Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Foulness   /fˈaʊlnəs/   Listen
Foulness

noun
1.
Disgusting wickedness and immorality.  "His display of foulness deserved severe punishment" , "Mouths which speak such foulness must be cleansed"
2.
A state characterized by foul or disgusting dirt and refuse.  Synonyms: filth, filthiness, nastiness.
3.
(of weather) the badness of the weather.  Synonym: raininess.
4.
The attribute of having a strong offensive smell.  Synonyms: fetidness, malodorousness, rankness, stinkiness.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Foulness" Quotes from Famous Books



... call to mind my past foulness, and the carnal corruptions of my soul; not because I love them, but that I may love Thee, O my God. For love of Thy love I do it; reviewing my most wicked ways in the very bitterness of my remembrance, that Thou mayest grow sweet unto me (Thou sweetness never failing, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine

... verses refer to a literary phenomenon that will in time become historical, that phenomenon being the sudden growth, in all parts of Europe, of a fungus-literature bred of Foulness and Decay; and contemporaneously, the intrusion into all parts of human life of a Calvinistic yet materialistic Morality. This literature of a sunless Decadence has spread widely, by virtue of its own ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... the Persian replied, 'He is in the city, with his father, and will presently come for thee in great state.' 'O fellow,' said she, 'could he find none to send to me but thee?' At this he laughed and answered, 'O my lady, let not the ugliness of my face and the foulness of my favour deceive thee. Hadst thou profited of me as hath the prince, thou wouldst praise my affair. Indeed, he chose me as his messenger to thee, because of my uncomeliness and forbidding aspect, in his jealousy and love of thee: else hath he slaves and pages and servants, white and ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous

... as feigned. It was he who, to avert suspicion from our order (for news had come that the jealousy of the prick-ear'd heretics was aroused, and that they were on sharp look-out for Catholics,) hesitated not to slander the Sister, his own confidential agent, trusting, by the magnitude and foulness of the charges, so to fill the minds of your judges, that other surmises would be thrust out, and thus the ground be ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams

... But truly Amos was staggered when he entered the room where sat, in the midst of gloom and filth, the man who had been the cause of so much distress to him and his. The atmosphere was oppressive with the concentrated foulness of numberless evil odours. A bed there was in the darkest corner of the room on the floor. It looked as though composed of the refuse raked from a pig-sty, and thrust into a sack which had been used for ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson

... menace of its weight, and divine the prodigious range of its intellectual power. And he hated it,—hated its tremendous and perfectly calculated mechanism; hated its utilitarian stability; hated its conventions, its greed, its blind cruelty, its huge hypocrisy, the foulness of its want and the insolence of its wealth. Morally, it was monstrous; conventionally, it was brutal. Depths of degradation unfathomable it had shown him, but no ideals equal to the ideals of his youth. It was all one great wolfish struggle;—and ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... dissolute Behaviour has given sting to. But I, who am perfectly acquainted with the Sweetness of your Disposition, and that Tenderness with which you consider the Errors of your Fellow Creatures, need not be inform'd, that while you expose the Foulness of those Facts, which renders them deservedly Objects of Reproach, you will [not] forget to pity the Weakness of Humanity and Lethargy of Reason, which at some unguarded Hours, steals on the Souls of even the wisest Men; ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher

... the gathering shadows the rushing water seemed to leap out of the darkness and to vanish again. Decayed drift-wood, trunks of trees, fragments of broken sluicing,—the wash and waste of many a mile,—swept into sight a moment, and were gone. All of decay, wreck, and foulness gathered in the long circuit of mining-camp and settlement, all the dregs and refuse of a crude and wanton civilization, reappeared for an instant, and then were hurried away in the darkness and lost. No wonder that as the wind ruffled ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... endurance.... But from the point of view of a decorous tea-party in a cathedral town, the tone—or the standard of manners, or whatever you would like by way of definition of that vague and comforting word—the tone of the average is deplorably low. The hooligan may be kicked for excessive foulness; but the rider of the high horse is brutally dragged down into the mire. The curious part of it all is that, the gutter element being eliminated altogether, the corporate standard of the remaining majority is lower than the standard ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke

... emanation."[99] Without observing upon the propriety of this metaphor, or asking how mirrors come to have lost their old quality of reflecting, and to have acquired that of refracting, and dissipating rays, and how far their foulness will account for this change; the remark itself is common and true: no less true, and equally surprising from him, is that which immediately precedes it: "It is in vain to endeavor to check the progress of irreligion and licentiousness, by punishing such crimes in ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... once quite how to reconcile the present foulness of the New England capital with the fairness of the New England country; and I am still somewhat embarrassed to own that after New York (even under the relaxing rule of Tammany) Boston seemed very dirty when ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... and prosper ever after, in an extraordinary manner. But hear me now, and I will tell you what I know. You shall understand that there is not under the heavens so chaste a nation as this of Bensalem, nor so free from all pollution or foulness. It is the virgin of the world; I remember, I have read in one of your European books, of an holy hermit amongst you, that desired to see the spirit of fornication, and there appeared to him a little foul ugly ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... has found time even while making money to have called into being a school of art of its own. It was a delightful morning with dazzling sunshine and an eager nip in the air that spoke of the swift, deep river that bathes the city walls. I revelled in the clear, cold atmosphere after the foulness of the drinking-den and the stifling heat of the journey. I exulted in the sense of liberty I experienced at having once more eluded the grim clutches of Clubfoot. Above all, my heart sang within me at the thought of an early meeting with Francis. In ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams

... unkempt Indian village then, but at least the banks were lovely, and the rolling distances clothed with majestic trees. To-day, these creek banks, connected with numerous iron bridges, are the dumping-ground for cinders, slag, rubbish of every degree of foulness; the bare hillsides are crowded with the ugly dwellings of iron-workers; the atmosphere ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... yellowness was clear and transparent, different altogether from the muddy foulness of the lower reaches. And the country around lost the density of matted jungle and undulated in a succession of grassy stretches through which cropped great round hummocks of sandy hills. The stream narrowed to a swift running gorge between two such hummocks, then suddenly widened ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle

... I understand ... But doesn't...? Couldn't one perhaps persuade Hoffmann to do something? She ought to be removed from all this foulness. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... of special Chinese fever; something bred o' dirt and filth and foulness; a complaint you have to live amongst for weeks, before you'll get it; a kind o' beri-beri or break-bone, which was new to the doctors here. I've been disinfected and fumigated till I couldn't hardly breathe. Races has their special diseases, just the same as they has their special ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace

... consider these two—one an assassin and a robber, standing above his victim; the other baser in his offences, if a lesser law-breaker, lying, abhorred, in the house of the wife he had persecuted, spoiled, and smitten, one a tiger, the other a dog-wolf—to consider each of them sickening at the foulness of the other; and each flourishing out of the mire of his manifest guilt his own immaculate standard—of conduct, if ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry

... speak of shame?" he said—"What shame is left in either man or woman nowadays? Naked to the very skin of foulness, they flaunt a nudity of vice in every public thoroughfare! Your sentiments, my grand Sergius, are those of an old world long passed away! You are a reformer, a lover of truth—a hater of shams—and ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... quickly that the cook, mechanically wiping his blade on the tablecloth, hardly realized the foulness of the crime of which he had been guilty, but felt inclined to congratulate himself upon his desperate bravery. Then as he realized that, in addition to the offence for which the choleric Mr. Dunn ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs

... Nothing remains but a world-wide pantomime. Worship itself becomes only a more extended place-hunting, and man the walking dummy of society. And then, since man no longer is properly vitalized, disease sets in, consumption, decay, putrefaction, filling all the air with the breath of their foulness. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... piazzas and gardens opened in bright populousness and peace; cities built that men might live happily in them, and take delight daily in each other's presence and powers. But our cities, built in black air which, by its accumulated foulness, first renders all ornament invisible in distance, and then chokes its interstices with soot; cities which are mere crowded masses of store, and warehouse, and counter, and are therefore to the rest of the world what the larder and cellar are ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... a generation would be drawn out by this heat—for there was never any washing of the walls and rafters and pillars, and they were caked with the filth of a lifetime. The men who worked on the killing beds would come to reek with foulness, so that you could smell one of them fifty feet away; there was simply no such thing as keeping decent, the most careful man gave it up in the end, and wallowed in uncleanness. There was not even a place where a man could wash his hands, and the men ate as much raw blood as food ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... bad system, bringing disgrace upon his countrymen, corrupting the moral foundation of society, spreading vice around the domestic fireside, and giving to base-minded men power to speculate in the foulness of their ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... their mad frolics, and even by their quarrels. Their heads and waists were bound with ivy, and in their hands they brandished a thirsus, or kind of lance, garnished with vine-leaves. When by any foulness of weather they were driven into their huts, they passed their time in a kind of noisy merriment, of shoutings and dithirambic catches, accompanied by timpanums, by cymbals, by sistrums, and other instruments, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini

... joined a pleasure-seeking equestrian party, who rode from the town to spend the day in the woods. What a lovely day it was! The pure, fresh air seemed to contain the very essence of the life it inspired, life drained of all impurity and sadness and foulness by the early summer rains, the springing joyous life of the delicate wood-flowers. The strong trees in the leafy woods trembled with happiness in their boughs and tender sprays; the carolling birds poured forth their brimming songs from full hearts. And upon the interlacing greenery ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various

... though," said Carthew. "It's deadly hot above, and there's no wind. I'll wash out this——" and he paused, seeking a word and not finding one for the grisly foulness of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... pit whence had issued the storm of foulness that blasted the fair kingdom of France after laying low the hallowed heads of a good king and a beautiful queen, in Paris, leaders and led were now chopping each other's heads off, a qui mieux mieux. "Those thinkers, those lofty patriots, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... disagrees with us, now follow that philosophy which confounds what is true with what is false, deprives us of all judgment, strips us of the power of approval, and robs us of all our senses? Even the Cimmerians, to whom some god, or nature, or the foulness of the country that they inhabited, had denied the light of the sun, had still some fires which they were permitted to avail themselves of as if they were light. But those men whom you approve of, after having enveloped us in such ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... face, not a kind look nor an understanding eye! Crime, passion, foulness, insanity. The sheer horror of her situation mercifully blotted out consciousness. She sank, a crumpled heap to ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... does not know that I am aware of all his foulness and villainy. He has been assured that I do not know it! And"—here she leaped to her feet and confronted me like an enraged tigress—"he has the effrontery to pretend that he is in love with me, and to believe that I can love ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman

... his opinion that temperance-societies were a hopeless undertaking in London, unless these dwellings underwent a transformation. They were so squalid, so dark, so comfortless, so constantly pressing upon the senses foulness, pain, and inconvenience, that it was only by being drugged with gin and opium that their miserable inhabitants could find heart to drag on life from day to day. He had himself tried the experiment of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... a month in a vast enclosed space that was open to the sky, but nevertheless of an indescribable foulness, a place of filth, disease, and suffering beyond human conception, the details of which the curious may seek for himself in my Lord Henry's chronicles. They are too revolting by far ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini

... and his followers were baptized is thus described by Camden, in his "Description of Great Britain," etc.: "In the Roman times, not far from its bank upon the little river Foulness (where Wighton, a small town, but well-stocked with husbandmen, now stands), there seems to have formerly stood Delgovitia; as it is probable both from the likeness and the signification of the name. For the British word Delgwe (or rather Ddelw) signifies the statues or images of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... benefits?" Replied the youth, "O king, I did this not of my choice and freewill and I had no business in being there; but, of the lack of my luck, I was driven thither, for that Fate was contrary and fair Fortune failed me. Indeed, I had endeavoured with all endeavour that naught of foulness should come forth me and I kept watch and ward over myself, lest default foreshow in me; and none may withstand an ill chance, nor doth striving profit against adverse Destiny, as appeareth by the example of the merchant who was stricken ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... learn by rote, And never miss one; no, no miser of them, * * * * * Avid of foulness, so they hound me out Away from blessing that they prate about, But never saw, and never dreamed upon, And know not how to long for with ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... lie a huge, weltering mass of slime, a very quagmire of foulness and miasma, in the depths and darkness of which he could dimly discern the innumerable coils of a deadly dragon, breathing forth poison and death into the air, which those beloved of God and himself must breathe, and crushing in its pestilential folds the bodies and souls of immortal men. ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton

... melting voice he solicited the passers-by. Certain persons had been given special orders to let themselves be attracted to his abode. For, as in other matters, so in this business, too, he had numerous detectives through whom he sought out the persons who could please him most by their foulness. He would collect money from his Patrons and put on airs over his gains: he would also dispute with his associates in this shameful occupation, saying that he had more lovers than they and took in more ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio

... waltzers gliding here and there—smiles and grace, smiles and grace; all fair, orderly, elegant, bewitching. A young Creole's laugh mayhap a little loud, and—truly there were many sword-canes. But neither grace nor foulness satisfied the eye of the zealous ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable

... from the Palladium. In other respects, the information comes to much the same thing. The long document which the pamphlet prints in extenso exhibits Albert Pike preaching Palladism in the full foulness of its doctrine and practice—the "resolution of the problem of the flesh" by indiscriminate satisfaction of the passions; the multiplication of androgyne lodges for this purpose; the dual nature ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... the thought that she could be false to herself, and her confession of love for him; but then, it was unthinkable. Let the whole world reek with foulness; his love must still shine above it, white and remote as the ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson

... the deluge all the fruits of the earth deteriorated greatly. Even so, in our own age, we find all things deteriorate. The Italian wines and fruits differ no more from our own at the present day than the fruits before the deluge differed from those produced amid that brackishness and foulness ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther

... lower Thames navigation, as Canon Isaac Taylor has pointed out, is Scandinavian to this day. Deptford (the deep fiord), Greenwich (the green reach), and Woolwich (the hill reach) all bear good Norse names. So do the Foreness, the Whiteness, Shellness, Sheerness, Shoeburyness, Foulness, Wrabness, and Orfordness. Walton-on-the-Naze near Harwich in like manner still recalls the time when a Danish 'wall'—that is to say, a vallum, or earthwork—ran across the isthmus to defend the Scandinavian peninsula from ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... a common race-feeling, and the broad, liberal and just inculcations of Jesus Christ. The nation was sunk to the moral turpitude of Constantinople; and not even a John crying in the wilderness could arouse it to a sense of the exceeding foulness in the midst of which it grovelled, or of the storm ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune

... was better attested than that swallows passed the winter months in the mud at the bottom of their brooks, clinging together in globular masses. They have apparently been compelled to give up the custom and account of the foulness of the brooks. Sotus Ecobius discovered in Central Asia a whole nation of people who hibernate. By some investigators, the fasting of Lent is supposed to have been originally a modified form of hibernation, to which the Church gave a religious significance; but this view was ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... must perish with me, my family and my name. [31] And I must suffer this, Cyrus, I swear to you by the great gods above us, who see all things and hear all things, though never by word or deed did I commit injustice or foulness ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon

... all ours too. It is with our mental as with our bodily vision,—we see only what is remote; and the image to the mind depends, not only upon seeing, but upon not seeing. In the distant star, all foulness and gloom are lost, and only the pure splendor reaches us. Inspired by Mr. Ruskin's eloquence, the neophyte sets forth with contrition to put his precepts into practice. But the counterstatement which he had overlooked does not, therefore, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various

... deceivers, greedy of gain, run-aways before peril, readier to pay back injury than kindness. "Worst of all they take middle paths." Upon these, his observations, he proceeds to tell a story of a State and he tells it icily. He lays bare the foulness of man. He doesn't lecture, he does not preach, he never laughs, never scolds, is never surprised. He shows, says Mr. Morley about "as good a heart as can be made out of brains." In my opinion, that sentence is the most terrible indictment in the book. ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... constant over-excitement, feverish restlessness, an inexhaustible propensity for scribbling, that mental automatism and single-mindedness of purpose constrained and ruled by a fixed idea. In addition to this, he displays the usual physical symptoms, such as insomnia, a pallid complexion, hot-headed, foulness of dress and person,[3101] with, during the last five months of his life, rashes and itching all over his body.[3102] Issuing from ill-matched stock, born of a mixed blood and tainted with serious moral agitation,[3103] he carries within him a peculiar germ: physically, he ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... other's Name was Worldly-Wisdom, its Water was thick, and yet far from dormant or stagnating, for it was in a continual violent Agitation; which kept the Travellers whom I shall mention by and by, from being sensible of the Foulness and Thickness of the Water; which had this Effect, that it intoxicated those who drunk it, and made 'em mistake every Object that lay before them: both Rivulets were parted near their Springs into so many others, as there were strait and crooked Paths, which they ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... and soon every eye is open, every foot astir, and the busy, waking life of men again begins. The fleecy clouds that hang on the eastern horizon grow ruddy with gold; and the arrowy light shoots its bright rays athwart the clear blue sky. The dust and foulness which the night has hidden stand revealed. But in the forests and hills the pulses of nature beat fresh and full; the leopard and the tiger slink away; the gay flowers open; the birds flit to and fro, and with woodland ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various

... which he advances, he will have so many means of commanding the respect and admiration of mankind, and will be enabled to act with such superior propriety and grace, that the luster of his future conduct will entirely cover or efface the foulness of the steps by which he arrived at that elevation. In many governments the candidates for the highest stations are above the law, and if they can attain the object of their ambition, they have no fear of being called to account for the means by which they acquired ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various

... I kept watch upon the woman. She stood quiet with Singing Arrow and waited for what might come. Her fate was hanging with Starling's at the council ring, and I knew that I must keep away from her. That was not easy. Each time that I let my glance rest upon the foulness of the camp I felt that I must go to her and blind her eyes. But I never made more than one step. I had only to look at her to understand that her spirit had learned in these months to hold itself above the body. What was passing did not touch her; ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith

... said Senhouse, his eyes searching the fire. "And when, afterwards, she did what her heart bade her, she never faltered either, though she steeped her pure soul in foulness compared to which the black water was sweet. But do you suppose that any evil handling would stain her? You fool! You are incapable of seeing a good woman. In the same breath with which I spurned myself for having a moment's fear for her, I thanked God for having let ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett

... your God let you go down into such foulness, then?"—the words broke from his lips irrepressibly. "It was He who put you in the hands of a selfish woman; it was He who gave you a weak will. It is He who suffers marriages as false as yours. Why, child! you call it crime, the vow that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... exact, about an hour, as well as I could measure time, which passed slowly; for not only were the minutes tedious, but the foulness of the air made them also extremely uncomfortable. Desiree was again lying down, half-unconscious but not asleep, for now and then she spoke drowsily. Harry complained of a dizziness in the head, and my own seemed ready to burst through my temples. ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout

... words, in acts so mean; So high, so low; chance-swung between The foulness of the penal pit ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... intelligence. For, as they say in dactylomancy, the 'psychical' of women are not disposed in their sensitive early days to dwell upon the fortunes of their sex: a thought or two turns them facing away, with the repugnant shiver. They worship at a niche in the wall. They cannot avoid imputing some share of foulness to them that are for scouring the chamber; and the civilized male, keeping his own chamber locked, quite shares their pale taper's view. The full-blooded to the finger-tips, on the other hand, are likely to be ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... I climbed the long staircase hastily, abusing its darkness and foulness, and planning as I went how my mother might most easily and quickly be moved to a better lodging. Gaining the top of the last flight, I saw that mademoiselle's door on the left of the landing was open, and concluding ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... Castle hall to several of the most distinguished Cavalier families, besides a world of boys from the village, who went to see the novel circumstance of a parson in a cassock and surplice, he went at great length into the foulness of the various crimes committed by the rebellious party during the late evil times, and greatly magnified the merciful and peaceful nature of the honourable Lady of the Manor, who condescended to look upon, or receive into her house in the way of friendship and hospitality, men ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... of imagination, but he becomes strong, inventive, and affecting the moment his foot touches the firm ground of reality, and nowhere is he more at ease, more sharply observant, or more warmly sympathetic, than in scenes whose meanness might have disgusted, or whose moral foulness might have appalled. Of the later novelists, the names of Mrs. Craik (Miss Muloch) and Charles Reade (d. 1884) may be mentioned as having acquired ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... thin one; and so, as long as they can stand and be seen at their pleasure, they shine and impose on us: when anything has fallen which disturbs and uncovers them, it is evident how much deep and real foulness an extraneous ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... of bells, even as the fountains themselves spring forth. In these bustling days we are apt to think that streams have no work but to turn mills and make light for cities, to bear merchandise, to sweep foulness to the sea; we forget that they pass through woodland places, feeding the grasses and the trees, quenching the thirst of bird and beast, that they sparkle in the sun, gleam wan in the sunset, reflecting the pale sky. Oh, perverse and forgetful ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... poison created expressly to injure them, and that the only course of safety lay in keeping the cars hermetically sealed, and breathing over and over the vapor from each others' lungs. If a person in despair at the intolerable foulness raises a window, what frowns from all the neighboring seats, especially from great rough-coated men, who always seem the first to be apprehensive! The request to "put down that window" is almost sure to follow a moment or two of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various

... head, suddenly chuckling. "No. The brand you may have, just to get you out of this cave, foulness; but the woman is in my thrall until a man sleeps with her—here—for a night. And if he does, I may have him to break ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson

... five dreadful days in the darkness, dampness, chill and foulness of that tiny cell. I found that influence such as Tanno and Vedia possessed and cash such as they had at their disposal, could do much even for the occupant of such a cell, destined to such a doom. I was visited by Galen, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... artificial foods are best fed with a teaspoon, as by this method liability to over-feeding and danger from unclean utensils are likely to be avoided. If a nursing-bottle is used, it should be of clear flint glass so that the slightest foulness may be easily detected, and one simple in construction, which can be completely taken apart for cleaning. Those furnished with conical black rubber caps are the best. Each time after using, such a bottle should have the cap removed, and ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... the functions of these millions of secreting and excreting rootlets will be disturbed by the clogging of the system with filth and bacterial poisons as a consequence of chronic constipation, biliousness and general foulness of the alimentary canal. Through such disturbance nutrition is diminished, cell-atrophy progresses, and emaciation becomes more marked. The progressive destruction of these rootlets, involving the pathological change indicated, will be manifest in one of its results, either costiveness ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison

... thing lay still; and from the wet, sticky foulness of it I rose and stood shuddering. Elza lay on the ground; but she had risen upon one elbow and I saw that she was unharmed save for the shock of terror through which she had passed—a mitigated shock with the knowledge now that I was with her, and ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings

... Herrick's most beautiful work is to be found in the profane division, despite the admixture of the above-mentioned epigrams, the dull foulness of which soils the most delightful pages to such an extent that, if it were ever allowable to take liberties with an author's disposition of his own work, it would be allowable and desirable to pick these ugly weeds ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... constituted one of the entrances to the city. Its predecessor had been burnt, in the great fire of 1666, and the new one was at this time less than forty years old, and, though close and badly ventilated, had not yet arrived at the stage of dirt and foulness which afterwards brought about the death of numbers of prisoners confined there, and in 1750 occasioned an outbreak of jail fever, which not only swept away a large proportion of the prisoners, but infected the court of the Old Bailey close to it, causing the ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty

... are who say they viewed without amaze The sad reverse of all thy former praise; That through the pageants of a patriot's name, They pierced the foulness of thy secret aim; Or deemed thy arm exalted but to throw The public thunder on a private foe. But I, whose soul consented to thy cause, Who felt thy genius stamp its own applause, Who saw the spirits of each glorious ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... up, and in horror ran to the captain's room; he was sleeping profoundly with the lamp shining upon his face, calm as marble. The boy did not like to disturb him. The next day, two of the slaves were found dead in the hold, suffocated by the foulness of the atmosphere. The captain is informed of this, and orders them in gangs to the forecastle to take the fresh air. The boy runs up on deck to see them; he did not find them so very unwell, but ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne

... stage, he takes a pill about the quantity of a hazel nut, confected with the gall of an heifer, and wheat flour baked. After which he drinks privately in his chamber four or five pints of luke-warm water, to take all the foulness and slime from his stomach, and to avoid that loathsome spectacle which otherwise would make thick the water, and offend the eye of ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini

... the same, never were two spirits more discordant than those of Wallace and Kirkpatrick. But Kirkpatrick did not so soon discover the dissimilarity; as it is easier for purity to descry its opposite, than for foulness to apprehend that anything can be ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter

... yer Master, are all shams an' humbugs. I know Him now. He's 'live to me. So now, when I see you belie Him, an' keep men from Him with yer hundreds o' wranglin' creeds, an' that there's as much honest love of truth outside the Church as in it, I don't put yer bigotry an' foulness on Him. I on'y think there's an awful mistake: just this: that the Church thinks it is Christ's body an' us uns is outsiders, an' we think so too, an' despise Him through you with yer stingy souls an' fights an' squabblins; not seein' that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... that there is such a thing as "the wrath of God." It is not only a fact, but one of the most tremendous facts in the universe. It is a fact as high as the Divine purity, as deep as the malignity and foulness of sin, as broad as all human experience. It is impossible to construct a theistic theory of the world which shall leave it out. The nature of the fact we shall investigate at a later point. But we can say this at once. It cannot be such a fact ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz

... or grosser heats, their foulness mask Under the vizor of a borrowed name; Let things eschew the light deserving blame: No cause hast thou to blush for thy sweet task. "Marcian Colonna" is a dainty book; And thy "Sicilian Tale" may boldly pass; Thy "Dream" 'bove all, in which, as in a glass, On the great world's ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb

... the holy place which you profane," he said. "Is it to the Lord's house that you came to pour forth the foulness of your heart, and the inspiration of the Devil? Get you down, and remember that the sentence of death is on you, yea, and shall be executed, were it ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells

... which, rigid and pedantic as it often seemed, was still healthy in its social tone, and whose power showed itself in a gradual disappearance of the profligacy which had disgraced the upper classes, and the foulness which had infested literature ever since the Restoration. A yet nobler result of the religious revival was the steady attempt, which has never ceased from that day to this, to remedy the guilt, the ignorance, the physical suffering, the social degradation ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green

... And now it is my desire that you should know the stories of these two happenings, understanding them more truly from learning the very facts than from hearing what is spoken of them, and in the order in which they came about. Because I had ever held in abhorrence the foulness of prostitutes, because I had diligently kept myself from all excesses and from association with the women of noble birth who attended the school, because I knew so little of the common talk of ordinary people, perverse and subtly flattering chance gave birth to an occasion for casting me ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard

... the midst of inventors. Watt and Boulton were constantly suggesting new things, and Murdock became possessed by the same spirit. In 1791 he took out his first patent. It was for a method of preserving ships' bottoms from foulness by the use of a certain kind of chemical paint. Mr. Murdock's grandson informs us that it was recently re-patented and was the cause of a lawsuit, and that Hislop's patent for revivifying gas-lime would have been an infringement, if it ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... then, fair child, on this flowery grass, and I will sit beside thee and tell thee of many things worth thine heeding.' So there we sat awhile, and in good sooth she told me much of the world which I had not yet seen, of its fairness and its foulness; of life and death, and desire and disappointment, and despair; so that when she had done, if I were wiser than erst, I was perchance little more joyous; and yet I said to myself that come what would I would be a part ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris

... forms all the difference between a good bath and a bad one, which latter is infinitely worse than no bath at all. There exist, at the present time, scores of baths where the odours of the sudatory chambers are nauseating. Such foulness arises from stagnation of the air. There is no continuous flow, and the respirations and exhalations of the bathers are not removed. A system of ventilation may be pointed out, but it is on the wrong principle, and does ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop

... pillow her head here, Constance, here, where thou sayest thou shouldst love to lie. I shall press her to my heart as wife, wife—ah! I have at last touched the quick within thee. We may hope there is some redemption—some possibility of bringing thee back from thy foulness—" ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... strong filed into the station. Stalwart and stolid, tow-haired, with the stamp of acquiescent patience in their homely faces, they came on with the swing, but none of the usual spirit, of drilled men. They asked no questions, but went where they were led, and the foulness of the close-packed steerage seemed to cling about them. For a time the depot rang to the rhythmic tramp of feet, and when, at a sign from the interpreter, it stopped, two bewildered children, frowsy and unwashed, in greasy homespun, sat down and gazed at Miss Torrance ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss

... seated, may be considered the Thames of the Midland and Northern Counties of England. It divides the East Riding of Yorkshire from Lincolnshire, during the whole of its course, and is formed by the junction of the Ouse and the Trent. At Bromfleet, it receives the little river Foulness, and rolling its vast collection of waters eastward, in a stream enlarged to between two and three miles in breadth, washes the town of Hull, where it receives the river of the same name. Opposite to ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock

... pointed out the positions of Liege and Polpier on the wall-map, and their relative distances from London. A moment later the Vicar frowned again as Mr Boult launched into a violent—and as it turned out, a lengthy—invective against the German Emperor; with the foulness of whose character and designs he had, it seemed, been intimately acquainted for a number of years. "Who made the War?" "Who had been planning it and spying for the opportunity to gratify his unbridled lust of power?" "Who would stand arraigned for it before the awful tribunal ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)

... showed him how his soul was growing smaller and meaner every day—how he was just a plague-spot on God's fair earth. He saw himself in a mirror that reflected the inmost recesses of his heart, and he was horrified at sight of the foulness so long concealed. ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous

... Surely this ought to be full. A foul bumbard might be empty. "Foulness" and "shedding his liquor" are not necessarily contingent; but fulness and overflowing are. A full vessel, shaken, cannot choose "but ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various

... impend which we do not wish to recite, lest it may be inferred that they are narrated either from hatred toward one or from partiality to another. But finally, when, either on account of his age or the foulness of the prison, he fell into disease, he sent for the guardian in order to tell him of his sickness; and when the guardian, inflamed with pharisaic hatred, had begun to reprove the man harshly on account of his kind of doctrine, which seemed ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon

... like our precious stones, and fairer still (compare Republic). The reason is, that they are pure, and not, like our precious stones, infected or corroded by the corrupt briny elements which coagulate among us, and which breed foulness and disease both in earth and stones, as well as in animals and plants. They are the jewels of the upper earth, which also shines with gold and silver and the like, and they are set in the light of day and ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato

... the hands off than to touch the eye, or the nose, or the mouth, or the ear, etc., with them without having first washed them. Unwashed hands may cause blindness, deafness, foulness of breath, or a polypus. It is taught that Rabbi Nathan has said, "The evil spirit Bath Chorin, which rests upon the hands at night, is very strict; he will not depart till water is poured upon the ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various

... our babies, and also shame. The child is pure, innocent, natural. One of the first efforts of nursery culture is to smear that white page with our self-made foulness. We labor conscientiously and with patience, to teach our babies shame. We degrade the human body, we befoul the habits of nature, we desecrate life, teaching evil and foolish falsehood to our defenceless little children. The "sex-taboos" of ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... commandment of innocence. Nor should the infirmity and weakness of human frailty have anything it might do, unless the divine mercy, coming again in aid, should open some way of securing salvation by pointing out works of justice and mercy, so that by almsgiving we may wash away whatever foulness we ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... own distracted brain, but lending his sacrilegious hand, without any malice of his own, to answer the abandoned purposes of the human fiends that have subdued his will. To condemn crimes like these we need not talk of laws or of human rules; their foulness, their deformity does not depend on local constitutions, on human institutes, or religious creeds; they are crimes, and the persons who perpetrate them are monsters, who violate the primitive condition on which the earth was given to man; they are guilty by ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... though flung back into an abyss of darkness. The air was filled with rumblings and vibrations, with sounds and echoes. The lowering, angry sky seemed purifying itself by fire, from the dust and the foulness which had risen toward it from the earth, and the earth, it seemed, was quaking in terror at its wrath. Shakro was shaking and whimpering like a scared dog. But I felt elated and lifted above commonplace life ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky

... say me, could he find none handsomer to send to me?"; whereat loud laughed the Sage and said, "Yea verily, he hath not a Mameluke as ugly as I am; but, O my lady, let not the ill-favour of my face and the foulness of my form deceive thee. Hadst thou profited of me as hath the Prince, verily thou wouldst praise my affair. Indeed, he chose me as his messenger to thee, because of my uncomeliness and loathsomeness in his jealous love of thee; else hath he Mamelukes and negro slaves, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... me. Moreover, of whom these men were I have been able to learn nothing. A boat was seen passing towards Bradwell—indeed, it seems that you saw it, and that night a boat was seen sailing southwards down St. Peter's sands towards a ship that had anchored off Foulness Point. But what that ship was, whence she came, and whither she went, none know, though the tidings of this fray have made ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard

... along the valleys of the Marne and the Meuse and in the Department of the Seine, through which the Germans passed on their first march across the French frontier. It was a nicer thing to be killed by a clean piece of shell than to suffer the foulness of men whose passions had been unleashed by drink and the devil and the madness of the first experience of war, and by fear which made them ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... disease. Now at last she knew why the pulse beat with such unhealthy irregularity, and why men felt an anxiety which they could not or would not explain. Her interest in the disease overcame her disgust at the foulness of the revelation. To say that the discovery gave her actual pleasure would be doing her injustice; but the excitement of the moment swept away every other sensation. She did not even think of herself. Not until afterwards ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams

... world. But the neglected infant has wilted into the premature man, with his old cunning look, blending so fantastically, so mournfully, with the unformed features of youth. Knowing the world on its worst side—knowing its hostility, its knavery, its foulness, its heartless materialism—knowing it as the man does not know it who has only breathed the country air, and looked upon the open face of nature. Is it not very sad, my friends, that the vagrant boy should know so much; and, without one hour of romance, one step of childish ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin

... application for food and lodging was received with a volley of curses, he honestly admired the noble fluency of his enemy. When he was harvesting, the singing stacker became increasingly and distressingly pornographic; instead of rebuking him for foulness, which would only have bewildered the stacker, Mr. Lindsay taught him the first stanza of Swinburne's chorus. "The next morning when my friend climbed into our barge to ride to ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... and more fortunate families take into their houses those to whom Providence has been less bountiful. You whose daily business takes you to the hovels of the poor, know how wretched and filthy they are, how even the healthy can scarcely bear the foulness of their atmosphere. How great must be the power of such pest-holes to extend the plague when once it finds a foothold there! Let us tear down those hovels. There are enough rich men among you to build new and better houses. ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith

... He knew that, with the shaft crowded full of wreckage and giving no passage to the air, the entire mine would eventually become filled with poisonous gases. He knew that his present physical condition was due to the foulness of the atmosphere he was breathing. He felt that the situation was becoming rapidly more alarming. The only question now was as to how long this vitiated air would support life. Still, his courage did not give way. He had strong hope ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene

... said Birkin. 'We are such dreary liars. Our one idea is to lie to ourselves. We have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and straight and sufficient. So we cover the earth with foulness; life is a blotch of labour, like insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a pianoforte in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a motor-car in your up-to-date house, and as a nation we can sport ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... attitudinising, blushing false blushes, weeping crocodile tears; she is cruel to us, but sincere. She is at her ease with us—unashamed. She shows us her thousand moods. She doesn't trouble to keep her secrets from us. She throws off the cloak that hid her foulness, the boot that constrained her cloven hoof. She gives free play to her appetites. We ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland

... scene in shapes which are exquisitely beautiful, in all its purity, its tenderness, its unselfishness. But the claims of its all-ruling and irresistible might are also only too readily verified in the passions of men; in the follies of love, its entanglements, its mischiefs, its foulness. In one shape or another it meets us at every turn; it is never absent; it is the motive and stimulant of the whole activity of the poem. The picture of life held up before us is the ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... or ten minutes brought her to a part of the town as little known to its citizens generally as if it were in the centre of Africa—a part of the town where vice, crime, drunkenness and beggary herd together in the closest and most shameless contact; where men and women, living in all foulness, and more like wild beasts than human beings, prey greedily upon each other, hurting, depraving and marring God's image in all over whom they can get power or influenced—a very hell upon the earth!—at part of the town ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur

... is held in the hand in the current of a running stream, in the waters of which the cloth leaves all its foulness and dirt, is meant to ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... natural, perhaps, that such a Court should inspire such a stage," returned Fareham, "and that for the heroic drama of Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Massinger, and Ford, we should have a gross caricature of our own follies and our own vices. Nay, so essential is foulness to the modern stage that when the manager ventures a serious play, he takes care to introduce it with some filthy prologue, and to spice the ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... the picture, the Prince of the Devils, Lucifer, under the semblance of an appalling monster. The figures seemed to grow to life of themselves under his hand. His success was beyond his fondest hopes; so hideous was the countenance of Lucifer, none could escape the nightmare of its foulness. The face haunted the painter in the streets and even went home with ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France

... what these may be, I, worm that I am, cannot pretend to understand. And now to our stars that are far away and pure, though who knows but that if one were near to them, they would prove as full of foulness as the earth?" ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard

... of their speeches and actions as the sight of a known cut-purse in a throng makes them watchful over their purses and pockets. He is also in this respect profitable physic, that his conversation being once truly tasted and discovered, the hateful foulness of it will make those that are not fully like him to purge all such diseases as are rank in him out of their own lives, as the sight of some citizens on horseback make a judicious man amend his own faults in horsemanship. If one of these uses can be made of him, let him not long offend the stomach ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... the benefit of a large number of galleys. The confederates, on the contrary, besides being away from any friendly port, were thinly manned, and had a great deficiency of stores and provisions, while the foulness of their ships was greatly to their prejudice in the day of battle. Notwithstanding this they were eager for ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... correctly enough —transgressions—means at bottom, 'rebellion,' the rising up of a disobedient will, not only against a law, but against a lawgiver. There we have a deepening of that solemn fact of a man's wrongdoing, which brings it into immediate connection with God, and marks its foulness by ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... gushing down to freshen the foulness within, and as the Ark rode dryly over the seas, I went below and brought up Nais to gain refreshment from the curing rays of our Lord the Sun. Duly the pair of us adored Him, and gave thanks for His great mercy in coming to light another ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

... is stronger made Which was before barr'd up with ribs of iron! Would the two princes lie? and Claudio lie, Who lov'd her so, that, speaking of her foulness, Wash'd it with tears? Hence from her; let ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]

... the sailors could no longer come up the Thames, they came on to the Essex coast, to Harwich and Walton and Clacton, and afterwards to Foulness and Shoebury, to bring off the people. They lay in a huge sickle-shaped curve that vanished into mist at last towards the Naze. Close inshore was a multitude of fishing smacks—English, Scotch, French, Dutch, and Swedish; steam launches from the Thames, yachts, electric boats; ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... my arm. He leaned upon it heavily. We continued our route in search of the Amontillado. We passed through a range of low arches, descended, passed on, and descending again, arrived at a deep crypt, in which the foulness of the air caused our flambeaux rather to glow ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... Houston couldn't be put into words, and if it could no sane person would want to repeat the mad foulness ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)

... that by far the greater part of the nose is built on breathing lines. But the smelling part of it, though small, is very important, because it now has to decide, not merely upon the goodness or badness of the food, but also upon the purity or foulness of the air we breathe. The nostrils lie, as you can see, side by side, separated from each other by a thin, straight plate of gristle and bone known as the septum. This should be perfectly straight and flat; but very often when the nose does not grow properly in childhood, it becomes ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson

... your cost! You are responsible for this bloodshed, this misery! How long is it to go on? How long are you free men going to allow yourselves to be bloody executioners? How long are you to be slavish followers of that grasping ambition which veils its foulness under ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... washed away by the blood of Christ, labour first to see them in the glass of the law, and do not be afraid to see thy besmeared condition, but look on every spot thou hast; for he that looks on the foulness of his face by the halves, will wash by the halves; even so, he that looks on his sins by the halves, he will seek for Christ by the halves. Reckon thyself, therefore, I say, the biggest sinner in the world, and be ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary for us to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to? Before motor cars became common, necessity had accustomed us to a foulness in our streets which would have horrified us had the street been our drawing-room carpet. Before long we shall be as particular about our streets as we now are about our carpets; and their condition in the nineteenth century ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw

... of opinion that it was the part of a brave man to chastise villainous and wicked men when attacked by them, but to seek out and overcome the more noble wild beasts. Others relate that Phaea was a woman, a robber full of cruelty, that lived in Crommyon, and had the name of Sow given her from the foulness of her life and manners, and afterwards was killed by Theseus. He slew also Sciron, upon the borders of Megara, casting him down from the rocks, being, as most report, a notorious robber of all passengers, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... olden, the one eyed goat! * What words shall thy foulness o' deed denote? Be not of our praises so pompous-proud: * Thy worth for a dock- tail dog's I wot. By Allah, to-morrow shall see me drub * Thy nape with a cow-hide[FN189] and dust ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... made one engineer the equivalent of thirty labourers. So, inverting the condition of the city clerk in the days when London was scarce inhabitable because of the coaly foulness of its air, the labourers now came hurrying by road or air to the city and its life and delights at night to leave it again in the morning. The city had swallowed up humanity; man had entered upon a new stage in his development. First had come the nomad, the hunter, ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... becomes dull by practice of sin and by neglect of conscience, until that which at first was as sensitive as the palm of a little child's hand becomes as if it were 'seared with a hot iron.' The foulness of the atmosphere of a crowded hall is not perceived by the people in it. It needs a man to come in from the outer air to detect it. We can accustom ourselves to any mephitic and poisonous atmosphere, and many ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... all from the least to the greatest On plunder are bent; From the prophet on to the priest Everyone worketh lies. They would heal the breach of my people 11 As though it were trifling, Saying "It is well, it is well!"— And well it is not! Were they shamed of the foulness they wrought? 12 Nay, shamed not at all, Nor knew their dishonour! So shall they fall with the falling, Reel in the time of their reckoning, Sayeth ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... nature as is the turning of a dog twice before he lies down, a feature of the canine race. Those who were physically incapable of dancing lined the walls and adorned the manger seats. For the rest, they occupied the sanded floor, and danced until the dust clouded the air and added to the choking foulness of the atmosphere. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum



Words linked to "Foulness" :   wickedness, scent, foul, B.O., darkness, body odor, olfactory property, dark, unsanitariness, severeness, iniquity, odour, aroma, badness, severity, odor, smell, body odour



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com