"Penury" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that paid his rent and supported his childish vanity and grotesque pride. From a peg in the corner hung the familiar masquerade that hid his poverty—the pearl-gray trousers, the black frock coat, the tall shining hat—in hideous contrast to the penury of his surroundings. But if THEY were here, where was HE, and in what new disguise had he escaped from his poverty? A vague uneasiness caused her to hesitate and return to the open door. She had nearly reached it when her eye fell on the pallet which it partly illuminated. ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... sort of penury and wretchedness is also common with the families of the former wealthy merchants and tradesmen. Paper money, a maximum, and requisitions, have reduced those that did not share in the crimes and pillage of the Revolution, as much as the proscribed nobility. And, contradictory as it may seem, the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... what she was born and first brought up in, resolve to return to her primitive Poverty, rather than give up her Innocence.} I say, it is surprising, that a young Person, so circumstanced, could, in Contempt of proffer'd Grandeur on the one side, and in Defiance of Penury on the other, so happily and prudently conduct herself thro' such a Series of Perplexities and Troubles, and withstand the alluring Baits, and almost irresistible Offers of a fine Gentleman, so universally admired and esteemed, for the Agreeableness of his Person ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... man is like Satan's supereminence of pain,—and the majority of his species, doomed to penury, disease, and crime, have reason to curse the untoward event, that, by enabling him to communicate his sensations, raised him above the level of his fellow animals. But the steps that ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... realized the place of the Fence in civilization. This is the Land of the Unfenced, where crouch on either hand scores of ugly one-room cabins, cheerless and dirty. Here lies the Negro problem in its naked dirt and penury. And here are no fences. But now and then the crisscross rails or straight palings break into view, and then we know a touch of culture is near. Of course Harrison Gohagen,—a quiet yellow man, young, smooth-faced, and diligent,—of course he is lord of some hundred acres, and we expect to ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... she took care that it should be of the best, she could not bring herself to spend much on the transient pleasures of the table. Therefore, for totally different reasons, her food was as poor as Mrs. Archer's, and her wines did nothing to redeem it. Her relatives considered that the penury of her table discredited the Mingott name, which had always been associated with good living; but people continued to come to her in spite of the "made dishes" and flat champagne, and in reply to the remonstrances of her son Lovell (who tried ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... complained with bitterness of the iron rule of Marie, the insolence of his nobles, and the ostentatious profusion of the Italian: contrasting the first with his own helplessness, the second with the insignificance to which he was condemned, and the last with the almost penury to which he ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... wanderer who is good for nothing on earth. He is despised of men, and, were it not that we know the inexhaustible bounty of the Everlasting Pity, we might almost think that he was forgotten of Heaven. Stand against idleness. Anything that age, aches, penury, hard trial may inflict on the soul is trifling. Idleness is the great evil which leads to all others. Therefore work while it ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... is disobedience to thee; and when one sin hath been dead in me, that soul hath passed into another sin. Our youth dies, and the sins of our youth with it; some sins die a violent death, and some a natural; poverty, penury, imprisonment, banishment, kill some sins in us, and some die of age; many ways we become unable to do that sin, but still the soul lives and passes into another sin; and that that was licentiousness grows ambition, and that comes to indevotion and ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... it could not have been difficult, in the enormous patronage of office, to have found some relief for the necessities of a man whose official character was unimpeached; who had been expressly put into government employ by ministers for the sake of preserving him from penury; who had been the companion, the friend of princes and nobles; and whose faults were not an atom more flagrant than those of every man of fashion in his time. But he was now utterly ruined and wretched. Some strong applications were made to his former ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... as well as in many other places, the apostle supported himself by the labour of his own hands. It was now customary, even for Israelites in easy circumstances, to train up their children to some mechanical employment, so that should they sink into penury, they could still, by manual industry, procure a livelihood. [110:2] Paul had been taught the trade of a tent-maker, or manufacturer of awnings of hair-cloth—articles much used in the East as a ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... novelist, dead or living, who so skilfully harmonises the poetry of moral life with its penury. Just as Millet could in the figure of a solitary peasant toiling on a plain convey a world of pathetic meaning, so Mr. Hardy with his yeomen and villagers. Their occupations in his hands wear a pathetic dignity, which not even the encomiums of ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... Go-Fukakusa received the name of the "Jimyo-in family." When a member of the latter occupied the throne, the Court enjoyed opulence, owing to its possession of the extensive Chokodo estates; but when the sovereign was of the Daigaku-ji line comparative penury was experienced. There can be little doubt that, throughout the complications antecedent to this dual system, the Fushimi princes acted practically as spies for the Bakufu. After all, the two Imperial families were descended from a common ancestor and should have shrunk from the disgrace of publishing ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... letter to his London constituents, urging them to clamour for the only remedy, "to unite to put an end to a system which has proved to be the blight of commerce, the bane of agriculture, the source of bitter divisions among classes, the cause of penury, fever, mortality, and ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... whose dejected eye Th' unfeeling proud one looks, and passes by, Condemned on penury's barren path to roam, Scorned by the world, and left without a home. Pleasures of Hope. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... prosperity as the American War Correspondent I had met in the Transvaal led me to expect. Indeed, after six months of successful lecturing on the subject of the Boers before various lyceums in the country, I was reduced to a state of penury which actually drove me to thievery of the pettiest and most vulgar sort. There was little in the way of mean theft that I did not commit. During the coal famine, for instance, every day passing the coal-yards to and fro, I would appropriate ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... provide a competent maintenance for them. If these last remain obstinate, and it be idle to hope that youths of talents without fortune, whatever be their piety, will serve the church of God at the expense of devoting themselves to infallible penury, and all the wretchedness which belongs to it—is it wise to weaken the hands and discourage the hearts of those ministers already settled pastors, or to furnish their people with arguments in their own vindication for leaving them in want ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... Resurrection, which he purchased for a few coppers. He had the linguistic gift which soon after made the young carpenter Mezzofanti of Bologna famous and a cardinal. But the gift would have been buried in the grave of his penury and his circumstances had his trade been almost any other, and had he not been impelled by the most powerful of all motives. He never sat on his stall without his book before him, nor did he painfully toil with his wallet of new-made shoes to the neighbouring towns or return ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... and its pretty burden. But then the mere snowy whiteness of the muslin and freshness of the ribbons, and the burning curiosity to see herself decked therein, overcame a nature which, in the midst of its penury, had been always really possessed by a more than common hunger for sensuous beauty and seemliness. Marcella wore it, was stormily happy in it, and kissed Mademoiselle Renier for it at night with an effusion, nay, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... teachers, kindly stern. The plow, the flail, the maul, the echoing ax Taught him their homely wisdom, and their peace. A rage for knowledge drove his restless mind: He fed his spirit with the bread of books, He slaked his thirst at all the wells of thought. Hunger and hardship, penury and pain Waylaid his youth and wrestled for his life. They came to master, but he made ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... on every occasion of "doubtful dilemma," looked to his cousin Dashall for extrication, expressed his surprise at the appearance of a squalid figure, whose lank form, patched habiliments, and unshorn beard, indicated 325extreme penury; in familiar converse with a gentleman fashionably attired, and of demeanour to infer ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... settlements. They never indulged the delusion that this region was a land flowing with milk and honey. Before they came they knew that they were to wrest their living from an uncongenial soil, to struggle with penury and to conquer only by constant toil and self-denying thrift. The forest would supply them with the materials for shelter and fuel and to some extent with food and clothing. All the rest must depend upon their own exertions. There was ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... these islands it must be confessed, that they have not many allurements but to the mere lover of naked nature. The inhabitants are thin, provisions are scarce, and desolation and penury give little pleasure.' Johnson's Works, ix. 153. In an earlier passage (p. 138), in describing a rough ride in Mull, he says:—'We were now long enough acquainted with hills and heath to have lost the emotion that they once raised, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... They are in all ranks and occupations, of all ages and characters. They are very earnest people, and their purpose is bona fide the dissemination of their paradoxes. A great many—the mass, indeed—are illiterate, and a great many waste their means, and are in or approaching penury. But I must say that never, in any one instance, has the quadrature of the circle, or the like, been made a pretext for begging; even to be asked to purchase a book is of the very rarest occurrence—it has ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... prosperity. The unscrupulous man amasses wealth, lives in luxury and splendor, and dies in the odor of respectability. His poor and honest neighbor, whom he has wronged and defrauded, lives in misery, and dies in disappointment and penury. The novelist cannot reverse the facts without such a shock to our experience as shall destroy for us the artistic value of his fiction, and bring upon his work the deserved reproach of indiscriminately "rewarding the good and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... could not readily be brought down to the minute distinctions of every day family conversation. This may arise, however, from a principle adverted to by Dr. Johnson, in speaking of the ancient languages, in which he says "nothing is familiar," and by the use of which "the writer conceals penury of thought and want of novelty, often from the reader, and often from himself." The Indian certainly has a very pompous way of expressing a common thought. He sets about it with an array of prefix and suffix, and polysyllabic strength, as if he were about ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... curiosity of being personally acquainted with the French king, he cheerfully adjusted all the preliminaries of this interview. The nobility of both nations vied with each other in pomp and expense: many of them involved themselves in great debts, and were not able, by the penury of their whole lives, to repair the vain splendor of a few days. The duke of Buckingham, who, though very rich, was somewhat addicted to frugality, finding his preparations for this festival amount to immense sums, threw out some expressions ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... to nursing the wounded, the sick, and the dying, of whom the numbers were overwhelming. Among the sufferers were men of quality and once opulent citizens, who had been reduced in a moment to absolute penury. The kitchens of the royal palace, which fortunately remained standing, were used for the purpose of preparing food for the starving multitudes. It is said that during the first two or three days a pound of bread was worth an ounce of gold. One of the first measures of the ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... whose love increased with his possession. But Sylvia longs for liberty, and those necessary gallantries, which every day diminished; she loved rich clothes, gay coaches, and to be lavish; and now she was stinted to good housewifery, a penury she hated. ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... of an old noble family; grand-nephew of the succeeding, but renounced his title and devoted his life and all his means of living to the promotion of his Socialist scheme, reducing himself in the end to utter penury; he made few disciples, though some of them were men of distinction; he is credited by Carlyle with having discovered, "not without amazement, that man is still man, of which forgotten truth," he bids us remark, "he ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... rugged stone when Phidias gives— Beneath his touch a new creation lives. Remove his marble, and his genius dies: With nature then no breathing statue vies. Whate'er I plan, I feel my pow'rs confin'd By fortune's frown, and penury of mind. I boast no knowledge, glean'd with toil and strife, That bright reward of a well acted life. I view myself, while reason's feeble light Shoots a pale glimmer through the gloom of night; While passions, error, phantoms of the brain, And vain ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... gunners were drifting daily into the hospital and the cemetery.... The national debt was increasing in a fabulous manner, and recourse was had to the mediaeval remedy of debasing the currency, while even at that moment the troops had more than a year's pay in arrear, and absolute penury was augmenting ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... Then he and his brother were sent to St. Andrew's, where he got his B.A. at nineteen. The next summer he went to France once more; and "fell," he says, "into the flames of the Lutheran sect, which was then spreading far and wide." Two years of penury followed; and then three years of schoolmastering in the College of St. Barbe, which he has immortalised—at least for the few who care to read modern Latin poetry—in his elegy on 'The Miseries of a Parisian Teacher of the Humanities.' The wretched ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... cottage that was her own. She became the mother of a pretty little babe, a girl, and on the day of her confinement there appeared unto her an angel, who said to her:—'Bear in mind thy marriage, and the time of penury thou didst go through. The child that has just been born unto thee will I take under my protection. When she will have grown up and be a fine lass, give her but to him who will build her up a temple, where ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... grown once more vehement and passionate, from the sense of wrong; remorse still visits him, but is alternated with the yet more human feeling of resentment at the unjust severity of his doom [350]. His sons, who, "by a word," might have saved him from the expulsion, penury, and wanderings he has undergone, had deserted his cause—had looked with indifferent eyes on his awful woes—had joined with Creon to expel him from the Theban land. They are the Goneril and Regan of the classic Lear, as Antigone is the Cordelia on whom he leans—a Cordelia ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... then consider their Christian thoughtlessness for the morrow, how superb and spiritual it is! How different from the things after which the Gentiles of the commercial classes seek! On a Bank Holiday I have known a mother and a daughter, hanging over the very abyss of penury, to spend two shillings in having their fortunes told. Could the lilies of the field or Solomon in all his glory have shown a finer ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... Whittington. In his own words: 'The fervent desire and busy intention of a prudent, wise, and devout man, should be to cast before and make secure the state and the end of this short life with deeds of mercy and pity, and especially to provide for those miserable persons whom the penury of poverty insulteth, and to whom the power of seeking the necessaries of life by act ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... head on a canvas. The price offered was such that Morewood could not refuse; but he had in the course of the sitting greatly annoyed Claudia by mentioning incidentally that her face did not interest him and was, in fact, such a face as he would never have painted but for the pressure of penury. ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... Allah hath eased our poverty." But when she saw that mighty fine silvern tray she fell to marvelling at the matter and Quoth she, "O my son, who be this generous, this beneficent one who hath abated our hunger-pains and our penury? We are indeed under obligation to him and, meseemeth, 'tis the Sultan who, hearing of our mean condition and our misery, hath sent us this food tray." Quoth he, "O my mother, this be no time for questioning: ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... playfully deprived of the means of an honest support. Efficient and experienced men were taken from almost all the city departments, and cast without occupation upon the world. Men who had toiled in the city's service, for years, for a bare livelihood, were suddenly cast forth to want and penury. It was in the season of a terrible epidemic, and physicians who had braved pestilence and death, heaped together in the great hospitals of the city—who had made a home of the lazar-house, when to breathe its atmosphere ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... everything to her less opulent daughter. My compassion for the Limberts led me to hover perhaps indiscreetly round that closing scene, to dream of some happy time when such an accession of means would make up a little for their present penury. ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... in an aristocratic age, in the midst of a nation where the hereditary wealth of some, and the irremediable penury of others, should equally divert men from the idea of bettering their condition, and hold the soul as it were in a state of torpor fixed on the contemplation of another world, I should then wish that it were possible ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... suggestions of visits to be paid to Ashley and herself, with introductions to a greater world—he swept them aside. He quite understood that she was offering him the two mites that make a farthing out of the penury of her resources, and, while he was touched by the attempt to pay him, ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... where beautiful; and tho' he has been ridiculed in the Treatise of the Bathos, published in Pope's works, for being too minute in his descriptions of the objects of nature; yet it rather proceeded from a philosophical exactness, than a penury of genius. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... indigence, penury, pauperism, destitution, want; need, neediness; lack, necessity, privation, distress, difficulties, wolf at the door. bad circumstances, poor circumstances, need circumstances, embarrassed circumstances, reduced circumstances, straightened circumstances; slender means, narrow means; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... enabled a few rich and privileged to live in affluence at the expense of the impoverished many. This juxtaposition of riches and poverty is the logical outcome of a system of social relations designed to provide the few with comfort and luxury while the many are forced to accept penury and hardship. Exploitation, carried to its logical conclusion, permits and requires a parasitic minority to live in abundance while the majority must content itself with scarcity, extending to ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... woe Which bursts when Nature's feelings newly flow; Yet tenderness and time may rob the tear Of half its bitterness for one so dear: A nation's gratitude perchance may spread A thornless pillow for the widow'd head; May lighten well her heart's maternal care, And wean from penury the soldier's heir." ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... blooms again After a night of rain. There are complacent widows clothed in crepe Who simulate a grief that is not real. Through paths of seeming sorrow they escape From disappointed hopes to some ideal, Or, from the penury of unloved wives Walk forth to opulent lives. And there are widows who shed all their tears Just at the first In one wild burst, And then go lilting lightly down the years: Black butterflies, they flit from flower to flower And live in the thin pleasures of the hour; Merging ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... besides the visible signs which we have mentioned, another symptom which was none the less significant for not being visible. This never deceives. When the population suffers, when work is lacking, when there is no commerce, the tax-payer resists imposts through penury, he exhausts and oversteps his respite, and the state expends a great deal of money in the charges for compelling and collection. When work is abundant, when the country is rich and happy, the taxes are paid easily and cost the state nothing. It may be said, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... of a London boarding-house in the neighborhood of Russell Square—one of those grim shelters, the refuge of Transatlantic curiosity and British penury. The girl—she represented the former race was leaning against the frail palisading, with gloomy expression and eyes set as though in fixed contemplation of the uninspiring panorama. The young man—unmistakably, uncompromisingly English—stood with his back to the chimney a ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "must be freed of ignorance, insobriety, penury, and the tyranny of man over man." That ought not to require more than three or ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... than to live again our stormy and tempestuous lives. Few would re-embark at the cradle, suffer the pains of childhood, the hurts which the feelings of youth get, the pangs of love, the shock of loneliness coming from the departure of those we cling to, the vicissitudes of fortune, the stings of penury, the journeys into the lands of strangers, the flight of summer friends, the alienation of children, and the fevers and the wounds which human nature crosses on its way to the kind haven of a good old age. Jesus stands near. When death ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... too, the same ill-fortune that had hitherto dogged his steps attended him. The lawsuit which he instituted, though it promised well at first, proved a will-o'-the-wisp, which lured him into the bog of absolute penury. His sister was dead; his mother's relatives, formerly hostile, were now, because of the lawsuit, doubly embittered against him. In his distress he sought refuge in the Benedictine monastery of Monte Oliveto, which is now occupied by the offices of ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... The woe of this would flame up in Ona sometimes—at night she would suddenly clasp her big husband in her arms and break into passionate weeping, demanding to know if he really loved her. Poor Jurgis, who had in truth grown more matter-of-fact, under the endless pressure of penury, would not know what to make of these things, and could only try to recollect when he had last been cross; and so Ona would have to forgive him and sob ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... many of us have the desire to be of service to others but timidity holds us back. Say, for instance, one might see a person in great distress and because of diffidence withhold the proffered hand—someone we've known who comes to the point of penury but has too much pride to ask assistance—we pass by fearful that we might offend. How many times has this happened to us? Who knows but the best friend we have at this very moment would give anything in the world if his pride would let him ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... the tenants of the almshouse whose descriptions follow, are all avowedly, like most other characters in Crabbe, drawn from life. The pious founder, being left without wife or children, lives in apparent penury, but while driving all beggars from his door, devotes his wealth to secret acts of helpfulness to all ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... met them. They exhorted their brothers, husbands, and sons to an unshrinking endurance in behalf of their country, and cheerfully became the inmates of their prison and the companions of their exile—voluntarily renouncing affluence and ease and encountering labor, penury, and privation. ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... reputation would perish. He never allowed himself to show a tremor, and he won. Poor Edwards toiled on, in spite of hunger, poverty, and chill despair; he received one knock-down blow after another with cheery gallantry, and old age had clutched him before his relief from grinding penury came; but nothing could daunt him, and he is now secure. Heine lay for seven years in his "mattress grave;" he was torn from head to foot by the pangs of neuralgia; one of his eyes was closed, and at times the lid of the other had to be raised ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Spirit being limited to the pulpit or the platform, or to the inward experiences of the religious life, He is just as truly and properly concerned with the affairs of the shop and the street, the nursery and the kitchen, the chamber of suffering and the home of penury, as with preaching the Gospel ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... Mee thinks I flee, yet want I legs to goe, Wise in conceite, in acte a very sot; Rauisht with ioy amidst a hell of woe, What most I seeme, that surest I am not. I build my hopes a world aboue the skye, Yet with a Mole I creepe into the earth: In plenty am I staru'd with penury, And yet I serfet in the greatest dearth. I haue, I want, dispayre, and yet desire, Burn'd in a Sea of Ice, and ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... world as London it will surprise my readers that I should not have found some means of starving off the last extremities, of penury; and it will strike them that two resources at least must have been open to me—viz., either to seek assistance from the friends of my family, or to turn my youthful talents and attainments into some channel of pecuniary ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... his undoing. I refer to his uncontrollable desire to contradict and to antagonize. It was simply impossible to find a subject upon which he and anyone else could agree. There were, however, extenuating circumstances. "Chill penury," forced upon him by the state of his financial affairs, had much to do with his cynical and acrimonious spirit. Prosperity is certainly conducive to an amiable bearing, and I believe that Gurowski ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... reward? In all the books of fate There is no page so pitiful as this— A cruel dungeon, and a monarch's hate, And penury and calumny were his; Robbed of his honors in his feeble age, Despoiled of glory, the old Genoese Withdrew at length from life's ungrateful stage, To try the ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... a garlic patch, denotes a rise from penury to prominence and wealth. To a young woman, this denotes that she will marry from a sense of business, and love ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... property Sir Richard Cludde died—of gout and other diseases, said Mr. Pinhorn; Mistress Vetch said of rage. His estate had been much impoverished, and his widow was now left almost penniless. She was my father's sister, and, my own lot being happy, I could not endure to think of her in penury and distress. So I made her a small allowance through Mr. Vetch (and I can vouch for it this was a secret his wife never knew)—sufficient to keep her from want. She never saw me, made me no acknowledgment, and to the day of her death maintained, in the little ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... the lust of gold shall here annoy, Enslave the nation and its nerve destroy. No useles mine these northern hills enclose, No ruby ripens and no diamond glows; But richer stores and rocks of useful mould Repay in wealth the penury of gold. Freedom's unconquer'd race, with healthy toil, Shall lop the grove and warm the furrow'd soil, From iron ridges break the rugged ore, And plant with men the man-ennobling shore; Sails, villas, towers and temples round them heave, Shine o'er the realms and light ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... it! Who is to pay your debts? You know how your gambling on the turf has ruined us—brought us to the very verge of disgrace and penury, and now, when you can help to set the old name straight again, you refuse—refuse!" ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... of their race and surroundings the peasantry of Cumberland and Westmoreland form an attractive theme. Drawn in great part from the strong Scandinavian stock, they dwell in a land solemn and beautiful as Norway itself, but without Norway's rigour and penury, and with still lakes and happy rivers instead of Norway's inarming melancholy sea. They are a mountain folk; but their mountains are no precipices of insuperable snow, such as keep the dwellers in some Swiss hamlet shut in ignorance and stagnating into idiocy. These barriers divide ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... morning, that whichever company I advised him, or he persisted in thinking I had advised him (which was the same thing), to invest in, would, sooner or later, come to smash. My grandmother had all her little fortune in the Terra del Fuego Nitrate Company. I could not see her brought to penury in her old age. As for Josiah, it could make no difference to him whatever. He would lose his money in any event. I advised him to invest in Union Pacific Bank Shares. He ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... too much in love with the wages of iniquity. They have too long turned a deaf ear to the pitiful cries of the widow and orphan whose ruin they have effected, whose natural protector they may have robbed, leaving his injured family in penury and want. Some of these, who were comparatively poor at the time of the colonel's downfall, in 1832, have since become rich. There is reason to fear that such sudden wealth, obtained without any visible means, was not very honourably acquired. It is seldom that honest industry will thus accumulate. ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... to get the fat and brains out of them: Thus the frequent and extraordinary Slaughter of their Sheep above a Hundred Thousand Head of Cattel were destroy'd. And upon this Account the Region was reduced to great penury and want, and at length perished with Hunger. Nay the Province of Quito, which abounded with Corn beyond Expression, by such proceedings as these, was brought to that Extremity that a Sextarie or small Measure or Wheat was sold for Ten ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... of comfortable living, as already hinted, has been greatly raised, and is still rising. What would have satisfied the ancient would seem to us like penury. We have a domestic life of which the Greek knew nothing. We live during a large part of the year in the house. Our social life goes on under the roof. Our houses are not mere places for eating and sleeping, like the houses of the ancients. It therefore costs ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... rank communism. The working of economic laws can be as infallibly projected as a solar eclipse. You can secure no class from periodic calamity, and so regulate laws of supply and demand by guiding-wheels of legislation and taxation as to save every man from penury. You wish us to send away our bone and sinew because we have no present employment for it, and next year, or the year after, under a recovered trade you will be wringing your hands and cursing the folly that prompted you ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... is unbecoming the character of a critic to lay himself out in general and vague declamation. It is also within the laws of possibility, that an incurious or unpoetical humour in some of our readers, and (ah me, the luckless day!) penury in others, may have occasioned their turning over the drowsy pages of the review, before they have perused the original work. Some account of the plan, and a specimen of the execution may therefore ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... of the government, the revolutions of public affairs, the plenty or penury in which people live, the situation of the nation with regard to its neighbours, ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... Macleod, to call out the clan in her husband's absence. Subsequently, when that Earl and his son were confined in the Tower of London for the part which they took on her advice, and when the Countess with ten children, and bearing another, were suffering the severest hardships and penury, the Rev. Colin, at great risk to himself and the interests of his family, collected the rents from the Cromarty tenants, giving his own receipt against their being required to pay again to the Forfeited ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, 20 penury, and useless labor, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.—This ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... you an instance. About this time Paris was in the grip of a gang of dog-thieves as unscrupulous and heartless as they were daring. Can you wonder at it? with that awful penury about and a number of expensive "tou-tous" running about the streets under the very noses of the indigent proletariat? The ladies of the aristocracy and of the wealthy bourgeoisie had imbibed this craze for lap-dogs during their ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... expectation, whilst the effect is at a distance, and may be the concern of other times and other men. On these principles, he chooses to suppose (for he does not pretend more than to suppose) a naked possibility that he shall draw some resource out of crumbs dropped from the trenchers of penury; that something shall be laid in store from the short allowance of revenue-officers overloaded with duty and famished for want of bread,—by a reduction from officers who are at this very hour ready to batter the Treasury ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... descendants of a family whom, a hundred and fifty years ago, persecution scattered through the world, in emigration and exile; in changes of religion, fortune and name. For this family—what grandeur, what reverses, what obscurity, what lustre, what penury, what glory! How many crimes sullied, how many virtues honored it! The history of this single family is the history of humanity! Passing through many generations, throbbing in the veins of the poor and the rich, the sovereign ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Daemon to whose suggestions Socrates is said to have listened anything more was meant than conscience, we must infer that he laboured under that mental malady to which those are liable who, either through penury or designedly, submit to extreme abstinence, and, thereby injuring the brain, fall into hallucination. Such cases are by no means of infrequent occurrence. Mohammed was affected in ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... to separate from the scenes of their youth; but the secret understanding with the solicitor required that sacrifice. By staying at home a still greater might be called for,—subsistence in penury, and, worse than all, in a humiliating position; for, notwithstanding the open house long kept by their father, his friends had disappeared with his guests. Impelled by these thoughts, the brothers resolved to go forth into the wide world, and seek fortune wherever it seemed most ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... if indeed our end must be more tame, Let large well-mounted photographs be made Of this high gathering, and let each name Beneath each face be generously displayed, That I may say, when penury has crept Too near for decency, to some old snob, "That was the kind of company I kept When England needed ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... the East. This is proved by a letter that he wrote to Decres, Minister of Marine and of the Colonies, from Bayonne on May 17th, 1808, when the Spanish affair seemed settled: "There is not much news from India. England is in great penury there, and the arrival of an expedition [from France] would ruin that colony from top to bottom. The more I reflect on this step, the less inconvenience I see in taking it." Two days later he wrote to Murat that money ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... not to recognise the true meaning of that dreadful disclosure! Arthur was not angry with him—he felt too fully at that moment what depths of genuine silent hardship uncomplainingly endured were implied in the stoically calm frame of mind which could treat Edie Le Breton's penury of luxuries as a comparatively slight matter: after all, his father was right at bottom; such mere sentimental middle-class poverty is as nothing to the privations of the really poor; yet he could not help feeling a little disappointed for all that. He wanted sympathy ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... anarchy. The kingly tyrant, with golden crown and iron sceptre, surrounded by wealthy nobles and dissolute beauties, had disappeared, and a many-headed monster, rapacious and blood-thirsty, vulgar and revolting, had emerged from mines and workshops and the cellars of vice and penury, like one of the spectres of fairy tales to fill his place. France had passed from Monarchy, not to healthy Republicanism, but to Jacobinism, to the reign of the mob. Napoleon utterly abhorred the tyranny of the king. He also utterly abhorred ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... south and north, and of these the most either rich in gold or in other merchandises. The common soldier shall here fight for gold, and pay himself, instead of pence, with plates of half-a-foot broad, whereas he breaketh his bones in other wars for provant and penury. Those commanders and chieftains that shoot at honour and abundance shall find there more rich and beautiful cities, more temples adorned with golden images, more sepulchres filled with treasure, than either Cortes found in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru. And the ...
— The Discovery of Guiana • Sir Walter Raleigh
... Consul ordered that the greatest magnificence should be displayed. "It is necessary," he had said the evening before, "to show these proud Britons that we are not reduced to beggary." The fact is, the English, before setting foot on the French continent, had expected to find only ruins, penury, and misery. The whole of France had been described to them as being in the most distressing condition, and they thought themselves on the point of landing in a barbarous country. Their surprise was great when they saw how many evils ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... was ten years old, and am happy to be able to say that he is going to dine with me one day this week. I hope I may not injure his character by stating that in those days I lived very much with him. He, too, was impecunious, but he had a home in London, and knew but little of the sort of penury which I endured. For more than fifty years he and I have been close friends. And then there was one W—— A——, whose misfortunes in life will not permit me to give his full name, but whom I dearly loved. ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... hundred hostages of Rome's noblest blood who had been sent to Pavia, thereby almost destroying its patricians. These were the parting tokens of Gothic affection for Italy. Then Belisarius, attempting to relieve Rome with inadequate forces, which was all that the penury of Justinian allowed him, was the means of prolonging the famine, while he did not save the city from capture. Lastly, Narses, sent to finish the war, enrolled in Dalmatia an army of adventurers. Huns, Lombards, Herules, Gepids, Greeks, and even Persians, in figure, language, arms, and customs utterly ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... finds a dangler, or a dozen danglers, who, having nothing on earth to do, and in their penury rejoiced to find any spot where they can kill an hour, and get a cup of coffee, are daily at her command. All those fellows, too, are counts; the title being about as common, and as cheap, as chimney-sweepers among us, though not belonging ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... naked, in the coldest weather; sufferings, almost without a parallel, were borne with patience and resignation. Despair there might be in the hearts of thousands, but those thousands were mute and passive in their misery; all was dark, all was hopeless; the wintry wind of penury blew untempered, keen upon them, but still they cried not; hunger preyed upon their very vitals, but they uttered no complaint. Let us not, even now, refuse a passing tribute of honour and respect to the passive heroism which in many an instance marked the endurance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... and vanity of her husband are both exhausted, though I believe they are inexhaustible," remarked Mr. Cantacuzene, "it will be a nest's-egg for them to fall back upon, and at least save them from penury." The duke had no doubt that Mr. Cantacuzene was of imperial lineage. But the latter portion of the letter was the most deeply interesting to Lothair. Bertram wrote that his mother had just observed ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... own misfortunes on the back Of such as have before endur'd the like. Thus play I in one person many people, And none contented: sometimes am I king; Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar, And so I am: then crushing penury Persuades me I was better when a king; Then am I king'd again; and by and by Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke, And straight am nothing: but whate'er I be, Nor I, nor any man that but man is With nothing shall ...
— The Tragedy of King Richard II • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... prolonged disappointment that followed it, he became sensible of a strange kind of happiness or contentment. Alice was not in poverty, she was not eating the unhallowed bread of vice, or earning the bitter wages of laborious penury. He saw her in reputable, nay, opulent circumstances. A dark nightmare, that had often, amidst the pleasures of youth, or the triumphs of literature, weighed upon his breast, was removed. He breathed more freely—he could sleep ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sufficed to show me my mistake. My scanty purse was exhausted, and for the first time in my life I experienced the sordid distress of penury. I had never known the want of money, and had never adverted to the possibility of such an evil. I was ignorant of the world and all its ways; and when first the idea of destitution came over my mind its ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... since the scandal of his mother's elopement and his father's duel with Sir Charles shook two continents. What an old rake the General was. And the boy's mother after two other marriages and a sad period on the variety stage died alone in penury! And Amos says that the General was so insolent to his men in the war, that he dared not go into action with them for fear they would shoot him in the back. Yet the boy is as lovely and gentle a creature as one could ask to meet. This is as it ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... all over the room made little sounds of pitying deprecation of old Isom's penury, and when Hammer drew from her, with evident reluctance on her part to yield it up, the story of her hard-driven, starved, and stingy life under Isom's roof, they put their ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... Chacon was sent home to Spain to be tried by a court-martial; honourably acquitted; and then, by French Republican intrigues, calumniated, memorialised against, subscribed against, and hunted (Buonaparte having, with his usual meanness, a hand in the persecution) into exile and penury in Portugal. At last his case was heard a second time, and tardy justice done, not by popular clamour, but by fair and deliberate law. His nephew set out to bring the good man home in triumph. He found him dying in a wretched Portuguese ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... letter from him in the colonnade of the cathedral. On this night, each week, the messenger waited. Sometimes there was a letter, sometimes none. That was all. It was amazingly simple, and for it one received the difference between penury ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Mind, it would be better than it is with a good many People who deserve better, that are now in extreme Want; and on the other Hand, many of those pamper'd Carcases would be brought down, who deserve to be taught Sobriety and Modesty by Penury. ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... physicians remaining in the city, nine fell a sacrifice to duty. Amongst those who survived was the learned Dr. Nathaniel Hodges, who was spared to meet a philanthropist's fate in penury and neglect. [Dr. Hodges subsequently wrote a work entitled "Loimologia; or, an Historical Account of the Plague of London," first published in 1672; of which, together with a collection of the ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... and hands and hair were old, But neither time nor penury Could quench within Llewellyn's eyes The shine ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... pressure, and would possibly free him from debt altogether. But neither he nor his creditors can lay a finger upon the pictures, nor raise a centime upon them. This man, therefore, is permanently reduced to penury, and his creditors are large losers, while he is still de jure and de facto the owner of property probably sufficient to cover all his obligations. Fortunately, he chances to be childless, a fact consoling, ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... duke might have filled his coffers by pillaging travellers, as many of his neighbors did; but he scorned to thrive by robbery, and lived in grandiose but honest penury. ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... cresting the bald summits of the mountains, or checkering the green slopes and valleys which lay between them. Its simple inhabitants, locked up within the lonely recesses of their hills, and accustomed to a life of penury and toil, had escaped the corruptions as well as refinements of civilization. In ancient times they had afforded a hardy militia for the princes of Granada; and they now exhibited an unshaken attachment to their ancient institutions and religion, which had been somewhat ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... point there can be no controversy; the poetry of Burns has had most powerful influence in reviving and strengthening the national feelings of his countrymen. Amidst penury and labour his youth fed on the old minstrelsy and traditional glories of his nation, and his genius divined that what he felt so deeply must belong to a spirit that might lie smothered around him, but could ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... becomes the practiced truant. In a few years he arrives at manhood; but, instead of being a blessing to his family and a useful member of society, he too frequently drags out a wretched life, in ignorance and penury, dividing it between the poor-house and jail, and terminating it, peradventure, upon ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... the man who with the sound of song Can charm away the heartache, and forget The frost of Penury, and the stings of Wrong, And drown the fatal whisper of Regret! Darker are the abodes Of Kings, though his be poor, While Fancies, like the Gods, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... away feeling sick at heart, and directed my vagrant steps towards home. All the pomp and glory of the world's wealth were dimmed and darkened before my eyes by this huge black shadow of penury and suffering, that had darted across my way at that moment. If such thoughts as these could be ever with us, if such vivid reminders of the shallowness and vanity of earth's transient splendors would ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... such aggravations as hunger, beggary, and external wretchedness? These were an inevitable consequence. It was by the desertion of mankind that, in each successive instance, I was made acquainted with my fate. Delay in such a moment served but to increase the evil; and when I fled, meagreness and penury were the ordinary attendants of my course. But this was a small consideration. Indignation at one time, and unconquerable perseverance at another, sustained me, where humanity, left to ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... translations from Plutarch and Lucian, Chrysostom and Basil. But this was not enough. He was free in his tastes, and liked to be free in his spending. He needed a horse to ride, and a boy to attend upon him. In consequence we hear a good many complaints of penury, all through his three years at Cambridge, 1511 ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... killed more than a hundred thousand head of animals, which reduced the country to very great want, while the natives died of starvation in great numbers. Although there was more maize in Quito than can be told, this bad order of things brought such penury on the people that a measure of maize came to cost ten pesos, and a sheep the same. 7. When the said captain returned from the coast, he determined to leave Quito, to go in search of Captain Juan de ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt |
