"Grovel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... yesterday slunk away. And who amid the dusty heap of the forgotten days shall grovel to ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... horrible, temptation of the devil. She would rather believe that she herself had been the thief, tempted during her unconsciousness; that she had hidden it somewhere; that she should recollect, confess, restore all some day. She would carry it to him herself, grovel at his feet, and entreat forgiveness. "He will surely forgive, when he finds that I was not myself when—that it was not altogether my fault—not as if I had been waking—yes, he will forgive!" And then ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... named Censier, comes in, and does not know whether he ought to salute or to question, to grovel in the dust or to keep his hat on his head. These poor devils of magistrates and local officials were very much exercised in their minds. General Changarnier had been too near the Dictatorship not to make them thoughtful. Who ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... to be what he wished, if he was to become what he had thought he was, he must get away from this sinister influence, from this temptation that had made him, at first onset, not merely stumble, but fall flat and begin to grovel. "She is a superior woman—that is no snob notion of mine," reflected he. "But from the way I falter and get weak in the knees, she ought to be superhuman—which she isn't, by any means. No, there's only one thing ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... welcome repentance with equal alacrity. If people thrust out their horns at me wantonly, they very soon run against a stone wall; but the moment they show signs of contrition, I soften. It is the best way. Don't insist that people shall grovel at your feet before you accept their apology. That is not magnanimous. Let mercy temper justice. It is a hard thing at best for human nature to go down into the Valley of Humiliation; and although, when circumstances arise which make it the only fit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... the self-same common mind that are promoted to dignity and degraded to servitude. And if you sometimes feel that,—you, in whose favor the arrangement tends,—what do you suppose your servants sometimes think upon the subject? It was no wonder that the millions of Russia were ready to grovel before their Czar, while they believed that he was "an emanation from the Deity." But in countries where it is quite understood that every man is just as much an emanation from the Deity as any other, you ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... world boast," said Andras, "of the delights of its villainy, and grovel in all that is low and base. Life is not worth living unless the air one breathes is pure and free! Man is not the brother ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... dark retreats, Crime's foul stain the righteous beareth, Perjury and false deceits Hurt not him the wrong who dareth; But whene'er the wicked trust In ill strength to work their lust, Kings, whom nations' awe declareth Mighty, grovel in ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... you are! Cringe and grovel and whine! [Draws a Nibelung whip from under his coat.] I will put the lash upon your backs! I will strip your shams from you... I will see you as you are! I will take away your wealth, that you have wrung from others! Before I get through with you you shall sweat with the toilers ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... call me tyrant! Were I such, they would grovel at my feet. I should gorge them with gold, I should grant them immunity for their crimes, and they would be grateful. Were I such, the kings we have vanquished, far from denouncing Robespierre, would lend me their guilty support; there would be a covenant between them and me. Tyranny must ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... the most gross and brutal Ignorance. European Slavery is indeed a State of Liberty, if compared with that which prevails in the other three Divisions of the World; and therefore it is no Wonder that those who grovel under it have many Tracks of Light among them, of which ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... would disport yourself in abominable fornications with this hallucination. Very well, I am amused at your clownish terror even more than I was amused at your burlesque ecstasies. Tremble now for here is a Medusa, a Messalina come to destroy you. Whimper and grovel, but observe in your idiot cowardice how Mallare, the indifferent one, sits and smiles—still supreme, still a spectator ravished ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... you really dead?" she cried. "Have you no pity for me? Do you think that I have followed you here to grovel at your feet for mere whim? Am I acting like a woman sane and sound? Don't you see that I am mad, and why I am mad? Must I tell you before her? Dick—" She staggered towards him, and the fine cloak slipped from her shoulders; and then it was that Tommy changed from ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... the rest of that day and the next, her easy injunction, tossed off that way as she turned her beautiful back, was like the crack of a great whip in the blue air, the high element in which Mrs. Lowder hung. He wouldn't grovel perhaps—he wasn't quite ready for that; but he would be patient, ridiculous, reasonable, unreasonable, and above all deeply diplomatic. He would be clever, with all his cleverness—which he now shook ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... the rum power in America. That is the god I mean. The most heartless, depraved monopoly on earth, yet men and governments grovel in the dust at its feet and cringe ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... Then the two ladies who looked beheld Houdaine fall down at the feet of Sir Tristram and grovel there with joy. And they beheld that he licked Sir Tristram's feet and his hands, and that he leaped upon Sir Tristram and licked his neck and face, and at that they ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... obligations. There is coupled with it a responsibility which you can not shirk without paying the penalty in a shriveled soul, a stunted mentality, a warped conscience, and a narrow field of usefulness. It is more of a disgrace for a college graduate to grovel, to stoop to mean, low practises, than for a man who has not had a liberal education. The educated man has gotten a glimpse of power, of grander things, and he is expected to look up, not down, to aspire, not ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... to commodities," and makes a virtue of necessity. He puts us out of conceit with this world, which perhaps a severe divine should do; yet does not, as a charitable divine ought, point to another. His morbid feelings droop and cling to the earth, grovel where they should soar; and throw a dead weight on every aspiration of the soul after the good or beautiful. By degrees we submit, and are reconciled to our fate, like patients to the physician, or prisoners in the condemned ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... undoubted historical probability, not to say certainty, that he is the direct descendant of some naked and bestial savage, whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a little more cunning than the Fox, and by so much more dangerous than the Tiger? Or is he bound to howl and grovel on all fours because of the wholly unquestionable fact, that he was once an egg, which no ordinary power of discrimination could distinguish from that of a Dog? Or is the philanthropist or the saint to give up his endeavours to lead a noble life, because the simplest study of man's nature ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... station'd me A type of better worlds to be To eyes that from life's sorrows rove In cheerful hope to Heav'n above, And, through the mists that hover here God and his precepts blest revere. Do thou, then, grovel like the swine, And to the ground thy snout confine, But suffer the enlighten'd eye To ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... light of day, almost riding a white horse and crowned with laurel. Anything but the foremost place I could not conceive for myself, and for that very reason I quite contentedly occupied the lowest in reality. Either to be a hero or to grovel in the mud—there was nothing between. That was my ruin, for when I was in the mud I comforted myself with the thought that at other times I was a hero, and the hero was a cloak for the mud: for an ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... apace—the draughts are deep, and long, and frequent, the mugs are large, the thirst insatiate. The takings, compared with the size and situation of the house, must be high, and yet, with all this custom and profit, the landlord and his family still grovel. And grovel they will in dirt, vice, low cunning, and iniquity—as the serpent went on his belly in the dust—to ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... of compacts between the devil and mankind; but, nevertheless, there is abundant evidence in their writings of their having been keenly alive to the fact that men horror-stricken at the sight of the destruction of their wives and children by magic would grovel in the submission of abject terror at the feet of the priest who promised to ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... little risk and much profit: others again" (and here he lost his tranquil tone, and his self-possession) "others hunt a little profit through much danger, choosing rather to be in eternal strife and to put their hopes daily to hazard than to creep and crawl and sneak and grovel: and at last perhaps they venture into a chase where there is no profit at all—or where the best upshot will be that some dozen of hollow, smiling, fawning scoundrels, who sin according ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... there never was a fleet. When the Mekinese arrive, the fleet will fight. It doesn't hope to win; it doesn't expect anything—except getting killed honorably when its enemy would like to have it grovel. But it's going ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... they will receive me with open arms. I shall come to grief at the bottom of some glacier; but, if I am to speak my mind, I would rather live for a couple of years among the heights, where there are no governments, nor excisemen, nor gamekeepers, nor procureurs du roi, than grovel in a marsh for a century. You are the only one that I shall be sorry to leave behind; all the rest of them bore me! When you are in the right, at any rate you ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... and grovel from the first, Crouching through life forever in the dark, Aimlessly creeping toward an unseen mark; And no one durst Deny their horrid dream, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... her; to grovel at her feet and crave her pardon for my behaviour of last night. What else should I want ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... tell her all this when she returned home; but in his inmost soul he knew all the time that the words would never be said. He knew that he would grovel before her and whine for her favour; that he would remain her slave and sell her his soul again and again, just as she sold him her body. He knew that that was what he would do, for he was head over ears ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... director of a bankrupt company. And so may a man be untrue to his troth,—and leave true love in pursuit of tinsel, and beauty, and false words, and a large income. But why should one tell the story of creatures so base? One does not willingly grovel in gutters, or breathe fetid atmospheres, or live upon garbage. If we are to deal with heroes and heroines, let us, at any rate, have heroes and heroines who are above such meanness as falsehood ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... under which he fell so prematurely. Oh! my dear Empson, there must be something terribly wrong in the present arrangements of the universe, when those things can happen, and be thought natural. I could lie down in the dirt, and cry and grovel there, I think, for a century, to save such a soul as Burns from the suffering, and the contamination, and the degradation, which these same arrangements imposed upon him; and I fancy that, if I could but have known him, in my present state of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... belabor'd at of life, Without some small attempt at strife, Our nature will not grovel; One impulse hadd both man and dame, He seized the tongs—she did the same, Leaving the ruffian, if he came, The poker and the shovel. Suppose the couple standing so, When rushing footsteps from below Made pulses fast and fervent; And first burst in the frantic cat, All steaming ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... something is gained by resisting them. It imitates our acts long before it can understand our words. As if it felt its insignificance, and dreaded to be arrested in some lower phase of its development, its instinct for obedience becomes almost a passion. As the vine must twine or grovel, so the child comes unconsciously to worship idols, and imitates bad patterns and examples in the absence of worthy ones. He obeys as with a deep sense of being our chattel, and, at bottom, admires those who coerce him, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the path which you mean to tread; and, once chosen, to tread it with a firm step, prepared to meet danger—to confront destiny. This very hour, this very moment, I call upon you to make your decision; and it shall be a final decision. Will you grovel on in poverty—the worst of all poverty, the gentleman's pittance? or will you make yourself possessor of the wealth which your uncle Oswald bequeathed to others? Look me in the face, Reginald, as you are a man, and answer me, Which is it to ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... and said to himself: "I will go to the Methodist meeting-house: they work directly upon the conscience, deepen the sense of sin, and preach a quick cleansing as by light shining in. There I may grovel in the sight of men and women and arise redeemed. But, no. It is the Sabbath my daughter's marriage is to be announced in our own church, and it would be cowardly, not to say unseemly, to fly from one worship to another now. If I go to church this morning it ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... venture to insult the intelligence of the reader with these idiotic details but for the reasons stated, and additionally, that they carry conviction with them to thousands of minds, honest doubtless, but which are accustomed to grovel in superstition, and falsehood, which they are unable ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... betrayer; To be the Thunderer's slave, he was too great: To be his friend and comrade,—but a man. His crime was human, and their doom severe; For poets sing, that treachery and pride Did from Jove's table hurl him headlong down, To grovel in the depths of Tartarus. Alas, and his whole race ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... them!" she would wail to herself. "If I could just see mother or father or anybody from New York! Oh, I know I shall never see New York again, or Broadway or Fifth Avenue or Central Park—I never—never—never shall!" And she would grovel among her pillows, burying her face and half stifling herself lest her sobs should be heard. Her feeling for her husband had become one of terror and repulsion. She was almost more afraid of his patronising, affectionate moments than she was of ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a voice, an' de win's went down, An' de lions grovel on de groun', An' de po' loss one am foun' an' sabed, For ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... the Sultan, who never allowed any one to stand before him, all having to grovel in the dirt, treated Gentile as an equal. Gentile even taught the old rogue to draw a little, and they say the painter had a key to every room in the palace, and was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... simply to grovel in the dust before him it should be done. If humiliation would suffice,—or any self-abasement that were possible to me! But I should be false if I said that I look forward to any such possibility. How can he wish to have me ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... Marlborough Street cell was a disgusting object— offensive to the eye and to one's sense of the dignity of man. At sight of me he sprawled, and when the shock of it was over he continued to grovel until the sight bred a shame in me for being the cause of it. What made it ten times worse was his curious insensibility—even while he grovelled—to the moral aspect ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "Understand at once that I am no spy or thief-taker. I am a kinsman of Monsieur de Saint-Yves—here in his interest. Upon my word, you have put your foot in it prettily, Mr. Burchell Fenn! Come, stand up; don't grovel there! Stand up, you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Gilgames would shower upon him riches and honours. "He will give thee wherein to sleep a great bed cunningly wrought; he will seat thee on his divan, he will give thee a place on his left hand, and the princes of the earth shall kiss thy feet, the people of Uruk shall grovel on the ground before thee." It was by such flatteries and promises for the future that Gilgames gained the affection of his servant Eabani, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... to grovel on this earth with our selfish, humbled race, wandering in mystery, and awe, and doubt, when we can communicate with the intelligences above! Does not the soul leap at her admission to confer with superior powers? Does not the proud heart bound at the ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... number, Mrs. Kelver. There is one of me must worship, adore a woman madly, abjectly; grovel before her like the Troubadour before his Queen of Song, eat her slipper, drink the water she has washed in, scourge himself before her window, die for a kiss of her glove flung down with a laugh. She must be scornful, contemptuous, cruel. There is another I would cherish, a tender, yielding creature, ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... everything out on to the floor, muttering curses on the whole railway system of Germany as you do so. Then you feel in your boots. You make everybody near you stand up to see if they are sitting upon it, and you go down on your knees and grovel for it ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... animals with which we have to cope under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits' end. We exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and ask God why. Thus we call out of the rat-trap. As for the children, no one understands them except old maids, hunchbacks, and ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... The nuggets fall around their feet like grain. They rattle over roof and wall; they scatter, roll and spread; The dust is like a shower of golden rain. The guests a moment stand aghast, then grovel on the floor; They fight, and snarl, and claw, like beasts of prey; And then, as everybody grabbed and everybody swore, The man ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... done there. And the Emperor in his uniform, drunk with militarism, wanted us—all our nation—wanted me—to kow-tow before him as if he were a god! But he did not get what he wanted from us. His own people may grovel before him, but we will not. Oh, these soldiers, these soldiers! You look down on your hangmen and butchers. We look down on our men-butchers, the soldiers, in the same way. We have soldiers just as you have ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... fix it upon the forward movement of the Spirit which he knows to be always identical both in the universe and in himself. He ceases the attempt to dictate to the Spirit, because he does not see in it a mere blind force, but reveres it as the Supreme Intelligence: and on the other hand he does not grovel before it in doubt and fear, because he knows it is one with himself and is realizing itself through him, and therefore cannot have any purpose antagonistic to his own individual welfare. Realizing this he ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... much rather do for another than himself, can earn enough in one day, if he take truck, to keep him three, and but that he prefers fixing cucumbers to thrashing, and making moccasins to clearing land, he might do well enough. Though poor, he is none the least inclined to grovel, but, with the spirit of his land, feels quite at ease in company with any judge or ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... as you intimated, he has had execrable advisers. I hardly know a more painful object of consideration than a man of genius in such a situation; those of lower minds do not feel the degradation, and become like pigs, familiarised with the filthy elements in which they grovel; but it is impossible that a man of Lord Byron's genius should not often feel the want of that which he has forfeited—the fair esteem of those by whom genius most naturally desires to be ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... explore without hindrance—yet his manner hinted at something in reserve. Though he quivered under Irene's outspoken incredulity, his aspect was that of a man whose schemes have been foiled by sheer ill-luck. A rogue unmasked will grovel: von Kerber was defiant. For the moment, Mrs. Haxton was struck dumb with foreboding. Mr. Fenshawe's. dejected air showed that a deadly blow had been dealt to the project to which she had devoted all her resources since the beginning ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... in the sense of fear to go counter to his will. "Perfect love casteth out fear." The redeemed saints and angels who stand before his heavenly throne in perfect love know no fear of God, "for fear hath torment." But we, who still grovel on earth battling with the world, the flesh and the devil, have cause to fear offending his righteous and holy will. But this only when we are tempted to leave some duty undone or to commit some actual sin. As long as we walk in the good way of love, faith and obedience we have nothing to fear. ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... labour movement is economically rotten it is easy to prove. In the words of Professor Hearnshaw, 'the government has ceased to govern in the world of labour, and has been compelled, instead of governing, to bribe, to cajole, to beg, to grovel. It has purchased brief truces at the cost of increasing levies of Danegeld drawn from the diminishing resources of the patient community. It has embarked on a course of payment of blackmail which must end either in national bankruptcy or in the social revolution ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... best of 'em," sneered McBane. "He'll call any man 'master' for a quarter, or 'God' for half a dollar; for a dollar he'll grovel at your feet, and for a cast-off coat you can buy an option on his immortal soul,—if he has one! I've handled niggers for ten years, and I know 'em from the ground up. They're all alike,—they're a scrub race, an affliction to the country, and the ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... life; no "mute, inglorious poet" rests amongst them, and he who is superior to his fellow, does not rise above mediocrity. The genius that sprouts from a dunghil soon shakes off the heterogenous mass; those only grovel, who have not power ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... courts, in senates, who so fit to serve? And both invited, but you would not swerve, All meaner prizes waiving that you might In civic duty spend your heat and light, Unpaid, untrammelled, with a sweet disdain. Refusing posts men grovel to attain." —Lowell's Poems, Vol. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Now, when so many things in America seem bad dreams, I cannot take refuge in thinking that a bad dream; the reality was so deeply burnt into my brain by the words of some of the slaves; and when I think of it I want to grovel on the ground with my mouth in the dust. But I know this can only distress you, for you cannot get away from the fact as I have got away from it; that there it is in the next street, perhaps in the next house, and that any night when you leave your ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... be, in a day or two,' muttered Heathcliff. 'But first—get up, Linton! Get up!' he shouted. 'Don't grovel on the ground there ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... Because you're tall and statuesque and stunning! You know if those men can't keep you out of the court-room at least you are safe in the hands of any judge or jury, because they are men! You know if you smile at them—pathetically—if you cast those wonderful eyes of yours at them, they'll grovel at your feet! I know you, Eunice Embury! You're banking on your femininity to save you ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... as if it were a little one. Any one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor quite happy. But to find out how far one MAY be quite miserable without making it impossible to be quite happy—that was a discovery in psychology. Any one might say, "Neither swagger nor grovel"; and it would have been a limit. But to say, "Here you can swagger and there you can ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... exaggeration at all to say that any one who has ever known any soldiers (I can only answer for English and Irish and Scotch soldiers) would find it just as easy to believe that a real Bishop would grovel on the carpet in a religious ecstasy, or that a real doctor would dance about the drawing-room to show the invigorating effects of his own medicine, as to believe that a soldier, when asked for his ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... button, and a Chinese boy (all male Chinese are boys) entered, bowing in that deference which is so potent to separate the white man from his silver. The white man glories in being salaamed, especially by an Oriental, who can grovel with a touch of art. And the Oriental has not been slow ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... people look," bawled Aksinya. "I will shame you all! You shall burn with shame! You shall grovel at my feet. Hey! Stepan," she called to the deaf man, "let us go home this minute! Let us go to my father and mother; I don't want to live with ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... in ecstasy, an angel in heaven. She looked around, she raised her eyes to the altar, she tried to seize upon some idea which should continue with her, and be a key with which she could unlock this fountain of joy hereafter when she would. She almost felt for the moment as if it would be worthy to grovel for such opium at the knees of an oleosaccharine priest and contribute to his support forever. She tried to think of something to which to compare the feeling, but in vain. In the effort to fix it her mind and memory became a blank, and for ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Parson savagely. "What's the good of you? I set you there to warn us and all you can do is to grovel on ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... scores, lose rather than win at Goodwood, and write down the "down" train instead of the "up" in their memorabilia. But there it is. They have only to apply sines and co-sines, tangents and logarithms to a stock exchange quotation for me to grovel before their superior wisdom and consult them at ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... Footelights would also give you the leading tragedians, and would favour you (through his nose) with the popular burlesque imitation of Mr. Charles Kean, as Hablet. He would fling himself down on the carpet, and grovel there as Hamlet does in the play-scene, and would exclaim, with frantic vehemence, "He poisods hib i' the garded, for his estate. His dabe's Godzago: the story is extadt, ad writted id very choice Italiad. You shall ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... have blurred with coffined night, And whisper deeds wrought in silence. A quiver that the tomb-sweat bore When walls were split with Typhon's ire; And monstrous shapes that carved the light As dragon-worms brought pestilence To souls who grovel on this shore, Proclaim each gyving djinnee sire. And dryades whom the mists have struck With ague—A Sceptre of Despair! (Sklayres to the night, and suns unstunned) Dank dulse, where templed vaults of man, Coarse-grained, who gambled with king Luck, 'Mid pulse of ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... I heard my father say the other day that it has often made him tired to see the way in which some of your titled nonentities grovel before a Lithuanian Jew who is a power on the Rand. But unbending is a different thing ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... got him his boots, and would have laced them for him, and kissed them too, if he would have let her, and did grovel at his feet to arrange the roll of his stockings ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... of wealth, who allows them to proceed, only after Virgil has informed him their journey is ordained, and is to be pursued to the very spot where Michael confined Satan. The mere mention of his master, the ex-archangel, causes Plutus to grovel; and Dante and Virgil, proceeding on their journey, discover that the fourth circle is occupied by all whom avarice mastered, as well as by prodigals, who are here condemned to roll heavy rocks, because their lives on earth ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... silence. She leaned her swathed head upon her hand and appeared to be lost in thought, while the multitude before her continued to grovel upon their stomachs, only screwing their heads round a little so as to get a view of us with one eye. It seemed that their Queen so rarely appeared in public that they were willing to undergo this inconvenience, and even graver risks, to have the opportunity of looking on her, or ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... came near to Achilles and spake winged words: "Now, at last, O godlike Achilles! shall we twain carry off great glory to the Achaian ships! He cannot now escape us, though the Far-Darter should grovel at the feet of Zeus with fruitless prayers. But do thou stay and recover thy breath; and I will go and persuade Hector to stand up against thee in fight." And he gladly obeyed her voice, and stood leaning on his ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... was the truth. He could tell himself now that he never wished to see Adelaide Houghton again. But, before anything of this could be achieved, he would have to own himself a sinner before her. He would have, as it were, to grovel at her feet. Hitherto, in all his intercourse with her, he had been masterful and marital. He had managed up to this point so to live as to have kept in all respects the upper hand. He had never yet been ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... susceptible to abstract influence, still hesitated, drawing near to each other in growling consultation. Dolores gave them no sign, though she watched them keenly from under her lowered lashes. She gave her attention to the line of abject creatures who filed slowly past her, each one stopping to grovel in the dust at her feet and passing on. These Milo halted near by and herded into a shivering, frightened mob. And Dolores's cool disregard of the whites had its calculated effect. One by one they stepped out into the open as had the colored men; the more timorous, or superstitious, came ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... fury by nothing more or less than Bill's yielding to his attacks, Kipping turned suddenly and reached for the carpenter's mallet, which lay where Chips had been working nearby. With a round oath, he yelled, "I'll make you grovel and ask me ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... and offended. She had not expected that he would kiss the dust. She hated to see him thus. She thought: "It isn't all your fault. It's just as much mine as yours. But even if I was ashamed I'd never confess it. Never would I grovel! And never would I want to undo anything! After all you took the chances. You did what you thought best. Why be ashamed when things go wrong? You wouldn't have been ashamed if things had ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... heaven! Bulkeley! Clarence! go for a doctor—go to Doctor Straitwaist at the Asylum—Horace Milliken, who has married the descendant of the Kickleburys of the Conqueror, marry a dancing-girl off the stage! Horace Milliken! do you wish to see me die in convulsions at your feet? I writhe there, I grovel there. Look! look at me on my knees! your own mother-in-law! drive ...
— The Wolves and the Lamb • William Makepeace Thackeray
... we tread for the first time the Court of Jovius—the columns with their arches on either side of us, the vast bell-tower rising to the sky, as if to mock the art of those whose mightiest works might still seem only to grovel upon earth. Nowhere within the compass of the Roman world do we find ourselves more distinctly in the presence of one of the great minds of the world's history; we see that, alike in politics and in art, Diocletian breathed a living soul into a lifeless ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... then I went at Him and implored and beseeched, if it would be best for Shelley, and would make her happy, to send her the Paget man, and to be quick about it. When I had said the last word that came to me, and begged all I thought becoming—I don't think with His face, that Jesus wants us to grovel to Him, at least He looks too dignified to do it Himself—I ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... said thoughtfully, "and yet I think that the very poorest among us was far freer and more independent than the richest of your Egyptian peasants. He did not grovel on the ground when the king passed along. It was open to him if he was braver than his fellows to rise in rank. He could fish, or hunt, or till the ground, or fashion arms as he chose; his life was not tied down by usage or custom. He was a man, a poor ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... of a cigar. Then, added to the occasional whiff, were occasional catches of derogatory remarks, which came home to me as unpleasantly as did the tobacco: "A chap with a sword like that should live up to it, and not grovel over a basin."—And a quotation from the Burial of Sir John Moore: "He lay like a ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... has the heart of a flea-bitten pariah dog. When the time comes he will grovel and squirm ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... something in her tone and confused, anxious manner that made me sure she was not telling the truth. The conviction swept over me that something had happened at the house in Park Lane since I slammed the front door and ran out. Diana might have thought twice before coming to grovel here to Eagle, unless she had been sure that I was not jumping to conclusions—sure that there could be no possible mistake about what I had found in Sidney's coat. Suddenly I knew as well as if she had put the story into words that Sidney had come home before she had made up her ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to think himself humble," said Father Payne. "The moment you do that, you are conceited. It's not a virtue to grovel. A man ought to know exactly what he is worth. You needn't be always saying what you are, worth, of course. It's modest to hold your tongue. But humility is, or ought to be, extinct as a virtue. It belongs to the time when people felt bound to deplore the corruption ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and shuddered. He thanked his God that the spring was near by. Upon one thing he was determined, that whatever happened, though he should have to die—by his own hand, he would not grovel into Eternity upon his hands and knees as had that ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... Twiddle had a palace; Twaddle said: "I'll grovel Or he'll think I bear him malice"— A sentiment as novel As a castor on ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... young men go Each pink and white and neat, She's older than their mothers, but They grovel at ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... and falling, and now and then when the fan sways to and fro, the hair just turning gray with trouble, and the round face growing wan and seamed with terrible reflection, are seen a moment crouching low, as if she would wish to grovel upon the floor and bury ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... They are, in some quarters, like the paving-stones of the street—eternally present. There are artists in colored chalks, who limn the heads of Christ and Napoleon on the pavement, with the inscription: 'I am starving.' Very fairly are the portraits executed; very decent artists they are, and they grovel by the side of their handiwork in an attitude of broken-hearted despondency, and pocket the pennies of the charitable. Objects the most decrepit in nature, hideous, half-nude wretches, male and female, creep along the streets, shivering, too evidently starving, till your heart ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and disagreeable—make the most of them: they will always appeal to a certain section whose minds are correspondingly unpleasant." We prefer the "pure joy" gospel, as being nearer the truth: for spirit is ever pointing the vision upward to what we may become, instead of allowing it to grovel around in the very unpleasant circumstances in which some people are liable to find themselves. The outward vision is transient, the inner vision can build eternal realities. "Are we to beg and cringe and hang on the outer edge of life,—we who should walk grandly? Is it for man to tremble ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... them both bother. ("E pronto, Teresina?" "Subito, subito," cried Teresina from the kitchen.) "I can't abide Vyvian," Peggy resumed. "The babies hate him, and he makes himself horrid to everyone, and lets Rhoda Johnson grovel to him, and stares at the stains on the table-cloth, as if his own nails weren't worse, and turns up his nose at the food. Poor little Rhoda! You saw her? The little thin girl with a cough, who hangs on Vyvian's words and blushes ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... had become the one fetich to which Salome's heart clung in silent adoration, defiant of the iconoclastic touch of reason and the adverse decree of womanly pride; for natures such as hers will always grovel in the dust, hugging the mutilated fragments of their idol, rather than bow at some new, fretted shrine, where other images hold sway, commanding worship. Looking up almost wolfishly at that tranquil, shining countenance, she said ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... hermitage, Master would maintain an unresponsive silence. "Do not allow yourself to be thrashed by the provoking whip of a beautiful face," he told the disciples. "How can sense slaves enjoy the world? Its subtle flavors escape them while they grovel in primal mud. All nice discriminations are lost to ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... spirits shall not cringe and grovel, Stooping lowly to a low thoughts door, As if Heaven were straitened to a hovel, All its star-worlds set to rise no more, And our genius ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... vivid imagination would place before him. He tried not to think of them. He knew he had drunk too much. Now he was seized with a desire to do horrible, sordid things; he wanted to roll himself in gutters; his whole being yearned for beastliness; he wanted to grovel. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... to the Cherwell in a tone of indignation, "With a blush of conscious virtue your enormities I see: And I wish that a reversal of the laws of gravitation Would prevent your vicious current from contaminating me! With your hedonists who grovel on a cushion with a novel (Which is sure to sap the morals and the intellect to stunt), And the spectacle nefarious of your idle, gay Lotharios Who pursue a mild flirtation in ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... shoulders of a young dean's wife. It shows at any rate that her heart is in the subject, and it shows moreover that she is removed, wide as the poles asunder, from that cesspool of abomination in which it was once suspected that she would wallow and grovel. Anathema maranatha! Let anything else be held as blessed, so that that be well cursed. Welcome kneelings and bowings, welcome matins and complines, welcome bell, book, and candle, so that Mr. Slope's dirty surplices and ceremonial Sabbaths be held ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... how long will mankind worship a book? How long will they grovel in the dust before the ignorant legends of the barbaric past? How long, O how long will they pursue phantoms in a darkness deeper ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... veriest wretch that ever groan'd in anguish, Comes here to grovel on the earth before thee, To tell her sad, sad tale, implore thy aid, For sure the pow'r is thine, thou canst relieve My bleeding heart, and soften all ...
— The Grecian Daughter • Arthur Murphy
... instead of German champagne at a banquet for Prince Henry, and he had allowed the Kaiser's yacht to be christened in French champagne. How could such a blunderer satisfy the diplomatic requirements of the vain and petty Kaiser? And yet! Holleben was utterly devoted and willing to grovel in the mud. He even suggested to President Roosevelt that at the State Banquet at the White House, Prince Henry, as a Hohenzollern, and the representative of the Almightiest Kaiser, should walk out to dinner first; but there was no discussion, for the President ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... love and compassion! Yes, yes!—fix your glittering eyes on me; contemplate me in the abyss of poverty where I am fallen! From the bottom of that pit I lift my brow boldly toward you, and your silent glance does not force me to grovel in the earth with shame! Here, in the presence of your noble images, I am alone with my soul, with my conscience;—hero, no mortification can touch the being who, as gentleman, Christian, brother, and father, has ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... secret, responsive ecstasy, to wondering if there were not some supreme abjection with which she might be inspired. Vague, but increasingly brighter, this possibility glimmered on her. It at last hung there adequately plain to Charlotte that she had presented herself once more to (as they said) grovel; and that, truly, made the stage large. It had absolutely, within the time, taken on the dazzling merit of being large ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... a hovel and dull we grovel, Forgetting that the world is fair; Where no babe we cherish, lest its very soul perish; Where our mirth is crime, ...
— Chants for Socialists • William Morris
... these hoary walls which have echoed to the songs of the bard for more years than man can count. Ah, woe the day; ah, woe the falling off! That I should live to see the sons of Dynevor thus fall away — the young eaglets leaving their high estate to grovel with the carrion vulture and the coward crow! Ah! in old days it was not so. But there are yet those of the degenerate race in whom the spirit of their fathers burns. Come, my sons — come hither with me. I bring you a message from Iscennen that will ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... all the sources of her life and hopes, she was not earthy. If her spirit could not soar and sing in the sky, it also could not grovel in the mire of gross materiality. Some little time, therefore, before the company broke up, on the plea of not feeling well she lured her father away from his wine and cigars and a knot of gentlemen who were beginning to talk a little incoherently. Making their adieux amid many protestations ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... short of physical force could have compelled her. More than once Magdalena wished that she was cast in her friend's anarchic mould. She felt that did her grip upon herself relax she should scream aloud and grovel on the very boards that had had their share in her brief love-life. But she was Magdalena Yorba, the proudest woman in California; in the very hour of her discovery, when she had been possessed of a blind terror rather than grief, she had remembered to be thankful that the world could ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... inviting them to a dance on the yacht, while it lay at anchor off Holmtown, and the humour of the moment was to play battledore and shuttlecock with the grotesque efforts of our great people (the same that had figured at my wedding) to grovel before my husband and ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... cause of science by his example as well as by his discoveries. By living a plain but honest life, declining magnificent offers of positions from royal patrons, at the same time refusing to grovel before nobility, he set a worthy example to other philosophers whose cringing and pusillanimous attitude towards persons of wealth or position had hitherto earned them the contempt of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... rough on me—" Kennedy began. Then a sudden indignation rushed through him. Why should he grovel to Fenn? If Fenn chose to stand out, let him. He was capable of running the ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... "If you were lonely, very lonely, if you had searched through the years for companionship, and thought you might have found it, would it please you to have that companion drop to his knees, grovel before you? Would this ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... accuse the foregoing with containing the least ingredient of persecution. The free spirit on which the American cause is founded, disdains to mix with such an impurity, and leaves it as rubbish fit only for narrow and suspicious minds to grovel in. Suspicion and persecution are weeds of the same dunghill, and flourish together. Had the Quakers minded their religion and their business, they might have lived through this dispute in enviable ease, and none would have molested them. The common ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... read those scrolls to herself, sitting in her throne, and spake not a long while; then she said: Come hither, and grovel before Us, and hearken! Even so we did; and she said again: Our sister, who hath been so kind unto you, and saved you from so many pains, here telleth Us, by the message of the two doves, that ye have betrayed Us and her, and have stolen her thrall ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... render men hateful, and hating one another: which has often rendered sovereigns, persecutors, and subjects, either rebels, or slaves: a religion, whose peculiar moral principles and maxims, teach the mind to grovel, and humble, and break down the energies of man; and which divert him from thinking of his true interests, and the true happiness of himself and his fellow men. Can such a religion, I would respectfully ask, be from God, since where fully obeyed, it would prove ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English |
