"Baseness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... than he was, for I should say to you—'Sire; it is for you to choose. Do you wish to have friends or lackeys—soldiers or slaves—great men or mere puppets? Do you wish men to serve you, or to bend and crouch before you? Do you wish men to love you, or to be afraid of you? If you prefer baseness, intrigue, cowardice, say so at once, sire, and we will leave you,—we who are the only individuals who are left,—nay, I will say more, the only models of the valor of former times; we who have done our ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of enticing her! Great God! if my heart were not breaking with anguish, it would break that such baseness could be attributed to me. Would that I could answer you, duchess, but God in heaven knows that I was ignorant of her departure, until I ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... what we shall eat or what we shall drink. The man who has to observe the least of the ordinances of style knows not liberty. He is a slave; his dress betrayeth him and proclaims him base. There may be degrees of baseness. I am abject myself; but whensoever I revisit the haunts of men clad in the few light incommoding clothes that rationalism ordains, I rejoice and gloat over the slavery of those who have failed to catch even glimpses of the loveliness of liberty, who are yet afeared of opinion—"that ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... that truly formidable element which underlaid a character which (as one said of him) "combined all that was noblest in man and woman; all the tenderness and all the strength, all the sensitiveness and all the fire, of both; and with that a humility which made men feel the utter baseness, meanness, of all pretension." For can there be true love without wholesome fear? And does not the old Elizabethan "My dear dread" express the noblest voluntary relation in which two human souls can stand to each other? Perfect love casteth out fear. Yes: but where is love perfect ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... thing with a vengeance! When the speech-making set in, these very men who had been all expressing their profound contempt for the Lord Mayor behind his back, now flattered him to his face in such a shamelessly servile way, with such a meanly complete insensibility to their own baseness, that I did really and literally turn sick. I slipped out into the fresh air, and fumigated myself, after the company I had kept, with a cigar. No, no! it's useless to excuse these things (I could quote dozens of ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... for the exchange of prisoners; a man whom Cineas said the Romans especially valued for his virtue and bravery, but who was excessively poor. Pyrrhus, in consequence of this, entertained Fabricius privately, and made him an offer of money, not as a bribe for any act of baseness, but speaking of it as a pledge of friendship and sincerity. As Fabricius refused this, Pyrrhus waited till the next day, when, desirous of making an impression on him, as he had never seen an elephant, he had his largest elephant ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... thereby, that, as in old buildings, it seem disorderly and ruinous. But as in most exquisite pictures they use to blaze and portrait not only the dainty lineaments of beauty, but also round about it to shadow the rude thickets and craggy cliffs, that by the baseness of such parts, more excellency may accrue to the principal—for ofttimes, we find ourselves I know not how, singularly delighted with the show of such natural rudeness, and take great pleasure ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... love and warmth, to be let in. Amelia stopped short in her work, and an ugly frown roughened her brow. Josiah Pease, with all his evil imaginings, seemed to be at her side, his lean forefinger pointing out the baseness of mankind. In that instant, she realized where Enoch had gone. He meant to take the three o'clock train where it halted, down at the Crossing, and he had left the child behind. Tearing off her apron, she threw it over her head. She ran to the door, and, opening it, ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... she came to the city, it was with the determination to win the love of this man, if it could be won; to let nothing stand between herself and the fulfillment of that purpose. But all this had been changed, and seeing how bravely Claire bore the shock of her lover's baseness, how proudly, how nobly, she commanded herself, Madeline had ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... fear.] Cowardice — N. cowardice, pusillanimity; cowardliness &c adj.; timidity, effeminacy. poltroonery, baseness; dastardness^, dastardy^; abject fear, funk; Dutch courage; fear &c 860; white feather, faint heart; cold feet [U.S.], yellow streak [Slang]. coward, poltroon, dastard, sneak, recreant; shy cock, dunghill cock; coistril^, milksop, white liver, lily liver, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... threw off the damp cloth, and revealed the clay model of a head. The face was unmistakable, but it expressed every baseness—cunning, arrogance, cruelty, and sensuality. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... possesses only your person, a creditor possesses your dignity and can administer to it a box on the ear. Rather than borrow, he went without food. He had passed many a day fasting. Feeling that all extremes meet, and that, if one is not on one's guard, lowered fortunes may lead to baseness of soul, he kept a jealous watch on his pride. Such and such a formality or action, which, in any other situation would have appeared merely a deference to him, now seemed insipidity, and he nerved himself against it. His face wore a sort of severe ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... of her married life seemed to have faded out of her mind. She raved of Montague Kingdon's baseness, of her own folly, her vain regret, her yearning for pardon; but of the dying husband in the garret at Rouen she uttered no word. And so, with her weary head upon her sister's breast, she passed away, her ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Poet's dictum "change is of all things most pleasant" is true, is "a baseness in our blood;" for as the bad man is easily changeable, bad must be also the nature that craves change, i.e. it is neither ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... assurance, had given him access to society at certain points, and of this facility he had taken every advantage. Too idle and dissolute for useful effort in society, he looked with a cold, calculating baseness to marriage as the means whereby he was to gain the position at which he aspired. Possessing no attractive virtues—no personal merits of any kind, his prospects of a connection, such as he wished to form, through the medium ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... the encounter was passing from Marcel's mind. A curious feeling of intimacy was induced by the girl's brief outline of the things that concerned herself. Then, above all, there was that youthful desire, untainted by any baseness of passion, the natural desire inspired by the appeal of a sweet face, and the smiling eyes of a young girl, battling in a country where there is no margin for the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... with Tomalin, One that a valiant knight had bin, And to King Oberon of kin; Quoth he, "Thou manly Fairy, Tell Oberon I come prepared, Then bid him stand upon his guard; This hand his baseness shall reward, Let him be ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... girl! You surely forget the presence in which you stand! Baseness, crime, can never be connected with the name of Brudenell. But young gentlemen will be young gentlemen, and amuse themselves with just such credulous fools as you!" said the ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... what loathing so many of them—"of you," he really said, and the Baron grunted as though his experience had been with droves of them—what loathing so many of you heap upon certain things without reference to the spirit by which they are accompanied and on which their nobility or baseness, their cleanness or foulness, ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... the feelings of shame which tormented me as I inflicted on my heart, like the beggars in the street, false wounds to excite the compassion of that enchanting woman. I soon appreciated the extent of my devotedness by learning to estimate the baseness of a spy. The expressions of sympathy bestowed on me would have comforted the greatest grief. This charming creature, weaned from the world, and for so many years alone, having, besides love, treasures of kindliness to bestow, offered these to me with childlike ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... resolution enough to execute his design. At the Restoration he was excepted out of the Act of Indemnity, and spent the remainder of his life in obscurity, dying soon after the Revolution.] And how that he is quite ashamed of himself, and confesses how he had deserved this, for his baseness to his brother. And that he is like to pay part of the money, paid out of the Exchequer during the Committee of Safety, out of his own purse again, which I am glad on. I could find nothing in Mr. Downing's letter, which Hawley brought me concerning my office; but I could discern that Hawley had ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... VI. of England, the baby king, doomed already to expiate sins that were not his, by the saddest life and reign. The French historians whimsically but perhaps not unnaturally, have the air of putting down this baseness on Philip's part, and on that of his contemporaries in general, to the score of the English, which is hard measure, seeing that the treachery of a Frenchman could in no way be attributed to the other nation of ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... gasp for breath and turn whiter still. Accuse her dear Christopher whom she loved and honored above all men of any wrong or baseness! God in heaven! If she had done this ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... your enmity? and if you choose to write your lingering affections upon stones, wreak also your delayed anger upon clay. This would be just, and, in the last case, little as you think it, generous. The true baseness is in the bitter reverse—the strange iniquity of our folly. Is a man to be praised, honored, pleaded for? It might do harm to praise or plead for him while he lived. Wait till he is dead. Is he to be maligned, dishonored, and discomforted? See that ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... some power in his hands, against which all her defiance would be as naught. Till this hour, though she had suffered, and when alone had writhed in agony of grief and bitter shame, in his presence she had never flinched. Her strength she knew was greater than his; but his baseness was his weapon, and the depths of that baseness she knew she ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... guiltier head Shall our intolerable self-disdain Wreak suddenly its anger and its pain; For manifest in that disastrous light We shall discern the right And do it, tardily.—O ye who lead, Take heed! Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... sagacity in Pope Innocent, and around Pompilia the tragic pathos of an incurable woe, which by its intensity might raise her to grandeur if it sprang from some more solemn source than the mere malignity and baseness of an unworthy oppressor. Lastly, there is nothing in The Ring and the Book of that "certain incommensurableness" which Goethe found in his own Faust. The poem is kept closely concrete and strictly commensurable by the very ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... guest of Louis XV., and a guest of whom the victorious English were continually requiring the ignominious dismissal; until, wearied by the indifference to all hints and orders to free France from his compromising presence, the Court of Versailles had descended to the incredible baseness of having the Prince kidnapped as he was going to the opera, bound hand and foot, carried like a thief to the fortress of Vincennes, and then conducted to the frontier like a suspected though unconvicted swindler, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... breast, and shame possessed her cheek. E'en Cupid, we are told, assistance gave; What from his aim effectually can save? Fair in person was Gyges to behold; Excuses for her easy 'twere to mould; To show her charms, what baseness could excel? And on th' exposer all her hatred fell. Besides, he was a husband, which is worse With these each sin receives a double curse. What more shall I detail?—the facts are plain: Detested was the king:—beloved the swain; All was accomplished, and the monarch placed Among ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... skill, He "squares" Surveyors too! For Jobbery finds some baseness still For venal hands ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... 'these, indeed, are women's words. The great Sheikh in this has touched me nearly, but I see no baseness in it. He could not know the intimate relation that should subsist between me and this young Englishman. He has captured him in the desert, according to the custom of his tribe. Much as Amalek may injure me, I must acquit him ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... the Austrians. Pray, was never a battle won against material odds? It is precisely such that a good leader, a noble man, may expect to win. Were the Austrians driven out of Milan because the Milanese had that advantage? The Austrians would again, have suffered repulse from them, but for the baseness of this man, on whom they had been cajoled into relying,—a baseness that deserves the pillory; and on a pillory will the "Magnanimous," as he was meanly called in face of the crimes of his youth and the timid ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... "if you must make this journey in our behalf,—and, alas! I have not generosity enough to refuse your noble proffer,—you must go alone, and without communication with Derby. I know him well; his lightness of mind is free from selfish baseness; and for the world, would he not suffer you to leave Man without his company. And if he went with you, your noble and disinterested kindness would be of no avail—you would but share his ruin, as the swimmer who attempts to save a drowning ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Greeks defended against the Persians, the Romans against the Carthaginians and Egyptians, the Franks against Islam: namely, the chivalrous European way of thinking, which is ever being threatened by brutal force and puling baseness. We stand once more at a watershed of Kultur.—O.A.H. SCHMITZ, D.W.D., ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... which he does not in his heart believe. Yet how true a moral instinct has presided over the changed signification of the word. The calumniator and the flatterer, although they seem so opposed to one another, how closely united they really are. They grow out of the same root. The same baseness of spirit which shall lead one to speak evil of you behind your back, will lead him to fawn on you and flatter you before your face; there is a profound sense in that Italian proverb, "Who flatters me before, spatters ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... disaster, it is merely what he deserves. Neither is it admissible to represent the misfortunes of a thoroughly good man, for that is merely painful and distressing; and least of all is it tolerable gratuitously to introduce mere baseness, or madness, or other aberrations from human nature. The true tragic hero is a man of high place and birth who having a nature not ignoble has fallen into sin and pays in suffering the penalty of his act. Nothing could throw more light on the distinguishing ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... showered on her every species of insult and indignity of which a cowardly and malignant nature is capable; and who, finding that did not kill her, at length consummated, or revealed, I do not yet know which term is most applicable, his utter baseness by causing her to be informed that his first wife was ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... politeness, with a ferocity and practice of savage vices which is probably unparalleled in any other part of the world."[653] One of the first civilised men to gain an intimate acquaintance with the Fijians draws a melancholy contrast between the baseness and vileness of the people and the loveliness of the land ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... he would take her. As for him—David's sinewy fingers closed as talons might close into the living flesh of a man's neck. He knew the lust of murder, and he exulted in it. Yet even as he exulted, the baseness of what Blair had done was so astounding, that, sitting there in the dreary room, his hands clenched in his pockets, his legs stretched out in front of him, David Richie actually felt a sort of impersonal amazement that had nothing to do with anger. For one instant the unbelievableness ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... still loved her; but what if his love had ceased, and he should be meanly desirous of increasing his own importance by telling how he, a slave, had been the chosen lover of the proudly allied lady before him? Nay, he would never act thus, for it would be a baseness foreign to his nature; and yet have not men of the most lofty sense of honor often fallen from their original nobility, and revelled in self-degradation? And it somehow seemed as though, at the last, the dwarf had looked up at her with a strangely knowing leer. And was it merely ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in Virginia, I expect to get a vast deal of good from thinking of you,—to do my work better, and to keep straighter altogether. Like all lovers, I'm horribly selfish. I expect to see a vast deal of shabbiness and baseness and turmoil, and in the midst of it all I'm sure the inspiration of patriotism will sometimes fail. Then I'll think of you. I love you a thousand times better than my country, Liz.—Wicked? So much the worse. It's the truth. But if ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... must there not be some tremendous change to bring about Paradise and Hell, two images without which God cannot exist to the mind of the vulgar? I know that a compromise was made by the invention of the Soul; but it is repugnant to me to make God answerable for human baseness, for our ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... table. My appetite was gone. I made a pretense of eating, and another pretense of being glad to see my devoted lover. I talked to him in the prettiest manner. As a hypocrite, he thoroughly matched me; he was gallant, he was amusing. If baseness like ours had been punishable by the law, a prison was the right ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... united—perhaps in order to prevent ambiguity; as, "I cannot go." But when the power is affirmed, and something else is denied, the words are written separately; as, "The Christian apologist can not merely expose the utter baseness of the infidel assertion, but he has positive ground for erecting an opposite and confronting assertion in its place."—Dr. Chalmers. The junction of these terms, however, is not of much importance to the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... abusive epithets, challenged him to the field. Grant declined to accept the invitation; and Lewis, after spitting in his face in the presence of several of the French officers, left him to reflect on his baseness. ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... 'Let him that does, shew an unblushing face of innocence. Montoni, you are a villain! If there is treachery in this affair, look to yourself as the author of it. IF—do I say? I—whom you have wronged with unexampled baseness, whom you have injured almost beyond redress! But why do I use words?—Come on, coward, and receive justice at ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... told with the simplicity and directness of obvious truth, are full of terror, of pathos, the shame of human baseness and the glory of human virtue; and though the time is not yet sufficiently distant from the date of their occurrence to give to this record the universal acceptance it deserves, there are few, we think, even now, who can read it without amazement ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... until then I was ignorant. It seems that any younger brother, next heir, might claim the estate by turning Protestant, or drive the incumbent to the same act. I was rejoiced to hear that there was hardly an instance of such profligacy known.[26] To what baseness will not the struggle for political ascendency ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Roger! what have we done to God to be damned alive! I can pity Raymond, since death separates him from Louise. May he forgive me! He will, for he was a grand, a noble, a perfect friend. We both failed to appreciate him, as a matter of course; folly and baseness are alone ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... Miss Franks's letter, and poured out to her the story of his treachery and baseness. I may have been wrong, but something in me forbade it, and I preferred to wait ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... go, papa,' she exclaimed, 'I must and will tell Louisa that I hate her baseness and hypocrisy, and then I'll never speak to her again. Why will mamma laugh? It is very ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... couple nature with fancy; they succeed in giving an extraordinary appearance to what is common, and thus preserve a certain fallacious image of the ideal. The morality of these writers is ambiguous. Not that they failed in strong colours to contrast greatness of soul and goodness with baseness and wickedness, or did not usually conclude with the disgrace and punishment of the latter, but an ostentatious generosity is often favourably exhibited in lieu of duty and justice. Every thing good and excellent in their pictures arises ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... into so sacred an engagement as marriage with one man, with a stronger affection for another, of how calm and innocent a nature soever that affection may be, is a degree of baseness of which my ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... published by Bonnet (Calvin's Letters, i. 162, 163-165). The reformer had had it from Du Bellay's own lips at Strasbourg, and had perused the letter in which the latter threw up his alliance with Montmian, and stigmatized the baseness of his conduct.] ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... to make a desperate effort to recover him; and he was the more fixed in this determination, because the horse was intended as a gift to Eveline on her recovery, in case she did recover, and, also, because, as he believed, the detection of the culprit would expose the baseness of her lover to his daughter, and cause her to discard him at once from her thoughts.—Full of these thoughts, he offered a handsome reward for the horse, and a very large one for the apprehension of the thief. In prospect of obtaining these rewards, as well as ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... to fertilize that simple heart, which, out of its very simplicity, had made for itself a passing idol out of what was essentially fake and base, which would have shortly crumbled to pieces out of its own baseness, had not Fate—or Providence—with kindly cruel hand forever thrown it down. Still, this was a grave, and her husband did ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... of such consequence became the centre of the caravansary from the instant of her arrival; and she gave him her hand with the conventional frankness and self-command that set her apart from the weak. Once more he knew she was a woman to be worshipped, whose presence rebuked the baseness he had just thought. ...
— The Indian On The Trail - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... the happiest dispensation. But, perhaps, with a view to a school of discipline and of moral fortitude, it might be a more salutary prayer, "Give me riches and poverty, and afterwards neither." For the transitional state between riches and poverty will teach a lesson both as to the baseness and the goodness of human nature, and will impress that lesson with a searching force, such as no borrowed experience ever can approach. Most probable it is that Shakspeare drew some of his powerful scenes in the Timon of Athens, those which exhibit the vileness of ingratitude and ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... outsider knew of their intended movements. Of course the matter had been discussed—as all matters were discussed and voted for or against—among the crew; but to doubt either of them was to doubt one's self, and any fear of betrayal among themselves was unknown. The amount of baseness such a suspicion would imply was too great to be incurred even in thought. What, then, could have led to this surprise? Had their movements been watched, and this decoy of the cutter only swallowed with the view of throwing them off ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... blight upon the place; and yet they were harmless, inquisitive people, tempted thither, most of them by fashion, a few perhaps by a feeble love of beauty, and only desirous to bring their own standard of comforts with them. The world seemed out of joint; the radical ugliness and baseness of man an insult to the purity and sweetness ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sermons even in stones. But goodness and badness is apt to run in streaks. Man, to use the language of another, is a queer combination of cheek and perversity, insolence, pride, impudence, vanity, jealousy, hate, scorn, baseness, insanity, honor, truth, wisdom, virtue and urbanity. He's a queer combination all right. And those mixed elements of his nature, in their effects on other people, we call personal influence. Many a ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... all people there is a sense of the hollowness of Fashion, and a just loathing of its pretension and show. Even its votaries secretly despise it, and obey its dictates only because they think they must. They know its baseness better than we can tell them. True, they do not fully realize its sinfulness nor wholly appreciate its evils. But its hollowness and falseness they feel at times most keenly. Else why their perpetual unrest, their longing, dissatisfied condition ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... glaring in his eyes, and stabbed Sanza in the side as he lay on the ground. Faint as he was, he could not lift his hand to save himself; and his craven foe was about to strike him again, when the bystanders all cried shame upon his baseness. Then Gombei and Shirobei lifted up their voices ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... uncommonly sweet, enhanced the admiration with which one viewed his matchless delivery, in which was perfect grace, and entire harmony with the expressions which fell from his lips. How mournful a sight, to see one so nobly gifted, leading a life of baseness and vice, devoting his immortal qualities to the vilest selfishness, and to the betrayal of his country and of liberty! Should the descendant of an oppressed and persecuted race take part with oppressors? Senator Benjamin is a renegade to the spirit ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... crowd of his cowardly assailants, and driven them away. A number of fellows had set on him in the dark—on him, of all others. Oh, what a change must have happened in the school that this should be possible! He felt that the contagion of Brigson's baseness had spread ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... bend his course among the perplexed vicissitudes of society, there was a force within him which would triumph over many difficulties; and a 'light from Heaven' was about his path, which, if it failed to conduct him to wealth and preferment, would keep him far from baseness and degrading vices. Literature, and every great and noble thing which the right pursuit of it implies, he loved with all his heart and all his soul: to this inspiring object he was henceforth exclusively devoted; advancing towards this, and possessed of common necessaries on ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... inconsistent with John's statement that the supper proper was ended before the washing of feet was performed; the act does not appear to have been so unusual as to cause surprize. To many it has appeared plausible, that because of his utter baseness Judas would not be permitted to participate with the other apostles in the holy ordinance of the Sacrament; others infer that he was allowed to partake, as a possible means of moving him to abandon ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... honor due or paid to said reputation. A good name is, after the grace of God, mans most precious possession; wealth is mere trash compared with it. You may find people who think otherwise, but the universal sentiment of mankind stigmatizes such baseness and buries it under the weight of its opprobrium. Nor is it impossible that honor be paid where a good character no longer exists; but this is accidental. In the nature of things, reputation is the basis of all honor; if ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... door-keeper to him, "Is no this thy comrade whom thou robbedst of his silvers and leftest with me sick in the closet doing such and such by him?" And the workmen said to him, "Is not this he whom thou badest us seize and beat?" Therewith Abu Kir's baseness was made manifest to the King and he was certified that he merited torture yet sorer than the torments of Munkar and Nakr.[FN228] So he said to his guards, "Take him and parade him about the city and the markets;"—And ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... virtutem obsepta est via, 'tis hard for a poor man to [2295] rise, haud facile emergunt, quorum virtutibus obstat res angusta domi. [2296]"The wisdom of the poor is despised, and his words are not heard." Eccles. vi. 19. His works are rejected, contemned, for the baseness and obscurity of the author, though laudable and good in themselves, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... refuses to see or to marry the wretch; who, repenting his usage of so divine a creature, would fain move her to forgive his baseness, and make him her husband: and this, though persecuted by all her friends, and abandoned to the deepest distress, being obliged, from ample fortunes, to make away with her apparel for subsistence; surrounded also by strangers, and forced (in want of others) to make a friend of the friend ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... the littleness of men? His stealthy eye missed nothing; and the men whom he flattered and used little thought that the wizened dandy who pleased them with his old-world courtesy was chronicling their weakness and baseness for all time. A nobly patriotic Ministry came before the world with a flourish of trumpets, and declared that England must fight Russia in defence of public law, freedom, and other holy things. But the wicked diarist had watched the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... I know the thoughts of all men's hearts, and discern their manhood or their baseness. And from the souls of clay I turn away, and they are blest, but not by me. They fatten at ease, like sheep in the pasture, and eat what they did not sow, like oxen in the stall. They grow and spread, like the gourd along the ground; ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... with masterly skill. As for Claire, she had striven to match her moves, plotting in the darkness against her, and fighting desperately with such weak weapons as she possessed. It was characteristic that she did not blame herself for her failure; it was the baseness of van Tuiver, his inability to appreciate sincere devotion, his unworthiness of her love. And this, just after she had been naively telling me of her efforts to poison his mind against Sylvia while pretending ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... who was mostly responsible for the baseness in the Regent's character—Dubois who had taught him a contempt for religion and morality, the cynical view of life which makes the pleasure of the moment the only thing worth pursuing, at whatever cost; and who had impressed indelibly on his mind that no woman is virtuous and that men are knaves. ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... titles, and boundless power heaped upon them, who can hardly write ten lines together correctly; but, remember, it is not merit that has been the cause of their advancement; the cause has been, in almost every such case, the subserviency of the party to the will of some government, and the baseness of some nation who have quietly submitted to be governed by brazen fools. Do not you imagine, that you will have luck of this sort: do not you hope to be rewarded and honoured for that ignorance which shall prove a scourge to your country, and which ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... Courts of Westminster are venerable to me; how venerable; gray with a thousand years of honorable age! For a thousand years and more, Wisdom, and faithful Valor, struggling amid much Folly and greedy Baseness, not without most sad distortions in the struggle, have built them up; and they are as we see. For a thousand years, this English Nation has found them useful or supportable: they have served this English Nation's wants; been a road to it through the abyss of Time. They are venerable, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... its large-hearted charity, its quiet satire of folly and baseness, the story is one to win the affection and charm the fancy not only of boys and maidens, but also of grown ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... turn around and do Mern up, Mern would heartily give the fellow three cheers. Thus did Mern put his remarkable business on the plane of a man-to-man fight by his argument, not admitting that there was any baseness in his plots and ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... eyes have dwelt with beauty night and morn, Guarding the soul within from every stain, No baseness since the first day she was born Behind those star-lit brows could access again, Bathed in the light that streamed from all things fair, Turning to spirit each delicate door of sense, And with all lovely shapes of ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... sigh, and sat apparently meditating on the enormous baseness of the man who saved a lady's life and then proposed; and it was not until Mrs. Willoughby had spoken twice that she ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... a home and not thought of the parrot who screamed out his name in her dear dwelling. There was a parrot like that in the world—and he wandered foolishly abroad. What madness! What baseness! ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... with delay, danger or extreme discomfort. Hence a special meaning of baseness in "his ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... determination into act he had chosen his colour in the game, and had given an inevitable bent to his wishes. He had made it impossible that he should not from henceforth desire it to be the truth that his father was dead; impossible that he should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the precise facts of his conduct should not remain for ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... passions, the reason, and the instincts of mankind? Have we no pride, no honor, no sense of shame, no reverence for our ancestors, no care for posterity, no love for home, or family or friends? Must we quail before the onion breath of an enthroned mob, confess our baseness, discredit the fame of our sires, degrade our children, abandon our homes, flee from our country and dishonor ourselves—all for the sake of a Union whose Constitution you have publicly burned and whose Supreme ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... evil-doing at the South compared with the North, no one who walks the streets of a Northern city, by day or night, with the ordinary discernment of one who sets himself to examine the moral condition of a place, will fail to see that we need not go to the South to find humiliating proofs of baseness and shame. There is less solicitation at the South; here it is a nightly trade, without disguise. At the South the young must go in search of opportunity; here it confronts them. The small number of yellow children in the interior of the Cotton States, ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... my soul very low if you think me capable of trafficking with my feelings, my affections. Rather than commit such literary baseness, I would do as they do in England,—put a rope round a woman's neck and sell her in ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... deeds that the mind has deliberately resolved upon are virtually accomplished facts as far as the wrong-doer is concerned. Before leaving his dingy hiding-place Haldane had in the depths of his soul been guilty of drunkenness and all kinds of excess. He also purposed unutterable baseness toward the widowed mother whom, by every principle of true manhood, he was bound to cherish and shield; and he had in volition more certainly committed the act of self-destruction than does the poor wretch who, under ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... evening receptions we well know, attended by some of the most illustrious French and foreign residents in the metropolis,) to accompany him on a tour of inspection to the Gobelins, and had afterwards been guilty of the unexampled baseness of leaving the coupe he had employed standing, unpaid, at the door of a certain house in the Rue Racine, whilst he escaped by a private passage into the Rue de la Harpe, and so forth, and so forth. I saw it all. I blushed, I shuddered at the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... this last reason will seem the best of all. However much we may moralize about its baseness and hollowness, whether with the Hugo of Les Chatiments we scorn and vituperate its charlatan head or pity him profoundly as we see him ill and helpless in Zola's Debacle, most of us, if we are candid, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... constantly reflected in our "good society" and "fashionable world" every baseness and vulgarity that is invented outre mer, particularly in Paris. One woman returns to smoke cigars, in a magnificent home erected by a lucky mechanic or shopkeeper, as if such an indecency had ever been tolerated among the well-born ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... history which the Tower of London has done in our own. Here, by the orders of Cicero, were strangled Lentulus, Cethegus, and one or two more of the accomplices of Catiline, in his famous conspiracy. Here was murdered, under circumstances of great baseness, Vercingetorix, the young and gallant chief of the Gauls, whose bravery called forth the highest qualities of Julius Caesar's military genius, and who, when success abandoned his arms, boldly gave himself up as an offering to appease ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... Nature. It is the loss, sorrow, weariness, and disappointment of life which give dark days their gloom, and cold its icy edge, and work its bitterness. The real sorrows of life are not of Nature's making; if faithlessness and treachery and every sort of baseness were taken out of human lives, we should find only a healthy and vigorous joy in such hardship as Nature imposes upon us. Upon men of sound, sweet life, she lays only such burdens as strength delights to carry, because in so doing ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... porringer: Of me she shall not win renown: For the baseness of its nature shall have ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... intend to do, Vaninka? What do you wish me to do? What can I do, but flee from St. Petersburg, and seek death in the first corner of Russia where war may break out, in order not to repay my patron's kindness by some infamous baseness?" ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... provided a base of operations. A full account of the doings of this poisonous gang is given in The German Spy in America (HUTCHINSON), by JOHN PRICE JONES, a member of the staff of the New York Sun. It is not easy for anyone, least of all for a good American, to refrain from indignation at the baseness of the rogues who thus battened for many months on the United States and their people. The book is soberly and clearly written, and is commended by Mr. ROOSEVELT in a Foreword, to which are added another Foreword by the Author, and an Introduction by Mr. ROGER ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various
... than heighten his permanent reputation when they are placed on a line with his masterpieces by formal reproduction. It is impossible to take much interest in personages with an unbroken record of profligacy and baseness; and we are reminded of the Aristotelian maxim that pure wickedness is ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... them. They will commit any baseness for money, except betraying their masters. It has been tried a hundred times. We may avoid using violence, as you call it, but the man must be frightened with the show of it. The people who can be bribed are the women slaves of the harem. But ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... you must infallibly be this night thirteen months hence. I didn't see any of the other millions who would be choking and gasping for breath and writhing in the torture of the universal fire—I only saw you and my own baseness in thinking, even for a moment, that such ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... his suit had been rebuffed at every point, he was not discouraged. Indeed, had his other qualities equalled his perseverance, he had richly merited a full and good reward; but, unfortunately, this was his only redeeming trait, and the baseness of that motive which prompted it poisoned ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... whose generosity redeems his guilt, whose kindliness outweighs his folly, or whose beauty charms the eye to overlook his baseness—this too common hero is an object, an example fraught with perilous interest. Charles Duval, the polite; Paul Clifford, the handsome; Richard Turpin, brave and true; Jack Sheppard, no ignoble mind and loving still his mother; these, and such as these, with ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... vices, your weaknesses, your meannesses in detail. One thing I might have told him, which I left out—the fact that you are no gentleman, not even bourgeois—a mere peasant clown. He would not have let you measure swords with him if he had known the baseness of your ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... habitation, where thou keep'st, Hourly afflict: merely, thou are death's fool; For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun, And yet run'st towards him still: Thou art not noble; For all the accommodations that thou bear'st Are nursed by baseness: Thou art by no means valiant, For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork Of a poor worm: Thy best of rest is sleep, And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself; For thou exist'st on many thousand grains ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... made his enemy by the poem of Absalom and Achitophel, which "he thinks a little hard upon his fanatick patrons;" and charges him with borrowing the plan of his Arthur from the preface to Juvenal, "though he had," says he, "the baseness not to acknowledge his benefactor, but instead of it to traduce me in ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... events; and she explained the reasons for her belief that the enormities of that period were no new crime, but a remnant of the old not to be eradicated at once, any more than it is possible for an individual to turn from great baseness to real goodness without some backslidings, even after the most unmistakable of conversions. Miss Sunderland was satisfied, the future again became clear to her, and after that she seemed to lose interest in the details of affairs. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... agitating you this long while, which you have asked at every stage of this long narrative of a sinful life. Shake not your head, lift not your finger, exquisitely hypocritical reader; you can deceive me in nothing. I know the baseness and unworthiness of your soul as I know the baseness and unworthiness of my own. This is a magical tete-a-tete, such a one as will never happen in your life again; therefore I say let us put off ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... its own characteristic value. Indeed, if this were not so there would be no possibility of that form of baseness known as being merely prudent. There is a prudential equilibrium; a condition of smooth and harmonious adjustment, within the personal life or the community. I propose that this equilibrium be termed health. In that admirable idealization of renaissance morality, Castiglione's {89} ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... connived at the escape of their friends and relatives, and at the same time countenanced, pretended to believe, and gave deadly effect to them when directed against others, is supposing a criminality and baseness too great to be readily admitted. In that wild reign of the worst of passions, this would have transcended them all in its iniquity. The only excusable people at that time were those who honestly, and without a doubt, believed in the guilt of the convicted. Those who had doubts, and did not ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Whatsoever we desire from motives of hatred is base, and in a State unjust. This also is evident from III:xxxix., and from the definitions of baseness and ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... thou, whose misery and baseness Hangs on my door; whose hateful whine of woe Breaks in upon my sorrows, and distracts My jarring senses with thy ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe
... in untruths against him. Mr. William spoke of him with the warmth of fraternal affection. The Baron perceived that his kinsmen disliked Edmund; but his own good heart hindered him from seeing the baseness of theirs. It is said, that continual dropping will wear away a stone; so did their incessant reports, by insensible degrees, produce a coolness in his patron's behaviour towards him. If he behaved with ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... should have thought of that before; but not even to spare her feelings can I neglect my duty. I cannot demean myself by touching a thing so vile. Ralph, whom you have calumniated, shall inflict upon you a punishment suited to the baseness of your crime. Wilson, you will find a light cane in ...
— George Leatrim • Susanna Moodie
... and dismay she turned upon him, and her face became crimsoned with shame. She then covered it with her open hands, and, turning round, placed her head upon the end of the sofa, and moaned with a deep and bursting anguish, on hearing this acknowledgment of deliberate baseness from his own lips. ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Austrian cabinet regarded the conquest of Naples with complacency, and that its measures were directed so as designedly not to prevent the French from overrunning it. That cabinet was assuredly capable of any folly, and of any baseness; and it is not improbable that at this time, calculating upon the success of the new coalition, it indulged a dream of adding extensively to its former Italian possessions; and, therefore, left the ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... contain?—What great name of Russia was absent from it?—Crime, intrigue, peculation, faithlessness, treachery, treason—by these sins of others had his father risen to his position and his wealth. Trusting to the ever-renewed baseness, cupidity, passion of humankind, and their cowardice in the possibility of discovery, Michael had known that his sources of revenue would never fail, his victims never rebel. So much, indeed, he had openly acknowledged. His defence had been: "No innocent person could ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter |
