"Desecration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... here is therefore a vivid and intent imagination. But this alone will hardly suffice. It is necessary also, especially to a true conception of the whole, to compare, to analyse, to dissect. And such readers often shrink from this task, which seems to them prosaic or even a desecration. They misunderstand, I believe. They would not shrink if they remembered two things. In the first place, in this process of comparison and analysis, it is not requisite, it is on the contrary ruinous, to set imagination aside and to substitute some supposed 'cold reason'; and it is only want ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... in St. Philip's churchyard, Charleston, S. C. In 1865, on that city's occupancy by the Union forces, friends seized and secreted them from fancied desecration by the conquerors.—Draper's Civil War in Am., ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... is drawing his loaves out of the oven," remarked Kenyon. "Do you smell how sour they are? I should fancy that Minerva (in revenge for the desecration of her temples) had slyly poured vinegar into the batch, if I did not know that the modern Romans prefer their ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... credulity. One probable cause of the taboo seems to be that the process of soaking and retting the stalks of the plant pollutes the water, and if carried on in a tank or in the pools of a stream might destroy the village supply of drinking-water. In former times it may have been thought that the desecration of their sacred element was an insult to the deities of rivers and streams, which would bring down retribution on the offender. It is also the case that the proper separation of the fibres requires ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... and come together; and at the point of meeting stands a crucifix. This large and dignified Calvaire, though bearing the nicks of bullets and faded by weather, still sheds a sorrowful beauty that is perhaps the more impressive because of these marks of desecration. It forms the center of the tiny village, whose houses cluster close to the mourning image and then straggle thinly along the three roads. Not even the war which swept over in all its ferocity has robbed Vauchelles of its winding charm. Many houses have collapsed, ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... it oftener—imparted to his brothers the subject for his new novel, which should have made the hair of the others bristle with terror; for the principal episode in this agreeable fiction was the desecration of a dead body in a cemetery by moonlight. There was a sort of hesitation in the audience, a slight movement of recoil, and Sillery, with a dash of raillery in his ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... terrific suggestion thrown amongst a mob. To have caught Sir Francis Varney and immolated him at the shrine of popular fury, they would not have shrunk from; but a desecration of the graves of those whom they had known in life was a matter which, however much it had to recommend it, even the boldest stood aghast at, and felt some ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... held only a feeling of disgust that such a desecration of Nature's gifts to humanity should be allowed. Then he remembered another place further along the glen which was almost as pretty as this had been before the defiling brush of the advertiser had ruined it. So ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... wrinkled countenances of the remaining caciques was stamped a look of dismay and hatred which boded no good. It was plain to Kirby that in battering up the man detailed to kill him, he had committed a desecration of first order. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... the outer edge of the cloth, and flung the bolt unfurling itself toward his fellows over the heads of the believing men who had crowded forward to save it from the desecration, while the woman tried to seize it from him, beseeching, imploring, "Oh, don't hurt it, Bill Murray! Oh, be careful! Don't let it ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... Now we know they are due to carelessness and lack of sanitation. It is the same with the sufferings of women. We used to think it was a dispensation of Providence if a woman were compelled to undergo an operation. Now we know it usually is due to someone's lack of care, to a desecration of Nature's teachings. ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... coyote's shrill "ki-yip-yapping"—again and again, as if endeavouring to convey some insidious message. George continued to stare at the pictures. Gad! what a strange fantastic mind the man must have! he mused—what rotten, erratic desecration to shove pictures indiscriminately together like that! . . . Lack of space was no excuse. Millet's "Angelus," "Ally Sloper at the Derby," a splendid lithograph of "The Angel of Pity at the Well of Cawnpore," Lottie Collins, scantily attired, in her song and dance "Tara-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," Sir ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... understand your inviting him. His very look is an insult, his touch a desecration. I don't like the ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... which the water, after reaching the bottom, passes, which intercepts the sight, and prevents it from taking in the whole fall at once. This unsightly object has stood where it now stands since the day of creation, and will probably remain there to the day of judgment. It would be a desecration of nature to remove it by art, but no one could regret if nature in one of her floods were to ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... the double load of dead and living; he would not urge the creature faster on; every movement that shook the drooping limbs, or jarred the repose of that last sleep, seemed desecration. He passed the place where his own horse was stretched; the vultures were already there. He shuddered; and then pressed faster on, as though the beasts and birds of prey would rob him of his burden ere he could give it sanctuary. And so he rode, mile after mile, over the barren ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... worth the price charged for it, but he was "humbugging" the public by this queer way of arresting attention. It turned out just as he anticipated, that English travelers in that part of Egypt were indignant at this desecration, and they wrote back to the London Times (every Englishman writes or threatens to "write to the Times," if anything goes wrong,) denouncing the "Goth" who had thus disfigured these ancient pyramids by writing on them in ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... and replaced by Spanish banners. Berenger had followed because he felt the need of doing as Walsingham and Sidney thought right, but he had not been in London long enough to become hardened to the desecration of churches by frequenting 'Paul's Walk.' He remained bareheaded, and stood as near as he could to the choir, listening to the notes that floated from the priests and acolytes at the high altar, longing from the time when he and Eustacie ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the silence between them knew only her own sorrow and the bitterness of the desecration that had been wrought in her own love. Then, dimly, through her tears, she heard Franklin's voice, and ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... into the fold than from the misinterpretation of any other text in the sacred scriptures. If any civilized power in the world to-day should send an expeditionary force into a heathen country, which should signalize its arrival therein by the desecration of its temples and the destruction of its idols, the commander would be recalled at once. We have learned other methods, methods of persuasion, of reason, of love. The age of Cortes knew nothing of these methods, and he was ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... some of them evidently portraits. At the rear of the tower on the ground floor, I came upon a vaulted apartment supported on columns, and being used as a storehouse. Its construction was so handsome, it was so beautifully lighted from without, as to make one grieve for its desecration; it may have served in the olden time as a refectory, and if so was doubtless the scene of great festivity in the time of Philip de Commines, who was noted for ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... hogs and dairy products, my three specialties. Mustn't the old horse-breeding Kildares turn over in their graves out there at the desecration? When I came into the property, I soon saw that racing stock was a luxury we could not afford, so I used the grass lands for mules instead. We have been lucky. Storm mules have the reputation now that Storm thoroughbreds used to have in Basil's day: and they ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... uttered their true meaning; and, in fact, her sincere devotion was like a simple flower blooming by the edge of a glacier. She felt that the human love she brought there and sought to gratify was pure and unselfish, and that in no sense could it be a desecration of the place and hour. To a nature like hers, her half-pitying love for one so unfortunate as Vinton Arnold was almost as sacred as her faith, and therefore she had no scruple ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... hear that I had told a string of falsehoods to her uncle over the dead body of their idolised Bingo—an act, no doubt, of abominable desecration, of unspeakable profanity, ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... first preaching of Christianity in the North of England, were removed and taken away from their site and appropriated as a boundary fence for some adjoining fields. After the Restoration, and when his religious views had become sobered and settled, he is said, in an eager desire to atone for the desecration of which he had been guilty, to have purchased the crosses from the person who was then in possession of them, and to have been at the cost of re-erecting them on their present site, from which no sacrilegious hand will, I trust, ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... there are exterior circumstances that make these occupations a desecration of the Lord's day, and as such evidently they cannot be tolerated. They must not be boisterous to the extent of disturbing the neighbor's rest and quiet, or detracting from the reverence due the Sabbath; they must not entice others away from a respectful observance of ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... gushings! Was to be seen in a future not distant mated with Laetitia and sharing with her an atmosphere of milk and silk and babies and kisses! Tame cat! What an end to which to bring such qualities! What a desecration of such qualities to set them to win such an ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... to hold all meetings for the transaction of public business in the sanctuary. None, not even the most piously fastidious parson or deacon, ever thought of being shocked at what in these degenerate times would seem like a gross desecration of the house of God. There were fewer Pharisees in Belfield a hundred years ago than now. To the Puritans, and to all their descendants, until of late, their places of worship were not churches, but meeting-houses ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... congregation concluded to abandon the "Round Church," which stood on the triangle between Liberty, Wood and Sixth streets, and began to dig for a foundation for Trinity, where it now stands, there was great desecration of graves. One day a thrill of excitement and stream of talk ran through the neighborhood, about a Mrs. Cooper, whose body had been buried three years, and was found in a wonderful state of preservation, when the coffin was laid open by the diggers. It was left that the friends ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... your head be it! Now she'll go on painting atrocities, and wasting good time, when she might be sweeping a floor! It's against my principles to encourage the desecration of art." ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... the sacred hearth: she will defend Her gods from desecration of the vile. Fierce, like a wounded ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... Count, peremptorily, advancing to the side of the coffin and extending his arm across it, "I cannot permit that indignity—that desecration." ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... picturesque rags, hangs about us as we travel. It is only to Paris—Paris beautiful in its strange blending of smoky ruins and splendid, freshly-erected mansions—that we can pardon the white glare of newly-opened streets, the Vandal desecration of antique landmarks, the universal sacrifice of old memories, historic associations and antique picturesqueness on that altar of modern progress whose high priest was Baron Haussmann and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... himself obliged to lend money for the support of the poor. If he were not now to return to his home, people would say that he had run away in order to evade his creditors, and such talk concerning a man of piety would have been desecration of the Divine Name. So he said to Moses: "There are people who have a fatherland, but no property there; there are also property-holders who have no family; but I have a fatherland, and have property there as well as a family; hence I desire to return to my fatherland, my property, and my family." ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... York, bursting with a noble wrath at the failure of their coup in Philadelphia. An outrage had been worked upon them, upon the public, upon the majesty of the law. To hear their ravings one might have supposed them the evangelists of Justice righteously denouncing a desecration of the sacred altar; or, that we had deprived them of an inalienable right they had possessed to our property. It would have been humorous if the ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... in purveying "creature comforts" for these spiritual comforters. Preparing hot dinners, it seems, is not working on the Lord's Day when it is for the preacher; though to save a field of corn, which is in danger of being spoiled if left out, as in some seasons, would be a shocking desecration of that day. Yet, to observe the abstracted unearthly carriage of these men, who seem "conversing with the skies" while walking the streets, one wonders at the contrast of such ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... noble-looking woman in her widow's dress, with a sad sweet gravity in her face, and not be touched with fresh admiration for her—and not feel, at least vaguely, that she had entered on a new life in which it was a sort of desecration to allude to the painful past. And the old friends who had a real regard for her, but whose cordiality had been repelled or chilled of late years, now came round her with hearty demonstrations of affection. Mr. Jerome felt that his ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... "trapping." Angus, in February 1545, protested that he loved Henry "best of all men," and would make Lennox Governor of Scotland, while Wharton, for Henry, was trying to kidnap Angus. Enraged by the English desecration of his ancestors' graves at Melrose Abbey, Angus united with Arran, Norman Leslie, and Buccleuch to annihilate an English force at Ancrum Moor, where Henry's men lost 800 slain and 2000 prisoners. The loyalty of Angus to his country ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... Thus the fray broke itself up into groups of foes who rent and tore at each other upon the brink of the pyramid, now and again to vanish down its side, ten or twelve of them together. Some of the priests also joined in the fight, thinking less of their own deaths than of the desecration of their temples, for I saw one of them, a man of huge strength and stature, seize a Spanish soldier round the middle and leap with him into space. Still, though very slowly, the Spaniards and Tlascalans ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... him, but she thought the more. And—though had he known it, the pelf-despising Mr. Vanbrugh would never have forgiven such a desecration of Art—it was not her lightest spur in the attainment of excellence, to feel that as soon as her pictures were good enough to sell, she might earn money enough to discharge the claim of this harsh creditor, whose very name sent a ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... slept: then had I been at rest." North could not rise to the height of this. But even this Milton will dare to lay his hand upon: and, if even he cannot lift it any higher, only he could have touched it at all without desecration. "How ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... strange scenes in the times of the Puritans. The ecclesiastical vestments had been already sold, the tapestries removed to the Houses of Parliament, the college plate melted down, and Henry VII.'s Chapel despoiled of its brass and iron, when, in 1643, the Abbey was subjected to actual desecration. The Royalist stories of soldiers smoking and singing round the communion table, and playing boisterous games about the church and chapels, have not been proved. But Sir Robert Harley, who had taken down the Eleanor crosses ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... With her back toward the door she looked down upon him as he stood on the sidewalk, his umbrella deeply shadowing his head and shoulders. She stood before him like a vestal guarding her temple from desecration. She was conscious of a sharp revulsion of feeling, and a sudden fierce anger burned in her heart. She spoke with a quick, ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... careful not to touch money. We are going to trust our customers, and keep our accounts without pen or ink. We have invented a most ingenious system, which gives us far more work than writing, but we have determined to spare ourselves no trouble to keep the Sabbath from unnecessary desecration.' ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... to steal her beautiful waterfall and carry it away in an ugly iron pipe. Whether the thing could be done, she did not ask herself; the design was enough. Never would she lend herself, or anything that was hers, to such an impious desecration! This was her position, which any child might have taken in defense of a beloved toy; but she was holding it with all a woman's force ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... the completion of the Psalter. Many of the psalms, especially those in the latter half of the book, bear the unmistakable marks of the Maccabean struggle. In Psalms 74 and 89, for example, there are clear references to the desecration of the temple and the bitter persecutions of Antiochus. They voice the wails of despair which then rose from the lips of many Jews. Many other psalms, as, for example, the one hundred and eighteenth, express that intense love and devotion to the law which ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... by them, also by the Levites, the city and the prince; the religious duties of the prince, and the rite of atonement for the temple. The whole description is a striking counterpart to the earlier vision of the desecration of the temple (viii.). The last section (xlvii., xlviii.) deals with the land which in these latter days is to share the redemption of the people. The barren ground near the Dead Sea is to be made fertile, and the waters of that sea sweet, by a stream issuing from underneath ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... no right to complain, but still I am not better satisfied than the child that has eaten its cake and wants to have it too. And I suppose there are many who would call me wretched, and say that my life, with my sorrowful marriage—which was no marriage, but a desecration of that holy state, and a sin—and my hopeless love, is a broken life. Certainly I feel it so. And yet I don't know. With his nature it seems to me that some wrong-doing was inevitable. Do you think my suffering might be taken as expiation for his sins? Do you think we are allowed the happiness ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... story, and may I not ask, gentlemen, that they shall so plead with you that you will report to the Senate unanimously in favor of the sixteenth amendment, which we ask in order that the women of these United States who shall come after us may be saved the desecration of their homes which we have suffered, and our country may be relieved from the disgrace of refusing representation to that half of its people that men call the better half, because it includes their ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... that this step would subject her to her mother's displeasure, but just then the girl's heart was hardened against her, in consequence of her persistency in dramatizing a record which the daughter deemed too mournfully solemn and sacred for the desecration of ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... though my training in college and in my office has covered my conscience with a layer of office dust it is still there. Of course (and obviously) you are not touched by the words and deeds of the women you represent, but I somehow feel that it is a desecration of your face and voice to put them to such uses. That is the reason I dreaded to go back and see you to-night. If you were seeking praise of your own proper self, the sincerity of this compliment is unquestionable. I ought to say, ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... caciques of Bogota were protected from desecration by diverting the course of a river and making the grave in its bed, and then letting the stream return to its natural course. Alaric, the leader of the Goths, was secretly buried in the same way. ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... dead, but knew some that ought to be, and Ma she did not ask any foolish questions any more. After about twenty teams had stopped, Ma she got nervous and asked Deacon Smith if he saw anything green; he said something about desecration, and drove away Deacon Brown asked Pa if he did not think he was setting, a bad example before his boy; but Pa, he said he thought it would be a good one if the boy could only be hired to do it. Finally Ma got mad and took the tub ...
— The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy - Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, No. 2 - 1883 • George W. Peck
... their days, when a young knight steps forward loudly proclaiming none of the Christians are to blame for the disappearance of the image, since Allah himself removed it from the temple because he considered it desecration to have such an image within its walls. This young knight turns out to be the warrior maid Clorinda, who not only convinces Aladine that the young people are guiltless, but bribes him to release them, in exchange for her services in the coming war. Touched by each other's devotion, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... with the tomb of Fenelon furnish us an emblem of the spirit in which we shall look upon his name. His remains were deposited in the vault beneath the main altar at which he had so often ministered. It would seem as if some guardian-angel shielded them from desecration. Eighty years passed and the Reign of Terror came upon France in retribution for her falsity to her best advisers. The allied armies were marshalling their hosts against the new republic. Every means must be used to add to the public resources, and the decree went ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... born of woman' (I. 324); the paraphrase or rather translation of 'I know that my Redeemer liveth' (I. 322). Nothing here, surely, to warrant the complaints of S['a] de Miranda as to the desecration of the Scriptures. This play was followed by the Dialogo sobre a Ressurrei[c,]am by way of epilogue; it is a conversation between three Jews and is treated in the cynical manner that Browning brought to similar scenes. The Sumario or Auto da Historia ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... indictment, and, pointing out the crises of the hour, paint in dismal hues a picture of the problems never to be solved except by shot and shell. Her skeptics, blinded by thought of the errors of the past, may prophesy the desecration of her honor and the disappointing failure of her hopes. The press may pen a graphic story of the military spirit of the age, and frowning patriarchs relate the deeds of golden days gone by. But underneath ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... desecration to a noble old name so to designate him—gave a turn to his wheel and the autocar started. Mr. Winkle, who sat at the extreme edge, waggled his shadowy legs forlornly in the air; Mr. Snodgrass, who sat next to him, snorted lugubriously; Mr. Tupman turned paler than even a ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton
... of Russia. Yet, even after the French had passed the frontier, Alexander still protested that his personal sentiments towards the emperor were unaltered; "but,'' he added, "God Himself cannot undo the past.'' It was the occupation of Moscow and the desecration of the Kremlin, the sacred centre of Holy Russia, that changed his sentiment for Napoleon into passionate hatred. In vain the French emperor, within eight days of his entry into Moscow, wrote to the tsar a letter, which was one long cry of distress, revealing the desperate ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... intensified by the personal repulsiveness of the professional medium. The vain, sleek, vulgar, emasculated, neurotic type of creature, who became the petted oracle of the dim-lighted room, was loathsome in his eyes. And his respect for his wife's genius made him feel that there was a certain desecration in the neighbourhood to her of men whom he regarded as verminous impostors. Yet he recognised her right to think for herself, and she, on the other hand, regarded his scepticism as rather his ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... order to advance and sweep the field at the front. From the grim, gray walls of the great church and convent, which for weeks had been strictly guarded by order of the American generals against all possible intrusion or desecration on part of their men, came frequent flash and report and deadly missile aimed at the helpless wounded, the hurrying ambulances, even at a symbol as sacred as that which towered above its altars—the blood-red ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... evident resentment, "I have lost my tobacco in the marine disaster, but luckily I have my pipe. I admit the scenery is beautiful here, if we could only see it; but darkness is all around, although the moon is rising. It can therefore be no desecration for me to smoke a pipeful of tobacco, and I am sure the tobacco you keep will be the very best that can be bought. Won't you grant my request, ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... Marquis Ito; the dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna in the "Gita," a book that is to Hindus what the "Imitation of Christ" is to emotional Christians—all these are pressed into the service of inflaming impressionable minds. The last instance is perhaps the worst. I can imagine no more wicked desecration than that the sacrilegious hand of the Anarchist should be laid upon the Indian song of songs, and that a masterpiece of transcendental philosophy and religious ecstasy should be perverted to the base uses ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... month, later, Mrs. Graham refers to the gay and fashionable circles to which they were introduced in Quebec, and mentions her visiting the beautiful falls of Montmorency; but mourns over the low state of religion, and the prevailing desecration of the Sabbath. ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... no reason in the world why my heart should beat in my slippers on that account. Still I don't see why Ruth Chester should have her head literally thrown against that stone wall and I wish Aunt Bettie wouldn't. It seemed like a desecration even to try to match-make him and it made me hot with indignation all over. I dug so fiercely at the roots of my phlox with a trowel I had picked up that they groaned so loud I could almost hear them. I felt as if I must operate on something. And it was ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... conduct, just as it has been, to be scrutinised, canvassed, and judged. What we carry away from following such a history is something far higher and more solemn than any controversial inferences; and it seems almost like a desecration to make, as we say, capital out of it, to strengthen mere argument, to confirm a theory, or ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... yes—of men who care for appearance more than sympathy. But you are not such a man! It is not as if we had been friends; it is not as if we had ever spoken. It is wicked to call such a foolish fancy by the name of love; it is desecration." ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... the Redcliffe Arms. Already, within a year, the time was historically distant when a policeman had refused to allow the automobile of a Member of Parliament to enter Palace Yard, on the ground that there was no precedent for such a desecration. The new motor-buses, however, did not run at night. Human daring had limits, and it was reported that at least one motor-driver, succumbing to the awful nervous strain of guiding these fast expresses through the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... brief account of this expedition and its consequences which is given us by the author of the Second Book of Kings, who writes from a religious point of view, and is chiefly concerned at the desecration of holy things to which the imminent peril of his city and people forced the Jewish monarch to submit. It is interesting to compare with this account the narrative of Sennacherib himself, who records the features of the expedition most important in ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... sanctity of the graves when throngs trampled down the well-kept grass, and groups of men and women fought for the possession of the most recent mounds as highest points of vantage? Those whose dead lay buried there raised effectual outcries against this desecration. To go back into the church seemed impossible. The next move had to be into the street. It was at this point that there set in that alienation of the Church from the Stage which was never afterwards removed. Clerical actors were forbidden to ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... porches, desecrated and destroyed the tombs of warriors and prelates, obliterated ancient paintings; flung stained glass by cart loads into the city ditch; and razed to the ground the beautiful old campanile which stood opposite the north porch." That such desecration should be permitted in a civilized country only a century ago ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... leagues of copra plantation, extending from the shore up into the mountainous hinterland, thousands of close-crowded acres of heavy green palms." This was in May, 1908. Vailima was at that time the residence of the German Governor (a desecration since happily removed); but the LONDONS were able to explore the gardens and peep in at the rooms whose planning STEVENSON had so enjoyed. Later of course they climbed to the lonely mountain grave of "the little great man"—a phrase oddly reminiscent of one in an unpublished letter of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... weakness modifies the severity of judgment. Years after, in The Lost Occasion I gave utterance to an almost universal regret that the great statesman did not live to see the flag which he loved trampled under the feet of Slavery, and, in view of this desecration, make his last days glorious in defence of "Liberty ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... desecration, this opening of shrines and disturbing the ashes of the illustrious dead, if only for the satisfaction of archaeological curiosity. But except where it has hitherto been protected by the sanctity of the tomb, there is so little that remains to us,—so few textiles have survived ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... the demeanour of the nation's leaders towards foreign intercourse! Only two years earlier, the advent of a squadron of foreign war-vessels at Hyogo had created almost a panic and had caused men to cry out that the precincts of the sacred city of Kyoto were in danger of desecration by barbarian feet. But now the Emperor invited the once hated aliens to his presence, treated them with the utmost courtesy, and publicly greeted them as welcome guests. Such a metamorphosis has greatly perplexed some students of Japanese history. Yet the explanation is simple. The ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... might meet. Only one thing Jeffrey had found it impossible to contemplate calmly. Some day Sara would marry—a man who was her equal, who sat at her father's table as a guest. In spite of himself, Jeffrey's heart filled with hot rebellion at the thought; it was like a desecration and a robbery. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... presence, the fact of their existence, is an outrage to the fresh, bright sun and the green and growing things. The clean, upstanding trees cry shame upon them and their withered crookedness, and their rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetness and ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... carried by one hundred and four against fifty-four. In the lords the second reading encountered no opposition, objections to it being reserved for the committee. In the committee the Bishop of Exeter moved, in order to avoid the desecration of the marriage contract when the ceremony was not performed in church, that the parties should make the following declaration:—"In the presence of Almighty God and these witnesses, I, M., do take thee, N., to be my wedded wife, according to God's holy ordinance; and I do here, in the presence ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... end of May and held pretty well into July, then dropped as the country season got into swing. Ernestine was for turning the Cake Shop into a glorified ice-cream stand for the summer, but Milly would not hear of this desecration of her Vision; they were both tired and had earned a vacation. So while Ernestine took Virginia to one of the lake resorts, Milly rested in the big, cool, empty house and played around Chicago with her ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... the lover, the husband, who are given the key of the sanctuary do not always know how to use it. For myself, without claim, without merit, simply by chance I had been allowed to look through the half-opened door and I had seen the saddest possible desecration, the withered brightness of youth, a spirit neither made cringing nor yet dulled but as if bewildered in quivering hopelessness by gratuitous cruelty; self-confidence destroyed and, instead, a resigned recklessness, a mournful callousness ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... outlined in cobwebs marked the places where the great maps had hung. The soul of the room was gone from it with the portrait of the late Mrs. Tancred; the watercolor drawings, sad work of her restless fingers, were no longer there. The furniture had been pushed aside to make room for the deed of desecration; the floor was littered with newspapers and straw; an empty packing-case lay on its side, abandoned, in ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... in China and Japan have guests' apartments, which may be secured for a trifle, either for a long or short period. It is false to suppose that there is any desecration of a sacred shrine in the act of using it as a hostelry; it is the custom of ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... of strangers; moreover, he had a vague belief that strangers were at the bottom of that desecration of the stocks. The boy, then, was a stranger; but what was his rank? Was he of that grade in society in which the natural offences are or are not consonant to, or harmonious with, outrages upon stocks? On that Lenny Fairfield did not feel quite assured. According to all the experience ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... arrival proceeded to largely strengthen and increase the fortifications, and in doing so had altogether disregarded the feelings of the people, had pulled down houses and mosques, had desecrated tombs, and cleared away all buildings on spaces of ground across which the guns would play. This desecration of their sacred places had given rise to the deepest feelings of ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... the immorality of the age was proved by their ascribing this frightful affliction to the inefficacy of baptism by unchaste priests, as if innocent children were doomed to atone, in after years, for this desecration of the sacrament administered by unholy hands. We have already mentioned what perils the priests in the Netherlands incurred from this belief. They now, indeed, endeavored to hasten their reconciliation with the irritated and at that time ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... when on attempting to approach the fine fountains below the Pincio I found it impossible to get near them for the abominations by which they were surrounded, and thought how unfaithful to the truth it would be to speak of the grace and beauty of this place, and not of this detestable desecration of it. The place and the people can only be perfectly described through the whole, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... was erected on the site of the holy Temple, and a shrine of Venus planted, we are assured, on the very spot hallowed to Christians by our Lord's crucifixion. But Hadrian had no purpose of insulting the disciples of Jesus, and this desecration, if the tradition be true, was probably accidental. A Jewish legend affirms that the figure of a swine was sculptured, in bitter mockery, over a gate of the new city. The Jews have retorted with equal scorn that the effigy of the unclean ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... ejaculated,—"Come in, gentlemen, come in. Don't be afeard! I'm only a tailor at work on the premises." This villanous salutation damped sadly the illusion of the scene; and it was some time before we rallied sufficiently from this horrible desecration to descend to the poet's walk in the shrubbery, where, pacing up and down the live-long morning, he composed his Lalla Rookh. It is a little confined gravel-walk, in length about twenty paces; so narrow, that there is barely room on it for two persons ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 356, Saturday, February 14, 1829 • Various
... of grievous peril and trial; that disease and heat, hunger and thirst, must be dared, as well as the sword of the infidel. But he spoke of the grand nature of the work, of the humiliation to Christians of the desecration of the shrines, and of the glory which awaited those who joined the crusade, whether they lived or whether they died in ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... go or take the consequences when the provincials march in. They will be implacable in their retaliation for the burning of Charlestown and Falmouth, and for the destruction of the Old North Meetinghouse, the desecration of the Old South, and the pulling down of hundreds of houses. They will confiscate the property of every one who has adhered to the crown, and make them beggars, or send them out of the Province, or perhaps do both. We may as well look the ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... does not often let a friend go like this. These things are too fine, of too pure a pleasantness. One does not learn the beauty of them until one has come far through terror and turmoil. It is almost a desecration to try to put such things into words; in fact, one cannot touch with words the heart of the mystery. One merely moves around it with an occasional suggestive sentence and those who know, smile warmly ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... to in the stanza just quoted. About forty years ago, it was proposed to build a summer hotel on this island, which is four or five miles from the mouth of the Merrimac. I have found among Mr. Whittier's papers an unfinished poem, protesting against what he considered a desecration of this spot which always had a great charm for him. It is likely that the reason why this poem was never finished or published was because the project of building a hotel was abandoned. I have taken the liberty ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... infant mortality will be overcome, because ignorant and incompetent mothers—the greatest cause of infant mortality—will be educated and instructed in the rudiments of eugenics and will consequently, to a large extent, cease to be ignorant and incompetent; that the desecration of young wives will stop, and stop forever, because vice and disease will be branded and exposed; that the feeble-minded, the deaf-mute, the imbecile, and the insane, will no longer be allowed to propagate their kind, to the permanent ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... impudent oration Hurts not me; 'tis desecration To a god, and fouls his tongue! At the utmost at nine paces Can I suffer filthy places, Fling far from me ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... be guarded with jealous care. How sacred the spot where lie the parents that tended us, the bosom that shielded our infancy, the hands that carried our weakness everywhither. Men will always deem the desecration of the body or the grave blasphemous. The physical house, standing, is the temple of God; falling, it must forever be sacred in ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... prepared for a regrettable amount of waste paper and broken bottles left about to mar what would otherwise be one of the finest scenes in the Downs. Refreshment stalls and tea gardens help to vulgarize the surroundings, though the added desecration of aerial railway across the Dyke ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... soft reproachful glance. It seemed a desecration to her to think that ever again—that ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... much with haunting vagueness, it seemed a horrible desecration to me that the beautiful, gentle girl should be given up to Wildred. I had little enough hope for myself with her, whatever might betide, for even had it been possible, under happier circumstances, that she ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... keenly interested. She had at times a strong feeling of the past life still in possession of the house, into which her own strangely fated life had intruded. She wanted, half-consciously, to know if her guilty secret was a desecration or only a continuance of ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... a desecration," said he, "to deprive the book of its original binding. What! Would you tear off and cast away the covers which have felt the caressing pressure of the hands of those whose memory you revere? The most sacred of sentiments should forbid ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... fluttering breath of morning and a sound like the cooing of doves. Never had the wood before shown so sweet a sense of security from the turmoil and tempest of the world beyond; never before had an intrusion from the outer life—even in the shape of a letter—seemed so wicked a desecration. Tempted by the solicitation of air and shade, she lingered, with Low's herbarium slung ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... money; would justify the doctor's interference, and insult the old well of his father and his father's father, the fountain of generations. To seal its mouth and bid its usefulness cease in the house where it had ministered for upwards of a hundred years was an act of desecration impossible to the man who in his stolid way loved the very stones that lined its slimy sides. The few sentiments that had taken hold on Abraham's arid nature went as deep as his obstinacy and clung as fast as his distrust of new opinions and ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... misuse, misusage, misemployment^, misapplication, misappropriation. abuse, profanation, prostitution, desecration; waste &c 638. V. misuse, misemploy, misapply, misappropriate. desecrate, abuse, profane, prostitute: waste &c 638; overtask, overtax, overwork: squander &c 818. cut blocks with a razor, employ a steam engine to ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and stumps of columns, remnants of the chapel, and prettily wreathed with ivy and clematis. We rejoiced in such a pretty and distinctive ornament to our garden, and never troubled ourselves about the desecration; and certainly ours was one of the most delightful gardens that ever existed, what with green turf, bright flowers, shapely shrubs, and the grand beech-trees enclosing it with their stately white pillars, green ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the varied and misleading phenomena of hypnotism. The thought of accepting the help of one who was probably, like most of her kind, a deceiver of herself and therefore, and thereby, of others, was an affront to the dignity of his distress, a desecration of his love's sanctity, a frivolous invasion of love's holiest ground. But, on the other hand, he was stimulated to catch at the veriest shadows of possibility by the certainty that he was at last within the same city with her he loved, and he knew that hypnotic subjects ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... the curate of St Roque's was a perpetual visitor. With a mortified and jealous pang, totally unreasonable and totally irresistible, Edward Rider, only a moment before so fantastically extreme in Nettie's defence—in the defence of Nettie's very "image" from all vulgar contact and desecration—strode past Nettie now without word or sign of recognition. She did not see him, as he observed with a throbbing heart; she was talking to young Mr Wentworth with all the haste and eagerness which Dr Rider had ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... other accusations calculated to keep up this hatred; such as the desecration of the consecrated host, the mutilation of the crucifix. Tradition informs us of a miracle which took place in Paris in 1290, in the Rue des Jardins, when a Jew dared to mutilate and boil a consecrated host. This miracle was commemorated by the erection of a chapel ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... it makes it almost desecration to touch it. It is to keep a private note-book with columns for the days of the week, and a list of virtues, with spaces against each for marks. this, with many stern rules for preface, is stored away in a secret place, and from time to time, at nightfall, the soul is arraigned ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... upper stage-boxes Helen and Lady Gower watched the successful progress of the play with an anxiety almost as keen as that of the author. To Helen it seemed as though the giving of these lines to the public—these lines which he had so often read to her, and altered to her liking—was a desecration. It seemed as though she were losing him indeed—as though he now belonged to these strange people, all of whom were laughing and applauding his words, from the German Princess in the Royal box to the straight-backed Tommy ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... soul and her limbs were but obeying their innate tuneful impulse. When we had finished the first waltz, I left her in the company of one of her Milwaukee friends and started out in quest of some acceptable male partner whose touch of her I should not feel to be a positive desecration. I had reached about the middle of the hall when an affectionate slap on my shoulder caused ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... strong measures. He once more speaks strongly and hotly to the nobles, for they had led the van in Sabbath desecration. They liked the freshest fruit and the daintiest dishes for their Sabbath feast, and they had, therefore, encouraged the market-people to go on with their Sabbath trade. Then, as now, there were plenty of people who, for their own self-pleasing, were ready to argue in favour of the loose ...
— The King's Cup-Bearer • Amy Catherine Walton
... Resolved, That the Joint Resolutions and report of the "Committee of Fifteen," now before Congress, to introduce the word "male" into the Federal Constitution, are a desecration of the last will and testament of the Fathers, a violation of the spirit of republicanism, and cruel injustice to the women of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... be desecration for any to attend, who was not perfectly virtuous. Hence it was regarded as an opportune time for the young men to satisfy themselves as to who were the virtuous ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... ostentation of equipage and apparel, for which this singular people, notwithstanding their avarice, have usually shown a predilection. [13] Stories were circulated of their contempt for the Catholic worship, their desecration of its most holy symbols, and of their crucifixion, or other sacrifice, of Christian children, at the celebration of their own passover. [14] With these foolish calumnies, the more probable charge ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... drinking 'mate' whilst they played at cards. Someone reminded him it was not fitting that God's Body should thus be seen so near to sailors, and therefore the Bishop, according to the custom of the Church in cases of accident or desecration, consumed the offended wafer, and peace ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... aching heart and wounded soul can find balm in sleep. Locked at night into a dark cell has made existence for nearly eighteen months a mere hideous vigil, broken by fitful nightmare. To see only pure faces, to listen to sweet feminine voices that never knew the desecration of blasphemy, to exchange the grim, fetid precincts of a penitentiary for a holy haven such as this, is indeed a glimpse of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... surprised!" replied Cornelia, with a depth of meaning which her hearers failed to fathom. They imagined that she was humbly appreciative of her own good fortune in visiting a neighbourhood as yet preserved from the desecration of the American tourists, whereas she was mentally reviewing the sleepy shops where the assistants took a solid five minutes to procure twopence change, the broken-down flies which crawled to and from the station; the tortoise-like round ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... to declare that 'the Veteran' (Miss G.) had wished to play the Part as it was acted: and furthermore comes Mr. Halliday, who somehow manages and adapts at D. L., to assert that the Veteran not only wished to enact the Desecration, but did enact it for many nights when Miss Wallis was indisposed. Then comes Isabel forward again—but I really forget what she said. I never saw her but once—in the Duchess of Malfi—very well: better, I dare say, than anybody now; but one could not remember a Word, a Look, or an Action. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... about that? Missed it—with a government cone, shot by a government stick on a government table, while a government scowl fairly shrieks: 'Cut out this desecration!'" She chalked her cue gravely, powdered her nose afterward, using a round scrap of a mirror not much bigger than a silver dollar. "Do you stay up here all the time ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... themselves, it is feared they must be given up as a farcical desecration of a solemn time-honoured privilege; it may be, exercised once in a life time,—and that once having the effect of a hundred repetitions, as Job lectured his wife. And Job's wife, a certain Mohammedan writer delivers, having committed a ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... followers of Mohammed. With powerful allies, and on more even terms than they had ever dreamed of, they could now do battle with the enemy that held their race in subjugation and with Russia, whose avowed object through generations had been the capture of Constantinople, the possession and perhaps desecration of the holy places of their religion and the dismembering of the last ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Christ-like man. I have very strong convictions, you see, on the subject of the sanctity and responsibilities of marriage. There are certain conditions which I hold to be essential on both sides. I hold also that human beings are sacred and capable of deep desecration, and that marriage, their closest bond, is sacred too, the holiest relationship in life, and one which should only be entered upon with the greatest care, and in the most reverent spirit. I see no ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the dress-coat in which you once captivated dinner-parties, on a costeimonger—seeing the strong-boned hunter that has carried you over post and rail, in a cab,—are sore trials; but nothing, according to my companion's description, to the desecration of your house and home by its conversion into a factory. Such an air of the "Inferno," too, pervades the smelting-house, with its lurid glow, its roar, its flash, and its furious heat, that I could readily forgive him the passionate warmth ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... madly in love with the divine Car-r-r-r-avaggio! Else how could he sing the magnificent second act aria? Life without her on those nights would be a hollow mockery, the glance of any possible rival in her direction a desecration. Why, he even had to restrain himself to keep from doing actual damage to Philippi, who, though on the shady side of forty-five, still sang a most dashing Escamillo; nor was his jealousy less poignant because Philippi and Caravaggio were ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... "and you know that 'he who fights and runs away, shall live to fight another day'." "Leftenant," said the captain gravely, "your quotation, besides bein' a kind o' desecration, is not applicable; 'cause the Ogilvys did not run away. They fowt on that occasion like born imps, an' they would ha' certainly won the day, if they hadn't been, every man jack of 'em, cut to pieces before the ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... cautious, and they halts themselves in the protecting shadows of the freight-shed or what's left of it, and they beckon me to come near 'em, and when I responds, they tell me I'm under arrest for inciting riots and disturbances and desecration of property and various other crimes and misdemeanours. I suggests to 'em that if they're really craving to arrest anybody, they should oughter begin with Emily, but they don't fall in with the idea. They marches me up to the ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... transept had perished in the fire of 1830, and its unroofed area had also become a burying-ground; whilst the north transept had been gradually encroached upon, no one knew how, and a large part of it was then used as a forge. The desecration of the east end was almost worse. The great Lady Chapel, which had been rebuilt in the fourteenth century, and which had formed part of the assignment to Sir Richard Rich, had been for long employed for trade purposes, being at one time the printing shop in which Benjamin Franklin had worked, and ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... brass-blurting of the overture to "Zampa" was noised forth: this was encored with ecstacies, and so were some of the quadrilles. Happy musical taste! Beethoven's septour, arranged as a set of quadrilles, is a desecration unworthy of Musard. For this piece of bad taste he ought to be condemned to arrange the sailor's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 16, 1841 • Various
... be hoped that nothing further will be heard of these various proposals to intern the KAISER at St. Helena. One would have thought that there had been quite sufficient desecration already ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 30, 1914 • Various
... man she had ever loved—the being for whom she had ruthlessly sacrificed the welfare of her sisters and every sentiment of honor; to whom she had given up her liberty to pander to his and his father's ignominy, and her home to their desecration. ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield |
