"Ignoble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bride, The other victim of thy pride,— Thou know'st for me was destined long; Thou saw'st, and coveted'st her charms; And with thy very crime—my birth,— Thou taunted'st me—as little worth; A match ignoble for her arms; Because, forsooth, I could not claim 260 The lawful heirship of thy name, Nor sit on Este's lineal throne; Yet, were a few short summers mine, My name should more than Este's shine With honours all my own. I had a sword—and ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... across the line and vote in Kansas on the "domestic institutions"; and to shoot in Kansas and to burn and ravage in Kansas. They were met by the anti-slavery legions along the wide frontier, and brother slew brother for years, one series of more or less ignoble and dastardly outrages following another in big or little, murders and arson in big or little, until the whole country at last was drawn into this matter of the domestic institutions of "bleeding Kansas." The animosities formed in those days were bitter and enduring ones, and the more prominent ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... so transmuted and so wielded, we solemnly determined that, so far at least as our modicum of influence extended, no tool-making politician, whatever his position, should again convert it unchallenged into an ignoble party utensil. With God's help, we have remained true to our determination; and so assured are we of being supported in this matter by the sound-hearted Presbyterian people of the Free Church, that we have no fear whatever, should ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... protected him, giving him strength and skill, and how instead of making a noble use of that strength and skill he had made himself like one of the wild beasts. Then he sang of how the vengeance of the Gods was about to fall on this ignoble King. ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... outcast of society, tramp, vagabond, bezonian[obs3], panhandler*, sundowner[obs3], chiffonnier, Cinderella, cinderwench[obs3], scrub, jade; gossoon[obs3]. Goth, Vandal, Hottentot, Zulu, savage, barbarian, Yahoo; unlicked cub[obs3], rough diamond|!. barbarousness, barbarism; boeotia. V. be ignoble &c. adj., be nobody &c. n. Adj. ignoble, common, mean, low, base, vile, sorry, scrubby, beggarly; below par; no great shakes &c. (unimportant) 643; homely, homespun; vulgar, low-minded; snobbish. plebeian, proletarian; of low parentage, of low origin, of low extraction, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... are some who are careless and callous, who are not and never were amenable to the claims of Christ, who daily grow more forgetful of home-ties and become slaves to ignoble appetites; but such are few, very few, indeed; and the like are to be seen not only in military but also in civil life, and generally are not unfamiliar with orderly or court-room proceedings. Is it right that all should be condemned because of the capricious behaviour of ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... than that liberty, struck dumb in the capital of our Republic, should plead no more for man. Every woman who appreciates the grand problem of national life must say war, pestilence, famine, anything but an ignoble peace. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... ignoble. It was not like anything human. Dr. Tyrell looked at it dispassionately. With a mechanical gesture ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... great or small, to the great total of national enterprise, national statesmanship, and national happiness. Men may deride that ideal; they may say that it is a futile and unreliable ideal, but they cannot call it an ignoble one. It is an ideal that we, at any rate, will cling to, and because we cling to it, and because it is there, embedded in our hearts and natures, it is an absolute bar to such a proposal as this amendment makes, ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... island in the Seine, where now stands the statue of Henry IV, between the King's garden on one side and the convent of the Augustinian monks on the other, the two pyres were raised—two out of the four had shrunk back into their ignoble confessions. It was the hour of vespers when these two aged and noble men were led out to be burned; they were tied each to the stake. The flames kindled dully and heavily; the wood, hastily piled ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... mind has this much in common with that of the Greek, that it intensely desires, in all things, the utmost completion or perfection compatible with their nature. This is a noble character in the abstract, but becomes ignoble when it causes us to forget the relative dignities of that nature itself, and to prefer the perfectness of the lower nature to the imperfection of the higher; not considering that as, judged by such a rule, all the brute animals would be preferable ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... metropolitan delays and absences which she had joyously forgiven on the score of Harlan's "work." Bitterest of all was the thought that she must endure it—that the long years ahead of her offered no escape, no remedy, except the ignoble, painful one which she would not for a ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... hostility excited among the Aristotelian philosophers, especially no doubt those he had left behind at Pisa, on the ground of his spoiling the pure, smooth, crystalline, celestial face of the moon as they had thought it, and making it harsh and rugged and like so vile and ignoble ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... as I recall it. For hours I tossed on the bed, rent by conflicting emotions, ashamed one minute of my ignoble thoughts, plunged the next into a black abyss of doubt. At the first flush of wintry dawn I dozed off into slumber; the sun was shining when I awoke, and the moonlight encounter seemed more ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... of ignoble and narrow natures may sit in judgment upon people of genius and refinement, and may force back the most aspiring seer into expressionless life by the utter lack of any comprehension by their dull, selfish fancy. Ye gods! How they ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... that time I knew not what else to do, but wait as others did. I said that we looked like vessels which had come so far up the river with the tide; and now that it had turned we were stranded and fast in the mud. Sometimes I changed the figure to one not so ignoble, and likened ourselves to the stately vessels anchored in Falmouth harbour, which were there because the wind was contrary. We were wind-bound too, and dependent on circumstances; but my idea of true religion was that we ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... horse. All this might be explained satisfactorily to a justice of the peace, but how? By returning to his former skin; by avowing himself to be Kenelm Chillingly, a distinguished university medalist, heir to no ignoble name and some L10,000 a year. But then what a scandal! he who abhorred scandal; in vulgar parlance, what a "row!" he who denied that the very word "row" was sanctioned by any classic authorities in the English ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... been ignoble had it not been naive. The recluse of Kremenetz, passionately devoted to his people but wanting in political foresight, was calling Russian officialdom to aid in his fight against the bigotry of the Jewish masses, in the childish conviction that the Russian authorities had the welfare of the Jews ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation. I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, A PROPOS of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... and sweet, this amen said: "We have done what we could, but ... but ..." And in the funereal silence which followed the clergy leaving the nave, there remained only the ignoble reality of the empty husk, lifted in the arms of men, thrust into a carriage, like the refuse of the shambles carted off each morning to be made into soap ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... Staunton and Morphy. In examining Mr. Staunton's play, for example, one is struck with the French tact of M. St. Amant's remark, made many years ago: "M. Staunton has the solidity of iron, but neither the purity of gold nor the brilliancy of the diamond." However much Mr. Staunton's ignoble evasion of the match with Morphy—after bringing him, by his letter, all the way from New Orleans to London, a voyage which would scarcely have been taken otherwise—may have stained his reputation as a courageous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... so ignoble a way of acting!" cried Amelia, as though she wanted to show that she was one of the other sort. "Love and devotion to a holy or chivalrous cause should be free ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... piece of work which was before them; but he assured them that pirates were so much in the habit of conquering Spaniards that if they would all promise to follow him and do their best, he was certain he could take the town. He assured them that it would be an ignoble thing to give up such a grand enterprise as this simply because they found the enemy strong and so well prepared to meet them, and ended by stating that if he saw a man flinch or hold back for a second, he would pistol him with his own hand. ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... sneeringly tolerated; but woe to him who spoke of agriculture, or commerce, or the mechanic arts! There was little comfort for the luckless wight who, in some unguarded moment, gave utterance to such ignoble aspirations. Henceforth he was, like the Pariah of India, cut off from human sympathy, and the young gentlemen whose tastes and tendencies led them to prefer the more aristocratic trade of butchery felt that there was a line of demarcation which completely and conclusively separated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... the indestructible basis of the equality of the sexes under the Christian law.' Again, 'in the vast majority of instances where the woman falls into sin, she does so from motives less impure and ignoble than those of the man.' He attacks with just vigour the limitation of legal cruelty in this case to the cruelty of mere force importing danger to life, limb, or health, though he was shocked in after years, as well he might be, at the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... became at thirteen, and in an English castle, the King of Scotland. His prison, however, proved a noble school instead of an ignoble confinement to his fine and elevated spirit. The name of Stewart has never been so splendidly illustrated as by this patriotic and chivalrous Prince. No doubt it is infinitely to the credit of the English kings, both Henrys, IV and V, that he received from them all ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... length the young wife was driven to the sad conclusion that her mother-in-law was not only harsh, unamiable, and unforgiving, but destitute of moral and religious principle, and that the man she had married was worthy such ignoble parentage. ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... of the epic and royal personages of our mottoes, is our excuse for passing on to treat of the ignoble topic of knives and forks, and to describe how three times a day our colony was fed. It is a topic which could not be left outside a narrative which seeks to ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... proceeded to do. He rushed his opponent and clinched, though not until his right eye was in mourning and a stiff jolt in the short ribs had caused him to grunt in most ignoble fashion. But few men could withstand Mr. Gibney once he got to close quarters. Tabu-Tabu wrapped his long arms around the commodore and endeavoured to smother his blows, but Mr. Gibney would not be denied. His great fist shot upward from ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... fascines to build entrenchments between the enemy and themselves. You brought me to Les Touches to mask your real feelings and leave you safe to follow your own secret adoration. The scheme was grand and ignoble both; but to carry it out you should have chosen either a common man or one so preoccupied by noble thoughts that you could easily deceive him. You thought me simple and easy to mislead as a man of ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... wrote pamphlets urging that divorce should be granted on the grounds of incompatibility, and pronouncing as inhuman the laws that gave freedom from marital woes on no less ignoble grounds than that a man should ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Too often breathed out in a woman's hearing, When men have shrunk from the ignoble care Of watching the last hour of him who ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... until the aspirants, or middies, were merely honoured by his little finger as their representative, we only laughed; and asked him, if he had been so destructive to the officers, how many men had fallen by the puissance of his arm. It seemed that these latter were too numerous and too ignoble to be counted; for that question was always answered with a bah! and a rapidly passing over the extended palm of his left hand with his open ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... (a.u. 818)] [Sidenote:—24—] Seneca, however, and Rufus the prefect and some other prominent men formed a plot against Nero. They could no longer endure his ignoble behavior, his licentiousness, and his cruelty. They desired at one and the same time to be rid of these evils and to give Nero his release from them. Indeed, Sulpicius Asper, a centurion, and Subrius Flavius, a ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... after this adventure I was in rapid retreat toward camp. Just as I reached the path leading from the shanty to the creek, my companion in the same ignoble flight reached it also, his hat broken and rumpled, and his sanguine countenance looking more sanguinary than I had ever before seen it, and his speech, also, in the highest degree inflammatory. His face and forehead were as blotched and swollen as if he had ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... by the study of history, and by the familiarity acquired in writing, to habituate my memory to receive and retain images of the best and worthiest characters. I thus am enabled to free myself from any ignoble, base, or vicious impressions, contracted from the contagion of ill company that I may be unavoidably engaged in, by the remedy of turning my thoughts in a happy and calm temper to view these noble examples. Of this ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... time of George the Second in 1747, two monarchs, and not a few of the most notable of the nobility of Great Britain, at the Tower, Whitehall, near the historic Tolbooth of Edinburgh, and other places have closed their noble, and in some instances ignoble, careers at the hands ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... innocent pleasures, its winsome affections,—so later, the temptations that would naturally beset a career so extraordinary fell harmlessly away from him, for a passion for knowledge burned within him, consuming all ignoble motives and keeping this young scholar, in friar's robes, in marvelous singleness of heart, in the midst of a flattering and ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... there is no patronage for a man who devotes himself to Igh art. You know the anecdote, Colonel? King Alfred flying from the Danes, took refuge in a neaterd's 'ut. The rustic's wife told him to bake a cake, and the fugitive sovering set down to his ignoble task, and forgetting it in the cares of state, let the cake burn, on which the woman struck him. The moment chose is when she is lifting her 'and to deliver the blow. The king receives it with majesty mingled with meekness. In the ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the most important Roman remains in the country are to be found. The soil in the neighborhood of Evora is rich in coins and other relics, and Evora has, besides its great aqueduct, the massive pillars of a temple to Diana, which, sad to say, was once put to ignoble use as a slaughter-house. The ruins of Troia have escaped desecration, if they have not obtained the care and study which they merit. Lying on a low tongue of land which projects into the bay of Setubal, the city of Troia is buried, not in Pompeian ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... Henderson who deleted the first title, The Sea Cook—appeared duly in the story paper, where it figured in the ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and attracted not the least attention. I did not care. I liked the tale myself, for much the same reason as my father liked the beginning: it was my kind of picturesque. ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... prisons, while each of the hand's fingers claims its separate apartment, leading from the antechamber, in the dainty glove. As a natural consequence of all this, their faculties are cramped, they grow into ignoble shapes, they become callous by long abuse, and all their natural gifts are crushed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... determined; and as the agreement was not observed, the troopers were useless. Before Chalons four hours had been lost—not by accident, as the royalist legend tells, for Valory the outrider testifies that it took but a few minutes to repair. Bouille knew the ignoble cause of his own ruin and of so much sorrow, but never revealed it. When he came to England he misled questioners, and he exacted an oath from his son that he would keep the miserable secret for half a ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... still staring at the fire. "I could have dared under some circumstance. But not these. Never under pretty, ignoble ones. I think that all makes it worse. There were two Sir Edwins. There was one I knew, and another the world knew. It was the other that triumphed. Mine will never come back. It ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... where undying fame may be purchased, seems likely to lose its hold on men, and soon the arbitrator will everywhere replace the commander-in-chief and the noble art of war will degenerate into the ignoble lawsuit. So even universal peace may ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... sense, And hems in life with narrowing fence. Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep,— The punctual stars will vigil keep,— Embalmed by purifying cold; The wind shall sing their dead march old, The snow is no ignoble shroud, The moon thy mourner, ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... in the household seemed to have an opposite effect on the twin girls. Gussie was delighted with his fine appearance and gallant speeches, but Dexie seemed to see the ignoble nature behind and kept ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one. Indeed, in most other towns art has often to present herself in the form of a reaction against the sordid ugliness of ignoble lives, but at Oxford she comes to us as an exquisite flower born of the beauty of life and expressive of life's joy. She finds her home by the Isis as once she did by the Ilissus; the Magdalen walks and the Magdalen cloisters are as dear to her as were ever the silver olives ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... like cowardice on the part of the Marquis de Sairmeuse that he decided to fire upon an unarmed foe; but the affront which he had received was so deadly and so ignoble in his opinion, that he would have shot Maurice like a dog, rather than feel the weight of his finger ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... "Your brother writes that he would have neither silver nor gold for his spoil, but took the fair daughter of the prince of the Danaids into his tent. The ignoble wretch!" ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... through trouble and trial, working with might and main, suffering from endless ills, in peril of their lives, and deprived of property and home, now joined in one heartrending wail of woe and disappointment. The consternation that followed the announcement of the ignoble surrender is thus described by Mr. Nixon, who was an eye-witness and sharer of ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... substance and without music, and of the frightful eccentricities in art, accompanied by immeasurable vanity and self-conceit,—the age of "finger-heroes." It is indeed a melancholy reflection, for all who retain their senses, that this charlatanry is made the solitary aim of numberless ignoble performers, sustained by the applause of teachers and composers equally base. It is sad to see how, engaged in artificial formalisms and in erroneous mechanical studies, players have forgotten the study of tone and of correct delivery, and that few teachers seek to improve either themselves ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... and the most self-conscious of artists; his observation was that of an inspired and very careful auctioneer; he was a visionary and a fanatic; he was gross, ignorant, morbid of mind, cruel in heart, vexed with a strain of Sadism that makes him on the whole corrupting and ignoble in effect. But he divined and invented prodigiously if he observed and recorded tediously, and his achievement remains a phantasmagoria of desperate suggestions and strange, affecting situations and potent and inordinate effects. He may be impossible; but there is ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... me. Yes! there is one; there is the Count. He has a great and generous soul. I believe Count Mirabel sympathises with my situation. I believe he does not think, because a man has risen from an origin the most ignoble and obscure to a powerful position, by great courage and dexterity, and let me add also, by some profound thought, by struggling too, be it remembered, with a class of society as little scrupulous, though not so skilful as himself, that ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... spaces, wherever is danger and awe and love—there's Beauty, plenteous as rain shed for thee and though thou shouldst walk the world over thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble." ...
— Life's Enthusiasms • David Starr Jordan
... Major Benjy ought instantly to have challenged his ignoble friend to another duel for this insolent suggestion, but he did nothing of the kind, and his silence, which had some awful quality of consent about it, chilled her mind, even as the sea-mist, now thick and cold, made her certain that her nose was turning red. She still boiled with rage, ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... carriage, for they at least are reaching blindly out after something better than their surroundings, striving after an ideal, and are in just so much the superiors of the foolish souls who mock them—better, even misguided efforts, than the ignoble stagnant quagmire of slouch into which we ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... ought to be, and that a person of true honour thinks it even criminal to suspect that any he is conversing with is capable of debasing[212] the dignity of his nature so low as to be guilty of such vile and ignoble practices. None could be freer of these, or indeed of all other vices, than the noble person I speak of. The fixed and unalterable principles of justice and integrity, which always made the rules of his conduct, were transmitted to him with his blood, and are virtues inherent and hereditary ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... tendency in these ignoble birds that exasperated poor Jacky, whose chief delight was to tempt the unfortunate hens to place unlimited confidence in him, and then clutch them by the beaks or heads, and hold them wriggling in his cruel grasp; and it was this tendency ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... will to deny you, my courage to control myself seem to be waning. I love you so; and it is becoming so much worse, such a blind, unreasoning love.... And—do you think it will grow so much worse that I could be capable of anything ignoble? Do you think I might be mad enough to beg my freedom? I—I don't know where it is leading me, dear. Do you? It is that which bewilders me—that I should love you so—that I should not be afraid to love you so.... Hush, dear! Don't speak—for ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... ridiculous. Sometimes comes the Sayyid Mohammed el Barr, a stout personage, formerly governor of Zayla, and still highly respected by the people on acount of his pure pedigree. With him is the Fakih Adan, a savan of ignoble origin. [10] When they appear the conversation becomes intensely intellectual; sometimes we dispute religion, sometimes politics, at others history and other humanities. Yet it is not easy to talk history with a people who confound Miriam and Mary, or politics ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... watched them leading him out he reflected bitterly that this was the man to whom Suzanne was betrothed—the man whom, not a doubt of it, she loved, since for him she had stooped so low. This miserable craven she preferred to him, because the man, so ignoble of nature, was noble by ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... was useless to ask George to come aboard the Comfort, and try to tow his craft. That would seem too ignoble, worse than having a farm wagon drag the broken-down bubble wagon ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... and also a terror, because she had often almost flung ink-bottles and heavy rulers at her silly, lying governesses, and once had dug a pair of scissors into one sneaking old maid fool's arm when she had made her "see red" by her ignoble trickeries. Perhaps she would be hanged some day herself. She once prayed for a week that she might be made better tempered, —not that she believed in prayer,—and of course ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... this thought fully engrafted into your consciousness, it seems to me you can never willfully do wrong, can never condescend to a mean or ignoble deed, because you recognize your divine inheritance, and feel compelled by it to ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... vision before his corporal pains, before the hard reality of his own impotence. It was better to dwell in vague melancholy, to stray in the forsaken streets of a city doomed from ages, to wander amidst forlorn and desperate rocks than to awake to a gnawing and ignoble torment, to confess that a house of business would have been more suitable and more practical, that he had promised what he could never perform. Even as he struggled to beat back the phantasmagoria of the mist, and resolved that he would no longer make ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... opinion, couched in very forcible words, to her correspondents at the Clock House. They should not continue to go astray for want of being told that they were going astray. It must be acknowledged, too, that there was a certain amount of ignoble wrath in the bosom of Miss Stanbury because her sister-in-law had taken the Clock House. She had never been told, and had not even condescended to ask Dorothy, whether the house was taken and paid for by her nephew ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... shall take thee at thy word. First let me rise and take my sword. That sword which has so oft this day Through squadrons of my foes made way, 800 And some to other worlds dispatch'd, Now with a feeble spinster match'd, Will blush with blood ignoble stain'd, By which no honour's to be gain'd. But if thou'lt take m' advice in this, 805 Consider whilst thou may'st, what 'tis To interrupt a victor's course, B' opposing such a trivial force: For if with conquest I come off, (And that I shall do sure ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... field, and for the purpose of becoming acquainted with the pasturage of the dumb animals. And they consider him the more noble and renowned who has dedicated himself to the study of the most arts and knows how to practise them wisely. Wherefore they laugh at us in that we consider our workmen ignoble, and hold those to be noble who have mastered no pursuit; but live in ease, and are so many slaves given over to their own pleasure and lasciviousness; and thus as it were from a school of vices so many idle and wicked fellows go forth for ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... by all means necessary to point this out—that the truly eloquent must be free from base and ignoble (or ill-bred) thoughts. For it is not possible that men who live their lives with mean and servile aims and ideas should produce what is admirable and worthy of immortality. Great accents we expect to fall from the lips of ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... left his cart, bewitched away from everyday things by the music. It may be the smart uniform had something to do with the popularity of the organization; there is ever a fine line between art and vanity—but why dwell upon an ignoble motive? ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... that she might clasp her hands and cry aloud, half-stifled with the overpowering emotions of the moment, 'Roma! Roma! the eternal city, bursts upon my view!' That was the proper thing to do, and it was a blow to make so commonplace and ignoble an entry into the city ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... beauty charms the eye to overlook his baseness—this too common hero is an object, an example fraught with perilous interest. Charles Duval, the polite; Paul Clifford, the handsome; Richard Turpin, brave and true; Jack Sheppard, no ignoble mind and loving still his mother; these, and such as these, with Schiller's 'Robbers' and the like, are dangerous to gaze on, as Germany, if not England too, remembers well. But, not more true to life, though far less common ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... misbehaves it gets a whipping. But when it comes to human beings: in man you have a creature still more open to persuasion through appeals to reason; [9] only make it plain to him "it is his interest to obey." Or if they happen to be slaves, [10] the more ignoble training of wild animals tamed to the lure will serve to teach obedience. Only gratify their bellies in the matter of appetite, and you will succeed in winning much from them. [11] But ambitious, emulous natures feel the spur of praise, [12] since some natures hunger after praise no less than others ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... be comforted, for what the teller said was true. Penton had a way with him among people; it was a hypocritical way, of course, but the affectation of it was not clear to the kind, simple people of Banfield. His ignoble flattery ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... part of mankind; and, as the hours of life glide away very pleasantly when self-love is tickled, it was impossible that he should be without disciples, for he flattered every body. Our monk did not confine his researches to man alone; for he descended to the more ignoble beasts of the earth, allotted to them their qualities by examining their faces and the structure of their bodies, and imagined that he had made a wonderful discovery when he proved—from the mighty claws, the teeth, and the aspect of the lion, and from the tender, light fabric of ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... anger woke in me, remembering the burden of ignoble years this hag had suffered me to bear; yet my so young gentility bade me avoid reproach of the dying peasant woman, who, when all was said, had been but ill-used by our house. Death hath a strange potency: commanding as he doth, unquestioned ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... fortresses along the coast, in the national gulf, and on the banks of the national river,—and this and much more would surely be demanded of us,—would place the United Fraction of America on a level with the Peruvian guano-islands, whose ignoble but coveted soil is open to ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... from which he suffered much in his own life, and against which he guarded with a curious amount of caution. His own family grudged the distinction which his talents gained for him, and a dark story is told of a secret attempt made by them to assassinate him through his servants. Alberti met these ignoble jealousies with a stately calm and a sweet dignity of demeanour, never condescending to accuse his relatives, never seeking to retaliate, but acting always for the honour of his illustrious house. In the same spirit of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... one friend in the Chamber,—a deputy newly elected for Deux-Sevres, named M. Sarigue, a poor fellow not unlike the inoffensive, ignoble animal whose name he bore,[2] with his sparse, red hair, his frightened eyes, his hopping gait in his white gaiters. He was so shy that he could not say two words without stammering, almost tongue-tied, incessantly rolling balls of chewing-gum around in his mouth, which put ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... haunting spectre. She did not believe for an instant that he was attached to the pretty, joyous girl whom rumour gave him; but she was well aware that he was ambitious of high social position, and feared that he might possibly, from selfish, ignoble reasons, seek an alliance with Judge Harris' only daughter, knowing that the family was one of the wealthiest and most aristocratic in the State. Life had seemed dreary enough before; but, with this apprehension added, it appeared ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... don't for a moment imagine that I take it to be in anyway indicative of the contents of the book. I know you too well for that. My first idea was that it had probably been forced on you by an unscrupulous publisher—I know too well to what ignoble compromises one may be driven in such cases!..." He paused, as though to give her the opportunity of confirming this conjecture, but she preserved an apprehensive silence, and he went on, as though taking up the second point in his sermon—"Or, again, the name may have taken your ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... better undone, as it so scares her. Turn back, you foolish, soft heart, and I shall say no more about it. Obstinate one, you saw the look on your husband's face as he left you. It is the studio light by which he paints and still sees to hope, despite all the disappointments of his not ignoble ambitions. That light is the dower you brought him, and he is a wealthy man if ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... Scotch terrier at the sight of his shifty eyes in the glade between his tangled hair and beard. For one ignoble moment I felt ashamed of having been introduced as his friend in the presence of so much beauty in distress. But evidently Tripp meant to conduct the ceremonies, whatever they might be. I thought I detected in his actions ...
— Options • O. Henry
... base retreat In youth's magnanimous years— Ignoble hold it, if discreet When interest tames to fears; Shall spirits that worship light Perfidious deem its sacred glow, Recant, and trudge where worldlings go, Conform and ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... of labor was so complete, even for the freeman, that the most pronounced aversion to taking a wage ruled among the entire educated class. Plato abhorred a sophist who would work for wages. A gift was legitimate, but pay ignoble; and the stigma of asking for and taking pay rested upon all labor. The abolition of slavery made small difference, for the taint had sunk in too deeply to be eradicated. A curse rested upon all labor; and even now, after four thousand years ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... time was not an ignoble one, and they had gone there with their lives in their hands. Had Harietta been true to that side, and had she been acting from patriotism, he could have desired to save her the death sentence now. But she had never ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... portward end fallen down to show the interior, and crowned with an enormous mass of cactus. On the south side, invisible from the port, are three fine Gothic windows, now filled up, but preserving the traceries. The palace could scarcely have had a nobler site, or the site a more ignoble occupancy. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... limitless prosperity, and as he sat there reviewing it his cheeks burned and his soul was steeped in humiliation. Look at her life—how fair it was, and tending ever upward; and look at his own—how frivolous, how charged with mean vanities, how selfish, how empty, how ignoble! And its trend—never upward, but downward, ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... tortured unceasingly. The sun had passed the zenith—this sun of a culminating summer throughout which he had thrived regal and lustful. It seemed ignoble of him that he now should stoop to torment only us, and one of us a small woman. There was all his ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... cruel man had made up his mind that the captain's charger should do it in a few hours. It is not so much distance as pace that kills. Had any consideration whatever been extended to the noble creature by the ignoble brute who rode it, the good horse would have galloped to the head of the Trap almost without turning a hair. At first he strode out over the rolling prairie with the untiring vigour of a well-made frame and a splendid constitution, leaping the little cracks ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... quarrelled with me that day, was determined to proceed, and the upshot was, that the students played and won more; then they lent money to the officers, who began to win, too; and in this ignoble way, in a tavern room thick with tobacco-smoke, across a deal table besmeared with beer and liquor, and to a parcel of hungry subalterns and a pair of beardless students, three of the most skilful and renowned players in Europe lost ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and Ursicinus alone, after the frequent and great toils which they had endured for the sake of the republic, had been so despised that he himself had been accused of treason in consequence of the examination of some slaves, and had been exposed to an ignoble trial; while Ursicinus had been brought over from the East, and placed at the mercy of his enemies; and these were the subjects of his incessant complaints both in public ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... Perhaps they have always needed it. But the nineteenth-century artist finds it not in Prince, or Pope, or Patron, but in high indifference of temper, in the pleasure of the creation of beautiful things, and the long contemplation of them, in disdain of what in life is common and ignoble and in such felicitous sense of humour as enables one to see how vain and foolish is all popular opinion, and popular judgment, upon the wonderful things of art. These qualities Mr. John Gray possesses in a marked degree. He needs no ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... before her on the terraces of the Villa Androud. Had she remembered it now, it might have rendered her uneasy, but it could not have recalled her from the path down which she was just beginning to go. For her life had blunted her, had coarsened her nature. She had followed too many ignoble impulses, has succumbed too often to whim, to be the happy slave of delicacy, or to allow any sense of patriotism to keep ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... not the writer's purpose to follow the varying stages of this ignoble quarrel, in which blood flowed like water in our vain attempts to force the unwilling Samoans to accept a Protestant divinity student for their king. This little war, so remote, so ill understood at home, so brief, violent, and unjust, swept ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... noble Laura, I long to make her acquaintance. I can almost hear the uncongenial stepmother, the feverish cook, and the infuriated directors, clamoring for a providence to remove her from their field of vision, and substitute some thoroughly practical and ignoble person in ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... "Ignoble conclusion to a tender affair; but not so devoid of tragicality as would seem. Infuriated at the desertion of this modern Joseph, Louise, the lorn, avenged the slight offered her charms by declaring to her youngest brother, the only one who resided ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... police regulations, that no bargain should be valid unless concluded in these barracks. The rent of them immediately mounted to a hundred livres a month for each, and the whole yielded these noble proprietors an ignoble revenue of half a ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... as in body, who drag on an existence utterly dull, very toilsome, well-nigh hopeless, and are illuminated by no high call for heroic deeds. There the observer sees whatever there is to be seen of petty spite and jealousies, the manipulating of jobs, the dodging of regulations, all that is most ignoble in the soldier's trade. There also are the men with grievances, who, in their own estimation, are fit for posts quite other than those they hold. Some one described war at the front as an affair of months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. If that philosopher had been stationed ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... will destroy us; we remain where we are and the sky-ranging fire will destroy us. Reflecting upon both the calamities, a death by fire is preferable to a death by being eaten up. If we are devoured by the mouse within the hole, that death is certainly ignoble, whereas the destruction of the body in fire is approved by ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of the girl's leaving home. She remained in her mother's house, but without capitulation. It was "her mother's house" now, no longer home. She was one of those proud, not ignoble natures whose affection is entirely dependent upon respect. Her mother had been the great figure in her rather narrow life, object of a silent, critical, undemonstrative affection which was the furthest possible ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... there is nothing venerable about them, they have not even the picturesqueness of poverty; indeed, Don Quixote's own village, Argamasilla, has a sort of oppressive respectability in the prim regularity of its streets and houses; everything is ignoble; the very windmills are the ugliest and shabbiest ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... him more attentively, and a feeling of some strange horror came over me. His livid skin, his features, huge and yet ignoble, gave an exact idea of what you must allow me to call the scum of the earth. A few bluish-black spots were scattered over his face, like bits of mud, and his eyes shot forth an evil gleam. The face seemed, perhaps, darker, more lowering than it was, because of the white hair piled ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... at home and the armies we maintained in the field. [Applause.] We illustrated a heroism and valor which is the admiration of the world, which is the highest pride and admiration of our gallant adversaries. They conquered no ignoble foe; the field was worthy even of their efforts. And when the war was over, the terrible strife had ended, while yet the land was filled with mourning, while every church on every Sunday in this North was crowded with women wearing the sable garments of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... consistently fallen below our best possible, lacked courage to incarnate our vision in the political sphere. Instead, we have, acted on the crowd level, swayed by unsublimated instincts of acquisition, disguised lust, self-preservation, self-assertion, and ignoble fear: and such a fall-back is the ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... spoke:—Dearest ladies, if Fortune, as Pampinea has shewn us, does sometimes bide treasures most rich of native worth in the obscurity of base occupations, so in like manner 'tis not seldom found that Nature has enshrined prodigies of wit in the most ignoble of human forms. Whereof a notable example is afforded by two of our citizens, of whom I purpose for a brief while to discourse. The one, Messer Forese da Rabatta by name, was short and deformed of person and withal flat-cheeked and flat-nosed, insomuch ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... This ignoble curiosity was likewise ignored by Miss Berta, who proceeded with dignified slowness to drop her valentines one by one into the caldron. Bea, with lingering care, deposited her contribution on the very top. One slid over the edge, and in rescuing it she disturbed a fold of the portiere. A ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... themselves from Dir and Aydur, thus claiming affinity with the Eesa: others declare their tribe to be an offshoot from the Bahgoba clan of the Habr Awal, originally settled near Jebel Almis, and Bulhar, on the sea-shore. The Somal unhesitatingly stigmatize them as a bastard and ignoble race: a noted genealogist once informed me, that they were little better than Midgans or serviles. Their ancestors' mother, it is said, could not name the father of her child: some proposed to slay it, others advocated its preservation, saying, "Perhaps ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... tragedy and its cause. They saw the chief office in their gift a mere pawn in the game of place-seekers, the time and energy of their President wasted in bickerings with congressmen over petty appointments, and the machinery of their Government dominated by the machinery of the party for ignoble ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... nervousness, and with set jaw thundered out his text from Jeremiah: "Why trimmest thou thy way?" With this entering wedge the parson clove into an analysis of practical politics which did not stick at instancing corruption near at hand, and whose climax was a bitter denunciation of ignoble leadership and the doubly ignoble laxity of the indifferent led. It was as pointed an attack on local conditions as he could frame without complications with his deacons, who were politically of divers minds, and the fusion managers might have used its final exhortation ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... say that all Americans nor all Englishmen are entitled to the glory of such a holy motive for conquest. No. Too large a proportion, alas! are actuated only by the ignoble idea of selfish or national aggrandisement. The robber is often found in the same camp, and fighting under the same banner, with the soldier of Freedom. It is not strange, therefore, that the true sons of Liberty should sometimes be associated with its bastard ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... allowed to incorporate into his own kingdom the very duchies in dispute, and of receiving the Prince of Conde and his wife from Spain. He was thus suspected of being about to betray his friends and allies in the most ignoble manner and for the vilest of motives. The circulation of these infamous reports no doubt paralysed for a time the energy of the enemy who had made no requisite preparations against the threatened invasion, but it sickened ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... smiled, as on recognising his friend, they expressed a wonderful innocence and suavity of nature; overshadowed, in thoughtful or troubled mood, by his heavy eyebrows, they became deeply pathetic. His nose was short and flat, yet somehow not ignoble; his full lips, bare of moustache, tended to suggest a melancholy fretfulness. But for the high forehead, no casual observer would have cared to look at him a second time; but that upper story made the whole countenance vivid with intellect, as ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... not to sell ourselves cheap; that we are very great. So, in particulars, our greatness is always in a tendency or direction, not in an action. It is for us to believe in the rule, not in the exception. The noble are thus known from the ignoble. So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance and is the principal fact in the history of ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... as this vehicle conveyed her to Grosvenor Place; but it was not in its nature consoling. The prevision of disgrace was now so vivid to her that it seemed to her that if it had not already overtaken them she had only to thank the loose, mysterious, rather ignoble tolerance of people like Mrs. Collingwood. There were plenty of that species, even among the good; perhaps indeed exposure and dishonour would begin only when the bad had got hold of the facts. Would the bad be most horrified ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... he was of very ordinary appearance; one says "ignoble and vulgar." The sum of the statements of contemporaries as to his personality, is that he was of sharp understanding, energetic, decided; coarse and sometimes brutal; enthusiastic; of great imaginative power. If a Picard, then a Frank, and if a Frank, then a fighter, and very ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... led the conversation airily on; talking fluently, and at times brilliantly, but always with that indefinable touch of something ignoble, something coarse, that now filled Hadria with unspeakable dismay. She was terrified lest the other two should go, and he should remain. And yet she ought to speak frankly to him. His conversation was full of little under-meanings, intended for her only to understand; ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... this festival. The scene was striking, in a word; but somehow not as I had dreamed of its being. I stood regardful, I suppose, but with a peculiarly tempting blankness of visage, for in a moment I received half a bushel of flour on my too-philosophic head. Decidedly it was an ignoble form of humour. I shook my ears like an emergent diver, and had a sudden vision of how still and sunny and solemn, how peculiarly and undisturbedly themselves, how secure from any intrusion less sympathetic than one's own, certain outlying parts of Rome must ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... of August, the Duc de Crequi, then French ambassador at Rome, was insulted by the Corsican armed police, a force whose ignoble duty it was to assist the Sbirri; and the pope, Alexander VII., at first refused reparation for the affront offered to the French. Louis, as in the case of D'Estrades, took prompt measures. He ordered the ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... exclaimed, "I will leave him behind; better let him slumber in an ignoble repose than wander over the board, a laughing-stock for his enemies. We have been conquered,—the foolish White ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... be ashamed of in it, though. Have not Day and Martin made a fortune by it, and a name in all the world? Has not many a proud merchant prince risen to eminence on a more ignoble commodity? ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing." Then, too, there is the attitude of Ibsen: that iron moralist to whom the whole scheme of salvation was only an ignoble attempt to cheat God; to get into heaven without paying the price. To be let off, to beg for and accept eternal life as a present instead of earning it, would be mean enough even if we accepted the contempt of the Power on whose ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... a pot of half-and-half, or to ask a Fairy Princess if her mother has parted with her mangle, is to secure the laugh, though contempt may follow it. To our minds there is something melancholy in such spectacles. Degrading lofty images by ignoble associations must operate maleficiently on the spectator. And if it be absolutely necessary to appeal to the coarse tastes and vulgar appetites of the crowd, let it be done without at the same time dragging beautiful ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various |
