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More "Baseness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for the exchange of prisoners; a man whom Cineas said the Romans especially valued for his virtue and bravery, but who was excessively poor. Pyrrhus, in consequence of this, entertained Fabricius privately, and made him an offer of money, not as a bribe for any act of baseness, but speaking of it as a pledge of friendship and sincerity. As Fabricius refused this, Pyrrhus waited till the next day, when, desirous of making an impression on him, as he had never seen an elephant, he had his largest elephant ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... thereby, that, as in old buildings, it seem disorderly and ruinous. But as in most exquisite pictures they use to blaze and portrait not only the dainty lineaments of beauty, but also round about it to shadow the rude thickets and craggy cliffs, that by the baseness of such parts, more excellency may accrue to the principal—for ofttimes, we find ourselves I know not how, singularly delighted with the show of such natural rudeness, and take great pleasure ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... love and warmth, to be let in. Amelia stopped short in her work, and an ugly frown roughened her brow. Josiah Pease, with all his evil imaginings, seemed to be at her side, his lean forefinger pointing out the baseness of mankind. In that instant, she realized where Enoch had gone. He meant to take the three o'clock train where it halted, down at the Crossing, and he had left the child behind. Tearing off her apron, she threw it over her head. She ran to the door, and, opening it, ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... she came to the city, it was with the determination to win the love of this man, if it could be won; to let nothing stand between herself and the fulfillment of that purpose. But all this had been changed, and seeing how bravely Claire bore the shock of her lover's baseness, how proudly, how nobly, she commanded herself, Madeline had ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... fear.] Cowardice — N. cowardice, pusillanimity; cowardliness &c adj.; timidity, effeminacy. poltroonery, baseness; dastardness^, dastardy^; abject fear, funk; Dutch courage; fear &c 860; white feather, faint heart; cold feet [U.S.], yellow streak [Slang]. coward, poltroon, dastard, sneak, recreant; shy cock, dunghill cock; coistril^, milksop, white liver, lily liver, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... threw off the damp cloth, and revealed the clay model of a head. The face was unmistakable, but it expressed every baseness—cunning, arrogance, cruelty, and sensuality. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... possesses only your person, a creditor possesses your dignity and can administer to it a box on the ear. Rather than borrow, he went without food. He had passed many a day fasting. Feeling that all extremes meet, and that, if one is not on one's guard, lowered fortunes may lead to baseness of soul, he kept a jealous watch on his pride. Such and such a formality or action, which, in any other situation would have appeared merely a deference to him, now seemed insipidity, and he nerved himself against it. His face wore a sort of severe ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... of her married life seemed to have faded out of her mind. She raved of Montague Kingdon's baseness, of her own folly, her vain regret, her yearning for pardon; but of the dying husband in the garret at Rouen she uttered no word. And so, with her weary head upon her sister's breast, she passed away, her ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Poet's dictum "change is of all things most pleasant" is true, is "a baseness in our blood;" for as the bad man is easily changeable, bad must be also the nature that craves change, i.e. it is neither ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... assurance, had given him access to society at certain points, and of this facility he had taken every advantage. Too idle and dissolute for useful effort in society, he looked with a cold, calculating baseness to marriage as the means whereby he was to gain the position at which he aspired. Possessing no attractive virtues—no personal merits of any kind, his prospects of a connection, such as he wished to form, through the medium ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... the encounter was passing from Marcel's mind. A curious feeling of intimacy was induced by the girl's brief outline of the things that concerned herself. Then, above all, there was that youthful desire, untainted by any baseness of passion, the natural desire inspired by the appeal of a sweet face, and the smiling eyes of a young girl, battling in a country where there is no margin for the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... with Tomalin, One that a valiant knight had bin, And to King Oberon of kin; Quoth he, "Thou manly Fairy, Tell Oberon I come prepared, Then bid him stand upon his guard; This hand his baseness shall reward, Let him be ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... girl! You surely forget the presence in which you stand! Baseness, crime, can never be connected with the name of Brudenell. But young gentlemen will be young gentlemen, and amuse themselves with just such credulous fools as you!" said the ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... what loathing so many of them—"of you," he really said, and the Baron grunted as though his experience had been with droves of them—what loathing so many of you heap upon certain things without reference to the spirit by which they are accompanied and on which their nobility or baseness, their cleanness or foulness, ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... the feelings of shame which tormented me as I inflicted on my heart, like the beggars in the street, false wounds to excite the compassion of that enchanting woman. I soon appreciated the extent of my devotedness by learning to estimate the baseness of a spy. The expressions of sympathy bestowed on me would have comforted the greatest grief. This charming creature, weaned from the world, and for so many years alone, having, besides love, treasures of kindliness to bestow, offered these to me with childlike ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... resolution enough to execute his design. At the Restoration he was excepted out of the Act of Indemnity, and spent the remainder of his life in obscurity, dying soon after the Revolution.] And how that he is quite ashamed of himself, and confesses how he had deserved this, for his baseness to his brother. And that he is like to pay part of the money, paid out of the Exchequer during the Committee of Safety, out of his own purse again, which I am glad on. I could find nothing in Mr. Downing's letter, which Hawley brought me concerning my office; but I could discern that Hawley had ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... VI. of England, the baby king, doomed already to expiate sins that were not his, by the saddest life and reign. The French historians whimsically but perhaps not unnaturally, have the air of putting down this baseness on Philip's part, and on that of his contemporaries in general, to the score of the English, which is hard measure, seeing that the treachery of a Frenchman could in no way be attributed to the other nation of ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... gasp for breath and turn whiter still. Accuse her dear Christopher whom she loved and honored above all men of any wrong or baseness! God in heaven! If she had done this ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... your enmity? and if you choose to write your lingering affections upon stones, wreak also your delayed anger upon clay. This would be just, and, in the last case, little as you think it, generous. The true baseness is in the bitter reverse—the strange iniquity of our folly. Is a man to be praised, honored, pleaded for? It might do harm to praise or plead for him while he lived. Wait till he is dead. Is he to be maligned, dishonored, and discomforted? See that ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... some power in his hands, against which all her defiance would be as naught. Till this hour, though she had suffered, and when alone had writhed in agony of grief and bitter shame, in his presence she had never flinched. Her strength she knew was greater than his; but his baseness was his weapon, and the depths of that baseness she knew she ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... guiltier head Shall our intolerable self-disdain Wreak suddenly its anger and its pain; For manifest in that disastrous light We shall discern the right And do it, tardily.—O ye who lead, Take heed! Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... sagacity in Pope Innocent, and around Pompilia the tragic pathos of an incurable woe, which by its intensity might raise her to grandeur if it sprang from some more solemn source than the mere malignity and baseness of an unworthy oppressor. Lastly, there is nothing in The Ring and the Book of that "certain incommensurableness" which Goethe found in his own Faust. The poem is kept closely concrete and strictly commensurable by the very ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... guest of Louis XV., and a guest of whom the victorious English were continually requiring the ignominious dismissal; until, wearied by the indifference to all hints and orders to free France from his compromising presence, the Court of Versailles had descended to the incredible baseness of having the Prince kidnapped as he was going to the opera, bound hand and foot, carried like a thief to the fortress of Vincennes, and then conducted to the frontier like a suspected though unconvicted swindler, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... breast, and shame possessed her cheek. E'en Cupid, we are told, assistance gave; What from his aim effectually can save? Fair in person was Gyges to behold; Excuses for her easy 'twere to mould; To show her charms, what baseness could excel? And on th' exposer all her hatred fell. Besides, he was a husband, which is worse With these each sin receives a double curse. What more shall I detail?—the facts are plain: Detested was the king:—beloved the swain; All was accomplished, and the monarch placed Among ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... skill, He "squares" Surveyors too! For Jobbery finds some baseness still For venal hands ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... 'these, indeed, are women's words. The great Sheikh in this has touched me nearly, but I see no baseness in it. He could not know the intimate relation that should subsist between me and this young Englishman. He has captured him in the desert, according to the custom of his tribe. Much as Amalek may injure me, I must acquit him ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... the Austrians. Pray, was never a battle won against material odds? It is precisely such that a good leader, a noble man, may expect to win. Were the Austrians driven out of Milan because the Milanese had that advantage? The Austrians would again, have suffered repulse from them, but for the baseness of this man, on whom they had been cajoled into relying,—a baseness that deserves the pillory; and on a pillory will the "Magnanimous," as he was meanly called in face of the crimes of his youth and the timid ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... "if you must make this journey in our behalf,—and, alas! I have not generosity enough to refuse your noble proffer,—you must go alone, and without communication with Derby. I know him well; his lightness of mind is free from selfish baseness; and for the world, would he not suffer you to leave Man without his company. And if he went with you, your noble and disinterested kindness would be of no avail—you would but share his ruin, as the swimmer who attempts to save a drowning ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Greeks defended against the Persians, the Romans against the Carthaginians and Egyptians, the Franks against Islam: namely, the chivalrous European way of thinking, which is ever being threatened by brutal force and puling baseness. We stand once more at a watershed of Kultur.—O.A.H. SCHMITZ, D.W.D., ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... which he does not in his heart believe. Yet how true a moral instinct has presided over the changed signification of the word. The calumniator and the flatterer, although they seem so opposed to one another, how closely united they really are. They grow out of the same root. The same baseness of spirit which shall lead one to speak evil of you behind your back, will lead him to fawn on you and flatter you before your face; there is a profound sense in that Italian proverb, "Who flatters me before, spatters ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... disaster, it is merely what he deserves. Neither is it admissible to represent the misfortunes of a thoroughly good man, for that is merely painful and distressing; and least of all is it tolerable gratuitously to introduce mere baseness, or madness, or other aberrations from human nature. The true tragic hero is a man of high place and birth who having a nature not ignoble has fallen into sin and pays in suffering the penalty of his act. Nothing could throw more light on the distinguishing ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... showered on her every species of insult and indignity of which a cowardly and malignant nature is capable; and who, finding that did not kill her, at length consummated, or revealed, I do not yet know which term is most applicable, his utter baseness by causing her to be informed that his first wife was ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... politeness, with a ferocity and practice of savage vices which is probably unparalleled in any other part of the world."[653] One of the first civilised men to gain an intimate acquaintance with the Fijians draws a melancholy contrast between the baseness and vileness of the people and the loveliness of the land ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... he would take her. As for him—David's sinewy fingers closed as talons might close into the living flesh of a man's neck. He knew the lust of murder, and he exulted in it. Yet even as he exulted, the baseness of what Blair had done was so astounding, that, sitting there in the dreary room, his hands clenched in his pockets, his legs stretched out in front of him, David Richie actually felt a sort of impersonal amazement that had nothing to do with anger. For one instant the unbelievableness ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... still loved her; but what if his love had ceased, and he should be meanly desirous of increasing his own importance by telling how he, a slave, had been the chosen lover of the proudly allied lady before him? Nay, he would never act thus, for it would be a baseness foreign to his nature; and yet have not men of the most lofty sense of honor often fallen from their original nobility, and revelled in self-degradation? And it somehow seemed as though, at the last, the dwarf had looked up at her with a strangely knowing leer. And was it merely ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in Virginia, I expect to get a vast deal of good from thinking of you,—to do my work better, and to keep straighter altogether. Like all lovers, I'm horribly selfish. I expect to see a vast deal of shabbiness and baseness and turmoil, and in the midst of it all I'm sure the inspiration of patriotism will sometimes fail. Then I'll think of you. I love you a thousand times better than my country, Liz.—Wicked? So much the worse. It's the truth. But if ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... must there not be some tremendous change to bring about Paradise and Hell, two images without which God cannot exist to the mind of the vulgar? I know that a compromise was made by the invention of the Soul; but it is repugnant to me to make God answerable for human baseness, for our ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... table. My appetite was gone. I made a pretense of eating, and another pretense of being glad to see my devoted lover. I talked to him in the prettiest manner. As a hypocrite, he thoroughly matched me; he was gallant, he was amusing. If baseness like ours had been punishable by the law, a prison was the right ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... united—perhaps in order to prevent ambiguity; as, "I cannot go." But when the power is affirmed, and something else is denied, the words are written separately; as, "The Christian apologist can not merely expose the utter baseness of the infidel assertion, but he has positive ground for erecting an opposite and confronting assertion in its place."—Dr. Chalmers. The junction of these terms, however, is not of much importance to the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... abusive epithets, challenged him to the field. Grant declined to accept the invitation; and Lewis, after spitting in his face in the presence of several of the French officers, left him to reflect on his baseness. ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... 'Let him that does, shew an unblushing face of innocence. Montoni, you are a villain! If there is treachery in this affair, look to yourself as the author of it. IF—do I say? I—whom you have wronged with unexampled baseness, whom you have injured almost beyond redress! But why do I use words?—Come on, coward, and receive justice at ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... told with the simplicity and directness of obvious truth, are full of terror, of pathos, the shame of human baseness and the glory of human virtue; and though the time is not yet sufficiently distant from the date of their occurrence to give to this record the universal acceptance it deserves, there are few, we think, even now, who can read it without amazement ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... until then I was ignorant. It seems that any younger brother, next heir, might claim the estate by turning Protestant, or drive the incumbent to the same act. I was rejoiced to hear that there was hardly an instance of such profligacy known.[26] To what baseness will not the struggle for political ascendency ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Roger! what have we done to God to be damned alive! I can pity Raymond, since death separates him from Louise. May he forgive me! He will, for he was a grand, a noble, a perfect friend. We both failed to appreciate him, as a matter of course; folly and baseness are alone ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... Miss Franks's letter, and poured out to her the story of his treachery and baseness. I may have been wrong, but something in me forbade it, and I preferred to wait ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... go, papa,' she exclaimed, 'I must and will tell Louisa that I hate her baseness and hypocrisy, and then I'll never speak to her again. Why will mamma laugh? It is very ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... couple nature with fancy; they succeed in giving an extraordinary appearance to what is common, and thus preserve a certain fallacious image of the ideal. The morality of these writers is ambiguous. Not that they failed in strong colours to contrast greatness of soul and goodness with baseness and wickedness, or did not usually conclude with the disgrace and punishment of the latter, but an ostentatious generosity is often favourably exhibited in lieu of duty and justice. Every thing good and excellent in their pictures arises ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... into so sacred an engagement as marriage with one man, with a stronger affection for another, of how calm and innocent a nature soever that affection may be, is a degree of baseness of which my ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... published by Bonnet (Calvin's Letters, i. 162, 163-165). The reformer had had it from Du Bellay's own lips at Strasbourg, and had perused the letter in which the latter threw up his alliance with Montmian, and stigmatized the baseness of his conduct.] ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... to make a desperate effort to recover him; and he was the more fixed in this determination, because the horse was intended as a gift to Eveline on her recovery, in case she did recover, and, also, because, as he believed, the detection of the culprit would expose the baseness of her lover to his daughter, and cause her to discard him at once from her thoughts.—Full of these thoughts, he offered a handsome reward for the horse, and a very large one for the apprehension of the thief. In prospect of obtaining these rewards, as well as ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... to fertilize that simple heart, which, out of its very simplicity, had made for itself a passing idol out of what was essentially fake and base, which would have shortly crumbled to pieces out of its own baseness, had not Fate—or Providence—with kindly cruel hand forever thrown it down. Still, this was a grave, and her husband did ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... of such consequence became the centre of the caravansary from the instant of her arrival; and she gave him her hand with the conventional frankness and self-command that set her apart from the weak. Once more he knew she was a woman to be worshipped, whose presence rebuked the baseness he had just thought. ...
— The Indian On The Trail - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... the happiest dispensation. But, perhaps, with a view to a school of discipline and of moral fortitude, it might be a more salutary prayer, "Give me riches and poverty, and afterwards neither." For the transitional state between riches and poverty will teach a lesson both as to the baseness and the goodness of human nature, and will impress that lesson with a searching force, such as no borrowed experience ever can approach. Most probable it is that Shakspeare drew some of his powerful scenes in the Timon of Athens, those which exhibit the vileness of ingratitude and ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... outsider knew of their intended movements. Of course the matter had been discussed—as all matters were discussed and voted for or against—among the crew; but to doubt either of them was to doubt one's self, and any fear of betrayal among themselves was unknown. The amount of baseness such a suspicion would imply was too great to be incurred even in thought. What, then, could have led to this surprise? Had their movements been watched, and this decoy of the cutter only swallowed with the view of throwing them off ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... blight upon the place; and yet they were harmless, inquisitive people, tempted thither, most of them by fashion, a few perhaps by a feeble love of beauty, and only desirous to bring their own standard of comforts with them. The world seemed out of joint; the radical ugliness and baseness of man an insult to the purity and sweetness ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sermons even in stones. But goodness and badness is apt to run in streaks. Man, to use the language of another, is a queer combination of cheek and perversity, insolence, pride, impudence, vanity, jealousy, hate, scorn, baseness, insanity, honor, truth, wisdom, virtue and urbanity. He's a queer combination all right. And those mixed elements of his nature, in their effects on other people, we call personal influence. Many a ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... all people there is a sense of the hollowness of Fashion, and a just loathing of its pretension and show. Even its votaries secretly despise it, and obey its dictates only because they think they must. They know its baseness better than we can tell them. True, they do not fully realize its sinfulness nor wholly appreciate its evils. But its hollowness and falseness they feel at times most keenly. Else why their perpetual unrest, their longing, dissatisfied condition ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... glaring in his eyes, and stabbed Sanza in the side as he lay on the ground. Faint as he was, he could not lift his hand to save himself; and his craven foe was about to strike him again, when the bystanders all cried shame upon his baseness. Then Gombei and Shirobei lifted up their voices ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... uncommonly sweet, enhanced the admiration with which one viewed his matchless delivery, in which was perfect grace, and entire harmony with the expressions which fell from his lips. How mournful a sight, to see one so nobly gifted, leading a life of baseness and vice, devoting his immortal qualities to the vilest selfishness, and to the betrayal of his country and of liberty! Should the descendant of an oppressed and persecuted race take part with oppressors? Senator Benjamin is a renegade to the spirit ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... crowd of his cowardly assailants, and driven them away. A number of fellows had set on him in the dark—on him, of all others. Oh, what a change must have happened in the school that this should be possible! He felt that the contagion of Brigson's baseness had spread ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... bend his course among the perplexed vicissitudes of society, there was a force within him which would triumph over many difficulties; and a 'light from Heaven' was about his path, which, if it failed to conduct him to wealth and preferment, would keep him far from baseness and degrading vices. Literature, and every great and noble thing which the right pursuit of it implies, he loved with all his heart and all his soul: to this inspiring object he was henceforth exclusively devoted; advancing towards this, and possessed of common necessaries on ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... inconsistent with John's statement that the supper proper was ended before the washing of feet was performed; the act does not appear to have been so unusual as to cause surprize. To many it has appeared plausible, that because of his utter baseness Judas would not be permitted to participate with the other apostles in the holy ordinance of the Sacrament; others infer that he was allowed to partake, as a possible means of moving him to abandon ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... honor due or paid to said reputation. A good name is, after the grace of God, mans most precious possession; wealth is mere trash compared with it. You may find people who think otherwise, but the universal sentiment of mankind stigmatizes such baseness and buries it under the weight of its opprobrium. Nor is it impossible that honor be paid where a good character no longer exists; but this is accidental. In the nature of things, reputation is the basis of all honor; if ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... door-keeper to him, "Is no this thy comrade whom thou robbedst of his silvers and leftest with me sick in the closet doing such and such by him?" And the workmen said to him, "Is not this he whom thou badest us seize and beat?" Therewith Abu Kir's baseness was made manifest to the King and he was certified that he merited torture yet sorer than the torments of Munkar and Nakr.[FN228] So he said to his guards, "Take him and parade him about the city and the markets;"—And ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... virtutem obsepta est via, 'tis hard for a poor man to [2295] rise, haud facile emergunt, quorum virtutibus obstat res angusta domi. [2296]"The wisdom of the poor is despised, and his words are not heard." Eccles. vi. 19. His works are rejected, contemned, for the baseness and obscurity of the author, though laudable and good in themselves, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... refuses to see or to marry the wretch; who, repenting his usage of so divine a creature, would fain move her to forgive his baseness, and make him her husband: and this, though persecuted by all her friends, and abandoned to the deepest distress, being obliged, from ample fortunes, to make away with her apparel for subsistence; surrounded also by strangers, and forced (in want of others) to make a friend of the friend ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... the littleness of men? His stealthy eye missed nothing; and the men whom he flattered and used little thought that the wizened dandy who pleased them with his old-world courtesy was chronicling their weakness and baseness for all time. A nobly patriotic Ministry came before the world with a flourish of trumpets, and declared that England must fight Russia in defence of public law, freedom, and other holy things. But the wicked diarist had watched the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... I know the thoughts of all men's hearts, and discern their manhood or their baseness. And from the souls of clay I turn away, and they are blest, but not by me. They fatten at ease, like sheep in the pasture, and eat what they did not sow, like oxen in the stall. They grow and spread, like the gourd along the ground; ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... with masterly skill. As for Claire, she had striven to match her moves, plotting in the darkness against her, and fighting desperately with such weak weapons as she possessed. It was characteristic that she did not blame herself for her failure; it was the baseness of van Tuiver, his inability to appreciate sincere devotion, his unworthiness of her love. And this, just after she had been naively telling me of her efforts to poison his mind against Sylvia while pretending ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... who was mostly responsible for the baseness in the Regent's character—Dubois who had taught him a contempt for religion and morality, the cynical view of life which makes the pleasure of the moment the only thing worth pursuing, at whatever cost; and who had impressed indelibly on his mind that no woman is virtuous and that men are knaves. ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... titles, and boundless power heaped upon them, who can hardly write ten lines together correctly; but, remember, it is not merit that has been the cause of their advancement; the cause has been, in almost every such case, the subserviency of the party to the will of some government, and the baseness of some nation who have quietly submitted to be governed by brazen fools. Do not you imagine, that you will have luck of this sort: do not you hope to be rewarded and honoured for that ignorance which shall prove a scourge to your country, and which ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... Courts of Westminster are venerable to me; how venerable; gray with a thousand years of honorable age! For a thousand years and more, Wisdom, and faithful Valor, struggling amid much Folly and greedy Baseness, not without most sad distortions in the struggle, have built them up; and they are as we see. For a thousand years, this English Nation has found them useful or supportable: they have served this English Nation's wants; been a road to it through the abyss of Time. They are venerable, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... its large-hearted charity, its quiet satire of folly and baseness, the story is one to win the affection and charm the fancy not only of boys and maidens, but also of grown ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... turn around and do Mern up, Mern would heartily give the fellow three cheers. Thus did Mern put his remarkable business on the plane of a man-to-man fight by his argument, not admitting that there was any baseness in his plots and ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... eyes have dwelt with beauty night and morn, Guarding the soul within from every stain, No baseness since the first day she was born Behind those star-lit brows could access again, Bathed in the light that streamed from all things fair, Turning to spirit each delicate door of sense, And with all lovely shapes of ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... sigh, and sat apparently meditating on the enormous baseness of the man who saved a lady's life and then proposed; and it was not until Mrs. Willoughby had spoken twice that she ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... a home and not thought of the parrot who screamed out his name in her dear dwelling. There was a parrot like that in the world—and he wandered foolishly abroad. What madness! What baseness! ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... with delay, danger or extreme discomfort. Hence a special meaning of baseness in "his ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... determination into act he had chosen his colour in the game, and had given an inevitable bent to his wishes. He had made it impossible that he should not from henceforth desire it to be the truth that his father was dead; impossible that he should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the precise facts of his conduct should not remain for ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... passions, the reason, and the instincts of mankind? Have we no pride, no honor, no sense of shame, no reverence for our ancestors, no care for posterity, no love for home, or family or friends? Must we quail before the onion breath of an enthroned mob, confess our baseness, discredit the fame of our sires, degrade our children, abandon our homes, flee from our country and dishonor ourselves—all for the sake of a Union whose Constitution you have publicly burned and whose Supreme ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... evil-doing at the South compared with the North, no one who walks the streets of a Northern city, by day or night, with the ordinary discernment of one who sets himself to examine the moral condition of a place, will fail to see that we need not go to the South to find humiliating proofs of baseness and shame. There is less solicitation at the South; here it is a nightly trade, without disguise. At the South the young must go in search of opportunity; here it confronts them. The small number of yellow children in the interior of the Cotton States, ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... my soul very low if you think me capable of trafficking with my feelings, my affections. Rather than commit such literary baseness, I would do as they do in England,—put a rope round a woman's neck and sell her in ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... deeds that the mind has deliberately resolved upon are virtually accomplished facts as far as the wrong-doer is concerned. Before leaving his dingy hiding-place Haldane had in the depths of his soul been guilty of drunkenness and all kinds of excess. He also purposed unutterable baseness toward the widowed mother whom, by every principle of true manhood, he was bound to cherish and shield; and he had in volition more certainly committed the act of self-destruction than does the poor wretch who, under ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... evening receptions we well know, attended by some of the most illustrious French and foreign residents in the metropolis,) to accompany him on a tour of inspection to the Gobelins, and had afterwards been guilty of the unexampled baseness of leaving the coupe he had employed standing, unpaid, at the door of a certain house in the Rue Racine, whilst he escaped by a private passage into the Rue de la Harpe, and so forth, and so forth. I saw it all. I blushed, I shuddered at the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... this last reason will seem the best of all. However much we may moralize about its baseness and hollowness, whether with the Hugo of Les Chatiments we scorn and vituperate its charlatan head or pity him profoundly as we see him ill and helpless in Zola's Debacle, most of us, if we are candid, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... constantly reflected in our "good society" and "fashionable world" every baseness and vulgarity that is invented outre mer, particularly in Paris. One woman returns to smoke cigars, in a magnificent home erected by a lucky mechanic or shopkeeper, as if such an indecency had ever been tolerated among the well-born ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... history which the Tower of London has done in our own. Here, by the orders of Cicero, were strangled Lentulus, Cethegus, and one or two more of the accomplices of Catiline, in his famous conspiracy. Here was murdered, under circumstances of great baseness, Vercingetorix, the young and gallant chief of the Gauls, whose bravery called forth the highest qualities of Julius Caesar's military genius, and who, when success abandoned his arms, boldly gave himself up as an offering to appease ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... Nature. It is the loss, sorrow, weariness, and disappointment of life which give dark days their gloom, and cold its icy edge, and work its bitterness. The real sorrows of life are not of Nature's making; if faithlessness and treachery and every sort of baseness were taken out of human lives, we should find only a healthy and vigorous joy in such hardship as Nature imposes upon us. Upon men of sound, sweet life, she lays only such burdens as strength delights to carry, because in so doing ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... porringer: Of me she shall not win renown: For the baseness of its nature shall have ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... intend to do, Vaninka? What do you wish me to do? What can I do, but flee from St. Petersburg, and seek death in the first corner of Russia where war may break out, in order not to repay my patron's kindness by some infamous baseness?" ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... provided a base of operations. A full account of the doings of this poisonous gang is given in The German Spy in America (HUTCHINSON), by JOHN PRICE JONES, a member of the staff of the New York Sun. It is not easy for anyone, least of all for a good American, to refrain from indignation at the baseness of the rogues who thus battened for many months on the United States and their people. The book is soberly and clearly written, and is commended by Mr. ROOSEVELT in a Foreword, to which are added another Foreword by the Author, and an Introduction by Mr. ROGER ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various
... than heighten his permanent reputation when they are placed on a line with his masterpieces by formal reproduction. It is impossible to take much interest in personages with an unbroken record of profligacy and baseness; and we are reminded of the Aristotelian maxim that pure wickedness is ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... them. They will commit any baseness for money, except betraying their masters. It has been tried a hundred times. We may avoid using violence, as you call it, but the man must be frightened with the show of it. The people who can be bribed are the women slaves of the harem. But ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... you must infallibly be this night thirteen months hence. I didn't see any of the other millions who would be choking and gasping for breath and writhing in the torture of the universal fire—I only saw you and my own baseness in thinking, even for a moment, that such ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... his suit had been rebuffed at every point, he was not discouraged. Indeed, had his other qualities equalled his perseverance, he had richly merited a full and good reward; but, unfortunately, this was his only redeeming trait, and the baseness of that motive which prompted it poisoned ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... whose generosity redeems his guilt, whose kindliness outweighs his folly, or whose beauty charms the eye to overlook his baseness—this too common hero is an object, an example fraught with perilous interest. Charles Duval, the polite; Paul Clifford, the handsome; Richard Turpin, brave and true; Jack Sheppard, no ignoble mind and loving still his mother; these, and such as these, with ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... vices, your weaknesses, your meannesses in detail. One thing I might have told him, which I left out—the fact that you are no gentleman, not even bourgeois—a mere peasant clown. He would not have let you measure swords with him if he had known the baseness of your ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... habitation, where thou keep'st, Hourly afflict: merely, thou are death's fool; For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun, And yet run'st towards him still: Thou art not noble; For all the accommodations that thou bear'st Are nursed by baseness: Thou art by no means valiant, For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork Of a poor worm: Thy best of rest is sleep, And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself; For thou exist'st on many thousand grains ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... made his enemy by the poem of Absalom and Achitophel, which "he thinks a little hard upon his fanatick patrons;" and charges him with borrowing the plan of his Arthur from the preface to Juvenal, "though he had," says he, "the baseness not to acknowledge his benefactor, but instead of it to traduce me in ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... events; and she explained the reasons for her belief that the enormities of that period were no new crime, but a remnant of the old not to be eradicated at once, any more than it is possible for an individual to turn from great baseness to real goodness without some backslidings, even after the most unmistakable of conversions. Miss Sunderland was satisfied, the future again became clear to her, and after that she seemed to lose interest in the details of affairs. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... agitating you this long while, which you have asked at every stage of this long narrative of a sinful life. Shake not your head, lift not your finger, exquisitely hypocritical reader; you can deceive me in nothing. I know the baseness and unworthiness of your soul as I know the baseness and unworthiness of my own. This is a magical tete-a-tete, such a one as will never happen in your life again; therefore I say let us put off ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... its own characteristic value. Indeed, if this were not so there would be no possibility of that form of baseness known as being merely prudent. There is a prudential equilibrium; a condition of smooth and harmonious adjustment, within the personal life or the community. I propose that this equilibrium be termed health. In that admirable idealization of renaissance morality, Castiglione's {89} ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... connived at the escape of their friends and relatives, and at the same time countenanced, pretended to believe, and gave deadly effect to them when directed against others, is supposing a criminality and baseness too great to be readily admitted. In that wild reign of the worst of passions, this would have transcended them all in its iniquity. The only excusable people at that time were those who honestly, and without a doubt, believed in the guilt of the convicted. Those who had doubts, and did not ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Whatsoever we desire from motives of hatred is base, and in a State unjust. This also is evident from III:xxxix., and from the definitions of baseness and ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... thou, whose misery and baseness Hangs on my door; whose hateful whine of woe Breaks in upon my sorrows, and distracts My jarring senses with thy ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe
... in untruths against him. Mr. William spoke of him with the warmth of fraternal affection. The Baron perceived that his kinsmen disliked Edmund; but his own good heart hindered him from seeing the baseness of theirs. It is said, that continual dropping will wear away a stone; so did their incessant reports, by insensible degrees, produce a coolness in his patron's behaviour towards him. If he behaved with ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... should have thought of that before; but not even to spare her feelings can I neglect my duty. I cannot demean myself by touching a thing so vile. Ralph, whom you have calumniated, shall inflict upon you a punishment suited to the baseness of your crime. Wilson, you will find a light cane in ...
— George Leatrim • Susanna Moodie
... and dismay she turned upon him, and her face became crimsoned with shame. She then covered it with her open hands, and, turning round, placed her head upon the end of the sofa, and moaned with a deep and bursting anguish, on hearing this acknowledgment of deliberate baseness from his own lips. ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Austrian cabinet regarded the conquest of Naples with complacency, and that its measures were directed so as designedly not to prevent the French from overrunning it. That cabinet was assuredly capable of any folly, and of any baseness; and it is not improbable that at this time, calculating upon the success of the new coalition, it indulged a dream of adding extensively to its former Italian possessions; and, therefore, left the ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... contain?—What great name of Russia was absent from it?—Crime, intrigue, peculation, faithlessness, treachery, treason—by these sins of others had his father risen to his position and his wealth. Trusting to the ever-renewed baseness, cupidity, passion of humankind, and their cowardice in the possibility of discovery, Michael had known that his sources of revenue would never fail, his victims never rebel. So much, indeed, he had openly acknowledged. His defence had been: "No innocent person could ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... not at first understood the lamentations of Catherine; but a twilight commenced to dawn in his ideas; he divined that his name had been used for an act of baseness; and, without being able to account for it, he felt the return of an old leaven of spite, ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... your master, had been King of Castile, I would never have been drawn by him out of my cloister. A man of virtue and spirit will not be prevailed with to go into a Court where he cannot rise without baseness. ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... would. I could not willingly begin to love a man whom I knew to be base; but when I had loved him I would not turn because of his baseness;—I couldn't do it. It would be a great—a terrible misfortune; but it would have to be borne. But here—I know all the ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... her, of course, I made light of her self-confessed baseness. I suppose I spent at least half an hour in comforting her. Then we supped, with a hint of April gaiety towards the end. I endeavoured to be humorous in a lover-like way. Fanny dabbed her eyes, smiled, and choked, and even laughed a little. But the vows, protestations, resolves for ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... hailed as the dawn of a new era. Young, he was only thirty-seven, well educated, a teacher of history, and with six serious books to his credit, he was a new figure in politics; Providence, moving in its mysterious way, had designed him to redeem politics from its baseness ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... deeply repented of the past, George could never summon up courage enough to inform Josiah of his baseness in destroying his trees. A hundred times a day he was on the point of declaring his guilt; but false pride always hindered him from confessing ...
— The Little Quaker - or, the Triumph of Virtue. A Tale for the Instruction of Youth • Susan Moodie
... world are those who are busy at something worth while, and the most miserable are those who are in idleness for lack of ambition or else are engaged in work which they themselves loathe because of its baseness." ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... which every man in love with glory tries first of all. Lucien was struggling as yet with himself and his own desires, and not with the difficulties of life; at strife with his own power, and not with the baseness of other men, that fatal exemplar for impressionable minds. The brilliancy of his intellect had a keen attraction for David. David admired his friend, while he kept him out of the scrapes into which he was led by ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... briefly; and I will begin from the first principles of praise and blame. For everything is to be praised which is united with virtue; and everything which is connected with vice is to be blamed. Wherefore the end of the one is honour, of the other baseness. But this kind of discourse is composed of the narration and explanation of facts, without any argumentations, in a way calculated to handle the feelings of the mind gently rather than to create belief or to confirm ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... they rode together down the plain, Their talk was all of training, terms of art, Diet and seeling, jesses, leash and lure. 'She is too noble' he said 'to check at pies, Nor will she rake: there is no baseness in her.' Here when the Queen demanded as by chance 'Know ye the stranger woman?' 'Let her be,' Said Lancelot and unhooded casting off The goodly falcon free; she towered; her bells, Tone under tone, shrilled; and they lifted up Their eager faces, wondering at ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... anticipation. It is the cave-man in me, hiding by night, waiting with a bludgeon to slay. I am beginning to be struck by the gradual change in my comrades. I fancied that I alone had suffered a retrogression. I have a deep consciousness of baseness that is going to keep me aloof from them. I seem to be alone with my own soul. Yet I seem to be abnormally keen to impressions. I feel what is going on in the soldiers' minds, and it shocks me, set me wondering, forces me to doubt myself. I keep saying it must be my peculiar ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... authenticity I cannot doubt. But that proves nothing for the truth of the particular stories which it contains. A book of scandalous and defamatory stories, especially where the writer has had the baseness to betray the confidence reposed in his honor by women, and to boast of favors alleged to have been granted him, it is always fair to consider as ipso facto a tissue of falsehoods: and on the following argument, that these are exposures ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... rejected "if he have a continued scab," i.e. lustfulness of the flesh: also, if he have "a dry scurf," which covers the body without giving pain, and is a blemish on the comeliness of the members; which denotes avarice. Lastly, he is rejected "if he have a rupture" or hernia; through baseness rending his heart, though it ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... he advanced into the heart of our kingdom, and at the head of the large army he had treacherously introduced as a mere appendage of state, than he declared the act of judgement was his right as liege lord of the realm! This falsehood, which our records disproved at the outset, was not his only baseness; he bought the conscience of Baliol, and adjudged to him the throne. The recreant prince acknowledged him his master; and in that degrading ceremony of homage, he was followed by almost all the lowland Scottish lords. But this vile yielding did not purchase ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... liberty she had just taken, "I have been told, there are men so base as to perjure themselves at the altar, in order to command the gold of ignorant and confiding girls; and if love of money will lead to such baseness, we may surely expect it will hurry those, who devote themselves to gain, into acts of ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... before him, offering that precious treasure his heart to Lady P——, asking whether it gave her pleasure to see him unhappy? whether it added to her triumph that her eyes and lips had turned a man into a fool?—quoting the Lord's Prayer, with a horrible baseness of blasphemy, as a proof that he had desired not to be led into temptation, and swearing himself the most tender and sincere fool in the world. It was from his home at Coxwould that he wrote the Latin ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "By my faith," said Charlot, "I mean to do the same by you. Know that I am the son of Duke Thierry of Ardennes, from whom your father, Sevinus, took three castles; I have sworn to avenge him, and I defy you." "Coward," answered Huon, "I know well the baseness that dwells in your race; worthy son of Thierry, use the advantage that your armor gives you; but know that I fear you not." At these words Charlot had the wickedness to put his lance in rest, and to run upon Huon, who had barely time to wrap his arm in his mantle. With this feeble buckler ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... lent thee meanes to scape thine ill, If thou abide, as true as is thy name, So truly shall thy fault, thy death fulfill: And as to loue the life for vertues flame, Is the iust act of a true noble will, So to contemne it, and her helps exclude, Is baseness, rashness, and ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... pure indifference the existence side by side with it of another false world, which had no right to be. Muspel was fighting for its life—against all that is most shameful and frightful—against sin masquerading as eternal beauty, against baseness masquerading as Nature, against the Devil masquerading ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... "I both could and did; and you will live to thank me for that baseness. You have a spirit, Asenath, that it pleases me to recognise. But we waste time. Mr. Fonblanque's estate reverts, as you doubtless imagine, to the church; but some part of it has been reserved for him who is to marry the family; and that person, I should perhaps tell you without more ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... matter and form. The materialization of the world is a consequence of the fall. Evil consists in the elevation of selfhood, which springs from desire, into self-seeking. Lucifer fell because of pride, and man, yielding to Lucifer's temptation, from baseness, by falling in love with nature beneath him. By the creation of matter God has out of pity preserved the world, which was corrupted by the fall, from the descent into hell, and at the same time has given man occasion for moral endeavor. The appearance of Christ, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... I know thy superhuman power Needs no assistance from an arm like mine; But grateful as I am for this great service, I cannot leave thee now, and shrink from peril, That would be baseness which ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... vice! Now do I loathe the amorous Serafina, Who sacrifices all—her fame—her honour, At Passion's shrine. How do I adore The chaste, the innocent, sweet Isidora! Yet in my love, so ardent and so pure, There's guilt—deep damning guilt—and more, There's cruelty and baseness! I plant a dagger In the fond breast that cherishes the wound; Nor will she feel the pain until withdrawn, And happiness—nay, life—will issue with it. How inconsistent, selfish, treacherous! Heav'n pardon me—how can I ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... last, by an unsurpassed and most pernicious baseness, Gallus ventured on adopting a course of fearful wickedness, which indeed Gallienus, to his own exceeding infamy, is said formerly to have tried at Rome; and, taking with him a few followers secretly armed, he used to rove in the evening ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... of innocence disregarded, and his guard ordered to murder them all then and there. The very soldiers shrink from the sacrilege, but a willing tool is at hand. The wild blood of Edom, fired by ancestral hatred, desires no better work, and Doeg crowns his baseness by slaying—with the help of his herdsmen, no doubt—"on that day fourscore and five persons that did wear an ephod," and utterly extirpating every living thing from the defenceless ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... Charles V. and Philip II. Of his mother nothing is known. The conjectures of scandal are heightened and perplexed by the fact that he was ennobled when a child, and that, amidst all the denunciations of his overbearing behaviour and insufferable arrogance, he is never reproached with the baseness of his maternal lineage. Legitimated in infancy by an imperial diploma, Antonio was literally a courtier and politician ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... interrupted, pointing passionately to the door, "go out from this house, never to return to it again—go, not as a stranger to me, but as an enemy! I have no faith in a single promise you have made: there is no baseness which I do not believe you will yet be guilty of. But I tell you, and the wretches with whom you are leagued, to take warning: I have wealth, power, and position; and there is no use to which I will not put them against the man or woman who threatens the fair fame of this family. ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... suffering in exile almost fifteen years? Is it thus they would recompense innocence which all the world knows, and the labour and fatigue of unremitting study? Far from the man who is familiar with philosophy be the senseless baseness of a heart of earth, that could act like a little sciolist, and imitate the infamy of some others, by offering himself up as it were in chains: far from the man who cries aloud for justice, this compromise by his money with his persecutors. No, my father, this is not the way that ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... concerning the alleged ill treatment of Indians, and their natural peacefulness and good disposition. Custer had so frequently befriended the very men who surrounded his command and annihilated it, that the baseness of their ingratitude should be apparent even to those who are inclined to sympathize with the red men, and to denounce the alleged severity with which they have been treated. Travelers through the Dakota region find few spots of more melancholy, though ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... the world, they are never in earnest, and they are never appalled. But Salvator was capable of pensiveness, of faith, and of fear.' 'He would have acknowledged religion had he seen any that was true, anything rather than that baseness which he did see.' 'If there is no other religion than this of popes and cardinals, let us to the robber's ambush and the dragon's den.' 'A little early sympathy, a word of true guidance, perhaps had saved him. What says he of himself? "Despiser of wealth and of death." ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... the age For baseness of the spirit scorns, Saint Priest, who every album's page With blunted pencil-point adorns. Another tribune of the ball Hung like a print against the wall, Pink as Palm Sunday cherubim,(84) Motionless, mute, tight-laced and trim. The traveller, bird ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... ferocity and practice of savage vices which is probably unparalleled in any other part of the world."[653] One of the first civilised men to gain an intimate acquaintance with the Fijians draws a melancholy contrast between the baseness and vileness of the people and the loveliness of the land in which ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... be put off before entering into the temple of history; and the man of the nineteenth century, if he has taste and information, is merely an historian, and nothing more. The sacred emotion which generous actions produce in us, the indignation stirred in us by baseness and cruelty, are childish emotions which are to disappear in order that we may be free to contemplate vice and virtue with a pleasure always equal, very deep, and very pure. We have not here the aberration of a young and ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... than three. There is in swift walking, when the muscles are hard, the wind long, and the atmosphere exhilarating, a buoyant rhythm that more, perhaps, than merited success, or valorous conduct, smoothes out the creases in a man's soul. And so quick is a man to recover from his own baseness, and to ape outwardly his transient inner feelings, that I found myself presently, walking with a high head and a mind full ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... how Germany wanted peace at the moment when she declared war! That is how sincere she was in pretending that we obliged her to take up arms for her defense! That is the price she intended to make us pay for our baseness if we had the infamy to repudiate our signature as Prussia repudiated hers by tearing up the treaty that guaranteed ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... spring, turning quickly on Wallace, struck his dagger into his side. All this was done in an instant. Wallace did not fall, but staggering, with the weapon sticking in the wound, he was so surprised by the baseness of the deed, he could not give the alarm till its perpetrator ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... spurn the tool of a tool. Manourie, too, had to publish his apology. He called God to witness that Stukely had bribed him to lay traps for Ralegh, and to put into his mouth malcontent speeches. All the evil he told of his ally was believed. His professions that his own admitted baseness had been provoked by resentment of Ralegh's spontaneous abuse of the King were received with incredulity or unconcern. On the fact, Captain King's word in his Narrative in answer to Manourie was accepted in preference to the Frenchman's. The Narrative ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... is accused of some act of baseness, a contrast is at once instituted between his character and the specified act, and we ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... gentle elevation, its large-hearted charity, its quiet satire of folly and baseness, the story is one to win the affection and charm the fancy not only of boys and maidens, but also of grown men and ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... the wise; and therefore those faculties, by which the foolish part of men's minds is taken, are most potent. Wonderful like is the case of boldness in civil business: what first? boldness; what second and third? boldness. And yet boldness is a child of ignorance and baseness, far inferior to other parts. But nevertheless it doth fascinate, and bind hand and foot, those that are either shallow in judgment, or weak in courage, which are the greatest part; yea and prevaileth with wise men at weak times. Therefore we see it hath done wonders, in popular ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... that all these ridiculous or wicked little kings and emperors, and these political parties, and these policies and conspiracies, and this nationalist nonsense and all the patriotism and rowdyism, all the private profit-seeking and every baseness in life, all the things that it is so horrible and disgusting to be young among and powerless among, you think they will ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... the disgrace which he felt in hearing of acts of disorder or violence, such as in the humbler ranks of life would render them amenable to the laws of their country; or again, on the trust which he placed in their honor as gentlemen, and the baseness of any instance in which it was abused. "Is this a Christian school?" he indignantly asked at the end of one of those addresses, in which he had spoken of an extensive display of bad feeling amongst the boys; and then added,—"I cannot remain here if all this is to be carried ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... his trial on the king's bench, when he came over voluntarily to take it, in the late king's time. There did not appear even the least ground for a suspicion of it; nor did Hamilton, who appeared in court, pretend to tax him with it, which would have been in truth accusing himself of the utmost baseness, in letting the murderer of his friend go off from the field of battle, without either resentment, pursuit, or even accusation, till three days afterwards. This lie was invented to inflame the Scotch nation against the Whigs; as the other, that prince Eugene intended ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... country with a feeble force, and when his victories had won the grateful plaudits of his countrymen, it had the unparalleled meanness, while he was still fighting our battles, to censure the capitulation of Monterey. It had the baseness to call General Scott from the head of a victorious army, and to attempt to disgrace him in the eyes of his own country and the world. It denounced Judge White as a renegade, General Harrison as a coward, Mr. Clay as a blackguard, and General Scott as a fool. And, without ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... course among the perplexed vicissitudes of society, there was a force within him which would triumph over many difficulties; and a 'light from Heaven' was about his path, which, if it failed to conduct him to wealth and preferment, would keep him far from baseness and degrading vices. Literature, and every great and noble thing which the right pursuit of it implies, he loved with all his heart and all his soul: to this inspiring object he was henceforth exclusively devoted; advancing towards this, and possessed of ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... he talked with Miss Wainwright, and the effort he was now making to bring himself up to the firmness needed for the important interview with Mr. Hubbard which lay before him. In the sleepless hours of the night, Fenton had gone over the ground again and again; he had painted to himself the baseness of the thing he meant to do, and all his instincts of loyalty, of taste, of good-breeding, rose against it; but none the less did he cling doggedly to his determination. His purpose never wavered. His decision had been made, and this summing up of the cost did ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... (as Mr. Orage wrote with something like splendid common sense the other day) there is such a lot to do and so few people who will do it. So I will devote this article to considering one case of the astounding baseness to which Liberal journalism ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... Baseness so gross I had not guessed of them!— The thirty thousand false Bavarians I looked on losing not unplacidly; But these troth-swearing sober Saxonry I reckoned staunch by virtue of their king! Thirty-five thousand ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... avoid a challenge, and who shrieks "murther!" at the entrance of an unexpected visitor. In the light of such conduct it is difficult to regard as merely assumed his pusillanimity in the final scene, where he at first grovels before Clermont on the plea that by his baseness he will "shame" the avenger's victory. And when he does finally nerve himself to the encounter, and dies with words of forgiveness for Clermont and Tamyra on his lips, the episode of reconciliation, though evidently ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... of His love for His Church, which should guard us from two errors in connection with it. If married love is to be a type, however faint, of Christ's love for His Church, there must be no unworthiness connected with it; "no inner baseness we would hide;" no marrying for the sake of being married, for the dignity and position, or the worldly advantages it may bring; and there must be no matchmaking or flirtation that a woman need be ashamed of afterwards. "Let the wife see that she reverence ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... All that her native pride, her keen sense of wrong could do, was to shame her from dwelling on the thoughts which still caught their breath of life from the undying devotion of the past; which still perversely ascribed Frank's heartless farewell to any cause but the inborn baseness of the man who had written it. The woman never lived yet who could cast a true-love out of her heart because the object of that love was unworthy of her. All she can do is to struggle against it in secret—to ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... praise, when tried by the standard which our own reason supplies of those great virtues? I confess it was not always so. His severity was formerly ever on the side of justice; it was indignation at crime or baseness which sometimes brought upon him the charge of cruelty—never the wanton infliction of suffering and death. But it certainly is not so now. A slight cause now rouses his sleeping passions to a sudden fury, often fatal to the first object that comes ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... circular of the 8th inst. are received. I was a long time a correspondent of Miss C., never having seen her, but holding a letter of introduction from Vice-President Henry Wilson. I have no standpoint in politics of influence now. * * * Miss Carroll's case shows the infinite baseness of human nature—how few worship truth and justice. I am already assailed for speaking a word in her cause, and shall have all the old feuds against me revived; but I am not dependent upon the American people ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... modelled somehow as a tragic mask. He too, like everything else, had a history. From what height had he fallen, from what depth had he risen? He was the perfect symbol of generated constituted baseness; and I felt before him in presence of a great artist ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... room for a minute, and then replied, "Signor Herbert, I feel so disgusted with the treachery and baseness of Count Rodolph, that I hardly need observe, if my daughter were free he never should espouse her; indeed, he will have immediate orders to quit the state. You have been instrumental in preserving the life of the Marquis of Salerno, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... in question to bring Before her own face, were a flattering thing, But we think thy father's baseness,' quoth they, 'Might by thy beauty be clean ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... negociation of wretches, who would have paid their court by multiplying stipulations. Tranquilla scorned to detain any part of her fortune from him into whose hands she delivered up her person; and Hymenaeus thought no act of baseness more criminal than his who enslaves his wife by her own generosity, who by marrying without a jointure, condemns her to all the dangers of accident and caprice, and at last boasts his liberality, by granting what only the indiscretion of her kindness enabled him to withhold. He therefore ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... against the iron authority of these conditions and stood for truth and conscience. They were, indeed, the conditions of his existence as a lawyer, a fact which they easily persuaded themselves mitigated the baseness of their obedience to them, or ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... defeat at Cannae, had gone over to Hannibal and drawn Arpi into revolt, as if it were right that a man's fidelity should vary according to the fluctuations of fortune; and who now, when the Roman cause, contrary to his hopes and wishes, was as it were rising up again, would seem to aggravate his baseness by recompensing those whom he had formerly betrayed, by fresh betrayal. That a man whose custom it was to espouse one side, while his heart was on another, was unworthy of confidence as an ally, and contemptible as an enemy; that he ought to be made a third example to deserters, in addition to ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... half-formed paralysis, may bring any of us to this pass. But while we can think and maintain the rights of our own individuality against every human combination, let us not forget to caution all who are disposed to waver that there is a cowardice which is criminal, and a longing for rest which it is baseness to indulge. God help him, over whose dead soul in his living body must be uttered the sad supplication, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... friendly, why be cowardly about it? If he must recognize me secretly, why, I would rather not have such recognition. Acting a lie to his fellow- cadets by appearing to be inimical to me and my interests, while he pretended the reverse to me, proved him to have a baseness of character with which I ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... reason to yield to him that commanded thirty legions." These and the like, applications, and stooping to points of necessity and convenience, cannot be disallowed; for though they may have some outward baseness, yet in a judgment truly made they are to be accounted submissions to the occasion and ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... striven to match her moves, plotting in the darkness against her, and fighting desperately with such weak weapons as she possessed. It was characteristic that she did not blame herself for her failure; it was the baseness of van Tuiver, his inability to appreciate sincere devotion, his unworthiness of her love. And this, just after she had been naively telling me of her efforts to poison his mind against Sylvia while ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... religion only to humanity's discredit. How, if the people were always predisposed to virtue, were priests, sprung of the same people and bred in the same traditions, so invariably and incurably devoted to baseness and hypocrisy? Was the nature of a priest absolutely devoid of what physicians call recuperative force, restoring him to a sound mind, in spite of professional perversion? In fine, if man had been so grossly enslaved in moral nature from the beginning of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... royal residence. For Tarautas had either destroyed the majority of those containing any accusation or had returned them to the senders themselves, as I have stated, [Footnote: The passage to which Dio refers is lost.] to the end that no proof of his baseness should be left. But he did reveal the names of three senators whom, from what he had himself discovered, he deemed to be especially deserving of hatred. These were Manilius and Julius, and moreover Sulpicius ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... violence and bloodshed, and my head swam, and my heart sickened, as I gazed at the confused conflict raging on the vessel's deck, and heard the shouts and cries of the combatants. Yet I felt an inward recoil against the baseness of sitting an idle spectator of such a struggle. A glance at the lion-hearted Erskine still maintaining the unequal fight, was an appeal to every noble and generous feeling: it nerved me for the attempt, and though I trembled ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... with the simplicity and directness of obvious truth, are full of terror, of pathos, the shame of human baseness and the glory of human virtue; and though the time is not yet sufficiently distant from the date of their occurrence to give to this record the universal acceptance it deserves, there are few, we think, even now, who can read it without amazement that ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... lurking in Florence, Tito went in hourly fear. At any moment the story of his baseness might be blown abroad; at any moment, worse still, he might be struck down by the old man, in whose wild eyes he had read only ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... refusal of Harold to embark in a civil war for his sake, and to force him upon the people of Northumbria in spite of their detestation of him, was an injury not to be forgiven. The fact that Tostig was ready thus to sacrifice England to his own private quarrel showed a baseness and recklessness that could hardly be expected from his early career. William naturally accepted the alliance, received Tostig's oath of allegiance, and aided him in fitting out a number of ships manned by Norman and Flemish adventurers. ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... her incredible suspicion. 'You insult me!' she said. 'And after what I told you! What intolerable assumption! What intolerable arrogance! What baseness!' ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... fronting the Tempter do grimmest battle with him; defiantly setting him at naught, till he yield and fly. Name it as we choose: with or without visible Devil, whether in the natural Desert of rocks and sands, or in the populous moral Desert of selfishness and baseness,—to such Temptation are we all called. Unhappy if we are not! Unhappy if we are but Half-men, in whom that divine handwriting has never blazed forth, all-subduing, in true sun-splendour; but quivers dubiously amid meaner lights: ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... make of such a man, wondered Mr. Caryll. If he were equipped with wit enough to apprehend the baseness of his conduct, he would be easily understood and it would be easy to despise him. But Mr. Caryll perceived that he was dealing with one who never probed into the deeps of anything—himself and his own ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... you to assure M. —— of my respect, and that it was only on one packet for him that I put my name, when I thought to have sent it by a friend. The baseness of the post-office opening it surprises me. No other letter for him has since passed through my hands. If any others come to me for him, I shall send them under ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... and Miss Piff; taking the tone of Mrs. Sniff, they shoulder Sniff about when he is let in with a corkscrew, and they whisk things out of his hands when in his servility he is a going to let the public have 'em, and they snap him up when in the crawling baseness of his spirit he is a going to answer a public question, and they drore more tears into his eyes than ever the mustard does which he all day long lays on to the sawdust. (But it ain't strong.) Once, when Sniff had the repulsiveness to reach ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... third, in ignoring the necessity of the presence of the military at the elections referred to, in order that disloyalty and treason might not openly defy the authority of the nation; the fifth, in ignoring two things, first, the monstrous baseness of the rebel treatment of our prisoners, who have been starved alive, with a refinement of cruelty reserved for this Christian age, and practised only by the Christian chivalry of the South; and secondly, the rebel refusal ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the Parade or elsewhere, but were to live ingloriously in wee side street lodgings, her disappointment was severe and extreme; but when she incidentally discovered that Mrs. Le Breton was positively a grocer's daughter from a small country town, her moral indignation against the baseness of mankind rose almost to white heat. To think that young Le Breton should have insinuated himself into the position of third master under false pretences—should have held out as qualifications for the post his respectable connections, when he knew perfectly well all the time that he was going ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... be chained by his appetites to the unclean: ever be driven back, dragged down again into the dirt by his own instincts: ever be rendered useless for all finer purposes by the baseness ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... life in which every one would be infinitely happier than anybody was in our world, and that the true interest of all would be furthered by establishing such a social order; but we held at the same time that the moral baseness and self-blinding selfishness of man would forever prevent him from realizing such an ideal. In vain, had he been endowed with a godlike intellect; it would not avail him for any of the higher uses of life, for an ineradicable moral perverseness would always hinder him from ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... cruelty and baseness, is to render the seat of the federal government the scoff of tyrants and the reproach of freemen FOREVER! On the 9th of January 1829, the House of Representatives passed the following vote. "Resolved, that the committee of the District of Columbia ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... rather have lost my purse Full of cruzadoes. And but my noble Moor Is true of mind, and made of no such baseness, As jealous creatures are, it were enough To put him to ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... desirous, as long as possible, of keeping up a semblance of friendship with Montezuma; and declared that he was willing to believe that, after the friendly messages and gifts the emperor had sent, he could not be guilty of such baseness and treachery. His anger therefore would be directed chiefly against the Cholulans, who were guilty not only of foul treachery to himself, but of dishonoring the ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... knows who made my need. Baseness of men! Pursuit being o'er, Doubtless her Husband feels no more The heaven of heavens of such a Bride, But, lounging, lets her please his pride With fondness, guerdons her caress With little names, and turns a ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... who flies into a rage at the least intimation that he will accept the gift which has been made him, spends most of his time in asserting his independence, and the firm resolution which he has made to owe nothing to the generosity of the man he has treated with such unquestionable baseness. Juliet keeps very quiet, but from the glimpse I caught of her this afternoon at her casement, I judge that the turn of affairs has had a very enlivening effect upon her beauty. Her eyes fairly ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... knows a trick worth any two of these: but it is curious to observe the community of baseness, and the comparative innocence of awkwardness and inexperience, which at once connote the species and denote the specimens of the later and ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... three rascals shouted, and what a vain struggle it was to try and preserve my dignity when Laddie clasped his hands and begged pardon, explaining that jokes were necessary to his health, and he never meant me to know the full baseness of this 'pleasantrie!' I revenged myself by giving him some bad English for his translation, and telling him of it just as I ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... of Kingsley's, above quoted, not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they faithfully describe sorrow. But the moment the mind of the speaker becomes cold, that moment every such expression becomes untrue, as being for ever untrue in the external facts. And there is no greater baseness in literature than the habit of using these metaphorical expressions in cold blood. An inspired writer, in full impetuosity of passion, may speak wisely and truly of 'raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame'; but it is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without talking ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the passions, the reason, and the instincts of mankind? Have we no pride, no honor, no sense of shame, no reverence for our ancestors, no care for posterity, no love for home, or family or friends? Must we quail before the onion breath of an enthroned mob, confess our baseness, discredit the fame of our sires, degrade our children, abandon our homes, flee from our country and dishonor ourselves—all for the sake of a Union whose Constitution you have publicly burned and whose Supreme Court ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... casuistical refinement. What Carlyle said of John Sterling applied with remarkable exactitude to Paul Jones: "True above all one may call him; a man of perfect veracity in thought, word and deed; there was no guile or baseness anywhere found in him. Transparent as crystal, he could not hide anything sinister if such there had been ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... mistaken in supposing that by "baseness" is meant "self-love" here assigned as the motive of all human actions. Shakespeare meant only to observe, that a minute analysis of life at once destroys that splendour which dazzles the imagination. Whatever ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... letter, he had actually written himself into a sort of persuasion of its truth. When a finely constituted nature wishes to go into baseness, it has first to bribe itself. Evil is never embraced undisguised, as evil, but under some fiction which the mind accepts and with which it has the singular power of blinding itself in the face of daylight. The power of imposing on one's self is an essential preliminary to imposing on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... black. And what a great name is Dharini, signifying the fortitude and forbearance that comes from majesty of soul! What an association it carries of the infinite dignity of love, purified by a self-abnegation that rises far above all insult and baseness of betrayal! ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... that only the pure can repose in his action,—only he obtain deliverance by his deed, and after deliverance from it? The egotism, the baseness, the partialities that are in our performance are hooks and barbs by which it wounds and wearies us in the passage, and clings to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... to be the truth. Her silence puzzled Ralph. He searched his memory for words or deeds that might have made her think badly of him. In his present mood instances came but too quickly, and on top of them this culminating proof of his baseness—that he had asked her to marry him when his reasons for such a proposal ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... short period of natural reverence sends light and calm all through the day. Where the home is the place where true prayer is offered, the family is the group which meets in an act of worship; here and into this group there cannot easily enter strife, bickerings, or baseness. One short period, five minutes or even less, of quietness, of united turning toward the eternal, gives tone to the day and finer atmosphere to ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... (whose Thursday evening receptions we well know, attended by some of the most illustrious French and foreign residents in the metropolis,) to accompany him on a tour of inspection to the Gobelins, and had afterwards been guilty of the unexampled baseness of leaving the coupe he had employed standing, unpaid, at the door of a certain house in the Rue Racine, whilst he escaped by a private passage into the Rue de la Harpe, and so forth, and so forth. I saw it all. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... saith she, "How good a knight are you, and how ill default do you make in another way! No knight, methinketh, is there in the world that would have refused me save only you. This cometh of your folly, and your outrage, and your baseness of heart! The griffons have not done my will in that they have not slain you or strangled you as you slept, and, so I thought that they would have power to slay you, I would make them come to slay you now. But the devil hath put so much knighthood into you that ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... His baseness was well known to the town, for he was one of those whose tongues reveal their degradation as soon as they are intoxicated. He boasted of his exploits in the city and of the women he had brought to his ranch, and these revelations made him the hero of a certain ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... blows, had scattered the crowd of his cowardly assailants, and driven them away. A number of fellows had set on him in the dark—on him of all others. Oh, what a change must have happened in the school that this should be possible! He felt that the contagion of Brigson's baseness had ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... dreams were more frequent, we should be happier; yes, and better than we are; we should be shamed out of much baseness—for nothing so purifies and exalts the soul as the actual or imaginary companionship of the pure and exalted; no man who purposed to create a noble picture would choose an imperfect model; no one who seeks virtue and cherishes ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... ingratitude! Do you reproach me? You, you upbraid me? Have I been false to her, through strict fidelity to you, and sacrificed my friendship to keep my love inviolate? And have you the baseness to charge me with the guilt, unmindful of the merit? To you it should be meritorious that I have been vicious. And do you reflect that guilt upon me which should lie buried ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... common in Indian life. Distrust exists not among the children of the wilderness, until generated by the conduct of white men. These stories and thousand others, all exemplifying the triumph of virtue and honour over baseness and vice, are every day narrated by the elders, in presence of the young men and children. The evening encampment is a great school of morals, where the Red-skin philosopher embodies in his tales the sacred precepts of virtue. A traveller, could he understand what was ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... clothes; little concern for what we shall eat or what we shall drink. The man who has to observe the least of the ordinances of style knows not liberty. He is a slave; his dress betrayeth him and proclaims him base. There may be degrees of baseness. I am abject myself; but whensoever I revisit the haunts of men clad in the few light incommoding clothes that rationalism ordains, I rejoice and gloat over the slavery of those who have failed to catch even glimpses of the loveliness of liberty, who ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... musical, and uncommonly sweet, enhanced the admiration with which one viewed his matchless delivery, in which was perfect grace, and entire harmony with the expressions which fell from his lips. How mournful a sight, to see one so nobly gifted, leading a life of baseness and vice, devoting his immortal qualities to the vilest selfishness, and to the betrayal of his country and of liberty! Should the descendant of an oppressed and persecuted race take part with oppressors? Senator Benjamin is a renegade to the spirit ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... say more than I have said." It is no wonder, then, that Holt, driven to desperation by such treatment, wrote to Speed:—"Your forbearance towards Andrew Johnson, of whose dishonorable conduct you have been so well advised, is a great mystery to me. With the stench of his baseness in your nostrils you have been all tenderness for him, while for me ... you have ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... were hanged at the same place where the boy had been killed; and the other was, through the intervention of the priests, taken aboard the ship, in order to send him to New Spain. Many houses were burned, a damage, "which, although slight, was some punishment for so great baseness and treachery as they had displayed toward us, ... and was done, so that when Spaniards, vassals of his majesty, anchor there another time, the natives shall give them a better reception, and maintain more ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... answered: "This foolish rage proves that you and Cambyses have the same blood in your veins. It would become you much better to repent of your crimes, and beg your old friend's forgiveness, instead of adding ingratitude to the unheard-of baseness of your ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... loss of power. "How can the man who has learned but one art procure all the conveniences of life honestly? Shall we say all we think?—Perhaps with his own hands.—Let us learn the meaning of economy.—Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have roast fowl to my dinner on Sunday is a baseness; but parched corn and a house with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbation, that I may be serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and quit and road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good will, is ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... word, hang no more about me, I am no gibbet for you: go: a short knife and a throng!—to your manor of Picht-hatch! go. You'll not bear a letter for me, you rogue!—you stand upon your honour!—Why, thou unconfinable baseness, it is as much as I can do to keep the terms of my honour precise. I, I, I myself sometimes, leaving the fear of God on the left hand, and hiding mine honour in my necessity, am fain to shuffle, to hedge, and to lurch; and yet you, rogue, will ensconce your rags, your cat-a-mountain ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... by the repetition of her ancient tales of war and overthrow on a scale of such apparent magnitude, but with no glamour of distance to hide the baseness of the agencies by which the destinies of Europe were shaped anew. This was an occasion that tried the hearts of men; it was not easy to remain through all those years at once undazzled and untempted, and never in the blackest hour to ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... deepest condemnation of the violence of the Republic and the despotism of the Empire that the generation formed by it should have produced the class who could exhibit, and the public who could tolerate, the prodigies of baseness which attended the second ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... pause. "I have come to condole and sympathise with you in your distress. Much as I may have blamed your misplaced and unbecoming attachment to an obscure courtier, almost an adventurer in this palace, I cannot but feel that you must suffer from the discovery of the utter baseness of this man. Look not thus surprised. I see you have already learned his arrest—your whole manner ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... the Lady de Tilly; "I know it is hard to bear, but perhaps Le Gardeur did not send that message to you. The men about him are capable of deceiving you to an extent you have no conception of,—you who know so little of the world's baseness." ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... to see why a freethinker, who by reticence and conformity passes himself off for a believer, should be more leniently judged. The differences between a catholic and a protestant are assuredly not any greater than those between a believer and an unbeliever. We all admit the baseness of dissimulation in the former case. Why is it any less ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... nevertheless she kept her eye upon her lover and Lady Mabel. Lady Mary had said that she thought her brother was in love with Lady Mabel. Could it be possible? In her own land she had heard absurd stories,—stories which seemed to her to be absurd,—of the treachery of lords and countesses, of the baseness of aristocrats, of the iniquities of high life in London. But her father had told her that, go where she might, she would find people in the main to be very like each other. It had seemed to her that nothing could be more ingenuous than this young man had been in the declaration ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... to his brow; there was no doubt upon the subject. Danglars defended himself with the baseness, but at the same time with the assurance, of a man who speaks the truth, at least in part, if not wholly—not for conscience' sake, but through fear. Besides, what was Morcerf seeking? It was not whether ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and more accurate adjustment. Yet let the man look exclusively for awhile on the opposite side of the tapestry; let him brood over any of the facts which seem at war with the above conclusion; on some signal triumph of baseness and malignity; on oppressed virtue, on triumphant vice; on 'the wicked spreading himself like a green bay tree;' and especially on the mournfull and inscrutable mystery of the 'Origin of Evil,' and he feels that 'clouds and darkness' envelope the administration of the Moral ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... scoundrel, double-dyed, Would pluck an Uncle's whiskers in their pride, What baseness, then, doth such a man disclose Who'd raise a hand ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... rights of man, when Phillips with golden eloquence preached the doctrine of humanity and progress, men approved and applauded. When Parker painted the moral baseness of the times, men acquiesced shamefacedly. When Channing preached the gospel of love, they wished the dream might become a reality. But, when Douglass told the story of his wrongs and those of his brethren in bondage, ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... thought of Delia's baseness the more she inwardly raged against it. She sat in her own room with her feet over the register and munched caramels and nursed her grievance all the afternoon. Delia was miserable. She had tried by every means in her power to win at least a look from the girl, but all her attempts ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... exhibition of baseness, my solicitor came to me and told me that he had had an interview with the Attorney-General, and that he had authorized him to say, that if I would enter into bonds and give securities to keep the peace, he ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... a handful of wealthy men—and especially to the one most wealthy and unscrupulous among them—whose wealth is an accident of speculation, whose origins are repulsive, and whose characters have, as a rule, the weakness and baseness developed by this sort of adventures. There are, among such gutter-snipes, thousands whose luck ends in the native gutter, half a dozen whose luck lands them into millions, one or two at most who, on the top of such a career go crazy with the ambition of the parvenu and propose ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... according to their usage, these strange monsters did not neglect to set apart a small sum as an offering to Kalee their goddess; and when, after this and several other murders, all characterized by similar features of treachery and baseness, they returned to their village, they proceeded at once to celebrate Tapoonee, or a solemn rite of their most ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... went to legislatures and demanded investigations into the rascally methods of the railroad magnates. The facts, said they, should be made public, so as to base on them appropriate legislation which would curtail the power of such autocrats. Contrasted with the baseness and hypocrisy of the trading class, Vanderbilt's qualities of brutal candor and selfishness shine out as brilliant virtues. [Footnote: No observation could be truer. As a class, the manufacturers were flourishing ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... existence. An awe of his cleverness, his trickery, gripped her in a clutch of ice. The whole fabric of her own desires and plans and purposes seemed to crumple like the white ash in a dead fire, leaving her nothing. She had been out-witted instead of outfought. One more evidence of the man's baseness, his ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... the seat of war? The answer is easy: New England is not infested with Tories, and we are. I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness. The period is now arrived, in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall. And what is a Tory? Good God! what is he? I should not be afraid to go with a hundred Whigs against a thousand Tories, were they to attempt to get into ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... occasion. They despised him; they loathed him; they said and believed that he was false, selfish, designing, a traitor, an apostate, that he had run away from a failing cause, that he had sold himself. The language of contumely was exhausted in vain efforts to describe his baseness. Not even yet has the echo of the hard names which he was called quite died away in the land; and there are still families in New England with whom his dishonest tergiversation ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... father's love and care, I cannot but despise a man who becomes a father, then shirks from the responsibility which follows—who leaves the burden and the disgrace which follow parenthood outside the marriage relation to the poor woman alone. Such baseness, such cowardice, such despicable littleness of soul!—do you wonder why I don't want to ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
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