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Deformity   Listen
noun
Deformity  n.  (pl. deformities)  
1.
The state of being deformed; want of proper form or symmetry; any unnatural form or shape; distortion; irregularity of shape or features; ugliness. "To make an envious mountain on my back, Where sits deformity to mock my body."
2.
Anything that destroys beauty, grace, or propriety; irregularity; absurdity; gross deviation from order or the established laws of propriety; as, deformity in an edifice; deformity of character. "Confounded, that her Maker's eyes Should look so near upon her foul deformities."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Deformity" Quotes from Famous Books



... Something had already moved her to learn from me the story of my life—to know that I was a man with neither faith nor hope. Her pure heart was torn by the thought of my wrong and of my error. I had never seen myself in such deformity as she saw me even when she used me with that divine compassion. I was almost glad to be what I was because of her ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells

... "You are kings only of concupiscence." This great court, the most brilliant in Europe, "sweated hypocrisy," said Saint-Simon. It may be remarked, that, in addition to the very frequent disfigurement by small-pox, from which even the king was not entirely free, there was a remarkable prevalence of deformity among the families of the aristocracy. "There was scarcely one of which some member, male or female, had not a curved spine, a distorted limb, or other malformation; owing, most likely, to the common practice of closely swathing the ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton

... The tongues of men speak of the personal deformity of that wanderer, no less than of his bold disregard of the law. You ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper

... how perfect a beauty might be bestowed on one of their race I could have pointed proudly to you, my faithful boy and have said, 'Beauty like that of the gods.' Now the crown is cut off from the trunk of the palm and the maimed thing can only be ashamed of its deformity; and if all humanity were but one man it would look like one who has had his right eye torn out. I will not look on the monsters, lean and fat, that they may not spoil my taste for the true type! Oh faithful, lovable, beautiful boy! What a blind, mad fool have you been! And yet ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... a dwarf, but a gallant knight. At that moment his memory came back to him, and he knew he was Conal, one of the Knights of the Red Branch, and he remembered now that the spell of dumbness and deformity had been cast upon him by the Witch of the ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various

... Peter i. 21,—derives its origin from the same prolific source. (1) some very ancient scribe mistook the first four letters of [Greek: agioi] for [Greek: apo]. It was but the mistaking of [Greek: AGIO] for [Greek: APO]. At the end of 1700 years, the only Copies which witness to this deformity are BP with four cursives,—in opposition to [Symbol: Aleph]AKL and the whole body of the cursives, the Vulgate[83] and the Harkleian. Euthalius knew nothing of it[84]. Obvious it was, next, for some one in ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... most unjustly aspersed. Drummond died, at Calcutta, in 1845, about the age of seventy. He was much respected among a wide circle of friends and admirers. His personal appearance was unprepossessing, almost approaching to deformity,—a circumstance which may explain the ultimate hesitation of Miss Wilson to accept his hand. "The Bonnie Lass o' Levenside" was first printed, with the author's consent, though without acknowledgment, in a small volume of poems, by William Rankin, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... Molly's. She was a cripple, and in spite of features made almost angelic by the ineffable touch of goodness, the family as a rule despised her, teased her, sometimes went near to torment her; for the Wesleys, like many other people of iron constitution, had a healthy impatience of deformity and weakness. Hetty alone treated her always gently and made much of her, not as one who would soften a defect, but as seeing none; Hetty of the high spirits, the clear eye, the springing gait; Hetty, ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... deserve the name of an artist. But this capital defect is not often perceivable, as examples of the naked and of elevated nature but rarely occur in his subjects, which are for the most part filled with characters that in their nature tend to deformity; besides his figures are small, and the jonctures, and other difficulties of drawing that might occur in their limbs, are artfully concealed with their clothes, rags, &c. But what would atone for all his defects, even if they were twice told, is his admirable fund of invention, ever inexhaustible ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... noticed," Hadria added, "that the desperate struggle to grow of that young tree had begun to loosen the masonry of the edifice that cramped it. There was a great dangerous-looking crack right across the building. The tree was not saved from deformity, but it had its revenge! Some day that noble institution would come down ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... a strong face and head and a soured, suspicious, cynical expression. He would evidently have been very tall but for his deformity—a hump stands out on his back almost like Mr. Punch. He can't be much over forty, but he looks far older; his hair ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn

... it follows that such become more easily and intensely enamoured, and also more easily and intensely disgusted, which might be through a change of the deformed spirit, which in some gesture and expressed intention reveals itself in such wise that this deformity extends from the soul to the body, and makes it appear no longer beautiful as before. The beauty, then, of the body has power to kindle, but not to bind, and the lover, unless aided by the graces of the spirit, such as purity, gratitude, courtesy, circumspection, is ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... Nymph, remember all your Scorn Will be by Time repaid; Those Glories which that Face adorn, And flourish as the rising Morn, Must one day set and fade. Then all your cold Disdain for me Will but increase Deformity, When still the kind will lovely be. Compassion is of lasting Praise; For that's ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn

... his eyes; suddenly he felt all the gnawing, hungry needs of his soul; suddenly his weakness, his wanderings, his infirmities, his tacit unbelief and indifference, were revealed, in all their frightful deformity,—and how? By a still, calm voice—the voice of a child, which had rung down the warning into his soul like thunder. "What will it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" it had said; ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey

... did not move. The baby, young as he was, had thrown the blanket from his face, and the father's eyes were fixed on it: while he gazed the nurse would not stir. He seemed fascinated by its ugliness. Without absolute deformity, the child was indeed as unsightly as infant ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... brunette, a pleasant glow still; hair with threads of grey. I hope she does not affect youth; she can't be less than one or two and thirty! Many people set up for beauties with far less claim. What is the matter with her? It is not the countenance of deformity—accident, I should say. Yes, it is all favourable except the dress. What a material; what a pattern! Did she get it second-hand from a lady's-maid? Will there be an incongruity in her conversation to match? Let us see. Grace making inquiries—Quite at my best—Ah! she is ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the tale of the Princess Clemence, daughter of a king of Provence. Her father was deformed, and the heir-presumptive to the French crown sought her in marriage. In order that the prince might be sure she had inherited none of the father's deformity, she was called upon to show herself in the garb of Lady Godiva before his ambassadors. This rather delicate subject is ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer

... think of things true and pure and of good report. Oft at midnight upon the poet's ear there fell the sound of celestial music, that afterward he transposed into his "Paradise Regained." Dying, it was given him to proudly say: "I am not one of those who have disgraced beauty of sentiment by deformity of conduct, nor the maxims of the freeman by the actions of the slave, but by the grace of God, I have kept my soul unsullied." Here is the immortal Bunyan, spending his best years in Bedford jail because he insisted on giving men the ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... and stood looking up from his squat, toad-like deformity into the face of the man who towered above him, yet in his eyes was the blaze with which a giant might look down ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... prejudiced adversely for so keen an analyst of the soul as Browning. For what a fellow-dramatist calls this "Sunset Shadow of a King," no man or woman could abase every hope and energy. Shakspere would never have committed the crucial mistake of making Charles the despicable deformity he is in Browning's drama. Strafford himself disappears too soon: in the fourth act there is the vacuum abhorred of ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp

... negro instantly fled to "the bush;" and, that night, in the agony of delirium, caused by fever and dreaded deformity, the mate ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... should be warned against meanness or unseemliness. Sculpture and painting equally with music must conform to the law of simplicity. He who violates it cannot be allowed to work in our city, and to corrupt the taste of our citizens. For our guardians must grow up, not amid images of deformity which will gradually poison and corrupt their souls, but in a land of health and beauty where they will drink in from every object sweet and harmonious influences. And of all these influences the greatest is the education given by music, which finds ...
— The Republic • Plato

... penetration of a Northern mist—accustomed to a close scrutiny of men's faces. It is painfully obvious that this sailor—for gait and clothes and manner set aside all other crafts— is horribly conscious of his deformity. ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman

... grass, already fixed so firmly and opened so widely, and filled almost to overflowing by the brown rough fruitage of the golden-rennet's next neighbour the russeting; and see that smallest urchin of all, seated apart in infantine state on the turfy bank, with that toothsome piece of deformity a crumpling in each hand, now biting from one sweet, hard, juicy morsel and now from another—Is not that a pretty English picture? And then, farther up the orchard, that bold hardy lad, the eldest born, who has scaled (Heaven knows how) the tall, straight upper branch of that great pear-tree, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... shuffling tread went on—and now even the murmuring sound was hushed. Men and women stared into each other's faces—children sought their elders' hands. What did it mean? Faith—yes, they had had faith—but never faith like this. They looked at the awful deformity over one another's heads, crawling inch by inch along before them—watched the stubborn, bitter struggle of pain and suffering of the wretched man who led them, spurred on by a faith cast in a heroic mold such as none there had ever dreamed of before—and they spoke no ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard

... gentleness and taste. It was cruel to think—he could wish him dead first—that his clean, white mind must become smeared and spotted here, his well-tuned ear reconciled to loud discords, and his fine eye at peace with deformity; but there was no help for it." And then, as though he had suddenly detected in my face an expression of surprised discovery, he said, "But I am sure I do not know how I came to say so much, or let myself be tedious with sickly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... injuries still further obscures the diagnosis by manipulation. The X rays, however, are oblivious, or nearly so, of all swelling, and the bones can be skiagraphed in the thinner parts of the body at present, say up to the elbow and the ankle, with very great accuracy. Thus, Figure 8 shows the deformity from an old fracture of the ulna (one of the bones of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various

... is called the great world (St. Giles' is bad, but of another kind), and it may be useful, on the principle that the actual sight of brutal ebriety was supposed to have inspired youth with the virtue of temperance; on the same principle that the Platonist, in the study of deformity, conceived the beautiful. Let me warn you not to fall into the usual error of youth in fancying that the circle you move in is precisely the world itself. Do not imagine that there are not other beings, whose benevolent principle is governed by finer sympathies, by more generous passions, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... that a "neuter verb expresses (active transitive verb) a state of being!! There are few minds capable of adopting such premises, and drawing therefrom conclusions which are rational or consistent. Truth is rarely elicted from error, beauty from deformity, or order from confusion. While, therefore, we allow the neuter systems to sink into forgetfulness, as they usually do as soon as we leave school and shut our books, let us throw the mantle of charity over those who have thoughtlessly (without ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch

... as it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with his deformity, whichever ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell

... It was the drink she spoke of, nothing but the drink; and as she talked of that she warmed with her subject and her grievances, and forgot the old love for her husband, and her former hesitation, and placed that vice in all its naked deformity and hideous results in plain but burning words before the Bench. Had she been the cleverest advocate she could not have prepared the ground for her case better. This tale of drink predisposed their minds against the defendant. Only the Clerk, wedded to legal forms, fidgeted ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies

... Shane.... Part of me was not alive.... That was terrible to know, like finding out a horrible deformity, or knowing you are insane.... And I began to watch people.... I could say: There is a woman who knows she is loved, Shane.... There is a radiance in her face, an indescribable something.... You remember the Bible word ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... a warfare in which religion and science shall stand together as allies, not against each other as enemies. Let the fight be for truth of every kind against falsehood of every kind—for justice against injustice—for right against wrong—for beauty against deformity—for goodness against vice—and the great warfare which has brought so many sufferings, shall bring to the earth God's ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various

... never sacrifice them without necessity. But these common characters interest me more than they interest you. I aggrandize them; I idealize them in an inverse direction, in their ugliness or their stupidity. I give to their deformity terrifying or grotesque proportions. You could not do this. You are wise not to look at people and things that would cause you nightmare. Idealize in that which is pretty and beautiful. This ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... Little Nobby's deformity was one of the strange things that made Adam think. Several years before, he had the child with him at the factory one night, just old enough to walk a little. In Adam's momentary absence the boy managed to get upon a box near one of the furnace doors, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... enough to make them repulsive," replied the girl, "but it is the fact that they were without souls that made them totally impossible—one easily overlooks physical deformity, but the moral depravity that must be inherent in a creature without a soul must forever cut him off from ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... yet what a difference there is! How crude are his blues! how evidently done over the glaze are his black letters! He has tried to give himself my very twist; but what a lamentable exaggeration of that playful deviation in my lines which in his becomes actual deformity!" ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)

... and Honour, and the genuine for an impostor. That he was born distorted and a dwarf, but by force of art appeared of a handsome shape, and taller than the usual size; and that none but those who were wise and good, as well as vigilant, could discover his littleness or deformity. That the true Merit had been often forced to the indignity of applying to the false, for his credit with those in power, and to keep himself from starving. That he filled the antechambers with a crew of his dependants and creatures, such as projectors, schematises, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift

... demoralising their hearers, any more than they had of correcting them. We will lay on them the blame of no special malus animus: but, at the same time, we must treat their fine words about 'holding a mirror up to vice,' and 'showing the age its own deformity,' as mere cant, which the men themselves must have spoken tongue in cheek. It was as much an insincere cant in those days as it was when, two generations later, Jeremy Collier exposed its falsehood in the mouth ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley

... sinking, overwhelmed in the dark waters. "Prudence," the only example of a female nude in Bellini's works, holds a looking-glass. Hypocrisy or Calumny is torn writhing from his refuge. The Summa Virtus is an ugly representation of all the virtues; a waddling deformity with eyes bound holds the scales of justice; the pitcher in its hand means prudence, and the gold upon its feet symbolises charity. The landscape, both of this and of the "Fortune," resembles that which he was painting in his larger ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps

... the prin- cipal agent upon the instrument; which if with reason we may do, then let our hammers rise up and boast they have built our houses, and our pens receive the honour of our writing. I hold there is a general beauty in the works of God, and therefore no deformity in any kind of species of creature whatsoever. I cannot tell by what logick we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly; they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best express the actions of their inward forms; and having passed that general visitation ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne

... my host. "It is the rule to deprive of life, promptly and painlessly, children to whom, from physical deformity or defect, life is thought unlikely to be pleasant, and whose descendants might be a burden to the public and a cause of physical deterioration to the race. It is, however, one of the exceptional tenets to which I have been obliged ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... the banker's is a fact; his good name and credit with the tradespeople is a fact; so is the comfort of his home; so are the health, the morals, the education of his children. All these are the true realities of life to him; but the beauty which changes to deformity by the small-pox, which fades under dyspepsia, grows stale by habit, and is worn threadbare by the end of twenty years, is only a skin-deep grace which he does not value. Perhaps he is right. Certainly, some of the happiest marriages among one's acquaintances are those where the wife has not one ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... be of earth, so calm, so angel-like was its expression. All the softer, gentler virtues of the mother, and all the intellectual qualities of the father were blended together in the child, who presented a combination of goodness, talent, beauty, and deformity such as this is seldom seen. For his sister Maude, Louis possessed a deep, undying love which neither time nor misfortune could in any way abate. She was part and portion of himself—his life—his ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes

... the action you propose to yourself is divested of some of the aggravations of seduction. I will acknowledge it. Had my friend received this crime into his bosom in all its deformity, dear as he is to me, I would have thrown him from my heart with detestation. Yes, I am firmly persuaded, that the man who perpetrates it, however specious he may appear, was never conscious to one generous sentiment, never knew the meaning of rectitude ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin

... what may be contagious, as well as loathsome. All men are not so wise as to choose a woman only for her good qualities; and even wise men consider the body as that which adds not a little to the mind: and it is certain there may be some such deformity covered with the clothes as may totally alienate a man from his wife when it is too late to part with her. If such a thing is discovered after marriage, a man has no remedy but patience. They therefore think it is ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... bodies? Beauty is nobly useful. It illumines the mind, raises the imagination, and warms the heart. It is not an added quality, but grows from the inner nature of things; it is the thought of God working outward. Only from drunken eyes can you with paint and tinsel hide inward deformity. The beauty of hills and waves, of flowers and clouds, of children at play, of reapers at work, of heroes in battle, of poets inspired, of saints rapt in adoration,—rises from central depths of being, and is concealed from frivolous minds. Even in the presence of death, the hallowing spirit ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding

... from which had stirred her growing curls as he leaned over her while they read together some passionate stanza from a hymn that was as much like a love-song as it dared to be in godly company? A shadow of disgust—the natural repugnance of loveliness for deformity-ran all through her, and she shrieked, as she thought, and threw herself at the feet of that other figure. She felt herself lifted from the floor, and then a cold thin hand seemed to take hers. The warm life went out of her, and she was to herself as a dimly conscious shadow ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... plausibility of pretence could conceal from himself that he was about to become that vilest of beings—a common murderer. There were moments even when the dread deed to which he had pledged himself appeared in such hideous deformity that he fain would have fled on the instant far from the influence of her who had incited him to its perpetration, but when the form of Matilda rose to his mental eye, remorse, conscience, every latent ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson

... tells us in his preface, to retrieve the moral deformity of Lucretia Borgia by the beauty of the maternal sentiment; he wished, according to his own energetic expression, 'to place the mother in the monster.' Here let us make a distinction. I admire the tenderness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... full bench: Joe Gibbons, Barney Barnhart, Jase Baker, Billy Graham, Birney Wilkins, and George Muckle Fee. Fee was a peculiar character, with an unusual deformity, since his neck was bent like a huge bow, not unlike a limb with the knee bent, his face looking to the ground. To look to either side he must turn his entire body. The only human being he ever thought ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field

... useful to themselves, and to account those things the best of all which have the most beneficial effect on mankind. Further, they were bound to form abstract notions for the explanation of the nature of things, such as goodness, badness, order, confusion, warmth, cold, beauty, deformity, and so on; and from the belief that they are free agents arose the further notions of praise and blame, ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza

... the meat that endureth for ever;" and most people labour not for the meat that endureth for ever, but for the meat that perisheth. As these three texts are kept, so do many people keep this part of the oath; for there were never more divisions and differences in the church, never more deformity, and pleading against uniformity, than ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various

... will not enumerate your omissions, dear father, but if this important step in my life does not arrest some sad tendencies I see in you, the disappointment may break me down. Intemperance in you—a judge, a gentleman, a husband, and a father—is a deformity worse than Mr. Milburn's honest, unfashionable hat. Do you not feel happier that my husband is not ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... employed in the kitchen; then the whole body of slaves promiscuously mixed up with a gang of idle plebeians from the neighbourhood; last of all, the multitude of eunuchs, beginning with the old men and ending with the boys, pale and unsightly from the distorted deformity of their features; so that whichever way any one goes, seeing troops of mutilated men, he will detest the memory of Semiramis, that ancient queen who was the first person to castrate male youths of tender age; doing as it were ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... no one present any strange or unwholesome thing to her, nor so much as name it, lest she should desire it and not be able to get it, and so either cause her to miscarry, or the child to have some deformity on that account. Let her belly be kept loose with prunes, raisins or manna in her broth, and let her use the following electuary, to strengthen the womb and ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous

... define the influence of particular writers upon Shakspere. His criticism is at some points purely conventional, as for instance when he calls the poet "that powerful magician, whose art could fascinate us even by means of deformity itself "; but on the whole Scott seems to write about Shakspere in a very reasonable ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball

... he was sitting on the shingle at Madame de Villegry's feet, both much amused by the grotesque spectacle presented by the bathers, who exhibited themselves in all degrees of ugliness and deformity. Of course Madame de Villegry did not bathe, being, as she said, too nervous. She was sitting under a large parasol and enjoying her own superiority over those wretched, amphibious creatures who waddled on the sands before her, ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)

... lay on her lap, the smallest, saddest specimen of infantile deformity. It had a large head—larger than most infants have—but its body was thin, elfish, and distorted, every joint and limb being twisted in some way or other. You could not say that any portion of the child was natural or perfect except the head and face. Whether it had the power ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... old skin and bones? It haint nothin' pretty anyway. And as fer the waists bein' all girted up and drawed in, that is nothin' but crushed bones and flesh and vitals, that is just crowdin' down your insides into a state o' disease and deformity, torturin' your heart down so's the blood can't circulate, and your lungs so's you can't breathe, it is nothin' but slow murder anyway, and if I ever take it into my head to kill myself, Alminy Hagidone, I haint a goin' to do it in a ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley

... the wife.[46] Among beings who hold life so cheaply, it cannot be a matter of surprise that the destruction of infants should be occasionally practised, more especially in cases where the child is born with any natural deformity: nor is it an excuse for these barbarians that the polished nations of ancient Greece and Italy habitually committed the like atrocities, or even greater,—considering it in their own choice to rear up their offspring or not, exactly as it suited their convenience. In fact, ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... common fault with such people is to excuse this conduct by saying: Oh! I was brought up in the Protestant religion, and everyone ought to live in the religion in which he was brought up. Let me ask: If persons were brought up with some bodily deformity that their parents neglected to have remedied while they were young, would they not use every means themselves to have the deformity removed as soon as they became old enough to see and understand their misfortune? In like manner, if unfortunately parents bring up their children ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead

... any kind of deformity in a woman," said King, "whether natural or—acquired. I have a theory that any physical defect has its ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce

... 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 gallant self-effacement which having honor for a companion taught. And yet, despite this frantic portrayal of terror, America ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson

... liver is their specific, and they place much reliance on it in colic and other pains. They are a healthy race. In this village of 300 souls, there are no chronically ailing people; nothing but one case of bronchitis, and some cutaneous maladies among children. Neither is there any case of deformity in this and five other large villages which I have visited, except that of a girl, who has one leg slightly ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird

... hands together, with cunning in his eyes, that resembled those of a weasel. And he said: Maharaj, as I entered, I heard thee wishing for Shri[22] to visit thee in the form of an abhisarika; and lo! here she is, in my form. And do not despise her, on account of my deformity: for Shri is a lady, and capricious, and comes in strange disguises. Thou knowest, that the city being dismal by reason of the obsequies, I seized my opportunity, and went away on a visit to my maternal uncle, who lives far off in a village in the wood that lies in the eastern quarter. ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown

... and in which they work their worst mischief; that is, when honourable names are given to dishonourable things, when sin is made plausible; arrayed, it may be, in the very colours of goodness, or, if not so, yet in such as go far to conceal its own native deformity. 'The tongue,' as St. James has said, 'is a world of iniquity' (iii. 7); or, as some would render his words, and they are then still more to our purpose, 'the ornament of iniquity,' that which sets it out in fair ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench

... however, should be as obvious as the difference between a William Blake and a Samuel Johnson of Cheshire. As William Hogarth was to remark, "variety uncomposed, and without design is confusion and deformity."[13] ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)

... as they freely express themselves through thought, emotion, and action. They get at the deepest truth and enter into the deepest relationships only as they act. Inaction involves something more than the disease and decay of certain faculties; it involves the deformity of arrested development, and failure to enter into that larger world of truth which is open to those races alone which live a whole life. It is for this reason that the drama must always hold the first place among those forms which the art of literature has perfected; ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... they could not sufficiently represent the Excellence of Virtue, if they did not comprehend in the Notion of it all possible Perfection[s]; and therefore did not only suppose, that it was transcendently beautiful in it self, but that it made the very Body amiable, and banished every kind of Deformity from the Person in whom ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... if they then attempted to finish the details with more precision, it was only substituting ornament for simplicity; and the endeavor to bring the proportions of the human figure nearer to nature, with the retention of its conventional type, only made its deformity greater, and showed how incompatible the Egyptian ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... gloom. In this perilous extremity, one was for cutting away the anchor, which had been got up to the cathead in time of need; another was for cutting down the foremast, the foretop-mast being already by the board. The fog totally disappeared, and the black, rocky island stood in all its rugged deformity before their eyes. Suddenly the sun broke out in full splendor, as if to expose more clearly to the view of the sufferers their dreadful predicament. Despair was in every bosom—death, arrayed in all its terrors, seemed to hover over the wreck. But exertion was required, and every ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman

... more of a prize-fighter than of a scientist. Even making allowances for its coating of dirt and its harsh, black stubble of half a week's growth, the face was not pleasant. Bennett was an ugly man. His lower jaw was huge almost to deformity, like that of the bulldog, the chin salient, the mouth close-gripped, with great lips, indomitable, brutal. The forehead was contracted and small, the forehead of men of single ideas, and the eyes, too, were small and twinkling, one of them marred ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris

... stains, and wholly given to matter, contracts deeply its nature, loses all its original splendour, and almost changes its own species into that of another; just as the pristine beauty of the most lovely form would be destroyed by its total immersion in mire and clay. But the deformity of the first arises from inward filth, of its own contracting; of the second, from the accession of some foreign nature. If such a one then desires to recover his former beauty, it is necessary to cleanse the infected parts, and thus by a thorough purgation to resume his original form. Hence, then ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus

... deep and mellowing shade over their closing history, and invested it still with the appearance of strength; they resolved he should yet wear the title, that better befitted him in other days, though it served but slightly to hide the deformity, wrought in his noble nature, ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard

... daughter, took a trip of some three hundred miles over the pathless Wind River Mountains. The mother rode astride, but the daughter preferred to exhibit her Durland Academy accomplishment, and rode sidesaddle, according to the fashion set by an artful queen to hide her deformity. The advantages of health, youth and strength were all with the daughter; yet in every case on that long march it was the daughter who gave out first and compelled the pack train to halt while she and her horse rested. And the daughter was obliged to change from one horse ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson

... a small woman, very small, with a long, pale face all forehead and chin. She carried herself with great erectness, as if reluctant to lose an inch of her height, and perhaps to disguise a trifling deformity of the shoulders; but she had a kind and womanly expression, and drawing the child towards her, admired his long curls and ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... out and out, of the same nature as ourselves, is to be judged of by our experience of that nature, and is therefore to be assumed to be variously imperfect, however eminent and admirable in some respects. And no one is to be called an imaginer of deformity, because he takes for granted that one who is Man has imperfections which were not known to those who compiled memorials of him. To impute to a person, without specific evidence, some definite frailty or fault, barely because he is human, would be a want of good sense; but ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... is to procure your Pleasure, by exposing the little Embarrassment of a Person; But the Intention of Satire, is to raise your Detestation, by exposing the real Deformity of ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris

... own character, must not be suppressed out of tenderness to its calumniators. Although written, generally, with great moderation, there may be some things in the pamphlet which may perhaps irritate. The characterizing every act, for example, by its appropriate epithet, is not necessary to show its deformity to an intelligent reader. The naked narrative will present it truly to his mind, and the more strongly, from its moderation, as he will perceive that no exaggeration is aimed at. Rubbing down these roughnesses ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... be shadowed by the bad, and virtue shine the brightest when contrasted with vice. Whoever proposes to discourage vice and to vindicate religion, morality, and social order against their enemies, must unveil crime in all its deformity, and place it before the eyes of men in its colossal magnitude; he must diligently explore its dark mazes, and make himself familiar with sentiments at the wickedness of which ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... find among a family of children reaching maturity one helpless from deformity, and another from feebleness, and are told that the parents, by employing surgical skill, might have removed the deformity, and overcome the weakness by tonic treatment, but had neglected to do so, we should not have much to say about chance. ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe

... magnificent ornaments as were both extraordinary and surprising. Besides these, one might see that even the great number of the captives was not unadorned, while the variety that was in their garments, and their fine texture, concealed from the sight the deformity of their bodies. But what afforded the greatest surprise of all was the structure of the pageants that were borne along; for indeed he that met them could not but be afraid that the bearers would not be able firmly enough to support them, such was their ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus

... slightly obscure, but I was in reality alluding to my physical deficiencies. Most men of twenty-two are endowed at any rate with some share of the comeliness of youth, but to me even this was denied. Short, thick-set, and deep-chested almost to deformity, with long sinewy arms, heavy features, deep-set grey eyes, a low brow half overgrown with a mop of thick black hair, like a deserted clearing on which the forest had once more begun to encroach; such was my appearance nearly a ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... been discussed by Professor Weismann and shown to be not conclusive. The mutilation itself—a section of certain nerves—was never inherited, but the resulting epilepsy, or a general state of weakness, deformity, or sores, was sometimes inherited. It is, however, possible that the mere injury introduced and encouraged the growth of certain microbes, which, spreading through the organism, sometimes reached the germ-cells, and thus transmitted a diseased condition ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... Mad-men: some of them Raging, others Loving, others laughing, all extravagantly, but according to their severall domineering Passions: For the effect of the wine, does but remove Dissimulation; and take from them the sight of the deformity of their Passions. For, (I believe) the most sober men, when they walk alone without care and employment of the mind, would be unwilling the vanity and Extravagance of their thoughts at that time should be publiquely seen: which is a confession, ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... since it is not in my heart? And if thy God desires me to love such persons, why in His all might did He not give them the forms of Niobe's children, for example, which thou hast seen on the Palatine? Whoso loves beauty is unable for that very reason to love deformity. One may not believe in our gods, but it is possible to love them, as Phidias, Praxiteles, Miron, Skopas, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... with the broadest accent of his province. It was easy to discern, from the first words which he spoke, whether he came from Somersetshire or Yorkshire. He troubled himself little about decorating his abode, and, if he attempted decoration, seldom produced anything but deformity. The litter of a farmyard gathered under the windows of his bedchamber, and the cabbages and gooseberry bushes grew close to his hall door. His table was loaded with coarse plenty; and guests were cordially welcomed to it. But, as ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... promise of which France had abstained from active intervention. If any such hopes existed they were doomed to speedy disappointment. The apparatus of priestly maladministration was restored in all its ancient deformity. An amnesty which had been promised by the Legate Benvenuti was disregarded, and the Pope set himself to strengthen his authority by enlisting new bands of ruffians and adventurers under the standard of St. Peter. Again insurrection broke out, and again at the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... beauties back, that care, sickness, and grief, had extremely tarnished; only her shape was a little more inclining to be fat, which did not at all however yet impair her fineness; and she was indeed too charming without, for the deformity of her indiscretion within; but she had broke the bounds of honour, and now stuck at nothing that might carry on an interest, which she resolved should be the business ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn

... limitation) of William Morris that the Dark Ages were to him a time of special light and illumination. Life then was simple. Men worked for the love of it, and if they wanted things they made them. "Every trade exclusively followed means a deformity," says Ruskin. Division of labor had not yet come, and men were skilled in many ways. There was neither poverty nor riches, and the idea of brotherhood was firmly fixed in the minds of men. The feverish desire for place, pelf and power was not upon them. The rise of the barons and an entailed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... handsome bird in the smooth grey coat and bright straw-coloured waistcoat, with the broad jet-black line down the centre, the great white cheeks edged with black, and the bold knowing look, could be like what the little bits of deformity in ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge

... air seems free; nothing but the blue sky above seems pure, as you walk from one scene of distress to another. You feel the more oppressed because human effort seems so powerless to alleviate the misery you witness; for who can minister to a mind diseased? What can take away the deformity and sting of guilt? Where lies the power to lift poverty from the degradation that the haughty and evil spirit of man has flung around it? The very heart grows faint as it beats in this wilderness of woe, and finds no fitting answer ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens

... I ask, to walk on one leg? Men, since the beginning of history, have had the bad taste to prefer a lame society to one that is healthy and beautiful. We women have really too much taste to yield longer to such deformity. In law, in institutions, in every social and political matter, there are two sides. Up to the present day, man has usurped what belongs to woman. That is the reason why we have injustice, corruption, international hatred, cruelty, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... show you what sort of a heart I have sold for money? Why, you know, little Margaret. You can reckon up its deformity, its worthlessness, on your cool fingers. You could tell the serene and gracious lady who is chaffering for it what a bargain she has made,—that there is not in it one spark of manly honor or true love. Don't venture too near it in your coldness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various

... Cabades; and the father's judgment did violence to the law of nature and of custom as well. And Zames, who was second in age, having had one of his eyes struck out, was prevented by the law. For it is not lawful for a one-eyed man or one having any other deformity to become king over the Persians. But Chosroes, who was born to him by the sister of Aspebedes, the father loved exceedingly; seeing, however, that all the Persians, practically speaking, felt an extravagant admiration for ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius

... one time in the old chateau of Kerouez, in the commune of Loguivy-Plougras, a rich and powerful seigneur, whose only sorrow was the dreadful deformity of his son, who had come into the world with a horse's head. He was naturally kept out of sight as much as possible, but when he had attained the age of eighteen years he told his mother one day that he desired to ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... cause proceeded thus: first, a promise not to burn the book; then a Bentley to the rescue, with accessory considerations; and then, the due administration of a little wholesome flattery: by this time we had obtained permission, after modest reluctance pretty well enacted, to transform the deformity of manuscript into the well-proportioned elegance of print. But, this much gained, our author would not yield to any argument we could urge upon the next point, viz: leave to produce the volume, duly fathered with his name. "Not he indeed; ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... point usually handled is the end of the rump at the tail-head, although any fat here is very obvious, and sometimes attains to an enormous size, amounting even to deformity. The hook-bone gets a touch, and when well covered, is right.... To the hand, or rather to the points of the fingers of the right hand, when laid upon the ribs, the flesh should feel soft and thick and the form be round when all is right, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various

... Bordeaux, France, May 24th, 1750. He lived in an age when avenues of business were utilized by the rich. A poor boy had little chance of being other than a poor man. Not only was the subject of this sketch born to poverty, but he also inherited a deformity which made him the butt of ridicule among his vulgar companions. His childhood was made up of neglect which developed a cold, distant nature. He is generally described as a loveless old man, but his biographers seem to forget the influences that surrounded ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis

... any affectation of language, nor that worn-out rhetoric which reminds you of a broken-winded barrel-organ playing a, che la morte, bad enough in prose, but when set up in blank verse awful and shocking in its more than natural deformity—but bright quips and cracks fresh from the back-yard of the slum where the linen is drying, or the "pub" where the unfortunate wife has just received a black eye that will last her a week. That inimitable artist, Bessie Bellwood, whose native wit is so curiously ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... which these latter bones are not unnaturally short or delicate; and that the crest of the sternum, to which the pectoral muscles are attached, has invariably become less prominent, the whole sternum being also extremely liable to deformity. These results we may attribute to the lessened ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... Of Expense Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates Of Regiment of Health Of Suspicion Of Discourse Of Plantations Of Riches Of Prophecies Of Ambition Of Masques and Triumphs Of Nature in Men Of Custom and Education Of Fortune Of Usury Of Youth and Age Of Beauty Of Deformity Of Building Of Gardens Of Negotiating Of Followers and Friends Of Suitors Of Studies Of Faction Of Ceremonies and Respects Of Praise Of Vain-glory Of Honor and Reputation Of Judicature Of Anger Of Vicissitude ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon

... word; so that what with his bottle, a hardy constitution, and light bed-clothes, Phelim got the upper hand of his malady. In a month he was again on his legs; but, alas! his complexion though not changed to deformity, was wofully out of joint. His principal blemish, in addition to the usual marks left by his complaint, consisted in a drooping of his left eyelid, which gave to his whole ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton

... and women is to demonstrate superiority or to avoid inferiority. There are some who feel inwardly inferior, yet disguise this feeling successfully. This feeling of inferiority may arise from purely accidental matters, such as appearance, deformity, tone of voice, etc., and the individual may either hide, become seclusive or else brazen it ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... attracted our attention, chiefly in its situation. He describes it as an ulcer, soon becoming black and foetid, corroding the inside of both lips, separating them widely from the gums and allowing them to fall outwards upon the face; thus producing a horrible deformity. Besides this, the author states, that a deep fissure usually extended down each half of the inside of each lip; thus adding four deep and ghastly ramifications to the ulcer. This shocking affection is stated to have prevailed extensively, both in England and Ireland; in which ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various

... drudgery, Will be the first that, like that foolish bird, Will follow him with yelling and false cries. Well[99] sung a shepherd, that now sleeps in skies,[100] "Dumb swans do love, and not vain chattering pies." In mountains, poets say, Echo is hid, For her deformity and monstrous shape: Those mountains are the houses of great lords, Where Stentor, with his hundred voices, sounds A hundred trumps at once with rumour fill'd. A woman they imagine her to be, Because that sex keep nothing close they hear; And that's the reason magic writers frame[101] There ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... a muscular little deformity and a wonder of good nature. His head looked unnaturally large, nestling grotesquely between the points of his lifted and distorted shoulders, like a shaggy black animal in the fork of a broken tree. He was bellicose ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson

... of liberty, nor any other, to show that man is a responsible being. This is not at all strange; the wonder is, that after having demonstrated that "the prejudice of men concerning good and evil, merit and demerit, praise and blame, order and confusion, beauty and deformity," are nothing but dreams, he should have felt bound to defend the position, that we may be justly punished for our offences by the Supreme Ruler of the world. His defence of this doctrine we shall lay before the reader without a word of comment. "Will you say," he replies to Oldenburg, ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe

... affairs were in this state there arrived one night in February, in our cafe, a most singular little man. He was short but exceedingly broad, with huge shoulders, and a head which was a deformity, so large was it. His heavy brown face was scarred with white streaks in a most extraordinary manner, and he had grizzled whiskers such as seamen wear. Two gold earrings in his ears, and plentiful tattooing ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle

... that cordial palm. So this was the man he had envied. No one had ever told him that "Nathan der Weise" was thus afflicted. It was as soul that he had appealed to the imagination of the world; even vulgar gossip had been silent about his body. But how this deformity must ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... excellence before which we bow with profounder deference than that which appears in a delicate woman, adorned with the inward graces and devoted to the peculiar duties of her sex; and there is no deformity of human character from which we turn with deeper loathing than from a woman forgetful of her nature, and clamorous for the vocation and rights of men. It would not be fair to object to the abolitionists the disgusting and disorganizing opinions of even some of their leading advocates ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... and his breast and some part of his arms were also made white with the same paint; not for beauty or ornament, one would think, but as some wild Indian warriors are said to do, he seemed thereby to design the looking more terrible; this his painting adding very much to his natural deformity; for they all of them have the most unpleasant looks and the worst features of any people that ever I saw, though I have seen great variety of savages. These New Hollanders were probably the same sort of people as those I met ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton

... Waste in the human frame, and Nature gifts 475 With choicest boons her human worshippers. How vigorous now the athletic form of age! How clear its open and unwrinkled brow! Where neither avarice, cunning, pride, or care, Had stamped the seal of grey deformity 480 On all the mingling lineaments of time. How lovely the intrepid front of youth! How sweet the smiles ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... whose friendly embrace she remained. She was already placing securely the foundations of commercial wealth and civil liberty upon those shifting quicksands which the Roman doubted whether to call land or water. Her submerged deformity, as she floated, mermaid-like, upon the waves was to be forgotten in her material splendor. Enriched with the spoils of every clime, crowned with the divine jewels of science and art, she was, one day, to sing a siren song of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... twisted, blotched, and speckled fruits which gourmands know by experience, and beneath whose skin nature has put the rarest flavors and perfumes. Why did Nicolas, that vulgar laborer, pursue this being who was worthy of a poet, while the eyes of the country-folk pitied her as a sickly deformity? Why did Rigou, the old man, feel the passion of a young one for this girl? Which of the two men was young, and which was old? Was the young peasant as blase as the old usurer? Why did these two extremes of life meet ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... Deformity or pain unstrings The music of the soul of things,— Ah, suns burn bright in eyes of panther, And lightnings leap in the ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand

... safer to say that sin must be somewhere lurking wherever there is deformity, pain, or discord—that, as a common phrase has it, the bleak and barren is the evidence of that which is forsaken of God. Things desolate are not divine. Religion is not repression but development into a fullness and ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope

... developed, and retreats somewhat, the upper part of the skull rising pyramidally; the eyes are prominent almost beyond the penthouse of the brow; the upper lip is so long that it must have been almost a deformity, unless the sculptor artistically exaggerated its length, in consideration, that, on the pedestal, it must be foreshortened by being looked at from below. On the whole, Shakspeare must have had a singular rather than a prepossessing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... a woe-begone, piteous, mute aspect; but no assumed expression could conceal this innate irremediable abjectness of his nature, any more than an arrangement of clothing can conceal some monstrous deformity of ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... the custom of the kings of this land to commit suicide by taking poison when any disaster or natural physical defect fell upon them, such as impotence, infectious disease, the loss of their front teeth, by which they were disfigured, or any other deformity or affliction. To put an end to such defects they killed themselves, saying that the king should be free from any blemish, and if not, it was better for his honour that he should die and seek another life where he would be made ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... rich and proves him a beggar, a naked beggar, which hath interest in nothing but in the gravel that fills his mouth. He holds a glass before the eyes of the most beautiful, and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness, and they ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... of North America; but a few of the old men only suffer a tuft to grow upon their chins. On arriving among them we were exceedingly surprised to see that they had almost all flattened heads. This configuration is not a natural deformity, but an effect of art, caused by compression of the skull in infancy. It shocks strangers extremely, especially at first sight; nevertheless, among these barbarians it is an indispensable ornament: and when we signified to them how much ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere

... will give the reader a vivid idea of the departure. The king was enormously fat. His figure, with long body and very short legs, was peculiar almost to deformity. He entered his carriage for his flight, with apparently none to regret his departure, at one o'clock, on the morning of the 19th of March. The evening of the next day, the 20th, the emperor arrived, and, surrounded by the acclamations ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... supposed that a small-footed woman must be one of rank, but this is an error. It is a matter of family ambition, even among the poor, to have in the family at least one such deformity. Gentlemen marry only small-footed women, and their child might make a good match. If large-footed, this would be impossible; but such hopes are sometimes doomed to disappointment, or after marriage reverses may ensue; and so it happens that many small feet stamp about in poverty and try to eke ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... deformed things, that which exceeds in deformity or disgrace, exceeds either in pain or ...
— Gorgias • Plato

... the death of Eudocia, his first wife, he disobeyed the patriarch, and violated the laws, by his second marriage with his niece Martina; and the superstition of the Greeks beheld the judgment of Heaven in the diseases of the father and the deformity of his offspring. But the opinion of an illegitimate birth is sufficient to distract the choice, and loosen the obedience, of the people: the ambition of Martina was quickened by maternal love, and perhaps by the envy of a step-mother; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... man, set him down as forward, did not quite approve of him. Always ready to judge involuntarily from externals, he would have been shocked to discover how much the deformity of the man, which caused him discomfort, prejudiced him also against him. Then Polwarth seldom went to a place of worship, and when he did, went to church! A cranky, visionary, talkative man, he was in Mr. Drake's eyes. He set him ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... you! To what a miserable, unwholesome state of deformity you have reduced yourself! We do not open our columns to persons who boast of having so ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various

... heir to, it must be by a clear understanding of, and a willing obedience to, the law which makes the parents the blessing or the curse of the children; the givers of strength, and vigor, and beauty, or the dispensers of debility, and disease, and deformity. It is by the lever of enlightened parental love, more than by any other power, that mankind is to be raised to the highest attainable point of ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew



Words linked to "Deformity" :   disfigurement, visual aspect, cleft foot, scaphocephaly, valgus, chicken breast, clawfoot, deformed, talipes, disfiguration, appearance, varus, pes cavus



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