"Nakedness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... But I'll take pity on your nakedness. For I can see just how ridiculous you look, and so Will help you with your tunic if close up ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... sat at the chief's feet and read to him from the Saxon book. He read stumblingly, haltingly; but he was not blamed for his blunders. His listener caught at the meanings hungrily, and pieced out their deficiencies with his keen wit and dressed their nakedness in his vivid imagination. Now his great chest heaved with passion, and his strong hand gripped his sword-hilt; now he crossed himself and sighed, and again his eyes flashed like smitten steel. When at last the failing light compelled Alwin to lay down the book, the ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... them repulsive at first and yet Lang might have liked them on a second reading. Indeed when, on somebody returning me the Eurydice, I opened and read some lines, as one commonly reads whether prose or verse, with the eyes, so to say, only, it struck me aghast with a kind of raw nakedness and unmitigated violence I was unprepared for: but take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... most conspicuous, crowding thickly in half-mourning robes of violet and white. In the middle of this gloomy spot a mutilated marble Cupid still remained standing, smiling beneath the lichens which overspread his youthful nakedness, while the arm with which he had once held his bow lay low ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... the wisdom of the sages of our own and of ages gone by—at the learning, the profundity, the astonishing acquirements of the Newtons, the Lockes, the Bacons, the Franklins, and the Humboldts. But when we shall stand, in all the nakedness of pure, unfettered spirit, within the confines of the spirit land, and gaze with all the clearness of unveiled spiritual vision upon the wonderful mechanism of the universe and of the spirit world; when we see—as we shall see—laws and principles, and even abstract truths, as plainly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... his shirt—that was all the McClain niggers wore—and he said to me: 'Nor, do you think you can stand this big nigger?' He had that old bull whip flung acrost his shoulder, and Lawd, that man could hit so hard! So I jes said 'yassur, I guess so,' and tried to hide my face so I couldn't see Sam's nakedness, but he made me look at ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... for the best pieces of linen and woollen goods produced in the country. A bounty was placed on the manufacture of silk.[390] In 1666, the establishment of cloth works in each county was made compulsory by act of Assembly.[391] "Whereas," it was declared, "the present obstruction of trade and the nakedness of the country doe suffitiently evidence the necessity of provideing supply of our wants by improveing all meanes of raysing and promoteing manufactures amonge ourselves, ... Be it enacted ... that within ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... blessed with copious rains, we learn to measure the productive capacity of the soil by its natural vegetation. But this rule is almost wholly inapplicable here, for, notwithstanding its savage nakedness, scarce at all veiled by a sparse growth of sage and linosyris [16], the desert soil of the Great Basin is as rich in the elements that in rainy regions rise and ripen into food as that of any ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... which must be used without distinction for Greek or Northern divinities, for heroes or savants of the present or former times, an artist ought to make tours of study to the lands of the south, where man does not need to protect himself from the cold with clothes, and where accordingly nakedness is the rule, at least among the poorer classes. The dress which is worn here is commonly convenient and tasteful. Among the Singhalese it consists of a piece of cloth wound round the middle, which hangs down to the knees. The men, who still prefer the convenient national dress ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... place for a cool turn in the morning, it had never been my good fortune to witness before or since. My wig! thought I, a precious country, where a man's life may be periled by the fashion of the covering to his nakedness! ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us—our life's star— Hath had elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, Who is our home. Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... sort of clothes, but a piece of the rind of a tree tied like a girdle about their waists, and a handful of long grass, or three or four small green boughs full of leaves, thrust under their girdle, to cover their nakedness. ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... should be. They are afraid, afraid, afraid; they dare not be kindly to formal sinners, they dare not abandon a hundred foolish observances; they dare not look at the causes of things. They are afraid of sunshine, of nakedness, of health, of adventure, of science, lest that old watching spider take offence. The voice of the true God whispers in their hearts, echoes in speech and writing, but they avert themselves, fear-driven. For the true God has no lash of fear. And how the foul-minded ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... could to obey him, but it was entirely impossible. On this account I was displeased with myself, because I believed M. Bertot rather than my experience. Through this whole retreat my inclination, which I discerned only by my resistance to it, was to rest in silence and nakedness of thought. In the settling of my mind therein I feared I was disobeying the orders of my director. This made me think that I had fallen from grace. I kept myself in a state of nothingness, content with my poor low degree of ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... What must not a poor old man have suffered in that severe weather and climate, whom I saw on a bleak common in Poland lying on the road helpless, shivering, and hardly having the wherewithal to cover his nakedness? I pitied the poor soul: though I felt the severity of the air myself, I threw my mantle over him, and immediately I heard a voice from the heavens blessing me for that piece of charity, saying, "You will be rewarded, my son, for this ...
— Stories to Read or Tell from Fairy Tales and Folklore • Laure Claire Foucher
... lit His Friar Bacon's little magic lamp At the Promethean fire of Faustus. Jove, It was a faery buck, indeed, that Will Poached in that greenwood." "Ben, see that you walk Like Adam, naked! Nay, in nakedness Adam was first. Trust me, you'll not escape This calumny! Vergil is damned—he wears A hen-coop round his waist, nicked in the night From Homer! Plato is branded for a thief, Why, he wrote Greek! And old Prometheus, too, Who stole his fire from heaven!" "Who ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Nairne's garden and grotto. Here was a fine old plane tree. Unluckily the colonel said, there was but this and another large tree in the county. This assertion was an excellent cue for Dr. Johnson, who laughed enormously, calling to me to hear it. He had expatiated to me on the nakedness of that part of Scotland which he had seen. His Journey has been violently abused, for what he has said upon this subject. But let it be considered, that, when Dr. Johnson talks of trees, he means trees of good size, such as he was accustomed to see in England; and of these there are certainly ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... back the scented coverlet And are afraid. Seeing Death in their own nakedness, They shroud ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... said Andrew. "Don't you worry your little head about it." Between his anxiety lest the girl should be troubled, and his intense humiliation that she should have discovered him in such an abandon of grief which was almost like a disclosure of the nakedness of his spirit, he was completely unnerved. Ellen felt him tremble, and heard his voice quiver when he spoke. She felt towards her father something she had never felt before—an impulse of protection. She felt the older and stronger of the two. Her grasp ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all I had besides. Poor child, thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this world! Thou must be beaten, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should blow on thee. But yet, thought I, I must venture all with God, though it goeth to the quick to leave you. I was as a man who was pulling down his house upon the head of his wife and children. ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... authority which must convince, 380 That saints own no allegiance to their prince; As 'tis a leading-card to make a whore, To prove her mother had turn'd up before. But, tell me, did the drunken patriarch bless The son that show'd his father's nakedness? Such thanks the present church thy pen will give, Which proves rebellion was so primitive. Must ancient failings be examples made? Then murderers from Cain may learn their trade. As thou the heathen ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... men rise and plunder the abbey? Was not the chatelain mad in leaving young Arnulf with him all day? Madder still, in taking him out to battle against the Count of Guisnes? He might be a spy,—the avant-courrier of some great invading force. He was come to spy out the nakedness of the land, and would shortly vanish, to return with Harold Hardraade of Norway, or Sweyn of Denmark, and all their hosts. Nay, was he not Harold Hardraade himself in disguise? And so forth. All which Torfrida heard, and thought within ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... and champions of the anti-revolution. The modern reader, without being attracted or repelled by the motif of the story, will take pleasure in the sustained energy and sure beauty of the poetic strain. Byron may have gone to the "nakedness of history" for his facts, but he clothed them in singing robes of a ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... desecration to me than cutting down an old and well-remembered French forest I have loved; and solving all its mystery, and laying bare the nakedness of the land in a way so brutal and expeditious and unexpected. It reminds one of the manner in which French market-women will pluck a goose before it's quite dead; you bristle with indignation to see it, but you ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... has, despite her forms studied from the antique and her gesture imitated from some earlier discovered copy of the Medicean Venus, the woe-begone prudery of a Madonna or of an abbess; she shivers physically and morally in her unaccustomed nakedness, and the goddess of Spring, who comes skipping up from beneath the laurel copse, does well to prepare her a mantle, for in the paled tempera colour, against the dismal background of rippled sea, this mediaeval Venus, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... would sicken at the recital. The summer passed away in marches and counter-marches, in assassinations, and skirmishes, and battles. The fields of the husbandmen were trampled under the hoofs of horses. Villages were burned to the ground, and their wretched inhabitants driven out in nakedness and starvation to meet the storms of merciless winter. Noble ladies and refined and beautiful maidens fled shrieking from the pursuit of brutal and licentious soldiers. Still neither party gained any decisive victory. The storms of winter came, and beat heavily, with frost and drifting ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... deed done, till every one was admonished of his folly, by the laird laughing, like a being out of his senses, at the number of bald heads and shaven crowns that his device had brought to light, and by one and all of us experiencing the coldness of the air on the nakedness of our upper parts. ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... something; and she came round by the prostrate trees that would have been invisible but for the white nakedness which enabled her to avoid them easily. Thus she approached the heap of ashes, and acting upon what was suggested by a still shining ember or two, she took a stick and stirred the heap, which thereupon burst into a flame. On looking around by the light thus obtained she for the first ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... wear a Dear-Skin, putting their Arms thro' the Holes of the Shoulder, with a Flap ty'd before and behind to cover their Nakedness; though they buy often Matchcoats or Blankets now, to defend them from the Wet and Cold, and think themselves very fine in such Coats as our common Soldiers wear, or of any taudry Colours: Besides this, some pin Pieces of red or blue Cloth about their Legs, and ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... left her, and remained there until late in the afternoon. In spite of the bold front she had put on, she was quaking with terror and tortured by remorse. Never before had she realised David Rossi's peril with such awful vividness, and seen her own position in relation to him in its hideous nakedness. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... the need of nourishment; what he required for the satisfaction of his needs She had placed around him in rich abundance; and by the senses of smell and taste She guided him in his choice. By means of a mild climate She had spared his nakedness, and through a universal peace round about him She had secured his defenceless existence. For the preservation of his kind provision was made in the sexual impulse. As plant and animal man was complete.... ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... over one of the most inhospitable regions of the world, could easily make out the Turks walking on the road near the Khan, which has been called the Good Samaritan Inn. The country has indeed been rightly named. Gaunt, bare mountains of limestone with scarcely a patch of green to relieve the nakedness of the land make a wilderness indeed, and one sees a drop of some four thousand feet in a distance of about fifteen miles. The hills rise in continuous succession, great ramparts of the Judean range, and instead of valleys between them there are huge clefts in the rock, hundreds of ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... Nakedness is of necessity uncouth, he held, whether it be the body or the soul that is unveiled. Mr. Pope went toward a window which he opened, and he stood thus looking out ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... country and of just liberty, which are graven in every Spanish heart, which have impelled you to battle with the hosts of the usurper, vanquishing and annihilating them, while braving hunger and nakedness, torture, and death." ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... Nature had only so far adopted this old pile of stonework as to cover almost every hand's-breadth of it with close-clinging lichens and yellow moss; and the immemorial growth of these kindly productions rendered the general hue of the tower soft and venerable, and took away the aspect of nakedness which would have made its age drearier ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Perhaps it takes a wide returning sweep, in doubt; but it disappears in the north. There is no mistaking that sign. This unmusical "conk" is sweeter than the "kerchunk" of the bull-frog. Probably these birds are not idiots, and probably they turned back south again after spying out the nakedness of the land; but they have made their sign. Next day there is a rumor that somebody has seen a bluebird. This rumor, unhappily for the bird (which will freeze to death), is confirmed. In less than three days everybody has seen a bluebird; and favored ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... other, the Digambaras, or 'sky-attire,' i.e., naked devotees of the south. The latter split off from the main body about two hundred years after Mah[a]v[i]ra's death; as has been thought by some, because the Cvet[a]mbaras refused to follow the Digambaras in insisting upon nakedness as the rule for ascetics.[6] The earlier writings show that nakedness was recommended, but was not compulsory.[7] Other designations of the main sects, as of the sub-sects, are found. Thus, from the practice of pulling out the hairs of their body, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... conception of the significance of liberty, thinking that it meant idleness and freedom from restraint. In consequence of this ignorance there developed such undesirable habits as deceit, theft and licentiousness to aggravate the afflictions of nakedness, ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... When some of these I recogniz'd, I saw And knew the shade of him, who to base fear Yielding, abjur'd his high estate. Forthwith I understood for certain this the tribe Of those ill spirits both to God displeasing And to his foes. These wretches, who ne'er lived, Went on in nakedness, and sorely stung By wasps and hornets, which bedew'd their cheeks With blood, that mix'd with tears dropp'd to their feet, And by disgustful worms was gather'd there. Then looking farther onwards I beheld ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... cliffs, strips of earth-beach extend downward, and trees and large shrubs root themselves in that earth, thus further contrasting the nakedness of the stone with their green foliage. But the immediate part where the stream forces its winding passage through the rock ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... piece of cloth being tied round his middle, his body was smeared with charcoal and water, as low as the shoulders, till it was as black as that of a negro: The same operation was performed upon several others, among whom were some women, who were reduced to a state as near to nakedness as himself; the boy was blacked all over, and then the procession set forward. Tubourai Tamaide uttered something, which was supposed to be a prayer, near the body; and did the same when he came up to his own house: When this was done, the procession was continued ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... perhaps, have not cared to meddle in what they may have considered a doubtful matter: but it must not be concealed, that when TRUTH and JUSTICE are at stake, neutrality is no honourable sanctuary for the avowed servants of the TEMPLE. Let the Bishops beware of discovering their nakedness upon the very steps of the altar.—The eye of an enlightened people is upon them; and with their character for real consistent PIETY, and fidelity to sound PROTESTANT PRINCIPLES, THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND will stand ...
— The Ghost of Chatham; A Vision - Dedicated to the House of Peers • Anonymous
... place at present in the Sixtine chapel; in which the yellow colour of the candles and torches, the nakedness of the Pope's throne and of the seats of the church denote the desolation of the church at the sufferings and death of her divine founder. The Cardinals do not wear their rings; their dress is of purple, which is their mourning colour; in like manner the Bishops do not wear rings and ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... she had consecrated, and broke the most filthy idol, and burnt it at the brook Kedron. Dr. Cumberland inserts, that the import of the word Peor, or Baal Pheor, is he that shews boastingly or publicly, his nakedness. Women to avoid barrenness, were to sit on this filthy image, as the source of fruitfulness; for which Lactantius and Augustine justly deride ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... more gravely, 'those gowns may be altered into something of a plainer cut; for finery is very unbecoming in us, who want the means of decency. I do not know whether such flouncing and shredding is becoming even in the rich, if we consider, upon a moderate calculation, that the nakedness of the indigent world might be clothed from the ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... morally mischievous than that corps-de-ballet literature in which the most animal of the passions is made more temptingly naked by a veil of French gauze. Nor does Dryden's lewdness leave such a reek in the mind as the filthy cynicism of Swift, who delighted to uncover the nakedness of our ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... eldest daughter, a gentle, sweet-looking girl, who held in her arms a baby brother, whose destitution she endeavoured to conceal. It was a touching sight; that suffering girl, just stepping into womanhood, hiding against her young bosom the nakedness of the little creature she loved. Another fine boy, whose neatly-patched clothes had not one piece of the original stuff apparently left in them, stood behind his mother, with dark, glistening eyes fastened upon me, as if amused, and wondering who I was, and what business I could ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... Herbert intelligently. 'Only temporarily. It's this beastly gregariousness that's the devil. The very thought of it undoes me—with an absolute shock of sheepishness. I suddenly realise my human nakedness: that here we are, little better than naked animals, bleating behind our illusory wattles on the slopes of—of infinity. And nakedness, after all, is a wholesome thing to realize only when one thinks ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... perceive that the so-called "wrongs" did not lie all on one side, but that there was a pretty large class of the so-called "lords" who went about the world habitually in a sad and disgraceful state of moral semi-nakedness, in consequence of their trousers having been appropriated and put on by their better-halves, and that therefore it was only meet that men and women should be united (as indeed they were from the first intended to be) in their efforts to put each ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... neatness that makes it almost ornamental. This is like the "excuse me" of a truly, well-bred man, apologizing for an offence he regrets; while the "excuse me" of the habitually rude man is like the botched patch of the sloven or the beggar, who wears it because the laws of the land forbid nakedness. ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... boatswain. Ichi was clad in shirt and trousers belonging to Little Billy—not a bad fit. The ju-jitsu man sported a complete outfit of his, Martin's. Obviously, the belongings of the Cohasset's crew had been looted to cover the scarecrow nakedness of the captors. ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... do not seem to deserve it? is the aspect of the problem which interests him. One solution that is offered, he tells us, is that evil is not anything positive or substantial. It is something negative, absence of the good, as blindness is absence of vision; deafness, absence of hearing; nakedness, absence of clothing. Hence it has no cause. God produces the positive forms which are good, and determines them to stay a definite length of time. When this time comes to an end, the forms disappear and their negatives take their place ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... find some of his poems in Von der Hagen's four immense volumes, but I recommend you to take your notions of Ritter Tannhaeuser's poetry rather from Wagner. Certain it is that the Pagan divinities lasted much longer than we suspect, sometimes in their own nakedness, sometimes in the stolen garb of the Madonna or the saints. Who knows whether they do not exist to this day? And, indeed, is it possible they should not? For the awfulness of the deep woods, with their filtered green light, the creak of the swaying, solitary reeds, exists, and is Pan; and ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... say that it is—no single verse detached from its context can weigh a feather against the full and flawless evidence of the whole speech. And of all this there is nothing in the Contention; the scene there opens in bald and flat nakedness of prose, striking at once into the immediate matter of stage business without the decoration of a passing epithet or ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the state of primitive communism, equal in their nakedness and ignorance, equal in the indefinite power of their faculties. The economists generally look at only the first of these aspects; they neglect or overlook the second. Nevertheless, according to the profoundest philosophers of modern times, La Rochefoucault, Helvetius, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... the explanation there was time for. Kerk swung the car out of the rush of traffic and onto a bridge marked Official Cars Only. Jason had a feeling of nakedness as they rolled under the harsh port lights towards ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... a man of sins and virtues, of weaknesses and strength, a man who had had much to conquer, and for whom the fight would never be finally won, was standing before them stripped of his coat of conventions and platitudes, and in nakedness of soul and sincerity of heart was talking to them as ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... may safely be regarded as an unamiable indiscretion. In art, the bare truth must, in common gallantry, be awarded a print petticoat or one of canvas, as the case may be, to hide her nakedness; and in life, it is a disastrous virtue that we have united to commend and avoid. Nor is the decision an unwise one; for man is a gregarious animal, knowing that friendship is, at best, but a feeble passion and therefore to be treated with the care due an invalid. It is impossible ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... wisdom of his suggestion, and as my clothes were by now so ragged as to but half conceal my nakedness, I had no regrets in laying them aside. Stripped to the skin, I donned the red-deerskin tunic, the leopard-tail, the golden fillet, armlets and leg-ornaments of a Galu, with the belt, scabbard and knife, the shield, spear, bow and arrow and the long rope which I learned ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... my breath, for to me there is nothing more awe-inspiring than when a man discovers to you the nakedness of his soul. Then you see that no one is so trivial or debased but that in him is a spark ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... Though nakedness might, as usual, be given as the pervading character of the spot, whither it is now necessary to transfer the scene of the tale, it was not entirely without the signs of human life. Amid the monotonous rolling of the prairie, a single naked and ragged rock arose on the margin of a little ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the separation is between the two orders of artists,[H]—how exclusively we may follow out the history of all the 'goffi nell' arte,' and write our Florentine Dunciad, and Laus Stultitiae, in peace; and never trench upon the thoughts or ways of these proud ones, who showed their fathers' nakedness, and snatched their ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... are the things which edify. I will now go into a monastery, where God shall choose; and let his will be done on me." The elder said, "My son, before thou enterest, hear me. Thou shalt have tribulation; for thou must watch and serve in nakedness, and sustain ills without ceasing; and again thou shalt be comforted, thou vessel ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... mingled with horror, when we saw first an arm, then a leg, then a trunk, then a head appear, forming a human body, not in a state of nakedness, but ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... Romans, barbarism torments the mind like a riddle. Yet there are the dusky barbarians!—fleeing from the harmonious tread of the ordered legions, running to hide themselves in the morass of vulgar sentiment, to ambush their nakedness in the sand-pits of ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... and the small rations generally. This, however, was the least part of the trouble, for the condition of the army as to clothing and shoes was simply appalling. When many had not even rags to cover their nakedness, and none were clad as civilized men should be to face the winter's snows and rains, it was nonsense to talk of campaigning. Grant saw this at a glance when he reached our camps. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 19, 43.] We have not the whole situation ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... The nakedness of any frailties which poets may possess, makes it the more contemptible, they feel, for the public to wrap itself in the cloak of hypocrisy before casting stones. The modern poet's weakness for autobiographical revelation leaves no secret corners in his nature in which surreptitious ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... the common people; violate their wives and daughters, and steal their beasts of burden and employ them for their own purposes, thus interrupting agricultural operations. Yesterday, they were outcasts, with barely sufficient clothes to cover their nakedness; to-day, they ride on horseback and don rich raiment. Meanwhile the country falls into a state of decay, and the homesteads are desolate. My appeal is that, with the exception of provincial governors' envoys, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... that Ernest heard near midnight the click of Reginald's key in the door. He found him unchanged, completely, radiantly himself. Reginald possessed the psychic power of undressing the soul, of seeing it before him in primal nakedness. Although no word was said of Ethel Brandenbourg except the mere mention of her presence in Atlantic City, Ernest intuitively knew that Reginald was aware of the transformation that absence had wrought in him. In the presence of this man he ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... have been compelled to hang one of our company. We have sold our clothes for corn, and are ready to starve, both with cold and hunger also, because we can not endure to get victuals by reason of our nakedness." ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... He wore the khaki suit, the high-laced riding boots of the ranch days; and he wore them with the grace, the debonair ease that had so charmed Rhoda in young Cartwell. That little sense of his difference that his Indian nakedness had kept in Rhoda's subconsciousness disappeared. She stared at his broad, graceful shoulders, at the fine outline of his head which still was bare, and she knew that her decision was going to be indescribably difficult to keep. Kut-le watched the wistful gray eyes tenderly, as ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... the three thousand children in the single city of Chicago without rags to shield their nakedness from the keen north wind; of the ten thousand innocents, such as Christ blessed, who died in New York every year of the world for lack of food; of the millions in every country whose cries go up night and day to God's great throne —not for salvation, ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Like one who speaks ter us in the Book, I've been in journeyin's often, in peril of robbers, in perils of mine own countrymen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in weariness an' painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger an' thirst, in fastings often, in cold an' nakedness, but he warns us not ter glory in these things, but in those which consarn ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... faith, as a sober estimate of the forces of fellowship which could be then discerned. Save for the ideals and ambitions of the central Empires of Europe they were perfectly true. What the war has done in regard to this fellowship is to expose in their hideous nakedness the dangers which threaten it, and to which in pre-war days we were far too blind, but also to unveil that strong passion for neighbourliness which lies deep in the hearts of men, and an almost fierce determination to give it truer expression in the ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... after you were born, you had no such reason for rejoicing in your form. You were then a mere cabbage-insect, a hairy worm; and you were so poor that you could not afford even one robe to cover your nakedness; and your appearance was altogether disgusting. Everybody in those days hated the sight of you. Indeed you had good reason to be ashamed of yourself; and so ashamed you were that you collected old twigs and rubbish to hide in, and you made ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... throughout the Netherlands, at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, we find the allegorical drama giving way to more definite and direct personations. Those cold representations of vices and virtues, of vice in its nakedness, such as to render the reading, when not absolutely tedious, distasteful, to say the least, to our modern ideas,—all such aimless productions were giving way to the conscious expression of satire. Diatribes against prevalent abuses, personal invectives scarcely veiled, were fast becoming ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the town's southern edge and out upon a low slope of yellow, deep-gullied sand and clay that scarce kept on a few weeds to hide its nakedness while gathering ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... streams together. In Japan both sexes bathe in public in natural hot pools, and that without diffidence. The Japanese, though a people of many clothes, regard nudity with indifference, but use garments to conceal the contour of the human form, while we are horrified by nakedness and yet use dress to enhance the form, especially to emphasize the difference between sexes. Our women's accentuated hips and waistlines shock the Japanese, whose loose clothing is the same for men and women, the broader belt and double ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... given it openly, but still with certain relative modifications, in different publications (especially in his book "Force and Matter," which appeared in 1855 in the first edition, and in 1872 in the twelfth) he gives it in cynical nakedness in the lectures with which he travelled through America and {189} Germany in 1872-1874, and the contents of which he has made public in his pamphlet: "Der Gottesbegriff und dessen Bedeutung in der Gegenwart" ("The Idea of God, and its Importance at the ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... writes: "I would by no means have consented to leave any part of them there, had not the general given me express orders.... By their present nakedness, the advanced season, and the inconceivable fatigues of an uncommonly long and laborious campaign, they are rendered totally incapable of any sort of service; and sickness, death, and desertion must, if they are not speedily supplied, greatly reduce their numbers. To replace ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... greedily, for I had had nothing for thirty-six hours. She then offered me the leggings, as they call them, which the Indians wear, and the other portions of the Indian dress, which probably belonged to her late husband. I put them on, as I was glad to cover my nakedness, and, worn out with walking and exertion, I first thanked God for my miraculous preservation, and then lay down and fell into ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... Himmelah chain are disfigured in the same manner, and for the same purpose, as the peepul and banyan trees are here; their small branches and leaves are torn off to supply fodder for bullocks and other animals. The ilex of the hills has not, however, in its nakedness the majesty of the peepul and banyan of the plains, though neither of them can be said to be "when unadorn'd, ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... out of all proportion to the act which produced it held him speechless while he gazed at her. He felt at first merely a sense of physical revolt from the brutality of her self-revelation—from the nakedness to which she had stripped the horror of her marriage under the eyes of her daughter. Nothing, not even the natural impulse to screen one's soul from the gaze of the people with whom one lived, had prevented the appalling ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... the tranquillity of the province in a great measure depended upon silencing these troops—who were not only clamorous and menacing, but in a state of nakedness and destitution—which rendered it probable that they might help themselves at the expense of the inhabitants—I consented to the application of the Junta, placing at their disposal the monies taken in the Portuguese treasury, amounting in cash to Rs.62.560 ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... He was neither seer nor prophet, but just ordinary man like you or any man. What he knew, you know, any man knows. But he most aptly stated it in his passage that begins "Not in utter nakedness, not in entire ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the streets, and watched the little upper room where the precious records of the Committee were burning brightly. The front wall gone, the small office stood open to the world, a bright and shameless thing, flaunting its nakedness to ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... but truly, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" No Christian, however weak he may be, need fail to feel with Paul, and ask the same question, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?... Nay in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... expressed them in the Character of the Misanthrope; but those only who are endowed with a true Greatness of Soul and Genius can divest themselves of the little Images of Ridicule, and admire Nature in her Simplicity and Nakedness. As for the little conceited Wits of the Age, who can only shew their Judgment by finding Fault, they cannot be supposed to admire these Productions [which [7]] have nothing to recommend them but the Beauties of Nature, when they do not know how to relish even those ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... gone, Leaving a weedy space; The bushes that veiled it once have grown Gaunt trees that interlace, Through whose lank limbs I see too clearly The nakedness ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... such horrible actions, partly by prayers, and partly with lunatic curses, they move or terrify the ignorant countryfolks into giving them alms. This poor fellow was such a one; and the king seeing him in so wretched a plight, with nothing but a blanket about his loins to cover his nakedness, could not be persuaded but that the fellow was some father who had given all away to his daughters, and brought himself to that pass: for nothing he thought could bring a man to such wretchedness ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... even more, for she took all his clothes, even to his shoes, stockings, and small clothes, nay, everything he had, along with her! Thus situated, he was under the necessity of doing something to cover his nakedness; and this, he himself acknowledged, was the first cause of his seriously applying himself to the profession which has ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... things before his eyes he spared not while he lived either toil or cost, for he went about preaching everywhere in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness. ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis
... nakedness of the entire tract was likewise very extraordinary. Elsewhere, in various quarters of the globe, there may be sterile rocks, but there are none so adamant as to be altogether unfurrowed by the filaments engendered in the moist residuum of the condensed vapor; elsewhere there ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... 14 Wherefore, we shall have a perfect knowledge of all our guilt, and our uncleanness, and our nakedness; and the righteous shall have a perfect knowledge of their enjoyment, and their righteousness, being clothed with purity, yea, even with the robe ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... countrymen; in perils by the heathen; in perils in the city; in perils in the wilderness; in perils in the sea; in perils among false brethren; in weariness and painfulness; in watchings often; in hunger and thirst; in fastings often; in cold and nakedness; besides those things that are without, that which cometh upon me daily, the care of all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? who is offended, and I burn not? If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... of men's eyes, there stood a whey-coloured, misbegotten caitiff, Duncan Jopp, on trial for his life. His story, as it was raked out before him in that public scene, was one of disgrace and vice and cowardice, the very nakedness of crime; and the creature heard, and it seemed at times as though he understood—as if at times he forgot the horror of the place he stood in, and remembered the shame of what had brought him there. He kept his head bowed and his hands clutched upon ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not see, and if thou chance t'espy Some aberrations in my poetry, Wink at small faults; the greater, ne'ertheless, Hide, and with them their father's nakedness. Let's do our best, our watch and ward to keep; Homer himself, in ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... Tralee? You've neither money nor men nor powder. Half a dozen broken captains who must starve if there's no fighting afoot, as many more who've put their souls in the priests' hands and see with their eyes—these and a few score boys without a coat to their backs or breeches to their nakedness—d'you think to oust old ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... scenery; a hard bed and a sleepless night, by the intelligent enjoyment of famous places clothed with historic interest; foul smells and rank odors, by the charming study of a unique people, extraordinarily interesting in their wretched squalor and nakedness. Though the stranger is brought but little in contact therewith, owing to the briefness of his visit to the country, quite enough is casually seen and experienced to show that there is no lack of culture and refinement, ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... 'betters' generally. All their lives they had been true to this teaching, they had always had blind, unreasoning faith in the wisdom and humanity of their pastors and masters. That was the reason why they and their children had been all their lives on the verge of starvation and nakedness, whilst their 'betters'—who did nothing but the thinking—went clothed in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... nearer to God; but if you journey with guides and jolly fellowship to some Mountain House, never so airily perched, you would as well visit a panorama. To comprehend the ocean, you must meet it in its own inviolable domain, where it tosses heavenward its careless nakedness, and laughs with death; from the deck of a steamboat you will never find it, though you sail as far as the Flying Dutchman. But the solitude which nature reveals, and which alone reveals her, does but prepare you for the ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... in the chain let down from other worlds; 'the purple light of love' is not a dim reflection of the smiles of celestial bliss. It does not appear till the middle of life, and then seems like 'another morn risen on midday'. In this respect the soul comes into the world 'in utter nakedness'. Love waits for the ripening of the youthful blood. The sense of pleasure precedes the love of pleasure, but with the sense of pleasure, as soon as it is felt, come thronging infinite desires and hopes of pleasure, and love is mature ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... in thy nakedness! Clothe thyself on the hillside! Let none see thee until thou art far away! Rot as thou wilt, but dare not to name me! Begone! ...
— The Little Hunchback Zia • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Joe. He stood up. His bath robe fell away from him, and he stepped forth to the centre of the ring, naked save for the low canvas shoes and a narrow hip-cloth of white. Genevieve's eyes dropped. She sat alone, with none to see, but her face was burning with shame at sight of the beautiful nakedness of her lover. But she looked again, guiltily, for the joy that was hers in beholding what she knew must be sinful to behold. The leap of something within her and the stir of her being toward him must be sinful. But it was ...
— The Game • Jack London
... broad day; absolutely stripping off, not merely the royal livery, which she wore for the last five hundred years with so much the look of a well-bred footman; but tearing away the last coverture of the national nakedness. Well; in a week or two of this process, she will have got rid not only of church and king, but of laws, property, and personal freedom. But, I ask, what business have we to interfere? If she is madder than the maddest of March hares, she ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... be a great benefit to the children of both countries. The next day we drove down to see Glastonbury cathedral. England is full of these beautiful ruins, covered with flowers and ivy, but the saddest spectacles, with all this fading glory, are the men, women and children whose nakedness neither man ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... various museums and art galleries; and went with him to concerts, popular and otherwise; and took long trolley rides with him on suffocating evenings when the poor slept on the grass in the parks and the slums, east and west, presented endless vistas of panting nakedness prostrate under a smouldering ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; 27 in labor and travail, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. 28 Besides those things that are without, there is that which presseth upon me daily, anxiety for all the churches. 29 Who is weak, and I am not weak? who is caused to stumble, and I burn not? 30 If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... it as if they had been formally reprimanded; and so much the more, because the kings and the elders, as well as the rest of the city, saw and heard all that passed. Nor was there any thing shameful in this nakedness of the young women; modesty attended them, and all wantonness was excluded. It taught them simplicity and a care for good health, and gave them some taste of higher feelings, admitted as they thus were to the field of noble action and glory. Hence it was natural for ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... class of people, unhappily rare, who possess a power of generating in others an instinctive knowledge of "dangerous ground"—a power which enabled them to avert, both from themselves and the might-be offender, many a painful situation. To proceed—the nakedness of the walls of Hennersley was veiled—who shall say it was not designedly veiled—by a thick covering of clematis and ivy, and in the latter innumerable specimens of the feathered tribe found ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... the part of France to assist in the conference, it is well known that the final cause of rupture was the dogged persistance of the French members of the joint commission in urging the tariff of France, in all its nakedness of prohibition, deformity, and fiscal rigour, as the one sole and exclusive regime for the union debated, without modification or mitigation. On this ground alone the Belgian deputies withdrew from their mission. How this result, this check, temporary only ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... crisis of danger was past, and while her mother and Mrs. Ulph were working over the infant, Mildred began quietly to put the room into something like order, and to dress the other children that were in various transition stages between rags and nakedness. As the German woman emerged from a semi-paralyzed condition of alarm over her child she began to talk ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... the so-called contradiction is a sterile boon. Like Shylock's pound of flesh, it leads to no consequences. It does not entitle you to one drop of his Christian blood either in the way of catarrh, social exclusion, or what further results pure nakedness ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... and wash among the grasses at the feet of man. He does not wish you to admire it, though he hopes you may love it; there are to be no excuses or pretences; he does not wish to be seen at certain angles or in subdued lights. He casts himself down in his nakedness, and lets who will observe him; and all this not because he is either hero or saint; his proudest title is to be an average man, one of the crowd, with passions, weaknesses, uglinesses, even deformities. He is there, he is just so, and you may take ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and England. This is the testimony of a distinguished minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, (North,) whom, nobody will suspect of any undue partiality for Southern slave-holders. When we look at the "degradation, the slavery, the exile, the hunger, the toil, the filth and the nakedness," of the English poor, we are astonished at the brazen impudence of that cruel, godless, and hypocritical nation! Nor are we less surprised, when we think of the ungodly crew of fools and fanatics in the United States, who are leagued with that monster England to overthrow their ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... cries of widowers, widows, fatherless and motherless children, are enough to pierce the most hardest of hearts. Likewise it's a very sorrowful spectacle to see those that escaped with their lives with not a mouthful to eat, or bed to lie on, or clothes to cover their nakedness, or keep them warm, but all they had consumed into ashes. These deplorable circumstances cry aloud for your Honor's most wise consideration; for it is really very shocking for the husband to see the wife of his bosom her head cut off, and ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... telling us the truth, so it doesn't much matter," said Paddy. "They are all in league with the slavers, from the king who dresses up on great occasions in a cocked-hat, top-boots, and an old blanket, to poor Quasho, who has never had his nakedness covered since he ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... everybody, from the oldest to the youngest, knew him and his story. He injured no one, he offended no one, and he never failed, somehow or somewhere, to find food to eat, lodging for his head, and clothing to cover his nakedness. He had been among the very first to enter the Refuge, and now, in November, he was the last one left within its walls. He was the only one of the guests who returned, and perhaps he would not have done so had not his aching restlessness driven him back to suffer an echo ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... saw, she rose to her and offered up prayers for her, saying, 'O my daughter, O thou to whom pertain goodness and beneficence and charity and almsdoing, know that this young man is a stranger, and indeed want and vermin and hunger and nakedness and cold slay him.' When the lady heard this, she gave her alms of that which was with her; and indeed her heart inclined unto Selim, [but she knew him ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... as in Lear and the Fool; and especially this, that the true language of passion becomes sufficiently elevated by your having previously heard, in the same piece, the lighter conversation of men under no strong emotion. The very nakedness of the stage, too, was advantageous,—for the drama thence became something between recitation and a re-presentation; and the absence or paucity of scenes allowed a freedom from the laws of unity of place and unity of time, the observance of which must either confine the drama to as few subjects ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... My previous fatigues had been enormous, and my clothes, heavy with moisture, greatly encumbered and retarded my movements. I had proposed to free myself from this imprisonment; but I foresaw the inconveniences of wandering over this scene in absolute nakedness, and was willing therefore, at whatever hazard, to retain them. I continued to struggle with the current and to search for the means of scaling the steeps. My search was fruitless, and I began to meditate the ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... peril of floods, in peril of thieves, in peril by the Jews, in perils by the pagans, in perils in the city, in perils in the desert, in perils in the sea, perils by false brethren, in labour and misery, in many nights' watch, in hunger and thirst, in many fastings, in cold and nakedness; beside those things that are outward, my daily instant labour, I mean my care and solicitude about all the churches," and yet saith he more of his tribulations, which for the length I let pass. This blessed apostle, I say, for all these tribulations ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... modest, rather than beautiful, meddle not with those Ladies of the Game, who make pageants of their Cheeks, and Shops of their Shoulders, and (contrary to all other Trades) keep open their Windows on the Sabbath-day, impudently exposing their nakedness to the view of a whole Congregation," &c. There are, in an appendix, pictures of a puritanically shrouded "Virtue," and a "Vice" who, apart from the patches on her face, singularly resembles a portrait of pretty ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway
... shall even be brought to pass: if I find thee again raving as now thou art, then may Odysseus' head no longer abide upon his shoulders, nor may I any more be called father of Telemachos, if I take thee not and strip from thee thy garments, thy mantle and tunic that cover thy nakedness, and for thyself send thee weeping to the fleet ships, and beat thee out of the assembly ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... poems are extant, written upon more humble subjects, and in a more naked and simple style than what I have aimed at, which poems have continued to give pleasure from generation to generation. Now, if nakedness and simplicity be a defect, the fact here mentioned affords a strong presumption that poems somewhat less naked and simple are capable of affording pleasure at the present day; and all that I am now attempting is to justify ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth |
