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More "Immoral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the floor, poring by the light of their dark-lanterns over some of the books they found, and thus absorbing moral truths and getting a moral uplift. The whole course of their lives would have been changed. As it was, they kept straight on in their immoral way and were ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... perspicacious and just, revelatory of an instinct for reasoning and common sense. The man's realistic criticism was not always to Manuel's taste, and at times the boy would make bold to defend a romantic, immoral thesis. Senor Custodio, however, would at once cut him short, ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... as a party leader. He was thirty-one years of age, belonged to an ancient and powerful family, possessed vast wealth, had great personal beauty and attractive manners, but above all, was unboundedly ambitious, and grossly immoral—the most insolent, unprincipled, licentious, and selfish man that had thus far scandalized and adorned Athenian society. The only redeeming feature in his character was his friendship for Socrates, who, it seems, fascinated him by his talk, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... instance, had often remarked to himself upon the singular freshness of the bodies. He had been struck again and again by the hangdog, abominable looks of the ruffians who came to him before the dawn; and putting things together clearly in his private thoughts, he perhaps attributed a meaning too immoral and too categorical to the unguarded counsels of his master. He understood his duty, in short, to have three branches: to take what was brought, to pay the price, and to avert the eye ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to social evils,—by the enactment of restrictive and superficial legislation, by wholesale philanthropies and charities, by publicly burying our heads in the sands of sentimentality. Self-appointed censors, grossly immoral "moralists," makeshift legislators, all face a heavy responsibility for the miseries, diseases, and social evils they perpetuate or intensify by enforcing the primitive taboos of aboriginal customs, traditions, and outworn laws, which at every step hinder the education ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... reappeared with a prose commentary, and various dissertations on the origin of moral virtue, etc., as The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits, and in 1729 was made the subject of a persecution for its immoral tendency. It was also vigorously combated by, among others, Bishop Berkeley and William Law, author of The Serious Call. While the author probably had no intention of subverting morality, his views of human nature were assuredly cynical and degrading in a high degree. Another of his ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... permissible, but actually enjoined as part of the ceremonial at these festivals of Bacchus; that it was not only in accordance with public taste, but was consecrated as a part of the national religion.... But the coarseness of Aristophanes is not corrupting. There is nothing immoral in his plots, nothing really dangerous in his broadest humour. Compared with some of our old English dramatists, he is morality itself. And when we remember the plots of some French and English plays which now attract fashionable audiences, and the character ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... divinity Krishna is a full manifestation; yet what a manifestation! He is represented as full of naughty tricks in his youth, although exercising the highest powers of deity; and, when he grows up, his conduct is grossly immoral and disgusting. It is most startling to think that this being is by grave writers—like the authors of the Bhagavad Gita and the Bhagavata Purana—made the highest of the gods, or, indeed, the only real ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... observed Penborough. "I said, 'Let Reckage once get full power, and he will fool us all.' He affects not to be ambitious, and to prefer moral science to immoral politics. I have no faith in these active politicians who make long speeches to the public, and assure their friends, in very short notes, that they prefer trout-fishing to the cares of State! There is but one man who ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... marriage, Sir H. Risley says, is tacitly recognised, and is so generally practised that in the opinion of the best observers no Oraon girl is a virgin at the time of her marriage. "To call this state of things immoral is to apply a modern conception to primitive habits of life. Within the tribe, indeed, the idea of sexual morality seems hardly to exist, and the unmarried Oraons are not far removed from the condition of modified ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... to its height, seems fast rising, which will sweep them all away, 'like the chaff of the summer thrashing-floor;' so that 'there shall be no place found for them.' But while we can entertain no hope for the old decrepit despotisms, we cannot see in the infidel liberalism—alike unwise and immoral—by which they are in the course of being supplanted, other than a disorganizing element, out of which no settled order of things can possibly arise. It takes the character, not of a reforming principle destined to bless, but of an instrument of punishment, with which vengeance ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... a revulsion of public sentiment which has brought about the practical abolition of duelling in America. Although the practice still obtains in continental European countries, it is here regarded as immoral, and it is illegal as well. For one reason, in spite of the apparent contradiction above, we are a law-abiding people. The genius of the Anglo-Saxon—I, who am a Celt, admit it—is for the orderly administration of the law, and much of the evil noted comes from the introduction ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... will discern in such a provision a means whereby those who, not without true faith at bottom, yet have committed great crimes, or those who have been carried off in youth while still undecided, or who die after a barren, though not immoral or scandalous life, may receive such chastisement as may prepare them for heaven, and render it consistent with God's justice to admit them thither. Again, the inequality of the sufferings of Christians ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... nervous power, the effecting of molecular change, and there the matter ends. But surely, you would urge, the scientist would discriminate between those two acts. Most assuredly. The one he would reprobate as immoral, and the other he would approve as lawful. But, be it carefully noted, he would do this, not as a scientist, but as a citizen respecting law and order and upholding good government based on morality ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... their false custom, Immoral ditties are their delight; Vain and tasteless praise they recite; Falsehood at all times do they utter; The innocent persons they ridicule; Married women they destroy, Innocent virgins of Mary they corrupt; As they pass their lives away in vanity; Poor innocent persons ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 3 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... by which the life of the people is made worth while. The Government is a servant and never should be anything but a servant. The moment the people become adjuncts to government, then the law of retribution begins to work, for such a relation is unnatural, immoral, and inhuman. We cannot live without business and we cannot live without government. Business and government are necessary as servants, like water and grain; as masters they ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... beginning of a saint, is perhaps inclined to exaggerate the extent of the evil in the Army as compared with civil life. I imagine that very few padres, especially if they are dons, and most of all if they are saints, realize that in civil life as in Army life, the average man is immoral, both in thought and deed. Let us be frank about this. What a doctor might call the "appetites" and a padre the "lusts" of the body, hold dominion over the average man, whether civilian or soldier, unless they are counteracted by ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... a taste for sculpture," Mrs. Ebley said. "People may call it what names they please, but I consider it immoral and indecent." ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... proves the brutalizing effects of your immoral system," said Flora, waxing warm. "I taught a black man from the island of St. Vincent to read the Bible fluently in ten weeks. Was that a proof of mental incapacity? I never met with an uneducated white man who learned to read so rapidly, or who pursued his ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... compensation he will accept to go to church some Sunday and sit during the sermon with his wife's bonnet upon his head? Not a trifle, I'll venture. And why not? There would be nothing irreligious in it, nothing immoral, nothing uncomfortable—then why not? Is it not because there would be something egregiously unfashionable in it? Then, it is the influence of fashion. And what is the influence of fashion but the influence that other people's actions have on our own actions—the ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Proverbs are art—cheap art. As a general rule they are not true; unless indeed they happen to be mere platitudes, as for instance the proverb, "Half a loaf is better than no bread," or "A miss is as good as a mile." Some proverbs are simply imbecile, others are immoral. That one evolved out of the naive heart of the great Russian people, "Man discharges the piece, but God carries the bullet," is piously atrocious, and at bitter variance with the accepted conception of a compassionate God. It would indeed be an inconsistent occupation for the Guardian ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... and yet not professing to rest upon Christianity, who reject this prudential basis of ethics as the death of all morality. And these men hold, that the social recognition of any one out of the three following dangerous and immoral principles, viz.—1st, That a man may lawfully sport with his own life; 2dly, That he may lawfully sport with the life of another; 3dly, That he may lawfully seek his redress for a social wrong, by any other channel than the law tribunals of ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... sold to the highest bidders and then sold by them again, had fetched exorbitant prices. I was awaited with impatience and curiosity, but not with any sympathy. There were no young girls present, as the piece was too immoral. Poor Adrienne Lecouvreur! ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... and, notwithstanding all I have said about them, I unhesitatingly affirm that it is better so. Geo. R. Witte, missionary to Brazil, says: "With one exception, all the priests with whom I came in contact (when on a journey through Northern Brazil) were immoral, drunken, and ignorant. The tribes who have come under priestly care are decidedly inferior in morals, industry, and order to the tribes who refuse to have anything to do with the whites. The Charentes and Apinages have been, for years, under ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. The fathers sowed the wind, and the children reaped the whirlwind. Generations of heartless luxury, selfishness, carelessness of the cry of the poor, immoral separation of class from class, and all the sins which a ruling caste could commit against a subject people, had prepared for the convulsion. Then, in a carnival of blood and deluges of fire and sulphur, the rotten thing was swept off the face of the earth, and the world ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... kind. You see how work keeps bubbling in my mind. Then I shall do another fifteenth century paper this autumn—La Sale and Petit Jehan de Saintre, which is a kind of fifteenth century Sandford and Merton, ending in horrid immoral cynicism, as if the author had got tired of being didactic, and just had a good wallow in the mire to wind up with and indemnify himself ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... engaged to take you sight-seeing! I thought it was to be my honor and privilege. Mrs. Hawthorne, my dear friend, if you do not wish deeply to hurt me, deeply to hurt me, you will write to Mr. Hunt at once, this evening, and I will post the letter, that you have thought better of that immoral plan for Sunday morning, and are going to church like a good Christian woman. And to-morrow, Mrs. Hawthorne, at whatever time will be convenient for you, I will come and take ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... permitted even to praise him." In this respect, however, all shame has vanished—from the public as well as from the Master's mind: he is allowed, not merely to cross himself before the greatest and purest creations of German genius, as though he had perceived something godless and immoral in them, but people actually rejoice over his candid confessions and admission of sins—more particularly as he makes no mention of his own, but only of those which great men are said to have committed. Oh, if only our Master be in the right! his readers sometimes ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... upon other objects and the expenditure of nervous energy in other channels. Some works which have issued from the medical press contain much that is calculated to excite, rather than to repress, the propensity; and the advice sometimes given by practitioners to their patients is immoral ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... consulted by his friends, notified him that, in its opinion, and in spite of the contrary advice of M. Faustin Helie, his condemnation was not of a political character. Proudhon, thus classed by the government with the authors of immoral works, thought it beneath his dignity to protest, and waited patiently for the advent of 1863 to allow him to return ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... can afford only one each; under monogamy they think it a disgrace to be wives of men who have other wives. The Japanese think the tie to one's father the most sacred. A man who should leave father and mother and cleave to his wife would become an outcast. Therefore the Japanese think the Bible immoral and irreligious.[151] Such a view in the mores of the masses will long outlast the "adoption of western civilization." The Egyptians thought the Greeks unclean. Herodotus says that the reason was because they ate cow's flesh.[152] The Greeks, as wine drinkers, thought themselves superior to the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... is immoral—whether it be a quarter to a beggar or a library to a city. It feeds the desire to get money without earning it, which is the most immoral of all our desires. I have not yet decided what I shall do with it. I have hired an expert, ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... only, "that an appeal to Mr. Russell was unnecessary when he had his mother's opinion." Lady Mary's wish for the Glistonbury connexion fortified her morality at this moment, and she replied, "Then my decided opinion is, that it would be an immoral and dishonourable action to break such a tacit engagement as this, which you have voluntarily contracted, and which you absolutely could not break without destroying the peace and happiness of a whole family. Even that cold Lady Glistonbury grew quite ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... together as inseparable from each other the two conceptions of holiness and of love. Now our modern notions of what is meant by the love of God are a great deal too sentimental and gushing and limp. Love is degraded unless there be holiness in it. It becomes immoral good nature, much more than anything that deserves the name of love. A God who is all love, so much so that it makes no difference to Him whether a man is a saint or a sinner, is not a God to be worshipped, and scarcely a God to be admired. He is lower than we, not higher. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... hiding-places when the world is abandoned by man, the members of those impious gatherings passed their nights in mysterious conclave. Fancy can paint the scene: weak-minded men of every shade of unbelief, men of dishonest and immoral sentiments, men who, if justice had her due, should have swung on the gallows or eked out a miserable existence in some criminal's cell, joined in league to trample on the laws and constitution of order, and, in the awful callousness of intoxication, uttering every ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... live with an immoral man or woman than a bad-tempered one. An immoral person can often be a very charming companion, quite easy to live with—if you take the various excuses for sudden absences at their face value, and don't probe too deeply into the business; in fact, ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... now recognized as the most bloody revolution in history, began with the assassination of a single man. This man was Gregory Novikh, known throughout the world under the name of Rasputin. A Siberian peasant by birth, immoral, filthy in person, untrained in mind, he had early received the nickname of Rasputin, which means "ne'er-do-well," on account of his habits. A drunkard, and a libertine always, he posed as a sort of saint and miracle worker, let his hair grow long, and ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... strange man, Orme," I said, drawing a long breath. "The most dangerous man, the most singular, the most immoral ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... the Army in August 1962 to declare segregated restaurants in Aberdeen, Maryland, off limits to all military personnel. The activist group justified its demand by stating that "the Army declares dangerous or immoral establishments off limits to soldiers and what is more dangerous or immoral in a democracy than racial intolerance?"[20-11] In this they failed to distinguish between the commander's proper response to what was illegal, ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... sharpened in sense and appreciation by them, while his stronger stomach did not pay him back next day as Killigrew's invariably did. Carminow was full of stories, all, needless to say, of a sanguinary nature; Killigrew capped them, or tried to, by would-be immoral tales of Paris; and Ishmael said very little, but, with his deadly clarity of vision for once working beneficently, sat there aware how young and somehow rather lovable they were through it all, while he himself, whom they were obviously treating ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... this alone Debauch'ry comprehends, The forward Age to other vice descends, And Youth e're he'as attain'd good Sence to think, Addicts himself with Pride, to swear and drink: [*?]'s Rules Immoral from Example take, And e're he's turn'd of fifteen, turns a Rake: [*?]ots in Sin—(nothing that's Lewd shall scape And on his Virgin Health commits a Rape, Forsaking Reason—grows to Vice a Slave, And e'r he's ...
— The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses from Men • Various
... the ancients could not calculate. The learned Dr. James, who has denounced the invention of the Indexes, confesses, however, that it was not unuseful when it restrained the publications of atheistic and immoral works. But it is our lot to bear with all the consequent evils, that we may preserve the good inviolate; since, as the profound Hume has declared, "The LIBERTY OF BRITAIN IS GONE FOR EVER, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... it, the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras were under suspicion. They were being followed, and watched. What for? Madame made a shrewd guess. "They want to say we are immoral foreigners," she said. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... stared at her daughter, while some strong expressions, out of the plebeian or rustic past which lies only a generation or two behind most of us, rose to her lips. I will not repeat them here; she had long denied them to herself as an immoral self-indulgence, and it must be owned that such things have a fearful effect, coming from old ladies. "What has got into all the men? What in nature does he want you to marry ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... enjoyment of their rights. The plaintiff admitted that social equality could not be enforced by legislation but contended that voluntary social equality of persons cannot be constitutionally prohibited, unless it is shown that such is immoral, disorderly, or for some other reason so palpably injurious to the public welfare as to justify direct interference with the personal liberty ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... friendly. I should have died, I think, without her, what with my seasickness and homesickness, and brooding over my terrible fall. I know it is immoral to say so, but I did not want to live any longer, truly I didn't. I even asked to be taken. I am sorry now that I prayed ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... who knowing of the immoral conduct of his wife, caused her to be drowned by her mule, which had been kept without drink for a week, and given salt to eat—as is more clearly ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... don't grow in the cabbage patch, and you are all well aware they don't, and it's criminal of your English writers to mislead the young as to the facts of existence. Charlotte Yonge is infinitely more immoral than Guy ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... civilisation. It is the thing called progress. It is part of Western civilisation that men will become more hypocritical. These foreigners say our Yoshiwara is a shame; but, in their own cities, immoral women walk in the best streets, and offer themselves to men quite openly. These virtuous foreigners are worse than we are. I myself have seen. They say, 'We have no Yoshiwara system, therefore we are good.' They pretend not to see like a geisha who squints ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... friendly relations with the sealers, who cruise so near the monikin region; I tried to convince the judges that Noah meant no harm in imputing moral properties to the king, and that so long as he did not impute immoral properties to his royal consort, she might very well afford to pardon him. I then quoted Shakspeare's celebrated lines on mercy, which seemed to be well enough received, and committed the whole affair ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... in our company, in which case we also become occasions of sin for them; (2) the places are usually liquor saloons, low theaters, indecent dances, entertainments, amusements, exhibitions, and all immoral resorts of any kind, whether we sin in them or not; (3) the things are all bad books, indecent pictures, songs, jokes and the like, even when they are tolerated by public opinion and found in ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 3 (of 4) • Anonymous
... forcing of the words into an unnatural and immoral theory of substitution, the notion of an angry God claiming a victim, that has done such terrible harm to the cause of Christianity, and has led many thoughtful minds to give it up in disgust or despair. Probably in a wise commingling of the two lines of thought we shall arrive most nearly at the ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... the average politician is like Abraham Lincoln. A Puritanic theater would become bankrupt in a twelvemonth. The great mass of those who frequent the playhouse go there for strong, passionate excitements..I do not affirm," says Dr. Cuyler, "that every popular play is immoral, and every attendant is on a scent for sensualities. But the theater is a concrete institution, it must be judged in the gross and to a tremendous extent it is only a gilded nastiness. It unsexes womanhood by putting her publicly ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... and belonged to one of the most illustrious families in France. He was destined to the Church against his will, being from the start worldly, ambitious, and scandalously immoral; but he accepted his destiny, and soon distinguished himself at the Sorbonne for his literary attainments, for his wit and his social qualities. At twenty, as the young Abbe de Perigord, he was received into the highest society of Paris; his noble birth, his aristocratic ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... place should be so vigorous and well- formed is the more surprising, if we reflect on their depraved and immoral kind of life. Little girls of seven or eight years old have their lovers of twelve or fourteen, and their parents are quite proud of the fact. The more lovers a girl has the more she is respected. ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... study of environment and its effects on the lowest classes of our great cities, the cheap lodging house affords a favorable field. Here we have crowding, unsanitary conditions, immoral atmosphere, and all the attendant evils. A good description of such lodging houses in New York City has been given by Jacob ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... the modesty and the fears which nature has made so powerful in the soul of a young girl, for the very purpose of preserving her from the misfortune of submitting to a man who does not love her? Again, what girl is there so thoughtless as not to discern, that the most immoral man wishes his wife to be a woman of principle, as masters desire their servants to be perfect; and that, therefore, her virtue is the richest and the most advantageous of ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... and their religion was, on this account, reckoned a destructive and pernicious enthusiasm. If, therefore, the rulers of a state are to prohibit the propagation of all doctrines, in which they apprehend immoral tendencies, an opening will be made, as I have before observed, for every species of persecution. There will be no doctrine, however true or important, the avowal of which will not, in, some country or other, be subjected ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... to put every possible obstacle to the crossing of the races, and the increase of half-breeds. It is unnatural, as shown by their very constitution, their sickly physique, and their impaired fecundity. It is immoral and destructive of social equality as it creates unnatural relations and multiplies the differences among members of the same community in ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... adventure, scion of a free and merry stock, the real, native Californian is a distinctive type; as far from the Easterner in psychology as the extreme Southerner is from the Yankee. He is easy going, witty, hospitable, lovable, inclined to be unmoral rather than immoral in his personal habits, and easy to ...
— The City That Was - A Requiem of Old San Francisco • Will Irwin
... gave the money extorted from the saloonkeepers to the city, there might be some excuse for the tax. We would get some benefit from it, but it gives a big part of the tax to local option localities where the people are always shoutin' that liquor dealin' is immoral. Ought these good people be subjected to the immoral influence of money taken from the saloon tainted money? Out of respect for the tender consciences of these pious people, the Raines law ought to exempt them ...
— Plunkitt of Tammany Hall • George Washington Plunkitt
... people make use of a library which admitted works of irreligious and immoral tendency? It was an undoubted fact (the Mercury made it known) that of late there had been added to the catalogue not only the "Essays of David Hume" and that notorious book Buckle's "History of Civilization," but even a large collection of the writings of George ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... without an explanation," she said bitterly. "And now"—she spoke more hurriedly, as if fearing to be interrupted—"I will finish what I was going to say, if you will allow me. Suppose I were to make an attack on, say, Mr. Craven, to tell you that I happened to know he was thoroughly bad, immoral, a liar, anything you like. Do you mean to say you would give him up at once without insisting on knowing from me my exact reasons for branding him as unfit for your company? Of course you wouldn't. And not only you! ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... choosing their lovers. Their fancy must be taken, and their favour must be earned. Mr. Borrow quotes, in proof of their virtue, one trait which does honour to his own, and especially to his simplicity: he declares that an immoral man of his acquaintance offered several gold ounces to a pretty gitana, and offered them in vain. An Andalusian, to whom I retailed this anecdote, asserted that the immoral man in question would have been far more successful if he had shown the girl two or three piastres, and ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... thread. Both these two emotions are fitting to a pure manhood in the presence of evil. They heighten each other. The perfection of righteous anger is to be tempered by sympathy. The perfection of righteous pity for the evildoer is to be saved from immoral condoning of evil as if it were only calamity, by an infusion of some displeasure. We have to learn the lesson and take this look of Christ's as our pattern in our dealings with evildoers. Perhaps our day needs more especially ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... figures such as I sketch. I find in Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature" which I consulted before coming away that a French writer wrote an elaborate treatise to prove that tea merchants were always immoral members of society. It would be rather curious to apply the theory to the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... often mere obstinate resistance to change. We must therefore be on our guard against those who would run ethics into rigid moulds, and so raise up static concepts and infallible dogmas for beliefs or action. Change must be accepted as a principle which it is both futile and immoral to ignore, even in the moral life. This does not mean setting up caprice or impulsiveness, for in so far as our change of character expresses the development of the single movement of our own inner life it will be quite other than capricious, but it ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... imperfect; yet, in his literature, he must express himself and his own views and preferences; for to do anything else is to do a far more perilous thing than to risk being immoral: it is to be sure of being untrue. To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty a sentiment; that will not be helpful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are sure you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth. There is probably no point of view possible to a sane man ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... different from a Methodist or a Presbyterian. He and his wife arrived to noon dinner, and I had to be civil because the Trowbridges respect them very much; but it was difficult when the man said that England was the most immoral and decaying country in the world, and his wife echoed him. He is a smug old fellow with a fringe of grey fluff growing out all round under his chin; and his upper lip, very long and shaved, is like the straight cover you see on mantelpieces in ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... work thoroughly, the abbe deemed it advisable to write a preliminary dissertation, presenting his aim and views. This he did in his Theory of Judaism (Theorie du judaisme, Paris, 1830). He endeavored to show how worthless, injurious, and immoral were the teachings of the Talmud. Only by discarding them would the Jews qualify themselves to enjoy the right of citizenship. He proved, to his own satisfaction, that ritual murder was enjoined in ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... character. "The entertainment," he says, "which is the subject of general enjoyment, is of a nature which tends to soften, if not to level, the distinction of ranks."[158] In another mood he admitted the greater likelihood that immoral plays would injure the public character than that moral plays ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... same," she went on, "though I must say I agree with Mr Davidson, who says he can't understand how a husband can stand by and see his wife in another man's arms, and as far as I'm concerned I've never danced a step since I married. But the native dancing is quite another matter. It's not only immoral in itself, but it distinctly leads to immorality. However, I'm thankful to God that we stamped it out, and I don't think I'm wrong in saying that no one has danced in our district for ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... sarit sagara ("Ocean of the River of Story"), a work belonging to the twelfth century, there is the story of the immoral union of a yaksha, or jin, and the daughter of a holy man, who was bathing in the Granges. The relatives of the girl by magic changed the two guilty persons into a lion and a lioness. The latter soon died, but gave birth to a human child, which the lion-father made the other lionesses suckle. ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... part of this remarkable essay, Hume considers the real, or supposed, immoral consequences of the doctrine of necessity, premising ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... "presented," and has more and far grander lovers; very wicked and fascinating women are introduced—even a French lionne; and no expense is spared to get up as exciting a story as you will find in the most immoral novels. In fact, it is a wonderful pot pourri of Almack's, Scotch second-sight, Mr. Rogers's breakfasts, Italian brigands, death-bed conversions, superior authoresses, Italian mistresses, and attempts at poisoning old ladies, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... an act that brings human beings into existence, with uncounted results both to such beings themselves and to others who are equally irresponsible for their appearance in the world, then the position is recklessly immoral, and it is, moreover, wholly repugnant to Diderot's ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... understood that marriage in the face of the Church, which included a vow absolutely prohibitive of all these things, would be commonly avoided. Malachy's anxiety to restore the marriage ceremony was no doubt due to a desire to purge the nation of immoral customs of which St. Bernard makes no express mention. But, however that may be, we have contemporary native evidence that the rite of marriage had fallen into desuetude, and that Malachy was successful in his effort to restore it. For in the document quoted ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... these trashy books, which we find everywhere, not excepting the Sunday-school libraries, be not actually exciting and immoral in tone and sentiment, they are so vapid, so utterly without purpose or object, so devoid of any healthy vigor and life, that they are simply dissipating to the power of thought, and hence weakening to the will. ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... a boy," said he, "when I read the Bible I considered it the word of God to man, and never have I ceased to hold this view; so that now it is so holy to me and its utterances so decisive that a single sentence which would reproach its sanctity fills me with horror, just as an immoral sentiment would rouse my conviction ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... lie in. And be the rule and law of my remaining days to shun all men, be blind to all men, scorn all men. Friendship, hospitality, society, compassion—vain words all. To be moved by another's tears, to assist another's need—be such things illegal and immoral. Let me live apart like a ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Paysan parvenu is simpler, less diffuse, bolder, and more virile, than that of Marianne; but its characters are uniformly less noble, and, if its general intent is not immoral, at least many of the scenes verge upon the risque. What is the cause of this digression from a style of writing so much more natural to Marivaux? Fleury attributes the reason to his pique with Crebillon fils and his desire to prove to him ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... No one can have any more or other right to take away another's living by superior economic skill or financial cunning than if he used a club, simply because no one has any right to take advantage of any one else or to deal with him otherwise than justly by any means whatever. The end itself being immoral, the means employed could not possibly make any difference. Moralists at a pinch used to argue that a good end might justify bad means, but none, I think, went so far as to claim that good means justified a bad end; yet this was precisely what the defenders of the old property system did in ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... Visitors would no doubt find, and Cranmer had told a story or two, with an appearance of great distress, of scandalous cases that had come under his own notice. Cromwell too had pointed out that such corruptions did incalculable evil; and that an immoral monk did far more harm in a countryside than his holy brethren could do of good. Both had said a word too about the luxury and riches to be found in the houses of those who professed poverty, and of the injury done to Christ's holy ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... certain time which has been suggested to him, he will murder or commit arson or theft; that, under hypnotic influence, the personal morale of the individual has only a small influence upon his conduct; the subject obeys the hypnotic suggestions, no matter how immoral they are. The conception of man as a mixture of animal and supernatural has for ages kept human beings under the deadly spell of the suggestion that, animal selfishness and animal greediness are their essential character, and the spell has operated to suppress their REAL HUMAN NATURE and ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... for?" said the man. "Why, to encourage Macready, to be sure. Don't you see how divinely he acts? why, he beats Kean hollow. Besides that, he's a moral man, and I like morality." "Do you mean to say," said I, "that he was never immoral?" "I neither know nor care," said the man; "all I know is that he has never been found out. It will never do to encourage a public man who has been found out. No, no! the morality of the stage must be ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... One says he is immoral, and points out Warm sin in ruddy specks upon his soul: Bigot, one folly of the man you flout Is more to God than thy ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... is that riches in themselves are counted neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral. The Bible recognizes money as a real force. What is done with this force depends upon the one who controls it. Money is condensed energy. It is pent-up power. It is lassoed lightning. It is a Niagara that I can hold in my hand and put into ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... it seems, has many faults:—Is the other faultless?—The principal thing objected to Mr. Lovelace (and a very inexcusable one) is that he is immoral in his loves—Is not the other in his hatreds?—Nay, as I may say, in his loves too (the object only differing) if the love of money be the root ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... been kept in a stew Because you have thought me immoral; And though I have had my opinion of you, You've had the best end ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... suffer the penalty due for such a crime, and the melancholy incident became a pulpit theme over a great part of Scotland, being held up as a proper warning to youth to beware of such haunts of vice and depravity, the nurses of all that is precipitate, immoral, and base, among mankind. ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... NURSERY.—Idea of Nursing. What a Nursery Is. The sense in which Home is a Nursery. Character of the Home-Nursery. The Mother's Special Sphere. Relation of the Nursery to the Formation of Character. The Nursery is Physical. Sickly and Immoral Nurses. Consequences. It is Intellectual. Its Abuse. It is Moral and Spiritual. The Ways in which the ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... But ignorance may be voluntary, quite as voluntary as drunkenness. It is a capital folly of our age to deny the possibility of voluntary intellectual error. Error is often voluntary, and (where the matter is one that the person officially or otherwise is required to know) immoral too. A strange thing it is to say that "it is as unmeaning to speak of the immorality of an intellectual mistake as it would be to talk of the colour of a sound." ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... Dialogues, Sonnets, Comedies, and mingled with a mass of discreditable and licentious works we find several books on morality and theology. These he wrote, not from any sense of piety and devotion, but simply for gain, while his immoral life was a strange contrast to his teaching. He published a Paraphrase on the seven Penitential Psalms (Venice, 1534), and a work entitled De humanitate sive incarnatione Christi (Venice, 1535), calling himself Aretino the divine, and by favour of Pope Julius III. he nearly obtained a ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... it merely his Catholic opponents who sought in such charges material for vile slander, but also jealous ranters like Munzer gave vent to their hatred in this manner. All the more remarkable it is that no slanderous reports of immoral conduct were ever launched at this time, even by his bitterest enemies, against the man who was denouncing so openly and sternly offences of that description among the superior, no less than the inferior, clergy. Calumnies ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... force of the objection. They believed that foreigners were dragooned and bayoneted; and though they certainly got their own skulls promptly fractured if they showed any ill-humour, still it was with a blunt instrument, and that didn't count. They believed that foreigners were always immoral; and though they had an occasional assize at home, and now and then a divorce case or so, that had nothing to do with it. They believed that foreigners had no independent spirit, as never being escorted to the poll in droves by Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle, with colours flying and the tune of ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... no evidence that he is religious. Because he partakes of the Lord's supper, or prays openly, or speaks in the habitual religious language of his sect, it is no evidence of his religious life. Many persons are quite comforted if one who has led an immoral life says on his death-bed that he "trusts in the atoning blood of Christ." But this may be a ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... attributes of human nature to the insidious wiles of evil society and intoxicating liquor. Millions of young men, as moral and as self-confident as Frederick Charlston, have been physically and morally ruined as he was. Once yielding a little to immoral influence gives the first impetus to a downward tendency. Continue to repeat it, and the inertia becomes stronger, and the descent ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... say, speaking roughly, the upper and upper middle ranks of society, claim to have a code of honour of their own, superior to that of the ordinary citizen. A breach of this code is called 'ungentlemanly' rather than wrong or immoral or unjust or unkind. So far as this code insists on courtesy of demeanour and delicacy of feeling and conduct, it is a valuable complement to the ordinary rules of morality, though, so far as it fulfils this function, it plainly ought not to be the exclusive possession ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... unless the seducer is rich and timid. Children, until the State takes possession of them, are used either as capital or as instruments of convenience. Self-interest has become, specially since 1789, the sole motive of the masses; they never ask if an action is legal or immoral, but only if it is profitable. Morality, which is not to be confounded with religion, begins only at a certain competence,—just as one sees, in a higher sphere, how delicacy blossoms in the soul when fortune decorates the furniture. A positively moral and upright man is rare among the peasantry. ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... painting the naked Antiope, than Salvator painting the slaughters of the thirty years' war? If you will not let me call the one kind of labor Christian, and the other unchristian, at least you will let me call the one moral, and the other immoral, and that is all I ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... "Your sympathy is immoral," said Jack. "By the way, Briggerland has been handed over to the Italian authorities. The crime was committed on Italian soil and that saves his head from ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... Gillet, and Walter Shandy is her visitor, not Yorick. Bode allows himself some verbal changes and softens the bald suggestion at the end. Bode's motive for this startling change is not clear beyond question. The most plausible theory is that the open and gross suggestion of immoral relation between Yorick, the clergyman and moralist, and the Paris maiden, seemed to Bode inconsistent with the then current acceptation of Yorick's character; and hence he preferred by artifice to foist the misdemeanor on to the ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... of public danger. For the first time he saw, what the whole civilized world outside of France had seen with surprise and indignation, that the conviction of Captain Dreyfus rested upon the testimony of a staff-officer of noble blood who lived openly and shamelessly on the immoral earnings of his mistress, and who was the self-acknowledged agent of a maison de toleration on commission. In the person of this distinguished member of the "condotteri" was centred the so-called "honor of the army." As for the so-called "evidence," no police judge of England or America ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... scandalous murder of the "King of Paris," as the capital fondly called the Duke, brought the wretched King no solace or power. His mother did not live to see the end of her son; she died in this the darkest period of his career, and must have been aware that her cunning and her immoral life had brought nothing but misery to herself and all her race. The power of the League party seemed as great as ever; the Duc de Mayenne entered Paris, and declared open war on Henri III., who, after some hesitation, threw himself into the hands of his cousin Henri of Navarre ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... Congregationalist, I think, though I don't know what that means, or how it's different from a Methodist or a Presbyterian. He and his wife arrived to noon dinner, and I had to be civil because the Trowbridges respect them very much; but it was difficult when the man said that England was the most immoral and decaying country in the world, and his wife echoed him. He is a smug old fellow with a fringe of grey fluff growing out all round under his chin; and his upper lip, very long and shaved, is like the straight cover you see on mantelpieces in ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... which inculcated the communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the only objects worth living for, objects in comparison with which the prosperity and even the existence of the state sank into insignificance. The inevitable result of this selfish and immoral doctrine was to withdraw the devotee more and more from the public service, to concentrate his thoughts on his own spiritual emotions, and to breed in him a contempt for the present life which he regarded merely as a probation for a better and an eternal. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... and with sex alone, and this is not sufficient. It is, for instance, doubtful if the Spillane novels or some of the books in the Milestone series could successfully be objected to merely on grounds of sex; but they are, nevertheless, of an immoral and mischievous tendency and should not be allowed to continue in circulation. They might be described as 'sadistic' in the true psychological sense in that ...
— Report of the Juvenile Delinquency Committee • Ronald Macmillan Algie
... is decided by war. Every youth who enters a beer-drinking and duelling club will receive the true direction of his life. War in itself is a good thing. God will see to it that war always recurs. The efforts directed toward the abolition of war must not only be termed foolish, but absolutely immoral. The peace of Europe is only a secondary matter for us. The sight of suffering does one good; the infliction of suffering does one more good. This war must be ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... all, though they are quite too often permitted to sit up late in the evening, to enjoy that society which they are denied so great a part of the day-time, are they not occasionally put to bed early that they may be out of the way, and that the parents may attend late parties, to indulge in immoral or unhealthy habits? ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... could pardon," the exasperated Pym would roar; "but want of interest is almost immoral. At your age the blood would have been coursing through my veins. Love! You are incapable of it. There is not a drop of ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... we should all remember this. For if we do not, we may fall, as thousands fall, into a very unwholesome and immoral notion about religion. We may get to fancy, as thousands do, rich and poor, that because Christ the Lord is meek and gentle, patient and long-suffering, that he is therefore easy, indulgent, careless about our doing wrong; and that we can, in plain English, trifle with Christ, and take ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... which we may conclude that the Church does not feel bound to enforce, as "of necessity," polygamy, prostitution, murder of heretics, and slavery. She does not venture to designate such precepts as immoral, but she does not feel bound in conscience to enforce them, for which small concession we must feel grateful. Passing from the law of the land to the Bible itself, we find that the Mosaic code must certainly be recognised as divine. Jesus himself proclaims: "Think not that I am come to destroy ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... their proportionate deserts, when the law which governs the sale of liquor to white men is considered. Things are very strictly regulated by complexions in South Carolina. The master sets the most dissipated and immoral examples in his own person, and allows his children not only to exercise their youthful caprices, but to gratify such feelings as are pernicious to their moral welfare, upon his slaves. Now, the question is, that knowing the negro's power of imitation, ought not some ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... earnings of their work for their own use; a part they might be allowed to take for tea, sugar, etc., but a part should be laid by that there maybe some provision for them when they leave the prison, without their returning to their immoral practices. This is the case, I believe, in all prisons well regulated, both on the continent of Europe and America. In a prison under proper regulation, where they had very little communication with their friends, where they were sufficiently well fed and clothed, constantly ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... be a ignorant and immoral foreigner. (The rebuke is well received; and Marzo is hustled into the background and extinguished.) She won't take him for harm; but she might take him for good. And then ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... existence to that magnificent flash. What social power can to-day, for the sum of five sous, give us five days' happiness and launch us ideally into all the joys of civilization? Tobacco, a craving far more immoral than play, destroys the body, attacks the mind, and stupefies a nation; while the lottery did nothing of the kind. This passion, moreover, was forced to keep within limits by the long periods that occurred between the drawings, and by the ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... right," said Sam. "When a man's in the right, and of course we always are, if he fights a man of his size or one bigger than he is, he gives the wrong a chance of winning, and that is clearly immoral. If he takes a weaker man he makes the truth sure of success. And it's just the same way ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... when our moral sympathetic sense shall widen its boundaries even farther yet, and shall take in the trees and the shrubs, the waters, the hills, all the natural and beautiful features of the world. I believe that by and by it will be regarded as immoral, as unmanly, to deface, to mar, that which God has made so glorious and so beautiful. As soon as man develops, then, his power of sympathy, so that it can take the world in its arms, so soon he will have grown to the stature of the Divine in the ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... obstinate resistance to change. We must therefore be on our guard against those who would run ethics into rigid moulds, and so raise up static concepts and infallible dogmas for beliefs or action. Change must be accepted as a principle which it is both futile and immoral to ignore, even in the moral life. This does not mean setting up caprice or impulsiveness, for in so far as our change of character expresses the development of the single movement of our own inner life ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... pulpit—I cannot think of one rival—that the essence of Christianity is its practical morals; it is there for use, or it is nothing: If you combine it with sharp trading, or with ordinary city ambitions to glaze over municipal corruptions or private intemperance, or successful frauds, or immoral politics, or unjust wars, or the cheating of Indians, or the robbing of frontier natives, it is hypocrisy and the truth is not in you, and no love of religious music, or dreams of Swedenborg, or praise of John Wesley or of Jeremy Taylor, can save ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... will be anxious here to attack the "aesthetic" movement. One will be expected to say that, after the ideas of Newman, after the ideas of Arnold, and of Jowett, came those of the wicked, the extravagant, the effeminate, the immoral "Blue China School." Perhaps there is something in this, but sermons on the subject are rather luxuries than necessaries in the present didactic mood of the Press. "They were friends of ours, moreover," as Aristotle says, "who brought ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... lived with a reformer knows this. Therefore are modern shop-windows—by steel construction made to occupy the maximum amount of space, to assault by breadth and brilliance the most callous eye—one of the most immoral forces in ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... Etruscan sages in certain emergencies and the government accordingly took steps to secure the traditional transmission of Etruscan lore in the noble families of Etruria, as well as the permission of the secret worship of Demeter, which was not immoral and was restricted to women, may probably be ranked with the earlier innocent and comparatively indifferent adoption of foreign rites. But the admission of the worship of the Mother of the Gods was a bad sign of the weakness which the government felt in presence of the new superstition, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... entangled with error, superstition, and even with crime—acts as a bounty upon imposture, and in some degree predisposes to guilt, from an erroneous belief that sin may be cancelled by alms and the prayers of mendicant impostors. The second point, in connection with pauperism, is the immoral influence that I proceeds from the relation in which the begging poor in Ireland stand towards the class by whom they are supported. These, as we have already said, are the poorest, least educated, and consequently ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... this dilemma, if he chooses. It is a free country. But if he takes that, we insist that he is logically bound to call Christianity a cheat, a delusion, a snare and a curse to humanity! He shall not ask us to swallow the monstrous and immoral proposition, that this outrageous lie and imposture is the glory, the blessing ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of people thrice that age. We were sadly told, by one who is himself a parent, that most children in the island but twelve years of age know the delicate relations of the sexes as well as they would ever know them. What else could be expected in an atmosphere so wretchedly immoral? Small boys dressed in stovepipe hats and swallow-tail coats, and little misses in long dresses with low necks ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... a man who had been a preacher. I spoke to him about something that had happened in his life on a certain occasion. He had been guilty of immoral conduct. He acknowledged it with apparently no sense of shame, saying, "Oh, I was not professing then." He acted as though he thought his past conduct made no difference in respect to his present standing ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... himself. Anger is of a more universal and injurious tendency than is generally supposed. As we cannot rage and storm from morning till night, and as the most ferocious animal has necessarily its intervals of repose, these intervals in man are greatly influenced by the immoral character of the conduct which may have preceded them. He appears to be at peace, indeed, but it is an irreligious, malignant peace; a savage sardonic smile, destitute of all charity or dignity; a love of ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... always mean Life. We can trace the connection with the Sirens: the absolute resignation to the senses is license, is destruction; we may say the same thing of the opposite, the absolute suppression of man's sensuous being is simply his dissolution. Hence the extremes appear; the moral and the immoral extremes land us in the same place; they are the two mighty rocks which may smite together and crush the poor mortal who happens to get in between the closing surfaces. If we understand the image, it holds ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... died unborn, for in 1837 Chopin found himself deserted by her. So much we learn from Hoesick. And now we may return to Chopin's immortal, if immoral, affair with George Sand. ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... Majesty was confident that the Catholics all over the country would fall on the Protestants without waiting for orders, [431] But Avaux was entirely mistaken. That he should have supposed James to be as profoundly immoral as himself is not strange. But it is strange that so able a man should have forgotten that James and himself had quite different objects in view. The object of the Ambassador's politics was to make the separation ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... seems, has many faults:—Is the other faultless?—The principal thing objected to Mr. Lovelace (and a very inexcusable one) is that he is immoral in his loves—Is not the other in his hatreds?—Nay, as I may say, in his loves too (the object only differing) if the love of money be the root ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... "understudy" may bring in its train; the opportunity of a small part; the gratification of ambition. There is no more immorality than in other trades, but there is an amount of humiliating and degrading philandering, a mauling sensuality which is more degrading than any violent abduction. To be immoral a certain amount of courage is required; but the curse of modern theatrical conditions is this corrupt debauchery. Many girls have come to me explaining their difficulties, and many in asking my advice ended up with the persistent cry of the modern woman, "I do so want to get on!" This is ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... teachers, with equal tact, took their illustrations from the familiar atmosphere of song and story and national tradition in which their readers lived. A secondary purpose, which they obviously had in view, was also to remove from certain of the popular tales the immoral implications which still clung to them from their heathen past, and to reconsecrate them to a ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... allow pipe-organ music, but draw the line at the violin; while still others use a whole orchestra in their religious service. Some there be who regard pictures as implements of idolatry; while the Hook-and-Eye Baptists look upon buttons as immoral. ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... fortunes won by the officers were of little use while peace was denied for their enjoyment; the millions of Massena did not save him from the exposures and hardships of the battle-field, and he confessed that he loved luxury and immoral self-indulgence. Such voices had created ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... pleasure. To feel his influence, and at the same moment to be the subject of strong passion, or fierce lust, or heroic resolve, or profound contemplation, or pensive melancholy, is impossible. Wantonness, innocent because unconscious of sin, immoral because incapable of any serious purpose, is the quality which prevails in all that he has painted. The pantomimes of a Mohammedan paradise might be put upon the stage after patterns supplied by this least spiritual ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... as the bankrupts have reason to complain of the extortion, the judges had some hope of reforming to that extent the system of bankruptcy. The attempt, however, will end in producing something still more immoral; for the creditors will devise other rascally methods, which the judges will condemn as judges, but by which they will ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... could desire. For it is tantamount to saying that the foundations of morality, the distinctions of right and wrong, are deeply laid in the very conditions of social existence; that there is in face of these conditions a positive and definite difference between the moral and the immoral, the virtuous and the vicious, the right and the wrong, in the actions of individuals partaking of that social existence.") Undoubtedly the great principle of acting for the good of all the members of the same community, and therefore the good of the species, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... do so effectively. Wherewith came on the question of raffles, an inexhaustible one, since some maintained that they were contrary to English law, and were absolutely immoral, while others held that it was the only way of disposing of really expensive articles. These were two statues sent by Mrs. White, and an exquisite little picture by Mrs. Grinstead, worth more than any ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not for us to enfeeble it, or carelessly fling it away. For it is a particular form of life that we represent on this planet—the life of feeling and thought; whence it follows perhaps that all that inclines to weaken the ardour of feeling and thought is, in its essence, immoral. Our task let it be then to foster this ardour, to enhance and embellish it; let us constantly strive to acquire deeper faith in the greatness of man, in his strength and his destiny; or, we might equally say, in his bitterness, weakness, ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... laughing. "Oh, you wicked, immoral little mother! Did I ever hear such an iniquitous proposition! Do you want me ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... you what, Sorrel," said the president, with mock gravity, "I consider the whole affair, however ridiculous, most immoral and reprehensible. What, shall a crack-shot make a target of an elder? Never! Let us seek more appropriate butts for our barrels! You may perhaps look upon the whole as a piece of pleasantry but let ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... have been all mercy and all love and no justice. That would have meant no moral laws; for why have moral laws, if there would be no penalty, no justice? That would have meant a premium on crime. That would have meant the debased, the debauched, the immoral, the drunken, the fiend, on a level with the chaste, the pure, the upright, the true. That would have meant unbridled rein to passion and lust and every other evil inclination, and no penalty following. That would have meant Hell in trying to get ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... city, there might be some excuse for the tax. We would get some benefit from it, but it gives a big part of the tax to local option localities where the people are always shoutin' that liquor dealin' is immoral. Ought these good people be subjected to the immoral influence of money taken from the saloon tainted money? Out of respect for the tender consciences of these pious people, the Raines law ought to exempt them from all contamination from the plunder that comes from ...
— Plunkitt of Tammany Hall • George Washington Plunkitt
... before, with the same infatuations and dissipations. He liked to dine and drink well, and though he considered it immoral and humiliating could not resist the temptations of the bachelor circles in which ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... said, with tentative defiance, "I suppose you'll think there's something wrong about me, boy.... But I loved her mother deeply. Honestly—if one can call it that. If I'd had a certain kind of—well, immoral—courage, I'd have married her.... Just think how different all our lives would have been. But I hadn't the heart to hurt Maizie; to break with her ... nor the courage to give up my position in life. So we parted. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... birth to, nursed and reared this daughter in her situation, assuredly without the slightest assistance from outsiders, and with heavy sacrifices—if I had reflected on the view of life which this woman had formed, I should have understood that there was, decidedly, nothing bad or immoral in the mother's act: she had done and was doing for her daughter all that she could, that is to say, what she considered the best for herself. This daughter could be forcibly removed from her mother; but it would be impossible to convince ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... of Victor Hugo, Dumas, and the enlightened classes, is profoundly immoral and absurd, the DRAMA of the common people is absurd, if you will, but good and right-hearted. I have made notes of one or two of these pieces, which all have good feeling and kindness in them, and which turn, as the reader will see, upon one or two favorite points ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to satisfy his artistic taste. But he did not yield to the temptation; had he done so he would have formed a more moral emblem for the edification of my readers than I am now able to provide; and they must face instead the uncomfortable fact that out of this long and immoral liaison between a prince and his mistress certain moral values held good, and that being in need of a sincere friend and confidante he found it in the woman from whom ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... as something hidden, something of which men ought to be ashamed; it was an avowed teaching, claiming full religious sanction. "The Church," says Baring-Gould, "trembled on the verge of becoming an immoral sect." The ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... not know, but I think that when all that jewel once more grows warm above my immoral heart, this temple which they call eternal will be but a time-eaten ruin. Hark, the priestess calls. Farewell, you man who have come out of the north to be my glory and my shame. Farewell, until the purpose of our lives declares ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... kept secret. She was therefore bursting with information of which she could manifest no consciousness without confessing that she had been eavesdropping—a thing which she knew Miss Laura regarded as detestably immoral. She wondered at her aunt's silence. Except a certain subdued air of happiness there was nothing to distinguish Miss Laura's calm demeanor from that of any other day. Graciella had determined upon her own attitude ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... returned home, he had struggled to feel strong and easy in the sense of being an honourable man; but now he was thrown violently out of the path in which he had meant to walk rightly. What he was about to do was necessary, was inevitable, yet in his relation to Kate he was in the position of an immoral man, a betrayer, an adulterer, with a vulgar secret, which he must support by lying and share with servants. And what was the outlook? What would be the end? Here was a situation from which there was no escape. Let there be no false ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... it might be found that we could breed "high energetics." But before we did so we should have to consider very gravely that the "go" and "energy" of a man have no ascertainable relation to many other extremely important considerations. Your energetic person may be moral or immoral, an unqualified egotist or as public spirited as an ant, sane, or a raving lunatic. Your phlegmatic person may ripen resolves and bring out truths, with the incomparable clearness of a long-exposed, slowly developed, slowly printed photograph. A ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... nature has made so powerful in the soul of a young girl, for the very purpose of preserving her from the misfortune of submitting to a man who does not love her? Again, what girl is there so thoughtless as not to discern, that the most immoral man wishes his wife to be a woman of principle, as masters desire their servants to be perfect; and that, therefore, her virtue is the richest and the most advantageous of ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... capacities upon the state benefited, as the support of the criminal jurisdiction at home in all its ramifications, from the chief judges of the land down to the lowest turnkey at Newgate. We need not stop to enquire in what proportion the manufacturing system, with the immoral schools of radicalism, irreligionism, and Anti-corn-Law Cobdenism, have contributed to people the penal settlements, and, pro tanto, to aggrieve the national treasury. Certain it is, and a truth which will not be questioned, that by far the largest share of that criminal refuse ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... in this respect is likely to agree to this assertion. It is as natural for a lot of children to condemn the mention of useless detail, because of its waste of time, as it is for them to condemn selfish or immoral conduct. ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... had a vague idea that France is an immoral country. To the eye of a mere visitor France is the most moral of the four Great Powers—France, Russia, England, Germany; has the strongest family life and the most seemly streets. Young men and maidens are ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... recognized as the most bloody revolution in history, began with the assassination of a single man. This man was Gregory Novikh, known throughout the world under the name of Rasputin. A Siberian peasant by birth, immoral, filthy in person, untrained in mind, he had early received the nickname of Rasputin, which means "ne'er-do-well," on account of his habits. A drunkard, and a libertine always, he posed as a sort of saint and miracle worker, let his hair grow long, and ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... the cause of God should be hindered by women asserting their Christian liberty, by speech or action, he desired them to comply with the common usages of the society in which they lived, where those usages were not in themselves immoral or contrary to the Word of God. Kindred to I Cor. xiv, 34, 35, and referring to the same thing, is I Tim. ii, 11, 12: "Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." For a woman to ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... Saint Paul, speaking of the hidden meaning of the Bible, say that Agar is Mount Sinai?[147] Origen and Saint Augustine are of the opinion that the Old Testament must be regarded as symbolical, as otherwise it would be immoral; the Jewish law forbade anyone to read it who had not attained the age of thirty years; Fenelon would have liked it to be thrust away in the recesses of the most secret libraries; the Cardinal de Noailles says ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... social bond, and thereby, for example, it aids us to see that, altho romance is ever young and ever true, what is known as "neo-romanticism," with its reckless assertion of individual whim, is anti-social, and therefore probably immoral. ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... opposed advancement, was a descendant of the 'man of fire.' Padre Caramuru dwelt for some years with an English merchant in the capital of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro. The padre was not an immoral man, but he was a fiery bigot and fiercely opposed everything that tended to advance the education of the people. This he did, firmly believing that education was dangerous to the lower orders. His church taught him, too, that the Bible was a dangerous book; and whenever ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... to an unhonored end, and the actors had been merged into the great body of disreputable jugglers and inferior minstrels who wandered over all Christendom. The performances of these social outcasts, crude and immoral as they were, continued for centuries unsuppressed, because they responded to the demand for dramatic spectacle which is one of the deepest though not least troublesome instincts in human nature. The same demand was partly satisfied also by the rude ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... that the persons so operated upon and liberated should be released on probation and kept under supervision for a reasonable period, and that they should be returned to institutional care if found to be leading an immoral life, or unable to support themselves, or for any other reason which the Eugenic Board may ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... thanking her for his translation to Paris; a third was from the fashionable modiste, thanking her for an invitation from the Minister. A feeling of shame came over her as she glanced at these letters. They brought the implication of an immoral influence, the ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... of the immoral conduct of his wife, caused her to be drowned by her mule, which had been kept without drink for a week, and given salt to eat—as is more clearly ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... Walter that Stoffel brought this knowledge home with him. Even to-day there are people who find something immoral in the words "Theatre" and "Player"; but at that time it was still worse. The satisfaction, however, of imparting knowledge and appearing wise put Stoffel in an attitude of mind on this occasion that ordinarily would have been irreconcilable with that narrowness ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... inducements to private persons to achieve successful results. It may mean a private society or a chartered company for the improvement of human live stock. But for the present it is far more likely to mean a blatant repudiation of such proposals as indecent and immoral, with, nevertheless, a general secret pushing of the human will in the repudiated direction; so that all sorts of institutions and public authorities will under some pretext or other feel their way furtively towards the Superman. Mr Graham Wallas has already ventured ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... undergo a great many trials," sighed Mr. Pricker. "Could you believe, my friends, that they contemplate depriving us of our respectable cue, and replacing it with a light, fantastic, and truly immoral wig?" ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... announce first that I have captured the English millionaire, the colossus of finance, Mr Samuel Harrogate. I next announce that I have found on his person notes and bonds for two thousand pounds, which he has given up to me. Now since it would be really immoral to announce such a thing to a credulous public if it had not occurred, I suggest it should occur without further delay. I suggest that Mr Harrogate senior should now give me the two ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... nature from a classic like Oliver Twist than from his own experience or from cheap thrillers. The boy needs to be kept from the vulgar cut-throat story, the girl from the unwholesome romance. Girls should read books that exalt the sweet home virtues. Cheap society stories are not necessarily immoral but they give false ideas of life, warp ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... that degree that it left off sinning for a moment. Thus, under the name of Order and Civil Government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness. After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... in his literature, he must express himself and his own views and preferences; for to do anything else is to do a far more perilous thing than to risk being immoral: it is to be sure of being untrue. To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty a sentiment; that will not be helpful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are sure you hold it, is to take a liberty with ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... astray. When other girls were convicted of being in love with married men, it had always sounded so immoral! But no one could think of Honor as such. She was plainly an upright ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... distinguish immorality from coarseness. The morality of a fiction-writer is not dependent on the decency of his expression. In fact, the history of literature shows that authors frankly coarse, like Rabelais or Swift for instance, have rarely or never been immoral; and that the most immoral books have been written in the most delicate language. Swift and Rabelais are moral, because they tell the truth with sanity and vigor; we may object to certain passages in their writings on esthetic, but not on ethical, grounds. They may offend ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... the manner in which (subject to my Lord's correction) I put the defence of the three defendants for whom I appear. I have stated to you, that Holloway and Lyte have admitted themselves guilty of most immoral conduct, for I never can believe that such transactions as these, let them be conducted by whom they may, are not immoral in the highest degree. Holloway, at all events, has since done all he can to make amends; he has confessed his guilt; he has come forward with Lyte, knowing ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... that the devotees of this apparently infallible principle were at variance amongst themselves, for they disputed, deceived, abused, and swindled each other. And many were grossly selfish, and most immoral. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... for the pleasure of keeping our conscience pure? Is this resistance required by this generous, devoted affection, always ready to forget itself for its object? I grant it is going against conscience to have recourse to this immoral means to solace the being we love; but can we be said to love if in presence of this being and of its sorrow we continue to think of ourselves? Are we not more taken up with ourselves than with it, since we prefer ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... this strikes me as a most immoral game," said the Lady, who had been a sympathetic spectator from a corner, doubtful of the ginger-ale, horrified at the pipe, and delighted at the complete ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... private soldier in the battles of Perryville and Murfreesborough. Several men in my car had served with her in a Louisianian regiment, and they said she had been turned out a short time since for her bad and immoral conduct. They told me that her sex was notorious to all the regiment, but no notice had been taken of it so long as she conducted herself properly. They also said that she was not the only representative of the female sex in the ranks. When I saw her she wore a soldier's ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... boasted; but, a little reflection will convince us, that religious opinions equally blind both sovereigns and people, and never enlighten them upon their true duties or interests. Religion but too often forms licentious, immoral despots, obeyed by slaves, whom every thing obliges to conform ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... gentleman, a refined, cultured, musical, artistic and philosophic person, of high attainments, lofty aspirations, strong emotions, and capricious will," produces arguments "wide in range, of profound significance and infinite ingenuity," to defend and justify immoral intercourse with a gipsy trull. The poem consists of the speculations of a libertine, who coerces into his service truth and sophistry, and "a superabounding wealth of thought and imagery," and with no further purpose on the poet's part than the dramatic delineation of character. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... always lost its virtue on the stairs and landing. And to splash—one of the most voluptuous pleasures in life—was forbidden by the code. Mrs Nixon would actually weep at a splashing. Splashing was immoral. It was as wicked as amorous dalliance in a monastery. In the shop-house godliness was child's play ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... is false, or mean, or of a coarse mind. She may, indeed, insist that only upright and honorable men of refined mind and manner are gentlemen, and she may also maintain that only men of truly lofty and royal souls are princes; but there will still remain crowds of immoral gentlemen and unworthy kings. ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... always, all his life, had a secret dread of Absolute Beauty. It had always been like a fetish to him, something to fear, really. For it was immoral and against mankind. So he had turned to the Gothic form, which always asserted the broken desire of mankind in its pointed arches, escaping the rolling, absolute beauty of ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... custom, Immoral ditties are their delight; Vain and tasteless praise they recite; Falsehood at all times do they utter; The innocent persons they ridicule; Married women they destroy, Innocent virgins of Mary they corrupt; As they pass ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... of the university, that she should allow, even if she had the right to withhold, the privilege of living within her walls as they would have lived at their fathers' seats; with one only reserve, applied to all modes of expense that are, in themselves, immoral excesses, or occasions of scandal, or of a nature to interfere too much with the natural hours of study, or specially fitted to tempt others of narrower means ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... writer [Footnote: Name forgotten, but the fact is indelible.] blames Hilda severely for her betrayal of Miriam (who was at least her best friend in Rome), and furthermore designates her as an immoral character. This, we may suppose, is intended for a hit at New England Puritanism; and from the French stand-point, it is not unfair. Hilda represents Puritanism in its weakness and in its strength. It is true, what Hamlet says, that "conscience makes cowards of us all," ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... not condemn the use of arms as immoral, nor do I conceive it profane to say that the King of Heaven—the Lord of Hosts! the God of Battles!—bestows his benediction upon those who unsheathe the sword in the hour of a nation's peril. From that evening, on which, in the ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... fact, this feeling in him was so irrepressible, so rapacious, that it grasped even at morsels of nourishment it could not obtain, in the desire to strengthen itself. Thus he had actually come to believe that Lord Henry was a charlatan; he was prepared to prove that he had immoral intentions against every girl in his immediate neighbourhood, and he was completely satisfied that, like Mrs. Delarayne, Lord Henry was decades ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... Ain't it better nor whippin' to death? "What's a Stole arter all? It's nothin' but a coat. Philosophizin' on it, Stranger, there is nothin' to shock a man. The dead don't feel. Skinnin', then, ain't cruel, nor is it immoral. To bury a good hide, is, waste—waste is wicked. There are more good hides buried in the States, black and white, every year, than would pay the poor-rates and state-taxes. They make excellent huntin'-coats, and would make beautiful razor-straps, bindin' for books, and ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... religious and moral nature, so beautiful to all who knew him, was especially repelled by sundry evolutionists, who, in their zeal as neophytes, made proclamations seeming to have a decidedly irreligious if not immoral bearing. In addition to this was the direction his thinking had received from Cuvier. Both these influences combined to prevent his acceptance ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Lagny, Beauvais, Reims, and even from so far as Touraine and Berry;[2179] which was information enough to burn ten heretics and twenty witches. Devilries were discovered which filled the priests with horror: the finding of a lost cup and gloves, the exposure of an immoral priest, the sword of Saint Catherine, the restoration of a child to life. There was also a report of a rash letter concerning the Pope and there were many other indications of witchcraft, heresy, and religious error.[2180] Such information was not to be included ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... refinement of this polish'd age Has swept immoral raillery from the stage; Since taste has now expung'd licentious wit, Which stamp'd disgrace on all an author writ; Since, now, to please with purer scenes we seek, Nor dare to call the blush from Beauty's cheek; Oh! let ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... Portland an art dealer was arrested for exhibiting immoral pictures in his window. Mr. Stubbs, the artist, gathered up samples of all the pictures that he had exhibited in his windows and took them with him into court. He placed them about the court room on chairs and benches. They were copies of masterpieces of the Paris Salon of well-known subjects, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... damp heavy earth, and there's no lifting it, nor disburthening of the souls of men of this intolerable weight. I was met on every side with a stare of curiosity, as if I were propounding something immoral or heretical. People looked at me, put their hands in their pockets, whistled dubiously, and went slowly away. Oh, it was weary, weary work! The blood was stagnant in the veins of the people and their feet were shod with lead. They walked slowly, spoke with ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... life a blessing or a curse, as you inculcate good or evil; for if through your neglect, or through bad example, you let evil passions obtain an ascendency, that child may grow into a dissolute and immoral man; his career may be one of debauchery and profaneness; and then, when he comes to die, in the agonies of remorse, in the delirium of a conscience-stricken spirit, he may gasp out his last breath with a curse on your ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... entertainment," he says, "which is the subject of general enjoyment, is of a nature which tends to soften, if not to level, the distinction of ranks."[158] In another mood he admitted the greater likelihood that immoral plays would injure the public character than that ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... an appeal to Mr. Russell was unnecessary when he had his mother's opinion." Lady Mary's wish for the Glistonbury connexion fortified her morality at this moment, and she replied, "Then my decided opinion is, that it would be an immoral and dishonourable action to break such a tacit engagement as this, which you have voluntarily contracted, and which you absolutely could not break without destroying the peace and happiness of a whole family. Even that cold Lady Glistonbury grew quite warm to-day; and you must ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... for goodness but goodness itself. Remember heaven and hell are utterly immoral institutions, if they are ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... moments, the acquired superposed conscience immediately imposes silence, concealing personal hatreds under public pretexts: the guillotined, after all, were aristocrats, and whoever comes under the guillotine is immoral. Thus, the means are good and the end better; in employing the means, as well as in pursuing the end, the function ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... with the traditional Dutch figures such as I sketch. I find in Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature" which I consulted before coming away that a French writer wrote an elaborate treatise to prove that tea merchants were always immoral members of society. It would be rather curious to apply the theory to the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... their natural superior; they asked advice of him, laid their small disputes before him for settlement, and gave him all honour, as this patriarchal relation involved. They were "respectable" people, good husbands and fathers, led moral lives because they had no temptation to be immoral, there being no groggeries or low houses in their vicinity, and because the host, at whose inn they now and then quenched their thirst, was also a respectable man, usually a large tenant farmer who took pride in his good order, good beer, and early hours. They had their children the whole day ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... that the Three Hours for Lunch Club is an immoral institution; that it is founded upon an insufficient respect for the devotions of industry; that it runs counter to the form and pressure of the age; that it encourages a greedy and rambling humour in the young of both sexes; that it even punctures, in the bosoms of settled merchants and rotarians, ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... there was a great difference of opinion among the Greeks. The people, the orators, and many of the poets praised them; but the philosophers either disapproved them openly, or passed them by in silence. Socrates says no word in their favor in all his reported conversations. Plato complains of the immoral influence derived from believing that sin could be expiated by such ceremonies.[262] They seem to have contained, in reality, little direct instruction, but to have taught merely by a dramatic representation ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... know that Miss Essie de Staff went to New York to get a new carpet for her best room and what the new style is;—and that Miss Faith Derrick was run away with and brought home again, and went through adventures. How could we do without talking of these things? Now perhaps you will say it's immoral; but I'm in favour of a possible morality; and I say, how could Pattaquasset get ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... his theory that soul is attainable through flesh, truth through falsehood, the real through what only seems; and, as he thinks, justified the conclusion that a man's spiritual life is advanced by every experience, moral or immoral, which comes in his way. He now relates a dream by which, as he says, those abstract reflections have been in part inspired; in reality, it continues, and in some degree refutes them. The dream came to him this morning when he had ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner's, 1932). See especially his consideration of coercion and persuasion in the two realms of individual and ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... of education has taught youths to think for themselves before either the mental or moral muscles are tough enough, with the result that she is the agnostic and materialistic nation of Europe, and her capital the most licentious and immoral in Europe. ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... "Rubaiyat," but all I succeeded in obtaining was a lithograph copy with no place or date of publication; merely the remark that it had been printed during the cold months. I was told that the writings of Omar Khayyam were regarded as immoral and for that reason were not to be found in religious households. My Persian friends would quote at length from Sadi's Gulistan or Rose Garden, and go into ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... with the ills of all nations, the reason lies in the lack of a reasonable religious teaching which by explaining the meaning of life would supply a supreme law for the guidance of conduct and would replace the more than dubious precepts of pseudo-religion and pseudo-science with the immoral conclusions deduced from them ...
— A Letter to a Hindu • Leo Tolstoy
... easy termination of unions, it can be understood that marriage in the face of the Church, which included a vow absolutely prohibitive of all these things, would be commonly avoided. Malachy's anxiety to restore the marriage ceremony was no doubt due to a desire to purge the nation of immoral customs of which St. Bernard makes no express mention. But, however that may be, we have contemporary native evidence that the rite of marriage had fallen into desuetude, and that Malachy was successful in his effort ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... upon his loose ways; and there is no doubt that his integrity, industry, economy, and desire to succeed in business had something to do with his moral improvement. He confessed that, along from 1725 to 1730 he was immoral, and was sometimes led astray; but his conscience made him much trouble, and, finally, it asserted its supremacy, and he came off conqueror over his evil propensities. A change from skepticism or deism to a decided belief in the Christian Religion, no doubt exerted the strongest influence ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... portrays the phenomena which have been the subject of his investigation,—in all this calm and conscientious study of nature he often reminds us of Goethe. Balzac, however, is only an artist . . . He is neither moral nor immoral, but a calm and profound observer of human society and human passions, and a minute, patient, and powerful delineator of scenes and characters in the world before his eyes. His readers must moralize for themselves. . . . It is, perhaps, his defective style more ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... mischief. I consider this a mere jargon, and although I would never recommend this book (because it is so grossly indecent) I should never apprehend the smallest danger to the most inexperienced mind or the warmest passions from its immoral tendency. The principle upon which books of this description are considered pernicious is the notion that they represent vice in such glowing and attractive colours as to make us lose sight of its deformity and fill our imagination with the idea of its pleasures. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... much greater abundance than they had. But there were other things which made them great, but which among us have no existence; such as industry at home, equitable government abroad, and minds impartial in council, uninfluenced by any immoral or improper feeling. Instead of such virtues, we have luxury and avarice; public distress, and private superfluity; we extol wealth, and yield to indolence; no distinction is made between good men and bad; and ambition usurps the honors due to virtue. Nor is this wonderful; ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... neglected by aunt or stepmother, in another that the mother is an invalid or a sweated worker too overwrought to do much for him, or, though a good-hearted soul, she is careless and dirty or ignorant, or that she is immoral and reckless, and so on and so on. Our haphazard sample of ten Scotch cases gives instances of nearly all these alternatives. And from these proximate causes one might work back to more general ones, to the necessity of controlling the drink traffic, of abolishing sweating, ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... of any or all of these things. As it was, his behavior must have been sufficiently ridiculous, since it amused Mrs. Fazakerly so much. The two had reached that topsy-turvy height of anguish that is only expressible by laughter. Theirs had a ring of insanity in it; it sounded monstrous and immoral, like the mirth of victims under the shadow of condign extinction. As for his play, he knew it was the play of a madman. And yet he still won; with Miss Tancred for his partner it was impossible to lose. She sat there unmoved by his wildest ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... dear," he continued. "Don't be offended for advising you, for I do so only because I love you. Have nothing to do with the prisoners. You will never find innocent people among them. They are the most immoral set. We know them," he said, in a tone of voice which did not permit the possibility of doubt. "You had better take an office. The Emperor and the country need honest people. What if I and such as you refused to serve? Who would be left? We are complaining of conditions, ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... thing if there were competent tribunals, preferably not official ones, where charges of untruthfulness and unfairness in the general news could be sifted. Cf. Liberty and the News, pp. 73-76. ] except as to matter which is vaguely described as immoral or seditious. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... can doubt that the havoc which secret sexual thoughts may bring to the neural life, especially of the unbalanced, is tremendous. Broken health and a distorted view of the social world with an unsound, unclean, and ultimately immoral emphasis on the sexual relations may thus be the sad result for millions of girls, whose girlhood under the policy of the past would have remained untainted by the sordid ideas of ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... About this time a widely known society of young persons of both sexes (called Media Nocte) endeavored to draw the prince into its circle at The Hague; but his friend and tutor, the Baron Schulenberg, making him aware of the immoral nature of the society, the prince abruptly left one of their convivial meetings, and resolved immediately to quit The Hague. The Prince of Orange was much surprised at this self-command, and when the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... go a great way amongst country people; and the worst construction of the case was, that he might be an embarrassed gentleman from Manchester or Liverpool, hiding himself from his creditors, who are notoriously a very immoral class of people. At length, however, a violent suspicion broke loose against him; for it was ascertained that on certain nights, when, perhaps, he had extra motives for concealing the fact of having been abroad, he drew woollen stockings over his horse's feet, with the purpose ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... meaning. "The essential point in the notion of a priest is this: that he is a person made necessary to our intercourse with God, without being necessary or beneficial to us morally,—an unreasonable, immoral, spiritual necessity." He did not mean, of course, that the priest might not have all the qualities which would recommend him as a teacher or as a man, but that he had a special power, quite independent of his personal character, which could act, as it were, mechanically; that out of ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... "ourselves created an immoral or unmoral social environment. To undo its inevitable results we must reverse our course. We must see that all our economic legislation, all our social reforms, are in the very opposite direction to those hitherto adopted, and that ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... people. The priests exercise great ingenuity to preserve the confessional. The better educated classes have long ago deserted the confessional, but it still holds sway over the common people and hangs like a dark shadow over the immoral deeds of the priests. Along with it flourishes the performance of penance. These two hand-maidens in wrong-doing often thrive in an ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... You can fancy how embarrassed I felt. My embarrassment was still further increased upon learning that the Archbishop had just arrived at the Seminary, and wished to speak to me. To accept would be immoral; it was impossible for me to give the real reason for my refusal, and I could not bring myself to give a false one. I had recourse to the services of worthy M. Carbon, who undertook to tell my story, and so spared me this painful interview. ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... Family as these institutions exist at the present time. But once we have realized the absurdity of this absolute treatment, then it should become clear that with it goes most of the fabric of right and wrong, and nearly all those arbitrary standards by which we classify people into moral and immoral. Those last words are used when as a matter of fact we mean either conforming or failing to conform to changing laws and developing institutional customs we may or may not consider right or wrong. Their use imparts a flavour of ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... Whisper fills a Patron's Ear, Who smiles unpleas'd, and mourns without a tear.[43] Persuasive, tho' a woful Blockhead he: Truth dies before his shadowy Sophistry. For well he knows[44] the Vices of the Town, The Schemes of State, and Int'rest of the Gown; Immoral Afternoons, indecent Nights, Enflaming Wines, and ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... perplexes the whole of human society. The neurosis is a disunity in one's inmost self. The cause of this inward strife is because in most men the consciousness would gladly hold to its moral ideal, but the subconsciousness strives toward its (in the present-day meaning) immoral ideal. This the consciousness always wants to deny. These are the sort of people who would like to be more respectable than they are at bottom. But the conflict may be reversed; there are people who apparently are ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... greatest possible misery. It is an institution that should be held up to the execration of mankind. All the riffraff of the globe are attracted to this hideous spot. The place is like an upas-tree, under which everything noble and good languishes and dies! The form of Government is absolutely immoral. It is a scandal that rates, and taxes, and public improvements should be paid for out of the private purse of the Director. He could not afford it had he not made a fortune out of his ill-gotten gains! Anyone who has watched at the tables knows that the chances are absolutely ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... the order of the day, then let there be free discussion of "Essays and Reviews," as well as of THE BIBLE. Six Clergymen of the Church of England who enter upon a crusade against the Faith of the Church of England must not be astonished if they are looked upon in the light of immoral characters, and treated as such. Accordingly, I have handled them just as freely as they have handled the Prophets, Apostles, and Evangelists ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... will object that it is an immoral trade, which caters to the worst passions of the nature of the Chinese. Let it be proved so; let us see something more than mere prejudice; let it be shown to be worse than the conduct of the farmer, at home, who raises and sells barley to make whiskey; or of the distiller, ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... two who became involved in scandal of some sort she gave to all. Because a motion picture actress, as human as any other woman and as liable to imperfection, sought a divorce in the courts she instantly, in Mrs. Gallant's mind, became an immoral character. A motion picture actor attacked by a blackmailer because of his wealth and prominence, was adjudged guilty of whatever wrong of which he was accused. It was an unfair and unjust attitude common to thousands of women as wholesome in character, ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... nonsense! It would be immoral. I may however tell you that if I had to make a choice I would rather do something immoral than something cruel. What I meant was that, not believing in the efficacy of the interference, the whole question is reduced to your consenting to do what your wife wishes you to do. That would be acting ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
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