"Blindness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... around them,—the world of petty aims and transitory pleasures, with which they, filled full of the knowledge of higher and eternal things, had so little in common save sympathy,—sympathy for the wilful wrong-doing of man, and pity for his self-imposed blindness. Presently Heliobas spoke again in his ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Protestant, of Englishman and Spaniard, have left indelible traces upon their descendants which intensify race prejudice and misunderstanding. The Englishman or American looks with a contempt upon the economic blindness or incapacity of the Spaniard that veils his eyes to their ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... line of consanguinity afforded no efficient guardian, the failure was supplied by the nomination of the praetor of the city or the president of the province. But the person whom they named to this public office might be legally excused by insanity or blindness, by ignorance or inability, by previous enmity or adverse interest, by the number of children or guardianships with which he was already burdened and by the immunities which were granted to the useful labors of magistrates, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... that too of a very few, with so many watchings, so much sweat, so much vexation and loss of sleep, the most precious of all things. Add to this the waste of health, spoil of complexion, weakness of eyes or rather blindness, poverty, envy, abstinence from pleasure, over-hasty old age, untimely death, and the like; so highly does this wise man value the approbation of one or two blear-eyed fellows. But how much happier ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... Holy Spirit, he may go boldly forth conquering and to conquer the numberless hosts of heathenism arrayed for battle against the truth. These weapons are dreaded by the spirit of evil more than all those iron implements of warfare on which man in his folly and blindness relies. The victories won by the Bible are lasting in this world, and not only in this world, but ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... speaking the words aloud, for she knew her father would treat them as treason. He always had a certain tender deference for his cousin Urania, mixed with something akin to compunction, as if his loyalty to his betrothed had been disloyalty to his family. Thus, he exceeded the rest of his sex in blindness to the defects that had been so evident to his wife and daughter; and whatever provocation might make him say of my Lady himself, he never permitted a word against her from any one else. He looked wistfully at Betty and said, "My little Aura! It is a kindly thought. Her son must have ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of his fur was drawn well forward over the face. He wore blue glasses, as a protection against snow-blindness apparently. Jessie smiled, judging him a tenderfoot; for except in March and April there is small danger of the sun glare which destroys sight. Yet he hardly looked like a newcomer to the North. For one thing he used the web shoes as an expert does. Before he ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... was out of sight Mrs. Mumpson betook herself to the rocking chair and began to expatiate on the blindness and obduracy of men in general and of Mr. Holcroft in particular. "They are all much alike," she complained, "and are strangely neglectful of the proprieties of life. My dear, deceased husband, your father, was becoming gradually senserble ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... about him. He did not run away, and yet he came near doing both. His head, it seemed to him, was wrapped up heavily in thick sail-cloth. He must do something finally to rid himself of that enforced blindness. He must look straight in the face of his ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... sphere of their influence, to promote as well unity in the faith as the bond of peace and righteousness of life, is removed from that narrow bigotry which fixes on those who differ from ourselves the charge of wilful blindness, and obstinate hatred of the truth, to be visited by man's rebuke here, and God's displeasure for ever.[251] A wise and pious writer of our own has said,[252] (p. 331) "Show me the man who would desire to travel to heaven ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... don't like him much. Most of the missionaries are good men—good for the Indians, in a way, but sometimes one drifts out here who is bad. A bad missionary teaching religion to savages! Queer, isn't it? The queerest part is the white people's blindness—the blindness of those who send the missionaries. Well, I dare say Willetts isn't very good. When Presbrey said that was Willetts's way of teaching religion he meant just what he said. If Willetts drifts over here he'll be risking much.... This you told me explains Nas Ta Bega's ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... old, old mystery of the beginning of things, of history that was long dead and lost for all time. And it came upon Roscoe now, like a flood of rare knowledge descending from a mysterious source, that he had at last discovered the key to new life, and that through the blindness of reason, through starvation and death, fate had led him to the Great Truth that was dying with the last sons of the First People. For the half of the last fish was brought to him, and he ate; and when the knowledge that he was eating life away from these people ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... host in arms. Night, as never night before, Hearkened to an army's roar Breaking up in snaky swarms: Torch and steel and snorting steed, Hunted by the cry of blood, Cursed with blindness, mad for day. Where the torches ran a flood, Tales of him and of the deed Showered like a torrent spray. Fear of silence made them strive Loud in warrior-hymns that grew Hoarse for slaughter yet unwreaked. Ghostly Night across the hive, With a crimson finger ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 'I am sorry to see a gentleman of your learning and gravity labouring under such strange blindness and delusion. Will you place the brief, the modern, and, as I may say, the vernacular name of Isaac Newton in opposition to the grave and sonorous authorities of Dariot, Bonatus, Ptolemy, Haly, Eztler, Dieterick, Naibob, Harfurt, Zael, Taustettor, Agrippa, Duretus, Maginus, Origen, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... philtres used by the witches is very fantastic, not seldom marked by malice, and recklessly mixed up with things that seem to us the least likely to have awakened love. By these methods they went a long way without the husband's perceiving in his blindness the ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... clip animals before the winter sets in. He is in doubt as to the advisability of grooming. He passed to the improvements preparing for the coming journey—the nose bags, picketing lines, and rugs. He proposes to bandage the legs of all ponies. Finally he dealt with the difficult subjects of snow blindness and soft surfaces: for the first he suggested dyeing the forelocks, which have now grown quite long. Oates indulges a pleasant conceit in finishing his discourses with a merry tale. Last night's tale ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... absurdities as this the Open Court newspaper at Chicago is devoted, and it has a bevy of well-educated friends and supporters—well-educated as the world goes,—and graced with literary capacity and culture, but educated into blindness and ignorance of the scientific phenomena of psychic science,—unwilling to investigate or incapable of candid investigation. The coterie sustaining such a newspaper are precisely in the position of the contemporaries ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... business is that of a banker; and I can hardly conceive it to be possible that any gentleman in England should object to his daughter marrying a banker, simply because the man is a banker. There would be a blindness of arrogance in such a proposition of which I think your father to be incapable. This has merely been added in to ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... execute his will. What more does he need? What more can he ask without declaring himself a weakling or a fool? So it is with superstition, the deadliest disease of the mind. Free-thought casts it out, with its blindness and its terrors, and leaves the mind clear and free. All nature is then before us to study and enjoy. Truth shines on us with celestial light, Goodness smiles on our best endeavors, and Beauty thrills our senses and kindles our imagination ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... village without bitterness. Well, it's too late.... Now, as to the future, I think you'd do best to give me up. Tull is implacable. You ought to see from his intention to-day that—But you can't see. Your blindness—your damned religion!... Jane, forgive me—I'm sore within and something rankles. Well, I fear that invisible hand will turn its hidden ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... her, and been attracted by the dog, and Maria had persuaded the child to go home with her. Afterwards Mrs. Brooks had taken Fly back to Colonel Allen's; and in this way Aunt Madge had learned about Maria's blindness, and had offered to take her to a physician who could help her, if ...
— Prudy Keeping House • Sophie May
... whitened and he turned away his eyes. He could not credit it. Two days ago she had been free; he could swear it; he remembered her eyes at parting. Then came the thought of his blindness, and in a great horror of self-mistrust he seemed to see throughout it all his criminal folly. He, poor fool, had been pleasing himself with dreams of a meeting, when all the while the other man had been the real lover. She had despised him, spared not a thought for ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... dawn of man's intelligence, had asked why, and had never received an answer more intelligible to them than to philosophers, they never showed difficulty in accepting that trinity as a fact. They might even, in their beneficent blindness, ask the Church why that trinity, which had satisfied the Egyptians for five or ten-thousand years, was not good enough for churchmen. They themselves were doing their utmost, though unconsciously, to identify the Holy Ghost with the Mother, while philosophy ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... astonishment burst simultaneously from the lips of four of the five male voyagers; for, as they glanced about them, they instantly recognised their surroundings, and discovered that von Schalckenberg, in the blindness of fog that had enveloped him, had brought the Flying Fish to earth within less than a hundred yards of the identical spot which she had occupied upon the memorable occasion when they had first beheld the unicorns. Yes, there was the little shallow lake amid the tall bordering reeds ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... expansion. Her amazing teamwork between state and business, stimulated by an interested finance, drove her on to a place in the sun. The shadows seemed far away when the great war crashed into civilisation. Then England woke to the folly of her blindness. The mystery of coal-tar products was shut up in a German laboratory; the secrets of tungsten, necessary to the toughest steel, were imprisoned in a Teutonic mill; and so on down a long list of products vital to ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... There are despairing moments, when the happy seem natural enemies of the miserable, and Ann was passing through them. As she sat there in her gloomy isolation of widowhood, her black veil and her dark thoughts coloring her whole outlook on life, she felt a sudden fury of blindness against all who could see. Had she been younger, she would have given vent to her emotion like Jerome. Her son seemed the very expression of her own soul, although ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Recovering from the shock, they presently returned with redoubled animation to the charge. Furious from disappointment, exasperated with the unforseen yet fatal result, they pressed to the assault with the blindness of phrensy. Still they were received with a fire so constant and deadly, that they were again forced to retire; and most ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... he knew that all memory of the offence had been blotted utterly from his enemy's mind—proves the entire proposition. It shows that it is not the present self of his enemy that the avenger is angry with at all, but the past self. Even in the blindness of his wrath he intuitively recognizes the distinction between the two. He only hates the present man, and seeks vengeance on him in so far as he thinks that he exults in remembering the injury his past self did, or, if he does not exult, that he insults and humiliates him ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... reasonably patriotic, patriotically rational; habit encourages to practice one thing, but theory may induce to think another. Now, little credence as so unenlightened so illiberal an integer as I give to an equalization in the rights of man, certainly on many accounts my blindness gives less to the rights of women with man, and very far less to those rights over man: it might be inconvenient to be specific as to reason; but the working of an ultra-republican scheme, in which females should ballot as well as males, would briefly ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... a sad mistake. I have learned through long years that Ezra of old was right when he told the people to turn from weeping and to 'drink the sweet.' Before this blindness came upon me I was something like Saul of Tarsus, always kicking against the pricks, or in other words, the dictates of conscience! 'Before I was afflicted, I went astray,' as the psalmist sang. But I have viewed things in a different light since then, and though the Father's ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... of exhaustion when he could not stop talking. He went over again every word of the scene. Now something occurred to him that he had not told me before; now he discussed what he ought to have said instead of what he did say; then he lamented his blindness. He regretted that he had done this, and blamed himself that he had omitted the other. It grew later and later, and at last I was as ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... that tae many of the laddies wull be tae tired to fit themselves tae be other than helpless creatures, despite their wounds or their blindness. They can do wonders, if we'll help them. We maun not encourage those laddies tae tak' it tae easy the noo. It's a cruel hard thing to tell a boy like yon that he should be fitting himself for life. ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... diamonds. Whichever way he turned the roses embroidered on his dress, the girdle which encircled his loins, the clasp of his turban, and every weapon about him seemed to scatter rainbow sparks, so that those who gazed at him were dazzled into blindness before they could catch a glimpse ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... with her, she was reduced by family misfortunes to earn her own living. The publishers would have been only too glad to keep her in their office, but for the oculist's report. He declared that she would run the risk of blindness, if she fatigued her weak eyes much longer. There is the only objection to this otherwise invaluable person—she will not be ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... lifelong friend, wrote to another, "The noblest eye that God ever made is darkened: the eye so privileged that it may in truth be said to have seen more wonderful things and made others to see more wonderful things, than were ever seen before." But blindness could not subdue him any more than it could John Milton. He had others look through the telescope and tell him what they saw and then he would foretell what they would ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... passed in this way without anything to excite suspicion. During all this time, however, the blindness of Muhamad was entirely a deception; and he was concerting a plan of escape, through the aid of some friends of his father, who found means to visit him occasionally. One sultry evening in midsummer, the guards had gone to bathe in the ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... general principles. The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... his version of the affair, distributing the credit of his rescue in the order in which he considered it to be due, and greatly disappointing both Mrs Rimbolt and her guest by his evident blindness to the heroism of Scarfe. He acknowledged warmly Percy's readiness to come to his help, and his promptitude in going for the ladder, and he did full justice to Julius's share in the affair. As to Scarfe's part, ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... is, these places are not wholesome to live in; most of the inhabitants are troubled with weak and sore eyes: and I recollect Sir Richard Jebb telling me, more than seven years ago, that when he passed through Savoy, the various applications made to him, either for the cure or prevention of blindness by numberless unfortunate wretches that crowded round him, hastened his quitting a province where such horrible complaints prevailed. One has heard it related that the goistre or gozzo of the throat is reckoned ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... humor that proceeded from not being of sound mind; yet such a person might perform his ordinary duties, and discharge the usual and customary requirements of life: but they considered one that was raving as afflicted with a total blindness of the mind, which, notwithstanding it is allowed to be greater than madness, is nevertheless of such a nature that a wise man may be subject to raving (furor), but cannot possibly be afflicted by insanity (insania). ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... original MS. is in the Royal Library at Stockholm. Svart writes in a forcible and at the same time easy style. Nor does he lack good sense; though the work is marred throughout by a bitterness toward popery and a total blindness to ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... Paris with his Son Wonders of Paris Countries Cousins Letters to Agen Visit to Sainte-Beuve Charles Nodier, Jules Janin Landlord of Jasmin's Hotel Recitation before Augustin Thierry and Members of the Academy Career of the Historian His Blindness His Farewell ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... Why, I saw more beauty with my eyes healthfully alert to see in two wet windy February afternoons in Scotland than I can see in my beautiful olive gardens and grey hills in a whole week in my low and lost estate, as the Shorter Catechism puts it somewhere. It is a pitiable blindness, this blindness of the soul; I hope it may not be long with me. So remember to keep well; and remember rather anything than not to keep well; and again I say, anything rather than ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... arranged, he never suffered beforehand from the apprehension of any; it seemed as if he could not think so ill of any two persons' understanding as to suppose they meant to marry till it were proved against them. She blessed the favouring blindness. He could now, without the drawback of a single unpleasant surmise, without a glance forward at any possible treachery in his guest, give way to all his natural kind-hearted civility in solicitous inquiries after Mr. Frank ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... as though its heredity were of similar kind. He refers to it as a male character latent in the female, remarks that we should expect that disease or removal of the ovaries might lead to the occasional appearance of colour-blindness in females. He also discusses the case of Abraxas grossulariata and its variety lacticolor, and other cases of sex-linked heredity, apparently with the idea that all such cases are similar to those of sexual dimorphism. A. lacticolor occurs in nature only in ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... was wandering to other topics now. She was exclaiming over the blindness of deceived husbands, a thing which he doubted and which she affirmed with such airs of personal contempt that he finally grew angry. Then the discussion became an angry quarrel, where she took the side of the women and he defended ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... said Hi-You, who seemed to have thought of everything. "And I venture to propose that Your Majesty should announce that a great alchemist has been compounding a potion to relieve their blindness. A few drops of this will be introduced into the water of the Public Baths, and all those bathing therein will ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... inferred that I am criticising them as they now are, or that their attitude towards myself was at any time lacking in sympathy. Blindness of heart does not imply hardness; and expression is a matter of temperament or impulse; hut it was their attitude towards life that was different from my own. They over- valued brains, which was a strange ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... the things set down. At all times his keen vision and active brain took in and tasted details with an easy swiftness that was marvelous to men of slower chemistry; the need to stare, he held, was evidence of blindness. Now the feeling of beauty was awakened and exultant, and doubled the power of his sense. In these instants a picture was printed on his memory that would ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... a thicket in the creek bottom half a mile away, and a dozen times in that short distance Gray Wolf stumbled and fell. And each time that she fell Kazan learned a little more of the limitations of blindness. Once he sprang off in pursuit of a rabbit, but he had not taken twenty leaps when he stopped and looked back. Gray Wolf had not moved an inch. She stood motionless, sniffing the air—waiting for him! For a full minute Kazan stood, also waiting. Then he ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... happened. We were too near together again; the same spark leaped, the same blindness struck us, the same impulse swayed us—call it what we will!—and it quickened out of chaos, grew from nothing into unreasoning existence. It was the terrific menace of emotion, stunning us both—simply because you are you and I am I. And ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... the presence of all the others*. 1. There is a world of wisdom in the question asked in the Hebrew Scriptures: "Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge?" There is in all wrong-doing either ignorance, or temporary hallucination or blindness, and imprudence is but ignorance or delusion carried into action. Did we see clearly the certain bearings and consequences of actions, we should need no stronger dissuasive from all evil, no more cogent motive to every form of virtue. 2. There is no conceivable duty which ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... Italy, and by the steady waning of Causidiena's eyesight. She could still recognize familiar persons when between her and the strong light of a door or window in the daytime; she could still place pieces of wood on the fire, if it was burning well. But she was plainly verging on total blindness. Except in so far as it was modified by pride in Terentia and solicitude for Causidiena, life in the Atrium flowed on as ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... attack the wrists of great and small, old and young, laity and clergy—that grass might grow in their streets—that Ilar and Cyveilach, Welsh saints, might slay them—that dogs might snarl at them—and that the king of heaven, with the saints Brynach and Non, might afflict them with blindness—which piece, however ineffectual in inducing God and the saints to visit the Chester people with the curses with which the furious bard wished them to be afflicted, seems to have produced somewhat of its intended effect on the chieftain, who shortly afterwards, on learning that the ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... affliction of the man who was BORN BLIND. "And his disciples asked him, saying, 'Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?'" The question being asked in order that Jesus might determine between the two prevailing theories: (1) That the blindness was caused according to the operation of the law of Moses, which held that the sins of the parents were visited on the children unto the third and fourth generation; or (2) that it was caused according to the Law of Karma, along the lines of reincarnation, and because of some sin which ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... by. The "Swamp-angel" was a big gun, and made a stunning noise, but it burst before it accomplished anything, while many an humble rifle helped decide the contest. Christ made salve out of spittle to cure a blind man, and the humblest instrumentality may, under God, cure the blindness of the soul. Blessed be God for the comfort ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... which Lamarck heard during his protracted old age, saddened alike by the weight of years and blindness; this was what people did not hesitate to utter over his grave yet barely closed, and what indeed they are still saying—commonly too without any knowledge of what Lamarck maintained, but merely repeating at secondhand bad caricatures of ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... next, slipping northward between the glazed walls of the Subway, another languid crowd in the seats about him and the nasal yelp of the stations ringing through the car like some repeated ritual wail. The blindness within him seemed to have intensified his physical perceptions, his sensitiveness to the heat, the noise, the smells of the dishevelled midsummer city; but combined with the acuter perception of these offenses was a complete indifference to them, as though he were some ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Romish hierarchy been willing to consent to moderate reforms, they might not humanly speaking, have lost their influence, and the whole of Europe might still have groaned under their power. But God had not thus ordered it. By their own blindness and obstinacy they brought about their own discomfiture. Luther himself was eminently conservative. He never altogether got rid of some of the notions he had imbibed in the cloister. Step by step he advanced as the light dawned on him—not ...
— Count Ulrich of Lindburg - A Tale of the Reformation in Germany • W.H.G. Kingston
... will not live together are in our midst, and tugging at each other's throats. They will search each other out, though you separate them a hundred times. And if by an insane blindness you shall contrive to put off the issue, and send this unsettled dispute down to your children, it will go down, gathering volume and strength at every step, to waste and desolate their heritage. Let it be settled now. Clear the ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... once to his original proportions, and became thenceforth, not the servant of his country, but the special pleader of a class and the representative of a section. And yet, with that strange judicial blindness which has ever been the doom of the defenders of wrong, he still hoped to attain the Presidency. There is scarcely any example of infatuation more remarkable than this. Here we have, lying before us at this moment, undeniable proofs, in the form ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... night was now adding itself to the blindness of the fog. The oarsman could not see even the thole pins. He sat adrift mind and body. He was, to use his own expression, "moithered." Haunted by the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... intention! Gale tried to close his eyes, but could not. He prayed wildly for a sudden blindness—to faint as Thorne had fainted. But he was transfixed to the spot with eyes that pierced ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... and not an answer. But it caused a laugh, and that always counts in debate. Then, with singular blindness to the fact that he himself was at the time being guided by a certain young woman, Jim ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... muse. Yet, stay, he told me the old man was desolate, his sons being all established elsewhere, and his one daughter lost. By which I take it, he spoke of thy celestial self. And strange indeed if the loss of such a one were not as blindness itself to one who hath looked in they ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... distinguished oculists and, in spite of their assurances, would tell them that slowly and surely his eyesight was failing him. He would declare to them, in the dread of such a catastrophe, he was of a mind to seek self-destruction. To others he would confide the secret of his blindness and his resolution not to survive it. And, later, all of ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... astonished at the delicate susceptibility of his casing of flesh, which is bruised by blows, torn by thorns, devoured by insects, and yet, day after day, the persevering man continues to face death under its most horrible aspects—poison from venom of serpents, giddiness from sun-stroke, blindness from the power of the moon, want of sleep, ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... David again unbuttoned his coat, and reckoned down the fine; whereupon the examination began in German, and I shall here note part of it down, that all men may know what horrible blindness and folly has fallen upon the Jews, by permission of the Lord God, since they imprecated the blood of Christ upon their own heads. Not even amongst the blindest of the heathen have such base, low, grovelling superstitions ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... can do it?" she retorted. "Do you think we come into the world to let fate be our master? Why have I royal blood and royal views, wealth, understanding and ambition, while the others have blindness and vague yearnings? ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... blindness that she had married him partly for the child's sake, and returned to the companionship of his daughter with a real ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... would stop you!" grinned Jim. "But that man, and the blindness of the so-called wise men of this wee burg make me positively sick ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... mournfully, "your words rend my heart. Oh, do not be so gentle and generous! Be angry with me, call me an infamous villain, who, in his blindness, did not penetrate your magnanimity and heroic self-sacrifice; do not treat me with this charming mildness which crushes me! You acted like an angel toward me, and I treated you ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... we always saw this state, destined to be the bulwark against Asiatic invasions, helpless and hesitating. In an unfortunate blindness this state has never understood its true interests, always suppressing its moral duty to accord to all races ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... heavenly King, Upon offenders here in earth for their offences bring. Sometime God doth it us to prove, if constant we will be; As he did unto Abraham: sometime his whole intent Is to declare His heavenly might; as in John we may see, When the disciples did ask Christ why God the blindness sent Unto that man that was born blind? to whom incontinent Christ said: Neither for parents' sins, nor for his own offence, Was he born blind, but that ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... shears down and laughed or cried on his knees; it could not be said what he did. The old gentleman first inclined his head to one side as if listening, then he pulled himself together. Apollonius saw that his father felt his blindness to be something of which he must be ashamed. He saw how the old man exerted himself to avoid every movement that might recall the fact that he was blind. The old gentleman felt that the new-comer was somewhere near him. But where? On which side? ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... the elder forgot, confirming the data, and echoing with a sonorous interjection the exclamations of the listeners. Augustin Franz Raoul, the grandfather of the men who addressed us, originally differed in no respect, save that of blindness, from ordinary people. One Christmas Eve, as the day drew towards twilight, and a driving storm of frozen snow raged over the mountains, he, his dog Hans, and his mule were fighting their way home up the pass in the teeth of the ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... you must water and weed and wait for the harvest. And just so in Divine things. Oh! we shall find out, by-and-by, that the laws of the spiritual kingdom are quite as certain and unerring in their operation as the laws of the natural kingdom, and, perhaps, a great deal more so; but, through the blindness and obtuseness and unbelief of our hearts, we could not, or would not find them out. People get up and fluster about, and expect to be able to work for God without any thought or care or trouble. For ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... blindness past the skill of surgery, but there is no blindness more incurable than that of a woman on the verge of ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... thee, When I break twenty? I am perjur'd most; For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee, And all my honest faith in thee is lost: For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness, Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy; And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness, Or made them swear against the thing they see; For I have sworn thee fair; more perjur'd I, To swear against the truth ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... something to forgive you, but not—not your presumption. It is your blindness, I think—and—and your cruel resolution to go away and never tell me of your—your love for me. If it had not been for the sending of these letters I might never have known. How can I forgive ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... fog. It did not perceptibly thicken in-doors that night, but the next day no day dawned, nor, for that matter, the day after the next. All the same the town was invisibly astir everywhere in a world which hesitated at moments between total and partial blindness. The usual motives and incentives were at work in the business of men, more like the mental operations of sleep than of waking. From the height of an upper window one could look down and feel the city's efforts to break the mesh of its weird captivity, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... nun, unmoved by the manner of the young maiden; "you are unable to judge rightly of your own heart. You possess a confidence in integrity of purpose, which is but a mental blindness on ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... attacks moderated, although they never departed. Sleeplessness pursued him always, the slightest excitement would deprive him of the power of exertion, his sight was always sensitive, and at times he was bordering on blindness. In this hard-pressed way he fought the battle of life. He says himself that his books took four times as long to prepare and write as if he had been strong and able to use his faculties. That this should have been the case is little wonder, for those books came into being with failing ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... was Mrs. Delarayne likely to be satisfied with this reply. She saw now that Agatha had been right, and blamed herself for her blindness hitherto. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... doubt been done for the church in past times by cruelty and oppression, but the folly of the French bishops, after the reign of Voltaire and the apostolate of the Encyclopaedia, lay exactly in their blindness to the fact that the old methods were henceforth impossible in France, and impossible for ever. How can we wonder at the hatred and contempt felt by men of the social intelligence of Diderot and D'Alembert for this desperate union of impotence ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Marking his blindness, whispered Babbalanja to Media, "My lord, methinks this Pani must be a poor guide. In his journeys inland, his little child leads him; why not, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... for Galena Creek, and Hank would not look at it on account of his courtin'. I took it alone myself by Yancey's and the second bridge and Miller Creek to the camp, nor I didn't tell Willomene good-bye, for I had got disgusted at her blindness." ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... married away from his class trusts that somehow or other nature will repair this. He assumes, in a real paroxysm of folly, that obscurity is the fostering condition of a richness of character which could not be got by culture. He pays the price of his blindness. Untended nature is more likely to produce weeds than choice fruits, and the chances in such cases as this are beyond calculation in favor of his having got a weed—in other words, having wedded himself to a life of wrangling, gloom, ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... doubts about the course taken in 1649 and since, he had none; and no one had suffered more in defence of it. The other and greater sonnet on his blindness— ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... eventually fall into Russia's hands—which is not probable—believe me, it will never be by a Russian army marching into India from the north, or north-west, or west. The danger, if there is any, may be found probably very much nearer home, in our own ignorance and blindness. ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... his shoulders to take a blow. To his blindness her manner looked like awakening love for the other man—and for the man himself, not for the prince! His sense of loss, his agony, were extreme. But of the old bitterness he now knew nothing. His rival was putting ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... fell from her eyes, she could see Ingram as a man, squalid. Nay, more: she could now see him as a beast, ravening. Thereupon he gave her horror, so that she dared not look back upon her hours of blindness. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... old woman in a firm yet pleasant voice, and Denison, looking to the right, saw that "Mary," in spite of her years and blindness, was still robust and active-looking. She was dressed in a blue print gown and blouse, and her grey hair was neatly dressed in the island fashion. In her smooth, brown right hand she grasped the handle of a polished walking-stick, her left arm she held across her bosom—the hand ...
— "Old Mary" - 1901 • Louis Becke
... lamp-posts cling to the side of the house! Not that that detail is not worth noting. It is—in its place. French lamp-posts are part of what we call the "interesting character" of a French street. We say of a French street that it is "full of character." As if an English street was not! Such is blindness—to be cured by travel and the exercise of the logical faculty, most properly termed common sense. If one is struck by the magnificence of the great towns of the Continent, one should ratiocinate, ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries of injustice and despotism, is but a poor excuse for such perverse blindness. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... not indiscreet. If all lawful Sovereigns do not read in these words their proscription, and the fate which the most powerful usurper that ever desolated mankind has destined for them, it may be ascribed to that blindness with which Providence, in its wrath, sometimes strikes those doomed to be grand examples of the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... imagine all the cruel practical jokes inspired by his blindness. And, in order to have some fun in return for feeding him, they now converted his meals into hours of pleasure for the neighbors and of punishment for the helpless ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... ambition to acquire influence and power had been allowed to become a ruling principle, and who favored the delusion because thereby their object could be most surely achieved by carrying the people to the greatest extremes of credulity, superstition, and fanatical blindness. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... voice struck upon his ear, though it was impossible to guess whence it came. "My lord," it said, "you told me, you were my friend. I act as a friend. If I have employed stratagem to bring you hither, it is because the blindness of your fatal passion would otherwise have prevented your accompanying me. The Princess de Saint Dizier named to you Agricola Baudoin, the lover of ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Margaret Junkin it meant seven years of physical pain, a part of the time in a darkened room, and the lifelong regret of unavailing aspirations. It was in Easton that she began to write in any serious and purposeful fashion, the result of her semi-blindness, as, but for that, she would have devoted her life to painting, for which she had decided talent. In the beautiful environment of Easton the young soul had found the poetic glow that tinged its early ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... living anywhere but at Brattalithe. He would not go to her father's house, nor to that which had been Thore's, and which was now hers for life. He put a reeve in each of them and took her to Brattalithe. Afterwards she understood everything, and was confounded by her former blindness; but it is the truth that Thorstan's love for her was of a sort to forbid thinking. She was carried off her feet and out of her common sense by his passion. He, so dumb and still a man, was by the touch of passion set on fire. And fire caught ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... represent two of Galileo's early friends. For the "Dialogues" he was sentenced by the Inquisition to incarceration at its pleasure, and enjoined to recite penitential psalms once a week for three years. His life thereafter was full of sorrow, and in 1637 blindness added to his woes; but the fire of his genius still burnt on till his death ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... thus linked to each other and to us those loyal hearts that longed to keep the empire whole; and thus President Kruger in his blindness became Greater ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... Recamier replied. "There is no impropriety in my taking care of you. If solitude is painful to you, I am ready to live in the same house with you. The world will do justice to the purity of our friendship. Years and blindness give me this right. Let us change nothing in so perfect an affection." Her charm never deserted her, and she continued to the very last to receive the greatest men and women of the day. Still the reigning ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... disables us from pursuing any transaction to an end. You can make no one understand that his bargain is anything more than a bargain, whereas in point of fact it is a link in the policy of mankind, and either a good or an evil to the world. We have a sort of blindness which prevents us from seeing anything but sovereigns. If one man agrees to give another so many shillings for so many hours' work, and then wilfully gives him a certain proportion of the price in ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... determined by his own inner mechanism. The sensation depends on his own make-up as well as on the nature of the stimulus, as is especially obvious when the sensation is abnormal or peculiar. Take the case of color blindness. The same stimulus that arouses in most people the sensation of red arouses in the color-blind individual the sensation of brown. Now what the color-blind individual receives, the light stimulus, is the same as what others receive, but ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... that of many things for which mankind demands "an explanation," there is no explanation. It is further the work and the service of science to destroy and to remove from men's minds the baseless and pretended "explanations" which are no explanations but causes of error, blindness, and suffering. ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... Mr. Headley's talents will please read this short extract: "The ominous sound grew louder every moment, and suddenly the fierce Alpine blast swept in a cloud of snow over the mountain, and howled like an unchained demon, through the gorge below. In an instant all was blindness and confusion and uncertainty. The very heavens were blotted out, and the frightened column stood and listened to the raving tempest that made the pine trees above it sway and groan, as if lifted from their rock-rooted places. But suddenly a still more alarming sound was heard—'An avalanche! an ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... Milton's interpretation of that sorrow in Samson's Lament. If you would find some message to cheer the blind man in his darkness and illumine his captivity, read the same poet's ode on his own blindness: ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... the English coolness and narrowness, in the speculative blindness and practical good sense which could look out over such a world at such a moment, and could see nothing in it save a quarrel of "opinions, and of names devised for the continuance of the same." But Henry only expressed the general feeling of his people. England indeed was being slowly ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... not common, and Talbot was a remarkable instance, for he was a remarkable man. His mind had not slept while the age advanced, and thus it had swelled as it were from the bondage of its earlier passions and prejudices. But little did he think, in the blindness of self-delusion,—though it was so obvious to Clarence, that he could have smiled if he had not rather inclined to weep at the frailties of human nature,—little did he think that the vanity which had cost him so much remained "a monarch still," ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... happened to Piero della Francesca of Borgo a San Sepolcro. He, having been held a rare master of the difficulties of drawing regular bodies, as well as of arithmetic and geometry, was yet not able—being overtaken in his old age by the infirmity of blindness, and finally by the close of his life—to bring to light his noble labours and the many books written by him, which are still preserved in the Borgo, his native place. The very man who should have striven with all his might ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... girl's desire to be of social service are even more difficult. There is a curious blindness or indifference in our town and country districts to social needs. There is still alive the notion that sending flowers and jellies to the hospital, distributing old clothes wisely, and packing generous ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... point close above it, the bold rise swung into view, crowned with pines, its lower parts evergreen with the bay magnolia, and its precipitous front lighted up, as now, with the last beams of day. He made it seem so fair and important that Ramsey's native pride and a shame of her previous blindness almost drove her from the board to take a last look at it from the stern guards; but she was again in her mother's seat and again very hungry. He was good company to every one, the actor; always acting, ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... nest, with hands or paws engaged in holding on, and keep his eyes for a single instant. It is more dangerous to climb for young herons than for young eagles. A heron always strikes for the eye, and his blow means blindness or death, unless you watch like a ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... SMALL LETTER ALPHA} is attached to the name of Mary Magdalene, although she had been mentioned three times before without such appendix. It seems to have been taken from Luke viii. 2."(270)—Strange perversity, and yet stranger blindness! ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... O God—give this man's life into mine hand!" So prayed I (in my vain pride and selfish blindness) as I jogged along that sunny midsummer morn; and thereafter, my trembling having passed from me, I stretched myself out amid the hay and fell to ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... upon him with as much force as though even a suspicion of it had been a thing before impossible. And yet, at the same time, it appeared to him as though he must have known it all the while; for how could he comprehend his blindness? ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... state of sin, the will shares, in common with all the other parts of his being, the ruin and corruption resulting from the fall. The natural man has the "understanding darkened;" "is alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance that is in him, because of the blindness of his heart." He "receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God ... neither can he know them." He is "in darkness," "dead in ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... Blame not my blindness, nor think ill of me. For I do my best, leaving you in the Hand of God, and not ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler |
