"Abase" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sort of hero, and a sort of villain, to this story: they are but instruments. Hero and villain are combined in the person of Edward, who was now here to abase himself before the old man and the family he had injured, and to kneel penitently at the feet of the woman who had just reason to spurn him. He had sold her as a slave is sold; he had seen her plunged into the blackest pit; yet was she miraculously kept pure for him, and if she ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... tempted to rush into her daughter's room, to throw herself upon her daughter's bed, and once again to beg for mercy and grace. She listened, and she knew that her daughter slept. Then she went silently down to the dark room and the old desk. Of what use would it be to abase herself? Her daughter was the only thing that she could love; but her daughter's heart was filled with the image of ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... whole gloom and sadness of which the Roman had not yet experienced. However august be the object we propose to ourselves, every less worthy path we take to insure it distorts the mental sight of our ambition; and the means, by degrees, abase the end to their own standard. This is the true misfortune of a man nobler than his age—that the instruments he must use soil himself: half he reforms his times; but half, too, the times will corrupt the reformer. His own craft undermines his safety;—the people, whom he himself ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... words he spoke rang hollow, awkward, even impertinent. He could say nothing which did not seem hideously supercilious; and yet he wanted to abase himself! He knew that Mary's humiliation must be very, ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... brother-in-law, "I take it your solicitors will accept service. For the others, what shall I say? Just because I hesitate to put off my mantle of dignity and abase this noble intellect by associating with a herd ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... good, all is as it should be; to abase the body is to abase the soul. Man is divine inside and out, and is no more divine about the head than about the loins. It is from this point of view that he has launched his work. He believed the time had come for an utterance out of radical, uncompromising human nature; let conventions ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... "That absolutely tears it. In the past three minutes I have been apologized to by a woman, a robot, and a cop. The next thing, a penguin will walk in here, tip his top hat, and abase himself while he mutters obsequiously in penguinese. Just what the devil is going on around ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... my aunt lamenting to Cousin Maud bitterly indeed of the sorrows brought upon her by her only son—for he was fully bent on taking the working wench to wife in holy wedlock—in my heart I took my aunt's part. And I deemed it a shameful and grievous thing that so fine a young gentleman could abase himself to bring heaviness on the best of parents for the sake of a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Humble; nor knew I yet whereto His infirmity would guide us. For Thy Word, the Eternal Truth, far above the higher parts of Thy Creation, raises up the subdued unto Itself: but in this lower world built for Itself a lowly habitation of our clay, whereby to abase from themselves such as would be subdued, and bring them over to Himself; allaying their swelling, and tomenting their love; to the end they might go on no further in self-confidence, but rather consent to become weak, seeing before their feet the Divinity ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... hill itself in humble occupation. That impression connected itself with what he had already noted of an actual change even then coming over Italian scenery. Throughout, he could trace something of a humour into which Stoicism at all times tends to fall, the tendency to cry, Abase yourselves! There was here the almost inhuman impassibility of one who had thought too closely on the paradoxical aspect of the love of posthumous fame. With the ascetic pride which lurks under all Platonism, [201] resultant from its opposition of the seen to the unseen, as falsehood ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... it; since of all men those would seem most abased who are not only poor, but are so needy that they have to receive their meat from others. In this way some deserve praise for begging out of humility, just as they abase themselves in other ways, as being the most efficacious remedy against pride which they desire to quench either in themselves or in others by their example. For just as a disease that arises from excessive heat is most efficaciously healed ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... more so as there is no prospect of seeing any large proportion of it in print. It is I think about as melancholy an exhibition as I ever contemplated. Why was such a sad phenomenon to come in sight on earth? Was it to abase the pride of human intellect ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... wishes to unite men together and nourish them; a small state only wishes to be received by, and to serve, the other. Each gets what it desires, but the great state must learn to abase itself. ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... employed when anything of moment is to be put into execution. The notion that intelligence was put in man only to be shattered, a will given him only to be forthwith distorted by passion or blinded by ignorance, and that "there is no health in us" unless we abase ourselves to the dust and proclaim our utter worthlessness, is to men and women of this time wholly inconceivable. That nothing ethically valuable can be accomplished except after instant prayer, or after copious outpourings of Divine grace, that the curse of absolute sterility is upon all our ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... lose it!'" repeated Ibarra, thoughtful. "The dilemma is hard. Is it impossible to reconcile love of my country and love of Spain? Must one abase himself to be a good Christian; prostitute his conscience to achieve a good work? I love my country; I love Spain; I am a Catholic, and keep pure the faith of my fathers; but I see in all this no reason for delivering myself into ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Detraction, which on Earth never fails to persecute superior Virtue, has not scrupled to assert that the affliction, to which I allude, was the mere consequence of paternal austerity. The Earth itself, though frequently accused of being eager to receive ideas that may abase the eminent, could hardly admit a calumny so groundless and irrational. In this purer spot it is utterly needless to prove the innocence of an exalted being, to whom we are only solicitous to pay that sincere tribute of praise and veneration which we are conscious he deserves. ...
— The Eulogies of Howard • William Hayley
... are perverted into instruments of terror and torment. This species of universal subserviency, that makes the very servant who waits behind your chair the arbiter of your life and fortune, has such a tendency to degrade and abase mankind, and to deprive them of that assured and liberal state of mind which alone can make us what we ought to be, that I vow to God I would sooner bring myself to put a man to immediate death for opinions I disliked, and so to get rid of the man and ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... divine Pity! what will you not brave?" He answered, and the dew was in his eyes,— "You bring her here, even to abase herself To rescue me! Too costly sacrifice! Here do not dwell the Graces and the Loves, But Drudgery is master of the house. Dear lady, elsewhere seek the answering bloom." A hope flashed up. "Do you suppose," said I, "That any impulse ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... languages are different. For a moment I have used yours to cast, if it be possible, a ray of faith into your soul; to give you, as it were, the hem of my garment and draw you up into the regions of Prayer. Can God abase Himself to you? Is it not for you to rise to Him? If human reason finds the ladder of its own strength too weak to bring God down to it, is it not evident that you must find some other path to reach Him? That Path is in ourselves. The Seer and the Believer find eyes within their ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... ought not altogether to abase and lower nature, as if she had no strength or stability against fortune; but on the contrary, knowing that the rotten and perishable part of man, wherein alone he lies open to fortune, is small, while we ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... is a wonderful tyranny, that life Has no choice but to be delighted love! (I know what I must do: I am to abase My heart utterly, and have nothing in me That dare take pleasure beyond serving love. Thus only shall I bear it; and perhaps— Might I even of my abasement make A ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... toward thee? Do I not inquire the counsels of thy mouth? Do I not seek for thy mighty counsels, O thou great lord of Egypt, at whose approach the oppressors of the land are scattered? What now is the hope of these Aamou? Amen shall abase those who know not god. Have I not made for thee many and great buildings of stone? have I not filled thy temple with my spoils, building for thee a temple to last myriads of years? ... The whole earth unites to bring thee offerings ... [to enrich] thy domain. I have sacrificed ...
— Egyptian Literature
... want is to KNOW the Celt and his genius; not to exalt him or to abase him, but to know him. And for this a disinterested, positive, and constructive criticism is needed. Neither his friends nor his enemies have yet given us much of this. His friends have given us materials for criticism, and for these ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... being unlearned and unskilful to supply the place of dignity, charge, and trouble, to speak before so many Phocions as here be? yea, which is the greatest, before the unspeakable majesty and sacred personage of our dread and dear sovereign; the terror of whose countenance will appal and abase even the stoutest hearts; yea, whose very name will pull down the greatest courage? for how mightily do the estate and name of a prince deject the haughtiest stomach even of their ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... low, Because her virgin neck was so; How thralled beneath the jealous state She stood at point to abdicate; How sacrificed, before to me She sacrificed her pride and thee; How did she, struggling to abase Herself to do me strange, sweet grace, Enforce unwitting me to share Her throes and abjectness with her; Thence heightening that hour when her lover Her grace, with trembling, should discover, And in adoring ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... majesty?" Alas for the weakness of the royal egotist! In an hour his boasting was at an end, and, reduced by the chastening judgment of the Almighty to the level of the brute creation, he was compelled to learn that "those who walk in pride the King of heaven is able to abase." Similar the lesson taught us by the overthrow of Belshazzar when, congratulating himself on the stability of his throne, and in his excess of arrogance, he insulted the sacred vessels which his father had plundered from the temple at Jerusalem. I say ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... the baseness of feeling and that which is connected with the mode of treatment and circumstance. The former in all respects is below aesthetic dignity; the second in many cases may perfectly agree with it. Slavery, for example, is abase thing; but a servile mind in a free man is contemptible. The labors of the slave, on the contrary, are not so when his feelings are not servile. Far from this, a base condition, when joined to elevated feelings, can become a source of the sublime. The master of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... characteristic of Mrs. Brookenham's amiability that, with her sudden sense of the importance of this new light, she should be quite ready to abase herself. "There are so many things in one's life. One follows false scents. One doesn't make out everything at once. If you're right you must help me. We ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... bulk of his mighty frame, the rugged power of his countenance, and the unconscious authority of his words he was easily master of them all; but though he had the voice of Mars and a head like Olympian Zeus he must needs abase his proud spirit to the demands of the occasion, for the jealousy of mortal man is a proverb. Where the punchers that he hired for thirty dollars a month were decked out in shaps and handkerchiefs he sat in his shirt-sleeves ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... destinies of the race of Peveril to one, whom, in their aristocratic pride, they held as a plebeian upstart. Think of this; and when you again boast of your ancestry, remember, that he who raiseth the lowly can also abase the ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... out vengeance" on the head of Eveline. He had entered her room so confident of triumphing, that the humiliation of defeat was tenfold greater than if he had doubted of success. And then the degradation to which he had been forced to abase himself! The very remembrance of it set his blood to boiling! He cursed himself for his cowardice; he cursed Eveline for her manifestation of courage and for everything else she had done. To be forced to kneel and beg his life of a woman! and ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... divided between them, namely, the church and the playhouse, where they segregate themselves from each other in a remarkable manner; for, as the people of fashion exalt themselves at church over the heads of the people of no fashion, so in the playhouse they abase themselves in the same degree under their feet. This distinction I have never met with any one able to account for: it is sufficient that, so far from looking on each other as brethren in the Christian language, ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding |
