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Unholy   Listen
adjective
unholy  adj.  Not holy; unhallowed; not consecrated; hence, profane; wicked; impious.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Unholy" Quotes from Famous Books



... to 'I WILL have it mine,' and the mere detail, 'HOW CAN I make it mine?' the advance was obvious. Silence! But as in my methods it was necessary that there should be an overwhelming inducement to the crime, that unholy admiration of yours for the mere trinket itself was not enough. You ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte

... Lescarbault, an amateur astronomer, of Orgeres, France, announced that, upon March 26, of that year, he had seen a body of planetary size cross the sun. We are in a subject that is now as unholy to the present system as ever were its own subjects to the system that preceded it, or as ever were slanders against miracles to the preceding system. Nevertheless few text-books go so far as quite to disregard this ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... between the Southern people and the Northern extremists clamoring for vengeance. On the night of April 14 he was murdered by a sympathizer with slavery and secession. No one old enough to remember the morning of April 15, 1865, will ever forget the horror aroused in the North by this unholy murder. In the beginning Lincoln had been a party leader. In the end the simple grandeur of his nature had won for him a place in the hearts of the American people that no other man has ever gained. He was indeed the greatest because the most typical of Americans. Vice-President ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing

... secret of her shameful love. As her passion mastered what remained of modesty or reserve in her nature, the woman sprang forward and recoiled again, with the movements of a panther, striving, as it seemed, to tear from her bosom the heart which stifled her with its unholy longings, until in the end, when, terrified at the horror her breathings have provoked in Hippolyte, she strove to pull his sword from its sheath and plunge it in her own breast, she fell back in complete and absolute collapse. This exhibition, marvellous in beauty of pose, in febrile force, in ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... emerge, Hounds straining, black fire-eyeballed, breathless steeds, Spurred by wild huntsmen, and unhallowed nymphs, And at their head the foam-begotten witch, Of soul-destroying beauty. Saints of heaven! Preserve mine eyes from such unholy sight! How all unlike the base desire which leads Misguided men to that infernal cave, Is the pure passion that exalts my soul Like a religion! Yet Christ pardon me If this be sin to thee! [He takes his lute, and begins to sing. Enter with ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus

... reason, dear child, is this. There comes a time to all that make—whether it be books or music or pictures—when they can make no new thing, but go on in the old manner, working with the fingers of age the dreams of youth. And to me this seems as it were a profane and unholy thing, that a man should use so divine an art thus unworthily; it is as though a host should set stale wine before his guests, and put into it some drug which should deceive their taste; and I think that ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson

... longer.' A bait-fisher may be a good man, as Izaak was, but it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. As coarse fish are usually caught only with bait, I shall not follow Izaak on to this unholy and unfamiliar ground, wherein, none the less, grow flowers of Walton's fancy, and the songs of the old poets are heard. The Practical Angler, indeed, is a book to be marked with flowers, marsh marigolds and fritillaries, and petals ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang

... a sacrilege as to dance a hornpipe on a Mohammedan's praying-mat. The very dogs respect German grass; no German dog would dream of putting a paw on it. If you see a dog scampering across the grass in Germany, you may know for certain that it is the dog of some unholy foreigner. In England, when we want to keep dogs out of places, we put up wire netting, six feet high, supported by buttresses, and defended on the top by spikes. In Germany, they put a notice-board in the middle of ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome

... to one's self how harmoniously the holy cursing of the Puritan of that day would have chimed in with the unholy cursing and the crackling wit of the Rochesters and Sedleys, and with the revilings of the political fanatics, if my imaginary plain dealer had gone on to say that, if the return of such misfortunes were ever rendered impossible, it would not be in virtue of the victory of the faith of ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... ever saw; a combination of the Old Guard of the Republican Party with the leaders of the Tammany Democracy of New York. "Bloody shirt" Foraker, senator from Ohio, voting with the sons of those Irish Catholic mob-leaders whom the Federal troops shot down in the draft-riots! By this unholy combination a pledge to reduce the tariff was carried out by a bill which greatly increased its burdens; by this combination the public lands and resources of the country were fed to a gang of vultures ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... and not knowing where I go, I turn into small chapel where a man talk to de people, and I heard him say, 'God lubs you!' He lubs bad man and bad woman, and black man, and brown man, and white man all de same. Him pure, holy God, and no bad, impure, unholy person dwell wid him; and all men ever born unholy, impure, and so dey must all be punished. But he say he let One be punished for de oders, and so him sent his Son into de world to suffer for dem, and dat ebery one who trust dat Son, and lub him, go free, and come and live wid him for ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston

... sordid cell, 5 Or mad Ambition builds the dream, Or Pleasure plots th' unholy scheme There with Guilt ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... show us how one may obtain speech with him, for the furtherance of his soul's salvation—apart from the vigilance of the Senate, and without suspicion in the convent that the message cometh from Rome, else were it not received in that unholy city." ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... Enough of this unholy theme. I was persuaded—the thing was done. The morrow dawned upon me as I lay upon the shingles, and I knew not my own shadow as it fell from me. I felt myself changed to a shape of horror, and cursed my easy faith and blind credulity. The chest ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... to brood the spell of an unholy influence; even the very flowers have taken part in ...
— The Enchanted Castle - A Book of Fairy Tales from Flowerland • Hartwell James

... saw Ollie in the door that morning, all flushed and trembling from Morgan's arms; now he understood why he had lingered to interpose between them in past days. It was the wild, deep fear of jealousy. He was in love with his master's wife! What had been given him to guard, he had looked upon with unholy hunger; that which had been left with him to treasure, he had defiled ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... ground soft and slippery. In the evening, to our surprise and disgust, further passage that day was cut off by a salt swamp. Not wishing to get fixed in a lake during rain, we camped early, pitched our tent and hoped for the rain to stop—an unholy wish in this country, but salt-lakes are bad enough without rain! The next two days were spent in trying to find a crossing, for we found ourselves confronted by a series of swamps, samphire flats, and ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie

... patronized, the elevators ran less frequently, making less chatter and bustle in corridors and stairways. Stillness reigned everywhere as if the sobering influence of the Sabbath had invaded even this exclusive domain of the unholy rich. The uniformed attendants, having nothing to do, yawned lazily in the deserted halls. Some even indulged in surreptitious naps in corners, confident that they would not be disturbed. Callers were so rare that when some one did enter from the ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow

... farthing, or you will let me carry this business through myself.' Is that plain speaking? He must have my assistance. He is assured that his wife will deal fairly by him; he knows that I shall leave his money to him and be content with my own. It is an unholy and dishonest compact, and he holds out threats of ruin to compel me to consent to it. He is buying my conscience, and the price is liberty to be Eugene's wife in all but name. 'I connive at your errors, and you allow me to commit crimes and ruin ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac

... to put this wild dance under the ban. The lights of the church were assembled for the formal judgment, when it was proposed to call a pair of Spanish dancers in order that every one of the priests might form his own idea of the unholy dance. But history tells that the effect was an unexpected one. After a short time of fandango demonstration the high clerics began involuntarily to imitate the movements, and the more passionately the Spaniards indulged in their native whirl, the more the whole court was transformed ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... from the pinnacle of earthly power was the work of his own duplicity, greed and fraud, and all ministers of state may take warning from this great wreck of unholy ambition! King Henry the Eighth sacrificed everything for his physical and religious ambition. Listen and profit by the last words ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... the view is restricted to the lower half of persons passing overhead beyond the area stairs. Here at the window Mrs. Dowey sometimes sits of a summer evening gazing, not sentimentally at a flower-pot which contains one poor bulb, nor yearningly at some tiny speck of sky, but with unholy relish at holes in stockings, and the like, which are revealed to her from her point of vantage. You, gentle reader, may flaunt by, thinking that your finery awes the street, but Mrs. Dowey can tell (and does) that your soles are in need of ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie

... and galloped from the unholy spot as fast as our brave beasts could carry us. To all of us the air had a purer flavour and the heath a sweeter scent by contrast with the grim couple whom we had left behind us. What a ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... ground for the Hudson's Bay that winter. As {403} time passed the captive Robertson began to wrack his brains how to communicate with his men. It was a drinking age; and the fur traders had the reputation of capacity to drink any other class of men off their legs. Robertson feigned an unholy thirst. Rapping for his guard, he requested that messengers might be sent across to the Hudson's Bay fort for a keg of liquor. It can be guessed how readily the Nor'westers complied; but Robertson took good care, when the guard was absent and the door locked, to ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... of London, we may profit by the example of our Northern brethren; for it appears, they not only watch over the temporal, but spiritual concerns of their citizens, and it should seem, with salutary effect: but the vespers and matins, of a watchman in England, would meet with many unholy interruptions. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various

... now raging in Europe has been described as "The Causeless War," but since no one would be bold enough to lay the blame for such an unholy situation upon an overruling Providence, it must find its origin in acts for which man, and man ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... him by God be fulfilled or not at all. In the whole book of Jeremiah we see no hope of the resurrection, no glory to come, no gleam even of the martyr's crown. I have often thought that what seem to us the excess of impatience, the rashness to argue with Providence, the unholy wrath and indignation of prophets and psalmists under the Old Covenant, are largely to be explained by this, that as yet there had come to them no sense of another life or of judgment beyond this earth. When we are tempted to wonder at Jeremiah's passion and cursing, let us try to realise ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... he has lately sat upon a stone or the stump of a tree. If he remembers having done so, he murmurs, unless he should be free from the popular superstition, 'Ah! I thought so. This is a rencontre!'—by which he means that he has met one of the three unholy reptiles, the snake, the toad, or the lizard, although it was hidden ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... retook Antioch, and brought home as a trophy the sword of "the most unholy and impious ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... up thar by to-morrow!" called a joker after him; "look out fer us! There'll be an unholy mob on hand, and they'll try to do ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White

... most thrilling sight of all was the cross in this unholy spot, not a symbol of victory and hope, but of the lowest infamy and degradation, of the vilest death which the vilest men can die. Nor was it the solid, lofty structure, fifteen or twenty feet high, which art has been glorifying for a thousand years, but ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... seem sufficiently meagre. Meantime, during all this campaigning by land and sea in the west, there had been great but profitless bloodshed in the east. With difficulty did the holy Roman Empire withstand the terrible, ever-renewed assaults of the unholy realm of Ottoman—then in the full flush of its power—but the two empires still counterbalanced each other, and contended with each'other at ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... that a point of the haircloth scratched his lip deeply, with a long trickling of blood upon the chin. It was as if the sight of blood transported the spectators with a kind of mad rage, and suddenly revealed to them the truth. The pretended hunting of the unholy creature became a real one, which brought out, in rapid increase, men's evil passions. The soul of Denys was already at rest, as his body, now borne along in front of the crowd, was tossed hither and thither, torn at last limb from limb. ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater

... boiled in the skull of a certain famous robber recently beheaded: powders, ointments, and candles of fat boiled in the same skull were the intended instruments for exciting love or hatred, and in affecting the bodies of the faithful. An unholy connection existed between the Lady Alice and a demon in the form sometimes of a black dog, sometimes of a cat. She was possessed of a secret ointment for impregnating a piece of wood, upon which, with her companions, she was carried to any part of the world without hurt or hindrance: in her house ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams

... old terrible work of enslavement of pure young womanhood, for the gratification of the debased and degraded passions of men. Lust knows no mercy, yea, it finds some degree of satisfaction in the cruelty inflicted on the victims of its unholy greed. ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various

... Brahmacharin, thou desirest to relieve us. But, O foremost of Brahmanas, thou canst not dispel our affliction by thy asceticism. O child, O first of speakers, we too have the fruits of our asceticism. But, O Brahmana, it is for the loss of children that we are falling down into this unholy hell. The grandsire himself hath said that a son is a great merit. As we are about to be cast in this hole, our ideas are no longer clear. Therefore, O child, we know thee not, although thy manhood is well-known on earth. Venerable thou art and of good ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... fundamental idea he overbuilt with a heavy mass of mere notions, and psychological acts of arbitrary reflection. Thus his theory degenerated into a crude [30] egoismus, a boastful and hyperstoic hostility to Nature, as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy: while his religion consisted in the assumption of a mere Ordo ordinans, which we were permitted exoterice to call GOD; and his ethics in an ascetic, and almost monkish, mortification of the natural passions and desires. In Schelling's ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... participants in the night's affairs were looking on from secret and divers hiding-places. Far out in the little grove Derby and his old companion watched the operations of the church-breakers, the sickly glare of Carpenter's lantern as it stood upon the edge of the rain barrel affording an unholy light for the occasion. Windomshire and Anne, crouching behind a stack of old benches, looked on in amazement. Mr. Hooker, whose conscience was none too easy, doubtless for excellent reasons, peered forth from behind a tall tombstone. He ...
— The Flyers • George Barr McCutcheon

... this part of the world, that the boats in question should be captured and carried into Oswego. They contain the blankets, trinkets, rifles, ammunition, in short, all the stores with which the French bribe their accursed savage allies to commit their unholy acts, setting at nought our holy religion and its precepts, the laws of humanity, and all that is sacred and dear among men. By cutting off these supplies we shall derange their plans, and gain time on them; for the articles cannot ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper

... conditions prevailing before the revolution, which caused the success of that upheaval; but the people, the masses, had quaffed of the cup of liberty, and the taste lingered. The Holy Alliance with its unholy aims might ordain what it pleased, the people obstinately refused to resume the place of beasts of burden for the benefit of the State. Thus a spirit of unrest was perceptible, and when Alexander learned that his "I, the czar, will it!" was not able to restore ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen

... which must always make the thought of Pindar's Theban citizenship painful to us, and that is the shameful part taken by Thebes in the Persian war, when compulsion of her exposed situation, and oligarchical cabal within her walls, drew her into unholy alliance with the barbarian invader. Had it been otherwise how passionately pure would Pindar's joy have uttered itself when the 'stone of Tantalos' that hung over the head of Hellas was smitten into dust in that greatest crisis of the fortunes of ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar

... many others an enviable blessing, threatened to be a miserable portion for him, for naturally enough, coming to him as it did through the channels of the soul, it had to partake of the unholy nature of these unhealthy and corrupt by-ways; and hence instead of the pure, buoyant emotion that fills the honest breast, in the redeeming passion of its first exalted love, there rushed into the heart of Vivian Standish, a poisonous torrent of insuperable ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera

... steaming, hissing higher than the pillars a dense white vapour, vast in extent, whose venomous sibilation we at this distance can quite distinctly hear. It is affrighting, it is intolerable! the eyes can hardly bear to watch, the ears to hear! it seems unholy travail, monstrous birth! But it lasts not long: all at once the Marie Meyer commences to pitch and roll violently, and the sea, a moment since calm, is now rough! and at the same time, through the white vapour, we see a dark shadow slowly rising—the shadow of a mighty back, a new-born ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... next assertion, that it is destructive to families: this also is so apparent, that it needs pity rather than proof. Why alas, do you bind a nobility (which no generation shall deny to have been the first that freely sacrificed their blood to the ancient liberties of this people) on an unholy altar? Why are the people taught that their liberty, which, except our noble ancestors had been born, must have long since been buried, cannot now be born except we be buried? A commonwealth should have the innocence of the dove. Let us leave this purchase ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington

... "Your requisition, in my judgment, is illegal, unconstitutional and revolutionary in its objects, inhuman and diabolical and cannot be complied with. Not one man will the State of Missouri furnish to carry on such an unholy crusade." ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon

... wasn't," exclaimed Mr. Gilton, hurriedly, with a touch of that unholy excitement that a lapse from ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull

... grace which enables believers to renounce the pleasures of sin, which are but for a season. It gives them a complete victory over the world. It abideth with hope and charity. Now, whosoever professes this faith, and then by his unholy life denies it, by neglecting to provide for his own, and especially for those of his own house, makes it manifest that he never had it. It is as unchangeable as its Author, for it is the gift of God. It ...
— A Narrative of The Life of Rev. Noah Davis, A Colored Man. - Written by Himself, At The Age of Fifty-Four • Noah Davis

... he went on, after a pause. "But like most easy trails, you're liable to keep on 'em longer than is good for you. We haven't had to worry a thing up to now. You see, we'd stifled competition, and we'd paid a steady thirty per cent dividend. Which left our Board in an unholy state of dope. I've tried to wake 'em. Oh, yes. I tried when that guy started up his outfit on Labrador. The Sachigo outfit. Then he seemed to fade away, and I couldn't rouse 'em again." He shook his head—"Nothing ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum

... though never was a life so filled with eager glad service. The touchstone was not natural liking or choice, the proper instinctive reach out of His true human nature, though this would be strong in Him, the typical Son of Man. This would not be repressed as an unholy or wrong thing. It would only be given second place, or left out, as it might run across the grain of the great life-passion. With a fresh touch of awe it may truly be said: He did not come down to earth primarily to die, though ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon

... Marty's clean blows, in his quick "duck" and "side-step;" and when her cousin's freckled fist impinged upon the fatuous countenance of Sim Howell, Janice Day uttered an unholy gasp ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long

... and strongly individualized by a certain moral grandeur, a saintly grace, something of vestal dignity and purity, which render her less attractive and more imposing; she is "severe in youthful beauty," and inspires a reverence which would have placed her beyond the daring of one unholy wish or thought, except in such ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... is weakened. Yet all who are affected with nerve troubles are not necessarily suffering from polyneuritis. Some one here has been dilettanting with death. It is of no use," he thundered, turning suddenly on a cowering figure. "You stood to win most, with the money and your unholy love. But Miss Hackstaff, cast off, has proved your Nemesis. Your nervousness is the nervousness not of polyneuritis, but ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve

... pursuit of Mayes, and as soon as I was in some degree recovered from my struggle, and the captured place had been hastily searched, the chase was resumed without a moment's delay; and that adventure was entered upon which saw the end of the Red Triangle and its unholy doings—which came terribly near to seeing the end of Hewitt ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison

... in the midst of her unholy joy, was pushed out of the door by Lucian, who immediately afterwards turned to see if Diana had overheard her ill-chosen and ominous words. But Miss Vrain, with a hard, white face, was leaning against the wall, and gave no sign of such knowledge. Her eyes were ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume

... the unholy and gigantic power that, leaving its territorial domain, has usurped the seat of freedom—that has established at our capitol a central despotism, and bends to its will with iron hand the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various

... Holland, when Alva's sword of vengeance was unsheathed against the Protestants, when the Catholic Inquisitions of Europe became the merciless executioners of vindictive wrath, upon those who dared to worship God, instead of bowing down in unholy adoration before "my Lord God the Pope," and when England, too, burnt her Ann Ascoes at the stake of martyrdom. Suffice it to say, that the Church, after having been driven from Judea to Rome, and from Rome to Piedmont, and from Piedmont to England, and ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... for delight, but how I never wot, I in a slumber and a swoon was caught, Not all asleep, and yet not waking wholly; And as I lay, the Cuckoo bird unholy Broke silence, or I heard him ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley

... class him with Bluebeard; his house on the Heath would assume a forbidding aspect, and dread whispers would be exchanged of what went on there under the shadow of night. Was it not already beginning to be remarked by his neighbours that you met him wandering about lonely places at unholy hours, and that he shunned you, like one with a guilty conscience? Let him advance in years, his face lose its broad colour, his hair grow scant and grey, his figure, per chance, stoop a little, his eyes acquire the malignity of miserly old age—and there you have the hero of a Dunfield ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... six names on the ticket, including our Luella Bailey, on the ground of lack of experience in educational matters. The Reform Club has nominated three other persons—one of them a woman. And who do you suppose is the head and front of this unholy crusade?" ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant

... that were pressed forward met the clouds that were pressed back, and together they seemed to come to earth, filling the air with a gloom so dense that the eye could not pierce it. To the west was a wall of blackness towering to the heavens; to the east, light, blue and unholy, gleamed upon the white cross and the ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard

... get through to his chateau." A voice full of unholy joy whispered in the Sapper's ear, and that worthy, whose eyes had got accustomed to the gloom, recognised ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile

... for the prevention of accidents, the prohibition of child labor, a "living wage," the eight-hour day, a Department of Labor, the conservation of the nation's resources, and the development of the agricultural interests. The third portion of the platform dealt with "the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics." It declared the test of corporate efficiency to be the ability "to serve the public"; it demanded the "strong national regulation of interstate corporations," a federal industrial commission comparable to the Interstate Commerce Commission ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... arena of the STANLEYS during the civil wars—where the progress and successful issue of his cause was but too confidently anticipated by CHARLES STUART, and the scene especially of those strange and unholy proceedings in which the "Lancashire witches" rendered themselves so famous—it may readily be imagined that a number of interesting legends, anecdotes, and scraps of family history, are floating about, hitherto preserved chiefly in the shape of oral tradition. The antiquary, in most ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... of Crusaders went, they agreed in few points except in gaming, drinking, and quarrelling, in a most unholy manner; in debauching the people among whom they tarried, whether they were friends or foes; and in carrying disturbance and ruin into quiet places. The French King was jealous of the English King, and the English King was jealous of the French King, and the disorderly ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens

... happy, compassion for the sorrowful, delight in the holy, disregard of the unholy, the psychic nature ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston

... quit sea life.[A] After his marriage he lived with his wife and her son by the former marriage on the estate in Concord, previously mentioned as having been conveyed by Rogers to her father. Captain Roach is said to have been most famous for his unholy expletives and his excessive potations. The venerable Colonel William Kent, now living at Concord in his nineties, says that Captain Roach one day brought into the store where he was a clerk a friend ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... Pennsylvania, was probably the most unpopular man in the House. An anonymous letter had appeared just before the election of President [Adams] by the Representatives denouncing an "unholy coalition" between Mr. Adams and Mr. Clay, by which the support of the friends of the latter had been transferred to the former, "as the planter does his negroes, or the farmer his team and horses." ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... made! Yet, even in this affliction he found at last a solace. A mind so strong could support and heal the weakness of the heart. He felt that Valerie de Ventadour was not a woman to pine away in the unresisted indulgence of morbid and unholy emotions. He could not flatter himself that she would not seek to eradicate a love she repented; and he sighed with a natural selfishness, when he owned also that sooner or later she would succeed. ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... sorcerers. He will show us how Lucifer is unmasked in an undemonstrative and gentlemanly fashion by a late Gnostic and initiate of the 33rd degree. He writes, as he frankly tells us, in a spirit of reparation and gratitude, having commerced freely with devils during a long series of unholy years. "Blessed be the omnipotent Lord, and blessed the loving kindness which drew me out of the abyss.... To glorify these I unmask the fallen angel." The delicacy of the motive and its setting of chivalrous sentiment will be appreciated even by the victim, and the ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... pleasure-yielding, its greatest joy being incidental. When I could cut ahead of a chum taking a girl home and shamelessly trip him up with a stretched rope and get back to the drugstore and be curled up in the woodbox when he reached his final destination, I am afraid I took unholy joy. ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock

... until they stopped it. And the Philistines put aside their unholy mirth and did not stint their praise ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... carriage looked out. He saw the bluish, lightning-like flames from the limestone, rising from the top of the furnace, and hard by the figures of Jim Hayward, the widow, and the horse, standing out with spectral distinctness against the mass of night behind. The scene wore the aspect of some unholy assignation in Pandaemonium, and it was all the more impressive from the fact that both Jim and the woman were quite unconscious of the striking spectacle they presented. The gentleman in the carriage watched them till he was borne out ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy

... makes clear the preceding injunction. He would restrain men from their unholy conceits. As before stated, every man is best pleased with his own ideas. Hence foolishness pervades the land. One, seeing another honored above himself, is restlessly ambitious to emulate that other. ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther

... defense rays—they would certainly be far more powerful than the Scorpion's. Then, somewhere there were the mighty gravity-plates batteries which motivated the asteroid and held it controlled in space. The dynamos. Two men, working swiftly, might wreak an unholy amount of damage in little time; in the resulting confusion anything might ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore

... for a time give a hand in the dark to each, lacking courage to fling love for ever over her shoulder, and declare at once for the world? Would she honestly dismiss John, confessing that she had chosen her path? or would she bravely destroy that which was unholy, and give her hand to him before the world? Contemplating this possibility, I felt my heart swell with something that was not selfishness; and I built a palace in the air ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland

... (with whose character, temptations, and necessities she was fully acquainted, and in whose excited and preoccupied manner she had probably discovered signs of a secretly growing purpose) meant indeed to elude his guests and slip away to town on the dangerous and unholy enterprise suggested by their mutual knowledge of the money to be obtained there by one daring enough to enter a certain house open like their own ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green

... of their husbands, for the bears rise in the north and their wives in the east. Therefore the worshipper should not set up his fires under the Pleiades, lest he should thereby be separated from the company of his wife. The Brahmanas(3) also tell us that Prajapati had an unholy passion for his daughter, who was in the form of a doe. The gods made Rudra fire an arrow at Prajapati to punish him; he was wounded, and leaped into the sky, where he became one constellation and his daughter another, and the arrow a third ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... on to the neighboring farm, and to the one after that, while the shadows pulsed in an unholy turmoil. The night swarmed with malignant invisible forces, that tried to blow the flame from their torches, that flayed them with the naked sword of fear. There were hideous shapes, half-seen. There were waves of terror ...
— The Invaders • Benjamin Ferris

... except that of alcoholic viciousness. The dark horror of secret drinking quickly developed into hideous proportions; it gripped him like a vice; his bleary eyes and wild fits of delirium foreshadowed inevitable collapse. He raved about things that were supposed to be whispered in his ears by unholy voices; he saw wild beasts of the most ferocious character, which were not there, and imagined them grinding their teeth in anxiety to devour him; he alternately yelled and whispered that rats, weasels and wild cats were crawling over his body and gnawing at his vitals. In ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman

... middle-aged men wished themselves younger that they might make love to her, or older that they might be privileged to kiss her. Though keenly anxious for amusement, though over head and ears in love with sport and frolic, no unholy thought had ever polluted her mind. That men were men, and that she was a woman, had of course been considered by her. Oh, that it might some day be her privilege to love some man with all her heart and all her strength, some man who should be, at any rate to her, ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... cafe-tables, so that by instinct I try to make rings on them with my wine-glass, and the people who suffer this life get up every morning at eight, and the poor sad men of the house slave at wretched articles and come home to hear more literature and more appreciations, and the unholy women do nothing and attend to local government, that is, the oppression of the poor; and altogether this accursed everyday life of theirs is instinct with the four sins crying to heaven for vengeance, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... wished for, even by a literary gourmand under the Tudors, than to be able to Read and Spell; To repeat that holy charm before which fled all unholy Ghosts, Goblins, or even the old Gentleman himself to the very bottom of the Red Sea, and to say that immortal prayer, which secures heaven to all who ex animo use it, and those mathematical powers, by knowing units, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various

... the sake of your mother's memory, who died to give you life, you have lived here in the holy woods away from an unholy world. As a man shelters a little, flickering flame, hollowing his hands around it to keep it from the wind, as a man screens a flower from the cold, so I have striven to shelter and to screen your life, ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... account of the queen, to the amount of L10,000, which the queen at first owned to, but afterwards acknowledged the debts were fictitious ones. Among these items was one of L400 for necessaries for her majesty; an apothecary's bill for drugs of L800; and another of L150 for "the bishop's unholy water," as the writer expresses it. The young French bishop attempted by all sorts of delays to avoid this ignominious expulsion; till the king was forced to send his yeomen of the guards to turn them out from Somerset-house, where the juvenile French bishop, at once protesting ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... is the Spirit of God, and the spirit of wisdom is the Spirit of God, then they must be the same spirit. For if they be two different spirits, then there must be two Holy Spirits; for any and every Spirit of God must be holy,—what else can He be? Unholy? I leave ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley

... able to pierce the forbidding hills which loomed up in the distance hiding lonely recesses into which the foot of man had never trodden, even the boldest of the desert people being deterred from a visit thereto by the weird tales of unholy creatures and unhallowed things, which made these places the scene of their uncanny ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka

... time there was a lord of Lossie who practised unholy works. Although he had other estates, he lived almost entirely at the House of Lossie—that is, after his return from the East, where he had spent his youth and early manhood. But he paid no attention to his ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... image of the brute, being fallen under the dominion of brutal passions and groveling appetites. Hence also death entered into the world, with all his forerunners and attendants; pain, sickness, and a whole train of uneasy as well as unholy passions and tempers. ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser

... of a gambler's life, all the vicissitudes which attend his unholy calling, followed close upon each other in grim succession. Most marked was the disturbance which his mental equilibrium was undergoing. Fits of gloomy despondency were succeeded, with alarming rapidity, by periods of tumultuous exaltation. One ...
— A Ghetto Violet - From "Christian and Leah" • Leopold Kompert

... that slant from the main stem of Market Street near Lotta's Fountain. That part of the city is of dubious repute; questionable back walls look down on the alley that leads to the stage door, and after midnight there is much light of electricity and gas and much unholy noise ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... impression she had, was that of abhorrence for the unholy deeds of the man who had just left her. To a woman for whom religion in its forms as well as in its meaning was the mainstay of life on earth and the hope of life to come, the sacrilege of the crime seemed supernatural. ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford

... had set a guard upon their form-room for the space of a full hour, which to a boy is a lifetime. Now they were busy with their Saturday evening businesses—cooking sparrows over the gas with rusty nibs; brewing unholy drinks in gallipots; skinning moles with pocket-knives; attending to paper trays full of silkworms, or discussing the iniquities of their elders with a freedom, fluency, and point that would have amazed their parents. The blow fell without warning. Stalky upset a form crowded ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling

... of young love, attracted by the wealth, the family, or the manners of her suitor, she allows the indissoluble tie to bind her in unholy wedlock. Soon the faith she has trifled with assumes its mastery in her repentant heart, but liberty is gone; for the dream of conjugal bliss which dazzled when making her choice, she finds herself plunged for ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly

... all the shame was the sense of ignominy and defeat, the feeling of intense hatred toward the man who had told him the truth. That unholy heritage from his mother, the hot, wild, passionate blood, which had proven so fatal to the boy, welled up like a stream of fire in the man's breast and extinguished all feeling but that of revenge. Hartmut's handsome features were still disfigured ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner

... still air, monks waved censers, and blasts of dissonant music woke the semi-subterranean echoes. In this temple of Justice the younger lamas spend some hours daily in the supposed contemplation of the torments reserved for the unholy. In the highest temple, that of Peace, the summer sunshine fell on Shakya Thubba and the Buddhist triad seated in endless serenity. The walls were covered with frescoes of great lamas, and a series of alcoves, each with an image representing ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)

... another beat the snakes took to frightening the unprotected birds and to the burgling of their nest. This incident caused a revision of the protective laws. They are much more explicit, and the pains and penalties for the violation of them are now absolutely unholy in ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... historian is almost a statesman Admired or despised, as if he or she were our contemporary Alas! one never knows when one becomes a bore All classes are conservative by necessity Already looking forward to the revolt of the slave States American Unholy Inquisition An order of things in which mediocrity is at a premium Attacked by the poetic mania Becoming more learned, and therefore more ignorant best defence in this case is little better than ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... unholy cursing and crackling wit of the Rochesters and Sedleys: John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, and Sir Charles Sedley, were both friends of Charles II, and were noted for biting wit and profligacy. Green, in his Short History of the English People, thus describes them: ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... once, when Mr. Mortimer, the vicar, called, and brought with him a more or less distinguished doctor—as to tell the professional man privately some symptoms of her husband's queerness. And his answer that there was "nothing he could prescribe for" added not a little to her sense of unholy bewilderment. No doubt Sir James had never been "consulted" under such unorthodox conditions before. His sense of what was becoming naturally overrode his acquired instincts as a skilled instrument that might help ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood

... lowering her against the uneasy air. All three engines are at work, for the sooner we have skated over this thin ice the better. Higher we dare not go. The whole upper vault is charged with pale krypton vapours, which our skin friction may excite to unholy manifestations. Between the upper and the lower levels—5,000, and 7,000, hints the Mark Boat—we may perhaps bolt through if.... Our bow clothes itself in blue flame and falls like a sword. No human skill can keep pace with the changing tensions. A vortex has us by ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling

... aye, do swear by all we hold sacred, that we will use all the cunning of our natures to put down all kingdoms, all governments which are ruled by crowned heads, presidents, or governors, or ruled by any principle of religion other than, nature—and that all religion, priestcraft, &c., is unholy in the sight of the Most High God, and that He requires of us, as a paramount duty, that we labour zealously for its final extermination, to the glory of Him and the benefit of mankind ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green

... same, and, more: "You must know, Master Nicholas"—for that was the name of the barber—"it was often my uncle's way to stay two days and nights together poring over these unholy books of misventures, after which he would fling the book away and snatch up his sword and fall to slashing the walls; and when he was tired out he would say he had killed four giants like four towers; and the sweat that flowed from ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... slaves of their masters. They have no money of their own. He claims a part of their infamous earnings, and demands the rest for board and clothes. Few have the courage to fly from these hells, and if they make the attempt, they are forced back by the proprietor, who is frequently aided in this unholy act by the law of the land. They can not go into the streets naked, and he claims the clothes on their backs as his property. If they leave the premises with these clothes on, ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin

... class, maintaining a certain impenetrable front when a question came his length, and with the instinct of a chieftain never risking his position in the school by exposing himself to contempt. When Thomas John Dowbiggin was distinguishing himself after an unholy fashion by translating Caesar into English like unto Macaulay's History, Speug used to watch him with keen interest, and employ his leisure time in arranging some little surprise to enliven the even tenor of Thomas John's life. So curious a being, however, is a boy, and so inconsistent, ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren

... manner in which knowledge of animal life is skipped over in the teaching of the young. The rude and wild conception of animals which the clergy teach from the Old Testament seems to cause only deep indifference on the part of the girls, and, in the boys, an unholy desire to ramble about and blaze ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland

... With the snows of the lolling lily; By the mountains—near the river 25 Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever; By the gray woods, by the swamp Where the toad and the newt encamp; By the dismal tarns and pools Where dwell the Ghouls; 30 By each spot the most unholy, In each nook most melancholy,— There the traveller meets aghast Sheeted Memories of the Past: Shrouded forms that start and sigh 35 As they pass the wanderer by, White-robed forms of friends long given, In agony, to the ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill

... against the popular, who protested vigorously against the low, mean art form that in dramatic shape packed nightly the playhouses of the great city with the unesthetic, artistically depraved and vulgar bourgeoisie. That things should come to so unholy a pass, he sighed. ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan

... Played with us as a cat with mice. Oh, he's the most unholy ruffian I've ever struck. And you know it. Look at his face. No, Barraclough, it's death, it's death to ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson

... Saturday, but there's not a scrap of evidence. The man undoubtedly died of fright in the same way as Maddison. The place ought to be pulled down; it's unholy." ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... have been an unholy one, if she was!" interrupted Sadie. "Anybody less like a monk than 'Stars and ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... was an unholy nightmare. Our fare could not, by any stretch of imagination, be described as Christmassy. We had several pro-Germans among us—they preached this gospel in the hope of being released if only on "passes," but the thoroughbred Prussian is not to be gulled by patriots made-to-order—and ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney

... their bushy brows and muttered vows of vengeance. The rays of the sun, now rapidly declining, shot into their angry faces, the evening breeze shook out their matted locks of hair. A peculiar glow was cast over their wild, Erin features, now gleaming with unholy passion. ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage

... the attendance was larger than they had had at any time. In the course of the meetings a heated debate on the subject of divorce took place. Mrs. Stanton and Lucy Stone took the ground that it was "not only woman's right, but her duty, to withdraw from all such unholy relations," and Mrs. Nichols ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson

... standing was the bare walls. The huge columns, with their beautiful sculptures, no longer able to support the roof, still stood like grim sentinels watching over their sacred charge. And yet, despite the unholy bombardment to which the building had been subjected, three things remained unharmed and untouched in the midst of this scene of awful desolation. The three crucifixes, with the figures of Christ still ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins

... who is to land with the Main Party, and Neale, who will remain with the Ship's Party, turn out at six and rouse the afterguard for the pumps, a daily evolution, and soon an unholy din may be heard coming up from the wardroom. "Rouse and shine, rouse and shine: show a leg, show a leg" (a relic of the old days when seamen took their wives to sea). "Come on, Mr. Nelson, it's seven o'clock. ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... The unholy fascination of dread dwells in the thought of the last moments of a ship reported as "missing" in the columns of the Shipping Gazette. Nothing of her ever comes to light—no grating, no lifebuoy, no piece of boat or branded oar—to give a hint of the place ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad

... before him. In his weak, thin hand an empty wineglass. The gem upon his finger glowed with a flame that was almost wicked; it was blue, burning, giving out sparkles of light—like a colour out of hell. The path of its light was unholy—it was ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... down, turned on the switch, and hopped up on the table again, peering through. He knew that the stream had now become a river of fire, and that it was sending to the ceiling an unholy, unearthly glow. ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr

... on, but the young friars would see him: so he did many wonders for them, even to the drawing of live frogs out of his ears. But after a while they turned on him, and said his tricks were dull and a shade unholy, and set the cross on his shoulders again. Another half-mile on the way, and he asked them to stop and hear him jest for them, for he knew, he said, all the jests of Conan the Bald, upon whose back a sheep's wool grew. And the young friars, when they had heard his merry ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats

... Last War and of the subsequent years, especially the mushrooming of crackpot cults with a murder tinge: the werewolf gangs, the Berserkers and Amuckers, the revival of Shiva worship and the Black Mass, the machine wreckers, the kill-the-killers movements, the new witchcraft, the Unholy Creepers, the Unconsciousers, the radioactive blue gods and rocket devils of the Atomites, and a dozen other groupings clearly prefiguring Deathlander psychology. Those cults had all been as unpredictable ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... tripping fairily across the rough street at the only point visible to those on the veranda. Fontenette scowled unaware as he started to follow, and the next moment a short "aha!" escaped him. For, at her gate, to my unholy joy, she stumbled just enough to make the whole performance unspeakably ridiculous, ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable

... yet, although the inhabitants of the two extremities of that island are engaged in frequent war, the country can, as thou seest, furnish forth such a body of men-at-arms as may go far to shake the unholy hold which your master hath laid on the ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott

... they both (the king and the devil) served one another many a slippery trick. One of the most remarkable is when Aschmedai, who was prisoner to Solomon, the king having contrived to possess himself of the devil's seal-ring, and chained him, one day offered to answer an unholy question put to him by Solomon, provided he returned him his seal-ring and loosened his chain. The impertinent curiosity of Solomon induced him to commit this folly. Instantly Aschmedai swallowed the monarch; and stretching out his wings ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... invader has been driven from the devastated scenes of his unholy conquest. The tide of conflict which during the dark days of midsummer threatened to overwhelm the allied forces has been turned into glorious victory. As the sounds of battle die away and the beaten foe ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... make a man's joy if they smiled on him in innocence; but which, as I well knew, had burned more than once, in her short but strenuous life, with fiery passions; and might, at the instant of waking, betray this same unholy gleam under the curious gaze of the unsympathetic ones ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green



Words linked to "Unholy" :   evil, sanctitude, fiendish, diabolic, diabolical, sinful, profane, demonic, holiness, hellish, unholiness, infernal



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