"Avaricious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Columbia, there lived a "mossback" who was as happy as the 22nd day of June is long in each year. At initiative conclusions he would be classified with the freak species of humanity, but beneath his raw exterior there lurked rich mines which the moss kept a secret from the inquisitive, avaricious world. ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... many of the villagers have known since she was born, and who, to the knowledge of every one here, lived in poverty with her mother, until her marriage to the decrepid and avaricious Don Gumersindo, has caused all this to be forgotten, and is now looked upon as a wondrous being, a visitant, pure and radiant, from some distant land, from some higher sphere, and is regarded by her fellow-townspeople with affectionate esteem, and ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... The avaricious and encroaching rail Seized the wide fields which knew the Indian's trail. Back to the reservations in the West The native owners of the land were pressed, And selfish cities, harbingers of want, Shut from their vision each accustomed haunt. Yet ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... said that mercenary views mingled with the ambition of Columbus, and that his stipulations with the Spanish court were selfish and avaricious. The charge is inconsiderate and unjust. He aimed at dignity and wealth in the same lofty spirit in which he sought renown; they were to be part and parcel of his achievement, and palpable evidence of its success; they were to arise from the territories he should discover, ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... in the Caliphate A.H. 60; and in most respects showed himself to be of a very different disposition from his predecessor. He was naturally cruel, avaricious, and debauched; but instead of concealing his vices from the eyes of his subjects, he seemed to make a parade of those actions which he knew no good Mussulman could look upon without horror; he drank wine in public, he caressed his dogs, and was waited upon by his eunuchs ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous
... a letter in the handwriting of Hymetius, in which he asked Amantius to propitiate the gods by some solemn sacrifices to engage them to make the disposition of the emperor favourable to him; and at the end of the letter were found some reproachful terms applied to the emperor as avaricious ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... contrary characters: shamelessness strengthens the shameless man, faithlessness the faithless man, abusive words the abusive man, anger the man of an angry temper, and unequal receiving and giving make the avaricious man more avaricious. ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... possessed with the idea that all was not right, and would return to his dwelling closely to scrutinize every part. This and many other characteristics of Pedan induced a belief in the minds of his townsmen that he had by degrees become possessed of an avaricious disposition, and that his miserly views of the "whole duty of man" had induced him to secrete huge boxes of silver, and bags, of gold in crevices of his cellar, vacancies in his chimney, and musty and ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... gambler become a faithful and zealous preacher of the gospel. We have seen the poor giving out of their poverty help to others, poorer still. We see many Chinese Christians who were once narrow and avaricious, giving out of their hard-earned month's wages, or more, yearly, to help the church's work. We see dull and uneducated people drinking in new ideas, mysteriously growing in their knowledge of Christian truth, and learning to shape ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... this vile abjection of youth to age! look at fashionable society as you know it. What does it pretend to be? An exquisite dance of nymphs. What is it? A horrible procession of wretched girls, each in the claws of a cynical, cunning, avaricious, disillusioned, ignorantly experienced, foul-minded old woman whom she calls mother, and whose duty it is to corrupt her mind and sell her to the highest bidder. Why do these unhappy slaves marry anybody, however old and vile, sooner than not marry ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... avaricious and money loving to a deplorable degree, but there is one thing that can be said for the Somali. He will never desert in time of danger and will cheerfully sacrifice himself for his master. He has the stamina of a higher type ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... that our troops are all from the northern provinces of India, the natives of which are a brave and generous race, who hold the profession of arms in the highest estimation. The Bengallees on the contrary, (with the most universal and shameless indifference to truth,) are mean, effeminate, and avaricious. They are chiefly composed of merchants, copying clerks, mechanics, and domestic servants, and are invariably refused admittance into the company's army. These people are vastly inferior to the natives of the upper provinces in mental and corporeal energy, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... elegance in France, they argued was no rarity to the terrible Turk, for it was from Damascus in his part of the world that this precious fabric came most plentifully. So de Helly took Arras tapestries into Turkey, a suite representing the history of Alexander the Great, and the avaricious monarch was persuaded by reason of this and other ransom to let ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... served as treasurer or agent of the apostolic company, receiving and disbursing such offerings as were made by disciples and friends, and purchasing supplies as required.[504] That he was unprincipled and dishonest in the discharge of this trust is attested by John. His avaricious and complaining nature revealed itself in his murmuring against what he called a waste of costly spikenard, in the anointing of the Lord by Mary but a few days before the crucifixion; he hypocritically suggested that the precious ointment could have been sold and the proceeds given to the ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... it; he could no more formulate a course of action to his certain disadvantage than an Englishman could, or a Frenchman, or an Italian, or a German. But to say that the advantage he pursues is always, or even usually, a monetary one—to argue that he is avaricious, or even, in these later years, a sharp trader—is to spit directly into the eye of the truth. There is probably, indeed, no country in the world in which mere money is held in less esteem than in these ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... creditors and vicious enemies—now eager as wolves, to confiscate his furs and seize his seigniory at Fort Frontenac—being restrained by the strong hand of the Viceroy; but while La Salle lay ill at the Illinois fort, Frontenac was succeeded by La Barre as viceroy; and the new Governor was a weak, avaricious old man, ready to believe any evil tale carried to his ears. He at once sided with La Salle's enemies, and wrote the French King that the explorer's "head was turned"; that La Salle "accomplished nothing, but spent his life leading bandits through the forests, pillaging ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... said he, "I came laughing away, rejoicing in my sleeve that I had disappointed the avaricious old cheat." ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... interior doings, these are the chief part of us; for out of these come most of our outward acts, and all of their color. As is the preponderance of the man, will be this inward brood. The timid man will imagine dangers, the anxious man troubles, the hopeful man successes, the avaricious man accumulations, the ambitious possession of power; and the poetic man will imagine all sorts of perfections, be ever yearning for a better and higher, be ever building beautiful air-castles, earthy or moral, material ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... inferior passions may, at times, surprise it and prevail. Is this ambitious statesman amorous? Indiscreet and unguarded confidences, made in tender moments, to his wife or his mistress, may defeat all his schemes. Is he avaricious? Some great lucrative object, suddenly presenting itself, may unravel all the work of his ambition. Is he passionate? Contradiction and provocation (sometimes, it may be, too, artfully intended) may extort rash and inconsiderate expressions, or actions destructive of his main object. Is he vain, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... this world!" answered Rhoda, with an air of immense experience. "Don't you expect it. Every man you come across is an avaricious, designing creature. Oh dear! 'tis a weary weary world, and ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... often spending a week or month at her sister's pretty cottage, where, surrounded by the kind-hearted generous family, she could not but contrast that happy home with the splendid misery of Sereton Hall; an abode rendered melancholy to her by its young owner's selfish and avaricious nature. ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... youths could obtain any favours they pleased. In addition to this sensuality which they exhibited in public, he saw that they were gluttons and drunkards, so much so that they were more the slaves of the belly than are the greediest of animals. When he looked a little further, he found them so avaricious and fond of money that they sold for hard cash both human bodies and divine offices, and with less conscience than a man in Paris would sell cloth or any other merchandise. Seeing this and much more ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... slaves. Although for some years the coast had been occasionally visited by our cruizers, their short stay and seldom appearance had made but slight impression on those traders, rendered hardy by repetition of crime, and avaricious by excessive gain. They were enabled by a regular system to gain intelligence of any cruizer being ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... very well, but as this maxim was not observed toward Lord Byron, I also will repeat what I have heard said of his wife—I mean that the blame was hers—that her temper was so bad, her manners so harsh and disagreeable, that no one could endure her society; that she was avaricious, wicked, scolding; that people hated to wait upon her or live near her. How dared this lady to marry a man so distinguished, and then to treat him ill and tyrannically? Truly it is inconceivable. ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... home, he tried to review the situation calmly. Barton's true relation to Martha Deane he partially suspected, so far as regarded the former's vanity and his slavish subservience to his father's will; but he was equally avaricious, and it was well known in Kennett that Martha possessed, or would possess, a handsome property in her own right. Gilbert, therefore, saw every reason to believe that Barton was an actual, if not ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... too, was closely in keeping with the greed of Monsieur Rigaud at breakfast. His avaricious manner of collecting all the eatables about him, and devouring some with his eyes while devouring others with his jaws, was the same manner. His utter disregard of other people, as shown in his way of tossing the little womanly toys of furniture about, flinging favourite ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... single dreadnaught to remake the educational system of a whole state; militarism, which in the days of war cries, Give me your best youth to slay, leave the crippled and defective to propagate the race, give me your best to slay; militarism, which lays its avaricious hand on every new invention to make gregarious death more swift and terrible, and when war is over makes the starved bodies of innumerable children walk in its train for pageantry,—we are not resigned to that. We count it our Christian duty ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... of accepting it as the one heaven-sent remedy, people will use any other puffed and advertised stuff. Chemists are even lukewarm. A grain of mustard seed of faith among them would save me thousands of pounds a year. Not that I want to roll in money, Mrs. Middlemist. I'm not an avaricious man. But a great business requires capital—and to spend money merely in flogging the invertebrate is ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... agreeably under our unbroken skins!" Christianity joined in the cry through the mouths of its best accredited representatives. As at the Crucifixion it is written, "On that day Herod and Pilate were friends," so on the outbreak of a singularly unjust, avaricious, and cruel war, the Christian Churches of England displayed for the first and last time some signs of unity. Canterbury and Armagh kissed each other, and the City Temple applauded the embraces of unrighteousness and war. Dean Farrar of Canterbury, concluding his glorification of the hell which I ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... but I believe you're right," blurted out Andy with an avaricious glitter in his shifty eyes. "Let's go there to-night and see if we can ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... of sense. Useless lives prolonged, useful ones taken! The honoured minister of God struck down, the unfaithful watchman spared! The philanthropic and benevolent have an arrest put on their manifold deeds of kindness and generosity; the grasping, the avaricious, the mean-souled—those who neither fear God nor do good to man, are suffered to live on from day to day! What is it but the picture here presented eighteen hundred years ago—Judas spared to be a traitor to his ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... accursed; for it seemed to them that they could not live a righteous life therein; and therefore went they into the wilderness, where they trowed to serve GOD in peace. Therefore says Seneca, "I have become more avaricious, and more cruel, and more inhuman ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... by whom the bachelor is supported after his father's death, is avaricious—so is Gil Blas's uncle, the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... fortune. 'I know,' he says, 'that even marriages of inclination do not always succeed. So from the fact that sometimes people make mistakes in their choice, it is concluded that we ought never to choose.' Condorcet, we may remember, many years after, insisted on the banishment by public opinion of avaricious and mercenary considerations from marriage, as one of the most important means of diminishing the great inequalities in the accumulation ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... endeavoring to seduce some unhappy maiden: at one time he is seen quarrelling with his neighbor; at another, he falls out with one of his own family, after which he grows mad with every one around him, and, at last, equally mad and out of humor with himself. He has been selfish, griping, and avaricious on all occasions, and what he has saved or gained by oppression and fraud, he has spent on his profligacy: he has got drunk with the money which he has acquired by dishonesty, and he has paid for his ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... of fading light against which the trees made dark blots of foliage. Nantbrook seemed unreal, a place of thin shadow, the future unsubstantial as well; only the past was actual in Lemuel Doret's mind—the gray cold prison, the city at night, locked rooms filled with smoke and lurid lights, avaricious voices in the mechanical sentences of gambling, agonized tones begging for a shot, just a shot, of an addicted drug, ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... seem a perfectly reasonable supposition that there must be many avaricious persons to whom the possession of untold riches would prove more attractive than a mere interest in the doings of another man. Let it be said at once that although Barraclough certainly confided the correct map ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... than the gesture—it is chiefly in calm afterthought that men have remembered the form of dramatic expression. When Sir Henry Irving made his famous exit as "Shylock" the last thing the audience saw was his pallid, avaricious hand extended skinny and claw-like against the background. At the time, every one was overwhelmed by the tremendous typical quality of this gesture; now, we have time to think of its art, and discuss its ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... punished where I had hoped to be rewarded," Michael said to me just now; "I had wished for a saving and industrious son, and God has given me an ambitious and avaricious one. I had always said to myself, that, when once he was grown up, we should have him always with us, to recall our youth and to enliven our hearts; his mother was always thinking of getting him married, and having children again to care for. You know women always will busy ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... nostrils of tigers; her voice growls beneath the volcanoes; her anger is the storm; and the pallor of her face has made the moon white. She ripens the harvests; she swells out the rinds; she makes the beard grow. Give her something, for she hates the avaricious!" ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... had a son and daughter, both married. They were good children and loved their father on the American plan. The son had married an avaricious woman, while the daughter was married to a man who was not so avaricious as his sister-in-law. The old gentleman was very wealthy and like all good children they were thinking of the time when ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... seventeenth century regarded the Campbells. In the short compass of one page the Marquess of Argyle is designated as "the diabolical Scotch Cromwell," "the vile vindictive persecutor," "the base traitor," and "the Argyle impostor." In another page he is "the insidious Campbell, fertile in villany," "the avaricious slave," "the coward of Argyle" and "the Scotch traitor." In the next page he is "the base and vindictive enemy of the House of Maclean" "the hypocritical Covenanter," "the incorrigible traitor," "the cowardly and malignant enemy." It is a happy thing that passions ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... state was worse than his first. Cruel, with the insane cruelty, the bloodmania of an Ezzelin, he never was; his cruelties had a purpose, the sufferings of the victims were a detail not an end. Yet something of that despot's character, refined into torturing the mind and not the flesh, chaste, cruel, avaricious of power, something of that Southern morbidness in crime, distinguishes Heathcliff from the villains of modern English tragedies. Placed in the Italian Renaissance, with Cyril Tourneur for a chronicler, Heathcliff would not have awakened the outburst of incredulous indignation ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... sin that, after the lapse of so many ages, people calling themselves Christians, people who have never suffered hardship for their faith as we do, come hither and wage war upon the Church in her bound and crippled state, seducing the feeble and the avaricious by the spectacle of their wealth and the prospect of foreign protection? These heretics—and the Muscovites, our co-religionists, alas! with them—conspire against the Sultan, who is our sole defender. With the Muslimin we have in common language, country, ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... wretchedness, and who are of the firm conviction that heaven has designed us and our children to be slaves and beasts of burden to them and their children.—I say, I do not only expect to be held up to the public as an ignorant, impudent and restless disturber of the public peace, by such avaricious creatures, as well as a mover of insubordination—and perhaps put in prison or to death, for giving a superficial exposition of our miseries, and exposing tyrants. But I am persuaded, that many of my brethren, particularly those who are ignorantly in league ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... go, Calton having first given Mother Guttersnipe some loose silver, which she seized on with an avaricious clutch. ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... nostrils, and heaved his flanks, the captain, left to more freedom of thought, reflected on the prodigious genius of Aramis, a genius of acumen and intrigue, a match to which the Fronde and the civil war had produced but twice. Soldier, priest, diplomatist; gallant, avaricious, cunning; Aramis had never taken the good things of this life except as stepping-stones to rise to giddier ends. Generous in spirit, if not lofty in heart, he never did ill but for the sake of shining even yet more brilliantly. Towards the end of his career, at the moment of ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and evidently piqued at her declaration; "not one claco whether you ever loved me or not! That's not the question now, but this is: You must make yourself known to your Croesus of an uncle here, and demand that part of your fortune that he still clutches within his avaricious old fingers. You must do ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... grant him bloody, Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful, Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin That has a name: but there's no bottom, none, In my voluptuousness: your wives, your daughters, Your matrons, and your maids, could not fill up The cistern of my lust; and my desire ...
— Macbeth • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... an utter want of that keen discriminating power, which can give at first glance the full numerical value of all exterior objects. The owner of "Gladswood" belonged to that "come-easy-go-easy" class, who, unless circumstances come to their relief, are ever being duped or made a prey to the avaricious. But Mr. Montgomery had a source of never-failing strength in his wife. "Had William Montgomery married a different kind of wife he would have become a poor man," had grown into a proverb regarding ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... return to the great South-Sea gulf, that swallowed the fortunes of so many thousands of the avaricious and the credulous. On the 29th of May, the stock had risen as high as five hundred, and about two-thirds of the government annuitants had exchanged the securities of the state for those of the South-Sea company. During the whole of the month ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... position he held in society, misfortune might deprive him of these, and a disagreeable companion for life would remain to remind me constantly of my choice. But a generous, talented man like Lyndsay, by industry and prudence may become rich, and then the most avaricious worlding would applaud the step ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... kept. It was the common fate those days. But Flora felt no title to the common fate, and while the bustle of the place went on about them she hiddenly suffered and, mainly for the torment it would give her avaricious companion, told a new reason for the look in her eyes. Only a few nights before she had started wildly out of sleep to find that she had dreamed the cause of Anna's irreconcilable distress for the loss ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... proposition, Fouche could urge no good reasons in opposition to it, but contented himself with recommending that the execution of the design, which was good in intention, should, however, be postponed for two years. Bonaparte appeared to listen favourably to Fouche's recommendation, who, as avaricious for money as Bonaparte of glory, consoled himself by thinking that for these two years the administration of the gaming tables would still be for him a Pactolus flowing with gold. For Fouche, already the possessor of an immense fortune, always dreamed of increasing it, though he himself ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... been afraid of life; think of that! afraid of life! Yes, a hard and avaricious egotist! If he banished woman from his existence, it was only through fear of having to pay for her shoes. And he has known only the children of others, who have made him suffer—hence his hatred of the child—that ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... keenly realized in some other countries. I have seen girl slaves sold with no other property except the clothes upon their backs. Frequently their garments were of the scantiest character and in some cases even these were claimed by the avaricious brokers. Many of the waifs were purchased upon trial as a precaution against leprosy which prevailed throughout the East. One of the tests consisted in placing the child in a dark room under a blue light; if the skin was found to be of a greenish hue, the slave passed ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... all ages there have been those whom nature has qualified for a better life, who wish to live in harmony, and turn with weariness and disgust from the present forms of avaricious strife, rivalry, and fraud. If the best of these could be gathered in one community, a better state of society could ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... worth the hearing; I have been diligent, Sir, and got my self acquainted with the old Steward of the Family, an avaricious Judas, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... We should have done, but for this fatal sickness;— More fatal than a mortal malady, Because it takes not life, but life's sole solace: Even now I feel my spirit girt about By the snares of this avaricious fiend:— How do I know he hath not ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... argument; but I know not whether it ought to be mentioned. Sir Arthur owns he is in the power of the avaricious Abimelech, and I believe is in dread of foreclosures that might even eject him from Wenbourne Hill. This man must have been an early and a deep adventurer in the trade of usury, or he never could have gained wealth so great as he appears to ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... stars, and the Dalmatian sailors sang glees. That day another pilgrim died, and was robbed. His body was rifled of his bit of money as he lay dying, and they fought like cats before his eyes for the money he had been too avaricious to buy food with ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... had a potent though secret coadjutor in the Abbe Dubois, now rising, during the regency, into great political power, and who retained a baneful influence over the mind of the regent. This wily priest, as avaricious as he was ambitious, drew large sums from Law as subsidies, and aided him greatly in many of his most pernicious operations. He aided him, in the present instance, to fortify the mind of the regent against all the remonstrances of his ministers ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... Gale's Pyramus and Thisbe, falls into bathos near the end when Amos, in an extended comparison, likens Laura's refusal to cure his love wound to an avaricious doctor's refusal to set a poor man's leg. Page's failure as a poet is not a result of temporary lapses, as here, but of his inability to invent significant conflict. As Amos says, with ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... reserved wife would take such high measures, and he felt miserably lonely after the usual round of elaborate dinners to which he had grown grumblingly accustomed. His one senile passion was his pride in her, and he was avaricious of the lost days while she was absent from her usual victorious post as the mistress of that great house. The next day his heart sank still lower, for he saw in the Sunday papers a little paragraph to the effect that Mrs. Stuart had invited a brilliant house-party to her autumn home in ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... talked of, if at all, chiefly as having been brutish, dull, stupid, venal, avaricious and cruel. Cruel and avaricious he certainly became; venal and brutish he certainly seemed; but dull or stupid I cannot admit that he ever was. Indubitably, at the time of his appointment to be Prefect of the Praetorium, he possessed some qualities ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... one who is sickly; one whose mouth contains worms; one whose breath smells like human excrement; one whose wife is dear to him; one who speaks harshly; one who is always suspicious; one who is avaricious; one who is pitiless; one who is a thief; one who is self-conceited; one who has a liking for sorcery; one who does not care for respect or disrespect; one who can be gained over even by his enemies by means of money; and lastly, one ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... will never do any thing of this kind without letting you know what I do. He most generously answered, I shall then, perhaps, have you do less good than you would otherwise do, from a doubt of me; though, I hope, your discretion, and my own temper, which is not avaricious, will ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... obstinacy. They next tried the effect of a bribe, offering to pay him a basket of corn and a fowl for each hut in the village if he would wait till the harvest was gathered. Chopart proved to be as avaricious as he was arbitrary, and agreed to accept ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... in it and on it should be mine. I know it was intended so. The law gives it you instead. Your technical claim has overridden my rights—you have a gift for making successful technical claims. But these old personal relics, of no monetary value—you should waive your avaricious and indelicate claim to them." He added the last words with a malicious smile, for the hardening look in Racine's face told him his request was hopeless, and he could not resist the temptation to put the matter with cutting force. Racine rose to the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to name the soldier who had deceived me should have the money; Marazzini was the first to do so. The officer made a note of the man's name with a smile; he was beginning to know me; I had spent three crowns to get back one, and could not be very avaricious. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... governmental authority; it has induced the use of force in an endeavor to wrest the sovereignty over a territory or over a community from those who have long possessed and justly exercised it. It has formed the basis for territorial claims by avaricious nations. And it has introduced into domestic as well as international affairs a new spirit of disorder. It is an evil thing to permit the principle of "self-determination" to continue to have the apparent sanction of the nations ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... hard to climb." But who can know what the bitterness of dependence is so well as the poor companion of an old lady of quality? The Countess A—— had by no means a bad heart, bat she was capricious, like a woman who had been spoilt by the world, as well as being avaricious and egotistical, like all old people who have seen their best days, and whose thoughts are with the past and not the present. She participated in all the vanities of the great world, went to balls, where she sat in a corner, painted and dressed in old-fashioned ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... king (March 25, 1621)—"When I enter into myself, I find not the materials of such a tempest as is comen upon me. I have been (as your majesty knoweth best) never author of any immoderate counsel, but always desired to have things carried suavibus modis. I have been no avaricious oppressor of the people. I have been no haughty or intolerable or hateful man in my conversation or carriage. I have inherited no hatred from my father, but am a good patriot born. Whence should this ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... he discovered a warder who had been in some trouble with the authorities, a man who was avaricious and was even then on the brink of being discharged from the service for trafficking with prisoners. The bribe he offered this man was a heavy one and the ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... sending me to a cloister to learn chastity; they would not have done worse in sending me to a roundhead to learn generosity, or to a quaker to learn manners, than to a papist to learn honor." "Destruction," said another, "seize my mother for her avaricious pride in preventing my obtaining a husband when I wanted one, and thus obliging me to purloin the thing I might have honorably come by." "Hell, and double Hell to the lustful wretch of a gentleman, who first began tempting me," would the third say; "if he had not, ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... of the hopelessness of their cause, emigrated in crowds and attempted to form another France on the borders of their country in the German Rhenish provinces. Worms and Coblentz were their chief places of resort. In the latter city, they continued their Parisian mode of life at the expense of the avaricious elector of Treves, Clement Wenzel, a Saxon prince, by whose powerful minister, Dominique, they were supported, and acted with unparalleled impudence. They were headed by the two brothers of the French king, who entered into negotiation with all the foreign powers, and they vowed to defend ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... times, this John was no agitator against established institutions, no inciter of riot, no advocate of revolt, no promoter of rebellion. He did not assail the tax system but the extortions of the corrupt and avaricious publicans; he did not denounce the army, but the iniquities of the soldiers, many of whom had taken advantage of their position to bear false witness for the sake of gain and to enrich themselves by forcible seizure. He preached, what in the now current dispensation we ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... passion of Christ." To sympathize, in the literal sense of suffering with our sinning and lost humanity, is not only the duty of the church, but the absolutely essential condition to her true manifestation of her Lord. A {64} self-indulgent church disfigures Christ; an avaricious church bears false witness against Christ; a worldly church betrays Christ, and gives him over once more to be mocked and reviled ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... the attention of the home government and invoked its intervention. In all such matters he was praetor and tribune combined. Without the intendancy the seigneurial system would soon have become an agent of oppression, for some Canadian seigneurs were quite as avaricious as their ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... have to some extent seen already, felt the horrors of Indian warfare. Kieft, the Dutch director-general, a man cruel, avaricious, and obstinate, angered the red men by demanding tribute from them as their protector, while he refused them guns or ammunition. The savages replied that they had to their own cost shown kindness to the Dutch when in need of food, but would not pay tribute. Kieft attacked. Some ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... for this gold; and desired the soldiers to take as much as they pleased, saying it were better for them to have it, than to leave it to their Mexican enemies. Upon this many of the soldiers of Narvaez, and some even of our veterans, loaded themselves with treasure. I was never avaricious, and was now more intent on saving my life than on the possession of riches: I took the opportunity, however, of carrying off four calchihuis from a casket, though Cortes had ordered his major-domo to take especial care of this casket and its contents, and these jewels ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... around the whole earth and found only equals and lovers," the water flows pure and free. These two groups—between them forming far the largest and most important mass of human kind—are those whose influence and tendency is toward peace and amity. It is only the scurrying, avaricious, fever-stricken, and, for all their wealth, poverty-stricken classes and cliques of the civilization-period who are the sources of discord and strife—and they only for a time. In the end it will be found that by every ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... avaricious, but he saves money. He cannot help it. He has no tastes and he draws very large pay. His mind, therefore, broods over questions relating to the investment of money, the depreciation of silver, and the saving effected by purchasing things at ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... to take it; but he could not so completely master his feelings as not to betray some marks of the pleasure he felt at the possession of so precious a gage. Gomez Arias, however, erroneously attributed these symptoms to the avaricious disposition of the wretch who appeared willing to undertake any service for gold. He again cast a contemptuous glance on the Moor, and making a sign to Roque, abruptly left the place. The renegade gave a loose to the joy which swelled tumultuously in his bosom; he kissed the ring with wild ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... money—not that he was avaricious—far from that; but he had numberless schemes in view, and he knew full well that without the gold they could ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... dice, the other property. The one can no more foresee the result of his schemes, than the other what spots will come up on his dice; the calculations of both are only the chances of luck. Both burn with unhealthy excitement; both are avaricious of gains, but careless of what they win; both depend more upon fortune than skill; they have a common distaste for labor; with each, right and wrong are only the accidents of a game; neither would scruple in ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... into her plans so unexpectedly and thrown them in a tangle, she felt that it would be wrong to her own honesty to conceal from him the knowledge of his danger. Perhaps there remained manliness enough in him to cause him to withdraw his avaricious scheme to oust Dr. Slavens in return for a service like that. She determined at last to ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... I had hoped to be rewarded," Michael said to me just now. "I had wished for a saving and industrious son, and God has given me an ambitious and avaricious one! I had always said to myself that when once he was grown up we should have him always with us, to recall our youth and to enliven our hearts. His mother was always thinking of getting him married and having ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... consequence of the unwholesome friendships which she contracted at the convent school, instructed by what she saw and heard and knew was going on around her, in spite of her deceitful and artificial conduct, knowing that neither her father nor her mother, who were very proud of their race as well as avaricious, would ever agree to let her marry the man whom she had taken a liking to, that handsome fellow who had little besides vision, ideas and debts, and who belonged to the middle-class, she laid aside all scruples, thought of nothing but of becoming his, no matter ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... livelihood on an extensive traffic in stolen goods which they carry on. It is said that there is honour amongst thieves, but this is certainly not the case with the Jews of Lisbon, for they are so greedy and avaricious, that they are constantly quarrelling about their ill-gotten gain, the result being that they frequently ruin each other. Their mutual jealousy is truly extraordinary. If one, by cheating and roguery, gains a cruzado in the presence of another, the latter ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... letters—the last there could be, for he had no more stamps. The others he had thrown over the wall, one each morning, beginning with the day after he had made the first attempt to bribe old Michel. As he had expected, twenty-four hours of avaricious reflection had proved too much for that ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... is its use among the natives that the manufacture of poi is carried on now by steam-power and with Yankee machinery, for the sugar planters; and the late king, who was avaricious and a trader, incurred the dislike of his native subjects by establishing a poi-factory of his own near Honolulu. Poi is sold in the streets in calabashes, but it is also shipped in considerable quantities to other islands, and especially ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... stubborn North-country yeomen, whose temperament accounts for the misfortunes that follow the house. Isaac, the last of the old parsimonious school, pushed on by his avaricious wife, cheats his brother and seizes the inheritance of his nephew, who is supposititiously killed by accident in the dark. Mark, another nephew, and the girl he marries, stand for a fresh and generous type, but he has inherited ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... impregnable, one of the company said, "This house indeed is strong, for if it should contain food it could never be got at," thus alluding both to the food and to the house. In like manner, a person, wishing to hint at the avaricious disposition of the mistress of a house, said, "I only find fault with our hostess for putting too little butter to her salt," whereas the accessory should be put to the principal; thus, by a subtle transposition of the words, converting the accessory into the principal, ...
— The Description of Wales • Geraldus Cambrensis
... infamous project had been crowned with complete success, the old libertine was overjoyed beyond measure; but when Mike demanded the one hundred dollars, his face lengthened—for he was avaricious as well as villainous, and his recent loss of five thousand dollars, in favor of the Chevalier and the Duchess, made him exceedingly loth to part with a cool hundred so easily.—Not exactly knowing the ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... occupy it. The men never appeared without their spears, shields, and assegais. They are fond of ornaments, the ordinary one being a tube of gourd thrust through the lower lobe of the ear. Their colour is somewhat like that of a rich plum. Impulsive and avaricious, they forced their way into the camp to obtain gifts, and thronged the road as the travellers passed by, jeering, ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... instructions. The king of Prussia had favourites and mistresses. Mirabeau had written in 1786, "There can be at Berlin no secrets for the ambassador of France, unless money and skill be wanting; the country is poor and avaricious, and there is no state secret which may not be purchased with three thousand louis." M. de Segur, imbued with these ideas, made it his first object to buy over the two favourites. The one was daughter of Elie Enka, who was a musician in the chapel of the late king. Handsome ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... has forgotten the date—in a city in the north of Europe—whose name is so difficult to pronounce that nobody remembers it—once upon a time there was a little boy of seven, named Wolff, an orphan in charge of an old aunt who was hard and avaricious, who only embraced him on New-Year's Day, and who breathed a sigh of regret every time that she gave ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... Fouchard, and uncle, on the mother's side, of Henriette and Maurice Levasseur. He was a small farmer at Remilly, who to make money more quickly took up the trade of butcher also. Avaricious to the last degree, and with a nature of unpitying hardness, he opposed the marriage of Honore with his servant Silvine Morange. At the end of two years of waiting Honore went off, after a terrible ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... to you individually. Now it is up to you to prove that you are a careful little business woman. With more than a thousand dollars in the bank you may feel quite like an heiress, but I warn you that a big city is a glutton and its avaricious maw is always open for money. Be warned by one who knows. If you need any advice of any nature that a man can give better than Miss Merriman, I want you to promise to call on Phil ... Dr. Bentley, that is, for I mean to put you in his charge. You can trust ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... important considerations. Firstly, the three professors ignore the fact that Germany was a menace to Belgium, and make no mention of German aspirations for a coastline on or near the English Channel. Holland and Belgium form a twentieth century "Naboth's vineyard," on which the German Ahab has cast avaricious glances ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... to paper. I will make it the best I can, my dearest father. I will neither be indolent, nor negligent, nor avaricious. I can never half answer the expectations that seem excited. I must try to forget them, or I shall ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... with a balcony which projects far over the street so as at once to strike the eye of any one entering through the Porta del Popolo, and there dwells perhaps the most whimsical oddity in all Rome,—an old bachelor with every fault that belongs to that class of persons—avaricious, vain, anxious to appear young, amorous, foppish. He is tall, as thin as a switch, wears a gay Spanish costume, a sandy wig, a conical hat, leather gauntlets, a rapier at ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... avaricious, and a great gambler. She would have passed the night up to her knees in water in order to play. Heavy gambling at lansquenet was carried on at Paris in the evening, at Madame la Princesse de Conti's. Madame de Charlus supped there one Friday, between the games, much company being present. She ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... pass between him and Mrs. Heartfree which had given them suspicions. And what is most astonishing of all is, that many of those who had before censured him for an extravagant heedless fool, now no less confidently abused him for a cunning, tricking, avaricious knave. ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... fond of women, it so befell that of the ladies of Florence she that he regarded with especial favour was the very beautiful niece of a brother of the said bishop. And having learned that her husband, though of good family, was but a caitiff, and avaricious in the last degree, he struck a bargain with him that he should lie one night with the lady for five hundred florins of gold: whereupon he had the same number of popolins(1) of silver, which were then current, gilded, ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... dirtied up digging dirty nuggets, when you can get nice, clean gold, all coined, ready to spend, by betting right?" And then dad turned to me and he said; "Hennery, don't let the sight of this wealth make you avaricious. Don't be purse-proud when you find that your poor father, after years of struggle against adversity, and the machinations of designing men, has got next to the Pierpont Morgan class and has money to buy railroads. Don't get excited ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... and but for certain untoward circumstances, and the growing influence of his enemies, Sir Reginald would have been elevated to the peerage. Like most reformed spend-thrifts, he had become proportionately avaricious, and his mind seemed engrossed in accumulating wealth. In the meantime, his second wife followed her predecessor, dying, it was said, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was, was a mere yeoman with nothing spiritual about him; the monks of Hyde were, the younger, gay comrades, only trying how loosely they could sit to their vows; the elder, churlish and avaricious; even the Warden of Elizabeth College was little more than a student. And in London, fresh phases had revealed themselves; the pomp, state, splendour and luxury of Archbishop Wolsey's house had been a shock to the lad's ideal of a bishop drawn from the saintly biographies he had studied at ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... this was the most remarkable man of his age. He may be said to have risen from nothing, for though his mother was Elizabeth, eleventh Viscountess Lisle in her own right, his father was Edmund Dudley, the mean and avaricious favourite of Henry the Seventh. The marriage of Dudley and Elizabeth was apparently forced upon the Viscountess, then a mere girl of some twenty years of age or under; and when she was left free, she re-married Sir Arthur Plantagenet (Viscount Lisle), to whom ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... built to make good the claim, and China helplessly yielded to the gigantic steal. Since then Russia has laid hands on an extensive slice of Chinese territory which lies on the Pacific coast far to the south of the Amur, and has forcibly taken possession of the Japanese island of Saghalien. Her avaricious eyes are fixed on the kingdom of Corea, and the whole of Manchuria may yet ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and taking advantage of a pause, "is the hobby of the sportsman and the life work of the avaricious." ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... looking in that direction, he spat at regular intervals toward the fireplace. Near him sat Edward S. Baker, statesmanlike, impressive, despite his drink-befuddlement; Edward Jones, of Palmer, Cook & Co., smaller, shrewd, keen and avaricious-eyed, was pouring a drink from a decanter; Volney Howard, fat, pompous, aping a blase, decadent manner, stood, ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman |
