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More "Bettering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... king's proclamation' in 1786, which was supplemented by the society for 'the Suppression of Vice' in 1802. I don't suppose that vice was much suppressed. Sydney Smith ridiculed its performances in the Edinburgh for 1809. The article is in his works. A more interesting society was that for 'bettering the condition of the poor,' started by Sir Thomas Bernard ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Conies, Hares, and Fowle, euen in the middest of Summer in incredible abundance. The woodes are not such as you finde in Bohemia, Moscouia, or Hercynia, barren and fruitles, but the highest and reddest Cedars of the world, farre bettering the Ceders of the Acores of the Indies, or Lybanus, Pynes, Cypres, Sassaphras, the Lentisk, or the tree that beareth the Masticke, the tree that beareth the vine of blacke Sinamon, of which Master Winter brought from the streighte of Magellan, and ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... must have descended to the very deepest levels of depression before he loses his power to laugh, or to be cheered by an unexpected bettering of his financial position. John Fulton was in a bad way, but certain things still struck him as funny, and the money which he had been enabled to borrow from the bank had eased his mind. Still, so Lucy told me, he could ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... bowed man, whose years were far less than they seemed. Although a farmer in a small way, he committed the sad error of engaging in stock speculations, more with a view of diverting his mind from his gnawing grief than with the hope of bettering his fortune. It is hardly necessary to relate what followed. He was successful for a time, and improved his financial standing. He gladly welcomed Tom Gordon beneath his roof, for he knew his own boy could not have a playmate whose company would be more improving to him. Then Mr. Travers ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... fellow-passengers of Hastings on the ship which conveyed him to India in 1769, were a German portrait-painter, named Imhoff, and his wife, who were going out to -Madras in the hope of bettering their circumstances. During the voyage a strong attachment sprang up between Hastings and the lady, who nursed him through an illness. The husband, it seems, had as little affection for his wife as she had for him, and was easily prevailed upon to enter into an amicable ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... his returning, and that event seemed to be the signal for the long and calamitous struggle that ensued in Pernambuco and the neighbouring Captaincies. Joam Fernandes Vieyra, a native of Madeira, had, at a very early age, left his native island in hopes of bettering his fortune in Brazil. He had succeeded, and at the time we speak of, he was one of the richest Portuguese of Pernambuco, and highly esteemed by both his countrymen and the Dutch. Against the latter, however, he was animated ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... or are passing. And we may now consider, what has been the effect of the improvement of natural knowledge on the views of men who have reached this stage, and who have begun to cultivate natural knowledge with no desire but that of "increasing God's honour and bettering man's estate." ...
— On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge • Thomas H. Huxley
... that prompted to action. No one can be utterly miserable who has a hope, even a remote one, of bettering his condition; and with a motive such as this to cheer him, Johnny persevered; young as he was, he understood the necessity. But how often, during the four weary weeks that succeeded, did the memory of ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... for himself too. And if I should add thereto and say further that I trust my diligent intercession for him may be the means that God should the sooner give him grace to amend, and fast and watch and pray and take affliction in his own body, for the bettering of his sinful soul, he would be wonderous wroth with that. For he would be loth to have any such grace at all as should make him go leave off any of his mirth, and so sit and mourn for his sin." Such mind as this, lo, have some of those who are not unlearned, and have worldly ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... Maggie is to you, Jean. Mind you both follow them. You'll never give folks reason to talk about you then. Don't get yourselves talked about! That's the main thing. Of course, you'll take every opportunity of bettering yourselves, both of you; but do it in a kind of sober, decent way. Do it like Andrew: I can say no more ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... which Cerimon, the man withdrawn from the world to study the bettering of man, revives the body of Thaisa, are the most lovely things ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... proposed to abolish the Slave-trade, by bettering the state of the slaves in the islands, and particularly that of their offspring. His plan, with respect to the latter, was not a little curious. They were to become free, when born; and then they were to be educated at the expense of those to whom their ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... estates to the eldest sons; younger sons and the scions of the middle classes were left with exceedingly limited opportunities or means of attaining estates in England, or, for that matter, of ever bettering their condition. Also, if England was to sustain its existing population, the nation must have sources of raw materials other than the dwindling supplies in the land, and it must have also outlets for the ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... noteworthy fact [Footnote: Though one of rare occurrence, Parker's case was not altogether unique; for now and then a pressed man by some lucky chance "got his foot on the ladder," as Nelson put it, and succeeded in bettering himself. Admiral Sir David Mitchell, pressed as the master of a merchantman, is a notable example. Admiral Campbell, "Hawke's right hand at Quiberon," who entered the service as a substitute for a pressed man, is another; and James Clephen, pressed ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... is Christ in the child which makes it speak the truth; Christ in the child which makes it shrink from whatever it has been told is wrong. It is Christ in the young man, which fills him with lofty aspirations, hopes of bettering the world around him, hopes of training his soul to be all that it can be, and of putting forth all his powers in the service of Christ. It is Christ in the middle-aged man, which makes him strong in good works, labouring patiently, wisely, and sturdily; so that having drunk of the living ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... than ever under its baneful power, until in 1818-19 his consumption of opium was something almost incredible. Thus he became truly enough the great English Opium-Eater, whose Confessions were later to fill a unique place in English literature. It was finally the absolute need of bettering his financial condition that compelled De Quincey to shake off the shackles of his vice; this he practically accomplished, although perhaps he was never entirely free from the habit. The event is coincident with the beginning of his career ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... free, it is perhaps questionable if it be not better to send for the ill-used and degraded slave from Africa, and leave the more elevated slave in his comparatively happy home in the Old Slave States; the plea may be used for bettering the condition of the former, but that plea cannot be used ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... right to relief. That is to injure the very essential social force. 'Hard as it may seem in individual instances, dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful.'[275] The spirit of independence or self-help is the one thing necessary. 'The desire of bettering our condition and the fear of making it worse, like the vis medicatrix in physics, is the vis medicatrix naturae in politics, and is continually counteracting the disorders arising from narrow human ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... anybody doubt that the evil may be thus increased, or diminished; and it would seem to follow that good must be similarly susceptible of addition or subtraction. Finally, to my knowledge, nobody professes to doubt that, so far forth as we possess a power of bettering things, it is our paramount duty to use it and to train all our intellect and energy to this ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... propaganda. It was the women workers of Massachusetts who first forced the legislature to investigate labor conditions and who aroused public sentiment to a pitch that finally compelled the enactment of laws for the bettering of their conditions. When the mill owners in Massachusetts demanded in 1846 that their weavers tend four looms instead of three, the women promptly resolved that "we will not tend a fourth loom unless we receive the same pay per piece as on three.... This we most solemnly ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... poorer classes. A rich country and poor inhabitants is an anomaly; and whatever is done should be prompt and effectual. If the Irish landlords looked directly into the state of their tenantry, and set themselves vigorously to the task of bettering their circumstances, they would, I am certain, establish the tranquillity and happiness of the country at large. The great secret, Colonel, of the dissensions that prevail among us is the poverty of the people. They are poor, and therefore the more easily wrought up ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... motives for the emigration of such persons may be summed up in a few brief words;—the emigrant's hope of bettering his condition, and of escaping from the vulgar sarcasms too often hurled at the less-wealthy by the purse-proud, common-place people of the world. But there is a higher motive still, which has its origin ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... we only be friends? We say that we are friends; but in my heart I have always loved you. When I began to love you I know not. I feel now that I cannot leave without telling you. Yes, Minnie, I love you, and you only; and it was the hope of bettering my prospects only to ask you to share them, that induced me to think of leaving. But I cannot leave without letting you know what I feel. Just be frank with me, and tell me, do you return my love? I cannot see your face. What! tears! Minnie, Minnie, my darling, ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... the pleasant picture of Scarron's house, and of the attention paid to him by the as yet unmarried Francoise d'Aubigne, in Dumas's Vingt Ans Apres. Nor is it easy to think of any literary following that, while no doubt bettering, abstains so completely from robbing, insulting, or obscuring its model as does ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... beauty of form or colour; and the simplicity which is to be the distinguishing mark of a Christian seems to me to be inconsistent with personal ambition. I do not see that there is any hint of a Christian being allowed to wish to do, what is called in domestic language "bettering" himself. The idea rather is that the all-wise and all-loving Father puts a man into the world where he intends him to be; and that a man is to find his highest pleasure in trying to serve the Father's ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... greeted Beroes. Mefres declared at that time that Egypt had fallen because the priestly order was lowered, while I asserted that the misery of the people was the cause of the suffering of the State, to which thou, so far as I remember, didst answer: Let Mefres occupy himself with bettering the priesthood, Pentuer in improving the lot of common people, while I will avoid destructive ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... the benefits that could be conferred upon mankind, I found none so great as the discovery of new arts, endowments, and commodities for the bettering of man's life.... But if a man could succeed, not in striking out some particular invention, however useful, but in kindling a light in nature—a light that should in its very rising touch and illuminate ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... until the last of that ilk has ceased to discourage men from trying to help their fellows by the shortest cut they can find, whether it fits in a theory or not. I don't care two pins for all the social theories that were ever made unless they help to make better men and women by bettering their lot. I have had cranks of that order, who rated as sensible beings in the ordinary affairs of life, tell me that I was doing harm rather than good by helping improve the lot of the poor; it delayed the final day of justice we were waiting for. Not I. I don't propose to wait ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... virtues. The Anarchist, the Fabian, the Salvationist, the Vegetarian, the doctor, the lawyer, the parson, the professor of ethics, the gymnast, the soldier, the sportsman, the inventor, the political program-maker, all have some prescription for bettering us; and almost all their remedies are physically possible and aimed at admitted evils. To them the limit of progress is, at worst, the completion of all the suggested reforms and the levelling up of all men to the point ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... upon us by competition, excessive population, public burdens, and the necessities of social position. In a new country, however, where all these circumstances are absent, and whither employers and employed resort alike for the purpose of bettering their condition, we should like to see traditions cast aside, and the fabric of society erected on ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... lady famous for her great beauty and accomplishments and for her tragic history. She was born in Rome of a family belonging to the minor noblesse of Gubbio, which migrated to Rome with a view to bettering their fortunes. After refusing several offers of marriage for Vittoria, her father betrothed her to Francesco Peretti (1573), a man of no position, but a nephew of Cardinal Montalto, who was regarded as likely to become pope. Vittoria ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... betterment in Society is naturally and rightly the result of self-interest. The man who spends his time altogether in the bettering of others does not establish reforms on the surest basis. Society usually has to do his work after him, with considerable delay and additional cost. He is all right in the abstract, but he delays matters. What I would illustrate is this: The place for the ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... sea. He had seen that she was afraid of her boss in the store. The rules there must be very strict. He had noted that everything about the girl, her apparel and her ornaments, was cheap and tawdry. She must be both poor and unhappy. Why should she not jump at the chance of bettering herself? ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... of the gas motor supplied by a gas generator in putting to profit certain improvements that will hereafter be possible, such, for example, as the lightening of the movable parts of the motor, the bettering of its organic rendering (now quite feeble), the use of better oils, the reduction of the consumption of water, the superheating of the steam injected into the gas ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... was the principal of a plot by which nearly a thousand dollars was got of the old man in Wall street, who had been Anna's friend; and fearing it might get out, I induced her to accompany me to Charleston, where she believed I had a prospect of bettering my condition, quitting my uncertain mode of living, and becoming a respectable man. Together we put up at the Charleston Hotel. But necessity again forced me to reveal to her my circumstances, and the real cause ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... Latin or Greek upon the sudden, by looking of the book only, without reading or construing anything at all, an usage right worthy and very profitable for all men, as well for the understanding of the book, as also for the aptness of framing the author's meaning, and bettering thereby their judgment, and therewithal perfecting their tongue and utterance of speech." In speaking of his own methods, however, Wilson's emphasis is on his faithfulness to the original. "But perhaps," he writes, "whereas I have been somewhat curious to follow Demosthenes' ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... we do not recollect to have heard of this particular infernal before. Be that as it may, Count Hardyknute of Holstein, having been sent into the world deformed in person and poor in circumstances, and being resolved to sell his soul to damnation for the bettering of his body, makes a contract with the demon, in condition of his being made handsome and powerful, to sacrifice to him a human victim on a particular day in each year; in failure of which he is to become the prey of the demon, who is ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... Reference to self, i.e. without the motive of bettering one's own self, or without any motive at all. (This contains the germ of the doctrine preached more elaborately in ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... keep on friendly terms with the villains, as long as he was in their power. To express disapproval of their conduct would have incurred the enmity of the whole crew, without bettering his own situation. ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... and Evening Service there is another important question that imperatively demands discussion, namely, a week-day worship. The movement for "shortened services," so-called, has shared the usual fate of all efforts at bettering the life of the Church, in being at the outset of its course widely and seriously misunderstood. The impression has gone abroad, and to-day holds possession of many otherwise well-informed people, that a large and growing party ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... Mr. Carleton had a very large tenantry around him and depending upon him, in bettering whose condition, if he had but known it, all those energies might have found full play. It never entered into his head. He abhorred business, the detail of business; and. his fastidious tastes especially shrank from having anything to do among those whose business ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... who were making or expecting to make corrupt gain, since they reverenced no element of the public weal in comparison with bettering themselves by such acts. But all the rest took it greatly to heart, and had much to say about it to intimates and also (as many as felt safe in so doing) in outspoken public conversation and the publication ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... his genius. The only thing of which he got nothing was schooling. His family was an old Connecticut one, which had come down in the world. Everything went wrong with his father. He was hard-working, kind-hearted, and strictly honest, but nothing succeeded. With the hope of "bettering his condition," he moved five times in ten years, getting so desperately poor at last that a borrowed two-horse sleigh carried all his worldly goods, including a wife and five children. Joel Weed was, perhaps, as unfortunate a man as ever brought an ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... shall act affectionate! He will probably loathe it, so there's just as much chance of injuring one's chance as of bettering it. In fact, if we are to get on at all, we had better try to forget the wretched money, and behave as if it did not exist. If anyone had told us a month ago that we should be staying in a big house with two quite good-looking young men as fellow-guests, and carte blanche to enjoy ourselves ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... these wisdoms next day when he asked her to walk with him to the village. He told her, as they walked, of the various projects for using his life to some advantage that he had used to make—projects for improved agricultural methods and the bettering of the conditions of life in the country. Althea had read a great deal of political economy. She had, indeed, ground at it and mastered it in the manner advised by Franklin to Helen. Gerald found her quiet comments and criticisms very illuminating, not only of his theme, but of ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... think of our friend Monsieur Le Breton, now that you have had an opportunity of bettering ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... evangelicals lies outside our subject, the character of its influence on society may be gathered from their efforts for the suppression of the slave trade; from the stricter observance of Sunday which became general towards the end of our period; from their plans for bettering the condition, and their care for the education of the poor. The institution of Sunday schools was largely due to Robert Raikes, of Gloucester, who began his work in 1780. Six years later some 200,000 children ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... can see and have cognizance of, not only with our physical senses, but by the intimations of the divinity which abides within us.* We can see, feel, and appreciate the virtue of a fellow-mortal who consecrates himself to the Divine idea through untiring exertion for the bettering of the condition of the world around him, whose agony he makes it his duty, only to satisfy his burning desire, to mitigate. The fact in its ghastly reality lies before us that the majority of mankind labour and are being crushed under ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... very far. As the prerogative of the authority makes husbands look upon their own wives with a vicious disdain, and many fathers their children; so I, betwixt two equal merits, should always be swayed against my own; not so much that the jealousy of my advancement and bettering troubles my judgment, and hinders me from satisfying myself, as that of itself possession begets a contempt of what it holds and rules. Foreign governments, manners, and languages insinuate themselves into my esteem; and I am sensible that ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... more positively than before. More than a year passed away. The time was approaching fast when Alfred would be of age. I returned from college to spend the long vacation at home, and made some advances toward bettering my acquaintance with young Monkton. They were evaded—certainly with perfect politeness, but still in such a way as to prevent me from offering my friendship to him again. Any mortification I might have felt at this petty repulse under ordinary circumstances ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... How can a man drive deeply an arrow which is so rough? Are you getting too old to make good spears and arrows, Mok?" And the man fumed a little. Old Mok made no reply, but he thought long and deeply after Ab had left the cave. Certainly Ab must have good arrows! Was there any way of bettering them? And, the next day, the crippled old man might have been seen looking for something beside the creek where it found its exit from the valley. There were stones ground into smoothness tossed up along the shore and the old man studied them most carefully. Many times ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... so disposed of my Affairs, that from whatever Corner of the Compass the Wind blew, it was bringing home one or other of my Ships; I hope, as a Husbandman, to contrive it so, that not a Shower of Rain, or a Glimpse of Sunshine, shall fall upon my Estate without bettering some part of it, and contributing to the Products of the Season. You know it has been hitherto my Opinion of Life, that it is thrown away when it is not some way useful to others. But when I am riding out by my self, in the fresh Air on the open Heath that lies by my House, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... girl," admitted her aunt, "and has made heaps of mistakes; but if she sees her way to bettering herself, she can be as determined as anyone. Of course you will have to run ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... well assured," said mother, colouring like the furze as it took the flame and fell over, "that our kinsman here hath received rough harm on his peaceful journey from Dulverton. The times are bad, as we all know well, and there is no sign of bettering them, and if I could see our Lord the King I might say things to move him! nevertheless, I have had so much of my ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... so far not a single lean, hungry-looking person, that the elements were kindly, that they could mend their own roads, and that he was tired of their everlasting complaint of poverty and hunger, when a little work would go a great way in this country toward bettering their material condition. This, of course, is just the kind of talk these people need, and the last some of ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... the lower strata of unskilled labor, to young and homeless workers, to transients, and to unassimilated immigrants. The better trained and the more intelligent American workmen reject the program of the I. W. W. These latter workmen believe in bettering their condition through the gradual development and enforcement of industrial standards, made possible by lawful coperation with the employer. The truth of this statement is borne out by the fact ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... think; I know a little better what I want to say all through; and in process of time, possibly I shall manage to say it. I must say I am a very bad workman, mais j'ai du courage: I am indefatigable at rewriting and bettering, and surely that humble quality should get me ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been the representative New England girlhood of those days. We had all been fairly educated at public or private schools, and many of us were resolutely bent upon obtaining a better education. Very few were among us without some distinct plan for bettering the condition of themselves and those they loved. For the first time, our young women had come forth from their home retirement in a throng, each with her own individual purpose. For twenty years or so, Lowell might have been looked upon as a rather select industrial school for young people. ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... Job's comforter at hand to put these black thoughts into my head they would not have helped me nor harmed me much. My whole heart had been set on getting my sights, and filled with the inconsequent hope that in getting them I somehow would be bettering my chances of coming out safe at last; and so it seemed to me when I could not get them—and in this, though the sight-taking had nothing to do with it, there was reason in plenty—that all likelihood of my being ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... is fundamentally anti-American to urge an uncritical deification of any form of government. Americanism involves an invitation to continuous constructive criticism in behalf of a bettering of our machinery of government. It is no solution of the foreign-born problem to preach loyalty to the status quo. We shall get further by saying to the foreigner, "We are engaged in a great democratic experiment on this continent. We have ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... is quite in accordance with individual observation, that human conduct, and particularly the conduct of young persons, is more generally influenced by hope than by fear,—that more are deterred from early and imprudent marriages by the hope and prospect of maintaining and bettering their condition in life, than by the fear of absolute destitution. The examples of the Highlands and of Ireland are more than enough to show, that this last is not a motive on which the legislator can place reliance, as influencing the conduct of young persons in extreme poverty. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... encouragement given by the administration to monied men of all denominations; or to necessity, impelling those who can no longer live on small incomes to risk their capitals in traffic, that they may have a chance for bettering their fortunes; or lastly, to a concurrence of all these causes; certain it is, the national exports and imports have been sensibly increasing for these forty years: the yearly medium of woollen exports, from the year 1738 to 1743 inclusive, amounted to about three millions and a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... should lose ground to the extent that they have. The Government see all the danger of their position, and how very probable it is that they may be reduced to the necessity of resignation or dissolution, and, though they have no hopes of bettering themselves by the latter, they have made up their minds to try the experiment, in order that they may give the Queen no reason to accuse them of unnecessarily deserting her, and not exhausting every expedient to retain their places ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... everywhere—but on the whole and in the long run. Now, with all deference, I would beg t' observe that we have got to examine the nature of changes before we have a warrant to call them progress, which word is supposed to include a bettering, though I apprehend it to be ill-chosen for that purpose, since mere motion onward may carry us to a bog or a precipice. And the questions I would put are three: Is all change in the direction of progress? if not, how shall we discern which change is progress ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... safe, no happiness is safe, there is no chance of bettering life until we have made an end to all ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... score of feet away, the satchel tucked under his arm, his body bent almost double, running like a jack-rabbit. Ere Kirkwood could get under way, in pursuit, the mate had dodged out of sight round the corner. When the American caught sight of him again, he was far down the block, and bettering ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... with the poets had induced him to entertain a somewhat plausible scheme of bettering his finances. He proposed to publish, in a handsome volume, a poem by each of the living bards of Great Britain. For this purpose, he had secured pieces from Southey, Wilson, Wordsworth, Lloyd, Morehead, Pringle, Paterson, and some others; and had received promises of contributions ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... scarcely ever mentioned but in blasphemy, and His precepts [are] almost utterly unknown . . . [where] the few who are enlightened are too much occupied in the pursuit of lucre, ambition, or ungodly revenge to entertain a desire or thought of bettering the moral state of their countrymen." This report, in which Borrow confesses that he "made no attempts to flatter and cajole," must have caused the British Minister some diplomatic embarrassment when he read it; but it seems to have been presented, although, ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... desirous of being initiated into the Black Art—the Art of communicating with the Unknown (Daramara) in order to acquire certain great powers, should dismiss from his mind all ideas of moral progress, and wholly concentrate on the bettering of his material self—on acquiring riches and fame in the physical sphere. His aspirations must be entirely earthly, and all his affections subordinate to his main desire for wealth and carnal pleasures. Having acquired this preliminary psychological stage, for one clear ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... were confined in narrow cells full of disease, and totally unfit for human habitation. The Popes, learning this sad state of affairs, tried to remedy it. Clement V was particularly zealous in his attempts at prison reform.[2] That he succeeded in bettering, at least for a time, the lot of these unfortunates, in whom he interested himself, cannot ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... itself automatically in sensation and of sending a vague idea to the deadened intellect. The intellect will still affirm, in implicit terms. And consequently, neither distinct concepts, nor words, nor the desire of spreading the truth, nor that of bettering oneself, are of the very essence of the affirmation. But this passive intelligence, mechanically keeping step with experience, neither anticipating nor following the course of the real, would have no wish ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... widely disseminated among the masses, and these are not engendered or fostered by the prevalence of distress or that want of employment which not unnaturally turns the thoughts of the idle and unoccupied to the most desperate expedients for bettering their condition, but they are the mere aspirings of a fierce democracy who have been gradually but deeply impregnated with sentiments of hatred and jealousy of the upper classes, and with a determination to 'level' all political distinctions and privileges, and when this is accomplished ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... new intoxication to what they conceived to be the concrete. Entering thus late upon the stage of national politics, they devoted themselves, with their accustomed thoroughness, to learning and bettering what they conceived to be the principles and the practice which had given success to other nations. In this quest no scruples should deter them, no sentimentality hamper, no universal ideals distract. Yet ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... undo this evening. Ladies and Gentlemen!—I will give you, presently, the pleasure of hearing some lines written expressive of my wishes toward the unknown—but supposed—mistress of my life and affections. Any suggestions toward the bettering of ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... are increasing in wealth, from necessity, because their country is becoming better, by being cultivated, in order to produce what is necessary. They cannot have what they want, in the way they wish, without increasing or bettering the property of ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... hopeless and pitiful about this people. There is no possibility of permanently bettering their condition. Born and living under a climate, which, from the gradual shifting of the pole, must every year grow more and more severe, they can but sink lower and lower as the struggle for existence grows sharper. There is no hope for them. Their absurd love of home precludes the ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... service held there, with his kindred and the friends of a lifetime about him, the following passages from 'Looking Backward' and 'Equality' were read as a fitting expression, in his own words, of that hope for the bettering and uplifting of Humanity, which was the real passion ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... existence and location of the Public Library there are many whose ideas of its contents and their uses, and of the conditions and value of such uses, are limited and crude. The advertising that succeeds in bettering this state of things is surely doing an economic service. All these things the self-respecting citizen should know. But beyond and above all this there is the final economic service of advertising—the causing a man to want that which he needs but does not yet desire. Every man, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... condition presented itself to the comprehension of Diaz early in his administration, and compliance with it has been one of the principal contributing causes to his success. This was the necessity for the bettering of the means of communication of the country. Roads, railways, and telegraph multiplied accordingly under the fostering work of the Diaz Governments, mainly by inducements held out to foreign capitalists; partly by the expenditure of national funds. When troops and messages can be moved and ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... this industrial institution and the immeasurable amount of good it has already done, during the lifetime of its founder, in bettering the temporal welfare of thousands of colored people in the south, have tended to make it the most prominent illustration of practical and successful industrial education among the colored people of this ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... of five per cent on his shares. A surplus was also set aside to pay dividends in case of a setback, but beyond this the money was invested in bettering the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... the sea-sand, by long triall and experience, hath bin found to be very profitable for the bettering of land, and especially for the increase of corne and tillage, within the counties of Devon and Cornwall, where the inhabitants have not commonly used any other worth, for the bettering of their ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... I willingly grant; for myself I am always Casting about for improvement,—things new, so they be not too costly. But what profits a man, who has not abundance of money, Being thus active and stirring, and bettering inside and outside? Only too much is the citizen cramped: the good, though he know it, Has he no means to acquire because too slender his purse is, While his needs are too great; and thus is he constantly ...
— Hermann and Dorothea • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the Queen Dowager and two Royal Duchesses doubled; then came sundry Dukes, Earls, and other notables with $500 each, followed by a long list of smaller and smaller subscriptions. But this money was given to the "Society for Bettering the Condition of the Laboring Classes," to enable them to try an experiment; and that experiment has triumphantly succeeded. All those I have described, as well as one for single women only near Hatton Garden, and one for families and for aged women near Bagnigge Wells, which I have not yet ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... have no hope, no chance to rise; and they submit—though I judge not cheerfully—to an iron necessity. The Northern laborer, if very poor, may be discontented; but discontent urges him to effort, and leads to the bettering of his condition. I tell you, my friend, slavery is an expensive luxury. You Southern nabobs will have it; and you ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... and the dull to help in the deterioration of the race and to breed sons as sluggish as themselves. In the New World women have taken an important part in the work of the National Grange, the greatest agency in bettering the economic and social conditions of the agricultural population in the States. In Ireland the women must be welcomed into the work of building up a rural civilization, and be aided by men in the promotion of those industries with which women have been immemorially ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... now bettering with more resolution. Many days had passed since Aurora had shown herself,—many days since the rising sun and the world had seen each other. But yesterday this sulky estrangement ended, and, after the beautiful reconciliation at sunset, the faint ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... his pontificate, softened some of the rigors with which they were afflicted, and had directed that they might spread beyond that ignominious precinct; nor, however great was the outcry about it among the mob, did he forego the idea of bettering the condition of the followers of the Mosaic law." He was disposed to give them civil rights; and if he did not think of extending his concessions even to political privileges, yet he would give this as the main reason for it, that, in a constitutional country, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... pondering. Putting Miss Collins' hints, Diana's own former confessions, and her present condition together, he saw, clearer than it was good to see, the probable state of affairs. And yet he was glad to see it; if any help or bettering was ever to come, it was desirable that his vision should be true, and his wisdom have at least firm data to act upon. But what action could touch the case?—the most difficult that a man can have to deal with. Through the night Basil alternately walked the floor and knelt down, sometimes ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... have lost patience and grown angry, had that served me; but I knew it would only give pleasure to my tormentors, without bettering my condition. I therefore observed silence, and kept my eyes averted or turned ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... debtor's earnings belonging to the creditor, who allows no credit toward the reduction of the debt. To make the hardship greater, if a relative or friend comes forward to pay the debt, the creditor has the right to refuse payment, and to keep his slave, whose only hope of bettering himself is in getting his owner to accept payment for him from a third party, so that he may become the slave of the ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... designing demagogues? why will ye strive to inflict the most irreparable injury upon the objects of your misplaced sympathy? reduce to ruins this fair fabric of liberty, and this happy land to desolation? Your own leaders acknowledge that, hitherto, your agitation, far from bettering the condition of the slaves, has only made it worse; and in some respects this is true. So long as you confine yourselves to making or hearing abolition speeches, or forming among yourselves anti-slavery societies; so long as you ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... them is the traditional American—and human—view that the natural world exists for the primary purpose of bettering the lot of such human beings or groups of human beings as may have the ingenuity and the vigor to extract its treasures or to adapt it to their use. Quite often the activities for which this view ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... with a fresh and noble endeavor after bettering the homes of the poor originated, I had almost said of course, by a woman, the experiment was in several places made of gathering small assemblies of the poor in the neighborhood of their own dwellings, that the ladies in charge ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... no man (I am sure) will open his mouth against this Enterprise. No man (I say) who either hath Charitie toward his brother (and would be glad of his furtherance in vertuous knowledge): or that hath any care & zeale for the bettering of the Common state of this Realme. Neither any, that make accompt, what the wiser sort of men (Sage and Stayed) do thinke of them. To none (therefore) will I make any Apologie, for a vertuous acte doing: and for commending, ...
— The Mathematicall Praeface to Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara • John Dee
... of an annuity, about which no one at the present time knew anything, the chevalier really had, therefore, a bona fide income of a thousand francs. But in spite of this bettering of his circumstances, he made no change in his life, manners, or appearance, except that the red ribbon made a fine effect on his maroon-colored coat, and completed, so to speak, the physiognomy of a gentleman. After 1802, the chevalier sealed his letters with a very old seal, ill-engraved to be ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... Flitch was a stable-boy, groom, and coachman, like his father before him, at the Hall thirty years; his father died in our service. Mr. Flitch had not a single grievance here; only one day the demon seizes him with the notion of bettering himself he wants his independence, and he presents himself to me with a story of a shop in our county town.—Flitch! remember, if you go you go for good.—Oh, he quite comprehended.—Very well; good-bye, Flitch;—the man ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for years after. She married against his will. He never forgave her. My father did not seem to have the knack of getting along in the world, and he moved to America in the hope of bettering his condition. He did not better it. My father died ten years ago, a prematurely broken down man, and my mother and I struggled along as best we could until she died two years ago. My grandfather returned her letter ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... gladly embrace that mode of publication. But while editors remain as pusillanimous and as careless of moral progress as they are at present, I have little hope that I shall persuade any one of them to accept a work written with a single eye to the enlightenment and bettering of humanity. ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... the young lady — for I suppose there is no chance in the world of your marrying her in any other way — it will be better both for you and her that you should avoid for the future these meetings in the gardens or elsewhere, and cast your thoughts in some other direction for the bettering ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... memoir, and such as there are now many others among the farmers and peasantry of Scotland) enjoying the just reward of his paternal cares in the prosperity and success of his children; each of whom he sees engaged in some beneficial pursuit, each bettering his condition in life, and each advanced somewhat in the scale of society above the situation in which he was born. It is this visible progress and continual improvement in the circumstances and condition of families, so frequent in the class ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... much worse off than we are. I confess, though, I feel uneasy about our old slaves. Slavery's wrong, uncle; and it's when one's reduced to such extremes as are presented in this uninviting garret that we realise it the more forcibly. It gives the poor wretches no chance of bettering their condition; and if one exhibits ever so much talent over the other, there is no chance left him to improve it. It is no recompense to the slave that his talent only increases the price of the article to be sold. Look what Harry ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... considering the reasons advanced on either side. These will be more fully explained in each case by Father Alonso Sanchez, to whom your Majesty should give entire credit, on account of his sanctity, and the earnest zeal that he has always shown for the bettering of affairs in this realm; and because he is a person who, through the broad experience he has had with them, and the many times he has pondered over their remedy, will be able to give a satisfactory account of them all. I therefore beg ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... of the committee on expenditures, and a member of the judiciary, &c. I directed my attention to the incorporation of a Historical Society; to the preparation of a system of township names derived from the aboriginal languages; and to some efforts for bettering the condition of the natives, by making it penal to sell or give them ardent spirits, and thus desired to render my position as a legislator useful, where there was but little chance of general action. As chairman of the committee on expenditures, I kept the public expenditures ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... it is obvious that very little can be effected in the way of bettering the average heredity; but are we taking adequate measures in the direction of improving the environment of mother and child? The housing problem is still far from satisfactory; help in the home can scarcely be procured, ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... Crusades, encouraged vagabondage in all classes. The extent to which travelling was carried in the Middle Ages for purposes of pilgrimage and commerce, out of pure curiosity or love of knowledge, for the bettering of trade in handicrafts or for self-improvement in the sciences, has only of late years been estimated at a just calculation. "The scholars," wrote a monk of Froidmont in the twelfth century, "are wont to roam around the world and visit ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... without any corresponding salaries. The case of Orange has been already alluded to, and there were many other nobles less able to afford the expense, who had been indulged with these ruinous honors. During the war, there had been, however, many chances of bettering broken fortunes. Victory brought immense prizes to the leading officers. The ransoms of so many illustrious prisoners as had graced the triumphs of Saint Quentin and Gravelines had been extremely ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... slightest idea from whence came my ancestors, from what part of Africa, what tribe, what nation. But I am a Negro and ... well, have the dream of bettering my race. I have no irons in the fire, beyond altruistic ones. Of course, when I say American Negroes I don't exclude Canadian ones, or those of Latin America or the Caribbean. It is simply that there are greater numbers of educated American Negroes ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... most part, that the paths well beaten by righteous feet are safest, even though much walking therein has worn away the grass and flowers. Nevertheless, she has an indulgent ear for all that gives promise of bettering anybody or anything, and therefore is not severe on any new methods that may arise in our progressive days ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that earth was bettering slowly Were dead and damned, there sounded "War is done!" One morrow. Said the bereft, and meek, and lowly, "Will men some day be given to grace? yea, wholly, And in good sooth, as ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... fared very badly in the new country, it often happened that he came out very well in the end. Among the white people who came here as slaves there were often convicts and paupers; but even some of these succeeded in bettering their condition and establishing themselves as good citizens, and in ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... with a pathos of which he was himself evidently unconscious, "I want to get home to Ninety-second Street, Philadelphia." He described himself as a printer by trade, and said that he had come over when he was a younger man, in the hope of bettering himself, and for the sake of seeing the Old Country, but had never since been rich enough to pay his homeward passage. His manner and accent did not quite convince me that he was an American, and I told him so; but he steadfastly affirmed, "Sir, I was born and have lived in Ninety-second Street, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the pains and hardships suffered by the army and in large part by the nation, will do all that human strength can do for the amelioration of the present situation and will energetically try all measures for refitting the army and bettering the sanitary service, as in this cause no ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... pathos of which he was himself evidently unconscious, "I want to get home to Ninety-second Street, Philadelphia." He described himself as a printer by trade, and said that he had come over when he was a younger man, in the hope of bettering himself, and for the sake of seeing the Old Country, but had never since been rich enough to pay his homeward passage. His manner and accent did not quite convince me that he was an American, and I told him ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... exhibits have been more instructive and more popular than have been (1) the picturesque reconstructions of ancient cities, and the presentment of their city life, and (2) the corresponding surveys of the present conditions of town life, and of the resources and means of bettering them. ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... said, "if you ask me why I does it, without any intention of bettering myself, for the Lord hath placed me above need of that; but mainly for the sake of discipline, and the respectability of things. Suppose I was under you, sir, and knew you was getting no more than I was, why, my stomach ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... impulse that prompted to action. No one can be utterly miserable who has a hope, even a remote one, of bettering his condition; and with a motive such as this to cheer him, Johnny persevered; young as he was, he understood the necessity. But how often, during the four weary weeks that succeeded, did the memory of the Saturday night he had spent at home come up before his mental vision! ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... to the news printed in another column, and stated that this information, if correct, showed a state of affairs at the High School that needed bettering. The ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... ventured to go into arrear, and never did so with impunity. . . . They would have cheated, loved, and despised a more easy landlord, and his property would have gone to ruin, without either permanently bettering their interests or their morals. He, therefore, took especial care that they should be convinced of his strictness in punishing as well as ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... into power in England the new government turned its attention to the navy, which had languished under the Stuarts. A great reform was accomplished in the bettering of the living conditions for the seamen. Their pay was increased, their share of prize money enlarged, and their food improved. At the same time, during the years 1648-51, the number of ships of the fleet was practically doubled, and ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... off in a hundred goes! As if that wasn't stunning enough, Vittle-us (and well named too) eats six millions' worth, English money, in seven months! Wegg takes it easy, but upon-my-soul to a old bird like myself these are scarers. And even now that Commodious is strangled, I don't see a way to our bettering ourselves.' Mr Boffin added as he turned his pensive steps towards the Bower and shook his head, 'I didn't think this morning there was half so many Scarers in Print. But I'm in for ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... and had come back to Chicago penniless. The woman was supporting him, some one said. Enough of this pretty tale could be read in the bearing of the men to make Sommers sorry that he had come, and sorrier that he had come in the hope of bettering his condition. He slipped out unobserved and walked the six miles back to ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... stand in the way of your bettering yourself, Timson. And, by the way, my daughter spoke to a friend about you to-day. I think ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... this state of things. See you, were men free to wander as they chose over the land instead of working at their vocations, the country would be full of vagrants who, for want of other means for a living, would soon become robbers. Then, too, very many would flock to the towns, and so far from bettering their condition, would find themselves worse off than before, for there would be more people than work could be ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... ruined by Germany. On the contrary, in spite of the remarkable progress of Germany in a few limited directions, the general figures show that we are fully maintaining our splendid lead, if indeed we are not actually bettering it. I cannot, therefore, admit this attempted justification of the character of Mr. Williams's book. To quote Mr. Punch's admirable picture, Mr. Williams, like his pupil Lord Rosebery, has been trying to make our flesh creep. There is more harm than humour in such a pastime. That ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... remembered what his master had said to him on the day of his death, after the congestion of both lungs had shut off any probability of recovery, and the sculptor had asked his pupil to send his body home. "It's not a pleasant place to be lying while the world is moving and doing and bettering," he had said with a feeble smile, "but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from, in the end. The townspeople will come in for a look at me; and after they have had their say, I shan't ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... principal thing which gave my mind a turn was a friendship I formed with a young fellow, a very noble character, but a hapless son of misfortune. He was the son of a simple mechanic; but a great man in the neighbourhood taking him under his patronage, gave him a genteel education, with a view of bettering his situation in life. The patron dying just as he was ready to launch out into the world, the poor fellow in despair went to sea; where, after a variety of good and ill fortune, a little before I was acquainted with him he had been set on shore by an American privateer, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... satisfied with their condition, and more valuable as pieces of property, without preparing them for the world to come. Mrs. Carlton found in her husband a congenial spirit, who entered into all her wishes and plans for bettering the condition of their slaves. Mrs. Carlton's views and sympathies were all in favour of immediate emancipation; but then she saw, or thought she saw, a difficulty in that. If the slaves were liberated, they must be ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... serious disadvantage, and often gives up the fight altogether. Anything that tends to equalise the chances of town and country, from the point of view of mental equipment, would do more general good to Scotland, by bettering the available brain power, than any half-dozen Acts of ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... in bettering conditions in prison camps, especially at Ruhleben, will be long remembered. When conditions were at their worst he went out daily to keep himself informed, and then daily went to the Foreign Office or wrote to the Ministry of War in an effort ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... sister Jane's son?" said a farmer's wife, who had stopped her trap at the cottage to pick up a lidded wisket in which some earthenware had been packed. "He's getting a good-looking young man and he's all for bettering himself. Well, he went and got his photo taken at Drayton and brought them in to show his mother. She was making jam at the time, and she's not an easy tongue at the best o' times. 'What's that?' she says; 'you don't mean to say that's a likeness o' thee? It looks fool enough.' She says she ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... whose name was Antonio, to whom I trusted everything; and as I was fond of retirement and deep study, I commonly left the management of my state affairs to your uncle, my false brother (for so indeed he proved). I, neglecting all worldly ends, buried among my books, did dedicate my whole time to the bettering of my mind. My brother Antonio being thus in possession of my power, began to think himself the duke indeed. The opportunity I gave him of making himself popular among my subjects awakened in his ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... disgusted with the Innovation, while the advocates for it were yet endeavoring to make the world believe, that the opposition to it arose from a few men only, of "no property" and "desperate fortunes," who were "endeavoring to bring things into confusion, that they might have the advantage of bettering their fortunes by plunder." Little did they think that it was then known, as it now appears in fact, that those who were assiduously watching for places, preferment and pensions, were in truth the very men of NO ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... are well assured," said mother, colouring like the furze as it took the flame and fell over, "that our kinsman here hath received rough harm on his peaceful journey from Dulverton. The times are bad, as we all know well, and there is no sign of bettering them, and if I could see our Lord the King I might say things to move him! nevertheless, I have had so much of my ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... watch and pray for himself too. And if I should add thereto and say further that I trust my diligent intercession for him may be the means that God should the sooner give him grace to amend, and fast and watch and pray and take affliction in his own body, for the bettering of his sinful soul, he would be wonderous wroth with that. For he would be loth to have any such grace at all as should make him go leave off any of his mirth, and so sit and mourn for his sin." Such mind as this, lo, have some of those ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... societies change—not always and everywhere—but on the whole and in the long run. Now, with all deference, I would beg t' observe that we have got to examine the nature of changes before we have a warrant to call them progress, which word is supposed to include a bettering, though I apprehend it to be ill-chosen for that purpose, since mere motion onward may carry us to a bog or a precipice. And the questions I would put are three: Is all change in the direction of progress? if not, how shall we discern which change is progress and which not? ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... our country the great nation that we love and honor. And directly to your hands in the accomplishment of the great national purpose, making all our prosperity, all our power, all our capital and our labor instruments for the bettering of mankind, for the progress of civilization and for the coming of the effective and universal rule of the religion which we profess, right at your hands, as the first and plainest duty, is the cementing of the bonds of friendship between our republic and our ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... your bucket where you are." The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: "Cast down your bucket where ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... horse hour is remarkable, and fully shows what may be expected of the gas motor supplied by a gas generator in putting to profit certain improvements that will hereafter be possible, such, for example, as the lightening of the movable parts of the motor, the bettering of its organic rendering (now quite feeble), the use of better oils, the reduction of the consumption of water, the superheating of the steam injected into the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... the less, capable of inscribing itself automatically in sensation and of sending a vague idea to the deadened intellect. The intellect will still affirm, in implicit terms. And consequently, neither distinct concepts, nor words, nor the desire of spreading the truth, nor that of bettering oneself, are of the very essence of the affirmation. But this passive intelligence, mechanically keeping step with experience, neither anticipating nor following the course of the real, would have no wish to deny. It could not receive an imprint of negation; for, once again, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... Lady Castlefort's marriage, the younger, the beautiful being now the successful lady of the ascendant, the elder writhed in all the combined miseries of jealousy and dependance, and an everyday lessening chance of bettering her condition. Lord Castlefort, too, for good reasons of his own, well remembered, detested Lady Katrine, and longed to shake her off. In this wish, at least, husband and wife united; but Lady Castlefort had no decent excuse for her ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... after years of uninterrupted labor and the severest analysis, to invent a panopticon, a self-sustaining penitentiary, or rather to apply that invention of his brother, General Sir Samuel Bentham, to the bettering of our prison-houses and to the restoration of the lost,—or perhaps a ballot-box, that nothing might be wanted, when that "system" he valued himself so much upon should be adopted throughout the world, as the outlines ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... this part of my discourse is directed, mind only such things as are useful to the bettering of manners. And such we are to put in mind that it is an absurd thing, that those who delight in fables should not let anything slip them of the vain and extravagant stories they find in poets, and that those who affect language should pass over nothing that is elegantly ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the boys and girls in company as much as possible, both at lessons and at games. His was the larger view. Her lord's view appeared similar to that of her aunt's 'throned Ottoman Turk on his divan.' Matthew Weyburn believed in the bettering of the world; Lord Ormont had no belief ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sacrilege. It is needless to tell you what he said, and quite enough to say that I would have held my head's safety very insecure, if, in that moment, accounts had been brought of the success of thy friend, William with the Beard, in his and thy honest scheme of bettering ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... theory appeals chiefly to the lower strata of unskilled labor, to young and homeless workers, to transients, and to unassimilated immigrants. The better trained and the more intelligent American workmen reject the program of the I. W. W. These latter workmen believe in bettering their condition through the gradual development and enforcement of industrial standards, made possible by lawful coperation with the employer. The truth of this statement is borne out by the fact that whereas ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... Queen Dowager and two Royal Duchesses doubled; then came sundry Dukes, Earls, and other notables with $500 each, followed by a long list of smaller and smaller subscriptions. But this money was given to the "Society for Bettering the Condition of the Laboring Classes," to enable them to try an experiment; and that experiment has triumphantly succeeded. All those I have described, as well as one for single women only near Hatton Garden, and one for families and for aged women near Bagnigge Wells, which I have not yet found ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... Wilberforce, as sincere a philanthropist as Anglicanism ever produced, an ardent supporter of Bible societies and foreign missions, a champion of the anti-slavery movement, and also of the ruthless "Combination Laws," which denied to British wage-slaves all chance of bettering their lot. Wilberforce published a "Practical View of the System of Christianity", in which he told unblushingly what the Anglican establishment is for. In a chapter which he described as "the basis of ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... three years. The country, too, was suffering from a great commercial crisis, and no one cared to go to the theatre. In many of the towns they visited strikes were on, and the people were convulsed with discussions, projects for resistance, and hopes of bettering their condition. Great social problems, the tyranny of capital, and such-like, occupied the minds of men, and there was naturally little taste for the laughing nonchalance of La Fille de Madame Angot or the ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... abstractions they turned with a new intoxication to what they conceived to be the concrete. Entering thus late upon the stage of national politics, they devoted themselves, with their accustomed thoroughness, to learning and bettering what they conceived to be the principles and the practice which had given success to other nations. In this quest no scruples should deter them, no sentimentality hamper, no universal ideals distract. ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... larger mundane spirit. But still he has but ascended nearer to his own mundane source, that soul of the world, or Prakriti, to which, if I must not too literally insist on it, I may still resort as a convenient figure. To transcend it, he must advance by the discrete degree. No simple "bettering" of the ordinary self, which leaves it alive, as the focus—the French word "foyer" is the more expressive—of his thoughts and actions; not even that identification with higher interests in the world's plane just spoken ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... city of Damascus was at the height of its splendour and magnificence, dwelt therein a young noble, named Demetrius, whose decayed fortunes did not correspond with the general prosperity of the times. He was a youth of ardent disposition, and very handsome in person: pride kept him from bettering his estate by the profession of merchandise, yet more keenly did he feel the obscurity to which adverse fates had reduced him, that in his lot was involved the fortune of one ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... for his deliverance; and either she lacked inventiveness or was too honest, for no method could she discover which avoided confession of the simple truth. As the days passed without catastrophe and without news save that her lover was bettering in hospital, she staved off the truth, trusting that the next night would bring inspiration. Almost she hoped—being quite unwise in such matters—that his sufferings would be accepted as cancelling his offence. ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... far-sighted. Mr. Carleton had a very large tenantry around him and depending upon him, in bettering whose condition, if he had but known it, all those energies might have found full play. It never entered into his head. He abhorred business,—the detail of business; and his fastidious taste especially shrank from having anything to do among those whose business was literally ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... carried out. Too often the prisoners were confined in narrow cells full of disease, and totally unfit for human habitation. The Popes, learning this sad state of affairs, tried to remedy it. Clement V was particularly zealous in his attempts at prison reform.[2] That he succeeded in bettering, at least for a time, the lot of these unfortunates, in whom he interested ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... nothing else. This is in my eyes the second part of a woman's parish work. I entreat you to bear it in mind when you hear, as I trust you will, lectures in this place upon that SANITARY REFORM, without which all efforts for the bettering of the masses are in my eyes not only useless, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... torturing, and chopping their neighbors, and using their heads in conventional patterns on the tops of gate-posts, did devote their leisure intervals to rearing fortresses like this. Edinburgh Castle could not be conceived, much less built, nowadays, when all our energy is consumed in bettering the condition of the "submerged tenth"! What did they care about the "masses," that "regal race that is now no more," when they were hewing those blocks of rugged rock and piling them against the sky-line ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... State, going to Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and New Jersey, where it is stated they are wanted as laborers in various pursuits. In your mind and to your knowledge, do you think it is the best thing for them to do, and are they bettering condition financially, morally and religiously; even in manhood, citizenship, etc. Our —— has been asked by the white and colored people here to speak in an advisory way, but we decided to remain silent until we can hear from reliable sources in the North and East, ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... among all the benefits that could be conferred upon mankind, I found none so great as the discovery of new arts, endowments, and commodities for the bettering of man's life.... But if a man could succeed, not in striking out some particular invention, however useful, but in kindling a light in nature—a light that should in its very rising touch and illuminate all the border regions that confine upon the circle ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... continually to suggest to himself ideas of health and hope and happiness and usefulness, instead of brooding upon the emptiness and unanswered needs of his life or upon his failing physical powers. Mrs. Eddy's sect, more than any other one of the cults which believe in and practise this method of bettering the patient's physical condition through his mind, has forced the most hide-bound medical practitioners to take account of this old but newly applied ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... a tone of reflection, the doctor: "That, sir neighbor, I willingly grant; for myself I am always Casting about for improvement,—things new, so they be not too costly. But what profits a man, who has not abundance of money, Being thus active and stirring, and bettering inside and outside? Only too much is the citizen cramped: the good, though he know it, Has he no means to acquire because too slender his purse is, While his needs are too great; and thus is he constantly hampered. Many the things I had done; but then the cost of such changes ...
— Hermann and Dorothea • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... sat close to one another, and Miss Kilgour told Sophy all the gossip and clash of gossip there had been about Christina Binnie and her lover, and how the marriage had been broken off, no one knowing just why, but many thinking that since Jamie Logan had got a place on "The Line," he was set on bettering himself with a girl something above ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... Gaul. Here the clergy were sadly demoralized, and the churches and monasteries had been despoiled of much of their property in the constant turmoil of the time. Boniface succeeded, with the help of Charles Martel, in bettering affairs, and through his efforts the venerable church of Gaul, almost as old as that of Rome itself, was brought under the supremacy of the pope. In 748 the assembled bishops of Gaul bound themselves to maintain ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... pray thee, mark me. I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated To closeness and the bettering of my mind 90 With that which, but by being so retired, O'er-prized all popular rate, in my false brother Awaked an evil nature; and my trust, Like a good parent, did beget of him A falsehood in its contrary, as great 95 As my ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... thereby it will appeare that he hath not withdrawne himselfe from seruice of the state to liue idle or wholly priuate to himselfe, but hath spent some time in doing that which may greatly benefit others, and hath serued not a little to the bettering of his owne mind, and increasing of his knowledge; though he for modesty pretend much ignorance, and pleade want in wealth, much like some rich beggars, who either of custom, or for couetousnes, go to ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... infinities still, Where, in Emmanuel, good has quench'd ill; Infinite humbleness, highest and first, Choosing the doom of the lowest and worst; Infinite pity, and patience,—how long? Infinite justice, avenging all wrong, Infinite purity, wisdom, and skill, Bettering good through each effort of ill, Infinite beauty and infinite love, Shining around and ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... however, in common politeness, to say something. Hardly attending himself to his own words, he began with a commonplace phrase: "I regret, Monsieur Lomaque, that we have not had more opportunities of bettering our acquaintance." ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... "Not I, indeed," she replied sharply; "others may part with their children, if they like, but I will never part with mine." "Well, my good woman, the offer to educate them has done no harm: let me hope it will do good. I would have you recollect that you have now a proposal made you of bettering their present and future condition. You and I must soon meet at the judgment-seat of Christ, to give an account of this meeting; and you know that I can do better for your little ones than you can." She was silent. The author then addressed these ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... been poring over Wordsworth lately: which has had much effect in bettering my Blue Devils: for his philosophy does not abjure melancholy, but puts a pleasant countenance upon it, and connects it with humanity. It is very well, if the sensibility that makes us fearful of ourselves ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... beginning of the war our people gladly welcomed the Japanese, because this seemed to herald needed reforms and a general bettering of conditions, but soon it was seen that no genuine reforms were intended and the people had ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... valuable type for civilization, and for bringing the people of the country up to a realization of the standards that you are trying to set. If you make it evident to a man that you are sincerely concerned in bettering his body, he will be much more ready to believe that you are ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... ships, much more at heart than his own private interest. It was reasonable to expect, that a man whose debts M— had paid more than once, whom he had obliged in many other respects, and whom he had carried with him at a very considerable expense, on this expedition, merely with a view of bettering his fortune, would have acted with common honesty, if not with gratitude; but such was the depravity of this little monster's heart, that, on his deathbed, he left a considerable fortune to mere strangers, with whom he had little or no connection, without the least thought of ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... has agreed to participate financially in the work of bettering the water approaches to Shanghai and to Tientsin, the centers of foreign trade in central and northern China, and an international conservancy board, in which the Chinese Government is largely represented, has been provided for the improvement ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... entirely of the railway workers. They presented many characteristics of the average English workmen and hungrily received information relating to the methods of the best organised English trade unions. They had no idea of the things we had done and the progress we had made in bettering the working conditions of labour generally. Their professional leaders had disposed of the British movement by describing our organisation as "bourgeois trade unions," and always referred to our trade union activities as though we were organised and internally ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... among us much worse off than we are. I confess, though, I feel uneasy about our old slaves. Slavery's wrong, uncle; and it's when one's reduced to such extremes as are presented in this uninviting garret that we realise it the more forcibly. It gives the poor wretches no chance of bettering their condition; and if one exhibits ever so much talent over the other, there is no chance left him to improve it. It is no recompense to the slave that his talent only increases the price of the article to be sold. Look what Harry would have been had he enjoyed ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... began to write a series of novels, in the hope of bettering his fortunes thereby. The books brought him some reputation, but to-day "Hannah Thurston" and "John Godfrey's ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... outside our subject, the character of its influence on society may be gathered from their efforts for the suppression of the slave trade; from the stricter observance of Sunday which became general towards the end of our period; from their plans for bettering the condition, and their care for the education of the poor. The institution of Sunday schools was largely due to Robert Raikes, of Gloucester, who began his work in 1780. Six years later some 200,000 children attended these schools, and in many cases gained in them their only education. ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... characterize their modern standard of gaining their livelihood.[28] A constantly increasing number of emigrants are streaming into the Holy Land, although the Zionists are devoting their main endeavors toward firmly establishing the resident inhabitants and bettering their condition. On April 3, 1914, the London Jewish Chronicle reported the emigration from the single port of Odessa as numbering 250 ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... feel affectionate, I shall act affectionate! He will probably loathe it, so there's just as much chance of injuring one's chance as of bettering it. In fact, if we are to get on at all, we had better try to forget the wretched money, and behave as if it did not exist. If anyone had told us a month ago that we should be staying in a big ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... his mouth against this Enterprise. No man (I say) who either hath Charitie toward his brother (and would be glad of his furtherance in vertuous knowledge): or that hath any care & zeale for the bettering of the Common state of this Realme. Neither any, that make accompt, what the wiser sort of men (Sage and Stayed) do thinke of them. To none (therefore) will I make any Apologie, for a vertuous acte doing: and for commending, or setting forth, Profitable Artes to English men, in the English toung. ...
— The Mathematicall Praeface to Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara • John Dee
... force of familiarity; I hated the thing, but it had made good its place in the map of my life; secondly, from the impossibility of inflicting a slight; thirdly, because I rather chose to bear the ills I had than fly to others that I knew not of. Who revolts save in the glowing hope of bettering his lot? I must marry; who was there to be preferred before Elsa? It did not occur to me that I might remain single; I should have shared the general opinion that such an act was little removed from treason. ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... more than they now know of the folk among whom it grew, and the land in which they dwelt. In so doing they will come to see how needful are a few lessons from the healthy life and speech of those days, to be applied in the bettering ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... for twenty-five years," went on Karl Steinmetz, "and I cannot say that I know any good of you. But let that pass; it is not, I suppose, my business. The world is as the good God made it. I can do nothing toward bettering it. I have always known you to be a scoundrel—a fact to be deplored—and that is all. But so soon as your villany affects my own life, then, my friend, a more active recognition ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... strongly against the new arrangement, which proposed that all the offices then held in Ireland should be filled by Englishmen having no personal interest whatever in Ireland. The certainty that they would have a personal interest in it the very moment there was a chance of bettering their fortunes thereby, appears to have been quite overlooked. The settlers, therefore were allowed to continue their career as before, and felt all the secure for their effectual ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... scene in which Cerimon, the man withdrawn from the world to study the bettering of man, revives the body of Thaisa, are the most lovely things ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... further injure us. But—if we can drive the Express upon the shoals, and then utterly discredit that girl, either in the libel suit or the Ketchim trial, why, then, with a little show of bettering things at Avon, we'll get what we want. But we've got work before us. Say, is—is Sidney with the Express?" he ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... her after that. The importance of her position was borne into her in a new and better way. By being Lady Hurdly she might hope, perhaps, to do some little service in bettering the lots of those who were at the other extreme of life's scale from her, whereas if she had remained in her former position she would have had as little value at one ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... cravat—such as you may get of Kentucky manufacture—I should not object to. Beyond this, however (and the difficulty grieves me sorely), I am so perfectly incapacitated from doing anything, that I am almost persuaded, in order to the bettering of my own condition, to pay the customary fees, and applying to your honorable body for the privilege of membership, procure those means of lavish generosity which my necessity, and not my will, prevents ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... said he was surely a man, though a match for few; "But let us hold our peace hereon," he said; "maybe he is chosen for the bettering of thy troubles." So the goodwife was ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... induced them first to take such a step. By the first of these laws, which was made by Ferdinand and Isabella as far back as the year 1499, they are commanded to seek out for themselves masters. This injunction they utterly disregarded. Some of them for fear of the law, or from the hope of bettering their condition, may have settled down in the towns, cities, and villages for a time, but to expect that a people, in whose bosoms was so deeply rooted the love of lawless independence, would subject ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... help realizing that chance had brought him to the most important decision of his life; for he could no longer doubt that he had won complete mastery over the heart of the loving girl. He had never thought of bettering his condition; he had never even wished such a thing, for a life without needs is a happy life, good for body and soul. He loved his freedom; he was exactly what he wanted ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... which tend so powerfully to expand the ideas, received no encouragement; the majority of men died without ever having ventured out of the neighborhood in which they were born. For them there was no hope of personal improvement, none of the bettering of their lot; there were no comprehensive schemes for the avoidance of individual want, none for the resistance of famines. Pestilences were permitted to stalk forth unchecked, or at best opposed only by mummeries. Bad food, wretched ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... the Lodge door—that is, a face not exactly strange; she seemed to have seen it before, but could not recollect how or where. Then she recalled it as that of a young daily governess, her predecessor at the Fergusons', who had left them "to better herself," as she said—and decidedly to the bettering of her pupils. ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... he had stumbled against a stone wall. What sign had she ever given him that she could care greatly? Was not any form of emotion always distasteful to her? Was not her mind always occupied with abstract questions? Was she not always engaged in her own self-improvement—with schemes, it is true, for bettering the world; but did her heart ever ache once for the individual? What was it, then, he loved? Something he imagined this girl to be, or was he in love with the fact that his own nature had been so mightily stirred? Was it not the joy of caring greatly which had carried him ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... any kind; though I've always heard my father say that civilisation was founded upon the instinct of ownership, and that it was the only thing that had advanced the world. And if you dread the danger of giving her advantages, as you say, or bettering her worldly lot," she continued, with a smile for his quixotic scruples, "why, I'll do my best to reduce her blessings to a minimum; though I don't see why the poor little thing shouldn't get some good from the inequalities that there always must be ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... many goodly woodes full of Deere, Conies, Hares, and Fowle, euen in the middest of Summer in incredible abundance. The woodes are not such as you finde in Bohemia, Moscouia, or Hercynia, barren and fruitles, but the highest and reddest Cedars of the world, farre bettering the Ceders of the Acores of the Indies, or Lybanus, Pynes, Cypres, Sassaphras, the Lentisk, or the tree that beareth the Masticke, the tree that beareth the vine of blacke Sinamon, of which Master Winter brought from the streighte of Magellan, and many other of excellent ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... from far off the faint blue banners of smoke blowing now right, now left, then tossed aloft in the pallid sunshine. He looked about sharply for the Boy, as he had been doing this two hours. There was the Jesuit bending over the fire, bettering the precarious position of a saucepan that insisted on sitting lop-sided, looking down into the heart of coals. Nicholas was ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... deliberately fixed, but forced upon us by competition, excessive population, public burdens, and the necessities of social position. In a new country, however, where all these circumstances are absent, and whither employers and employed resort alike for the purpose of bettering their condition, we should like to see traditions cast aside, and the fabric of society erected ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... England is for Epigram, Turns of Wit, and forced Conceits, which have no manner of Influence, either for the bettering or enlarging the Mind of him who reads them, and have been carefully avoided by the greatest Writers, both among the Ancients and Moderns. I have endeavoured in several of my Speculations to banish this Gothic ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... I left behind me in the East End of London. Were the alternative presented to me, I would deliberately prefer the life of the savage to that of those people in Christian London. Nothing would please me better—not even to discover a new truth—than to contribute toward the bettering of that state of things which, unless wise and benevolent men take it in hand, will tend to become worse, and to create something worse than savagery,—a great Serbonian bog, which in the long run will swallow up the ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... over in the sunny Rhine country before it began in Ireland. Why should not some practical native, go over from home and see how it is all done? I quite know that any plan for bettering the physical condition of our people is open to the objection that as soon as they seem a little 'comfortable' the landlord would raise the rent in many a case; but perhaps in a still larger number of cases he would now be afraid to do so. And I know, ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... more contentedly than ever to hammer the soles of the new shoes and patch up the old, Mr. Stewart was taking silent but effective measures for bettering his condition. He first went to the old watchman, from whom he heard much in behalf of our hero, and which served to strengthen him in his benevolent project. He found out from the old man, too, that Mr. Walters might be induced to give up the boy; the physician who had attended him in his severe ...
— Watch—Work—Wait - Or, The Orphan's Victory • Sarah A. Myers
... case of Orange has been already alluded to, and there were many other nobles less able to afford the expense, who had been indulged with these ruinous honors. During the war, there had been, however, many chances of bettering broken fortunes. Victory brought immense prizes to the leading officers. The ransoms of so many illustrious prisoners as had graced the triumphs of Saint Quentin and Gravelines had been extremely profitable. These sources of wealth had now been cut off; yet, on the departure of the King from the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... husbands look upon their own wives with a vicious disdain, and many fathers their children; so I, betwixt two equal merits, should always be swayed against my own; not so much that the jealousy of my advancement and bettering troubles my judgment, and hinders me from satisfying myself, as that of itself possession begets a contempt of what it holds and rules. Foreign governments, manners, and languages insinuate themselves into my esteem; and I am sensible that Latin ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Their situation, notwithstanding their victory, seems worse than that of their antagonists with reference to their power as a party; and if they do storm Downing Street and St. James's, and go again to the country, as far as appearances go, what chance have they of materially bettering their condition, and getting another House of Commons more manageable and better adapted to their purpose than this? This victory, therefore, will not enable the old Government to triumph over the new, or materially affect the positions of the two parties, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... enough to discover deficiencies: indeed, it is unjust to do so, if at the same time one cannot contrive to give the means for bettering the state of affairs. I will not, therefore, my friends, something like a preacher in Passion Week, exhort you in general terms to repentance and amendment: I rather wish all amiable couples the longest and most enduring happiness; and, to contribute to it myself ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... their minds early to seek a career in India, have failed to pass the Civil Service examinations, or, having originally intended to take up the teaching profession in England, are subsequently induced to come out to India by disappointments at home or by the often illusory hope of bettering their material prospects. When they arrive they begin work without any knowledge of the character and customs of the people. Some are employed in inspection and others as professors, and the latter especially ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... advice does not necessarily signify that she either expects or wishes it to be followed, since had she been present at the Creation she would have cheerfully pointed out to the Deity His various mistakes, and have offered her co-operation toward bettering matters, and have thought a deal less of Him had He accepted it; but this is merely a habit—" "Yes?" said Bettie, yawning; and she added: "Do you know, Robin, the saddest and most desolate thing in the world is to practise an etude ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... happy to say that not a single word of the musty stuff remains in my brains. The boy will see life and service, he will have opportunities of distinguishing himself under the eye of the most chivalrous king in Europe, he will have entered a noble profession, and have a fair chance of bettering his fortune, all of which is a thousand times better than settling down here in ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... and household economics are new sciences developed under the active interest of college women in the last twenty-three years. Their real hold upon the public, however, and their enlarged avenue for bettering the home, the food, the health of the nation, and consequently its usefulness, happiness, and prosperity has come within the last ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... me, in typical cowboy music, Larry Chittenden's entire "Cowboys' Christmas Ball"; since that time the poem has often come to me in manuscript form as an original cowboy song. The changes—usually, it must be confessed, resulting in bettering the verse—which have occurred in oral transmission, are most interesting. Of one example, Charles Badger Clark's "High Chin Bob," I have printed, following Mr. Clark's poem, a cowboy version, which I submit to Mr. Clark and his admirers ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... expression in matter. What makes progress possible is that rational action may leave traces in nature, such that nature in consequence furnishes a better basis for the Life of Reason; in other words progress is art bettering the conditions of existence. Until art arises, all achievement is internal to the brain, dies with the individual, and even in him spends itself without recovery, like music heard in a dream. Art, in establishing instruments for human life beyond the human body, and moulding ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... generation than his own. But in Japan his choice is not so limited. In so praiseworthy an act as the perpetuation of his unimportant family line, it is deemed unwise in that progressive land to hinder him from unconsciously bettering it by the way. He is consequently permitted to adopt anybody. As people are by no means averse to being adopted, the power to adopt whom he will gives him more voice in the matter of his unnatural ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... wear at all. I did not impart all this to my petitioners, but disengaging myself from them, for they held my hands and clothes, I conjured them to offer us some encouragement to better their condition, by bettering it as much as they could themselves,—enforced the virtue of washing themselves and all belonging to them, and at length made good my retreat. As there is no particular reason why such a letter as ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... Unwillingly by Mankind, Man Must Advance—The Recognition of Truth and Real Freedom Enables Man to Share in the Work of God, not as the Slave, but as the Creator of Life—Men Need only Make the Effort to Renounce all Thought of Bettering the External Conditions of Life and Bend all their Efforts to Recognizing and Preaching the Truth they Know, to put an End to the Existing Miserable State of Things, and to Enter upon the Kingdom of God so far as it is yet Accessible to ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... two known to each other? They were comparatively strangers, knowing little of the antecedents of each other. Each was unhappily situated—the one from poverty, the other owing to her wealth; the one ardently desirous of bettering pecuniarily his position, the other to release herself from restraints that were tyrannical and to enjoy that independence which she felt was her natural right. Might not these considerations override the purer impulses ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... Sermons; and if you see any Matron or Virgin remarkable for Piety, in whose Company you may get good; if you see any Man that is endow'd with singular Probity, from whom you may learn what will make for your bettering, you may have their Conversation; and you may chuse that Preacher that preaches Christ most purely. When once you come into a Cloyster, all these Things, that are the greatest Assistances in the Promotion of true ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... to dwell upon this fact, that, the moment life has an inspiring significance, and the moment also the men, industries, and conditions around us become instrumental toward resolving that, in this moment one must begin, so far as he may, bettering these conditions. If I hire a man to work in my garden, how much is it worth to me, if he bring not merely his hands and gardening skill, but also an appreciable soul, with him! So soon as that fact is apparent, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... after receiving this admonition Dr. Horne ceased to be King's Printer, whereby the post became vacant. As Collins was familiar with the nature of the work, and was naturally desirous of bettering his condition, he applied for the appointment. The office was at the disposal of the Lieutenant-Governor, and was held entirely at his pleasure. Collins was curtly checked for his presumption by a leading official, who informed him that the office would be conferred upon "no one but ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... class, whose riches are the cause of the poverty of the masses, is the justification for the Socialist demand that the cost of bettering the condition of the people must be met by the taxation of the rich. The Socialist's ideas of taxation may be briefly summarised as follows: (1) Both local and national taxation should aim primarily at securing for the communal benefit all 'unearned' or 'social' increment of wealth. (2) Taxation ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... not approve of this concession; he assured me quite positively that the Arabs thoroughly understood the agreement, and that if they were now without food they had wilfully brought themselves into this strait for the wretched purpose of bettering their bargain by the value of a few paras’ worth of bread. This suggestion made me look at the affair in a new light. I should have been glad enough to put up with the slight privation to which my concession would ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... empire, Catherine labored to reform its institutions and to civilize her subjects. Her labors in bettering the laws and improving the administration of the government, have caused her to be likened to Solon and to Lycurgus; while her enthusiasm for learning and her patronage of letters led Voltaire to say, "Light now comes from ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... enjoyable enough, and that his malady was not giving him serious trouble, thus far. Near the end of January he wrote: "Life continues here the same as usual. There isn't a flaw in it. Good times, good home, tranquil contentment all day and every day, without a break. I shouldn't know how to go about bettering my situation." He did little in the way of literary work, probably finding neither time nor inclination for it. When he wrote at all it was merely to set down some fanciful drolleries with no thought ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... certainly be ranked the pleasant picture of Scarron's house, and of the attention paid to him by the as yet unmarried Francoise d'Aubigne, in Dumas's Vingt Ans Apres. Nor is it easy to think of any literary following that, while no doubt bettering, abstains so completely from robbing, insulting, or obscuring its model ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... independently of them, or the object may be simply to discover their will in order to be guided by it. The first of these lines is magic, the second is divination. While the two have in common the frank and independent employment of the supernatural for the bettering of human life, their conceptions and modes of procedure differ in certain respects, and they ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... There was another man who told me the same thing about five years ago, John Henry, Sandsting, in Walls. With regard to the price paid for lines, I wish also to say that we have to furnish our own lines in the Faroe fishing. You were asking me if I thought there was a possibility of our bettering ourselves. I thought there was, and that was one of the ways in which I thought we might do so. I have always thought that the owner, when he provided a vessel, ought also to provide the material for the catching of the fish; but instead of that we have to provide ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... motives for education, besides bread winning and bettering one's material condition. I remember at Harvard how Charles Eliot Norton, Prof. Thayer, the New Testament Greek scholar, and Dean C. C. Everett, of the Harvard Divinity School, impressed students by the grandeur and nobility of ...
— Alexander Crummell: An Apostle of Negro Culture - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 20 • William H. Ferris
... not the slightest chance of my bettering myself," said the Military Man. "Now that the Regiment has come from India, I can't afford to live at home, and I can't exchange because of my liver. Promotion was never slower than in 'Ours,' and my look-out is about the most ghastly there ever yet ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 31, 1892 • Various
... feels. Here he had a good farm, a good inn, and a good business—one that don't dwindle but is on the increase, and the land bettering every day—and yet off he went, chucked aside the blessin's of Providence, to take up wi' scribblin' and scrawlin' on paper. If it weren't a thing altogether shameful it would be ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... ill for him who, bettering not with time, Corrupts the strength of heaven-descended Will, And ever weaker grows thro' acted crime, Or seeming-genial venial fault, Recurring and suggesting still! He seems as one whose footsteps halt, Toiling in immeasurable sand, And o'er a weary ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... to occupy his attention. He could discover numerous ways of bettering the conditions of affairs, and took keen delight in making changes calculated to lessen the ...
— The Outdoor Chums at Cabin Point - or The Golden Cup Mystery • Quincy Allen
... ideas; they center current history. Men are made in New York State in the schools. ... The better the schools the finer the quality of the men produced. Therefore, the school exhibit of New York State should interest every citizen, as the schools have been bettering year by year and the product increasing in value. ... The Commission in charge of this exhibit has spared no expense to make this educational showing a storehouse of novel ideas and suggestions dealing with the advance in pedagogy, and of the State's ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... West Indies, which had no success. In 1567, he served under his kinsman Sir John Hawkins in the bay of Mexico, but was again unfortunate, returning from the voyage rich in character and fame, but with almost ruined circumstances. These disappointments served only to increase his desire of bettering his fortunes at the expence of the grand enemy of his country, against whom he made two other voyages into these parts; the first in 1570 with two ships, the Dragon and Swan and the second in 1571, in the Swan alone, chiefly for information, that he might qualify himself for undertaking some enterprize ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... of Italian gentlemen resident in New York have generously devoted themselves to the task of bettering the lot of these little ones, and many of those who formerly lived on the streets are now in attendance upon the Italian schools of the city. Yet great is the suffering amongst those who have not been reached by these efforts. Only one or two ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... University, and by the help of the weapons of thought and teaching, they regarded themselves as the natural allies of the Liberal party which was striving for these things through politics and Parliament. "Usefulness," "social reform," the bettering of daily life for the many—these ideas are stamped on all their work and on all the biographies of ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... so full of weaknesses that this unselfish way of dividing our energies is apt to weaken our own defenses. Thus the scheme for our own uplifting, our own purification, rather suffers. You see, I think we are here on this earth for the purpose of bettering ourselves and preparing for that future, which—I know what I am saying sounds selfish, but really, really, I don't think it is. Do you know, Jim came to ask me to marry him? I know he did. I avoided his direct question, and told him that you asked me last night, and that I had given ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... sets forth the fact that little can be done towards bettering even the material conditions of living when men's hearts are not right towards God. If a man lets the spirit of avarice reign over him, no matter how much money he may have he will still want more and he will not care whom he oppresses to get it. If the spirit of a purely ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... gallant, betwixt wealth and honour; There lies the pelf, in sum to bear thee through The dance of youth, and the turmoil of manhood, Yet leave enough for age's chimney-corner; But an thou grasp to it, farewell ambition, Farewell each hope of bettering thy condition, And raising thy low rank above the churls That till the earth for bread. ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... really recovered from the poison. We believed indeed that he never again would be the sturdy old-time Bingo. But when the spring came he began to gain strength, and bettering as the grass grew, he was within a few weeks once more in full health and vigor to be a pride to his friends and ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... monopolizing in their hands all the studies of the Filipino youth, have assumed the obligation to its eight millions of inhabitants, to Spain, and to humanity, of which we form a part, of steadily bettering the young plant, morally and physically, of training it toward its happiness, of creating a people honest, prosperous, intelligent, virtuous, noble, and loyal. Now I ask you in my turn—have the friars fulfilled that obligation ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... far less than they seemed. Although a farmer in a small way, he committed the sad error of engaging in stock speculations, more with a view of diverting his mind from his gnawing grief than with the hope of bettering his fortune. It is hardly necessary to relate what followed. He was successful for a time, and improved his financial standing. He gladly welcomed Tom Gordon beneath his roof, for he knew his own boy could not have a playmate whose company would be more improving to ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... Society is naturally and rightly the result of self-interest. The man who spends his time altogether in the bettering of others does not establish reforms on the surest basis. Society usually has to do his work after him, with considerable delay and additional cost. He is all right in the abstract, but he delays matters. ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... the principal of a plot by which nearly a thousand dollars was got of the old man in Wall street, who had been Anna's friend; and fearing it might get out, I induced her to accompany me to Charleston, where she believed I had a prospect of bettering my condition, quitting my uncertain mode of living, and becoming a respectable man. Together we put up at the Charleston Hotel. But necessity again forced me to reveal to her my circumstances, and the real cause of my leaving New ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... theories which no uneducated person could reasonably be expected to understand, they adopted a more rational method. Though impervious to abstract theories, the Russian workman is not at all insensible to the prospect of bettering his material condition and getting his everyday grievances redressed. Of these grievances the ones he felt most keenly were the long hours, the low wages, the fines arbitrarily imposed by the managers, and the brutal severity of the foreman. By helping ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... time, in connection with a fresh and noble endeavor after bettering the homes of the poor originated, I had almost said of course, by a woman, the experiment was in several places made of gathering small assemblies of the poor in the neighborhood of their own dwellings, that the ladies in charge of the houses in which they ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... this particular infernal before. Be that as it may, Count Hardyknute of Holstein, having been sent into the world deformed in person and poor in circumstances, and being resolved to sell his soul to damnation for the bettering of his body, makes a contract with the demon, in condition of his being made handsome and powerful, to sacrifice to him a human victim on a particular day in each year; in failure of which he is to become the prey of the demon, who is very handsomely named ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... population in England, and the ancient law of entail, which limited possession of large landed estates to the eldest sons; younger sons and the scions of the middle classes were left with exceedingly limited opportunities or means of attaining estates in England, or, for that matter, of ever bettering their condition. Also, if England was to sustain its existing population, the nation must have sources of raw materials other than the dwindling supplies in the land, and it must have also outlets for the ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... those campaigns in which Napoleon gained every battle. Then came that peaceful meeting on the raft at Tilsit—worse for Russia than any warlike meeting; for thereby Napoleon seduced Alexander, for years, from plans of bettering his empire into dreams ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... be lost sight of. Russia had to make ready for those campaigns in which Napoleon gained every battle. Then came that peaceful meeting on the raft at Tilsit,—worse for Russia than any warlike meeting; for thereby Napoleon seduced Alexander, for years, from plans of bettering his Empire into dreams of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... class to which they belong, whether in their eyes the money is an adjunct of the property, or the property of the money. In the first case the holder's pleasure is in his possessions, and in his money subordinately, as the means of bettering or adding to them. In the second, his pleasure is in his money, and in his possessions only as representing it. (In the first case the money is as an atmosphere surrounding the wealth, rising from it and raining back upon ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... conquest is active, energetic, inured to warlike habits, simple in its manners, or at any rate simpler than those which it conquers, and, comparatively speaking, poor. It is urged on by the desire of bettering its condition. If it meets with a considerable resistance, if the conquest occupies a long space, and the conquered are with difficulty held under, rebelling from time to time, and making frantic efforts to throw off the yoke which galls and frets ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... did of himself take notice of this business of the Treasury, wherein he is in the Commission, and desired that I would be thinking of any thing fit for him to be acquainted with for the lessening of charge and bettering of our credit, and what our expence hath been since the King's coming home, which he believes will be one of the first things they shall enquire into: which I promised him, and from time to time, which he desires, give him ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... it is fundamentally anti-American to urge an uncritical deification of any form of government. Americanism involves an invitation to continuous constructive criticism in behalf of a bettering of our machinery of government. It is no solution of the foreign-born problem to preach loyalty to the status quo. We shall get further by saying to the foreigner, "We are engaged in a great democratic experiment on this continent. ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... another hacienda belonging to these rich lady proprietors; and profitable on account of the fine pasture which some of the surrounding hills afford. Nothing could look more solitary. Magdalene might have left her desert, and ended her days there, without materially bettering her situation. The only sign of life is a stream that runs round a very productive small orchard in front of the house, while on a hill behind are a few maguey plants, and on the mirador, in front of the house, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... desirous of emancipation, it is well known, is competent to adopt the Bhaikshya mode after having gone through the mode called Brahmacharya. Sleeping at that place (in the course of the wanderings) where evening overtakes him, without desire of bettering his situation, without a home, subsisting on whatever food is obtained (in charity), given to contemplation, practising self-restraint, with the senses under control, without desire, regarding all creatures equally, without enjoyments, without dislike to anything, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
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