"Disenchantment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her with thinking the more. She agreed with everything he said, so he considered her the cleverest woman he knew. He discovered his error, no doubt, in sackcloth and ashes, poor fellow; but mercifully he had not to endure many years of disenchantment. I can't imagine a worse fate than being tied for life ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... aches, and a poignant yearning pains My pulse, as though from revel I had waked To find sore disenchantment. Oh for the simple ways of childhood, And its joys! Why have I grown so cold and cynical? My life seems out of tune; Its notes harsh and discordant; The crowded thoroughfare doth fret me And make lonely. Darkling I muse and yearn For those glad days of yore, ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... impressively, "that you were different—a woman-hater, honest, gruff, a little cynical. Yet those are the speeches of your salad days. What a disenchantment!" ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... thought came to me that neither was there any one in the gray heavens above to see them; the overcast sky seemed as lonely as the solitary street. That little band of orphaned children intensified my feeling of sorrow and added to the disenchantment of the May night, and I had a consciousness of the vanity of prayer, of the emptiness ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... that the child was going to be roasted, and did not know that what he saw was simply the act of disenchantment, which was being carried out by the wise woman of the village on a child born ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... accept these changelings with a gross complacency. At last Love awakes and looks about him; find his hero sunk into a stout old brute, intent on brandy pawnee; finds his heroine divested of her angel brightness; and, in the flash of that first disenchantment, flees for ever. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at last secured at the cost of half her vast estates, ended in a brief reunion. A secret marriage, a swift discovery that her idol was of very common clay, abuse so violent that she was obliged to forbid him forever her presence, and the disenchantment was complete. The sad remnant of her existence was devoted to literature and to conversation; the latter she regarded as "the greatest pleasure in life, and almost the only one." When she died, the Count de Lauzun wore the deepest mourning, had portraits of her ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... search or inquiry.] Discovery. — N. discovery, detection, disenchantment; ascertainment[obs3], disclosure, find, revelation. trover &c.(recovery) 775[Law]. V. discover, find, determine, evolve, learn &c. 539; fix upon; pick up; find out, trace out, make out, hunt out, fish out, worm out, ferret out, root ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... can only happen with "the utter cessation of and disenchantment about that very craving, giving it up, renouncing it and emancipation from it [Footnote ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... veiled or eclipsed by a rush of thick-headed comets, now flashing out through openings between their tails. I was in fairyland between the dark wall and the wild throng of illumined waters, but suffered sudden disenchantment; for, like the witch-scene in Alloway Kirk, "in an instant all was dark." Down came a dash of spent comets, thin and harmless-looking in the distance, but they felt desperately solid and stony when they struck my shoulders, like a mixture of choking spray ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... old in proportion than Ponto—still in full vigour of mind and body, but old in disenchantment, and not without the traces of her forty-seven years. The auburn hair was still in rich masses of curl; only on close inspection were silver threads to be detected; the cheek was paler, the brow worn, and the gravely handsome dress was chosen to suit the representative ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... this is just about the same as to dream of the devil; it indicates stormy times and much bad fortune. Disenchantment with humanity will follow. To kill ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... any great delicacy in his love affairs. The day when, as a young girl, in all the radiance of her beauty and all the triumph of her life, she suffered, at the cost of her heart and her sweet illusions, the disenchantment which falls on us so slowly and yet so quickly—for we try to postpone as long as possible our belief in evil, and it seems to come too soon—that day was a whole age of reflection, and it was also a day of religious thought and resignation. She refused ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... the world is evil and disenchantment old. Man's ancient heart is bitter, his hard eyes doubt of a sign. Blown hair beneath that banner that floated in folds of gold, In spirit I see you standing first ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... the scene were conducive to melancholy. We had walked a good fifteen miles into the open country and back again under chilly clouds, and were now paying for it with an empty sense of weariness and disenchantment. There is nothing so depressing as a bare room lit up by flaring gas-jets against the gloom of a late afternoon of rain; and the lights in Scipione's little cellar restaurant flared away in the most outrageous manner. Harding, ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... who might some day make gold at will was certainly not to be despised; rather, he should be cultivated. Nor was her esteem for Dee lessened by the success with which, by astrological calculations, he named a favorable day for her coronation; and, a little later, by solemn disenchantment warded off the ill effects of the Lincoln's Inn Fields incident, when a puppet of wax, representing Elizabeth, was found lying on the ground with a huge pin ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... his conjugal career with ample precaution; indulgence and perfect confidence were the two anchors to which he moored it. Mothers of families ought to seek such men for their daughters. A good mind protects like a divinity; disenchantment is as keen-sighted as a surgeon; experience as foreseeing as a mother. Those three qualities are the cardinal virtues of a safe marriage. All that his past career had taught to Felix de Vandenesse, the observations of a life that was busy, literary, and thoughtful by turns, ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... now with an irrational and supporting sense of duty done. He had dug his grave that morning; now he had carved his epitaph; the folds of the toga were composed, why should he delay the insignificant trifle that remained to do? He paused and looked long in the face of the sleeping Huish, drinking disenchantment and distaste of life. He nauseated himself with that vile countenance. Could the thing continue? What bound him now? Had he no rights?—only the obligation to go on, without discharge or furlough, bearing the unbearable? ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... in a heap. He wasn't playing the game at all as she had expected. He was avoiding her. She was dismayed for an instant, and then laughed outright quite frankly at her own disenchantment. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... conscience, the remark completed his descent into the state of disenchantment he had been approaching for hours. The shock of his mother's illness, coming after three days of marriage, had been too much for his unstable equilibrium, and he felt smothered by an oppression which, in ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... to the state of public opinion in England." The messengers of the Peace Society, the language held by the organs of the Manchester school, had emboldened him to try to realize the secular dream of Russian despots,—namely, the conquest of Constantinople. The disenchantment he experienced gave even his iron frame a terrible shock. Yet his haughty temper forbade him to entertain offers of, still more to sue for, peace. Those surrounding him, including his nearest by kinship, were afraid of angering the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... dissolves. And ah that life, ah that the heart and brain Might keep their mist and glamour, not to know So soon the disenchantment and the pain! But one by one our dear illusions go, Stript and cast forth as ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... visit the scene where for Pallas Athene "the hundred altars glowed with Arabian incense, and breathed with the fragrance of garlands ever fresh," found disenchantment when I spent the night in the cabin of a Greek priest—not a priest of the goddess, but of the Greek church—where there was but one room for man, priest, and beast. A few days after, our ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... in their presence from one of the millionaire toy-shop keepers. For a wondering moment they looked from their beds, sputtering, gibbering, gasping, with cautious calls one to the other. Then having proved speech to be no disenchantment they shouted and laughed crazily. There followed a scramble from the beds and a swift return from the cold, each bearing such of the priceless bits as had lain nearest. And while these were fondled ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... of his spirit! "I'll write—I'll write: that must be what the whole thing means," he said to himself, with a vague clutch at some solution which should keep him a little longer hanging half-way down the steep of disenchantment. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... entitled The Disenchantment of France, Mr. F.W. Myers points out the goal towards which "progress" is leading us, through the destruction of those four "illusions" which formerly gave life all its value and dignity,—namely, belief in religion; devotion to the State—whether ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... Johnnie Thorpe fell, and exercising a singular muscular ability, rolled out in time from the track of the on-coming wheel, and arose, dishevelled and aggrieved, casting a look of mournful disenchantment upon the black crowd that poured after the machine. The cart seemed to be the apex of a dark wave that was whirling as if it had been a broken dam. Back of the lad were stretches of lawn, and in that direction front-doors were banged ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... also to have brought away at the same time some of the sunlight of that country, a scrap of the blue sky, the eccentric costume and the bulrushes of the Tiber, and the large swing nets of the Ponte Rotto; in fact the frame with the picture. Then he would have been spared the cruel disenchantment he experienced when, having settled in a modest flat on the fourth storey, on the heights of Montmartre, he saw his handsome Transteverina decked out in a crinoline, a flounced dress, and a Parisian bonnet, which, constantly out of balance on the top of her heavy braids, assumed the ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... constitution in the early 1990s. However, the low turnout and allegations of electoral fraud during the most recent local elections in 2002-03 have exposed the weaknesses of formal political structures in Gabon. In addition, recent strikes have underscored the popular disenchantment with the political system. Presidential elections scheduled for 2005 are unlikely to bring change since the opposition remains weak, divided, and financially dependent on the current regime. Despite political conditions, ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... men I may be misunderstood, disliked perhaps, or, more generally, simply ignored and overlooked; but among the hills I fear no harsh, no indifferent word: each treasure of beauty breathes to me of One who knows my every heart-beat, One whom I can love without fear of wound or disenchantment. The mountain clefts have no unkind words, no fault-finding, no ridicule, no rash judgments for the sons of men. They offer clear springs, fresh fruits, and festal flowers, peace and rest and ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... painful symptoms, ennui, whose origin was seen to lie in an excess and abuse of esprit in a society that based all its pleasures and happiness upon the mind without any higher interest than the self, infected a whole century with an "irremediable disenchantment of others and one's self." This self-cult, or life in and for the mind, developed sagacity, justness of views, and an incomparable penetration, but it neglected all the elements necessary to contentment and those other pleasures, ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... M. Scribe I had learnt from M. Duval; the naturalistic school had taught me to scorn tricks, and to rely on the action of the sentiments rather than on extraneous aid for the bringing about of a denouement; and I thought of all this as I read "Disenchantment" by Miss Mabel Robinson, and it occurred to me that my knowledge would prove valuable when my turn came to write a novel, for the mise en place, the setting forth of this story, seemed to me so loose, that ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... long ceased to be my friend?... But, after all, was he ever my friend? What a disenchantment! ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... was looking at me while I swung open the door with a low bow. I did not trust myself to look at her. An unreasonable disenchantment, like the awakening from a happy dream, oppressed me. I felt an almost angry desire to seize her in my arms—to go back to my dream. If I had looked at her then, I believed I could ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... poised, so averse to all impulsive manifestations of emotion, her affections were surprisingly warm and clinging, and she loved him with all the depth and fervor of her tender, generous heart; hence the slow torture of her humiliation in the hour of disenchantment. To women who love is given a sixth sense, a subtile instinct whereby, as in an occult alembic, they discern the poison that steals into their wine of joy; so Leo was not long in ignorance that her coveted kingdom belonged by right of conquest to another, and that she reigned ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... lost in a throng of figures more august.[110] Diana, Bertha, Holda, Abundia, Befana, once beautiful and divine, the bringers of blessing while men slept, became demons haunting the drear of darkness with terror and ominous suggestion. The process of disenchantment must have been a long one, and none can say how soon it became complete. Perhaps we may take Heine's word ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... English poets of the romantic period were Lord Byron and Shelley; the former the admirable poet of disenchantment and of despair, gifted with a noble epic genius, creating and vitalising characters which, it must be confessed, differed very little from one another, but an exalted figure with a grand manner and, except Shakespeare, the only English poet who exercised ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... admiration he drew near and went on his knees beside her. At the same moment, the hour of disenchantment having come, the princess awoke, and bestowed upon him a look more tender than a first ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... the inner buoyancy of youth, hope, and faith in the joy of life. After the marriage of Nathalie, and his subsequent precipitation, had come those wild rebellions of the soul, the violent protestations, the young and petted cynicisms, that are the inevitable accompaniment of the inevitable hour of disenchantment. This phase, however great its length, must, nevertheless, resolve itself at last into one of two others: the quiet complacency of a renewed but gentler optimism; or a cynicism tried, real, deep-rooted, unhappy but irresistible. Be this state a sign of weakness ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... informs us that a naked woman is such a fright "that Don Juan himself were fain to hide his eyes in sorrow and disenchantment and fly to other climes." How thankful Cupid must be that he was born blind! Still the most of us are willing to risk one eye on the average "altogether" model. Du Maurier—who is a somewhat better artist than author—illustrates ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... well enough aware that he could, if he chose, make up the lost way and leave Brunson "nowhere" in the race for honours; but it was his first disenchantment, and he felt it deeply. Letters are dear and honours sweet, but our own beloved personality is dearer still; and there is no one who does not feel humbled and wounded when he finds out that he is esteemed, not for himself, but for ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... mysterious thing by which all this is accomplished. How it came to have this power is a question on which I never ventured an opinion. If, then, Matter starts as 'a beggar,' it is, in my view, because the Jacobs of theology have deprived it of its birthright. Mr. Martineau need fear no disenchantment. Theories of evolution go but a short way towards the explanation of this mystery; the Ages, let us hope, will at length give us a Poet competent ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... know what to buy for house-keepin,"; which poor piece of hypocrisy endeared him to me more than ever. The puncher was not of the fibre to succeed in keeping appearances, but he deserved success, which the angels consider to be enough. I wondered if disenchantment had set in, or if this were only the preliminary stage of surprise and wounding, and I felt that but one test could show, namely, a coming face to face of Mr. and Mrs. Lusk, perhaps not to be desired. Neither was it likely. The assistant rain-maker kept himself steadfastly ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister |
