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More "Depravity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stern displeasure, "the other is the very incarnation of the haughtiness, the luxury pushed to insanity, and the infamous depravity of the metropolis. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... stupider fellow than that dreamer knows that no woman will do it for nothing. The worst of them thinks herself worth something. One with such hair and such eyes and such a body!" He seized her by the hair and gazed into her eyes with a glance before which purity must blush; only depravity could meet it and laugh. He took her blush for a confession and laughed still more wildly. "You want to say that I am worse than he. Ha, Ha! You're right; I married such a woman. He wouldn't have done that. He isn't bad enough ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... consummate realization in engendering is being built. The supposed enormity perpetrated in its production, provided it had fallen within the sphere of ethics, would, at the least, have ranked, with its denunciators, as a brand-new exemplification of total depravity. But, after all, what incontestable defect in it has any one succeeded in demonstrating? Mr. White, in opposing to the expression objections based on an erroneous analysis, simply lays a phantom of his own evoking; and, so far as I am informed, other impugners of is being ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... enemies, or become enemies, because of their spleen; others because of their total depravity; and others still because they persist in standing upright when someone wants them to lie down and be stepped on. That is the meaning of backbone, in this world of human strife, and if, from time to time, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... oblivion must hide from the tender gaze of the young and the innocent the harrowing scenes that brought misery on his home, ruin on his financial condition, and a deeper hue to the moral depravity ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... has said that morals are infinitely more rigid in North America than elsewhere. This is not, it seems to me, a trifling advantage. Whatever may be the depravity of the seaports, where the whole world holds rendezvous, it remains certain that it does not penetrate into the interior of the country. Open the journals and novels of the United States; you will not find a corrupt page ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... moments later he was at the club, and surrounded by a host of the most abandoned profligates he joined in the ribaldry and obscene jests with a zeal that betrayed the utter depravity of his habits, and also shewed that he had taken a headlong plunge into the vortex and must soon become a hopeless wreck. And yet a short time ago, so fair to look upon, Hubert Tracy had been indeed prepossessing in appearance. His neat, well built figure, graceful but manly carriage, agreeable ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... seventy years, being brought personally to judgment, and kneeling before you Most Eminent and Most Reverend Lords Cardinals, General Inquisitors of the universal Christian republic against heretical depravity, having before my eyes the Holy Gospels, which I touch with my own hands, swear that I have always believed, and now believe, and with the help of God will in future believe, every article which the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome holds, teaches, and preaches. But because I have ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... agitation subsided and the company was again in the midst of wild revelry and merriment. The king endeavored to be merry; but the peculiar deep tone of that messenger of woe still sounded in his ears; and, with all his efforts, he could not forget it. In the midst of his depravity and wickedness, he still at times had some dread of that God whom he daily insulted. He sought to drown his unpleasant thoughts in mixed wines, but the King of Judah felt a presentiment of some awful calamity near at hand. With desperation he struggled against it, and joined ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... never told a lie, or never confessed one, will be shocked at these revelations of my childish depravity. What proof has he, he will cry, that I am not lying on every page of this chronicle, if, by my own confession, my childhood was spent in a maze of lies and dreams? I shall say to the saint, when I am challenged, ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... de Ronquerolles would very likely have bidden him compromise the Duchess by responding to her show of friendliness by passionate demonstrations; but as it was, Armand de Montriveau came away from the ball, loathing human nature, and even then scarcely ready to believe in such complete depravity. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... their origin, because he is vividly aware what they are, and what they mean. There are some emotions of his heart, at which he trembles and recoils at the very moment of their uprising, because he perceives clearly that they involve a very malignant depravity. There are some actings of his will, of whose wickedness he is painfully conscious at the very instant of their rush and movement. We are not called upon, here, to say how many of a man's thoughts, feelings, and determinations, are thus subjected ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... fact so much at the time, as afterward, when she subjected him to the merciless scrutiny of a woman who has heretofore discovered in men only depravity, ignorance, selfishness, or brutality. Her first thought had been to use Terabon, play with him, and, if she could, hurt him. She knew that there were men who go about plaguing women, and as she subjected herself to grim analysis, she realized that in her disappointment ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... and the depravity of his taste, while a youth, have been doubted and contradicted, but not disproved by modern historians; but the positive assertions of older writers, whose means of information was great and immediate, must always be more valuable than the theoretical doubts of persons who live when ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... the one, is the same as man's laughter, which is the end of the other. A pun is prima facie an insult to the person you are talking with. It implies utter indifference to or sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter how serious. I speak of total depravity, and one says all that is written on the subject is deep raving. I have committed my self-respect by talking with such a person. I should like to commit him, but cannot, because he is a nuisance. Or I speak of geological convulsions, and he asks me what was the cosine of Noah's ark; also, whether ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... But the chief point was that all this was, as it were, not accidental in me, but as though it were bound to be so. It was as though it were my most normal condition, and not in the least disease or depravity, so that at last all desire in me to struggle against this depravity passed. It ended by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was perhaps my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, what agonies I endured in that struggle! ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... Sabbath desecration. "I confess," observes this sage of ten, "when I look upon the present and past state of our public morals, and when I contrast our present luxury, dissipation, and depravity, with past frugality and virtue, I feel not merely a sensation of regret, but also of terror, for the result of the change." "The late Revolution in France," he adds, "has afforded us a remarkable lesson how necessary religion is to a State, and ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... him. Isn't it awful to find so much depravity in such a small body? But keep him to it, and make him speak. ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... flower? is there no one that cares that the growing man may be upright and virtuous, and that the nobility of his nature may not be warped and corrupted, either through want of a guardian or by the depravity of those he associates with? Is it not monstrous and thankless to say so, seeing that we enjoy the divine bounty, which is dealt out to us richly, and never abandons us in our straits? And yet some of these same straits have more necessity than ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... by thin walls from the most depraved beings, whose vile language was constantly audible to her ears, this refined and elegant woman was forced to occupy. She suffered acutely from this proximity to depravity and vulgarity at first; but ere long she transformed the vicinity in which her cell was situated "from an inferno to an oasis of peace." When she walked in the corridor, where at first she was pointed at, abused and reviled, she was now surrounded ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... this world, are blessings in disguise. Oh! if we could really feel this to be so in all of our troubles, it would be well for us in this world and better in the next. I never have seen the real total depravity of the human heart show itself more plainly or clearly than it did when my factories were destroyed by fire. An envious feeling had always been exhibited by others in the same business towards me, and those who had made the most out of my improvements and had injured my reputation by making ...
— History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, - and Life of Chauncey Jerome • Chauncey Jerome
... thrown a sinister shade upon all her previous life. Looking back upon the preliminaries which led to such wild confusion and misery, it was not unnatural that a man so absolute in judgment should perceive in the most innocent bygone details indications of depravity. It is one (whether good or bad we will not say) consequence of the use and practice of what may, to use a modern word, be called society, that men are less disposed to believe in the existence of monstrous and hideous evil, that they do not attach an undue importance to trifles nor take ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... garret in the silence of despair. She went slowly down the steep stair, supporting herself against the wall, her round-toed shoes creaking solemnly as she went, took refuge in the ga'le-room, and burst into a violent fit of weeping. For such depravity she was not prepared. What a terrible curse hung over her family! Surely they were all reprobate from the womb, not one elected for salvation from the guilt of Adam's fall, and therefore abandoned to Satan as his natural prey, to be led captive of him at his will. She threw herself ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... sentimentalized Christianity which professes the entire goodness of the human heart; but the discordant element in Cowper's mind was his inclination towards Calvinism, which goes to the opposite extreme by insisting on total depravity. Personally he believed that he had committed the unpardonable sin (against the Holy Spirit),—a dreadful thought which underlies his tragic poem, The Castaway; and probably unwholesome, though well-intentioned, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... in any instance, who is the criminal—but society. The murderer and the suicide are not responsible, but are merely public executioners. Through them the depravity of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... treated him with every sort of indignity. Moreover, he was compelled to be a witness of practices so revolting and cruel, that he often put the question to himself whether it was possible for devils to display greater wickedness and depravity than these people. ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... It is a welter of experiences and reactions which the future may use as another first-hand document in casting up its own conclusions. There is no careful culling out of just those episodes which support a particular theory, such as the total and complete depravity of ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... particulars of what had passed between my lady and me, repeated his question, What she had called me besides wench and creature? And I said, My lady, supposing I was wicked, lamented over me, very kindly, my depravity and fall, and said, What a thousand pities it was, so much virtue, as she was pleased to say, was so destroyed; and that I had yielded, after so noble a stand! as ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... grounds for the failings of the Irish people. If they are wanting in industry, in regard for the rights of property, in reverence for the law, history furnishes a full explanation of their defects, without supposing in them any inherent depravity, or even any inherent weakness. They have never had the advantage of the training through which other nations have passed in their gradual rise from barbarism to civilization. The progress of the Irish people was arrested at ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... dear," I heard her say. "Be a good boy, and give my love to Little Brown-Eyes." Then, as if to prove the immortal saying that there is no such thing as ultimate total depravity in the human atom, she leaned over to whisper the parting word: "Make good with her if you can, and want to, Bertie: I didn't mean it when I said I'd spoil your chances. Good-night and good-by." And with that the train moved off ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... also been convenient and consistent, in support of the doctrine of man's depravity, to exploit this dark view so as to make him a fit subject for redemption. Somehow, the traditional "Fall" and procreation have been so associated in religious thinking that it has been practically impossible for the religious mind to ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... Mrs. Catherick's extraordinary narrative, was to destroy it. The hardened shameless depravity of the whole composition, from beginning to end—the atrocious perversity of mind which persistently associated me with a calamity for which I was in no sense answerable, and with a death which I had ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... time people with money who wanted to educate their sons sent them out, at what seems to us a very tender age, to travel and tramp the earth alone. They were remittance-men who shifted from university to university, and took lessons in depravity, being educated ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... Much less can one realize without seeing it, how—apart from the corruption of sin, depravity, wickedness, and inveterate customs—how kind, honorable, content, gentle, pleasant, tractable, and easily governed these people are by nature; and how all China, with but one stock, is so great and populous, and so much ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... certain men; and what a royal ecstatic felicity there sometimes is in indisputable survey of the same. He rises to the heights of Anti-Biblical profanity, quoting Moses on the Hill of Vision; sinks to the bottomless of human or ultra-human depravity, quoting King Nicomedes's experiences on Caesar (happily known only to the learned); and, in brief, recognizes that there is, on occasion, considerable beauty in that quarter of the human figure, when it turns on you opportunely. A most cynical profane ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... to you for a heart, the refuse of half the prostitutes in town; a heart, the best feelings of which will be entirely obliterated; a heart hardened by a long commerce with the most unworthy of the sex; and which will bring disgust, suspicion, coldness, and depravity of taste, to the ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... Depict priskribi. Deplore bedauxregi. Deponent atestanto. Depopulate senhomigi. Depopulated senhoma. Deportment konduto. Depose (give evidence) atesti. Depose eksigxi, detroni. Deposit enmeti. Depot tenejo. Deprave malvirtigi. Depravity malvirto. Depreciate maltaksigi. Depredation rabado. Depress malleveti. Deprivation senigo. Depth profundo—ajxo. Depute deputi. Deputy deputato. Derail elreligxi. Derange malordigi. Deride moki, mokegi. Derive deveni. Derivation ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... whose power I was created, and by whose providence I am sustained, look down upon me with tenderness and mercy; grant that I may not have been created to be finally destroyed; that I may not be preserved to add wickedness to wickedness[1211].' 'O, LORD, let me not sink into total depravity; look down upon me, and rescue me at last from the captivity of sin[1212].' 'Almighty and most merciful Father, who hast continued my life from year to year, grant that by longer life I may become less desirous of sinful pleasures, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... hair right on top of their heads and wrap it around as tightly as she could with a string, and then, catching hold of this "top-knot," she would pull with all her might to bring up the palate. The unlucky little "nig" in the meanwhile kept up the most unearthly yells, for so great was the depravity among them that they had rather have their palates down than up. Keeping their "palate locks" tied was a source of great trouble and ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... king excites in the mind a sensation of horror;—and tho' it required the overwhelming evidence of human depravity furnished by the French revolution, to make the author of the "Historic Doubts," believe his crimes possible, the concurrent testimonies both of Lancastrian and Yorkist Chroniclers, too well demonstrate them. Tho' the latter may have endeavoured to soften the ...
— A Walk through Leicester - being a Guide to Strangers • Susanna Watts
... reasons why he should not be proud, are, notwithstanding, the reasons why he is so. Were not he a sinful creature, he would not be subject to a passion which rises from the depravity of his nature; were he not an ignorant creature, he would see that he has nothing to be proud of; and were not the whole species miserable, he would not have those wretched objects before his eyes, which are the occasions of this passion, and ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... of bogs seems always in earlier times to have been expeditiously set down by all historians and agriculturists as part of the general depravity of the Irish native, who had allowed his good lands,—doubtless for his own mischievous pleasure—to run to waste; bogs being then supposed to differ from other lands only so far as they were made "waste and barren by superfluous ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... friendship has been broken off, should not entirely forget their former intercourse; and that just as we hold that we ought to serve friends before strangers, so former friends have some claims upon us on the ground of past friendship, unless extraordinary depravity were the ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... a good-looking young fellow, little more than a boy. His smooth face was flushed, and there was about him an air of dissipation that suggested depravity in its advanced stage. The face that might have been handsome was the reflection of a roue, dashing, devilish. He was fair-haired and tall, taller than his companions by half a head. With reckless abandon he drank and sang and jested, ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... much louder than intellectual ones. ( 2, 14.)(155) On the other hand, in over-cultivated ages, when decay begins, an over-estimation of material things is wont to become general.(156) The mere servants of mammon, whether as political economists or as private individuals, may see their depravity faithfully reflected in communism as in a mirror. We should not overlook the fact that it is with whole nations as with the individual man who amasses his own fortune. He reaches the culminating point of his wealth generally after he has passed the prime of life. The most flourishing period of a ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... youthful sensibility, the doll-like mechanism of the whole figure, which seems to have no other feeling but a sickly sense of pain—show the deepest insight into human nature, and into the effects of those refinements in depravity, by which it has been good-naturedly asserted that 'vice loses half its evil in losing all its grossness.'" In the death of the Countess, again, he speaks thus of two of the subordinate characters:—"We would particularly refer to the captious, petulant self-sufficiency of the apothecary, ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... Martha, and Ruth. The father, Simon, was absent, and also his precious son, Sam, whose acquaintance we have already made. The remaining son, Reuben, was visiting a near neighbor about three miles distant. However much of original depravity existed in this family the parents were determined that they should ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... lines, aren't they?' said Maynard. 'Won't some of our worthy citizens lick their chops over them, and point to the depravity of the upper classes? Do ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... question," says the coroner. "You have heard the boy. 'Can't exactly say' won't do, you know. We can't take THAT in a court of justice, gentlemen. It's terrible depravity. Put the ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... regard the Siberian native as immeasurably superior to his Alaskan neighbours,[67] both from a moral and physical point of view, for the Eskimo is fully as vicious as the Tchuktchi, who frankly boasts of his depravity, while the former cloaks it beneath a mantle of hypocrisy not wholly unconnected with a knowledge of the white man and his methods. But every cloud has its silver lining, and it is comforting to think that even this rapacious and dissipated race can occasionally derive pleasure from the beauties ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... more strongly than the majority of them, the doctrine of Election, and the wise policy of cultivating friendly relations with Nonconformists, to whose places of worship he frequently went, as also the doctrine of personal assurance, and that of the utter depravity of human nature. But Gordon was not of a type of mind that can ever go completely with a party. He had such a strong individuality, that it would have been impossible for him to do as many do—sink ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... Swiss should be deprived of their arms and dismissed from the Quirinal; the Pope complied. The club then asked that Galletti should be named general of the carbineers; and he was appointed. "Such was the poltroonery or such the depravity of consciences that no journal would or dared denounce the murder. But why do I speak of denouncing? The murder was honored with illuminations and festivities in numerous cities, and not in these ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... since Alexander's marriage, and he had employed them in his wonted debauchery, carrying depravity and dishonour alternately into the convents and noblest abodes of Florence, when, on January 6, 1537, he was assassinated by the man whom, of all men, he the least mistrusted. This was his cousin, Lorenzino de' Medici.... ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. II. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... possibility or the advisability under altered circumstances of enforcing ecclesiastical discipline, but in common fairness to the clergy, who were accused of doing little or nothing to oppose the general depravity, it should be borne in mind that they were practically debarred from using a formidable weapon which in earlier times had been ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... congratulate the Assembly on the good working of their system; which meant that the negroes were quiet, the mulattoes kept under, and the crops promising; but under this "good working" there were the heart-burnings of the men of colour, the woes and the depravity of the slaves, and the domestic fears and discomforts of the masters, arising from this depravity. Now, when there was no oppression and no slavery, the simple system of justice was truly "working well"; not only in the prospect of the crops, and the external quiet of the proprietors, ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... peace, were in themselves sufficient to induce hostilities on the part of the Indians. Charity would incline to the belief that the continuance of the war was rightly attributable to these causes—the other reason assigned for it, supposing the existence of a depravity, so deep and damning, as almost ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... had been maturely digested, and communicated to the Lord Bolingbroke, Dr Swift, and one or two more, and was intended for the only work of his riper years; but was, partly through ill health, partly through discouragements from the depravity of the times, and partly on prudential and other considerations, interrupted, postponed, and, lastly, in a ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... of him. He said no one would give it away.... I am guilty of putting the 'Jessie Dodd' ashore, for which I am extremely sorry of being prompted to do so by Thomas Jagger, and to be so sadly led away into such depravity. Had it not been for such an irreproachable character, which I have held previous to this dreadful act, ten minutes after the occurrence I would have given myself up. Not one hour since but what I have repented bitterly...." ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... liberty was dead, the fullest personal liberty was enjoyed under the emperors, and it was under their sanction that jurisprudence in some of the most important departments of life reached perfection. If injustice was suffered it was not on account of the laws, but owing to the depravity of men, the venality of the rich, and the tricks of lawyers; the laws were wise and equal. The civil jurisprudence of the Romans could be copied with safety by the most enlightened of European States; indeed, it is already the foundation of their civil codes, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... if taxes are raised from us by the Parliament of Great Britain without our consent, and the men on whose opinions and decisions our properties liberties and lives, in a great measure depend, receive their support from the Revenues arising from these taxes, we cannot, when we think on the depravity of mankind, avoid looking with horror on the danger to which we are exposed? The British Parliament have shewn their wisdom in making the Judges there as independent as possible both on the Prince and People, both for place and support: But our Judges hold their Commissions only during ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... of Suetonius, equally with the masterly pencil of Tacitus, may convince us of the cruel depravity of Nero or Tiberius: But what a difference of sentiment! While the former coldly relates the facts; and the latter sets before our eyes the venerable figures of a Soranus and a Thrasea, intrepid in their fate, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... the slope on which he glides, albeit there may be precipices. He that rushes in his sledge down the artificial ice-hills of St. Petersburgh, skims along not more swiftly than Jennings, from the altitude of infant innocence, had sheered into the depths of full-grown depravity; but even he can fall, and reach, with startling suddenness, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... state of intellectual and moral depravity, he found a solace in the renewal of his experiments with the mechanical powers of the kite. For a couple of weeks he did not see Lady Arabella, who was always on the watch for a chance of meeting him; ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... of the drollest touches in the Reading—"'Cobbs,' says that boy, 'I'll tell you a secret. At Norah's house, they have been joking her about me, and [with a wondering look] pretending to laugh at our being engaged! Pretending to make game of it, Cobbs!' 'Such, sir,' I says, 'is the depravity of human natur.'" A glance during the utterance of which words, either at the Reader himself or at his audience, was ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... grounded in your heart, for lo! these many years! Dark despair, endless death, inexpressible misery, manifold, and worse than death, follow in the ghastly train of your crimes, and riot in your corrupt bosom, as with infernal drunkenness of delight! The record of your deep depravity, of your utter want of principle, and of your ten thousand villainous exploits, is stereotyped upon the burning sands of eternity, and stamped on the imperishable walls of the rotunda of the Devil's Hell, to which you are driving at railroad speed! In upper East Tennessee, where you are known, ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... all this and grew more than ever afraid of her. He tried to understand, to make out things a little in the darkness, but she was right after all; he took these things too seriously in his way. With all her vulgar depravity, Barbro was not worth a single earnest thought. Infanticide meant nothing to her, there was nothing extraordinary in the killing of a child; she thought of it only with the looseness and moral nastiness that was to be expected of a servant-girl. It was ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... books tell us, that in spite of the will of the Almighty, the whole human race, who had already been punished by infirmities, accidents, and death, continued to give themselves up to the most unaccountable depravity. God becomes irritated, and repents having created them. Doubtless he could not have foreseen this depravity; yet, rather than change the wicked disposition of their hearts, which he holds in his own hands, he performs the most surprising, the most impossible of miracles. ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... which accompany the advance of years to bring a revolt against the selfish blindness of our youth. As we watch and learn from the terrible tragedy of nature, as we realize more and more the baseness and depravity of human life, our faith becomes stronger that beauty, truth, righteousness, are eternal and cannot be born only that they may perish; that man is not "a wild and ravening beast held in check only by the bonds of civilization," ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... slavery is a heavy burden to my heart. Last night I was led to speak of this subject, of all others the sorest on which to touch a Carolinian. The depravity of slaves was spoken of with contempt, and one said they were fitted to hold no other place than the one they do. I asked what had made them so depraved? Was it not because of their degraded situations, and was it not white people who had placed them and ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... blueskin had at any named time taken part. But everybody was afraid of blueskins. It was a patterned, an inculcated, a stage-directed fixed idea. And it found expression in shocked references to the vileness, the depravity, the monstrousness of the blueskin inhabitants of Dara, from whom Weald must at ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... Kenyon looked indignant when I answered: "Then go along; you don't understand our trials, or you wouldn't condemn us. It can only be natural depravity that leads Harry to persist in living with such a companion when half the girls on the prairie are willing to provide him ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... for its own sake. The motive is not sufficient. You shall not find him refusing to do any mischief which tends to his own advantage. I grieve to say it, for I have leanings towards the dog-boy, but there is in him a vein of unsophisticated depravity, which issues from the rock of his nature like a clear spring that no stirrings of conscience or shame have rendered turbid. His face, it is simple and childlike, and he has the most innocent eye, but he tells any lie which ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... repacking of the Department trunks for Montgomery or some other convenient Southern city. The vitality of the Rebellion existed not in cities, towns, or capitals, but in that which could die only by annihilation,—Human Slavery. That was and is the "original sin" of the Rebellion,—the total depravity and innate heinousness, to use theological terminology, without which there could not have been ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... bushels of new wheat;—the alternate scarcity and comparative abundance of provisions;—the arrival or departure of ships from the harbour;—the commission of the first murder in the colony, and other sad accounts of human depravity and its punishment;—the gradual improvement and extension of the colony;—the first sale by auction of a farm of twenty-five acres for the sum of 13l.:—these and similar subjects occupy the history ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... The very language of the leaders of the people as they surrounded the cross is given by the Spirit of God. "He trusted on the Lord that He would deliver Him, seeing He delighted in Him" (verse 7). What depths of the depravity of the human heart they reveal! And in all this, while He suffered thus from man His sole trust was in God (verses 9-10). His whole life was to trust in the Lord to lean upon Him, till that moment came when God could no longer know Him as His own, when ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein
... our standards, was certainly, as well as Ptolemy, a depraved and vicious man; but his depravity was of a very different type from that of Cleopatra's father. The difference in the men, in one respect, was very clearly evinced by the objects toward which their interest and attention were respectively turned after ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... desperate condition, and nearly desperate character, could have induced him to attempt, the degenerate descendant of the virtuous Clarendon walked towards his place of confinement, with the step of one who assumed a superiority over his fellows, and yet with a mind so indurated by habitual depravity, as to have left it scarcely the trace of ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... Ginger—alias Ebony—when he shipped as cook. If the captain of the Eastern Star had introduced those three,—who had never seen each other before—and told them that they would spend many months together among savages in the midst of terrestrial beauty, surrounded by mingled human depravity and goodness, self-denial and cruelty, fun and tragedy such as few men are fated to experience, they would have smiled at each other with good-natured scepticism and regarded their captain as ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... descendants. In certain cases the severity of the condition increases from generation to generation. According to Morel there may be merely what is recognized as a nervous temperament often associated with moral depravity and various excesses in the first generation; in the second, severe neuroses, a tendency to apoplexy and alcoholism; in the third, psychic disturbances, suicidal tendencies and intellectual incapacity; ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... discovered a fatalistic tendency in Luther's teaching of justification by faith without works. They declare that Luther's theory of the utter depravity of man by reason of inherited sin and his incapacity to perform any work that can be accounted good in the sight of God kills every ambition to virtuous living in man. They argue that when you tell a person that he is not capable to do good, ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... was no gratitude for any so-called leniency of the North, no repentance for the war, no desire for humiliation, for sackcloth and ashes, and no confession of wrong. The insistence of the radicals upon obtaining a confession of depravity only made things much worse. Scarcely a measure of Congress during reconstruction was designed or received ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... principles; instead of that, theological considerations alone were adduced. The attentive reader will have remarked, in Tertullian's statement of the principles of Christianity, a complete absence of the doctrines of original sin, total depravity, predestination, grace, and atonement. The intention of Christianity, as set forth by him, has nothing in common with the plan of salvation upheld two centuries subsequently. It is to St. Augustine, a Carthaginian, that we are indebted for the ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... condition, with four-horse carriages, liveries, officials, antechamber, court, chancellorship and ministers of justice, obliging their monks to address them as "my lord," as lax as any ordinary layman, well fitted to cause scandal in their order by their liberties and to set an example of depravity. No more lay intrusions, commendatory abbes or priors, interlopers, and imposed from above; no more legislative and administrative interferences[5306] in order to bind monks and nuns down to their vows, to disqualify them and deprive them almost of citizenship, to exclude ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... man, dear—with all the lovable faults and sins and contradictions of one. But there is no real depravity in you any more than there is in me. Only—I think you are a little more selfish than I am—you lose self-command—" she blushed—"but that is because you are only a man after all.... I think, perhaps, that a girl's love is different in many ways. Dear, my love for you is perfectly ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... that, in numerous instances, except in the single quality of industry, not only has no improvement taken place in the character of the prisoner, but that he has become more hardened and corrupt than when he left England. The horrible scenes of depravity he has witnessed in the barracks whence he has emerged, must have produced their natural effect on his mind. I cannot help thinking that this system of concentration is extremely impolitic. We all know what a detrimental influence the associating of men, punished for an offence comparatively ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... part which war has played in human history, in art, in poetry, is not, as Rousseau maintains, an arraignment of the human heart, not necessarily the blazon of human depravity, but a testimony to man's limitless capacity for devotion to other ends than existence for existence' sake—his ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... selfishness and depravity which the corrupt churchmen made upon all observers is reflected in innumerable writings of the time,—in the letters of the popes, in the exhortations of holy men like St. Bernard, in the acts of the councils, in the satirical poems of the popular troubadours and the ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... punish anybody. Slander should never be spoken. If spoken, it should never be heard. When slanderous converse goes on, one should close one's ears or leave the place outright. Slanderous converse is the characteristic of wicked men. It is an indication of depravity. They, on the other hand, O king, who speak of the virtues of others in assemblies of the good, are good men. As a pair of sweet-tempered bulls governable and well-broken and used to bear burthens, put their necks to the yoke and drag the cart willingly, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... lady of the house, as usual, turned the conversation upon the subject of politics. She inveighed with much warmth against the effeminacy and depravity of the modern times. We were slaves, and we deserved to be so. In almost every country there now appeared a king, that puppet pageant, that monster in creation, miserable itself, a combination of every vice, ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... righteousness; secondly, in the gift and renewing of the Holy Spirit and in the hope of eternal life bestowed freely for the sake of Christ. This salvification and justification is only begun [in this life] and imperfect; for in those who are saved and justified by faith there still remains sin, the depravity of nature, there remain also the terrors of sin and of the Law, the bite of the old Serpent, and death, together with all miseries that flesh is heir to. Thus by faith and the Holy Ghost we, indeed, begin to be justified, sanctified, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... and its university suburb, there was little patience with a new religion or with a theology which did not teach the world the total depravity of man and the vengeance of an angry Deity consigning his wayward children to everlasting perdition. Southern gentlemen like Calhoun or Hayne might accept the mild and humane God of Channing, but not the farmers of the rural ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... badness of the disposition thus indicated. The question of merit leads to interesting moral problems. Bentham, however, observes that he is not here speaking from the point of view of the moralist but of the legislator. Still, as a legislator he has to consider what is the 'depravity' of disposition indicated by different kinds of conduct. This consideration is of great importance. The 'disposition' includes sensibility to what he calls 'tutelary motives'—motives, that is, which deter a man from such conduct as generally produces mischievous ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... fear!" says he. "I have known men who, by mere contact with depravity, have so dulled their sense of shame that they could make light of sins that once appalled them. Who knows but that one day I may forgive you, chat easily upon this villany, maybe, regret I went ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... after the other, all those fond, foolish, impassioned letters that the love-sick lad, Alden Lytton, had written to the artful woman who had beguiled him in the earliest days of their acquaintance, and before he had discovered her deep depravity. ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... hand on women, although when irritated by something he sometimes abused them indecently. He felt that he was immeasurably stronger than any woman, and every woman seemed to him immeasurably more miserable than he was. Those of the women who led their dissolute lives audaciously, boasting of their depravity, called forth in Foma a feeling of bashfulness, which made him timid and awkward. One evening, during supper hour, one of these women, intoxicated and impudent, struck Foma on the cheek with a melon-rind. Foma was half-drunk. He turned pale with rage, rose from his ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... himself!"—he also suspected him then. This crushed my last faint hope that, after all, it might turn out to be only a trick of the pupils; and, overpowered by the utter vileness and depravity of him who was set in authority over me, I buried my face in the pillow, feeling a strong inclination to renew the lamentations of the preceding night. Not many minutes had elapsed when the sound of a heavy footstep slowly ascending the stairs ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... this tale with an intensity of horror, of loathing, which at first deprived him almost of every other feeling; but when he could withdraw himself from the horrible idea, a species of disbelief took possession of him. It was impossible such utter depravity, such fearful insensibility to the claims of nature could exist in the breast of any man; it was a tale forged to inflict fresh agony on the mother's heart, and he determined on discovering, if possible, the truth. He pretended entirely to disbelieve it; declared it was not possible; ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... anything have been more thoroughly horrible and atrocious! It certainly betrayed how deep was the malignant hatred which she had ever borne to myself, and of which her daughter was now required to bear a portion. What a volume of human depravity was opened on my sight, by that single utterance of this wretched mother. Guilt and sin! ye are, indeed, the masters everywhere! How universal is your dominion! How ye rage—how ye riot among souls, and minds, and fancies—never utterly overthrown anywhere—busy ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... were to amuse himself by telling children complacently that there is an age in adolescence when the soul, not yet having found its balance, is capable of crimes, and suicide, and the worst sort of physical and moral depravity, and were to excuse these things—at once these offenses would spring into being. And even with men it is quite enough to go on telling them that they are not free to make them cease to be so and descend to the level of the ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... offspring is already incalculable. An acute and candid person, in the revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south and west, to investigate frauds, has talk'd much with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... held in the past, and is still held, that monotheism was the primitive form of religion and that the worship of many spirits or many gods is a corruption of primitive thought due to man's intellectual feebleness or to his moral depravity. It is urged that such a monotheistic system was the natural one for unsophisticated man. The view has been widely held also that it was the result of a primitive divine revelation to men. It is obvious that neither of these opinions is susceptible of proof on a priori grounds; the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... old Dame Trot, but without her cat, The Gossip was hunting all Tringham thorough, As if she meant to canvass the borough, Trumpet in hand, or up to the cavity;— And, sure, had the horn been one of those The wild Rhinoceros wears on his nose, It couldn't have ripped up more depravity! ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... I must wait until I undeceive him? No doubt it would have been better; but I should not be avenged, nor the honour of my husband vindicated, should he find so clear and easy an escape from the strait into which his depravity has led him. Let the traitor pay with his life for the temerity of his wanton wishes, and let the world know (if haply it shall ever come to know) that Camilla not only preserved her allegiance to her husband, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of these paragraphs running up and down the grimy gamut of sin. Beginning with all unrighteousness, he goes on to specify depravity, greedy covetousness, maliciousness. Oozing out of every pore there are envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity. Men are whisperers, backbiters, God-haters, and self-lovers, in that they are insolent, haughty, boastful. They are inventors of evil things, without understanding, ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... predisposes him to fall a victim to the malignant germs that cruelty sows in his heart. We tell the child that he is a criminal, and treat him as such, and then expect him to be perfect; and when our misguided education has begun to deprave him, we shake our heads over his congenital depravity, and thank God that we believe ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... courage and energy, was known to all who had opportunities of becoming personally acquainted with him to be a bad man. He was unprincipled, hard-hearted, and reckless. This, however, did not detract from his military fame. Indeed, depravity of private character seldom diminishes much the applause which a nation bestows upon those who acquire military renown in their service. It is not to be expected that it should. Military exploits have been, in fact, ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... religion. Infidelity tends to destroy conscience. It annihilates the great motives to virtue. It strengthens the selfish and weakens the benevolent affections and tendencies of our nature, and smoothes the road to utter depravity. The farther men wander from Christ, and the longer they remain away, the nearer they ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... was tenanted by a red and white cow belonging to Sylvanus Cahoon. Whether or not the animal had, during her calfhood days, been injured by a woman is not known; possibly her behavior was due merely to innate depravity. At any rate, she cherished a mortal hatred toward human beings of her own sex. With men and boys she was meek enough, but no person wearing skirts, and alone, might venture in that field without being chased by that cow. What would happen if the pursued one was caught could only be surmised, ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... have called forth the profoundest thought and speculation. From the contemplation of these strange phenomena sprang the esoteric doctrines of Egypt and the East, with their horrible accompaniments of vice and depravity; the same thoughts, low and terrible, hovered before the devotees of Moloch and Cybele, when Carthage sent her innocent boys to the furnace, a sacrifice to the king of gods, and Asia Minor offered up ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... not believe in utter human depravity, nor have I any faith in great virtue, nor in the notion that the affairs of life may be removed beyond good and evil. We shall outgrow, we have already outgrown, the conception of sin, but we shall never pass beyond the idea of good and evil; that would be equivalent ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... and a murderess; and is now about to sacrifice her person to me, the instrument of her murderous wishes. Why, what a devil is here, in the form of a lovely woman, whose beauty would seem to proclaim her a tenant of the skies, while the black depravity of her heart fits her only for the companionship of the fiends below! Why do I hesitate and tremble in her presence? She is in my power—my slave! Yet, by heavens, what a superb creature! A thousand passionate devils are dancing in her ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... the long raging of the plague. I have waited till he is less harassed to tell him about the Pymeuts' deliberate depravity. Nicholas, too!—one of our own people, one of the first pupils of the school, a communicant in the church; distinguished by a thousand kindnesses. And ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... 1872, contains the following bitter criticisms of the new double bridge:—"With Blackfriars Bridge," says the writer, "we find the public thoroughly well pleased, though the design is really a wonder of depravity. Polished granite columns of amazing thickness, with carved capitals of stupendous weight, all made to give shop-room for an apple-woman, or a convenient platform for a suicide. The parapet is a fiddle-faddle ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Lane), a compact but uninteresting village, 3 m. N. of Cranmore Station. Its church is an instructive example of architectural depravity, but internally has been much improved. The tower is ancient but poor. About a mile E. of the village are the ruins of a villa once owned by the notorious Duke ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... is nevertheless a master-work of its kind. Of the nature of a debauch, it is yet without passion, though it produces the disturbance of passion. The soul is wanting, but still it weighs upon the heart. Depravity of maxims, insult to rectitude of life, could not go farther; but over the abyss descends the talent of the author. In the valley of Gomorrah the dew falls nightly upon the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... mankind were to be damned, he "would rather keep them company than creep into heaven alone." On questions of inspiration, and the deeper problems of human life, he is less distinct, being naturally inclined to a speculative necessitarianism, and disposed to admit original depravity; but he did not see his way out of the maze through the Atonement, and held that prayer had only significance as a devotional affection of the heart. Byron showed a remarkable familiarity with the Scriptures, and with parts of Barrow, Chillingworth, and ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... allow that he deserves the very severe censure which Johnson pronounced upon him. His absurd preference of savage to civilised life[35], and other singularities, are proofs rather of a defect in his understanding, than of any depravity in his heart. And notwithstanding the unfavourable opinion which many worthy men have expressed of his 'Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard', I cannot help admiring it as the performance of a man full of sincere reverential submission ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... told, on the contrary, the story of an incessant rise in the scale of being, it was quite plain that the Pauline scheme—I mean the argumentative processes of Paul's scheme of salvation—had lost its very foundation; for was not that foundation the total depravity of the human race inherited from their first parents?.... But now there was no Fall; there was no total depravity, or imminent danger of endless doom; and, the basis gone, the ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... during my four years' course, in the pulpits of the surrounding towns, but it was not of the total depravity nor flaming brimstone; far grander themes engrossed my thoughts and speech; the true heroism of keeping ourselves unspotted from the world, the sublime possibilities of our natures if we would walk in the footsteps of the only perfect One ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... the reader a more realizing sense of it. It becomes thoroughly transparent to us; we find ourselves suddenly the confidants of virtue and vice, of greatness and insignificance, of nobility and depravity—all this, and more, through the simplest means. If we seek to discover what those means are, it appears as if he wrought for our eyes; but we are deceived. Shakespeare's creations are not for the eyes of the body. I shall endeavor to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... present moment, and for some time past, has been the victim of a morbid state of mind, few impartial observers will deny. It has, however, not been so generally recognized that this disease—for it is nothing less—is due not to any national depravity but to constitutional ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... which had been overlooked in ages of ignorance and superstition. In the fifteenth century, many great abuses scandalized a body of men who should have been the lights of the world; and the sacred pontiffs themselves set examples of unusual depravity. Julius II. marched at the head of armies. Alexander VI. secured his election by bribery, and reigned by extortion. He poisoned his own cardinals, and bestowed on his son Caesar Borgia—an incarnated demon—the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... in her more than my lamp and my saint, the gracious presence which should "imparadise," in Dante's phrase, my mind. I was an honest lad, very serious and very simple. Perhaps I was a fool, but I was a pure fool: and he had been a very monster of depravity who could have cast unwholesome regard upon a welcome so generous and modest as hers. I declare that she was never anything to me but a holy emanation, not to be approached but on the knees, not to be looked upon but through a veil. So from this page until near the end of my long history she will ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... least have stopped Clemence upon a dangerous path and saved her from a most irreparable fall. But his nature was too unrefined for him to see the degrees which separate weakness from vice, and the intoxication of a loving heart from the depravity of a corrupt character. With the obstinacy of narrow-minded people, he had been looking at the whole thing in its worst light, and for several hours already he had decided upon his wife's guilt in his own mind; this served now as a foundation for his stern conduct. His features remained ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... evidence of total depravity, Mrs. Jeffrey brushes down her black silk apron and goes back to Theo, her more tractable pupil; while Maggie, emerging ere long from the stable, clears the fence with one leap of her high-mettled pony, ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... born in an age, of a family, in a rank the most vicious in the annals of vice, of parents whose depravity had contaminated even their blood, was ushered with infinite difficulty into the breathing scene he was so much to trouble, and offered, at the outset of his disorderly career, misfortune and singularity in a twisted fool, a tied tongue, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... women and girls, you put men in the position which forces them to thievery and murder; you corrupt them with whisky—international butchery, universal falsehood, depravity, and savagery—that's your civilization! Yes, we are enemies ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... That's the worst of it. He 's money enough, and might justly take offense. What breaks my heart is that we could have the depravity to smile at the mistake of a friendless stranger, who supposed he had at last met with an act of pure kindness. It's a thing to weep over. Look at these grinning wretches! What a fiendish effect their smiles have, through their cinders and sweat! O, it's the terrible weather; the despotism of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... farmer, who made her the companion of his flocks and herds, lived till now, till now she might have been secure from the annoyance of human kind; but, thrown once more upon society, she was unfit to sustain the conflict of decorum against depravity. Her master, her patron, her preserver, was dead; and hardly as she had earned the pittance she received from him, she found that it surpassed her power to obtain the like again. Her doubtful character, her capacious mind, her unmethodical manners, were still badly suited to the nice precision ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... good people about our ears," said Segur. "We'll be denounced as a defender of depravity, a foe of purity. They'll thunder away at us from every pulpit. The other newspapers will take it up, especially those that expect to sell millions of papers containing accounts of the 'exposure' of ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... could only toss the roll of music under the sofa as gently as masculine depravity would permit, and conduct my music-greedy friend to the choir-meeting, ostensibly to listen to the chants, though I knew, and he knew, that he had always heretofore objected ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... shortest route to it. Esoon shook its head. "Yes, it was close, but it was impossible to reach Uguma's factory." "Why?" "There was blood war on the path." I said it was no war of mine. But Esoon said, such was the appalling depravity of the next town on the road, that its inhabitants lay in wait at day with loaded guns and shot on sight any one coming up the Esoon road, and that at night they tied strings with bells on across the road and shot on hearing ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... more moral, more peaceful races (perhaps trading or cattle-rearing communities), or upon old mellow civilizations in which the final vital force was flickering out in brilliant fireworks of wit and depravity. At the commencement, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their superiority did not consist first of all in their physical, but in their psychical power—they were more COMPLETE men (which at every point also implies the same ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... between men and women of his own age, and Ma's. At these gatherings he had waxed oratorical or argumentative, and they had heard him, some in agreement, some in disagreement, but always respectfully, whether he prated of real estate or social depravity; prohibition or European exchange. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... reflections was a determination to carry to Borneo, an island of some magnitude, and terribly afflicted in more respects than one, such knowledge and instruction as might help to elevate its people from the depravity in which they lived, and the horrors to which they were hourly subjected. This was in 1830. In the year 1838, he quitted England to fulfil his purpose. For eight years he had patiently and steadily worked towards his object, and gathered about him all that was necessary ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... many murderers in the mines. In fact, nearly all the life men are there. Some of them speak of their crimes with a bravado simply astonishing, showing their utter depravity. Others, admitting their guilt, say but little of details. The following will give the reader some idea of the stories that greeted my ears almost daily, and led me to conclude that the coal mines of the penitentiary are not inhabited exclusively ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... their minds should have remained unpolluted by the notions of the extravagant and degrading idolatries, which were in practice among almost all the ancient nations; and that their hearts should have remained untouched by the contagion of universal depravity. The soil to which any seed, however good, is to be committed, would never respond to the expectations of the husbandman, if it were not cleared from weeds and thistles. Those individuals had, therefore, ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... offences happened often enough to give her repeated shocks, and to confirm her in her belief in the total depravity, the hopeless wickedness of all boys—especially of John Allan's ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... our humanity which, when touched, does not find a sympathetic vibration in the mighty range and scope of our Lord's being, saving, of course, the jarring discord of sin. But sin is not a necessary and integral part of unfallen human nature. We speak of natural depravity, but, in reality, depravity is unnatural. God made Adam upright and perfect; sin is an accident; it is not necessary to a ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... Barlow, "what is the general malady of human nature but this very instability which now appears in your son? Do you imagine that half the vices of men arise from real depravity of heart? On the contrary, I am convinced that human nature is infinitely more weak than wicked, and that the greater part of all bad conduct springs rather from want of firmness than from any settled propensity ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... up to that point, the devastation was infinitely greater than time alone could have wrought. Great guns, bombs, and mines must have leveled every building that man had raised, and then nature, unhindered, had covered the ghastly evidence of human depravity with her beauteous mantle of verdure. Splendid trees reared their stately tops where splendid cathedrals once had reared their domes, and sweet wild flowers blossomed in simple serenity in soil that once was drenched with ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to my face?" said the teacher. She was, even after many years at the business of exposing the natural depravity of the youthful mind, appalled at the ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... Thaw was front-paged on the newspapers and gibbeted in the pulpits as the shocking example of youthful depravity. He seems never to have had a fighting chance to become a man. He seems to have been robbed of his birthright from the cradle. Yet the father of this boy who has cost America millions in court and detention expenses was one of the greatest business generals ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... and we moved up towards our host, I found myself between two groups; one discussing the mercantile depravity of a gentleman called Wilmot, of whom I had never heard, the other arguing on dark dilemmas connected with an Abyssinian loan. A vacant chair happening to be by my side, Adrian, glass in hand, came round the ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... malignant to be employed in this unhallowed contest, if it can but serve the purpose of deluding, even for a moment, the most ignorant of mankind. No insinuation is too base, no equivocation too mean, no artifice too paltry. The world affords no parallel to the scene of political depravity exhibited ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... board surrounded by rollicking and greedy guests. But it was not upon this overthrow we stopped to look. It was upon something that mingled with it, dominated it, and made of this chaos only a setting to awful death. Janet's face, in all its natural hideousness and depravity, looked up from the floor beside this heap; and farther on, lay the twisted figure of him they called Hector, with something more than the seams of greedy longing round his wide-staring eyes and icy ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... Darwinism." "A system," His Holiness adds, "which is repugnant at once to history, to the tradition of all peoples, to exact science, to observed facts, and even to Reason herself, would seem to need no refutation, did not alienation from God and the leaning toward materialism, due to depravity, eagerly seek a support in all this tissue of fables.... And, in fact, pride, after rejecting the Creator of all things and proclaiming man independent, wishing him to be his own king, his own priest, and his ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... his escape and to outwit or outfight his enemies. I don't say he couldn't do it successfully; but I do say that, with the hazards confronting him at every turn, he will find the real criminal in him growing and possessing him, making him think things and do things of the utter depravity of which he has never ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... did Christ teach that man is wholly sinful, in the sense that there is in man nothing that is good, or that every man is by nature as bad as he can be. Nor, let it be said in passing, is this what theology means when it speaks, as it still sometimes does, about the "total depravity" of human nature. What is meant is, as Dr. Denney says, that the depravity which sin has produced in human nature extends to the whole of it.[35] If I poison my finger, it is not only the finger that is poisoned; the poison is in the blood, and, ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... resolution; choose, and pursue your choice. If you spend this day in study, you will find yourself still more able to study to-morrow; not that you are to expect that you shall at once obtain a complete victory. Depravity is not very easily overcome. Resolution will sometimes relax, and diligence will sometimes be interrupted; but let no accidental surprise or deviation, whether short or long, dispose you to despondency. Consider these ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... raise the devil. But throughout all this fearful period the delusion of the criminals was as great as that of the judges. Depraved persons who in ordinary times would have been thieves or murderers, added the desire of sorcery to their depravity, sometimes with the hope of acquiring power over their fellows, and sometimes with the hope of securing impunity in this world by the protection of Satan. One of the persons executed at the first burning, a prostitute, was heard ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... is any individual who combines within himself the vices of an entire species it is he. A mother-in-law has usually been thought a rather satisfactory specimen of total depravity; it has been customary to regard your sweetheart's brother as tolerably vicious for a young man; there is excellent authority for looking upon your business partner as not wholly without merit as a nuisance-but your friend's friend is as far ahead of these in all that constitutes ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... and deeply argued out already by such great minds as Coleridge and Gladstone, but perhaps, for general usefulness, requiring a more brief and popular discourse; the question of passive obedience; the true though unfashionable doctrine of man's general depravity invalidating the consignment of power to the masses; and so forth. There are, however, if Scripture is to be held a constitutional guide, some examples to a certain extent contrary to the argument: as, elective monarchy in the case of Saul; non-legitimate succession in families ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... became quiet. Charles helped himself to as much money as he wanted, and was ready for the ball in the evening. Alas, what degradation for a parent! and what persevering depravity in ...
— Charles Duran - Or, The Career of a Bad Boy • The Author of The Waldos
... motive were somewhere in it. Perhaps after all—he wondered more and more now—there had been an admixture of personal ambition in the plan. The idea that it would bring him honour in the eyes of the world had possibly lain there hidden all along. If so, he had not realised it; the depravity had been unconscious. Before the Bourcelles standard of simplicity, artificial elements dropped off automatically, ashamed. ... And a profound truth, fished somehow out of that vanished dreamland, spun its trail ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... that you are diseased from the crown of your head to the sole of your foot. You are unclean; you are a leper. Believe not me, but believe God's Word, that over and over again announces, in language that a fool might understand, the total and complete depravity of the unchanged heart: "The heart is deceitful above ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... practically step-mother to children of another race; and if she is sensible, and amenable to nature's teaching, she will attribute their seemingly unsuitable ways and appetites to the right cause, and not to a hypothetical perversity or inherent depravity of heart, about which many authors will have spoken ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... time when people seemed to take pride in self- depreciation. Believing in total depravity, they were suspicious of all natural tendencies, and the crushing out of strong desires seemed no evil. Obedience to Another's will was the one supreme virtue, and the killing of human nature, the annihilation of self, was the condition of its attainment. [Footnote: See ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... confession of the late Leonidas Parker, which appeared in your issue of the 13th ultimo, has given rise to a series of disturbances in this neighborhood, which, for romantic interest and downright depravity, have seldom been surpassed, even in California. Before proceeding to relate in detail the late transactions, allow me to remark that the wonderful narrative of Parker excited throughout this county sentiments of the most profound and contradictory ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... Whereas the amateur who works with no higher aim than that of immediate recognition betrays it from the vanity and wantonness of his spirit. The one is naughty because he is needy, the other from natural depravity. Besides, the amateur can keep his work to himself, whereas the professional man ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... cruel discipline. It results in depravity of life. The most notorious criminals began their career under the lash of parental cruelty. If rods and stripes and cries and tears and cruel beating are the first lessons of life we are to learn, then we shall be educated in as well as by these. The Europeans ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... the same as man's laughter, which is the end of the other. A pun is prima facie an insult to the person you are talking with. It implies utter indifference to or sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter how serious. I speak of total depravity, and one says all that is written on the subject is deep raving. I have committed my self-respect by talking with such a person. I should like to commit him, but cannot, because he is a nuisance. Or I speak of geological convulsions, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... within his breast. He was carried along by vehement political anger, and deeper than that there glowed a wrath as stern as that of an ancient prophet. To cling to a mischievous error seemed to him to savor of moral depravity and corruption of heart. What he saw was the selfishness of the aristocracy and the landlords and he was too deeply moved by the hatred of this to care to deal very patiently with the bad reasoning which their own self-interest ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... sins? None will deny that so they are. A woman that indulges herself in the intimate use with a man commits but a sin of nature; but if she rob him, or slay him, or drive him out into exile, her sin proceeds from depravity of spirit. That you did rob Tedaldo, I have already shewn you, in that, having of your own free will become his, you reft you from him. I now go further and say that, so far as in you lay, you slew him, seeing that, shewing yourself ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... and he is one of those men to whom a blot in the 'scutcheon is only less terrible than the knowledge that such trust has been misplaced. He is stung to madness by what seems this crowning proof of his sister's depravity; and by the thought of him who has thus corrupted her. He surprises Mertoun on the way to the last stolen visit to his love; and, before there has been time for an explanation, challenges and ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... rights, or having her own way when it crossed the will and pleasure of any one around her. All she wanted of a child, or in fact of any human creature, was something to love and serve. We leave it entirely to theologians to reconcile such facts with the theory of total depravity; but it is a fact that there are a considerable number of women of this class. Their life would flow on very naturally if it might consist only in giving, never in withholding—only in praise, never in ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... cause to repent it. But you know him as well as I do, who would not have thought his piety sincere?—who would not still think so? And notwithstanding all you have said, I still hesitate to feel serious alarm; I am unwilling to believe in such utter depravity." ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was secure and the stork unmolested in her nest; till the praetorian [Sempronius], the inventor, first taught you [to eat them]. Therefore, if any one were to give it out that roasted cormorants are delicious, the Roman youth, teachable in depravity, would acquiesce, in it. ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... for, you don't say. And I shouldn't wonder if you are sending me to Petersburg to plot some revenge in your spite against Mr. Stavrogin, Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, reckoning on my simplicity. And that proves you are the chief murderer. And do you know what you deserve for the very fact that in the depravity of your heart you've given up believing in God Himself, the true Creator? You are no better than an idolater and are on a level with the Tatar and the Mordva. Alexey Nilitch, who is a philosopher, has expounded the true God, the Creator, many a time to you, as well as ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... between the kings of Judah and Israel, and between them and the neighbouring kings,—the kings and people both of Judah and Israel, soon fell into the greatest depravity; and at length God suffered Shalmaneser king of Assyria, by the capture of Samaria in the reign of Hoshea, to put an end to the kingdom of Israel 721 years B. C. and about 250 years after its first establishment into a separate kingdom. And 606 years B. C. and about 115 years after the destruction ...
— A Week of Instruction and Amusement, • Mrs. Harley
... It was wrong, no doubt, to deface the first page of the Bible in this way, but Ann had said "too wicked to leave about!" so Morva searched through the whole book, until on the fair leaf which fronted "The Revelations" she found evident proof of Gethin's depravity; and she quailed a little as she saw a vivid and realistic pen and ink drawing of a fire of leaping flames, standing over which was a monster in human shape, though boasting of a tail and cloven hoofs. With fiendish glee the ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... one reflect upon the writer because he assisted in robbing this churchman of his horses. For him there was no choice; and if he is chargeable with moral depravity, it must be elsewhere,—forsooth, in joining with one who made war unprovided with a military chest sufficient to cover expenses. However, this is no matter, one way or the other. The private character of the relator, Samuel Absalom, is not before the reader; nor is it to be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... always laughed at marriage as a dull depravity permitted to the respectable classes! I who always maintained that man's whole duty to woman—meaning his mistresses—that a man's duty to a woman is liberally discharged when he has made a settlement on her, or stuck her into his will! [Blowing ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... the nature of man is not made for him. But you will say that man's nature is depraved. In what consists this pretended depravity? Is it because he has passions? But are not passions the very essence of man? Must he not seek, desire, love that which is, or that which he believes to be, essential to his happiness? Must he not fear and avoid that ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... l'Ile Adam, whose servant she would rather be than reign of Christendom. The English cardinal remonstrated with the pope that this love for one, in the heart of a woman who was the joy of all, was an infamous depravity, and that he ought with a brief in partibus, to annul this marriage, which robbed the fashionable world of its principal attraction. But the love of this poor woman, who had confessed the miseries of her life, was so sweet a thing, and so moved the most dissipated ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... should never be heard. When slanderous converse goes on, one should close one's ears or leave the place outright. Slanderous converse is the characteristic of wicked men. It is an indication of depravity. They, on the other hand, O king, who speak of the virtues of others in assemblies of the good, are good men. As a pair of sweet-tempered bulls governable and well-broken and used to bear burthens, put their necks to the yoke and drag ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... language so encyclopaedic. A gallant scene in truth it made. Crotthers was there at the foot of the table in his striking Highland garb, his face glowing from the briny airs of the Mull of Galloway. There too, opposite to him, was Lynch whose countenance bore already the stigmata of early depravity and premature wisdom. Next the Scotchman was the place assigned to Costello, the eccentric, while at his side was seated in stolid repose the squat form of Madden. The chair of the resident indeed stood vacant before the hearth but on either flank of it the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... other hand, the civilized classes give us the still more repulsive sight of lethargy, and of a depravity of character which is the more revolting because it roots in culture. I forget who of the older or more recent philosophers makes the remark, that what is more noble is the more revolting in its destruction. The remark applies with truth to the world of morals. The child ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... by pretty women on their counsel. Where will morality stop short? Such precautions are like the ready-made sets of questions for self-examination, where pure imaginations are defiled by meditating on unknown and monstrous depravity. In this parlor, too, parents and friends may be allowed by the authorities to meet the prisoners, whether on remand or ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... workers, the real producers of all that makes life possible. I have felt this for a long time, and as the years have passed by the feeling has grown and grown, until recently it reached its climax. Although I feel all this so vividly, I still live on amid the depravity and sins of rich society; and I cannot leave it, because I have neither the knowledge nor the strength to do so. I cannot. I do not know how to change my life so that my physical needs—food, sleep, clothing, my going to and fro—may be satisfied without a sense of shame and wrongdoing ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... at you!' said Gashford, with a kind of meek severity. 'This is a very sad picture of female depravity.' ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... London 'Prentice Street came to be given to the delectable thoroughfare is one of "those things no fellow can understand." At one time there was a schoolroom there, the boys being taught good manners upstairs, while they could learn lessons of depravity below. With the anxious desire of putting the best face on everything that characterises the present local "fathers of the people," the London 'Prentice has been sent to the right-about, and the nasty dirty stinking thoroughfare ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... impossible that in any country, but most of all in a monarchical and in aristocratic one, such manners can exist in the higher ranks, without inducing a total depravity of general thought, and perversion of the power of mind. Talent, often the most venal of venal things, follows in the wake of corruption. Covetous of gain, thirsting for patronage, it fans, instead of lowering, the passions by which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... theological teachers to the majority of their opponents that they substantially recognise these realities of things, however strange the forms in which they clothe their conceptions. The doctrines of predestination, of original sin, of the innate depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgus subordinate to a benevolent Almighty, who has only lately revealed himself, faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... known some of the most abandoned of human beings, who have been a disgrace to that holy office. In due course I shall shortly detail the moral character of two clergymen of this diocese, as a specimen of human depravity, both of them living under the nose ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... in analyzing his character, is to discover by what depravity of intellect he took delight in revolving ideas, from which almost every other mind shrinks with disgust. The ideas of pleasure, even when criminal, may solicit the imagination; but what has disease, deformity, and filth, upon which the thoughts ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... is in man nothing that is good, or that every man is by nature as bad as he can be. Nor, let it be said in passing, is this what theology means when it speaks, as it still sometimes does, about the "total depravity" of human nature. What is meant is, as Dr. Denney says, that the depravity which sin has produced in human nature extends to the whole of it.[35] If I poison my finger, it is not only the finger that is poisoned; the poison is in the blood, and, unless it be got rid of, not my ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... aside from that of the innocent babe, whose little form lay roasted and charred, on the fatal and bloody hearthstone of the drunkard! Victims all, of an intoxicated husband and father! When the guilty man saw the mangled remains of his household, he only increased his depravity by trying to make others responsible for the wicked deed,—exclaiming in feigned anguish, "my dear wife! my poor children! I was afraid they would murder you! Oh, my lost family!" &c. Community was soon alarmed; Severin, arrested, ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... to end none of us can tell. Deliberately to blot from this earth and its service that which comes into the world so divinely equipped with knowledge and inspiration requires both sublime courage and indescribable depravity; sublime courage to invite the hostility of the vast, complicated, mysterious forces that are embodied in a human life, however humble it may be; indescribable depravity to destroy the most useful and the most beautiful product of ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... fashionable topic, as we in our times laud the Arcadian innocence of the inhabitants of Otaheite. In both these pictures the colouring is more vivid than true. When nations, wearied with mental enjoyments, behold nothing in the refinement of manners but the germ of depravity, they are pleased with the idea, that in some distant region, in the first dawn of civilization, infant society enjoys pure and perpetual felicity. To this sentiment Tacitus owed a part of his success, when ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... be no toleration of any "tenderloin" or "red light" district, and that, above all, there should be the most relentless war on commercialized vice. The men who profit and make their living by the depravity and the awful misery of other human beings stand far below any ordinary criminals, and no measures taken against them can ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... government which is best adapted to the exigency of that human society which at the time it serves. Republicanism would not do in China, any more than despotism in New England. Bad men, somehow or other, must be coerced and punished. The more prevalent is depravity, so much the more necessary is despotic vigor: it will be so to the end of time. It is all nonsense to dream of liberty with a substratum of folly and vice. Unless evils can be remedied by the public itself, giving power to the laws which ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... must be punished, and assuredly the other shall not come out until he has paid the uttermost farthing. Gibbie, who would have died rather than cast a shadow of injustice, was not shocked at the woman's depravity like Mistress Murkison. I am afraid he smiled. He took no notice either of her scoldings or her lamentations; but the first week after he came of age, he carried her a ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... not pretend to address myself to men who do not believe in prayer. I know men well enough to know that there are very few of them who do not believe in prayer, and that there are very few of them who do not, particularly in moments of danger, pray. Deep down under the thickest crusts of depravity there lies the conviction, always ready to rise in painful emergencies, that God takes cognizance of every man, and is able to help him. Smooth away the idea of Providence as we may, into an unmeaning generality, the time comes, in every man's life, when he recognizes the ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... of mischief-making, of ignorant evil-doing, of inherited tendencies, physical, mental, and moral— and sometimes it will seem as if the whole human creation were incurably ailing, and the doctrine of total depravity will take on alarming probability. But at this point some sound, smiling, active boy or girl comes in with a cheerful greeting, and pessimism retires into the background. And all this reminds me of one more quality ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... to deploring the depravity of the young woman, and the blindness of the unfortunate duke, a blindness which had, without doubt, endured till that ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... day Murglebed exhibits unimagined horrors of scenic depravity. It snarls at you malignantly. It is like a bit of waste land in Gehenna. There is a lowering, soap-suddy thing a mile away from the more or less dry land which local ignorance and superstition call the sea. The interim is mud—oozy, brown, malevolent mud. Sometimes it seems to heave as if with ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... Sundays, during my four years' course, in the pulpits of the surrounding towns, but it was not of the total depravity nor flaming brimstone; far grander themes engrossed my thoughts and speech; the true heroism of keeping ourselves unspotted from the world, the sublime possibilities of our natures if we would walk in the footsteps of the only perfect One ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... a creation of Mrs. Whitney's, often spoke in epigrams, as: "Good looks are a snare; especially to them that haven't got 'em." While Mrs. Walker's creed, "I believe in the total depravity of inanimate things," is more than an epigram—it is ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... William Stanley, she could have sat down calmly to enjoy his inheritance. Such a case of turpitude might not be without example; but he confessed that in his eyes, it would amount to guilt of so black a dye, that he was unwilling to accuse human nature of such depravity; it went beyond the powers of his, Mr. Clapp's, imagination to comprehend. No, he acquitted Mrs. Stanley of all blame; she had been influenced and guided by the two gentlemen before him. He had himself observed, that during all the preliminary proceedings, the venerable step-mother ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... to Infant Depravity, Infant Regeneration, and Infant Baptism. By J.H. Bomberger. Philadelphia. Lindsay & Blakiston. 16mo. pp. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... did greater depravity, never a more dangerous corruption, never a blacker soul serve to the accomplishment of a project of higher morality, or of a more equitable end; ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... of things internal as the common eye upon outward nature, and loved the many shapes of evil as the latter does the varieties of earth, not for their graces, but their utility. His loves, coarse and low, fed their rank fires from an unmingled and gross depravity. His devotion to wine was either solitary and unseen—for he loved safety better than mirth—or in company with those whose station flattered his vanity, not whose fellowship ripened his crude and nipped ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... like—like a black vein through a piece of Parian marble, or a scratch upon a mirror, which streak or twist baffles our effort to make ourselves righteous. I am not going, if I can help it, to exaggerate the facts of the case. The Christian teaching of what is unfortunately called total depravity is not that there is no good in anybody, but that there is a diffused evil in everybody which affects in different degrees and in different ways all a man's nature. And that is no mere doctrine of the New Testament, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... of his life were one uninterrupted schooling in hypocrisy, brutality, and depravity. A debauchee in his youth, a sodomite in later life, a hater of women and a despiser of men, a bully to his subordinates, a monster of ingratitude, revelling in filth so continuously in his written and spoken words that even a loyal Academy of Berlin has found it impossible to publish his ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... malignant germs that cruelty sows in his heart. We tell the child that he is a criminal, and treat him as such, and then expect him to be perfect; and when our misguided education has begun to deprave him, we shake our heads over his congenital depravity, and thank God that we ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... and people. The court have performed their arduous duties with great ability and fairness. The result will doubtless be satisfactory to the people. It is proved that this great crime was in all its naked deformity and depravity actually committed. It follows that the Copperhead statement, published in the rebel organ in this city, charging that the entire plot and arrest of these Copperhead traitors and assassins were invented by the Union Republicans of Chicago as an electioneering trick, was the subterfuge of ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... portend a long and strong determination of mankind to cleave to the world, the flesh, and evil, causing great obscuration of Spirit. When we remember that God is just, and admit the total depravity of mortals, alias mortal mind,—and that [10] this Adam legacy must first be seen, and then must be subdued and recompensed by justice, the eternal attri- bute of Truth,—the outlook demands labor, and the laborers seem few. To-day we behold but the first faint view of a more spiritual Christianity, ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... way descended until at sixty-eight he became a suicide. If eight hundred years did not make antediluvians any better, but only made them worse, the ages of eternity could have no effect except prolongation of depravity. ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... ministers of the gospel." Dr Seemann is a naturalist, and certainly is not prejudiced in favour of the Wesleyans, or of any other religious body. His evidence is therefore of more value. A description of the condition of Fiji as it was is sickening; and yet it is necessary to show the depth of depravity to which human nature can sink, and the glorious change which the gospel can work even in savages such as these. They were constantly at war with each other, and often fought for no other purpose than to procure people for their ovens. They have been known even to bake ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... services. Considerable sums of money are collected and expended here, employment is found for the idle, strangers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity distributed. At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic centre is a religious centre of great power. Depravity, Sin, Redemption, Heaven, Hell, and Damnation are preached twice a Sunday after the crops are laid by; and few indeed of the community have the hardihood to withstand conversion. Back of this more formal religion, the Church often stands as a real conserver of morals, a strengthener of ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... the walls, one of which, in particular, was the Cardinal's Hat; and a small court, now or till lately called Cardinal's Hat Court, still exists on the Bankside, and probably shows the precise site of the mansion of depravity. In like manner we find on Bankside, Pike Garden, Globe Alley, and in the vicinity a public-house with the sign of the Globe. On Bankside also stood an ancient Hall and Palace of the Bishops of Winchester, stated to have been built by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... eventually be crowned with success." But another voice said: "The Marquis was your benefactor, the Marquise filled your mother's place. Had it not been for them you would have been reared in shame, in ignorance and in depravity. You would never have known parental tenderness, the happiness of a home or the comforts and luxuries that have surrounded you from your childhood. Is it too much to ask that you should silence the pleadings of your heart in order not to destroy their ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... inspired and spurred him on to astounding atrocities of the needle and acid. This diabolism, this worship of Satan and his works, are sincere in the etcher. A relic of rotten Romanticism, it glows like phosphorescent fire during his last period. The Church has in its wisdom employed a phrase for frigid depravity of the Rops kind, naming it "morose delectation." Morose Rops became as he developed. His private life he hid. We know little or nothing of it save that he was not unhappy in his companionships or choice of friends. He loathed the promiscuous methods by which some men achieve ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... is lost among mankind, that no man ventures to act, where money can be endangered upon the faith of another. It is impossible to see the long scrolls in which every contract is included, with all their appendages of seals and attestation, without wondering at the depravity of those beings, who must be restrained from violation of promise by such formal and publick evidences, and precluded from equivocation and subterfuge by such punctilious minuteness. Among all the satires to which folly and wickedness have given occasion, none is equally severe ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... secrets—there are nooks in their hearts where the sun never enters, and where those nearest them are never allowed to look. More lives are blasted by secrecy than by frankness—ay! a thousand times. Why should such a thing as a secret ever exist? 'Tis preposterous, and is proof positive of depravity. If you and I are to live together, my life must be open as the ether and all my thoughts be yours. If I keep back this and that, you will find it out some day and suspect, with reason, that I also keep back the other. Ananias and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... object much to their brides having had a child or two by various fathers before marriage. The women do not lose reputation unless they become utterly depraved, but in that case they are condemned pretty strongly by public opinion. Depravity is, however, rare, for all require more or less to be wooed before they are won. I did not see (although I mixed pretty freely with the young people) any breach of propriety on the praias. The merry-makings were ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... Let's not overstay our dissipation. Sex is like eating. Who would eat if he didn't have to? To say you enjoy a meal is carnal. To say that you derive some sense of ecstasy from paternal and maternal desires is a confession of depravity. Sex at the best is ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... lady will be much obliged to you for a heart, the refuse of half the prostitutes in town; a heart, the best feelings of which will be entirely obliterated; a heart hardened by a long commerce with the most unworthy of the sex; and which will bring disgust, suspicion, coldness, and depravity of taste, to the bosom of sensibility ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... on her flat chest and gave vent to a groan. Already, with her gloomy views on Kindergarten regeneration versus innate depravity, she foresaw the contamination of every half-subjugated small ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... LOSS which the Town has sustaind by the Death of Dr Eliot & Dr Greenleafe. In Times so degenerate as these are, it is much to be lamented that Men of such Exemplary Piety and Virtue are taken away. I hope the Depravity of Manners is not so great as to exclude all Hopes of Childrens rising up and serving God and their Country in the Room of their Fathers. May Heaven grant us a ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... one had told him of Dakota's complicity in the plan to murder him and that he refused to believe his friend capable of such depravity. The second was that he knew who had shot him; he also knew the man who had informed him of Dakota's duplicity—though this knowledge would amount to very little unless he recovered enough to be able to supply the ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... is moral depravity in India, and where is there no moral depravity in this world? But to appeal to international statistics would be, I believe, a dangerous game. Nor must we forget that our standards of morality differ, and, on some points, differ considerably from those recognized in India; and we ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... House were, from about the year 1680, until towards the end of the last century, the scenes of robbery, murder, and every species of depravity and wickedness of which the heart can think. They appear to have been originally called the Long Fields, and afterwards (about Strype's time) the Southampton Fields. These fields remained waste and useless, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... my peace, I press my way through all the difficulties and say: If I perish I will pray and perish at the Cross; for if this be not sufficient, it hath not entered into the heart of man to solve the problem of human depravity, and ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... depravity of the Cockney School is another thing which is for ever thrusting itself upon the public attention, and convincing every man of sense who looks into their productions, that they who sport such sentiments can never be great poets. How could ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... answered Mr Barlow, "what is the general malady of human nature but this very instability which now appears in your son? Do you imagine that half the vices of men arise from real depravity of heart? On the contrary, I am convinced that human nature is infinitely more weak than wicked, and that the greater part of all bad conduct springs rather from want of firmness than from ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... "The very depravity which you have described," replied the other, "is the accomplishment possessed by the chief of that tribe which is our neighbour; so you know exactly what you have to expect from ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... moment, fixing me with his excited eyes, and perhaps perceived in my own an irrepressible smile at his perplexity. "'Swing ahead, in Heaven's name,' you want to say, 'and much good may it do you.' I don't know whether you are laughing at my scruples or at what possibly strikes you as my depravity. I doubt," he went on gravely, "whether I have an inclination toward wrong-doing; if I have, I am sure I shall not prosper in it. I honestly believe I may safely take out a license to amuse myself. But it isn't that I think of, any more than I dream ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... last given we can gather that, notwithstanding the opposition of some, and the frightful depravity of all, Mr. Duncan seemed to be gaining the ear of the people just in proportion as he advanced in fluency of speech in their mother tongue. And during the following year, 1859, not a few tokens for good were granted ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... there had been no other cities along the river up to that point, the devastation was infinitely greater than time alone could have wrought. Great guns, bombs, and mines must have leveled every building that man had raised, and then nature, unhindered, had covered the ghastly evidence of human depravity with her beauteous mantle of verdure. Splendid trees reared their stately tops where splendid cathedrals once had reared their domes, and sweet wild flowers blossomed in simple serenity in soil that once was drenched with ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... out the very shortest route to it. Esoon shook its head. "Yes, it was close, but it was impossible to reach Uguma's factory." "Why?" "There was blood war on the path." I said it was no war of mine. But Esoon said, such was the appalling depravity of the next town on the road, that its inhabitants lay in wait at day with loaded guns and shot on sight any one coming up the Esoon road, and that at night they tied strings with bells on across the road and shot on hearing them. No one had been killed since the first party of Esoonians were ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... debasing or evil influence approached him he would trample upon it with all the fierceness of a true Ueberhell; but such conflicts seldom occurred, for his nature was so exalted that it carried him unconscious through the depravity ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of the Adams party to be defeated, in 1828, they attributed this result partly to the depravity of the human heart, partly to the tricks of Jackson, and partly to the unfortunate temperament of Mr. Adams. The day after a candidate is beaten everybody knows why it was, and says it was just what anyone might have foreseen. Ezekiel Webster, writing from New Hampshire, laid the result ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... they were made; and we know the mental condition of Shakespeare in his early manhood by his poem of "Venus and Adonis," which he expressly styles "the first heir of his invention." Now leaving out of view the fact that "Titus Andronicus" stamps the impression, not of youthful, but of matured depravity of taste, its execrable enormities of feeling and incident could not have proceeded from the sweet and comely nature in which the poem had its birth. The best criticism on "Titus Andronicus" was made by Robert Burns, when he was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... essential condition for the production of any great work of art, and especially of religious art. As regards the fact, we need not concern ourselves very long. If Rio and others, presumably biassed by the same theory, are inclined to see Lippi's moral depravity betrayed in every stroke of his brush, yet the more general and truer verdict accords him a place among the great masters of his age, albeit beneath Angelico and some others. Beyond all doubt it must be allowed that even in point of spirituality and heavenliness ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... forced to yield. Perhaps the worthy school-master knew his daughter; if so he was the only one. Never did so consummate a hypocrisy minister to so profound a perversity, and a depravity so inconceivable in a young and seemingly innocent girl. If, at the bottom of her heart, she thought herself the most wretched of women, there was nothing of it apparent—it was a well-kept secret. ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... group consists of persons who, believing in the general truths of Evangelical religion, accommodate them to their passions, and are capable, by gradual increase in depravity, of any crime or violence. I am not going to include these in our present study. Trumbull ("Red Gauntlet"), Trusty Tomkyns ("Woodstock"), Burley ("Old Mortality"), are ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... ceiling with such forceful precision, that it stuck right over the centre of the chair. This was perhaps the first time that such a trick had been dared in the first class, belonging more properly to the advanced depravity of the second or third. When the air began to get warm, the snow began to drop upon the head of the old professor; and this was the cause of his troubled glance at the ceiling. But the moment he looked ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... whom all sores lay siege, can so emphatically express nature in its greatest perfection, I shall not endeavour to explain. The meaning I take to be this: Brother, when his fortune is inlarged, will scorn brother; for this is the general depravity of human nature, which, besieged as it is by misery, admonished as it is of want and imperfection, when elevated by fortune, will despise beings of nature ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... Balzac with scientific curiosity. Ariosto, Cervantes, and even Boccaccio are masters in the mysteries of common life. In all these cases the tone of the artist's mind is felt throughout his work: what he paints, or sings, or writes, conveys a lesson while it pleases. On the other hand, depravity in an artist or a poet percolates through work which has in it nothing positive of evil, and a very miasma of poisonous influence may rise from the apparently innocuous creations of a tainted soul. Now Correggio is moralised in neither way—neither as a good nor as a bad man, neither ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... I very much fear that does not prove our innocence, but only their depravity. It reminds me of that ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... fish!" an expletive too inane even to be wicked, being a distortion of the words "God's flesh." There was young Crofts, the king's acknowledged son, Duke of Monmouth by grace of his mother's frailties. He was a living example of the doctrine of total depravity in what purported to be a man. There was John Churchill, a very decent fellow in a politic way, though in bad company. He afterward married my laconic cousin Sarah, whose shrewdness made him the first Duke of Marlborough, and last, I regret to chronicle, ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... I prefer them clean, sir, and particularly in the case of Marian's husband. Had it been I, he must have stuck to prosaic soap; with you in the role there is a difference. Faith, Lord Humphrey, there is a decided difference, and if you be other than a monster of depravity you will henceforth, I think, preserve your ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... incantations and imprecations, play an important part in the ceremonies of initiation. In some quarters there has been some recrudescence of the Shakti cultus, with its often obscene and horrible rites, and the unnatural depravity which was so marked a feature in the case of the band of young Brahmans who conspired to murder Mr. Jackson at Nasik represents a form of erotomania which is certainly much more common amongst Hindu political fanatics than amongst ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... comic opera or in the penny dreadful. Emotionally we have lost touch with him as we have with Byron's Corsair. When he stalks across the serious stage and rages and fumes and wipes his bloody sword, we are inclined to smile or to yawn. As for the villain Franz, with his abysmal depravity, and Amalia, with her witless sentimentalism, we find it hard to take them seriously; they do not produce a good illusion. And then the whole style of the piece, the violent and ribald language, the savage action, the rant and swagger, the shooting and stabbing,—all this seems at first calculated ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... trifling and partial it might appear at first, soon became serious and general. A melancholy instance of the depravity of human nature; as it shews, that neither the laws nor religion of any country, however excellent the forms of each, are sufficient to bind the consciences of some; but that there are always men, of every age, country, and persuasion, who are ready ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... he obtained, and carefully considered; and the result of his reflections was a determination to carry to Borneo, an island of some magnitude, and terribly afflicted in more respects than one, such knowledge and instruction as might help to elevate its people from the depravity in which they lived, and the horrors to which they were hourly subjected. This was in 1830. In the year 1838, he quitted England to fulfil his purpose. For eight years he had patiently and steadily worked towards his object, and gathered about him all that was necessary for its accomplishment. Nothing ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... way down to the slave factories usually kept by Europeans (generally Portuguese and Spaniards) and Americans, on some secluded part of the coast. And in no instances are the parents and relatives known to sell their own children or people into slavery, except, indeed, in cases of base depravity, and except such miserable despots as the kings of Dahomi and Ashantee; neither are the heads of countries known to sell their own people; but like the marauding kidnapper, obtain ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... of their neglect and wanton maladministration of affairs in the Indian districts, the loss would be small and the retribution just. But they sit at ease, far away from the scene of carnage, and 'get' nothing but the 'news,' which they read as they would any other record of human passion and depravity. It is the innocent settlers who pay the penalty for the guilt and transgressions of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was against the rules. So we agreed to be cousins and she went off to find the dean or some awful autocrat like that, to spring the delightful surprise, that her long-lost cousin from Kalamazoo had suddenly appeared, and might she go driving with him. That was her idea, I assure you,—my own depravity could suggest nothing more euphonious than Canajoharie. And would you believe it, the consent being forthcoming, she came back and said she wouldn't go—absolutely declined! She rested on the fine point in ethics that, while it was not improper to tell the fib, it would be ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... going, and you're not to coddle your conscience any more about it. It's all right, and we're all right, and mother and I would feel we were two beasts if you stayed away on our account. What makes you think Mr. Brand responsible for this awful depravity? Because he ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... thorn, and his dribbling mountain streams? I am altered very much about Wordsworth from finding him too hard, too elevated, to attend to the voice of humanity. No, give me Byron with all his spite, hatred, depravity, dandyism, vanity, frankness, passion, and idleness, rather than Wordsworth with all his heartless ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... the railroads which encroached upon their rights or endangered their existence, but if railroad companies are disposed to cut each other's throats, the public should not be made to pay the penalty of their depravity. As long as schedule rates are unreasonably high, railroads will be tempted to offer to certain shippers low secret rates; but as soon as all rates have been leveled down to a point where they will yield only a fair profit with good management, the ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... rigid. They had never believed their brother capable of such a thing. They exchanged glances that telegraphed the horror of this depravity. If it had been any one else on earth! And the brazenness of it! Hastings and Fosdick grinned at each other, as much as to say that after all you never can tell. It was a pleasant discovery that their brother-in-law was only human. The cheek of the thing was stupendous; ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... Martineau painted in 1837 a picture of this society, showing how the depravity of the settlers had worked out. "The Quadroon girls of New Orleans," said she, "are brought up by their mothers to be what they have been, the mistresses of white gentlemen. The boys are some of them sent to France; some placed on land in the back of the State; and some are sold in the slave market. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... and banquets were riotous and expensive, and violence and rapine were restrained only by the strong arm of law dictated by instincts of self-preservation? Where was the ennobling influence of the gods, when nobody of any position finally believed in them? How powerless the gods, when the general depravity was so glaring as to call out the terrible invective of Paul, the cosmopolitan traveller, the shrewd observer, the pure-hearted Christian missionary, indicting not a few, but a whole people: "Who exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... myself—of the indulgence of my own desires. I lived a useless, contemptible life—entirely without scruples or restraints. There was scarcely a vice that I was not steeped in—hardly a sin that I had not explored. I had enough money to gratify all my senses. Nothing was beneath me. I plunged into every depravity. I made new depths for myself." He clenched his hands. "And I ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... right, anyhow. He said they were all afraid of him. He said no one would give it away.... I am guilty of putting the 'Jessie Dodd' ashore, for which I am extremely sorry of being prompted to do so by Thomas Jagger, and to be so sadly led away into such depravity. Had it not been for such an irreproachable character, which I have held previous to this dreadful act, ten minutes after the occurrence I would have given myself up. Not one hour since but what I have repented bitterly...." I present this that the ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... tired and weak. Yet also he was relieved. He gave up his old position. He went and sat on the bank. No doubt Ursula was right. It was true, really, what she said. He knew that his spirituality was concomitant of a process of depravity, a sort of pleasure in self-destruction. There really WAS a certain stimulant in self-destruction, for him—especially when it was translated spiritually. But then he knew it—he knew it, and had done. And was not Ursula's way of emotional intimacy, emotional ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... shop in which to put my real antiques excepting this man's, I am glad to pay ten per cent to interest him in their sale; but that terra cotta cow that he sold you, 'twas a sad piece of business," and he looked at us as a Mackenzie might have looked upon some artless victim to man's depravity! Whereupon a new light seemed all at once to break in upon us, and we resolved to get at the truth, if we could, by a ruse which should throw him off his guard; so, in place of appearing put ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... employment of Catholics—practical Catholics—Catholics who go to confession. I maintain, therefore, that confession, far from being an incentive to sin, as our adversaries have the hardihood to affirm, is a most powerful check on the depravity of men and a most effectual preventive of ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... irresolute and fond of pleasure, the power behind his throne was HANNIBAL. This great soldier, after his defeat at Zama, did not relinquish the aim of his life. He became the chief magistrate of his native city, and in a short time cleared the moral atmosphere, which was charged with corruption and depravity. Under him Carthage might have risen again. But his intrigues with Antiochus, with whom he wished to make an alliance, gave Rome an opportunity to interfere. His surrender was demanded. He fled, and, after wandering ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... receives a deadly wound. But it is not immediately destroyed. Still its influence is felt, and its effects observed. Sometimes it evinceth so much power, that its deadly wound seems to be healed. Reason and conscience, strengthened by renewing grace, ordinarily prevail over indwelling depravity; but not without a struggle, as every Christian can testify—neither do the better principles always conquer. Sometimes the opposing principles, or powers, prevail, and lead to error and wickedness. ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... being perfectly conscious of the baseness and rascality of the means which they will use every day towards this end, affect nevertheless—even to themselves—a high tone of moral rectitude, and shake their heads and sigh over the depravity of the world. Some of the craftiest scoundrels that ever walked this earth, or rather—for walking implies, at least, an erect position and the bearing of a man—that ever crawled and crept through life by its dirtiest and narrowest ways, will gravely jot down in diaries the events of every day, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... I originally put "may be followed by a series of similar questions to which there is no end," the goodness of God must simply be pronounced a delusion. For the question which I originally put was no mere flimsy question of a stupidly unreal description. My own moral depravity is a matter of painful certainty to me, and I want to know why, if there is a God of infinite power and goodness, he should have made me thus. And in answer I am told that my question is "practically without importance," ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... gratified in heaping these trophies to his genius, while his meaner passions could compile one of the most voluminous of the scandalous chronicles of literature. We are mortified on discovering so fine a genius in the text humbling itself through all the depravity of a commentary full of spleen, and not without the fictions of satire. The unhappy influence his Literary Quarrels had on this great poet's life remains to be traced. He adopted a system of literary politics abounding with ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... was silent, Ratcliffe for the first time addressed her, and it was in that cold sarcastic indifferent tone familiar to habitual depravity, whose crimes are instigated by custom rather than by passion. "This is a braw night for ye, dearie," he said, attempting to pass his arm across her shoulder, "to be on the green hill wi' your jo." Jeanie extricated herself from his grasp, but ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... woman groaned over this proof of depravity as she questioned her visitor further with regard to ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... Napoleon's brain was to any great degree abnormal, but I am satisfied that criminal's brains are generally abnormal, for there are many criminals whose heads do not, by their exterior form, indicate their depravity, but wherever I have examined the interior of the skull I have found the basilar organs active, growing and imprinted upon the interior table of the skull, while the superior region reveals the decline of the moral nature by the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... the previous Book we beheld the depravity of the Suitors, we now witness the imbecility of the People. Still the spark of hope flashes out brightly in this Ithacan night; something is at work to punish the guilty and ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... hideousness behind a rose-coloured mist of fine words,—such an emasculated gospel is not a message of life, but has the answer of death within itself. That in the past, in a doctrine such as that of man's total depravity, the fact of sin has been over-emphasised, may be readily granted; but in the present all the symptoms indicate that the peril we have to meet is its under-emphasis. Against this whole tendency ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... you doubt that it was to him that I first applied? I do not know whether it came from his own innate depravity or from the promptings of his master, but he was rude enough to set a dog at me. Neither dog nor man liked the look of my stick, however, and the matter fell through. Relations were strained after that, and further inquiries out of the question. All that I have learned I got ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... there was no longer any room to question that Britannicus was dead, Nero began immediately to make preparations for the burial of the body. The remorse which, notwithstanding his depravity, he could not but feel at having perpetrated such a crime, made him impatient to remove all traces and memorials of it from his sight; and, besides, he was afraid to wait the usual period and then to make arrangements for a public funeral, lest the truth in respect to the death of Britannicus ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... could not have returned with greater accuracy to their unhappy dispatcher. Oh, the vileness and utter degradation of the moment when the stale little cylinder of closely written pages, which seemed so fresh and full of promise a few days ago, is handed in by a remorseless postman! And what moral depravity shines through the editor's ridiculous plea of "want of space!" But the subject is a painful one, and a digression from the plain statement of facts ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it?" remarked Tim Rokens, crossing his legs and devoting himself to his pipe, with the air of a man who mourned the depravity of his species, but did not feel called upon to disturb his equanimity very much ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... is not sufficient. You shall not find him refusing to do any mischief which tends to his own advantage. I grieve to say it, for I have leanings towards the dog-boy, but there is in him a vein of unsophisticated depravity, which issues from the rock of his nature like a clear spring that no stirrings of conscience or shame have rendered turbid. His face, it is simple and childlike, and he has the most innocent eye, but ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... suppressed, stifled, hermetically sealed under the smooth, cold, glittering varnish of pretended refinement and conventional politeness. The one may be corrected by being better informed; the other is incorrigible, wilful, heartless depravity. I cannot describe the contempt and disgust I have felt at the tone of what would be thought good company, when I have witnessed the sleek, smiling, glossy, gratuitous assumption of superiority to every feeling of humanity, honesty, or principle, as a part of the etiquette, the mental ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... combatants are allowed in the line. They brought civilian minds, undisciplined to the conquest of fear, to their task; they never for one instant guessed the truly spiritual exaltation which gives wings to the soul of the man who fights in a just cause. Squalor, depravity, brutalisation, death—moral, mental and physical deformity were the rewards which the American public learned the fighting man gained in the trenches. They heard very little of the capacity for heroism, the eagerness for sacrifice, the ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... character are founded upon such a knowledge. But man, in his self-ignorance, does not perceive their awful truth. He has not yet attained the internal correspondent to the Biblical statement,—that apprehension of total depravity, that knowledge of the plague of the heart, which always and ever says "yea" to the most vivid description of human sinfulness, and "amen" to God's heaviest malediction upon it. Nothing deprives the Word of its nerve and influence, more than this general lack ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... sent to gaol for two months with hard labour by Mr. Saunders, of the Thames Police Court. Oh, the weary, sickening waiting in the court for "my prisoner," the sordid vice, the revolting details of human depravity to which my unwilling eyes and ears were witnesses. I carried Lyons off in triumph, and the Middlesex magistrates quashed the conviction, the evidence being pronounced by them to be "confusing, contradictory, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... province, no less important, has to be added. Galeotto, lord of Faenza, had married the daughter of Giovanni Bentivogli, prince of Bologna. She, either through jealousy or ill treatment by her husband, or from the depravity of her own nature, hated him to such a degree, that she determined to deprive him of his possessions and his life; and pretending sickness, she took to her bed, where, having induced Galeotto to ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... justice require that allowance should be made on historical grounds for the failings of the Irish people. If they are wanting in industry, in regard for the rights of property, in reverence for the law, history furnishes a full explanation of their defects, without supposing in them any inherent depravity, or even any inherent weakness. They have never had the advantage of the training through which other nations have passed in their gradual rise from barbarism to civilization. The progress of the Irish people was arrested at almost a primitive stage, and a series ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... reject the dogma of human depravity, as taught in the Bible. They willingly accept it,—nay, accept it complacently, hugging themselves for their own penetration,—as taught in the ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
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