"Grossness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the fair Julie d'Angennes, who bestowed not her hand on the Duc de Montausier until he had served as many years in seeking it as Jacob had served to gain that of Rachel, and until she had passed her thirtieth year (in order that his passion should become as purified from all grossness, as was the language spoken among the circle in which she lived), receiving with dignified reserve the finely painted flowers and poems to illustrate them, which formed the celebrated Guirlande de Julie, presented to her by her ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... passages except the passages that seemingly had a bearing on her belief. That is, Mrs. Eddy believed things first, and then skirmished for proof. This is a very old plan. Says Shakespeare: "In religion what damned error but some somber brow will bless it and approve it with a text, hiding the grossness thereof with fair ornament." Let no one read "Science and Health" in the hope of finding in it simple and sensible statements concerning life and its duties. They ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... preference to truth, and who, for their generation, performed the part of general libellers—to represent Potemkin as a savage, devoted to drinking, and whose influence was solely the result of his grossness. But the conferences which he held with this British ambassador, and the extracts of his opinions given in these letters, show him to have been a man of remarkable clearness of comprehension, dexterity of resource, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... go on to reproduce his grossness and trivialities? All that he thought, at that hour, was even noble, though he could not clothe it otherwise than in the language of a brutal farce. Presently he bade me call the doctor; and when that ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wasn't, because the thing was valuable, because he had sunk so much capital in that body and those engines (he had bought the most expensive kind of car you could buy). There was a sort of romance, a purity in his passion that redeemed it from the taint of grossness. It was the car's own purity, her unique and staggering beauty that had captivated him. And mixed with his passion there was the remorse and terror caused by the memory of his first car, the victim of his intemperance in motoring. He had evidently said to himself: "Motor-cars are ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... presence a name contemptible or gross (as Jew)." Thus, for further elucidation to the enquirer after the peculiarities of language, Kie 'tkillem ma el Kaba hashak asseedi,—"He is talking with a prostitute—your pardon, Sir, for the grossness ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... nothing that could offend the affected simplicity of the times, prepared to quit the house. A friendly voice, however, exerting itself above the clamour, informed us that the offensive objects were a cloak and a shawl which hung over the front of the box.—You will scarcely suppose such grossness possible among a civilized people; but the fact is, our friends are of the proscribed class, and we were insulted because in their society.—I have before noticed, that the guards which were stationed in the theatre before the revolution are now removed, and a municipal officer, made ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... the grossness of his language, as he seemed half out of his mind with fear. When I went upstairs with him he pointed to several footprints upon the ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... be observ'd, its Temperature, as to the first four Qualities (commonly so call'd) and the Measures of them: its Weight, Clearness, Refractive power: its Sublety or Grossness: its abounding with, or wanting an Esurine Salt: its variations according to the seasons of the year, and the times of the day; What duration the several kinds of Weather usually have: What Meteors it is most or least wont to breed; and in what order they are generated; and how long they ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... Baudelaire's taste for hideous and shocking aspects of lust. One is not surprised to find among his poems that "heroical epistle of Sappho to Philaenis," in which he makes himself the casuist of forbidden things. His studies of sensuality, however, are for the most part normal, even in their grossness. There was in him more of the Yahoo than of the decadent. There was an excremental element in his genius as in the genius of that other gloomy dean, Jonathan Swift. Donne and Swift were alike satirists ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... her in grace?" wept the Fairy Eglantine; "the Spark will melt away all mortal grossness, till she is light and graceful as the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... accurately recollected in one corresponding point on the retina, but take up some space thereon, so that rays from different points become mixed and confused together. This is opposed to a distinct vision, and attends near objects. Faint vision is when by reason of the distance of the object or grossness of the interjacent medium few rays arrive from the object to the eye. This is opposed to vigorous or clear vision, and attends remote ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley
... Monks, the Monks they did the mischief! Theirs all the grossness, all the superstition Of a most gross and superstitious age— May He be praised that sent the healthful tempest And scatter'd all these pestilential vapours! But that we owed them all to yonder Harlot Throned on the seven hills with her cup of gold, I will as soon believe, with kind Sir ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... him it suffuses the imagination; he is not merely selfishly sentient, or selfishly scheming: his very conceptions are selfish. I remember walking at my swiftest pace, blaming everybody I knew for insufficiency, for want of subordination to my interests, for poverty of nature, grossness, blindness to the fine lights shining in me; I blamed the Fates for harassing me, circumstances for not surrounding me with friends worthy of me. The central 'I' resembled the sun of this universe, with the difference that it shrieked for nourishment, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... slipping out an oath; but that appeared to me as the surest symptom of their distinction, (tho' I am since informed that swearing is perfectly unfashionable.) Their finery, however, threw a veil over any grossness in their conversation. My daughters seemed to regard their superior accomplishments with envy; and what appeared amiss was ascribed to tip-top quality breeding. But the condescension of the ladies was still superior to their other accomplishments. One of them observed, that had miss Olivia seen ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as Plato thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection, reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. God would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He worked in some way defeated His purpose. Death, disease, decay, clung necessarily to everything which was created out of ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... their own follies for the benefit of learning, who make themselves and their own failures the centre of the comedy of Love's Labour's Lost, are not going to let this thing escape; with the heights of its ideal, and the grossness of its real, it is the very fuel for the mirth that is blazing and crackling here. For these are the woodmen that are at work here, making sport as they work; hewing down the old decaying trunks, gathering all the nonsense into heaps, and burning it ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the sublimate and "proof" essence of French character? Not one, of all the great men of history, has possessed, so far as we know, a physical constitution more perfectly representing, even in its advancing grossness, both the strength and weakness of ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... of honour, which felt a stain like a wound; which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness." ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... certainly as beautiful as the lilies, he himself wasn't like those tragic sellers. It was only that he was so very ordinary,—a little man compact, apparently, of grossness, and the music he was making was so divine. It was that marvellous French and Russian stuff. I must play it to you, and play it to you, till you love it. It's like nothing there has ever been. It is of ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... lust grips them. And the towns they build of their greed will be but the nucleus of all the crime let loose upon the land. There will be men among your savages; men in whom the finer stuff outweighs the grossness and the greed. But to save their lives and that thing they prize more than life or gold, and call by the name of honor or friendship or justice—that thing which is the essence of all the fineness in their natures—to save that and ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... strangers. The father, with a grand simplicity, either spoke of what interested himself, or maintained an unaffected silence. The son turned in his head for some topic that should be quite safe, that would spare him fresh evidences either of my lord's inherent grossness or of the innocence of his inhumanity; treading gingerly the ways of intercourse, like a lady gathering up her skirts in a by-path. If he made a mistake, and my lord began to abound in matter of offence, Archie ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror. It is my common practice when a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such grossness, such partiality and such wearing iteration, as at length shall spur him up in its defence. In a moment he transmigrates, dons the required character, and with moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in question. I can fancy nothing to compare with the vim of these impersonations, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... husband is, the wife is; thou art mated with a clown, And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down. 953 TENNYSON: Locksley ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... Florence, and in Ognissanti; and tombs and adornments in many places for the doors of churches, wherein they have certain figures for corbels to support the roof, so rude and vile, so misshapen, and of such a grossness of manner, that it appears impossible ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... But, Mrs. G., do not you know, as well as I, that in all great cities, in your country and in mine as well as in this, a certain portion of every class of society is less moral than the rest? In some countries immorality is more refined indeed; and when manners lose their grossness, they are stripped apparently of half their vice. But suppose the fact, that women, even the unmarried, are less pure here than in Europe, remember that with us, besides the mother, there is the nurse of the family, or the governess, or even the waiting-maid ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... bore so helplessly the weight of his misfortunes, she felt herself a head and shoulders taller in cheerful and sterling courage. She could walk head in air along the most precarious rafter; her hand feared neither the grossness nor the harshness of life's web, but was thrust cheerfully, if need were, into the briar bush, and could take hold of any crawling horror. Ruin was mining the walls of her cottage, as already it had mined and subverted Mr. Archer's palace. Well, she faced it with a bright countenance and a busy hand. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... high responsibility attached to the character of a guardian, with which circumstances invested him, had proved sufficient to restrain him from freedoms of behaviour towards her, which no reasonable allowance for the comparative grossness of the age can reduce within the limits of propriety or decorum. We learn that, on some occasions at least, she endeavoured to repel his presumption by such expedients as her youthful inexperience suggested; but ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... develop that: "We owe it our revolt against the academic; or our disgust at 'big business,' and all the grossness of commercial success. We owe——". [His ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... you, we would not have woman exposed to the grossness and vulgarity of public life, or encounter what she must at the polls. When you talk, gentlemen, of sheltering woman from the rough winds and revolting scenes of real life, you must be either talking for effect, or wholly ignorant of what the facts of life are. The man, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of the most eminent of the ancient fathers describes the music of the flutes, sackbuts, and psalteries of the temple worship as only befitting the childhood of the Church. "It was," says he, "permitted to the Jews, as sacrifice was, for the heaviness and grossness of their souls. God condescended to their weakness, because they were lately drawn off from idols; but now, instead of instruments, we may use our own bodies to ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... twenty-eight. At twenty-eight she begins to evolve into something else, and her capacity for harm is largely curtailed, because by this time spirit has written itself in her form and features, and the grossness and animality which before were ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... modest simplicity, depend at ease, and now at last have a graceful flow; the Waistcoat hides no evil passion, no riotous desire; hunger or thirst now dwells not in it. Thus all is purged from the grossness of sense, from the carking cares and foul vices of the World; and rides there, on its Clothes-horse; as, on a Pegasus, might some skyey Messenger, or purified ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... hair's breadth higher or lower than I had done; and attacked, with a virulence that shewed I was totally blind to the lameness of my own cause, the socinianizing clergy, who dared subscribe in defiance of the grossness of their heresy, and the Calvinists, who had the impudence to understand the articles in the sense in ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... precision of torture. God knew what he was about. With all his resources he couldn't have hit on anything more delicately calculated to hurt. Nothing less subtle would have touched her. Not discovery; not the grossness of exposure; but this intolerable security. What could discovery and exposure do but set her free in her reality? Anne would have rejoiced to see her lie go up in one purifying flame of revelation. But to go safe in her lie, hiding her ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... The grossness of the Hawaiian erotic taste is indicated by "Haeole's" reference (123) to "the immense corpulency of some of the old Hawaiian queens, a feature which, in those days, was deemed the ne plus ultra of female beauty." Incest was permitted to the chiefs, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... containing much that has instructed and delighted our predecessors, are, nevertheless, but ill adapted in their original form for general perusal. Among these may be reckoned some works of fiction, the excellencies of which are often obscured by a grossness of style not uncommon at the time when they were composed, but which justly excludes them from family-reading in the present day. Such works would be acceptable if freed from objectionable passages; and in undertaking to accomplish this reform, without detriment to the spirit of the original, ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... whole of the nurse's speech is admirable: its naive and striking picture of conjugal affection goes far to redeem the grossness of The Nights. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... Maintenance of your Health, by preventing Infirmities and Grossness of Humours, you compose your Kennel; consult first your own Ability for this Exercise; and if you think you are able to foot it away, then the Biggest and slowest Dogs you can get are best; which you may bring so to your Command, as to make them ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... unconsciously felt to be danger woman increases her feeling of safety by setting up a taboo on the whole subject of sex. It is time that we freed our minds from the artificial and perverted attitude toward this dominant impulse; time to rescue the word "sex" from its implications of grossness and sensuousness, and to recognize the instinct in its true light as one of the necessary and holy forces of life, a force capable of causing great damage, but also holding infinite possibilities ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... Darius buvant avec des goujats dans un cabaret.' Johnson, perhaps, had this attack in mind when, in his Life of Pope (Works, viii. 275), he thus wrote of Voltaire:—'He had been entertained by Pope at his table, when he talked with so much grossness, that Mrs. Pope was driven from the room. Pope discovered by a trick that he was a spy for the court, and never considered him as ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... indecent suggestion is also followed in the hints at the possible occasion of the Original's aversion to women. Asimilar censure could be spoken regarding the adventure in the tavern,[77] where the author hesitates on the edge of grossness. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... little fear of lust or license. Men will, on the whole, continue to prefer one partner, and friendship will refine the grossness of sense. There are worse evils than open and avowed inconstancy—the loathsome combination of deceitful intrigue with the selfish monopoly of property. That a child should know its father is no great matter, for I ought not in reason to prefer one human being to another because he ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... is, he can only take a degree at Oxford or Cambridge under the implied and wholly unmerited stigma applying to the non-collegiate student. And these iniquities apply not only to the great anthropoids whose strength and grossness we might legitimately fear, but to the most delicately organized types—to the Barbary Ape, the Lemur, and the Ring-tailed Baboon. Finally—and this is the worst feature in the whole matter—a Monkey, by a legal fiction at least as old as the fourteenth century, is not a person in the ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... confirmed by divers trials, that the root of the male peony dried, tied to the necke, doth helpe the falling sickness, and likewise the incubus, which we call the mare. The cause of both these diseases, and especially of the epilepsie from the stomach, is the grossness of the vapours, which rise and enter into the cells of the brain, and therefore the working is by extreme and subtle alternation which that simple hath." Worn as an amulet, the peony was a popular ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... something gross and prurient in things intrinsically sweet and pure, and it happens that when the dance has fallen to their shaping and direction, as in religious rites, then it has received its most objectionable development and perversion. But the grossness of dances devised by the secular mind for purposes of aesthetic pleasure is all in the censorious critic, who deserves the same kind of rebuke administered by Dr. Johnson to Boswell, who asked the Doctor if he considered a certain nude statue ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... a stranger to Waldegrave's sister. I knew merely that he had such a relation. There was nothing, therefore, to outbalance this unfavourable report, but the apparent malignity and grossness of those who gave it. It was not, however, her character about which I was solicitous, but merely the place where she might be found and the suitable inquiries respecting her deceased brother be answered. On this head, these people professed utter ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... in shrinking haste, From sin that passeth helpless by; The weak antennae of whose taste From touch of alien grossness fly— Shall, banished to the outer waste, Never ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... everything that is sincerely good And perfectly divine, With Truth, and Peace, and Love shall ever shine About the supreme Throne Of Him, t' whose happy-making sight alone, When once our heav'nly-guided soul shall climb, Then all this earthly grossness quit, Attir'd with stars, we shall forever sit, Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee, ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... strangest of all, she blossomed, physically as well as mentally, into a fuller revelation of gracious loveliness than before, sweeter and more exquisite, indeed, than anything life had yet shown to me. Moreover, having captured me, she changed; the grossness I had discerned, that which had led me to my own undoing, vanished completely as though it were transmuted into desires and emotions of a loftier kind. Some purpose, some intention, a hope immensely resolute shone out of her, and of such spiritual loveliness, ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... so strongly figurative an expression that its metaphorical character cannot but be obvious to the most cursory reader. The very frankness, and, we may say, the grossness of the image, saves it from all misconception, and as with other similar expressions in the Old Testament, at once suggests its meaning. We read, for example, of the 'arm,' the 'hand,' the 'finger' of God, and everybody feels that these mean His power. We read of the 'eye' of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... period of our national history—unless, perhaps, during the orgies of the Restoration were aristocratic morals at so low an ebb. Edmund Burke, in a passage which is as ethically questionable as it is rhetorically beautiful, taught that vice loses half its evil when it loses all its grossness. But in the English society of his time grossness was as conspicuous as vice itself, and it infected not only the region of morals, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... superior sagacity; he avowed himself a knave upon system, and upon the lowest scale. To overreach, to deceive, to elude, to shuffle, to fawn, and to lie, were the arts that he confessed to with so naked and cold a grossness, that one perceived that in the long habits of debasement he was unconscious of what was not debased. Houseman seemed to draw him out: he told us anecdotes of his rascality, and the distresses to which it had brought him; and he finished by saying: 'Yet you see me ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... paltry avarice. Those absentees have their reward in profligate sons, and foreignized daughters, in giving them manners ridiculous to the people of the Continent, and disgusting to their countrymen—morals adopting the grossness of continental life, and general habits rendered utterly unfit for a return to their country, and, of course, for any rational and meritorious conduct, until they sink into ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... match, but finding that she did not know the alphabet of the game, and was more interested in the spectators than in the players, he gave her up. He admired her appearance, but it did not make amends for ignorance of such a grossness; and, equally displeased with him, she returned home alone while he ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... spirit of an exalted freedom. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... the Chinese) who still survive in every one of the provinces south of the Yang-tsz Kiang; but the ruling caste, whose administrative centre lay to the north of these tribes, though affected by the grossness of their barbarous surroundings, were manifestly more or less orthodox Chinese in origin and sympathy, and, even at this early period (771 B.C.), possessed a considerable culture, a knowledge of Chinese script, ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... disinterested, chivalrous, protective, in their love for women as he. Angel Clare was far from all that she thought him in this respect; absurdly far, indeed; but he was, in truth, more spiritual than animal; he had himself well in hand, and was singularly free from grossness. Though not cold-natured, he was rather bright than hot—less Byronic than Shelleyan; could love desperately, but with a love more especially inclined to the imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious emotion which ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... age of Charles II. to that of Aristophanes—'which called its own grossness polite.' How bitterly he decries the stale poems of the time as 'a heap of senseless ribaldry;' how truly he shows that licentiousness weakens as well as depraves the judgment. 'When Satyrs are brought to court,' ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... compassion, to bestow on him." Though forty-eight hours had elapsed after this furious sally before he met with the Austrian Ambassador, Count Von Cobenzl, his passion was still so furious, that, observing his grossness and violence, all the members of the diplomatic corps trembled, both for this their respected member, and for the honour of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... all the schools of Europe and America. In this country it seems to have had less attention paid to it than it deserved, because its influence was counteracted by the arrogance and profligacy of its author, as if the grossness of a man's manner affected the conclusiveness of his arguments; but this influence did not extend beyond Britain, while the light of his theory illuminated the opposite hemisphere. And when the manner in which he was persecuted is recollected, the liberal mind will allow ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... it was as if the faint, the delicate colors of the place gave a more frightful grossness and pungency to its smell. Dying asafetida struggled still with gas fumes, and was pierced by another odor, a sharp and bitter odor that ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... "Metamorphoses," they have been greater favorites than any other of his works. Love, in the days of Ovid, had in it nothing pure or chivalrous. The age in which he lived was morally polluted, and he was neither better nor worse than his contemporaries; hence grossness is the characteristic of his "Art of Love." His "Metamorphoses" contain a series of mythological narratives from the earliest times to the translation of the soul of Julius Caesar from earth to heaven, and his metamorphosis ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... maintain the general proposition that various degrees of idealization are essentially incompatible within the limits of a single artistic composition, or else he must hold that the contrast between the two sets of characters in the actual play is itself of a grossness to offend the sense of literary propriety in an audience. If any one is prepared without qualification to maintain the former of these two propositions, he is welcome to do so, and he will be perfectly entitled to condemn Jonson's pastoral on the strength of it; but I ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... occasion of the birth of the King's daughter Maria. There is no action in the play, and King Manuel would perhaps have yawned at these shepherds' quarrels, relieved not at all by the parvo's wit or the hermit's grossness and only occasionally by a touch of lyric poetry; but perhaps these simple scenes were welcome to the growing artificiality of the Court. For us the beautiful cossante Um amigo que eu havia stands out like a single orange gleaming from a dark-foliaged ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... said the wizard to the boy.—“I see,” answered the boy, “I see a fair girl with golden hair, blue eyes, pallid face, rosy lips.” There was a shot! I shouted out my laughter to the horror of the wizard, who perceiving the grossness of his failure, declared that the boy must have known sin (for none but the innocent can see truth), and accordingly kicked ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... stronger this force, the better. All Sannyasis learn consciously or unconsciously to transmute this energy into mental and spiritual force and generally their minds dwell on a plane of mental and spiritual effort where there cannot be even a breath of sensuality or grossness. They have gone beyond such things utterly; the same statement applies to all advanced thinkers, philosophers and workers, whether married or unmarried. To me the very name of philosophy carries with it an atmosphere of Chastity, ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... gaze, a confused comprehension began to stir in him—at first only a sort of chagrin, then something more—a consciousness of his own heaviness of intellect and grossness of figure—the fatness of mind and body which had developed so rapidly within ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... "Rudeness and Grossness matter, and I've shown both, and already I'm sorry, and I hope she'll let me apologize. But from the selfish point of view it doesn't matter a straw. She's no more to us than the Wonham ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... had known it. Ambition soared on mad wings, and he saw himself climbing the heights with her, sharing thoughts with her, pleasuring in beautiful and noble things with her. It was a soul-possession he dreamed, refined beyond any grossness, a free comradeship of spirit that he could not put into definite thought. He did not think it. For that matter, he did not think at all. Sensation usurped reason, and he was quivering and palpitant with emotions he had ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... great probability, to have designed him as a caricature of some real person; for Margutte is a Greek who, in point of morals, has been horribly brought up, and some of the Greek refugees in Italy were greatly disliked for the cynicism of their manners and the grossness of their lives. Margutte is a glutton, a drunkard, a liar, a thief, and a blasphemer. He boasts of having every vice, and no virtue except fidelity; which is meant to reconcile Morgante to his company; but though the latter endures and even likes it for his amusement, he gives him to understand ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... thing was that he should have come out of his own ordeal so smiling and so unconcerned; that he could have sinned as he had sinned, and that he could meet, after seven years, in his wife's presence, the partner of his sin (whose face was a revelation of its grossness)—meet her, and not be shaken by the shame of it. It showed how lightly he held it, how low his standard was. She recalled, shuddering, the woman's face. Nothing in the visions she had so shrunk from could compare ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... selfish child. When she held his dark head in the crook of her arm, he was her child, her little boy.... And perhaps one day she would hold, through her love for him, a real child there, a child who was really innocent and helpless and weak—a child without grossness to scare her or hardness to wound her—her own child, ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... holy spirit could be incorporated, as though, for example, a man might hope to become a poet or a sculptor by feeding upon the flesh or bones of a Shakespeare or a Michael Angelo. Only mind can know and receive mind, and it is really difficult to comprehend the grossness of soul which suggests to man the idea that by feasting on the flesh and blood of his God he may hope to become ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... licentiousness of the pen in all these notes to the Dunciad to a height which can only be paralleled in the gross logomachies of Schioppius, Gronovius, and Scaliger, and the rest of that snarling crew. But his wit exceeded even his grossness. He was ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... neglect the knowledge of and training in right relations with men, reverence and right relations to the most high, your culture of the intellect is worse than waste; it is the perfecting of the poison of our social life; it is the whetting of the edge of a man's villainy and grossness. ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... sensitive. He was a young man of eighteen, and he had not yet become familiar with the grossness and selfishness of this calculating world. He was rather offended at the patronage which the Senator had proposed to bestow upon him, and he even regretted that he had so ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... acts are done, be they righteous or sinful, be they done knowingly or otherwise, remain (and are never destroyed unless their fruits are enjoyed or endured).[1513] Whatever acts are done by the mind with full deliberation, produce, according to their grossness or subtility, fruits that are gross or subtile.[1514] Those acts, however, O thou of righteous soul, which are fraught with great injury, if done in ignorance, do without fail produce consequences and even consequences that lead to hell, with this difference that ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... satisfactorily exposed, as well as the different disguises to which the meanness of self-love resorts in such cases to hide a want of generosity and good faith. The lurking selfishness of Apemantus does not pass undetected amidst the grossness of his sarcasms and his contempt for the pretensions of others. Even the two courtezans who accompany Alcibiades to the cave of Timon are very characteristically sketched; and the thieves who come to visit him are also 'true men' in their way.—An exception to this general picture of ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... monotonous, since the consequent maiming was various, and it was not always a single person who was killed. So that the pleasures of the Carnival were of a checkered kind, and if a painter were called upon to represent them truly, he would have to make a picture in which there would be so much grossness and barbarity that it must be turned with its face to the wall, except when it was taken down for the grave historical purpose of justifying a reforming zeal which, in ignorance of the facts, might be unfairly condemned for its narrowness. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... by bedaubing him with the renown of a common buffoon. But the argument is none of the soundest in itself, and may fairly be set aside as a piece of desperate special pleading, the work of counsel at their wits' end for matter of defence. For Rabelais clean is not Rabelais at all. His grossness is an essential component in his mental fabric, an element in whose absence he would be not Rabelais but somebody else. It inspires his practice of art to the full as thoroughly as it informs his theory of language. He not only employs ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... hand laid upon his shoulder. 'Crimes, hunted, the gallows.' They were ugly words; in the ears of an innocent man, perhaps all the uglier; for if some judicial error were in act against him, who should set a limit to its grossness or to how far it might be pushed? Not John, indeed; he was no believer in the powers of innocence, his cursed experience pointing in quite other ways; and his fears, once wakened, grew with every hour and hunted him ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in a realm of mere imaginative life, where, if it be the only life, the diviner part of our being can find no sustenance. This danger is for her the greater and more insidious, because in her the sensuous, so strongly developed, is refined from all its grossness by the presence of ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... of the court of Charles II. were, to the utmost, profligate and abandoned: yet in what colours have they been drawn by Hamilton? The elegance of his pencil has rendered them more seductive and dangerous, than if it had more faithfully copied the originals. From such a mingled mass of grossness of language, and of conduct, one would have turned away with disgust and abhorrence; but Hamilton was, to use the words of his admirer, Lord Orford, "superior to the indelicacy of the court," whose vices ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... but a kind of madness and folly; far be it that my words should give any offense, rather consider my matter. And first, the Christians and Platonists do as good as agree in this, that the soul is plunged and fettered in the prison of the body, by the grossness of which it is so tied up and hindered that it cannot take a view of or enjoy things as they truly are; and for that cause their master defines philosophy to be a contemplation of death, because it takes off the mind from visible and corporeal objects, than which death does no more. ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... lovers. The bond between the story of Alcestis, who goes down to death to save the life of Admetus, and that of Leonore, who ventures her life to save Florestan, is closer than that of the Orphic myth, for though the alloy only serves to heighten the sheen of Eurydice's virtue, there is yet a grossness in the story of Aristaeus's unlicensed passion which led to her death, that strongly differentiates it from the modern tale of wifely love and devotion. Beethoven was no ascetic, but he was as sincere and severe a moralist in life as he was in art. ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... explanation that the springing of it on the professors was due to an error or misunderstanding. But that the attempt should have been made, and in a manner that argued so total a lack of any sense of its grossness and crudity, is a significant warning of the extent to which the notions underlying it have fastened upon ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... French literature,—"Pantagruel." Aretino, the friend of Titian, and the Voltaire of his century, has, in our day, a reputation the exact opposite of his works and of his character; a reputation which he owes to a grossness of wit in keeping with the writings of his age, when broad farce was held in honor, and queens and cardinals wrote tales which would be called, in these days, licentious. One might go ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... soft, yielding body. She never wore corsets, preferring the clinging Grecian style of gowns that showed graceful lines and left the figure free, and her form, slender yet firm and delicately chiseled like that of some sculptured goddess, had none of that voluptuous grossness which mars the symmetry ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... of the young minister's cheek was accounted for by his too earnest devotion to study, his scrupulous fulfilment of parochial duty, and more than all, to the fasts and vigils of which he made a frequent practice, in order to keep the grossness of this earthly state from clogging and obscuring his spiritual lamp. Some declared, that if Mr. Dimmesdale were really going to die, it was cause enough that the world was not worthy to be any longer trodden by his feet. He himself, on the other hand, with characteristic humility, avowed his ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... present from her majesty was never so received before; but the grossness of the manner of the messenger swallowed up the graciousness of the design in the principal: and I had not even a wish to conceal how little it was ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... himself was an earnest, intelligent disciple. He found her mind clearer than he had expected. Judith (this he now knew was the mother's name) was a remarkable woman; her mind was lofty, if darkened. While others were satisfied with the grossness of a material creed her spirit soared aloft. Her Gods commanded her implicit faith, her unswerving allegiance. Seated on the storm-clouds, sweeping through space, they represented to her infinite force. She attributed to them no love for mankind, which ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... speak too slightingly of these verbal critics;—how can I, who am so fond of talking about errors and vulgarisms of speech? Only there is a difference between those clerical blunders which almost every man commits, knowing better, and that habitual grossness or meanness of speech which is unendurable to educated persons, from anybody ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... awful head, Zoilus again would start up from the dead. Envy will Merit, as its shade, pursue, But like a shadow, proves the substance true; For envied wit, like Sol eclipsed, makes known The opposing body's grossness, not its own. When first that sun too powerful beams displays, 470 It draws up vapours which obscure its rays; But even those clouds at last adorn its way, Reflect new glories, and ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... of the druidical priesthood, we have every where apparent proofs of their polytheism: and the grossness of their religious ideas, as represented by some writers, is very inconsistent with that divine philosophy which has been considered as a part of their character. These, however, were popular divinities which the Druids ostensibly worshipped, and ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... personality of Saint Francis, which informs with his memory every detail of the buildings and rocks around you. Each legend was full of interest for her. The alembic of her mind seemed to have the secret of distilling from traditions, which in their grossness the ordinary visitor turns from with a smile of contempt, the spiritual value they once possessed for ages of faith, or at least the poetry with which the simple belief of those ages has invested ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... spectacle, at least, of those who eat and drink too much. We can switch off a bore at once. We can retire when we are fatigued, without leaving a blank space before the others. And all this without saying anything of the higher spiritual and intellectual effect—freed from material grossness of appetite and show—which the dinner party thus attains. But you are surely joking! You, an American, and not know it! Why, it comes from Boston. Haven't you read that book, 'Jumping a Century'? ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... parts of England any thing large is called a bumper. Hence a bumping lass is a large girl of her age, and a bumpkin is a large-limbed, uncivilized rustic; the idea of grossness of size entering into the idea of a country bumpkin, as well as that of unpolished rudeness. Dr. Johnson, however, strangely enough deduces the word bumpkin from bump; but what if it should prove to be a corruption of bumbard, or bombard: in low Latin, bombardus, a great gun, and from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... almost all, impartial minds will acquiese in what we say as to the tone of lax morality, in reference to marriage, so common in their literature. We do not like it, in joke or in earnest; neither are we of those to whom vice "loses most of its deformity by losing all its grossness." If there be a deep and ulcerated wound, we think the more "the richly-embroidered veil" is torn away the better. Such a deep social wound exists in France; we wish its cure, as we wish the health of all nations and of all men; so far indeed would we "recoil towards a ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... refined taste, the bowls are often ornamented with queer shaped heads, having bead-like eyes; sometimes imaginary beings, sometimes caricature portraits of eminent persons. Where more than the head is represented, license is given to a certain grossness of idea; but this is not a general characteristic. The clay of which these French pipes are made is admitted to be superior to that of England, due to the careful mixture of different kinds, ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings |
