"Destitution" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Involved, perplexed, and distrusted-with ever-slaying suspicion staring him in the face-he was a victim pursued by one who never failed to lay low his object. That man moved with unerring method, could look around him upon the destitution made by his avarice, without evincing a shadow of sympathy. Yes! he was in the grasp of a living Shylock, whose soul, worn out in the love of gold, had forgotten that there existed a ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... resistance of the individual. Perhaps such conditions may make infection easier, but that is of little importance considering how easy it is for all city dwellers—for the population as a whole. The question remains, will not bad housing cause a greater liability to fatal phthisis? Will not destitution and its attendant conditions increase the probability that a given individual will succumb to ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... obliged to submit to the terms imposed by the conquerors, glad in their destitution to be permitted to occupy their own lands as tenants at will. The English undertakers, as we have seen, were bound to deal differently with the English settlers; but their obligations resolved themselves into promises of freeholds and leases which were seldom granted, so that many persons ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... reforms begin with some great heart. Much now is being said of the destitution in the poorer districts of great cities. Dante saw a second hell deeper than hell itself. Each great modern city hath its inferno. Here dwell costermongers, rag-pickers and street-cleaners; here the sweater hath his haunts. Huge rookeries and tenements, whose every ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... intercession, I asked him for cash. What do you suppose the old skinflint answered? "I'll pay your debts," says he, "if you like. Up to twenty-five roubles inclusive!" Do you hear, inclusive! No, sir, this was a gift from God in my destitution. A lucky chance.' ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... rise to many serious questions. Many of the workers were near to destitution, and it was said that the organized charities would find it very difficult to give assistance to all who applied for it. They were busy everywhere, to their full capacity. "And I've heard it's nothing here to what it is on the mainland," said Baker Jorgen. "There ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... houses with woe; snatched the bread from the children to feed their dogs; shocked the principles, scorned the scruples, and blasphemed the religion of their humble hosts; and when they had reduced them to destitution, sold the furniture, and burned down the roof-tree which was consecrated to the peasants by the name of Home. For all this attention each of these soldiers received from his unwilling landlord a certain sum of money per day—three shillings sterling, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... found to consist of a fragment of original table-land, very marshy, and full of deep sloughs, intersected with small rills of water, pure and pellucid as crystal, and a profusion of wild parsley and celery. The prospect was one dreary scene of destitution, without a single ray of hope to relieve the misery of the desponding crew. After some days, the dead cow, hams, and cheese, were consumed; and from one end of the island to the other, not a morsel of food could be seen. Even the celery began to fail. A few bottles ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... of destitution and collapse. John Storm began to feed the old creature with the chicken and milk sent up for ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... brightened her prospects of futurity. It is perhaps not in the power of a man whose attention has been divided by diversity of pursuits, and who has not been accustomed to derive from others much of his happiness, to image to himself such helpless destitution, such dismal inanity. Every object of pleasing contemplation is at once snatched away, and the soul finds every receptacle of ideas empty, or filled only with the memory of joys that can return no more. All is gloomy privation, or impotent desire; the faculties of anticipation slumber ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... stratagem. Christianity fell before the old heathenism, and in 1814 we find the King of Congo, D. Garcia V., complaining to His Most Faithful Majesty that missioners were sadly wanted. Captain Tuckey's "Expedition" (A.D. 1816) well sets forth the spiritual destitution of the land. He tells us that three years before his arrival some missionaries had been murdered by the Sohnese; the only specimen he met was an ignorant half-caste with a diploma from the Capuchins of Loanda, and a wife plus five concubines. In 1863 I found that ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... for many years, and there was no falling off in the attendance. Those who have read the life of Henry Martyn, and others of the early missionary period in India, know that they ministered to this class. Here were persons whose destitution appealed directly to the Christian heart, and who were content to be present when the gospel message was delivered, while little access to others could be obtained. How far these poor people heard it would be difficult to say. I am afraid few heard with any desire to understand ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... wine, as well as for the ordinary sorts of medicine, is always sure of being filled from the ample stores of the "housekeeper's room." If the city poor were half as well provided for as are the agricultural poor by their "lords of the manor," there would be far less destitution. Some affect to sneer at a system which savors of what they call "feudalism," and which, they wisely suggest, encourages pauperism, but warm-hearted and charitable people will probably disagree with these ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... in Oldport, "What New-Yorkers call poverty: to be reduced to a pony phaeton." In consequence of a November gale, I am reduced To a similar state of destitution, from a sail-boat to a wherry; and, like others of the deserving poor, I have found many compensations in my humbler condition. Which is the more enjoyable, rowing or sailing? If you sail before the wind, there is the glorious vigor of the breeze that ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... to lose his share in the expected battle. "My heart would break," he says to Jervis, "to be absent at such a glorious time;" but it is difficult to understand why he imagined that the French would transfer their army into the destitution of the Corsican mountains from the fertile plains of Lombardy, abandoning the latter to their enemy, and exchanging their assured communications with France for the uncertainties and irregularities of ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... thence a woman who, squalid and degraded as she was, had evidently once been in the higher walks of life. As he passed her dwelling, the remembrance of this woman sent a thrill of mingled pity and disgust through his heart. The miserable destitution of her home, the glimpses of refinement that broke through her outbursts of passion, the state of revolting intoxication in which she was plunged—all arose vividly to his mind. He paused before the house with a feeling of vague interest. The night before, a scene of perfect ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... some dry wood, and was making a fire—and as we went a little further we met the woman afoot. I could not see her face, in its great sun-bonnet, but somehow her figure and gait told misery, terror, destitution. She had the rag-bundled, half-starv'd infant still in her arms, and in her hands held two or three baskets, which she had evidently taken to the next house for sale. A little barefoot five-year old girl-child, with fine ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... afflicting society spring from want, but this is only partially true. A small number of crimes are probably due to sheer lack of food, but it has to be borne in mind that crime would still remain an evil of enormous magnitude even if there were no such calamities as destitution and distress. As a matter of fact easy circumstances have less influence on conduct than is generally believed; prosperity generates criminal inclinations as well as adversity, and on the whole the rich are just ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... enclosures by stone walls, and subdivided by rows of a tall stout reed (Arundo donax) resembling sugarcane. Although taxes and other burdens are heavy, and wages very low, yet to a mere visitor like myself there appeared none of those occasional signs of destitution which strike one in walking through a town at home, nor did I ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... with fatigue, hungry and cold—for the nights were now very chill—and without a sou in his pocket, poor Gabriel, having wandered for some hours among the streets of this great city, now emptied of all but its crime and destitution, at last found shelter for the night in an empty cask, which had served probably as a dog-kennel in an open workyard into which he strayed. In this he made his bed with a few armfuls of shavings, and, spite of the cold, slept soundly ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... no real destitution, for a farmer can always raise enough produce to feed his family, and in a wooded country he can get fuel, even if he has to lift it between ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... gifts of Unionism to Ireland have been, as all the world knows, poverty and police. Soon after 1830, that is to say when the first harvest of government from Westminster was ripe to the sickle, Irish destitution had assumed what politicians call men-acing proportions. One person in every three of the population never had any other alimentary experience than the difference between hunger and starvation. In these circumstances a Royal Commission was appointed to consider the advisability of extending ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... untempered dread. She racked her brain trying to devise plans, deplored her weakness and the gaps in her training, bemoaned the neglect both she and Daniel were suffering, and was quite disturbed to see that Philippina's heart was filled with joy at the thought that the destitution of the household with its accompanying mental anguish ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... which stimulate political action reach the voters through newspapers. The emotional appeal of journalism, even more than that of the stage, is facile because it is pure, and transitory because it is second-hand. Battles and famines, murders and the evidence of inquiries into destitution, all are presented by the journalist in literary form, with a careful selection of 'telling' detail. Their effect is therefore produced at once, in the half-hour that follows the middle-class breakfast, or in the longer interval on the Sunday morning when the workman ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... they were assailed, the dearer became the cause for which they suffered, and the more profoundly the moral springs of faith were stirred in their souls. The natural revulsion of their souls was from destitution, contempt, peril, and pain on earth to a more vivid and magnified trust in a great reward laid up for them ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... then he lay down, and his children have got out of the carriage, and not only been compelled to walk, but to go barefoot. Against parsimony and niggardliness I proclaim war; but with the same sentence I condemn those who make a grand splash while they live, leaving their families in destitution when they die. ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... father's destitution means our destitution—yours and mine; for his gambling schemes have ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... wife, "how is she to be told? It is heart-rending to look at her and to think,—nothing but luxury all her life, and now, in a moment, destitution. I am very glad to have her with me: she is a dear little thing, and so nice with the children. And if some good man would ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... making amputation necessary. He was beginning to use his wooden leg. His master was taken prisoner by our men a few days before, and he, with one hundred fellow-slaves, fell into the hands of the Union army. He was fitted with a whole suit. This was done in but few instances, the general destitution forbidding it. It would have pleased the donors to see me with open boxes, taking out garment after garment, measuring and delivering, upon presentation of tickets previously given, to fifty or a hundred at a time; and to listen to the many thanks ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... cheerfully offered and amply paid. Accordingly, as each individual among us hath a parent, so should we regard the whole people as parents of the state, and, so far from depriving them of what the state bestows, we ought, in the absence of such bounty, to find other means to keep them from destitution. If the rich will adopt this principle, I think they will act both justly and wisely; for to deprive any class of a necessary provision, is to unite them in ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... being taken for a lady; she had no feeling and no thought that gave her any pleasure, but only a dull aching at the heart, only the wish in her mind to find something to do and save herself from utter destitution. ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... ease, so that in listening to him one felt the pleasure that is derived from such books as Horace Walpole's correspondence and those of the French memoir-writers.... He knew not how to care for money, yet he had none of those vices which ordinarily reduce men of genius to destitution, and are cloaked beneath the hackneyed phrase, "He had no enemy ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... very broken English that "Mees Alice" was the pupil of her deceased sister, who had come from France some years before and had undertaken the vocal instruction of haut ton young ladies, in order to save their aged mother from a destitution which threatened her, owing to some heavy reverses which had befallen ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... ought to be resigned to the mysterious dispensations of Providence—that was the prescribed phraseology of pious people. She had heard the cant times without number. What more would they have than her utter destitution of love and bliss? Was she not miserable enough to satisfy the sternest believer in purgatorial purification? to appease the wrath even of Him who had wrought her desolation? It must be the judgment of a retributive Deity ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... period on a diet of bread and meat three times a day, washed down with creamless, unsweetened coffee, and varied occasionally with additions of potatos, onions, beans, etc. It would astonish the Innocent to have one of our veterans inform him that this was not even the first stage of destitution; that a soldier who had these was expected to be on the summit level of contentment. Any of the boys who followed Grant to Appomattox Court House, Sherman to the Sea, or "Pap" Thomas till his glorious career culminated with the annihilation of Hood, will tell ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... destitution, frugality, lack, scantiness, defect, economy, inadequacy, need, shortcoming, deficiency, failure, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... full of reflections of this sort. The destitution of the Campagna of Rome demonstrates triumphantly what an aversion mankind has to arbitrary government, while the well-populated mountain of St Marino shows what a natural love they have for liberty. Whigs abroad were well caricatured by Smollett in Peregrine Pickle ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... revenue, to curtail exorbitant salaries, and to put down electioneering corruption. In 1809 Erskine introduced a bill for the prevention of cruelty to animals. In 1810 there were earnest, if somewhat futile, debates on spiritual destitution, the non-residence and poverty of the clergy, and the scarcity of places of worship. Moreover, early in 1811, a premonitory symptom of the repeal movement caused some anxiety in Ireland. It took the form of a scheme for a representative assembly to sit in Dublin, and manage ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... clergy, without books or education of any kind; still they are Christians, and carry their infants to the Greek Church in Nabloos for baptism. What a deplorable state of things! Since the date of this journey the Church Missionary Society's agents have in some degree ministered to the spiritual destitution of these poor people by supplying some at least with ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... majority of albums are comparatively valueless: they are written with so much negligence; many of the pieces are of so light and frivolous a character; there is so much childish and mawkish sentimentality in numbers of the effusions poured forth; and there is so great a destitution of solid, original, and striking thought, that, in my unpretending, yet honest estimation, the majority of albums are worth comparatively nothing. A good album should contain pieces of genuine talent; should be marked by no frivolity or childishness; should ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 491, May 28, 1831 • Various
... much destitution felt by people whose pride prevents them from asking for supplies from the relief committees. I saw a sad little procession wending up the hill to the camp of the Americus Club. There was a father, an honest, ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... have replied that she had no choice between these long walks and utter destitution for herself and her children; but she said, cheerfully, that it was only since the weather had become so warm that she had found the walk at all beyond her strength, and the hot weather would ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... must return to the forsaken spouse.—Left in this abrupt destitution and distress, Mrs. Lester had only the resource of applying to her brother-in-law, whom indeed the fugitive had before seized many opportunities of not leaving wholly unprepared for such an application. Rowland promptly and generously obeyed ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... together in the parks every night, having no other shelter than what is supplied by the trees and a few hollows of the embankment. Of these, the majority are young girls who have been seduced from the country by the soldiers and turned loose on the world in all the destitution of friendless penury, and all ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... to their ostentatious self-righteousness, pathetically shows the unfitness of pitting against one another teachers who share in an equality of forlorn destitution and contempt (iv. 6-13). He concludes this section with an affectionate but authoritative speech: he says that he has sent Timothy to Corinth, and hopes shortly ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... will never see it. Another class will hail the prospect of emancipation, but will deprecate the length of time. They will feel that it gives too little to the now living slaves. But it really gives them much. It saves them from the vagrant destitution which must largely attend immediate emancipation in localities where their numbers are very great, and it gives the inspiring assurance that their posterity shall be free forever. The plan leaves to each State choosing to act under it ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... native found himself in a state of near, or complete, destitution and resorted to the pawnbrokers's or to theft, what happened? The law restricted pawnbrokers from charging more than seven per cent on amounts more than $25, but on amounts below that they were allowed to charge twenty-five per cent. which, as the wage value of money then went, was oppressively ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... manufactories were forced to stop work, and paralysis fell on the whole industry of the nation. It was estimated that ten thousand persons were thrown out of employment. These soon used up their earnings, and destitution and suffering of course followed. Their condition grew worse as cold weather came on, and many actually died of starvation. At length they became goaded to desperation, and determined to help themselves to food. Gaunt men and women, clad in tatters, gathered in the Park, ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... frugally, but there seems to be little real destitution among them. We saw sometimes in front of a church, a representation of a beggar with his hat in his hand, under which was an iron box, with an appeal to travellers to drop something in for the poor of the parish; but of actual beggars we found none. The houses, although small, are warm ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... deputation, the anniversary meeting of the Tunbridge Wells Church Missionary Association. There he met a naval officer, Capt. J. C. Prevost, R.N., who had just returned from Vancouver's Island. While in command of H.M.S. Virago, he had been much impressed by the spiritual destitution of the Indians of the Pacific coast of British North America and the adjacent islands. They were "scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd," and he, like his Divine Master, was "moved with compassion on them." No Protestant missionary ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... manners, with a fund of humor and an abundance of ready anecdote which made his society fascinating; but he concealed beneath all these attractions a character of hard, grasping, unscrupulous selfishness, and an utter destitution of moral principle. ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... dwindled to surprisingly small proportions. Of 9386 lodgers, 3622 were shown to have been here less than sixty days, and 968 more not a year. The old mistake, that there is always a given amount of absolutely homeless destitution in a city, and that it is to be measured by the number of those who apply for free lodging, had been reduced to a demonstration. The truth is that the opportunity furnished by the triple alliance of stale beer, free lunch, and free lodging at the police station was the open door to permanent ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... them were, no doubt, not only relatively but positively poorer; the destruction of the guilds of labor, the displacements in industry, had left great numbers not only of the peasantry and the artisans but also of the poorer nobles in practical destitution. The organization of society was giving strength to the strong and weakness to those of no might—thus exactly reversing Mary's prophecy of what her royal Son should bring; and those who were thus dispossessed and scattered felt, and had a right to feel, that the social organization ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... as I should glory in benefiting mankind, I could not by any effort or sacrifice ameliorate the condition of these poor people, although I would willingly do anything in my power to testify my sorrow for their wretched destitution." ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... England. One or two Templars died in prison, but none were executed; and the majority were dismissed with pensions or secluded in monasteries. Edward and his nobles took good care to make a large profit out of the transaction. The resources of the Temple alone kept the king from destitution during the period between the death of Gaveston and his reconciliation with the earls. Many barons laid violent hands on estates belonging to the order, and long held on to them despite papal expostulation. ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... conditions on which he holds his mental vitality, cannot resist the hourly temptation to ignore them. Add to these native characteristics the frequent fact that such a man must make merchandise of his attainments, must toil under the perpetual menace of destitution; and what hope remains that his blood will keep the true rhythm, that his nerves will play as Nature bade them, that his sinews will bide the strain of exceptional task? Such a man may gaze with envy at those who "sweat in the eye of Phoebus," but he knows that no choice ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... Missolonghi, in the early part of 1823, shortly after the death of Marco Botzaris—being then in a state of perfect destitution, and his mental sufferings greatly aggravated by the consciousness, that he had induced so many of his comrades to sacrifice their lives and ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... continent, though it has the oldest civilization in its northeast corner, and the newest British civilization rapidly developing on its southern edge. It is the "dark continent," both in the color of its inhabitants and in its sad destitution and degradation. About a tenth of the world's population is here; with as many missionaries as in civilized India, but unable to reach the people as effectually as there because of the lack of national organization and the absence of great highways ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... it."—(Mill, Polit. Econ.) In whatever point of view, therefore, we regard this subject—whether as one of duty by providing the means of healthy and legitimate employment to our numerous artificers and labourers now in a state of destitution—a domestic calamity likely to be often inflicted upon us—unless new fields, easy of access, are made permanently open to our continually increasing population—and "it would be difficult to show that it is not as much the duty of rulers to provide, as far as they can, for the ...
— A Letter from Major Robert Carmichael-Smyth to His Friend, the Author of 'The Clockmaker' • Robert Carmichael-Smyth
... half a million inhabitants, the largest British city in Canada (in spite of the cheery Italian faces that pop up at you out of excavations in the street), liberally endowed with millionaires, not lacking its due share of destitution, misery, and slums. It is no mushroom city of the West, it has its history; but at the same time it has grown immensely of recent years. It is situated on the shores of a lovely lake; but you never see that, because ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... on their shoulders; small black boys learned on their back little brothers equally inky, and, gravely depositing them, shook hands. Never had I seen human beings so clad, or rather so unclad, in such amazing squalid-ness and destitution of garments. I recall one small urchin without a rag of clothing save the basque waist of a lady's dress, bristling with whalebones, and worn wrong side before, beneath which his smooth ebony legs emerged like those of an ostrich from its plumage. How weak is imagination, ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Foulerton;—seconded by Mr. Alderman Venables,—That the subjects of all nations be equally objects of the Institution, as well in war as in peace; that the same rewards be given for their rescue as for British subjects; and that foreigners saved from shipwreck, and being in a state of destitution, be placed under the care of the consuls or other accredited agents of their own nations, or be forwarded ...
— An Appeal to the British Nation on the Humanity and Policy of Forming a National Institution for the Preservation of Lives and Property from Shipwreck (1825) • William Hillary
... not mend the matter, papa. There will be great destitution and suffering in the village with every mill closed; and they are all going to close, Bridget says. Thank Heaven that this did not happen in ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to breakfast on the door-step of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and gives it a brush when he has finished as an acknowledgment of the accommodation. He admires the size of the edifice and wonders what it's all about. He has no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific or what it costs to look up the precious souls among the coco-nuts ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... succeeded in conciliating by his amiable manners and evident abilities; but his efforts were all in vain, and poor Jackson, familiar with poverty from childhood, began now to experience the misery of destitution. In truth, starvation stared him in the face, and a sense of delicacy withheld him from seeking from his Jamaica friend the most trifling pecuniary assistance. In this, his state of desperation, he determined ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... him with the sword, and what wrinkles the reader may imagine. In default of portraits, that is all I have been able to piece together, and perhaps even the baldness should be taken as a figure of his destitution. A sinister dog, in all likelihood, but with a look in his eye, and the loose flexile mouth that goes with wit and an overweening sensual temperament. Certainly the sorriest figure on the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... amused himself with compliments and questions that sometimes nettled her, sometimes pleased her, giving her a sense that he might admire her beauty, but was playing on her simplicity, and trying to make her betray the destitution of her home and her purpose ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... exposing himself to the operation of the penal laws by holding conventicles and preaching, he was deeply afflicted at the thought of the suffering and destitution to which his wife and children might be exposed by his death or imprisonment. Nothing can be more touching than his simple and earnest words on this point. They show how warm and deep were his human affections, and what a tender and loving heart he ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... touch but lightly upon the next few days. I would rather forget the atmosphere of squalor and destitution that pervaded our household when the carpets had been stripped up and we were stumbling about among half-packed barrels upon bare, resounding floors. I do not seek to retrace in detail the process of packing, which began with some buoyancy and system, to degenerate at last in its endlessness ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... through the night, not plotting merely against the sleep of betrayed husbands, but against the property of murdered victims! Now, then, thou hast a notable occasion for displaying those illustrious qualities of thine, that wonderful endurance of hunger, of cold, of destitution, by which ere long thou shalt feel thyself undone, and ruined. This much, however, I did accomplish, when I defeated thee in the comitia, that thou shouldst strike at the republic as an exile, rather than ravage it as a consul; and that the warfare, so villanously evoked ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... reads. A specimen or two will amply suggest the rest. In one tale the hero is held up to the unqualified admiration of posterity for having starved to death his son, in an extreme case of family destitution, for the sake of providing food enough for his aged father. In another he unhesitatingly divorces his wife for having dared to poke fun, in the shape of bodkins, at some wooden effigies of his parents which he had had set up in the house ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... line moved up, and we were admitted in groups of three. Name, age, occupation, place of birth, condition of destitution, and the previous night's "doss," were taken with lightning-like rapidity by the superintendent; and as I turned I was startled by a man's thrusting into my hand something that felt like a brick, and shouting into my ear, "any knives, matches, or tobacco?" "No, sir," I lied, ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... you cannot understand; go to your luxurious and costly home; go and repine that human nature is not measured by your mangled and crippled laws: amidst men, yet more fallen than I am, hope to select your victim; amidst prisons, and hovels, and roofless sheds; amidst rags and destitution, and wretches made mad by hunger, hope that you may find a villain. I leave you ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tenderness has given away every thing, is driven out to the world a wandering beggar; the childish imbecility to which he was fast advancing changes into the wildest insanity, and when he is rescued from the disgraceful destitution to which he was abandoned, it is too late: the kind consolations of filial care and attention and of true friendship are now lost on him; his bodily and mental powers are destroyed beyond all hope of recovery, and all that now remains ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... himself, with enormous nails. He teaches her verses that are easy to understand. He is afraid of altering her moral beauty by taking her out of the shame where she lives in perfect simplicity and admirable destitution." ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... known. First because nobody counted them—that would have been quite contrary to oriental indifference and fatalism—and then because it would have been excessively difficult to make them out, in the confused ash heap which had taken their place. The number of families reduced to destitution must have been very considerable, but individual charity is very liberal amongst the Mussulmans, as indeed amongst all people possessed of religious faith. I got home, at one o'clock in the morning, worn out. Shortly afterwards ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... sickness, Capt. Smith had so won the confidence of the Indian chieftains, that notwithstanding the gross irregularities of his young men, they brought him supplies of corn and game, which they freely gave to the English in their destitution. ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... more than time to carry on this admirable work. Under the guidance of the second gentleman mentioned above, I proceeded to the St. George's and St. Giles's Refuge in Great Queen Street, where boys are admitted on their own application, the only qualification being destitution. Here they are housed, clothed, boarded, and taught such trades as they may be fitted for, and not lost sight of until they are provided with situations. A hundred and fifty-four was the number of this truly miraculous ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... opened her miserable eyes, and regained her consciousness of herself and what lay before her. There was no course open but submission. She knew that from the first. All three faced destitution; she was the one financial asset, she and her poor flesh. She had to face it, and with what dignity she ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of the cheapness of provisions at Gallarate, and of occasional meals taken gratis from the fields, complete destitution seemed to be only a matter of days, and just at this crisis, to add to his embarrassments—though he longed earnestly for the event—Lucia was brought to bed with her first-born living child on May 14, 1534. The child's birth was accompanied ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... banker's messenger; and for the first time he was returning to his home without the vision of any expedient in the background which left him a hope of raising money enough to deliver him from the coming destitution of everything which made his married life tolerable—everything which saved him and Rosamond from that bare isolation in which they would be forced to recognize how little of a comfort they could be to each other. It was more bearable to do without tenderness for himself than to see that ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... to adopt an opinion to the prejudice of their less fortunate acquaintance, merely from their deficiency of the world's wealth! But, not content with this, these persons, who are the very people to esteem poverty as the worst of ills, not satiated with his destitution, must do their utmost to sink him still lower by their treatment of him; little suspecting, too, I should hope, that the most probable means of enticing a man to become a villain, is to convince him that the world deems him to be such. I have known more than ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... Fowler's eyes gazing up at her from the heavy shadow of the crape veil she had lifted. So that was the end—a little love, a little hope, a little happiness, and then separation and death. Effort appeared not only futile, but fantastic, and yet effort, she knew, must be made if she were to ward off destitution. She must recover her cheerfulness, she must be strong, she must be confident. Alone, penniless, with two children to support, she could not afford to waste her time and her energy in useless regret. Whatever it cost her, she must keep ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... usually earnest in pleading for her plan,—not merely on the strength of her own deep, prophetic conviction of her fitness for a dramatic career, but on the ground of an urgent and bitter necessity for exertion on her part, to ward off actual destitution and suffering,—he exclaimed, somewhat impatiently,—"Why, Zelma, it is an impossibility, almost an absurdity, you urge! You could never make an actress. You are too hopelessly natural, erratic, and impulsive. You would follow no teaching implicitly, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... gave three raps at the door. Lucien came to open it. The room was forlorn in its bareness. A bowl of milk and a penny roll stood on the table. The destitution of genius made an impression ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... now occurred, the importance of which it is difficult to discover, but which seems to have been great, to judge from the mystery in which it is shrouded. Whether he had received some urgent communication from England, or whether, in his state of destitution, he had thought of claiming the help of his friends at Tournebut, d'Ache despatched Flierle to Mme. de Combray, and gave him two letters, advising him to use the greatest discretion. Flierle set out on horseback from Caen in the morning of March 13th. At dawn next day he arrived at Rouen, ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... any price for their productions. The people were obliged to restrict themselves in their purchases to articles of prime necessity. In the general prostration of business the iron manufacturers in different States probably suffered more than any other class, and much destitution was the inevitable consequence among the great number of workmen who had been employed in this useful branch of industry. There could be no supply where there was no demand. To present an example, there could be no demand for railroad iron after our magnificent ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... little cottage, where he found his aged housekeeper, the Senora Margarita, watching for him. Notwithstanding that one is well accustomed to the sight of poverty in Spain, it was impossible to help being struck by the utter of destitution which appeared in the house of the good priest; the more so, as every imaginable contrivance had been restored to, to hide the nakedness of the walls, and the shabbiness of the furniture. Margarita had prepared for her master's ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... are followers that adhere to them in their fallen fortunes with more than canine fidelity, sticking to them like their sins, clinging to their persons, cleaving to their garments, with an attachment and in numbers that grow with their patron's destitution." ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... is Sir Tobias Vandilk, one of the richest men on the Stock Exchange. He is of Dutch extraction, they say; and this is supposed to account for his utter destitution with regard to English aspirates. He has a palace in Park Lane, and a park in Yorkshire; gives dinners of a most recherche description every Thursday in the season; and immense shooting parties, at which I am told he and his friends slaughter ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... been brought to perfection. Universities, libraries and other benefactions will abound, pleading for recognition of the money-making dyspeptics. Human ingenuity will have contrived some means for freeing men's minds from the dread of destitution. ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... a fleet such as was never brought together by the Romans now covers the shore of Campania and the greater part of the Ionian Gulf. And within a few days these reinforcements will come to us and bring with them all kinds of provisions, to put an end to our destitution and to bury the camps of the barbarians under a multitude of missiles. I have therefore reasoned that it was better to put off the time of conflict until they are present, and thus gain the victory in the war with safety, than to make a show of daring in unreasoning haste and thus throw away ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... to criticize the obvious limitations of organized charities in meeting the desperate problem of destitution. We are all familiar with these criticisms: the common indictment of "inefficiency" so often brought against public and privately endowed agencies. The charges include the high cost of administration; the pauperization of deserving ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... fishers at Harlech eat grass when the fishery fails? Do you know that at Burton-Lazars there are still lepers confined, on whom they fire if they leave their tan houses! At Ailesbury, a town of which one of you is lord, destitution is chronic. At Penkridge, in Coventry, where you have just endowed a cathedral and enriched a bishop, there are no beds in the cabins, and they dig holes in the earth in which to put the little children to ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... resting made an excuse to him for the barrenness of day after day. His 'Pliny' article had been despatched to The Wayside, and would possibly be accepted. But he did not trouble himself about this or other details; it was as though his mind could do nothing more than grasp the bald fact of impending destitution; with the steps towards that final stage he seemed to ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... of the land that sometimes parents destroyed their children, rather than let them grow up to a life of suffering. This vast system of organized oppression, like all tyranny, "was not so much an institution as a destitution," undermining and impoverishing the country. It lasted until time brought its revenge, and Rome, which had crushed so many nations of barbarians, was in her turn threatened with a like fate, by bands of ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... the poor, comparatively at any rate, poorer. Hence, when in the fourteenth and following centuries the national market expands into a world market, we find growing up side by side capitalism and destitution; and the reason why there are so many millionaires and so much destitution to-day, compared with earlier times, is that the world is now one market, and the range of operations is only limited by ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... brow of the prosperous, that the child of misfortune must never gather. Another thought that all interest being destructive to its very essence, it could not be trusted, unless there was an utter destitution of every thing that might recommend us to favor, or requite affection. This lady must have been brought to the depth of wretchedness ere she ever could be sure she had a friend. Some, I found, thought ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... villain made his appearance the object of his jeers. By the way, you look a little comical yourself at the present moment, captain, and your colonel would certainly say that you had been getting into mischief. To continue, however, my boy's youth and his destitution—for his pockets were empty—moved the pity of a kind-hearted major, and he advanced him ten Napoleons from his own pocket without security of any kind. Into your hands, Captain Baumgarten, I return these ten gold pieces, ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... circumstances the project of attacking Sackett's in force was again most seriously agitated among the British officials, military and naval, upon whom the destitution of the Niagara peninsula pressed with increasing urgency. Such an intention rarely fails to transpire, especially across a border line where the inhabitants on either side speak the same tongue and are often intimately acquainted. Desertion, moreover, was frequent from both parties. ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... fire having taken place on a Friday night. The lessons in my Bible-class were sooner over than usual that day, and I took advantage of the short interval of time before the concluding prayer was offered, to tell my class about the fire, and of the utter destitution in which the poor widow and her children had been left. All the girls seemed very sorry, and I heard them discussing the subject as we were coming out, after the class had been dismissed. The next morning I was told that a girl wanted to ...
— Catharine's Peril, or The Little Russian Girl Lost in a Forest - And Other Stories • M. E. Bewsher
... himself, the reprobate king, who, when he was on his way to Naioth, and was visited by God's Holy Spirit, did not thereupon receive the garment of salvation, nor was clothed in righteousness, but behaved himself in an unseemly wild way, as one whose destitution and shame were but detected by the visitation. He stript off his clothes and prophesied before Samuel, and lay down in that state all that ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... examination may be neglected, because it is based upon the misconception that Lord Wharncliffe, Lady Mary's greatgrandson, and not Lady Stuart, her granddaughter, was the writer of the foregoing account. But as a set-off to the extreme destitution alleged, Mr. Keightley very justly observes that Mrs. Fielding must for some time have had a maid, since it was a maid who had been devotedly attached to her whom Fielding subsequently married. He also argues that "living in a garret and skulking ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... passing events. Even the slightest of them, so far as they are known to me, show conscience and work. In 1852, for example, he wrote no less than twelve articles for the four leading quarterlies of that date. They were, with one exception, all on political or economical subjects. 'Highland Destitution,' and 'Irish Emigration,' 'Investments for the Working Classes,' 'The Modern Exodus;'—these were not themes to be dealt with by the facile journalist, standing on one foot. Mr. Greg always showed the highest conception of the functions and the obligations ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... woman, still feeling persuaded that I had acted under a delusion in going to her house. How was it possible to associate the charming object of my heart's worship with the miserable story of destitution which I had just heard? I stopped the boy on the first landing, and told him to announce me simply as a doctor, who had been informed of Mrs. Brand's illness, and who had called to ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... though it was distinct enough indeed that this thing might sometimes serve. It consisted in the perfection of an indifference, an indifference at the present moment directed to the plea—a plea of inability, of pure destitution—with which his sister had met him. Yet it had even now a wider embrace, took in quite sufficiently all consequences of queerness, confessed in advance to the false note that, in such a setting, he almost ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... funds were, in fact, so heavy, that only the bare means of subsistence were left to the mass of the agricultural population. In admiring the greatness and glory of the city, therefore, we must remember that there was a gloomy counterpart to its splendor in the very extended destitution and poverty to which the mass of the people were everywhere doomed. They lived in hamlets of wretched huts along the banks of the river, in order that the capital might be splendidly adorned with ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... 1792.—Letters of the Special Committee of Rouen, October 22 and 23, 1792: "The more the zeal and patriotism of the cultivators is stimulated, the more do they seem determined to avoid the market-places, which are always in a State of absolute destitution."] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... acknowledge her, and, having squandered the property that should have been applied to her support, absconded from the country. In after years, however, conscience drove him back, but only to find her dying of destitution and a broken heart, and to learn from her last words that the offspring of their connection, a male infant, had been thrown unacknowledged on the charity of the public. Aroused by a new sense of duty, he diligently sought for the child—followed it from ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... sympathetically. Her life had been hard, and there was plenty of rough work in it, but she had never been within seeing distance of destitution, and she had plenty of pity for those whose lives had been fuller of ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... is it that keeps up missionary work abroad? Mainly the Christian Churches. There is a vast deal of unreality in that objection. Just think of the disproportion between the embarrassment of riches in our Christian appliances here in England and the destitution in these distant lands. Here the ships are crammed into a dock, close up against one another, rubbing their yards upon each other; and away out yonder on the waters there are leagues of loneliness, where never a sail is seen. Here, at home, we are drenched with Christian teaching, and the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... defend one's happiness, one's honor, one's peace of mind, feebly protected by piles of gold pieces which topple over and crush one, is a far more ghastly, more heart-sickening task. Never, in the gloomiest of my days of destitution, did I suffer the torture, the agony, the sleeplessness with which fortune has overwhelmed me, this horrible fortune which I abhor and which suffocates me! I am known as the Nabob in Paris. Nabob is not the proper name for me, but Pariah, a social pariah stretching out his arms, ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... fellow-countrymen from ever having to endure such calamities that we have undertaken this work, in which it is proven conclusively that the "Reds," unless quickly thwarted, will overwhelm us with unspeakable horrors of crime, rebellion, anarchy and destitution. ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... that crawled phantom-like, filling the little dingle brimful and blotting out the surrounding trees. In a little I arose and, coming without the cave, shivered in the colder air, shaken with raging hunger. And now remembering my utter destitution, I stooped to peer down at the sleeper, half minded to go through his pockets, but in a while I turned away and left him sprawled ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... could not long be tolerated, and the Foullans threatened to besiege it. The doctor, therefore, left it on the 17th of March, 1854, and fled to the frontier, where he remained for thirty-three days in the most abject destitution. He then managed to get back to Kano in November, thence to Kouka, where he resumed Denham's route after four months' delay. He regained Tripoli toward the close of August, 1855, and arrived in London on the 6th of September, the only ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... classes, and a general look of ease and contentment. Of course, there are poor in Turin, as everywhere else,—except Japan, if we may credit travellers; but nowhere are my eyes saddened by the spectacle of that abject destitution which blunts, nay, destroys, the sense of self-respect. The operatives, especially,—what are here called the braccianti,—this salt of all cities, this nursery of the army and navy, this inexhaustible source of production and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... tradition, to play the solid part of an English country gentleman of the good old- fashioned kind. It was pitiful to think of a man of his stamp forced by the vile exigencies of a narrow purse to scheme and fight against the advancing tide of destitution. And Ida, too,—Ida, who was equipped with every attribute that can make wealth and power what they should be—a frame to show off her worth and state. Well, it was the way of the world, and he ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... copper coins amongst them, now excited not the least commiseration, called forth nothing but some passing execration upon the slovenly government that could permit human life to sink down into all the wildness, and more than the destitution ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... ever give one answer of satisfaction to the mind; in the midst of the loudest vauntings of philosophy, nature will have her yearnings for society and friendship;—a good heart wants some object to be kind to—and the best parts of our blood, and the purest of our spirits, suffer most under the destitution. ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... appointed a commissioner for treating with the Dey of Algiers on the subject of peace and the ransoming of American captives. The letter informing of his appointment did not, however, reach him, for Jones died at Paris on the 18th of July, 1792, in abject poverty and destitution. ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... England produced another good work. She, with her husband and daughter, returned home by way of North Devon, Somerset, and Wiltshire. At Amesbury she tarried long enough to learn something of the mental destitution of the shepherds employed on Salisbury Plain, and set her fertile brain to contrive a scheme for the supply of the necessary books. She communicated her desires and intentions to the clergyman of ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... from the depth of their destitution, these men summon sweet souvenirs—"All that," Barque goes on, "isn't worth much, compared with the good ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... definitive conclusion as to the balance of the probabilities. At one moment his mind swung back to his original conviction that the Marchese Ludovico had yielded to the temptation of making himself safe from the destitution that awaited him if his uncle's purpose were carried out. The persuasion that it was so seemed to come like a flash of light upon him. Then, again, thinking of all the stories of what women have done under the influence of a maddening jealousy, he reverted ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... fearfully. Happily, after two long hours' march, a beautiful country spread out before us, covered by olives, pomegranates, and vines, which appeared to belong to anybody and everybody. In any event, in the state of destitution into which we had fallen, we were not in a ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... miles around. Now all these people, vary as they might in church creeds, were united in a hearty admiration for plucky little Mrs. O'Callaghan. They all knew, though the widow would not own it, that destitution was at her door. The women feared that in taking her boys to town she was taking them to their ruin, while the men thought her course the only one, since a destitute woman can hardly run a farm with only seven growing boys to help her. And for a day or two there ...
— The Widow O'Callaghan's Boys • Gulielma Zollinger |
