"Vulnerable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pierced him very sharply, had been wont to compare his condition to St. Paul's, and to wonder whether the pricks inflicted on that holy man could have bled as his own did. He meant no irreverence when he thought this; neither do I in writing it. We are generally wounded in the most vulnerable spot about us, and Jabez Gum made no exception to the rule. He had been assailed in his cherished respectability, his self-esteem. Assailed and scarred. How broad and deep the scar was Jabez never told the world, which as ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... armor is usually placed at the water line because it is this part of the ship which is the most vulnerable and open to attack and where a shell or projectile would do the most harm. If a hole were torn in the side at this place the vessel would quickly take in water and sink. On this account the armor is made thick and is known as the water-line belt. At the point where the protective ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... that the spear took it about a foot below the overhanging armor of the great back shell, and I could see that it penetrated some distance into the creature, the man having, by the aid of Providence, stricken it in a vulnerable part. Upon receiving this thrust, the mighty crab ceased at once its pursuit, and clipped at the haft of the spear with its great mandible, snapping the weapon more easily than I had done the same thing to a straw. ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... provided with a calabash or gourd of the bread-fruit tree, dips water up and pours it over himself after he has first examined it carefully. The indigenous Indians, living in the remote parts of the forest, do not use this mode of protection, but cover the vulnerable portions of the body carefully with strips of bark, which render complete immersion ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... against him that may never be crushed; for in the fields of logic one can skirmish, perhaps, as well as he. Had he confined himself to dogmatism, he would have intrenched his position in darkness, and have hidden his own vulnerable points. But coming down to base reasons he lets in light, and one sees where to plant the blows. Now, the worshipful reason of modern France for disturbing the old received spelling is that Jean Hordal, a descendant of La Pucelle's brother, spelled the name Darc in 1612. But what ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... north of the city, and broadening into the East River, about a mile wide where it separates New York from Brooklyn Heights, on Long Island. Encamped on Staten Island, on the south, General Howe could, with the aid of the fleet, land at any of half a dozen vulnerable points. Howe had the further advantage of a much larger force. Washington had in all some twenty thousand men, numbers of them serving for short terms and therefore for the most part badly drilled. Howe had twenty-five thousand ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... when all communication was cut off and the twin lenses of the telestereos and the microphones were dead. Prince Joro had told her, with weary cynicism. But Joro had also told her that the oligarchs guarded this vital and vulnerable point with ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... there had not been a woman, after all. That had been a mistake. A bad mistake, for it had killed his wife. But a lucky mistake for them! For it had delivered into their hands the secret of an actual and even more vulnerable place to attack. ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... this case. Here's my plan: I want to hit the German in a vulnerable and not a vital spot. I don't want her to sink, but I do want to damage her so badly that the crew will abandon her. Then I can go aboard and get ...
— The Boy Allies with Uncle Sams Cruisers • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... that the blow is full upon my sore place. 'Tis on the side I could be the most easily penetrated. But Achilles could be touched only in his heel; and if he was to die by an enemy's hands, must not the arrow find out that only vulnerable place? My jealousy is that place with me, as your ladyship observes; but it is seated deeper than the heel: it is in my heart. The barbed dart has found that out, and there it sticks up to ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... inclination, determined him, after due deliberation, to cut out Mr Escot in the young lady's favour. The practicability of this design he did not trouble himself to investigate; for the havoc he had made in the hearts of some silly girls, who were extremely vulnerable to flattery, and who, not understanding a word he said, considered him a prodigious clever man, had impressed him with an unhesitating idea of his own irresistibility. He had not only the requisites already specified for fascinating female vanity, ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... decide to join Germany she would starve. It would be deliberate suicide. The French and Italian fleets are at Malta, less than a day distant; the English fleet is off the Gallipoli peninsula. Fifteen hours' steaming could bring it to Salonika. Greece is especially vulnerable from the sea. She is all islands, coast towns, and seaports. The German navy could not help her. It will not leave the Kiel Canal. The Austrian navy cannot leave the Adriatic. Should Greece decide against the Allies, their combined war-ships would pick ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... man asked him what he should do to be the most illustrious person on earth, he told him the readiest way was to kill him who was already so; and that to incite him to commit the deed, he bade him not be awed by the golden couch, but remember Alexander was a man equally infirm and vulnerable as another. However, none of Hermolaus's accomplices, in the utmost extremity, made any mention of Callisthenes's being engaged in the design. Nay, Alexander himself, in the letters which he wrote soon after to Craterus, Attalus, and Alcetas, tells them that the young men ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... with Palmerston's answers the other night, but they have an extraordinary reluctance to provoke any discussion on foreign affairs, though he is so vulnerable on all points. It is, however, highly probable that the matter will not be suffered to rest here. In such a manner does one bold, unscrupulous, and able man predominate over his colleagues, one of whom is John Russell, not less bold at ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... for this was a wound in his one vulnerable point, his pride of birth. The cigarette dropped to the floor unheeded. He moistened his lips ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... seeming contradiction. The resulting conviction he firmly established in his heart, regardless of temptations, by fervent prayer. With this procedure he was sometimes bound to reach conclusions which seemed, even to ordinary human understanding, vulnerable. When, for instance, in the year 1522, he undertook, from the Scriptures, to put matrimony on a new moral basis, reason and the needs of the people were certainly on his side when he subjected to severe criticism the eighteen grounds of the Ecclesiastical Law for forbidding and annulling marriages ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... having slain the Amazon Penthesileia and Memnon, king of the Aethiopians, who had come to the assistance of the Trojans, was himself slain by Paris (Alexander), whose arrow was guided by Apollo to his vulnerable heel (Virgil, Aen. vi. 57; Ovid, Met. xii. 600). Again, it is said that Achilles, enamoured of Polyxena, the daughter of Priam, offered to join the Trojans on condition that he received her hand in marriage. This was agreed to; Achilles went unarmed to the temple of Apollo Thymbraeus, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of the heroic age may be handled in this comedy, the form of heroic narrative comes out unscathed. There is nothing for the comic spirit to fix upon in the form of the Sagas. The Icelandic heroes may be vulnerable, but Comedy cannot take advantage of them except by using the general form of heroic narrative in Iceland, a form which proves itself equally capable of Tragedy and Comedy. And as the more serious Icelandic histories are comprehensive ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... given to the tendon of the leg above the heel, so called as being the tendon by which Thetis held Achilles when she dipped him in the Styx, and where alone he was in consequence vulnerable. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Madigan warfare to aid and comfort the enemy. When Sissy, chastened, returned to Bep's ministrations, the blonde one of the twins was so hurt and offended by the implication of awkwardness—a point upon which she was as vulnerable as she was sensitive—that Sissy slapped them both before she went at last ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... said that he cannot steal; yet he is capable of stealing should he so elect. His honesty is an armor against temptation; but the coat of mail, the helmet, the breastplate, and the greaves, are but an outward covering; the man within may be vulnerable if he ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... coach was sent for, the handsomest in the town. The good lady prepared the speech she was going to make to Monsieur Godeau; Julie tried to teach her how she was to touch the heart of her father, and did not hesitate to confess that love of rank was his vulnerable point. ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... hashish; many narcotics-processing labs throughout the country; drug trade source of instability and some antigovernment groups profit from the trade; 80-90% of the heroin consumed in Europe comes from Afghan opium; vulnerable to narcotics money laundering through informal ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... recollect and ponder it across the centuries. It is easy, most easy, to kill a strong, live, breathing man with so crude a weapon as a piece of steel. Why, men are like soft-shell crabs, so tender, frail, and vulnerable are they. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... remember you are vulnerable, as well as we," Carolyn remarked in a sorry imitation of her original cocksureness, as she opened the play by ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... these waters is the chief drawback to the pleasures of boating, and many an ill-fated oarsman pays the forfeit of life or limb for his temerity in venturing out too far. The nose of the shark is his most vulnerable part; and the natives, who eat this sea-monster as willingly as he eats them, often inflict a fatal wound by slinging a huge stone at his nose and battering it to a jelly as he rises out of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... which surrounded that fell personage, shot them with arrows as they struck at him, and having thus reached the lodge of his enemy he engaged him in combat. All day long they battled to no purpose, but toward evening a woodpecker flew overhead and cried, "Your enemy has but one vulnerable point. Shoot at his scalp-lock." Hiawatha did so and his foe fell dead. Anointing his finger with the blood of his foe, he touched the bird, and the red mark is found on the head of every woodpecker to this day. A duck having ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... and that the grand conflict with Austria should be transferred to Italy. Germany was a nation of armed men, and was best let alone. In Italy, the Austrians would have only their own resources for war. Their most vulnerable point was the outlying principality of Belgium, so distant from Vienna and so near ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... of the Ideal involves so much emotion as to render the Idealist vulnerable by human passion, however long and well guarded, still vulnerable,—liable, at last, to a union with Instinct. Passion obscures both Insight and Forecast. All effort to elevate Instinct to Idealism is abortive, the ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... struggle, the Church favors the party which favors it, the effect of which is to expose it to ill-will and, in case of political defeat, to hostilities. Now, the chances are, that, should hostile rulers, in this case, attempt to strike it in its most vulnerable point, that of teaching, they might set aside liberty, and even toleration, and adopt the school machine of Napoleon in order to restore it as best they could, enlarge it, derive from it for their own profit and against the Church, whatever could ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... invincible by the brilliant rhetorician, and the eloquence and ingenuity of De Maistre and Schlegel would be of no avail against researches pursued with perfect mastery of science and singleness of purpose. The apologist's armour would be vulnerable at the point where his religion and his science were forced into artificial union. Again, as science widens and deepens, it escapes from the grasp of dilettantism. Such knowledge as existed formerly could be borrowed, or superficially acquired, by men whose lives were not devoted to its pursuit, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... and pin a bandanna handkerchief around my neck, besides buttoning up my coat collar. Even then I shivered. But would you believe it? The mosquitoes were as lively and active as if a balmy breeze were blowing from Arcady, puncturing me wherever they could find a vulnerable spot, and even thrusting their sabres through my thick woollen gloves into the flesh. They must be extremely hardy insects, for I am sure such arctic weather would send the mosquitoes of our lower altitudes ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... cheered by their victory. They reloaded their weapons and waited, keeping an eye on all vulnerable spots. ...
— The Camp in the Snow - Besiedged by Danger • William Murray Graydon
... she had attacked him in his most vulnerable spot, namely, his horror of scandal, of anything which would besmirch the name of which he was so inordinately proud. This pride was at once his strength and ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... only by experience and by the applied study of the campaigns of all the great captains. Gustavus, Turenne, and Frederick, as well as Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar, have all acted on the same principles. To keep one's forces together, to bear speedily on any point, to be nowhere vulnerable,—such are the principles that ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... He takes his work seriously, but, unlike most war correspondents, not himself. After some interesting freight-car adventures of his own planning, he reached the Grosser Hauptquartier, a small city on the Meuse, where at that time the brain of the German fighting machine was located. This most vulnerable spot of the entire German Empire was, paradoxically, in France. The Kaiser, the King of Saxony, the Crown Prince of Germany, and Field Marshal von Moltke were here holding council of war. It was therefore of utmost importance to conceal the locality. Neutral correspondents were ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... they were jointed in the chairs, which were generally carried on stone blocks, thus affording most excellent anvils for the battering to pieces of the ends of the rails—that is to say, for the destruction of the very parts where they were most vulnerable. The engines were not competent to draw heavy trains, and it was a common practice to have at the foot of an incline a shed containing a "bank engine," which ran out after the trains as they passed, and pushed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... Here Maximilian established himself in a friar's lonely cell. On the north a small river skirted the town, on the south, where nothing intervened between the grassy plain and the wooded Alameda, the besiegers found the most vulnerable flank. ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... and of compass to the world's range of thought. Society, mistily conscious of the sympathy that lightens in any habitual name, seems to have become aware, by one of those wonderful processes of chary instinct which serve the great, vulnerable, timid organism in lieu of a brain, that to accept of the pickpocket his names for the mysteries of his trade is to accept also a new moral stand-point and outlook on the question of property. For this reason, and by no special masonic ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... their utility. Behind an army they are excellent; in front of an army their value is still problematical. Even down in Calvinia, where Burghers were scarce and main roads fair, they rarely carried a message as safely and as quickly as a mounted Kaffir. They are vulnerable all round from other causes than the hazards of war. Machine vulnerable, man vulnerable, and in a country like this, where the roads are not masked by hedgerows, they furnish a kind of 'running-deer' to every Burgher observation-post, and, as far as I can judge, an observation-post ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... which an invading force could most conveniently land.[328] There is, therefore, a strong probability that Charles V., who had undertaken to execute the papal sentence in the course of the summer, was looking for the most vulnerable point at which to strike; and, not venturing to invade England, was encouraging an Irish rebellion, with a view to following up his success if the ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... physical department has ever proved the vulnerable portion of false religions,—the portion which, if I may use the metaphor, their originators could not dip in the infernal river. The ability of drawing the line, in the early and ignorant ages of the world, between what man can of himself discover and what he ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... were so strongly guarded; so, leaving Stagg's brigade and Miller's battery about three miles southwest of Deatonsville—where the road forks, with a branch leading north toward the Appomattox—to harass the retreating column and find a vulnerable point, I again shifted the rest of the cavalry toward the left, across-country, but still keeping parallel to the enemy's ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 5 • P. H. Sheridan
... excellence till the climax of rejoicing was reached on Easter Day in the dish of Schweinebraten, and who was now declaring, in a die-away, affected sort of voice, that she did not want to eat pig at all. Where, then, was her vulnerable point? How would he ever be able to touch her, to influence her, if she was indifferent to the chief means of happiness known to the dwellers in those parts? That was the real aim and end of his labours, of the labours, as far as he could see, of everyone ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... penetrated, impregnated with art, as yet he had not produced anything remarkable. Eager in the pursuit of pleasure and of love, he had never yet really loved or really enjoyed whole-heartedly. Tortured by aspirations after an Ideal, and abhorring pain both by nature and education, he was vulnerable on every side, accessible ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... to hide from your Majesty the fact that our plan has a vulnerable side. They may say to us: In twenty years all left hands will be as skilled as right ones are now, and you can no longer count on left-handedness ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... her by the extent of his gratitude the corresponding intensity of the pleasures which it was in her power to bestow on him, the supreme pleasure being to guarantee him immunity, for as long as his love should last and he remain vulnerable, from ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... chest, from chest to bureau drawer, piling into John's arms the flask of brandy, the homely medicines, the warm garments, such bits of food as she could catch up that were palatable and portable. Pap, with more vulnerable emotions and less resolute nature, was incapable of speech; he ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... whose flag, with its eight-pointed cross, struck terror into every infidel heart. Nothing but a combination of Christian monarchs could cope with the superiority of the Turk on land: by sea he was still vulnerable. The Knights took up their new part with all their old energy and determination: it is but typical that henceforward we never hear of the "Knights" of Malta fighting ...
— Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 • R. Cohen
... natural weapons the further persuasions of a club or shillelagh. He also fought, as Darwin has very conclusively shown, in the main for the possession of the ladies of his kind, against other members of his own sex and species. And if you fight, you soon learn to protect the most exposed and vulnerable portion of your body; or, if you don't, natural selection manages it for you, by killing you off as an immediate consequence. To the boxer, wrestler, or hand-to-hand combatant, that most vulnerable portion is undoubtedly the heart. A ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... him simply half a minute powerless. He received a shrewd cut across the head, and lay for a couple of hours senseless in the wine-shop of one Battista—one of the many all over Lombardy who had pledged their allegiance to the Great Cat, thinking him scarcely vulnerable. He read the letter, dizzy with pain, and with the frankness proper to inflated spirits after loss of blood, he owned to himself that it was not worth much as a prize. It was worth the attempt to get possession of it, for anything ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... difficult to find. With this direct attack they began fighting with an almost human caution. Their bodies were impervious to bullets, save perhaps in the orifices of the face which might or might not be vulnerable. But when attacked, they skulked in the houses, or crouched like cautious animals under the smashed vehicles. Then there were times when they would wade forward directly into machine-gun fire—unharmed—plunging on until the gunners ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... and of inky blackness, relieved by vivid flashes of lightning. No precaution that could be thought of was neglected. Chains were twisted around the pilot-house and other vulnerable parts, and wood was piled against the boilers, with which the hose was connected, to make the jets of steam available to repel boarders. On one side was lashed a boat loaded with pressed hay, while a barge of coal was fastened ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... usually armed with powerful 11- or 15-inch smoothbores, were a revolutionary development in mid-century. They were low-hulled, armored, steam vessels, with one or two revolving turrets. Although most cannonballs bounced from the armor, lack of speed made the "cheese box on a raft" vulnerable, and poor visibility through the turret slots was a ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... inventor that, as the vessel is rigid, and therefore no pressure is required in the gas-chamber to maintain its shape, it will not be readily vulnerable to projectiles. But the Count did not foresee that the very "frightfulness" of his engine of war would engender counter-destructives. In a later chapter an account will be given of the manner in which Zeppelin attacks upon ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... described experiments, on intertransfusion of blood, designed to test the truth of the hypothesis of pangenesis. My father, while giving all due credit to Mr. Galton for his ingenious experiments, does not allow that pangenesis has "as yet received its death-blow, though from presenting so many vulnerable points its life is always ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... like shadows, so depart," were by him fixed and embodied as they presented themselves, and, at once, taking a shape cognizable by public opinion, either in his actions or his words, either in the hasty letter of the moment, or the poem for all time, laid open such a range of vulnerable points before his judges, as no one individual perhaps ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... away with her sense of justice. A very naughty little girl, if she managed to be funny, might hope to escape; whereas an equally naughty little girl, who was not funny, paid the full penalty of her crime. Fortunately, however, the school at large had not discovered this vulnerable spot in ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... like an angry bird seeking some vulnerable point whereat to strike. But before she could speak, Scott ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... adroitness. If he failed now, it would be final. He thought he knew where she might be really vulnerable. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... enemy reached the far side of that rock he would have to sacrifice either his steadying hold, or his touch on the chest plate where his other hand rested. Would he, then, for an instant be vulnerable? ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... stepped on deck, and after invoking the aid of the Fates, uttered a magic incantation, which had the effect of throwing Talus into a deep sleep. He stretched himself at full length upon the ground, and in doing so grazed his vulnerable ankle against the point of a sharp rock, whereupon a mighty stream of blood gushed forth from the wound. Awakened by the pain, he tried to rise, but in vain, and with a mighty groan of anguish the ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... Queen and little Prince, whose pretty responses to her caresses could not but win her love. Moreover, Pauline's example continued to attract her, and Father Crump was a better controversialist, or perhaps a better judge of character, than Pere Giverlai, and took her on sides where she was more vulnerable, so as to make her begin to feel unsettled, and wonder whether she were not making a vain sacrifice, and holding out after ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... incidents which might help him to solve this doubt. Something told him that his obligation to his mother involved the understanding that he would not even attempt to discover her secret; but he could not prevent his thoughts from wandering around it, and making blind guesses as to the vulnerable point. ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... merriment, and thenceforth she placed her trust in Heaven alone. There were foes around her of the upper, no less than of the nether world. Of these, the bears were the most redoubtable; yet, being vulnerable to mortal weapons, she killed three of them, all, says the story, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... was no doubt, no reason for doubt. There was but one question: might there be still other enchantments, unknown to Merlin, which could render Sir Sagramor's veil transparent to me, and make his enchanted mail vulnerable to my weapons? This was the one thing to be decided in the lists. Until then the world ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... foreign investments, her exports, and the overseas connections of her merchants; II. The exploitation of her coal and iron and the industries built upon them; III. Her transport and tariff system. Of these the first, while not the least important, was certainly the most vulnerable. The Treaty aims at the systematic destruction of all three, but ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... in hand. They are in such awe of him; they regard him as something almost more than mortal. If they learn that he is vulnerable—who knows what might happen!" ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... gay, and the admiration of the learned! He wrote much and variously: but in an evil hour the demon Malice caught him abroad—watched his deviations—noted down his failings—and, discovering his vulnerable part, he did not fail, like another Paris, to profit by the discovery. Menander became the victim of over-refined sensibility: he need not have feared the demon, as no good man need fear Satan. His pen ceased to convey his sentiments; he sickened at heart; and after his body had been ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... my boy. It is a great chance if we could hit a vulnerable part, and I don't like wounding ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... can deprive me of, and that is, that neither ambition nor interested motives have influenced my conduct. The arrows of malevolence, therefore, however barbed and well pointed, never can reach the most vulnerable part of me; though, whilst I am up as a mark, they will be continually aimed. The publications in Freneau's and Bache's papers are outrages on common decency, and they progress in that style in proportion ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... 1643, the shires lying in the neighbourhood of London, which were devoted to the cause of the Parliament, were incessantly annoyed by Rupert and his cavalry. Essex had extended his lines so far that almost every point was vulnerable. The young prince, who, though not a great general, was an active and enterprising partisan, frequently surprised posts, burned villages, swept away cattle, and was again at Oxford before a force sufficient to encounter him ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the solar vortex. It will be necessary to enter into this question a little more in detail than our limits will justify; but it is the resisting influence of the ether, and its consequences, which will appear to present a vulnerable point in the present theory, and to be incompatible with ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... in these two conversations, lasting perhaps two hours, this slip of a girl, in mere idle curiosity, had touched with her silly chatter the vital, the vulnerable points of Jerry's philosophy of life. Fate had not been fair to me or with him. Less than a year; remained of Jerry's period of probation. In December the boy was to go out into the world. And through an unfortunate accident due to a broken iron, a chaos of half-baked ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... in which Grassette's head was thrust forwards, his eyes staring into space. The old Seigneur had touched a vulnerable corner in his nature. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... face relaxed its gravity. He even smiled. "You will agree, Count, that in a line of that extent a uniform strength is out of the question. It must perforce present many weak, many vulnerable, places." ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... of human culture were, however, peculiarly vulnerable to invading hosts of later comers. There were no natural protecting barriers like the narrow Nile valley or the Kong mountains or the forests below Lake Chad. Once the pathways to the valley were open and for hundreds of years the newcomers kept arriving, ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... than we, and of which the greatest captains of our time are not ashamed. Always, while you wear a sword, remember that you hold it for the service of God. But at the same time, when you are among men, avoid being deceived by the hypocrite. He will encompass you, my son; he will assail you on the vulnerable side of your ingenuous heart, in addressing your religion; and seeing the extravagance of his affected zeal, you will fancy yourself lukewarm as compared with him. You will think that your conscience cries out against you; but it will not be the voice of conscience that ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... was, she recognized, something essentially feminine in the saturnine bullfighter; his pride had been severely assaulted; and therefore he would be—in his own, less subtle manner—as dangerous as Gheta. Cesare's self-esteem, too, had been wounded in its most vulnerable place—he had been insulted before her. But, even if the latter refused to proceed, Mochales, she knew, would force an acute conclusion. There was nothing to be got from her sister and she slowly returned to her chamber, from which she ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... listened with breathless attention to the words of the Duchess; he plainly saw that she was not to be subdued by argument. "Her only vulnerable point lies though the avenue of the passions," thought he—"for according to her own confession, she was intoxicated with rapture when encircled by my arms, and when receiving my ardent kisses; and only escaped the entire surrender of her person to me, by a powerful ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... old fort on the west side of the river mouth, with half a dozen twelve-pound quick-firers at the Coast-Guard station on the east side to repel torpedo attack, but the War Office had laughed at the idea of an enemy getting within gunshot of the inviolate English shore, and so one of the most vulnerable points on the south coast had been ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... creeping, or even shrunk into his shell, the attack never presents any difficulty. The shell possesses no lid and leaves the hermit's fore-part to a great extent exposed. Here, on the edges of the mantle, contracted by the fear of danger, the Mollusc is vulnerable and incapable of defence. But it also frequently happens that the Snail occupies a raised position, clinging to the tip of a grass-stalk or perhaps to the smooth surface of a stone. This support serves him as a temporary lid; it wards ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... to extravagance where it gratified his vanity, of broad-minded charity in its higher and nobler sense the man knew nothing. He gave not because he loved, but because his charities reflected lustre on his name; and here was the man's most vulnerable point, his sensitiveness as to name, fame, honour, reputation dignity, public opinion. "What will the world think?" stood out in blazing letters on a glittering signpost pointing to the motive of all he did. And so when Mr. Stanton told his ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... or presentiment at times haunted the mind of the missionary. He believed this hunter who could resort to such diabolical means to revenge himself, would seek to inflict further injury upon him, and he instinctively looked upon his boy as the vulnerable point where the blow would be likely to fall. For over a year, while Teddy was absent, Richter had taken the boy with him, when making his daily visits to the village, and made it a point never to lose sight of him. During these years of loneliness, also, Harvey Richter ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... True, he had nothing as yet in the oil-field conspiracy that the newspapers or the public would accept as evidence of fraud and corruption. But on the other hand, Bucks was only a man, after all; a man with a bucaneer's record, and by consequence vulnerable beneath the brazen armor of assurance. If the attack were ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... slip, with as much lace as could be put upon one garment; such white satin slippers as she had never hoped to wear; and the texture of the silk stockings almost made her shout for joy. Achilles was vulnerable in the heel: fly, O man, from the woman who is indifferent to the lure of ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... My answer was simply this: I should try to give him what I constantly and without much effort gave most men—A new sensation. After all it is not such a hard thing to do. Blase men are my especial prey; they can always be reached; their vulnerable points are many, but generally ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... like Samson, had a curious wife. His romances growing out of his love for this woman would fill a volume. She had learned where his one vulnerable spot lay. But she was a lovely lady, and the wedded pair lived ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... is the vulnerable point of the artificial integument. I learned this in early boyhood. I was once equipped in a hat of Leghorn straw, having a brim of much wider dimensions than were usual at that time, and sent to school ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... to doubt a thing far removed in time. We lose sight of evidence. We dispense with the leadership of reason, and let inclination and imagination guide. This is a bias which antiquity must meet and, if it may, master. If the Iliad and the Bible were vulnerable in this regard, Shakespeare was not. He was a modern. His thought is neither ancient nor mediaeval. He has the characteristics of modern life, begotten of the hot-blooded era in which he lived. The modern Shakespeare ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... March 30th, Flag-officer Foote gave him permission to make the attempt on the first dark night. The morning of April 4th was a busy time on the Carondelet. The deck was covered with heavy planks, surplus chains were coiled over the most vulnerable parts of the boat, an eleven-inch hawser was wound around the pilot-house as high as the windows; barriers of cordwood were built about the boilers. After sunset, the atmosphere became hazy and the sky overcast. Guns were run back, ports closed, and ...
— From Fort Henry to Corinth • Manning Ferguson Force
... a man of steel, but he had a vulnerable part; and iron natures like John Meadows have often one spot in their souls where they are far tenderer than the universal dove-eyed, and weaker than the omnipotent. He never spoke a word of love to Susan, he knew it would spoil all; and she, occupied with another's ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... extensive welfare system, low unemployment, and remarkably even distribution of income. The economy depends heavily on the fishing industry, which provides 75% of export earnings and employs 12% of the work force. In the absence of other natural resources-except energy-Iceland's economy is vulnerable to changing world fish prices. The economy remains sensitive to declining fish stocks as well as to drops in world prices for its main exports: fish and fish products, aluminum, and ferrosilicon. The center-right government plans to continue its policies of reducing the ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... length and strength, and unless it be practically solid, his hand contains at least one reentry. The leader by his opening can attack only one-quarter of the No-trump fortification, and it is his duty to pick out the spot which promises to be most vulnerable. A No-trump call is very likely to spell game unless a suit can be established against it. In order to accomplish this it is generally necessary to start with the first card led. Therefore, making the right original opening is probably ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... unenterprising defence? what must be the sentiments and feelings of one who remembers the former energy of England, when he is given to understand that these two islands, with their extensive and everywhere vulnerable coast, should be considered as a garrisoned sea-town; what would such a man, what would any man think, if the garrison of so strange a fortress should be such, and so feebly commanded, as never to make a sally; and ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... devotion, after this prodigious waste of their blood and the blood of others, is a France shorn of fifteen departments acquired by the republic, deprived of Savoy, of the left bank of the Rhine and of Belgium, despoiled of the northeast angle by which it completed its boundaries, fortified its most vulnerable point, and, using the words of Vauban, "made its field square," separated from 4,000,000 new Frenchmen which it had assimilated after twenty years of life in common, and, worse still, thrown back within the frontiers of 1789, alone, diminished in the midst of its aggrandized neighbors, suspected ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... tact, he alluded to the strongest points of the British character, touching with consummate skill the vulnerable parts of his audience. He took for granted that their aims were pure, their standard lofty, and by the very supposition raised for a time the most abject of his hearers, inspired ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... fellows after me lately," he said in ruminative tone, as he picked at the green baize of his desk-top. He spoke with a slight querulousness, as if these wily and hardy adventurers had wilfully hit upon him as the weak spot in the defences, as the vulnerable point of the Grindstone. In particular he saw a pair of burning black eyes, a pair of eager, sinewy hands strewing drawings over the pink and gold brocades of his front parlour suite, and a shock of dark hair that swished ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... her if her lord had a weak place, that he might know and guard it for him. Kriemhild confided to him her husband's secret. When Siegfried was bathing in the dragon's blood, a leaf fell between his shoulders, and that spot was vulnerable. There she would embroider a cross on his vesture that Hagan might protect him in ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... their opponents. In both it is probable that their unmeasured and unsparing criticism recoiled on the cause which they had at heart. But in the case of both of them it was not the temper of the satirist, it was no mere love of attacking what was vulnerable, and indulgence in the cruel pleasure of stinging and putting to shame, which inspired them. Their souls were moved by the dishonour done to religion, by public evils and public dangers. Both of them died young, before their work ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... and foot alike beset the company of Villena, already sadly reduced; and while the infantry, with desperate and savage fierceness, thrust themselves under the very bellies of the chargers, encountering both the hoofs of the steed and the deadly lance of the rider, in the hope of finding a vulnerable place for the sharp Moorish knife,—the horsemen, avoiding the stern grapple of the Spaniard warriors, harrassed them by the shaft and lance,—now advancing, now retreating, and performing, with incredible rapidity, the evolutions of Oriental cavalry. But the life and soul of his party was ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had been appealed to, subtly, cleverly, on his most vulnerable side; he had been bothered and badgered and beset. Two women, clever and hard as nails, had made up their minds to the marriage; the third remained passive, indifferent, but acquiescent. Wiser, firmer, and more experienced men than ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... opened wide. "Whatever's come to Jack?" he said; but seemed puzzled at the Maluka's answer that he was "only getting educated." The truth is, that every man has his vulnerable point, and ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... rather have bread, tea, sugar, etc., a little jammed than water-soaked. Also, it may be remarked that man is a vertebrate animal and ought to respect his backbone. The loaded pack basket on a heavy carry never fails to get in on the most vulnerable knob of the human vertebrae. The knapsack sits easy and does not chafe. The one shown in the engraving is of good form; and the original—which I have carried for years—is satisfactory in every respect. It holds over half a bushel, carries blanket-bag, shelter-tent, ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... follower of Love: but if so, he has hitherto followed at a most respectful distance. Yet he had not erred, when in the Italian sonnet, so finely rendered in Professor Masson's biography, he declared the heart his vulnerable point:— ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... fairly expert with our spears, besides having discovered their vulnerable spot—the throat, just forward from the gills. To this day I don't know whether or not they were man-eaters. Their jaws were roomy and strong as those of any shark; but they never ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... Even eighty-odd is sometimes vulnerable in vanity. "I've heard that children and fools tell the truth," she said. "I was used to compliments when I was young—but they're scarcer when you get as far along as I am. I haven't had one for years. It tastes good. I s'pose now, you monkey, you wouldn't ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... that the house was not surrounded by four walls, but merely filled a breach in one of the four, which nipped it (as it were) at either end. The back entrance was approachable enough, but barred or watched, I might be very sure. It is ever the vulnerable points which are most securely guarded, and it was my one comfort that the difficult way must also be the safe way, if only the difficulty could be overcome. How to overcome it was the problem. I followed ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... point do I now feel vulnerable: I should grieve to see my father's peace of mind perturbed on my account; for which reason I keep my author's existence as much as possible out of his way. I have always given him a carefully diluted and modified ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... philosophy, while the rest was pure utopianism, consisting of unsound and impractical reforms, mixed with atheism and schoolboy declamation. Altogether, the policies and projects of Bakounin seemed so vulnerable that the General Council evidently felt that little preparation was necessary in order to defeat them. They seemed to have forgotten, for the moment, that Bakounin was an old and experienced conspirator. In any case, he had left no stone unturned ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... men, and true they were indeed, but a better name for their body would have been the 'Life Guard of the Sovereign.' The five hundred far below them might rage and at times revolt, but the twenty in their shining armour stood undaunted above the vulnerable ground and smiled grimly at the mob. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was touched by the letter, moved also in the hope that an arrow from the quiver of truth had found in the doctor a vulnerable spot. He answered that he should be welcome to see the child when he would; and that she should go to him when he pleased. He must promise, however, as the honest man every body knew him to be, not to teach her there was no God, or ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... was rudely disturbed, by feeling himself touched on a vulnerable spot—that of his pocket. Before the end of the year trade had come to a standstill, and the very town he lived in was ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... with the lurid flames of worse than fratricidal war! Let the dagger, the bullet, the flames and the pestilence, smite every vulnerable point! Let the desolation of death reign in the Northern homes enriched by plunder of the South! Let the audacious minions of the tyrants in our country be met in silence and darkness, struck down by a power they see not! Remember the oath! The Crescent is broad enough to include ...
— The Oaths, Signs, Ceremonies and Objects of the Ku-Klux-Klan. - A Full Expose. By A Late Member • Anonymous
... brought to bear, with the pilots drilled not only in the manipulation of their individual machines, but to work with others in military formations and groups, while increased attention was paid to weapons and the protection of vulnerable parts. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... now appeared to lose all fear and caution. Her tail fell down. Her long snout was unsheathed from under its protection, and she seemed undecided what to do. But she was not allowed much time to reflect. The puma, seeing the snout, the most vulnerable part, uncovered, launched himself forward like an arrow, and caught hold of it in his bristling fangs. Then having dragged his victim forward, he flung her upon her breast, and mounting rapidly on her back, proceeded to ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... with him against each other. The archduke and the czar opposed the Turk; the Muscovite could not endure that Sweden should be aggrandised by this new crown; and Denmark was still more uneasy. Montluc had discovered how every party had its vulnerable point, by which it could be managed. The cards had now got fairly shuffled, and he depended ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... daring and sudden invaders, these instances of good fortune are not to be ascribed to the capacity of the existing government for the protection of those from whom it claims allegiance, but to causes that are fugitive and fallacious. If we except perhaps Virginia and Maryland, which are peculiarly vulnerable on their eastern frontiers, no part of the Union ought to feel more anxiety on this subject than New York. Her seacoast is extensive. A very important district of the State is an island. The State itself is penetrated by a large navigable river ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... where the flap of the shirt was open. He was excited as a hunter who has tracked some new and dangerous animal and at last driven it to bay, holding his gun poised, and not knowing whether or not it will prove vulnerable. ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... most vulnerable point is the peculiar sentimental morality-in-immorality which has been more than once glanced at. It was frankly found fault with by French critics—themselves by no means strait-laced—and the criticisms were well summed up (I remember the wording ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... garantio, garantianto, atesto. Vow dedicxi, promesi. Vow (religious) religia promeso. Vowel vokala. Voyage vojagxo, vojiro. Vulgar vulgara. Vulgarise vulgarigi. Vulgarity vulgareco. Vulgate Latina Biblio. Vulnerable vundebla. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... to storm those heights, now strengthened with earthworks and bristling with cannon, would be presumptuous; but away on the right seemed the vulnerable point of the enemy's line. Returning to his quarters, Sheridan determined at once upon his plan of attack. The Nineteenth corps was thrown farther to the left, and our Sixth corps occupied the position in the center, facing now to the south. Crook's ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... remembered the words of the spirit, how none of woman born should hurt him; and smiling confidently he said to Macduff, "Thou losest thy labour, Macduff. As easily thou mayest impress the air with thy sword, as make me vulnerable. I bear a charmed life, which must not yield to ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... that with her own hand she might distribute flowers among her wounded soldiers, and with her own lips speak to them words of solace. At that same inclement season she crossed the Irish Channel to show her vulnerable face once more among her Irish people, and I should not marvel if for such a queen some would even ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... and Prussian generals had moved the greater part of their armies to this vulnerable point with impunity: and appeared disposed, to attempt an attack with open force. That, if they failed the first time, they might return to the charge a second; and renew their attempts, till they rendered themselves masters of the capital. That they would have fresh ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... finds them and never to expect or ask or the impossible. He will drink the wine of the country, even when sour, without a grimace; pass without grumbling a sleepless night; plod through dust ankle deep, without a murmur; there is but one vulnerable feature in his armor, and with Achilles, it is his heel! And it is literally the heel that, is the sensitive spot. I will venture the assertion that the long-distance tramper—not even excepting Brother Weston—who has not at ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... led off with their main force first; for while the two killers hung on the cachalot's flanks, diverting his attention, the sword-fish, a giant some sixteen feet long, launched himself at the most vulnerable part of the whale, for all the world like a Whitehead torpedo. The wary eye of the whale saw the long, dark mass coming, and, like a practised pugilist, coolly swerved, taking for the nonce no notice of those worrying wolves ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... a single mutation somewhere back there. Just a tiny change of cell structure or metabolism that left one line of primates vulnerable to an invader no other would harbor. Why else should man have begun to flower and blossom intellectually—grow to depend so much on his brains instead of his brawn that he could rise above all others? ...
— The Coffin Cure • Alan Edward Nourse
... like it not an epistemological premise but a deliberate subterfuge, an insidious blind to vindicate his attacks upon an organized priesthood. We can recognize now that his opponents oversimplified his intention, that they blackened it to make his villainy at once definitive and vulnerable. At the same time we must admit that he often equated the ideas of repression and clerical authority, even as he coupled those of freedom and the guide of ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... wife, a simple-minded woman mostly absorbed in the affairs of her nursery. This interest aroused Becky's private scorn, but the first thing that clever little lady did was to attack Lady Jane at her vulnerable point. After being conducted to the apartments prepared for her, and having taken off her bonnet and cloak, Becky asked her sister-in-law in what more she ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... labor, Macduff. As easily thou mayest impress the air with thy sword as make me vulnerable. I bear a charmed life, which must not yield to ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... four obstacles Jimmy seemed the most vulnerable, and upon him Paul hurled himself with the exalted frenzy of a single idea: an idea of boring his way out of an insupportable position. That Jimmy's blows hurt him so little astonished him, and under the spur of fear he fought with such abandon ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... it will have reached 250,000,000. By such a vast increase in population, the Professor complacently concludes, "Germany will be rendered invulnerable." We know what that means. The presence of an "invulnerable" nation among nations that are "vulnerable" means inevitable aggression and war, a perpetual menace to civilisation and humanity. It is not along that line that hope can be found for the world's future, or even Germany's future, and Gruber ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... time in Egypt, endeavoring to assail England, the most formidable foe of France, in India, the only vulnerable point which could be reached. Fifty thousand Russians, in a single band, were marching through Germany to cooeperate with the Austrians on the French frontiers. The more polished Germans were astonished at the barbaric character ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... eighteen days after, they were not so strict but that they[266] would connive at their going privately abroad; nor would people be much afraid of them afterwards, but rather think they were fortified the better, having not been vulnerable when the enemy was in their house: but we sometimes found it had lain ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... most vulnerable part appears to be the snout,—just where the sailor had chosen to make his hit; and a blow delivered there with an axe, or even a handspike, usually puts a termination to the career of this rapacious ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... employed.(289) The relative importance of fixed and circulating capital to a country depends upon whether the country is an advanced or only an advancing one. A people with very much and very fixed capital are indeed very rich; but run the risk of offering many vulnerable points to an aggressive enemy, and of thus turning the easily jeopardized mammon into an idol. To make a passing sacrifice of the country that the people and the state may be saved, as did the Scythians against Darius, the Athenians against Xerxes, and the Russians against Napoleon, becomes difficult, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... English Protestants together. They agreed to engage in further raiding of Spaniards, share and share alike by nationalities, though Drake had now only thirty-one men against Tetu's seventy. Nombre de Dios, they decided, was not vulnerable, as all the available Spanish forces were concentrated there for its defence, and so they planned to seize a Spanish train of gold and jewels just far enough inland to give them time to get away with the plunder ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... the floating fire engine, that could attend a fire by the river-side, usually in one of the very vulnerable ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... running down her whole length, jarring, raking, and venting their wrath in a very audible manner; or a wave would rake along the side with a sharp, ringing, metallic sound, like a huge spear-point seeking a vulnerable place; or some hard-backed monster would rise up from the deep and grate and bump the whole length of the keel, forcibly suggesting hidden rocks and consequent ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... ever another heavy retribution. It is of proof against conciliation, love, and confidence; against all gentle sympathy from without, all trust, all tenderness, all soft emotion; but to deep stabs in the self-love, it is as vulnerable as the bare breast to steel; and such tormenting festers rankle there, as follow on no other wounds, no, though dealt with the mailed hand of Pride itself, on weaker ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... indignation and distress must come to this task. The stern, uncompromising militarist will not be moved from his determinations by our horror and hostility. These things will but "brace" him. He has a more vulnerable side. The ultimate lethal weapon for every form of stupidity is ridicule, and against the high silliness of the militarist it is particularly effective. It is the laughter of wholesome men that will finally end war. The stern, strong, silent man will cease to trouble us only when we have stripped ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... be at the time of the earthquake. In the early morning (i.e., 2:30 a.m.) most people are at home, by far the safest environment during a seismic emergency. At 2:00 in the afternoon, on the other hand, the majority of people are at their places of employment and therefore vulnerable to collapse of office buildings. Around 4:30 p.m. many more people are in the streets and thus subject to injury due to falling debris or failures of transportation systems. Consequently, depending on the time of day, wide variations in the number ...
— An Assessment of the Consequences and Preparations for a Catastrophic California Earthquake: Findings and Actions Taken • Various
... can act more intelligently, and therefore successfully. We can study the characters of our enemies, and learn their vulnerable points. The black and green aphides, or plant-lice, are often very troublesome. They appear in immense numbers on the young and tender shoots of trees, and by sucking their juices check or enfeeble the growth. They are the milch-cows of ants, which are usually found very busy among them. ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... But when men speak so much nowadays of the difficulties of religion, they chiefly mean intellectual and not practical difficulties. Religion is identified with the tenets of a Church system, or of a theological system; and it is felt that modern criticism has assailed these tenets in many vulnerable points, and made it no longer easy for the open and well-informed mind to believe things that were formerly held, or professed to be held, without hesitation. Discussions and doubts which were once confined to a limited circle when they were heard of at all, have penetrated ...
— Religion and Theology: A Sermon for the Times • John Tulloch
... learned at the Academy, a whole Earth expedition had been slaughtered before contact because the natives mistook hand telescopes for weapons. And surely on any world a spacesuited man looked more like a monster than a man although he was vulnerable in a spacesuit, even more vulnerable than a naked man because he could only ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... him in all the relationships of life. In his profession, his trade, his family; amongst his friends, the companions of his sports, his neighbours, and his servants. She eyes him all round, she feels him all over, and, if he has a vulnerable point, if he has a speck, however small, she is ready with her stab. How many hundreds of men have been ruined by her without being hardly able to perceive, much less name, the cause; and how many thousands, seeing the fate of these hundreds, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... impalpable as the air we drew into our lungs. And suddenly this danger, this breath of our life, had taken this material form. It was material and expected, and yet it had the effect of an evil spectre, inasmuch as one did not know where and how it was vulnerable, what precisely it would do, how one ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... baffled, as his bomb shell exploded without apparent effect. Was there no vulnerable spot in her armor of iron self-control? After a moment he continued ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... Pascal, then thirty-three years old, under the form of "Letters to a Provincial by one of his Friends," put forth a series of [63] pamphlets in which all that was vulnerable in the Jesuit Fathers was laid bare to the profit of their opponents. At the moment the quarrel turned on the proposed censure of Antoine Arnauld by the Sorbonne, by the University of Paris as a religious body. Pascal, intimate, like many another fine intellect of the ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... way through the forest but when they saw that they had to face a broadside instead of one stern gun and perceived that a ship afloat is less vulnerable to cavalry even than when on shore, they abandoned ideas of revenge, and comforted themselves with a text out of their sacred book which tells how in other days and other places our enemies shall suffer ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... of work than the non-leading leg; and, as we all know, to canter or gallop comfortably, a lady's horse has to lead with his off fore when the leaping-head is on the near side; and vice versa. Also, the vulnerable side of the back and withers of an animal which carries a side-saddle, is the one which is opposite to that on which the leaping-head is fixed. I am afraid that these practical considerations would not outweigh the dictates of fashion and the expense of having two ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... road, with stooping mothers in their train; the whole air and scene seemed to be suffused with suggestions of the pathetic expansiveness and helplessness of human existence, which, generation after generation, is still so vulnerable, so confiding, so eager. Life after life flowers out from the darkness and sinks back into it again. And in the interval what agony, what disillusion! All the apparatus of a universe that men may know what it is to hope and fail, to win and lose! ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The only vulnerable point for fire was on the roof, but the designs of the Indians had been defeated thus far, and he believed they could be stood off indefinitely, at least until the arrival of the cowboys, who would ...
— The Great Cattle Trail • Edward S. Ellis
... flaws in this story, which is casuistically vulnerable. Let it be: all the same it shows that Tenderness, Pity and Love, were traits which adorned the most sanguinary exploits of the samurai. It was an old maxim among them that "It becometh not the fowler to slay the bird which takes ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... a special constable. The duties of a special constable were chiefly not to understand what was going on in the military sphere, and to do what he was told in the way of watching and warding conceivably vulnerable points. He had also to be available in the event of civil disorder. Mr. Britling was provided with a truncheon and sent out to guard various culverts, bridges, and fords in the hilly country to the north-westward of Matching's Easy. ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... water, but from other indications it is only reasonable to admit that there is an added ingredient, of which we probably have no knowledge, whereby the effect is enhanced in every degree, and the outer surface of the victim rendered more vulnerable. There is also another and milder form of torture, known as the "task", consisting either of sharp-edged stones being broken upon the body, or else the body broken upon sharp-edged stones, but precisely which is the official etiquette of ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... that, in the gallant age of chivalry, the gentler sex should have been most frequently the subjects of these rude trials and perilous ordeals; and that, too, when assailed in their most delicate and vulnerable part—their honor. ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving |
