Literary notes about heinous (AI summary)
The term “heinous” is often deployed to intensify the moral gravity of acts or crimes, marking them as shockingly evil or unethical. It appears in contexts ranging from personal guilt and betrayal—where an individual’s misdeeds are portrayed as so egregious that they isolate him from society, as in [1] or even induce self-condemnation as seen in [2]—to broader societal and religious transgressions, such as those denounced in certain biblical passages [3, 4]. Poets and dramatists, including Shakespeare, use the word to heighten dramatic tension and underline the abominable nature of sins and crimes, as evidenced in passages like [5] and [6]. In epic narratives and political prose alike, “heinous” reinforces the notion that certain acts, whether personal or communal, transcend mere wrongdoing and slip into the realm of the unforgivable [7, 8, 9, 10, 11].
- Mr. Aislabie found few friends: his guilt was so apparent and so heinous that nobody had courage to stand up in his favour.
— from Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay - You hold too heinous a respect of grief.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare - If any man lie with his daughter in law: let both die, because they have done a heinous crime.
— from The Bible, Douay-Rheims, Complete - Hebrew, this word heinous crime is expressed by the word confusion, signifying the shamefulness and baseness of this abominable sin.
— from The Bible, Douay-Rheims, Complete - If on the first, how heinous e'er it be, To win thy after-love I pardon thee.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare - Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare - Now will I, by the world abhorred, Fall at the dear feet of my lord, And at fair Sítá's too, to win His pardon for my heinous sin.”
— from The Rámáyan of Válmíki, translated into English verse by Valmiki - It is a heinous thing to kill one who is of noble blood.
— from The Odyssey by Homer - And because the killing of a Brahmana is more heinous than that of any other living thing, therefore, hast thou, O Dharma, been sinful.
— from The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 - We won't stop at anything in our efforts to bring the perpetrators of these heinous crimes to justice.
— from Little Brother by Cory Doctorow - It was their duty to judge heinous political crimes, and from their sentence there was no appeal.
— from The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
