Free translatorFree translator
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Slavish   /slˈeɪvɪʃ/   Listen
Slavish

adjective
1.
Blindly imitative.
2.
Abjectly submissive; characteristic of a slave or servant.  Synonyms: submissive, subservient.  "A slavish yes-man to the party bosses" , "She has become submissive and subservient"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Slavish" Quotes from Famous Books



... his instincts told him that not even the last extremity of danger would force a tear from those proud eyes, nor bow that haughty head an inch. How this wild, fierce worship maddened him! So longing, yet so slavish—so reckless, so debased, yet all the while cursed with a certain leavening of the true faith, that drove him to despair. But come what might, in a few minutes he would see her again. Even at ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville

... Rules of composition I shall certainly spoil the Air, and cross the Strain that Fancy dictated. And indeed this is without dispute, a very just Plea, for I am sure I have often and sensibly felt the disagreeable and slavish Effect of such Restraint as is here pointed out, and so I believe every Composer of Poetry as well as Musick, for I presume there are strict Rules for Poetry, as for Musick. But as I have often heard of a Poetical License ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton

... and he was of no avail! Must we not detest a world that so treats us? We loathe it the more, by the measure of our contempt for them, when we have made the people within the shadow-circle of our person slavish. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Ah slavish Italy! thou inn of grief, Vessel without a pilot in loud storm, Lady no longer of fair provinces, But brothel-house impure! this gentle spirit, Ev'n from the Pleasant sound of his dear land Was prompt to greet a fellow citizen With such glad cheer; while ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... sixth." Listless scholars now turned round, and ceased to whisper, in order to be in at the master's final triumph. But to their surprise "ole Miss Meanses' white nigger," as some of them called her in allusion to her slavish life, spelled these great words with as perfect ease as the master. Still not doubting the result, the Squire turned from place to place and selected all the hard words he could find. The school became utterly quiet, the excitement was too great for the ordinary buzz. Would ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various

... in so speaking I hold to an old-fashioned belief, and tread incontinently, not only on a notion afloat among some of the strong-minded of my sex at the present day, that this institution is nothing more nor less than an engine of selfish and despotic power on the one hand, and of slavish subjection on the other; but on the more moderate idea that it is not desirable for all women, nor even for a majority. But I still think that this state of union is the most natural, beneficent, satisfying condition possible for all of both sexes—the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... and those may groan who also made me unhappy. I am the son of Agamemnon, who ruled over Greece by general consent; no tyrant, but yet he had the power as it were of a God, whom I will not disgrace, suffering a slavish death, but breathe out my soul in freedom, but on Menelaus will I revenge me. For if we could gain this one thing, we should be prosperous, if from any chance safety should come unhoped for on the slayers then, not the slain: this I pray ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides

... more heavenly than the light flashed upward from glassy surfaces, but luminous and watchful; never shooting beyond them, nor lagging in the rear; so closely attached to them that it may be taken for a slavish reflex, until its features are studied. It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of a faun lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness of half tension. That slim feasting smile, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... acquainted her agent with your being here on Miss Bertram's part; and I will meet you afterwards at the house she inhabited, and be present to see fair play at the opening of the settlement. The old cat had a little girl, the orphan of some relation, who lived with her as a kind of slavish companion. I hope she has had the conscience to make her independent, in consideration of the peine forte et dure to which she ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... fight on corporations that broke the laws and charged the people prohibitive prices for the necessities of life. Party worshippers like the Hon. Mr. Maxwell besieged the committee room pleading for harmony, meaning by "harmony," a slavish compromise with the greed and influence of money and power that might help the party if they were let alone. Letters flooded him from all parts of the state begging him or threatening him to leave well alone. Some of the very men who had during ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon

... aims and methods. Any education is bad which leads to the formation of habits of idleness, carelessness, failure, instead of habits of industry, thoroughness and success. Any religious or social institution is bad which leads to habits of pious make-believe, insincerity, slavish regard for authority and disregard for evidence, instead of habits of sincerity, ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski

... infirm clergyman in the parish. Being a student of divinity he was at liberty to preach, but conscious ignorance had hitherto restrained him. He thought, however, that by committing some other man's sermon to memory he might profit the hearers, and so he undertook it. It was slavish work to prepare, for it took most of a week to memorize the sermon, and it was joyless work to deliver it, for there was none of the living power that attends a man's God-given message and witness. His conscience ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson

... holier law of the great Power, who made us what we are, than this one of slavish obedience to a tradition. Why must our feet ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo

... manner, that he would attend only if the expected courier from Paris did arrive in the course of the day, so that he might profit by the Bavarian ambassador's party to take leave of all those "fawning and slavish representatives of the ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach

... condition of possessing land seemeth miserable and slavish—holding it all at the pleasure of great men; not freely, but by prescription, and, as it were, at the will and pleasure of the lord. For as soon as any man offend any of these gorgeous gentlemen, he is put out, deprived, and thrust from all ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... Isidore's father had robbed, cheated, deceived, and adored Castrillon's father; the fathers of these two reprobates had observed the same measure of whippings and treacheries, and so it had been always from the first registered beginnings of the noble and the slavish house. But an Isidore had never been known to leave a Castrillon's service. The hereditary, easy-going forbearance, on the one hand, which found killing less tedious than a crude dismissal, and the hereditary guilty conscience, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... a heart like woman! I would cast Life at her foot, and, as she glided past, Would bid her trample on the slavish thing— Tell her, I'd rather feel me withering Under her step, than be unknown for aye: And, when her pride had crush'd me, she might see A love-wing'd spirit glide in glory by Striking the ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart

... is free?—the wise, who well maintains An empire o'er himself; whom neither chains, Nor want, nor death, with slavish fear inspire; Who boldly answers to his warm desire; Who can ambition's vainest gifts despise; Firm in himself, who on himself relies; Polish'd and round, who runs his proper course, And breaks misfortune with ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various

... shadows, chilly springs, and sloppy summers; of factory chimneys and crowds of grimy operatives, rung to work in early morning by factory bells; of union workhouses, confined rooms, artificial cares, and slavish conventionalities. To live again amidst these dull scenes, I was quitting a country of perpetual summer, where my life had been spent like that of three-fourths of the people— in gipsy fashion— on the endless streams or in the boundless forests. I was leaving the equator, where ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... a tigress, uncovered—she was always too hot—she would read the letters sent her by Lubkov; he besought her to return to Russia, vowing if she did not he would rob or murder some one to get the money to come to her. She hated him, but his passionate, slavish letters excited her. She had an extraordinary opinion of her own charms; she imagined that if somewhere, in some great assembly, men could have seen how beautifully she was made and the colour of her skin, she would have vanquished all Italy, ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... enough to impassioned recitative to do justice to the words on which they are built. Nevin is also an enthusiastic devotee of the position these masters, after Schubert, took on the question of the accompaniment. This is no longer a slavish thumping of a few chords, now and then, to keep the voice on the key, with outbursts of real expression only at the interludes; but it is a free instrumental composition with a meaning of its own and an integral value, truly accompanying, not merely ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... himselfin public, appeared in the state and the costume of a successor of Darius and Xerxes, with the purple caftan, the half-white half-purple tunic, the long plaited trousers, the high turban, and the royal diadem—attended moreover and served in slavish fashion, wherever he went ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... wise and good have hived for the use of the race, is poohed at as old-fogyish. To receive as true anything which the child cannot fathom, and which he has not discovered or demonstrated for himself, is denounced as slavish. All authority in teaching, growing out of the age and the reputed wisdom of the teacher, all faith and reverence in the learner, growing out of a sense of his ignorance and dependence, are discarded, ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... and on Puppy's—for, though we tried many, we never found any other satisfactory name for him but "Puppy"—a reverent admiration and watchful worshipping imitation. No great man was ever more anxiously copied by some slavish flatterer than that old sleepy carelessly-great setter by that eager, ambitious little terrier. The occasions when to bark and when not to bark, for example. One could actually see Puppy studying the old dog's face on doubtful ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... forget this, he tempted them to worship the creature instead of the Creator; to pray to sun and moon and stars, to send them fair weather, good crops, prosperous fortune: to look up to the heaven above them, and down to the earth beneath their feet, in slavish dread and anxiety: and pray to the sun, not to blast them to the seas, not to sweep them away; to the rivers and springs, not to let them perish from drought; to earthquakes, not to swallow them up; ay, even to try to appease those dark fierce powers, with ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley

... we are treating of, were manifestly owing to that continual violation of such oaths of allegiance, as appear to have been contrived on purpose by ambitious men to be broken at pleasure, without the least apprehension of perjury, and in the mean time keep the prince in a continual slavish dependence. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift

... have a mind inured to such conceptions, a mind capable of remaining on such a verge, is, alone, to be, intellectually speaking, what we call "aristocratic." When, even with eyes like poor Gloucester's in the play, we can see "how this world wags," it is slavish and "plebeian" to swear that it all "means intensely, and means well." It is also to lie ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... instance, of Anne of Cleves, that she was the "ugliest woman that ever I saw." As far as we can glean from his own voluminous writings it would seem to be extremely doubtful whether he ever saw Anne of Cleves at all, and we suspect him here of being no more than a slavish echo of the common voice, which attributed Cromwell's downfall to the ugliness of this bride he procured for his Bluebeard master. To the common voice from the brush of Holbein, which permits us to form our own opinions and shows us a lady who is certainly ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini

... is, those only who were worthy of that splendid name, so bandied by the Press and the Academies and doled out to divers windbags greedy of money and flattery—the poets, despising impudent rhetoric and that slavish realism which nibbles at the surface of things without penetrating to reality, had intrenched themselves in the very center of the soul, in a mystic vision into which was drawn the universe of form and idea, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... light and liberty in which he himself moved. He did not doubt his power, when she should once be where he could speak with her freely, without fear of interruption. Hers was a soul too good and pure, he said, to be kept in chains of slavish ignorance any longer. When she ceased singing, he spoke ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various

... century, so slavish was the condition of women on the one hand, and so much was beauty coveted on the other, that, for about two hundred years, the kings of Austria were obliged to pay a tribute to the Moors, of one hundred ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous

... misunderstanding, we refuse the verbal form of its true interpretation, but we cannot thus refuse the spirit and the truth of it, for those we could not have seen without being in the condition to recognize them as the mind of Christ. Some misapprehension, I say, some obliquity, or some slavish adherence to old prejudices, may thus cause us to refuse the true interpretation, but we are none the less bound to refuse and wait for more light. To accept that as the will of our Lord which to us is inconsistent with what we have learned to worship in him already, is to introduce ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... their peace, in the next place a strict commandment was given out, that yet my Lord Willbewill should, with Diligence his man, search for, and do his best to apprehend what town Diabolonians were yet left alive in Mansoul. The names of several of them were, Mr. Fooling, Mr. Let-Good-Slip, Mr. Slavish-Fear, Mr. No-Love, Mr. Mistrust, Mr. Flesh, and Mr. Sloth. It was also commanded, that he should apprehend Mr. Evil- Questioning's children, that he left behind him, and that they should demolish his house. The children that he left behind ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan

... that to hold Blaze Jones to a strict accountability with fact was to rob his society of its greatest charm. A slavish accuracy in figures, an arid lack of imagination, reduces conversation to the insipidness of flat wine, and Blaze's talk was never dull. He was a keen, shrewd, practical man, but somewhere in his being there was concealed a tremendous, lop-sided sense of humor which ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... petitioned for another nap; in vain Max protested that we were not New York shop-boys, obliged to rise at daylight to make fires, and open and sweep out stores, but free and independent desert islanders, who had escaped from the bondage of civilised life, and the shackles of slavish routine, and who need not get up until noon, unless of our own good pleasure. Arthur was inexorable, and finding that further sleep was out of the question, we yielded at last to his despotic pertinacity, and ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer

... Cowards; and it is not always for the Sake of your Country, that you leave your Wives and Children, but for the Sake of a little nasty Pay; and, worse than Fencers at the Bear-Garden, you deliver up your Bodies to a slavish Necessity of being killed, or yourselves killing others. And now after all your Boasting of your warlike Prowess, there is none of you all, but if you had once experienced what it is to bring a Child into the World, would rather ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus

... were accomplished, Midir came again to Eochy, and this time he bore a dark and fierce countenance and was high girt as for war. And the King welcomed him, and Midir said, "Thou hast treated me hardly and put slavish tasks upon me. All that seemed good to thee have I done, but now I am ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston

... as unbalanced are, with one exception, among the oldest examples given; conceived in the most slavish geometrical symmetry in which, indeed, the geometrical outline almost hides the fact that the slight variations are all toward a ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... equivocate, quibble, shuffle, dodge, fence, fib. Likeness, resemblance, similitude, similarity, semblance, analogy. Limp, flaccid, flabby, flimsy. List, roll, catalogue, register, roster, schedule, inventory. Loud, resonant, clarion, stentorian, sonorous. Low, base, abject, servile, slavish, menial. Loyal, faithful, true, constant, staunch, unwavering, steadfast. Lurk, skulk, slink, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... she stood firm. When the child was ailing, it should be brought at once to her for succour. It should be healed by the power of her mind, not poisoned by the nostrums of a man like Doctor Keltridge, good as gold, but slavish in his adherence to the foolish ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... quoted instances from ancient History, such as Judith and Holophern, then, without any reason Lucretia with Sextus, Cleopatra who admitted to her intimacy all the enemy generals and reduced them to slavish servility. Then a fancy History was propounded, originating in the imagination of those ignorant millionaires, and according to which Roman matrons used to go to Capua and lull Hannibal in their arms, and with him, his lieutenants and the phalanxes of his mercenaries. They quoted ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant

... order; and it was wonderful how I got over the temporary blunder—how I cleared up the mistake of supposing Mr. Rochester's movements a matter in which I had any cause to take a vital interest. Not that I humbled myself by a slavish notion of inferiority: on the ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... "that the most reverend Archbishop Whitgift did ever constantly maintain the liberty of the free charter, that men ought to be fined, salvo contenemento. But they have been of late imposed according to the nature of the offence, and not the estate of the person. The slavish punishment of whipping," he proceeds to observe, "was not introduced till a great man of the common law, and otherwise a worthy justice, forgot his place of session, and brought it in this place too much in use." It would be difficult ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... they can co-operate for these purposes. But perhaps thou wilt say the gods have placed them in thy power. Well, then, is it not better to use what is in thy power like a free man than to desire in a slavish and abject way what is not in thy power? And who has told thee that the gods do not aid us, even in the things which are in our power? Begin, then, to pray for such things, and thou wilt see. One man prays thus: How shall I be able to lie with that ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

... venture no opposition. Whoever may have the power to declare and maintain himself their ruler, he is their master, and the slavish horde ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... his slaves, even as thy dog is thine; Harried by hunger, pillaged, ravaged, slain, By Viking robbers and the warring Jarls; Oft glad like hunted swine to fill their maws With herbs and acorns. "Progress and Poverty!" The humblest laborer in our mills or mines Is royal Thane beside those slavish churls; The frugal farmer in our land to-day Lives better ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... the church from some other type than the basilica might be likely to show itself. This, in fact, is what occurred; for while the most ancient churches of Rome all present, as we have seen, an almost slavish copy of an existing type of building, and do not attempt the use of vaulted roofs, in Byzantium buildings of most original design sprang up, founded, it is true, on Roman originals, but by no means exact copies of them. In the erection of these churches the most difficult problems ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith

... dismissed from it; who, on the other hand, cling with most fidelity to those masters and mistresses who have tested and proved their real capacity, and do not look for that superficial responsiveness, that slavish affability, which may impress a stranger favourably, but often conceals an utter barrenness of spirit in which no amount of training can produce the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... slavish his labour an' little his wage, His path tuv his grave were bud rough, Poor livin' an' hardships, a deal more nor age, Hed swealed(1) daan his ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman

... real trial of charity to read this scene with tolerable temper towards Fletcher. So very slavish—so reptile—are the feelings and sentiments represented as duties. And yet, remember, he was a bishop's son, and the duty to God was ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge

... judgment.... This is a vein which we hope to see successfully prosecuted.... We hail the appearance of this work as a long stride toward the formation of a purely aboriginal, indigenous, native, and American literature. We rejoice to meet with an author national enough to break away from the slavish deference, too common among us, to English grammar and orthography.... Where all is so good, we are at a loss how to make extracts.... On the whole, we may call it a volume which no library, pretending to entire completeness, should fail to ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell

... squeamish, nor did he entertain slavish thoughts of how people would feel over a disregarded custom. He liked simplicity, and moreover he felt the need of exercise now that his work kept him inactive most of the time. He was at an age when ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge

... things to be, and I too am minded to utter a prophecy. Once, for a brief space, I associated with the son of Anytus, and he seemed to me not lacking in strength of soul; and what I say is, he will not adhere long to the slavish employment which his father has prepared for him, but, in the absence of any earnest friend and guardian, he is like to be led into some base passion and go ...
— The Apology • Xenophon

... the base of which is the small village of Trempeleau, where a moment's halt is made, and the wheels of the great ship splash through the water again, all tremulous with nervous energy and pent-up power as they bend slowly to their slavish labor; and, the only labor that man has any right to make a slave of is that with iron arms and metallic lungs. He may compel these to work and groan and sweat at every pore with honor to himself and the added ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill

... come That wrath of sympathy: One windy night We watched through squalid panes, forlornly white, — Amid immense machines' incessant hum — Frail figures, gaunt and dumb, Of overlabored girls and children, bowed Above their slavish toil: "O God! — A bomb, A bomb!" he cried, "and with one fiery cloud Expunge the horrible ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse

... matter—usually are born into the petty slavery of conventions at least, and know nothing else their whole lives through—never know the joy of the thought and the act of a free mind and a free heart. Still, she was released from a bondage that seemed slavish even to her, and the release gave her a sensation akin to the joy of freedom. A heavy hand that was crushing her very soul had been lifted off—no, FLUNG off, and by herself. That thought, terrifying though it was, also gave her a certain new and exalting self-respect. After all, she ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips

... sorry to say Newby does know my real name. I wish he did not, but that cannot be helped. Meantime, though I earnestly wish to preserve my incognito, I live under no slavish fear of discovery. I am ashamed of nothing I have written—not ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... them? Nevertheless, Herminia's manners were so sweet and engaging, to rich and poor alike, that Bower Lane seriously regretted what it took to be her lapse from grace. Poor purblind Bower Lane! A life-time would have failed it to discern for itself how infinitely higher than its slavish "respectability" was Herminia's freedom. In which respect, indeed, Bower Lane was no doubt on a dead level with Belgravia, or, for the matter of that, with ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen

... excellent opportunities for observing the half-wild cattle in S. Africa, says (20. See his extremely interesting paper on 'Gregariousness in Cattle, and in Man,' 'Macmillan's Magazine,' Feb. 1871, p. 353.), that they cannot endure even a momentary separation from the herd. They are essentially slavish, and accept the common determination, seeking no better lot than to be led by any one ox who has enough self-reliance to accept the position. The men who break in these animals for harness, watch assiduously for those who, by grazing apart, shew a self-reliant disposition, and these they ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... learnt, but not virtue, seems to act altogether contrary to the Scythians. For they, as Herodotus tells us,[210] blind their slaves that they may remain with them, but such an one puts the eye of reason into slavish and servile arts, and takes it away from virtue. And the general Iphicrates well answered Callias, the son of Chabrias, who asked him, "What are you? an archer? a targeteer? cavalry, or infantry?" "None of these," said he, "but the commander ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... could not be imagined than the beautiful English face of the girl, and its exquisite fairness, together with her erect and independent attitude, contrasted with the sallow and bilious skin of the Malay, enamelled or veneered with mahogany by marine air, his small, fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, slavish gestures, and adorations. Half hidden by the ferocious-looking Malay was a little child from a neighboring cottage, who had crept in after him and was now in the act of reverting its head and gazing upward at the turban and the fiery eyes beneath it, while ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day

... very closely at his representation of events and examine how far partisan feeling and prejudices, and how far servility and the courtier spirit, have colored it. We have also to consider how far his reflections represent his own judgment, and how far they are the slavish adoption of opinions expressed by the victorious enemies ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich

... the stern battle of the seas might cease, And guard Leander to his love in peace. The Fates consent;—ay me, dissembling Fates! They showed their favours to conceal their hates, And draw Leander on, lest seas too high Should stay his too obsequious destiny: Who[114] like a fleering slavish parasite, In warping profit or a traitorous sleight, 20 Hoops round his rotten body with devotes, And pricks his descant face full of false notes; Praising with open throat, and oaths as foul As his false heart, the beauty of an owl; Kissing his skipping hand with charmed skips, That cannot leave, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... gifts was this lord of Valapee; the legatee, moreover, of numerous anonymous souls, bequeathed to him by their late loyal proprietors. By a slavish act of his convocation of chiefs, he also possessed the reversion of all and singular the immortal spirits, whose first grantees might die intestate in Valapee. Servile, yet audacious senators! thus prospectively ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... they were many times more numerous than the enemy; they were now more familiar with his aspect and found him less terrible, the result not having justified the apprehensions which they had suffered, when they first landed in slavish dismay at the idea of attacking Lacedaemonians; and accordingly their fear changing to disdain, they now rushed all together with loud shouts upon them, and pelted them with stones, darts, and arrows, whichever came first to hand. The shouting accompanying their onset confounded the Lacedaemonians, ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides

... be right soon now, while travellin's good. Come snowfall hit'll git ter be right slavish journeyin'—but I don't 'low ter tarry there long. I kain't noways be ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... the slavish and bestial doctrine," said the Dwarf, his eyes kindling with insane fury,—"I spurn at it, as worthy only of the beasts that perish; but I will waste no more ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott

... believe, as an inferior species of animals, and seem to be brought up for no other purpose than that of administering to the sensual pleasures of their imperious masters. Voluptuousness is, therefore, considered as their chief accomplishment, and slavish submission as their ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park

... were brought to New York were crowded into churches, and environed with slavish Hessian guards, a people of a strange language * * * and at other times by merciless Britons, whose mode of communicating ideas being unintelligible in this country served only to tantalize and insult the helpless and perishing; but above all the hellish delight and triumph of the tories over them, ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... Croftangry, and lyeth near to the royal palace. And whereas that some of those who bear this auld and honourable name may take scorn that it ariseth from the tilling of the ground, quhilk men account a slavish occupation, yet we ought to honour the pleugh and spade, seeing we all derive our being from our father Adam, whose lot it became to cultivate the earth, in respect ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott

... gaudy, theatrical togs. It is impossible to describe what took place within her. Never before had she felt like this. In her stage appearances she usually gazed at the public with an expression of aloofness as on a foolish and slavish throng, but to-day it seemed to her as though she were standing in the front part of a huge cage like some animal on exhibition, while that audience had come to view her and amuse itself with her antics. For the first time she saw that smile which was not on any particular face, ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont

... and am I born for this, To wear this slavish chain? Deprived of all created bliss, Through ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson

... horses had done, so to-day the mare spread her powerful haunches and raised clouds of earth with each firm impact of her gleaming hoofs; but the joy was gone from the sight. Even Hester, the farm-dog, lineal descendant of poor Wanda, seemed to feel the inaction in the air, and, leaving off her slavish following of the roller, flung herself down on a stretch of field where it had already passed, legs outspread, looking so flattened as she lay there, a mere pattern of black and white, that the roller might have passed over her also. Archelaus stood leaning upon a favourite stick of Nicky's ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... surreptitious favors. Objectively, she was a slim, hoopless little woman, with a tendency to be always at the street-door when we opened it. She had a narrow, narrow face, with eyes of terrible slyness, an applausive smile, and a demeanor of slavish patronage. Our kitchen, after her addition to the household, became the banqueting-hall of Giovanna's family, who dined there every day upon dishes of fish and garlic, that gave the house the general savor ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... all nations, to ask to be annexed to the Union. As an independent sovereignty her right to do this is unquestionable. In doing so she gives no cause of umbrage to any other power; her people desire it, and there is no slavish transfer of her sovereignty and independence. She has for eight years maintained her independence against all efforts to subdue her. She has been recognized as independent by many of the most prominent of the family of nations, and that recognition, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson

... one of commerce and noise and crowded, breathless life; he had been cooped up in it like a panther in a den, like a hawk in a cage. What he saw of the vices and appetites of men, the pressure of greed and of gain, the harsh and stupid tyranny of the few, the slavish and ignoble submission of the many, the brutish bullying, the crouching obedience, the deadly routine, the lewd licence of reaction—all filled him with disdain and with disgust. When he returned to his valley he bathed in the waters of Edera before ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida

... a good and a glorious work, few will be such slavish bigots as to deny. But the enemy came, by night, and sowed tares among the wheat; or rather; the foul and rank soil, upon which the seed was thrown, pushed forth, together with the rising crop, a ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... glass herself. Then she filled another glass and gave it him, and he took it with his right hand. Then she immediately recognized her ring, and said to her father, "This man is my husband who delivered me from death, but that fellow"—pointing to the lackey—"that rascally slavish soul killed my husband and made me say that he was my husband." When the Tsar heard this he boiled over with rage. "So that is what thou art!" said he to the lackey, and immediately he bade them bind him and tie him to the tail of a ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous

... martyrdom of Asaad Shidiak,1 so very early in the history of this mission, is a significant and encouraging fact. He not only belonged to the Arab race, but to a portion of it that had long been held in slavish subjection to Rome. His fine mind and heart opened to the truths of the Gospel almost as soon as they were presented; and when once embraced, they were held through years of suffering, which terminated in a martyr's death. With freedom to act, he would have gone forth an apostle ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson

... Now, Tamburlaine, the mighty Soldan comes, And leads with him the great Arabian king, To dim thy baseness and [222] obscurity, Famous for nothing but for theft and spoil; To raze and scatter thy inglorious crew Of Scythians and slavish Persians. ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe

... softly a while; Let us not break in upon him. O change beyond report, thought, or belief! See how he lies at random, carelessly diffused With languished head unpropt, As one past hope, abandoned, And by himself given over, In slavish habit, ill-fitted weeds O'er-worn and soiled. Or do my eyes misrepresent? Can this be he, That heroic, that renowned, Irresistible Samson? whom unarmed No strength of man or fiercest wild beast could withstand; Who tore the lion, as the lion ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various

... rendered the translation as literal as possible, consistent with the comprehension of the author's meaning. This may be considered by some a slavish and dull compliance; but in my humble opinion we ought, in this case, to display the author's own thoughts and ideas; all we are permitted to do, is to change their garb. This course has one superior advantage which may compensate for its seeming ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli

... "For the reason aforementioned—a slavish timidity." Daisy broke off to carol a few bars of a song. "I've known the Ratcliffe family ever since I became engaged to Will," she said presently. "Jim Ratcliffe, you know, was left his guardian, and he was always ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell

... enchant the old serpent of evil, which refuses the voice of the charmer!—struggling against the prejudice and bigoted delusion of the bandaged and fettered herd to whom, in our fond hopes and aspirations, we trusted to give light and freedom; seeing the slavish judgments we would have redeemed from error clashing their chains at us in ire;—made criminal by our very benevolence;—the martyrs whose zeal is rewarded with persecution, whose prophecies are crowned with contempt!—Better, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... a source of inspiration in design. The whole range of historic art is brought within our survey, and while this has on the one hand tended toward the confusion and multiplication of styles in modern work, it has on the other led to a slavish adherence to historic precedent or a literal copying of historic forms. Modern architecture has thus oscillated between the extremes of archological servitude and of an unreasoning eclecticism. In the hands of men of inferior ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... round, When shame and all her blushing train are drown'd, Rather than hear his God blasphemed, he takes The last loved glass, and then the board forsakes. Not that religion prompts the sober thought, But slavish custom has the practice taught; Besides, this zealous son of warm devotion Has a true Levite bias for promotion. Vicars must with discretion go astray, Whilst bishops may be damn'd the nearest way; So puny robbers individuals kill, When ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe

... instruments of saving them from the tyranny meditated against them. Let us, therefore, animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a freeman contending for liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various

... was like a victim that was being prepared for the savage rites of a bloody idolatry. Her terror numbed her. She could not bear to let Davidson out of her sight; it was only when he was with her that she had courage, and she hung upon him with a slavish dependence. She cried a great deal, and she read the Bible, and prayed. Sometimes she was exhausted and apathetic. Then she did indeed look forward to her ordeal, for it seemed to offer an escape, direct and concrete, from ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham

... the Body, Without and Within, Makes for Royal Health-Tone. The law should be given rational, not slavish, obedience. Your body and your deeper self are in a constant state of interaction. Material uncleanness consented to contaminates that self. Uncleanness of the self also contaminates the body. The white life requires the clean dress of honored flesh. You are invited, therefore, to ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock

... were sharply defined in reality, but smoothed over by a conventional and decorous benevolence of language, which deceived vulgar minds. He was a strict absolutist. His deference to arbitrary power was profound and slavish. God and "the master," as he always called Philip, he professed to serve with equal humility. "It seems to me," said he, in a letter of this epoch, "that I shall never be able to fulfil the obligation of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... swiftly accumulating evidence that the North was becoming rashly impatient Newspaper correspondents at Washington talked to his secretaries "impertinently."(5) Members of Congress, either carried away by the excitement of the hour or with slavish regard to the hysteria of their constituents, thronged to Washington clamoring for action. On purely political grounds, if on no other, they demanded an immediate advance into Virginia. Military men looked with ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... is instantaneous. The man is mean, saving, toiling, the slave of one passion which is the master of the rest: Is he not the very image of the State? He has had no education, or he would never have allowed the blind god of riches to lead the dance within him. And being uneducated he will have many slavish desires, some beggarly, some knavish, breeding in his soul. If he is the trustee of an orphan, and has the power to defraud, he will soon prove that he is not without the will, and that his passions are only restrained by fear and not by ...
— The Republic • Plato

... seest folk like slain, * And when she's pleased, their souls are quick again: Her eyne are armed with glances magical * Wherewith she kills and quickens as she's fain. The Worlds she leadeth captive with her eyes * As tho' the Worlds were all her slavish train." ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton

... give to the paid men of law ungrateful work to do;—and in your homes, think of me!—remember my words!—and while you maintain order by the steadiness and reasonableness of your difficult lives, still avoid and resent that slavish obedience to the yoke fastened upon you by capitalists,—who have no other comfort to offer you in poverty than the workhouse; and no other remedy for the sins into which you are thrust by their neglect, than the prison! Take, and keep the rights of your humanity!—the right to think,—the ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... is, they have slavish fears that do overmaster them; I speak now of the fears that they have of men, for "the fear of man bringeth a snare". [Prov. 29:25] So then, though they seem to be hot for heaven, so long as the flames of hell are about their ears, yet when that terror is a little over, ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan

... or some other sinister view could have no place among them? Whether those holy lords I spoke of were always promoted to that rank upon account of their knowledge in religious matters and the sanctity of their lives; had never been compilers with the times while they were common priests, or slavish prostitute chaplains to some noblemen, whose opinions they continued servilely to follow, after they ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift

... voluptuous Arab, gave to his countrymen an impulse of which the effect was the subjugation and desolation of vast countries in Asia, in Africa, and in Europe; whose consequences were sufficiently potential to erect a new, extensive, but slavish empire; to give a novel system of religion to millions of human beings; to overturn the altars of their former gods; in short, to alter the opinions, to change the customs of a considerable portion of the population of the ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach

... commonwealths where either philosophers are elected kings, or kings turn philosophers." Alas, this is so far from being true, that if we consult all historians for an account of past ages, we shall find no princes more weak, nor any people more slavish and wretched, than where the administrations of affairs fell on the shoulders of some learned bookish governor. Of the truth whereof, the two Catos are exemplary instances: the first of which embroiled the city, and tired out the ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus

... blessing! And shame on the light race, unworthy its good, Who, at Death's reeking altar, like furies, caressing The young hope of Freedom, baptized it in blood. Then vanished for ever that fair, sunny vision, Which, spite of the slavish, the cold heart's derision, Shall long be remembered, pure, bright, and elysian, As first it arose, my ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... Chancellor was not long in removing himself from this dangerous vicinity; nor did the commission waste time in giving the royal assent to the work of the slavish Parliament, and appointing the morrow for the beheading of the premier peer of England, the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... wantonly abused, 530 Have Britons drawn their sport; with partial view Form'd general notions from the rascal few; Condemn'd a people, as for vices known, Which from their country banish'd, seek our own. At length, howe'er, the slavish chain is broke, And Sense, awaken'd, scorns her ancient yoke: Taught by thee, Moody[37], we now learn to raise Mirth from their foibles; from their virtues, praise. Next came the legion which our summer Bayes[38], ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... Oration was our Declaration of Literary Independence. But Mr. Emerson did not cut himself loose from all the traditions of Old World scholarship. He spelled his words correctly, he constructed his sentences grammatically. He adhered to the slavish rules of propriety, and observed the reticences which a traditional delicacy has considered inviolable in decent society, European and Oriental alike. When he wrote poetry, he commonly selected subjects which seemed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... be taught to go up to the same original and ever-living fountains of all literature, at which the Miltons, and the Barrows, and the Drydens drank in so much of their enthusiasm and inspiration, and to cast off entirely that slavish dependence upon the opinions of others which they must feel, who take their knowledge of what it is either their duty, their interest, or their ambition to learn, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... and repulsive is this our existence, in which the immoderate, slavish toil of the one-half incessantly enables the other to satiate itself with ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald

... formantes'), namely, the rewards and punishments. Now contrast with this the process of the Gospel. There the affections are formed in the first instance, not by any reference to works or deeds, but by an unmerited rescue from death, liberation from slavish task-work; by faith, gratitude, love, and affectionate contemplation of the exceeding goodness and loveliness of the Saviour, Redeemer, Benefactor: from the affections flow the deeds, or rather the affections overflow in the deeds, and the rewards are but a continuance and continued ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... we wise, Him also! though the chorus of the throng Be silent: though no pillar rise In slavish adulation of the strong:— But here, from blame of tongues and fame aloof, ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... Clarke (Mary Graves), now of White River, Tulare County, speaking of this second day, says: "We had a very slavish day's travel, climbing the divide. Nothing of interest occurred until reaching the summit. The scenery was too grand for me to pass without notice, the changes being so great; walking now on loose snow, and now stepping on a hard, slick ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan

... and imprudence to blame, if he also loses the substance with the form, the figurative nature of which can be shown to him only too certainly. We acknowledge it as a real providence of God, which intends faithfully to guard believing man against a senseless and slavish adherence to the letter, and against grounding his means of salvation upon insecure foundations, that at the grand and venerable portal of Holy Scripture two accounts stand peacefully beside one another, which, if we penetrate through the ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid

... heart singer of the human frame Divine, whose poesy disdains control Of slavish bonds! each poem is a soul, Incarnate born of thee, and given thy name. Thy genius is unshackled as a flame That sunward soars, the central light its goal; Thy thoughts are lightnings, and thy numbers roll ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler

... House of Representatives to be a republic. Through its own groveling abjections, however, it long ago sunk to an autocracy with the Speaker in the role of autocrat. It sold its birthright for no one knows what mess of pottage to pass its slavish days beneath a tyranny of the gavel. The Speaker settles all things. No measure is proposed, no bill passes, no member speaks except by the Speaker's will. He constructs the committees and selects their chairmen and lays out their work. With a dozen members, ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis

... to this I would say, that it must be a base spirit which does not prize "independence" for its own sake, whatever privation and suffering may attend it; and much more base must be that spirit, which can exchange that "independence" for a state of slavish subjection—even though that state abound in all sensual gratifications. To talk of "a kind master" is to talk of a blessing for a dog, but not for a man, who is made to "call no man master." Were the people of this nation like yourself, they would soon exchange their blood-bought liberties ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... science, and, above all, of everything written by the Germans. He believes in himself, in his preparations; knows the object of life, and knows nothing of the doubts and disappointments that turn the hair o f talent grey. He has a slavish reverence for authorities and a complete lack of any desire for independent thought. To change his convictions is difficult, to argue with him impossible. How is one to argue with a man who is firmly persuaded that medicine is the finest of sciences, that doctors are the best of men, and that ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... really and truly a Free-thinker in any tolerable Sense, meerly by virtue of his being an Atheist, or an Infidel of any other Distinction. It may be doubted, with good Reason, whether there ever was in Nature a more abject, slavish, and bigotted Generation than the Tribe of Beaux Esprits, at present so prevailing in this Island. Their Pretension to be Free-thinkers, is no other than Rakes have to be Free-livers, and Savages to be Free-men, that is, they can think whatever they ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... done. To the great relief of the government Gordon was at length persuaded to resume his command, more from the thought that he might be able to some extent to check the cruelty natural to the Chinese than for any other reason. It is amusing to watch the slavish behaviour of the emperor towards the man whose help he so greatly needed, and whose anger he so deeply feared. Once, when Gordon in leading an attack with his wand in his hand, the only weapon he ever carried, received a bad wound below the knee, his majesty promulgated ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang

... became the refuge of all noble spirits. But, in spite of its severity, and its apparent triumph over the feelings, it brought no real freedom and peace. "Stoical morality, strictly speaking, is, at bottom, only a slavish morality, excellent in Epictetus; admirable still, but useless to the world, in Marcus Aurelius." Pride takes the place of real disinterestedness. It stands alone in haughty grandeur and solitary isolation, tainted with an incurable ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... the Cross, in slavish dress, Weary and worn, the Heavenly King Our mother, Russia, came to bless, And through ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... to revision—its crudities can never be remodeled into more subtle, more gracious shading. It is my contention that, due to these inescapable conditions, the mental effort necessitated by the employment of nice distinctions in sense and meaning of words and a slavish adherence to the dictates of the more precise grammarians should be reserved for ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... occupation, and flattering herself with the fruits of her success. I learned much of the excellent child's true character in these brief hours. Her mind wandered over her hopes and fears, recurring to her other labors, and the prices she received for occupations so wearying and slavish. By the milliner, she was paid merely as a common sewing-girl, though her neatness, skill and taste might well have entitled her to double wages. A franc a day was the usual price for girls of an inferior caste, and out of this they were expected ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper

... really the soulless and mercenary object of the craven Northerners. Let the common people of England look to this. Let the improvident literary hack, the starved impecunious Grub Street debtor, the newspaper frequenter of sponging- houses, remember this in their criticisms of the vile and slavish Yankee. ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... etymological analysis does not matter. Like English, therefore, in its relation to French and Latin, it welcomed immense numbers of Sanskrit loan-words, many of which are in common use to-day. There was no psychological resistance to them. Classical Tibetan literature was a slavish adaptation of Hindu Buddhist literature and nowhere has Buddhism implanted itself more firmly than in Tibet, yet it is strange how few Sanskrit words have found their way into the language. Tibetan was highly resistant to the polysyllabic ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir

... myself. It was remarkable, too, how he kep his people, and how they looked up to him, which wouldn't have been the case if he had been like they represented. There was John Rau, the mate, a bullet-headed Belgian, who used to walk just like he did and copy all his little ways slavish, reading the cyclopediar, too, and stopping at R from discipline. And Lum, the China cook, a freak of a fellar, with coal-black hair all round his head like a girl's, and who'd out-Coe Coe till you'd split. The ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... your only clew. But scepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill: something we must believe in and do, and whatever that something may be called, it is virtually our own judgment, even when it seems like the most slavish reliance on another. Fred believed in the excellence of his bargain, and even before the fair had well set in, had got possession of the dappled gray, at the price of his old horse and thirty pounds in addition—only five pounds more than ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... a position beneficially and sanely to consider his evil in its moral quality only. But when the conviction comes to a man, 'God is pacified towards thee for all that thou hast done'; and when he can look at his own evil without the smallest disturbance rising from slavish fear of issues, then lie is in a position rightly to estimate its darkness and its depth. And there can be no better discipline for us all than to remember our faults, and penitently to travel back over the road of our sins, just because we are sure that God in Christ has forgotten ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... people. Though much was yet to be done before the fruits of victory could be fully realized, Clive at once became almost supreme in authority. Surajah Dowlah fled in disguise, and disappeared from history in complete obscurity. Meer Jaffler held Clive in slavish awe. He once reproved a native of high rank for some trouble with the company's Sepoys. "Are you yet to learn," he said, "who Colonel Clive is, and in what station God has placed him?" The answer was: "I affront the colonel! I who never get up in the morning without making ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot

... first half is, 'Thy will be done, as in Heaven, so on earth.' Obedience to that will is the end of God's self-revelation. It makes all the difference whether we begin with the thought of the name or of the will. In the latter case, religion will be slavish and submission sullen. There is no more horrible and paralysing conception of God than that of mere sovereign will. But if we think of Him as desiring that we should know His name, and as gathering all its syllables into the one perfect 'Word ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... after a thing he cannot live without, does not much concern himself at the coldness of their reception and countenance, nor at the inconstancy of their wills. He who does not brood over his children or his honours with a slavish propension, ceases not to live commodiously enough after their loss. He who does good principally for his own satisfaction will not be much troubled to see men judge of his actions contrary to his merit. A quarter of an ounce of patience will provide sufficiently against such inconveniences. I ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... with a free wind day after day, marking the position of my ship on the chart with considerable precision; but this was done by intuition, I think, more than by slavish calculations. For one whole month my vessel held her course true; I had not, the while, so much as a light in the binnacle. The Southern Cross I saw every night abeam. The sun every morning came up astern; every evening it went down ahead. I wished for no ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum

... entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, some scission in the continuity of man's experience, some wilful illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on the rules, calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as the defeated tyrant overthrew the chess-board, should ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various

... The source of all evil! They are our sinister masters—the weak, the flabby, the silly, the cowardly, the faint of heart, and the slavish of mind. They have power. They are the multitude. Theirs is the kingdom of the earth. Exterminate, exterminate! That is the only way of progress. It is! Follow me, Ossipon. First the great multitude of the weak ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad

... strands; his eyes were hard and weary; his face lined with new wrinkles. Ah, well, it was war—and a losing war, he had to admit, that they fought. If a miracle didn't come, America would crumble even as old Europe had, before the overwhelming Slavish troops. ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various

... time, thus to ruin myself and those dear to me? And for what? for the mere indulgence of a debasing appetite. I rose to my feet and my step grew light with my new-formed resolution, that I would break the slavish fetters that had so long held me captive; and now, my dear wife, if you can forgive the past and aid me in my resolutions for amendment there is hope for me yet." Mrs. Harland was only too happy to forgive her erring ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell

... serve the academical practitioner, as it seems to when taken alone. In the same way, the sentence printed in italics in the above quotation, if isolated, would certainly seem to serve the scientific practitioners and their slavish realism, though in connection with those that follow this is no longer possible. Duerer regards nature as providing raw material for a creation which may not tally exactly with any individual natural object. This was the Greek artists' idea of the ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... touch based on observation of the men of the London of the day. Jonson was neither in this, his first great comedy (nor in any other play that he wrote), a supine classicist, urging that English drama return to a slavish adherence to classical conditions. He says as to the laws of the old comedy (meaning by "laws," such matters as the unities of time and place and the use of chorus): "I see not then, but we should ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson

... veneration for the ancients—who personally might be forgiven for their misfortune in having lived when the world was young, were not one so slavish before them—is only because again one looks at the ideal,—looks through that magical Claude Lorraine glass which makes even the commonest landscape picturesque. We forget the dirty days of straw-strewn floors, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various

... of obedience. Fear, where not mixed in its actings with faith and love, is a spirit of bondage, but the Christian ought to walk according to the spirit of adoption which cries "Abba, Father." Yet how many Christians are rather in a servile and slavish manner driven on by terrors and chastisements to their duty than by love! There is a piece of liberty in Christian walking, when there is not a restraint upon the spirit, by this slavish fear. This, I say, is not beseeming those ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... not follow his Roman models in any slavish spirit. They were neither numerous nor excellent enough to compel blind imitation or to paralyse inventive impulse. The thoughts to be expressed in marble by the first modern artist were not Greek. This ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... in all cases of bloode, made him choose the softer way, and not hearken to seveare councells how reasonably soever urged. This only restrayned him from pursuinge his advantage in the first Scotts expedition, when humanely speakinge, he might have reduced that Nation to the most slavish obedyence that could have bene wished, but no man can say, he had then many who advized him to it, but the contrary, by a wounderfull indisposition all his Councell had to fightinge, or any other fatigue. He was alwayes ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various

... him," returned Grace simply, "and return to my pipe, but I do sometimes think it is too weak an indulgence of a slavish habit." ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell

... And when a smirking, slavish youth with red cheeks and awkward gestures turned up in Van Bibber's livery, his friends were naturally surprised, and asked how he had come to lose Walters. Van Bibber could not say exactly, at least he could not rightly tell whether he had dismissed Walters or ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis

... mistress wanted to do anything that was inconvenient to herself; quoting their sayings, pointing out how they would have acted in any given case, and always, it appeared, they had done exactly what Hilton desired. Susie's admiration for duchesses was slavish, and Hilton was treated with an indulgent liberality that was absurd compared to the stinginess displayed towards everyone else. Hilton was not more horrified than her mistress when she saw the farm cart, and understood that it was for ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp

... and barbarians. And thus, through an unjust desire of governing, he in a manner shut himself up in a prison. Besides, he would not trust his throat to a barber, but had his daughters taught to shave; so that these royal virgins were forced to descend to the base and slavish employment of shaving the head and beard of their father. Nor would he trust even them, when they were grown up, with a razor; but contrived how they might burn off the hair of his head and beard with red-hot nut-shells. And as to his two ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... something like a hearing, was understood to say, that he had little to offer in the shape of comment on the Report submitted to the meeting. (Groans.) The causes of its unsatisfactory nature were patent to all. Owing to their having been compelled, in what he now fully recognised was a slavish and mistaken obedience to a popular clamour (a Voice, "You're right!"), three years ago, in the height of a sudden scare about invasion—("Oh! oh!")—to let the water in and flood the Tunnel—(groans)—they had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various

... months spent in her charming society, a change came over Bigot. He received formidable missives from his great patroness at Versailles, the Marquise de Pompadour, who had other matrimonial designs for him. Bigot was too slavish a courtier to resent her interference, nor was he honest enough to explain his position to his betrothed. He deferred his marriage. The exigencies of the war called him away. He had triumphed over a fond, confiding woman; but he had ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... see if I am. I accuse her of nothing but a slavish devotion to custom and the conventions. What did she say when you read her the chapter before this one: where Fidelia goes down to the dining-room at midnight and finds Fleming breaking into the silver-safe ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... that the cholera should spread rapidly, for fear is its powerful auxiliary, and the Cruces people bowed down before the plague in slavish despair. The Americans and other foreigners in the place showed a brave front, but the natives, constitutionally cowardly, made not the feeblest show of resistance. Beyond filling the poor church, and making the priests bring out ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole

... so on to Munich and Berlin, picking up a technical touch here or a new idea of grouping or mass or color scheme there, and then, having thoroughly absorbed it all, return home and use whatever suits them; but a slavish imitation of any one English, French, or German master—never; neither do they follow any other brush at home. They do not believe in each other sufficiently to pay the highest form ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith

... Gobelins factory from all originality, sanctioned only the small wares for original work, and forced a slavish copying of paintings for the larger pieces. It is not deniable that some beautiful hangings were produced, but the sad result is that pieces of so many tones lose in value year by year, through the gentle, inexorable touch of time; and, more deplorable yet, the ambition ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... that begot the idea of admitting Catholics to administer any part of our laws or constitution. It was admitted by all that, by the very act of abandoning the Roman religion, we became a free and enlightened people. It was only by throwing off the yoke of that slavish religion that we attained to the freedom of thought which has advanced us in the scale of society. We are so much advanced by adopting and adhering to a reformed religion, that to prove our liberal and unprejudiced views, we throw down the barriers betwixt the two religions, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... ideal and achieve some good, these goods are dull and fleeting in proportion to their rudimentary character and their nearness to protoplasmic thrills. Where reason exists life cannot, indeed, be altogether slavish; for any operation, however menial and fragmentary, when it is accompanied by ideal representation of the ends pursued and by felt success in attaining them, becomes a sample and anagram of all freedom. Nevertheless to arrest attention on a means is really illiberal, though not so ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... opportunity of judging how far it would be convenient or agreeable to do so, in the conduct of some soi-disant contemners of forms; we perceive that such contempt is equally the offspring of selfishness with slavish regard: it is only the exchange of the selfishness of vanity for the selfishness of indolence and pride, and the world is the loser by the exchange. Hypocrisy has been said to be the homage which vice pays to ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady



Words linked to "Slavish" :   unoriginal, submissive, subservient, servile



Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org