"Misery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... life anywhere. Still the travelling was good, with here and there little streams of icy water trickling over the rocks. They made most excellent progress, Hampton ever grasping the bit of Murphy's horse, his anxious thought more upon his helpless companion in misery than upon the possible perils ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... all-satisfying. It is a good, a fitting spot for an American to make a pilgrimage to. A noble, eloquent, peaceful sadness pervades it, and generations shrink to dots. And Nature herself has had pity on these stones for the mirth, the heroism, the misery they have encompassed: she has propped up the tottering ramparts with forests of tall trees in the courts, balustraded the dizzy heights with a sturdy, bushy growth of ivy, and firmly bound together all the crumbling decay with a centuries-old ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... by the competition of large manufacturing towns in Great Britain; every class of Irish producers saw ruin staring him in the face, while landlords and farmers were further impoverished by the huge poor-rates, which sometimes reached 20s. in the L. The misery and poverty of the country could hardly have been greater, and to us at the present day it seems extraordinary that just at this inopportune time the Government should have thought fit to go back from the conciliatory fiscal policy ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... flee—my poor old master, frail as he was, his delicate wife, our young ladies, and the boys—all fled together, and after facing perils such as I trust none of their descendants will ever know, they reached a safe refuge. And then they had to endure a new misery, for months and months went by before they had any tidings of poor Mademoiselle Jeanne's husband, your great-grandfather, my children, who, like all of his name—a name you may well be proud of, my little ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... scenes ever imagined by poet, ever expressed in art. Wonderful theme!—the terror-stricken anguish of the girl, little more than a child, startled suddenly from bridal dreams into this open-eyed vision of a hideous doom; the helpless remorse of the father; the misery of the mother; and behind it all the pitiless fate—the savage creed—the blood-thirst of the goddess—and the maddened ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... been called, but in misery's name, I ask, must the whole public crowd into one coach? Yesterday, after I had waited for a car the best part of the forenoon, it came crawling along at snail-like pace, the horses fast asleep, and the driver ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... that children by nature are cruel, and that humanity has to be acquired by education. A child will gloat over the sufferings of a wounded animal till his mother bids him "put it out of its misery." An unsophisticated child would not dream of terminating the poor creature's agonies abruptly, any more than he would swallow whole a bon-bon till he had well sucked it. Inherent cruelty may be obscured by after impressions, or may be kept under moral restraint; ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... would be worse than useless to return to Mr. Hunt and encumber him with so many starving men, and that their only course was to extricate themselves as soon as possible from this land of famine and misery and make the best of their way for the Columbia. They accordingly continued to follow the downward course of Snake River; clambering rocks and mountains, and defying all the difficulties and dangers of that rugged defile, which subsequently, ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... surprising how much real happiness we can have in the midst of trouble, when the heart is right; and it is surprising, too, how much real misery we can have in the midst of prosperity, when there is everything apparently to make life pleasant and blissful, when ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... askance. The Spanish minister demanded his head. It was hinted to him that he was not safe, and he withdrew to Rouen, where he found asylum among his friends. His fortune was gone; debts contracted for his expedition weighed heavily on him; and for years he lived in obscurity, almost in misery. At length a dawn brightened for him. Elizabeth of England learned his merits and his misfortunes, and invited him to enter her service. The King, who, says the Jesuit historian, had always at heart been delighted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... children wanted. They were very strange, the places and people he had seen to-day. Of course he had known about such places and people, read about them, heard about them, but seeing for one's self was different. There were a lot of bummers among these people he had passed; much of their misery was of their own making (he had made much of his), but the wonder was ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher
... fire, and their death at last comes from extreme old age. We judge them to be very affectionate and charitable towards their relatives—making loud lamentations in their adversity, and in their misery calling to mind all their good fortune. At their departure out of life, their relations mutually join in weeping, mingled with singing, for a long while. This is all that we could learn of them. This region is situated in the parallel of Rome, being 41 degrees 40' of north latitude, but much ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy
... it all, once more, in this strange room, as the darkness closed; only the vision ended now, not in a tender thrill—half conscious, fading into sleep—of remembered joy, but in an anguish of sobbing, the misery of the frail tormented creature, ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... frightened. "It is here also!" he said half aloud. "It has followed me," and he looked over his shoulder to see whether the It were not standing behind him. "There is no one here." The night noises of the marsh went on, but never a bird or beast spoke to him, and the new feeling of misery grew. ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... Captain Barber, and laying her hand upon his, pressed it affectionately. The captain, a picture of misery, exchanged a significant glance with Nibletts, ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... all but distracted with her misery, for she went about wringing her hands and sobbing as if her heart were broken. Here and there she picked her way, peering into the smoking ashes and now and then poking among them for a trinket or a keepsake that the ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... for the heart is open to him as it is to no other, and knowledge, large knowledge, is the food which nourishes charity in the tender-hearted. In the tender-hearted? How can he be that? All his days he has walked amidst misery, anguish, bodily and mental suffering. Be careful when you come to test him by his ability to feel what you call sympathy. In its loftiest meaning this is the capacity to enter into, to realize, and hence to feel ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... been loved after this sort; and yet it was no romance of the poets, but had a real existence, and was here, here by her side, in the monotonous little world which had never been touched by such a presence before. She said to herself that it would never come to anything but misery and pain; yet even misery was better than nothingness, and he who had loved had lived. To think that a quiet, middle-aged Englishwoman, a pattern of domestic duty, should think thus, and exult in her ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... pain of sin, he took it all home now, and clung to it. He recollected the verses about that One kneeling—nay, falling on the ground, in the cold dewy night, with the chosen friends who could not watch with Him, and the agony and misery that every one in all the world deserved to feel, gathering on Him, Who had done no wrong, and making His brow stream ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... advanced was much mixed up with the result, if I may not say of former experience, yet of former reflection, for I had entertained many conjectures concerning what this powerful personage would or might yet do; and, indeed, his wilful waywardness, together with the misery which he represented as continually haunting him, constituted an impressive advertisement to the world, and served to keep ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... glanc'd o'er the voiceless sea, The billows kissed the strand— And one sad dirge of misery Fill'd all the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... three blindfolded girls, "this is Eleanor Savell. You can't see her yet, but you may all shake hands with her. She is to be your companion in misery." ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... his head and his heart to compose The Pilgrim's Progress. His heart-affecting page on the slough has been wetted with the tears of thousands of its readers, and their tears have been mingled with smiles as they read their own sin and misery, and the never-to-be-forgotten time and place where their sin and misery first found them out, all told so recognisably, so pathetically, and so amusingly almost to laughableness in the passage upon the slough. We see the ocean of scum and filth pouring down into the slough through ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... bed: she rent her garments upon him, clapping her breast, and scratching her face and stomach. Then she dried up his blood that had berayed his face, and called him her lord, her husband, and emperor, forgetting her own misery and calamity, for the pity and compassion she took of him. Antony made her cease her lamenting, and called for wine, either because he was athirst, or else for that he thought thereby to hasten his death. When he had drunk, he earnestly prayed her, and persuaded her, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... intrusted by his officer; being detected, he was punished with that rigorous severity with which thefts in the army usually are, and being afterwards thrown into the Savoy prison, to prevent a repetition of his crime, he died there in a few days of his wounds in the utmost misery. When the Bramin had finished this melancholy tale, the poor wolf, as if he was conscious how nearly it concerned him, heightened the horrour with which it had filled us by such a mournful and terrifying howl, as made us heartily ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... that he had fallen head and ears in love with Flora Westwood, and he felt that he might as well have fallen in love with the moon—as far as any chance of getting married to her was concerned. Will was therefore very miserable, and, like all ardent and very youthful lovers, he hugged his misery to his bosom—rather enjoyed it, in fact, than otherwise. In short, if truth must be told, he took pleasure in being miserable for her sake! When he allowed himself to take romantic views of the subject, and thought of the heights of bliss that might be attained, ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... the depraved denizens about us got sadly up and danced to it. Say, it was the most formal and sedate dancing you ever see, with these gun men holding their guilty partners off at arm's length and their faces all drawn down in lines of misery. They looked like they might be a bunch of strict Presbyterians that had resolved to throw all moral teaching to the winds for one purple moment let come what might. I want to tell you these depraved creatures of the underworld was darned near as depressing as that ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... chair. His face was haggard and drawn, and sleepless nights had made dark circles about his deep-set eyes, while his face, which was naturally lean, had grown suddenly thin and hollow. He was indeed one of the most unhappy men in Rome that day, and so far as he could see his misery had fallen upon him through no fault of his own. It would have been a blessed relief, could he have accused himself of injustice, or of any misdeed which might throw the weight and responsibility of Corona's actions back upon his own soul. He loved her still so well that he could have ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... code for the adherents of Islam. It contains a few important prohibitions. The Moslem is not to make images, to engage in games of chance, to eat pork, or to drink wine. This last prohibition has saved the Mohammedan world from the degradation and misery which alcohol has introduced into Christian lands. To Mohammed strong drink was "the mother of all evil," and drunkenness, a sin. The Koran also inculcates many active virtues, including reverence toward parents, protection of widows and orphans, ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... behind, as fast as their feet could carry alarmed and bewildered heads, leaving the fate of their carts to the sagacity of the horses. Finding that the louder he called for help the more alarm he excited, the suspended postboy determined philosophically to endure the misery of his situation in dignified silence. But there he was suffered to hang unnoticed; or, if remarked, it was only concluded that another criminal had been added to the gibbet, as its second tassel. The circumstance, however, of a second body having been placed there speedily came to the knowledge ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... they urge), it would be a monstrous freedom for one man to take with another, to say that he should undergo the chances and changes of this mortal life without any option in the matter. No man would have any right to get married at all, inasmuch as he can never tell what frightful misery his doing so may entail forcibly upon a being who cannot be unhappy as long as he does not exist. They feel this so strongly that they are resolved to shift the blame on to other shoulders; and have fashioned a long mythology as to the world in which the unborn people live, ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... slunk away, and Charles Stevens returned home. The evening air fanned his heated brow, and he sought to cool his angry temper before he reached home. The silent stars watched the sullen youth who, pausing at the gate, gazed in his helpless misery on ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... 1600, we lost sight of our admiral, and never saw his ship more; yet we still continued our course for Japan. The 24th March we saw an island called Una Colona, at which time many of our men were again sick, and several dead. We were in the utmost misery, not above nine or ten of our men being able to creep about on their hands and knees; while our captain and all the rest were expecting every hour to die. The 11th April, 1600, we had sight of Japan, near to Bungo, at which time there ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... had not told him of her Sydney husband till afterwards. He had, he verily believed, overcome all tendency to fly to liquor—which, indeed, he had never done from taste, but merely as an escape from intolerable misery of mind. Yet he perceived with despondency that, taken all round, he was a man of too many passions to make a good clergyman; the utmost he could hope for was that in a life of constant internal warfare between flesh and spirit the former might ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... she had just left, know sooner or later what she had done, or would know it, at least, only if the final consequence should be some quite overwhelming publicity. She fixed this possibility itself so hard, however, for a few moments, that the misery of her fear produced the next minute a reaction; and when the carriage happened, while it grazed a turn, to catch the straight shaft from the lamp of a policeman in the act of playing his inquisitive flash over an opposite house-front, she let herself wince at being thus incriminated only that ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... Russia should be a warning to all. Russia is passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where is heard "the continual howling and yelling of a people under unutterable misery, who sit there bound in affliction and iron, and over it hang the discouraging clouds of confusion; death also does always spread his wings over it. In a word it is every whit a dreadful being utterly without order." ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... Great God! there is no bondage so terrible as that of the mind. I have loved Berene Dumont with a changeless passion for twenty-three years, and there has not been a day in all that time that I have not during some hours endured the agonies of the damned, thinking of all the disasters and misery that might have come into her life through me. Heaven knows I would have married her if she had remained. Strange and intricate as the net was which the devil wove about me when I had furnished the cords, I could and would ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... falling and their doom sealed. Meanwhile the lame and the halt, the withered and the blind, to whom the heavens are brass and life a burthen, cry on Death with impassioned gestures, to release them from their misery,—but in vain; she sweeps past, and will not hear them. Between these two groups lie a heap of corpses, mown down already in her flight—kings, queens, bishops, cardinals, young men and maidens, secular and ecclesiastical—ensigned ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... rules at Washington, and that Queen Victoria sits in the seat of Akbar or Aurungzebe, are facts which must all be attributed to the decision made by the sword at Hastings, no matter what may have been the particular process of events after that battle. It is possible that the misery consequent on the victory of the Normans has been exaggerated, though a great deal of suffering must have followed from it. But there can be no exaggeration of the general consequence of the success of the Normans. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... not to do this, Jack,' she cried. 'I swear that I will tell you everything some day, but nothing but misery can come of it if you enter that cottage.' Then, as I tried to shake her off, she clung to me in a ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... girl had lost none of the terror which had made her face like a mask, no power of movement remained to her. A picture of hopeless misery, she stood for one breathless moment, with her eyes fixed in unmistakable appeal on mine; then she began to sway so helplessly that I leaped with bounding heart to catch her. As she fell into my arms I heard her sigh as before. No common ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... began to find his position at home far from agreeable. His father had sunk into a mere nonentity through his mother's superior energy. Hence, in her hands rested the happiness or misery of all connected with the household. It soon became evident that her grand project was to effect a marriage between Lady Elizabeth Plympton and Herbert; and when she found no inducement could warm her son's heart towards that lady, her conduct ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... the entire energies of the War Department, but to the men it seemed as if their longed for turn would never come. Back in the well-known fortifications around Washington they waited, taking part in the Grand Review on June 8th, in all the misery of full dress, and in a temper that would have carried them against the thousands of acclaiming spectators with savage joy, had it been a host of enemies ...
— The County Regiment • Dudley Landon Vaill
... interesting!" said Esther, though not as if she put a question. "And you're no relation at all." She made it, for the moment, seem rather a breach of taste to talk of nothing else but a man to whom Lydia wasn't a sister, and Lydia's face burned in answer. A wave of childish misery came over her. She wished she had not come. She wished she knew how to get away. And while she took in Esther's harmony of dress, her own little odds and ends of finery grew painfully cheap to her. But the telephone bell rang in the next ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... almost eagerly into his face. "Poor daddy hadn't an enemy in the world, I am sure," she said. "His extraordinary words to you no doubt have some simple explanation. Oh, it would be such a relief to know that his end was a natural one. At least it would dull the misery of it all a ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... aim in fighting is that they may get the scalps, the money, that they may amass scalps and money: out of such came no Chivalry, and never will! Out of such came only gore and wreck, infernal rage and misery; desperation quenched in annihilation. Behold it, I bid thee, behold there, and consider! What is it that thou have a hundred thousand-pound bills laid-up in thy strong-room, a hundred scalps hung-up in thy wigwam? I value not them or thee. Thy scalps and thy ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... dejected companion on the shoulder, turned upon his heel, and walked out into the passage, whither poor Mr Pinch, after lingering irresolutely in the parlour for a few seconds, expressing in his countenance the deepest mental misery and gloom followed him. Then they took up the box between them, and sallied out ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... incident increased the excitement that usually accompanies a departure for a long sea-voyage, fourfold. Men and women forgot their griefs and leave-takings in anxiety, and in that pleasure which usually attends agitation of the mind that does not proceed from actual misery ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... Fiancee). Well, my dear, I don't approve of young men getting engaged until they have some prospects of being able to marry, and dear ALGY was always my favourite brother, and I've seen so much misery from long engagements. However, we must hope for ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 27, 1890 • Various
... where the manna had been stolen by the leaders, and there were no tokens of a promised land. To the universities the Reformation had brought with it desolation. To the people of England it had brought misery and want. The once open hand was closed; the once open heart was hardened; the ancient loyalty of man to man was exchanged for the scuffling of selfishness; the change of faith had brought with it no increase of freedom, and less of charity. The prisons were crowded, as before, ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... of insults and obscenities. When we were all in bed, no one could stir without causing inconvenience to his neighbours. A sleepless night, invariably accompanied by the restless impulse to stir and fidget, was unforgettable misery, but fortunately our work was so hard that sleepless nights ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... were like those of the previous day, but with added details of misery and horror. Many of the wounded, brought in from the extreme right flank of the army at Caney, had had nothing to eat or drink in more than twenty-four hours, and were in a state of extreme exhaustion. Some, who had been shot through the mouth or neck, were unable to ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... fool: "May Allah make cold thy face!"may it show want and misery. "By Allah, a cold speech!"a silly or abusive tirade (Pilgrimage, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... properties he found himself not only with mining and manufacturing problems to solve, but with what was practically a relief problem to face. For the underpaid workmen and their unfortunate families were in a state of great misery. He succeeded not only in modernizing and rehabilitating the material part of the great establishment, but at the same time in rescuing and revivifying a suffering laboring ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... Count of Poictiers, who had remained as a hostage in Damietta till the ransom of the Crusaders was paid, came on board; and, all being now in readiness for leaving the place where he had experienced so many misfortunes and so much misery, the saint-king made a sign to the mariners, the sails were given to the wind, and the fleet of the armed pilgrims—the wreck of a brilliant army—glided away towards Syria. But thousands of the survivors still ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another..." [Footnote: Leviathan, Ch. XIII. Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as concerning their Felicity and Misery.] ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... effects of the true sublime? That master, too—the patient, crafty, and obdurate Ulysses, who encounters every danger and bears every calamity with a constancy unshaken, a spirit undepressed, and a temper unruffled—when he sees this faithful old servant perishing in want, misery, and neglect, yet still remembering his long-lost benefactor, and collecting the last effort of expiring nature to give a sign of joy and gratulation at his return, hides his face and wipes away the tear! This is true sublimity of character, which is ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... tearing others, may not feel its brutality, but man, who has to prey on other sentient beings like the carnivorous, is intelligent enough, as hard fate would have it, to know and feel his own brutal living.' He must be the most miserable of all creatures, for he is most conscious of his own misery. Furthermore, 'he experiences not only the misfortunes which actually befall him, but in imagination he goes through every possibility of evil.' Therefore none, from great kings and emperors down to nameless beggars, can be free from cares and anxieties, which 'ever ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... influence of evil companions, and the power of destiny, or the deity. Hence, the Greek imagination, which impersonated every great power, very naturally conceived of Ate as a person, a sort of omnipresent and universal cause of folly and sin, of mischief and misery, who, though the daughter of Jupiter, yet once fooled or misled Jupiter himself, and thenceforth, cast down from heaven to earth, walks with light feet over the heads of men, and makes all things go wrong. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... of kindred hearts The lordly mansion rang, the next they lay Crush'd neath its ruins. He,—the childless sire, Last of his race, and lonely as the pine That crisps and blackens 'neath the lightning shaft Upon the cliff, with such a rushing tide The mountain billows of his misery came, Drove they not Reason from her beacon-hold? Swept they not his ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... matter of paramount importance is a consideration of the horoscope of the parties. Were the boy and girl born under astrological conditions which harmonize; or does her horoscope so conflict with his that their dissonance would bring evil and misery to the family? In the latter case, a marriage will be impossible, even though all other conditions are ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... prison! Aunt, my dear aunt, if I have long sickened at this scene of splendid misery, and sighed for your sister's calm cottage in Franconia, what must I now, when poor ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... had several captured Indian women with them, and half-a-dozen children; the former were absorbed in grief, and one in particular, whose young husband had been shot in the fray, and whose scalp was one of those I have just mentioned, was quite overwhelmed. The children, little conscious of the misery of their parents, swam about and dived in the river like amphitrites; they each carried a small bow and quiver of arrows. There is no doubt the Indians these volunteers had fallen in with and routed, were the identical party referred to by ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... family groups were to be seen slowly streaming west. There were few roads, and those few very bad. Hardly a wheeled conveyance of any sort existed in the country. Those who were too weak to walk or to ride had to be carried on men's backs or in horse litters. The confusion, the misery, the cold, the wretchedness may be conceived, and always behind, urging them on, rebuking the loiterers, came the armed escort sent to drive them into exile—Puritan seraphs, with drawn swords, set to see that none ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... almi de si re, Mimis tres I ne ver re qui re, Alo veri findit a gestis, His miseri ne ver at restis. [Footnote: A pudding is all my desire, My mistress I never require; A lover I find it a jest is, His misery never at rest is.] ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... that art to save, thine hour is nigh! The sad world waileth in its misery, The blind world stumbleth on its round of pain; Rise, Maya's child! wake! slumber ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... upon just now." The precaution was much needed. Frost set in once more, and now with unending grip. Vilna offered a poor haven of refuge. The stores were soon plundered, and, as the Cossacks drew near, Murat and the remnant of the Grand Army decamped in pitiable panic. Amidst ever deepening misery they struggled on, until, of the 600,000 men who had proudly crossed the Niemen for the conquest of Russia, only 20,000 famished, frost-bitten, unarmed spectres staggered across the bridge of Kovno in the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... misery began with "analytical" and the crisis came with calculus, and to the boy's bitter sorrow, after having been turned back one year on the former and failing utterly on the latter, the verdict of the Academic Board went ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... conciliate the traditional powers thereof; and to the people's passions through the sensuous rites and feasts of the rural shrines. Among such distractions Israel lost her innocence, forgot what her own God was or had done for her, and ceased to enquire of Him. Hence her present vices and misery in contrast with her early troth and safety. Hence the twin evils of the time—on the one hand the nation's trust in heathen powers and silly oscillation between Egypt and Assyria; on the other the gross immoralities to which the Baals had seduced its sons. There ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... lout who is shown passing swiftly from worse to unbearable, and herself broken at last by the ordeal of the witness-box in a "defended action." Inevitably such a book, a record of disillusion and increasing misery, can hardly be cheerful; tales with a purpose seldom are. But the poignant humanity of it will hold your sympathy throughout. You may think that Mr. MAXWELL too obviously loads his dice, and be aware also ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 14, 1920 • Various
... God!" exclaimed the anguished woman, kneeling by her chair and laying her cheek upon it, while only such tears as we shed in supreme moments saturated her handkerchief, "what have I done to make such misery to others? How sinful I must be to set son and father against each other! Yet, Heavenly Father, I can ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... allowed to marry her—Alderman Sutton. In all else he regarded her as an angel. And to many another, besides James Peake, it seemed that Sarah Sutton wore robes of light. She was a creature born to be the succour of misery, the balm of distress. She would have soothed the two thieves on Calvary. Led on by the bounteous instinct of a divine, all-embracing sympathy, the intrepid spirit within her continually forced its fragile ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... so engross his attention, but that he saw, with gratitude, how the elder Mr Chivery kept the Lodge clear of prisoners; how he signed to some, with his keys, not to come in, how he nudged others with his elbows to go out, and how he made his misery as easy to ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... moral. For they consisted chiefly of the praises of heroes that had died for Sparta, or else of expressions of detestation for such wretches as had declined the glorious opportunity, and rather chose to drag on life in misery and contempt. Nor did they forget to express an ambition for glory suitable to their respective ages. Of this it may not be amiss to give an instance. There were three choirs on their festivals, corresponding with the three ages of man. The old ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... you may defend her, if you choose; but you must allow me to tell you plainly that it is Mathilde's advice that has guided me from the days of my innocent childhood, and has led me into all the misery I am suffering now! If it were not for her I should not be married to-day and separated from my parents. She came here with me—not to help me, as she pretended—but to be able still to spy on me, quietly and secretly, in her usual way, and afterwards to make use of what she had discovered. But ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... It was Paris in her forge, Paris with her passions, her battles, her ever-growling thunder, her ardent life ever engendering the life of to-morrow. And the white train, the woeful train of every misery and every dolour, was returning into it all at full speed, sounding in higher and higher strains the piercing flourishes of its whistle-calls. The five hundred pilgrims, the three hundred patients, were about to disappear in the vast city, fall again upon the hard pavement of life ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... little by the rivers of blood that streamed over the length and breadth of the Slavonic land. Half a million Jewish victims were not sufficient to satisfy the followers of a religion of love. They only whetted their insatiable appetite. The anarchy among the Gentiles increased the misery of the Jews. The towns fell into the hands of the Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, and Tatars successively, and it was upon the Jews that the hounds of war were let loose at each defeat or conquest. Determined ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... and let the men take their places. Her Majesty said she was resolved to continue a privilege which kept places of that description most honourable, and render them suitable for ladies of nobility without fortune. Madame de Misery, Baronne de Biache, the Queen's first lady of the chamber, to whom I was made reversioner, was a daughter of M. le Comte de Chemant, and her grandmother was a Montmorency. M. le Prince de Tingry, in the presence of the Queen, used to call her cousin. The ancient household of the Kings of France had ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... table-lands of the interior, rather than on the sea-board or the banks of the great arterial rivers. Men may escape death in an unhealthy place, but the system is enfeebled and energy reduced to the lowest ebb. Under such circumstances life becomes a misery, and important results can hardly be looked for when one's vitality is preoccupied in wrestling with the unhealthiness of the situation, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... according to trustworthy observation, that there is no knowledge of the heavy defeats which the Russians have sustained, and the belief continues in the Russian "steam-roller" advancing on Berlin, which is "perishing from starvation and misery," and confidence exists in the great offensive in the west, which for months has not progressed. If the Governments of hostile States believe that by the deception of the people and by unchaining blind hatred they can shift the blame for the crime of this war and postpone ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... 50 per cent of them sink to that level through the effects of drink. That is to say, if by the waving of some magic wand intoxicants and harmful drugs should cease to be obtainable in this country, the bulk of extreme misery which needs such succour, and it may be added of crime at large, would be lessened by one-half. This is a terrible statement, and one that seems to excuse a great deal of what is called 'teetotal fanaticism.' The rest, ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... Turtle's nest. Cease, busy Memory! cease to urge the dart; Nor on my soul her love to me impress! 10 For oh I mourn in anguish—and my heart Feels the keen pang, th' unutterable distress. Yet wherefore grieve I that her sorrows cease, For Life was misery, and the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... "that it was you who raised her from misery and degradation, and brought her into communication with her kind. But why do we converse alone together, when we can converse so well with her? Address her in ...
— Doctor Marigold • Charles Dickens
... extraordinary relations between Church and State in the New German Empire: "The year 1848 proved to us Germans that we could not rely on our governments. Both diplomacy and bureaucracy are, and will remain, incorrigible. Our misery is, indeed, great. Dissension prevails among our good citizens; the ill-meaning are united. The Revolutionary War of 1848 and 1849 was a war of principles, but without results. It was repressed, but not exhausted. It keeps alive under the appearances by which ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... and as it is through the senses that we acquire our knowledge, not only of the outward objects with which we are daily conversant, but of other minds than our own, *the education of the senses* is an obvious duty. There are few so prolific sources of social evil, injustice, and misery, as the falsehood of persons who mean to tell the truth, but who see or hear only in part, and supply the deficiencies of perception by the imagination. In the acquisition of knowledge of the highest interest and importance this same hindrance is one of the most frequent obstacles. The ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... war another brutal butchery entailed upon another spot in the Gore just north of Camp Swamp the name of "Nine Men's Misery." There three triads of white soldiers, finding themselves surrounded by a large force of savages who had been lying in wait for them, placed their backs against a huge rock and fought like heroic knights in the old Arthurian days, until all were slain. Afterwards their nine bodies were ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... aloud. "You would pity her, your reverence, if you seen the misery they are in this two months; and it is easily telling they saw better days in the ould country. It is easily knowing that, by the dacent, mannerly children she has around her, ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... a bit of luck yesterday, and took too much on the strength of it. I was carried home from this house, and I could not speak to Lily or any of them. I deserve to lose you, and I will never ask you to come back unless there is no fear of more misery. But this I will do. I intend to maintain my own children, if I go and sell matches. I won eight pounds odd yesterday. I squandered one pound, I keep two to make a fresh start, and you have the rest. While this heart ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... drawers upon their legs, their trousers being utterly worn to rags. Some had no coats and drew their tattered blankets about them, sitting upon their haunches, like Indians, about the camp-fires. I do not recall a single querulous or ill-natured complaint. It was heart-breaking work to see their misery, but they were so intelligent that they knew as well as I did that it had grown out of the inevitable fortunes of war, in spite of the utmost efforts of their commanders to get supplies forward as soon as the siege of Knoxville had been raised. I estimated that fully one-third of the ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... of the country as it was excellent through the spirit and acquirements of its officers. Sight also has been lost of the actual conditions of repression, confinement, and isolation, enforced upon the maritime frontier during the greater part of the war, with the misery and mortification thence ensuing. It has been widely inferred that the maritime conditions in general were highly flattering to national pride, and that a future emergency could be confronted with the same supposed facility, and as little preparation, as the ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... century after century, and always when it does so lending its own charm to a record, which, without some such alleviations, would be almost too grim and disheartening in its unrelieved and unresulting misery to be ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... forbidden by the Lawes. Thirdly, to prescribe Ceremonies, Supplications, Sacrifices, and Festivalls, by which they were to believe, the anger of the Gods might be appeased; and that ill success in War, great contagions of Sicknesse, Earthquakes, and each mans private Misery, came from the Anger of the Gods; and their Anger from the Neglect of their Worship, or the forgetting, or mistaking some point of the Ceremonies required. And though amongst the antient Romans, men were not forbidden to deny, that which in the Poets is written of the paines, ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... fashion, and then he set out in an inverse direction, on his long journey through the seas. Instead of living like a bird in the full wind of the tops, he remained below deck, in the midst of the bad air of medicines, wounds, and misery. ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... could be done by force, how long could a Repub^n Gov. exist as a military despotism? And who would not prefer banishment or death to such a life? What Satisfac^n could the North themselves have in such an event? They would live a life of misery; provoke the sneers of the civilized world; and draw down upon their heads the terrible wrath ...
— Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Father and His Youngest Sister, - 1857-78 • Ulysses S. Grant
... by winds that parched the lips and filled the eyes with fine dust, causing us infinite misery, our gaze was ever turned northward where Omar told us lay our land of promise. The very last hesitations on the part of our followers had long been overcome. The African savage is not given to roaming far from his own tract, fearing capture or assassination at ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... after the bringing of the sword, which stirred up so many memories, was the most fearful of all my hours, so fearful that, had it been prolonged, death would have come to me of its own accord. I had sunk to misery's lowest deep, who did not know that even then its tide was turning, who could not dream of all the blessed years that lay before me, the years of love and of such peaceful joy as even ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... meeting with the Board of Deacons, the preliminary visits to the field of work, where the streets were full of misery and the slum life rampant. A few short blocks away was another world—a world of palaces. Jim had never before seen massed misery; he had never before seen profligate luxury, and the shock of contrast brought to him the sudden, overwhelming ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... since legal equality is indispensable where there is physical inequality, in order to correct to a certain extent the injustice of nature. Besides, who can be a king in Colombia? Nobody, for no foreign prince would accept a throne surrounded by danger and misery, and the generals would consider it humiliating to subordinate themselves to a comrade, and resign ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... to have a just estimation of objects. One moment's being uneasy or not, seems of no consequence; yet this may be thought of the next, and the next, and so on, till there is a large portion of misery. In the same way one must think of happiness, of learning, of friendship. We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Hatty better than you do. Very little would make her a confirmed invalid. It is not in our power, not in the power of any man living," continued the doctor, with emotion, "to give that poor child health; but we may help her a great deal by teaching her self-control. Half her misery proceeds from her own nervous fancies. If we can help her to overcome them, we shall do more for Hatty than if we petted and waited on her." But Bessie had always found this wise prescription of the ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... is Edward II, a tragic study of a king's weakness and misery. In point of style and dramatic construction, it is by far the best of Marlowe's plays, and is a worthy predecessor of Shakespeare's ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... as regards population, in an inferior position to other countries, the inhabitants of which may at some time become your enemies. Yet, at the same time, you have told us that a very large number of your people are living in poverty and misery, that the population is too numerous for work to be found for all, and that many, being unable to find a living in their own country, have gone out, or been sent out, ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... is the most delicately attuned musical instrument that God has created. It is capable of a cultivation beyond the dreams of those who have given it no thought. It maybe made to express every emotion in the gamut of human sensation, from abject misery to boundless ecstasy. It marks the man without his consent; it makes the man if he ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... delivers over people to shameful affections, to a reprobate sense; he suffers them to be a hell unto themselves. And nature seldom fails to avenge herself for the outrages suffered. She uses the flail of disease and remorse, of misery and disgust, and she scourges the culprit to the verge of the grave, often to the yawning ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Except to cook or fetch water or kneel in prayer, none of them moved out of the small space or position which they assumed at the beginning of the voyage. Those who died did not die of disease so much as of privation and fatigue, hunger, thirst, and opium. They died of vermin and misery. I shall never forget the expression of dumb, mute, patient pain which most of them wore. I cannot eat my dinner if I see a dog looking wistfully at it. I therefore spent the whole day staggering about our rolling ship ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... children; for you can not educate your children well surrounded by men and women who hold false doctrines of society, of politics, of morals. Leave minor issues, leave your differences of opinion about the Trinity, or the Holy Ghost, or endless misery; about high license and low license; or Dorcas Societies and Chautauqua Circles. Let them all go; they are of no consequence compared ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... had reduced the citizens of Olynthus to the last stage of misery through famine. Unable to supply themselves with corn from their own land, or to import it by sea, they were forced to send an embassy to Lacedaemon to sue for peace. The plenipotentiaries on their arrival accepted articles ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... until to-day had this longing been gratified. In a most unexpected way she at last found herself at the Chase. She had enjoyed a good dinner there. That dinner had been followed by nearly an hour of great misery and terror. Still, she had been there, and she reflected with pride that, in consequence, she could now hold up her head higher ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... do," she said, and the tears sprang to her eyes as their lips met. "It was because I loved you that I was so sorry when you went; that every hour and day was a misery to me, and seemed to hang like lead; it was because I loved you that I could not think of anything else, and—and all the world became black and dark, and—and—I hated to be alive. It was because—because of ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... in his aimless wandering, drawing near to Fern's Hollow, where she had lived. The outer shell of the new house was built up, the three rooms above and below, with the little dairy and coal-shed beside them, and Stephen, even in his misery, was glad of the shelter of the blank walls from the cutting blast of the north wind; for he felt that he could not go home to the cabin where the dead child—no longer darling little Nan—was lying. Poor Stephen! He sat down on a heap of bricks upon the new hearth, where no ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... the excitements of his first journey, his visit to the Temple, his earliest sight of the splendor and confusion and misery of the great city, had sunken all the more deeply into the Boy's mind. Excitement does not blur the impressions of youth; it sharpens them, makes them more vivid. Half-covered and hardly noticed at the time, they spring up into life when the ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... later, General Lake paid a visit to the unfortunate emperor, who was now eighty-three years old. He had been blinded by his brutal conquerors, and lived in a state of misery, and poverty, greater than that of any of the tillers of the fields of the wide empire over which he had once ruled. He lived for another three years, and was succeeded by his son, ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... that other matter, Bel? You always decide that too. The time has come again. Steady now! This is far more important than the other. Just to be wiped out, Bel, pouf! That isn't anything and it concerns no one save ourselves. But to bring misery into our lives and live with it daily, that would be a condition to rend the soul. So ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... veil between me and all that I do, think, or look at. One of my sisters is very ill in England—my married sister—an internal tumour, accompanied with considerable suffering, and doubtful enough as to its issue to keep us all (I can answer at least for myself) in great misery. Robert says I exaggerate, and I think and know that consciously or unconsciously he wants to save me pain. She went to London, and the medical man called it an anxious case. We all know what that must mean. For a little time I was in an anguish of fear, and though come ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... She could not speak. She was so deadly pale, and her face had such an expression of misery, that the boys ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... worship! And how sweet it was to worship! Ah, lad, cherish love's young dream while it lasts! You will know too soon how truly little Tom Moore sang when he said that there was nothing half so sweet in life. Even when it brings misery it is a wild, romantic misery, all unlike the dull, worldly pain of after-sorrows. When you have lost her—when the light is gone out from your life and the world stretches before you a long, dark horror, even then a half-enchantment ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... those parents who do not make their child an idol to fall down and worship, and thus turn him, to his own misery and theirs, into the most arbitrary of domestic tyrants, is to treat him as though he were in mind, as well as in body, a miniature man; feebler in intellect as he is inferior in strength, but differing in degree only, not ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... condition, still go far. The latter succumb, and as reflection does nothing for them, and as their sensations in such a world bring them few blandishments, they are tolerably early surrounded with a self-diffusing atmosphere of misery. Rousseau had none of this energy which makes oppression bracing. For ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... doubt, our duty to create the happiness and to prevent the misery of every living thing; but with our horse this is also a matter of policy. The colt should be caressed, rubbed, and spoken to kindly. He should be fed from the hand with anything he may fancy, such as carrot, or apple, or sugar, and be made to ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... attention to those scattered operations which prolonged the resistance for a turbulent year at the expense of the lives of many brave men on either side. These raids and skirmishes, which had their origin rather in the hope of vengeance than of victory, inflicted much loss and misery upon the country, but, although we may deplore the desperate resolution which bids brave men prefer death to subjugation, it is not for us, the countrymen of Hereward or ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the words! And they were the last I could utter to Doe!... I grasped his wrist. If I couldn't speak, I could pass all my abounding love and misery through the ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... come to the end of our journey; and I cannot help considering it a great blessing that we did not meet with natives who knew the settlement of Port Essington at an earlier part of our journey, or I am afraid we should have been exposed to the greatest misery, if not destruction, by an inconsiderate, thoughtless desire ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... a sick man, if it'll do you any good," said Sanford with a peculiar recklessness of lifeless misery. "Pay y'rsell out of the safe. ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... destitute of a will of his own, and that he had no favour for any diminution of the Royal Prerogative. As we passed out of the Palace after the interview a house in the Palace grounds was pointed out to me, within which had been imprisoned in squalid misery ever since the mortal illness of the previous King, a number of the members of the Burmese ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... say what they may, it is very questionable whether a guilty man would have felt half as much misery that night, as Kit did, being innocent. The world, being in the constant commission of vast quantities of injustice, is a little too apt to comfort itself with the idea that if the victim of its falsehood and malice have a clear conscience, he cannot fail to be sustained under his trials, and ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Virtue and beauty and truth and tenderness, and all that is noble and lofty and heart-appealing, have no chance against a mere piece of savage brutality. And that fact, which has been repeated over and over again from the beginning, and so largely makes the misery of mankind, reaches its very climax, and most solemn and awful illustration, in the fact that a handful of ruffians and a detachment of Roman soldiers were able to put an end to the life of God manifest in the flesh. If we have nothing more to say about Jesus than that He lived ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... softer towards him. When you wrote to me of your poor Mary's sad death, and of the sadder life that had preceded it, I began to wonder whether, after all, your system of free choice in marriage produces greater happiness or greater misery than ours of a marriage ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... than once. But she had not been told when Mr. Gibson came on the Saturday. It may truly be said that the poor mother's pleasure in the prospects of one daughter was altogether destroyed by the anticipation of the other daughter's misery. Had Mr. Gibson made Dorothy Stanbury his wife they could have all comforted themselves together by the heat of their ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... could, here or to-day, embody a record of my later years of unspeakable misery and unpardonable crime. This epoch, these later years, took unto themselves a sudden elevation in turpitude, whose origin alone it is my present purpose to assign. Men usually grow base by degrees. From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... true, terrible accidents happen even now, and indeed, had any one passed through a certain coal district on the day of which we speak, a scene of desolation and misery would have presented itself; for there had been a colliery accident!—a fearful explosion in a mine through some (as yet) unknown cause, and they were now bringing up the dead and dying. We too often, alas! read these ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... was conscious of little beyond the unceasing pain in his joints and the leaden heaviness of his limbs; but the recollection of that march haunted him like a horrible nightmare long afterwards, when each sensation and incident emerged from the haze of numbing misery. He remembered that he stormed at and almost fought with Charly, who lagged behind now and then in a fit of languid dejection, and that once he fell heavily, and was sensible of a certain half-conscious regret that he was still capable of going on when the Indian dragged ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss |
