"Ugliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Lucid as if thro' crystal trembling, Yet soft as if suffused with sighs, To the long, fawn-like mouth, and chin, Lovelily tapering, less and less, Till by this very charm's excess, Like virtue on the verge of sin, It touched the bounds of ugliness. Here lookt as when they lived the shades Of some of Arno's dark-eyed maids— Such maids as should alone live on In dreams thus when their charms are gone: Some Mona Lisa on whose eyes A painter for whole years ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... accomplish the results. He will cease from trying to put the new ideas of the twentieth century into the old houses of the eighteenth or fifteenth even, and that beauty, which is fitness, will come forth from the tangle of ugliness everywhere. If, as the economist tells us, "cost measures lack of adjustment," then the perfectly adjusted house will not be costly in reality, it will be adapted to the production and protection of ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... hideous conceits imaginable, characterised the jewellery designs of Birmingham until about 1854-55, when a little more intelligence and enterprise was introduced, and our manufacturers learned that work well designed sold even better than the old-styled ugliness. A great advance has taken place during the past thirty years, and Birmingham jewellers now stand foremost in all matters of taste and design, the workmen of to-day ranking as artists indeed, even the commonest gilt ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... ugliness was as much a subject for pity as degradation or misery. Compare the following passage from Les Contemplations: Ce ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... picture which contemporaneous history gives us of these barbarians. In their faces was concentrated the ugliness of the hyena and the baboon. They tattooed their cheeks, to prevent the growth of their beards. They were short, thick-set, and with back bones curved almost into a semicircle. Herbs, roots and raw meat they devoured, tearing their food with their teeth or hewing it with their swords. To warm ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... us," writes De Maupassant, "forms for himself an illusion through which he views the world, be it poetic, sentimental, joyous, melancholy, or dismal; an illusion of beauty, which is a human convention; of ugliness, which is a matter of opinion; of truth, which, alas, is never immutable." And he concludes by asserting that the happiest artist is he who approaches most closely to the truth of things as he sees them ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... mark the long travail of man's ethical and social life, they were among the only "evidences" of religion a critical mind allowed itself—the most striking signs of something "greater than we know" working among the dust and ugliness of our common day. Attack wealth as wealth, possession as possession, and civilisation is undone. But bring the force of the social conscience to bear as keenly and ardently as you may, upon the separate activities of factory and household, farm and office; and from ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... footed the tight-rope of the galliambic measure and the swaying planks of various trochaic experiments; but his resolve to astonish is stronger than his desire to charm, and he lets technical skill carry him into such excesses of ugliness in verse as technical skill carried Liszt, and sometimes Berlioz, in music. Meredith has written lines which any poet who ever wrote in English would be proud of; he has also written lines as tuneless as a deal table and as rasping as a ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... below, and in due season turned in, in a place where true comfort consists in oblivion. The morning, as the doctor predicted, was clear, the fog was gone, and the little French village lay before us in all the beauty of ugliness. The houses were small, unpainted, and uninviting. Fish-flakes were spread on the beach, and the women were busy in turning the cod upon them. Boats were leaving the shore for the fishing-ground. Each of these was manned ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... She may be dull, sorrowful, troubled; she may be lost in tears and pallor, but she cannot be ugly. It is only when you rise into animal nature that you find ugliness." ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... These inscriptions belonged, of course, to the kings which made way for Donatello's prophets. The Zuccone must belong to the series of prophets; it is fruitless to speculate which. Cherichini may have inspired the portrait. Its ugliness is insuperable. It is not the vulgar ugliness of a caricature, nor is it the audacious embodiment of some hideous misshapen creature such as we find in Velasquez, in the Gobbo of Verona, or in the gargoyles of Notre Dame. There ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... Beauty and ugliness form a contrast which is presented to us every day of our lives, though, perhaps, we may not be much impressed by the fact. And this contrast is presented ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... how a woman could make everything she touched exquisite, to Neale who had only known Marise, subdued helplessly to the roughness of the rough things about her, Marise who had capitulated to America and surrendered to the ugliness of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... the table the soup-tureen out of which rose a fragrant column of steam. She was an old woman, her hair hidden under a black kerchief, and in her wrinkled face were strongly mingled the beauty of race and the ugliness of decay. I was in profound distress, and yet the peace of this saintly dwelling, the gaiety of the wood fire, the white table-cloth, the wine and the steaming dishes entered, little by little, into my soul. Whilst I ate I nearly forgot that I had come to the fireside of this priest to exchange ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... Miriam had been lying on the floor, because, years ago, the woman lying alone in Pinderwell House had brought the Canipers to the moor where George lived and was brutal and was going to marry her. But it could not be true, for, in some golden past, before this ugliness fell between her and beauty, she had promised to marry Zebedee. She held her head to think. No, of course she had given him no promise. They had come together like birds, like bees ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... spite of the clearing up of the matter of Sue's ugliness at the Grovers, a subtle change had taken place in the relationship of the two. Although they were together facing the first of the events that were to be like ports-of-call in the great voyage of their lives, they were not facing it with the same mutual understanding ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... the face of Lotys,—and that prettiness becomes like a cheap advertisement on a hoarding or a match- box! Contrast the perfect features, eyes and hair of the newest social 'beauty,'—with the magical expression, the glamour in the eyes of Lotys,—and perfection of feature becomes the rankest ugliness! Once in a hundred centuries a woman is born like Lotys, to drive men mad with desire for the unattainable—to fire them with such ambition as should make them emperors of the world, if they had but sufficient courage to snatch their thrones—and yet,—to ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... soon began to change visibly. The shades of ugliness that had so long hung over it vanished away. Its very angles seemed to grow less acute, and never, in its palmiest days, had it rejoiced in such bright coats of paint. But, with all the brightening up without and within, there was one most ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... desire to be merely beautiful seemed, if possible, to absorb the art of Corot even more completely than it did that of Ingres. Among the numerous pictures, sketches, and drawings which he left you will find weakness, repetitions, even commonplace, but ugliness never. An ugly set of lines is not to be found in Corot; the rhythm may sometimes be weak, but his lines never run out of metre. For the rhythm of line as well as of sound the artist must seek in his own soul; he will never find it in the inchoate and discordant ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... en Francaise, my true character," smiled Berthe. "I never could sacrifice my Gaelic taste to the hideous color mixtures and utilitarian ugliness of the English machine-made toilette. An Englishwoman can only be trusted with a blue serge, a plain gray traveling dress, or in the easy safety of black or white. They are not the 'glass of fashion and the mold of form.' ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... rarefied extension of it; moving, in triumph and in beauty, through 'an ampler ether, a diviner air.' It is a world where the hesitations and the pettinesses and the squalors of this earth have been fired out; a world where ugliness is a forgotten name, and lust itself has grown ethereal; where anguish has become a grace and death a glory, and love the beginning and the end of all. It is, too, the world of a poet, so that we reach it, not through melody nor through vision, but through the ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... and the head chief none to interfere. A fair price was paid for the block, and surveyors sent to it. The Ngatiawa good-humouredly encountered these with a band of old women well selected for their ugliness, whose appalling endearments effectually obstructed the survey work. Then, as Kingi threatened war, an armed force was sent to occupy the plot. After two days' firing upon a stockade erected there, the soldiers advanced and found it empty. Kingi, thus attacked, astutely made the disputed piece ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... but smaller. Of the human element—if human it can be called—all are savages of the lowest type and wildest aspect, their coarse shaggy hair hanging like loose thatch over low foreheads, and partially shading their little, bleary red eyes. Hideous are they to very deformity. Nor is their ugliness diminished, but rather heightened, by a variety of pigments—ochre, charcoal, and chalk—laid thick upon their faces and bodies with an admixture of seal-oil or blubber. The men are scantily clothed, with only one kind of garment, a piece of skin ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... who enters suddenly into a period of social change— especially change from a feudal past to a democratic present—is likely to regret the decay of things beautiful and the ugliness of things new. What of both I may yet discover in Japan I know not; but to-day, in these exotic streets, the old and the new mingle so well that one seems to set off the other. The line of tiny white telegraph poles carrying the world's news to papers printed in a mixture of Chinese ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... yet shows by his amused expression that he is probably conscious of its peculiarity or absurdity. In such cases "pretty" seems to be given the meaning of "funny" or "amusing." Nevertheless, we score this response as failure, since it betokens a rather infantile tolerance of ugliness. ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... the common people, the ugliness is more pleasant and sometimes becomes a kind of prettiness. The eyes are still too small and hardly able to open, but the faces are rounder, browner, more vivacious; and in the women remains a certain vagueness of feature, something childlike which ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... Billy thought he had achieved his aim at last. When he returned from the sea-side he brought with him a powerful dog of unknown breed and of the most colossal ugliness. He confided to me that he would not let him out on the street until his education was complete, "and then," said he, "there will be only one dog in the Ballybun census." I had my doubts, as I know the local ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... time induce in them an acetous fermentation (as milk sometimes sours during thunder); and from acid becoming acrid, they at length fall fairly in love with the Erinnyes, and henceforth dote upon destruction and ugliness as happier lovers do upon cosmical health and beauty. Concluding that the universe is a shabby affair, they like to make it out shabbier still,—and so, seldom brighten up till they have an ill thing to say. They are not persons toward whom it is easy to feel amiable. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... gently from side to side with a rolling swagger; and as his body rolled, his eye rolled too, and he looked this way and that with a jovial leer and a smile of contentment and amusement on his face. The smile and the merry eye redeemed his appearance from blank ugliness, but neither of them indicated a spiritual ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... less its beauty than its pathos. Having long discredited the old systems of mysticism, he now began to discredit the old appraisements of morality. He thought they wanted readjusting. Who was the moral man? Still more pertinently, who was the moral woman? The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... indifference to all man-made moral standards. They are beyond all that goes by the name of good and evil, in that the two are used indifferently for the furtherance of a purely aesthetic end. The Beyond-man discovers beauty in the abyss, and ugliness in mere worldly rectitude. Leonardo painted the Medusa head, with its charnel pallor and its crown of writhing snakes, no less lovingly than the sweet-tender face of the Christ of the Cenacolo, and the beauty is not less, though of an opposite sort. Shakespeare's ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Annie had not looked at her two seconds, before she saw that she was perfectly blind. Indeed she thought at first that she had no eyes at all; but as she kept gazing, fascinated with the strangeness and ugliness of the face, she discovered that the eyelids, though incapable of separating, were inconstant motion, and that a shrunken eye-ball underneath each kept rolling and turning ever, as if searching for something it could not find. She saw too that there was a light on the face, a light which came ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... Samson-strength of intellect or taste Shall bow the pillars of this temple chaste Of ugliness and unction. What is't they argue lengthily and late? The flame of patriot passion for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... it life, a great herd of cattle on the parada ground, weaving and milling before the rushes of yelling horsemen, intent on cutting out every steer in the herd. Beyond lay the corrals of peeled cottonwood, and a square house standing out stark and naked in the supreme ugliness of corrugated iron, yet still oddly homelike in a land where shelter was scarce. As he gazed, a mighty voice rose up to him from the midst of the turmoil, the blatting of calves, the mooing of cows and the hoarse thunder ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... room, like every room that faced the south, that night, was full of strange, spectral effects. The scrolls and the roses on the cheap yellow curtains that hung in the windows, were changed to hideous faces of variable size and ugliness. Their grotesque shadows on the floor mingled with other faces—horrible as antique masks—wrought by the magic of the moon from the gigantic flowers that adorned the narrow strip of carpet by the bedside. Her dresses, suspended ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... to take your pen in hand and write to me, has not the step itself the appearance of degradation? What meaning am I to give to your letter? Are you one of a rejected caste, and do you seek a friend far away from you? Or, are you afflicted with personal ugliness, yet feeling within you a noble soul which can give and receive a confidence? Alas, alas, the conclusion to be drawn is grievous. You have said too much, or too little; you have gone too far, or not far enough. Either let us drop this correspondence, or, if you continue ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... lovely in detail, but having this great virtue, that there shall be absolutely nothing which does not contribute to the effect of the whole; whereas in the natural landscape there is a redundancy which impresses only as redundance, and often an occurrence of marring features; not of ugliness only, but of ugliness in the wrong place. Ugliness has its proper virtue and use; but ugliness occurring at the wrong time (as if the negro servant, instead of standing behind the king, in Tintoret's picture, were to thrust his head in front of the noble features of his master) ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... though in a very different sense from that in which we are speaking. It was as a patriot, and not as an artist, that he congratulated himself on his American origin. There is a humorous struggle between his sense of the rawness and ugliness of his native land and the dogged patriotism befitting a descendant of the genuine New England Puritans. Hawthorne the novelist writhes at the discords which torture his delicate sensibilities at every step; but instantly Hawthorne the Yankee ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... at her almost as at an enemy, for his heart was so full of misery, his mind was so worn with weariness, that he began to lose the true appreciation of human relations, and to confuse the beauty near him with the ugliness ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... small head surmounted by closely cropped carotty thatch. His skin was drawn tight over the framework of his face, as though his Maker had been forced to observe the strictest economy in material. His complexion was brick red over a myriad freckles. His features preserved the irregular ugliness of the child I half remembered, but it was redeemed by light blue candid eyes set in a tight net of humorous lines, and by a large, mobile mouth, which, though it could shut grimly on occasions, yet, when relaxed in a smile, disarmed you by its ear-to-ear kindliness, and fascinated ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... facts, breathlessly, and in spite of herself accusingly,—and then waited for the explanation that would extenuate the apparent ugliness of his attitude toward her, and set all the world right for her again. As she looked into his face she felt that it must come. She noted compassionately how the shadows under the dark eyes had deepened; how weary the pose of the fine head; and for the moment she longed only to rest it ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... figure, occasioned a great murmuring among the company, insomuch that the ladies cried out, We must give our bride to this handsome young gentleman, and not to this ugly hump-back. Nor did they rest here, but uttered imprecations against the sultan, who, abusing his absolute power, would unite ugliness and beauty together. They also upbraided the bridegroom, and put him quite out of countenance, to the great satisfaction of the spectators, whose shouts for some time put a stop to the concert of music in the hall. At last the musicians began again, and ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... explains politeness as a conventional and systematic attempt to mask the egoism of human nature in the small affairs of life,—an egoism so repulsive that some such device is necessary for the purpose of concealing its ugliness. The relation which politeness bears to the true love of one's neighbor is analogous to that existing between justice as an affair of legality, and justice as the real integrity ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... very odd, but she had nothing else to say. As regarded the pecuniary considerations of the affair she left them altogether to her husband, feeling that in this way she could relieve herself from misgivings which might otherwise make her unhappy. "And after all I don't know that his ugliness signifies," she said to herself. And so she made up her mind that she would be loving and affectionate to him, and sat up till she heard his footsteps in the passage, in order that she might speak to him, and make him welcome to the privileges ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... beauty since she went away; she had entered into the life of the cultivated, the intellectually great. In spite of her deep affection for Aunt Raby, she came back to the ugliness and the sordid surroundings of home with a pang which she hated herself for feeling. She forgot Aunt Raby's sufferings for a moment in her uncouthness. She longed to shower riches, ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... outside the zone of awful ugliness which follows the British wherever they go. The docks were left behind and the ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... whispering as his tone, the man who had been kneeling by the tomb, had unobserved joined his associate and Egremont. He hardly reached the middle height; his form slender, but well proportioned; his pale countenance, slightly marked with the small pox, was redeemed from absolute ugliness by a highly-intellectual brow, and large dark eyes that indicated deep sensibility and great quickness of apprehension. Though young, he was already a little bald; he was dressed entirely in black; the fairness of his linen, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... pulled down and half built up; by scattered red brick villas, where the besmoked evergreens were sprinkled with a dirty powder, like untidy snuff-takers; by coal-dust paths and many varieties of ugliness; Stephen got to the top of ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... domestic animal. They recognised him as a sort of custodian of Percy, and on that account showed off before him, and demonstrated to Percy that he was no custodian of theirs. They freely discussed his ugliness and poverty within earshot. They patronised him without stint, and made a display of their own affluence in his presence. And when once or twice he put down his foot and interdicted some illegal ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... was given to me by London. The call came to me in a dirty street at night. The street was short and narrow, its ugliness softened here and there by the liquid lights of shops, the most beautiful of all standing at the corner. This was the fried-fish shop. It was a great night, because I was celebrating my seventh birthday, and I was proud and everything seemed to be sharing in ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... tree, Kill bird or beast our strength to stay, The vines, the hives our wants obey— Like spiders spreading nets, we take and slay As tragedy gives men delight, So the exchange of death and strife Still yields a pleasure infinite To the great world's triumphant life Nay seeming ugliness and pain Avert returning Chaos' reign— Thus the whole world's a comedy, And they who by philosophy Unite themselves to God, will see In ugliness and evil nought But beauteous ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... made us familiar with the habits, and specimens in the Zoological Gardens, in a pannage close to that of the "painted pig," show us the form and ugliness, of the bush pig and flat pig (Choiropotamus Africanus) of that southern land, with their long heads, long legs, upturned tails, and horrid tusks. They have a strange habit of kneeling on their fore-legs. In South Africa they abound; and the natives—our excellent ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... thinking and lecturing on land reform, and was regarded as a very intense -disciple of Herbert Spencer and Henry George a singular combination, as I see it now. On my way westward, that summer day in 1887, rural life presented itself from an entirely new angle. The ugliness, the endless drudgery, and the loneliness of the farmer's lot smote me with stern insistence. I ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... not been in the camp a week before McWha's "ugliness" to her had aroused even the Boss's resentment, and the Boss was a just man. Of course, it was generally recognized that McWha was not bound, by any law or obligation, to take any notice of the child, still less to "make a fuss over her," with the rest of the camp. But ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... cottage cannot please by its propriety, for it can only be adapted to the ugliness around; and, as it ought to be, and cannot but be, adapted to this, it is still less able to please by its beauty. How, then, can it please? There is no pretense to gayety in its appearance, no green flower-pots in ornamental lattices; but the substantial style of ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... the worst of Mr. Browning's admirers certainly, will say that these grotesque objects exist in real life, and therefore they ought to be, at least may be, described in art. But though pleasure is not the end of poetry, pleasing is a condition of poetry. An exceptional monstrosity of horrid ugliness cannot be made pleasing, except it be made to suggest—to recall—the perfection, the beauty, from which it is a deviation. Perhaps in extreme cases no art is equal to this; but then such self-imposed problems should not be worked by the artist; these ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... a few workmen and he gives them plenty of time. The place makes a little vignette, leaves an impression—the quiet white house in its garden on the road by the wide, clear river, without the smoke, the bustle, the ugliness, of so much of our modern industry. It struck me as an effort Mr. Ruskin might have inspired and Mr. William Morris—though that be much to ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... ever he inflicts any." To inflict pain was not, indeed, in his way, but to suffer it was his too-frequent lot. From first to last he was protesting against hideousness, rawness, vulgarity, and commonplace; craving for sweetness, light, beauty and colour, instead of the bitterness, the ugliness, the gloom and the drab which provided such large portions of English life. "The [Greek: euphnes] is the man who turns towards sweetness and light; the [Greek: aphnes] on the other hand is our Philistine." "I do not much believe in good being done by a man unless he can ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... close to the Nile on the eastern side of the island, is not one of those rugged, majestic buildings, full of grandeur and splendor, which can bear, can "carry off," as it were, a cruelly imposed ugliness without being affected as a whole. It is, on the contrary, a small, almost an airy, and a femininely perfect thing, in which a singular loveliness of form was combined with a singular loveliness of color. The ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... that live in the moat of the Chateau de Miramel (in the zone of the armies in France) are of an age and ugliness incredible and of a superlative cynicism. One of them—local tradition pointed to a one-eyed old reprobate with a yellow face—is the richer these hundred years past by an English ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... 'twon't hurt him. It will do him good to freeze some of the ugliness out of him. Besides it's best to wait awhile. Perhaps, somebody coming along will help him out, and that will ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... it makes us uglier, as not appertaining to it: a little more or less ugliness in decrepitude is hardly worth considering, there being quite enough of it from other quarters: I ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... a line to paint Their moral ugliness, I'm not a saint. Not one of those self-constituted saints, Quacks—not physicians—in the cure of souls, Censors who sniff out mortal taints, And call the devil over his own coals— Those pseudo Privy Councillors of God, Who write down judgments with a pen hard-nibb'd; Ushers of Beelzebub's Black ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the name of Ali when he passed into the service of Madame Bonaparte. He was of more than Arabic ugliness, and had a wicked look. I recall in this connection a little incident which took place at Malmaison, which will give an idea of his character. One day, while playing on the lawn of the chateau, I unintentionally threw him down while running; and furious at his fall, he rose up, drew his poniard, ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... above the altar, is deposited this far-famed effigy of the Holy Galilean virgin—a hideous female negro, carved in wood, and holding an infant Jesus in her arms of the same hue and material; and exhibited in its extremity of ugliness by the reflected glare of the silver and diamonds, and gems of every description, by which she is surrounded. Chests, mimic altars, models of ships, crowns and sceptres, chalices and crosses of gold and silver and enamel, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... who were already on the high road to the coming ideal of universal ugliness, Antinous Lebeau was remarkable for his ugliness, and one might have said that he positively threw zeal, too much zeal, into the matter, though he was not hideous like Mirabeau, who made the people exclaim: "Oh! the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... city life are thus largely reinterpreted; and if so more efficiently combated; since the poverty, squalor and ugliness of our cities, their disease and their intemperance, their ignorance, dulness and mental defect, their vice and crime are thus capable not only of separate treatment but of an increasingly unified civic hygiene, and this in the widest sense, material and moral, economic ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... Ugliness has its compensations, thought I. Nobody makes such a fuss over a pretty girl at home (they are not so uncommon), and I will never bring one to Paris again. Thank Heaven! we are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... bring that up as a claim," he said; "what was I born for except to be useful to you? But I love you so; if you could only make up your mind to endure my ugliness and ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... derived from works of art. That sense has been destroyed. The Japanese alone, of all moderns, still foster an ingenuous affection which prompts them to cling closely to these things of beauty, to press them to their hearts as loving friends; the rest of us, surrounded by a world of sordid ugliness, have become positively afraid of their fair but reproachful shapes. Ah, Mr. van Koppen, that was the age of true refinement, the age of gold! Nowadays—nowadays we only carry ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... are some exceptions—admire the aristocracy, and consider them pinks, the aristocracy who admire the Emperor of Austria, and adored the Emperor of Russia till he became old, ugly, and unfortunate, when their adoration instantly terminated; for what is more ungenteel than age, ugliness, and misfortune! The beau-ideal with those of the lower classes, with peasants and mechanics, is some flourishing railroad contractor—look, for example, how they worship Mr. Flamson. {330} This person makes his grand debut in the year '39, at a public meeting in the principal ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... their children the potential influence of kindness to dumb animals and to birds. By it they will conquer what of viciousness, ugliness, or wildness is often the character of their beasts of burden; and they will find, by the almost total eradication of the destructive flies and insects which are the scourge of their crops, the value of the lives of birds and toads to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Zebedee, maintained an obstinate silence; and Thomas had evidently not made up his mind to say anything, but was still weighing the matter. He kept his gaze attentively fixed on Christ and Judas as they sat together. And that strange proximity of divine beauty and monstrous ugliness, of a man with a benign look, and of an octopus with immense, motionless, dully greedy eyes, oppressed his mind ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... their own ugliness, the five girls stood in a row distorting their pretty faces with hideous grins and grimaces until they were weak from laughing. The banging of the car door sent them scuttling into their seats. A portly old gentleman passed through the car to the rear platform, ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... I, how much stronger his body, that he could do anything with me if he liked. He asked me, very politely, whether I'd mind blowing out the candle and I did it at once. He watched me as I walked across the floor and I felt ashamed of my thinness and my ugliness and I know that he knew that I was ashamed. After the light was blown out I heard him settle into his bed with a great heavy plop. I couldn't sleep for a long time, and at every movement that he made I felt as though he were laughing at me. And yet with ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... might be an Assyrian tiara, only ending behind in a floating train. This head rests upon a beautifully developed neck and throat. All power being given to the awful enemy, he is beautiful where he pleases, in order to point and envenom his ghostly ugliness. The mouth, in that stage of the apocalypse which Sir John Herschel was able to arrest in his eighteen- inch mirror, is amply developed. Brutalities unspeakable sit upon the upper lip, which is confluent with a snout; for separate nostrils there ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... was drawn in with careless angles and lines by a mere stroke or two; and surely no painter, no builder save the utilitarian backwoodsman, would have left it with no relief of trees behind it, no vineyard, no garden, no orchard, no background, naught; in its gaunt simplicity and ugliness it stood against its own ill-tended fields ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... multiplied her lovers, both men and women; and gives of her ability which is unquestioned. There are a few publishers who know her skill. There is a touch of pathos in all she draws, pathos-never bitterness, never ugliness-always the breath of beauty. ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... by youth's divine effrontery, into mysteries that have vexed diners, not less than hermit sages, since "the fog of old time" first obscured truth. Of life and death—the ugliness of life, and the ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... so, under favourable circumstances, but that's all. You are as far from ugliness as I am, and have as little need to think of it. As far as features go, there's the making of a much handsomer woman in you than ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the foot of the Park, and walked up on the Park Row side. Here again he saw a line of street merchants. Most conspicuous were the dealers in penny ballads, whose wares lined the railings, and were various enough to suit every taste. Here was an old woman, who might have gained a first prize for ugliness, presiding over an apple-stand. ...
— Ben, the Luggage Boy; - or, Among the Wharves • Horatio Alger
... delight in tormenting these little children. On their way from school one day, when they had on their nice clothes, he covered them from head to foot with dirt and mud. In that sad plight John and Louisa went home crying. Their mother felt as badly as they did, when she saw the ugliness ...
— Charles Duran - Or, The Career of a Bad Boy • The Author of The Waldos
... what that means? You think it is ugliness. But no; it is a DISEASE. It is a droll sort of malady, to which a learned Louisiana doctor has given a singular name, which I can't spell, and which you wouldn't know how to pronounce; but the symptoms I can describe. Where a slave ...
— Step by Step - or, Tidy's Way to Freedom • The American Tract Society
... such a witness may be none who have not seen its power can suppose. Example does tell. A holy life curbs evil, ashamed to show itself in that pure presence. A good man or woman reveals the ugliness of evil by showing the beauty of holiness. More converts would be made by a Christ-like Church than by many sermons. Oh! if you professing Christians knew your power and would use it, if you would come closer to Christ, and catch more of the light from His face, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the lot, and their undisputed leader, was a peasant boy of remarkable ugliness, squint-eyed and snub-nosed, with tufts of yellow hair always falling over his face and several teeth missing. His clothes were in rags and he never wore shoes. He boasted of never washing unless "the old one" stood over him with a stick, and ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... did this thing was a gorgon named Madame Victurnien, the guardian and door-keeper of every one's virtue. Madame Victurnien was fifty-six, and re-enforced the mask of ugliness with the mask of age. A quavering voice, a whimsical mind. This old dame had once been young—astonishing fact! In her youth, in '93, she had married a monk who had fled from his cloister in a red cap, and passed from the Bernardines to the Jacobins. She was dry, rough, peevish, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... in a delicate nondescript coloured dress, such as none but a French dressmaker could describe, and covered with transparent lace, like, as Mysie averred, a hedgeback full of pig-nut flowers, the justice of the comparison being lost in the ugliness of the name; and as all Rockquay tried to squeeze into the church to see and admire, the beauty was ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... those subjects are concerned on which we are most anxious to be informed, we are sure of nothing. What we have to do is to accept the facts and wait. We must take care not to deny beauty and love because we are forced also to admit ugliness and hatred. Let us yield ourselves up utterly to the magnificence and tenderness of the sunrise, though the East End of London lies over the horizon. That very same Power, and it is no other, which blasts a country ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... piscatorius, a hideous creature, which has also obtained the name of fish-frog, monk-fish, bellows-fish, sea-devil, and other appellatives significant of its ugliness and bad manners. There is also a powerful Raia, which grows to an immense size in the tropics, known as the devil-fish, the terror of the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... 1643 to {Compressed regularity {Straight, square, 1715 { giving way in { grooved and very Key-note { reaction to a { squat cabriole The Grand { ponderous ugliness. { legs. Audience Rooms ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... the same as when I knew it, and yet it was altered. The gigantic architectural horrors of New York and Chicago had leapt to the Pacific, and here and there ten or twelve-storied buildings thrust their monotonous ugliness into the sky. ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... in the reign of Anne, by the renowned Bishop Burnett to restrain the roving eyes of the congregation and make gallants better attend to their devotions; all these, in addition to the memorial slabs and tablets, and weeping angels over cinereal urns, tend to give the church that air of ugliness and comfort which the modern ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the pride out of all earthly pomps and the fragrance out of all fleeting pleasures. But it was not, surely, the mere dread of death that did this, for these were ages in which men went to meet death singing; it was the idea of the degradation of man in the grinning ugliness of his structure that withered the juvenile insolence of beauty and pride. And in this it almost assuredly did more good than harm. There is nothing so cold or so pitiless as youth, and youth in aristocratic ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... laughter, sounded brutal, and Carraway, gazing at him in wonder, saw his face grow suddenly lustful like that of an evil deity. The beauty was still there, blackened and distorted, a beauty that he felt to be more sinister than ugliness. The lawyer was in the presence of a great naked passion, and involuntarily he ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... spirit of a gentleman, will see that his workmen are treated with the respect that is their just due. Discipline there must be, but it is a wrong view of discipline that makes it consist of oaths and brutal insults delivered according to the prevalent good temper or ugliness of the overseer. Unfortunately, not every man who is placed in authority is wise, honest, and a gentleman. Bodily violence is no longer permitted by law, but too often the curses and insults which are heaped on men with no due cause are a violence which is more severe ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... outward show may be. There is a beauty common to us all, neither greater nor less in any of us, which these childish hearts discover. Looking upon us, they are blind or of transcendent vision, as you will: the same in issue—so what matter?—since they find no ugliness anywhere. 'Tis the way, it may be, that God looks upon His world: either in the blindness of love forgiving us or in His greater wisdom knowing that the sins of men do serve His purpose and are like virtue ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... so silly to make ugliness. It's wicked. Do be good, and let's try to enjoy the lessons ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... the grounds, in single file, each carrying a bright Chinese parasol and leading a prodigious dog by a string. It was a very imposing spectacle. Sometimes there would be as many dogs around the pavilion as students; and of all breeds and of all degrees of beauty and ugliness. These dogs had a rather dry time of it; for they were tied to the benches and had no amusement for an hour or two at a time except what they could get out of pawing at the gnats, or trying ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... The ugliness of Adam Drewe, from which his mother turned in disgust at his birth, and which in youth drove him across the seas in an agony of sensitiveness from the woman he loved, was a less serious affliction than that of ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... with the mere credit of innovation, and the absence of any original to which my work can be referred; if it is not good as well as original, I assure you I shall be ashamed of it, bring down my foot and crush it out of existence; its novelty shall not avail (with me at least) to save its ugliness from annihilation. If I thought otherwise, I admit that a round dozen of vultures would be none too many for the liver of a dunce who could not see that ugliness was ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... haunted him in his dreams. Scarcely a night passed that her wrinkled countenance did not hover round his pillow, now partially shrouded by the ample veil, then again fully exposed and apparently exulting in its unearthly ugliness; or else peering at him from behind the drapery that covered the walls of his apartment. In vain did he attempt to address the vision, or to follow it as it gradually receded and finally melted away ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... Desjardins drew my attention to the toilette of Madame de Montparnasse. She said: "Mon Dieu! Monsieur Dorinet, are you not tired of seeing La Montparnasse in that everlasting old black gown? My Rosalie says she is in mourning for her ugliness." ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... of them, untouched, to succeed us, ultimately, when the grasp of our 'civilisation' weakens, and our transient anarchy in these wilder lands recedes once more before the older anarchy of Nature? Or will they be entirely swallowed by that ugliness of shops and trousers with which we enchain the earth, and become a memory and less than a memory? They are that already. The Indians have passed. They left no arts, no tradition, no buildings or roads or laws; only a story or two, and a few names, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... women 'ere, Mrs. 'Ilson," observed Captain Kockney; "that's really a lovely creature just come in, and what a piece of ugliness it ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... stood combing his hair he intently studied his image in an antique mirror, cracked and dimmed. Thirty-six! He could not complain of his looks. He was ugly, but it was a grandiose ugliness, to adopt the expression of a woman who had exercised a peculiar influence over his life. This ugliness had yielded him some satisfactory adventures. Miss Mary Gordon, a blonde-haired idealist, daughter of the governor of an English archipelago in Oceanica, traveling through ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... loves the fox he is chasing to its death. He wanted to destroy anything which kept her away from him: her lover, if she had one; her pride, her modesty, her honor, if she were fancy-free. Aware of Sleeny's good looks, if not of his own ugliness, he hated them both for the comeliness that seemed to make them natural mates for each other. But it was not in his methods to proceed rashly with either. He treated Maud with distant respect, and increased his intimacy with ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... powerful a machine that lay arrested; and his features, cleared for the moment both of temper and dissimulation, were seen to be so purely modelled. But it was not thus with Seraphina. Her victim, as he lay outspread, twitching a little, his big chest unbared, fixed her with his ugliness; and her mind flitted for a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... index to its opposite. We have an instinctive dislike to many reptiles, to many beasts—as apes. These may have in them some beauty; we only object to the author's want of clearness. If there be no ugliness there is no beauty, for every thing has its opposite; so that we think he has not yet discovered and clearly put before us what beauty consists in. He shows how it happens that we do admire it instinctively; but that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... veiled Turkish women from the small harems of the little town, shuffling along in silence, or squatted peacefully upon a jutting point of the pier, veiled in yashmaks, the more transparent as they have the more beauty to show or the less ugliness to conceal. The carpet merchant sees them all, and sits like Patience upon a monumental heap of stuffs, waiting for customers and smoking his water-pipe. His eyes are greedy and his fingers are long, but the peace of a superior mendacity is on his brow, and in his heart the lawful price ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... Victoria's reign, more than 200 years later, what would he have found? England still a mighty Power, it is true, scarcely yet recovered from the long war against Napoleon, with Nelson and Wellington enthroned as the national heroes. But the times were bad in many ways, for it was "a time of ugliness: ugly religion, ugly law, ugly relations between rich and poor, ugly clothes, ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... squashed-in, stunted, disproportionate, commonised look of the bulk of our people, because, as we take our walks abroad, we note only faces and figures which strike us as good-looking; the rest pass unremarked. Ugliness has become a matter of course. There is no reason, save town life, why this should be so. But what does it matter if we have become ugly? We work well, make money, and have lots of moral qualities. A fair inside is better than a fair outside. I do think that we are in many ways a ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... taken into consideration at this point. By atmospheric conditions we mean the half-truths and rumors and expressions of feeling that were in the air. A sergeant of the company questioned carefully by the writer states positively that the expressions of ugliness were confined to comparatively few members of the company. The feeling seemed to spread through the company that morning that some of the men were going to speak ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... Panurge. Most of the men are strapping fellows, slight and active. I don't think I ever saw a gipsy who had grown fat. In Germany the gipsy women are often very pretty; but beauty is very uncommon among the Spanish gitanas. When very young, they may pass as being attractive in their ugliness, but once they have reached motherhood, they become absolutely repulsive. The filthiness of both sexes is incredible, and no one who has not seen a gipsy matron's hair can form any conception of what it is, ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... can probably engage our interest or sympathy who possesses the infirmity of ugliness: it is not in human nature to admire her, and human nature is a thing very much to be consulted. Moreover, no one ever yet saw an amiable personage, who was not so far pleasing, or, in other parlance, so far pretty. I cannot help the common course of things; and ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... she was regarded, she commenced her operations by endeavouring to efface or overcome those prejudices which, in her heart, she resented as mortal offences. This was easily done, for the hag's external ugliness was soon balanced by a show of kindness and interest, to which Lucy had of late been little accustomed; her attentive services and real skill gained her the ear, if not the confidence, of her patient; ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... suppose, this was not easy, as my ugliness was such that no one would look at me a second time. My nurse and I were almost in despair, as my fifteenth birthday was drawing near, and I had never so much as spoken to a man. At last we received a visit ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... of that war a physical wreck but with a heart purified. I saw such a hell of evil, such destruction, such misery that to-day I am a doctor and a planter of trees. When I saw men torn to rags and lovely strips of woodland ripped to splintered ugliness I vowed that if I ever came through that madness I would make amends. I swore I would go through the world mending things. So terribly did those war horrors grip me. And I have tried to keep my promise. For every tree I saw splintered I have tried to ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... Columbia" has been ringing in my ears all day, accepted the conditions of his life, and the sting of his calamity has departed. It is pleasant to say to him, and to all the brotherhood and sisterhood of ugliness and lameness, that there is every reason to believe that there is no such thing in heaven as a one-legged or a club-footed soul—no such thing as an ugly or a misshapen soul—no such thing as a blind or a deaf soul—no such thing as a soul with ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... the next morning with a heart that was heavy with dread and nerves that were quivering with fear. The brightness, the beauty, and the joy, of her womanhood, she felt to be going from her as the sunshine goes under threatening clouds. The blackness, the ugliness, and the sorrow, of life, she felt coming over her as fog rolls in from the sea. The faith, trust, and hope, that is the soul of womanhood was threatened by doubt, distrust, and despair. The gentleness, sensitiveness, and delicacy, ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... mother's face is a miracle of truth; I have seen the expression more than once; doctors see it often, in the sudden revulsion from terror and agony to certainty and peace; I only marvel where he ever met it: but the general effect is unpleasing, marred by patches of sheer ugliness, like that child's foot. There is the same mistake in all his pictures. Whatever they are, they are not beautiful; and no magnificence of surface-colouring will make up, in my eyes, for wilful ugliness of form. I say that nature is beautiful; and therefore nature cannot have ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... the black smudge of smoke and the gray, unpainted, sprawling rows of ill-kept tenements around the coal mines, that was South Harvey. They could see even then the sky stains far down the Wahoo Valley, where the villages of Foley and Magnus rose and duplicated the ugliness ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... meant such things as the basket of jelly-fish in The Englishman in Italy, or the stomach-cyst in Mr. Sludge the Medium—"the monstrosities and living mysteries of the sea." To me, these lines on the purple lily are not only ugly and grotesque—in that kind of ugliness which "was to Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a quite unnecessary luxury, to be enjoyed for its own sake"—but are monstrously (more than any other instance I can recall) unsuited to the mind from which they ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... penetrating—that the disagreeable feeling of repugnance, which the first sight of him generally inspired, wore off little by little, and he almost always finished by involving his dupe or victim in the tortuous windings of an eloquence as pliant as it was honeyed and perfidious; for ugliness and evil have their fascination, as well as what is good ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the street front because of a small plantation of ornamental trees, which grew in front of the house and hid it almost completely from view. When the carriage drive which wound through the plantation had been passed the house burst abruptly into view—a big, rambling building of uncompromising ugliness. Its architecture was remarkable. The impression which it conveyed was that the original builder had been prevented by lack of money from carrying out his original intention of erecting a fine symmetrical house. The first story was well ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... said Mr. Stryker. "There is a vast deal of prettiness, and very little repulsive ugliness among the women in this country. But it strikes me they are inclining a little too much to the idea, just now, that all the beauty in the world is collected in these United States, which, as we all know is ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... kindness I asked him at last to sit to me. I daresay moreover she was disgusted to hear that I had ended by attempting almost as many sketches of his beauty as I had attempted of hers. What was the value of tributes to beauty by a hand that luxuriated in ugliness? My relation to poor Dawling's want of modelling was simple enough. I was really digging in that sandy desert for the buried ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... tasteless enough to produce these inanities and imagine them artistic, could form even the subjects of art; he began to have doubts of his impression of the trotting-match, its value, its possibility of importance. The senseless ugliness of the things really hurt him: his worship of beauty was a sort of religion, and their badness was a sort of blasphemy. He could not laugh at them; he wished he could; and his first impulse was to turn and escape from the Fine Arts Department, and keep what little ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... this direct manipulation of muscle is ugliness—everywhere hard, unmusical, unsympathetic voices. The public is so used to hearing hard, muscular voices that the demand for beautiful tone is not what it should be. In fact, it is not generally known that ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... gasped, sick of this ugliness, dizzy with the stench of powder and brandy. Death had never seemed so vile. He looked away to the guardian where she knelt at her post, her hands clasped on the breast of her coarse white robe as if she prayed, the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... qualities; and the dog had grown old over coon-trails. He was black and white, grizzled and battlescarred; and if ever a dog had an evil eye, Moze was that dog. He had a way of wagging his tail—an indeterminate, equivocal sort of wag, as if he realized his ugliness and knew he stood little chance of making friends, but was still hopeful and willing. As for me, the first time he manifested this evidence of a good heart under a rough ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... threshed the nut-trees and routed marauding boys from her preserves, and carved pumpkin lanterns to light her to her attic chamber on cold November nights, where she would lie awake watching strange shadows on the sloping roof, half worshiping, half afraid of her idol's ugliness in the dark. ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... tumbling into the dozens of vacant pits. So it seemed to Woodseer, whose perceptions were discoloured by hereditary antagonism. Had he preserved his philosopher's eye, he would have known that the Hoofed One is too wily to show himself, owing to his ugliness. The Black Goddess and no other presides at her own game. She (it is good for us to know it) is the Power who challenges the individual, it is he who spreads the net for the mass. She liquefies the brain of man; he petrifies or ossifies the heart. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... which the romanticists, or idealists, as they were often called in later times, had accustomed themselves to ask, was, "Have these characters or incidents the unusual beauty or ugliness or goodness necessary to make an impression and to hold the attention?" The masters of the new eastern school of fiction took a different view, and asked, "Is our matter ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... bank. The last Child died early in this century. A descendant of Addison is a member of the present firm. In Chapter 1., Book I., of his "Tale of Two Cities," Dickens has sketched Child's bank with quite an Hogarthian force and colour. He has playfully exaggerated the smallness, darkness, and ugliness of the building, of which he describes the partners as so proud; but there is all his usual delightful humour, occasionally passing ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... word may transform the sentence from nonsense into sense, and it would be true to say that its sense mingles not with nonsense. Similarly the last touch of the brush may transform an inchoate mass of color into a picture, disarray into an object of beauty; and its beauty mingles not with ugliness. So life, when it finally realizes itself, obtains a new and incommensurable quality of perfection in which humanity is transformed into deity. There is frankly no provision for imperfection in such a world. In his later writings Plato sounds his characteristic note less frequently, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... light gave a foreboding look to Paris; like a pretty woman, the city has mysterious fits of ugliness or beauty. So the outer world seemed to be in a plot to steep this man about to die in a painful trance. A prey to the maleficent power which acts relaxingly upon us by the fluid circulating through our nerves, his whole frame seemed gradually to experience a dissolving process. He felt ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... skirt full. Ysabel's gown was of embroidered crepe. Her hair was coiled about her head, and held by a tortoise comb framed with a narrow band of gold. Pio Pico, splendid with stars and crescents and rings and pins, led her in, and with his unique ugliness ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... crystal model could reflect all the lustre of the original, it would be of equal utility; but it cannot. Now the reprint does impart all the intelligence and intrinsic worth of the original (for "the ugliness of the types" cannot be thought worthy of aiding the argument one way or another) therefore the reprint of Roy's poetical tract is not illustrated by the model of the Pigot diamond: which latter cannot impart the intrinsic value of the ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... beak; leaving it as they found it, is not progressing." Ferguson, speaking of fowls, says, "their peculiarities, whatever they may be, must necessarily be fully developed: a little peculiarity forms nought but ugliness, seeing it violates the existing laws of symmetry." So Mr. Brent, in discussing the merits of the sub-varieties of the Belgian canary-bird, remarks, "Fanciers always go to extremes; they do ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... he.'' A Hindu proverb says: "Man is a creature of reflection; he becomes that upon which he reflects.'' A modern metaphysicist says: "Our thoughts are real substance and leave their images upon our personality, they fill our aura with beauty or ugliness according to our intents and purposes in life.'' Each evil thought or action has its pursuing phantom, each smile or kindly deed its guiding angel, we leave wherever we ignobly stand, a tomb and an epitaph to haunt us through the ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... expert on naval affairs, and in 1776 he obtained some credit for an expedition which he commanded against the Barbary pirates. In 1778 Maria Carolina of Naples visited her brother Leopold at Florence, and was impressed by Acton's ugliness and reputation for exceptional efficiency. Her favourite minister, Prince Caramanico, persuaded the Grand Duke, Leopold, to permit Acton to exchange into the Neapolitan service, and reorganize the navy of the southern ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... this afternoon has killed my love. A smear of ugliness has been drawn across a thing of beauty, and I can never feel towards ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse |
