"Refine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the study of "literature" (only the adult's manner of saying "reading") is expected to accomplish was aptly described by Cardinal Newman when he wrote: "The object of literature in education is to open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to comprehend and adjust its knowledge, to give it power over its faculties—application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, address and expression." Reading at home and in the public schools as well as in the high school and colleges ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... Many a scene of riot and orgies did those log-walls witness. Such is generally the life in a lumber-camp: hard, wholesome labour in the day, loud revelling at night. The rough, adventurous life, with no home charm or female influence to refine or restrain, is probably the principal reason of such low practice of ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... that the agitating circumstances of the stormy time seemed to call forth a certain dignity of feeling and expression, which he had not formerly observed; and that she omitted no opportunity within her reach to extend her knowledge and refine her taste. ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... their station and raise hopes which, in the great majority of cases, will be bitterly disappointed. It is said: There must be hewers of wood and drawers of water, scavengers and coalheavers, day labourers and domestic servants, or the work of society will come to a standstill. But, if you educate and refine everybody, nobody will be content to assume these functions, and all the world will want ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... think it so but those who possess, or fancy they possess, it. To hear them speak, you would believe that their hearts would be cold if that elixir did not flow about them, that their eyes would be dim if that flame did not refine their vision, that they would be lonely if this strange companion abandoned them. You would suppose that it imparted some glad hope to spring, some fine charm to summer, some tranquil joy to autumn, some consolation to ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... as her mother must have been, one of Nature's own ladies, but more refined in type, texture, and form, as the American atmosphere and food and life always refine the children of European stock,—slenderer, more delicate, finer of complexion, and with a soft, exquisite sweetness of voice, more thrilling than her mother's, larger and more robust heartfeltness of tone,—and with the same, but shyer ways, and swift blushes and smiles. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... arts:' so said the old maxim, but it has rarely been found a truism. They who feel it, feel also the virtue which dictated the aphorism. Men whose object is to enlighten the nations or exalt the judgment or (the least ambition) to refine the tastes of others—men who feel that this object is dearer to them than a petty and vain ambition—feel also that all who labor in the same cause are united with them in a friendship which exists in one climate as in another—in a I republic or in a despotism: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... things was to do them quickly and brilliantly, arriving at conclusions, as became an American, with prompt energy and despatch. It seemed to her that Wilbur, in his work, was slow and elaborate, disposed to hesitate and refine instead of producing boldly and immediately. And his sister, with her studies and letter-writing, suggested the same wearisome tendency. Why should not Wilbur, in his line, act with the confident enterprise and capacity to produce immediate, ostensible results which their neighbor, ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... refine the Russian tongue the more thoroughly, something like half the words in it were cut out: which circumstance necessitated very frequent recourse to the tongue of France, since the same words, if spoken in French, were another ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... language of verse, serves to mark the contrast between vulgar and ideal sentiments; it is a positive means of exhibition. Continued prose in Comedy is nothing but the natural language, on which the poet has failed to employ his skill to refine and smoothe it down, while apparently he seems the more careful to give an accurate imitation of it: it is that prose which Molire's Bourgeois Gentilhomme has been speaking his whole lifetime ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... result that Jane had been so long a listener to the conversations between Michael and Kirkwood. Defective as was her instruction in the ordinary sense, those evenings spent in the company of the two men had done much to refine her modes of thought. In spite of the humble powers of her mind and her narrow experience, she had learned to think on matters which are wholly strange to girls of her station, to regard the life of the world and the individual in a light of idealism and ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... pencillings, to the skilled purveyors of countless forms of pleasure—the theatres and restaurants, the green and blossoming suburbs, the whole shining shifting spectacle of nights and days—every sight and sound and word had combined to charm her perceptions and refine her taste. And her growing friendship with Raymond de Chelles had been the most ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... now, shall have to do so still more; which will leave them all even more bewildered than the boldest definition would have done. But that's quite a different thing. The furthest we have gone in the way of definition—unless indeed this too belongs but to our invincible tendency to refine—is by the happy rule we've made that Lorraine shall walk with me every morning to the Works, and I shall find her there when I come out to walk home with me. I see, on reading over, that this is what I meant by "our" in speaking above of our little daily ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... stoops upon its course; while by our vague and inaccurate acceptance of the words we remove the idea of His presence far from us, into a region which we can neither see nor know; and gradually, from the close realization of a living God who "maketh the clouds his chariot," we refine and explain ourselves into dim and distant suspicion of an inactive God, inhabiting inconceivable places, and fading into the multitudinous formalisms of the ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt;" and those in the intermediate state, who go down into hell, where they cry and howl for a time, whence they ascend again; as it is written (Zech. xiii. 9), "And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried; they shall call on my name, and I will hear them." It is of them Hannah said (1 Sam. ii. 6), "The Lord killeth and maketh alive; He bringeth down to hell and ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... refine your Tast;——A common Woman! I'd as soon dine at a common Ordinary: Give me a Woman of Condition, there's Pride as well as Pleasure in ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... nice little American girl, who has been brought up to cultivate her mind, to refine her taste, to care for her health, to be a helpful daughter and a good sister, to visit the poor and teach in Sunday schools; when a good, sweet, modest little puss of this kind combs all her pretty hair ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... judged: and if it is hugely animal still, that is because primitive men abound and will have their pasture. Since the lead is ours, the leaders must bow their heads to the sentence. Jealousy of a woman is the primitive egoism seeking to refine in a blood gone to savagery under apprehension of an invasion of rights; it is in action the tiger threatened by a rifle when his paw is rigid on quick flesh; he tears the flesh for rage at the intruder. The ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... versa, to reject as inconceivable whatever from its own nature is unimaginable. But as soon as it becomes intelligible, it ceases to be materialism. In order to explain thinking, as a material phaenomenon, it is necessary to refine matter into a mere modification of intelligence, with the two-fold function of appearing and perceiving. Even so did Priestley in his controversy with Price. He stripped matter of all its material properties; substituted spiritual ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... in much earnest prayer to tender your affections, to refine your nature, to make you very sensitive to the feelings of your child, and to help you to love the tender "olive plants" round about thy fireside. Some day there may be a vacant chair, and there can be no sweeter joy on earth to your sorrowing ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... pure, Their judgment nice, or their decisions sure; Merit they have to mightier works unknown, A style, a manner, and a fate their own. We, who for longer fame with labour strive, Are pain'd to keep our sickly works alive; Studious we toil, with patient care refine, Nor let our love protect one languid line. Severe ourselves, at last our works appear, When, ah! we find our readers more severe; For, after all our care and pains, how few Acquire applause, or keep it if they do! Not ...
— The Village and The Newspaper • George Crabbe
... home from the office. To walk with Katharine in the flesh would either feed that phantom with fresh food, which, as all who nourish dreams are aware, is a process that becomes necessary from time to time, or refine it to such a degree of thinness that it was scarcely serviceable any longer; and that, too, is sometimes a welcome change to a dreamer. And all the time Ralph was well aware that the bulk of Katharine was not represented in his dreams at all, so ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Nile's shore, Her yearly nurse; came back, inquired Amongst the doctors, and desired To see the temple, but was shown A little dust, and for the town A heap of ashes, where, some said, A small bright sparkle was abed, Which would one day (beneath the pole) Awake, and then refine the whole. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the waning of that first winter, began actually to refine his own superlative elegance by spraying his superior garments with perfume, by munching tiny confections reputed to scent the breath desirably, by a more diligent grooming of the always superb moustache, the little boy suspected no motive. He saw these works only ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... highly flavored fruit. He carried with him into the sterner regions of the north, all the fertilizing arts of southern refinement. He did every thing in his power to win his countrymen to the gay, the elegant, and gentle arts, which soften and refine the character of a people, and wreathe a grace round the loftiness of a proud and warlike spirit. He wrote many poems, which, unfortunately for the fulness of his fame, are now lost to the world; one, which is still preserved, called "Christ's Kirk of the Green," shows how diligently he had made ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... idea of assumption is the same. It is to be put on, primarily, by faith. It is given in Christ to simple belief. He that hath faith thereby has the righteousness which is through faith in Christ, for in his faith he has the one formative principle of reliance on God, which will gradually refine character and mould conduct into whatsoever things are lovely and of good report. That righteousness which faith receives is no mere forensic treating of the unjust as just, but whilst it does bring with it pardon and oblivion from past transgressions, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... God! Thou hast done clumsily in exalting children—such poor little simpletons—so high. Is it just and right that Thou shouldst reject the wise, and receive the foolish? But God our Lord has purer thoughts than we have; He must, therefore, refine us, as said the fanatics; He must hew great boughs and chips from us, before He makes such children and little ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... those Fools, who exclaim against Wine, And fly the dear sweets that the Bottle doth bring; It heightens the Fancy, the Wit does refine, And he that was first Drunk ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... should aim to cultivate their morals, refine their tastes, manners, habits. I wish to lift from them that ever-depressing sense of hopelessness which ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... all that is possible in realizing the national conceptions of the gods, the younger ones, forbidden to change the scheme of existing representations, and incapable of doing anything better in that kind, betake themselves to refine and decorate the old ideas with more attractive skill. Their aims are thus more and more limited to manual dexterity, and their fancy paralyzed. Also in the course of centuries, the methods of every ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... who begins her nervous degeneration by indulging herself in jealousy—which is really a gross emotion, however she may refine it in appearance—could be made to see the truth, she would, in many cases, be glad to use her will in the right direction, and would become in reality the beautiful character which her friends believe her to be. This is especially true because this ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... it there might be schools of design for improvement in ornamental manufacture, the development of architecture, and whatever aids to refine and give beauty to social life, including a simple academic system for the elementary branches of drawing and coloring, upon a scientific basis of accumulated knowledge and experience, providing models and other ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... to refine upon some particulars, especially concerning the ornaments of gardens, which I shall endeavor so to handle as that they may become useful and practicable, as well as magnificent, and that persons of all conditions and faculties, which delight in gardens, may therein encounter something for their ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... of this society," says Defoe, "should be to encourage polite learning, to polish and refine the English tongue, and advance the so much neglected faculty of correct language; also, to establish purity and propriety of style, and to purge it from all the irregular additions that ignorance and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 79, May 3, 1851 • Various
... thought, and prayer, may one more and more consciously and entirely control and determine his active life, and constantly refine and exalt it in quality. As this is done its potency increases, ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... the letter; Scripture is the letter inspired by the Spirit. What Jesus said in justification of his doctrine of the new birth is equally applicable to the doctrine of inspiration: "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." Educate, develop, and refine the natural man to the highest possible point, and yet he is not a spiritual man till, through the new birth, the Holy Ghost renews and indwells him. So of literature; however elevated its tone, however lofty its thought, it is not Scripture. Scripture is literature indwelt by the Spirit ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... They are better adapted, it must be owned, to please the many than the critical few, who demand more incisive treatment and a deeper consideration of the problems of life. And it is very fortunate that a writer who can reach the great public and entertain it can also elevate and refine its tastes, set before it high ideas, instruct it agreeably, and all this in a style that belongs to the best literature. It is a safe model for young readers; and for young readers there is very little in the overwhelming flood of to-day that is ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed. All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the human form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reveries of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the pagan world, the ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... for many years from the same roots; and although the canes from old stools, as they are called, produce less sugar than those of the first year's planting, the juice is clearer, and requires far less trouble to prepare and refine. Before another year came round, the boys made a pair of wooden rollers of eighteen inches in diameter. These were covered with strips of hoop iron, nailed lengthways upon them at short intervals from each other, thereby obtaining a better grip upon the canes, and preventing ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... pronounced a crime whose penalty was death. And Bruno, who, from the depths of infamous superstition, had risen into the pure light of heaven, to a theory whose principles, though they might not satisfy, could not fail to refine, elevate, and encourage the soul long groveling in the mire of ignorance, or languishing in the dark dungeons of Scholasticism,—Bruno died for the truth. More foolish than the savages of whom Montesquieu speaks, who ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... brighter world than this, With less of curse and much of noble bliss; For God's kind hand in all our conflicts here Is clearly seen and doubts must disappear; The end He has in view is most benign; The fire will dross consume and gold refine. ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... which was woven upon a background of surpassing natural beauty—the climax and gradual decrescendo of the year. He had emerged from that long period of semi-idleness in which he had been able to do no more than refine a mass of half-finished work; and was now feeling a fresh joy in a renewed and strong-flowing power; an excitement in the evolving of new ideas. September found ready for the printer five new works; the first of them and the biggest, his "Fifth Symphony," the andante of which must remain ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... wrath of God, if we aim at happiness at all. We must know, many of us, that strange shadow which falls upon us when we say, "I feel so happy to-day that some evil must be going to befal me!" It is true that afflictions must come, but they are not to spoil our joy; they are rather to refine it and strengthen it. And those who have yielded themselves to joy are often best equipped to get ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... public amusements for the masses is one that we ought seriously to consider. In Berlin, and in all other German cities, there are gardens and public grounds in which there are daily concerts of a high order, and various attractions, to which people can gain admittance for a very trifling sum. These refine the feelings, and cultivate the taste; they would be particularly useful in America in counteracting that tendency to a sordid materialism, which is one of our great ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... said, "it is no longer the fault of religion. There have been times when the church seemed afraid, but she is so no longer. Analyze, dissect, use your microscope or your spectrum till the last atom of matter is reached; reflect and refine till the last element of thought is made clear; the church now knows with the certainty of science what she once knew only by the certainty of faith, that you will find enthroned behind all thought and matter only one central idea,—that idea which the church has never ceased to ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... fit for warp or woof! Till cunning come to pound and squeeze And clarify,—refine to proof *2* The liquor filtered by degrees, While the world ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... half-lights, by courtesy, genius; talent which converts itself to money; talent which glitters to-day that it may dine and sleep well to-morrow; and society is officered by men of parts, as they are properly called, and not by divine men. These use their gifts to refine luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic, and piety, and love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they find beauty in rites ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the coincidence that while the Virgin was miraculously using the power of spiritual love to elevate and purify the people, Eleanor and her daughters were using the power of earthly love to discipline and refine the courts. Side by side with the crude realities about them, they insisted on teaching and enforcing an ideal that contradicted the realities, and had no value for them or for us except in ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... as are ordinarily expected in the employments of active life, he would seem, so far, in respect to his principles and his habits, to have an advantage over others, inasmuch as intellectual labor is, in itself, better suited to refine and elevate the affections, and removes one farther from the scenes and objects of temptation. If we add to this, that the student is usually under a more uniform superintendence, and comes more frequently and habitually under the influence of moral precept and religious ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... mine only; but I believe it to be common to all of us who are not seamen. With the seaman, wonder changes into fellowship and close affection; but to all landsmen, from youth upwards, the boat remains a piece of enchantment; at least unless we entangle our vanity in it, and refine it away into mere lath, giving up all its protective nobleness for pace. With those in whose eyes the perfection of a boat is swift fragility, I have no sympathy. The glory of a boat is, first its steadiness of poise—its assured standing on the clear softness of ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... in this second or purified light, that taste begins to exist. It is at this period of cultivation that the mind begins to perceive its true good; that the natural affections rectify, methodize, and refine, in a word, become moral affections, through whose medium, i.e. the moral sense, the soul perceives every object ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of - our Ideas of Beauty, etc. • Frances Reynolds
... product of industry. From the time the raw material leaves the earth in the form of iron ore, crude petroleum, logs, or coal, through all of the processes of production, it is owned by the industrial master, not by the worker. Workers separate the product from the earth, transport it, refine it, fabricate it. Always, the product, like the machinery, is the possession ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... glorious condition of being can we imagine than from impure to become pure? May I not forget that I am impure and vicious! May I not cease to love purity! May I go to my slumbers as expecting to arise to a new and more perfect day! May I so live and refine my life as fitting myself for a society ever higher ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... the young man who seeks the society of the loose and the dissolute. There is at all times and everywhere open to him a society of persons of the opposite sex of his own age and of pure thoughts and lives, whose conversation will refine him and drive from his bosom ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... also the phenomena of the kathode rays, have obliged us to refine our machinery of minute particles by including therein particles at least a thousand times lighter than atoms of hydrogen. The term electron was suggested, a good many years ago, by Dr Johnstone Stoney, for the unit charge of electricity ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... and is a steady growth throughout life; that memory should be cultivated by learning extracts from classic authors; that great care should be taken to make the amusements and environments of the child such as to elevate and refine, as well as properly to develop its powers; that at the suitable time some calling should be chosen for which the youth has evident fitness; that religion is the basis of morals, therefore careful attention should ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... interest that we are caught up in spirit and carried to the Attic Plain and the hills of Latium. They are useful, not because they teach us anything that may not be learned and learned more accurately from modern books, but because they move the mind, fire the heart, ennoble and refine the imagination in a way which nothing else has power to do. They are sources of inspiration; they first roused the modern mind to activity; and the potency of their influence can never cease to be felt by those whose aptitudes lead them to the love of intellectual ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... he is to be thwarted in what would best raise and refine him. That great, bright leading star of a well-placed affection is not to be allowed to help him through all the storms and quicksands ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... while do trouble the Aire, do withall purge and refine it: And our trust is that through the most wise Providence and blessing of GOD, the Truth by our so long continued agitations, will be better cleared among us, and so our service will prove more acceptable to all the Churches of ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... confession of her own intractable character, without religious faith to ennoble it, without even imagination to refine it—the unconscious disclosure of the one tender and loving instinct in her nature still piteously struggling for existence, with no sympathy to sustain it, with no light to guide it—would have touched ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... as given by proper food, sunlight, and harmonious thoughts-to a million-year Goal. It needs twelve years of normal healthful living to effect even slight perceptible change in brain structure, and a million solar returns are exacted to sufficiently refine the cerebral tenement ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... quite; That gives surprise, and this delight, Humour is odd, grotesque, and wild, Only by affectation spoil'd; 'Tis never by invention got, Men have it when they know it not. Our conversation to refine, True humour must with wit combine: From both we learn to rally well, Wherein French writers most excel; [2]Voiture, in various lights, displays That irony which turns to praise: His genius first found out the rule For an obliging ridicule: He flatters ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... hopes as I had built his body and mind and character, sure that contact with the world would only refine and strengthen him." ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... obscured. The only Englishman who could have rivalled La Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere was the Earl of Chesterfield, and he only could have done so from his very intimate connexion with France; but unfortunately his brilliant genius was spent in the impossible task of trying to refine a boorish young Briton, in "cutting blocks ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... Clarke, with the delicacy and artistic taste of refine womanhood, has in this work shown great ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... than more important changes, Hetty perceived the circumstances, and wondered at them in her own simple way. Her ambition was a little quickened, and the answer was as much out of the usual course of things as the question; the poor girl attempting to refine beyond her strength. ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... the soul precedes that of the mind. They wish to make their children good before they make them clever; and good by the feelings of the heart rather than the instruction of the head. Every care is taken to refine and strengthen the sentiments and instincts, the conscience, good sense and taste, as well as the affections, filial piety, friendship, and the love of Nature. Spiritual and moral ideals are inculcated by means of innocent and simple ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... characters, do not develop any further the type which we have found in St. Teresa and St. Juan. St. Francis de Sales has been a favourite devotional writer with thousands in this country. He presents the Spanish Mysticism softened and polished into a graceful and winning pietism, such as might refine and elevate the lives of the "honourable women" who consulted him. The errors of the quietists certainly receive some countenance from parts of his writings, but they are neutralised by maxims of a different tendency, ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... features of the old story, but modernized, individualized, and carrying on his shield an unobtrusive little moral. In "Jack the Dullard" he comes nearest to his primitive prototype, and no visible effort is made to refine him. In "The Most Extraordinary Thing" he is the vehicle of a piece of social satire, and narrowly escapes the lot which the Fates seem especially to have prepared for inventors, viz., to make the fortune of some unscrupulous clown while they themselves die in ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and which, having so taught us, enable us to recall them ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... should waft it to the skies, although each thread would be immeasurably above its present condition, the relation of one to another would still be the same. If the baser wool should be transmuted into gold, the very same process would refine and sublimate the precious metal, in a corresponding ratio; and the equilibrium of God's ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... The darling of the public began to think more of his art and less of his popularity. Less impetuous, less fecund, perhaps, in melodic invention, he began to study how to wed dramatic situations and music. This led him to enrich his harmonies, and to refine his instrumentation, which in his earlier works is frequently coarse and vulgar in the extreme. At this stage he gave us "La Forza del Destino" and "Ada." Now the hack writers of opera books would no longer suffice him. He had already shown high appreciation of the virtue which lies in a good ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... refine upon this statement of the matter. The course of external events, in so far as it affects one person, whether as proceeding from or reacting upon him, reveals character, and has meaning as an interpretation of inward life. It is a series outward indeed, but parallel with the states of ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... learned and polite persons of the nation, complain to your Lordship, as first minister, that our language is imperfect; that its daily improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily corruptions; that the pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied abuses and absurdities; and that, in many instances, it offends against every part of grammar."—Dean Swift, to the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... distinguished and cultivated men in England, together with the succession of brilliant pageants, masks, and processions, which he witnessed at court and at Lord Leicester's mansion, must have done much to refine his tastes and broaden his outlook ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... the dreamer. In her, life was so puissant and rich, that action seemed necessary to its glorious development—action, but still in the woman's sphere—action to bless and to refine and to exalt all around her, and to pour whatever else of ambition was left unsatisfied into sympathy with the aspirations of man. Despite her father's fears of the bleak air of England, in that air she had strengthened the delicate health of her childhood. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... intellectual one. "God hath made of one blood, all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth."—(Acts 17: 26.) Much of our happiness, and usefulness in this world arises from this quality which man possesses over the animal creation. And just in proportion, as we shall cultivate, and refine our social and intellectual natures, just in that proportion, shall we rise above the level of the savage and ...
— A Narrative of The Life of Rev. Noah Davis, A Colored Man. - Written by Himself, At The Age of Fifty-Four • Noah Davis
... is no time for thoughtlessness; and it is especially applicable to the youth of a race that has its future to make. The Negro who stands on the higher rounds of the ladder of education is pre-eminently fitted for this work of inspiration—helping to mold and refine, "working out the beast" and seeing that the "ape and tiger die," rescuing from vice and all that the ...
— The Educated Negro and His Mission - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 8 • W. S. Scarborough
... from the permanently good; which requires that a distinction be made between what must have some excellence because so many people like it, and what is good in a book whether many people like it or not. Such discrimination may not help the young novelist to make money, but it can refine judgment and ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... providing beautiful music, pictures, and ornaments, and so resting satisfied in a somewhat indolent feeling of goodness, and not troubling ourselves with too much effort of reason. A love of the beautiful undoubtedly tends to elevate and refine the mind, but the follies of the false love and the dangers of an inordinate love are numerous and deadly. It is absurd that a man should either be or pretend to be absolutely absorbed in the worship of a dado or a China tea cup so as to care for nothing else, and to be unable to do anything ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... beauty, and beauty was truth. He never wearied of maintaining the uplifting quality resident in the Sunday afternoon contemplation of works of painting and sculpture, and nothing, to his mind, was more calculated to ennoble and refine human nature than the practice of art itself. The Doctor was one of the trustees of the Art Academy; he went to every exhibition, and dragged as many of his friends with him as could be induced to listen to his orotund commentaries; and he had almost ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... present all the While the Metamorphosis is under the Operation, and to look on very attentively, and that they may have the less Reason to doubt, to perform the whole Operation with their own Hands, while I stand at a Distance, and don't so much as put my Finger to it. I put them to refine the melted Matter themselves, or carry it to the Refiners to be done; I tell them beforehand, how much Silver or Gold it will afford: And in the last Place, I bid them carry the melted Mass to several Goldsmiths, ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... had prepared for salvation by sending perfection embodied in Christ. We may not attach ourselves to any system or effort as absolutely true or good, nor condemn any as utterly false. All knowledge and arts are related to religion. They refine man and aid him in his emancipation from ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... will ... refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried." Zech. xiii, 9. "I bought the field ... and weighed him the money, even seventeen shekels of silver. And I ... weighed him the money in the balances." Jer. xxxii, 9, 10. A shekel was 224 grains, ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... Por-ce que cil pardon, fut issi gran, si s'en esmeurent mult li cuers des genz, et mult s'en croisierent, porce que li pardons ere si gran. Villehardouin, No. 1. Our philosophers may refine on the causes of the crusades, but such were the genuine ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... nature was not disarmed by this angel of gentleness, whose ugliness day by day decreased, driven out by the ineffable expression of moral qualities which shone upon her face. She was all soul. The spirit of prayer seemed to purify her and refine those homely features and make them luminous. Who has not seen the phenomenon of a like transfiguration on sacred faces where the habits of the soul have triumphed over the plainest features, giving them that spiritual illumination whose light comes from the purity and nobility of the inward thought? ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... I understand it, is the character of the Christian philosophy—for philosophy I must think it deservedly called. It is admitted into the mind with ease. But once being there, its operation is continually to exalt and refine it—leading it upwards forever to some higher point than it has hitherto arrived at. I do not deny an elevating power to your philosophy when once an inmate of the soul—I only assert the difficulty of receiving it on the part of ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... this well-covered incident spurred the colonel's group to extend and refine their activities. Their idea was to build a radiation-detection instrument in an empty wing tank and hang the tank on an F-47. Then when a UFO was reported they would fly a search pattern in the area and try to establish whether or not a certain sector of the sky was more radioactive ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... What I wished to explain was that, if a man in a humble situation seeks to refine his pronunciation of English, and finds himself in consequence taxed with pride that will not brook the necessities of his rank, at all events, he is but integrating his manifestations of pride. Already in his Sunday's costume he has begun this manifestation, and, as I ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... hard diamonds in a mass that cometh out of gold, when men pure it and refine it out of the mine; when men break that mass in small pieces, and sometime it happens that men find some as great as a peas and some less, and they be as hard as ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... chapel, of quadrangle and cloister. She does not mistake parsimony for economy; she does not neglect to regard the duty that lies upon her, as the guardian and instructress of youth, to set before their eyes models of fair proportion, noble structures which shall exercise at once an influence to refine the taste and the sentiment and to enlarge the intellect. She acknowledges the claims of the future as well as of the present, and does not erect that which the future, however it may advance in constructive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... young men of their own age and became intimately acquainted with them, morals were purer, marriages of affection were much more frequent, and the state of married life was much more congenial, than in any other century. Young men paid court to the older ladies, to refine their manners and sharpen their intellects, but not for any immoral purpose. To a certain extent women were more world-wise when they reached the marriageable age, and inspired respect and admiration rather than passion and desire ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... Literature refines, science deepens, various devices extend it. Those who act on the knowledge at hand are the men of affairs. And all the while, research studies their results, artists express subtler perceptions, critics refine and adapt the general culture of the times. There is no other way but through this ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... of staid and decorous subsidence from the energetic restlessness of the seventeenth—an age in which men eschewed revolution and innovation, and devoted themselves assiduously to conserve, consolidate, polish, refine, and make the ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... dare say you will agree with me, that as there is no Moral in these Jests, they ought to be discouraged, and looked upon rather as pieces of Unluckiness than Wit. However, as it is natural for one Man to refine upon the Thought of another, and impossible for any single Person, how great soever his Parts may be, to invent an Art, and bring it to its utmost Perfection; I shall here give you an account of an ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... through a great many changes during the last few weeks. He had begun to grow rather captivated by Miss Chivvey and in his efforts to polish, refine and educate her had become rather carried away himself. But towards the end she began to show signs of rebellion; she was bored, though impressed. He took her to a serious play and explained it all ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... that should regulate clothing, the rules of cleanliness, the advantages of early rising and domestic exercise, as readily communicated as the principles of mineralogy, or rules of syntax? Are not the rules of Jesus Christ, applied to refine domestic manners and preserve a good temper, as important as the abstract principles of ethics, as taught by Paley, Wayland, or Jouffroy? May not the advantages of neatness, system, and order, be as well illustrated in showing how they contribute to the happiness of a family, ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... needs refine. "Why, no—you would have made me do it, wrung out the last drop. You would have bullied me and shamed me into being all that I might have been. I see that now." He spoke as if in wonder, with quickening speech. "Pauline, I haven't been entirely not worth while. Oh, yes, I know! ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... privacy was invaded by some patronizing, loud-voiced nouvelle-riche with a low-bred physiognomy that no millions on earth could gild or refine, and manners to match; some foolish, fashionable, would-be worldling, who combined the arch little coquetries and impertinent affectations of a spoilt beauty with the ugliness of an Aztec or an Esquimau; some silly, titled old frump who frankly ignored his tea-making wife and daughters and talked ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... La Gioconda those subtle and poisonous curves. Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had any one told him of this picture that 'all the thoughts and experience of the world had etched and moulded therein that which they had of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias?' He would probably have answered that he had contemplated none of these things, ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... fruition consists in the activity of turning an apt material into an expressive and delightful form, thus filling the world with objects which by symbolising ideal energies tend to revive them under a favouring influence and therefore to strengthen and refine them. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... soon found that excess is followed by pain and repentance. My fasting had weakened digestion, and rendered it inactive. My body swelled, my water-jug was emptied; cramps, colics, and at length inordinate thirst racked me all the night. I began to pour curses on those who seemed to refine on torture, and, after starving me so long, to invite me to gluttony. Could I not have reclined on my bed, I should indeed have been driven, this night, to desperation; yet even this was but a partial relief; for, not yet accustomed to my ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... camaraderie. Speech, like a man, should be alive. It need not, of course, be boisterous. It may be intense in a quiet, modest way. But if it too sedulously observes all the Thou shalt not's of the rhetoricians, it will refine the vitality out of itself and leave its ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... But don't you see, then, that you must stand up for art all the more unflinchingly if you intend to write plays that will refine the theatre-going public, or create a new one? That is why I can't endure to have you even seem to give ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... democratic spirit through beauty. Its enemies are of its own household; those who by nature and training should be its helpers hinder it instead. Why do they do this? Because their fastidious, aesthetic natures are outraged by a crudeness which they themselves could easily refine away if they chose; because also they recoil at a lack of conformity to existing conventions—conventions so hampering to the inner spirit of the Newness, that in order to incarnate at all it must of ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... commit suicide in the year 2022 without permission from the Board. Gulflex and other oil companies protest to Number One as they say we might open up a hole that will spill all the petroleum out of the earth all at once, so fast they couldn't refine it. A spark could ignite it and set the globe on fire like it was a brandied Christmas pudding. But then another earthquake shakes Earth from the rice fields of China to the llamas in Peru just when it looks as if we were about to be tossed ...
— Operation Earthworm • Joe Archibald
... how to cure and prevent redness and roughness, and to make the skin soft, smooth, white and delicate, producing a perfectly natural appearance. It teaches how to cure and refine a coarse skin, so that it will ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... "Refine Vincart!" repeated Claudet, sternly, "what business have you to mix up her name with those creatures to whom you refer? Mademoiselle Vincart," added he, "has nothing in common with that class, and you have no right, Monsieur de Buxieres, to use ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... air, swarm with countless myriads of undistinguished and indistinguishable human creatures, until the beauty of the world is befouled and the glory of the Heavens bedimmed. To stem back that tide is the task now imposed on our heroism, to elevate and purify and refine the race, to introduce the ideal of quality in place of the ideal of quantity which has run riot so long, with the results we see. "As the Northern Saga tells that Odin must sacrifice his eye to attain the higher ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... words and manners. The typical Londoner of Queen Anne's day was still rude, and a little vulgar in his tastes; the city was still very filthy, the streets unlighted and infested at night by bands of rowdies and "Mohawks"; but outwardly men sought to refine their manners according to prevailing standards; and to be elegant, to have "good form," was a man's first duty, whether he entered society or wrote literature. One can hardly read a book or poem of the age without feeling this superficial elegance. Government still had its opposing Tory and Whig ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... art should lend its aid. The aim of nature supposes already that we ought spontaneously to advance towards the beautiful, although we still avoid the sublime: for the beautiful is like the nurse of our childhood, and it is for her to refine our soul in withdrawing it from the rude state of nature. But though she is our first affection, and our faculty of feeling is first developed for her, nature has so provided, nevertheless, that this faculty ripens slowly and awaits its full development until the understanding ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... brain sees to it that the thoughts within do immediately dispose of facial tissue without. Mental brightness gives facial illumination. The right act or true thought sets its stamp of beauty in the features; the wrong act or foul thought sets its seal of distortion. Moral purity and sweetness refine and beautify the countenance. The body is a show window, advertising and exhibiting the soul's stock of goods. Nature condenses bough, bud and shrub into black coal; compacts the rich forces of air and sun and soil into peach and pear. In the kingdom of morals, there are people ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... life, that thrilled in every movement, was contentment to the other perceptions; the thought of a soul, bringing with it that other of death, was cold and inconsistent. Such mortal perfection loses its full effect, unless we can look upon it as physically immortal: as soon as we begin to refine our ideas into the abstract, we sully ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... religious improvement, to raise a protesting voice against that policy of the states denominated Christian, and especially our own, which has, through age after age, found every conceivable thing necessary to be done, at all costs and hazards, rather than to enlighten, reform, and refine the people. He thinks that nothing can more strongly betray a judgment enslaved, or a time-serving dishonesty, in those who would assume to dictate to such an advocate and to censure him, than that sort of doctrine which tells him that ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... the cockneys chosen should be tailors, he will of course think it his duty, on the old established equation, to murder eighteen. And, here, in this attention to the comfort of sick people, you will observe the usual effect of a fine art to soften and refine the feelings. The world in general, gentlemen, are very bloody-minded; and all they want in a murder is a copious effusion of blood; gaudy display in this point is enough for them. But the enlightened connoisseur is more refined in his taste; and from our art, as from all the other liberal ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... notice of the boy-tradesman, there had been a growing friendship between the two; and of late years Lord Driffield's interest in David's development and career had become particularly warm and cordial. He had himself largely contributed to the subtler sides of that development, had helped to refine the ambitions and raise the standards of the growing intellect; his advice, owing to his lifelong commerce with and large possession of books, had often been of great practical use to the young man; his library had for years ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... last chapter was fully carried out in the West India colonies. Manufactures were so entirely interdicted from the date of their coming under the crown of Great Britain, that the colonists were not permitted even to refine their own sugar, and still less to convert their cotton into cloth. The necessary consequence was that women and children could have no employment but that of the field. This, of course, tended to sink both mother and child far lower in the scale of civilization than would have ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... the summer noon, and the flower stands will be gay and fragrant; and the shaded parlour will be the cool retreat of the wearied husband, when he comes in to rest from his professional toils. There will stand the books destined to refresh and refine his higher tastes; and there the music with which the wife will indulge him. Here will they first feel what it is to have a home of their own—where they will first enjoy the privacy of it, the security, the freedom, the consequence in the eyes of ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... This marr'd one heedless day, This heart take thou to scan Both within and without: Refine with fire its gold, Purge Thou its dross away— Yea, hold it in Thy hold, Whence none ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... industrial training extricate him from the hopeless mass of ignorant unskilled labour where competition is always hottest and most perilous, it will teach him, better than he could know without it, the relative value of things; it will so elevate his thoughts and refine his tastes that the path of duty in its roughest and steepest places, will ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... is to refine and elevate the mind, so we should cultivate our hearts and minds and live to bless those we meet. We should neither flatter nor despise those ...
— A Slave Girl's Story - Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold. • Kate Drumgoold
... gentle. Hush my spirit. Refine my manner. Let me have Christ in my bearing and my very tones as well ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... excluded, because our conscience was shocked at the notion that some part of it might have been produced by slaves. But what was thus forbidden directly, was allowed circuitously; we were willing to refine and export this slave-grown sugar, and to take the hemp and tallow of Russia in its stead, which seemed to be an easy way of letting down our consciences. This savoured of hypocrisy. If the United States ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... tribe; that a champion had now appeared to vindicate their rights; that a herald had raised his voice to immortalize their renown. The distant or hostile tribes resorted to an annual fair, which was abolished by the fanaticism of the first Moslems; a national assembly that must have contributed to refine and harmonize the Barbarians. Thirty days were employed in the exchange, not only of corn and wine, but of eloquence and poetry. The prize was disputed by the generous emulation of the bards; the victorious performance was deposited in the archives of princes and emirs; and we may read ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... gave a loose to appetites that were not only sordid, but inhuman. There was a sort of odd contrast in his disposition: for while he practised cruelties sufficient to make the mind shudder with horror, he was fond of those amusing arts which soften and refine the heart. He was particularly addicted, even from childhood, to music, and not totally ignorant of poetry; chariot-driving was his favourite pursuit; and all these he frequently exhibited ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... passions, to carry him beyond rules of judgment; nor weakness, to cause him to fall short of doing justice: Therefore he has (as was said) his judgments for her by weight, and his indignation by measure: But yet this weight and measure is not suited to her constitution, not with an intent to purge or refine her; but it is disposed according to the measure and nature of her iniquity, and comes to sweep her, as with the besom of destruction, until she is swept off from the face ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... delicate and ingenuous spirit, it is necessary for you to get rid of them as fast as possible. You must shut your heart against the Muses, and be content to feed your understanding with plain, household truths. In short, you must not attempt to enlarge your ideas, or polish your taste, or refine your sentiments; but must keep on in one beaten track, without turning aside either to the right hand or to the left. "But I cannot submit to drudgery like this: I feel a spirit above it." 'Tis well: be above it then; only do not repine that ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... as little a gainer by the revolution as morals. The pieces which were best calculated to form and refine the minds of the people, all abound with maxims of loyalty, with respect for religion, and the subordinations of civil society. These are all prohibited; and are replaced by fustian declamations, tending ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... Virgil was used to pour out a great number of verses in the morning, and pass the day in retrenching the exuberances, and correcting inaccuracies; and it was Pope's custom to write his first thoughts in his first words, and gradually to amplify, decorate, rectify, and refine them. Others employ, at once, memory and invention, and, with little intermediate use of the pen, form and polish large masses by continued meditation, and write their productions only, when, in their opinion, they have completed them. This last was ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... distorting influences of biologically aborted reformers as well as the wastefulness of seducers," Dr. Edward A. Kempf recently declared. "Man arose from the ape and inherited his passions, which he can only refine but dare not attempt to castrate unless he would destroy the fountains of energy that maintain civilization and make life worth living and the world worth beautifying.... We do not have a problem that is to be solved by making repressive laws and executing them. Nothing will be ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... unable to go abroad without being hissed and pelted by the mob, and it is hard for a minister to convince himself of the admiration of a nation when a strong bodyguard is necessary to secure him from the constant danger of personal attacks. Bute's character did not refine under the tests imposed upon it. His objectionable qualities grew more and more unpopular. The less he was liked the less he deserved to be liked. Adversity did not magnify that small soul. In his mean anger he sought for mean revenge. Every person who owed an appointment to the ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... will love him that shal trace or unfeather me; I meane through clearenesse of judgement, and by the onely distinction of the force and beautie of my discourses. For my selfe, who for want of memorie am ever to seeke how to trie and refine them by the knowledge of their country, knowe perfectly, by measuring mine owne strength, that my soyle is no way capable of some over-pretious flowers that therein I find set, and that all the fruits of my increase ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... is the breeze. The air in the valleys immediately beneath them is pure and pleasant; but the least climb, even a hundred feet, puts you on a plane with the atmosphere itself, uninterrupted by so much as the tree-tops. It is air without admixture. If it comes from the south, the waves refine it; if inland, the wheat and flowers and grass distil it. The great headland and the whole rib of the promontory is wind-swept and washed with air; the billows of ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... Coleridge elsewhere says, "has preserved a purity of meaning to many terms of natural objects. Without this holdfast, our vitiated imaginations would refine away language to mere abstractions." This is merely saying that our Bible, designed for common people centuries ago, is a monument of Saxon English. Clearly that is an accident of our translation, and not an essence of the Bible itself. As much may ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... behold, there was all manner of gold in both these lands, and of silver, and of precious ore of every kind; and there were also curious workmen, who did work all kinds of ore and did refine it; and thus they ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... voting, but are the expressions of course, criminal and evil natures, excited by the desire for victory. The admission to the polls of delicate and tender women would, without injury to them, tend to refine and elevate the politics in which they took a part. When, in former times, women were excluded from social banquets, such assemblies were scenes of ribaldry and excess. The presence of women has substituted for them the festival of the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... have first to mould her physical frame, and then, as the strength she gains will permit you, to fill and temper her mind with all knowledge and thoughts which tend to confirm its natural instincts of justice, and refine its natural ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... beauty; but that was not enough for the poets of the Renaissance: they determined to sing not only with beauty, but with care. The movement began in the verse of MAROT, whose clear, civilized, worldly poetry shows for the first time that tendency to select and to refine, that love of ease and sincerity, and that endeavour to say nothing that is not said well, which were to become the fundamental characteristics of all that was best in French poetry for the next three hundred years. In such an exquisite little work of art as his epistle in three-syllabled ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... first names, like servants. Think what an hourly pin-prick of insult that must be. Ever since her letter came, I've been thinking about it, the things she told me, about what happens when they try to raise themselves and refine themselves, how they're made to suffer intimately for trying to be what I thought we all wanted all Americans to be." He looked at Marise with troubled eyes. "I've been thinking how it would feel to be a Negro myself. What a different life would be in front of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... it. For though to a reasonable extent and in certain circumstances, all enjoyments are harmless, they degenerate into crimes, when excessively indulged, and particularly when the imagination is overstrained to improve their zest, or to refine or exalt them beyond the limits which Nature and sobriety prescribe. But this can no more be alledged as a reason for renouncing the moderate use of the enjoyment, than the excesses of the drunkard or glutton for the rejection of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... shoulders. You would crown them with a pretty garland of flowers, such as I like for Aimee. You should wear a light-coloured muslin dress, very low and very short, up to the knees, your arms bare, and the skirts exceedingly full (the body of which would be transparent, and refine and reveal the divine shape of your angelic bosoms), your legs, perfectly naked, would be visible amongst a mass of folds of muslin, and would be covered by little open-work stockings of rose-coloured silk, fastened at the instep by bows, like the dress, ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... they did not seem to be actors. They did not refine living into a cult, with every pleasure and pain classified and weighed out and valued. No, they actually lived. It was hard to realize this, but in the end she did, and with ever increasing wonder, with also a beginning of envy and hunger. But there was still another thing even ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... beyond his depth,—and this, not so much from fear, as from ignorance. His insight is anything but profound. He has no suspicion of deeper waters. Through the whole course of the present story, he never attempts to fathom Crosbie's feelings, to retrace his motives, to refine upon his character. Mr. Trollope has learned much in what is called the realist school; but he has not taken lessons in psychology. Even while looking into Crosbie's heart, we never lose sight of Courcy Castle, of his Club, of his London life; ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and licentious expressions, which, during the civil wars had been introduced into literature as well as into manners. It was praiseworthy of some high-born ladies in Parisian society to endeavour to refine the language and the mind. But there was a very great difference between the influence these ladies exercised from 1620 until 1640, and what took place in 1658, the year when Molire returned to Paris. The Htel de Rambouillet, and the aristocratic ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... moment—before the brain had begun to refine on the situation—what was asked of him. He was to be Melrose's tool and accomplice in all that Melrose's tyrannical caprice chose to do with the lives of human beings; he was to forfeit the respect of good men; he was to make an enemy of Harry Tatham; ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of this country is much better than that which we bring home from our plantations: for all the sugar that is made here is clayed, which makes it whiter and finer than our muscovada, as we call our unrefined sugar. Our planters seldom refine any with clay, unless sometimes a little to send home as presents for their friends in England. Their way of doing it is by taking some of the whitest clay and mixing it with water, till it is like cream. With this they fill up the pans of sugar that are sunk ...
— A Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... broad shelves, for the reception of such necessaries of the dining-room as were not placed upon the table. The early buffets were sometimes carved with the utmost elaboration; the Renaissance did much to vary their form and refine their ornament. Often the lower part contained receptacles as in the characteristic English court-cupboard. The rage for collecting china in the middle of the 18th century was responsible for a new form—the high glazed back, fitted with shelves, for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... abandon certain phases of religion. We will purify, refine and beautify our religion, just as we have our table etiquette and our housekeeping. The millennium will come only through the scientific acceptance of piety. When Church and State separated it was well, but when Science and Religion ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... blood-full, throbbing Russian literature come from; this Russian painting of Verestchagin, that smites us like a sword with the consciousness of the tremendous meaning of existence? Is there a barbaric force left in the world that we have been daintily trying to cover and apologize for and refine into gentle agreeableness? ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... elevate, refine, and ennoble its recipient is a curse instead of a blessing. A liberal education only renders a rascal more dishonest, more dangerous. Educated rascality is infinitely more of a menace to society ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... reasons against copious profanity of speech. Here you have the artistic reason, and, by implication, that which forbids its use in literature—namely, its ineffectiveness. But though she selects, Mrs. Woods does not refine. She exhibits the life of the travelling show in its habitual squalor as well as in its occasional brightness. How she has managed it passes my understanding: but her book leaves the impression of confident familiarity with this kind of life, of knowledge not merely accumulated, but assimilated. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... What is a good wife, a good mother? Is she not a gift out of heaven, sacred and delicate, with affections so great that no measuring line short of that of the infinite God can tell their bound; fashioned to refine and soothe and lift and irradiate home and society and the world; of such value that no one can appreciate it, unless his mother lived long enough to let him understand it, or unless, in some great crisis of life, when all else ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... demonstration, to exhibit the Riseholme spirit in its full panoply, and then crush into dazzled submission any potential rivalry. She meant also to exert an educational influence, for she allowed that Olga had great gifts, and she meant to train and refine those gifts so that they might, when exercised under benign but autocratic supervision, conduce to the strength and splendour of Riseholme. Naturally she must be loyally and ably assisted, and Georgie realized ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... giving her an education then unrivalled, so that rumour asserted that, through the knowledge of languages, enabling her to penetrate into the mysteries of the older world, she had become a sorceress, like the Celtic druidesses; and how as Abelard and Heloise sat together at home there, to refine a little further on the nature of abstract ideas, "Love made himself of the party with them." You conceive the temptations of the scholar, who, in such dreamy tranquillity, amid the bright and busy spectacle of the "Island," lived in a world of something like shadows; and that for one who ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... anatomists are perceivable at the end of the wonderful net, where all the arteries close in a terminating point; which arteries taking their rise and origin from the left capsule of the heart, bring, through several circuits, ambages, and anfractuosities, the vital spirits, to subtilize and refine them in the ætherial purity of animal spirits. Nay, in such a studiously meditating, musing person, you may espy so extravagant raptures of one, as it were out of himself, that all his natural faculties for that time will seem to lie suspended ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... cropped, rain-freshened grass, after finding it already dry; and the chairs, turned away from the broad alley, the main drive and the aspect of Park Lane, looked across the wide reaches of green which seemed in a manner to refine upon their freedom. They helped Charlotte thus to make her position—her temporary position—still more clear, and it was for this purpose, obviously, that, abruptly, on seeing her opportunity, she ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... failed to refine your soul, Juan? Has the terrible judgment of which my father's statue was the minister ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... their dirty skill to freight such a drunken ship with so much gilded dirt"—was one of the mildest of his phrases, as, "breathing out these and many other passions," he harangued those who had "no thought, no discourse, no hope, and no work but to dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... will honour him.' The word translated 'honour' is more correctly rendered 'glorify.' Is not that the end of a trouble which has been borne in company with Him; and from which, because it has been so borne, a devout heart is delivered even whilst it lasts? Does not all such sorrow hallow, ennoble, refine, purify the sufferer, and make him liker his God? 'He for our profit, that we should be partakers of His holiness.' Is not that God's way of glorifying us before heaven's glory? When a blunt knife is ground upon a wheel, the sparks fly fast from the edge held down upon the swiftly-revolving ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... give him the world raw and unsubdued and he can transform it again as he has. He can build again everything on land and sea, the farms, towns, and cities, and the floating palaces. He can again dig out the mines and refine the silver and gold, mould the clay, smelt the ore and shape the iron. His needs and his power, however, give him no claim to the ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... horrors and atrocities of war thus brought into the bosom of a peaceful home. All the amenities and charities of domestic life are outraged, are annihilated. All that is dearest to man; all that tends to refine, to soften him—to make him a noble and a better being—all these are trampled under foot by a brutal soldiery—all these are torn from his heart for ever! He will tell you that he detests war so much that he almost despises its glories; and that he detests it because he has known its evils, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various
... aesthetically [58] so brilliant world of Greater Greece, as if anticipating Plato, he has, like the philosophic kings of the Platonic Republic, already something of the monk, of monastic ascesis, about him. Its purpose is to fit him for, duly to refine his nature towards, that closer vision of truth to which perchance he may be even now upon his way. The secrecy again, that characteristic silence of which the philosopher of music was, perhaps not inconsistently, a lover, which enveloped the entire action ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... prizes for those who should, on the following day, distinguish themselves by any festive performances; the tables of the antechamber were covered with gold and pearls, and robes and garlands decreed the rewards of those who could refine elegance ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... of manners too thorough and genuine to be thought of as a separate endowment,—that is to say, if the individual himself be a man of station, and has had gentlemen for his father and grandfather. The sturdy Anglo-Saxon nature does not refine itself short of the third generation. The tradesmen, too, and all other classes, have their own proprieties. The only value of my criticisms, therefore, lay in their exemplifying the proneness of a traveller to measure one people by the distinctive characteristics of another,—as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various |
