Free translatorFree translator
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Humiliating   /hjumˈɪliˌeɪtɪŋ/   Listen
Humiliating

adjective
1.
Causing awareness of your shortcomings.  Synonyms: demeaning, humbling, mortifying.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Humiliating" Quotes from Famous Books



... to forget her past life, to comfort herself with ease, and the confidence of her own worth that it gave her. Without wine she was despondent and abashed. There was the choice of two things before her; either the humiliating occupation of a servant, with the certain unwelcome attentions of the men, or a secure, quiet and legitimatized position of everybody's mistress. She wished to revenge herself on her seducer, as well ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy

... empurpling, glared at him in speechless stupefaction. His rage was the more utter from his humiliating conviction that whatever he might say or do, this irresistible fellow would bend him to his will. At last speech came ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... large sum of money, which he spent in supporting companions in exile; then, returning by stealth to England in quest of funds, he was detected and sent to the Tower, where he languished for three years, being released only on the humiliating condition of informing against his associates in the plot. The public records show, however, that, all the time of his alleged exile and captivity, he was quietly living in London, regularly drawing his pensions in person, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... smoked in my life; and, humiliating though it was, found myself obliged to decline a "prime Havana," proffered in the daintiest of embroidered cigar-cases. My companion looked as if he pitied me. "You'll soon learn," said he. "A man can't live in Paris without ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards

... criminal fools unhung. I'm glad that I am a Bavarian, and that Prussia, whom we have always so hated and despised that we have never turned the lions about on the Siegesthor, should be the prime offenders, humiliating as it may be that we fell for their lies and got into this rotten mess. But go ahead, Mrs. Prentiss. What's your next? Gee, but you can hand it out. You must have kept tab since ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton

... lost in the confusion of moving the Division, and he would be condemned to keep up this life for more dreary weeks and months. Would any years of work and happiness in some future existence make up for the humiliating agony of ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... by her friend's sorrow and humiliating poverty, and was therefore out of sorts, a state of mind which with her always found expression in calling her maid "my dear" and speaking to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... stopped him. Danish emissaries came pleading for peace. He met them on the way to the capital, surrounded by his Finnish horsemen, and gave scant ear to their speeches while he drove on. Before the city he halted and dictated a peace so humiliating that one of the Danish commissioners exclaimed when he came to sign, "I wish I could not write." Perhaps the same wish troubled the conqueror's ambitious dreams. The peace was broken as swiftly as made. ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis

... but when the success of my Persian Letters proved perhaps that I was not unworthy of my reputation, and the public began to esteem me, my reception with the great was discouraging, and I experienced innumerable mortifications." Montesquieu subjoins a reflection sufficiently humiliating for the mere nobleman: "The great, inwardly wounded with the glory of a celebrated name, seek to humble it. In general he only can patiently endure the fame of others, who deserves fame himself." This sort of jealousy unquestionably prevailed in the late Lord ORFORD, a wit, a man of the ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... ignorance concerning the health of their bodies that they become the prey of the unscrupulous charlatans who thrive upon the maladies of humanity, and the patent medicine vendors whose specious advertisements beguile them of their money. The humiliating part of it is that these same imposters (in a large majority of cases) possess but little more knowledge of these subjects than their dupes, but are absolutely devoid of conscientious scruples. It behooves ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell

... ver. 5 he had spoken as the angel. The consolatory import of the event for the Church of all times is destroyed, if Jacob had to do with a created angel only. With such an one, Jacob had not to reckon on account of his sinfulness, and it is just the humiliating consciousness of this his sinfulness which forms the point at issue in his wrestling. Moreover, with such a view, the New Testament Antitype would be altogether lost. Jesus, the true Israel, does not wrestle with an angel,—such an one only appears to strengthen Him ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg

... themselves in the wrong. The one had confessedly mistaken the moral character of the revolution, and the other had miscalculated both its moral and its physical resources. The experiment was made at the price of great, almost, we may say, of humiliating sacrifices; and wise men foresaw that it would fail, at least in its direct and ostensible object. Yet it was purchased cheaply, and realized an object of equal value, and, if possible, of still more vital importance. For it brought about a national unanimity ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... will inform myself completely as to the Lake School." It is necessary to say: "I will inform myself completely as to the Lake School before I am a year older." Without this precautionary steeling of the resolution the risk of a humiliating collapse ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT

... coincidences with which I am acquainted, know that all this Kaffir magic is bosh am to beg a savage to tell me something of which he must be ignorant. That is, unless we educated people have got hold of the wrong end of the stick altogether. It is humiliating; it isn't Christian, and I'm ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard

... not to compromise the Duc de Gontaut, the King was told that the valet had come to a knowledge of the business from a letter which he had found in his master's clothes. The King took his revenge by humiliating the Archbishop, which he was enabled to do by means of the information he had obtained concerning the conduct of the lady, his protegee. She was found guilty of swindling, in concert with her beloved valet; but, before her punishment was inflicted, the Lieutenant of Police was ordered ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various

... saddled with a load of railroad-shares, useless for any present purpose, and all his convertible property gone. The consciousness that he—the man of all others who prided himself upon his sagacity—had been so easily overreached was quite as humiliating as the idea of ruin itself. He remembered Kerbstone's appeals, also, and now cursed his own stupidity in refusing to aid him. There he had overreached himself; it was his own stocks which he had thrown down to the "bears." And now, heaviest stroke ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... kindness which you have shown us for these many years. Herbert, your namesake, is in deep trouble—disgrace, I might better say. Never mind the details. They are sufficiently serious, sufficiently humiliating. We have managed to cover it up, to conceal what we can, but for the present at least, or until this blows over, it is impossible for him to remain at home. It has all come about so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that there has been no time to write to you to obtain ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte

... followed. Nettie, with all her feminine acuteness, could not divine that this calm way of treating a business which had wrought her companion into such a pitch of passion, was the most humiliating and mortifying possible to a man in whose bosom love and pride were so combined. He tried to speak more than once, but could not. Nettie said nothing more—she was uneasy, but secure in the necessity of her own position. What else could she do ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... same, and advised their removal. Colonel Dalrymple had consented that the regiment which began the disturbance should leave, but it would be very humiliating if all the troops were to go. The instructions from the king had put the military as superior to ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin

... tells her sister. 'In the end, after a series of the most harassing and vexatious conduct on the part of the newspaper company, he was swindled out of every farthing. Oh, it was a most mortifying and humiliating thing to see men professing liberal and honest principles act so badly. A month ago, when in the very depths of discouragement and low spirits, I set about a little volume for Darton, to be called ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston

... intervals of the two latter, as the two latter have disabled from reflection; and, besides their showing me the inutility of all our little views, they have suggested an observation that I love to encourage in myself from the rationality of it. I have learnt and practised the humiliating task of comparing myself with great authors; and that comparison has annihilated all the flattery that self-love could suggest. I know how trifling my own writings are, and how far below the standard that constitutes excellence: as for the shades that distinguish the degrees ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... It was really too humiliating! It was more than Nan could bear. She sprang to her feet and without a word—with nothing but a glance of withering scorn at Delia—swept out of the room and ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann

... think over it long, but she was torn in pieces between the shame of a humiliating confession, and the desire to be unhorned. At last she made answer ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various

... portion of them, were it only to inspire a more thorough contempt for the remainder. Love is more powerful than wealth—more attractive than grandeur or fame; but, alas! it cannot exist without certain artificial aids; and there is nothing more humiliating to the feelings, of a sensitive lover, than to find himself, by want of means, reduced to the level of the most ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost

... nothing so humiliating: to see a rational being in such mechanical motion! with no knowledge upon what principles he proceeds, but plodding on, one foot before another, without even any consciousness which is first, or ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... this before. And I've no doubt you think me simply a disagreeable, crotchety old person. Has it ever occurred to you, however, that you may have failed to get my point of view? Can you not conceive then that it might be somewhat humiliating to me to know that my maids suppress a smile as they announce—Mr. Torchy? Understand, I am not censuring you for being a nameless waif. No, do not interrupt. I realize that this is something for which you should not be held responsible. But ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford

... so through the after-part of the day—I suppose led to such idea by my own life-afternoon now arrived. But I soon found I could move at more ease, by giving the narrative at first hand. (Then there is a humiliating lesson one learns, in serene hours, of a fine day or night. Nature seems to look on all fixed-up poetry and ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... designs upon her heart, which I was going to wring so unmercifully, did not meet with very brilliant success. To confess the humiliating truth, I soon found that I was torturing myself a good deal more than I was torturing her. As a last and desperate resort, what ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... of patron and dependant—so irksome, so humiliating, so feudal, yet containing for many the whole moral law—is done away with, and in its place appears a spirit of true fellowship, a growing sense of mutual respect and helpfulness. Club life teaches us that there are many kinds of wealth in the world—the ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various

... thought was to extricate himself, without asking assistance from the man who had furnished him with the fun. His pride would be greatly mortified should the Kaffir get out of his pit, and find him in the other. That would be a humiliating rencontre. ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid

... it. Parade and pomp have no charms in the eyes of a patriot, or even a man of common good sense; but at the same time, I can never submit to the changing of my name, unless I am convinced that so humiliating a step will promote the service of my country. I can pass unnoticed under that name, as well as any other, whilst I conduct in every other step as a private gentleman. I have now but little hopes of being in Holland till October, ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various

... another, to the utter detriment of Spanish interests. The queen's relations with her husband's chief of state were well known to all save Charles himself, and, on one occasion at least, Napoleon, by threatening to reveal the whole shameful story to the king, bent Godoy to his will and forced him to humiliating concessions. The queen supported him blindly, however, in every measure, and put her evil pleasure above ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... reduced the previous month. A drawn battle was fought between Lord Gough's force and that of Chuttar Singh at Chillianwallah. While the English were not defeated, their losses in men, guns and standards were sore and humiliating to the national pride. Sir Charles Napier was ordered out, and, in spite of bad health, obeyed the order. But in the meantime Lord Gough had retrieved his losses by winning at Goojerat a great victory over the Sikhs and Afghans, which in the end compelled the surrender ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler

... for the profusion, and the impudent recklessness of the underling who abuses it. Such are a few of the causes which concur in giving to the finest banquet I have seen an aspect not more odious than humiliating; and here I dwell upon the fact, because the incident which I shall shortly bring before the reader's eye, served to confirm the feelings which I entertain on this subject, and presented an instructive contrast to the splendid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... the union met alternately at Perth Amboy and at Burlington. Lord Cornbury, the first governor, was also Governor of New York, a humiliating arrangement that led to no end of trouble. The executive government, the press, and the judiciary were in the complete control of the Crown and the Governor, who was instructed to take care that "God Almighty be duly served according to the rites of the Church of England, and the traffic in ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher

... more to England, I suppose. It is humiliating to be always in need of help," she said with an impatient ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... of her arrival. He knew that she had been a widow for some months. Garnet had at last met his end like an ox from a fit of apoplexy. But at the same time everybody knew that the widow of the Indian bore a deadly hatred against Lancia ever since the humiliating practical joke that her compatriots had played on her at the time of her marriage. The fact of her not having come there at the death of her father the preceding year was a clear proof of it. The Count thought of all this for some minutes, and ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds

... revolt—should not only have made no vigorous effort to crush the insurrection; but that it should ultimately have been driven by an undisciplined Asiatic mob, destitute of artillery, and which never appears to have collected in one place above 10,000 men, to seek safety in a humiliating capitulation, by which it surrendered the greater part of its artillery, military stores, and treasure, and undertook to evacuate the whole country on condition of receiving a safe conduct from the rebel chiefs, on whose faith they placed, and could place, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various

... fleet, while the land force to Montreal mutinied through hunger. Sir William, on the 22nd of October, re-embarked the soldiers which he had landed, and sailed, without carrying with him his field pieces or ammunition waggons. Humiliating as the repulse was to Massachusetts, it was highly creditable to De Frontenac, who now easily succeeded in winning over the Five Nation Indians. Indeed, matters had so very much changed, that these enemies of his most Christian Majesty solicited the Governor to rebuild the fort at Cataraqui, ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger

... Oftener the master finds pleasure in punishing and humiliating, the favourite in witnessing her companions' tears and terror. They like to see the household grateful for an hour's amusement, crouching to caprice, incredulously thankful for barest justice. One book much read in our schools ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... the child, not telling him the actual truth, but giving him that which will satisfy—that which he can mentally digest. To say, "The fairies brought it," may be all right until the child begins to ask who the fairies are, and wants to be shown one, and then we have to make the somewhat humiliating confession that there are ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... possessed me. I have never been able to account for what I said and did, because I am naturally a truthful person and hate all deceit. It seemed to me that I simply could not say "No" to Wilhelmina before that whole roomful of women. It was TOO humiliating. I suppose all the prickles and stings and slurs I had endured for fifteen years on account of never having had a lover had what the new doctor calls "a cumulative effect" and came to ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... It is humiliating to think, that while a system fraught with so many blessings has been so long in operation, and with such signal success as a financial measure, in a country with which our relations are so intimate, I should now begin to prepare the first ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt

... another silence. Then: "It has come to our notice in a most direct manner that the Prince of Dawsbergen feels that his friendly consideration of a proposal made by our government some years ago is being disregarded in a manner that can hardly be anything but humiliating to him, not only as a ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... somewhat sheepish, expression on his face. And one night the village was bombarded, and on Henri's refusing to be moved to the cellar Sara Lee took up a determined stand in his doorway, until at last he made a most humiliating ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... reply was flat—you would have had it sharp. I should have hurt the poor well-meaning man's feelings, and perhaps have burdened my own soul with a falsehood, into the bargain. Who are we, to judge whether people merit their bad name or not? No, no. The humiliating circumstance is, that if I had possessed the substance as well as the show, if I had really been a son of St. Ignatius, I should have found a retort that would have ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... dismemberment of the boy's room or the pursuit and battery of him with pillows along the corridors, invariably required Irving's interference to quell it. This task of interference, though it was one that he came to perform more and more capably, never grew less distasteful or less humiliating; he saw always the row of faces wearing what he construed as an impudent grin. What seemed to him curious was the fact that Allison after a fashion enjoyed—at least did not resent—the outrages of which he was the subject; after them he would be found sitting ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier

... humiliating to those who paid it, was imposed upon the Paduans for an insult offered to St. Mark, and gave occasion for a national holiday, some fifty years after the Patriarch of Aquileja began atonement for his outrage. In the year 1214, the citizens ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... into the water and not being able to get them up again, or taking terrific pulls without putting them in at all; in either case, pitching over on the backs of their heads with startling violence, and exhibiting the soles of their pumps to the 'sitters' in the boat, in a very humiliating manner. ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... comments on human life, and all the wild and amusing caprice, and daring wilfulness, and grand affectation, that distinguish and inspire a circle of patrician youth, there came over him the consciousness that to him something dark had occurred, something bitter and disappointing and humiliating, and that the breaking morn would not bring to him a day so bright and ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli

... abominations is the ferry-boat, and the facilities, or rather obstacles, for entering and exiting. To any one who has seen the New York ferry-boats, and all the conveniences connected with them, the contrast is painfully humiliating. In the one case you drive on board as readily as into a court-yard, and find plenty of room when you get there; in the other, you have half a dozen men holding horses and carriages, screaming in all directions, and more time is wasted in embarking than a Yankee boat would employ ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... methodically and most passionately, Darwin, though scarcely confessing it to himself, loses confidence at every step, and retreats before the unexpected and the irreconcilable. Would you have before you the nobly humiliating spectacle of human genius battling with infinite power, you have but to follow Darwin's endeavours to unravel the strange, incoherent, inconceivably mysterious laws of the sterility and fecundity of hybrids, or of the variations ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck

... believe your words, and assume that the Princess Elizabeth may be fair without the aid of splendor in dress. We therefore accept the invitation, Woronzow. Announce that to the regent's messenger. But still it is sad and humiliating," continued Elizabeth after a pause, a cloud passing over her usually so cheerful countenance, "yes it is still a melancholy circumstance for the daughter of the great Peter to be so poor that she is not able to dress herself suitably to her rank. Ah, ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... ought to keep it to myself, I know. I cant tell you, Ridgeon, how ashamed I am of dragging my miserable poverty to your dinner after all your kindness. It's not that you wont ask me again; but it's so humiliating. And I did so look forward to one evening in my dress clothes (THEYRE still presentable, you see) with all my troubles left behind, just ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw

... a compassion, most rare in those days, the impending fate of the heroic mountaineers, the powerful Count of Toggenborg tried to negotiate a peace with the Duke. Leopold's terms, however, were so humiliating and evidently so insincere that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... apprehension. The necessity of considering my situation prevented me from contemplating, at that time, the perfidy of Mlle. d'Arency, the blindness with which I had let myself be deceived, or the tragic and humiliating termination of my great ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens

... offered prayers. Impregnable Baza fell on the fourth of December, and, with its fall, the Moorish power in Spain was forever broken. Smaller cities and numerous strongholds in the surrounding country hastened to offer their submission and, after the humiliating surrender of El Zagal in the Spanish camp at Tabernas, Almeria opened its gates to the triumphant Christians who sang Te Deum within its walls on Christmas day. Peter Martyr's description of this victorious campaign has proved a rich ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt

... burglars,—especially Keturah, in the green wrapper, with her hair rolled all up in a huge knob on top of her head, to keep it out of the way, and her pistol held out at arm's-length, pointed falteringly, directly at the stars. She will inform the reader confidentially—tell it not in Gath—of a humiliating discovery she made exactly four weeks afterward, and which she has never before imparted to a human creature,—it ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... combine with it that courage of performance which is never abashed by any failure, but steadily pursues its right and human design in a scene of imperfection, I might hope to strike in the long-run a conduct more tender to others and less humiliating to myself. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... astonishing and humiliating to perceive how frequently human wisdom, especially argumentative wisdom, is at fault as to results, while accident, prejudices, or common sense seem to light upon truths which reason feels after without ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady

... out, just for the look of the thing—especially after her reflections on my social position—but unfortunately my sister has imbued that terrible woman with the belief that art can't possibly flourish anywhere outside this attic of hers. Ever since then she's kept us in the most humiliating subjection. I don't want you to think badly of Mrs. Rogers: there's no malice about her; she wouldn't raise your rent suddenly, or leave pails of water on the stairs, or anything of that kind, and she's capable of really deep feeling when ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... has. Then, too, we don't want Jimmy proposing to any of the nice girls we know, like Laura Stephens or May Cutler; for then we should have to confess that he had no means of any sort, and it would be horribly humiliating. See how well those young Cutlers have got on in their father's office. Of course, Edith Grimmer knows that Jimmy is a failure; but she won't ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt

... rate, silent, creatures who allow you to sniff at them a little curiously without taking offence, but who keep their real thoughts to themselves. It was necessary to learn, as the result of painful and humiliating experiment, that you are not at liberty to obey all nature's laws without distinction in the dwelling of the gods; to recognize that the kitchen is the privileged and most agreeable spot in that divine dwelling, although you are hardly allowed to abide in it because ...
— Our Friend the Dog • Maurice Maeterlinck

... to do next, or because we feel it might as well be that as anything; perhaps because it will please one's father in a business point of view, or please one's own sense of importance; satisfy one's desire to be foremost in the fashionable world. I am humiliating myself to tell you, plainly, that my promise meant not much more than that. I did not realize how empty it was till I found that all my plans, and aims, and hopes in life were changed. That, in short, life had come to seem ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden

... try; she would begin to look on the other side of these questions. She would regain her footing in spite of her humiliating downfall, although there might still be a lingering sense of ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson

... proud and independent, with a sensitive horror of incurring debt. He would rather endure privation than solicit help or lie under a humiliating obligation. His mother seems to have been animated with a like spirit, for the Hon. Amos Kendall informs us that she had suffered much through the kindness of her husband in becoming surety for his friends, and that when she was dying she ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... call to mind the humiliating necessities of human nature as far as the body is concerned, and in our intellectual resolves the meanness or paltriness of many of our motives to action, we may well be surprised that man who has so much cause to be humble should indulge for a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various

... man might have harbored, that he made this resolve. What Charles wanted was simply the means of filling his exchequer; and if Parliament would not give him that except by a dicker for reforms, and humiliating pledges which he could not keep, why then he would find new ways of raising money without them. His father had done it before him, he had done it himself. With no Commons there to rate and insult him, it could ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele

... reported that his condition was improving. Perhaps he might soon return. Then the money would enable her to weave a joy into the sorrow that awaited him. It had always been a humiliating thought that he had lost his own house and was obliged to live in a hired one, and at least she could ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... third coalition (England, Russia. Austria, and Sweden), only to see Napoleon hurl it to the ground on the field of Austerlitz (December, 1805). England's isolation seemed as complete as the Emperor's victory. Russia, Austria, and Prussia made humiliating peace with the victor, who carved his conquests into new states and kingdoms. Pitt, who, at the news of Austerlitz, had pointed to the map of Europe with the words "Roll up that map, there will be no use for it these ten years," survived ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... met with a complete silence, ignoring and humiliating. After a moment the Senior Surgeon went on, as if ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer

... to hesitate in saying that the family would be very glad to count you as one of them. Even a little snob like myself can see that there is, in this desire of theirs, no motive except affection for you and for Shiela; and, in a way, it's rather humiliating to recognise that they don't care a fig for the social advantage that must, automatically, accrue to the House of ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... soon as he came in she meant to call him up to her room and hand him the letters without a word. For a moment she gloated on the picture; then her imagination recoiled from it. She was humiliated by the thought of humiliating him. She wanted to keephis image intact; she would not ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton

... each is a genius, in his own way. Hem! And Miriam has a genius for the piano. Now I never could bear to compete with any one, knowing that it is the law of my being to be inferior to others, consequently to fail, and failure is so humiliating to me. So it is, that people may force me to abandon any pursuit by competing with me; for knowing that failure is inevitable, rather than fight against destiny I give up de bonne grace. Originally, ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson

... native citizens. Where is the true-hearted American whose cheek does not tingle with shame and mortification to see our highest and most coveted foreign missions filled by men of foreign birth to the exclusion of native-born? Such appointments are a humiliating confession to the crowned heads of Europe that a Republican soil does not produce sufficient talent to represent a Republican nation at a monarchical court. I confess that it seems to me—with all due respect to others—that, as a general ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow

... injustice of calling men to fight for freedom while subjecting them to humiliating discrimination within the fighting forces is at once apparent. Furthermore, by preventing entire groups from making their maximum contribution to the national defense, we weaken our defense to that extent and impose heavier burdens on ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... the Northern people; whereas, as a matter of fact, but for the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, I believe the great majority of the Northern people, and the soldiers unanimously, would have been in favor of a speedy reconstruction on terms that would be the least humiliating to the people who had rebelled against their government. They believed, I have no doubt, as I did, that besides being the mildest, it ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant

... dragged on my clothes as well as I could, and began to reflect in what manner I should act. Conceal my situation from the other members of the convent I could not; and to explain it would not only be too humiliating, but subject me to more rigorous discipline. At last, I considered that out of evil might spring good; and gathering a large bundle of the nettles, which grew under the walls, I crawled back to the convent. When I attained my cell, I threw off my gown, which ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat

... smiled the Senator. "I assume that in making your important appointments you will consult those of us who have stood sponsor for you, not only to the party but to the country. It would be very humiliating to me if I should insist upon your nomination and election and then should for four years have to apologize ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House

... nations of the earth, and rejoiced at every step that leads in the direction of such a consummation, I deem it my duty to especially direct the attention of Congress to the close of the report of the Secretary of the Navy, in which the humiliating weakness of the present organization of his Department is exhibited and the startling abuses and waste of its present methods are exposed. The conviction is forced upon us with the certainty of mathematical demonstration that before we proceed ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... have had to shoot him with his revolver. It seems to be hardly an exaggeration to say that the whole South applauded Brooks and exulted. Exuberant Southerners took to challenging Northern men, knowing well that their principles compelled them to refuse duels, but that the refusal would still be humiliating to the North. Brooks himself challenged Burlingame, a distinguished Congressman afterwards sent by Lincoln as Minister to China, who had denounced him. Burlingame accepted, and his second arranged for a rifle duel at a wild spot across the frontier at Niagara. ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... if in a pet, just in time to escape the outburst he knew was coming. She sat in the parlor with firm-set lips till quite a late hour that evening, hoping that he would come down and give her a chance to set him right with an indignant explanation. So humiliating to her did his misunderstanding seem, that it was intolerable he should retain it a moment longer, and she felt almost desperate enough to go and knock at his door and correct it. Far too clever a strategist to risk an encounter that evening, ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... Poloniae" had come. A Russian Army marching against Kossuth, and the Czar's demand for the extradition of the heroic Magyar, unmasked the despot. Yet his European triumph was complete, and the war in the Crimea seemed his crowning chance—the humiliating of the two Powers which in his eyes represented Liberty and the Revolution. Every force that personal rancour, and the devotion of years to one sole end, every measure that reason and State policy could dictate, lent their aid ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb

... the injured Greeks were heard with indifference and disdain. The Albanians, a vagrant tribe of shepherds and robbers, filled the peninsula with rapine and murder: the two despots implored the dangerous and humiliating aid of a neighboring bashaw; and when he had quelled the revolt, his lessons inculcated the rule of their future conduct. Neither the ties of blood, nor the oaths which they repeatedly pledged in the communion and before the altar, nor the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... Peter at first, but he was observant, and his mind worked quickly. The crime of destroying birdlings in their nest, or on the ground, was impressed upon him. He began to understand there was a certain humiliating shame attached to an attack upon a creature weaker than himself, unless there was a reason for it. He looked chiefly to his master for decisions in the matter. Snowshoe rabbits, young and half grown, were very tame in this month of August, and ordinarily he would have destroyed many of them in ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood

... Pencroft, and Herbert did not miss this opportunity of going to visit their traps. They did not find them easily, under the snow with which they were covered. They had also to be careful not to fall into one or other of them, which would have been both dangerous and humiliating; to be taken in their own snares! But happily they avoided this unpleasantness, and found their traps perfectly intact. No animal had fallen into them, and yet the footprints in the neighborhood were very numerous, among others, certain very clear marks ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne

... difficulty got to hold in the sides of the old Indianian. On August 14th John Paul Jones again set sail for English waters, with the following vessels: Alliance, thirty-six; Pallas, thirty; Cerf, eighteen; Vengeance, twelve; and two French privateers. Owing to the humiliating conditions imposed upon him by the French Minister of Marine, Commodore Jones did not have absolute command. In a gale on the 26th the two privateers and the Cerf parted company, never to return. After the most outrageous conduct ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... I see such crowds of objections. To begin with, I hate the position; it's awkward and humiliating. To stay here on approval, studied like specimens in a case; being on one's good behaviour, and 'acting pretty' to try to get a fortune for oneself, away from other people—bah! It makes me hot even to think of it. I ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... even to that approach to an angel in this world, a person who has satisfied his appetite, the spectacle of a crowd of people feeding together in a large room must be a little humiliating. The fact is that no animal appears at its best in this necessary occupation. But a hotel breakfast-room is not without interest. The very way in which people enter the room is a revelation of character. Mr. King, who was put in good humor by falling on his feet, as it were, in such agreeable ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... bound upon the altar. There swelled upon her, swifter than the Rhone, a tide of abhorrence and disgust. She had succumbed to the monster, humbling herself below animals; and now she loved a hero, aspiring to the semi-divine. It was in the pang of that humiliating thought that she had ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... own best interests cannot be such to another. Here, indeed, if I may hope to have part or lot in the matter, the thing aimed at is high; but this does not insure its attainment, and there is great cause for care that the humiliating discovery of the discrepancy between the two, does not lead us to lower the one rather than seek to elevate the other. I have a strong belief of the importance of self-scrutiny and honesty with one's own heart, of real willingness to know and feel the worst of one's self, and sincerity of application ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall

... be kinder in tone, nothing more humiliating in substance. I was sore and offended for a few days; but I soon began to see, and ever more and more clearly, that she was wholly right. I was sure, also, that any further attempt to correspond with her would ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various

... one vote of being elected.[44] He was again a member of the Finance Committee; but financiering by those wise lawgivers was no longer so lightsome and exuberant a task as it had been. The hour of reckoning had come; and the business proved to be chiefly a series of humiliating and futile efforts to undo the follies of the preceding two and a half years. Lincoln shared in this disagreeable labor, as he had shared in the mania which had made it necessary. He admitted that he was "no financier," ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse

... me as though I were leaving the world, as I travelled on day after day through the desert marches. Then followed a sad and humiliating impression of Konigsberg, where, in one of the poorest-looking suburbs, Tragheim, near the theatre, and in a lane such as one would expect to find in a village, I found the ugly house in which Minna lodged. The friendly and quiet kindness of manner, however, which was peculiar to her, soon made ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... Englishman—Delaine—and the letter that must be written him. But there, also, no evasions, no suppliancy. Delaine must be told that the story was true, and would no doubt think himself entitled to act upon it. The protest on behalf of Lady Merton implied already in his manner that afternoon was humiliating enough. The smart of it was still tingling through Anderson's being. He had till now felt a kind of instinctive contempt for Delaine as a fine gentleman with a useless education, inclined to patronise "colonists." The two men had jarred from the beginning, and at Banff, Anderson had both ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... North craves a living and lasting peace with the South; it asks no humiliating conditions; it recognizes the fact that the proximate cause of the war was the constitutional question of the right of secession—a question which, until it was settled by the war, had neither a right nor wrong side to it. Our forefathers, in framing the Constitution purposely ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... the murder I condemn so much as the condition you were in when you did it," she complained. "Mr. Garrison, you do not know how humiliating it is to be killed by a man who is too drunk to know where the jugular vein is located. ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon

... of Porthos, and sends Porthos on an heroic ride back to Paris to warn Fouquet of the danger. Fouquet rushes to the king, and gives him Belle-Isle as a present, thus allaying any suspicion, and at the same time humiliating Colbert, just minutes before the usher announces someone else seeking ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... called on his colleagues not "to continue a useless and humiliating debate," but to withdraw from the House: and we accordingly followed him into the lobby. In our absence the discussion continued, in a tone not flattering to the Government. It was remarkable for one utterance from ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn

... assuming the charge of you, I never contemplated anything in our intercourse but such as occurs between gentlemen. Since I have been mistaken in my estimate of you, let our intercourse cease. It would not alter your character to subject you to a humiliating punishment before the assembled school. If it were your brother Bob, the case would be different. But you are almost a man. You have been treated here, as at home, with the consideration due to a young gentleman. I would myself revolt at seeing one ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... enough to be governed by an aristocracy or a monarch whose executive power is dependent upon legend in the mass of the people; it is humiliating enough to be thus governed through a sort of play-acting instead of enjoying the self-government ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc

... you would have to leave the rest of your class behind and that you must not do. President Allen of Jefferson College says that his instruction has been successful in proportion as it has been elementary. It may be a humiliating statement, but it is one which I have found ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... looks longingly to Slavic unification, and is anxious to secure for herself a predominance in the new nation to be moulded out of the old scattered elements: Hungary believes that the consolidation of the Slavs would place her in a dangerous and humiliating position, and conspires day and night to compass exactly the reverse of Servian wishes. Thus the two countries are theoretically at peace and practically at war. While the conflict of 1877 was in progress collisions between Servian and Hungarian ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various

... that their real story was a thousand-fold more wonderful—more the story—than anything she had been able to invent. She would give much to have known it long before. She felt that she had missed much. There was something humiliating in the thought of having lived one's life without knowing what life was. It made one seem such a dead thing. Now she was on fire to ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell

... no matter what may be the prospect before them. Aware too that (in quiet times), they are always behaving badly, they will cheerfully submit to the severest punishment—provided, always, that it is not of a degrading nature. They can not endure harsh and insulting language, or any thing that is humiliating. In this respect they show the traits which characterize all of their Southern brethren—the Irish are of a similar disposition. I have frequently known the efficiency of fine companies greatly impaired by officers ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke

... obedience; if one has the right to command, there arises in others the correlative duty and obligation to submit. There is no question of how this will suit us; it simply does not, and will not, suit us; it is hard, painful and humiliating, but it is a fact, and that ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton

... in the sunshine my head swam. It was no longer a question of mere delay. I perceived myself involved in hopeless and humiliating absurdities that were leading me to something very like a disaster. "Let us be calm," I muttered to myself, and ran into the shade of a leprous wall. From that short side-street I could see the broad main thoroughfare ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad

... absence would occasion at home, Catharine would have thought nothing of their present adventure; but she could not endure the idea of her high-principled father taxing her with deceiving her kind indulgent mother and him: it was this humiliating thought which wounded the proud heart of Hector, causing him to upbraid his cousin in somewhat harsh terms for his want of truthfulness, and steeled him against the bitter grief that wrung the heart of the ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill

... was thinking of the King. What can he want me for, my friend? What must I do if he proposes to place me about his person? I must please him; and at this thought—shall I own it?—I am tempted to fly. But I trust that I shall not have that fatal honor. 'To please,' how humiliating the word! 'to obey' quite the opposite! A soldier runs the chance of death, and there's an end. But in what base compliances, what sacrifices of himself, what compositions with his conscience, what degradation of his own thought, may not a courtier ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny

... several months subsequent at Athens, he was in a great measure stationary. His health, which was never robust, was impaired by the effects of the fever, which lingered about him; perhaps, too, by the humiliating anxiety he suffered on account of the uncertainty in his remittances. But however this may have been, it was fortunate for his fame that he returned to England at the period he did, for the climate ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... reduced to 2,000 a year each, and as great as the inequality is between us in all other respects, in that we shall be equal, and the alternative is to submit to the terms imposed by the new people, which may be very humiliating to us both. If you are not an object of their justice, of their esteem, and respect, you will, I am sure, not consent to be one of their mercy only. I shall feel the deprivation of two parts out of three of my income, but ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue

... way and that, as if yet undecided, and at length a positive heel over to that; the whole of my little world within being canted to half a right angle, and a ridiculous distortion of every single thing in my bedroom was the result. The humiliating sensation of being aground on hard unromantic mud is tempered by the ludicrous crooked appearance of the contents of your cabin and by the absurd sensation of sleeping in a corner with everything askance except the lamp flame, which, ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... in such institutions which serves to accentuate in a humiliating way the contrast between the inmates and more fortunate children who possess parents and homes, the clothing worn by the orphans of the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society is varied in colour and style. Girls skilled in the use of their needle alter their dresses ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... French troops. Napoleon thereupon led his forces north to meet the allied armies of Austria and Russia; these he defeated on December 2, in the terrible winter battle of Austerlitz. Russia then withdrew for a time and signed an armistice; and Austria was obliged to submit to a humiliating ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... his hotel from the meeting in the Broad Street board room, paid his bill, and had himself shot up to the fifth floor to prepare for a swift retreat from the scene of his humiliating defeat. It was hardly in keeping with his boast of persistence that he should suffer himself to be thus routed by a single reverse, however crushing. But in a world where every problem contains its human factor, red wrath accounts for much that is ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde

... done well in throwing off all allegiance and fidelity to the unhappy family that could not vindicate its right except by such treachery—by such dark intrigue and base agents. There were designs against King William that were no more honourable than the ambushes of cut-throats and footpads. 'Tis humiliating to think that a great prince, possessor of a great and sacred right, and upholder of a great cause, should have stooped to such baseness of assassination and treasons as are proved by the unfortunate King James's ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... my boy, that it is very humiliating to have to beg for money which really belongs to one—for it does belong to us, to you and me, I mean—as much as to him, doesn't it? It's maddening to think that the law allows a man to ruin his relations because senility has ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley

... both offers, finding it less humiliating to be helped by women than by friends of his own sex. This work would support him in a frugal way, and certain musical drudgery promised by his master assured his own teaching. Delighted with the success of their little plot, these friendly neighbours left him with ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott

... put directly to Dacoma by the speaker on the other side. The proud Indian, who seemed exasperated with the humiliating situation in which he was placed, with an angry wave of his hand and a short ejaculation, answered in ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid

... released from the heavy and humiliating weight of the dog-collar he started off across the fields and never stopped until he had reached the high road that led to the Fairy's house. He could see amongst the trees the top of the Big Oak to which he had been hung, but, although he looked ...
— Pinocchio - The Tale of a Puppet • C. Collodi

... Christian community at present exists. Not long after he had conquered Nepaul, the Ghorka monarch organized an expedition into Tartary, which was so signally successful that the H'Lassa Government was obliged to treat on humiliating conditions. This advantage was followed, in defiance of the treaty, by another invasion, which was only arrested by the forces of the Emperor, who, having heard of the violent proceedings in this distant part of his dominions, sent an army of 70,000 men to oppose the Ghorka ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant

... first woman whom he could not attract in some way, who won from him the strongest feelings, and gave him nothing in return but polite friendliness; and that she should be nothing but a seventeen year old girl, was something rather humiliating. When the study on the head began, as it did the next day, it was both a pleasure and almost a pain to him to feel that he might as well have been a piece of statuary as for all the attention she gave him, aside from the long careful ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving

... getting out of bed to meet the boat at six in the morning, the chief of police would be in a state of mind to arrest almost anybody, and that his choice would certainly fall on Kinney and myself. It was ridiculous, but it also was likely to prove extremely humiliating. So I said, speaking to Lord Ivy: "There's been a mistake all around; send for Mr. Kinney and I will explain it to you." Lord Ivy, who was looking extremely bored, smiled and nodded, but young ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis

... as a goose is to a tailor. Foul fare the grasping taxman who wrings a couple of guineas from us on the plea that it is a luxury! We can just hold on, and I would not have him a pound the poorer for me. But you can understand, Bertie, that it is humiliating for a man of my age to have to go about without any money in my pocket. It affects me in so many petty ways. A poor man may do me a kindness, and I have to seem mean in his eyes. I may want a flower for a girl, and must ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... to his room and started in on his report. It had stuck in Crowley's crop—seemed humiliating—to be made a subaltern in the case of women operatives. He believed that at last he was in right and proper on the grand opportunity of his career; he would come down from the bush with the bacon; Elsham had fallen ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day

... other than a humiliating explanation of the fact? Is it only snobbishness, a mean admiration of mean things? Are we all essentially lackeys who love to wear a livery? Or is it not rather—all this interest in the small performances of those who, if distinguished for nothing else, are the distinguished favorites of fortune—the ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis

... So utter, so congratulatory, so lordly was the contempt on Welford's dark and striking features, that though he was in that situation in which ridicule usually attaches itself to the husband, it was the gallant and the wife that would have appeared to the beholder in a humiliating and ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... had the best of it in the world, and I was feeling rather aggrieved because somebody described me yesterday as 'that girl in the first class who is always getting up head; she is short and rather stout and wears her hair in a knot at the back of her head?' Now wasn't that humiliating? Not a word about my eyes ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin

... have taken Impressionism upon themselves, in several forms and under a succession of names, in this our later day. It is against all probabilities that more than a few among these have within them the point of honour. In their galleries we are beset with a dim distrust. And to distrust is more humiliating than to be distrusted. How many of these landscape-painters, deliberately rash, are painting the truth of their own impressions? An ethical question as to loyalty is easily answered; truth and falsehood as to fact are, happily for the intelligence of the common ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell

... suburban line, and, within the hour, was on her way to Medford. As always happened when an interesting case was to be treated, her mind became gradually filled with it to the exclusion of everything else. The Campbells, and Bennett's ready acceptance of a story that put her in so humiliating a light, were forgotten as the train swept her from the heat and dust of the City out into the green reaches of country to the southward. What had been done upon the case she had no means of telling. She only knew that the case was of unusual virulence and well advanced. It had killed one ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris

... few things more humiliating to professional riders of the range than to be left afoot; and while Patches was far too much a novice to have acquired the peculiar and traditional tastes and habits of the clan of which he had that morning felt himself a ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright

... endeavours to overcome the arrogance of the young Count. The style of the whole is more sententious than imaginative: the glowing colours of fancy could not with propriety have been employed on such a subject. In the passages where the humiliating rejection of the poor Helena is most painfully affecting, the cowardly Parolles steps in to the relief of the spectator. The mystification by which his pretended valour and his shameless slanders are unmasked must be ranked among the most comic ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... king exacts from his own subjects the most humiliating and abject prostrations, on approaching his person, yet he admits Europeans to his presence without the least scruple, requiring only from them those marks of respect which they may think fit to perform, in the style of salutation they have been accustomed to in their own countries. ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... I worried over that as I was leaving the park. I seemed to be getting nearer to reality near Rotten Row. A reassuring policeman was in sight. Motor-cars that were humiliating with their enamel and crystal were threading about. The fashionable ladies and their consorts seemed to be in no doubt about the world they were in. I began to feel mean and actual. While thus composing my mind ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... commenced to get its work in. By degrees perhaps Bandy-legs might even come to like Obed Grimes; though, truth to tell, he had always despised that last name, for a boy answering to it had once treated Bandy-legs in a most humiliating fashion, and this still rankled in his memory, although years had ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie

... be of success, my friends, when, with an enemy close to their gates, the Jews are slaying more of their fellow countrymen than the Romans themselves? Did ever a country present so humiliating and terrible a spectacle? Were such atrocities ever perpetrated by men upon their brothers? And yet, the madmen still believe that the Almighty will deliver them—will save from destruction that ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty

... attack which Hole-in-the-Day had made on the Sioux a short time before, Major Plympton decided not to execute the prisoners. They were turned over to their own people to be flogged in the presence of the officers. More humiliating than death was their punishment. Their blankets, leggins, and breech-cloths were cut into small pieces, and finally the braves whipped them with long sticks while the ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen

... still admire the 'Rape of the Lock,' yet I must agree with most critics that it is admirable after its kind. Pope's sylphs, as Mr. Elwin says, are legitimate descendants from Shakespeare's fairies. True, they have entered into rather humiliating bondage. Shakespeare's Ariel has to fetch the midnight dew from the still-vexed Bermoothes; he ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... their country, having stolen their traps, and effectually prevented them from taking furs. In the conflict, in which Kit Carson was wounded, the Indians had retired, though with loss, still victorious, carrying with them all their booty of stolen horses. Most humiliating of all, they had, without firing a shot, captured all the animals of the garrison and the trappers at Fort Hall. And it was most probable that they had robbed and murdered the two men who had been sent ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott

... pretty humiliating, for it just proved we had aimed at the tree and missed it. Instead, we shot the Chinkee's inoffensive pigs. It was many a long day before that joke was forgotten against us. Moreover, amongst us we had to scrape a pound together to pay the Chinaman for his ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield

... beyond the seas. Many, too, of those who had made themselves notorious as Owyn's partisans, fled from Wales when his cause began to falter, and avoided the penalty of perseverance in their rebellion, or the humiliating alternative of submission to one whom they deemed a tyrant and usurper. Quitting their native soil in the enjoyment of health and strength, not a few of these inhabitants of the Principality enlisted under the standard of foreign powers; especially (as it is reasonable ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler

... the records of history. With less than 30,000 men, in a state of almost complete destitution, it is a fine thing to have, in the course of less than two months, beaten, eight different times, an army of from 65 to 70,000 men, obliged the King of Sardinia to make a humiliating peace, and driven the Austrians from Italy. The last victory, of which you have doubtless had an account, the passage of the Mincio, has closed our labours. There now remain for us the siege of Mantua and the castle of Milan; but these obstacles will ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... artistically, they are sure to receive as their right. I found the other day in a well-circulated little volume a suggestion that the actor was a degraded being because he has a closely-shaven face. This is, indeed, humiliating, and I wonder how it strikes the Roman Catholic clergy. However, there are actors who do not shave closely, and though, alas! I am not one of them, I wish them joy of the spiritual ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving

... the whole affair—as far as his share in it was concerned—came home to him with humiliating distinctness. He would have liked to be able to feel that, at the time at least, he had staked something more on it, and had somehow, in the sequel, had a more palpable loss to show. But the plain fact was that he hadn't spent a penny on it; which was no doubt the reason ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton

... I've done two things for you quite lately. The first was that letter to the editor you're going to see to-morrow, and the second is what I've done now with our new backer. It's this. They wanted to sack you or to offer you humiliating conditions. I said if you didn't stay I wouldn't stay either. I gave in on other points to get my way about this. I shall have their final answer to-morrow, and I know I shall succeed if I ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux

... could ever have imagined herself capable of being, she began to struggle. She tore herself away from him. Coming on top of her grievance, this thing filled her with a sudden, very vivid hatred of James. At the back of her anger, feeding it, was the humiliating thought that it was all her own fault, that by her presence there she ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... was wanted to answer this purpose—while, at the same time, it possessed the great moral advantage of rendering a sacrifice of sinful self-esteem essentially necessary on my part. I have been obliged to acknowledge that my fallen nature got the better of me. In making that humiliating confession, I get the better of my fallen nature. The moral balance is restored; the spiritual atmosphere feels clear once more. Dear friends, we may ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins

... unknown, he was persuaded even to degrade himself farther; for he actually officiated at the marriage in character of father, and gave away the young beauty to his rival, although at that time six months advanced in pregnancy by himself. These humiliating concessions were extorted from him, and yielded (probably at the instigation of friends) in order to save his life. In the sequel they had the very opposite result; for he died soon after, and it is reasonably supposed ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... a moment. He shut his teeth, blinked and came back to the buggy seat and reality—and shame. Overwhelming, humiliating shame. He glanced fearfully at her, afraid that she might have seen his face and read upon it the secret which he himself had learned for the first time. No, she did not read it, she was not looking at him, she too seemed to be thinking. There was a chance for him yet. He must be a man, a decent ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... imagination and his curiosity. His situation at this period is thus feelingly alluded to by Mr. Moore:—"The circumstances under which Lord Byron now took leave of England were such as, in the case of any ordinary person, could not be considered otherwise than disastrous and humiliating. He had, in the course of one short year, gone through every variety of domestic misery;—had seen his hearth eight or nine times profaned by the visitations of the law, and been only saved from a prison by the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various

... lay inert, her brain reeling with vague, swift ideas that burnt her in passing, like flames. She remembered her husband's infamous behaviour, his humiliating conduct to her, his threats, his plans for a divorce; and she gradually came to understand that she was the victim of a regular conspiracy, that the servants had been sent away until the following evening by their master's orders, that the governess had ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc

... the painful consciousness of the grief their unusual absence would occasion at home, Catharine would have thought nothing of their present adventure; but she could not endure the idea of her high-principled father taxing her with deceiving her kind indulgent mother and him. It was this humiliating thought which wounded the proud heart of Hector, causing him to upbraid his cousin in somewhat harsh terms for his want of truthfulness, and steeled him against the bitter grief that wrung the heart of the penitent Louis, who, leaning ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill

... came back to her. They were in the woodpath. She crept inside her husband's arm and put up her face to him, swept away by an overmastering impulse of self-humiliating love. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... being ravaged by foreign armies, recruited from three of her own disaffected provinces; while a young King with whom she was well satisfied was peremptorily ordered to make way for one Austria, England, and Holland preferred. It was a humiliating proof of the decline in national spirit, and the old Castilian pride must have sorely degenerated for such ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele

... rule strictly faithful to each other. If the woman was found to be guilty of unfaithfulness to her husband, the penalty was death. Such a thing as a man whipping or beating his wife was never known. Whipping under any circumstances was considered a more humiliating and ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark



Words linked to "Humiliating" :   mortifying, undignified, humbling



Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org