"Purblind" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shades "'Of—what is not. Wise, wise and strong the man "'who poisons that fond haunter of the mind, "'Craving for a hereafter with deep draughts "'Of wild delights—so fiery, fierce, and strong, "'That when their dregs are deeply, deeply drain'd, "'What once was blindly crav'd of purblind Chance, "'Life, life eternal—throbbing thro' all space "'Is strongly loath'd—and with his face in dust, "'Man loves his only Heav'n—six feet of Earth!' "So, Katie, tho' your blue eyes say me 'Nay,' "My ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... woman and influences that life so long as it is lived here on earth, is on the surface sufficiently finite for us to say: It was on such a day I made my decision; to such and such an event I can look back as the cause of all that has followed. The How thereof remains traceable to our purblind eyes for a month, a term of years, one generation, possibly two; the Where and When can generally be defined; but the Why we ask blindly, and ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... array are the prisons of the only sane ones of history, the cells dug by Inquisitorial Ignorance in every age for its wisest men. Now I understand them; walls cannot impede the hands we stretch out to each other across oceans and centuries. One day the purblind world will invoke in its prayers the holy army of the martyrs ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... Kate cried fiercely. "I understand, and I tell you they're all mad. Hopelessly mad." She laughed wildly. "Disaster? Oh, blind, blind, fools. There'll be disaster, sure enough. The old Indian curse will be fulfilled. Oh, Helen, I could weep for the purblind skepticism of this wretched people, this consequential old fool, Mrs. Day. And I—I am the idiot who ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... a young man like Poliziano (who was not yet born when I was already held worthy to maintain a discussion with Thomas of Sarzana) to have a glorious memory as a commentator on the Pandects—why is Ficino, whose Latin is an offence to me, and who wanders purblind among the superstitious fancies that marked the decline at once of art, literature, and philosophy, to descend to posterity as the very high priest of Platonism, while I, who am more than their equal, have not effected ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... including Carlo Maratti frames that had cost the painter four guineas each. The eight 'Rake's Progress' pictures had fetched but twenty-two guineas each. The six 'Harlot's Progress,' fourteen guineas each. The 'Strolling Players' had gone for twenty-six guineas! O purblind connoisseurs! Dullard dillettanti! Still there was something for the widow; not her wedding portion—that seems to have long before melted away. Sir James Thornhill had been forgiving, kind, and generous after a time—two years—and opened to the runaway lovers his heart and his purse. ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... artists thought the labor of a lifetime well employed in painting but one picture of her—Kharvani the sorrowful, grieving for the wickedness of earth; Kharvani, Bride of Siva, ready to intercede with Siva, the Destroyer, for the helpless, foolish, purblind sons ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... the Doctor, "it is God's truth, and stands in no need of the endorsement of a set of well-meaning but purblind bigots and pedants, who presumed to set metes and bounds to Divine inspiration, and decide by vote what is God's truth and what is the Devil's falsehood. But, speaking of eagles, I never see one of these spiteful old sea-robbers without fancying that he may be the soul of a mad Viking of the middle ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... usually took place in the dishevelled drawing-room, after a round of the widely parted chambers, where frowzy beds, covered with frowzy white counterpanes, stood on frowzy carpets or yet frowzier mattings, and dusty windows peered into purblind courts. A vulgar modernity coexisted with a shabby antiquity in the appointments; a mouldering wall showed its damp through the smart tastelessness of recent paper; the floor reeled under a combination of pseudo-aesthetic rugs. ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... designed to frustrate all efforts at extinguishing the dread fire-demon, the flaming torch was applied by Chinese soldiery to half a dozen different places, and almost before anybody knew it, the holy of holies was lustily ablaze. As the flames shot skywards, advertising the danger to the most purblind, everybody at last became energetic and sank their feuds. British marines and volunteers were formed up and independent commands rushed over from the other lines; a hole was smashed through a wall, and the ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... blind, undirected energy that at one time had prompted him to a vast desire to acquit himself of some terrible deed of readjustment, just what, he could not say, some terrifying martyrdom, some awe-inspiring immolation, consummate, incisive, conclusive. He fancied himself to be fired with the purblind, mistaken heroism of the anarchist, hurling his victim to destruction with full knowledge that the catastrophe shall sweep him also into the ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... The only issue to be solved was whether France, Britain, Italy and Russia should convict and brand the felon unaided, or the mighty power of the Western World should join hands with the avengers of outraged law. Well, a purblind Germany settled that uncertainty by a series of misdeeds which no nation of high ideals could allow to pass unchallenged. I do believe most firmly that President Wilson gave the criminal such chances of reform as no court of law in the world would grant. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... of their liaison, when they made their love in that same room under the very nose of a purblind husband. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... right-hand came the flash of the fruitful ring, And at last spake Reidmar scowling: 'Ye wait for my yea-saying That your feet may go free on the earth, and the fear of my toils may be done That then ye may say in your laughter: The fools of the time agone! The purblind eyes of the Dwarf-kind! they have gotten the garnered sheaf And have let their Masters depart with the Seed of Gold and of Grief: O Loki, friend of Allfather, cast down Andvari's ring, Or the world shall yet turn backward and the high heavens ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... received us in his private rooms, looked at Mr. Lindsey and Mr. Portlethorpe with evident surprise—it may have been that there was mystery in their countenances. I know that I, on my part, felt as if a purblind man might have seen that I was clothed about with mystery from the crown of my head to the sole of my foot! And he appeared still more surprised when Mr. Lindsey, briefly, but fully, explained why we had called ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... Mr. Wooster, that I appreciate your splendid defiance of the outworn fetishes of a purblind social system. I appreciate it! You are big enough to see that rank is but the guinea stamp and that, in the magnificent words of Lord Bletchmore in 'Only a Factory Girl,' 'Be her origin ne'er so humble, a good woman is the equal of the finest ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... had I stayed there very long, I should have become purblind, and that would have been a great misfortune, for I have heard men say that a stone-blind horse was safer to drive than one which had imperfect sight, as it generally makes them very timid. However, I escaped without any permanent ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... purblind race of miserable men, How many among us at this very hour Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves, By taking true for false, or false for true; Here, thro' the feeble twilight of this world Groping, how many, until ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... national life, in the things that make a nation rich and the things that make it scrupulous and just, he had only limited perception and moderate faith. Where Peel was strong and penetrating, Palmerston was weak and purblind. He regarded Bright and Cobden as displeasing mixtures of the bagman and the preacher. In 1840 he had brought us within an ace of war with France. Disputes about an American frontier were bringing us at the same period within an ace of war with the United States. ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... and flowery wreaths; no more applause; no more of the dear divine stage excitement; the heroine and fairy vanished; only a little commonplace child in dingy gingham, with a purblind cripple for thy sole charge and playmate; Juliet Araminta evaporated evermore into ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... minutes longer the landau rolled on; then it came to a halt under the broad porte cochere of the Villa Irma, and two minutes after that Cleek and the Count stood in the presence of Madame Tcharnovetski, her purblind associate, and her ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... link or two, and, in an age of relaxed discipline, gave a trifling indulgence to my own notions. If that could be allowed, perhaps I might sometimes (by accident, and without an unpardonable crime) trust as much to my own very careful and very laborious, though perhaps somewhat purblind disquisitions, as to their soaring, intuitive, eagle-eyed authority. But the modern liberty is a precious thing. It must not be profaned by too vulgar an use. It belongs only to the chosen few, who are born to the hereditary representation of the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... lines and parallels with a wet finger, describing the positions of the opposing forces. "Here were we—here were the Turks," to all which Johnson listened with the most earnest attention, poring over the plans and diagrams with his usual purblind closeness. ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... time, and of an honest politician and a pure-minded journalist. He never really forsook literature, and the world of actual interests and experiences afforded him outlooks and perspectives, without which aesthetic endeavor is self-limited and purblind. He was a great man of letters, he was a great orator, he was a great political journalist, he was a great citizen, he was a great philanthropist. But that last word with its conventional application scarcely describes the brave and gentle friend ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of God all round us, able to sing, to draw, to paint, to hammer and build, to sail, to ride horses, to run, to leap; having for our splendid inheritance love in youth and memory in old age, and we are to take one miserable little faculty, our one-legged, knock-kneed, gimcrack, purblind, rough-skinned, underfed, and perpetually irritated and grumpy intellect, or analytical curiosity rather (a diseased appetite), and let it swell till it eats up every other function? Away ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... to their embrace, saying in a glad way, "Rejoice with me, O my father and mother! the robbers have at length allowed him to come back to us." Of course the parents were deceived, they are mostly a purblind race; and Hemgupt, showing great favour to his worthless son-in-law, exclaimed, "Remain with us, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... Cooper's shelves are continuously being denuded by his friends. But if you think of Cooper as a helpless victim you are sadly mistaken. There is an elaborate scheme behind it all, a scheme of such transcendent ingenuity as only simple-hearted, sweet-natured, unpractised, purblind visionaries like Cooper are ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... amusement for the pupils because of his personal peculiarities, was really considered by the girls in general a deeply learned man, and when he chanced to trot by a group of the students on the campus, in his stoop-shouldered, purblind way, their voices became hushed and they looked after him as though he really was all he pretended to be—or all he thought he was. He delved in histories—ate, slept, and seemed to draw the breath of his nostrils from histories. That the pamphlets and books he wrote ...
— Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall - or Solving the Campus Mystery • Alice B. Emerson
... said; Dorothea was too much jarred to recover her temper and behave so as to show that she admitted any error in herself. She was disposed rather to accuse the intolerable narrowness and the purblind conscience of the society around her: and Celia was no longer the eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence in the "Pilgrim's Progress." The fad of drawing plans! What was life worth—what great faith was possible when ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Morrison's-Pill hypothesis, What is to be done? allow me to reply: By thee, for the present, almost nothing. Thou there, the thing for thee to do is, if possible, to cease to be a hollow sounding-shell of hearsays, egoisms, purblind dilettantisms; and become, were it on the infinitely small scale, a faithful discerning soul. Thou shalt descend into thy inner man, and see if there be any traces of a soul there; till then there can be nothing done! O brother, we must if possible resuscitate some soul and conscience in us, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... important lines of manufacture to turn out goods expressly made with a view to wearing as short a time as possible, so as to need the speedier renewal. They taught their very machines to be dishonest, and corrupted steel and brass. Even the purblind people of that day recognized the vanity of the pretended reductions in price by the epithet 'cheap and nasty,' with which they characterized cheapened goods. All this class of reductions, it is plain, cost the consumer two dollars for every ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... Villeneuve because he proceeded out of Cadiz against orders and suffered a crushing defeat! It is quite permissible for a French admiral to put authority at defiance if doing so complies with the sentiments of anti-Napoleon writers, who were either ill-informed, purblind critics or eaten up with insincerity or moral malaria! But it is the maintenance of discipline to have men like Sir John Byng court-martialled and shot after being tried, it is said, by a not entirely impartial court, on the supposition that he had neglected his duty ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... these, a man 'mongst other men. Yea, and will Fortune pick out, now and then, The noblest for the anvil of her blows; Great names are few, and yet, indeed, who knows What greater souls have fallen 'neath the stroke Of careless fate? Purblind are most of folk, The happy are the masters of the earth Which ever give small heed to hapless worth; So goes the world, and this we needs must bear Like eld and death: yet there were some men there Who drank in silence to the memory ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... "Wretched, purblind girl! Thirty-five indeed! Why, I am eighteen, and clad in the hide of a leopard with a wreath of roses on my brow, and you, sweet Oenone, are wandering with me on the slopes of Ida—and we are taking your mother, not one, but a peck of ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... she plied all her wiles to captivate poor Pommer anew. His pulses hammered, his senses were aflame; but he remained master of himself, and sternly he resolved to sever these equivocal relations with a woman whom he could no longer respect. The weak, purblind man had been steeled against further temptation by seeing a few hours ago the abyss yawning at his feet, in which an illicit love had threatened to engulf him forever. The image of his mother, noble type of womanhood, rose before his mind, and he ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... reproach, that His was a life unique and inexplicable by the ordinary motives which shape the little lives of the masses of mankind. They witness to His entire neglect of ordinary and low aims; to His complete absorption in lofty purposes, which to His purblind would-be critics seem to be delusions and fond imaginations that could never be realised. They witness to what His disciples remembered had been written of Him, 'The zeal of Thy house hath eaten Me up'; to His perfect devotion to man and to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... how well one seems to know thee, with thy purblind spectacled eyes peering into fusty books and parchments, or bending over thy crucibles and retorts! Truly a novel and interesting sight it would be to see thee assuming wings. In thy philosophy ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... a printed Document, emanating, as it were, from a vile, mean, and ignorant miscreant of the name of ———, calumniating and vituperating me; it is evidently the production of a vain, supercilious, disappointed, frantic, purblind maniac of the name of ———, a bedlamite to all intents and purposes, a demon in the disguise of virtue, and a herald of hell in the paradise of innocence, possessing neither principle, honor, nor honesty; a vain and vapid creature whom nature plumed ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... whose beck all things are turned topsy-turvy, according to whose will all human affairs are regulated—war and peace, government and counsel, justice and treaties. He has begotten her on the nymph Youth, not a senile, purblind Plutus, but a fresh god, warm with youth and nectar, like ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... have been supposed to be lost forever in the woods of America, but thrown upon the bosom of Nature, the breath of God revived it, and the world hath gathered its fruits. Even Ireland has contributed her share to the liberties of America; and while purblind statesmen were happy to get rid of the stubborn Presbyterians of the North, they little thought that they were serving a good cause in another quarter.—Yes! the Volunteers of Ireland still live—they live across the Atlantic. Let this idea animate us in our sufferings, ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... indemnity. Russia's final claims, as will be seen, were open to criticism at several points; but the censure just referred to is puerile. It accords, however, with most of the criticisms passed in London "club-land," which were remarkable for their purblind cynicism. ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... accomplice of an impostor. He liked the "Arabian Nights," but oddly enough these wonderful tales made no such impression on his fancy as the stories in a wretchedly inferior book made. He did not know the name of this book, or who wrote it; from which I imagine that much of his reading was of the purblind sort that ignorant grown-up people do, without any sort of literary vision. He read this book perpetually, when he was not reading his "Greek and Roman Mythology;" and then suddenly, one day, as happens in childhood with so many things, it vanished out of his possession as if by ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... quite another matter whether he ever opens the box or not. And he is as likely to poison as to cure himself, if, without guidance, he swallows the first drug that comes to hand. In these times a man may as well be purblind, as unable to read—lame, as unable to write. But I protest that, if I thought the alternative were a necessary one, I would rather that the children of the poor should grow up ignorant of both these mighty arts, than that they should remain ignorant of ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... not worse—a rabbi. I, for my part, want to be startled out of my conceits; I want to be put to shame in my own eyes; I want to feel the bridle in my mouth, and be continually reminded of my own weakness and the omnipotence of circumstances. (5) If I from my spy-hole, looking with purblind eyes upon the least part of a fraction of the universe, yet perceive in my own destiny some broken evidences of a plan and some signals of an overruling goodness; shall I then be so mad as to complain that all cannot be deciphered? Shall I not rather wonder, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that preceded this proposed expedition, he went into one of the boxes at the playhouse, as usual, to show himself to the ladies; and reconnoitring the company through a glass (for no other reason but because it was fashionable to be purblind), perceived his mistress very plainly dressed, in one of the seats above the stage, talking to another young woman of a very homely appearance. Though his heart beat the alarm with the utmost impatience ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Driving the darkness, Even as the banners And spears of the Morning; Sifting the nations, The slag from the metal, The waste and the weak From the fit and the strong; Fighting the brute, The abysmal Fecundity; Checking the gross, Multitudinous blunders, The groping, the purblind Excesses in service Of the Womb universal, The absolute drudge; Firing the charactry Carved on the World, The miraculous gem In the seal-ring that burns On the hand of the Master - Yea! and authority Flames through the dim, Unappeasable ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... of enmity, virtue appears the ugliest blemish; it is a rose, O Sa'di! which to the eyes of our rivals seems a thorn. The world-illuminating brilliancy of the fountain of the sun, in like manner, appears dim to the eye of the purblind mole." ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... functionary, a meagre old captain of invalids, who had been roused from his bed, and was evidently half asleep. I stoutly denied my being "the criminal who had offended the majesty of the people." But as the governor himself, on gazing at me with his purblind eyes, was perfectly satisfied of my identity, there was no use in contesting the point. A couple of sentinels were placed at the door of my cell, and I was left, like himself, to my slumbers. Before the door closed, I grasped my guide by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... that among a body of immigrants are one or two who are decidedly unsuitable. There is an example among our particular ship-load. Here is a woman, purblind, decrepit, looking sixty years old at least, and, by some incomprehensible series of mistakes, she has found her way out here as a "single girl!" What was the Agent-General in London about, and what could the Dispatching Officer have been thinking ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... "Scene of Pirna over again, in reverse form;" "Is not your King at last over with it?" said and sang multifariously the Gazetteers. As counter-chorus to which, in a certain Royal Heart: "That miserable purblind Finck, unequal to his task;—that overhasty I, who drove him upon it! This disgrace, loss nigh ruinous; in fine, this infernal Campaign (CETTE CAMPAGNE INFEMALE)!" The Anecdote-Books abound in details ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... once learn to know them, and his memory shall never starve; he will never forget the hour when first they yielded him up their secret. Many moments of intimate delight do I treasure in remembrance, moments when I was suddenly aware that all previous impressions were the poor gatherings of purblind eyes; but I will only tell you of one, which may suffice to show what riches lie ever open to those who ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... nature this one, like an Apollo clad in sunbeams and in lightnings (after his sort); and with a back which all the world could not succeed in breaking!—Yes, if, by most rare chance, this were indeed a new man of genius, born into the purblind rotting Century, in the acknowledged rank of a king there,—man of genius, that is to say, man of originality and veracity; capable of seeing with his eyes, and incapable of not believing what he sees;—then truly!—But as yet none knows; the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... friends and beloved ones will have none of them. Even if one such is fortunate enough to find a medium through whom he can communicate, he gets little or no recognition or welcome, unless he can absolutely conform to the wishes of the purblind folk, who, knowing nothing of spiritual law, try to insist upon making conditions, and getting tests which are so outside of the law that even the Creator could not meet their demands. For those who have no aspiration toward ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... of natural facts, until they were, so to speak, thrust under our noses, what force remained in the dilemma—creation or nothing? It was obvious that hereafter the probability would be immensely greater, that the links of natural causation were hidden from our purblind eyes, than that natural causation should be incompetent to produce all the phenomena of nature. The only rational course for those who had no other object than the attainment of truth was to accept "Darwinism" as a working hypothesis and see what could be made of it. Either it ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... he groaned, "it is hard to have to play second fiddle to this purblind old Scotchman." Alaric Hobbs had been a reporter upon that dainty sheet, The New York Whorl, in one of his "emergent" periods, and so he writhed in agony at being left at the post. "I must be content to tap old Fraser when ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... streets of Galilee eighteen hundred years ago. Knowles, with his heated brain, fancied that the silence without in the night grew deeper, that the slow-moving air stopped in its course to listen. Perhaps the simple story carried a deeper meaning to these brooding mountains and solemn sky than to the purblind hearts within. It was a far-off story to them,—very far off. The old school-master heard it with a lowered head, with the proud obedience with which a cavalier would receive his leader's orders. Was not the leader a knights the knight ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... those who were. Mr. Croker is not to be blamed as the architect of his overthrow. With what lights that shone, his conduct was prudent enough; and his dethronement is to be charged to destiny—to kismet, rather than to any gate-opening carelessness on the purblind part of himself. 'Prudentia fato major,' said the Florentine. But the Medici was wrong, and before Death bandaged his eyes for eternity it was given him to see that Destiny, for all his caution and for all his craft, ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... was. And old Judge Ballard was holding about half the men, including Ben Sutton, while he made a speech. I hung back to listen. 'Sir,' he was saying to Ben, 'Secretary Seward some years since purchased your territory from Russia for seven million dollars despite the protests of a clamorous and purblind opposition. How niggardly seems that purchase price at this moment! For Alaska has perfected you, sir, if it did not produce you. Gentlemen, I feel that we dealt unfairly by Russia. But that is in the dead past. It is not too late, however, to tiptoe to the grillroom and offer a toast ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... Publication in this case; no such Design is in my head: on the contrary, not even a Friend will know of it except yourself, Mr. Norton, and Aldis Wright: the latter of whom would not be of the party but that he happened to be here when I was too purblind to correct the few Proofs, and very kindly did so for me. As for Mr. Norton (America), he it was for whom it was printed at all—at his wish, he knowing the MS. had been lying by me unfinisht for years. It is a Version ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... if she had; she has probably never heard of the corrupted, or any version of the Epistles of St Ignatius, but she would accept the corruptions bodily upon the smallest hint that they savoured better with the hierarchy, and she would do all this apparently in good faith on the authority of a purblind party within the Church, which exists to keep open its wounds. Now, I submit that a volte face is possible, especially in religious opinions, but that a pronounced habit of religious thought cannot be acquired in a day, so that, in the history of Miss Vaughan's ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... other hand, there are those who take a different view of human nature, and who find in its contemplation a source of humility rather than of pride. They remind us how weak, how ignorant, how short-lived is the individual, how infirm of purpose, how purblind of vision, how subject to pain and suffering, to diseases that torture the body and wreck the mind. They say that if the few short years of his life are not wasted in idleness and vice, they are spent for the most part in a perpetually recurring round of trivialities, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... down his goblet on the pavement. 'Use? you purblind old hamster-rat, who think of nothing but filling your own cheek-pouches!—to give him a wife worthy of a hero, as he is, in spite of all—a wife who will make him sober instead of drunk, wise instead of a fool, daring instead of a sluggard—a wife who can command ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... an express train, in so far as its power to modify the gracious purpose of God already declared was concerned. And would it not be a miserable thing if we could deflect the solemn, loving march of the divine Providence by these hot, foolish, purblind wishes of ours, that see only the nearer end of things, and have no notion of where their further end may go, or ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... measur'd steps of one, two, three, But made a careless, slouching bow, And said, "Your highness will allow, That I am personable, tall, A rather handsome face withal, And fit to serve as volunteer, At least as any present here! Purblind, and deaf, and long and short, Without distinction here resort; Whilst I, neglected and forgot, Sate daily watching in my cot; And scarcely stirr'd, for fear there might, Arrive that morning or that night A captaincy, or some commission, For I confess I have ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... preposterous, that has not been a way to holiness. God who is himself finite, who himself struggles in his great effort from strength to strength, has no spite against error. Far beyond halfway he hastens to meet the purblind. But God is against the darkness in their eyes. The faith which is returning to men girds at veils and shadows, and would see God plainly. It has little respect for mysteries. It rends the veil of the temple in rags and tatters. It has no superstitious fear ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... Purblind and short-sighted friends! You will listen to me,—you will sympathize with me; for you know by painful experience what I mean when I say that we near-sighted people do not receive from our hawk-eyed neighbors that sympathy and consideration to which we are justly entitled. ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... enchanted moccasins. He would have taken away Onwee's war-club too, if he could have carried it; but although he was twice the size and girth of Onwee, he had not the strength to lift it; so he borrowed a club from an old chief, who was purblind, and mistook Ko-ko for his brother who was a brave man; and raising a terrible tumult with his voice, and a great dust with his ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... moral far more strongly than Eden could do. As by a lightning flash, the purblind politicians of Vienna could now discern the storm-wrack drifting upon them. The weakness of the Piedmontese army, their own unpreparedness in the Milanese, the friendliness of Genoa to France, and the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... dyspeptical, bashful; nay what is worse than all, we are foolish. Thus, in a whole imbroglio of Capabilities, we go stupidly groping about, to grope which is ours, and often clutch the wrong one: in this mad work must several years of our small term be spent, till the purblind Youth, by practice, acquire notions of distance, and become a seeing Man. Nay, many so spend their whole term, and in ever-new expectation, ever-new disappointment, shift from enterprise to enterprise, and from side to side: till ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... anchor on his thigh, so had his posterity, as Trogus records, lib. 15. Lepidus, in Pliny l. 7. c. 17, was purblind, so was his son. That famous family of Aenobarbi were known of old, and so surnamed from their red beards; the Austrian lip, and those Indian flat noses are propagated, the Bavarian chin, and goggle eyes amongst the Jews, as [1317] ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... especially as he passed through the Great Hall. This circumstance, together with what I saw that afternoon in every street, convinced me how much our friends were dispirited, and I therefore resolved next day to raise their courage. I knew the First President to be purblind, and such men greedily swallow every new fact which confirms them in their first impression. I knew likewise the Cardinal to be a man that supposed everybody had a back door. The only way of dealing with men of that stamp is to make them believe that you design to deceive ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... a rich canopy. The monarch's appearance was in strange contrast with that of the numerous and powerful army behind him. He seemed almost a monster, with his enormous head, long nose, wide, gaping mouth, big, white, purblind eyes, very diminutive body, extraordinarily thin legs, and misshapen feet. He was clad in black velvet and a mantle of gold brocade, bestrode a tall and very beautiful charger, and entered the city riding with his lance levelled—a martial attitude then considered as a sign of conquest. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... to be implicitly dealt with by Charles Darwin in his "Theory of Sexual Selection"? Or did he in the good old oriental way regard her as unimportant in the eyes of the Deity? If the latter, he was a purblind prophet and missed the very ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... of his long career Mr. Hardy has not budged an inch from his original line of direction. He holds that, abandoned by God, treated with scorn by Nature, man lies helpless at the mercy of "those purblind Doomsters," accident, chance, and time, from whom he has had to endure injury and insult from the cradle to the grave. This is stating the Hardy doctrine in its extreme form, but it is not stating it too strongly. This has been ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... weary diamond-digger of the South, the crazed perfume-hunter in the East, the stifled hemp-curer in the fetid swamps of Russia, the shriveled iron-worker in the scorching furnaces of England. Here, in Paris, amid that motley herd who feed on virtue, the moon shines down calmly on purblind embroiderers and peerless beauties, on worn-out roues and squalid beggars. The breeze that wafts to heaven the pure prayer of the maiden witnesses the fierce ribaldry of the courtesan; it flutters the curls of a sleeping infant, and bears ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... is, be sent forth "cured," like missionaries of hell, and the horrent shapes of Night and Acheron, to mingle in the pure river of humanity the poison-taint of their protean vileness? Do you know that in your schools one-quarter of the children are already purblind? Have you gauged the importance of your tremendous consumption of quack catholicons, of the fortunes derived from their sale, of the spread of modern nervous disorders, of toothless youth and thrice loathsome age among the ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... that once in the twilight undergrowth of a forest of nut-bearing trees a number of little purblind creatures wandered, singing for nuts. On some of these purblind creatures the nuts fell heavy and full, extremely indigestible, and were quickly swallowed; on others they fell light, and contained nothing, because the kernel had already been eaten up above, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... tell whether a girl will make an industrious woman? How is the purblind lover especially, to be able to ascertain whether she, whose smiles and dimples and bewitching lips have half bereft him of his senses; how is he to be able to judge, from any thing that he can see, whether the beloved object will be industrious or lazy? Why, it is very difficult: ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... asks the tribunes in the First Folio version 'what harm can your besom conspectuities [i.e. vision or eyes] glean out of this character?' Theobald replaced the meaningless epithet 'besom' by 'bisson' (i.e. purblind), a recognised Elizabethan word which Shakespeare had already employed in 'Hamlet' ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... conformed to it, and treated those who surrendered not as conquered, but as reclaimed. Lincoln went further. He found a Confederate legislature ready-made to his hand, and promptly permitted it to repair the situation. In thus mingling the gray with the blue he was neither color-blind nor purblind. He knew what he was doing. He desired to blend them, as emblematic of a more perfect Union. Possibly the Confederate legislature suited his ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... bees that careful lore, And frugal ants, whose millions would have end, But they lay up for need a timely store, And travail with the seasons evermore; Whereas Great Mammoth long hath pass'd away, And none but I can tell what hide he wore; Whilst purblind men, the creatures of a day, In riddling ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... as should always be closed against poetry, there is no music in verse which has not in it sufficient fulness and ripeness of meaning, sufficient adequacy of emotion or of thought, to abide the analysis of any other than the purblind scrutiny of prepossession or ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... you are near shore you will probably be near rocks—an unpleasant complication in a hurried dive. There would, probably, very soon be boats out too, seeking with a machine-gun or pompom for a chance at your occasionally emergent conning-tower. In no way can a submarine be more than purblind, it will be, in fact, practically blind. Given a derelict ironclad on a still night within sight of land, a carefully handled submarine might succeed in groping its way to it and destroying it; but then it would be much better ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... to our purblind eyes that so many girls should be married before they are women! The woman comes at length, and finds she is forestalled—that the prostrate and mutilated Dagon of a girl's divinity is all that is left her to do the best with ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... was either in good humour or out of the way. It was her certain belief that my brother William would have returned to his country, and my eldest brother would not have looked so high, if they had had a little less learning." Poor, purblind, well-meaning, obstructive old dame Herschel! what a boon to the world that children like yours are sometimes seized with this incomprehensible fancy ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... true fashionable is peculiar and characteristic. From the toe of his boot to the crown of his hat, there is that unostentatious, undefinable something about him distinctive of his social position. Professional men, every body knows, have an expression common to their profession. A purblind cyclops could never mistake the expression of an Independent preacher, an universal free-black-nigger Baptist minister, or a Jesuit. Every body knows an infantry officer, with his "eyes right" physiognomy, his odious black-stock, and his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... indeed, is admitted by all, both from the structure of the heart and the arrangement and action of its valves. But still they are like persons purblind or groping about in the dark, for they give utterance to various, contradictory, and incoherent sentiments, delivering many things upon conjecture, as ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... over, and no more need of him: I kept that thought. Along the sky-line they held their slow way, toilsome through weakness, the rider with weary swing in the saddle, the horse with long gray neck hanging low to his hoofs, as if picking his path with purblind eyes. When his rider should collapse and fall from his back, not a step further would he take, but stand there till he ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... but can we show that what God has done is wise and right? Unquestionably not. That what he has done may be wise and right, could we see his whole scheme of things, no careful thinker will deny; but to suppose it can be shown that he has done this, is an instance of purblind fanaticism which is most startling in a work on Theism. "The best world, we may be assured, that our fancies can feign, would in reality be far inferior to the world God has made, whatever imperfections we may think we see in it." Are we leading a sermon on the datum ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... power to develop wings under the mortal wrapping. Also they tell us not to trouble ourselves about the fact that we see no Psyche-imago detach itself from the broken cocoon: this lack of visual evidence signifies nothing, because we have only the purblind vision of grubs. Our eyes are but half- evolved. Do not whole scales of colors invisibly exist above and below the limits of our retinal sensibility? Even so the butterfly-man exists,—although, as a matter of course, we ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... woman, since the world began, more cast down from her high estate. Not a shred of magnificence remained. She saw herself as the most useless, vaporing and purblind of mortals. She had gone forth from the despised Nunsmere, where nothing ever happened, to travel the world over in search of realities, and had returned to find that Nunsmere had all the time been the center of the realities that most deeply concerned her life. While she had been talking others ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... of this terrific Truth! Another of the many shapes in which it started up about him, out of vacancy. This man, of all men in the world, a spy upon him; this man, changing his identity; casting off his shrinking, purblind, unobservant character, and springing up into a watchful enemy! The dead man might have come out of his grave, and not confounded and ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... Purblind that she had been. What claim had any man, seeing what the lives of men are, to this pitiful sacrifice of reticence, this rending of the veil of merciful, wise secrecy from an innocent young head? None. Not ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... from the ark, rather than an accurate explanation of the actual causes of the deluge. Now, it is certainly true, that the Bible does describe things as they appear to men. It is, however, beginning to be discovered, that these popular appearances are closely connected with philosophical reality. Our purblind astronomy and prattling geology may be as inadequate to expound the mysteries of the Bible philosophy as was the incoherent science of Strabo and Ptolemy. The experience of another planet, now transacting before our eyes, admonishes us not to limit the resources of Omnipotence by our narrow experience, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... is ophthalmia of intellect, affecting the higher classes. Monarchs, stone-blind, have tumbled headlong from their thrones, and princes have been conducted by their subjects out of their principalities. The aristocracy are purblind, and cannot distinctly decipher the "signs of the times." The hierarchy cannot discover why people would have religion at a reduced price: in fact, they are all blind, and will not perceive that an enormous mass, in the shape of public opinion, hangs ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... We are all purblind, but some are blinder than others who use the various means available for sharpening their eyesight. As an onlooker it seems to me safe to say that the lenses recommended by both the "radicals" and their vivid opponents rather tend to increase ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... is, is right. Though purblind man Sees but a part o' the chain, the nearest link: His eyes not carrying to the equal ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... half plunged into the back of her hut, the Epeira certainly cannot see her web. Even if she had good sight, instead of being purblind, her position could not possibly allow her to keep the prey in view. Does she give up hunting during this period, of bright sunlight? ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... and too much strength would make us drunk, and over-weight our feeble reason till it fell and we were drowned in the depths of our own vanity. For what is the first result of man's increased knowledge interpreted from Nature's book by the persistent effort of his purblind observation? It is not but too often to make him question the existence of his Maker, or indeed of any intelligent purpose beyond his own? The truth is veiled, because we could no more look upon her glory than we can upon ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... metaphysical, mystical, and esoteric. For, as to the last—it denoted that the task of the spectacles was over; that, when a philosopher has made up his mind to marry, it is better henceforth to be short-sighted—nay, even somewhat purblind—than to be always scrutinizing the domestic felicity to which he is about to resign himself, through a pair of cold, unillusory barnacles. And for the things beyond the hearth, if he cannot see without spectacles, is he not ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... God knows that we have enough. And I suppose that these purblind sheep do have some occult weight that is salutary. They enable a leader to be a leader, and even in that way they are useful. We shall ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... Let them not be ashamed to hear what any man might have to preach to them, unless he preached false doctrine; in which case, let the bishop silence him. So spoke our friend; vainly; for human ends must be attained by human means. But the dean saw a ray of hope out of those purblind old eyes of his. Yes, let them tell the bishop how distasteful to them was this Mr. Slope: a new bishop just come to his seat could not wish to insult his clergy while the gloss was yet ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... And wrought by hand, and fixed with binding chalk, Lest weeds arise, or dust a passage win Splitting the surface, then a thousand plagues Make sport of it: oft builds the tiny mouse Her home, and plants her granary, underground, Or burrow for their bed the purblind moles, Or toad is found in hollows, and all the swarm Of earth's unsightly creatures; or a huge Corn-heap the weevil plunders, and the ant, Fearful of coming age and penury. Mark too, what time the walnut in the woods With ample bloom shall clothe her, and bow down Her odorous branches, ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... passion" will never come to him again. He feels that it has not heightened him in his own regard. His love may have been smooth or it may have been swallowed in the quicksands of adversity—the difference is small. It is not creditable to the human brain to be so hoodwinked and purblind as Cupid makes his ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... of sharks received me. They could not be counted for multitude. The terrible requiem of the storm—the cannibal white shark—welcomed me with open jaws; the blue shark flung up his caudal for joy; the fox-shark lashed the sea; the northern shark glared through his purblind orbs; the hammer-head dilated his yellow irides; the purple dog-fish made a low purring huzza; and the spotted eyes of the monk-fish glistened with satisfaction. The hound-shark, the basking-shark, and the port-beagle were not less loyal; and these, the most perfectly organized of my ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... hast on foot the purblind hare, Mark the poor wretch; to overshoot his troubles, How he outruns the wind, and with what care, He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles; The many musits through the which he goes Are like a labyrinth ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... romantic as to make good to a detected robber. Moreover, he lets this Silver Phil go onharmed when by every roole his skelp is forfeit. It turns out good for the camp, however, as this yere experience proves so depressin' to Silver Phil he removes his blankets to Red Dog. Thar among them purblind tarrapins, its inhabitants, it's likely he gets prosperous an' ondetected action on that little old ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... whose curious glance delights to trace What Heaven and Nature join'd to frame most rare; Here view mine eyes' bright sun—a sight so fair, That purblind worlds, like me, enamour'd gaze. But speed thy step; for Death with rapid pace Pursues the best, nor makes the bad his care: Call'd to the skies through yon blue fields of air, On buoyant plume the mortal grace obeys. Then haste, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... without ever giving a thought to the motive of the canon's extreme circumspection in his relations to Mademoiselle Gamard. When he came himself to live with that saintly woman he was in the condition of a lover on the point of being made happy. Even if he had not been by nature purblind of intellect, his eyes were too dazzled by his new happiness to allow him to judge of the landlady, or to reflect on the limits which he ought to impose on their daily intercourse. Mademoiselle Gamard, seen from afar and through the prism of those material felicities which the vicar dreamed ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... law. Now I lay down the judgeship he lent me. Each faculty tasked To perceive him, has gained an abyss, where a dewdrop was asked. Have I knowledge? confounded it shrivels at Wisdom laid bare. Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the Infinite Care! Do I task any faculty highest, to image success? I but open my eyes,—and perfection, no more and no less, In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... this sick and therefore weak man, comes a Docker purblind with cinturies of Cant, Pricidint, Blood, and Goose Greece; imagines him a fiery pervalid, though the common sense of mankind through its interpreter common language, pronounces him an 'invalid,' gashes him with a lancet, spills out the great liquid material of all repair by the gallon, and fells ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade |
