"Frailty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I said at last in a heavy voice, "that thou, too, art not betrayed, but art still here to taunt me, thou who once didst swear that thou didst love me? Being a woman, hast thou no pity for the frailty of man?" ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... would wrong him. The world is full of slander; and every wretch that knows himself unjust, charges his neighbour with like passions; and by the general frailty, hides his own. If you are wise, and would be happy, turn a deaf ear to such reports: ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... more wear the aspect of men over the souls of beasts. My father who rests here to-day at our feet, was a priest of the Roman Church. In that capacity he should have been clothed with sanctity. Human, yet removed from common frailty. Yet reckless of his order, heedless of his vows, he, priest as he was, turned libertine, and betrayed an innocent woman. He destroyed her name— killed her honour—broke her heart! Libertines of all classes from kings to commoners, do this kind of thing every day, and deem it ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... thee, Vice without splendour, Sin without relief[fw][475] Even from the gloss of Love to smooth it o'er, But in its stead, coarse lusts of habitude,[476] Prurient yet passionless, cold studied lewdness, Depraving Nature's frailty to an art;— When these and more are heavy on thee, when 90 Smiles without mirth, and pastimes without Pleasure, Youth without Honour, Age without respect, Meanness and Weakness, and a sense of woe ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... calm-mad heights, with the certitude of a god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friends—in the clear, white light of his logic they are exposed as frauds and shams. He sees through them, and all that he sees is their frailty, their meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness. No longer do they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms, like all the other little humans, fluttering their May-fly life-dance of an hour. They are without freedom. They are puppets of chance. So is he. He ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... nae accounting for human frailty and wickedness," said James. "Let a' necessary steps be taken at once. We will consider what to do. But—d'ye hear, sir?—dinna let the bairn Jennet go. Haud her fast. D'ye mind that? Now go, and cause the guilty party to be put ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of fanaticism, in which seven persons lost their lives, one was killed, two were murdered, and four executed for the murders. A signal and melancholy instance of the weakness and frailty of human nature, and to what giddy heights of extravagance and madness, an inflamed imagination will carry unfortunate mortals. It is hard for the wisdom of men to conceive a remedy for a distemper such as religious infatuation. Severity and persecution commonly add strength ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... for having loved such a thing. It was long since she had seen the gentle light in his face which had won her heart two years ago. She was familiar with his genius, and it no longer surprised her into overlooking his frailty. His fame no longer flattered her. His gentleness was gone, and had left, not hardness nor violence, in its place, but a sort of irritable palsy of discontent. That was what she called it as ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... giving evidence a man ought not to affirm as certain, as though he knew it, that about which he is not certain; and he should confess his doubt in doubtful terms, and that which he is certain about, in terms of certainty. Owing however to the frailty of the human memory, a man sometimes thinks he is certain about something that is not true; and then if after thinking over the matter with due care he deems himself certain about that false thing, he does not sin ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... intelligence and vivacity had deeply interested Alexander and other royal guests, who had cordially paid their tribute of respect and sympathy to their mother. Napoleon had taken a deep interest in the education of the two princes, as he was aware of the frailty of life, and as the death of the King of Rome would bring them in the direct line to the ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Human frailty. The most accomplished human being is the finished liar. Never to forget a detail, to remember step by step the windings, over a ticklish road. And Cutty, for all his wide newspaper experience, was a poor liar because he had been brought up on facts. Perhaps his lie might have passed ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... manner as those applying for a license to practice a profession or desiring to marry. All were placed on the same footing. The law for divorce was enforced by the Department of Health, as doctors were, from their knowledge of human frailty, the best judges to decide whether a man and woman should live together in the married state or be separated, and while the law provided for a compulsory decree of divorce for adultery, which was a felony, it also allowed divorce for incompatibility of temperament. A court of six Government ...
— Eurasia • Christopher Evans
... heaven, and surveying the whole scheme of created things. Yet on the other hand there fell the sense of a baffling and miserable impotence, a despairing knowledge that one's consciousness of the right to live, and to live happily, was conditioned by one's utter frailty, the sense that one was surrounded by a thousand dangers, any one of which might at any moment deprive one of the only thing of which one was sure. How, and by what subtle process of faith and imagination, could ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... we have been among platitudes. There is less of overt platitude in the doctrine that it is precisely this physical frailty that has given women their peculiar nimbleness and effectiveness on the intellectual side. Nevertheless, it is equally true. What they have done is what every healthy and elastic organism does in ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... pleased with your verdict on The Bride's Prelude. I think the poem is saved by its picturesqueness, but that otherwise the story up to the point reached is too purely repellent. I have the sequel quite clear in my mind, and in it the mere passionate frailty of Aloyse's first love would be followed by a true and noble love, rendered calamitous by Urscelyn, who then (having become a powerful soldier of fortune) solicits the hand of Aloyse. Thus the horror which ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... never to be curst With second love, so fatal was my first, To this one error I might yield again; For, since Sichaeus was untimely slain, This only man is able to subvert The fix'd foundations of my stubborn heart. And, to confess my frailty, to my shame, Somewhat I find within, if not the same, Too like the sparkles of my former flame. But first let yawning earth a passage rend, And let me thro' the dark abyss descend; First let avenging ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... the way he treats the doctrine of Eternal Punishment. Here a little of that readiness to strain the letter of the Scriptures which he so often manifests when his object is to prove a point against Romanism, would have been an amiable frailty if it had been applied on the side of mercy. When he is bent on proving that the prophecy concerning the Man of Sin, in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, refers to the Pope, he can extort from the innocent word [Greek text] the meaning cathedrize, though why we are to translate "He ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... were entertaining. In great number was the pretty frailty, whose wings are compact of transparencies and purple blotches. In this full, fierce light the purple is black and the transparencies all steel-like glitter. They came across in shoals. There was neither beginning nor ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... kings. After all these, where Eudoxus, Hipparchus, Archimedes; where so many other sharp, generous, industrious, subtile, peremptory dispositions; and among others, even they, that have been the greatest scoffers and deriders of the frailty and brevity of this our human life; as Menippus, and others, as many as there have been such as he. Of all these consider, that they long since are all dead, and gone. And what do they suffer by it! Nay they that have not so much as a name remaining, what are ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... but, O John, think it is for your good. Think in England how many true maids may be waiting for your love, how many that can bring you a whole heart, and be a noble mother to your children, while your poor Diana, at the first touch, has proved all frailty. Go, go and be happy, and let me be patient. I ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... to excite our liberality; the miserable, our pity; the sick, our assistance; the ignorant, our instruction; those that are fallen, our helping hand. In those who are vain, we see the vanity of the world; in those who are wicked, our own frailty. When we see good men rewarded, it confirms our hope; and when evil men are punished, it excites our ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... to be expected of human frailty; have you the strength to endure it? Are you a man? Beware of disgust, it is an incurable evil; death is more to be desired than a living distaste for life. Have you a heart? Beware of love, for ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... ladies who desire to be pleasing in the eyes of men to "avoid a light rollicking manner, and to cultivate a sweet plaintiveness, as of hidden sorrow bravely borne." It also declares that if any young lady has a robust frame, she must be careful to dissemble it, for it is in her frailty that woman can make her greatest appeal to man. No man wishes to marry an Amazon. It also earnestly commends a piece of sewing to be ever in the hand of the young lady who would attract the opposite sex! The use of large words or any ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... history of Kaspar Hauser is a useful hint 194:18 as to the frailty and inadequacy of mortal mind. It proves beyond a doubt that education consti- tutes this so-called mind, and that, in turn, 194:21 mortal mind manifests itself in the body by the false sense it imparts. Incarcerated in a dungeon, where neither sight nor sound ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... flatter yourself too far," replied the Hermit, "with the hope that I will positively yield to the frailty of pity. Why should I snatch a dupe, so well fitted to endure the miseries of life as you are, from the wretchedness which his own visions, and the villainy of the world, are preparing for him? Why should I play the compassionate Indian, and, knocking out the brains ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... that the proportion of certifiable mental defectives, and of a much larger class, the subnormal but not certifiable class, is progressing by leaps and bounds. It is perhaps the most absurd frailty of our present system of education that it takes almost no account of innate differences in educability. To spend money upon the teaching of these children along lines where they are unteachable is not only waste pure and simple, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... times that I am silent, yet, Lady, though your rare beauties prompt my rhyme, When first I saw thee I recall the time Such as again no other can be met. But, with such burthen on my shoulders set. My mind, its frailty feeling, cannot climb, And shrinks alike from polish'd and sublime, While my vain utterance frozen terrors let. Often already have I sought to sing, But midway in my breast the voice was stay'd, For ah! so high what praise may ever spring? And oft have ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... deplore among certain classes of our people, which are often superinduced by their migratory habits and irregular mode of life. But they are commonly sins of frailty, and these are not the persons that are accustomed to approach the confessional. If they did their lives would be very different from ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... faithfully recording some little imperfections which shadowed over the lustre of those great qualities which we shall here record, to teach the lesson we have above mentioned, to induce our reader with us to lament the frailty of human nature, and to convince him that no mortal, after a thorough scrutiny, can be a proper object of ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... He drew the girl still closer, and in that pit of blackness, with the deluge about her and the crash of thunder over her head, she snuggled up against his breast, the throb of her body against him, waiting, watching, with him. Her frailty, the helplessness of her, the slimness of her in the crook of his arm, filled him with an exquisite exultation. He did not think of her now as the splendid, fearless creature who had leveled her little black gun at the three men in barracks. She was no longer the ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... his position or forgets his disqualifications, by newspaper writers using language that is seemly only in one who stakes his life on his words, by preachers exceeding the license of fallibility, by moralists condemning frailty, by speculative traders deprecating frank ways of hazard, by ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... found in a reverie on the green turf, under the shade of spreading trees, without requiring the assistance of Cupid? Come! be frank, who is the heroine? Some love-sick nymph deserted on the far earth; or worse, some treacherous mistress, whose frailty is more easily forgotten than her charms? 'Tis a miserable situation, no doubt. It cannot ...
— Ixion In Heaven • Benjamin Disraeli
... with me; that's my only sorrow! There! I hear the rumble of the wheels! People will be seeing our grand surprise now! Hug me once for luck, dear Emmie; a careful hug, remembering our butter-muslin frailty!" ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Providence had erred in not making her a saint, a king, or anything else that demands a resolute repression of human infirmities. Some people are content to triumph over their own weaknesses; my mother had an eye also for the frailty ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... a thousand petty rubs, which too often spoil the euphony of a silver voice, and discompose the symmetry of fair features. But the confidence which reposes on divine affection, and the charity which covers human frailty, are the only specifics ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... She remembered the doped cigarettes. She had heard of them before at clairvoyants'. She saw it all—Madame Cassandra playing on Mildred's wounded affections, the broker on both that and her desire to be independent—and Drummond pulling the wires that all might take advantage of her woman's frailty. ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... countless times that these [Greek: hetairai] were a mentally superior class of women, and on the strength of this information I assumed, in Romantic Love and Personal Beauty (79), that, notwithstanding their frailty, they may have been able, in some cases, to inspire a more refined, spiritual sort of love than the uneducated domestic women. A study of the original sources has now convinced me that this was a mistake. Aspasia ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... From ancient times, at least from the days of Greece and Rome, Democracy as a political ideal had been dreamed of, and had even been put into practice on a small scale here and there. But its shortcomings and the frailty of human nature made it the despair of practical men and the laughing stock of philosophers and ironists. Nevertheless, the conviction that no man has a right to enslave another would not die. And in modern times the English sense of justice and the English belief that a man ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... and likelier. The pernicious influence of bodily frailty and abnormality upon mind and morals has always been recognized (cf. the mens sana in corpore sano of the ancients), but was never so clearly seen as today. The lack of proper nutrition or circulation, the state of depressed vitality resulting from want of fresh air, exercise, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... found there the wish that his wife should be as worldly-wise and as eager to please as the married lady whose charms had held his fancy through two mildly agitated years; without, of course, any hint of the frailty which had so nearly marred that unhappy being's life, and had disarranged his own plans for ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... you are through with this marvelous clock yet. There is in addition a grim statuette of death which is to remind man of his frailty and the shortness of his days; this strikes each hour with a bone. It is at the very top that we get the touch of more modern Christianity in a procession of the twelve apostles, who at noon pass before a figure of ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... sunset's old age. God never inspired a holier picture than the wrinkled face of a good old mother. The old eyes, with the peering promise of a near peace in them; the toothless mouth, whose words of cheer are records of the past; the wrinkled face, the sad token of human frailty; the gentle word of welcome which age trustingly bestows, all speak to younger hearts with hungry words, and we hope that their lot is one of peace and contentment ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... away, the science and the austere philosophy taught in these plays were enlivened by tavern scenes, and by the gambols of a clown, fool, or buffoon, called Vice, armed, as Harlequin, with a wooden dagger. And often, such is human frailty, the beholders went, remembering nothing but the mad pranks of Vice. It was in their eyes the most important character in the play, and the part was accordingly entrusted to the best actor. Shakespeare had seen Vice still alive, and he commemorated ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... the general confession of polished nations, carried the functions of poetry and eloquence to that sort of faultless beauty which probably does really exist in the Greek sculpture. There are few things perfect in this world of frailty. Even lightning is sometimes a failure: Niagara has horrible faults; and Mont Blanc might be improved by a century of chiselling from judicious artists. Such are the works of blind elements, which ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... the devil. There is more in sin than our own frailty and stupidity, and the bad influence of other individuals. There is a permanent force of organized evil which vitiates every higher movement and sows tares among the grain over night. You work hard on some law to reform the ballot or the primary in order to protect the freedom and rights of the ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... relations. Ninon made use of the passion of love for the purpose of pleasure only, while her more exalted rival made it subservient to her ambitious projects, and did not hesitate with that view to cloak her licentious habits beneath the mantle of religion, and add hypocrisy to frailty. The income of Ninon de l'Enclos was agreeably and judiciously spent in the society of men of wit and letters, but the revenues of the Marchioness de Maintenon were squandered on the useless decoration of her own person, or hoarded for the purpose of elevating into ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... satisfaction from the authors who please him, the bent of his intellect and cast of character can be very accurately judged. If other testimony were wanting, these sentences would prove the gravely philosophical temper of Montaigne's mind, notwithstanding the flippant confessions of frailty which he mingles sometimes so incongruously with the reflections of a sage. Most of the extracts are from Latin and Greek authors, but not a few are from the Books of Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus and the Epistles of St. Paul. Here one sees written by the hand of ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... have once mingled, Love first leaves the well-built nest; The weak one is singled To endure what it once possest. O Love! who bewailest The frailty of all things here, Why choose you the frailest For your cradle, your home, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... disturbances which may beset the reproductive organs, and despite the havoc wrought by venereal diseases, it may be said with absolute assurance that the majority of feminine ills are the result neither of the natural frailty of the female body, nor even of man's infringement of the social law, but are the direct result of false suggestion and of false attitudes toward the facts of the reproductive life. The trouble is less a difficulty with the reproductive organs than a difficulty with ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... I live!" thought Tom to himself. "'Frailty, thy name is woman!' The canting, little, methodistical humbug! She must have slipped it off my waist as I lay senseless. I suppose she means to keep it in pawn, till I redeem it by marrying her. Well I might take an uglier mate certainly; but when I do enter into the bitter bonds of matrimony, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... masses of Europe hither, and makes their rulers fear and hate us. It may often, and uniformly, happen that any given individual is unconscious of the Spirit that moves within him; for it is the way of that Spirit to subordinate its manifestations to its ends, knowing the frailty of humanity. But it is there, and its gradual and cumulative results are seen in the retrospect, and it may perhaps be divined as to the outline of some ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... feels so strongly that he needs someone who can keep a hold on him when temptations assail him. That is the most winning thing about Jacob Engstrand; he comes to one like a helpless child and accuses himself and confesses his frailty. The last time he came and had a talk with me... Suppose now, Mrs. Alving, that it were really a necessity of his existence to have Regina at home with ...
— Ghosts - A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... this thy frailty and thy need He friends and helpers doth prepare, Which thee shall cherish, clothe, and feed, For of thy weal they tender are. Sweet baby, then, forbear to weep; Be still, my babe; sweet ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... light and safeguard of Publicity, affix any penalty to the abuse of that power, if by one chance in a thousand detected. In Lunacy Law extremes of intellect meet; the British senator plays at Satan; and tempts human frailty and cupidity beyond what ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... subdue himself for loyalty's sake. Indeed the beauty of this young lady beguiled him and he could not avail to keep his covenant with me so strictly but [139] that he desired her for his bride. However, I know the frailty of human nature and withal I think greatly of him that he guarded her and kept her unsullied and withdrew himself from her; [140] wherefore I accept this his constancy and bestow her on him as a bride. She is the ninth image, which ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... length one of those holy men to whom its guardianship had descended so far forgot the obligation of his sacred office as to look with unhallowed eye upon a young female pilgrim whose robe was accidentally loosened as she knelt before him. The sacred lance instantly punished his frailty, spontaneously falling upon him, and inflicting a deep wound. The marvellous wound could by no means be healed, and the guardian of the Sangreal was ever after called "Le Roi Pescheur,"—The Sinner King. The Sangreal withdrew its visible presence ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... immoderately, for the object was unusually tall and loose-jointed, and wore a soiled suit of yellow mackinaw. He had laid off his coat, and now the baggy, bilious trousers hung precariously from his angular shoulders by suspenders of alarming frailty. His legs were lost in gum boots, also loose and cavernous, and his entire costume looked relaxed and flapping, so that he gave the impression of being able to shake himself out of his raiment, and to rise like a burlesque Aphrodite. His face was overgrown with a grizzled tangle that looked as though ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... glory, half wishing to descend from it, and perhaps feeling curious to know what a fall was like. She was a little too heavy for her cloud. To err is a diversion. Princely unconstraint has the privilege of experiment, and what is frailty in a plebeian is only frolic in a duchess. Josiana was in everything—in birth, in beauty, in irony, in brilliancy—almost a queen. She had felt a moment's enthusiasm for Louis de Bouffles, who ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... let it have its natural duties and powers at its command; but, if not good, let it be made so. . . . We follow, therefore, the true course in looking first for the true idea, or abstract conception of a government, of course with allowance for the evil and frailty that are in man, and then in examining whether there be comprised in that idea a capacity and consequent duty on the part of a government to lay down any laws or devote any means for the purposes of religion,—in short, to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... frailty, refinement, fastidiousness, discrimination, sensitiveness; dainty, tidbit, junket. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the case with bland surprise, And over human frailty sighs, The while he reads between the lies? ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton
... deceased, had, like the rest, merely a composed and serious countenance, undisfigured by any great affliction. The body was lowered into the grave; the officiating minister made a brief, and somewhat cold, discourse on the frailty of life; the young females afterwards came forward, and each threw her wreath of flowers on the coffin; and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... whole mixture a poison or a cordial. A man is vexed, the nerve of his equanimity thrillingly touched at the tender elbow, and forthwith his whole wholesome body writhes in pain; while, to speak morally, those useful reminders of life's frailty, the habitual side-thorns—spurs of diligence, incentives to better things—are exaggerated into sixfold spears, and terribly stop the way, like long-lanced Achaeans: a careless fit succeeds to one of spleen, and vanity well spangled, pretty baubles, stars ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 1775 to 1864, in his old age confessed, "I never did a single wise thing in the whole course of my existence, although I have written many which have been thought so." This is the exaggeration of an old man who has been impressed by the frailty of human endeavor. Nevertheless, Landor is a striking illustration of the artistic temperament. He was impractical. Landor could not make a good fist. Even when angry, a frame of mind in which he found himself very frequently, he did ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... good men are always powerful, and evil men of no strength, thou mayest easily know, the one is proved by the other. For since that good and evil are contraries, if it be convinced that goodness is potent, the weakness of evil will be also manifest; and contrariwise if we discern the frailty of evil, we must needs acknowledge the firmness of goodness. But that our opinions may be more certainly embraced, I will take both ways, confirming my propositions, sometime from one ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... golden-haired and very lovely, whose life had been devoted to virgin service of the goddess. Her golden locks, which set her above all other women in the desire of Neptune, had been her undoing: and when Athene knew of the frailty of her priestess, her vengeance was indeed appalling. Each lock of the golden hair was transformed into a venomous snake. The eyes that had been so love-inspiring were now bloodshot and ferocious. The skin, with its rose and milk-white tenderness, had changed to a loathsome ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... to his own humour, we find it to be, by his Book, more fickle than even the Wind, or Feminine frailty in its highest Inconstancy. One while he's for Instructing our Stage, Modelling our Plays, Correcting the Drama, the Unity, Time and Place, and acts as very a Poet as ever writ an ill Play, or slept at an ill Sermon; and then, presently after, wheiw, in the twinkling ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... against his life. But, were this story as apocryphal as the legends of our nurseries, still the bare possibility that 'the laurelled majesty'[61] of that mighty brow should have been laid low by one frailty of this particular description—this possibility recalls us clamorously to the treasonable character of such an insolence, when practised systematically for the last eighteen months by a Pagan hound, by a sepoy from Lucknow ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... when and where jewels could be worn in seventeenth-century Virginia when, even at the close of the century, there were no centers, other than church at which a lady might attend to display her ornaments. Yet, the feminine frailty to covet the beautiful, whether in gems, in fine household furnishings, linens or silver, was perhaps even stronger than it is today. Possession of jewels was a mark of distinction, and, even though the precious baubles could ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... fast and pray we are by Scripture taught: Oh could I do but either as I ought! In both, alas! I err; my frailty such,— I pray too little, and I fast ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... upon the whole it seems to have done me credit, though I am surprised it has, for there is nothing in the part that gives me the least satisfaction. My next character, I hear, is to be of a very different order of frailty—Calista, in "The Fair Penitent." However odious both play and part are, there are powerful situations in it, and many opportunities for fine acting, but I am afraid I am quite unequal to such a turpissime termagant, with whom my ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... people. St. Celsus, the Archbishop of Armagh, and Maelmuire[238] or Marianus O'Dunain, Archbishop of Cashel, were present. Attention had already been directed to certain abuses in ecclesiastical discipline. Such abuses must always arise from time to time in the Church, through the frailty of her members; but these abuses are always carefully reprehended as they arise, so that she is no longer responsible for them. It is remarkable that men of more than ordinary sanctity have usually been given to the Church at such periods. Some have withheld heretical emperors from deeds of ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... steps found ease: Then Thea spread abroad her trembling arms Upon the precincts of this nest of pain, 90 And sidelong fix'd her eye on Saturn's face: There saw she direst strife; the supreme God At war with all the frailty of grief, Of rage, of fear, anxiety, revenge, Remorse, spleen, hope, but most of all despair. Against these plagues he strove in vain; for Fate Had pour'd a mortal oil upon his head, A disanointing poison: so that Thea, Affrighted, kept her still, and let him pass First onwards ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... declared in its different forms of government, and in which it has even superadded a new and powerful guard unknown to any of them? If, on the contrary, he happened to be a man of calm and dispassionate feelings, he would indulge a sigh for the frailty of human nature, and would lament, that in a matter so interesting to the happiness of millions, the true merits of the question should be perplexed and entangled by expedients so unfriendly to an impartial and right determination. Even such a man could hardly forbear ...
— The Federalist Papers
... there was a suggestion of frailty about Mrs. Jett. Anything but that. On the contrary, in all the eight years in the boarding house, she held the clean record of not a day in bed, and although her history previous to that time showed as many as fifteen hours a day on duty in the little fancy-goods store ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... for his death; Forget his parts, Which finde a living grave in good mens hearts; And, (for, my first is dayly payd for sinne) Forget to pay my second sigh for him: Forget his powerfull preaching; and forget I am his Convert. Oh my frailty! let My flesh be no more heard, it will obtrude This lethargy: so should my gratitude, My flowes[7] of gratitude should so be broke; Which can no more be, than Donnes vertues spoke By any but himselfe; ...
— Waltoniana - Inedited Remains in Verse and Prose of Izaak Walton • Isaak Walton
... unparalleled in the annals of ancient or modern history, he added the most consummate knowledge of government; and although his actions might frequently partake of arbitrary sway, (and who is the human being exempted from human frailty) yet he certainly created and sustained, in her most elevated zenith, the splendour of France, till crushed by the union of nations in arms; and if power is the criterion of greatness, who was, is, or ever can be greater than the man, who, emerging from obscurity, raised himself solely ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... cautious youth, aware of the frailty of matches, wisely resolved to penetrate as far as possible into the interior of the cupboard, in the direction in which he knew his particular boots to ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... of the atonement, the doctrine of personal immortality. If he knows that Christ died for him, that there is a future beyond the grave, it makes all the difference between despair and hope, between misery and consolation, between the helpless frailty of a being that is puffed out like a candle, and the joyful ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... Of philosophers who are orthodox in this sense, only the earliest or the most powerful, an Aristotle or a Spinoza, need to be remembered, in that they stamp their language and temper upon human reason itself. The rest of the orthodox are justly lost in the crowd and relegated to the chorus. The frailty of heretical philosophers is more conspicuous and interesting: it makes up the chronique scandaleuse of the mind, or the history of philosophy. Locke belongs to both camps: he was restive in his orthodoxy and timid ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... As incidents of this kind will be not infrequent during the twenty years that follow in Crabbe's clerical career, it may be well to intimate at once that no peculiar blame attaches to him in the matter. He but "partook of the frailty of his times." During these latter years of the eighteenth century, as for long before and after, pluralism in the Church was rather the rule than the exception, and in consequence non-residence was recognised as inevitable, and hardly matter ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... out for that faith that needed no other confirmation than the tones of a mother's voice, and found God everywhere in the soft pressure of her love; and when his steps begin to hesitate, and he finds himself among the long shadows, and the frailty and fear of the body overcome the prophecies of the soul, and no religious assurance lights and lifts up his mind, how he wishes for some fountain of restoration that shall bring back his bloom and his strength, ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... sense; how weak intellect; how short bodily life. Yet the very frailty and uncertainty of life establishes the immortality of the soul and the soul, in turn, gives spontaneous testimony to God and of a life within which the body ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... non-progressency of the nation, and of its retrograde motion of late, in liberty and spiritual truths. It is much to be bewailed; but, yet, let us pity human frailty. When those who had made deep protestations of their zeal for our liberty, both spiritual and civil, and made the fairest offers to be the asserters thereof, and whom we thereupon trusted,—when these, being ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... I ever met with; but what is the more remarkable is that these two old men, who have lived, or rather but just existed under such privations, were as good-tempered, kind-hearted old persons, as it is capable for human frailty to attain; and when we consider that each day is a day of penance, and that, too, a monotonous penance, with not a prospect beyond their walls, and none within, save their burial-ground, perhaps there is nothing in the character of man so unaccountable as such overwhelming ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... is nothing in which the self-righteousness created by anti-slavery views and feelings is more conspicuous than in the way in which the South is judged and condemned by us with regard to this one sin. Had the pulpits of the South afforded such dreadful instances of frailty, for the last ten or fifteen years, as we have had at the North, what confirmation would we have found for our invectives against the corrupting and ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... and here also, in his ordered polities and rigorous justice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact of individual sin. Does it stop, then, with the ant? Rather this desire of welldoing and this doom of frailty run through all the grades of life: rather is this earth, from the frosty top of Everest to the next margin of the internal fire, one stage of ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tears and perseverance. The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together. It is the common and the god-like ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Christianity differ somewhat in the detailed forms of these three essential beliefs, but not to the same degree as in the case of the secondary additions. God's laws, Christ's teachings, and the inspiration of the Holy Ghost are the recognized guides to conduct; but human frailty has been such that the history of Europe presents a panorama of warring sects in almost unceasing strife about details of ritual and interpretation, while the great fundamental truths have been too frequently ignored. The conflicts of ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... the change sought by the petitioners. "I will not enter," he said, "into the abstract merits of our articles and liturgy; perhaps there are some things in them which one would wish had not been there; and they are not without the marks and character of human frailty. But," he added, "it is not human frailty and imperfection, or even a considerable degree of them, that becomes a ground for alteration; for by no alteration will you get rid of those errors, however you may vary them." He then adverted to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the talents of my friend, Who, with the charms of his own genius smit, Conceives all virtues are compris'd in wit! But time his fervent petulance may cool; For though he is a wit, he is no fool. In time he'll learn to use, not waste, his sense; Nor make a frailty of an excellence. He spares nor friend, nor foe; but calls to mind, Like doomsday, all the faults of all mankind. What though wit tickles? tickling is unsafe, If still 'tis painful while it makes us laugh. Who, for the poor renown ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... and yet Love doth not live, Love, that to loss in life her folly led[249], Folly the food whereon her frailty fed, Frailty the milk that Nature's breast did give: Life, loss, and folly: frailty, food, and kind, Worm, sting, thorns, fire, and torment to the mind; Life but a breath, and folly but a flower, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... of physical courage for a person of Mrs. Toomey's frailty to face such a gale. But with her thin lips in a determined line and her gaze straight ahead, she managed, by tacking judiciously and stopping at intervals to clasp a telephone pole while she recovered her breath, to reach the iron fence imported ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... flared all the frustration of months, of years, all the disappointments of all his chase, all the defeat of all his career. Even as she sat there in her pink and white frailty she knew and nursed the secret for which he had girdled the world. He felt that he must tear it from her, that he must crush it out of her body as the pit is squeezed from a cherry. And the corroding part of it was that he had been outwitted by a woman, that he was being defied ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... black beard spoke and said to me, "Human frailty though you be, Yet shout and crack your whip, be harsh! They'll obey you in the end: Hill and field, river and marsh Shall obey you, hop and skip At the terrour of your whip, To your gales ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... through both thine eyes, like the unexpected apparition of a bed-ridden old woman at a garret window. Thou art the very owl of Minerva, and the little bill, that thou ever carriest with thee, is given thee for this purpose, to peck at man's frailty in the matter of repayment. Come, thou art in danger. I ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... the priest. At this stage of thought the ultimate causes of things are conceived to be personal beings, many in number and often discordant in character, who partake of the nature and even of the frailty of man, though their might is greater than his, and their life far exceeds the span of his ephemeral existence. Their sharply-marked individualities, their clear-cut outlines have not yet begun, under the powerful ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... in rain, And with wide parent wing Shadowed thee, nested thing, Fed thee, and slaved for thy Impotent tyranny. Nature's broad thews bent Meek for thy content. Mastering littleness Which the wise heavens confess, The frailty which doth draw Magnipotence to its law— These were, O happy one, ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... her visitor, "granting this in a measure, I should still like to know of some of these popular good-doers. We must make considerable allowance for human frailty. Perhaps I shall be able to pick out a real jewel, where you have believed them to be only ...
— Working in the Shade - Lowly Sowing brings Glorious Reaping • Theodore P Wilson
... gentleman, in my case, would have settled the matter with the kirk-treasurer for a small sum of money; but the poor stibbler, the penniless dominie, having married his cousin of Kittlebasket, must next have proclaimed her frailty to the whole parish, by mounting the throne of Presbyterian penance, and proving, as Othello says, "his love a whore," in ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... victoria I know a man (Blesensis by name) | comm[e]dabilior. Pet. Bles. ser. that thought two things should | 33. p. 420. Timeo autem ne forte excuse him at the dreadfull day of | viri a virginibus iudicentur: iudgement, the Frailty of his | Comparatione tam[e] non flesh, and the Ignorance of his | Auctoritate: quia per duo tantum minde; but then he feared lest God | scilicet: per Fragilitat[e] carnis would iudge men by wom[e], whose | & Ignorantiam mentis ...
— The Praise of a Godly Woman • Hannibal Gamon
... According to the world's opinion, it was not always "May-day" with Landor, for the world neither preaches nor practices that rarity, human charity. Its instinct is a species of divining-rod, the virtue of which seems to be limited to a fatal facility in discovering frailty. Great men and women live in glass houses, and what passer-by can resist the temptation to throw stones? Is it generous, or even just, in scoffers who are safely hidden behind bricks and mortar, to take advantage of the glass? Could they show a nobler record if subjected to equally ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the possibility of her frailty. She turned her face to the window. Through the lace curtains shone the moonlight, the gleaming path along which she had so often flown out to be a fairy. But to-night she didn't wish to be a ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... went home, with his eyes on the ground as usual, and measured steps. And to all who met him he seemed a creature in whom religion had conquered all human frailty. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... was not herself convinced. She regarded the colonel as too high-minded to be a fit judge of human frailty; and his over-caution in explanation had given her the feeling that he had a standard for a husband for their daughter which only another such rare man as himself could live up to. Further, she had always been extremely reserved in mother-and-daughter talk with Pauline, and thus could ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... duster under his arm, and proceeded to satisfy Anne that he shared the landlady's view of her position, without sharing the severity of the landlady's principles. "There's nae man livin'," said Mr. Bishopriggs, "looks with mair indulgence at human frailty than my ain sel'. Am I no' to be familiar wi' ye—when I'm auld eneugh to be a fether to ye, and ready to be a fether to ye till further notice? Hech! hech! Order your bit dinner lassie. Husband or no husband, ye've got a stomach, and ye must een ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... investigation, (not without some blame, for which of us is faultless, but) with a character unsullied even in this respect, and in all other respects irreproachable." Mankind are, more or less, the children of error; but their propensity to exaggerate human frailty deserves to be reprobated for its cruelty ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - No. 291 - Supplement to Vol 10 • Various
... not long after this time that Dante was seized with grievous illness, which reduced him to such a state of weakness that he lay as one unable to move. And on the ninth day, suffering greatly, he thought of his lady, and, reflecting on the frailty of life even at its best, the thought struck him that even the most gentle Beatrice must at some time die. And upon this, such consternation seized him that his fancy began to wander, and, he says, "It seemed to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... reneweth the world, but shall passe through it to Salvation; but so, as to see, and relinquish their former Errours. The Builders, are the Pastors; the Foundation, that Jesus Is The Christ; the Stubble and Hay, False Consequences Drawn From It Through Ignorance, Or Frailty; the Gold, Silver, and pretious Stones, are their True Doctrines; and their Refining or Purging, the Relinquishing Of Their Errors. In all which there is no colour at all for the burning of Incorporeall, that is to ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... something wrong if they do not 'feel washed out after each drawing,' he still urges them to 'put a new piece of goods in the window' every morning. In fact, he is quite severe on Mr. Ruskin for not recognising that 'a picture should denote the frailty of man,' and remarks with pleasing courtesy and felicitous grace that 'many phases of feeling . . . are as much a dead letter to this great art teacher, as Sanskrit to an Islington cabman.' Nor is Mr. Quilter one of those who fails to practice what he preaches. Far from it. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... "The lady's frailty, [writes the reviewer,] is philosophized into a natural and necessary result of the Scriptural law of marriage, which by holding her irrevocably to her vows, as plighted to a dried-up old book-worm, ... is viewed as making her heart an easy victim.... The sin of her seducer, too, seems to ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... of good repute, just as I, myself, would be of good repute. But as for chastity of heart, I believe that we are both children of Adam and Eve; wherefore, when we examine ourselves, we have no need to cover our nakedness with leaves, but should rather confess our frailty." ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... ancient family of Noyon. But now, her ancestral home was a heap of debris, a tomb for men of many nations, which she did not like to visit. She took me there once, and we walked through the old tennis court where a little summer house remained untouched, its jaunty frailty seeming to mock at the desolation ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... because it came into advantage, but in fact he only asked me whether I were to be in Sydney Gardens in the evening or not. There is now something like an engagement between us and the Phaeton, which to confess my frailty I have a great desire to go out in; but whether it will come to anything must remain with him. I really believe he is very harmless; people do not seem afraid of him here, and he gets groundsel for his birds and all that. . ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... daughter, age and misfortunes, which of late came thicker and thicker, had given to the good knight's passions a wayward irritability unknown to his better days. His daughter, and one or two attached servants, who still followed his decayed fortunes, soothed his frailty as much as possible, and pitied him even while they ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... which the grave Sir Thomas pointed out to the noble youth of his land at the beginning of England's greatness, and such, within the bounds of human frailty, has been the ideal even until now which the two universities have held before them. Naturally the method of training prescribed in the sixteenth century for the attainment of this goal is antiquated in some of its details, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... in Africa, and to send him materials to Florence, there to be put into shape (operosius excolenda), otherwise it would befall him as it had befallen all the others whose deeds, unsupported by the help of the learned, 'lie hidden in the vast heap of human frailty.' The king, or his humanistic chancellor, agreed to this, and promised that at least the Portuguese chronicles of African affairs should be translated into Italian, and sent to Florence to be done into Latin. Whether the ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... until my hand was quite healed. If my plight was not quite so terrible as the newspapers—which announced that I had been bitten by a mad dog—made out, it was still conducive to serious reflection on human frailty. To complete my task, therefore, I needed, not only a sound mind and good ideas, irrespective of any required skill, but also a healthy thumb to write with, as my work was not a libretto I could dictate, but music which no one ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... true, when a man has so far acknowledged his participation in the common frailty as to die, then men begin to condone his faults; and by the time he is dead one or two hundred years they find him quite tolerable. An eminent ecclesiastic in the Anglican Church recently pronounced the greatest of the Puritans, Oliver Cromwell, "the most ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... only, as I said above, bringing up the surface to a finer state than the back—not to be called waste of time by you on any account, as you will soon understand when you come to find out what a heartless exposer of any frailty is ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson |
