"Misery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... comfort Christina had was that which her pride provided. At least Wallace would never dream that she had been silly enough to set him up on a pedestal, dream about him at night, and watch for him by day. But it was a very small and cheerless comfort in a whole world of misery. ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... attended (the press of the morning had incited movement) and announced the welcome intelligence that Mr. A. Howitt was in Melbourne; that he had seen him; that he was ready to go on the shortest notice. So far all was good. But now I saw the full misery and imbecility of leaving a large body to decide what should have been delegated to a quorum of three at the most. The meetings took place regularly, but the same members seldom attended twice. New illusions and conceits suggested themselves ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... concealed his name and quality, he had there languished in extreme indigence. But both Somerset and Margaret were detained by contrary winds from reaching England, till a new revolution in that kingdom, no less sudden and surprising than the former, threw them into greater misery than that from which they had ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... disconsolate founder of landscape gardening, our author paints his situation with all its misery—lamenting that his house is not fit to receive "polite friends, were they so disposed;" and resolved to banish all ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... have I done?" cried poor Aurelia, in horror and misery, dropping by him on the ground, while the opened shutters admitted the twilight of a May evening, with a full moon, disclosing a strange scene. A youth in a livery riding coat lay senseless on the ground, partly covered by the black fragments of the curtain, the iron rod clenched in one hand, the ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have moved from the Palazzo Rospigliosi to the Palazzo Tittoni, in Via Rasella, which leads from the Palazzo Barberini down to the Fontana di Trevi. I never would have chosen this palace, beautiful as it is, if I could have foreseen the misery I suffer when I hear the wicked drivers goading and beating their poor beasts up this steep hill. The poor things strain every muscle under their incredible burdens, but are beaten, all the same. I am really happy when I hear the ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... their import. It was not, I am persuaded, either the retrospect of a past life, or the direct fear of death or of judgment, that occupied my mind at the period I allude to; but a broad, illimitable view of eternity itself, altogether abstracted from the misery or felicity that flows through it—a sort of painless, pleasureless, sleepless eternity. I know not whither the overwhelming thought would have hurried me, had I not speedily seized, as with the grasp of death, on some of those sweet promises of the gospel which give to an immortal ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... The doctor looked very grave, the nurse and Miss Virginia shook their heads and said, "No better." Norah was the only one who gave him any encouragement. She bade him not give up yet, and devised errands to distract him from his misery, and make him feel that he was of some use. He hung upon her words with such an appealing face her heart was touched, for she guessed that remorse ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... Then fell misery. He knew why the sponge loaf had been saved, and though everybody was kind now, and seemed to feel in an unspeaking way that he had been ill-used, he foresaw the near future ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... of Egypt, and relate that these strangers, calling themselves Egyptians, pretended that they were driven from their country by the Sultan of Turkey, and condemned to wander for seven years in want and misery. These chroniclers add that they were very honest people, who scrupulously followed all the practices of the Christian religion; that they were poorly clad, but that they had gold and silver in abundance; that they lived well, and paid for everything they had; and that, at the end of seven ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... conduct toward the Colonel when, some ten years afterward, the latter was bound to the stake at one of the Wyandot towns, and in the extremity of his agony besought the renegade to put an end to his misery by shooting him through the heart: it offers no apology, however, for Girty's ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... But as I had seen an end of all the ready money during the long time I had lived in a state of expectation for my husband, so I began to make away one thing after another, till those few things of value which I had began to lessen apace, and I saw nothing but misery and the utmost distress before me, even to have my children starve before my face. I leave any one that is a mother of children, and has lived in plenty and in good fashion, to consider and reflect what must be my condition. As to my husband, ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... naught of its passing. She was in a place of bitterness very far removed from the ordinary things of life. She shed no tears. The misery and shame that burned her soul were beyond all expression or alleviation. She could have laughed over the irony of it all more easily than she could ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... appearance of reality to Von Barwig. Indeed it was real, as real as reality itself, until the wild applause of an enthusiastic audience awoke him alike to the consciousness of the success of his work and the hopeless misery of his present position; his success in his music only accentuating the ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to misery and pain, shall set this undiminished light of his eyes against the feeble glow of the sun. The artistic faculty, of which each of us has a minute grain, may find its voice in some individual of that last group, gifted with a power of expression ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... would gladly live his life over again, were he allowed to bring to bear on his {44} second life the experience he had acquired in that past. For in the grave there is no room, either for ambition or repentance; and the degree of our happiness or misery for eternity is proportioned to the state of preparation or unpreparation in which we leave this world. Instead of many a man, I might have said most good men; and of the others, all who have not passed the rubicon of hope and grace. The vista of the past, however, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... After the second night I realized and counted every hour in all its misery of hunger and duration, yet I cannot, to save my soul, remember how many days and nights passed between the wreck and that singular argument for a parrot's power of reasoning that was to be advanced to me. It suffices to know that many days and nights went by before we began ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... their power even to nurse the sick and bury the dead. And in later years, when corn was planted in abundance, the stealthy savages often succeeded in cutting it down before it could be harvested. There can be no surprise then that famines came at frequent intervals to add to the misery of the ill-fated colonists. The most terrible of these visited Virginia in the winter of 1609-10. Smith's Historie gives a graphic account of the suffering during those fearful months. Those that escaped starvation were preserved, it says, "for the most part, by roots, herbes, acornes, ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... snatch at all manner of trivial things and thoughts in order to avoid the one feeling which ever weighs him down. When he wakes! Henceforth, while still half asleep, he will feel the gradual entrance of terror and misery into his soul. Even in his dreams he will have a sense of the sweetness of unconsciousness and the horrors of thought, and will strive against waking, while, in spite of his strivings, his anguish grows stronger ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... greatest to endure; and I find those that other historians relate to have been practised by him upon the Epirot lords, are more horrid and cruel, where they were condemned to be flayed alive piecemeal, after so malicious a manner that they continued fifteen days in that misery. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... way he stopped at the houses of many of his boy friends, and was shocked at the misery which already prevailed in some of them. Harry Shepherd's home was ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... matters incidental to the world's work and its burdens that he had never mentioned before so long as I had lived with him, and that was pretty close to ten years. It was easy to see that this was no ordinary case. Several times I had suffered the same sort of misery; had looked for a soft seat and reposeful thoughts in vain. Jim had ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... camp, his animals, well hobbled, fed in sight; for nothing did a hunter dread more than a visit from horse-stealing Indians, and to be afoot was the acme of misery. ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... left him at about ten o'clock, and he then sat brooding over his misery for about an hour. It was his custom when he remained in his chambers to tell his clerk, Stemm, between nine and ten that nothing more would be wanted. Then Stemm would go, and Sir Thomas would sleep for a while in his chair. But ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... of the justice of such grief. As she stood, the imprint of deep sorrow was on the fair young face—a sorrow the young should never know. One arm was raised as though in mute appeal to him not to forsake her in this misery. A look, and he closed the door, passing ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... Doherty, aloud. "You would pity her, your reverence, if you seen the misery they are in this two months; and it is easily telling they saw better days in the ould country. It is easily knowing that, by the dacent, mannerly children she has ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... might know, is cast away: they hasten their own agony; neither as they parted had the heart to say farewell; and while they lived they knew no sadder day than this. All other losses they bore with hearts hardened and steeled by misery. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... resistance an excuse for murder. There were plenty of needy citizens, too, and of rascally slaves, who were perfectly ready to betray wealthy householders: others were indicated by their friends. From all sides came cries of mourning and misery. Rome was like a captured city. People even longed to have the insolent soldiery of Otho and Vitellius back again, much as they had been hated. The Flavian generals, who had fanned the flame of civil war with such energy, were incapable of using their victory ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... woman, upon the first change of weather, rose like a cork, dressed like a Christian, and toddled about the deck in the easiest manner, sipping her grog, and cutting sly jokes upon her late companions in misery,—is supposed by some to have been an impostor, and, when ill-treated, announced intentions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... quarter, and more especially in this house, was an anomaly; but his surprise only lasted for an instant, for he had seen among German and Russian Jews many instances of the same contrast between apparent misery and hoarded wealth. As he walked from the door to the bed he kept his eye on the patient, and the moment he reached her he ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... In his 'War and Peace,' the hero, Peter, is supposed to be the richest man in the Russian empire. During the French invasion he is taken prisoner, and dragged through much of the retreat. Cold, vermin, hunger, and every form of misery assail him, the result being a revelation to him of the real scale of life's values. "Here only, and for the first time, he appreciated, because he was deprived of it, the happiness of eating when he was hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy, and ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... woo The wither'd leaf fall'n in the woods, or blasted Upon this bough? a lightning stroke had come Even from that Heaven in whose light I bloom'd And taken away the greenness of my life, The blossom and the fragrance. Who was cursed But I? who miserable but I? even Misery Forgot herself in that extreme distress, And with the overdoing of her part Did fall away into oblivion. The night in pity took away my day Because my grief as yet was newly born, Of too weak eyes to look upon the light, And ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... for the sentiments which it contains, but for its poetical beauties. Although the path of human life is rough and thorny, the mind may always receive consolation by looking forward to the world to come. The mind which rejects a future state has to thank itself for its utter misery and hopelessness. ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... was his wont now and then to entrap a man and carry him to his house and slay him and take his money and cook his flesh and give it to the folk to eat.[FN538] So he asked him, "O youth, wilt thou that I release thee from this thy misery, on condition that thou be reasonable and never discover aught of thine affair?" Salim answered, "I will swear to thee by whatsoever oath thou wilt administer that I will keep thy secret and will not speak one syllable anent thee, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... and received his acquiescence with a scorn little disguised. Carford passed on to the house; Barbara did not follow him, but, flinging herself on a marble seat, covered her face with her hands and remained there in an attitude which spoke of deep agitation and misery. ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... his disposition: but I lectured him fully and honestly, and yet said nothing to him so severe as what he said of himself. I told him he would certainly be caught in the end by some unworthy person, and then he would look back with regret and misery upon the chances he had lost, and the unhappiness he had caused to those whose only faults had been in believing him true ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... the rivers of blood that streamed over the length and breadth of the Slavonic land. Half a million Jewish victims were not sufficient to satisfy the followers of a religion of love. They only whetted their insatiable appetite. The anarchy among the Gentiles increased the misery of the Jews. The towns fell into the hands of the Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, and Tatars successively, and it was upon the Jews that the hounds of war were let loose at each defeat or conquest. Determined ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... durst, or would, stay in their dwellings the next winter, but they would fley the countrey, and leave their houses and lands to the fury of the outlawes. Upon this complaint, I called the gentlemen of the countrey together, and acquainted them with the misery that the highest parts of the marsh towards Scotland were likely to endure, if there were not timely prevention to avoid it, and desired them to give mee their best advice what course were fitt to be taken. They all showed themselves willing to ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... one service he could render[123]. He is within his right when he claims praise for not abandoning himself to idleness or worse, as did so many of the most prominent men of the time[124]. For Cicero idleness was misery, and in those evil times he was spurred on to exertion by the deepest sorrow[125]. Philosophy took the place of forensic oratory, public harangues, and politics[126]. It is strange to find Cicero making such elaborate apologies as he does for devoting himself ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... blot the paper, as she exclaimed, "Great God! when will this horrible effusion of blood cease?" The Tories, who, like herself, wished for peace with all their hearts, adroitly fostered her grief. With her, they deplored the butchery of Malplaquet, the increase of taxation, the misery entailed by the interminable campaigns, and repeated that it was time to put an end to the sufferings of the people. Such hideous carnage seemed at last to cry aloud to Heaven for cessation. Pity and conscience, so long stifled and tyrannised over, ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... and holy love is, in one aspect of it, a sadder thing to see than the profoundest grief. Misery, at its worst, is at least final: and for that there is the relief of death. But love, in its sacred exaltation,—the love of the parent for the child,—is so fair a mark for affliction that one can hardly view it without a shudder of apprehensive dread. That sort of love was personified in ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... instantly that it was a girl. And evidently the stranger was in much misery. But at Betty's cry she started up from the hearth and whirled about in both ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... rare plants by the Queen, and destined for the wedding wine of Isolt and King Mark! And now the Lord Tristram and she have drunk it together, by misadventure, and can never be parted more! Oh, misery me! What have ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... this as the very central character of the Greek race—the being born pure and human out of the brutal misery of the past, and looking abroad, for the first time, with their children's eyes, wonderingly open, on the strange ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... fainting in the gut of the pass. Some were long past the stage where anything less than threats could make impression on them, and only able to go forward in a dull dream at the best. But there were numbers of both men and women unexpectedly capable of extremes of heroism, who took the burden of misery upon themselves and exhibited high spirits based on no evident excuse. Nothing could overwhelm ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... sight and each time becoming more helplessly entangled in her fascinations, until any escape from the thralldom of her beauty became impossible. His days were a cycle of tantalizing visions which ceased only with the coming of darkness; and when with the night he would have found release from their misery, it was only to discover that night an endless stretch of hours that intervened betwixt him and the moment when ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... inexperienced youth, who cannot get the moon he cries for, may vent his irritation in pessimistic moanings; but there can be no doubt in the mind of any reasonable person that mankind could, would, and in fact do, get on fairly well with vastly less happiness and far more misery than find their way into the lives of nine people out of ten. If each and all of us had been visited by an attack of neuralgia, or of extreme mental depression, for one hour in every twenty-four—a supposition ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through the trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose. But we must wait with patience the workings of an overruling Providence, and hope that that is preparing the deliverance of these our suffering brethren. When the measure ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... lost almost beyond redemption. Will you return to this gang of robbers, and to this man, when a word can save you? What fascination is it that can take you back, and make you cling to wickedness and misery? Oh! is there no chord in your heart that I can touch! Is there nothing left, to which I can ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... Moon— So feeble is thy kiss, so cold thy light,— Lamp of my life, alas!—how soon, how soon— O speak! comes thy last greeting and good-night? My breasts are sere as sand, no flowers bloom, No grass, no forests hide my misery bare; The reaches of the tyrannous poles consume Those gardens of delight we made so fair, And men lie dark in caves, a sullen race, Framed of ray daughter's flesh but now my bane, Yet shall I not withdraw my patient face, Nor tomb them in my hollow caves of ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... anger. Here was a man who grumbled at the present state of things, yet took no trouble to think for himself and try to alter them, and who at the first chance would vote for the perpetuation of the System which produced his misery. ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... but it may suffice to mention, in general, all trades being stopped, employment ceased, the labor, and by that the bread of the poor, were cut off; and at first, indeed, the cries of the poor were most lamentable to hear, though, by the distribution of charity, their misery that way was gently[152] abated. Many, indeed, fled into the country; but, thousands of them having staid in London till nothing but desperation sent them away, death overtook them on the road, and they served for no better than the messengers of death: indeed, others carrying the infection ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... letter, and re-read it, and laid it down on the table beside his untouched breakfast. There was but one expression in his face, and that was misery, and in his soul no other feeling ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... despair was invading the remnant of the Confederacy; supplies began to run short in Richmond, recruiting had ceased, desertion was increasing. Before the story of its long resistance closes it is better to face the gravest charge against the South. That charge relates to the misery inflicted upon many thousands of Northern prisoners in certain prisons or detention camps of the South. The alleged horrors were real and were great. The details should not be commemorated, but it is right to observe that the pitiable ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... the question, 'Who created his satanic majesty?' Well, who did? If God created everything, and evil cannot come out of good, where did evil come from? What a paradox it seems!" she went on, without waiting for a reply. "Yet evil does exist in the world—look at Dorothy! Think of the sin, misery and crime all about us! Where did they come from? There are some who contend that God did not create evil, but permits it for some wise purpose; but that, to me, seems like a weak attempt to clear the Almighty from the terrible responsibility ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... to seem more supernatural than human, floated upward on the silence. Maryllia caught her breath, and listened with a quickly beating heart,—she knew that the voice of this child whom she had rescued from a life of misery, was ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... What had been pastime to me was going to be misery to her. I had to show her the impossibility of my keeping her; then she said she would drown herself. Altogether it was not a very comfortable meeting apart from the fucking, which was as good as usual I dare say, though I ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... not be surprised if you gave me up to the Delawares," said Isaac, coldly. "I am prepared for it, and I would not care very much. I have despaired of your ever becoming civilized enough to understand the misery of my sister and family. Why not ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... aware that the little boy with the hoop had stopped and said something. Above her, very large and grim, was her aunt. Some bird on a tree was making a noise like the drawing of a cork. (She had heard her nurse once draw one.) In her heart was utter misery. The gravel hurt her face, the almond tree was farther away than ever; she was captured more completely than she had ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... solely to those unfortunate young women, who, having lost it, were but the juster objects of compassion: among these, indeed, she picked out such as suited her views and taking them under her protection, rescued them from the danger of the public sinks of ruin and misery, to place, or for them, well or ill, in the manner you have seen. Having then settled her affairs, she set out on her journey, after taking the most tender leave of me, and at the end of some excellent instructions, recommending me to myself, with an anxiety ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... unlikely that the tradition is justified by the remembrance, among the people of every race, of a pre-civilization period of comparative harmony and happiness when two things, which to-day we perceive to be the prolific causes of discord and misery, were absent or only weakly developed—namely, PROPERTY ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... through the pathless wilderness is a slow, grinding misery. The lightest pack soon becomes a burden. At the beginning of a march it may seem a mere nothing, in an hour it is an oppression; in three a millstone is a feather compared with it; and before night the inexperienced ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... followers were trying to bring him food and raiment, and his enemies were preventing them and boasting that they would keep guard over his refuge till they starved him out. Then all again was a blur, a texture of conscious and unconscious misery till a night came when the woof broke and trailed away from him, and he lifted himself on his elbow and after he had drunk a long draft from the spring, found tremulous strength to get to his feet. He tried some steps in the open space, where the light of the full ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... gazing on thee, do I sigh That those most happy years must flee, And thy full share of misery Must fall in life ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... carry back tales of success, for his salary was only four hundred dollars a year. He couldn't go back well dressed, because he was fifty dollars in debt to the bank, and owed a tailor's bill in Banfield.... Invariably thoughts of the girl he knew he loved brought him misery and despondency. Thoughts of home brought him little less. He might have known, from that, that either he or the bank was a failure; but a fellow of nineteen looks through a smoked glass. To say that Evan did not think is scarcely the fact. He did think, but spasmodically. ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... amount of good. This idea is happily embodied in the closing apologue, designed to supplement one of Laurentius Valla, a writer of the fifteenth century. Theodorus, priest of Zeus at Dodona, demands why that god has permitted to Sextus the evil will which was destined to bring so much misery on himself and others. Zeus refers him to his daughter Athene. He goes to Athens, is commanded to lie down in the temple of Pallas, and is there visited with a dream. The vision takes him to the Palace of Destinies, which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Frenchmen who accompanied him the misery of the Irish people and the imbecility of the Irish government produced an effect which they found it difficult to describe. Lauzun wrote to Louvois that the Court and the whole kingdom were in a state ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... more prolific source of human misery than a persistent and long continued fall in the general range of prices. But, although exercising so pernicious an influence, it is not itself a ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... fifth century before our era, a great teacher and reformer, known as Buddha, or Gautama (died about 470 B.C.), arose in India. He was a prince, whom legend represents as being so touched by the universal misery of mankind, that he voluntarily abandoned the luxury of his home, and spent his life in seeking out and making known to men a new and better way of salvation. He condemned the severe penances and the self-torture ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... proof of the dangerous falsity of the old maxims which extol indifference to death as a virtue? In some individuals it may be a sign of virtue, I allow; but, as a national trait, it is the strongest sign of national misery. Look round the great globe. What countries are those where the inhabitants bear death with cheerfulness, or, at least, with apathy? Are they the most civilized, the most free, the most prosperous? Pardon me; no! They are the half-starved, half-clothed, half-human sons of the forest and the waste; ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... said she, "when misery is near; and where misery is, there am I. Do not be angry with Denis, father. I ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... completing. What, alas! remains For Philomela? Guards prevent her flight. Of stone erected, high the massive walls Circle her round. Her lips so mute, refuse The deed to blazon. Keen the sense of grief Sharpens the soul:—in misery the mind Ingenious sparkles. Skillful she extends The Thracian web, and on the snow-white threads, In purple letters, weaves the dreadful tale. Complete, a servant with expressive signs, The present to the queen she bids to bear. To Procne was it borne, witless the slave Of what ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... for anyone who had been such an indescribable fool as to give up Merefield, and his prospects and his past and his abilities, and set out on this absurd and childish adventure? So once more he came round in a circle and his misery ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... know, led a struggling and turbulent existence for five or six centuries in contest with the Danes. Probably the full total of the misery inflicted on this country by the Danish raids can never be reckoned, but that they crippled and exhausted Saxon England by their frequency and the great duration of time over which they extended is apparent by the advance made in civilization in the short period between the breaking ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... labour and hardship, and at the hazard of all that fortune hath liberally given them, could send them at the head of a multitude of prigs, called an army, to molest their neighbours; to introduce rape, rapine, bloodshed, and every kind of misery among their own species? What but some such glorious appetite of mind could inflame princes, endowed with the greatest honours, and enriched with the most plentiful revenues, to desire maliciously ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... had probably never even occurred to his father for instance; he belonged to the old school, who considered it at once humanizing and educational to confine baboons and panthers, holding the view, no doubt, that in course of time they might induce these creatures not so unreasonably to die of misery and heart-sickness against the bars of their cages, and put the society to the expense of getting others! In his eyes, as in the eyes of all Forsytes, the pleasure of seeing these beautiful creatures in a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Innocent IV, fugitive before Federigo II, Henry VII of Germany, St. Catherine of Siena, and often too, St. Catherine Adorni, Louis XII of France, Don John of Austria after Lepanto, and maybe, who knows, Velasquez of Spain, Vandyck from England, and behind them, all the misery of Genoa through the centuries, an immense and pitiful company of men and women crying in the silence to him who ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... have said, no attempt has been made to protect, feed, or house the people who have been brought into the towns; and the overcrowding and hunger and misery have produced every form of fever and sickness, from which these poor unfortunates ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 30, June 3, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... be born equal (including equal privileges of the sexes), but the practical difficulty is to keep them equal. Life is wrong somehow. Some are born rich and some are born poor, and this inequality makes misery, and then some lose their possessions, which others get hold of, and that makes more misery. We can put our fingers on the two great evils of life as it now is: the first is poverty; and the second is infirmity, which is the accompaniment ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the miseries of the people.—Mr. Bleeck followed on the same side with Mr. Hunt, exposing the fallacy of attempting to palm upon the meeting a petition, professing to have for its object the welfare of the tradesman and the mechanic, whilst the operation of it would tend to perpetuate the misery they had so long endured; he called to the recollection of many of the meeting, the scenes which they had been in the habit of witnessing in that hall, the walls of which had so often resounded with the professions of those gentlemen who were now complaining of the present times, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... dreadful. It was a chestnut horse with a long, thin neck. I saw a white streak down the forehead. I believe it was Ginger; I hoped it was, for then her troubles would be over. Oh! if men were more merciful they would shoot us before we came to such misery. ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... seeth every secret, He save you all and make you perfect and strong, And give us grace with His mercy for to meet! For now in great misery mankind is bound; The serpent hath given us so mortal a wound That no creature is able us for to release Till the right Unction of Judah ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... reappear to the moral eye at the end of this period, first by the approach of Misfortune, whose atmosphere being much less dense than that of Interest, will allow of imperfect views of the obscured postulate; but the radiance of the latter will not be completely restored until the arrival of Misery, whose chastening colors invariably permit all truths to be discernible, although through a sombre ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... for their swine, that kept up the iniquitous forest laws to so late a date, and covered so large a portion of the land with such immense tracts of wood and brake, to the injury of agriculture and the misery of the people. Some idea of the extent to which swine were grazed in the feudal times, may be formed by observing the number of pigs still fed in Epping Forest, the Forest of Dean, and the New Forest, in Hampshire, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... after all. They are our co-ordinators, the only ones we have; and they do their work with much friction and waste, only by correcting a maladjustment after it has taken place, by slow and often cruel devices, of which one of the most cruel is, precisely, unemployment and all the misery it entails. ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... a lunch-party on the day following Trennahan's departure and paid calls during the afternoon. The small details diverted her, and she found herself able to make conversation, despite the sluggish current of misery beneath. She had told her mother of her determination not to marry Trennahan; and although Mrs. Yorba had paced the room in apprehension of her husband's wrath, she was secretly pleased. A daughter, ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... is it the people cry? They ask for all equality. The poor no more shall be In slavish misery; The idle ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... without linking himself to his enemy, and so must fight her! All perverse and unmanly men are admirers of women! How's it with you now? So you saw those invalids and thought yourself responsible for their misery? They're tough fellows, you can believe me; they'll be able to leave here in a few days and go back to their occupations. Oh yes, lying Erik's a wag! But things have gone so far with you, that you can't distinguish between your own and other people's children. ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... liable to be immured for life under the pretext of lunacy, sequestered from his wife, children, and friends, robbed of his fortune, deprived even of necessaries, and subjected to the most brutal treatment from a low-bred barbarian, who raises an ample fortune on the misery of his fellow-creatures, and may, during his whole life, practise this horrid oppression, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... in youth, find the rest of life fall far short of their expectations. Her voice had acquired a perpetual wail, and the corners of what had once been a pretty mouth drooped in an eternal peevishness. She found herself in a morass of misery and shabby discomfort, but had her days continued in an even tenor she would still have lamented. "A dingy body," was Mrs. Morran's comment, but she laboured in kindness. Unhappily they had no common ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... but get her married to the man at Church. She is 18, he 30, and no Gentleman. She was advertised and 20 guineas reward offered to anyone who could give an account of the stray sheep. It is a sad History. What misery this idle girl has caused her parents, and probably ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... a few words as to what this Palace may and may not do. In the first place, it can do nothing, absolutely nothing, to relieve the great starvation and misery which lies all about London, but more especially at the East-end. People who are out of work and starving do not want amusement, not even of the highest kind; still less do they want University extension. ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... sky, were whimsically curious. A day was coming! It would come and go, and never in all eternity come again—would this day! It was coming: to some, bringing ungrudging pleasure, sweet happiness; to others, unsparing misery, bitter despair! Before days were, it had been arranged that this one should appear—it had been nicely calculated that this very dawn should glorify the sky at this precise moment; and that e'er the ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... wild glare at Jimmy, who hovered in the background, but at the look of utter misery on the latter's face, even Bob's hard ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... become wanderers as homish vagabonds; or, as banished men, to forsake the kingdom!" Again: "with bloody tears of heart, he, and his wife, their seven children, and their servant (seventeen of them in all), did that day make their petition unto their honours," &c. Can human misery be sharper than this—and to be the lot of a philosopher and ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... behaved altogether like a silly little chap, and the outcome of it all was that instead of starting alone for my enchanted garden, I led the way presently—cheeks flushed, ears hot, eyes smarting, and my soul one burning misery and shame—for a party of six mocking, curious, and ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... miles, we began to wish that the man who sent those horses, a Spaniard, by the way, might be doomed to ride them through all eternity under the saddles with which they were equipped. We were sorry enough for the poor brutes, but sorrier still for ourselves. For several days, I limped in misery from a long row of savage blisters raised on my leg by rawhide knots with which my saddle had been repaired. An hour after starting, we were overtaken by a heavy thunder-shower. At nightfall, after having ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... amongst the most respectable orders, abounding with the truest honour, and noblest spirit, as to cause duels on the most trifling subjects, thus involving their families in distress and themselves in the greatest misery. ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... of all who must venture into the waist of the ship. The dogs sit with their tails to this invading water, their coats wet and dripping. It is a pathetic attitude deeply significant of cold and misery; occasionally some poor beast emits a long pathetic whine. The group forms a picture of wretched dejection; such a life is truly hard ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... moment, I regretted. When I entered the house, and saw mother in her old place, her surroundings unaltered, I suffered a disappointment. I had not had the power of transferring the atmosphere of my year's misery ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... seeming result of replacing social order and tranquillity by a condition of widespread anarchy, confusion, and lawlessness. It is only fair to say, however, that the Land League meetings did not create but only revealed the misery, distress, and discontent of the Irish rural populace. The country had recently suffered from a severe visitation of famine. Evictions for non-payment of rent had been steadily increasing for several years past. In 1877 ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... reverses had put them in a particularly ugly mood—who said out loud in places where Britt could not hear them that the money-grabber could not get much more than twelve-per-cent blood out of the nag he had ridden for so long, and might as well set knife to neck and put the town out of its misery. ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... struggling with his difficulties, became a bankrupt in 1656. His son took possession of Rembrandt's house, and from the sale of the painter's art collection and other resources eventually recovered his mother's fortune, but Rembrandt himself never rose above the misery, degradation, and poverty of this period. He lived thirteen years longer, but it was in obscurity—out of which the only records which reach us, are stories of miserly habits acquired too late to serve their purpose, a desperate resort to low company dating ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... clothes and nice houses to live in, and money to spend for luxuries, and could go away on summer vacations and all that, while the people outside the churches, thousands of them, I mean, die in tenements, and walk the streets for jobs, and never have a piano or a picture in the house, and grow up in misery and drunkenness ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... in a Cup of Wine fasting to the Party, just at the time when he feels the beginning of his misery, anguish and pain to come upon him, the second and third, use it in like manner; it allaies all pain the first day how great soever it be, and prevents Swelling; the second day it causes Sweat, which is very nasty, ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... Country pastimes, fly, Sad troops of humane misery, Come serene looks, Clear as the Christal Brooks, Or the pure azur'd heaven that smiles to see The rich attendance on our poverty; Peace and a secure mind Which all men seek, ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... sufferings came when for forty-eight hours they were under a snow-shed without light, and with the stoves empty. As, for the maintenance of warmth, every crevice in the cars was stopped, the misery of close and unwholesome atmosphere was added to their sorrows. The writer, as an old traveller, has had some experience of odd sleeping dens, and has been obliged at times to inhale a pestiferous air, though he has never endured so much from this discomfort as in his winter passage ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... joyous; for such love sorrows as those which oppressed Bertram when sitting in the chambers of Mr. Neversaye Die rarely oppress a young man in moments which would otherwise be jovial. And Arthur had at this time gotten over one misery, and not yet fallen into another. He had obtained the fellowship which he had hardly expected, and was commencing the life of a don, with all a don's comforts ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... illustration, by the events of history peculiar to England or common to the British dominion. The one topic, which is specially attractive to an Irish meeting, is abuse of England as the source of Irish misery. Community of hatred the mixed Nationalist population has, but whether such a passion is sufficiently creative to build up a new national type the reader can judge for himself. With this exception, ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... Turn of the Balance is a novel that grew out of his legal experiences: it deals with the underworld of crime, and often in a depressing way. It reflects the author's belief that the present organization of society, and our methods of administering justice, are the cause of much of the misery in the world. Following these novels came two volumes of short stories, The Gold Brick and The Fall Guy: both deal with various aspects of American life of to-day. In 1914 he published an autobiography under ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... Ossaroo who were thus perplexed. Karl knew that glittering meteor, that for a moment had flashed before his eyes like a beam of hope—now slowly but surely departing from him, and plunging him back into the old misery. ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... might have fancied him a sailor who had grown old in contending with storms, an astonishing fact, almost incredible, but one which awakened some gleam of joy amidst the sorrows which overwhelmed me. I was ill, and several times I thought my last hour was near.... To complete my misery comes the thought that twenty years of service, of fatigues and perils, have brought me no profit, and I find myself to-day unpossessed of even a roof to shelter me in Spain, and forced to betake myself to an inn when I would ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... hitherto monopolised by the Brahmans, began to flow into new channels, supporting hundreds and thousands of Buddhist mendicants, more had been achieved than probably Buddha himself had ever dreamt of; and he whose meditations had been how to deliver the soul of man from misery and the fear of death, had delivered the people of India from a degrading thraldom ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... hand and My left; Six hours alone, athirst, in misery: At length in death one smote My heart and ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... come to have counsel with one who has the wisdom of the gods. Others before you have come for such counsel, but seeing the misery that is visible upon me they went without asking for counsel: I would strive to hold you here for a while. Stay, and have sight of the misery the gods visit upon those who would be as wise as they. And when you have seen the thing that is wont to befall me, it may be that help will come ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... unfitness of the situation for a woman's presence, I must beseech my fair readers to reflect, that the pilgrim's wife followed him, weary and footsore, through all his difficulties, led, not by choice, but by devotion; and that in times of misery and sickness her tender care saved his life ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... attributes, except by observation of His words and acts. If we had been introduced to the philanthropist, Howard, we could not have become acquainted with his excellence by merely gazing at his countenance. We must have listened to his words, and followed him to those scenes of misery which he was in the habit of visiting, if we would obtain a clear understanding of his benevolence. So too, the holiness, love, and other moral perfections of the Deity, are not matters which can be apprehended ...
— Thoughts on a Revelation • Samuel John Jerram
... point some practical reader may say that attaining wisdom is all very well, but what he wants is practical help. He is perhaps out of work, has sickness in his house and is in debt. Or, he may be well-to-do, and yet in the deepest distress and misery. To all such I would say that they possess the Power by which they can overcome all their difficulties, and, through overcoming, attain wisdom. A man's success depends, more than anything, upon his faith—his faith in the good ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... character shone with irresistible comicality. How striking was the contrast between it in its main features and the great Civil War waged at the same time in our own country! Yet the Fronde had its serious—terrible aspect, too, in the wide-spread misery it entailed upon France, as may be seen from the valuable statistical researches of M. Feillet. That writer cites the following passage from the record of an eye-witness of what he describes:[4]—"No tongue can tell, no pen describe, no ear may hear that which we have seen (at ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... unfair. You ask me not to talk of my love, you wish to talk friendship, while you are forcing me by your every word and act to think of my own misery." ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... days, now, we have not been anxious about Mrs. Clemens (unberufen). After 20 months of bed-ridden solitude and bodily misery she all of a sudden ceases to be a pallid shrunken shadow, and looks bright and young and pretty. She remains what she always was, the most wonderful creature of fortitude, patience, endurance and recuperative power ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Antoine Pechard and Marianne Fouan, his wife. As she insisted on marrying a poor youth named Vincent Bouteroue, her mother cast her out. Misfortunes pursued the young couple, both of whom died within a few years, leaving two children in profound misery. La Terre. ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... judged the slayer of the settler according to their laws. They sent him to ha shackled with chain and iron ball and do heavy, squaw-work in misery the balance of his years. They did not say because this Indian was bad that all Seminoles were slayers of ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... lost in the magnitude of it; the fierceness of tormenting flames, is qualified and made innoxious by the greater fierceness of his pride; the loss of infinite happiness to himself is compensated in thought, by the power of inflicting infinite misery on others. Yet Satan is not the principle of malignity, or of the abstract love of evil—but of the abstract love of power, of pride, of self-will personified, to which last principle all other good and evil, and even his own, are subordinate. From this principle ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... trunk continueth longer in burning, even so the more that a man is rooted in sin, the greater is his punishment. Ah! thou perpetual damned wretch! how art thou thrown into the everlasting fiery lake that shall never be quenched! there must I dwell in all manner of wailing, sorrow, misery, pain, torment, grief, howling, sighing, sobbing, running at the eyes, stinking at the nose, gnashing of teeth, snare to the ears, horror to the conscience, and shaking both of hand and foot? Ah! that I could carry the heavens upon my shoulders, so that there were time at last to quit me of ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... 1821. He had begun to take opium, as a cure for the toothache, when a student at Oxford, where he resided from 1803 to 1808. By 1816 he had risen to eight thousand drops of laudanum a day. For several years after this he experienced the acutest misery, and his will suffered an entire paralysis. In 1821 he succeeded in reducing his dose to a comparatively small allowance, and in shaking off his torpor so as to become capable of literary work. {240} The most ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... laughs, to-morrow she weeps. Thy Mother has lost all patience with her, and, as she always does when her own words rail her, I heard her quoting the Sage: "Just as ducks' legs though short cannot be lengthened without pain, nor cranes' legs though long be shortened without misery to the crane, neither can sense be added to ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... for the sublimity of its ideas, the vivacity and force of its expressions, the grandeur of its imagery, and the variety of its characters. No other work represents, in more true and vivid colors, the nobility and misery of humanity, the laws of necessity and Providence, and the trials to which the good are subjected for their moral improvement. Here the great straggle between evil and good appears in its true light, and human virtue heroically submits ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... life, and rivaling her companion in artistic effects. These were the parents of Miss. Juno—or rather not quite that. Her mother had been twice married; first, a marriage of convenience darkened the earlier years of her life; Miss. Juno was the only reward for an age of domestic misery. A clergyman joined these parties—God had nothing to do with the compact; it would seem that he seldom has. A separation very naturally and very properly followed in the course of time; a young child was the only possible excuse ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... creeping down on Giles's Rents, hiding its grime, its misery and squalor, what time Barnabas stepped out into the court, and, turning his back upon the shadowy River, strode along, watchful-eyed, toward that dark corner where the Bow Street Runners still lounged, smoking their pipes and talking together ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... in a room whither of late he had come more rarely, the Countess looked at him so tenderly that she blushed and cast down her eyes. Her clemency enraptured Soulanges all the more, because this scene followed on the misery he had endured at the ball. He seized his wife's hand and kissed it gratefully. Is not gratitude often ...
— Domestic Peace • Honore de Balzac
... when making its debut among strangers? Mrs. Allen said it was the image of its grandma, whereupon Mrs. Salsify laughed and looked supremely silly. The deacon patted its back and said, "Poor little innocent! what a world of sin and misery ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... a character in the "Heart of Midlothian," who, being seduced, had, in her misery under a sense of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... used to be groaning in sickness and misery; but at night he used to come out of his skin and appear as a beautiful and shining man; in this form he used to go and play and dance in the moonlight in the court yard of the Raja's palace. One night the princess's maid-servant saw her master return and creep into his ugly skin; she told ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... sensuous rites and feasts of the rural shrines. Among such distractions Israel lost her innocence, forgot what her own God was or had done for her, and ceased to enquire of Him. Hence her present vices and misery in contrast with her early troth and safety. Hence the twin evils of the time—on the one hand the nation's trust in heathen powers and silly oscillation between Egypt and Assyria; on the other the gross immoralities to which ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... I became faint and sick, and was obliged to crawl back to bed. I had all this time nearly forgotten my bruises and injuries of the previous evening, but I was painfully reminded of them now, and gradually all the misery of that exploit returned, and along with it a ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... phrase! To one it arouses feelings akin to rapture; to another it is suggestive of heavings and horror. To him whose physical condition is easily and disagreeably affected by aquatic motion, "at sea" savours of bad smells and misery. To him who sings of the intensity of his love for "a ride on the fierce, foaming, bursting tide," "at sea" sounds like the sweet ringing of a silver bell floating towards him, as if from afar, fraught with the fragrance and melody of distant climes—such as coral ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... even Heaven against the earth be hurled, Or fire inwrap in crackling flames the world, That which is past—we never can restore, His soul has travelled to some happier shore. Alas! no good from sorrow canst thou reap, Then wherefore thus in gloom and misery weep?" ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... in the least unusual had occurred? Did she notice nothing in my manner that appeared to be unusual? True, she addressed to me no term of endearment, which was singular; but so engrossed was I in my introspection and in my own misery that I scarcely noticed this. Indeed, had she spoken to me fondly, her doing so just then would but have increased the feeling ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... weeping into the needless stream; 'Poor deer,' quoth he 'thou mak'st a testament As worldlings do, giving thy sum of more To that which had too much:' then, being there alone, Left and abandoned of his velvet friends; ''Tis right'; quoth he; 'thus misery doth part The flux of company:' anon, a careless herd, Full of the pasture, jumps along by him And never stays to greet him; 'Ay,' quoth Jaques, 'Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens; 'Tis just the fashion; wherefore do you look Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there?' ...
— As You Like It • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... holy thing to see In a rich and fruitful land,— Babes reduced to misery, Fed with cold and ...
— Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience • William Blake
... of pain and misery in women is shown by an examination of the number of male and female suicides from physical suffering. Von Oettingen states that in 30,000 cases the percentage of suicides from physical suffering was in ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... conviction that these differences are essential, and such conviction naturally leads to these points of disagreement being (may we not say?) rather too obtrusively enforced as part and portion of a saving belief. All Bunyan's efforts were to awaken sinners to a sense of their degradation, misery, and danger, and to direct them to the only refuge from the wrath to come—the hope set before them in the gospel; and then leaving the pious convert to the guidance of his Bible in forming his connections in the pilgrimage of life. Bunyan is solemnly in earnest; his desire is, that poor ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Williams says: that she wonders the happiest women in the world can look each other in the face without bursting into tears, their happiness is so unreasonable, and so built upon and hedged about with misery. She declares that there's nothing so sad to her as a bride, unless it's a young mother, or a little girl growing up in the innocent gayety of her heart. She wonders they can live ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... prince of Lesbos to the sultan, (c. 44.) Till Lesbos was subdued in 1463, (Phranza, l. iii. c. 27,) that island must have been full of the fugitives of Constantinople, who delighted to repeat, perhaps to adorn, the tale of their misery.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... ponder on the past, I often think, and my confessor was not backward in favoring the idea, that it might be a good rather than an evil spirit, sent by my guardian angel, to show me the folly and misery of pride. So well at least did I learn this lesson, roughly taught as I was, that I am known now by all my friends and fellow-citizens by the name of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads! And when my only prayer was to be taken off from the rest and when it was such inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... ... Who brought you hither? Has the grave no bars? Ah, 'tis past bearing, how with corpse-cold eyes Ye suck the life-blood from me pitilessly! I know I slew you—but it had to be. Was it my fault ye threw the losing dice? Away! Alas—when ends my misery?" ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... built, and the sand formed rapidly all about her. The storm lasted for several days, and by the end of that time a shoal had formed. Several storms have occurred since, and have heaped the sand all over her. I have lived here ever since in great misery. Yesterday a vessel passed, and I put up a signal on the rock over there, which she did not notice. In despair I set fire to the brig, which was loaded with wood and burned easily. I watched till morning, and ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... such stead but that I have been shrewdly shaken, nay, all but uprooted by the blast, and altogether lacerated by the bite of this same envy. Whereby I may very well understand that 'tis true, what the sages aver, that only misery is exempt from envy in the present life. Know then, discreet my ladies, that some there are, who, reading these little stories, have alleged that I am too fond of you, and that 'tis not a seemly thing that I should take so much pleasure in ministering to your gratification and solace; and some ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... biting, eager air, and at a late hour, he drew his cloak about his thin and bent form, and walked off with me across the Common, and to the South End, nearly two miles of an exposed walk, to the scene of misery. He gave his full share, and more, of kindness and material aid; and, as George's mother told me, on my return, had with medical aid and stores, and a clergyman, made the boy's end as comfortable and hopeful ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... Ireland with ninety pounds in his pocket and many tons' weight of misery in his heart. In his bones he felt tragedies on foot in Ireland which concession and good government could not prevent. He had fled from it all. When he set his face to Holyhead, he felt that he would never live in Ireland again. Yet his courage was firm as he made ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... weeping; the terrible words "destroy him," and the assurance that if she had thought sooner of appealing to the Governor, much misery, or at least the thought of misery, might have been spared her, so affected her that she could ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... almost monastic; and Waverley, who had given his horse to his servant on entering the first gate, walked slowly down the avenue, enjoying the grateful and cooling shade, and so much pleased with the placid ideas of rest and seclusion excited by this confined and quiet scene, that he forgot the misery and dirt of the hamlet he had left behind him. The opening into the paved court-yard corresponded with the rest of the scene. The house, which seemed to consist of two or three high, narrow, and steep-roofed buildings, projecting from ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Abyssinians, Greeks, Turks, Parsees, Nubians, and Jews, which crowded the path. But curiosity of this sort is soon satisfied, and these novelties are passed, when I find myself in the midst of the city, more full of mud and misery, dark, dirty twisting lanes, arched almost over by verandas, and wretchedly paved or not paved at all, full of smells and disgusting sights—such as lean, mangy dogs, and ragged beggars quivering with lice, and poverty-stricken people; all ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... all these turbulent means of security to their system, very great discontents everywhere prevail. But they only produce misery to those who nurse them at home, or exile, beggary, and in the end confiscation, to those who are so impatient as to remove from them. Each municipal republic has a Committee, or something in the nature of a Committee ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... I turn? Wretch that I am! To what Place betake my self? Shall I go to the Capitol?—Alas! it is overflowed with my Brother's Blood. Or shall I retire to my House? Yet there I behold my Mother plung'd in Misery, weeping ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... steps, and was almost whirled along the avenue by the wild wind that roared in the branches, tearing the leaves from the trees, and whirling them round and round. She hardly felt it—her whole soul was set upon the little orphan; the misery of watching the suffering she could not relieve, joined with passionate resentment at her father and sister-in-law, who she fancied made light of it. Only Mr. Fotheringham, when stopping at the lodge on his way, had shown what she thought tolerable humanity. He had shared her concern, ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... day, but a few hours earlier, she had perused these pages, wondering how the unknown gifted poetess beyond the sea had so accurately etched the suffering in her own young heart, the loneliness and misery that seemed coiled in the future like serpents in a lair. Now, holding that bruised palpitating heart under the steel-clad heel of pride, she was calmly declaiming that portraiture of her own wretchedness, as any elocutionist might a grand passage from the "Antigone," ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... not looked very carefully; why,' he continued more earnestly,' you haven't even seen one of the most conspicuous features of the animal, which is as plainly before your eyes as the fish itself; look again, look again!' and he left me to my misery. ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... not know," said he, "that your beloved France is at the back of all this misery?" And he pointed to the smoking ruins of the village. "Do you not know that it is the gold of the French king that pays Le Loutre and his savages? Do you not know that while King Louis instructs his agents in Quebec and Louisburg and yonder ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts |
