"Ugliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... banks of jungle which seemed to fence it in on all sides. The ill-kept garden, with the tennis-ground, that never got beyond the stage of being dug up, and the rank grass behind the bamboo fence, were flooded with the soft light, every tattered detail of its ugliness showing as clearly as though it was noon. The night was very still, and the soft, scented air blew coolly round ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... collected works, Vol. IV., pp. 187 and 198), Schopenhauer explains politeness as a conventional and systematic attempt to mask the egoism of human nature in the small affairs of life,—an egoism so repulsive that some such device is necessary for the purpose of concealing its ugliness. The relation which politeness bears to the true love of one's neighbor is analogous to that existing between justice as an affair of legality, and justice as the ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... direction. He felt his way through the lilacs, along the boxwood hedge, up to the south wing of the Big House, where Miss Nellie d'Arnault practised the piano every morning. This angered his mother more than anything else he could have done; she was so ashamed of his ugliness that she couldn't bear to have white folks see him. Whenever she caught him slipping away from the cabin, she whipped him unmercifully, and told him what dreadful things old Mr. d'Arnault would do to him if he ever found him near the Big House. But the next time Samson ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... of riches, and the power of gratifying any improper appetites as they may arise. But by knowledge we shall be able to discover the beauty of things, so that their opposites, or the things prohibited, will cease to charm us. By knowledge we shall be able to discern the ugliness of the things prohibited, so that we shall be enabled to loathe them, if they should come into our way. And thus an education, conducted upon the principles of knowledge, may operate to ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... appear like a sort of repetition of what we have before said, to insist here upon the nature of UGLINESS; as I imagine it to be in all respects the opposite to those qualities which we have laid down for the constituents of beauty. But though ugliness be the opposite to beauty, it is not the opposite to proportion and ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... value is positive, it is the sense of the presence of something good, or (in the case of ugliness) of its absence. It is never the perception of a positive evil, it is never a negative value. That we are endowed with the sense of beauty is a pure gain which brings no evil with it. When the ugly ceases to be amusing or merely uninteresting and ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... best. Imagine the dull green of the tangled thickets, the ragged clumps of reeds and water-grasses, the sombre and silent flow of the fulvous water sliding and curling down out of the jungle, and the implacable fervour of the pallid, searching sunlight heightening every touch of ugliness and desolation, and you will understand why the Hebrew poets sang no praise of the Jordan, and why Naaman the Syrian thought scorn of it when he remembered the lovely and fruitful ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... event of my stay has been a peasants' ball on the lawn of the chateau with the best bagpipers of the place. The people of this part of the country present a remarkable type of gentleness and good nature; ugliness is rare here, though beauty is not often seen, but there is not that kind of fever which is observable in the peasants of the environs of Paris. All the women have the appearance of those sweet faces ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... in the way, to be sure, but even his ugly black head seemed to lose some of its ugliness and ferocity when Lilian laid her pretty hand ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... are the three disasters—the most terrible of all to which man is exposed—that habitually strike him before birth: I refer to absolute poverty, disease (especially in the shocking forms of physiological degradation and incurable infirmities, of repulsive ugliness and deformity), and intellectual weakness. These are the three great priestesses of unrighteousness that lie in wait for innocence and brand it, on the threshold of life. And yet, mysterious as their method of choice may appear, the triple source ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the fringed ends of which drooped upon his left shoulder. But it was the fellow's countenance that riveted my attention despite myself; it was of itself ugly enough to have commanded attention anywhere, but to its natural ugliness there was added the further repulsiveness of expression that bespoke a character notable alike for low, unscrupulous cunning and the most ferocious cruelty. But for the fact that he had been encountered upon ground whereon neither Morillo nor any of his gang would have dared to show ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... prevailing local style of architecture and from the stately colonial type dear to the heart of every Virginian. The building was long and low, with sloping roofs of flat French tiles. A broad veranda bordered it on three sides. The symmetry of the whole was saved from ugliness by a large central gable the overhanging porch of which cast a deep and friendly shadow over the great front door and over the wide flights of steps that led down to the ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... ominous. And yet the man himself was so attractive—tall, stalwart, and well-looking—no feature of his face or limb of his athletic form recalling the gross tyrant who concealed worse than Caligula's ugliness from sight in secret chambers—that I shook this preconception from my mind. As it turned out, Filippo Visconti had nothing in common with his infamous namesake but the name. On a long and trying journey, he showed neither ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... {Compressed regularity {Straight, square, 1715 { giving way in { grooved and very Key-note { reaction to a { squat cabriole The Grand { ponderous ugliness. { ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... abandoned characters. At night proctors patrolled the street and dogged your steps if you tried to go into any haunt where the presence of vice was suspected. By day the females who were admitted within the college walls were selected mainly on the score of age and ugliness. It is hard to see what more can be done for any young man than this. For the last four or five months you have been a clergyman, and if a single impure thought had still remained within your mind, ordination should have removed it: nevertheless, not only does it appear ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... wisdom of Comte was insufficient, the folly of Comte was wisdom. In an age of dusty modernity, when beauty was thought of as something barbaric and ugliness as something sensible, he alone saw that men must always have the sacredness of mummery. He saw that while the brutes have all the useful things, the things that are truly human are the useless ones. He saw the ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... search for perfection. He has but a few workmen, and he gives them plenty of time. The place makes a little vignette, leaves an impression, - the quiet white house in its garden on the road by the wide, clear river, without the smoke, the bustle, the ugliness, of so much of our modern industry. It ought to gratify ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... this house, and straightway an old woman of extraordinary ugliness stuck her head out of the little door. Among the Wallachians one meets with the comeliest young women and the ugliest old hags. Knock at any door, and it is sure to be opened by one of ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... he planted only a few of this variety, the soft, gold-hearted lavender. See what increase." The youth plunged supple fingers into the balmy-scented loam, among the swelling tuber forms. "A beautiful kind of ugliness," he mused. "I remember I used to think——" The young gardener, as if he felt that the eyes fixed upon him were grown suddenly too eager, broke ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... during the reign of David or Solomon, synchronous with the Persian Kay Kaus and Kay Khusrau, also Pythagoras the Greek (!) His physique is alluded to in the saying, "Thou resemblest Lokman (in black ugliness) but not in wisdom" (Ibn Khallikan i. 145). This negro or negroid, after a godly and edifying life, left a volume of "Amsal," proverbs and exempla (not fables or apologues); and Easterns still say, "One should not pretend to teach Lokman"—in Persian, "Hikmat ba Lokman ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... third class then belonged such things as life and death, health and sickness, pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, strength and weakness, honour and dishonour, wealth and poverty, victory and defeat, ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... five eyes; and though the subject of poverty is too serious to joke on, the withered and stunted appearance of the country people exactly corresponded to that of these dry pollards. I trust that we were in some degree deceived by their natural ugliness, and that hard labour and scanty profits are not the only reasons which render their tout ensemble such a contrast to the healthy robust looks of the Normans and Picards, whose very horses show the effects of their abundant ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... "horror-world" with that of Coleridge in "The Ancient Mariner." "What 'The Ancient Mariner' is in the poetry of the mysterious terrors and splendors of the sea, that 'Childe Roland' is in the poetry of bodeful horror, of haunted desolation, of waste and plague, ragged distortion, and rotting ugliness in landscape. The Childe, like the Mariner, advances through an atmosphere and scenery ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... say that, when I'm crossed in anything my mind's made up to, I can be tarnation ugly. I just told you I don't want the captain disturbed. Do you know, Sam Truax, I feel a queer notion coming over me? I've an idea that that feeling is just plain ugliness coming to life!" ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies • Victor G. Durham
... quality as to make his rendition more expressive. And yet, in spite of this difficulty, there are many passages in both choral and orchestral music in which the essential significance depends absolutely upon beauty or ugliness or plaintiveness or boldness of tone; and especially in choral music is it possible for the conductor to induce his chorus to bring out many more such effects than is usually done. A positively ugly and raspy vocal tone may convey a certain dramatic effect ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... little too great for one to note personal and individual beauty; but since I have heard that Boston is famous for its ugly women, perhaps that was an advantage, as diminishing likewise individual ugliness. If no one was strikingly handsome, no one was strikingly plain. And though you could not mark the delicacies of faces, you could have the full effect of costume,—rich, majestic, floating, gossamery, impalpable. Everything was ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... inexperienced hands. The mother's bonnet alone would have been enough to have condemned the whole party on any of the world's thoroughfares. I remembered afterward, with shame, that I myself had smiled at the first sight of its antiquated ugliness; but her face was one which it gave you a sense of rest to look upon,—it was so earnest, tender, true, and strong. It had little comeliness of shape or color in it, it was thin, and pale; she was not young; she had worked hard; she had evidently been much ill; but I have seen few faces ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... suggestion and indecency it may be urged we shall end by driving all these things underground. Youth comes to adult life now between two dangers, vice, which has always threatened it, and morbid virtue, which would turn the very heart of life to ugliness and shame. How are we, or to come closer to the point, how is the average juryman going to distinguish between these three things; between advisable knowledge and corruptingly presented knowledge, and unnecessary and undesirable knowledge? In practice, under the laws I have sketched, it is quite ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... the city's worst sections and near the river-front there stood an old ramshackle building. Why it had not been condemned by the building inspectors was a mystery. But it stood in all its squalid ugliness. The door and the windows were locked and shuttered. One could see at a glance that the building ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... the sun to dry, Luther recommended as the best cure for all manner of "pestilent humors"). At any rate, the difference between their aspect and that of the sail-boat is that of a beetle and a butterfly. The acme of ugliness is reached in the freight ferry-boats, floating fragments of railroad, whose cars look like the joints ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... in her cabinet with the Duke de Chartres, who had been complaining of the ugliness and stupidity of his affianced bride. Louvois was announced, and the duchess, in her impetuous way, hurried to the door and met him—not by way of welcoming ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... possess not so much an undue importance, but when they affect a boy as a mould through which the plastic experience of his youth is passed and whence it emerges to harden slowly to the ultimate form of the individual. In the case of Mark there was the revulsion from the arid ugliness of Haverton House and the ambition to make up for those years of beauty withheld, both of which urged him on to take the utmost advantage of this opportunity to expose the blank surface of those years to the fine etching of the present. Miriam ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... terror in all beholders. Was it to consist of horse or of foot? and of how many men? and so forth. The mystery was resolved at the time and place appointed. A camel—a picked sample, seemingly, for general ugliness and the vicious way it writhed its mouth—shambled up to my tent. Its rider, who in all specialties of repulsiveness tallied with the beast to a hair, impaled a letter on the tip of his spear and handed it down. It was from the Resident at Lucknow. In its unpromising bearer I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... going to study, he went to gamble with other ne'er-do-weels, to whom he talked loosely, and whom he taught to be bad-hearted as himself. He made love to every woman, and despite his ugliness, he was not unsuccessful. For they are equally fortunate who are very handsome or very ugly, in so far as they are both remarkable and remarked. But the latter bear away the palm. Beautiful men begin well ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... her long head; the hinder horn was not more than half a foot long, while the front horn, which inclined forward, was nearly four feet in length. She carried her strange, wrinkled head low down to the ground. In spite of her ugliness she seemed to be ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... buccaneering mariners of Elizabethan Devon. I sat down on a chair at the foot of an old elm with a poetic hollow, prosaically filled by a utilitarian plate of galvanised iron. Two ancient ladies were seated on the other side already—very grand-looking dames, with the haughty and exclusive ugliness of the English aristocracy in its later stages. For frank hideousness, commend me to the noble dowager. They were talking confidentially as I sat down; the trifling episode of my approach did not suffice to stem the ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... matter with me? Had I grown in stature or developed a ferocious ugliness? No; I now was a famous swordsman. That was all. I now was expected to try to grab the maids and kiss them wantonly. I now was expected to clout the grooms on their ears if they so much as showed themselves in my sight. In fact, I was now a great ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... coward, nor a fool; he was only unintellectual and brutally selfish. There were ladies in his company who received English titles, and offended one part of the public by their morals and the remainder by their ugliness. One was created Duchess of Kendal, and Walpole said of her that she was Queen of England if ever there was one. But she sold her influence for money, amounting sometimes to L10,000, and Walpole at last complained to his master. The king laughed in his face, and ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... pride in this mournful sameness of attire,—delight in wearing a hat like every other man's hat, are content that it should be a perfected miracle of ugliness, that it should be hot, that it should be heavy, that it should be disfiguring, if only they can make sure of seeing fifty, or a hundred and fifty, other hats exactly like it on their way downtown. So absolute is this uniformity that the late Marquess of Ailesbury bore all ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... which can make its own the motives and desires of other men. Self-interest, intolerance and greed he understood as little as common men understand heroism and devotion. He had no mean powers of observation. He saw the world as it was, and perhaps he rather exaggerated than minimised its ugliness. But it never struck him that its follies and crimes were human failings and the outcome of anything that is natural in the species. The doctrines of perfectibility and universal benevolence clothed themselves for him in the Godwinian phraseology, ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... that way should have a gallant bravery in its look; if its aspect be mean, its assertive position but directs the eye to its infirmities. There is something pathetic about a tall, cold, barn-like house set high upon a brae; it cannot hide its naked shame; it thrusts its ugliness dumbly on your notice, a manifest blotch upon the world, a place for the winds to whistle round. But Gourlay's house was worthy its commanding station. A little dour and blunt in the outlines like Gourlay himself, it drew and satisfied your eye ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... reading, the radiance of a green droplight falling over the litter of papers and across his shoulder to the page of his book. The room, at the back of the house, had been chosen as much for its quiet as its low rent. A few of his own possessions relieved the ugliness of its mean furnishings, and it had acquired from his occupancy a lived-in, comfortable look. Two windows at the back framing the night sky were open, and the soft April air flowed in upon an atmosphere, smoke-thickened ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... seducer: 'tis shameful in such a lovely woman to have understanding too; yet even this I could forgive, had she not that enchanting softness in her manner, which steals upon the soul, and would almost make ugliness itself charm; were she but vain, one had some chance, but she will take upon her to have no consciousness, at least no apparent consciousness, of her perfections, which is really intolerable. I told her so last night, when she put on such a malicious smile—I believe the ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... police magistrates and justices of the peace, than to keep anything wrapped within his own bosom. The charm of such outspoken truth does not reconcile itself at once to the untrained mind; but the fact of the loveliness does gradually creep in, and the hideous ugliness of the other venture. On the minds of those men of Kerrycullion something of the ugliness and something of the loveliness must have made itself apparent. And when this had been done it was not probable that ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... women, who for some reason did not mingle with the others of the village, peered down at us curiously, some holding up their sarongs to cover all but the eyes, and some frankly interested, with uncovered faces; while still other creatures, of nightmare ugliness, their skins plastered with a white flour paste, their eyebrows shaved, and their teeth newly blackened and filed into shape, incurred the displeasure of their respective lords and masters by appearing at the window even for a few moments at a time, ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... Paris, Vienna, New York, and Madrid. Some of the portraits, painted without a suspicion of flattery, show the absurd head-dress, the false hair, and the extraordinary crinoline that were worn at the time, in all their ugliness, and force us to see how great was the distance lying between the royal house and any sense of beauty. Velazquez was not perhaps very happy with this work, because Nature had endowed Philip's wife with a face that ...
— Velazquez • S. L. Bensusan
... to the door of the house and dismounted, after he had with some difficulty found a man to hold their horses. From the heavy brick porch they looked across the superb river to the raw and incoherent ugliness of the city, idealised into dreamy beauty by the atmosphere, and the soft background of purple hills behind. Opposite them, with its crude "thus saith the law" stamped on white dome and fortress-like ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... I call downright Radical nonsense," said Mrs. Low, nodding her head energetically. "Portrait indeed! Why should we want to have a portrait of ignorance and ugliness? What we all want is to ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... found time to good-naturedly call Josh when any particular prize of this kind was found, and the Temples had not been there long before, flapping, gasping, and staring, a very monster of ugliness was taken out in a landing-net, along with a ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... of brutality and resolute ugliness that one finds here and there in Brooke's work is not wholly amiss nor unintelligible. Like all young men of quick blood he seized gaily upon the earthy basis of our humanity and found in it food for purging laughter. ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... like them!' he said, turning away. 'They are as ugliness to me! I don't feel a single touch of kin with or interest in any one ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... deliberately how much finer a man he was than I, how much stronger his body, that he could do anything with me if he liked. He asked me, very politely, whether I'd mind blowing out the candle and I did it at once. He watched me as I walked across the floor and I felt ashamed of my thinness and my ugliness and I know that he knew that I was ashamed. After the light was blown out I heard him settle into his bed with a great heavy plop. I couldn't sleep for a long time, and at every movement that he made I felt as though he were laughing at me. And yet with all this I had also ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... "Mickey Mouse Club" theme to express their opinion of the beast. 2. A comparative for any very {rude} software that a hacker is expected to use. "That's as bad as JCL." As with {COBOL}, JCL is often used as an archetype of ugliness even by those who haven't experienced it. See ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... ourselves and say, is only conspicuous—in its feebler examples. But there is always something that it does not give, and some of us think that there are not a few things which it cannot give. There is nothing, not even ugliness itself, which Romance cannot give, though there its form of generosity comes in, and the ugly in simple ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... repeated the voice; and now I saw that it was the dealer's. There was in his countenance the same ugliness that his ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... with timidity; ingenuity, frequently misdirected; ugliness, the result of a false ideal of beauty—these in general characterize the architecture of our immediate past; an architecture "without ancestry or hope of posterity," an architecture devoid of coherence or conviction; willing to lie, willing to steal. What impression such a city as Chicago ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... extinguisher off the wall of the office and squirted its contents full in the bear's face. The animal gave one roar of dismay and a mighty struggle that burst the door open and threw Noddy off his feet. He set up a yell of fright. But he need not have been afraid. The ugliness had all gone out of the bear, and besides being half choked he was temporarily blinded by the ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Partingtons can sweep back with their little mops of beneficence and philanthropy the Atlantic Ocean of sin, suffering, and despair which floods in to the shores of our industrialism—at high tide nearly swamping its prosperity, and at low tide leaving all its ugliness, squalor, and despairing hopelessness bare to the eye ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... young artist. Everyone in Rome knew him, laughing at his pictures on the rare occasions when he painted, and appreciated his accommodating nature that to some extent dignified his parasite's existence. Short, rotund, bald-headed, with projecting ears and the ugliness of a good-natured, merry satyr, Signor Cotoner, when summer came, always found refuge in the castle of some cardinal in the Roman Campagna. During the winter he was a familiar sight in the Corso, wrapped in his greenish mackintosh, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... ugliness you ever saw or heard of, Sir Norman Kingsley, do tell me if there ever was one of them half so repulsive or disgusting as ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... moss had grown upon one of those weather-beaten boulders. The sea air had stained them, and the grey evening mists had rotted them, until their surface was honeycombed with indentations, but neither had softened or toned down their fierce ugliness. Even in the bright sunlight such a country as this must still have been a country of desolation, and a light heart must sometimes have lost its gaiety and felt oppressed. To me, as I hurried along, with the cold evening ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... because this particular art in the present crisis of human nature on this planet is the desperate, the almost reckless need of a world that the other nations of the world with all their dislike of us and their superiorities to us, with all our ugliness and heaviness and our galumphing in the arts, have been compelled in this huge, modern thicket of machines and crowds to give ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... reckoned this as an advantage, though in a very different sense from that in which we are speaking. It was as a patriot, and not as an artist, that he congratulated himself on his American origin. There is a humorous struggle between his sense of the rawness and ugliness of his native land and the dogged patriotism befitting a descendant of the genuine New England Puritans. Hawthorne the novelist writhes at the discords which torture his delicate sensibilities at every step; but instantly Hawthorne the Yankee protests ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... was still holding his cap on his knees even after prayers were over. It was one of those head-gears of composite order, in which we can find traces of the bearskin, shako, billycock hat, sealskin cap, and cotton night-cap; one of those poor things, in fine, whose dumb ugliness has depths of expression, like an imbecile's face. Oval, stiffened with whalebone, it began with three round knobs; then came in succession lozenges of velvet and rabbit-skin separated by a red band; after that a sort ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... spiritual—perfection. But those who look not inwards, but upwards; not at themselves, but at Christ and all spiritual perfection—they become more and more painfully aware of their own imperfections. The beauty of Christ's character shows them the ugliness of their own. His purity shows them their own foulness. His love their own hardness. His wisdom their own folly. His strength their own weakness. The higher their standard rises, the lower falls their estimate of themselves; till, in utter humiliation and self-distrust, they seek comfort ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... bucks, squaws, and papooses. Their curiosity. Pride of an Indian on his ability to repeat one line of a song. Indian women. Extreme beauty of their limbs; slender ankles and statuesque feet; haggardness of expression and ugliness of features. Girl of sixteen, a "wildwood Cleopatra," an exception to the general hideousness. The California Indian not the Indian of the Leatherstocking tales. A stop at the Buckeye Rancho. Start for Pleasant Valley Rancho. The trail again lost. Camping out for the night. ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... of ours, which has been so liberally abused for its ugliness, is not without a certain charm when worn by a handsome man. A tall man looks taller in the perfect black. The broad expanse of shirt-front, with its delicate embroidery, not obtrusively splendid, but minutely elaborate ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... But the girl—heavens, madame, she is of an ugliness! And I cannot teach ugly people. She has the face of ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... this point. By atmospheric conditions we mean the half-truths and rumors and expressions of feeling that were in the air. A sergeant of the company questioned carefully by the writer states positively that the expressions of ugliness were confined to comparatively few members of the company. The feeling seemed to spread through the company that morning that some of the men were going ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... appearing to notice the uneasiness of his favourite, 'I am that diver. Amid this dark ocean of humanity, wherein confusedly move so many defective or misshapen beings, so many forms incomplete or degraded, so many types of bestial ugliness, wretched outlines of nature's experimental essays, I have found beauty, pure, radiant, without spot, without flaw, the ideal made real, the dream accomplished, a form which no painter or sculptor has ever been able to translate upon canvas or ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... tartan night-gown which had covered his singularly grim and ghastly face, replied to his host's courtesy; "Landlord, I think I could eat a morsel of a poor man." Boniface, surprised alike at the extreme ugliness of Lord B.'s countenance, and the nature of the proposal, retreated from the room, and tumbled down stairs precipitately; having no doubt that this barbaric chief, when at home, was in the habit of eating ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... you have only a brain! You cannot love, you only think! Nor have you any need of love, but only of power! Applause is your vital breath, your native air! To hear your name and praise on every tongue—that is your highest ambition! Such a woman should be a gorgon of ugliness that men might not waste their hearts' wealth upon her!" exclaimed Thurston, bitterly, gazing with murky eyes, that smoldered with suppressed passion, upon ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... must not omit to mention that at the time when her aunt was Abbess, the Prior, thinking that his ugliness was the cause of her refusal, had caused Sister Marie to be tempted by a handsome young monk, in the hope that if she yielded to this man through love, he himself might afterwards obtain her through fear. The young monk aforesaid spoke to her in a garden with gestures too shameful ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... see the point, I must give you a little history of Siegmund Stein. Any one who has seen him never forgets him. He is one of the most hideous men in New York, but it's not at all the common sort of ugliness that comes from over-eating and automobiles. He isn't one of the fat horrors. He has one of those rigid, horselike faces that never tell anything; a long nose, flattened as if it had been tied down; ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... affectation only, the misfortunes and calamities of life, or the imperfections of nature, may become the objects of ridicule. Surely he hath a very ill-framed mind who can look on ugliness, infirmity, or poverty, as ridiculous in themselves: nor do I believe any man living, who meets a dirty fellow riding through the streets in a cart, is struck with an idea of the Ridiculous from it; but if he should see the same figure ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... prerogative of those called the highest and of those called the lowest. It is the women of all the grades between these two extremes who have dared not to be themselves, who ape the manners, echo the catchwords, and garb themselves in the elaborate ugliness, devised for ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... more ugliness than anything else," he said, "that made me come back here to live, where everybody knows I 've been in jail and is ...
— The Village Convict - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... Court to make any attempt to think of their meaning. She could only say to herself that she was to go quite away from Albert Street for a whole month—away from the noise and worry, and needlework and ugliness, to a place where birds sang, and flowers bloomed, and one might be idle all the ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... Brooding over these questions, he observed two men hard by in the old cloister garden, one of lofty stature, nearer forty than fifty years of age, the other younger and shorter, with a pale face redeemed from ugliness by its intellectual brow. Egremont ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... make a bow; to hold a fork daintily; to offer little courtesies, and to receive a smiling approbation. They would rather do things prettily than not. They are not "contrary," exceptional cases of hereditary ugliness aside. They are apt pupils, whether their tutor be a philosopher or a fool. And if a faulty example be a child's most constant and influential teacher, what wonder that the lessons, well-learned, are put in practice? And just then, ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... to a zone of change, over one of the ridges, a region where rocks and ugliness gave way to a growth of brush and stunted trees. These were the outposts, ragged, dwarfed, and warped, ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... nature and outward show may be. There is a beauty common to us all, neither greater nor less in any of us, which these childish hearts discover. Looking upon us, they are blind or of transcendent vision, as you will: the same in issue—so what matter?—since they find no ugliness anywhere. 'Tis the way, it may be, that God looks upon His world: either in the blindness of love forgiving us or in His greater wisdom knowing that the sins of men do serve His purpose and are like virtue in ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... New York are not numerous. Some of them are handsome, and others are models of ugliness. We shall mention here only those which are not described elsewhere ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... away, but wherever I went she dodged my steps and would not let me out of her sight for a minute. I did my best in every way to escape, but it was no go; in fact, young gentlemen, I found myself the slave of this monster of fat and ugliness, for I am sorry to say that I cannot speak in more flattering terms of the fair Oilyblubbina. Seeing that for the present it was hopeless to attempt to escape, I pretended to be reconciled to my lot, and offering my arm in the politest way possible, walked quietly by ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... establishment,—not a bad sort of woman,—who kept the dresses, nursed the sick, revered Rugge, told fortunes on a pack of cards which she always kept in her pocket, and acted occasionally in parts where age was no drawback and ugliness desirable,—such as a witch, or duenna, or whatever in the dialogue was poetically called "Hag." Indeed, Hag was the name she usually took from Rugge; that which she bore from her defunct husband was Gormerick. This lady, as she braided the garland, was also bent on ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Martha and her maid had been summoned to sudden departure, and had rummaged recklessly for their most cherished possessions. In the principal bedroom, on the best bed, stood Beauty in her native ugliness—the only living thing left to do the honours ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... green fields, hedges, and other monotonous features of an ordinary English landscape. There were little factory villages, too, or larger towns, with their tall chimneys, and their pennons of black smoke, their ugliness of brick-work, and their heaps of refuse matter from the furnace, which seems to be the only kind of stuff which Nature cannot take back to herself and resolve into the elements, when man has thrown it aside. These hillocks of waste and effete mineral ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... (says Bulwer, in his Zanoni,) that most of the principal actors of the French Revolution were singularly hideous in appearance—from the colossal ugliness of Mirabeau and Danton, or the villanous ferocity in the countenances of David and Simon, to the filthy squalor of Marat, and the sinister and bilious meanness of the Dictator's features. But Robespierre, who was said to resemble a cat, and ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... Havre the country is well wooded, and much applied to the cultivation of flax, which flourishes in this neighborhood, and has given rise to considerable linen manufactories. The trees look well in masses, but individually they are trimmed into ugliness. Near Havre the road goes through Montivilliers, and, still ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... age, who had long, brilliantly fair hair, eyes of an unnatural size, and bare feet. The monstrous improbabilities of the setting did not shock him. His keen, childish eyes did not perceive the grotesque ugliness of the actors, large and fleshy, and the deformed chorus of all sizes in two lines, nor the pointlessness of their gestures, nor their faces bloated by their shrieks, nor the full wigs, nor the high heels of the tenor, nor the make-up of his lady-love, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... signify "allness," we may as well admit first as last that there is no way of escape from the difficulties which these queries suggest. In that case it is not for us to pick and choose—to say that God is the beauty of the beautiful, but not the ugliness of the ugly; the compassion of the compassionate, but not the cruelty of the cruel: if He is all, He is both, and for that very reason is neither. That is the real inwardness of a conception of the Deity which represents Him, with Omar ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... ugly than mine are not perhaps to be found on the whole globe. The King has often told me so, and has made me laugh at it heartily; for, not being able to flatter even myself that I possessed any one thing which could be called pretty, I resolved to be the first to laugh at my own ugliness; this has succeeded as well as I could have wished, and I must confess that I have seldom been at a loss for something to laugh at. I am naturally somewhat melancholy; when anything happens to afflict me, my left side swells up as if it were filled with water. I am not good at lying in ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... in spite of all the ugliness of his life, his brother Nikolay, in his soul, in the very depths of his soul, was no more in the wrong than the people who despised him. He was not to blame for having been born with his unbridled temperament and his somehow limited intelligence. But he had ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... had nothing to say. I had neither fear nor hope, nor even a feeling of curiosity; I was neither cheerful nor sad. The only thing which grated upon me was the face of the mistress of the house. Although I had not the faintest idea either of beauty or of ugliness, her face, her countenance, her tone of voice, her language, everything in that woman was repulsive to me. Her masculine features repelled me every time I lifted my eyes towards her face to listen to what she said to me. She was tall and coarse like a trooper; her ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... lead the child to love righteousness, to prefer right doing to wrong doing; to make right doing a permanent desire. Therefore, in all the procedures about to be suggested, an effort is made to convince the child of the ugliness ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... that I have often thought it to be a favor to the heathen, that they are far off and out of sight; for if they were near and directly around many professed Christians, with all their defilement and ugliness in full view, much of the apparent sympathy for them which now exists, would be turned into contempt and cold neglect. But if such had been the superficial and ill-founded character of Christ's compassion, ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... jest to go any further, or rather of her want of that spirit so necessary to ensure the success of an intrigue. If the three companions of my charmer had had anything attractive about them, I might possibly have persevered and defied misfortune; but in the same measure as beauty cheers my heart, ugliness depresses it. Anticipating the melancholy which I foresaw would result from this disappointment, I went out with the idea of amusing myself, and happening to meet Giustiniani I told him of my misfortune, saying that I should not be sorry to make up for ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... with an instinctive hatred of academic poses, of the atmosphere of the studio, of the hired model, of "literary," or of mere digital cleverness, Cezanne has dropped out of his scheme harmony, melody, beauty—classic, romantic, symbolic, what you will!—and doggedly represented the ugliness of things. But there is a brutal strength, a tang of the soil that is bitter, and also strangely invigorating, after the false, perfumed boudoir art of ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... qualities, and it is doubtful if any one design can surpass in all. Modern type is cleaner-cut than the old, but it may be questioned whether this is a real gain. William Morris held that all types should avoid hair-lines, fussiness, and ugliness. Legibility should have the right of way for most printed matter, especially children's books and newspapers. If the latter desire compactness, they should condense their style, not ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... helped a farmer to put a heavy bag of flour in his wagon. The farmer drove away and a cloud of dust the team stirred up blew down the street. The fronts of the wooden houses were cracking in the hot sun; there was not a tree to relieve the bare ugliness of the place, and the glare was dazzling. Keller at first imagined this was why he could not see the wagon well, but after a few moments he ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... never entered a palanquin, and was content with the plainest fare. But when he was no longer at the head of an army, he laid aside this Spartan temperance for the ostentatious luxury of a Sybarite. Though his person was ungraceful, and though his harsh features were redeemed from vulgar ugliness only by their stern, dauntless, and commanding expression, he was fond of rich and gay clothing, and replenished his wardrobe with absurd profusion. Sir John Malcolm gives us a letter worthy of Sir Matthew Mite, in which Clive orders "two hundred shirts, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... persons—-the bride in a delicate nondescript coloured dress, such as none but a French dressmaker could describe, and covered with transparent lace, like, as Mysie averred, a hedgeback full of pig-nut flowers, the justice of the comparison being lost in the ugliness of the name; and as all Rockquay tried to squeeze into the church to see and admire, the beauty ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... like galley slaves they are, every man of them. It's shameful to a man that's seen how they've been treated by the nigger drivers that stands over them day and night." He was speaking in a loud voice, with the fluency of a man who is carefully prepared. There was none of the bitterness or the ugliness in his manner that had slipped out in his last talk with Bannon, for he knew that a score of laborers were within hearing, and that his words would travel, as if by wire, from mouth to mouth about the building and the grounds ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... was bent, and his limbs were somewhat shrunken, but he did not appear in the least degree decrepit. His eyelids were very red, and his eyes, though dim, had a deep and intent look. Ugly as was the man—or perhaps by virtue of his ugliness—he exercised ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... all the ugliness of life shook Lorraine. She turned on her mother swiftly, scarcely knowing what she ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... voice, "a scoundrel of a howling dervish robbed me at Scutari of all I had for my subsistence, and of my daughter's portion, seven hundred sequins, in a goat's-skin bag!" and then she began to curse. May the dogs of the city howl at her ugliness! How she did curse! She cursed my father and mother—she cursed their graves—flung dirt upon my brother and sisters, and filth upon the whole generation. She gave me up to Jehanum, and to every species of defilement. It was a dreadful ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... framework of his face, as though his Maker had been forced to observe the strictest economy in material. His complexion was brick red over a myriad freckles. His features preserved the irregular ugliness of the child I half remembered, but it was redeemed by light blue candid eyes set in a tight net of humorous lines, and by a large, mobile mouth, which, though it could shut grimly on occasions, yet, ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... down to the tumbler's head and beak, or carry it out to the carrier's head and beak; leaving it as they found it, is not progressing." Ferguson, speaking of fowls, says, "their peculiarities, whatever they may be, must necessarily be fully developed: a little peculiarity forms nought but ugliness, seeing it violates the existing laws of symmetry." So Mr. Brent, in discussing the merits of the sub-varieties of the Belgian canary-bird, remarks, "Fanciers always go to extremes; they do ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... to live is not always or everywhere the way to ugliness, but in some countries, at some dates, it is the sure way. In all countries, and at all dates, extreme finish compassed by hidden means must needs, from the beginning, prepare the abolition of dignity. This is easy to understand, but it is less easy to explain ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... only hand that moved the pawns? Why had he come back to it? He dared not confess the reason. The best he could do was admit to himself he had been mistaken. The rose tints had vanished from his sky and the path he had chosen was disclosed in all its drab ugliness. He had chosen it fatuously. The rose tints had been of his own making. He viciously snapped his mind shut on the thought. For a while he would feverishly clamp his attention to his work, while outside the sky continued serenely blue, and the breeze that drifted through ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... trees that look like cauliflowers. They are the sort of trees one comes upon in old Bibles, spare of foliage, thick and clumsy, bearing blossoms and fruit but no leaves; the symbolical, theological, and devout trees that are almost fantastical on account of their impossible ugliness. A little further, Saint Christopher is carrying Jesus on his shoulders; Saint Antony is in his cell, which is built on a rock; a pig is retiring into its hole and shows only its hind-quarters and its corkscrew tail, while a rabbit is sticking its head out ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert |
