"Meanness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I was sodden with selfishness; to pretend not to be as full of meanness as I really was! Doesn't that seem to ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... they had any sense," responded Grace hotly, "I never believed that those girls could be so snobbish. I always thought them above such petty meanness. Don't pay any attention to them, Anne. They aren't worth it. I am going to interview Julia Crosby and make her acknowledge that she wasn't referring to you the other day. There is something queer about ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... Wylder's plump face, vivid with an irritable humanity, from the moveless pallor of lady Ann's delicately formed cheek, and the pinched thinness of her fine, poverty-stricken nose. Oh those pinched nostrils, the very outcry of inward meanness! will they ever open to the full tide of a surging breath? What vital interweaving of gladness and grief will at length make strong and brave and unselfish the heart that sent out those nostrils? Less than a divine shame ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... Indiaman, with her studding-sails out on both sides, sunburnt men in wide-brimmed hats on her decks, and a monkey and paroquet in her rigging, "rolling down from St. Helena.'' There was no need of his stopping her to speak her, but his vanity led him to do it, and then his meanness made him so awestruck that he seemed to quail. He called out, in a small, lisping voice, "What ship is that, pray?'' A deep-toned voice roared through the trumpet, "The Bashaw, from Canton, bound to Boston. Hundred and ten days out! Where are you from?'' "Only from Liverpool, sir,'' ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... either done or said over a glass of wine, how should he behave himself, who is not a true principally invited guest, but as it were a bastard and supposititious intruder? For whether he is free or not, he lies open to the exception of the company. Besides, the very meanness and vileness of the name is no small evil to those who do not resent it but can quietly endure to be called and answer to the name of shadows. For, by enduring such base names, men are insensibly accustomed ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... for—all were forgotten. And now they are returning to me—only that I may see the hollowness and vanity of them, and taste the bitterness for which I have sacrificed you. And here, on this last night of my exile, I am confronted with only the jealousy, the doubt, the meanness and selfishness that is to ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... this simple unaffected air; this serene face, whose calmness irritated me; this gentleness which seemed servile; this wisdom which I thought pedantry; this pliancy of disposition which I took for the meanness of a crouching dog. All this I can it really be the same man!" He was silent for a moment and then continued in a ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... when Montsurry first tells her of the suspicions which Monsieur has excited in him, she protests with artfully calculated indignation against the charge of wrong-doing with this "serpent." But the brutal and deliberate violence of her husband when he knows the truth, and the perfidious meanness with which he makes her the reluctant instrument of her lover's ruin, win back for her much of our alienated sympathy. Yet at the close her position is curiously equivocal. It is at her prayer that Bussy has ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... time or cause. He was himself too simple-hearted to reflect that it is seldom a great fault which destroys liking for a person. A great fault can be forgiven. It is small personal offences constantly repeated; little acts of meanness, and, above all, the petty plans and provisions of a selfish nature. Besides which, the soul has often marvellous intuitions, unmasking men and things; premonitions, warnings, intelligences, that it ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... habituated to actions of meanness and injustice, commits them without reflection, or with a very partial one; for on what other ground than this, can we account for the declaration of war against the Dutch? To gain an idea of the politics which actuated the British Ministry to ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... must necessarily be dignified and variegated and alive with metaphors and figures.... This selection will form a distinction ... and will entirely separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life." ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... used for repairing the British squadron which Hawkins had pronounced as being composed of the finest ships in the world for him to hand over to Philip, even though they had been neglected owing to the Queen's meanness. The plausible way in which the great seaman put this proposition caught the imagination of the negotiators. They were captivated by him. He had caused them to believe that he was a genuine seceder from heresy and from ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... week, he did not decline the week's pay directed to be paid to him, but placed the money in his vest pocket and went out with assumed nonchalance, though, in reality, deeply mortified at the unexpected discovery of his meanness. ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... in Opinion, and both mean well. You, Sir, think it for the Good of Society, that human Nature should be extoll'd as much as possible: I think, the real Meanness and Deformity of it to be more instructive. Your Design is, to make Men copy after the beautiful Original, and endeavour to live up to the Dignity of it: Mine is, to enforce the Necessity of Education, and mortify Pride. I was very much delighted with what you say in your First Dialogue of Apple-trees ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... from conceiving that rivalship authorizes a latitude not otherwise justifiable, always feels greater delicacy in such cases, and would think it meanness to speak of a rival but in terms of respect; to do justice to his merits; to be silent of his foibles. Such has invariably been his conduct towards Jay, Adams, and Hamilton; the only three who can be supposed to have stood ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... has too bitter a disdain of meanness ever to wish her child to sacrifice the truth and integrity of her soul, by accepting the hand of one for whom she has ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... so. Perhaps that was because she seldom thought them absurd, and understood something of the ambitions with which their heads were filled. They were not, indeed, unlike those with which her own was overflowing. Whenever she was angry it was at any meanness or injustice, which seemed to arouse in her a ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... authors and sponsors of these misrepresentations, which at the time were full of interest to me. But it would be a dreary thing now to go over the record of exploded mendacity, or to expose the meanness and malice shown by some men of high official position. A favorite argument was to call the reform Chinese, because the Chinese had constructed an inefficient governmental system based in part on the theory of written competitive examinations. The argument was simple. There had been written ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... and when I have sold my cabbages, I shall have another dollar. I shall soon have enough," and his heart bounded joyfully, his step recovered its elasticity and his pace quickened, as the pleasant thought removed the sting which the accusation of meanness had inflicted on his ...
— The Nest in the Honeysuckles, and other Stories • Various
... Cecilia the next morning obeyed the summons of Mr Delvile, and for the first time went to St James'- square in a humour to look for evil instead of good, and meanness instead of nobleness. ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... Millicent said, "much more. And will you tell him that I never reached the hills, that I am not guilty of that one meanness?" ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... men who had fallen, among whom was the Duc de Mayenne, and bitterly complained of the dishonour to which he had been subjected; while in order to revenge himself at once upon De Luynes and the Duchess, he condescended to the meanness of informing the former that the Prince de Joinville was enamoured of his wife, and subsequently boasted to Bassompierre that he had done so. The Marquis listened in astonishment to this extraordinary communication, and in reply ventured to assure his Majesty that ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... model boy, but I cannot exactly define in what his wickedness consisted. He had no inclination to steal, nor much to lie; and he despised "meanness" and stinginess, and had a chivalrous feeling toward little girls. Probably it never occurred to him that there was any virtue in not stealing and lying, for honesty and veracity were in the atmosphere about him. He hated work, and he "got mad" easily; but ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... typical joke about Scots' meanness appeals to Englishmen because Englishmen are mean themselves. No joke appeals to a man unless it releases some repressed wish of his own. No one expects a devout Roman Catholic to see the point of a joke about extreme unction. The professional comedian to be a success ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... his father that he could speak well, and it may be said of him that he could write well, the only thing he could do which was worth doing, always supposing that there is any merit in being able to write. He was of a mean appearance, and, like his father, pusillanimous to a degree. The meanness of his appearance disgusted, and his pusillanimity discouraged the Scotch when he made his appearance amongst them in the year 1715, some time after the standard of rebellion had been hoisted by Mar. He only stayed a short time in Scotland, and then, seized with panic, retreated ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... man born under Sol, that loveth honour; nor under Jupiter, that loveth business (for the contemplative planet carrieth me away wholly); but as a man born under an excellent sovereign, that deserveth the dedication of all men's abilities.... Again the meanness of my estate doth somewhat move me; for though I cannot accuse myself that I am either prodigal or slothful, yet my health is not to spend, nor my course to get. Lastly, I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends as I have moderate civil ends; for I have taken all knowledge to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... to know why? You started with just foolishness, but you've ended up with meanness, Virginia Bascom. You've taken your revenge on people who've done you nothin' but kindness. I know pretty well who it was that suggested to your father that the mortgage on the rectory should be foreclosed, and the Maxwells turned out ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... Yudhishthira, O Madhava, that "Thy virtue, O son, is daily decreasing. Act thou, therefore, in such a way that thy religious merit may not diminish." Fie to them that live, O Janardana, by dependence on others. Even death is better than a livelihood gained by meanness. Thou must also say unto Dhananjaya and the ever-ready Vrikodara that—"The time for that event is come in view of which a Kshatriya woman bringeth forth a son. If you allow the time to slip without ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... bosom," she said, "to imagine that cowardice or meanness of soul must needs be its guests, because I have censured the fantastic chivalry. Would to Heaven that the shedding of mine own blood, drop by drop, could redeem the captivity of Judah! Nay, would to God it could avail to set free my father, and this his benefactor, from ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... was pale and slender. He was very quiet and studious, and had such a love of honesty and truth, and such detestation of meanness and wrong, that we boys had dubbed ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... or age. Besides, Fanny thought that Lord Kilcullen had behaved generously to her when she so violently repudiated his love: she believed that it had been sincere; she had not even to herself accused him of meanness or treachery; and she spoke of him as one to be pitied, liked, and regarded; not as one to be execrated ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... Nature hath giv'n no outward mark to note The generous mind; the qualities of men To sense are indistinct. I oft have seen One of no worth a noble father shame, And from vile parents worthy children spring, Meanness oft grov'lling in the rich man's mind, And oft exalted spirits in the poor. How then discerning shall we judge aright? By riches? ill would they abide the test. By poverty? on poverty awaits This ill, through want it prompts to sordid deeds. Shall we pronounce by arms? but who can judge By looking ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... only respect in which Becky's course gives us pain is when it locks itself into that of another, and more genuine child of this earth. No one can regret those being entangled in her nets whose vanity and meanness of spirit alone led them into its meshes—such are rightly served; but we do grudge her that real sacred thing called love, even of a Rawdon Crawley, who has more of that self-forgetting, all-purifying feeling for his little evil spirit than many a better ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... against material foes, and largely for material ends. It is the glory of the Church militant that its conquests are spiritual and its victories are eternal. Its fight is chiefly against the inner, not the outer foe—against sin and wrong-doing, impatience, strife, anger, clamor, meanness, evil-speaking, wrath. It is the foe of tyranny and its heel is upon the head of the oppressor and the avenger. Its banner flies over every country and has been carried through tribulation, through sorrow, through ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... misinterpreted as fear, will probably enough operate as a snare for such a person by tempting him into excesses calculated to rouse that courage with which all genuine forbearance is associated. If the early moderation of Government did really entrap any man, that man has himself, and his own meanness of heart, to thank for his delusion. But were it otherwise, and the Government became properly responsible for any possible misinterpretation of their own lenity—even in that case, it will remain to be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... Oakford and her daughter; and, being pressed to stay to tea, I could not well help it. Before tea I sat talking with Mrs. Oakford and a friend of hers, Miss Clinch, about the Americans and the English, especially dwelling on the defects of the latter,—among which we reckoned a wretched meanness in money transactions, a lack of any embroidery of honor and liberality in their dealings, so that they require close watching, or they will be sure to take you at advantage. I hear this character of them ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... often a traffic of mutual meanness, where, although both parties intend deception, neither are deceived, since words that cost little are exchanged for hopes ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... suddenly opening the wicket, fling them one after another, into the crowd, with all the force he possessed. Many were knocked down, and many received hurts which resulted in fatal gangrene. If he had left the clubs lying where thrown, there would have been some compensation for his meanness, but he always came in and carefully gathered up such as he could get, as ammunition ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... blame ought to rest, and on whom it will rest, only nobody seems to take the least interest in the dispute, and he brazens it out in a very unblushing manner. I am more particularly struck with the meanness here exhibited, from having just been reading Lord Chatham's correspondence, in which his noble and lofty character, so abhorrent of everything like trickery, shabbiness, and underhand dealing, shines forth with peculiar lustre. It ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... him away, and his hearers went with him like so many straws on the flood, and in the exercise of this great gift the whole man seemed transfigured; abroad, he was a languid, rather slouching priest, who crept about, a picture of delicate humility, but with a shade of meanness; for, religious prejudice apart, it is ignoble to sweep the wall in passing as he did, and eye the ground: but, once in the pulpit, his figure rose and swelled majestically, and seemed to fly over them all like a guardian angel's; his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the English language. If there is a word in the English language that means treachery, servility, and cowardice, it is that word 'conservative.' It ought never hereafter to be on the lips of an American statesman. For twenty years it has stood in America the synonym of meanness and baseness. I have studied somewhat carefully the political history of the country during the last fifteen or twenty years, and I have always noticed that when I heard a man prate about being a conservative and about conservatism, he was about to do some mean thing. [Laughter.] ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... energies, the same will to great vices, had given force to great virtues. Do we provide the opportunity? Do we believe in Good? If we are ourselves deceived in any one, is not all, thenceforth, deceit? if treated with contempt, is not the whole world clouded with scorn? if visited with meanness, are not all selfish? And if from one of our frailer fellow-creatures we receive the blow, we cease to believe in women. Not the breast at which we have drank life—not the sisterly hands that have guided ours—not the one voice ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... the buildings which they needed for their common life, besides temples, but there was no adorning of them with gold and silver, for they made no use of these for any purpose; they took a middle course between meanness and ostentation, and built modest houses in which they and their children's children grew old, and they handed them down to others who were like themselves, always the same. But in summer-time they left their gardens ...
— Critias • Plato
... long-suffering with me and professed even gratitude, and was just (in a sense) to her son, and showed here and there moments of genuine and not undignified emotion; but O! on the other side, what lapses—what a mechanical movement of the brain, what occasional trap-door devils of meanness, what a wooden front of pride! I came out damped and saddened and (to say truth) a trifle sick. My wife had better luck with the daughter; but O, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... highway robbery. And you have spent the afternoon in putting me in the wrong about them—in assuming that it was I who wanted to steal YOUR letters—in explaining that it all came about through my meanness and selfishness, and your goodness, your devotion, your ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... government; but it is a dangerous attitude for any people to assume toward another nation. It does not turn the soul-searchings in on self. It does not get down beneath the skin of things; down, for instance, beneath a hide of self-righteousness to meanness or nobility of motive. A big ship always has barnacles; the United States is a big ship, and she keeps her engine going and her speed up and in the main her prow headed to a big destiny. It ill becomes a little ship to bark out—but let it ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... thinking. He is so much in earnest that his English is badly wrenched in the effort to convey his views, but I give his words very nearly as he wrote them. "What I think and what often I observed is that the Chinese very meanness and sordidness, just exactly what were the Jews. Scatter all round the world, and still they feel very proud of their country, despise the foreigners, close all their sea-ports, would not allow the poor celestial to go out or have civilized men to enter the happy country. On ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various
... mere subsistence. The sting of animal wants is his chief motive of action, and the full gratification of animal wants his highest ideal of happiness. The "noble savage," as sketched by poets, weary of the hollowness, the insincerity, and the meanness of artificial life, is really a very ignoble creature, when seen in the "open daylight" of truth. He is selfish, sensual, cruel, indolent, and impassive. The highest graces of character, the sweetest emotions, the finest sensibilities,—which make up the novelist's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... but it would help to keep us more select for the future. (Cheers.) In fact, I don't see, gentlemen, why we shouldn't make the club big enough to take in any fellow who, like all of you, hates cowardice, and meanness, and dirtiness, and that sort of thing. (Cheers, not unmixed with blushes.) We may not all think alike about everything, but, if we are all agreed it's good form to be gentlemen, and honest and brave, I don't see why we can't be 'Select Sociables' still. We pride ourselves ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... is trying to ruin me, but that kind of meanness isn't in his line. Perhaps I'd better say that I never had clothes like those and that I sold no land ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... strip the wretch of his last claim to manhood. Then followed the brutal instant of extinction, and the paltry dangling of the remains like a broken jumping-jack. He had been prepared for something terrible, not for this tragic meanness. He stood a moment silent, and then - "I denounce this God-defying murder," he shouted; and his father, if he must have disclaimed the sentiment, might have owned the stentorian voice with which it ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a virtuous love to plant a blister there!' What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others and ignorance of ourselves—seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy—mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... great credit among his neighbours.' He soon became a respectable member of civil as well as religious society; for, by the time that he joined the church, his Christian character was so fully established, that, notwithstanding the meanness of his origin and employment, he was considered worthy of uniting in a memorial to the Lord Protector. It was to recommend two gentlemen to form part of the council, after Cromwell had dissolved the Long Parliament. It is a curious document, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Thus the eye turned round to look at you without turning the head indicates generally slyness or suspicion; but if this is combined with large expanded eyelids or fixed eyebrows, as we see it in Titian's pictures, it will denote calm contemplation or piercing sagacity, without anything of meanness or fear of being observed. In other cases it may imply merely indolent, enticing voluptuousness, as in Lely's portraits of women. The languor and weakness of the eyelids give the amorous turn to the expression. How ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... paused, inherent meanness struggling with a snobbish desire to emulate the Duchess; and finally she gave ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Gosport," said Cecilia, "who seem to make the minutiae of absurd characters your study, can explain to me, perhaps, why Mr Briggs seems to have as much pleasure in proclaiming his meanness, as ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... of "mine" and "thine" will ensure unity, because it abolishes the primary cause of discord; common maintenance by the state removes all temptation either to meanness or cringing. Our guardians will be uncommonly happy. As to practicability: communism is suitable for war. The youngsters will be taken to watch any fighting; cowards will be degraded; valour will be honoured, and death on the field, with other supreme services to the state, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... I deliver myself to be, provided it be such as I really am, I have my end; neither will I make any excuse for committing to paper such mean and frivolous things as these; the meanness of the subject compels me to it.'—'Human reason is a two-edged and a dangerous sword. Observe, in the hand of Socrates, her most intimate and familiar friend, how many points it has. Thus, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... shape, by obliging them to conform to the rules of politeness and proper behavior, as understood by their class. For this purpose the senior lieutenant of each regiment was the chief of the regimental club, and there was a general chief for the whole army. Offenses against good manners, faults of meanness, or oddity of behavior, were discouraged by admonitions, given privately by the chief, or publicly in the convivial meetings of the club. Moral pressure might be carried so far in an aggravated case, as to cause the culprit to resign ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... makes one believe in the adage: "God gives children." Augustine was little, or, to describe her more truly, delicately made. Full of gracious candor, a man of the world could have found no fault in the charming girl beyond a certain meanness of gesture or vulgarity of attitude, and sometimes a want of ease. Her silent and placid face was full of the transient melancholy which comes over all young girls who are too weak to dare ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... can hate, others.' CHAP. IV. The Master said, 'If the will be set on virtue, there will be no practice of wickedness.' CHAP. V. 1. The Master said, 'Riches and honours are what men desire. If it cannot be obtained in the proper way, they should not be held. Poverty and meanness are what men dislike. If it cannot be avoided in the proper way, they should not be avoided. 2. 'If a superior man abandon virtue, how can he fulfil the requirements of that name? 3. 'The superior man does not, even for the space ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... that most depressing companion—the sense of his own meanness. He was unable to help knowing that the exercise of force against weakness is the most ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... House. The captivating work is not without its faults, chief among which is the curious awkwardness of design which makes of the composition, cut in two by a central tree, two pictures instead of one. Undeniably, too, there is a certain meanness and triviality in the little nymph or mortal of the foreground, which may, however, be due to the intervention of an assistant. But then, with an elasticity truly astounding in a man of his great age, the master has momentarily ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... to read the words, for I did not realise the full meanness of what I was doing until the end came, and I woke with a shock to see myself as I really am. All these last ten days I have been acting a part to myself as well as to others, pretending to be unconscious ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... plain, strong-minded women, who had about as little to do with Fashion as with the changing clouds. I have given considerable attention to this fact. It is worthy of the deepest thoughtfulness. Oh, it is a solemn fact that we descend into our children, in our weakness or strength, in our meanness or majesty, as we have lived. And what a lean, meagre, moonshine inheritance does a fashionable mother convey to her offspring! I confess that to me there is something grand in being the mother of a noble son or daughter, of a strong and virtuous family of children. If there is a just ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... was brought to bear in the right direction. The girl who could do or think meanly avoided the expression of Annabel's beautiful eyes. It was impossible for her to think badly of her fellow-creatures, but meanness and sin made her sorrowful. There was not a girl in Heath Hall who would willingly give ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... Ariosto's or Spenser's knights-errant might have done in the fairy country of old romance. In the sordid tale of "Irish Artifice," printed in Curll's "Female Dunciad" (1728), no reader could distinguish in the romantic names Aglaura and Merovius the nationality or the meanness of a villainous Irish housekeeper and her son. And though the tale is the very reverse of romantic, it contains no hint of actual circumstance. The characters in Mrs. Haywood's early fiction move in an imaginary world, sometimes, it is true, marked with ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... times it happens that the meanness and trifling nature of a cause not very obvious to observation has occasioned it to be entirely overlooked, even on account of that very meanness, since no one is willing to acknowledge that he has been alarmed by a cause of little consequence, and which he would ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... This act of meanness had been brought to light by an explanation between the lady and the Englishman. On his saying to the princess that he was ready to do anything for her, and that the two hundred sequins he had given her were as nothing in comparison ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... chief and none was demanded. For a time Hamilton was bitterly disgusted and wounded. He shrugged his shoulders, finally, and accepted his new enemy with philosophy, though by no means with amiability and forgiveness; but he had seen too much of the selfishness and meanness of human nature to remain pained or ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... may this lead to? Ah, none for him, for Bonython now steps in and plies him with flattery and drink, gaining from the chief, at last, his signature—the bow totem—to a transfer of the land for which he is willing to sell his daughter. Ruth, maddened at her father's meanness and the Indian's brutality, rushes on the imbruted savage, grasps from his belt the knife that has slain her lover, cleaves his heart in twain, and flies into the wood, leaving Bonython ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... The meanness of his vices prejudices the grandeur of his crimes. What would you have? Peter the Cruel massacred, but he did not steal; Henry III assassinated, but he did not swindle; Timour crushed children under horses' hoofs, much as M. Bonaparte exterminated women and old men on the boulevard, ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... Reginald, you will not Get any Presents from Santa Claus this Year; but you, my son James, will get Oodles of Presents, because you have Been Good. Will you Believe it, Children, that Bad boy Reginald said he didn't Care a Darn and he Kicked three Feet of Veneering off the Piano just for Meanness. Poor James was so sorry for Reginald that he cried for Half an Hour after he Went to Bed that Night. Reginald lay wide Awake until he saw James was Asleep and then he Said if these people think they can ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... on religious subjects are worthy of a liberal and enlarged mind. He could discern clearly enough the folly and meanness of all bigotry except his own. When he spoke of the scruples of the Puritans, he spoke like a person who had really obtained an insight into the divine philosophy of the New Testament, and who considered Christianity as a noble ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... sentiments from those which I entertain, I trust, I shall be always liberal enough to tolerate in any one, without prejudice to previous intimacy; but I cannot remain on terms of friendship with a man who has the meanness to seek to conciliate the party he opposes, by concealing his adherence to that which he ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... she could prove to her friend that no such beginning was possible. In the first place there was the falsehood, the base falsehood, which Sir Francis had told. In order to save himself he had declared that he had rejected her. It was very mean. At this moment its peculiar meanness made her feel doubly sure that the man was altogether unfitted to be her husband. But she would allow the false assertion to pass unnoticed. If he could find a comfort in that let him have it. Perhaps upon the whole it would be better ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... course, he spoke Urdu, but he had also mastered many queer side-speeches like the chotee bolee of the women, and held grave converse with shopkeepers and Hill-coolies alike. He was precocious for his age, and his mixing with natives had taught him some of the more bitter truths of life: the meanness and the sordidness of it. He used, over his bread and milk, to deliver solemn and serious aphorisms, translated from the vernacular into the English, that made his Mamma jump and vow that Tods must go Home next hot weather. Just ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... that. Breaking trust. Meanness. It was mean and dishonorable of you when you knew you ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... Mr. Middleton, who had been an attentive listener, "what's all this about? Tempest, do you write down your task? Good reason why you don't bring home your books. Speak, girl, quick—are you guilty of such meanness?" ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... sashes and neckerchiefs and some fine jewels, they devoured us with their eyes, and one of them, speaking to her papa, that most hospitable gentleman invited us to enter his house. By that time we were once more upon our saddles and ready to start. Roche felt indignant at the meanness of the fellow, who had received our seventy-five cents for the water before he invited us into the house. We refused, and Roche told him that he was an old scoundrel to sell for money that which even a savage will never refuse to his ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... which all men admire in a Sickingen or a Cid. Even his vices, his hatred of an enemy, his contempt for a foreigner, his jealousy of rivals, his implacable love of revenge, have in them a dash of barbaric greatness, and nothing of the petty meanness of the vices of civilization and ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... 'Well, speakin' of tricks and meanness, I've allers heard tell that there was some of them things hitched to the tail of the stock market. What makes the stock market price of—well, ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the parallel ends. In Jackson, even as a cadet, self was subordinate to duty. Pride was foreign to his nature. He was incapable of pretence, and his simplicity was inspired by that disdain of all meanness which had been his characteristic from a child. His brain was disturbed by no wild visions; no intemperate ambition confused his sense of right and wrong. "The essence of his mind," as has been said of another of like mould, "was clearness, healthy ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... softly smoothing back the hair from her forehead, said in kind, fatherly tones, "I am not displeased with you, daughter. I understand that it was quite accidental, and I am sure my little girl is entirely above the meanness of intentionally listening to what is evidently not meant for her ear. And in fact, now that I think of it, I am not sorry that you know I did not, and do not now, approve of the treatment you received at that time. Yet that was the first time I had ever mentioned it to any one, and I should ...
— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... galleys filled every port, whose merchandise crowded every city, who divided with Cosmo de Medici the commerce of the world. Here did Jacques Coeur reflect, with bitter disappointment, on all the selfishness, cruelty, meanness, and ingratitude, of the man he had mainly assisted to regain the throne of his ancestors. It was here he was told that the falsehood of the charge against him had been proved; but when he quitted this, the first prison which the gratitude of the king had ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... the soldiers with every thing of which they were in need, he brought them all easily into his measures, believing that the most effectual means of succeeding in his mission, was by acting gently and in a conciliating manner with every one: yet in all this he acted without meanness or servility, constantly preserving the dignity becoming his rank and authority. In all his negociations, the president was ably and faithfully seconded by his major-general Alfonzo de Alvarado, who was exceedingly serviceable ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... most public virtues always accompany it. Truth, sincerity, all the cardinal virtues are fostered most where there is most independence. This takes away the source of all corruption, all temptation. This seeks dependence, and victimizes its creatures to every purpose of corruption and meanness. ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... faces turned up to the sky, and their hands so small in death, and when I see wounded men, and hear of soldiers going out of the trenches with a laugh and a joke to cut wire entanglements, knowing they will not come back, then I am ashamed of meanness and petty spite. So my poor young woman got a "fair dose of it" this morning, and when she had gulped once or twice I ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... marriage with some neighbour's daughter, I would do it with all my heart; and even then they would expect you should have some little estate, or be of some trade. When such poor folks as we are wish to marry, the first thing they ought to think of, is how to live. But without reflecting on the meanness of your birth, and the little fortune you have to recommend you, you aim at the highest pitch of exaltation; and your pretensions are no less than to demand in marriage the daughter of your sovereign, who with one single word can crush you ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... discovery of new countries and nations, or of new species and sources of commerce, the advantages thence arising must ultimately redound to the emolument of Great Britain. Since, as our fleets are at present superior to those of the whole world united, it must be a matchless degree of supineness or meanness of spirit, if we permit any of the advantages deriveable from new discoveries, or from a more extended navigation, to be ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... destin'd never to be read. Fain would I view thee, with prophetic eyes, Exalted more among the good and wise; 60 A glorious and a long career pursue, As first in Rank, the first in Talent too: Spurn every vice, each little meanness shun; Not Fortune's minion, but her noblest son. Turn to the annals of a former day; Bright are the deeds thine earlier Sires display; One, though a courtier, lived a man of worth, And call'd, proud boast! the British drama forth. [4] Another view! not less renown'd for Wit; Alike for courts, and ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... left it to Mackenzie's imagination to fix his identity, not bending to reveal his name. Hector Hall, Mackenzie knew him to be, on account of his pistols, on account of the cold meanness of his eyes which Dad Frazer had described as holding such a throat-cutting look. But armed as he was, severe and flash-tempered as he seemed, Mackenzie was not in any sort of a flurry to give ground before him. He looked up at him coolly, ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... is corrupted like stagnant water, and passion dwindles, frittered away upon the infinitely small objects which it strives to exalt. Herein lies the secret of the avarice and tittle-tattle that poison provincial life. The contagion of narrow-mindedness and meanness affects the noblest natures; and in such ways as these, men born to be great, and women who would have been charming if they had fallen under the forming influence of greater minds, are balked of ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... she faced about now a second time she would indeed attract attention. So, while her cheeks flamed hot at the meanness, the miserable ridiculousness of the imposture, she assumed a brisk, determined gait, as though she knew just where she were going, and, turning out of the square down a by-street, walked around the block, even stopping ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... deal of the gaiety in the trenches, but the wounded are not gay. Neither are they sad, however. They are calm, meditative, strangely purified and matured. It is as though their great experience had purged them of pettiness, meanness and frivolity, burning them down to the bare bones of character, the fundamental substance of the soul, and shaping that substance into something so strong and finely tempered that for a long time to come Paris will not ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... Middlesex. The last record ought to be preferred, because it was made upon oath. It is observable, that, as a native of Winborne, he is styled filius Georgii Prior, generosi; not consistently with the common account of the meanness ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... him see that he does not fall Heidelberg Catechism were declared to be infallible Highborn demagogues in that as in every age affect adulation History has not too many really important and emblematic men Human nature in its meanness and shame I hope and I fear I know how to console myself If he has deserved it, let them strike off his head Implication there was much, of assertion very little In this he was much behind his age or before it It had not yet occurred ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... deepening daily. He had even addressed a small meeting of miners on the subject of the rights of the people, and he was no pusillanimous reformer. He declared the diggers had reached that point at which toleration meant meanness of spirit. The thought of civil war was appalling, but not so much so as the degradation of a nation in which the manhood plodded meekly under the whip, like driven cattle yoked ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... 100 in the house of representatives, but that majority voted directly against its convictions. It was told that it would get no jobs for constitutents until it had surrendered its honesty. American history contains no such pitiful instance of cowardice and grovelling meanness. Instead of one Benedict Arnold selling his soul for temporary gain, we had fifty. It did the soul of me good to read the returns of the next Congressional election and to know that the truckling, craven ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... termed the scatalogical group, with the two subdivisions of urolagnia and Coprolagnia.[24] Inter faeces et urinam nascimur is an ancient text which has served the ascetic preachers of old for many discourses on the littleness of man and the meanness of that reproductive power which plays so large a part in man's life. "The stupid bungle of Nature," a correspondent writes, "whereby the generative organs serve as a means of relieving the bladder, is doubtless responsible for much of the disgust which those organs ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the Spanish usurpation, when robbed of her commerce by Holland and by England, united against her will to a decaying power, she was unable to finish her last great work, while such buildings as she did herself finish—for it must not be forgotten that Mafra was designed by a foreigner—show a meanness of invention and design scarcely to be equalled in any other land, a strange contrast to the exuberance of fancy lavished on the buildings of a ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... he was close and hard with others. He paid small wages to his employes and never gave more than the man bargained for, no matter what extra service might be rendered. He carried his economy to a degree of meanness painful to contemplate. At his death, out of his vast estate, he left to his friend and faithful manager an annuity of only two hundred dollars, which his ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... Whether third or fourth rate attorney, counselor, surgeon, journalist, cure, artist, or author, the Jacobin is like the shepherd that has just found, in one corner of his hut, a lot of old parchments which entitle him to the throne. What a contrasts between the meanness of his calling and the importance with which the theory invests him! With what rapture he accepts a dogma that raises him so high in his own estimation! Diligently conning the Declaration of Rights, the Constitution, all the official documents ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... to illustrious persons, and antient and noble families; several occurrences in which the Public is interested, and other matters of a more private nature, can only be found in works of this kind. History cannot stoop to the meanness of examining the materials of which Memoirs ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... triumphantly; "now you'll come back with me to our camp, and explain what sort of meanness you were up to, ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... her sober young face there was no hint of discontent, nothing of meanness or envy to narrow the blue eyes, nothing of bitterness to touch the sensitive lips, nothing, even, of sadness; only a gravity—like the seriousness of a youthful goddess musing alone on mysteries unexplained even ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... him behind the broom bushes. He had ceased to love her, she knew, and although he had never freed her from her promise, Morva had too much common sense to feel bound for ever to a man who had so evidently forgotten her. If sometimes the meanness and selfishness of his conduct dawned upon her mind, the feeling was instantly repressed, and as far as possible banished, in obedience to the instinct of loyalty to Garthowen, which was so strong a trait in ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... not be maintained. They were followed by a meanness and a descent of the mind into lower levels; the loss of wings; no high speculation. Locke, to whom the meaning of ideas was unknown, became the type of philosophy, and his "understanding" the measure, in all nations, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... self-forgetfulness. All his devotion, his self-abjection, had been the mere qualms of a craving, the flush of eager courtship. Do as she would to overcome these realizations, forces within her stronger than herself, primordial forces with the welfare of all life in their keeping, cried out upon the meanness of his face, the ugly pointed nose and the thin compressed lips, the weak neck, the clammy hands, the ungainly nervous gestures, the tuneless whistling between the clenched teeth. He would not let her forget a single detail. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... proclaim and emphasize the faults of a poor, unfortunate, demented man. We can hardly blame them; for, in their eyes, Rousseau appeared as a kind of mad dog—a pest to society, deserving of no quarter. They did not realize—they could not—that beneath the meanness and the frenzy that were so obvious to them was the soul of a poet and a seer. The wretched man wandered for long in Switzerland, in Germany, in England, pursued by the ever-deepening shadows of his maniacal ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... fire it was always cold. The carpet was very dingy, and the mirrors were much spotted; but the poverty of the room was the respectable poverty of age: old furniture had become fashionable just in time to save it from being metamorphosed by its mistress into a show of gay meanness and costly ugliness. A good fire of mingled peat and coal burned bright in the barrel-fronted steel grate, and shone in the brass fender. The face of the boy continued to look very red in the glow, but still its colour came more from within than from without: he cherished the memory of his ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... had been very well pleased with him in London, but he was dissatisfied at hearing heavy complaints of rents racked, and the people driven to emigration.' Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 2, 1773. He reproached him also with meanness as a host. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... state, with all due deference to your correspondent's term 'bolt,' that Madame Lola Montez left quietly and unostentatiously.... The attempt to stop her leaving Sydney and prevent her engagement in Melbourne was an exhibition of meanness at which every honest heart must feel disgusted. Alone, in a strange land, without friends or protector, her position as a woman should in itself have saved her from the unmanly abuse heaped upon her and the contemptible attitude manifested by ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... welcome; and so my service to you; and may the squire, and all such sneaking rascals, go to the devil together."—"O fie!" says Adams, "O fie! He is indeed a wicked man; but G— will, I hope, turn his heart to repentance. Nay, if he could but once see the meanness of this detestable vice; would he but once reflect that he is one of the most scandalous as well as pernicious lyars; sure he must despise himself to so intolerable a degree, that it would be impossible for him to continue a moment in ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... have done us an injury will callous the heart and harden the affections. When we have been slighted by some one or misjudged, oh, how Satan strives to get us to thinking much about this, and to work a "hurt" feeling into our heart. Even to think about the meanness of others will bring a harshness and coldness into the inner life. That which we condemn in others will, if we think and talk much about it, creep into our ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... to accuse me of meanness. You shall not say that I left you on your wedding-day without a shilling in your pocket, as your friend was left ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... Assembly. M. Dupin had answered, "I cannot, I am guarded." Jerome Bonaparte burst out laughing. In fact, no one had deigned to place a sentinel at M. Dupin's door; they knew that it was guarded by his meanness. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... scrupulous fear must damp the heat and retard the impetuosity of speaking, while at the same time it prevents the mind from attending to thoughts which are of greater moment. As, therefore, it is carelessness to yield to these faults, so it is meanness to be ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... generally was supposed to be. And during the whole Trent affair, Lord Lyons's conduct was discreet, delicate, and generous. Events may transform Lord Lyons into an official enemy of the Union; but a mind soured by human meanness is soothingly impressioned by such true nobleness in a diplomat and ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... Now, though they were but lodgings, and the street not in fashion, Olivier Dalibard's apartments had an air of refinement, and even elegance, that contrasted both the wretched squalor of the abode Gabriel had just left and the meanness of Dalibard's former quarters in London, The change seemed to imply that the Provencal had already made some way in the world. And, truth to say, at all times, even in the lowest ebb of his fortunes, there was that indescribable neatness and formality ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of ethics. In his conception, virtue is the mean, vice the excess lying on either side—courage, for example, the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice, temperance, between incontinence and insensibility, generosity, between extravagance and meanness. The various phases of feeling and the various kinds of action he analyses minutely on this principle, understanding always by "the mean" that which adapts itself in the due proportion to the circumstances and requirements of ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... murmured about his extravagant way of life. Though he became the favourite and leader of young men who were much his superiors in wealth and station, he was much too generous to endeavour to propitiate them by any meanness or cringing on his own part, and would not neglect the humblest man of his acquaintance in order to curry favour with the richest young grandee in the university. His name is still remembered at the Union Debating Club, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... calculated to deprive Flinders of the credit that he had won. Both Peron and Freycinet knew, too, when they issued their volume and atlas, that Flinders was being held in captivity in Mauritius; and the dead captain was certainly not guilty of the meanness and mendacity of hurrying forward the issue of books that pretended to discoveries never made, while the real discoverer was prevented from ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... related the particulars of the event at Green Point, which had procured him the whipping. Lily expressed her horror at the meanness of Master Archy, and poured out her sympathy in unmeasured fulness upon ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... theorist, but the individuality of a broad-minded, high-minded, chivalrous gentleman. With a soul open to the finest sentiments and ideas of the age in which he lives, tolerant of frailty, but intolerant of meanness, falsehood, and malignity, and writing with the frankness with which a cultivated man of decided opinions might speak to a company of chosen associates, the most obstinate bigot can hardly fail to feel the charm of his free and cordial manner of expression. Hume, Gibbon, Hallam, and Macaulay, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... be opened after long knocking. The round campanile that towers and seems to totter in its strange dilapidation beside the church is so beautiful that it surprises one at once by its melancholy nobility in the midst of so much meanness and desolation. It is a building of the ninth century, and may well have been used as much as a watch tower as a bell tower. Till recently it had at its base a sacristy, but this has been swept away. Of old the church too had before it a great narthex of which certain ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... fair count; but then it shows his insatiable vanity. Vanity is one of the capital sins; it is hard to tell into what meanness it may not lead a man.' With this sententious denunciation, the Mexican, who had clearly misinterpreted my indignant ejaculation, raised his hat, with an air of extreme politeness, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... never fear it, it cannot be. And O, fellow-Christians, what a day will that be when we, who have been kept prisoners by sin and the grave, shall be fetched out by the Lord Himself! It will not be such a coming as His first was—in meanness and poverty and contempt. He will not come, O careless world, to be slighted and neglected by you any more. To think and speak of that day with horror doth well beseem the impenitent sinner, but ill the believing saint. How full ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... prescribed by his law, prompted Mary to perform this act of religion, though evidently exempt from the precept. Being poor herself, she made the offering appointed for the poor: accordingly is this part of the law mentioned by St. Luke,[4] as best agreeing with the meanness of her worldly condition. But her offering, however mean in itself, was made with a perfect heart, which is what God chiefly regards in all that is offered to him. The King of Glory would appear everywhere ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... her there, alone and fierce—thrawn, as the Scotch say—bent upon a course of conduct that she knew would hold her up to the hatred of every right-thinking person of her acquaintance, and bitterly triumphant in the knowledge. The meanness of her errand never struck her. On the contrary, she would have argued it was one well worthy of her, a part of the scheme in the consummation of which she had spent her married life and her whole indomitable energy, losing actually her own identity in the process, ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... were pale with indignation, and asked whether she recognized the tablets as her property; Paula, after convincing herself, replied with a flaming glance of scorn and aversion at Horapollo: "Yes, my lord. It is mine. That base old man has taken it with atrocious meanness from among my things." For an instant her voice failed her; then, turning to the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... enlightened, hardened, sharpened, as to evil; he sees it where others do not.—MOZLEY, Essays, i. 308. All satirists, of course, work in the direction of Christian doctrine, by the support they give to the doctrine of original sin, making a sort of meanness and badness a law of society.—MOZLEY, Letters, 333. Les critiques, meme malveillants, sont plus pres de la verite derniere que les admirateurs.—NISARD, Lit. fr., Conclusion. Les hommes superieurs ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... a-countin' of 'em up and a-gloryin' in it all the tother night, takin' credit to myself for givin' away a few victuals after I had had plenty myself. Think of a man gittin' self-righteous over givin' to some poor fellow-critters what he couldn't eat himself! If that ain't meanness, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... he whispered savagely between his teeth; "and I will contradict you to your face! If you are desperate, I am desperate too. I don't care what meanness I am guilty of! I will deny it on my honor; I will deny it on my oath. You heard what she said about you at Browndown. She will ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... conferring on him a new trust and commission, was deemed an instance of cruelty and injustice. To sacrifice to a concealed enemy of England the life of the only man in the nation who had a high reputation for valor and military experience, was regarded as meanness and indiscretion; and the intimate connections which the king was now entering into with Spain, being universally distasteful, rendered this proof of his complaisance still ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Meantime, Ferdusi's poem of Yussuf, and his magnificent verses on several subjects, had received the fame they deserved. Shah Mahmud's late remorse awoke. Thinking by a tardy act of liberality to repair his former meanness, he dispatched to the author of the Shah Namah the sixty thousand pieces he had promised, a robe of state, and many apologies and expressions of friendship and admiration, requesting his return, and professing ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... men of his time. He was of an eminently social temper, although averse to large companies and shy and silent in their presence. "There is no such thing," he once said, "as real conversation but between two persons." He was free from malice, meanness, or jealousy, Pope to the contrary notwithstanding. He was absolutely loyal to his principles and to his friends, in a time when many men changed both with as little compunction as they changed wigs and swords. His personality was ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... from within, it is far otherwise. Alongside of these warblings of a heart grateful to the first of Kings, there goes on a series of utterances to Niece Denis, remarkable for the misery driven into meanness, that can be read in them. Ill-health, discontent, vague terror, suspicion that dare not go to sleep; a strange vague terror, shapeless or taking all shapes—a body diseased and a mind diseased. Fear, quaking continually for nothing at all, is not to be borne in a handsome ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... Company's affairs, more might be said to his prejudice—not in respect of his integrity, for, I believe him to have been a most honourable man, and incapable of any meanness—but in regard to his management. Although, as the original projector of the Canada Company, he evinced much cleverness, and afterwards displayed considerable judgment in the choice of the best situations ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... abide by law and order, I came safely past them and turned up the less-frequented street that held my inn, when at the corner, under the big lamp, a young man with something of a swagger about him, in spite of the meanness of his dress, came out from the shadow of the wall and looked ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... to let her fall into the hands of France; but the vast majority of the house seemed to think that the entrance of France into the quarrel rendered all present thought of negociation an absurdity and a meanness; and that no future friendship could be hoped from a people who, though descended from us and bound to us by the strong ties of community of descent, language, and religion, had united themselves with the most ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... "I thought everybody had to begin with the first question. All the rest of us took so long over it, that we hadn't time for the parsing, and yet we got bad marks, and you, who hadn't even tried, got a good mark. It's just like Miss Rowe's meanness." ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil |
