"Sackcloth and ashes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and when out among the people he was always figuratively clothed in sackcloth and ashes. A few extracts from his book may be ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... that day for Sodom, than for that city. 13 Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works had been done in Tyre and Sidon, which were done in you, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. 14 But it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the judgment, than for you. 15 And thou, Capernaum, shalt thou be exalted unto heaven? thou shalt be brought down unto Hades. 16 He that heareth you heareth me; and he that rejecteth you rejecteth ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... the loss of health, or the loss of wealth, or the loss of friends, which forms the heaviest of trials, the deepest ground of soul sadness. We put on the sable attire as emblems of mourning; but if we saw it as a weeping Jesus sees it, there is more real cause for sackcloth and ashes in the heart at enmity with God, and despising His salvation, trampling under foot His Son, and enacting over again the ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... rage, orphans and widows may weep, but the world must not pause in its regular routine of business and of pleasure. This is natural and right. It was not intended that men should walk perpetually in sackcloth and ashes because of the sorrows that surround them. But equally true is it that they were never meant to shut their eyes and ears to those woes, and dance and sing through life heedlessly, as far too many do until some thunderbolt falls on their own hearts, ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... Lord, they are fighting with their neighbors; when at peace with them, worshiping their gods and giving them their daughters in marriage, then the Lord is angry, and vents His wrath on them. Thus, they are continually between two fires; now repenting in sackcloth and ashes, and now, with the help of the Lord, blessed ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Goodwood Elinor was going with a party, Lady Mariamne and a number of the "set." She told her mother, to amuse her, of the new dresses she had got for this important occasion. "Phil says one may go in sackcloth and ashes the remainder of the year, but we must be fine for Goodwood," she said. "I wanted him to believe that I had too many clothes already, but he was inexorable. It is not often, is it, that one's husband is more anxious than one's ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... headlong into another mood. "Oh, well, the end of the world hasn't come if we are frozen out. And perhaps we're not, anyway; the invite may get round to-morrow—who knows? So don't let's order our sackcloth and ashes quite yet awhile. Life is still worth living, and we have got several other ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... entirely new, strange feeling to her. In that simple community; joys and sorrows were not for secrecy. A wedding or a funeral was the affair of every one. Women were expected to weep publicly, and if they wore sackcloth and ashes, to wear it in the sight of every one. Love affairs were discussed without ceremony, and often arranged in full family conclaves. All married strictly within their own rank; not once in a generation did a fisher-girl ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... His heart harshly ticking like a clock, he viewed, as in a vision, the march of the nations, the crash of falling theocracies, of dying dynasties. On a stony platform, vast and crowded, he knelt in sackcloth and ashes; the heavens thundered over the weeping millions of Nineveh; and the Lord of Hosts would not be appeased. Stretching to the clouds were black, basaltic battlements, and above them reared white terraced palaces, as swans that strain their throats to the sky. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... rejected it of his own free will. Upbraiding the wicked cities of Corozain and Bethsaida, our Lord exclaims: "If in Tyre and Sidon had been wrought the miracles that have been wrought in you, they had long ago done penance in sackcloth and ashes."(111) The omniscient God-man here asserts the existence of graces which remained inefficacious in Corozain and Bethsaida, though had they been given to the inhabitants of Tyre and Sidon, they would have proved effective. ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... instant Gail had slipped her arms around her, and had drawn the brown head down on her shoulder, where for a moment the child sobbed heartbrokenly. Then, with a mighty gulp, she swallowed back her grief and explained, "I heard Hope reading about the people who put on ash-cloth and sashes—I mean sackcloth and ashes whenever any one of their family died, so's the angels would let the soul into heaven. No one did that when papa died—and we don't know whether he ever got to heaven or not—but he's a man and could take care of himself, ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... health will not be so firm; there will be a good deal of morbid sorrow over imaginary misdeeds, and none at all over real ones; there will be compensatory church-going, with delightful little monogram-covered prayer-books. But will the flesh be mortified by any real rough sackcloth and ashes? It is hardly to be hoped. Neither Lent, nor religion, nor judgment, nor anything but poverty and absolute impotence, will put a period to the wild pursuit of pleasure that a fashionable season begins. Ill for the next generation, the mothers of which are wrecks before its birth! ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... we could see towers of evergreen, terraces of red and brown, golden steeple-tops, gilded domes minareted with lavender and purple and draped with scarlet banners. It seemed as if the trees were shriving after all the green riot of summer, and making ready for sackcloth and ashes. Some stood trembling, and as if drenched in their own blood. Now and then a head was bare and bent, and naked arms were lifted high, as if to ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... gave its name to the pirate ship "Alabama" now votes for tariffs to exclude the iron, steel, and coal of England. Sheffield is in sackcloth and ashes because Pennsylvania has taken away from her the Russian order for armor plates, and countless millions of British dollars are invested in American factories, giving high wages to tariff-protected American workmen instead of sweaters' wages to the beer-sodden ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... said my master, what sort of an answer you'd have from Pamela. The younger miss said, She never heard of such grave folks in her life, on such an occasion: Why, sir, said she, I hope you'll sing psalms all day, and miss will fast and pray! Such sackcloth and ashes doings, for a wedding, did I never hear of!—She spoke a little spitefully, I thought; and I returned no answer. I shall have enough to do, I reckon, in a while, if I am to answer every one that ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... combined to snap the silken cord, and break the golden bowl. These are the consequences of a persistency in sectional strife and domination, foreseen and foretold by me in the "Southern Monitor," published in Philadelphia; no one regarded the warning. Now hundreds of thousands are weeping in sackcloth and ashes over the untimely end of hundreds of thousands slain in battle! And thousands yet must fall, before the strife ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... and, to her, any separation between those whom God had bound together was shocking and wicked. Lady Susanna was louder and less just. She did not believe that Mary had done anything to merit expulsion from the family; but she did think that her return to it should be accompanied by sackcloth and ashes. Mary had been pert to her, and she was not prone to forgive. Lady Alice had no opinion,—could say nothing about it; but would be happy if, by her services, she could ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... destroyed by the severity of his Southern policy when he became President. There was no gratitude for any so-called leniency of the North, no repentance for the war, no desire for humiliation, for sackcloth and ashes, and no confession of wrong. The insistence of the radicals upon obtaining a confession of depravity only made things much worse. Scarcely a measure of Congress during reconstruction was designed or received in a ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... shock head of foxy hair, his antiquated and neglected garb, his copious jabot - much affected by the clergy of those days - were becoming investitures of the inward man. His temper was inflammatory, sometimes leading to excesses, which I am sure he rued in mental sackcloth and ashes. But visitors at Holkham (unaware of the excellent motives and moral courage which inspired his conduct) were not a little amazed at the austerity with which he obeyed ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... been so kind of jokey and frivolous, all about the good times she was having, and the parties she went to, and the new dresses she got. New dresses! When I read that letter of Anne's, I knew that all the purple and fine linen in the world was just like so much sackcloth and ashes to her as long as Gilbert was sulking out ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... screech and abuse the drink sellers are even less effective than the men of figures; their opponents laugh at them, and their friends grow deaf and apathetic in the storm of whirling words, while cool outsiders think that we should be better employed if we found fault with ourselves and sat in sackcloth and ashes instead of gnashing teeth at tradesmen who obey a human instinct. The publican is considered, among platform folk in the temperance body, as even worse than a criminal, if we take all things seriously that they choose to say, and I have over and over again heard vague ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... only, this and nothing more; he, a British officer, in a mad impulse (I am like him) marries my mother, nobody's daughter, and a ballet dancer, during a run he made to New York city just thirty-five years ago; my sire repents in sackcloth and ashes, dragging us with him; sells out; living by his wits anyhow and anywhere, chiefly at gaming places abroad. At a German suburb once he had left us, my late husband came to our cottage to enquire his road; as he was an American, my mother nearly swallow'd him whole; I did, on seeing his diamonds ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... the perspiration in beads on his forehead, "Thou hast said that the pastors become brutish and have not sought Thee and that they shan't prosper. Help us tonight to labor with this one that he may see his error and repent in sackcloth and ashes." ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... weeds, willow, cypress, crape, deep mourning; sackcloth and ashes; lachrymatory[obs3]; knell &c. 363; deep death song, dirge, coronach[obs3], nenia[obs3], requiem, elegy, epicedium[obs3]; threne[obs3]; monody, threnody; jeremiad, jeremiade|!; ullalulla[obs3]. mourner; grumbler &c. (discontent) 832; Noobe; Heraclitus. V. lament, mourn, deplore, grieve, weep over; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus |
