"Agonize" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... life, was the mainspring of his action and the secret of his character. The Puritan hated play. The Southerner loved to play. He dreamed of a life rich and full of spiritual and physical leisure. He enjoyed his religion. He did not agonize over it. His character was genial. He hated fear and drove it from his soul. He loved a fiddle and a banjo. He was brave. He was loyal to his friends. He loved his home and his kin. He despised ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... "Every woman ought to have something! Men have. It should be with women as with men—love a thing apart in their lives, not their whole existence! Then they wouldn't agonize and wear on each other so! I believe there's a chapter in that, for my ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... and his state can bear. Why has not man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, man is not a fly. Say what the use, were finer optics given, T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heaven? Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o'er, To smart and agonize at every pore? Or quick effluvia darting through the brain, Die of a rose in aromatic pain? If nature thundered in his opening ears, And stunned him with the music of the spheres, How would he wish that Heaven ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... boast, perhaps: yourself are judge, Who listened to the Legate's talk last week, And just as much they used to say in France. At any rate 'tis easy, all of it! No sketches first, no studies, that's long past: I do what many dream of, all their lives, —Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do, And fail in doing. I could count twenty such On twice your fingers, and not leave this town, Who strive—you don't know how the others strive To paint a little thing like that you smeared Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,— Yet ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... because we are conscious that it must condemn us—abjure the authority of the court because we have violated its jurisdiction; yes, when I reflect upon this, it is then that these visitations of gloom and wretchedness sometimes agonize my mind until it becomes dark and heated, like hell, and I curse both myself and my creed. Now, however, when this marriage shall have taken place, the great object of my life will be gained—the great struggle will be ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... do, and yet can much less be utterly idle; while to Wordsworth, basking in the sun, or loitering near an evening stream, is sufficient and satisfactory work. To Sartor, Nature is a divine tormentor—her works at once inspire and agonize him; Wordsworth loves her with the passion of a perpetual honeymoon. Both are intensely self-conscious; but Sartor's is the consciousness of disease, Wordsworth's of high health standing before a mirror. Both ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... little, fortified and wooded Island of Sainte Helene; and up the stream, apast the petty promontory of Pointe Saint Charles, stretched the low, umbrageous lapse of Nuns Island, whence the eye followed the bending flood, that trended towards where, with eternal toil and sullen roar, agonize for ever the hoary rapids of Lachine. In the other direction the eye roved downwards over Hochelaga and Longueuil, Longue Pointe and Pointe aux Trembles, towards where lay the islet-strewn shallows of Boucherville, and, lower yet, the village of Varennes. ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... with companions fit; And bid, with a good will, The serpent-fangs of ill Take their foul fill Of the foul fell it wore. Though a thousand serpent heads were raised to slay, A thousand twisting coils writhed where it lay, There lies the beast, there let it lie for me And agonize and rave; For Thou has raised my soul, Thy soul, to Thee! Thy soul, dear Lord, Thou hast been ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... mysterious thing. It is impossible to say that Leonora, in acting as she then did, was not filled with a sort of hatred of Edward's final virtue. She wanted, I think, to despise him. He was, she realized gone from her for good. Then let him suffer, let him agonize; let him, if possible, break and go to that Hell that is the abode of broken resolves. She might have taken a different line. It would have been so easy to send the girl away to stay with some friends; to have ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... thousand places, and in less than two hours the walls crashed in,—a mass of smoking, blackened ruins; whilst the children wandered through the streets, a prey to beings who were wild beasts in everything save the superior ingenuity of man to agonize and torture ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... disgraced; the once happy congregation be rent; its ministry be driven from the altar, and its sanctuary crumble to ruin? Shall our benevolent institutions fail, and our liberties be sacrificed? Shall God be grieved? Shall wailings from the bottomless pit hereafter reproach and agonize you as the cause of the ruin, perhaps of your children and children's children? Methinks one common pulsation beats in your hearts, and you answer, No—no. Methinks I see you rising in the majesty of freemen and Christians, in behalf of an injured ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... appeal to me, but never one of simple grief or sorrow. Its expression is rather of great dignity, and I remember watching in somewhat of awe one which grew near my childhood's home, as its branches writhed and twisted in a violent rain-storm, seeming then fairly to agonize, so tossed and buffeted were they by the wind. But soon the storm ceased, the sun shone on the rounded head of the willow, turning the raindrops to quickly vanishing diamonds, and the great tree breathed only a gentle and benignant peace. When, in later ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... call me here the wizard, boy, Of dark and subtle skill, To agonize but not destroy, To torture, not to kill. When swords are out and shriek and shout Leave little room for prayer, No fetter on man's arm or heart Hangs ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... thought made. Change your thought and you will change your condition. To agonize and struggle in a bad condition is like struggling in quicksand, you get in deeper. Tell your bad conditions to another and you multiply them. If the heavens are falling and the earth is slipping under your feet, grab a big Turkish towel, walk briskly into the supreme sanctuary ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... in human beings by that brutality is just as much a part of Nature as the brutality itself," he said, and he insisted that the supreme business of man, was to evolve a scheme of life on a higher plane, wherein the weak shall not be forced to agonize for the strong, so far as mankind can intervene to prevent it. Let man follow the dictates of pity and generosity in his own soul. They would never lead him astray. While Miss Du Prel laid the whole blame upon natural law, the Professor impeached humanity. Men, he declared, cry out against ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird |
