudden beam of light, he says, came to him at this time from God, putting him to the proof and showing him in how deep an abyss of error and of filth he had been living. He thereupon abandoned his former ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... larger sense. The invasion of family life, the ruthless destruction of every social barrier, the shattering of every tribal law, the introduction of criminal practices which struck the chiefs of the people dumb with horror—in a word, a veritable avalanche of filth and immorality overwhelmed ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... glances of ruffians, whose direct contact, even, could not be avoided; women of the town of all kinds and of all ages—the unequivocal beauty in the prime of her womanhood, putting one in mind of the statue in Lucian, with the surface of Parian marble, and the interior filled with filth—the loathsome and utterly lost leper in rags—the wrinkled, bejewelled and paint-begrimed beldame, making a last effort at youth—the mere child of immature form, yet, from long association, an adept in the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... their schools, but the schools were dirty, like the children within them. This was not the fault of the children or their mothers. It was the fault of the idealists, who said: "The more dirt, the more prosperity." They drew patriotic, optimistic breaths of the flying powdered filth of the streets, and took the foul and heavy smoke with gusto into the profundities of their lungs. "Boost! Don't knock!" they said. And every year or so they boomed a great Clean-up Week, when everybody was supposed to get rid of the ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... the children look well, but, on the other hand, a vast number look quite the reverse of this, pictures of starvation, neglect, bad blood, and cruelty. An Englishman is born for a nobler purpose than to lead a vagabond's life and end his days in scratching among filth and vermin in a Gipsy's wigwam, consequently, upon those of our own countrymen who have forsaken the right path, the sin attending such a course is dogging them at every footstep they take. I don't lay at the door of ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... is almost a little fortune in itself. Content in his dwelling to sit on a bullock's skull, on horseback his saddle must be mounted in silver. His own beard and hair he seldom trims, but his horse's mane and tail must be assiduously tended. The baked-mud floor of his abode is littered with filth and dirt, while he raves at a speck of mud on his ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... the favour to tell me what door you intend to put it behind?' However, after all I could say in opposition, I was obliged to go to the painter's. And I found him in such a condition! a room all dirt and filth, brats squalling and wrangling, up two pair of stairs, and a closet, of which the door was open, that Seward well said was quite Pandora's box—it was the repository of all the nastiness, and stench, and filth, and food, and drink, and - oh, it was too bad to be borne! and 'Oh!' says ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... robs. 'Tis fired with alarms, and it arms with hot haste for the imminent fray, For it quakes at the tramp of King Mob, and the thought of this Queen of the May. The bandit of Capital falls, and shall perish in shame and in filth! The harvest of Labour's at hand!—The harvest; but red is the And the reapers are wrathful and rash, and the swift-wielded sickle that strives For the sheaves, not the gleaners' scant ears, seems agog ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 30, 1892 • Various
... forth, desiring to be scraped by the touch of objects of sense. Yet if these had not a soul, they would not be objects of love. To love then, and to be beloved, was sweet to me; but more, when I obtained to enjoy the person I loved, I defiled, therefore, the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I beclouded its brightness with the hell of lustfulness; and thus foul and unseemly, I would fain, through exceeding vanity, be fine and courtly. I fell headlong then into the love wherein ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... rush into print with statistics purporting to show that the Negro Race in America is "fast dying out." The aim of this class of people seems to be to show that the Negro Race withers under the influence of freedom, which is by no means true. It is possibly true that filth and disease does its fatal work in the Negro Race, the same as in other races among the filthy and corrupt, but the filthy and corrupt in the Negro Race, as a class, are growing fewer every year—for which we can ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... was the sorcerer appointed for lovers. The mancocolam was the sorcerer or witch who belched forth fire from himself, which could not be extinguished with any application except by his rolling himself in the ordure and filth that falls from the houses into the silong; and the master of the house where he rolled himself died and there was no remedy. The hocloban was another kind of sorcerer more efficacious than the others, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... were the distant landscapes on the Cornice road, nor the hills and bay of Genoa the Superb, more beautiful. Mr Dorrit and his matchless castle were disembarked among the dirty white houses and dirtier felons of Civita Vecchia, and thence scrambled on to Rome as they could, through the filth ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... stream remains unsoil'd, } Unmix'd with foreign filth and undefil'd; } Her wit was more than man, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... deputy,— Whose settled visage and deliberate word Nips youth i' the head, and follies doth emmew, As falcon doth the fowl,—is yet a devil; His filth within being cast, he would appear A ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... dug to drain the streets, they remained mere swamps and morasses. In dry weather the dust was even a worse plague than the mud. Pig-styes stood in front of the houses; and the streets were covered with heaps of filth and manure and with rotting corpses of animals, over which the pigs wandered at will. Street police in fact was practically non-existent. Medievalism is undoubtedly ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... Columbia, about the waters of the rivers Klamet and Umqua, partake largely of the characteristics of the Indians of the plains, their country having prairies, and themselves possessing horses: they are remarkable for nothing but their determined hostility towards the Whites. Idleness and filth are inveterate among all three, but among the Indians of the plains there is a marked difference; there, their food consist of fish, indeed, and dried for winter, but not entirely, being more varied by venison than on the coast, and in the winter by roots, which they dig up and lay by ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... its rambling and squalid-looking houses; to the north-east was Port Tewfik, and beyond that—running down east and south-east—were the desert sands of Sinai. The waters of the Gulf were calm, but every revolution of the screws stirred up filth and polluted the air. Some distance away lay another ship obviously also carrying troops. Greetings were exchanged at long range. Eventually it was learned that the transport was the "Ballarat" with a load ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... will be driven out wherever he is found. He shall no longer live in the Green Meadows or the Green Forest. Everyone will turn their backs upon him. He will live on what others throw away. He will live in filth and there will be no one to say a good word for him. He will become an outcast instead ...
— Mother West Wind's Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... in the street, and the others could not pardon her for possessing a treasure which they possessed no longer—innocence! What a dish for the fine palate of a connoisseur! What a rare fruit of paradise! A child of fifteen or sixteen, whose diamond soul has been cleansed from mud and filth, who is still conscious of God, and capable of pure delights, whose tender loving heart, perhaps, is in the safekeeping of some honest, romantic youth—what a fine thing to root her up unmercifully, to tear off her budding leaves one by one, hurl her back again into the mire from ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... strong-bodied men loitering before cheap lodging houses. Their clothing was filthy with long wear and there was no light of determination in their faces. In the little fine interstices of the cloth of which their clothes were made was gathered the filth of the city in which they lived and in the stuff of their natures the filth and disorder of modern ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... themselves in depths of gloom in the tomb-like coolness of their double walls. Builders' trowels and hammers had a sound that made you think of sparks struck out, as if the world were a great forge and all its matter at a white heat. Down in the poor, crowded places, where the gutters fumed with filth, and doors stood open upon horrible passages and staircases, little children, barefooted, with one miserable garment on, sat on grimy stone steps, or played wretchedly about the sidewalks, impeding the passers of a better class who hastened with bated breath, amidst the fever-breeding nuisances, ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Antony wants to go into business, and to get hold o' as much gold and honor as iver he can put his hands on. Now suppose he wanted to spend a' t' money he could get hold of, and to drag thy old name through t' mire o' jockey fields and gambling houses, and t' filth that lies at t' month o' hell. ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... force its crime upon a distant and unoffending one; it was a moral wrong. He was much struck at a remark which appeared in the Public journals in Melbourne. It seems to have been the custom of some persons to collect all the filth and rubbish from their persons and during the night to force it upon the premises of their neighbours. Now, these persons were designed miscreants, the paragraph commenced "the miscreants have been at work again." But he considered that the Government who would force a ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... necessary. Cincinnati is built on the side of a hill that begins to rise at the river's edge, and were it furnished with drains of the simplest arrangement, the heavy showers of the climate would keep them constantly clean; as it is, these showers wash the higher streets, only to deposit their filth in the first level spot; and this happens to be in the street second in importance to Main street, running at right angles to it, and containing most of the large warehouses of the town. This deposit ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... has been a peculiar charm in ranch life. In no life are the grit and efficiency of the well-bred in such marked contrast with the puling whine and shiftlessness of the settler from the cesspool of the city slums. I have gone into a prairie shanty where an Englishwoman sat in filth and rags and idleness, cursing the country to which she had come and bewailing in cockney English that she had come to this; and I have gone on to an English ranch where there presided some young Englishman's sister, who had literally ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... common stews, filled with the ruck and the filth, the scum and dregs, of society—hereditary inefficients, degenerates, wrecks, lunatics, addled intelligences, epileptics, monsters, weaklings, in short, a very nightmare of humanity. Hence, fits flourished with us. These fits seemed contagious. ...
— The Road • Jack London
... imagine that filth and ordure affect those brute animals that feed on them out of choice, with the same smells which ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... truly religious man too, who loathed loose talk and swearing, and lived up to his ideals even amid the slime and filth of war. And his bravery was that of the honest man who fears and yet faces danger, not the bull-headed heroism of the "man who knows ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... the barque, and overhauling and setting up our topmast and lower rigging, and caulking decks. Took a stroll in the north island towards sunset. It is dull recreation after the novelty has worn off, with the somewhat tough walking through the sand, and the smell and filth of the ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... English servant-girl in Humphry Clinker (Letter of July 18), after describing how the filth is thus thrown out, says:—'The maid calls gardy loo to the passengers, which signifies Lord ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... stops the ship, and joins the echeneis to it; for the ship continuing dry, not yet made heavy by the moisture soaking into the wood, it is probable that it lightly glides, and as long as it is clean, easily cuts the waves; but when it is thoroughly soaked, when weeds, ooze, and filth stick upon its sides, the stroke of the ship is more obtuse and weak; and the water, coming upon this clammy matter, doth not so easily part from it; and this is the reason why they usually calk their ships. Now it is likely that the echeneis in this case, sticking ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... upright, basking in the sun's rays, and bearing a comical resemblance to an Egyptian mummy. At the door of the tent a child of riper years amused itself by rolling about among the chips of wood, useless bits of deer-skin, and filth always strewn around a wigwam. On the right hand lay a pile of firewood, with an axe beside it, near which crouched a half-starved, wretched-looking nondescript dog, who commenced barking vociferously the moment he cast eyes upon me. Such was the outside. The interior, filled with smoke from the ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... to be eaten by their prisoners, their defiling with ordure the sacred vessels in the churches—all these things, too numerous and too monotonous to describe, are not the instinctive coarsenesses of the brute beast; they are a solemn ritual of filth, religiously practised, by officers no less than by men. The waves of emotional exaltation which from time to time pass over the whole people have the same character, the character ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... his understanding in many of you; his great love will come to light, and will light up every one." After more of this kind of address, the "instrument" said: "You are to begin the Lord's Supper on Ascension-day, make ready then all your hearts, clean out all filth, all that is rotten and stinks, all sins and every thing idle and useless; and cherish pious thoughts, so that you shall put down the flesh, as you are ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... under our first strong impression of the native's life we overlook much—the filth, the sores, the brutality of social life; but these are really only ripples on an otherwise smooth existence, defects which are not less present in our ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... floated over a river. The river was the color of chrysoprase. She, Rosalind Wescott, stood on a bridge in the heart of the city and she had become entirely convinced of the filth and ugliness of life. She was about to throw herself into the river, to destroy herself in an ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... remember that those were the times of Congreve and Fielding to believe that the author could have the right to style himself "A GENTLEMAN." We shudder with pity for poor Sophia, who had such a mass of filth flung at her. But that decorous personage is not disconcerted: she does not lose her head or her temper, but opens her mouth with a freedom of speech which was the prerogative of an honest woman in those days, and rejoins with a second pamphlet: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... interests. Here was the principle of the Church—association for reciprocated strength; they were thus taught the inevitable result of the indulgence of the vice. The missionaries of temperance went through the country contrasting the wretchedness and the degradation and the filth of drunkenness with the domestic comfort, and the health, and the regular employment of those who were masters of themselves. So far as men believed this, and gave up the tyranny of the present for the hope of the future—so ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... season compelling the use of fire, they are all provided with chimneys, which was a feature remarkable at once, it being unusual on the southern coast. From these houses, as you approach the city, you enter upon a scene of filth and dirt indescribable, and have to pass through a line of beggars, who exhibit the most loathsome and revolting sores, to excite ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... with ships of all nations, the quays encumbered with piles of barriques and mountains of Egyptian wheat discharged in bulk. What blinding dust as they shovel it up! What a suffocating heat! What smells in this hollow trough which receives the filth of all the town! How curiously names on the sterns of vessels, and annonces over the shops of traiteurs and ship-chandlers, in very readable Greek, carry the mind back to the Phocæan founders of this ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... the courses of the stars, as if thou wert going along with them; and constantly consider the changes of the elements into one another, for such thoughts purge away the filth ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... confess that my poor black Dirk was a bit of a genius. The thought I desire you to catch is that so many of those poor fellows, who of necessity live by their wits in the city slums, are diamonds which could be fitted to shine. You take a diamond and throw it down in the dirt and filth, and put your foot on it and grind it in, and leave it there, sinking and soiling, day after day, year after year, and when somebody comes along and picks it out, how much will it gleam for him at first? ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... truck to another soul, I ain't going to be responsible for what happens to you!" He shot each word at the kicking figure from between set teeth, and brushed one hand over the other as though to clean them of filth. ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... faced, but as a great consummation, the supreme safety. How his poetry would have reacted to the actual experience of war we can only guess. But in others, his friends and comrades, the fierce immersion in the welter of ruin and pain and filth and horror and death brought only a more superb faith in the power of man's soul to rise above the hideous obsession of his own devilries, to retain the vision of beauty through the riot of foul things, of love through ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... dainty—he cannot understand and cannot tolerate this barbarian, who eats raw fish and leaves the bones and fins and the smell of slime in his doorway. The beaver is exemplary in his neatness, detesting all smells and filth; and this may possibly account for some of his enmity and his savage attacks upon Keeonekh when he catches him ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... minutes these creatures, that had appeared so clean and beautiful—for the king-vultures are as proud of their plumage as peacocks, and usually keep it in the best order—exhibited a picture of filth that was disgusting to look upon. The brilliant hue of their heads and necks was changed into a dark blood colour; and their white breasts became dappled with gore. Their vulturous appetites rendered them regardless of ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... arms against the South. Some few did escape by digging under the stockade—but what perils they endured to escape from the enemy's country! They slept in leaves by day, and travelled by night. They were pursued by bloodhounds, lay in water and swamps, with only their lips above the filth until the peril had passed by. They wore rags, ate roots, shivered in the rains, sweltered in the heat, grew more emaciated, until more dead than alive they ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... you won't deny that Carlo's teeth may have been dirty? He's always nosing in some filth or other," she said challengingly, in a measured tone of sagacity. "And there may ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... their coming dismay on the visage of their mother, shall one day lie fathoms deep under the blessed ocean, to be cleansed and remade into holy because lovely forms! May the ghosts of the men who mar the earth, turning her sweet rivers into channels of filth, and her living air into irrespirable vapours and pestilences, haunt the desolations they have made, until they loathe the work of their hands, and turn from themselves with a ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... Here, one is likely to get a glimpse into such enchanted worlds as the name of a Dickens or a Balzac might suggest. Here, too, is Shakespeare in lamentable state; there is Carlyle in rags, still crying, as it were, against the filth and beastliness of this underworld. And look at my lord Tennyson shivering in his nakedness and doomed to keep company with the meanest of poetasters. Observe how Emerson is wriggled and ruffled in this crushing ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Chalcedon, and saw Justinian standing in the midst of the channel. The latter drank up all the water of the sea, so that it seemed as if he were standing on dry land, since the water no longer filled the strait. After this, other streams of water, full of filth and rubbish, flowing in from the underground sewers on either side, covered the dry land. Justinian again swallowed these, and the bed of the channel again became dry. Such was the vision this person beheld ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... and from the pigsties which they inhabit—four miles each way, through mud and slush, rain, snow, sleet, and storm, daily, year in and year out. They get four hours of sleep. They kennel together, three families in a room, in unimaginable filth and stench; and disease comes, and they die off like flies. Have they committed a crime, these mangy things? No. What have they done, that they are punished so? Nothing at all, except getting themselves born into your foolish race. You have seen how they treat a misdoer there in the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... busines shall her prayers[2] let. Those that bee good, shee prizes most, Noe time with them shee counteth lost. 30 Her chast delights, her mind, aduance Above Lot-games or mixed dance. Shee cares not for an enterlude, Or idly will one day conclude. The looser toungs that filth disclose 35 Are graueolencie to her nose. But when a vertuous man shall court Her virgin thoughts in nuptiall sort: Her faire depor[t]ment, neyther coy Nor yet too forward, fits his ioy, 40 And giues his ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... I must acknowledge. Still there is an infinity of mud huts, and abominable hovels. We cannot help perceiving abundance of filth in every kennel, and, were it not for the over-powering fumes of idolatrous incense, I have no doubt we should find a most intolerable stench. Did you ever behold streets so insufferably narrow, or houses so miraculously tall? What gloom their shadows ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... often excluded him, when the politeness, and variety of his conversation, would have been thought a sufficient recompence for his entertainment. Having no lodging, he passed the night often in mean houses, which are set open for any casual wanderers; sometimes in cellars, amongst the riot and filth of the meanest and most profligate of the rabble; and sometimes when he was totally without money, walked about the streets till he was weary, and lay down in the summer upon a bulk, and in the winter, with his associates in poverty, among the ashes ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... was present to meet Mary when in the fog and filth of Leith she touched Scottish soil, except her natural brother, Lord Robert. {194} The rest soon gathered with faces of welcome. She met some Robin Hood rioters who lay under the law, and pardoned these roisterers (with their excommunication ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... and sair affliction I gie't as my sincere conviction— Of a' their foreign tricks an' pliskies, I maist abominate their whiskies. Nae doot, themsel's, they ken it weel, An' wi' a hash o' leemon peel, And ice an' siccan filth, they ettle The stawsome kind o' goo to settle Sic wersh apothecary's broos wi' As Scotsmen scorn to fyle their ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of forts crowning the hills, where the sky begins—a sky smothered in stars. I have been out, on deck, looking at it all, at the black masts and funnels of the ships ranging to right and left against the glare of the town, and at the oily, black water, thick with floating filth and garbage and with wandering reflections like jewels and precious metals on the surface of it—the rummiest mixture of fair and foul. And then, all that faded out somehow—and I saw black water ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... of the prayer which he repeated so often had not come home to him. Alas! how many of us from week to week call ourselves worms and dust and miserable sinners, describe ourselves as chaff for the winds, grass for the burning, stubble for the plough, as dirt and filth fit only to be trodden under foot, and yet in all our doings before the world cannot bring home to ourselves the conviction that we require other ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... buzzard stooping from the sky My craw with filth to fill, Into your honorable body I Would introduce ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... gladdened me like the victory of the Prussians over the Austrians. It was the triumph of Prussian over French and Napoleonic influence. The Prussians were a valiant, pious people, and it was a question which should have the most power in Germany, they or Napoleon. The French are sunk in all kinds of filth. Compare what the Prussians did with what we did in the Crimea. The English people are an incredible people. They seem to think that it is not necessary that a general should have the least knowledge of the art of war. It is ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... result. Cedar Rapids has adopted a commission form of government. Last spring when the "dagoes" came the same complaints went up as usual, that because of their insanitary methods these people carried with them filth and disease. But the petitioners did not go to the city council which met once in two weeks, nor were they referred to a committee which met less often. They went directly to the commissioners who had charge of the city health ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... their immediate influence. The country acted zealously for the King. Lanfranc could report that Earl Ralph and his army were fleeing, and that the King's men, French and English, were chasing them. In another letter he could add, with some strength of language, that the kingdom was cleansed from the filth of the Bretons. At Norwich only the castle was valiantly defended by the newly married Countess Emma. Roger was taken prisoner; Ralph fled to Britanny; their followers were punished with various mutilations, save the defenders of Norwich, who were admitted ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... A slothful man is compared to the filth of a dunghill: every man that takes it up ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... thread snapped. It was the beginning of a period of unrestrained misconduct. Intoxicated by the novelty of yielding to Satan, I gave him a free hand and the result was months of debauchery and self-disgust. The underworld women I met, the humdrum filth of their life, and their matter-of-fact, business-like attitude toward it never ceased to shock and repel me. I never left a creature of this kind without abominating her and myself, yet I would soon, sometimes during the very same evening, ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... disfavor on account of its disagreeable note. He grows more bitter in his denunciations as he proceeds and finally disposes of the matter by saying that all the seven clans alike are uhisa[']'t[)i] and are covered with filth. Then follows another glowing panegyric of himself, closing with the beautiful expression, "your soul has come into the very center of mine, never to turn away," which reminds one forcibly of the sentiment in the German love ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... great delight in what I had to relate concerning our beautiful ceremonies and the dignity of our prelates in their pontifical vestments. As to other matters I will only say that the Ethiopian is joyous and merry, not at all like the Tartar in the matter of filth, nor like the wretched Arab. They are refined and subtle, trusting no one, wonderfully suspicious, and very devout. They are not at all black as is commonly supposed, by which I refer to those who do not live under the equator or too near to it, for these are ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... much except that I found the "summum" of misery and distress in 678, Pelser's; whole family down measles; poverty; filth; baby ill at breast (died yesterday, buried this afternoon); sent food, but made her promise faithfully that ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... means eating the same dinner at a different restaurant, and afterwards meeting the same tired people, or seeing the same show, the same songs, jests, dances at different houses. But Eastward ... there, large and full, blossoms Life—a rather repellent Life, perhaps, for Life is always that. Hatred, filth, love, battle, and death—all elemental things are here, undisguised; and if elemental things repel you, my lamb, then you have no business to be on this planet. Night, in the particular spots of the East to which these pages take you, shows you Life in the raw, stripped of its silken ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... that this, and other less destructive visitations of plague, were due to the action of some of those bacterial organisms which are now known to have so much to do with infectious diseases. This particular pestilence-breeder seems to have flourished in filth, and the streets of the cities of Europe of that day formed a richly fertile soil for its growth. Men prayed to God for relief, instead of cleaning their highways and by-ways, and ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... downward, with the muck-rake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... stickleback. It's Oeland stickleback. It's the best stickleback in the world," said a gull. "Won't you taste of it?" And he flew up to the goose, with his mouth full of the little fishes, and wanted to give her some. "Ugh! Do you think that I eat such filth?" said the ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... reverence nor sense of honor, do nothing except as they are driven to it by blows, and perpetrate what wrong and detraction they can behind each other's back; therefore God also punishes them, that they sink into all kinds of filth and misery. As a rule, the parents, too, are themselves stupid and ignorant; one fool trains [teaches] another, and as they have lived, so live ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... incomprehensible being, but nowhere more than in Hungary, where, in the midst of slavery, he is free, though apparently one step lower than the lowest slave. The habits of the Hungarian Gypsies are abominable; their hovels appear sinks of the vilest poverty and filth, their dress is at best rags, their food frequently the vilest carrion, and occasionally, if report be true, still worse - on which point, when speaking of the Spanish Gitanos, we shall have subsequently more to say: thus they live in filth, in rags, in nakedness, and in merriness of heart, for ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... Florence edition of Vasari published in 1832—1838, in which it is stated, that the Palazzo del Podesta had now become a prison—the Bargello; that the Chapel had been turned into a dispensa, (it was more like a coal-hole where the rags and much of the filth of the prison was deposited); that the walls of this dispensa exhibited nothing but a dirty coating, and that Moreni speaks of the painting in some published work; the annotator concluding thus—'It is hoped that some day or other we shall be able to see what there is under ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... mad as ever were any People in the World; and you may hear them make the most dismal and hellish Cries, and Howlings, that ever humane Creatures express'd; all which continues about five or six Weeks, and the little Meat they eat, is the nastiest, loathsome stuff, and mixt with all manner of Filth it's possible to get. After the Time is expired, they are brought out of the Cabin, which never is in the Town, but always a distance off, and guarded by a Jaylor or two, who watch by Turns. Now, when ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... charity, the condescension of the rich to the poor. What we want are understanding, fellowship, and we get alms! If there is so much spirituality as you say, and Christianity is what you say it is today, how happens it that this side is left in filth and misery and physical wretchedness? You know what it is, and you know the luxury elsewhere. And you think to bridge over the chasm between classes with flowers, in pots, yes, and Bible-readers and fashionable visitors and little aid societies—little ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... badly, and they had been confined, a great part of the voyage, to their narrow quarters between decks, herded together in a noisome and pestilential atmosphere, littered with damp straw, and full of filth. ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... On these towers I could gladly have looked long, and not wearied. For they are all carven with the holy company of the martyrs and saints, like the Angels whom Jacob saw ascending by the ladder into heaven; even so that blessed company seemed to scale upwards from the filth of the street, and the darkness, and the din, right on towards the golden heights of the City of God. And beneath them lie the sacred bones of all the kings of France, from the days of St. Dagobert even to our own time, all laid ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... delirium tremens, etc., and (3) various preparations of opium especially the "Madad," pills made up with toasted betel-leaf and smoked. Opium, however, is usually drunk in the shape of "Kusumba," a pill placed in wet cotton and squeezed in order to strain and clean it of the cowdung and other filth with which it ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... beset my path. Yonder dingily white remnant of a huge snow-bank,—which will yet cumber the sidewalk till the latter days of March,—over or through that wintry waste must I stride onward. Beyond, lies a certain Slough of Despond, a concoction of mud and liquid filth, ankle-deep, leg-deep, neck-deep,—in a word, of unknown bottom, on which the lamplight does not even glimmer, but which I have occasionally watched, in the gradual growth of its horrors, from morn till nightfall. Should I flounder into its depths, farewell to upper earth! ...
— Beneath An Umbrella (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to, then it was high time the police stepped in and closed the playhouses. He was no prude and could laugh as well as anyone at the witty immorality of a farce at the Palais Royal, but here was nothing but filth. With an emphatic gesture he held his nose and whistled through his teeth. It was the ruin of the family, the uprooting of morals, the destruction ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... distinguished himself by his zeal in the cause of the King. He had seized sixteen heads of families for singing hymns at a baker's funeral, had thrown them into the drain-vaults of the White Tower at Prague, and had left them there to mend their ways in the midst of filth and horrible stenches. And now he occupied the proud position of town-captain of Leitomischl. Never yet had he known such a golden chance of covering himself with glory. For some time Augusta, who ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... command (what a command for me!) of certain woolly ones—Hubshis—whose touch and shadow are pollution. They were enormous eaters; sleeping on their bellies; laughing without cause; wholly like animals. Some were called Fingoes, and some, I think, Red Kaffirs, but they were all Kaffirs —filth unspeakable. I taught them to water and feed, and sweep and rub down. Yes, I oversaw the work of sweepers—a jemadar of mehtars (headman of a refuse-gang) was I, and Kurban Sahib little better, ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... few intelligent persons that require to be convinced; and the question has come to be with the well-informed part of the public, as it has long been the question with medical men—has not the time now arrived to compel those who harbour the filth and the contagion that carry off one-half of mankind, to expel those enemies to the human race? The innumerable statistical inquiries of the last ten years on this subject, all go to prove that dirt, squalor, close air, and stagnant water, are ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... eagerness to step back, down I fell backward over the other pig, who turned and bit me in the thigh, and then as he rushed away went full butt into his comrade, which broke the rope, and down came the bleeding animal on top of me. I was in an awful state of filth, and as I rose they both came at me again; in fact I might have been seriously hurt had I not used my knife freely on the already-wounded pig. Luckily the other ran away, or it might have been serious for me. In falling a second time I went down ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... ye are also risen with Him through the faith of the operation of God." Tit. iii. 5: "According to His mercy He saved us by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost." 1 Pet. iii. 21: "The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us; not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God, by the resurrection of ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... its peculiar municipal laws, throughout the Middle Ages, Oxford had the proud distinction of being the cleanest city in England. That is to say, it was not quite so appallingly smothered in mire and filth as others were. Down the midst of every narrow street ran a gutter, which after rain was apt to become a brook, and into which dirt of every sort was emptied by every householder. There were no causeways; and there were frequent holes of uncertain depth, filled with thick mud. Ownerless dogs, ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... the right or left in indecision. He had talked with women of every port. They were a huge band, a great sisterhood that reached thin hands about the earth, touching it with shame; and they congregated most where the rivers empty their burden of filth into the sea. Uncle William knew them well. He could steer a safe path among them; and he could turn a young man, hesitating, with foolish, confident smile on his face. Uncle William had not been in New York for twelve years, but he had a sailor's unerring instinct for the dangers ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... children were crying for bread, and that he was unable to give them any. Policemen had to bring milk from miles away. In other cases the pupils of these patriots, the preachers of the Land League, poured human filth into the water supply of their victims, who were in many cases ladies of gentle birth and children of tender years. Go up to Cong, and walk out to the place where Lord Mountmorres was murdered, near Clonbur. His whole income was L150 or L200, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... must deeply rouse the commiseration of every benevolent man. From our own personal observation one year since, we would corroborate the assertion, that were the world ransacked for a subject in which should be concentrated and personified injustice, oppression, drunkenness, squalid filth, and degradation, one would point to the straggling Indian on the banks of the Upper Mississippi ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... it with Cranajour's help. Through the door the two men passed into a long dark passage, swept by a sharp rush of air. The floor of it was paved, and at the side of it flowed a pestilential stream, carrying along in its slow-moving water a quantity of miscellaneous filth: it was thick ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... songs, and flowers, and Alice; and in on this rolled suddenly a sense of what was actually around him, as under a calm sky and out of a still sea swoops sometimes suddenly some huge wave in on the quiet beach. He saw about him rags, filth, men sick, men dying, men dead, men groaning, men cursing, men gibbering. There rose up before him the grim succession of days of hunger, pain, sorrow, and loneliness, already past; there came upon him a terrible threatening of days to come, yet worse,—without hope or relief, unless ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... is being done for the advantage of your town. When it was suffering from a long drought, our grandfather, with God's help, watered it with the life-giving wave. Cleanse out then the mouths of your sewers, lest otherwise, being checked in its flow by the accumulated filth, it should surge back into your houses, and bring into them the pollution which it was meant ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... battles of 1914. The Germans had lived there and everything was in an awful condition. One wonders how they endured themselves. The Military detailed two men for two days to spade up and carry away the filth from the bedrooms, and it took two women an entire week all but one day, scrubbing all day long until their shoulders ached, to scrub the place clean. But they got it clean. They were the kind of women that did not give up even when a thing seemed an impossibility. ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... of Luther's, grafted on an older legend, on this matter, which runs somewhat in this fashion: A man's heart is like a foul stable. Wheelbarrows and shovels are of little use, except to remove some of the surface filth, and to litter all the passages in the process. What is to be done with it? 'Turn the Elbe into it,' says he. The flood will sweep away all the pollution. Not my own efforts, but the influx of that pardoning, cleansing grace which is in Christ will wash away the accumulations of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... ground and drove out devils. This was not with the power of the world, nor with bodily fortitude, but with strength of spirit and the power of God, which they had received through Divine grace. Now thus it will happen to those who have arisen from the filth of mortal sin and the misery of this world, and begin to taste the Highest Good and enamour themselves of His sweetness. But as I have said, by remaining in fear alone, one would not escape hell; but would do like the thief, who does ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... would, no doubt, see the enduring beauty under every school; equally an ideal moralist would see the enduring ethic under every code. But practically some of the best Englishmen that ever lived could see nothing but filth and idolatry in the starry piety of the Brahmin. And it is equally true that practically the greatest group of artists that the world has ever seen, the giants of the Renaissance, could see nothing but barbarism in ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... notation was unknown. Even in the Imperial Treasury the computations were made by the help of balls strung on wires. Round the person of the Sovereign there was a blaze of gold and jewels; but even in his most splendid palaces were to be found the filth and misery of an Irish cabin. So late as the year 1663 the gentlemen of the retinue of the Earl of Carlisle were, in the city of Moscow, thrust into a single bedroom, and were told that, if they did not remain together, they would be in danger ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that Stevenson believed. His poetry is not mere whining and whimpering of genius which occasionally changes its mood and sticks its fingers to its nose. It is rather the confession of a man who had wandered over the "crooked hills of delicious pleasure," and had arrived in rags and filth in the famous city of Hell. It is a map of disaster and a chronicle of lost souls. Swinburne defined the genius of Villon more imaginatively than Stevenson when he addressed him in a paradoxical ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... cease, or if they had rather do their clients some good, they would change their defence into accusations. And the wicked themselves, if they could behold virtue abandoned by them, through some little rift, and perceive that they might be delivered from the filth of sin by the affliction of punishments, obtaining virtue in exchange, they would not esteem of torments, and would refuse the assistance of their defenders, and wholly resign themselves to their accusers and judges. By which means it cometh to pass, that in wise men there is no place for hatred. ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... to me that in reading Freud he had to wade through much almost unimaginable filth, and he is driven to think that Freud himself is the victim of "a sex complex," a man so obsessed by a single theory, so ridden by one idea, that he perfectly illustrates the witty definition of an expert—"an expert is one who knows nothing else." All the same, ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... stocking of these women-diggers, is reeking with dirt. Volumes of slush are splashed on the bared skinny ankles, on the wet skirts, wet to the waists, and on the coarse sail-cloth aprons tied beneath the hanging bosoms. The women are all drenched now in a bath of filth. The baskets are reeking with filth also, they rain showers of dirt along the bent backs. A long line of the bent figures has formed on their way to the carts. There is, however, a thick fringe of diggers left who still dispute ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... was the day after a festival, a tiresome day for every one, and above all for the magistrate who is charged with sweeping away all the filth, properly and figuratively speaking, which a festival day produces in Paris. And then he had to hold a sitting at the Grand Chatelet. Now, we have noticed that judges in general so arrange matters that their day of audience shall also be their day of bad humor, so that ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... imitate my style,—do not, like a good many others, take a tube of black paint in your hand, or dab on a few glaring colours, or even make two or three crippled figures with repulsive faces look up from the midst of filth and dirt, and then say, 'There's a Salvator for you!'—just for these very reasons I think a good deal of you. I tell you, my lad, you'll not find a more faithful friend than I am—that I can promise you with all ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... was almost bathing in the gutter. I picked it up. Underneath, it was soiled with mud; the greasy, fetid sewer water had left black stains upon the flowers. And then, gazing at these exquisite daughters of our gardens and our woods, astray amidst all the filth of the city, I began to ponder. On what woman's bosom would those wretched flowerets open and bloom? Some hawker would dip them in a pail of water, and of all the bitter odours of the Paris mud they would retain but a slight pungency, which would remain mingled with their own sweet perfume. ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... purity within, I reply—that virtue is so much the effect of habit, that whatever improves the habits improves the character; and that, if a house were frequently white-washed within and without, it could scarcely fail to banish personal filth from the inmates; while habits of cleanliness, which call for habits of industry, would produce the rest. I have, indeed, often thought that it would be an efficacious means of bettering the morals, as well as the health, of the London poor, if St. Giles's, Hockly-in-the-hole, Fleet-lane, ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... drink it down, and the result was just what might be supposed; many of us were led to think that there was little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt, and very properly too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum. So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field,—feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... waters of the Ganges seems incredible to anyone from the Western World. The water of the sacred river is here of the consistency of pea soup. The city's sewer pipes empty into the Ganges just above the bathing ghats, and the current carries this filth directly to the place which the Hindoos have selected for their rites. The water is not only muddy and unclean, but it offends the nose. Yet Hindoos of good family bathe here side by side with the poverty stricken. They use the mud of the Ganges in lieu of soap; they scrub ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... seaport. Kind, generous, forsooth! as harlots are, or thieves. And the gold, flowing in torrents through that tainted and luxurious world, splashing the very walls, seemed to him now to be loaded with all the dross, all the filth of its impure and muddy source. There remained, then, for him, de Gery, but one thing to do, to go away, to quit with all possible speed this situation in which he risked the compromising of his good name, the one heritage from his father. Doubtless. But the two little brothers down yonder in the ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... washed with vast and rapid rivers, whose peculiar qualities strike horror into mortals. Cocytus falls with an impetuous roaring; Phlegethon rages with a torrent of flames; the Acharusian fen is dreadful for its stench and filth: nor does Charon, the ferryman, who wafts souls over, occasion any less horror; Cerberus, the triple-headed dog, stands ready with open mouths to receive them; and the Furies shake at them ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... where there are not only herbs, fruits, and bread, but also fish, fowl, and cattle. There are also, without their towns, places appointed near some running water, for killing their beasts, and for washing away their filth; which is done by their slaves: for they suffer none of their citizens to kill their cattle, because they think that pity and good-nature, which are among the best of those affections that are born with us, are much impaired by the butchering of animals: ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... your dog lie on straw, burn it once a week, as fleas harbour and propagate in the tubes of the straw. If the bed be carpet, or anything similar, let it be often cleansed or changed. Vermin revel in filth, and their extirpation depends ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... sits at the Right-Hand of God the Father. And all this Felicity we owe to his gratuitous Bounty, that we have Jesus Christ for our Lord, rather than the Devil to be a Tyrant over us; that we have Innocence and Sanctity, instead of the Filth and Uncleanness of our Sins; and instead of the Torments of Hell, the Joys ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... Cursed him to live till doomsday, still to be A scarecrow to the nations. None the less Are we beholden in Christ's name at whiles, When maggot-wise Jews breed, infest, infect Communities of Christians, to wash clean The Church's vesture, shaking off the filth That gathers round her skirts. A perilous germ! Know you not, all the wells, the very air The Jews have poisoned?—Through their arts alone The Black ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... death he had to spring from the path of a thundering tramcar. A heavy cart ran over the bundle. While he was ruefully and hastily gathering the papers together, a band of street children swooped down and kicked them lustily about the filth. He was battling with one urchin when a policeman grabbed him. With an elusive twist he escaped and ran like a terrified hare. Disaster followed, and that was the end of his career as ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... want of every necessary comfort and accommodation. They were destitute of surgeons, nurses, cooks and proper provision; they were pent up between decks in small vessels, where they had not room to sit upright; they wallowed in filth; myriads of maggots were hatched in the putrefaction of their sores, which had no other dressing than that of being washed by themselves with their own allowance of brandy; and nothing was heard but groans, lamentations and the language of despair, invoking death to deliver them from their miseries. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Catholic atmosphere; a young soul shut up in darkness and ignorance to accumulate filth. In the name of purity and decency and under ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... be part of the big, conquering nation that you are. Those 'hymns of hate' don't affect England!—neither do the scores of lewd verses that flow like filth all over Germany! They are merely the wails of disappointed people, Roger,—the shrieks of a cruelly tricked ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... They are only fifteen feet wide or even less,—intolerable alleys a later age would call them,—and dirty to boot. Sometimes they are muddy, more often extremely dusty. Worse still, they are contaminated by great accumulations of filth; for the city is without an efficient sewer system or regular scavengers. Even as the crowd elbows along, a house door will frequently open, an ill-favored slave boy show his head, and with the yell, "Out of the way!" slap a bucket of dirty water into the street. ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis |
