"Deformity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... particularly well and femininely attractive, he was pitying her as a forlorn creature, who could never inspire love and ought to be treated with consideration, much as one tries to hide by an effusive show of courtesy the repulsion deformity inspires. ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... castigate his faults; it is your duty,—he himself will have reason to thank you. But do not approach him with arrogance or a supercilious coldness; do not, if your knowledge be less than his, seek to mask your ignorance with the deformity of conceit; do not treat him as a criminal or as a dunce, unless he happens really to be one. Above all, do not, by dint of judging, vitiate your faculty of tasting. Recognize the importance, the inestimable virtues, of that quality which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... criticised. How often, how often, have those long months of infinite toil been in vain! How often has the actor led the child of his imagination to the footlights, only to realise that he has brought into the world a weakling or a deformity which may not live! And how often he has sat through the long night brooding over the corpse of this dear figment of his fancy! It has lately become customary with many actor-managers to avoid these pangs of childbirth. They have determinedly declined the responsibility they owe to the ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... those days towards every new discovery seems stupid and almost insane. They had a crystallized system of truth, perfect, symmetrical—it wanted no novelty, no additions; every addition or growth was an imperfection, an excrescence, a deformity. Progress was unnecessary and undesired. The Church had a rigid system of dogma, which must be accepted in its entirety on pain of being treated as a heretic. Philosophers had a cast-iron system of truth to match—a system founded upon Aristotle—and ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... only une boete d'or pour le defendre des injures de l'air; and it certainly has received no other, than such as rain, and wind, and heat, and cold, have made upon it; and those are rather marks of dignity, than deformity. What reason else, then, can be assigned for its preservation to this day; but that the savage and the saint have been equally awed by its ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... to an education committee, a trainer in an elementary training college or physical training college, the head of the gymnastic department of a school clinic, or she may prefer to start a private practice, holding classes, treating cases of deformity, and also acting as visiting gymnastic teacher or games-coach to ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... world as it la, women such as they are, and not such as they ought to be; let us call things by their names, and when there is moral deformity somewhere, ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... about real people, that may well have seemed permissible in an age when historians recorded mere hearsay as actual fact. Richard III., perhaps, had one shoulder higher than the other, but within a few years of his death grave historians had represented him as a hunchbacked deformity. ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... experience, the shoulders broad, but painfully humped, and the whole upper portion of the body immensely too large for the short and slender limbs, which served for its support. And yet, as if all this wretched deformity were not enough, one leg was shorter than the other, and the foot was a club one. To assist him in walking, he carried a pair of crutches, apparently much too long for him, which raised his spindle arms in their loose sockets, and rendered the ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... from the censorious. Who will ridicule a personal imperfection in one that seems conscious, that it is an imperfection? Who ever said an anchoret was poor? But who would spare so very absurd a wrong-head, as should bestow tinsel to make his deformity ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... evidently made no attempt to define the influence of particular writers upon Shakspere. His criticism is at some points purely conventional, as for instance when he calls the poet "that powerful magician, whose art could fascinate us even by means of deformity itself "; but on the whole Scott seems to write about Shakspere in a very ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... least hardened, by this consciousness. But Ramona's was not. She never put it in words to herself. She accepted it, as those born deformed seem sometimes to accept the pain and isolation caused by their deformity, with an unquestioning acceptance, which is as far above resignation, as resignation is ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Disease, Insanity, and Deformity. By John Ellis, M.D., Professor of the Principles and Practice of Medicine in the Western Medical College of Cleveland, Ohio; Author of "Marriage and its Violations." A Book for the People as well as for the Profession. New York. Mason Brothers. 16mo. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Preraphaelite one. It was the great virtue (or limitation) of William Morris that the Dark Ages were to him a time of special light and illumination. Life then was simple. Men worked for the love of it, and if they wanted things they made them. "Every trade exclusively followed means a deformity," says Ruskin. Division of labor had not yet come, and men were skilled in many ways. There was neither poverty nor riches, and the idea of brotherhood was firmly fixed in the minds of men. The feverish desire for place, pelf and power was not upon them. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... Africa—the Wart-hogs, as they are commonly called. Of these there are two species; and it would be difficult to say which is the uglier of the two. In respect of ugliness, either will compare advantageously with any other animal in creation. The deformity lies principally in the countenance of these animals; and is caused by two pairs of large protuberances, or warts, that rise upon the cheeks and over the frontal bone. These excrescences—if we may so call them—lend to the visage of the creature an aspect positively ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... who understood all truth, worked out his conceptions on the same principle, having said himself, that "proper deformity shows not in the fiend so horrid as in women." Hence it is that whether he portrayed the wickedness founded in perverted power, as in Lady Macbeth; or the wickedness founded in weakness, as in Gertrude, Lady Anne, or Cressida, he is the more fearfully ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... old-looking boy, Tom thought. His spine had been deformed through an accident in infancy, and to Tom he was simply a humpback. He had a vague notion that the deformity of Wakem's son had some relation to the lawyer's rascality, of which he had so often heard his father ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... than that of a girl's of ten years; you saw both holes quite close together. Her cunt was in fact a study. Something seemed to bar the passage; for about an inch further up it seemed smaller. The whole thing seemed out of proportion, yet I could not say how, or where that deformity was, with ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... the adder egg of vanity can brood in its own dunghill, and hatch itself to persecution, rape, and murder!—Lo how Guilt and Folly couple, and engender darkness to hide their own deformity!—The picture is mine!—Black, midnight rape, and blood red murder! A horrid ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... nothing redundant. So, then, in distributing our ornament, there must never be any sense of gap or blank, neither any sense of there being a single member, or fragment of a member, which could be spared. Whatever has nothing to do, whatever could go without being missed, is not ornament; it is deformity and encumbrance. Away with it. And, on the other hand, care must be taken either to diffuse the ornament which we permit, in due relation over the whole building, or so to concentrate it, as never to leave a sense of its having got ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... address. He first alluded to the perfection to which the forceps had reached for pelves narrowed at the brim, and the means of correcting faulty position of the foetus during labor. He then stated: 'In cases of great deformity of the pelvis, it has long been the ambition of the obstetrician, where it has been impossible to deliver a living child per vias naturales, to find some means by which that child could be born alive with comparative safety to the mother; and that time has now arrived. ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... alone. He was a youth of about twenty, but looked older. Heavy brows shaded deep-set eyes, his shoulders were square, with a slight deformity of the spine. His name ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... surprised if you prefer me to speak of your ugly deformity of a face and to be silent about your morals, which are infinitely more repulsive than your features. I will say nothing of them. In the first place I am not naturally of a quarrelsome disposition, and ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... ancient scribe mistook the first four letters of [Greek: agioi] for [Greek: apo]. It was but the mistaking of [Greek: AGIO] for [Greek: APO]. At the end of 1700 years, the only Copies which witness to this deformity are BP with four cursives,—in opposition to [Symbol: Aleph]AKL and the whole body of the cursives, the Vulgate[83] and the Harkleian. Euthalius knew nothing of it[84]. Obvious it was, next, for some one ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... luckless negro instantly fled to "the bush;" and, that night, in the agony of delirium, caused by fever and dreaded deformity, the mate terminated his existence ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... one soil to nourish the productions of another, one tree to bear the fruits of another; he mingles and confounds climates, elements, seasons; he mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He overturns everything, disfigures everything; he loves deformity, monsters; he desires that nothing should be as nature made it, not even man himself. To please him, man must be broken in like a horse; man must be adapted to man's own fashion, like a tree ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... was his blood without a taint of sullenness, which disqualified him from conciliating the good opinion of those whom his innate superiority must have often prompted him to desire for friends. He was branded, moreover, with a personal deformity; and the grudge against Nature for inflicting this defect not only deeply disturbed his happiness, but so generally affected his feelings as to embitter them with a vindictive sentiment, so strong as, at times, to exhibit the disagreeable energy of misanthropy. This was not all. He enjoyed high ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... of misfortune in this case is the deformity in the organ, and the fact that the more important right ear is deformed, so far from mitigating the force of ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... his own, he loved them unto the uttermost, through all dulness and all unfaithfulness. He suffered unjustly, but bore all wrong in silence. He never lost his temper. He never grew discouraged, though all his work seemed to be in vain. He never despaired of making beauty out of deformity in his disciples. He never lost hope of any soul. Had it not been for this quality of unwearying patience nothing would ever have come from his interest in ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... recent victories, and believe that this wicked rebellion will soon be subdued, we must rejoice with trembling, so long as SLAVERY, the acknowledged casus belli, still remains. The unsightly monster, in all its rottenness and deformity, is drawn up from the hiding-place of ages, and it can no more be restored to its former status, than, at the will of the workmen, our old pump could be thrust back, when, suspended in the air, it threatened their destruction. God forbid ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... not have produced such a deformity. Still the suffering made no impression upon him. All he had was his lawfully, and he was making lawful use of it—that was the most they wrung from him. Now, however, he is past persecution. He has a license to ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... sad circumstances. She was at the time thirty-six years old. She was disfigured, having in her infancy slipped off her nurse's lap into the fireplace, and getting her face so shockingly burned that it ever afterward presented a frightful appearance. This deformity had made her resolve not to marry, for she did not want any man to ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... absolute essential in all cases of imperfect bone structure, such as rachitis, or rickets, constitutional disease of children, osteomalacia, tuberculosis of the bones, deformity of bone structure, such as ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... shifting eyes seldom looked squarely at any one whom he deigned to address. He was fleshy, but his movements were nevertheless elastic and suave. Behind him stood First Lieutenant Leimann, under-sized and prematurely bent, with a neck several sizes too short for him and a suspicion of deformity between the shoulders. A pear-shaped head protruded from between them, fitfully lit up by a pair of pig's eyes, which either restlessly shot glances or else were so completely buried under their lids as to become ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... pneumonia." Less frequently there are other complications, and the eyes, ears, the central nervous system, heart, and the skin may any one of them suffer. Sometimes there is gangrene at the corners of the mouth and this may result in death or horrible deformity. ...
— Measles • W. C. Rucker
... that he sees, hears, feels, or thinks; and all with which he trifles, or with which he is seriously engaged. Not content with deforming whatever he can seize with his hands, he soars upon the wings of imagination into worlds to him unknown, and arrays them in ideal deformity. Even freedom, the noblest of his treasures, to obtain which he has shed rivers of blood, he readily sells for gold and pleasure, before he has tasted its sweets. Incapable of good, he yet trembles at evil, he heaps horror upon horror ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... is merely a deformity, and like many others in various breeds of animals, was solely the result of accident in the first place; and as we often see, even in the human species, the deformities and infirmities of our ancestors entailed upon ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... in that he had given life to so much moral deformity. And yet it was not from him that she inherited "that cursed Spanish blood," he said, turning away with a groan, including Pepita, Leam, all his past with its ruined love and futile dreams, its hope and its despair, in that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... the women in their visits, and acts as their interpreter, grinning with mischievous glee at his mother's bad English and my perplexity at not being able to understand her signs. In spite of his extreme deformity, he seemed to possess no inconsiderable share of vanity, gazing with great satisfaction at his face in the looking glass. When I asked his name, he replied, "Indian name Maquin, but English name 'Mister Walker,' very ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... a scene entirely different from that which had marked the tempestuous deformity of the night. The whole fury of the winds appear ed to have been expended in their precocious effort. From the moderate gale, to which they had fallen by the end of the middle watch, they further altered to a ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... baths. But the embittering circumstance of his life,—that, which haunted him like a curse, amidst the buoyancy of youth, and the anticipations of fame and pleasure, was, strange to say, the trifling deformity of his foot. By that one slight blemish (as in his moments of melancholy he persuaded himself) all the blessings that nature had showered upon him were counterbalanced. His reverend friend, Mr. Becher, finding him one day unusually dejected, endeavoured to cheer and rouse him, by representing, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... limbs, which caused them horrible sufferings, in the hope of escaping the service. If the operation was successful, the patient was rejected by the examining officers, and in a short time he was well, and a free man. Often, however, the deformity intended to be temporary proved incurable, so that there were many men in Polotzk blind of one eye, or hard of hearing, or lame, as a result of these secret practices; but these things were easier to bear than the memory of four years in ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... to whom he owes much more Than ever child to parent owed before, In life's first season, when the fever's flame Shrunk to deformity his shrivel'd frame, And turn'd each fairer image in his brain To blank confusion and her crazy train, 'Twas thine, with constant love, through lingering years, To bathe thy idiot orphan with thy tears; ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... reasonable that persons of wit and sense should be in a worse condition than those who have none? Can you pretend this; you who have so great a share, and desired so earnestly to have it? But let us come to fact, if you please. Setting aside my ugliness and deformity, is there any thing in me which displeases you? Are you dissatisfied with my birth, my wit, humour, ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... some artist's brain. If the period is a good one, then it proves that fate allowed the artist to be true to his muse. If the fashion is a bad one the artist may have had to adapt his lines and colour or detail to hide a royal deformity, or to cater to the whim of some wilful beauty ignorant of our art, but rich and ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... which had stirred her growing curls as he leaned over her while they read together some passionate stanza from a hymn that was as much like a love-song as it dared to be in godly company? A shadow of disgust—the natural repugnance of loveliness for deformity-ran all through her, and she shrieked, as she thought, and threw herself at the feet of that other figure. She felt herself lifted from the floor, and then a cold thin hand seemed to take hers. The warm life ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of these unfortunate creatures a relief. He could not, from their language, manners, and appearance, doubt that they belonged to the degraded class of beings whom deformity of person and weakness of intellect recommended to the painful situation of appendages to great families, where their personal appearance and imbecility were food for merriment to the household. Superior in no respect to the ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... by the names of Wealth and Fashion. In the end, it is said, the island became, nine tenths of it, church. The women, too, it appears, were oddly deformed by a natural protuberance of the region just below the small of the back—although, most unaccountably, this deformity was looked upon altogether in the light of a beauty. One or two pictures of these singular women have in fact, been miraculously preserved. They look very odd, very—like something between a ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... heterogeneous parts, contains in it a principle of corruption. All disproportion is unnatural; and from what is unnatural, we can derive only the pleasure which novelty produces. We admire it awhile as a strange thing; but, when it is no longer strange, we perceive its deformity. It is a kind of artifice, which by frequent repetition detects itself; and the reader, learning in time what he is to expect, lays down his book, as the spectator turns away from a second exhibition ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... has obtained to any degree in New York City, but I do know that I have as yet found only one working girl who has had the benefit of any such training in childhood. She was "Lame Lena" at Springer's box-factory; and in spite of her deformity, which made it difficult for her to walk across the floor, she was the quickest worker and made more money than any other ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... preservation and improvement, and in both of these directions love is the mightiest of all agencies. It makes the world go round. Take it away, and in a few years animal life will be as extinct on this planet as it is on the moon. And by preferring youth to age, health to disease, beauty to deformity, it improves the human ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... how sharp was the scrutiny to which he subjected the most elusive appearances of pride and vanity. But with his high and living sense of the source and destiny of every human mind, and his almost morbid consciousness of the deformity of moral evil, he reverenced in himself and in others the presence of a spirit which connected humanity with its Maker, and by unfolding the greatness of the spiritual capacities of men, he hoped to elevate them above the degradation of sensuality and sin. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... and censure seldom rise against them, unless they appear associated with that confidence which belongs only to long acquaintance with the modes of life, and to consciousness of unfailing propriety of behaviour. Deformity itself is regarded with tenderness rather than aversion, when it does not attempt to deceive the sight by dress and decoration, and to seize upon fictitious claims the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... salivation, hydrocephalus; others from some accidental symptom of the disease, as tooth-ach, head-ach, heart-burn; in which the pain is only a concomitant circumstance of the excess or deficiency of fibrous actions, and not the cause of them. Others again are taken from the deformity occasioned in consequence of the unnatural fibrous motions, which constitute diseases, as tumours, eruptions, extenuations; all these therefore improperly give names to diseases; and some difficulty is thus occasioned to the reader in endeavouring to discover to what class ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... a name which he knew was quite impossible for a white man's tongue to manage. Everybody laughed, including the newcomer, who put up his mutilated hand to cover his grinning mouth. Mick noticed the deformity at once. The man's hand, with its three fingers set wide apart, from which long hard nails stuck out, resembled the claw of some bird, so the drover turned to the white boys and said: "What d'you think of that for a name? They've ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... your bosom, you stand forward as her champion and say, "Thank God, she is my wife and I am proud of it!" That is what you or I would have answered. But the gauzy curtain that was covered over this foul tableau, has been lifted up, and you see it in all it hideous deformity. As I have before stated, you have seen, gentlemen, the flimsy evidence upon which is attempted to predicate a conviction for grand larceny. I am confident that in spite of all the attempts that have been made by a shameless wanton and ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... wore over his other clothing. It was a blue stockinett, with large white stripes running across. Having put this on, I proceeded to equip myself with a false stomach, in imitation of the horrible deformity of the swollen corpse. This was soon effected by means of stuffing with some bedclothes. I then gave the same appearance to my hands by drawing on a pair of white woollen mittens, and filling them in with any kind of rags that offered themselves. Peters then arranged my face, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... resulting from carelessness in learning to speak; (2)—Those which are of distinct mental form; and (3)—Those caused by a physical deformity in the organs of ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... people are well proportioned in body, without any deformity, and are also agile. The women are well-shaped, full and plump, and of a swarthy complexion, on account of the large amount of a certain pigment with which they rub themselves, and which gives them an olive color. They are clothed in skins, one part ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... did not care to stay. Everything was against him; for the first time in his life he felt himself a failure,—in the way. How had he come to be so careless? Well he knew, for the face of the dreadful child, in spite of its deformity, evinced a strong, strong, insistent resemblance to a face he knew. The dark hair and eyes, the shape of the forehead, the way the hair grew on the forehead—where had he seen it all reproduced not so very long ago? Miss Clairville's expression, colouring, and ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... their fields and villages consumed with flames, and deluged with indiscriminate slaughter. To these real terrors they added the surprise and abhorrence which were excited by the shrill voice, the uncouth gestures, and the strange deformity of the Huns. * These savages of Scythia were compared (and the picture had some resemblance) to the animals who walk very awkwardly on two legs and to the misshapen figures, the Termini, which were often placed on the bridges of antiquity. They were distinguished from the rest of the human species ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... which religion and science shall stand together as allies, not against each other as enemies. Let the fight be for truth of every kind against falsehood of every kind—for justice against injustice—for right against wrong—for beauty against deformity—for goodness against vice—and the great warfare which has brought so many sufferings, shall bring to the earth ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... eruption of these tubercles is usually preceded at the onset by fever, as well as by puffy swelling of the involved region, eyelids, ears, etc. These leprous tubercles choose the face as their favored site. They mass here in great numbers, and thus produce the characteristic deformity of the countenance that has given to the disease one of its names, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Twin-sister of religion, selfishness! Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all The wanton horrors of her bloody play; Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless, 25 Shunning the light, and owning not its name, Compelled, by its deformity, to screen, With flimsy veil of justice and of right, Its unattractive lineaments, that scare All, save the brood of ignorance: at once 30 The cause and the effect of tyranny; Unblushing, hardened, sensual, and vile; Dead to all love but of its abjectness, With heart impassive by more ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the one great deformity of Lord Mansfield's character; his quailing before Lord Camden is but a solitary instance of the fault that tarnished his otherwise brilliant career. When we have said that the Chief Justice acted unconstitutionally in continuing in the Cabinet whilst he held the Judicial office, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... leading actor in the mournful drama which filled up the whole period of the Twelve Years' Truce. His words had a direct influence on great events. He was a man of unquestionable erudition, of powers of mind above the average, while the absolute deformity of his moral constitution made him incapable of thinking, feeling, or acting rightly on any vital subject, by any accident or on any occasion. If there were one thing that he thoroughly hated in the world, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... such waterflies"—"diminutives of nature"—as excited the scorn of his moralizing cynic, Velasquez is as unquestionably condemned as is Raphael or Titian. It is true that this miraculous power of hand (?)[35] makes beautiful for us the deformity of dwarfs, and dignifies the degradation of princes; but that is not the question. It is true, again, that Mr. Whistler's own merest "arrangements" in colour are lovely and effective;[36] but his portraits, to speak of these alone, are liable to the damning ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... and afterwards from the narrow channel of the shell. As long as the operation of the release lasts, it pushes outside all that it is able to inject of its accumulated humors; it makes itself small inside the pupa and swells into a bloated deformity without. Two hours and more are spent in ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... threat against him. The brutal reference to his lameness roused the girl's soul. When the old man, crushed by Phil's desertion, broke down the last reserve of his strange cold nature, tore his wounded heart open to her, cried in agony over his deformity, his lameness, and the anguish with which he saw the threatened ruin of his life-work, she threw her arms around his neck in a flood of ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... a soldier entered the garden for the purpose of purchasing some vegetables, and Dominica perceived that his soul was very offensive in the sight of God. She looked in his face, and it seemed to her so disfigured by foul and monstrous deformity, that she was moved with a deep compassion for him; she prayed therefore very earnestly, that God would give him the grace of conversion, and save him from his miserable state. She longed to say something to him; but ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... the inferior beings unworthy of the Latin grammar, Pope suggests the brilliant wit whose contempt has a keener edge from his resentment against fine ladies blinded to his genius by his personal deformity. ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... possible to demonstrate in man the existence of several characters showing simple Mendelian inheritance. As few besides medical men have hitherto been concerned practically with heredity, such records as exist are, for the most part, records of deformity or of disease. So it happens that most of the {171} pedigrees at present available deal with characters which are usually classed as abnormal. In some of these the inheritance is clearly Mendelian. One of the cases which has been most fully worked out ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... of a high order of excellence. Hippocrates used the sound for exploring the bladder, and understood the use of the speculum for examining the rectum, and in operations for fistula and piles. He understood the causation of club-foot, and could cure cases of this deformity by bandaging. He was skilful also in obstetric operations. He trepanned the skull, which appears to have been a common operation in his day. He had clear and sound views in reference to wounds of the head, recognizing ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... forward, producing a sinking in of the abdomen and a marked prominence of the hips and sacrum, necessitating a compensatory curve of the spine which increases the curvature forward at the small of the back— a deformity which, a few years ago, women were going to orthopedic surgeons to have corrected. In this attitude the line passing through the centre of gravity strikes the heels, the knees are hyper-extended, and the muscles of the calves and ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... gives us his gods, what more can he do? And yet, it seems, he may be the richer for the loss. Never was a question more senseless than that of the idolatrous fool,—"Ye have taken away my gods, and what else have I left?" His godship was a little injured in his transit; but he was very perfect in deformity before, and his ugliness could not, by any accident, be improved. I have put him into a glass case with some stuffed birds, at which he ogles, with his great eyes, in a manner not altogether divine. His condition, therefore, is pretty nearly that ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... down it. To him, those liquid flashing eyes, and arching brows, and curled red lips seemed to light, positively light, the small and common room. But the eye grows accustomed to beauty and ceases to heed it, just as it grows accustomed to, and ceases to heed, ugliness and deformity, especially where there is no standard, no measure for it, no comparison with other objects. Just as any shortcoming, any mental or physical defect that a man hardly notices in a woman he loves, when alone with her, becomes painfully apparent to him ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... great stand-by. On dull days he could always get a story from the unions. He attended their meetings religiously. They trusted him implicitly, for Ben never broke his word to any one but his landlady. He was short and wiry, with a head so large as to be almost a deformity. On top of this head was a shock of brick-colored hair that resembled a street-cleaner's broom. And Ben's heart was as big as his head. His generosity was always getting him into ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... anchor, which had been got up to the cathead in time of need; another was for cutting down the foremast, the foretop-mast being already by the board. The fog totally disappeared, and the black, rocky island stood in all its rugged deformity before their eyes. Suddenly the sun broke out in full splendor, as if to expose more clearly to the view of the sufferers their dreadful predicament. Despair was in every bosom—death, arrayed in all its ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... frailties, but a cool, unconcerned fiend, laughing with a detestable glee over the whole of the better and worse elements of which human life is composed; treating well-nigh with equal derision the most pure of virtues, and the most odious of vices; dead alike to the beauty of the one, and the deformity of the other; a mere heartless despiser of that frail but noble humanity, whose type was never exhibited in a shape of more deplorable degradation than in his own contemptuously distinct delineation of himself. To confess to his ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the English throne, speaks of "a popular though probably a groundless tradition, that by his mother he was descended from Henry III. by an elder brother of Edward I., who, on account of his personal deformity, had been excluded from the succession to the crown." Where may I find this tradition? or where meet with any information on ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... avoid the conditions which, in the absence of my advice, would have certainly destroyed the health and life of the little ones. Moreover, at an early age a defect may be easily overcome, which at a later period would ripen into a permanent deformity, such as defects of vision, color blindness, defects of speech, stammering, stuttering, lisping, defects of walk, and every other defect caused by a deficient development ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... of society. Let us not miss this opportunity of communion. Let us, through these two thousand men, preserve this communion, and let us make use of it to free ourselves from the aimlessness and the deformity of our lives, and to free the condemned from that indigence and misery which do not allow the sensitive people in our ranks to enjoy our good ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... so, and read a good deal about the Egyptian Expedition. Had comfortable accounts of Anne, and through her of Sophia. Dr. Shaw doubts if anything is actually the matter with poor Johnnie's back. I hope the dear child will escape deformity, and the infirmities attending that helpless state. I have myself been able to fight up very well, notwithstanding my lameness, but it has cost great efforts, and I am besides very strong. Dined with Colin Mackenzie; a fine family all growing up about him, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... and the gentle murmur of the stream was subdued by the loud rattle of the loom. Sometimes M. —— and his friend halted amidst all that is delightful and soothing; and after a short advance, found themselves amidst barrenness, deformity, and confusion. The remoter scenery was not less impressive. Behind them were the rugged mountains of Puy de Dome; the lofty Tarare lifted its majestic head beside them, and far before appeared the ...
— The Village in the Mountains; Conversion of Peter Bayssiere; and History of a Bible • Anonymous
... Valais, or Pays-de-Vaud, in Switzerland, or into the less frequented regions of Savoy, Aosta, or Styria, impressed as he may be with the beauty and grandeur of the scenery through which he passes, finds himself startled also at the frightful deformity and degradation of the inhabitants. By the roadside, basking in the sun, he beholds beings whose appearance seems such a caricature upon humanity, that he is at a loss to know whether to assign them a place among the human or the brute creation. Unable to walk,—usually ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... their heads backwards; and Sir A. Carlisle[14] specifies a pendulous fold to the eyelids as inherited. "In a family," says Sir H. Holland,[15] "where the father had a singular elongation of the upper eyelid, seven or eight children were born with the same deformity; two or three other children having it not." Many persons, as I year from Mr. Paget, have two or three of the hairs in their eyebrows (apparently corresponding with the vibrissae of the lower animals) much longer than the others; and even so trifling a peculiarity ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... for the nobleness of his descent. They say, that she was farther encouraged to persevere in her advances, by an incident which evinced the great ingenuousness of his disposition. Upon her pressing her suit, he took an opportunity, when they were alone, of stripping off his toga, and showing her the deformity of his person, that he might not be thought to impose upon her. He had by Achaica two sons, Caius and Sergius. The elder of these, Caius [649], having very much reduced his estate, retired from town, and being prohibited by Tiberius from standing ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... every other account of the disease, it is significant that there is no mention, or hint, of any loss of sensation in connection with the disorder, of any affection of the nerves, nor of any deformity of the body; no provision is made for those who were unable to take care of themselves, nor is there a tittle of evidence, or the barest hint given, that the disease was either contagious or dangerous. Only two persons in the whole of ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... free from dust, such as we find in and around all the residences of Muhammadan princes. On reaching my tents I found them pitched close outside the flower-garden, in a small dusty plain, without a blade of grass or a shrub to hide its deformity—just such a place as the pig-keepers occupy in the suburbs of other towns. On one side of this little plain, and looking into it, was the summer-house of the prince, without one inch of green sward or one small shrub ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with his deformity, whichever way ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... naturally keep a proper and harmonious proportion in the different parts of the body, but it will be noticed in this subject that the feet are unusually broad, projecting far beyond the natural lines of the leg, and giving evidence of usage which has caused what is almost a deformity. ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... which is most useful to themselves, and to account those things the best of all which have the most beneficial effect on mankind. Further, they were bound to form abstract notions for the explanation of the nature of things, such as goodness, badness, order, confusion, warmth, cold, beauty, deformity, and so on; and from the belief that they are free agents arose the further notions of praise and ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... that there is in many individuals a peculiarity about the eye, amounting in some instances to deformity, which I have not noticed elsewhere. It consists in the inner corner of the eye being entirely covered by a duplication of the adjacent loose skin of the eyelids and nose. This fold is lightly stretched over the edges of the eyelids, and forms, as it were, a third palpebra ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... outline of mountain which melts into its glowing background of sky, is not more pleasing than the pictures which fancy sometimes draws of less material things; but, as he draws near, the disappointed traveller too often finds nakedness and deformity, where he so fondly imagined beauty only was to be seen. No wonder then that the dwellers of the simple provinces of New-England blended recollections of the country they still called home, with most of their ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... affairs were in this state there arrived one night in February, in our cafe, a most singular little man. He was short but exceedingly broad, with huge shoulders, and a head which was a deformity, so large was it. His heavy brown face was scarred with white streaks in a most extraordinary manner, and he had grizzled whiskers such as seamen wear. Two gold earrings in his ears, and plentiful tattooing upon his hands and arms, told us also that he was of the sea before he ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... this was the man he had envied. No one had ever told him that "Nathan der Weise" was thus afflicted. It was as soul that he had appealed to the imagination of the world; even vulgar gossip had been silent about his body. But how this deformity must embitter ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the colossal monster, repugnant in deformity, and then at the girl, who was tapping impatiently on the table with her white fingers. The fool's color came and went; what human strength might stand against ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... passion surviving amid a life of corruption, the apotheosis of virtue discovered in a soul abandoned to vice, and exhibited in violent contrasts. Marion is ennobled by the sacrifice of whatever remains to her of honour; the moral deformity of Lucrece is purified by her instinct of maternal love; the hideous Triboulet is beautiful by virtue of his devotion as a father. The dramatic study of character is too often replaced by sentimental rhetoric. Ruy Blas, like Marion Delorme and Hernani, has ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... and stood looking up from his squat, toad-like deformity into the face of the man who towered above him, yet in his eyes was the blaze with which a giant might look ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... formerly the custom of the kings of this land to commit suicide by taking poison when any disaster or natural physical defect fell upon them, such as impotence, infectious disease, the loss of their front teeth, by which they were disfigured, or any other deformity or affliction. To put an end to such defects they killed themselves, saying that the king should be free from any blemish, and if not, it was better for his honour that he should die and seek another life where ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... poverty. But the principal point was, that there was so much of it in one spot, that it produced on me a frightful impression. The impression which I experienced in the Lyapinsky house had, at the very first, made me conscious of the deformity of my own life. This feeling was genuine and very powerful. But, notwithstanding its genuineness and power, I was, at that time, so weak that I feared the alteration in my life to which this feeling commended me, and I resorted to a compromise. I believed what everybody told me, and everybody ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... healthful? Then cast about and see and search diligently to find out all those burthens that came in by Kings, and remove them; and then will thy Commonwealth's Government arise from under the clods under which as yet it is buried and covered with deformity."—WINSTANLEY, The Law of Freedom. ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... appeared on the brow of the hill, and every neck was craned for a glimpse of the poor creature who sat on the coffin—a pitiful-looking, half-dwarf mulatto, who gave you the idea of deformity and distress without your being able to tell why. He walked bravely to his place on the scaffold, singing and praying, protesting his innocence and bequeathing forgiveness to his enemies, apparently full of faith, like many others who by reason of weariness and despair have attained ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... over his shoulder, with either a mistrustful snarl or a woe-begone, piteous, mute aspect; but no assumed expression could conceal this innate irremediable abjectness of his nature, any more than an arrangement of clothing can conceal some monstrous deformity of the body. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... place, and with that increase of wealth a powerful stimulus to the invention of mere luxury, that, if it stands alone, is not, never can be, progress. It is only that one-sided development which is but one side of deformity. I hope we shall have no one-sided development. One mode of avoiding it is to teach the doctrine of that sisterhood you have asserted to-day, and confident I am that the good wishes you have expressed on behalf of literature will be re-echoed in behalf of art wherever ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... it is well that you are without them; know, thou foolish spirit, that these three princesses are only three destructive deluders, daughters of the prince Belial, and all their beauty and affability, which are irradiating the streets, are only masks over deformity and cruelty; the three within are like their father, replete with deadly poison." "Woe's me; is it possible," said I, quite sad, and smitten with love of them! "It is but too true, alas," said he. "Thou admirest the radiance with which they ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... says, a wandering life of military servitude. At first, indeed, he was so pleased with his new mode of life that he had serious thoughts of becoming a professional soldier. But this enthusiasm speedily wore off, and our "mimic Bellona soon revealed to his eyes her naked deformity." It was indeed no mere playing at soldiering that he had undertaken. He was the practical working commander of "an independent corps of 476 officers and men." "In the absence, or even in the presence of the two field officers" (one of whom was his father, the major) "I was ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... objects. More than once had the reflected shadow of Paul Lanier appeared in startling clearness. Far from being homely or of unpleasant features, judged by approved standards of manly beauty, yet compared with Oswald Langdon, Paul Lanier was to Alice Webster an uninteresting deformity. ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... see it ten times acted, before they understand and fully estimate the merit that should counterbalance its defects. When one has seen the beauty of a work, and not till then, I think one is entitled to pronounce on its deformity. I hear, however, that the second representation succeeded better than the first. This arises either from the changes made upon the piece by Dalberg, or from the fact, that on a second view, the public comprehended certain things, which on a ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... their solitary research and study for the opportunity of intercommunication on the subjects and objects of their pursuit. The cases in which society is voluntarily shunned or forsaken are as rare as the cases of congenital disease or deformity; and for every such instance there may generally be assigned some grave, if not sufficient, cause. Religious asceticism has, indeed, induced many persons, especially in the early Christian ages, to lead a solitary ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... understanding,—one latent and virtual, the other active and at the surface. To use familiar examples, we cannot distinguish white without having known black, nor evil without having known good, nor beauty without having known deformity. Thus every principle has two sides, like a penny, and one presupposes the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... because she is inferior: on the contrary she ought not to understand me. She is happy, she is like nature: consistent, calm, and self-contained; and I, a weak distorted being, want her to understand my deformity and my torments! I have not slept at night, but have aimlessly passed under her windows not rendering account to myself of what was happening to me. On the 18th our company started on a raid, and I spent three days away from ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy |
