"Corroding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Stinchcomb was a fellow servant with Nichols at Mr. Bromedge's farm at the time the cattle had the cow-pox, and he was, unfortunately, infected by them. His left hand was very severely affected with several corroding ulcers, and a tumour of considerable size appeared in the axilla of that side. His right hand had only one small tumour upon it, and no sore discovered itself ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... he knew not what to conjecture. Melissa's miniature found in the streets of Paris, after she had some time been dead! He viewed it, he clasped it to his bosom.—"Such, said he, did she appear, ere the corroding cankers of grief had blighted her heavenly charms! By what providential miracle am I possessed of the likeness, when the original is no more? What benevolent angel has taken pity on my sufferings, and conveyed to me this ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... way with new caution among the bogs and boulders. The neighbourhood of the lochs was a sort of guidance in some degree, for their immediate presence gave to a nostril sharpened by life in the wild a moist and peaty odour fresh from the corroding banks. I sought them and I found them, and finding them I found a danger even greater than my loss in that desolate plain. For in the grey smoke of mist those treacherous pools crept noiselessly to my feet, and ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... are told, for a good digestion: let us add to the prayer — and a bad memory. Truly we are sometimes tempted to think that we are the only ones cursed with this corroding canker. Our friends, we can swear, have all, without exception, atrocious memories; why is ours alone so hideously vital? Yet this isolation must be imaginary; for even as we engage in this selfish moan for help in our own petty ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... horrible, corroding suspicion. One touch of thought or of goodwill would have brushed it away. Just the senseless fear that does make men ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... bore, on its bent back, a goat-skin bag as heavily filled with water as could be carried. Strongly alkaline as that water was, corroding to the mouth and nauseous to the taste, still the refugees were clinging to it. For only this now stood between them and one of the most hideous deaths known to man—the death ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... 'There are many sources of happiness, even if shipwreck have been made on one venture. Your aunt had few resources to which to turn her mind. Every pursuit or study is a help stored up against the vacuity which renders every care more corroding.' ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and neither coarse nor rough. We can all recall a few cases where a rude treatment has effected a cure, but only by draining the life blood of the victim, or by turning every better human feeling into bitterness and corroding gall. Words of blame intended to fall upon the hearts of the young, or of the old, should always be spoken kindly, for we can never know how deeply they may penetrate, what tender schemes for widowed mother, aspiring brother, portionless sister, or starving wife and children ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... may easily be rubbed off. The acid I have chiefly employed has been the marine; but both the vitriolic and nitrous succeed very well. They should undoubtedly be so far diluted as not to be in danger of corroding the parchment, after which the degree of strength does not seem to be a matter of ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... and conveniences to those of others, and to make those around them happy, without letting them see that it costs them an effort to do so.[9] There is assuredly no society where the members are more generally free from those corroding cares and anxieties which 'weigh upon the hearts' of men whose incomes are precarious, and position in the world uncertain. They receive their salaries on a certain day every month, whatever may be the state of the seasons or of trade; they pay no taxes; they ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... celestial home, Where, robed in white, the ransomed nations roam Through golden streets, and gardens fair and free; And on its banks stands life's unfading tree. All, all is bliss, and love, and glory there; No pain, no sickness, no corroding care, No grief, no aching hearts, no tearful eyes, No broken bands, and there no severed ties; For, o'er those broad and beautiful domains The Prince of peace, the great Immanuel reigns. The good have met, of every age and land, Around the throne a glorious ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... darkness. Morder in French, derived from the Latin mordere, means "to bite," and formerly the users of mordants in dyeing and printing believed their action to be merely a mechanical action, that is, that they exerted a biting or corroding influence, serving to open the pores of the fabrics, and thus to give more ready ingress ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... an acute perception of the strange and confused struggle that was going on in her mind. But he had no notion of the peculiar reasons, in her case, for an effect that he knew to be far from rare among women; he did not understand the angry, corroding action of a strong artistic impulse that was incessantly baulked in full tide. The sinister, menacing voices of that tide had no meaning for him, except as expressing a malaise which he had met with a hundred times before. He put it down to an excess ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... having owned that I have resentments, I will begin with those considerations in which anger and disappointment have too great a share; in hopes that, having once disburdened my mind upon paper, and to my Anna Howe, of those corroding uneasy passions, I shall prevent them for ever from returning to my heart, and to have their place supplied by better, milder, and more ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... corroding grief to him in the thought that it was Felicita herself who had erected that cross over the tomb of the stranger, with whom his name was buried. He did not know that it was Mr. Clifford alone who ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... alimentary canal, not of a traumatic origin or from the accidental or intentional swallowing of corroding chemicals or from the continuous use of drugs on the advice of physicians, come from infection or intoxication. Why not? This is the most reasonable cause, for the fecal matter in health is toxic and it only requires one step further to sufficiently intensify the putrefactive ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... piccaninny, soon found that Wylo could talk back with such withering effect, such shatteringly gross personalities that he, who with the spiteful ironies of his venomous tongue had kept the camp in awe, was dazed to gloomy silence by Wylo's vivid flashes of wit. His weird models showed a mind corroding with vicious intent. He dared not open his lips while Wylo was about. The quaking piccaninnies cringed with fear as they watched him working up his malignant feelings into the most awful imps—imps which threatened violence ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... of the Swiss rivers and those of the western Himalaya, where a powerful sun melts the glaciers by day, and their head-streams are frozen by night. Here the clouds alike prevent solar and nocturnal radiation, the temperature is more uniform, and the corroding power of the damp southerly wind that blows strongly throughout the day is the great melting agent. One morning I saw a vivid and very beautiful halo 20 degrees distant from the sun's disc; it was no doubt caused by snow in the higher regions of the atmosphere, as a sharp shower ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... indicated dwelling, and anchored her so that one of the doors was close to a flight of steps leading from the corner of the building down into the water. Carfon stepped out, opened the door of his house, and preceded his guests within. The room was large and square, and built of a synthetic, non-corroding metal, as was the entire city. The walls were tastefully decorated with striking geometrical designs in many-colored metal, and upon the floor was a softly woven rug. Three doors leading into other rooms could be seen, and strange pieces of furniture stood here and there. In the ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... classed the Panther, and his sister, Ie Sumach, so called from the number of her children, who was the widow of le Loup Cervier, now known to have fallen by the hand of the captive. Native ferocity held one in subjection, while the corroding passion of revenge prevented the other from admitting any gentler feeling at the moment. Not so with Rivenoak. This chief arose, stretched his arm before him in a gesture of courtesy, and paid his compliments with an ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... grand and noble proportions, and already overshadowed the whole earth with the glory of honor and peace and perfect justice. Before the advancing tide of a spotless civilization, all poverty, all corruption and filthiness, all crime, all war and corroding seeds of discord were swept utterly away and washed from the world, to leave only forever and ever the magnificent harmony of nations and peoples, wherein none of those vile, base, and wicked things should even be dreamed of, or so much ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... without a degree; afterwards wandering lecturer to working-men's associations upon the socialistic aspects of hygiene; author of a popular quasi-medical study (in the form of a cheap pamphlet seized promptly by the police) entitled "The Corroding Vices of the Middle Classes"; special delegate of the more or less mysterious Red Committee, together with Karl Yundt and Michaelis for the work of literary propaganda—turned upon the obscure familiar of at least two Embassies that glance of insufferable, hopelessly dense sufficiency ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... there was an inn in the village. It was marked out to travellers by a sign-board dependent from a beam projecting over the footpath. Something had once been painted on the board, but it had become so blurred and indistinct under the corroding action of sun and rain, that it would be quite impossible now to decide whether the features delineated on it were those of a landscape, a ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... most valuable allies have been the Jewish Press and the Jewish haute finance of Germany, Austria and Hungary. Just as we hope and believe that one result of this war will be the emancipation of Germany and German "culture" from the corroding influences of militarist doctrine, so there are good grounds for hoping that it will also give a new and healthy impetus to Jewish national policy, grant freer play to their many splendid qualities, and enable them to shake off the false shame which has led men who ought to be proud of ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... charm have held in thrall: Total eclipse—of pleasure on their part Who love pure melody and polished Art. Memory will echo long the silvery chime Of such a voice as even ruthless Time Might stay his stride to listen to, and spare From the corroding touch. Some scarce will care To hear "Tom Bowling" sung by other lips, And when in tenor strains "Total Eclipse" Sounds next upon our ears, SIMS REEVES will seem To sing again to us as in ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 16, 1891 • Various
... the Revolution were rapidly passing to eternity. The cement of blood which bound these as one was dissolving, and the fabric of their creation was undermined in the hearts of the people, with corroding prejudices, actively fomented by the bigotry of a selfish superstition. A sectional struggle for supremacy had commenced. The control of the Government was the aim, and patriotism was consuming in the flame of ambition. The Government's security, the Government's perpetuity, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... the Country.—The recreative instinct is not confined to children. For the adult labor is lightened, worries banished, and carking care is less corroding, if now and then an evening of diversion interrupts the monotony of rural life, or a day off is devoted to a picnic or neighborhood frolic. There is the same interest in the country that there is in the city in methods of entertainment that satisfy primitive ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... coarser food must please, Substantial beef, pies, puddings, ducks, and peas; Such food the fangs of keen disease defies, And such rare feeding Hornsey-house supplies: Nor these alone the joys that court us here, Wine! generous wine! that drowns corroding care, Asserts its empire in the glittering bowl, And pours Promethean vigour o'er the soul. Here, too, that bluff John Bull, whose blood boils high At such base wares of foreign luxury; Who scorns to revel in imported cheer, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... than dramatic justice, or of corroding infamy, seemed to reach every branch of this devoted family. After the extinction of the direct male heirs, a brother, who was a captain in the army, came home to take possession of the property. He was a person well-respected in life, and possessed ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... god of love, in pity to our swain, At last revok'd BLACK CARE'S corroding reign; For, doubtless, in his views he oft was cross'd, While such a lover to the world ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... better have supported those fears and apprehensions which the public distempers occasioned, had he enjoyed any domestic satisfaction, or possessed any cordial friend of his own family, in whose bosom he could safely have unloaded his anxious and corroding cares. But Fleetwood, his son-in-law, actuated by the wildest zeal, began to estrange himself from him; and was enraged to discover, that Cromwell, in all his enterprises, had entertained views of promoting his own grandeur, more than of encouraging piety and religion, of which he made such ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... happy, papa, when we separated this morning? Are you happy this moment? Are you generally happy? Is there no rankling anxiety—no project of ambition—no bitter recollection corroding your heart? Does the untimely loss of my young brother, who would have represented and sustained your name, never press heavily upon it? I ask again, Papa, are you generally happy? Yet you are in possession of all the wealth ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Dore died, prematurely aged and broken down by grief, corroding disappointment and quite frenzied overwork ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... nature's stronger sceptre rules, And pain and passion in her right prevails. Oh, the unpity'd lot, severe condition, Of solitary, sad, dejected grandeur! Alone condemn'd to bear th' unsocial throb Of heartfelt anguish, and corroding grief; Deprived of what, within his homely shed, The poorest peasant in affliction finds, The kind, condoling, comfort of a ...
— The Earl of Essex • Henry Jones
... everything and lodged in an artist's garret, and by a sort of mirage or calenture I was surrounded by captivating mistresses. I drove through the streets of Paris, lolling on the soft cushions of a fine equipage. I plunged into dissipation, into corroding vice, I desired and possessed everything, for fasting had made me light-headed like the tempted Saint Anthony. Slumber, happily, would put an end at last to these devastating trances; and on the morrow science would ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... other in a disorderly confusion. For this very reason it has always been easier for me to play a passive part than an active one. It appears to me that many cultured people are attacked by the same disease. Criticism of ourselves and everything else is corroding our active power; we have no stable basis, no point of issue, no faith in life. Therein lies the reason why I do not care so much to win Aniela as I am afraid of losing her. In speaking of a disease common to our ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... scope of my present remarks. Miracles as evidence, involve an argument; and of course I am thinking of some means which does not immediately run into argument. I am rather asking what must be the face-to-face antagonist, by which to withstand and baffle the fierce energy of passion and the all-corroding, all-dissolving scepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries? I have no intention at all to deny, that truth is the real object of our reason, and that, if it does not attain to truth, either the premiss or the process is in fault; ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... of his life. He was unspoiled by fortune and applause; uncorrupted by the tempting chances of his time; stainless in the use of gifts which in the hands of a man less true would have caught the contagion of Pope's malice or of Swift's corroding cynicism. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... so slovenly a way, that, as they have succeeded other plagues, so they may have successors themselves. They take pains to spoil what they leave. Like the Harpies, they smear every thing that they touch with a miserable slime, which has the effect of a virus in corroding, or as some say, in scorching and burning. And then, perhaps, as if all this were little, when they can do nothing else, they die; as if out of sheer malevolence to man, for the poisonous elements of their nature are then let loose and dispersed abroad, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... the Andre family were ever peculiarly tender and affectionate; and in the loss of its head the survivors confessed a great and a corroding sorrow. To repair the shattered health and recruit the exhausted spirits of his mother and sisters, the son resolved to lead them at once away from the daily contemplation of the grave to more cheerful scenes. The medicinal waters of Derbyshire were then in vogue, and a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... effects a flank movement, as is often the case in contemporary drama; with a skill that is frequently sophistical, it shows up the inconsistencies of society; it exaggerates the shams and shibboleths of the social law; and so indirectly, by merely dissolving or corroding the outer crust, it again brings us back to the inner core. But, in both cases, whether it weakens society or strengthens nature, it has the same end in view: that of laying bare a secret portion of ourselves,—what might be ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... sealed by his blood at Bunker Hill, on the 17th of June, 1775, and are the amulet that will protect his fame from the corroding touch ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... seated on their chargers; all notable strangers who passed through Florence or had aught to do with its affairs—Mohammedans, even, in well-tolerated companionship with Christian cavaliers; some of them with faces blackened and robes tattered by the corroding breath of centuries, others fresh and bright in new red mantle or steel corselet, the exact doubles of the living. And wedged in with all these were detached arms, legs, and other members, with only here and there a gap where some image had been removed for public ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... old could sever from my side? What is this life?—what none but fools esteem; A fleeting shadow, a romantic dream!— Not far I wander'd o'er the peopled field, Till Socrates and Laelius I beheld. Oh, may their holy influence never cease That soothed my heart-corroding pangs to peace! Unequall'd friends! no bard's ecstatic lays Nor polish'd prose your deathless name can raise To match your genuine worth! O'er hill and dale We pass'd, and oft I told my doleful tale, Disclosing all my wounds, end not in vain: Their sacred presence ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... in a department store. The highest wage she could earn, even though she wore long dresses and called herself "experienced," was five dollars a week. This sum was of course inadequate even for her own needs and she was constantly filled with a corroding worry for "the folks at home." In a moment of panic, a fellow clerk who was "wise" showed her that it was possible to add to her wages by making appointments for money in the noon hour at down-town hotels. Having ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... he danced on roses and thorns. All three were consumptives and the aura of decay floats about their work; all three suffered from the nostalgia of the impossible. The morbid decadent aquafortist that is revealed in the corroding etchings of Laforgue is germane to men in whom irony and pity are perpetually disputing. We think of Heine and his bitter-sweetness. Again with Zarathustra, Laforgue could say: "I do not give alms. I am not poor enough for that." He possesses the sixth sense of infinity. A cosmical jester, his badinage ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... has already been opened as a field for discussion; so I suppose I may enter upon it without claiming the honor or risking the danger which may await its first explorer. It seems as though we are never to have an end to this baneful and corroding system, acting almost as prejudicially to the general interests of the community as a direct tax of several thousand dollars annually laid on each county for the benefit of a few individuals only, unless there be a law made fixing the limits ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... maintain the integrity of those parts, I find not particularly observed; who not- withstanding have an advantage of their preservation by abstaining from all flesh, and employing their teeth in such food unto which they may seem at first framed, from their figure and conformation; but sharp and corroding rheums had so early mouldered these rocks and hardest parts of his fabric, that a man might well conceive that his years were never like to double or twice tell over his teeth. Corruption had dealt more severely with them than ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... "With me no corroding resentment shall live: My bosom is calm'd by the simple reflection, That both may be wrong, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... imaginative sympathy, that his own outlook on life is alone compatible with mental sanity, and yet being too clear-sighted to accept that outlook as satisfactory, he will mingle with his frivolity a strain of bitterness and discontent,—the bitterness of self-corroding scepticism, and the discontent which grows apace through its very effort to ignore its own existence. In a word, his attitude towards life will be one of cynicism,—that blend of hardness and bitterness with frivolity which exactly inverts the ideal of the ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... from sorrow find a sweet relief? Or is thy heart oppressed with woes untold? Balm would'st thou gather for corroding grief? Pour blessings round thee like ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... friend; and if the knowledge of who I am can only be obtained at the price of thy perjury, let me for ever remain ignorant—let the corroding thought still haunt my pillow, cross me at every turn, and render me insensible to the blessings of health and liberty—yet, in vain do I suppress the thought—who am I? why thus abandoned? perhaps the despised offspring of guilt—Ah! is ...
— Speed the Plough - A Comedy, In Five Acts; As Performed At The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden • Thomas Morton
... alternately, a pepper, then a date, then another pepper, then another date, and so on, for half an hour. An infant at the breast, when tired of its natural nourishment, is often given one of these fiery abominations to suck, as an appetizer, or by way of change and amusement. Their corroding juices are responsible for half the stomach troubles of the race; a milk diet would work wonders as a cure, if the people could be induced to do things by halves; but they cannot; it is "all peppers or all milk," and, the new diet disagreeing ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... of Bible thoughts and words, became a fruitful source of Jewish humor. If a theory of literary descent could be established, an illustration might be found in Heine's rapid transitions from tender sentiment to corroding wit, a modern development of the flashing humor of ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... a pathetic sound in the utterance of these words, that struck Rushbrook to the heart—and he beheld himself as a barbarian, who had treated his benevolent and only friend, with insufferable liberty; void of respect for those corroding sorrows which had imbittered so many years of his life, and in open violation of his most peremptory commands. He felt that he deserved all he was going to suffer, and he fell upon his knees; not so much to deprecate ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... while my faculties last, and (if I know myself) have a certain something in me that would still be active in rusting and corroding me, if I flattered myself that I was in repose. On the other hand, I think that my habit of easy self-abstraction and withdrawal into fancies has always refreshed and strengthened me in short intervals wonderfully. I always seem to myself to have rested far more than I have ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... In the last few moments all that vast glistening surface of metallic blue which stretched so far to windward appeared to be slowly eaten away as if by some dull, corroding acid; the distant horizon line of sea and sky was still distinct and sharply cut, but the whole water between them had grown gray, as if some invisible shadow had passed in mid-air across it. The actual fog bank had suddenly lost its resemblance to the shore, had lifted as ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... man's happiness: few consider him to be like the silk-worm, that, when she seems to play, is, at the very same time, spinning her own bowels, and consuming herself; and this many rich men do, loading themselves with corroding cares, to keep what they have, probably, unconscionably got Let us, therefore, be thankful for health and a competence; and above ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... motives, in purer and more unselfish habits. And better for us, perhaps, that He should not cure us at once, lest we should fancy that sin was a light thing, which we could throw off whenever we chose; and not what it is, an inward disease, corroding and corrupting, the wages whereof are death. Therefore it is, that because Christ loves us He hates our sins, and cannot abide or endure them, will punish them, and is merciful and loving in punishing ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... to avail himself of my sympathy other than by mere companionship. He never sought to unbosom himself to me; there appeared to be a settled corroding anguish in his bosom that neither could be soothed "by silence nor by speaking." A devouring melancholy preyed upon his heart, and seemed to be drying up the very blood in his veins. It was not a ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... in circles float, And all seem feasting with delight Upon the pleasures of the night, None thinks upon the grief or pain, That soon must follow in their train,— The coffin shroud, and death's cold pall, That must so soon be flung o'er all; But yet, in that gay circle there, We can detect corroding care, Can plainly see, in sparkling eyes, Sorrow, clad in gay disguise,— Trying happy to appear, To usher ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... for a lord to be a perfect gentleman as for a camel to pass through the needle's eye. But it also exposed to the rancours of jealousy a man who had nearly everything but domestic happiness to excite that most corroding of literary passions; and when he got out of gear he became the quarry of Spenser's "blatant beast." On the other hand, Burns was, beneath his disgust at Holy Fairs and Willies, sincerely reverential; much of ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... is there not from six to Eleven P.M. 6 days in the week, and is there not all Sunday? Fie, what a superfluity of man's time,—if you could think so! Enough for relaxation, mirth, converse, poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. O the corroding torturing tormenting thoughts, that disturb the Brain of the unlucky wight, who must draw upon it for daily sustenance. Henceforth I retract all my fond complaints of mercantile employment, look upon them as Lovers' quarrels. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the corroding wind of a hot Sirocco can only be conceived by those who have suffered from them; the unwonted dulness with which it overcasts even the most active mind; the deep-drawn sighs it will elicit; and if there be one melancholy feeling which presses on the heart more heavily ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... fervour than the occasion demands that we are more merry and wise than our neighbours. Mr. Brander Matthews, for example, has told us that there are newspaper writers in New York who have cultivated a wit, "not unlike Voltaire's." He mistrusts this wit because he finds it "corroding and disintegrating"; but he makes the comparison with that casual assurance which is a ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... thy hand! Pale poverty or wealth. Corroding care or calm repose. Spring's balmy breath or winter's snows. Sickness or buoyant health,— Whate'er betide, If God provide, 'T is for the best; I ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... the New Testament, which must from the first have been accessible to comparatively few, have all long since disappeared; and it is now impossible to tell whether they were worn away by the corroding tooth of time, or destroyed in seasons of persecution. Copies of them were rapidly multiplied; and though heathen adversaries displayed no small amount of malice and activity, it was soon found impossible to effect their annihilation. It was not necessary that ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... impossible to use the side pockets which the change in his figure carried so far to the rear when the garment was reduced at the waist. At the same time her own dresses of ten years earlier would not half meet round her; and one of the most corroding cares of a woman who had done everything a woman could to get rid of care, was what to do with those things which they could neither of them ever wear again. She talked the matter over with herself before her husband, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... so gentle, yielding, and submissive, or had her father, Tom Bays,—husband to the Chief Justice,—been more combative and less amenable to the corroding influences of henpeck, I doubt if Madam Bays would ever have attained a dignity beyond that of "Associate Justice." That strong sense of domineering virtue which belongs to the truly just must be fed, and it waxes fat on an easy-going husband and ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... But—could he go to Adela just now? No; he could not. And he hailed a cab and drove home. Something the beast had said had made a horrible impression upon the faithful lover, an impression which remained with him, which seemed to be eating its way, like a powerful acid, into his very soul, corroding, destroying. ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... my head at the question; for a single tinge of red, whether arising from such ultra-bestial cruelty in those who have the impudence to accuse the cannibals of theirs, or whether from abhorrent shame at the corroding disease of intractable superstition, hereditary in the European nations for fifteen centuries, a tinge of red came over the countenance of the emperor. When I raised up again my forehead, after such time as I thought would have removed all traces of it, still fixing ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... was his ruling passion;—with him no gentle or generous sentiment meliorated the harshness of authority, or directed it to acts of beneficence. He delighted in simple undisguised tyranny. He had been twice married, and the unfortunate women subjected to his power, had fallen victims to the slow but corroding hand of sorrow. He had one son, who some years before had escaped the tyranny of his father, and had not been since heard of. At the late festival the duke had seen Julia; and her beauty made so strong an impression upon him, that ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... child of ten or twelve, sound, vigorous, well developed for his age, it gives me pleasure, whether on account of the present or of the future. I see him impetuous, sprightly, animated, free from anxiety or corroding care, living wholly in his own present, and enjoying a life full to overflowing. I foresee what he will be in later years, using the senses, the intellect, the bodily vigor, every day unfolding within him. When I think of him as a child, he delights me; when ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... ridicule, sharp, corroding ridicule. The comedy of the Greeks ridiculed everything,—persons, characters, opinions, customs, and sometimes philosophy and religion. Comedy became, therefore, a sort of consecrated slander, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... earnest in her self-abasement, for she had not latterly been brilliant, not even adequate to the ordinary requirements of conversation. She had no courage, no wit, no diligence, nothing that she could distinguish save discontentment like a corroding acid, and she went so far in sincerity as with a curious shift of feeling to pity the man plighted to her. If it suited her purpose to pity Sir Willoughby, she was not moved by policy, be assured; her needs were her nature, her moods her mind; she had ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fruitful rain of magnanimous thoughts. The hearts in our bosoms, turned into stone, were bereft of human sympathies. Vanity and illusions were our idols; lies and deception poisoned our lives; lust and avarice dictated our actions; a hell of immorality and misery, corroding every institution, heated the atmosphere to suffocation, until black clouds gathered, a storm of the nations raged about us, and purifying streaks of lightning darted down upon the barricades and into the streets. Through the storm-wind, I saw chariots of fire ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... they camped beside a chorus of waterfalls, joyous, gurgling, laughing silver water, not the sullen silent blood red streams of the Desert that flow without a sound but the plunk of the soft bank corroding and falling in. They could not talk. They lay in quiet, listening to the tinkle and trill and treble of the silver flow over the stones; to the little waves lipping and lisping and lapping through the grasses; and when ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... outlook is not so bad. His description of noli me tangere and of lupus is rather practical. Lupus is "eating herpes," occurs mainly on the nose, or around the mouth, slowly increases, and either follows a preceding erysipelas or comes from some internal cause. Noli me tangere is a corroding ulcer, so called perhaps because irritation of it causes it to spread more rapidly. He thinks that deep cauterization of it is the best treatment. Since these are in the department of skin diseases this seems the place to mention that ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... humanity—a book that set humility like a diamond in the forehead of virtue; that found mercy and charity outcasts among the minds of men and left them radiant queens in the world's heart; that stickled not to describe the gorgeous esotery of corroding passion and shamed it with the purity of Mary Magdelen; that dragged from the despair of old Job the uttermost poison-drop of doubt and answered it with the noble problem of organized existence; that teems with murder and mistake and glows with all goodness and honest ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... buckle on his sword. But those days were past. His trusty war-horse had become used to the carriage-pole, and the keen Toledo blades were drawn from their scabbards only when they were to be oiled to prevent the rust from corroding them. ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... motion lasts longer than when lying idle, so a body and soul in active exercise escape the corroding rust of physical and mental laziness, which prematurely cuts off the life of so many women. I believe I am able to endure the strain of daily travelling and lecturing at over threescore years and ten, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... it occasionally, at least, a joy to live; disquiet rages fiercely and tumultuously in the human breast, undermining health, temper, goodness, nay, even the quiet of conscience, and conjuring up all the spirits of darkness: so does the corroding rust eat into the steel-plate and deface its clear mirror with a tracery of ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... all. She might equally well have seen the whole lot of them, herself included, jerked by wires from a sardonic heaven that had no purpose, no plan—only such figures of thought were not within her scope; still the feeling was there, corroding her faith in life. ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... visitors cast into their new life a drop of corroding bitterness. This intruder was Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a man two years younger than Victor Hugo, and one who blended learning, imagination, and a gift of critical analysis. Sainte-Beuve is to-day best remembered as a critic, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... ranging from about fourteen to sixty years of age; and I never beheld a set of more wretched human beings. They were nearly starved and almost naked, and wholly unable to take exercise, from their crowded condition. It was too dark to read, and they yielded their minds up to corroding despondency, and became sullen and morose. Their features became rigid; and to see a smile upon a face was like a sunbeam illumining ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... be pleaded, he has done so from a strong conviction on his part that his duty lay the other way, and that it was high time literature should, regardless of merely dilettante aestheticism, address itself to exposing, by depicting it, the extent to which the evil genius is gnawing at and corroding the vitals of society; and it is not for a moment to be supposed he has done so from any pleasure he takes in gloating over the doings of the ghoul, or that he is in sympathy with those who do; of his works suffice it ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... "the cause of this great falling off, in a season of reviving prosperity in the trade, business and general prosperity of the country, cannot be regarded as transient, but, on the contrary, is shown to be deep and corroding. The cause is the dissatisfaction felt generally through the country, but most strongly in the densely peopled regions to with the rates of postage now established by law, and the frequent resort to various means of ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... Villefranche, at the moment when the tearful eyes of the young princess were casting a last glance at the lovely Italian land, was that admirable queen whose life in default of mental courage became worn out by the corroding of adversity, and whose popular name has remained as a symbol in Spain of every royal and domestic virtue. Not quite fourteen at the period of that meeting, the princess was already as tall as the Duchess of Burgundy, whose ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... there is hardly an ornament, hardly an image, in the verse: it is like scraps of broken, of heart-broken, talk, overheard and jotted down at random, hardly suggesting a story, but burning into one like the touch of a corroding acid. These cruel and self-torturing lovers have no illusions, and their 'tragic hints' are like a fine, pained mockery of love itself, as they struggle open-eyed against the blindness of passion. The poem laughs while it cries, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... there in her pink and white frailty she knew and nursed the secret for which he had girdled the world. He felt that he must tear it from her, that he must crush it out of her body as the pit is squeezed from a cherry. And the corroding part of it was that he had been outwitted by a woman, that he was being defied by a physical weakling, a slender-limbed thing of ribbons and laces whose back he could bend and break across his ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... even the foundations of the houses are buried. It is a city without an inhabitant. Dismantled cannon, with the rust clinging in great flakes; scattered implements of war; broken weapons, bayonets, gun-locks, shot, shell or grenade, unclaimed, untouched, corroded and corroding, in silence and desolation, with no signs of life visible within these once warlike parapets except the peaceful sheep, grazing upon the very brow of the citadel, are the only relics of ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned. Willingly would I now have gone and asked Mrs. Reed's pardon; but I knew, partly from experience and partly from instinct, that was the way to make her repulse me with double scorn, thereby re-exciting ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... things that are eternal. Time is the 'ceaseless lackey of eternity,' and the things that pass over us may become, like the waves of the sea, the means of bearing us to the unmoving shore. Oh! if only in the midst of joys and sorrows, of heavy tasks and corroding cares, of weary work and wounded spirits, we could feel, 'but for a moment,' all would be different, and joy would come, and strength would come, and patience would come, and every grace would come, in the train of the wholesome ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... follow their souls into the world to come, behold them in the hands of good or evil spirits, brought to judgment and then awarded their deserts of bliss or woe. This knowledge has been derived from their sepulchres, which still resist the corroding hand of Time when nearly every thing else Etruscan has mingled with the ground.1 They hewed their tombs in the living rock of cliffs and hills, or reared them of massive masonry. They painted or carved the walls with descriptive and symbolic scenes, and crowded their interiors with ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... residence of Columbus himself. Cortez, the Conqueror of Mexico, once lived in its vicinity. The cathedral still stands entire and is still used as a place of worship, but the walls of the convent attached to the cathedral have yielded to the corroding influences of time and the climate, and are crumbling into ruins. The palace of Diego Columbus, the son of the immortal admiral, who to Castile and Leon gave a new world, is still pointed out, but that, ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... are better than the sigh suppressed, Corroding in the cavern of the heart, Making the countenance a masque of rest[ni] And turning Human Nature to an art. Few men dare show their thoughts of worst or best; Dissimulation always sets apart A corner for herself; and, therefore, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... combination of shrewdness and simplicity which had caused him to send Dorothy, bitter as it had been to part with her, to Europe to finish her education. His gorge had risen at the intolerable snobbishness which is corroding the wealthy sections of American society; he had made up his mind that she had a better chance of obtaining the necessary social acquirements, while remaining a gentlewoman, in Europe; and had acted with ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... become rusted and good for nothing. Andy, my friend, just so rusted, and good for nothing as a man, are you in danger of becoming. Don't quit business; don't fall out of your place; don't pass from useful work into self-corroding ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... thee in the town, beloved, I miss thee in the town; From morn I grieve till dewy eve Spreads wide its mantle brown. My spirit's wings, that once could soar In Fancy's world of air, Are crushed and beaten to the ground By life-corroding care. ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... world had not been closed by either temperament or tradition. But love had been the one window through which light could enter her house of Life; and when this darkened, her whole nature had sickened and grown morbid. Then at last all the corroding bitterness in her heart had gathered to a canker which ached ceaselessly, like a physical sore, ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... during three years, which began in little red spots and then spread rapidly, destroying the integuments. One of these ulcers, on the thigh, was twelve inches in length and five in breadth, and exhibited the appearance of a deep corroding furrow; it was surrounded by a fiery redness and was attended by extreme pain. There were many other ulcers of the same kind, several nearly of the same magnitude; and the poor patient was compelled to take large doses of laudanum several times in the day. She ...
— An Essay on the Application of the Lunar Caustic in the Cure of Certain Wounds and Ulcers • John Higginbottom
... injury to one is an injury to all. The future progress of the world will not be assured until they cease their squabbles over territory, trade, and the natural resources of the world—not until they abandon corroding selfishness, jealousy, and suspicion, and covenant with each other openly to keep ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the fervent ejaculation of my lips; such, in spite of its seeming inconsistency, was the real belief within my soul. What was it, then, that I did doubt? wherefore, then, the misery, the suspense, the suspicion, which grew and gathered, corroding in my heart, the parent of a thousand unnamed anxieties? It will be difficult to answer. The heart of man is one of those strange creations, so various in its moods, so infinite in its ramifications, so subtle and sudden ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... weeks after the serious attack from which she had suffered. There was not very much to cheer her in the few events that touched her interests during this time. She heard in March of the death of a friend's relation in the Colonies; and we see something of what was the corroding dread at ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... it has not the heart to take part in it. It is rather a vigorous discrimination between pleasure and joy, an austerity which is not deceived by selfish, obvious, apparent pleasure, but sees what sort of pleasure is innocent, natural, social, and what sort of pleasure is corroding, ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... they execute their task in so slovenly a way, that, as they have succeeded other plagues so they may have successors themselves. They take pains to spoil what they leave. Like the Harpies, they smear every thing that they touch with a miserable slime, which has the effect of a virus in corroding, or, as some say, in scorching and burning it. And then, as if all this were little, when they can do nothing else, they die;—as if out of sheer malevolence to man, for the poisonous elements of ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... Liquors then Wine doth. The Juice of Grapes after fermentation will yield a Spiritus Ardens; which if competently rectifyed will all burn away without leaving any thing remaining. The same fermented Juice degenerating into Vinager, yields an acid and corroding Spirit. The same Juice turn'd [Errata: tunned] up, armes it self with Tartar; out of which may be separated, as out of other Bodies, Phlegme, Spirit, Oyle, Salt and Earth: not to mention what Substances may be drawn ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... the torments of the water, the wheel and the fire until my soul sickened. He told me how it menaced alike the untrained savage, the peasant in his hut and the noble in his hall. I heard of parents who, by reason of this corroding fear, had denounced their children to the torment and ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... are defrauded, negatively and positively: negatively, by the privation of that 'sweetness and light' which is the natural concomitant of good health; positively, by the insertion into life of cynicism, ill-temper, and a thousand corroding anxieties which good health would dissipate. We fear and scorn 'materialism.' But he who knew all about it, and could apply his knowledge, might become the preacher of a new gospel. Not, however, through the ecstatic moments of the individual does such knowledge come, but through the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... in Europe, without, however, the care or the wish to study the Theory of Chances—that philosopher's stone of all gamblers! And a gambler, in the strict sense of the word, I had never been. I was heart-whole from the corroding passion for play. My gaming was a mere idle amusement. I never resorted to it by necessity, because I never knew what it was to want money. I never practised it so incessantly as to lose more than I could afford, or to gain more than I could coolly pocket without ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... what secret woe I bear, corroding joy and youth? And wilt thou vainly seek to know A pang even thou must fail ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... shack, on her way home, and Struthers witnessed the tail end of that enlevement. It spoilt her day for her. She fumed and fretted and made things fly—for Struthers always works hardest, I've noticed, when in a temper—and surrendering to the corroding tides which were turning her gentle nature into gall and wormwood, obliquely and tremulously warned the somewhat startled Peter against ungodly and frivolous females who 'ave no right to be corrupting simple-minded colonials and who 'ave no ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... all, Yolanda," entreated Max, "for I, too, have suffered from the same want, though my misfortune comes from being born to a high estate. If you but knew the lonely, corroding misery of those born to a station above the reach of real human sympathy, you would not envy, you would pity them. You would be charitable to their sins, and would thank God for your lowly lot in life. I will tell you my secret. I am Maximilian ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... with some remarks on the subject in Robison's Account of Black's Lectures. The air in the vessel, then, it will be readily imagined will contain it, and hence, as it is known that it is gradually decomposed by iron, the rust that was observed. The process of corroding the iron, &c. as it is commonly called, would be much accelerated by moisture, as the muriatic acid acts most powerfully on bodies capable of decomposing water; and it is no less certain, that the heat of a tropical climate would aid the operation. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... a rather indefinite term, as applied to the diseased ear of a dog; in fact, any malignant corroding sore may be called a canker, no matter where situated. Some writers describe, under the head of canker, a violent chronic otitis, attended by a purulent sanguinoid discharge. Others understand by canker a species of erysipelatous inflammation, that makes its ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... page, and every name that headed those pages. True, Moses knew the generations of the patriarchs, the names of the sons of Jacob, the chronologies of the Chronicles, but he knew the families of Rehoboth better. These latter were engraved on the palms of his hands, and written with corroding ink on the fleshly tables of his heart. As he turned over the well-thumbed pages he made many mental calculations, sometimes smiling and sometimes sighing as his eye fell on an irreclaimable debt. Then, taking up his pencil, he entered an ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... darkened the latter into a treacherous hypocrite, with a black secret shut up in her soul for years—living in apparent confidence, and daily household familiarity with the Bensons for years, yet never telling the remorse that ought to be corroding her heart! Who was true? Who was not? Who was good and pure? Who was not? The very foundations of Jemima's belief ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... court decisions and federal attempts at enforcement reversed the ominous trend in black unemployment rates, which had been rising for a decade. Above all, court decisions could not spare Negroes the sense of humiliation that segregation produced. Segregation implied racial inferiority, a "constant corroding experience," as Clarence Mitchell once called it. It was segregation's seeming imperviousness to governmental action in the 1950's that caused the new generation of civil rights leaders to ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... and less as a form of bondage. One of the partners can not force the other one to be "good." People do the best by others when full confidence is given, and even if the confidence should be misplaced, it would be better than to suffer from this corroding emotion at ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... room was a sick-room, and the shadows lost their fearsome quality. The only thing which it could not altogether abrogate was the strange Egyptian smell. You may put a mummy in a glass case and hermetically seal it so that no corroding air can get within; but all the same it will exhale its odour. One might think that four or five thousand years would exhaust the olfactory qualities of anything; but experience teaches us that these smells remain, and that their secrets ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... merely mentions, under the article aphthae, that the latter sometimes spread around the fraenum and tongue, occasionally corroding the subjacent parts. He is so far from giving a clear description, under the head of Aphthae Serpentes, of any affection analogous to that we are about to record, that he quotes GALEN as remarking, very properly, that ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... signs of weakness, had for many years been supported by a prop carefully put up by the farmer. But whether the prop in course of time had decayed at the line where the air and earth exercise their corroding influence upon wood; or whether the bough had stiffened with age, and could not swing easily to the wind; or whether, as seems most likely, the event occurred at that juncture in order to indicate the course of fate, it is certain that the huge bough was torn partly away from the trunk, leaving ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies |
