"Abase" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "imbase" is frequently found in the sense of "abase." Here the meaning seems to be "weakened, enfeebled." (Ovid's words are ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... Lord who am but dust and ashes. If I count myself more, behold Thou standest against me, and my iniquities bear true testimony, and I cannot gainsay it. But if I abase myself, and bring myself to nought, and shrink from all self-esteem, and grind myself to dust, which I am, Thy grace will be favourable unto me, and Thy light will be near unto my heart; and all self-esteem, how little soever it ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... especially as she was the cause of thy strangerhood and thy separation from me." Then he complained to her of his case, saying, "O my mother, go to her and speak with her; haply she will vouchsafe me her sight to see and dispel from me this despondency." Replied his mother, "Idle desires abase men's necks; so put away from thee this thought that can only vex; for I will not wend to her nor go in to her with such message.' Now when he heard his mother's words he told her what said the horse-thief concerning Zat al-Dawahi, how the old woman was then in their land ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... old Country! I have watched thee long Still ever first to rise against the wrong; To check the usurper in his giant stride, And brave his terrors and abase his pride; Foresee the insidious danger ere it rise, And warn the heedless and inform the wise; Scorning the lure, the bribe, the selfish game, Which, through the office, still becomes the shame; Thou stood'st aloof—superior to the fate That would have wrecked thy ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... satisfied the claims of honour; he had punished Servia for her peevish and unsisterly jealousy. Under his lead the Bulgarians had covered themselves with glory, and had leaped at a bound from political youth to manhood. Why should he risk their new-found unity merely in order to abase Servia? The Prince never acted more prudently than when he decided not to bring into the field the Power which, as he believed, had pushed on Servia ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... thou canst, this is the greatest, Thy duty earliest and latest. Thy future rests in its embrace With cure for ills that now abase. ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... absolute, In hideous shape incarnate! Venomed Gad In Civilisation's path; malignant-mad, And blindly biting; raising an asp-neck In Beauty's foot-tracks, and prepared to wreck The ordered work of ages in a day, To raze and shatter, to abase and slay. Blind as the earthquake, headlong as the storm, Yet in such hideous subter-human form, Vulgar as venomous! Dragon indeed, And dangerous, but with no soul save greed, No aim save chaos. Bloody, yet so blind, The common ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... XVII.! How inscrutable are the ways of providence—for what great and mysterious purpose has it pleased heaven to abase the man once so elevated, and raise up him ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... letter was not destined to be sent to its address, but to abase the pontifical dignity, or at least the person of the Pope, in the eyes of the French public. The spirit of the people must have been greatly changed if this end could be thus attained by a means which formerly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... pomp and love and power, of gold also, more than I can count. When I go forth, my armies, who still look on me as half a god, shout their welcome and kiss the air after their heathen fashion. My beauteous queen bows down to me and the women of my household abase themselves into the dust. The people of the Ancient City of Gold turn their faces to the wall and the children cover their eyes with their hands that they may not look upon my splendour as I pass, while ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... evidence which was said to inculpate Dr Pendle in the murder of Jentham. The ex-sailor accepted the common ground of argument, and in his turn abandoned theology for the business of everyday life. Common sense was needed to expose and abase and overturn those criminals whose talents enabled them to conceal their wickedness; proselytism could follow in due course. There was the germ of a new sect in Baltic's conception of ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... colour change; his skin shuddered with horripilation, he was violently moved and he fell down in a fainting fit When he revived he said, 'I take refuge with Allah from the stead of the liars and the lot of the negligent! O Allah, before whom the hearts of the wise abase themselves, O Allah, of Thy bene ficence accord to me the remission of my sins, adorn me with the curtain of Thy protection and pardon me my shortcomings, by the magnanimity of Thy Being!' Then I rose and went away. Quoth one of the pious, 'When I entered Baghdad, Al-Shafi'i was there. So ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... on that very tree. They were proud hard men, and uttered no entreaty for grace. They had hung too many travellers upon these same branches not to expect their own turn, and they were no cravens to abase themselves. ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... smoke that his fingers will quickly be scorched in the flame. Moreover, had the Roman kept quiet, even had he refrained from threats, it becomes our honour, of our own choice, to enter on this war, to avenge the wrongs of our fathers, and to abase his pride. The Romans' logic is that they are entitled to receive tribute at our hands, by reason that their fathers, in their day, took truage of our ancestors. If this be so, it was no free-will ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... men those would seem most abased who are not only poor, but are so needy that they have to receive their meat from others. In this way some deserve praise for begging out of humility, just as they abase themselves in other ways, as being the most efficacious remedy against pride which they desire to quench either in themselves or in others by their example. For just as a disease that arises from excessive heat is most efficaciously healed by things that ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the moon from giving her light? Can you count the number of the stars, or stay the bottles of heaven? Can you call for the waters of the sea, and cause them to cover the face of the ground? Can you behold every one that is proud, and abase him, and bind their faces in secret? Yet these are some of the works of our King, in whose name this day we come up unto you, that you may be brought under his authority. In his name, therefore, I summon you again to yield up yourselves to ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... And the armies that have most swiftly and suddenly broken their enemies in pieces have been the religious armies—the Moslem Armies, for instance, or the Puritan Armies. And a religious army may, by its nature, be defined as an army in which every man is taught not to exalt but to abase himself. Many modern Englishmen talk of themselves as the sturdy descendants of their sturdy Puritan fathers. As a fact, they would run away from a cow. If you asked one of their Puritan fathers, if you asked Bunyan, for instance, whether he was sturdy, he would have answered, ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... he discovered that his ideal requirement was out of tune with the facts. To represent Fiesco as a would-be liberator of his country was impossible without a violent perversion of history for which he was not prepared. Out of deference to history he was led to abase his hero into something like a Catilinarian conspirator. But he could not give up the idea of a republican tragedy; so he tried to save it by depicting his hero as a man who had it in him to become a noble liberator, but is corrupted ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... prompted these schemes, some with the passing of time had become weaker, some remained quite as strong as before. Most Englishmen and women knew now that Spain had clay feet; and that Rome, though she might threaten, could not always perform what she threatened. To abase the pride of Spain, to make harbors of refuge for the angel of the Reformation—these wishes, though they had not vanished, though no man could know how long the peace with Spain would last, were less fervid than they ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... the pavements of the city, great artists, and vile scrapings of talent, thronged to the palace to sate their dazzled eyes with a splendor almost surpassing human estimate, and to approach the giver of every favor, wealth, and property,—whose single glance might abase, it is true, but might also ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz |
