"Perverted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "crowns him with glory and honour." Alone of all earthly beings, man is not only an effect but a cause; his freedom—not unlimited but quite real within its not inelastic confines—is the noblest of all his faculties, even though for that very reason it is capable of being most ignobly perverted. What its bestowal tells us is that God does not call us into servitude, but to that service which is perfect freedom; He might have made us His playthings, as Plato suggested,[3] but by endowing us ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... out of use within twelve years, or in any way introduce improvements by which the Government could get the service at lower rates. Nor have we any reliable hope for the future. We wait until commerce has been perverted into unnatural channels, and then become suddenly and galvanically aroused, when it is too late to effect a change until two or three years have expired in building ships. We thus find ourselves in the midst of the difficulty without having foreseen it, and without being prepared for it. ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... ground. But no one can deny that, while that which Cusick narrates has much in common with the mythology of the Wabanaki, it is much less like that of the Edda; that Indian grotesqueness has in it greatly perverted an original: and finally, that it certainly occupies a position midway between the mythology of the Northeastern Algonquins and that of the Chippewas, Ottawas, and other Western tribes. Examination shows this in every story. Thus the Wabanaki warrior makes his bow infallible in aim by stringing ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... him were varied and numerous, and easy of proof. He had received bribes; he had given false judgments for money; he had perverted justice to secure the smiles of Buckingham, the favorite; and when a commission was appointed to examine these charges he was convicted. With abject humility, he acknowledged his guilt, and implored the pity of his judges. The annals of biography present no sorrier picture than this. "Upon advised ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... perverted from the mouth of an enemy, has in itself a note to which the soul responds, let the mind deny as vehemently as it will. Cynthia read, and as she read her body was shaken with sobs, though the tears came not. Could it be true? Could the least particle of the least of these ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... resulted from such extended local improvements being undertaken by the General Government. State legislation upon this subject would have been suspended and private enterprise paralyzed, while applications for appropriations would have perverted the legislation of Congress, exhausted the National Treasury, and left the people burdened with a heavy public debt, beyond the capacity ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... made in my image—line for line—torture for torture, must go on living in the hell which he has prepared with his own perverted mind. He can never get back. It is too ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... forfeiting their vessel and cargo, or of perishing at sea; they must still have entered the port: the loss of their vessel and cargo being the lesser evil. But the character of the lawgiver assures them, that the intention of his laws are perverted, when misapplied to persons, who, under their circumstances, take refuge in his ports. They have no occasion to recur from his clemency to his justice, by claiming the benefit of that article in the treaty which binds the two nations together, and which assures to the fugitives of either ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... immovable. I think some such misfortunes as these must have happened to men who are unable to move their own bodies. But I know that in their case the echeneis is corruption trading on delays; the bite of the Indian shell-fish is insatiable cupidity; the torpedo is fraudulent pretence. With perverted ingenuity they manufacture delays that they may seem to have met with a run of ill-luck. Wherefore let your Greatness, whom it specially concerns to look after such men as these, by a speedy rebuke bring them to a better mind. Else the famine ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... great deal can be done, also, in the way of diet. Girls, especially at this time, have a most perverted appetite, preferring pickles, olives, rich pies and cakes, and other indigestible foods. These are all bad, of course, as they disturb the digestion ...
— Treatise on the Diseases of Women • Lydia E. Pinkham
... operation before his eyes, he returned to take the government of a dilapidated country. The power of the priesthood, exercised in the most fearful shape of tyranny; the power of the crown, at once feeble and arbitrary; the power of opinion, wholly extinguished; and the power of the people, perverted into the instrument of their own oppression—were the elements of evil with which the minister had to deal; and he dealt with them vigorously, sincerely, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... that that young divine chafed and almost choked over his great meals. He made Madame Esmond angry, and doubly so when he sent off Harry into fits of laughter. Her authority was defied, her officer scorned and insulted, her youngest child perverted by the obstinate elder brother. She made a desperate and unhappy attempt to ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... his mind that the clergyman was obsessed by some perverted spiritual force, some "Devil" who deceived him, and that the name he sought to pronounce was after all not good—not God. His thoughts, fears, hopes, all became hopelessly entangled, through them one thing alone holding clear and steady—the passionate desire to keep Miriam ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... who, after having made him write the Symphonie fantastique to spite Henrietta Smithson, next made him write the wretched fantasia Euphonia to spite Camille Moke, now Mme. Pleyel. One would feel obliged to draw more attention to the way he often adorned or perverted the truth if one did not feel it arose from his irrepressible and glowing imagination far more than from any intention to mislead; for I believe his real nature to have been a-very straightforward one. I will quote the story of his friend Crispino, a young countryman from Tivoli, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... "Yes, a perverted will. But there can be no good without a strong will. A weak will means inconstancy. It means, even in good, good attempted and relinquished, which is always a terrible thing, because it is sure to betray some one who relied upon ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... baser alchemist In some perverted plan persist To turn my gold to dross. If I turned my gold their soul were sold Tho' I wore a crown and cloth of gold, Their soul were ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... despise) the process of cursing, and uther censures of Haly Kirk."—(Acta Parl. vol. ii. p. 342; Keith's Hist., vol. i. p. 28.) There is a singular production by one of the early Scotish Poets, a priest named Sir John Rowll, called his Cursing, which exemplifies the abuses to which this process was perverted. It was written between 1492 and 1502, and is directed chiefly against the stealers, among ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... murderer makes no provision to protect himself from the sure consequences of his act, requires a certain amount of perverted courage. Neither Mrs. Collins nor her brother credited Collins with the possession of even this low courage—at least not in sufficient degree to induce him to relinquish the comforts of freedom for the inconveniences of a prison. So they offered no ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... of the Perverse, when he descends upon the printing office, sometimes becomes the Imp of the Perverted. Here his achievements will not bear reproducing. Suffice it to say that in point of indecency he displays the same superhuman ingenuity as in his more innocent pranks. His indecencies are all, indeed, in print, but fortunately scattered, ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... bravery were both reputed high, should have submitted himself and his men to Menendez without positive assurance of safety is scarcely credible; nor is it lack of charity to believe that a miscreant so savage in heart and so perverted in conscience would act on the maxim, current among the bigots of the day, that faith ought not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... the arches are adorned with entire skeletons, looking as if they were wrought most skilfully in bas-relief. There is no possibility of describing how ugly and grotesque is the effect, combined with a certain artistic merit, nor how much perverted ingenuity has been shown in this queer way, nor what a multitude of dead monks, through how many hundred years, must have contributed their bony framework to build up these great arches of mortality. On some of the skulls there are inscriptions, purporting ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... will be hell, or the second[134] death whereof Holy Scripture speaks. But at last hell will render up its dead, death itself will be destroyed; reason and peace will begin to hold sway again in the spirits that had been perverted; they will be sensible of their error, they will adore their Creator, and will even begin to love him all the more for seeing the greatness of the abyss whence they emerge. Simultaneously (by virtue of the harmonic parallelism of the Realms of Nature ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... bore a tarnished name; but that he was more unhappy for me, for us, than for himself. My mother was all his comfort; she was dying, and I promised to take her place. With all the ardor of a soul whose feelings had never been perverted, I saw only the happiness of softening the bitterness of my mother's last moments, and I pledged myself to continue her work of secret charity,—the charity of the heart. The first time that I saw my father ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... right,' he cried, 'I find him a prowler, breaking all rules of discipline. A perverted, impudent rascal! An example shall be set to my school, sir. We have been falling lax. What! I find the puppy in my garden whistling—he confesses—for one of my servants—here, Mr. Boddy, if you please. My school shall see that none insult me with impunity!' He laid ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... nature corrupted, there would be no diversity. Now, truth and right is one; and yet we judge not one thing, we think not aright. Yet is the original impulse true to its purpose, but, in its passage through the many channels of the mind, is strangely perverted. It is eloquently said by a modern writer, a deep thinker, "Thus does the conscience of man project itself athwart whatsoever of knowledge, or surmise, or imagination, understanding, faculty, acquirement, or natural disposition he has in him; and, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... being represented. These more educated foreigners usually kept their names, sometimes with slight modifications which do not make them unrecognizable. Thus, Bouverie, literally "ox-farm," is generally found in its unaltered form, though the London Directory has also examples of the perverted Buffery. But the majority of the immigrants were of the artisan class and illiterate. This explains the extraordinary disappearance, in the course of two centuries, of the thousands of French names which were introduced between ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... state and the people; or of the necessity of taking from Court favourites the nomination of officers to the charge of all districts and all fiscal and judicial Courts, and to the command of all corps and establishments, in order to render them efficient and honest, and prevent justice from being perverted, and the revenues of the state from being absorbed on their way to the treasury, they took no heed. Court favourites retained their powers, and the King and his minister relied entirely, as heretofore, upon the reports of the news-writers, who attend officially ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... object of worship, but because the Gypsy language, descending directly from the Sanskrit, has retained in its primitive exalted sense a word which the English language has received only in its debased and perverted sense. The Teutonic words devil, teufel, diuval, djofull, djevful, may all be traced back to the Zend dev, [97] a name in which is implicitly contained the record of the oldest monotheistic revolution ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... which had so recently been made a general cause, and who would soon be undermining the work of their own hands. The Pacification of Ghent would never be maintained in letter and spirit by the vicegerent of Philip; for however its sense might be commented upon or perverted, the treaty, while it recognized Catholicism as the state religion, conceded, to a certain extent, liberty of conscience. An immense stride had been taken, by abolishing the edicts, and prohibiting persecution. If that step were ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... superb in his impetuous sensuality. It is a rare thing to see a young man arrive in his native purity, at the age in which are developed, in all their powerful energy, those admirable instincts of love, which God has implanted in the heart of his creatures, and which, repressed, disguised, or perverted, may unseat the reason, or generate mad excesses and frightful crimes—but which, directed towards a great and noble passion, may and must, by their very violence, elevate man, through devotion and tenderness, to the limits ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... princes, the abuse of public law and justice, the fires and chains of religious persecution, the vengeance of God against the enemies of the saints, and the final judgment of sinners, when air and fire and water become the accusers of those who have perverted the powers of nature to purposes of cruelty. The poem is ill composed, its rhetoric is often strained or hard and metallic, its unrelieved horrors oppress the heart; but the cry of true passion is heard in its finer pages; from amid the turmoil and smoke, living tongues of flame seem to dart forth ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... by the enemy's horse, and dismissing all other considerations he took to the woods and walked rapidly away. Late in the evening he crossed the North Anna with a train of wagons, as driver of an unruly mule team, one of which had rewarded his driver in kind for brutal use of the whip and perverted English. The man groaning in the wagon informed Josiah concerning mules and their ways. After a day or two he was pleased to get back on his legs, for when bullets were not flying the army life was full of interest. A man who could cook well, shave an officer or shoe a ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... the shed; but she could not move. It was Danglar who was standing there. He seemed to sway a little on his feet, and the dark, sinister face seemed blotched, and he seemed to smile as though possessed of some unholy and perverted ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... examined it closely and, on the pilaster, I found only a small buckler suspended as an ornament by a little chain attached by the sculptor to a little lion's mouth, like those we see serving as door-knockers or as water-cocks."—Perverted sensations and delirious conceptions of this kind would be regarded by physicians as the symptoms of mental derangement, and we are only in the early months of the year 1789!—In such excitable and over-excited brains the powerful fascination of words is about to create phantoms, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... forms of lawlessness which had been rampant in pre-British days under the name of dacoity. Schools and colleges were found to be honeycombed with secret societies, and a flood of light was suddenly thrown on the disastrous workings of an educational system that had been slowly perverted to such ends under the very eyes of the Government that was supposed to direct and ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... the babbling youth had been taught to speak a few words, he begged to be taken back to the dungeon. Only cold and dismal silence seemed to satisfy him. All that gave pleasure to others gave his perverted senses only pain. The sweetest music was a source of anguish to him, and he could eat only his black crust without ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... of justice seems to contain many excellent features," said he, musingly. "Your laws have a splendid foundation of equality, and cannot be arbitrarily perverted and abused to shield wrong and injustice. I am astonished that, with this code of Frederick II. in your hand, you were not able to render harmless and silence forever all those seditious and revolutionary spirits that recently infested Berlin, and now have made Prussia ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... for delivering them bound and helpless to their "capitalist oppressers." To this sorry pass had the perpetual disputes of peace brought the workmen under stress of war! Rates of pay did not enter into the dispute—never in their lives had they earned such wages—its origin led in a queer perverted sense of loyalty to the trade unions, and to those members who had gone forth to fight. "What will our folks say," asked the men of one another, "when they come home from the war, if we have given away in their absence all that they fought for during long years?" ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... this constancy, this passion, is no poetical fiction. It is actual, and dwells in its greatest purity amongst that class of mankind whom we term rude, uneducated. We are the educated, not the perverted. But read this story with attention, I implore you. I am tranquil to-day, for I have been employed upon this narration: you see by my writing that I am not so agitated as usual. I read and re-read this tale, ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... then give out in a manly and somewhat pompous address what has before been mentioned, namely, that he has seen the fatal way in which the hospitality of England has been perverted hitherto, accapare'd by a few cooks with green trays. (He must use a good deal of French in his language, for that is considered very gentlemanlike by vulgar people.) He will take a set of chambers in Canton Gardens, ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... artist's sense, must have been utterly dead. They might as well have employed Burne-Jones to illustrate Martin Chuzzlewit. It would not have been more ludicrous than putting this portrayer of evil puppets, with their thin lines like wire and their small faces like perverted children's, to trace against the grand barbaric forests the sin and the sorrow ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... as yet more her judgment than her heart that was perverted. But had she spoken out what was in her thoughts as she looked over the great wallowing water, she would have merely said that for all that Liftore was no worse than other men. They were all the same. It was very unpleasant; but how could a lady help ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... he said, "who completely altered my views of life, and made me see how perverted and unnatural are our ideas of sex and love and morals, and, in short, of everything. She was an ignorant peasant girl who lived in a neighbouring village, but a woman of rare mind and character. I shall never forget her, nor what I owe her. I was a young fellow of some twenty-one years ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... early adolescence he finds within himself a wonderful quickening of mind,—impulses, feelings, longings that he does not understand. These impulses, feelings, longings, perplex him, it may be for years. They reach out vaguely, blindly toward the opposite sex, sometimes in a perverted way, but oftener naturally and honestly. Then the young man falls in love. At once his more or less vague, cloudy, incoherent, formless feelings and purposes are concentrated, directed, and fixed in devotion to a young woman whom he idealizes, almost deifies. ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... joys missed!—so many gracious and helpful sentiments discarded!—all the best of his years given over to eager pursuit of gold,—not because he cared for gold really, but because, owing to a false social system which perverted the moral sense, it seemed necessary to happiness. Yet he had proved it to be the very last thing that could make a man happy. The more money, the less enjoyment of it—the greater the wealth, the less the content. Was this according to ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... of it exhibited in the monastic orders, be ever written, this work will be of the greatest importance:—it will show the means by which dominion was obtained over the minds of the ignorant; how the most sacred mysteries were perverted; and frauds, which can hardly be termed pious, used to support institutions which can scarcely be called religious. That the spirits of the dead should be permitted to return to earth, under circumstances the most grotesque, to support the doctrines of masses for the dead, purgatory and propitiatory ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... drained in the name of good fellowship; money which is wanted for legitimate purposes is squandered under the mask of a noble and free generosity, and all that the small imaginations of a number of persons of perverted intellects could enable them to do, has been done from time to time, to impart a kind of lustre to intemperance and all its ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... strange to watch the women as the talk went on. The woman within them had died, there was nothing of it left to which we could appeal; everything about them was perverted, unnatural. I looked at the insensitive faces and then at the sensitive face of the child, and entered deeper than ever into the mercifulness ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... Liberty shall soon, indignant, raise Red on his hills his beacon's comet blaze; 775 Bid from on high his lonely cannon sound, And on ten thousand hearths his shout rebound; His larum-bell from village-tow'r to tow'r Swing on th' astounded ear it's dull undying roar: Yet, yet rejoice, tho' Pride's perverted ire 780 Rouze Hell's own aid, and wrap thy hills in fire. Lo! from th' innocuous flames, a lovely birth! With it's own Virtues springs another earth: Nature, as in her prime, her virgin reign Begins, and Love and Truth compose her train; 785 With ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... by introducing a sort of etiquette, quite different from the conventions above noticed,—a set of manners, as it may almost be called, which had the strongest and most beneficial influence—though, like all strong and good things, it might be perverted—on fiction generally. In this all sorts of nice things, as in the original prescription for what girls are made of, were included—variety, gaiety, colour, surprise, a complete contempt of the contemptible, or of that large part of it which contains priggishness, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... account I heard at Lord Orkney's. The Bishop of Chester,(11) a high Tory, was against the Court. The Duchess of Marlborough sent for him some months ago, to justify herself to him in relation to the Queen, and showed him letters, and told him stories, which the weak man believed, and was perverted. Nite MD. ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... risked anything of the sort. His genius ran to catering, "white man for white men" and to the inventing, elaborating, and retailing of scandalous gossip with asinine unction and impudent delight. But now his mind was perverted by the pangs of wounded vanity and of thwarted passion. In this state of moral weakness Schomberg allowed himself to ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... their cold chisel-tortured marble. It is open to critics of the school of Lessing to object that here is the suicide of sculpture. It is easy to remark that those strained postures and writhen limbs may have perverted the taste of lesser craftsmen. Yet if Michael Angelo was called to carve Medicean statues after the sack of Rome and the fall of Florence—if he was obliged in sober sadness to make sculpture a fit language for his sorrow-laden heart—how could he have wrought more ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... originally expressive of some one of that Being's attributes. But in course of time these words have lost their force—their meaning has been forgotten—and they have come to be mere proper names, designative but not significative. Here is material for the perverted imagination to work upon. A separate being is imagined answering to each of the names; and so the nomina become numina.[1112] Many gods are substituted for one; and the idea of God is instantly lowered. The gods have ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... bonnet-pins. [Laughter.] The sharp points of those pins have made me a little doubtful about sovran woman at times—a little apt to suspect that in private life her name is Mrs. Harris [laughter], but I must be careful about what I say in this connection lest it should be supposed that I have been perverted. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Its charm lay essentially in its simplicity, and to give it full development, retaining unimpaired meanwhile such original excellences as Nature in Sambo shapes and inspires, was the task of the time. But the task fell into bungling hands. The intuitive utterance of the art was misapprehended or perverted altogether. Its naive misconceits were construed into coarse blunders; its pleasing incongruities were resolved into meaningless jargon. Gibberish became the staple of its composition. Slang phrases and crude jests, all odds and ends of vulgar sentiment, without regard to the idiosyncrasies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... justifiable to claim St. Augustine as a mystic, since there are important parts of his teaching which have no affinity to Mysticism; but it touched him on one side, and he remained half a Platonist. His natural sympathy with Mysticism was not destroyed by the vulgar and perverted forms of it with which he was first brought in contact. The Manicheans and Gnostics only taught him to distinguish true Mysticism from false: he soon saw through the pretensions of these sectaries, while he was not ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... with sudden severity, such as startled him. 'Never say so, Louis. She was a mere child, educated for that sole purpose, her most sweet and docile nature wasted and perverted.' ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... subject to convulsions of so long duration and so violent in character, that he had never, in all his practice, seen the like; and that she suffered horribly. He adds,—"Here is what happened during her first convulsion-fits. This unhappy girl, whose instinct was perverted by intensity of pain, earnestly entreated the persons present to press upon her with such force as at any other time would have produced the most serious injury. I had the greatest difficulty to prevent those around her from acceding to her urgent requests that they would kneel ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... with much pleasure a collection of old ballads, to which I see, Sir, you have contributed with your usual benevolence. Continue this kindness to the public, and smile as I do, when the pains you take for them are misunderstood or perverted. Authors must content themselves with hoping that two or three Intelligent persons in an age will understand the merit of their writings, and those authors are bound in good breeding to Suppose that the public in general is enlightened. They who arc in the secret know how few of that ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... the system with a multitude of general and special enactments which render the land laws complicated, subject the titles to uncertainty, and the purchasers often to oppression and wrong. Laws which were intended for the "common benefit" have been perverted so that large quantities of land are vesting in single ownerships. From the multitude and character of the laws, this consequence seems incapable ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... earthly part been wrought upon by Rappaccini's skill,—as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death; and thus the poor victim of man's ingenuity and of thwarted nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted wisdom, perished there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni. Just at that moment Professor Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the window, and called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror, to the thunderstricken man of science, "Rappaccini! ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... home to France with every ship. The intendant wrote dispatches of wearisome length, rehearsing the governor's usurpations, insults, and incompetence. "Disorder," he told the minister, "rules everywhere. Universal confusion prevails; justice is openly perverted, and violence supported by authority determines everything." In language quite as unrestrained Frontenac recounted in detail the difficulties with which he had to contend owing to the intendant's obstinacy, intrigue, and dishonesty. The minister, appalled by the bewildering contradictions, could ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... a notorious burglar found in possession of a jemmy; it is admitted on all hands that he will use it as soon as he gets a chance; there is no doubt about this; how perverted should we not consider the ingenuity of one who tried to persuade us we were wrong in thinking that the burglar compassed the possession of the jemmy by means involving ideas, however vague in the first instance, of applying it ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... may be perverted by an impenitent heart to its own undoing. There is no falser notion than that expressed in the French proverb, Tout comprendre est tout pardonner (To understand everything is to pardon everything), for it means that man is the mere creature of circumstances ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... and showed his gratitude for his promotion by sending to Tyburn men who, as every barrister in the Inns of Court knew, were guilty of no offence at all. He richly deserved to have been excepted from the Act of Grace, and left to the vengeance of the laws which he had so foully perverted. The return which he made for the clemency which spared him was most characteristic. He missed no opportunity of thwarting and damaging the Government which had saved him from the gallows. Having shed innocent blood for the purpose of enabling James to keep up thirty thousand troops without ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... honourable, honest, hard-working men made the gazing stock of a parcel of pampered perverted fools, for the fun of 'a change' to gratify their contempt for the blue-shirt and thick boots who had dared, mucky and muddy, to come out of their deep wet holes to hamper these gods of the land in their dog's ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... not the Schools Distorted by pedantic rules, With patience wrought, such logic vain Had ne'er perverted thus thy brain: For Genius never gave delight By means of what offends the sight: Nor hadst thou deem'd, with folly mad, Thou could'st to Nature's beauties add, By taking from her that which gives The best assurance that she lives; By imperfection ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... pass to an examination of the Medicean tyranny (pp. 34-49). This is one of the masterpieces of Guicciardini's analysis. He shows how the administration of justice, the distribution of public honors, and the foreign policy of the republic were perverted by this family. He condemns Cosimo's tyrannical application of fines and imposts (p. 68), Piero the younger's insolence (p. 46), and Lorenzo's appropriation of the public moneys to his private use (p. 43). Yet while setting forth the vices of this tyranny in ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... other words, the truth. If things are shown to him in their connection, his soul perceives them thus as a conception. But if, as often happens, things are brought before his mind singly, or piecemeal, and in fragments, then the natural disposition to see correctly is perverted to the opposite, and the healthy mind is ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... worth. But he gloried in his bondage, and rattled his chains as gleefully as if he were discoursing sweet music. What she announced oracularly, he attempted to demonstrate by bald and feeble arguments. He was the false understanding to her perverted will. ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... to observe the perverted understanding and obstinate temper of Madame Montoni; but, not less grieved for her sufferings, she looked round for some alleviating circumstance to offer her. 'Your situation is, perhaps, not so desperate, dear madam,' said Emily, 'as you may imagine. The Signor may represent his affairs to be ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... was centered on her. Poor Doctor! How things had changed from the days when his mobs would meet the troops shot for shot in the streets of Alcira, shouting vivas for the Federal Republic!... In his solitude and in all the dejection coming from the defeat of his perverted ideas, he took more than ever to music. He had but one joy left him. Leonora loved music as much as he. She learned her lessons rapidly; and soon could accompany her father's violoncello on the piano. They would spend the days playing together, going through the whole pile of music sheets ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... man moves in the midst of a badly-lit district of many pitfalls. It is the same with a man at a desk, before whom pass many papers representing transactions of merchandise and whose business it is to take a proprietary bite out of each. He develops a perverted look at life, and a bad bill of moral health. There is no exception to this, though he conduct a weekly bible lesson for the young, even move his chair to a church every ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... Cottin was much more celebrated than George Sand is now. For all her books were read, and by everybody. Notwithstanding the great merits of George Sand's style, her plots and her characters are so exaggerated and so unnatural, and her morality is so perverted, that we have ceased ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... individualisation of penalties is suggested as being far more efficacious than the uniform and injurious punishment of detention in prison; so that while society defends itself, it tends to improve the perverted faculties of criminals, or where improvement is impossible, to utilise them in their natural state, following the example set by nature in the transformation of injurious parasitical relationships into pacific and mutually ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... How often did Cremes wish himself far distant from such a diabolical company, and now dreaded the fatal consequence which threatened him. His blood ran chill at his heart, and joy and rapture were perverted to amazement and horror!—When Esculapius perceived it had made a sufficient impression on his guest, he thus addressed him: "Know, Cremes, it is Esculapius who has thus entertained you, and what you have beheld is a true image of the deceitfulness and misery inseparable from luxury and intemperance. ...
— A Lecture on the Preservation of Health • Thomas Garnett, M.D.
... second depredator. Such, on sober reflection, is the judgment I have formed concerning the pilfering disposition of the Mandingo Negroes towards myself. Notwithstanding I was so great a sufferer by it, I do not consider that their natural sense of justice was perverted or extinguished; it was overpowered only for the moment, by the strength of a temptation which it required ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero (for we except Claudius from part of the censure), while discriminated from each other by some peculiar circumstances, exhibited the most flagrant acts of licentiousness and perverted authority. The most abominable lust, the most extravagant luxury, the most shameful rapaciousness, and the most inhuman cruelty, constitute the general characteristics of those capricious and detestable ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... house nine times during that year in possession of bailiffs; while, in addition to these anxieties, he had also the pain of fancying that the eyes of enemies and spies were upon him, even under his own roof, and that his every hasty word and look were interpreted in the most perverted light. ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... behind them. But as has been the case with other great philosophers, and with Plato and Aristotle themselves, what was really permanent and original could not be understood by the next generation, while a perverted logic carried out his chance expressions with an illogical consistency. His simple and noble thoughts, like those of the great Eleatic, soon degenerated into a mere strife of words. And when thus reduced to mere words, they seem to have exercised a far wider influence in the cities of ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... after service, or to attend death-beds of repentance; here was that suffering entity, the Sinner, alone with him, weak in her strength and strong through her weakness, and with her delicate, guilty, perverted impulses he had to deal, and no longer with pulpit abstractions. But while they stood thus, another turn in the affairs which revolved around the lonely barn carried with it a new sound; a horse's trot was plainly heard, likewise the humorous lilt ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... thoughts were occasionally reverting to Cicada. His nature was not, perhaps, so perverted as to think about persons of such condition and position in life as Cicada; but since he had heard the discussion about women, and their several classifications, he had somehow become speculative in his sentiments, and ambitious of testing all those ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... nothing—or she meant mischief. Why, he could not say. She was quit of him at her own desire. She had made a mouthful of his modest fortune. If she had somehow guessed the real man behind that mask of scars, and from some obscure, perverted motive meant to bring shipwreck to both of them once more, Hollister felt that he would strangle her without ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... competitors, and the games long maintained a dignity second only to the Olympic, over which indeed they had some advantages; first, that they were not abused for the purpose of promoting petty jealousies and antipathies of any administering state, as the Olympic games were perverted by the Eleans on more than one occasion; next, that they comprised music and poetry as well as bodily display. From the circumstances attending their foundation, the Pythian games deserved, even more than the Olympic, the title bestowed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... genuine negro was a terrible aristocrat,—their pride in their own and their master's dignity, together with their overflowing and never-failing animal spirits, both during hours of labor and leisure, altogether, made up an aggregation of joyous simplicity and fidelity—when not perverted by harsh treatment—that ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... monstrosities. Bette is the poor relation who, unlike Pons, revenges herself for her humiliations and the insults bestowed on her. She aids in the pecuniary and moral ruin of the Hulot family, acts in cold blood, and attains her object before she dies. She is not the only perverted nature delineated. There is the Baron Hulot, whose odious licentiousness brings him to a veritable cretinism. There is Crevel, a grotesque, contemptible dupe; there are the Marneffes, sinks of corruption; and, with these, other minor characters—the ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... cords, are affected by the alcohol more readily than the coarser membranous textures of other parts of the body, and give rise to a series of troublesome conditions, which are too often attributed to other than the true causes. Some of these are thus described: "The perverted condition of the membranous covering of the nerves gives rise to pressure within the sheath of the nerve, and to pain as a consequence. To the pain thus excited the term neuralgia is commonly applied, or 'tic;' or, if the ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... or economico-social, doctrine. The one party starts from the assumption that man is naturally evil, born in original sin, and that it is through grace that he becomes good, if indeed he ever does become good; and the other from the assumption that man is naturally good and is subsequently perverted by society. And these two theories really amount to the same thing, for in both the individual is opposed to society, as if the individual had preceded society and therefore were destined to survive it. And both ethics are ethics ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... on as the policy of our Church, be right, that she cannot get a single man, of all she sends out to China, to think so. Can it be that the missionary work is so subversive of right reason, or of correct judgment, or of conscientiousness, that all become perverted by engaging in it? ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... septenaries, twenty-one years, so that, according to the prevalent idea, her whole frame would have been thrice made over, counting from her birth, she would revert to the natural standard of health of mind and feelings from which she had been so long perverted. The thought of any other motive than love being sufficient to induce Richard to become her suitor had not occurred to him. He had married early, at that happy period when interested motives are least apt to influence the choice; and his single idea of marriage was, that it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... motionless, without a hat, in the full sun, craning his white head in the direction from which he knew the little model habitually came. The mistress of the house was herself returning from her annual visit to the Royal Academy, where she still went, as dogs, from some perverted sense, will go and sniff round other dogs to whom they have long taken a dislike. A loose-hanging veil depended from her mushroom-shaped and coloured hat. Her eyes were brightened by her visit. Mr. Stone soon seemed to take in who ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... enclosure he viewed a monstrosity that in some way resembled a human. Every reptile, every insect, every queer, misshapen animal not only looked human in some shocking manner, but also seemed to possess human characteristics. It seemed as though some demented creator with a perverted sense of humor had attempted to mock man by calling forth monsters ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... is final death: fain would an Ens not end in Nil; Love made the sentiment kindly good: the Priest perverted all to ill. ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... a wretch of a physician, her creature, to introduce a poisoned feather into his throat, under pretence of making him vomit, and thus to dispatch him, which had its intended effect. Thus died Clau'dius the First, the complicated diseases of whose infancy seemed to have affected and perverted all the faculties of his mind. He was succeeded by Nero, the son of Agrippi'na by her first husband. Nero ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... such [as they expected]. Now as to Zedekiah himself, while he heard the prophet speak, he believed him, and agreed to every thing as true, and supposed it was for his advantage; but then his friends perverted him, and dissuaded him from what the prophet advised, and obliged him to do what they pleased. Ezekiel also foretold in Babylon what calamities were coming upon the people, which when he heard, he sent accounts of them unto Jerusalem. But Zedekiah did not believe their prophecies, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... nasty. There is a certain intolerable nastiness about the real Ibsen: the same thing is in Strindberg and in most of the Norwegian and Swedish writings. It is with them a sort of phallic worship also, but now the worship is mental and perverted: the phallus is the real fetish, but it is the source of uncleanliness and corruption and death, it is the Moloch, worshipped ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... plenty of spirits to drink, appear to be thought the chief goods of human life; and among persons in every class, the acquisition of money is the one great object. Indeed this last passion, the love of gain, can scarcely be mentioned among the perverted habits by which the Australian colonies are infested, since it seems scarcely possible that the worship of Mammon can be practised more openly or carried much further than it is in the mother country. Yet the temptations to prefer gain to every thing else are unusually strong ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... Judea by miracle, and so on; but you are as well aware as I am that the subject has been mixed with a heap of nonsense both by Jews and Christians. And as to the connection of our race with Palestine, it has been perverted by superstition till it's as demoralizing as the old poor-law. The raff and scum go there to be maintained like able-bodied paupers, and to be taken special care of by the angel Gabriel when they die. It's no use fighting against facts. We must look where they point; that's ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... fault of our whole lifetime, Laura,' said he, recovering himself, when a few agitated words had passed on either side. 'I taught you to take my dictum for law, and abused your trusty and perverted all the best and most precious qualities. It is I who stand first to bear the blame, and would that I could bear all the suffering! But as it is, Laura, we must look to enduring the consequence all our lives, and give each other what support ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... spite of myself, and in spite of all that with most perverted pains he has made himself (so different from what he once was), can charm and interest, pain and perplex me:—not so D**, another disciple of the same school: he inspires me with the strongest antipathy I ever felt for a human being. Insignificant and disagreeable is his appearance, he ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... or social slumming, but surely the most despicable of all is artistic slumming. The religious teacher is at least supposed to be interested in the costermonger because he is a man; the politician is in some dim and perverted sense interested in the costermonger because he is a citizen; it is only the wretched writer who is interested in the costermonger merely because he is a costermonger. Nevertheless, so long as he is merely seeking impressions, or in other words copy, his trade, though dull, is honest. But when he ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... destruction. Nevertheless, the unhappy prince was executed. That Peter slew him with his own hand, and that Catherine poisoned him, are both fables. The real source of the tragedy is to be found in the monks who perverted the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... what you say that counts." He cannot see that voice and enunciation and pronunciation are essentials. But they are. You can no more help affecting the meaning of your words by the way you say them than you can prevent the expressions of your face from carrying a message; the message may be perverted by an uncouth habit, but it will no less surely insist ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... But ere it fail, tell me how fares your life. You have seen sorrow; but it comforts me To hear the language of a chastened soul From one perverted by my guilty hand. You speak the dialect of the redeemed— The Heaven-accepted. Tell me it is so, And ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... demanded that the judge should acknowledge his innocence, and prove it by condemning his calumniators to the punishment invoked against himself; that his wife, Bertrande de Rolls, should be secluded in some house where her mind could no longer be perverted, and, finally, that his innocence should be declared, and expenses and ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARTIN GUERRE • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... how it would do him good for me to harm his injurers. Some races are of revengeful kind, and will for years pursue their wrong, and sacrifice this world and the next for a moment's foul satisfaction, but methinks this comes of some black blood, perverted and never purified. And I doubt but men of true English birth are stouter than so to be twisted, though some of the women may take that turn, if their ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... evolution hypothesis. Derangements of function precede abnormalities of structure; hence the innervation must be at fault before the organ fails. Hence the art of healing should aim at grappling with the neuroses first, for the local trophic changes, perverted secretions, and structural abnormalities are the effects or symptoms, not the causes of the disease. Dr. J.L. Thudicum has studied the chemical constitution of the brain, and he holds that, "When the normal composition of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... exaggeration of nice gradations. He comprehends neither the character nor the style of the piece. The gradations then become so many blemishes; the accents, yells; the intentions of the poor composer are totally disfigured and perverted; while those of the orchestral conductor—however politely meant they may be—are none the less injurious: like the caresses of the ass in the fable, who crushed ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... of cure, based upon modes of appeasing the divine anger, or of thwarting satanic malice. The curing of disease by the casting out of devils, by prayers, were the means of relief from sickness recognized and commanded by the Bible. Thus Christianity perverted the beginning of a science of medicine to a system of attempted cure of disease ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... contain eight millions, while the kingdom of Portugal, together with those annexed to Arragon and the other provinces of the realm, must have numbered half as many. Here was a populous nation in a favoured land, but the foundation of all wealth was sapped by a perverted moral sentiment. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... calling itself civilized, where innocence had never been accounted sacred, where society had as yet taken no heed of the defenceless woman, no care for the helpless child; where the one was enslaved, and the other perverted: and here, under the form of womanhood and childhood, they were called upon to worship the promise of that brighter future, when peace should inherit the earth, and righteousness prevail over deceit, and gentleness with wisdom ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... was full of upsetting anomalies to Sir George. Even government was perverted. He had no desire for Unionism; to sit at Council with even win-the-war Liberals—once plain Grits. It needed political philosophy to make colleagues of such men as Calder, the Grit enemy of Toryism in the West, Crerar, the avowed apostle of free-trade, ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... to put a comma after the word "beginning." But, according to Critical Note 12th, "Proof-tests in grammar, if not in all argument, should be quoted literally; and even that which needs to be corrected, must never be perverted." The authorized text is this: "In the beginning God created the heaven and ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... routine, away from plagiarism and from disorder and anarchy, one word upon the most distasteful and effectual blight to which art is subject—the loss of naturalness, viz., affectation. Can anything be more irritating than an affected actor or singer, caterers to perverted tastes? ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... a perverted form of intelligent ambition—we are all natural gamblers because we have within us the quality which makes us willing to risk our own comfort, security and present happiness for a result that ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... that we can stop mouths of scoffers, or so clearly elucidate this dark part of the book of God, that it will no more be abused to the purposes of depravity; but believe that it may be made apparent that it hath been mistaken and perverted; and thereby rendered the more mischievous. ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... "St. George the Martyr in the Old Jails," "The Nine Holy Martyrs on Cabbage-Stalks," on the site of a former market garden, and the inexplicable "Church of the Resurrection on the Marmot," besides many others, some of which, I was told, bear quite unrepeatable names, probably perverted, like the last and like "St. Nicholas Louse's Misery," from words having originally some slight resemblance in sound, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... of Travel in General, a panegyric in the style of Turler, Lipsius, etc., containing most points of previous essays in praise of travel, and some new ones. For instance, in his defence of travel, he must answer the objection that travellers run the risk of being perverted from the ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... world-wide meaning, 'religious education,' are almost sure to induce, when restricted, in a narrow, inadequate sense, to the teaching of the schoolmaster; and next, to the divine commission of the minister of the gospel. 'Perverted as human nature is,' he remarked, 'there are cases in which, by appealing to its sentiments and affections, we may derive a very nice evidence respecting the divine origin of certain institutions and injunctions. For instance, the Chinese ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... two divisions of the united kingdoms. The reason probably is, that the consciousness of wealth, and a sturdy feeling of independence, which generally pervade the English nation, are, in a few individuals, perverted into absurdity, or at least peculiarity. The witty Irishman, on the contrary, adapts his general behaviour to that of the best society, or that which he thinks such; nor is it any part of the shrewd Scot's national character unnecessarily to draw upon himself public attention. These ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... enough; one can't listen to all this balderdash. The fact is all this sort of thing must be eradicated, and action taken to prevent the people being perverted. [To Colonel] Have ...
— The Light Shines in Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... in these matters, seldom feel much interest in the model boy of a moral story; not from any innate depravity of mind, which leads them to prefer vice to virtue, for no such preference can exist in the human breast,—no, not even in the perverted hearts of the worst of men—but because the model boy is like no other boy of their acquaintance. He does not resemble them, for he is a piece of unnatural perfection. He neither fights, nor cries, nor wishes to play when he ought to be busy with his lessons; he lectures like a parson, ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... GEISTLICHE DEPARTEMENT (Board of Religion, we may term it) reports that the Roman-Catholic Schools, which have been in use these eight years past, for children of soldiers belonging to that persuasion, "are, especially in Berlin, perverted, directly in the teeth of Royal Ordinance, 1732, to seducing Protestants into Catholicism;" annexed, or ready for annexing, "is the specific Report of Fiscal-General to this effect:"—upon which, what would it please his Majesty ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... great in the productions of the human mind—to nature, with all her fountains? Does not the spirit of man, in the great civilized nations at this day, travail with desire of knowing itself, its laws, its conditions, its means, its powers, its hopes? It studies with irregular, often blind and perverted, efforts; but still it studies—itself. And is not criticism, when it speaks, much bolder, more glowing and generous, ampler-spirited, more inspiring, and withal more enquiring and philosophical? During the whole period we speak of, poetry and criticism—in nature near akin—with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... few are the species in place of those destroyed? and when the owner of many sheep and much wheat desires variety—for he possesses this instinctive desire, albeit in conflict with and overborne by the perverted instinct of destruction—what is there left to him, beyond his very own, except the weeds that spring up in his fields under all skies, ringing him round with old-world monotonous forms, as tenacious of their undesired union with him as the rats and ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... which he was so much distinguished, by way of reply, enlarged on these words, "Alexander the coppersmith hath done me much evil, the Lord reward him according to his works." In short, the pulpit was perverted by both into the mean purposes of spite and malevolence, and every one catching a share of the infection, spoke of the clergymen as they ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... persons or parties. It will be made a vehicle for the freest thought, though not of random speculations; and with a generous appreciation of the various forms of truth and beauty, it will not fail to expose such instances of false sentiment, perverted taste and erroneous opinion, as may tend to vitiate the public mind or degrade the individual character. Nor will the literary department of the Harbinger be limited to criticism alone. It will receive contributions from various pens, in different ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... That yields obedience to her blest control, Proves how of her unjustly we complain, When she vouchsafes her gracious aid in vain In vain the self-abandon'd shift the blame Upon their stars, or fate's perverted name. Ne'er did a gladiator shun the stroke With nimbler turn, or more attentive look; Never did pilot's hand the vessel steer With more dexterity the shoals to clear Than with evasion quick and matchless art, By grace and virtue ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... back, and flopped down. Up jumped Dilly Boy, and the gin raced after him, murderously inclined to the crab. Half her blows were misses and the other half seriously embarrassed her husband, as his tumbles testified. She belaboured him impartially and with perverted goodwill from shoulder to heel, for she aimed invariably at the crab, and where is the woman who ever hit where she designed? The crab was merely tickling; the faithful spouse, with the tenderest motives, was cruelly beating ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... times and the abject and degraded vassal of the princes of the Austrian dynasty! Religious sentiment was not less energetic, it was not less profound, in the second epoch than in the first; but it was a sentiment perverted by superstition, envenomed by fanaticism, and which, far from associating itself, as before, with the propensity to illustrious deeds and grand enterprises, consecrated itself exclusively, moved by the former, to the most puerile rites and ridiculous exterior ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... a nation, which is the spiritual basis of socialism. In this sense, the nation as a whole has shown a fine socialistic temper; but the disgraceful exception has been the socialist party. The intense and perverted individualism of the so-called socialist is shown in another way. Whatever liberties a State may permit to its citizens, it is certain that no nation can be in a healthy condition unless the government keeps in its own hands the keys of birth and of death. The ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... freedom, reason and life, and leads men to commit crimes even the most filthy. One glass leads naturally to another, and that to many; just as stealing pennies leads to stealing dollars, and hundreds and thousands of dollars. A perverted appetite or passion can never be fully satisfied, but it leads to sorrow. All such evils must be shunned totally as ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... are parts of a general systematic plan of corruption, for advancing his fortune at the expense of his integrity; that he has, for that purpose, not only taken the opportunity of his own power, but made whole establishments, altered and perverted others, and created complete revolutions in the country's government, for the purpose of making the power which ought to be subservient to legal government subservient to corruption; that, when he could no longer cover these fraudulent proceedings by ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... life, there was the freshness of a morning existence, when the gloss of novelty was on every thing that met the eye; when the senses, not blunted by familiarity, were more keenly alive to the beautiful, and the mind, under the influence of a healthy and natural taste, was not perverted by philosophical theory; when the simple was necessarily connected with the beautiful, and the epicurean intellect, sated by repetition, had not begun to seek for stimulants in the fantastic and capricious. The realms of fancy were all untravelled, and its fairest flowers had not ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... character reading, a perverted revival of the ancient phrenology and physiognomy, has invaded the employment territory in America as the newest charlatanism. The study of the internal secretions, including blood and X-ray examinations, will surely assist the demand for a truly scientific estimate of constitution ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... itself why Commercialism should be false. Commerce and interchange of goods is of course a perfectly natural and healthy function of social life. Indeed, it is a function which should have a most beneficent influence in binding nations together. It is when that function is perverted to private gain that it becomes false. But of course without this perversion there would be no distinctively commercial class with interests opposed to those of ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... declension. The theologians had submerged the land in fruitless controversy; they hesitated not to commit open sin when occasion demanded it; they neglected the youth of the whole country; the ignorant peasantry were not blessed with even the crumbs of truth; the pulpit was perverted to a cathedra for the declamation of the hyperbolical rhetoric that a corrupt taste had imported from Spain and Italy: the Apocrypha was the all-important part of the Bible; and the private life of the clergy ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... near the Arbat, and he was living (although she did not of course know anything about that at the time) with one of his gaudiest mistresses. Her mother and father being dead she had no protection. She was defenceless. I don't think that he in any way perverted her innocence. I except that he was especially careful to shield her from his own manner of life (he had always his own queer tradition of honour which he effected indeed to despise), but she felt more than she perceived. The house was garish, ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... to be our safety in urging us ever on towards the Unity, we are constantly calling each new part the whole, saying we have found the idea, and casting ourselves on the couch of self-glorification. Thus the very need of unity is by our pride perverted to our ruin. We say we have found it, when we have it not. Hence, also, it becomes easy to refuse certain considerations, yea, certain facts, a place in our system—for the system will cease to be a system at all the moment they are acknowledged. They may have in them the very germ of life ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... social change in all societies. So, too, changes in political conditions, especially changes in law through new legislation, frequently prove a profound modifying influence in societies. Lastly, there are certain moral causes inherent in the individual, oftentimes involving perverted expressions of instinct, which lead to profound social changes. Such was the vice which Rome copied very largely from Greece, but which proved the final solvent ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... clarion, for that tells of blood and carnage, of tears and anguish, of widowhood and orphanage. It can be compared to nothing but a Babel of confusion in which their own folly is worse confounded. And yet, I am sorry to say it, the languages of all ages and nations have been too frequently perverted, and compiled into a heterogeneous mass of abstruse, metaphysical volumes, whose only recommendation is the elegant bindings in ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... and whence a corrected public opinion on all such matters ought constantly to flow, as truth emanates from the collisions of minds, is one of these reasons. The extent of the country, which separates men by distances that no fact can travel over without incurring the dangers of being perverted on the road, is another. But the most fatal of al he influences that tend to mislead the judgment of the American citizen, is to be found in the abuse of a machinery that was intended to produce an exactly contrary effect. If the tongue was given to man to communicate ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... and uniformity. But as these appearances are sure, all of them, to prove deceitful, philosophy will very soon find herself very unequally yoked with her new associate; and instead of regulating each principle, as they advance together, she is at every turn perverted to serve the purposes of superstition. For besides the unavoidable incoherences, which must be reconciled and adjusted, one may safely affirm, that all popular theology, especially the scholastic, has a kind of appetite for absurdity and contradiction. If that theology went not beyond reason ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... insults Mr. Knight turned perfectly livid with suppressed rage. But he did suppress it, for he had an object to gain which, to his perverted mind, was the most important in the whole world—namely, the final separation of his son ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... for her citizens from the citizens of other States.... And that the common government, to the promotion of which she contributed so largely, for the purpose of establishing justice and ensuring domestic tranquillity, would not, whilst the forms of the Constitution were observed, be so perverted in spirit as to inflict wrong and ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... contributed to so large a vote. To-day, sir, is the first time since that occasion that I have been officially called upon to record my judgment upon the same question. I have had no reason since that report was drawn to shake my belief that the right of suffrage will not be jeopardized or perverted if wielded by the hand of woman. Believing that now and desiring to act in accord with my action in 1858 in the Senate of my native State. I am glad of the opportunity to prove my consistency by ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of avarice. Financial gain seems to be the one end and aim of many ambitious men. They struggle day after day and year after year in the whirlpool of perverted enthusiasm, looking continuously for wealth and still more wealth. But there is something more in life than money. Health, for instance, is worth a thousand times, and self-respect should be rated a million times, more than money. Do not ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... but, as a means to profit you and me and the rest of us, 't was a thing of the grandest import. So, at first, he would not have had us keep our secret for a day; but I—by a sophistry that is only sophistic when we add to the consideration man's impotent and easily perverted will—brought him into my plans, showing him what an instrument for good vast riches would be in his hands. And he was the more easily persuaded because of the very grand purity of his nature. Sans doute, he felt it to be altogether true, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... sculpture. The people of the East, sometimes indeed depicting their deities in human forms, did not hesitate to change them into monsters, if the addition of another leg or another arm, a dog's head or a serpent's tail, could better express the emblem they represented. They perverted their images into allegorical deformities; and receded from the beautiful in proportion as they indulged their false conceptions of the sublime. Besides, a painter or a sculptor must have a clear idea presented ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... God, the source of all attraction, God descends to it in sympathy, and blends with it, as Christ says, 'Whoso loves Me, and keeps My word, My Father will love him, and we will come and take up our abode with him.' But if the perverted soul descends to the source of all repulsion, which is the devil, God will turn away from him, and he will hate God and love the devil, as our blessed Saviour says (Matt. vi.), 'No man can serve ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold |
