"Open-minded" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... representative industrial organization and business ties, its determination to hold fast to what is original and good in its Western experience, and its readiness to learn and receive the results of the experience of other sections and nations, make it an open-minded and safe ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... the Hindu in the library. The thing had surprised him—first, because of the perfect English in the mouth of a foreigner, and secondly, because of the breadth and tolerance of the thought. He wondered how he could ever have believed himself open-minded or fair when he had been so miserably narrow in all his ideas. Where was he headed? All his early days he had been taught to waste effort on scorning the ceremonials great and small of Jews, Catholics, yes, of Baptists even; and now the heathen—to ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... to it, young and without advisers, rather priggish, rather dangerously open-minded and very open-eyed, and with something—it is, I think, the common gift of imaginative youth, and I claim it unblushingly—fine in me, finer than the world and seeking fine responses. I did not want simply to live or simply to live happily or well; I wanted ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the Government whose ...
— In Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson
... the parish as well as I could. Indeed I consider him a better man for the place than I am. That old Oro is a tough proposition, but I do not despair of him yet, and besides him there is the Glittering Lady, a most open-minded person, whom I have not yet had any real opportunity of approaching in a spiritual sense. Then there are all these natives who cannot learn without a teacher. So on the whole I think I would rather stay where I am until Providence points out some ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... shall know," says orthodoxism, "only the truth that has been prescribed and ticketed by authority; ye shall be taught what is orthodox, and orthodoxy shall keep you safe and sound." The entire attitude of the mind is changed, under this demand. It is no longer that of free inquiry, of open-minded search for truth; it is that of passive assent, of ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... the best and most earnest in preaching. His old likes and dislikes, prejudices and prepossessions, self-opinionativeness and self-assertiveness all miraculously melted off him, and he became in a day an open-minded, intelligent, good-mannered, devout-minded gentleman. He who was once such a mule to everybody was now led about by a child in a silken bridle. All old things had passed away, and all things had become new. For a time; for a time. ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... An Open-minded Spect. Mind yer, if this yere 'Ipnotism can prevent water from being wet, there must be something ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 8, 1892 • Various
... means of the press, and no one was its apologist.[25] Many, however, did not approve of the methods of the abolitionists, and some strongly opposed the extreme measures of a part of that body of reformers. The desire of Unitarians to be just, rational, and open-minded, exposed many of them to the criticism of being neither for nor against slavery. But it is certain that they were not indifferent to its evils nor recreant ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... the best that means will allow. It implies that the home shall be recognized as a teaching institution quite as much as the school. Like other laboratories, it must be a place of experiment, not merely a preserver of tradition. The efficient laboratory presupposes an informed and open-minded ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... People learned in bees ought to know, but I never happened to meet one who had settled the question. It is curious how such beliefs or superstitions fix themselves in the popular mind of a countryside, and are held by wise and simple alike. David the constable was a most sensible and open-minded man of his time and class, but Kemble or Akerman, or other learned Anglo-Saxon scholars would have vainly explained to him that "tang", is but the old word for "to hold", and that the object of "tanging" is, not to ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... sailor-merchants and had amassed considerable wealth. The head of the family still sailed the seas; and as, in Palos and in near-by Huelva, many Portuguese lived who boasted about the discoveries their country had made, his interest had been much piqued by their talk. He was educated and open-minded. Moreover, he was considered the best navigator of all who sailed from that important maritime ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... election he invited me to come and see him at the Executive Mansion in Albany, and in the course of the conversation he said: "In your speeches in the campaign against me you were absolutely fair, and as a fair and open-minded opponent I want to have a frank talk. I am governor of the State, elected upon an issue which is purely local. The Democratic party is at present without principles or any definite issue on which to appeal to the public. If I am to continue in power we ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... all right, Harlan, when the right men are in. You are the kind the people are calling for these days. You're clean, straight, open-minded, and—" ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... incessant effort which, recognizing nothing short of success, has resulted in the ultimate accomplishment of his ideas. Optimistic and hopeful to a high degree, Edison has the happy faculty of beginning the day as open-minded as a child—yesterday's disappointments and failures discarded and discounted by ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... but had to fight all his days against the winds and tides of adversity. "The poet," said Thomas Carlyle, "was fortunate in his father—a man of thoughtful intense character, as the best of our peasants are, valuing knowledge, possessing some and open-minded for more, of keen insight and devout heart, friendly and fearless: a fully unfolded man seldom found in any rank in society, and worth descending far in society to seek. ... Had he been ever so little richer, the whole might have issued otherwise. But poverty sunk ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... impress this impartial and judicial mind with the truth and importance of the glorious and regenerating views he had embraced. His self-esteem was pleased at the thought that he should yet conquer this cool and open-minded girl by the force of his own intelligence. He admired her intellectual self-possession all the more that it was a quality which he lacked. Before that afternoon ride was over, he was convinced that he sat by the supreme woman of all he had ever known. And who was so fit to marry the supreme woman ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... that they happen to hear in regard to a disputed matter is likely to be the one that they accept. It might seem, therefore, that there is no need of emphasizing the importance of open-mindedness as a factor in their education. That is far from the case, however. Children are peculiarly open-minded toward many things; but it is mainly those that they have had no previous opportunity to learn about. It is hard to take sides on a matter that you have never heard of. But the test of an impartial mind is found in those matters that are already somewhat familiar, so that ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... without affirming a belief in its own intellectual processes. The open mind that never reaches any certainty to fill it is a very poor possession indeed. And it is not at all what we mean when we say of S. Joseph that he was open-minded. We mean that he was receptive of new spiritual impressions and capable of further spiritual development. There are minds, and they are not unusual among people of a certain degree of spiritual development, ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... artilleryman in question was deficient. "Who can live in Italy to-day?" Evidently the Prussian philosopher can't. His impressions are taken from Italian operas; not from Italian streets; certainly not from Italian fields. As a matter of fact such images of Italy as burn in the memories of most open-minded Northerners who have been there, are of exactly the other kind. I for one should be inclined to say, "Who can live in Italy to-day without feeling that a woman feeding children, or a man chopping wood, may almost touch him with fear with ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... exchange of views seems to have demonstrated to open-minded Italians was that the Jugoslavs, whose reputation for obstinacy was a dogma among all their adversaries and some of their friends, have chinks in their panoply through which reason and ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... their respective marriages. For many years, Uncle Seth had conscientiously, if not lavishly, fed and clothed the little orphans, whose entire patrimony in the Savings Bank scarcely yielded interest enough to pay for their boots and shoes; but it remained for the present crisis to prove him as open-minded as he was conscientious. For, no sooner had Polly finished the rapid exposition of her great plan—how they were to draw the money from the bank to pay for their tickets and start them in their new life, and how they were to earn their own living when once they got started—than he was ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... other. The logical result of this was a caste of good (saved) people for whom I became a sort of an ecclesiastical attorney. Naturally one outgrows such obsolescence. Such archaism has an antidote: it is an open-minded study of the life of Jesus. The result of such a study to me was a rediscovery of myself, that I think is what Jesus always does for an inquiring soul. He is the Supreme Individualist, the Master ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... working towards the accomplishment of my views, introduced me to a friend of his, Herr Gruner, the headmaster at that time of the Frankfurt Model School,[39] which had not long been established. Here I found open-minded young people who met me readily and ingenuously, and our conversation soon ranged freely over life and its many-sided aspects. My own life and its object were also brought forward and talked over. I spoke openly, manifesting myself just ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... also expected at the ball, and so he has donned his military garments. He is a 'Genist,' a Royal Engineer, and had his education at the Royal Military Academy at Breda. This means that he is no swashbuckler, but a genial, well-mannered, open-minded and well-read gentleman, with a somewhat scientific turn of mind and a rare freedom from military prejudice. Hollanders are not a military people in the German sense, and fire-eaters and military fanatics are rare, but they are rarest amongst ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... Benares, where the father immediately erected a Shiva temple. He conducted his household along the lines of Vedic discipline, with regular observance of ceremonial worship, acts of charity, and scriptural study. Just and open-minded, however, he did not ignore the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... and Madge McCulloch came across the yard from the back of the house, and climbed on the fence, and Madge hooked her feet on the lower rail and talked cheerful. They spread out what was on their minds pretty confident. I never knew a couple so open-minded. ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... these give a hint of the causes that led to the French Revolution and explain in some degree why thoughts of liberty, fraternity, and equality were haunting the minds of the youth of France, and, to some of the more open-minded among them, suggesting dreams of ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... circumstances, and work for itself new organs of power appropriate to the new sphere of its motion and activity."[45] This rare grasp of general principles was combined in Coleridge with poetic vision and a declamatory eloquence which enabled him to seize on the more ardent and open-minded men of letters and to determine ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... that it is to the militarist system of government which centers in Berlin that every open-minded man who is familiar with past history would point as being the ultimate source of all the expansion of armaments, of all the international unrest, and of the failure of all movements toward co-operation and harmony among nations during the last ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... my practice as Secretary of State to speak to him with candor and to disagree with him whenever I thought he was reaching a wrong decision in regard to any matter pertaining to foreign affairs. There was a general belief that Mr. Wilson was not open-minded and that he was quick to resent any opposition however well founded. I had not found him so during the years we had been associated. Except in a few instances he listened with consideration to arguments and apparently endeavored ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... Indeed, the rare endeavours of Frenchmen seriously to cultivate alien methods and points of view more often than not end in disaster. Shortly before the war a school of particularly intelligent and open-minded writers discovered, what we in England are only too familiar with, the aesthetic possibilities of charity and the beauty of being good. Dostoevsky began it. First, they ran after him; then, setting themselves, as well as they could, to study Wordsworth and ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... as a corollary, life! But how dared he, how dared any man, preach from a pulpit, when it was given to him to toil in a laboratory, instead? Which was the greater reverence: to exploit one's own belief; or, open-minded, to be searching for a clearer outlook upon truth? And so, bit by bit, the lure of the laboratory beckoned to Scott Brenton, just as, bit by bit, his wife and his profession lost their hold upon him; lost it, to his regret, lost it by their own failure to supply his highest needs. As ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Roosevelt had made it unfashionable to admit that you were conservative. You wished it to be understood that you were open-minded—"forward looking," as Mr. Wilson, who turned reactionary at the test, called it; that you were broad, sympathetic, free from mean prejudices, progressive, in short. Our very best reactionaries of to-day all used to call themselves progressive. ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... uniformity of procedure and for prompt external results are the chief foes which the open-minded attitude meets in school. The teacher who does not permit and encourage diversity of operation in dealing with questions is imposing intellectual blinders upon pupils—restricting their vision to the one path the teacher's mind happens ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... to stretch, and sturdily has he resisted the process. That protoplasmic substance of the brain, used so much and understood so little, astonishes us no less by its infinite capacity for new extension, for endless fluent combination, than by its leaden immobility. Here are some, open-minded, sensitive and hospitable to new impressions; and here are others, an innumerable majority, preferring always to know only what they have known, to think only what they have thought before. The distinction does not seem innate. A normal child provided with proper stimulus, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... Naturally magnanimous and open-minded, the red man prefers to believe that the Spirit of God is not breathed into man alone, but that the whole created universe is a sharer in the immortal perfection of its Maker. His imaginative and poetic mind, ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... representative Eugenists one cannot ignore the distinct middle-class bias that prevails. As that penetrating critic, F. W. Stella Browne, has said in another connection, "The Eugenics Education Society has among its numbers many most open-minded and truly progressive individuals but the official policy it has pursued for years has been inspired by class-bias and sex bias. The society laments with increasing vehemence the multiplication of the less fortunate classes at a more rapid rate than the possessors of leisure and opportunity. ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... years of the Balkan wars which followed this false dawn, coupled with the loss of all the territory which remained to the Ottoman Empire in Europe, with the exception of Thrace, caused an immediate reaction from the open-minded policy of the Young Turks, if we decide to credit them at the outset with a sincere purpose. Organisation by a slightly different spelling became Ottomanisation, and the aims of the Young Turks were identified with those of the Nationalist party which ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... far in substance may be greatly doubted. But it is to be remembered withal, that always on the back of these compulsory adventures there followed English bishops, priests and preachers; whereby to the open-minded, conviction, to all degrees of it, was attainable, while silence and passivity became the duty or necessity of ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... Anglesea! A noble, open-minded fellow! I must consider my daughter. I must consider my daughter! And I have no doubt that this affair will ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... or to break? And how would it fare with any woman whom it was known that I wished to wed? I must be secret until she was gone from Constantinople, and in this way or in that I could follow her. I, who had ever been open-minded, must learn ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... S. Weir Mitchell, Century Company, stands out among the stronger books of the season. He takes for his heroine a not unfamiliar type of woman, reared by an old uncle whose antipathy to religion has made her, as she describes it: "Neither religious nor non-religious—open-minded." ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... accepting evil than devising escape from it. But it also held many blessings of constancy, friendship, kindly deeds, and useful doings. She had not devotion to give such as that of the good Howard whom she revered, but the equable help and sympathy for others of an open-minded and kindly woman was hers. Her marriage would seem to have been brought about by a romantic fancy rather than by a tender affection. Mr. Barbauld's mind had been once unhinged; his protestations were ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... been elected to sit in the minor council soon after his homecoming, being no longer a boy, but near on thirty years of age. And his manners befitted his years; dignified and modest, albeit cheerful and full of a young man's open-minded ardor for everything that was above the vulgar. With him, for certain, if with any man, might I grow to be all I desired to become; and could I but learn to rule my fiery temper, I might hope to follow in the ways of his mother, whom he held above all other women. The great dance, of which I have ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... subject to debate. In the most intellectual of the quadrupeds, birds and reptiles, the display of fear, courage, love, hate, pleasure, displeasure, confidence, suspicion, jealousy, pity, greed and generosity are so plainly evident that even children can and do recognize them. To the serious and open-minded student who devotes prolonged thought to these things, they bring the wild animal very near to the ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... thought, must he himself appear to Mrs. Wayne. Yet his self-respect insisted that his case was different. Loyalty had been responsible not for his conservatism, but for the pig-headedness with which he had acted upon it. He would have asked nothing better than to profess himself open-minded to Mrs. Wayne's views, only he could not desert Adelaide in the moment of her struggle for beliefs in which he himself had brought her up. And now she had deserted him. He alone was left to flaunt a banner the motto of which he didn't wholly believe, while Adelaide, at a word from ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... pursued into great detail. They show acute observation, great ingenuity, clever adaptation, and teachableness. The lasso, bola, boomerang, and throw knife, as well as the throw stick, are products of persistent and open-minded experience. The selection and adaptation of things in nature to a special operation in the arts often show ingenuity as great as that manifested in any of our devices.[172] This ingenuity is of the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... rather encouraged. Not alone the lower classes, but the whole people, including nobles and the King himself, suffer by it. It is a remarkable fact, that, a people who in many ways are extremely open-minded, and more philosophic than the general run of human beings, can allow themselves to be hampered in this way by such absurd notions as spirits and their ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor |
