niggardness

• “You will find the extravagances of one day coming to be the niggardness of the next; and feverish anxieties lest you should not succeed in getting this gem, and irritating regrets that you too soon bought that, will divide your tortured soul.”

  The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866

• “Slavery is the most degrading condition of which he is capable, and he is as often a slave to the niggardness of the earth and the inclemency of heaven, as to a master or an institution.”

  The Sense of Beauty Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory

• “And the niggardness of Nature makes the misery of man:”

  The Poems of William Watson

• “Carpetless, dreary barracks the rooms usually are, with an uncompromising squareness of prints upon the wall, an appalling breadth of husk-bed, a niggardness of wash-bowl, and an obduracy of sofa, never, never to be dissociated in their victim's mind from the idea of the villanous hard bread of Venice on which the gloomy landlady sustains her life with its immutable purposes of plunder.”

  Venetian Life

• “The character of covetousness is what a man generally acquires more through some niggardness or ill grace, in little and inconsiderable things, than in expenses of any consequence.”

  Pearls of Thought

• “And every day she assembled the goodwives of the quarter and cooked for them manifold kinds of food because her spouse the Kazi was possessed of property approaching two Khaznahs [FN#219] of money, he being ever loath to expend what his hand could hend and unprepared to part with aught on any wise, for the excess of his niggardness and his greed of gain.”

  Arabian nights. English

• “[FN#386] Lane (ii. 168) reads: -- "The niggardly female is protected by her niggardness;" a change of "Nahílah" (bee-hive) into "Bakhílah" (she skin flint).”

  Arabian nights. English

• “The last village is indeed a mere wretched assemblage of huts, the inhabitants of which labour under the most squalid poverty, owing to the extreme niggardness of the neighbouring soil, which consists almost entirely of rock from which scarcely anything can be gathered, so that the people are proverbially thieves.”

  Letters of George Borrow to the British and Foreign Bible Society

• “251 The symbol of generosity, of unasked liberality, the “black hand” being that of niggardness.”

  The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night

• “FN#14] From his sire cometh generosity or niggardness; from his uncle courage or cowardice; from his mother modesty or immodesty; and such is the proof of every man. ”

  Arabian nights. English

Show 10 more examples...