"Swinish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the Low Countries would seem to furnish proof that the climate is such as to induce degeneracy of the human mind and body; these, I soon found, were completely under her influence, and with their aid she got up and sustained a swinish tumult, which I was constrained at last to quell by ordering her and two of her tools to rise from their seats, and, having kept them standing five minutes, turning them bodily out of the schoolroom: the accomplices into a large place ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... furtively toward the adversary, an appraising glance, as if to judge his gullibility. The brutish passion of the man showed in the pendulous lower lip, thrust forward a little, in the swinish lifting of the wide-flaring nostrils, in the humid glowing of the inflamed eyes. A nausea of disgust swept over her. She fought it down. Then, with hypocrisy that amazed herself, she met his ardent stare boldly, though with a pretense of timidity. She spoke with ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... insertions have also been made from a quarto copy corrected by Mr. Burke himself. From the same source something more has been drawn in the shape of notes, to which are subscribed his initials. Of this number is the explanation of that celebrated phrase, "the swinish multitude": an explanation which was uniformly given by him to his friends, in conversation on the subject. But another note will probably interest the reader still more, as being strongly expressive of that parental ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Of that which lewdly-pampered Luxury 770 Now heaps upon some few with vast excess, Nature's full blessings would be well dispensed In unsuperfluous even proportions, And she no whit encumbered with her store; And then the Giver would be better thanked, His praise due paid: for swinish gluttony Ne'er looks to Heaven amidst his gorgeous feast, But with besotted base ingratitude Crams, and blasphemes his Feeder. Shall I go on? Or have I said enow? To him that dares 780 Arm his profane tongue with contemptuous words Against the sun-clad power of chastity Fain ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... abstract rebellion against the futility of life as he was living it. This was different: This was a definite, concrete sense of failure to keep faith with himself and with Mason; the sickening consciousness of a swinish return to the wallow; a distrust of himself that was beyond any emotion he had ever felt in ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... a broken knocker or two into your pocket as you go along, and then pestering your bewildered memory with all sorts of nocturnal misdemeanors; truly they are a race of noxious vermin; pretty well, perhaps, for the protection of the swinish multitude; but for us gentlemen, why, they "come betwixt the wind and our nobility," and their remembrance stinks in our nostrils! One thing only we know in their favour,—they dress all in one colour; their blueness alone makes them sufferable in this nineteenth century of ours, and whenever they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... statement that "the crowd rent the air with their shouts," his printer made the line read "the crowd rent the air with their snouts." However, this error was a natural one, since it occurs in the "Catechism of the Swinish Multitude." Royalty only are privileged when it comes to the matter of blundering. When Louis XIV. was a boy he one day spoke of "un carosse"; he should have said "une carosse," but he was king, and having changed the ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... understand and support the sort of mind and character that is (at least comparatively) capable of handling it? For remember: what our voters are in the pit and gallery they are also in the polling booth. We are all now under what Burke called "the hoofs of the swinish multitude." Burke's language gave great offence because the implied exceptions to its universal application made it a class insult; and it certainly was not for the pot to call the kettle black. The aristocracy he defended, in spite of the political marriages ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... business, was, like many of your great geniuses, in outward aspect unprepossessing and misleading; for whereas he looked like a very shiftless and very dirty tramp, he was as a matter of fact as vile a rascal as ever pawned a swinish soul for whiskey. ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... dull country neighborhood had wrought great changes in the simple feeling with which she had sought him at first. He had then been to her only a Prodigal who had squandered his substance, tried to feed his soul on the swinish husks of Doubt, and returning to his father's house unrepentant, had been admitted yet remained rejected: a Prodigal not of the flesh and the world but of the spirit and the Lord. But what has ever interested the heart of woman as a prodigal of ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... divided in choice between Switzerland and Tuscany, and I gave my vote for Pisa, as nearer the Mediterranean, which I love for the sake of the shores which it washes, and for my young recollections of 1809. Switzerland is a curst selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world. I never could bear the inhabitants, and still less their English visiters; for which reason, after writing for some information about houses, upon hearing that ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... And if Beck had been taught to pray, he would have prayed for thee as for a good man, O miserable sinner! And thou art going now, Nicholas Grabman, upon an enterprise which promises thee large gains, and thy purse is filled; and thou wantest nothing for thy wants or thy swinish luxuries. Why should those shaking fingers itch for the ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... whether a man sees history from above or from below. Burke saw it from the comfortable altitude of the Whig aristocracy to which he had allied himself. The revolutionary school saw its inverse, from the standpoint of the "swinish multitude" (an angry indiscretion of Burke's) for whom it had worked to less advantage. Paine was a man of the people, and Godwin belonged by birth to the dissenting community for whom history had been chiefly a record of persecution, illuminated ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... "It's swinish!" he cried. "It's near getting my patience all out. Wine. Wine and women. What devil threw his spell over the boy's mother letting him ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... best part of a summer day! Buried in swinish slumber, with window-curtains heedfully drawn, and shutters closely fastened, between us and it, we know nothing of the stately pageant spread outside ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... called to mind that his time from day to day drew nigh, he began to live a swinish and epicurish life. Wherefore he commanded his spirit Mephistophiles to bring him seven of the fairest women that he had seen in all the times of his travel; which being brought, he liked them so well that he continued with them in all manner of love, and made them to travel with him all his ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... The story of the worthy old woman of Goshen, a very moral old woman, who wouldn't let her shoats eat fattening apples in fall, for fear the fruit might ferment upon their brains, and so make them swinish. Now, during a green Christmas, inauspicious to the old, this worthy old woman fell into a moping decline, took to her bed, no appetite, and refused to see her best friends. In much concern her good man sent for the doctor, who, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... reueale east and west[3] Makes vs tradust, and taxed of other nations, They clip[4] vs drunkards, and with Swinish phrase Soyle our addition,[5] and indeede it takes From our atchieuements, though perform'd at height[6] The pith and marrow of our attribute, So oft it chaunces in particuler men,[7] That for some vicious ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... no honor in misery; it is picturesque to read about, but it is a sorry state in reality to be very poor. Some poets have been scamps. I shall not start as the prodigal son, Bessie, for I love not swinish company nor diet ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... and horror when I contrasted this ghastly calmness of pale ice and the brightness of the holy stars looking down upon it, with our swinish revelry in the cabin, and I thought with loathing of the drunken ribaldry of the pirate and my own tipsy songs piercing the ear of the mighty spirit of this solitude. The exercise improved my spirits; I stepped the length of the little raised deck briskly, ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... to truth, I said, is not a soul equally to be deemed halt and lame which hates voluntary falsehood and is extremely indignant at herself and others when they tell lies, but is patient of involuntary falsehood, and does not mind wallowing like a swinish beast in the mire of ignorance, and has ...
— The Republic • Plato
... quite bluntly, after alluding to the Mysteries: "Even now I fear, as it is said, 'to cast the pearls before swine, lest they tread them underfoot, and turn and rend us.' For it is difficult to exhibit the really pure and transparent words respecting the true Light to swinish and untrained hearers."[3] ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... these and all later scenes in which Shakespeare has taken on him to paint the action and passion of an insurgent populace. With him, it might too plausibly be argued, the people once risen in revolt for any just or unjust cause is always the mob, the unwashed rabble, the swinish multitude; full as he is of wise and gracious tenderness for individual character, of swift and ardent pity for personal suffering, he has no deeper or finer feeling than scorn for "the beast with many heads" that fawn and butt at bidding ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... were propagating the most barefaced and wanton falsehoods against me. And who are these men that have been the foremost to accuse me? Some of the most degraded, swinish, and abandoned of the human race. And what has been the cause of all their hostility to me? Why, merely because I have been the undisguised and uncompromising advocate of the people's rights and liberties; because I have publicly and unequivocally, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... our superior soles. There is an abominable riff-raff gone into those thickets for purposes quite other than the discovery of the right thing to do, for quite other motives than our high intellectual desire. There are ugly rebels and born rascals, cheats by instinct, and liars to women, swinish unbelievers who would compromise us with their erratic pursuit of a miscellaneous collection of strange fancies and betray us callously at last. Because a man does not find the law pure justice, that is no reason why he ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... culpable on account of his intrigue with the young and handsome widow, Mrs. Raymond.—How prone are many people to lose sight of their own imperfections while they censure and severely punish the failings of those who are not a whit more guilty than themselves! The swinish glutton condemns the drunkard—the villainous seducer reproves the frequenter of brothels—the arch hypocrite takes to task the open, undisguised sinner—and the rich, miserly old reprobate, whose wealth places him above the possibility of ever coming to want, who would sooner "hang the ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... and gluttony of northern nations for a like reason found no favor in Italy. It disgusted the Romans beyond measure to witness the swinish excesses of the Germans. Their own sensuality prompted them to a refined Epicureanism in food and drink; on this point, however, it must be admitted that the prelates, here as elsewhere foremost in profligacy, disgraced the age of Leo with banquets worthy of Vitellius.[1] ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... The swinish racer was about a hundred yards ahead when I gave the mare the reins, and told her to go. And she did go. She flew against the wind with a motion so rapid that my face, as it clove the air, felt as if cutting its way through a solid body, ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... any reasonable distance of a school they come readily to it, and prove bright and apt scholars. But when the "run of the mountain" was seized upon by many proprietors, the people were mentally, if not bodily, in a swinish condition. The idea of any right which a landlord was bound to respect had not dawned upon them, and, if it had, prompt vengeance would have descended on the village Hampden in the shape of a notice to quit, and he ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... thee; the snow From swinish footprints takes no staining, But, leaving the gross soils of earth below, Its spirit mounts, the skies regaining, And unresentful falls again, To beautify the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... muttered he, in a voice of the keenest anguish, "no hope; merciful God! none, none? What, I, I, who have shamed kings in luxury,—I to die on the gibbet, among the reeking, gaping, swinish crowd with whom—O God, that I were one of them even! that I were the most loathsome beggar that ever crept forth to taint the air with sores! that I were a toad immured in a stone, sweltering in the atmosphere of its own venom! a snail crawling on these very walls, and tracking ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... even in the highest development of the civilization of the future, for they are innate in every thoughtful and energetic race,—feelings which, though they have often led to crime, have far oftener delivered from swinish sensuality; the feelings which drove into the merry greenwood "Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John;" "Adam Bell, and Clym of the Cleugh, and William of Cloudislee;" the feelings which prompted one half of his inspiration to the nameless immortal who wrote the "Nutbrown Maid;"—feelings which ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... even as they raged. Now and then it was rumored that he found some single individual in whom he would take an interest, but not often. In the main I think he despised them one and all for the puny machines they were. He even despised life and the pleasures and dissipations or swinish indolence which, in his judgment, characterized most men. I recall once, for instance, his telling us how as a private in the United States Army when the division of which he was a unit was shut up in winter quarters, huddled about stoves, smoking (as he characterized them) "filthy ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... island, in the hope of surprising us unawares and killing us. For now they were very numerous, and at least as well-armed as we were, and would make very formidable enemies. The only wonder was that they had not already attempted it, but the men believed that the villains were so engrossed in a swinish orgie after their triumph as to be heedless of time or prudence. So here were we—but thirty-two men in all, not counting these fugitives—and with one woman, though so brave an one—in urgent peril. It was fortunate for us all that in Lancelot's youth there was ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy |
