"Enormity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and found Aymer smoking composedly with one arm round the sleeping boy, he had pointed out with great care the enormity of a small child being out of bed at ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... parched at the lips now, awake to the enormity of his forwardness. "I am twelve," ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... survivors in France began to count their numbers and marshal their forces for self-preservation. From every part of Protestant Europe a cry of horror and execration simultaneously arose in view of this crime of unparalleled enormity. In many places the Catholics themselves seemed appalled in contemplation of the deed they had perpetrated. Words of sympathy were sent to these martyrs to a pure faith from many of the Protestant kingdoms, with ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... symptoms of no fleeting impulse, but of steadfast desire; therefore they were persistent. The likeness of the great bass horn remained upon the retina of his mind's eye, losing nothing of its brazen enormity with the passing of hours, nor abating, in his mind's ear, one whit of its fascinating blatancy. Penrod might have forgotten almost anything else more readily; for such a horn has this double compulsion: people cannot possibly keep themselves from looking at its possessor—and they certainly ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... that Monsieur of Reims sent this enormity to Monsieur of Paris," added la Gaultiere, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... did because it was commanded by a book—a book that men had been taught implicitly to believe, long before they knew one word that was in it. They had been taught that to doubt the truth of this book, to examine it, even, was a crime of such enormity that it could not be forgiven, either in this ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... English upon their defenceless prisoners, and had instructed him to prepare a school book for the use of American children, to be illustrated by thirty-five good engravings, each to picture some scene of horror, some enormity of suffering, such as should indelibly impress upon the minds of the school children a dread of British rule, and a hatred ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... therefore, in a sense, the whole law, for man cannot break any one law unless he breaks first this fundamental Law of all Laws. This implies that the demoralizing effect of sinning or law-breaking, on any one of the planes of being, does not depend so much upon the enormity of the deed as upon the loss of self-control. Continued weakening of self-control in trivial things may therefore, in the end, prove more destructive than a murder committed in the heat of passion. If there is not ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... knew the life of the workingmen better than these people, and saw more clearly than they the enormity of the task they assumed. She could look upon them with the somewhat melancholy indulgence of a grown-up person toward children who play man and wife without understanding the drama of ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... from repeated experience, so unfit for the charge with which they were intrusted. He exaggerated the oppressions exercised against the lower orders of the state, the violations of the barons' privileges, the continued depredations made on the clergy; and in order to aggravate the enormity of this conduct, he appealed to the Great Charter, which Henry had so often ratified, and which was calculated to prevent forever the return of those intolerable grievances. He magnified the generosity of their ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... asked Clarissa, who was not prepared to believe, and did not believe this enormity on the part ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... wild suggestion. What if it were SHE who was dead! If she were going to die—to die soon—and leave him free! The sensation of standing there, in that warm familiar room, and looking at her, and wishing her dead, was so strange, so fascinating and overmastering, that its enormity did not immediately strike him. He simply felt that chance had given him a new possibility to which his sick soul might cling. Yes, May might die—people did: young people, healthy people like herself: she might die, ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... stealing, which was then reduced to a system of most extraordinary ingenuity and address. Still, there were many poor wretches who, sunk in the deepest destitution, and contaminated by a habit which familiarity had deprived in their eyes of much of its inherent enormity, scrupled not to relieve their distresses by having recourse to the prevalent ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... confess her husband's also. What the priest said to her it is not necessary to repeat. She had had the same sort of things said before, and had not been shocked. He now, however, before he allowed her to depart, brought the enormity of her conduct fully before her, and told her that he could not afford her absolution, because she was married to one who held heretical notions, unless she could manage to get him duly punished. She had made her confession; ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... affords him another occasion for indulging it. It is not for any want of attachment to his father or abhorrence of his murder that Hamlet is thus dilatory, but it is more to his taste to indulge his imagination in reflecting upon the enormity of the crime and refining on his schemes of vengeance, than to put them into immediate practice. His ruling passion is to think, not to act: and any vague pretence that flatters this propensity instantly diverts him from ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... becomes, under critical circumstances, an unpardonable crime. If the symbol, instead of being an inanimate object, be a human being—a high officer of the Government—does not such an outrage as that committed by Terry exceed in enormity the offense denounced by General Dix? And if so, why ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... country's annals? Above all, when he and his descendants have adroitly disguised his villainy with the varnish of incorruptible patriotism, why should the hand which has the power to tear off the mask, and expose the enormity of guilt, be made to fall, self-withheld and self-paralyzed, from the effort? These are questions which admit of but one reply. I shall go on, and in continuation of my developments, I here subjoin another letter from Col. ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... Agesilaus, was passionately attached. Now the friends of Cleombrotus, as comrades of Sphodrias, were disposed to acquit him; but they feared Agesilaus and his friends, not to mention the intermediate party, for the enormity of his proceeding was clear. So when Sphodrias addressed his son Cleonymus: "You have it in your power, my son, to save your father, if you will, by begging Archidamus to dispose Agesilaus favourably to me at my trial." Thus instructed, the youth did not shrink from visiting ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... Alphonse, and never complained while the dinners lasted, but it was whispered that she had fits in the upper part of the house. No sooner did my father hear the rumour than he accused her to her face of this enormity, telling her that he was determined to effect a permanent cure, even though she should drive him to unlimited expense. We had a Ball party and an Aladdin supper, and for a fortnight my father hired postillions; we flashed through London. My father backed a horse to run ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of war, and unknown to this day amongst civilized nations. I flatter myself, however, that our enemies have been brought to see this transaction in its true light, and that we shall not experience a repetition of the like enormity. ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... his arms involuntarily at the sheer enormity of the idea. It was one thing to let a useless race expire, quite another to think of its being forced back to— "But—can't anyone think of ...
— DP • Arthur Dekker Savage
... as I admitted them to be. My first impulse—and it was a very strong one—was to take Mr Austin into my confidence, to unfold to him my suspicions and the circumstances which had given rise to them, frankly admitting at the same time their apparent enormity, and then to put the question to him whether, in his opinion, there was the slightest possibility ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... not any clearer moral teaching, but rather a stronger enforcement of the condemnation long since passed upon infanticide, and an increased protection for exposed infants.... The church labored to deepen the sense of the enormity of the crime."[975] Evidently infanticide was a tradition with serious approval from one state of things to another in which it was harmful and not needed in any view. In 331 A.D. Constantine gave title to those who rescued exposed children against ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... to the educated palate, is art, literature and song combined, meant nothing more to her than if it had been Medoc. She drank it because it was there at her hand, as she would have drunk water, without savouring it, without any realisation of the enormity of the crime. Yet though it meant nothing, nothing at least of which she was aware, the royal cru was affecting her. It modified and mollified, admonishing her that this man was an inoffensive insect who, circumstances favouring, might, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... tried to go to arbitration upon it before a Court in which the best known personage was to have been M. de Martens, the hereditary librarian of the Russian Foreign Office, whose opinion on such points was hardly likely to be impartial. Luckily, the French added a condition, the enormity of which was such that the arbitration has never taken place, and it may be ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... publicly sold or left by will, passed down through families from father to son, and from husband to wife, and the possessions of the Church served for dowry to the daughters of bishops. Absolution was at a low quotation in the market, and redemption for sins of the greatest enormity cost scarcely the price of founding a church or a monastery. Horror-stricken at the sight of such corruption in the only things they at that time recognized as holy, men no longer knew where to find the rule of life or the safeguard of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... hold carefully in his mind that this visible abyss, this enormity of purest dark, was not an opening into nothingness but was simply Earth at ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the shop of a mechanic, or hasten the hand of the public executioner, she has yet had the satisfaction of embittering all his hours, and forcing him into exigencies that hurried on his death. It is by no means necessary to aggravate the enormity of this woman's conduct by placing it in opposition to that of the Countess of Hertford. No one can fail to observe how much more amiable it is to relieve than to oppress, and to rescue innocence from destruction than to ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... affairs—look into the votes and speeches of members, give their opinions—but are universally corrupt. They have a sour feeling against what are nicknamed abuses, rail against sinnicures, as they call them, and descant upon the enormity of such things while they are forced to work all day long and their families have not enough to eat. But the one prevailing object among the whole community is to make money of their votes, and though he says there are some exceptions, they are very few indeed. Robarts too is a Reformer, and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... him. The next, to place all the victims of this piece of deception in the guard-house, where the commanding officer's lady supplied them bountifully with coffee and hot cakes, by way of opening their eyes to the enormity of their offence. It is not to be wondered at that the officers sometimes complained of its being more of a strife with the soldiers who should get into the guard-house, than who should keep out of it. The poor fellows knew when they were ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... pressure was put upon him by the opposite party. The Pope did his best through the Nuncius at Paris directly, and through agents at Prague, Brussels, and Madrid indirectly, to awaken the King to a sense of the enormity of his conduct. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... are but few slaves, and they can easily disincumber themselves of them; and emancipation is put in such a train that in a few years there will be no slaves northward of Maryland. In Maryland I do not find such a disposition to begin the redress of this enormity as in Virginia. These [the inhabitants of Virginia] have sucked in the principles of liberty, as it were, with their mothers' milk, and it is to these I look with anxiety to turn the fate of this question. Be not, therefore, discouraged. The College of William and Mary ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... convenient place for hearing, and seeing all that passed. The accusateur general who sat on the left, wore a costume similar to that of the judges, without the scarf. He opened the trial by relating the circumstances, and declaiming upon the enormity of the offence, by which it appeared that the prisoner stood charged with robbery, accompanied with breach of hospitality; which, in that country, be the amount of the plunder ever so trifling, is at present capital. ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... you why you have left the Pope's niece, take care not to tell her the reason. She will be pleased with your discretion. In short, do your best to expiate the enormity of your offence." ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Parmenides was the Adam of that race, and first tasted the deceptive kind of knowledge which, promising to make man God, banishes him from the paradise of experience. His sin has been transmitted to his descendants, though hardly in its magnificent and simple enormity. "The whole is one," Xenophanes had cried, gazing into heaven; and that same sense of a permeating identity, translated into rigid and logical terms, brought his sublime disciple to the conviction that an indistinguishable immutable substance ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... were afterwards killed by the Mackenzies; but it is somewhat startling to reflect that this terrible instance of private vengeance should have occurred in the commencement of the seventeenth century, without, so far as we can trace, any public notice being taken of such an enormity. In the end the disputes between the chiefs of Glengarry and Kintail were amicably settled by an arrangement which gave the Ross-shire lands, so long the subject of dispute, entirely to Mackenzie; and the hard terms to which Glengarry was obliged to submit in the private ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... justice to the Jacobins with the true Jacobin measure; but at Paris the punishments were inflicted with order and decency, and were few when compared with the number, and lenient when compared with the enormity, of the crimes. Soon after the ninth of Thermidor, two of the vilest of mankind, Fouquier Tinville, whom Barere had placed at the Revolutionary Tribunal, and Lebon, whom Barere had defended in the Convention, were placed under arrest. A third miscreant ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... pocket-handkerchief, instead of blowing it up with a match and train, is rarely successful; and after three or four other and much guiltier victims than Lenny had been incarcerated in the stocks, the parish of Hazeldean was ripe for any enormity. Pestilent Jacobinical tracts, conceived and composed in the sinks of manufacturing towns, found their way into the popular beer-house,—Heaven knows how, though the tinker was suspected of being the disseminator by all ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... been hers, she had hated. Her passionate nature had drawn her whither its stormy waves listed. And now that the tempest was passed, and the driving forces had ceased to urge, leaving her in a rock-bound pool of reflection, she saw the enormity of the step she had taken, she realized the strength of Nature's tendrils which still ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... which is that of a Broker, leading me often into Taverns about the Exchange, has given me occasion to observe a certain Enormity, which I shall here submit to your Animadversion. In three or four of these Taverns, I have, at different times, taken notice of a precise Set of People with grave Countenances, short Wiggs, black Cloaths, or dark Camlet ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... about six tricks in it, finishing up with the two; he therefore made with his spades all—indeed, I rather think more tricks than the Colonel ought to have made in his diamonds, each of which, now losing cards, he successively banged down with increasing anger and turbulence of gesture, as the enormity of my crime was borne in upon him. It was the deciding game of a rubber; the adversaries' score had stood at one, while we were at two, and besides, we had had two by honours; as they made four by cards, they went out—and so did I—not without an obbligato ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 19, 1892 • Various
... It was "up to him," and he was too much of a man to shirk the issue. After all, he realized that, although actually led away from home by this determined little girl, he was the one who had fully understood the enormity of what they were doing. In his own unuttered but emphatic phrase, "She ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... although on foot and still some way behind four of la Garda were trying to find him. Rodriguez' mind, which was looking at life from the point of view of a judge, changed somewhat at this thought. He reflected next that, for the prevention of crime, to make Morano see the true nature of his enormity so that he should never commit it again might after all be as good as killing him. So what we call his better nature, his calmer judgment, decided him now to talk to Morano and not to kill him: but Morano, looking back upon this merciful change, ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... gambles; but over the gambling of the Blade it is well to draw a veil—a partially translucent and coquettish veil, through which we can see the thing dimly, and enhanced in its enormity. You must patronise the Turf, of course, and have money on horses, or you are no Blade at all, but a mere stick. The Harrow Blade has his book on all the big races in the calendar; and the great and noble game of Nap—are not Blades its worshippers wherever the sun ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... and saw my fault in all its enormity. I was guilty of that crime—or so I felt in the first heat of my sorrow and despair. I may even have said so—in dreams or in some of my self- absorbed broodings. Though I certainly had not lifted the stick against Mr. Etheridge, I had left the hand free ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... on every sort of rustic enormity of which he accused Benjie. He had been suspected of snaring partridges—was detected by Joshua himself in liming singing-birds—stood fully charged with having worried several cats, by aid of a lurcher which attended him, and which was as lean, and ragged, and mischievous, as his master. ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... violently than the horrors of the narrative was his cool and easy recital of his own and the deeds of his companions. You saw that he had no more conscience in him than the death's head he puffed at, and that his idea was there was no true greatness to be met with out of enormity. Well, thought I, as I stepped to the corner for some coal, if I was afraid of this creature when he was dead, to what condition of mind shall I be reduced by his ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... the memory of his friend, he argued and remonstrated against her indecent haste, and besought her to postpone the unseemly union. Roused by all he saw, the faithful friend spoke warmly on the deceased's behalf, and painted in the strongest colours he could employ, the enormity of her transgression. Now Margaret loved Michael as she had never loved before. Slander could not open its lying lips to speak one word against the esteem and gratitude she had ever entertained for Mildred but esteem and gratitude—I appeal to the best, the most virtuous and moral of my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... violations of law in the West, and for the horrors which resulted from his exploitation of the Indians, was Astor ever prosecuted? To repeat, no; nor was he disturbed even by such a triviality as a formal summons. Yet, to realize the full enormity of acts for which he was responsible, and the complete measure of immunity that he enjoyed, it is necessary to recall that at the time the Government had already begun to assume the role of looking upon the Indians as its wards, and thus of theoretically extending to them ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... their authority. Hildebrand boasts (Ep. vii, 23) that, when William of Normandy sent envoys to ask Pope Alexander to sanction his unscrupulous invasion of England, and the Papal Court was itself too sensible of the enormity to give its sanction, he (Hildebrand) overbore the wavering Pope and forced him to bless the enterprise; and, when he had in his turn mounted the Papal throne, he vehemently claimed that his action had made England a fief for ever of the Holy See! ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... disposed to look upon evil thoughts as an offense too trivial to awaken any concern, mark the company in which this sin is found. Learn from those offenses with which it is classed something of the enormity to which it may rise. "Out of the heart proceedeth evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... personal rights and freedom to all the "inhabitants." Of course it cannot be pretended that the mere fact that one or more States had established, and had power to perpetuate slavery, secured to new States the right to establish and perpetuate the same enormity, as a necessary result of State equality. That would make the right or power of one State, resulting from State equality, necessarily coextensive with tolerated evil in another. Manifestly "the fathers" had no such idea as this. Theirs was the common sense and rational idea that ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... sentiments neither consoled nor convinced. Stover was too firmly persuaded of the enormity of his offense and the depth of ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... the crime, and own the enormity of its consequences, and the danger of its example. Nor have I the confidence to petition for impunity; but humbly hope, that publick security may be established, without the spectacle of a clergyman dragged through the streets, to a death of infamy, amidst the derision of the profligate ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... and weeping all but echo hard-hearted Nulli. Tears are not swords and wrongs seem almost natural as rights. For the righteous to suppress an evil, is sometimes harder than for others to uphold it. Humanity cries out against this vast enormity:— not one man knows a prudent remedy. Blame not, then, the North; and wisely judge the South. Ere, as a nation, they became responsible, this thing was planted in their midst. Such roots strike deep. Place to-day those serfs in Dominora; and with them, all Vivenza's ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... few hours, that he might be sacrificed under circumstances of peculiar enormity. A hole being dug in the ground of a depth sufficient to enable him to stand upright, with his head only exposed, his arms were pinioned to his body, he placed in it, and the loose earth thrown in and rammed closely around him. He was then scalped and permitted to remain in that situation ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... Mrs. Gray realized the enormity of the offence, and she could only put her arms around Emma's back and say, "There, there, I wouldn't take on so about it." As a matter of fact, she had striven to have Bill send an invitation to his brother-in-law, but Bill was inflexible on that point. ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... letter were sent out, but Brokaw and his associates had omitted the words, 'If a half of the lakes mapped out were fished.' It would take fifteen thousand men, a thousand refrigerator cars, and a capital of five million to bring this about. I was stunned by the enormity of their fraud, and yet when I threatened to bring the whole thing to smash Brokaw only laughed and pointed out that not a single caution had been omitted. In all of the advertising it was frankly stated that our license was provisional, subject to withdrawal if ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... this abuse to the public every vain swearer is responsible; and he would do well to consider that he will never be able to make reparation for them. And the public is much concerned that this enormity be retrenched. ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... can perhaps understand another evil of those times. It did not grow directly out of love for country, but that too much lauded sentiment prevented the people from seeing its full enormity. This was the practice of attempting by law to protect the inhabitants of one country by shutting out the goods of all others. This prohibition included both the manufactured articles and natural ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... some time, awaiting the pleasure of the very leisurely guide, sweating at every pore, (or nearly every one, for there are several millions, I believe, and I so hate exaggeration,) and trying to evade the glances of the amused bystanders, did I begin to realize the enormity of the imposition that had been practised on me. Just fancy yourself, Mr PUNCHINELLO, in such a costume, taking a seemingly interminable walk in a hot sun, down ever so many steps, encased in those nasty articles of gear, in the company ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various
... Susie, 'because he interests me enormously. There's no place like Paris for meeting queer folk. Sooner or later you run across persons who believe in everything. There's no form of religion, there's no eccentricity or enormity, that hasn't its votaries. Just think what a privilege it is to come upon a man in the twentieth century who honestly believes ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... left behind. His consciousness of pure aims allows him to become an accomplice in the worst crimes. Suspecting himself at bottom to be a theorist, he hastens to clear his character as man of practice by conniving at an enormity. Thus, in September 1792, a band of miscreants committed the grievous massacres in the prisons of Paris. Robespierre, though the best evidence goes to show that he not only did not abet the prison murders, but in his heart deplored ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... gone and she stepped from the train into the lazy spring silence of the village, her own heart spelled the thing in quick, loud, hammering beats—a thing which, now that she faced it, was so wildly impossible that her cheeks burned at the first second of actual realisation of its enormity; and her knees weakened in a deathly tremble, quite as if they might bend ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... assimilate safely new forms of thought when given enough time for digestion, as if he were assimilating food. If he be plied with new thought too rapidly he fails to digest. He has a surfeit, serious in proportion to its enormity. That is to say, his power of drawing correct conclusions from the premises submitted to him fails, and we have all sorts of crude experiments in sociology attempted, which end in that form of chaos which we call a violent revolution. ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... of the North to find some means of bringing home to the British Ministry the enormity of the offence in American eyes and the serious danger to good relations if such offences were to be continued. An immediate downright threat of war would have been impolitic and would have stirred British pride to the point of resentment. Yet American pride was aroused ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... of the gambler by profession, and, having become an adept in his despicable science, to practise it habitually as a means of increasing my already enormous income at the expense of the weak-minded among my fellow-collegians. Such, nevertheless, was the fact. And the very enormity of this offence against all manly and honourable sentiment proved, beyond doubt, the main if not the sole reason of the impunity with which it was committed. Who, indeed, among my most abandoned associates, would not rather have disputed the clearest ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... people in whom are to be found none of the genial foibles of ordinary, hearty men, he felt an excess of remorse for any unkind thing he had ever said to Eleanor. His pessimism about his play caused him to exaggerate the enormity of his offences. He pictured her, looking at him with that queer air of puzzled pathos that had so impressed him when he first saw her, and intense shame filled him when he thought that he had done or said anything to make her look ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... "Does the priest ask you about anything else?" I inquired. "Yes," he rejoined; "he asks me about my father and my mother." "What does he ask you about them?" "He asks me if they do dirty actions," said the boy. Now, here the enormity and vileness of the confessional peeped out. Here one can see how the confessor can look into every hearth, and into every heart, in Rome. The priests had dragged this young boy into their den, and taught ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... held up like a hunter or a rough-rider, not down like a jockey; and so completely between the hand and the thumb as to leave the fingers free for the reins. To carry that club called the handle of a hunting whip is a frightful enormity. The excuse is, to open gates; but if you put your horse's side against a gate, it is better opened by the hand, but keep your leg from your horse's side. The fingering of the reins should not be impeded even by thick gloves; as thick muffettees as you like, but no gloves ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... opened, and he turned, frowning at the interruption, and then sprang up with a troubled eye. It was his father certainly; but what a remarkable change since he had seen him last! For the first time Andrew realized the full enormity of his conduct in growing younger. His very appearance had become ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... these laws acted so instantaneously that the slayer perished with his victim. It was judged afterwards that this prompt retribution prevented the offender from having time to realise the enormity of his offence. ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... able to win such a paragon,) was now turned against him by his assailants, not only in the way of contrast with his own character, but as if the excellences of the wife were proof positive of every enormity they chose to charge ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... ridiculous, and punishments unjust. The ruin of Liberty overthrows all order and all police, confounds vice and virtue, authorises every monstrous infamy, extinguishes the last spark of shame and remorse, degrades and disfigures beyond recovery the whole human race. A doctrine of such enormity as this ought not to be examined in the schools; it ought to be punished by the magistrates."[187] Of course, this was exactly what the Jesuits said about a belief in God, about revelation, and about ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... women hope to improve the social atmosphere by showing the enormity of the double standard of morals, which teaches that we should turn the cold shoulder upon a fallen sister, but greet her destroyer with open arms and a gracious smile. The duty of setting a high moral standard and living up to it devolves ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... system of ethics which lays down with perfect precision the moral code on literary forgeries, or enables us to judge of the exact enormity of such offences. The world looks leniently on them, and sometimes sympathises with them as good jokes. Allan Cunningham, who, like Ramsay, was called "honest Allan," did not lose that character by the tremendous "rises" which he took out of Cromek about those remains of Nithsdale ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... period in the history of Maryland, her lands began to be exhausted by the bad cultivation peculiar to slave states; and hence she soon commenced the business of breeding slaves for the more southern states. This has given an enormity to slavery, in Maryland, differing from that which attaches to the system in Louisiana, and equalled by none of the kind, except Virginia and Kentucky, and not by ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... Noises filled his ears, and streaking lights blurred the keenness of his eyes. Reason had but little to do with his first thoughts, and feelings had nearly everything. There did not seem to be any possible atonement for him to make. Too late, as it seemed, he realized the enormity of his offence and the ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... Mr. Anthony says, he saw a score or more of people killed. Women became hysterical and prayed in the streets, while men sat on the curbing, appearing to be dazed. It was twenty minutes before those in the vicinity seemed to realize the enormity of the catastrophe. The crowds became larger and in the public squares of the city and in empty lots ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... there is sorrow, deep sorrow. But the German women and the few men still left in the capital realize that the national life itself is at stake and accept the inevitable losses of a successful military occupation. There is a grim dignity everywhere. There are no false ideas as to the enormity of the struggle for existence. A great many Germans, in fact, realizing that it is nearly the whole world against Germany, do not believe that the Fatherland can survive. But they are determined that while there is a living German ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... loses this, he becomes nothing so human or homely as a slave. Rather he becomes a wild beast, a sort of wandering vermin with no place in the state at all. It would be necessary to explain this, and a great deal more which cannot possibly be explained here, before we could measure the enormity of the enigma facing the British official who had to propose to the English the practical suspension of the Trades Unions. To this must be added the fact that the Unions, already national institutions, had just lately been in a ferment with new and violent ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... all happened so suddenly that one or two minutes passed before Edward Lynde took in the full enormity of Mary's desertion. A dim smile was still hovering about his lips when the yellow speck that was Mary faded into the gray distance; then his countenance fell. There was no sign of mortal habitation visible from the hillside where he stood; ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... The affair at the bank was a thing apart. The embezzler of six hundred thousand dollars was not John at all, but a separate personality wearing John's clothes and bearing his name. He perceived clearly the enormity of his offense, but, because he was the same John in every other respect, he had a feeling that somehow the fact that he had done the thing was purely fortuitous—in other words, that the bonds had to be taken, were going to be taken anyway, and that Fate had simply ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... come," began Plank, growing redder and redder as he began to realise the enormity of familiarity committed only on the warrant of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... to inquire into their practices and to reform abuses has raised and piqued them to a far more regular and steady support. The Company has made a common cause and identified themselves with the destroyers of India. They have taken on themselves all that mass of enormity; they are supporting what you have reprobated; those you condemn they applaud, those you order home to answer for their conduct they request to stay, and thereby encourage to proceed in their practices. Thus the servants of the East India Company triumph, and the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... an enduring life, which shows no decline or abatement after the effect of the monologues by the other speakers has been produced and the speakers themselves almost forgotten. Count Guide Franceschini is not a miracle of evil rendered credible, like Shakespeare's Iago, nor a strange enormity of tyrannous hate and lust like the Count Cenci of Shelley. He has no spirit of diabolic revelry in crime; no feeling for its delicate artistry; he is under no spell of fascination derived from its horror. He is clumsy in his fraud and coarse in his violence. Sin may have its strangeness in beauty; ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... to realize the enormity of the catastrophe that had brought a cold, bleak death to the population of this world—death to ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... stated them clearly and positively, when he felt it his duty to speak, although evasion or silence would have been the more comfortable alternative. "I doubt," says Mr. Chadwick,[129] "if Garrison or Parker had a keener sense than his of the enormity of human slavery. Before the first Abolitionist Society had been organized, he was one of the organizers of a committee for the discussion and advancement of emancipation. I have read all of his principal writings upon slavery, and it would be hard to find more terrible indictments of its wickedness. ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... this was a heavy sin, for a man's book is the bantling of his brain, and, to say the least, it was a literary-infanticide. That very night an angel appeared to him, and as a penance for his foul crime (in the enormity of which every author will agree with the angel), he was enjoined to make the book over again, no easy task in those days, when manuscripts were rare, and the art of book-making had not been invented. The sinner, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Neither hair, dress, nor conversation affords the slightest clew, and you are left to guess. By some mysterious law of nature you invariably guess wrong, and are thereupon regarded by all the relatives and friends as a mixture of fool and knave, the enormity of alluding to a male babe as "she" being only equaled by the atrocity of referring to a female infant as "he". Whichever sex the particular child in question happens not to belong to is considered as beneath contempt, and any mention of it is ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... the inhabitants of the United States were transformed from slaves into freemen. To leave them with their shackles broken off, unprotected, in a new and undefined position, would have been a sin against them only surpassed in enormity by the ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... punctuated throughout by Mr. Whitehead with bitter comments on the enormity of theft, the boys went to chapel. Smith and Hart were in the choir: they wore white surplices which were put on in the vestry. Hart Minor, who knew that he was in for a terrific row of some kind, thought he observed something unusual in the conduct of the masters who ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... to tell a lie, he should sport a good thumping one when he is about it. If a great lie serves his purpose better than a little one, why hesitate between the two, when the sin is equally great in both cases? The former has this advantage, that, when detected, its enormity may be so great as to enable the person to pass it off as a piece of quizzery, which can never ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... the adoption of a virtuous career;—all, in themselves, both unexceptionable and praiseworthy, but, nevertheless, having a strange sound in the ears of those who recognized them as the utterances of one whose conversation was always flippant and puerile, and whose daily life, in the enormity and uninterrupted persistency of its profligacy, rendered him the acknowledged leader of all that was most disreputable and contaminating in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... will suffice for all. It is of ludicrous enormity; nor do I believe any thing more flagrantly willful was ever done by himself. I heard Mr. C——, the sufferer, now a most respectable person in a government office, relate it with a due relish, long after quitting the school. The master ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... Slamming the door shut, she locked it, then sank on the edge of the bed and laughed—laughed until she wiped the tears from her cheeks, rocking back and forth and hugging herself in an ecstasy. Every few moments she would pull up; then some unconsidered enormity would strike her afresh and she would go off into another paroxysm. After a while, much relieved, she wiped her ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... of this Dyak tribe are administered by the chief and the two principal men. They have no fixed code, nor any standard of punishment, each case of crime being judged according to its enormity. In the event of murder in their own tribe, the murderer suffers death by decapitation, provided he be in fault. Theft is punished by fine, and adultery (stated as a heinous offense) by severe beating and heavy mulct [7]. Other crimes are, in like manner, punished ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... actually witnessed such sights to realise the enormity of human agony, grasp the torment that a stupid bit of flying steel can inflict upon a splendid human frame—so well, so happy, so full of hope but a second since. Oh, ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... letter had the effect which the writer had intended. It made Alice think immediately of her own remissness,—if she had been remiss,—rather than of the enormity of his claim upon her. The decision with which he asked for her money, without any pretence at an excuse on his part, did for the time induce her to believe that she had no alternative but to give it to him, and that she had been ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... In five brief, savage sentences he had told her of Frances and the woman in the hospital. And when he had done he read her face with its tolerant good-humour, and the full enormity of it all burst over him like a flood of crude light. He turned ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... urging their kinsmen to "give the poor wretch a sound whipping and let her go." Ah! what atrocities are we unconsciously perpetrating North and South now, in the name of mercy or defence, which the advancing light of progressive thought will presently show out in their enormity? ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... are told that crimes of great enormity were perpetrated by the Athenian government, and the democracies under its protection. It is true that Athens too often acted up to the full extent of the laws of war in an age when those laws had not been mitigated by causes which have operated in later times. This ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... occasion, in connection with the same subject-matter, had much to say of the enormity of the oppression practiced by his political opponents in depriving the town of Portland of the right of representation in view of its paying such heavy taxes as it does pay. He expressed the greatest indignation ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... said Vinnie, trying hard to see the enormity of her offence. "I couldn't very well do it alone; I am sure you couldn't have helped me; and my friend who brought me over, he has done so much for me already that I should have been ashamed to ask him. Besides, he is not here, and I wanted the trunk. Mr. Betterson ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... Joseph. That those fatal shots would echo around the world and, flashing out suddenly like a bolt from the blue, hurl nearly the whole of Europe within a week's time from a state of profound peace into one of continental war, unannounced, unexpected, unexplained, unprecedented in suddenness and enormity, was an unimaginable possibility. And yet the ringing of the church bells was suddenly drowned by the roar of cannon, the voice of the dove of peace by the blare of the trump of war, and throughout the world ran a shudder of terror at ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... me how much she'd gin to this object and how much ministers had gin and how they wuz all goin' to preach sermons about these poor lost wimmen and try to wake the public up to the fact of the enormity of their sins and the burnin' need ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... authors of that volume had attracted to their work an increasing share of notice. An able article in the 'Westminster Review' first aroused public attention. A still abler in the 'Quarterly' awoke the Church to a sense of the enormity of the offence which had been committed. It was not that danger was apprehended. There could be but one opinion as to the essential impotence of the attack. But the circumstances which aroused public indignation ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... indecency of speech that would shroud the Tenderloin in blushes. Both kinds are equally popular in the camps, and both are of the most astounding naivete. Of the worst of them, even, the simple-minded woodsmen are not in the least ashamed. They seem unconscious of their enormity. Nevertheless, it came about that, without a word said by any one, from the hour of Rosy-Lilly's arrival in camp, all the indecent "chanteys" were dropped, as if into oblivion, from ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... they had neither earned nor inherited, and which was in fact stolen from the poorer clergy. It named some sons of bishops, and grandsons of archbishops; men great in their way, who had redeemed their disgrace in the eyes of many by the enormity of their plunder; and then, having disposed of these leviathans, it ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... at length upon the enormity of young Billings's early liaisons; and then he told his own, in the year four, with a burgomaster's daughter at Ratisbon, when he was in the Elector of Bavaria's service—then, after Blenheim, when he had come over to the Duke ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... And now, Teancum saw that the Lamanites were determined to maintain those cities which they had taken, and those parts of the land which they had obtained possession of; and also seeing the enormity of their number, Teancum thought it was not expedient that he should attempt to ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... themselves of them; and emancipation is put into such a train, that in a few years there will be no slaves northward of Maryland. In Maryland, I do not find such a disposition to begin the redress of this enormity, as in Virginia. This is the next State to which we may turn our eyes for the interesting spectacle of justice, in conflict with avarice and oppression: a conflict wherein the sacred side is gaining ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding becomes most glaring—the house owes its actual value to the profit which the owner can make out of it. Now, this profit results from the fact that his house is built in a town—that is, in an agglomeration of thousands of other houses, possessing ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... an unexpected attack had produced, he repeats, in a hurried manner, the circumstances of his situation, and dwells on the perfidy of Hermione; but when he finds no palliation for his crime, and sees how completely he has been degraded by his unmanly weakness, the whole enormity of his guilt comes full upon his mind, and he acquires even dignity in the opinion of the beholder, from the solemn and emphatic manner in which he curses the folly and inhumanity of his conduct. But a further blow ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... well as I could, and in a trembling and piteous voice I addressed such words to him as induced him to stay the infliction of a punishment so severe. He then caused all the duennas of the palace, those that are here present, to be brought before him; and after having dwelt upon the enormity of our offence, and denounced duennas, their characters, their evil ways and worse intrigues, laying to the charge of all what I alone was guilty of, he said he would not visit us with capital punishment, but with others of ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... morbid disposition of the mind—a desire to be familiar with crime; for it is necessary to detect it successfully, to come in contact frequently with the criminal. In consequence, by familiarity, crime loses its enormity: the police officer sees how seldom the perpetrator is detected; how often, when detected, he escapes unwhipped of justice; he connives at some petty offence, in the hope of entrapping the criminal in some more flagrant act, and tampers with crime, till the little moral ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... forbearance to inflict punishment, and the various methods He employed to bring us to repentance. And by the side of all this He will exhibit our conduct toward Him—our ingratitude, our disobedience, our perverseness. And with what enormity will these things then appear invested! So guilty will thy conduct then appear, O sinner, that thou wilt be constrained to exclaim: "Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art, and wast, and shall be, because ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... the light, he felt, as positively as though he heard it uttered, that he knew her name complete. The first syllable had come to him in the passageway when he saw her partly, and the feeling of dread that "Mir—" might prove to be part of "Miranda," "Myrtle," or some other enormity, passed instantly. These would only have been gross and cruel misnomers. Her right name—the only one that described her soul—must end, as it began, with M. It flashed into his mind, and at the same moment Mr. Skale picked it ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... explanation. Our conceptions of things depend mainly upon two conditions: first, the clearness of our vision of truth and duty; and secondly, the standard of measurement and comparison. The more we live in God and unto God, the more do our eyes become enlightened to see the enormity and deformity of sin, so that we recognize the hatefulness of evil more distinctly: and the more clearly do we recognize the perfection of God's holiness and make it the pattern and model ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... falsehood; first, because his having occupied himself with politics is proved by the letters which were found at his house; and secondly, because his having occupied himself with tulips is proved by the bulbs which leave no doubt of the fact. And herein lies the enormity of the case. As Cornelius van Baerle was concerned in the growing of tulips and in the pursuit of politics at one and the same time, the prisoner is of hybrid character, of an amphibious organisation, working with equal ardour at politics and at tulips, which proves him ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... told her, more fully than he had recounted any other incident of the sixteen years, of Phil's party; of the insistence of her sisters upon a reconciliation with the William Holtons, and of Jack's appearance on the threshold. His indignation waxed hot; the enormity of the offense was intensified by the fact that he was describing it to Lois; it seemed even more flagrantly directed against her, now that he thought of it, than to Phil or Phil's father. He rose and stood with his back to the fire as he dilated upon it. Lois frowned once ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... little solitary confinement might perhaps be beneficial," said Bonaparte. "It will enable you, Waldo, to reflect on the enormity of the sin you have committed against our Father in heaven. And you may also think of the submission you owe to those who are older and wiser than you are, and whose duty it is to ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... hurried from the tertulia before a military court—martial law then prevailing in the capital—with a rapidity corresponding with the supposed enormity of her offences. It was her chief pang that she was not hurried there alone. We have not hitherto mentioned that she had a lover, one Juan de Sylva Gomero, to whom she was affianced—a worthy and noble youth, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... in spite of the enormity of his pretensions, he doubtless detected that Francois had been speaking ironically. So he turned to Antoine, who had remained seated in front of a block he was engraving. It was the one which represented Lise reading in her garden, for he ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Susy remembered that she had gone upstairs for an exercise-book, but she determined not to tell her mother of this further enormity. ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... is Lord Campbell who has preserved the following specimen of a judge's concluding remarks to a prisoner convicted of uttering a forged one-pound note. After having pointed out to him the enormity of the offence, and exhorted him to prepare for another world, added: "And I trust that through the merits and the mediation of our Blessed Redeemer, you may there experience that mercy which a due regard to the credit of the paper currency of the country forbids you ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... enemy—the tail—the salt—these were all in nubibus; the only thing certain was the leap, and the thousand miles. And then, having achieved this first stage on the road, why not go on to St Petersburg, and take the Czar by the beard? The enormity of this extravagance showed from what mint it came. Ever since we have harboured the Czar's rebels in England, there has been a craze possessing our newspaper press, that Russia was, or might be, brewing evil against India. We can all see the absurdity of such ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... done is ever before them. From one victim to another their keepers pass unquestioned, and plunder, debauch, ruin and murder with an impunity frightful to contemplate. As was said by a distinguished author, speaking of a kindred social enormity, "There is not a country throughout the earth on which a state of things like this would not bring a curse. There is no religion upon earth that it would not deny; there is no people on earth that it would ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... Finally, the enormity of bloodshed and woe involved caused a sort of concession on both sides to be agreed upon. Oppression continued will surely lead to a point where it cures itself, and the superior class in England, with a wise weather-eye, saw the reef on which ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... inherit with their mountain air, entitle them to admiration and esteem; but an undue appreciation of these should not be allowed to warp the judgement or prejudice the mind. Some there are who invest them with almost supernaturally noble qualities, while they attribute every conceivable enormity to their enemies the Turks. Each of these views is incorrect. The Osmanlis, whether it be from a consciousness of their own decrepitude, or some other cause, appear to have lost the spirit of cruelty which characterised their more successful days; ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... ungraceful; her voice loud, yet not disagreeable." Elliot's briefer mention of her appearance is at once confirmatory and complementary of that of Mrs. St. George: "Her person is nothing short of monstrous for its enormity, and is growing every day. Her ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... retort to that, or begin to think of a reply, or even assimilate the full enormity of Fay's statement, he was grabbed from behind and frog-marched away from Fay and something that felt remarkably like the muzzle of a large-caliber gun was shoved in ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... which lies heavy at my heart, and which makes my last moments dreadful, as they are without hope.' 'Be comforted,' said madame, who was affected by the energy of his manner, 'we are taught to believe that forgiveness is never denied to sincere repentance.' 'You, madam, are ignorant of the enormity of my crime, and of the secret—the horrid secret which labours at my breast. My guilt is beyond remedy in this world, and I fear will be without pardon in the next; I therefore hope little from confession even to a priest. Yet some good it is still in my power to do; let me disclose to you that ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... the crying sin of infanticide is most prevalent In those localities where the system of moral education has been longest neglected. This inhuman crime might be compared to the murder of the innocents, except that the criminals, in this case, exceed in enormity the ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... responsibility through time, is what chiefly distinguishes us, I will not say from savages, but from brutes and reptiles. This was noted by the shrewdness of the Old Testament, when it summed up the dark irresponsible enormity of Leviathan in the words "Will he make a pact with thee?" The promise, like the wheel, is unknown in Nature: and is the first mark of man. Referring only to human civilisation it may be said with seriousness, that in the beginning was the Word. The vow ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... itself to get up such expeditions than to allow them to proceed under the command of irresponsible adventurers. We could then at least exercise some control over our own agents and prevent them from burning down cities and committing other acts of enormity ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... the reply, "he did not think his partners, Mr. Harvey Chester and Col. Van Ellis, would go to the extremity proposed. He thought they would change their minds when the enormity of the crime was set before them. In fact, he suspected from the first that they were being urged on by others having private ends to gain by the destruction of the dam. Besides, he thought himself capable of handling the situation alone. Is ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... burden of honor had fallen upon him with the disclosure of a man's desires. His boyhood seemed suddenly to have gone from him like the light of a lamp blown out by a puff of wind. He felt old, and responsible to answer now for himself, since the enormity of his offense was plain to his ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... might look upward and see the stars blotted out in irregularly-shaped, swiftly enlarging areas which would grow until there was only blackness overhead. But that could not last. It turned abruptly to white-hot incandescence as the falling enormity touched atmosphere, and ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... a careful consideration of her welfare, and that nothing came by chance with her. And on her rare ebullitions of self-will, mamma, governess, nurse, nay even papa, were all in sorrowful commotion till their princess had been brought to a sense of the enormity ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to the brutal violence which compelled, but even to the gentle seduction which might persuade, an unmarried woman, under the age of twenty-five, to leave the house of her parents. "The successful ravisher was punished with death;" and as if simple death was inadequate to the enormity of his guilt, he was either burnt alive, or torn in pieces by wild beasts in the amphitheatre. The virgin's declaration, that she had been carried away with her own consent, instead of saving her lover, exposed her to share his fate. The duty of a public prosecution was intrusted to the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... "That's the enormity of the whole business," broke in Mr. Allison. "What I wish could be done with our hands would be to have them regularly enlisted for the work,—so many years unless sooner discharged,—just like the soldiers, by Jove! Then when a man quit work it would be ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... winds. Leperos now rioted on carpets from Brussels and on cushions of Oriental stuffs, and quaffed the choice wines of Madeira and Champagne. In the fury of their intoxication they lost all restraint, and indulged in every excess and enormity. Robbery and murder were the order of the day. In carrying away the plunder, disputes arose, and then they murdered each other as readily as they had murdered those who claimed the title of citizens. Fear was the only authority they had learned to respect, ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... hard, grim, dumb; it is the enormity of mathematical power applied to utilitarian ends of solidity and durability. These leagues of palaces, of warehouses, of business structures, of buildings describable and indescribable, are not beautiful, but sinister. One feels depressed by the mere ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... was as if he took his question back, conceding its enormity. He leaned forward now in his balancing, and lowered his voice ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... believed that when she first came to me. I hate my brother because he is a bad man; but I liked his niece, and when she came to me for shelter I took her in, notwithstanding the enormity of the crime which she was accused of ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... business-like, a dozen strong chairs were bought for the use of the Committee room. There was also a rule about attendances, and any member failing to put in an appearance was fined sixpence, and if he happened to be the overseer, the enormity of his offence was marked by a fine of a shilling—"unless a note be sent to the meeting" [explaining cause of absence]. Here was a model authority, the like of which the town of Royston has never had since, considered as a working body, and having a due regard ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... the realization of the enormity of this favor he had demanded. "That's all right," he said and held her soft hand in his; "just forget it. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... frank and firm in her unexpected confidential interview with her new friend. She placed before him clearly the enormity of his conduct, which no provocation could justify; it was a violation of divine law, as well as human propriety. She found the little lord attentive, tractable, and repentant, and, what might not have been expected, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... he found them in the same place and got rid of them by a large coin proportioned to the enormity of his remorse. Enchanted with this method of "doing the Jungfrau," the mountaineers pocketed their trinkgeld gravely, and took, with resigned step, the path to their native village, leaving Tartarin confused and despairing at ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... snarled he to the Creoles, who now stood in trembling alarm, and fully enlightened by the rage of the alguazils as to the enormity of the treasonable pasquinade they had witnessed; "so you have been pleased to take the person of his most sacred majesty for your sport ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... with whom he had a talk almost every time they met, that his eldest son wanted a little discipline; and the Club might have served as a pretext for this, when the true crime must not be declared, by reason of its enormity. Dan closed his teeth, and English air grew bitter in his mouth, as this ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... religion all morality is conditioned by the castes,[28] which is true also to a certain degree of the earlier Sutras, but the evil fruit of this plant is not there quite so ripe as it is in the later code. The enormity of all crimes depends on who commits them, and against whom they are committed. The three upper castes alone have religious privileges. The lowest caste, outcasts, women, and diseased persons are ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... have been very different. His perplexity would then have been—how God being just, could require of a man more than he could do, and punish him as if his sin were that of a perfect being who chose to do the evil of which he knew all the enormity. For me, I will call no one Master but Christ—and from him I learn that his quarrel with us is that we will not do what we know, will not come to him that we may have life. How endlessly more powerful with men would be expostulation ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... explosive, which Fayette had purloined from the store of the workmen who were excavating for the new wing of the building. In a moment more the fuse would have burned unnoticed to its fatal end, and an awful crime, of whose enormity the dull criminal had no real comprehension, ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... out of the question. The case admitted of no comfort. Lady Bertram did not think deeply, but, guided by Sir Thomas, she thought justly on all important points; and she saw, therefore, in all its enormity, what had happened, and neither endeavoured herself, nor required Fanny to advise her, to think ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... that I really meant to kill him, for some vile purpose of my own; and if (which by no means always follows) I am really capable of feeling the enormity of my own crime—that is, as I think, true remorse. Murderer as I am, I have, in that case, some moral worth still left in me. But if I did not mean to kill the man—if his death was my misfortune as well as his—and if (as frequently happens) I am nevertheless ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... the second promised to restore it again. The high priest saw too well that they were making nothing of it; and, starting up and springing forward, he demanded of Jesus, "Answerest Thou nothing? What is it which these witness against Thee?" He affected to believe that it was something of enormity that had been alleged; but it was really because he knew that nothing could be founded on it that he gave way to such ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... enemies. But lo, even in my own camp, so much was I deceived in my opinion, the report of my death was not only readily believed, but anxiously waited for. Not that I wish to implicate you all in this enormity; for, be assured, if I supposed that the whole of my army desired my death, I would here immediately expire before your eyes; nor could I take any pleasure in a life which was odious to my countrymen ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... the last forty-eight hours had suddenly presented themselves to the girl's mind in all their enormity. It occurred to her for the first time that she had not only thrown away the chance of her life, but that she had been guilty of black ingratitude to her benefactors. And her folly in permitting the ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... pity on you. But your crime is so great! Have you considered well the enormity of your sin? None can remember to have seen the like. The Gods! To overthrow the Gods! And such Gods! Ammon and Thoueris! I would I might disarm their wrath. But what shall I offer them in your name that may ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... usually close at four in the afternoon. Always with the same inscrutable meekness of countenance, each night he methodically danced the cake-walk at Maxim's or one of the Montemarte restaurants, to the cheers of acquaintances of many nationalities, to whom he offered libations with prodigal enormity. He carried with him, about the boulevards at night, in the highly powerful car he had hired, large parties of strange people, who would loudly sing airs from the Folie-Rouge (to my unhappy shudderings) all the way from the fatiguing ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington |
