"Rightness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon the right man and the right action. This may seem a trite thing to say in praise of a great genius; but when you reflect that Shakespeare is read throughout the civilized world, the simple fact that the splendor of his poetry is balanced by the rightness of his message becomes significant and impressive. It speaks not only for Shakespeare but for the moral quality of the multitudes who acknowledge his mastery. Wherever his plays are read, on land or sea, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the autumn, when nature is dying for the winter, he feels strong and hopeful, holds his head erect, and walks with a vigorous step, though the flaunting dahlias discourage him greatly? I do not ask for the physical causes: those I might be able to find out for myself; but I ask, Where is the rightness and fitness in the thing? Should not man and nature go together in this world which was made for man—not for science, but for man? Perhaps I have some glimmerings of where the answer lies. Perhaps "I see a cherub that sees it." And ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... that the walks of the Compound and the steps leading to Miss Powers' study were of a two times border; inside part show tiny yellow and white hemispheres, outside part show much large yellow globes. When I behold Chrysanthemums to me alone I say, "Can it be English flower-book is of a rightness? 'That a heart to desolation is now left?' Perhaps the foreign game we cannot play." ...
— Seven Maids of Far Cathay • Bing Ding, Ed.
... of the rightness or wrongness is nothing in comparison to my own deep knowledge, my innate conviction that it was wrong. But we will not talk of that any more, if you please. It is done—my sin is sinned. I have now to put it behind me, and be truthful for ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... determination of laws of music by the morality of the past. Every act, every impulse, of virtue and vice, affects in any creature, face, voice, nervous power, and vigour and harmony of invention, at once. Perseverance in rightness of human conduct, renders, after a certain number of generations, human art possible; every sin clouds it, be it ever so little a one; and persistent vicious living and following of pleasure render, after a certain number of generations, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... legal counsellor. I would now take up his words, and from the point of view of the friend and Brother in the Lord say a little to my younger Brethren, engaged or about to be engaged in assistant Curacies, concerning the Christian rightness and Christian wisdom of taking the sort of line which ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... thought a patriot at Cork. Where the enforcement of the law is not popularly deemed coercion the law-breaker does not suppose himself to be in the right, and still less do his associates think him morally praiseworthy. A thief does not in general hold any theory about the rightness of larceny, and there is no society in the United Kingdom at least who deny the moral validity of the ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... caused war had not sober patriots on both sides of the Atlantic, aghast at this shocking possibility, smoothed the way to an understanding, and had not the British Government itself acknowledged the rightness of the demand for arbitration. So the danger vanished, but Roosevelt, and every other thoughtful American, said to himself, "Suppose England had taken up the challenge, what had we to defend ourselves with?" And we compared the long roll of the great British ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... similar, to which unquestionably he would give the name of art. He must have seen plays like those of Aristophanes, with the chorus dressed up as Birds or Clouds or Frogs or Wasps, and he might undoubtedly have claimed such plays as evidence of the rightness of his definition. Here were men imitating birds and beasts, dressed in their skins and feathers, mimicking their gestures. For his own days his judgment would have been unquestionably right; but again, ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... inviting spell of Italy, by all the old academic literature of travel and art of the Salvator Rosas and Claudes. This is the main tribute I may pay in a few words to an impression of which a sort of divine rightness of oddity, a pictorial felicity that was almost not of this world, but of a higher degree of distinction altogether, affected me as the leading note; yet about the whole exquisite complexity of which I can't ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... The rightness of the Council in selecting Denry as mayor was confirmed in a singular manner by the behaviour of the football and of Callear at the opening ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... standpoint from which to consider the nature of Sin. It suggests to us, that the essence of much sin is conservatism, or atavism: that it is rooted in the tendency of the instinctive life to go on, in changed circumstances, acting in the same old way. Virtue, perfect rightness of correspondence with our present surroundings, perfect consistency of our deeds with our best ideas, is hard work. It means the sublimation of crude instinct, the steady control of impulse by such reason as we possess; and ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... of the essential rightness of the League and the Covenant and of the inherent right-mindedness of the American people, that he could not believe that the people would sanction either rejection or emasculation of the Treaty if they could be made to see the issue in all the sincerity of its motives and ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... colours sharpened; it is hard and yet blurred, like a bad steel engraving. Charlotte's senses, so intensely, so supernaturally alive in Jane Eyre, are only passably awake in Shirley. It has some of the dulness of The Professor, as it has more than its sober rightness. But, for three-and-twenty chapters, the sobriety, the rightness triumph. There are no improbabilities, no flights of imagination, none of the fine language which was the shame when it was not the ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... seen, or visions witnessed; automatic motor phenomena occur; and it always seems, after the surrender of the personal will, as if an extraneous higher power had flooded in and taken possession. Moreover the sense of renovation, safety, cleanness, rightness, can be so marvelous and jubilant as well to warrant one's belief in a radically ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... an exception to this; for, in spite of many years abroad, he remained always characteristically American. He comes next to Palmer in strength and rightness of achievement; his work, like his life, was ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... treatment of boy and girl respectively. Probably we are on the whole correct in instituting no deep distinction of any kind in the nurture, either physical or mental, of children during their early years. Nor can there be any doubt, at least so far, as to the rightness of educating them together, and allowing them to compete, in so far as we allow competition at all, freely both ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... contrasted with the merely childish guiltlessness of Bernardo. Beatrice rises to her full height in the fifth act, dilates and grows with the approach of danger, and fills the whole scene with her spirit on the point of death. Her sublime confidence in the justice and essential rightness of her action, the glance of self-assured purity with which she annihilates the cut-throat brought to testify against her, her song in prison, and her tender solicitude for the frailer Lucrezia, are used with wonderful dramatic ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... is much else besides being virtuous or vicious. In many of the characters in which some of the finest and most singular qualities of humanity would seem to have reached their furthest height, their morality was the side least worth discussing. The same may be said of the specific rightness or wrongness of opinion in the intellectual order. Let us condemn error or immorality, when the scope of our criticism calls for this particular function, but why rush to praise or blame, to eulogy or reprobation, when we should do better simply to explore and enjoy? Moral ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... the sea good-humouredly calm, and I enjoyed the voyage amazingly. And as day by day we drew nearer to the scene of action, my doubts of success grew less and less, until I had a conviction of the rightness of the step I had taken, which would have carried me ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... excellent quality of the champagne, and the inexhaustible supply of oysters. At the musical evening the music was as admirably rendered as it was completely neglected. And at both parties only those people were present as to whose social status and absolute "rightness" there could be no question. Indeed the dancer, whose foot had been trodden upon at the former, might console herself with the thought that none but a noble boot had caused her pain; while at the latter the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 18, 1891 • Various
... about our artist's ears, the already celebrated portrait of "Madame G.?" It is an experiment of a highly original kind, and the painter has had in the case, in regard to what Mr. Ruskin would call the "rightness" of his attempt, the courage of his opinion. A contestable beauty, according to Parisian fame, the lady stands upright beside a table on which her right arm rests, with her body almost fronting the spectator and her face in complete profile. She wears an entirely ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... the Buddhist brother's jewels is the Dharma, i.e. the Law or Essential Rightness revealed by the Buddha. That the Master laid a firm practical foundation for his religion cannot be denied, and if Jews and Christians reverence the Ten Words given through 'Moses,' much more may Buddhists reverence the ten ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... they are related to the intellect, we have Augustine's definition (De Vera Relig. xxxvi), "Truth is a supreme likeness without any unlikeness to a principle": also Anselm's definition (De Verit. xii), "Truth is rightness, perceptible by the mind alone"; for that is right which is in accordance with the principle; also Avicenna's definition (Metaph. viii, 6), "The truth of each thing is a property of the essence which is immutably attached to it." The definition that "Truth ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... he was speaking, and Erica went away quickly to see to the necessary preparations. Herr Haeberlein had come, and she did not for a moment question the rightness of her father's decision; but yet in her heart she was troubled about it, and she could see that both her aunt and Tom were troubled too. The fact was that for some time they had seen plainly enough that Raeburn's health ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... present to him, and never not seen. It was involved, as we explained already, in the doctrine of identity and iteration, because the mental series exactly tallies with the material series. It required an insight that could rank things in order and series; or, rather, it required such rightness of position, that the poles of the eye should coincide with the axis of the world. The earth has fed its mankind through five or six millenniums, and they had sciences, religions, philosophies; and yet had failed to see the correspondence of meaning between every part and every ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... place that the light comes from, you will make it a cut or cavity; if you put it on the opposite side, you will make it a ridge or mound; and the complete success of the effect depends less on depth of shade than on the rightness of the drawing; that is to say, on the evident correspondence of the form of the shadow with the form that casts it. In drawing rocks, or wood, or anything irregularly shaped, you will gain far more by a little patience in following the forms carefully, though ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... raised out of the grave, and cried out again, 'Lord, how couldst thou find out such a word as this?' for I was filled with admiration at the fitness and at the unexpectedness of the sentence. The fitness of the word; the rightness of the timing of it; the power and sweetness and light and glory that came with it also, were marvellous to me to find. I was now for the time out of doubt as to that about which I was so much in doubt before. I seemed now to stand upon the same ground with other sinners, and to have as ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... Jewish name. He was indeed a Jew, and, young though he was, had all the depth, self-control, and steadfastness of purpose of that strange race. He also had, as the sequel will show their indifference as to the rightness of the means employed so long as the end in ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... shall inherit the earth." Just so far as we are able to prove our rightness, the world—nay the whole universe of God—is ours. Our Heavenly Father has never said: "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther, upon the road to knowledge." Everything invites us; get wisdom, get understanding, and to thy knowledge add virtue are the recommendations from inspired ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... although neither of them developed the organic view of humanity, which is implied in their doctrines, into an explicit philosophy, still the moral life of the individual is for each of them the infinite life in the finite. The meaning of the universe is moral, its last might is rightness; and the task of man is to catch up that meaning, convert it into his own motive, and thereby make it the source of his actions, the inmost principle of his life. This, fully grasped, will bring the finite and the infinite, morality and religion, ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... the sixteenth century Robert Brown and William the Silent had denounced the persecution of sincere belief. Early Baptists like Busher and Richardson had finely denied its validity. Roger Williams in America, Milton in England had attacked its moral rightness and political adequacy; while churchmen like Hales and Taylor and the noble Chillingworth had shown the incompatibility between a religion of love and a spirit of hate. Nor had example been wanting. The religious freedom of Holland was narrow, as ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... landscape, incorporates itself subtly into the unconscious thought of men, becomes corpuscular in the blood of the language. It comes down to us in the accent of those who have loved and quoted it, invigorated by our subtle sense of the permanent rightness of its phrasing and our knowledge of the pleasure it has given to thousands of others. The more it is quoted, ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... by any malign possibility they could be supposed to be doing wrong. She could not connect wrong with either her love or Winn's. If there was one quality more than another which had distinguished it, it had been its simple sense of rightness. She had seen Winn soften and change under it as the hard earth changes at the touch of spring. She had felt herself enriched and enlarged, moving more unswervingly than ever toward her oldest prayer—that she might, on the whole, be good. She hardly prayed at all about ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... useful handbook to Bergson. The extent of my introductory remarks is an almost involuntary tribute to the material and provocative nature of Bergson's discussions, just as the frequent use by the author of this book of the actual words of Bergson are a tribute to the excellence and essential rightness of his style. The Frenchman, himself a free and candid spirit, would be the last to require unquestioning docility in others. He knows that thereby is the philosophic breath choked out of us. If we read him in the spirit in which ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... appeared in the pathway and came to meet me, smiling, and said 'Well?' to me, and lifted me, and kissed me, and put me down, and led me by the hand, there was no amazement, but only an impression of delightful rightness, of being reminded of happy things that had in some strange way been overlooked. There were broad red steps, I remember, that came into view between spikes of delphinium, and up these we went to a great avenue between ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... envisage them, the fact to which they point, but a substitute for or representative of that—an anticipation of or prevision of it, a symbol of a fact. Their own kind or degree of reality is sometimes called 'validity'—a term I do not like: it might be more simply named 'rightness' with the connotation of a certain incumbency and imperativeness as well as of an appeal or adjustment to our nature as we know it; or perhaps all we can say is that their reality—it seems a paradox ...
— Progress and History • Various
... The moral rightness of this man's life was worthy of all praise; but in spite of some intellectual acumen, Knight had in him a modicum of that wrongheadedness which is mostly found in scrupulously honest people. With him, truth seemed too clean and ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... well as great, and I will give you a little instance of the rightness of his thought. In a Dialogue which he wrote, in his teaching days, he supposes Prince Pepin to ask the question, "What is the liberty of man?" and ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... Defoe. He had discussed them with his father and at the latter's suggestion had set down his impressions. His father had assured him that it was well done, but had said to Mrs. Irons that it showed "a remarkable rightness of mind and temper and unexpected aptitude in the ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... sight of blood and wounds steels the nerves of the soul, the horrors of war stimulate the spirits, so that instead of the falsehood and cowardice of enervation, the old heroic virtues are restored ... fear of God, martial bravery, obedience, up-rightness of mind, constancy, truth ... manlike courage, manly pity, and all that is great and good in humanity.—E. v. ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... was not right when you were "lenient" and gave them protection. You cannot mean that. The rightness or wrongness must be a matter of law, not of personal discretion, and for you to attempt to substitute your discretion is to set up a little autocracy m place of the settled laws of the land. This would justify a charge of "Kaiserism" right here ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... his youth, about forty years ago—as it was immediately before and after the discovery of gold. That his record per se is strikingly vivid and faithful is the first general impression which his novels make upon the reader, whether English or colonial. There is about them much of that air of 'rightness' which Hall Caine has noted to be one of the most enduring qualities of good fiction, whatever its literary style may be. They are cheerful, virile, soundly moral, and take far more account of the good than of the bad in human nature. There is no fondness of the sensational for its own sake. ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... harm." He felt of his necktie, and settled his collar as well as he could, thankful for the friendly darkness. "Indeed, I am all right!" he assured her, earnestly. "Trivets aren't a circumstance to me, as far as rightness is concerned. Now if you'll forget all about it, Miss Montfort, please, I shall be as happy as the bounding roe,—or the circumflittergating cockchafer!" he added, as a ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... unusual and a very high type of mind that can be satisfied simply with the doing of the good act, without the return of gratitude. On the other hand, the employe, if he be a man of pride, may resent charity even in such a general form as this, and may, with an element of rightness, prefer that the money to be expended be put into his pay envelope, instead. If it is simply a case of better working conditions, something that improves him as an efficient worker for the management, he will feel that this welfare work is in no sense something ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... foremost of his literary countrymen, is confessedly a master in that craft. The judges to whom I do submit our case are those Englishmen and others whose conscience blends with their judgment, and who determine such questions as this on their essential rightness which has claim to the first and decisive consideration. For much that is irregular in the arrangement and sequence of the subject-matter, some blame fairly attaches to our assailant. The erratic manner in which lie launches his injurious statements ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... And the result had been a strained relation between him and Barry. The boy had felt himself misunderstood. Gordon had sat in judgment. Constance had tearfully agreed with Gordon, and Mary, torn between her sense of Gordon's rightness, and her own championship of Barry, had been strung to ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... training, he has won the suffrages of the most fastidious and academic judges of excellence in his profession. The secret is, I suppose, that the lawlessness, the amateurishness, the indifference to standards were on the surface,—apparent to everybody,—the soundness and rightness of his practice ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... his mother has ruined; he does not care for it a pin: he is not the less confident of a nature that is immortal. In virtue of this belief in life, he is indifferent to the form of it. When, later in the play, he seems to fear death, it is death the consequence of an action of whose rightness he ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... doctrine of the 'categorical imperative' would express his feelings more accurately than Bentham's formulae. But his reasoning was different. He declares himself to be a utilitarian in the sense that, according to him, morality must be built upon experience. 'The rightness of an action,' he concludes, 'depends ultimately upon the conclusions at which men may arrive as to matters of fact.'[150] This, again, means that the criterion is the effect of conduct upon happiness. Here, however, we have the old difficulty that the estimate of happiness varies widely. Fitzjames ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Germany was really planning: we were only talking.... I believe in the Pinkerton press, and the other absurd presses. They have the unthinking rightness of the fool. Of course they have. Because the happenings of the world are caused by people—the mass of people—and the Pinkerton press knows them and represents them. Intellectual people are always thinking above the heads of the people who make movements, so they're nearly always out. The Pinkerton ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... SOCRATES: And if rightness attaches to any of them, should we not speak of a right opinion or right pleasure; and in like manner of ...
— Philebus • Plato
... thunders of law or terrors of judgment. Let it unveil for you not only the depths of the love of God, but the darkness of your own selfish rebellion from Him. Measure your crooked lives by the perfect rightness of Christ's. Learn how you have missed the aim which He reached, who could say, 'I delight to do Thy will, O my God!' And let that same infinite love that teaches sin announce frank forgiveness and prophesy perfect purity. Then, with heart fixed ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... realize neither the fallacy of many taken singly nor the conflict of all taken together. His points are often cleverly and faithfully put, and our attention is so riveted on this cleverness and faithfulness that we take for granted the rightness of his deductions, slovenly, illogical or false though they may be. What we most remark in his books is how the purely artistic element in his nature—of a very high grade and very true instincts—is dwarfed of full development and stunted of full results by the theorizing literary bent which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... imitation of all those classes of society which profess to have opinions. It would thus become an established element in the temper of the age. Nor need we fear that the result of this would be any flaccidity of conviction, or lethargy in act. A man would still be penetrated with the rightness of his own opinion on a given issue, and would still do all that he could to make it prevail in practice. But among the things which he would no longer permit himself to do, would be the forcible repression in others ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... idea of WISDOM or PRUDENCE (phronesis)—thoughtfulness, rightness of intention, following the guidance of reason, the right direction of the energy or will.—"Republic," bk. iv. ch. vii., bk. vi. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... impression given by your numerous testimonials as to the character of the word gradely, is one of decency, order, rightness, perfectness. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various
... balance of pleasures over pains, and degrees of happiness the proportions of this balance, it will be sufficient if I confine myself to the word 'pleasure.' One statement, then, of the test of the morality or rightness of an action is that it should result in a larger amount of pleasure than pain to all those whom it affects. But it is at once objected that there is the greatest variety of pleasures and pains, intellectual, moral, aesthetic, sympathetic, ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... Agnostic, is as incredible as a black horned devil, an active material anti-god with hoofs, tail, pitchfork, and Dunstan-scorched nose complete. To believe completely in God is to believe in the final rightness of all being. The ethical system that condemns the ways of life as wrong, or points to the ways of death as right, that countenances what the scheme of things condemns, and condemns the general purpose in things as it is now ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... itself is only a stage toward something better. It is but the impulse, God-given I believe, toward a far more vital contact with the truth. We shall one day forget all about duty, and do every thing from the love of the loveliness of it, the satisfaction of the rightness of it. What would you say to a man who ministered to the wants of his wife and family only from duty? Of course you wish heartily that the man who neglects them would do it from any cause, even were ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... to suppose that the Greek worship, or seeking, was chiefly of Beauty. It was essentially of Rightness and Strength, founded on Forethought: the principal character of Greek art is not Beauty, but Design: and the Dorian Apollo-worship and Athenian Virgin-worship are both expressions of adoration of divine Wisdom and Purity. Next to these great deities rank, in power ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... triumphant consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit. He expected to die; he was willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced toward the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country's cause and a heart devoid ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... but never meanly. Over-reaching is justifiable when the other fellow has equal opportunities to be "smart"; lying, tyranny—never. And though the opposites of all these laudable practices come to pass, he must frown on them in public, deny their rightness even to the last cock-crow— ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... to rise on Archie strolling back from the golf-links in the cool of an August evening. From time to time he sang slightly, and wondered idly if Lucille would put the finishing touch upon the all-rightness of everything by coming to meet him and sharing ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... the species for the species," and without significance per se; we are "episodes in an experience greater than ourselves," "incidental experiments in the growing knowledge and consciousness of the race." Mr. Wells's fundamental act of faith is a firm belief in "the ultimate rightness and significance of things," including "the wheel-smashed frog on the road, and the fly drowning in the milk." In other words, all is just as it has to be; regrets, remorses and discontents exist only for the "unbeliever" in this truth, while, speaking for ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... old body a fierce and unexpected resentment against David. He had chosen a course and abided by it. He had even now no doubt or falterings. Just as in the first anxious days there had been no doubt in him as to the essential rightness of what he was doing. And now—This was what came of taking a life and moulding it in accordance with a predetermined plan. That was for God ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... never before felt the care of his father a sacrifice. There had been humiliating moments, hard moments, but always he had been sustained by a sense of the rightness of the thing that he was doing ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... is a serene and meek charity to all creatures. He is not a preaching saint—still less a persecuting one: not even an anxious one. Of his prayers we hear little—of his wishes, nothing. What he does always, is merely the right thing at the right moment;—rightness and kindness being in his mind one: an extremely exemplary saint, to ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... have an accompanying charm, either the best thing in them is this very charm, or there is some rightness or utility possessed by them;—for example, I should say that eating and drinking, and the use of food in general, have an accompanying charm which we call pleasure; but that this rightness and utility is ...
— Laws • Plato
... written from one of the houses where she was a governess, express precisely the same feeling, and movement of mind. But notice the instinctive rightness and swiftness of Emily's, the blurred ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... intolerable emptiness and hypocrisy in a life of slavish devotion to the opinions of society. Perhaps he feels that his passions govern him, and not he his passions. The higher life stirs within him, and he begins to question the rightness of things. He learns to appreciate for the first time that the natural impulses may not be the noblest, and that custom may not be an ideal guide. His soul is astir with the problem of life—the result ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... rush to the conclusion that Shelley was a prig. But the prig is a man easily wounded by blows to his self-esteem, not by the miseries and imperfections of humanity. Shelley, no doubt, was more convinced of his own rightness than any other man of the same fine genius in English history. He did not indulge in repentance, like Burns and Byron. On the other hand, he was not in the smallest degree an egolator. He had not even such an innocent egoism as Thoreau's. He ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... lives socially, he has in practice to outgrow it, and this lands him in a serious theoretical dilemma. He has to learn to live with others who differ from him in their dogmatizing. Social life plainly would become impossible if all rigidly insisted on the absolute rightness of their own beliefs and the absolute wrongness ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... representations to do the commonest duty of the most wearisome calling in a hearty and hopeful spirit. This is the work of the right imagination; and towards this work every imagination, in proportion to the rightness that is in it, will tend. The reveries even of the wise man will make him stronger for his work; his dreaming as well as his thinking will render him sorry for past failure, and ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... life, 13. Definition of the terms of moral value. Moral goodness: the fulfilment of an economy of interests, 15. Moral goodness and pleasure, 16. Rightness or virtue, 18. Morality ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... be gathered and by confronting the first pronouncement by others fetched from every quarter of experience, has power to minimise the error and reach a practically just estimate of absent values. This achieved rightness can be tested by comparing two experiences, each when it is present, with the same conventional permanent object chosen to be their expression. A love-song, for instance, can be pronounced adequate or false ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... but which are concerned with the perception of beauty, in forms and colours, musical sounds, human faces and limbs, words majestic or sweet; and this sense of beauty may go further, and may be discerned in qualities, regarded not from the point of view of their rightness and justice, but according as they are fine and noble, evoking our admiration and our desire; and these are ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... perpetuated this traffic in flesh on the specious reasoning that a court judgment of half a millennium ago is as good today as when it was handed down. Never once did anyone have the moral courage to re-examine that old decision. Never once did any human question the rightness of that decision. None of us are immune. We all based our conduct upon an antiquated law and searched no further. Everyone was happy with the status quo—or at least not so unhappy that they wanted to change it. Even I would have been content had it not ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... was safe, the sorrow of other homes, devastated and mourning, weighed heavily upon Mary Ballard, and she needed to listen to the stirring editorials of the Tribune, which Bertrand read with dramatic intensity, to bolster up her faith in the rightness of this war between men who ought to be brothers in their hopes and ambitions for the national life of their ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... other. "There is no fault nor folly of my life," says Mr. Ruskin, "that does not rise up against me, and take away my joy, and shorten my power of possession, of sight, of understanding. And every past effort of my life, every gleam of rightness or good in it, is with me now, to help me in my grasp of this ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... intellectually. Any action would be welcome after the long tradition of inaction which our spineless politics had nurtured; brave and effective action with an ethical halo about it had an irresistible appeal, both to the intellect and the emotions. Step by step he convinced us of the rightness of the action, and we went with him, although we did not accept his philosophy. To divorce action from the thought underlying it was not perhaps a proper procedure and was bound to lead to mental conflict and trouble later. Vaguely we hoped that Gandhiji, being essentially ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... not a question of courage, but one of mental process. Some people come of a caste to whom war or the idea of fighting for their country is second nature. They take it for granted, like death and taxes. If they ever permitted themselves seriously to question the rightness of it; to submit patriotism and courage to an acid analysis, they might suddenly turn arrant cowards. How much harder is it, then, for people who have never even faced the idea of it before to be suddenly placed up against ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... the last two words as she made her light way out into the shed in a fictitious search for Jerry. He stood staring after her and wondering. It was inconceivable that Anne, by sheer force of a mind absolutely convinced of its own rightness, should have had such a grip on everybody she came in contact with. It had been Anne's house next door. She had spent her summers in it, and even Charlotte had imbibed through its walls the pronouncements of a ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... threw his emphasis where men need it thrown,—not on abstract ideas, but on action. His teaching was always as to conduct. Purity, forgiveness, rightness of ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... the universal mind. And in the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, for example, instead of a sparse handful of persons disturbingly conscious of being in a minority, as now, a magnificent and proud majority had collected, deeply aware of its rightness and its correctness. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... any organism, is to be set right—to have all its parts brought into harmony with each other; the one comfort is to know this cure in process. Rightness alone is cure. The return of the organism to its true self, is its only possible ease. To free a man from suffering, he must be set right, put in health; and the health at the root of man's being, his rightness, is to be free from wrongness, that is, from sin. A man is right when there ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... theme more perfectly adapted to his mood and to his powers. There are no novel ideas in "Snow-Bound," nor is there any need of them, but the thousands of annual pilgrims to the old farmhouse can bear witness to the touching intimacy, the homely charm, the unerring rightness of feeling with which Whittier's genius recreated his own lost youth and painted for all time a true ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... defy critical augury, in their unending quest of beauty and truth. That they succeed, now and then, in giving a permanently lovely embodiment to their vision is surely a more important fact than the rightness or wrongness of whatever artistic theory they may have ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... on both sides, and neither believe nor reject any thing, because any other person, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by Heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision. I forgot to observe, when speaking of the New Testament, that you should read all the histories of Christ, as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... went mad almost from sheer despair; yet whenever the Master Player called, they sprang to their places with a new-born belief that he who had been so successful in so many long-past battles would be right in the end with his old rightness, though he had been wrong so ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... stone for building and the practice of mummification. It was probably for this reason, and not from any abstract sense of "wonder at the magic of art," as Professor Lethaby claims, that "ideas of sacredness, of ritual rightness, of magic stability and correspondence with the universe, and of perfection of form and proportion" came to be associated with ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... in morality." That is, attention and choice are essential elements of interest in the pedagogical sense. On the other hand, we may say of the same boy, in the sociological sense: "He has not discovered his health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness interests." We thus imply that interests, in the sociological sense, are not necessarily matters of attention and choice. They are affinities, latent in persons, pressing for satisfaction, whether the persons are conscious of them either generally or specifically, or not; they are indicated ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Christ may take up this lamentation, "We have piped to you, and you have not danced; lamented to you, and you have not mourned." You use to tell over some words in your prayers, and are not so serious in any approach to God, as in twenty other things of the world. Whatever you plead of your heart's rightness, and have recourse to it, when your conversation cannot defend you, yet your hearts are the worst of all, and have no uprightness towards God; for you know that what duties you go about, it is not from an inward principle, but from education, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... against going to church in any but your best clothes. It's easy to conceive wrongness in the application of it. It's easy to conceive a person wanting to go to church and likely to benefit by going to church, but staying away because of feeling too shabby. But you can't help seeing the rightness at the bottom of it—the idea of presenting yourself decently at worship, as before princes. ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... equal to fifty millions. When they arrived at Mortgrange, the moon was indeed still in the sky, but the honey-pot, to judge by the appearance of the twain, was empty: twain they were, and twain would be. The man wore a look of careless all-rightness, tinged with an expression of indifferent triumph: he had what he wanted; what his lady might think of her side of the bargain, he neither thought nor cared. As to the woman, let her reflections be what they might, not a soul would come to the knowledge of them. Whatever it was ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... to prove to them that they will become absolutely free only when they have abjured their freedom in our favor and submit to us absolutely. Thinkest Thou we shall be right or still lying? They will convince themselves of our rightness, for they will see what a depth of degrading slavery and strife that liberty of Thine has led them into. Liberty, Freedom of Thought and Conscience, and Science will lead them into such impassable ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... proceeded out of dear Lady Mildmay's gentle lips. But the undercurrent of wonder and of reproach that there had been in the warning May Quisante now almost missed. By an effort at last she realised its presence, the naturalness of it, and its rightness. But still it seemed to her a little conventional, something that might be supposed to be appropriate, but was not, if the truth were faced. "Alexander and I have never been like that to one another—at least never for more ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... injustice. She had seemed to hate him. If she hadn't been his mother Mr. Twist would have been certain she hated him, but he still believed that mothers couldn't hate their children. It was stark against nature; and Mr. Twist still believed in the fundamental rightness of that which is called nature. She had accused him of gross things—she, his mother, who from her conversation since he could remember was unaware, he had judged, of the very existence of such things. Those helpless children ... Mr. Twist stamped as he strode. ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... Great faith, rightness of mind, influence over other men, and finally, personal success and satisfaction come of service to the ideals of the profession. Were these strengths reflected throughout the officer body, it could well happen that because of the shining example, the American people would become ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... the women laugh, and their laughter does not displease, for whatever women do in whatever circumstances appears to have a rightness of its own. It seems right that they should scream when danger to themselves is imminent, and it seems right that they should laugh when the danger ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... some fundamental truth of political science, and then employing it with merciless logic for the illustration or refutation of the practice of the present. The central idea here was one gathered from the political science of the Greeks. The good of the community is the only test of the rightness of an institution. It is justified if it secures that end, unjustified if it does not: or, to use the language of religion, holy in the one case, devoid of sanctity in the other. And an institution is not a mere ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... only with great difficulty; and he suffered much from depression and melancholy. This man, however, never appears in the pictures; when once in his studio, alone facing his canvas, Watts is final, absolute, an undisturbed and undistracted unity, conscious of that overwhelming "rightness" known to a Hebrew prophet. Whatever Time or Death may have in store for him or any man, there riding swiftly above them is Judgment the Absolute One; whatever theories may be spun from the perplexed mind of the magazine writer ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... international tension was greater than ever before. If The Leader could doubt the rightness of any of his actions, he doubted it then. There was great danger of war. Prime Minister Winston had said flatly that The Leader must withdraw his demands or fight. The Leader was greatly agitated. He demanded my prediction. I considered ...
— The Leader • William Fitzgerald Jenkins (AKA Murray Leinster)
... to go out, clothed in Thy robes of perfect rightness and with our hearts in adjustment with ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... not a few tears for poor Miss Smith-Waters's disappointment. That is the worst of living a life morally ahead of your contemporaries; what you do with profoundest conviction of its eternal rightness cannot fail to arouse hostile and painful feelings even in the souls of the most right-minded of your friends who still live in bondage to the conventional lies and the conventional injustices. It is the good, indeed, who are most against you. Still, Herminia steeled her heart to tell ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... of virtue and vice, affects in any creature, face, voice, nervous power, and vigour and harmony of invention, at once. Perseverance in rightness of human conduct renders, after a certain number of generations, human art possible; every sin clouds it, be it ever so little a one; and persistent vicious living and following of pleasure render, after a certain number of generations, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... consummate. Often the word has a fulness of significance that gives the reader a shock of appreciation. This is always so in those simplest odes which we have taken as the heart of the author's work. Without such wonderful rightness, simplicity of course is impossible. Nor is that beautiful precision less in passages of description, such as the landscape lines in Amelia and elsewhere. The words are used to the uttermost yet with composure. And a certain justness of ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... Dagonet, both, from Ralph's earliest memories, so closely identified with the old house in Washington Square that they might have passed for its inner consciousness as it might have stood for their outward form; and the question as to which the house now seemed to affirm their intrinsic rightness was that of the social disintegration expressed by widely-different architectural physiognomies at the other end of Fifth Avenue. As Ralph pushed the bolts behind him, and passed into the hall, with its dark mahogany doors and the quiet ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... with the whip-snapping of the ring-master, but with the consummate art that conceals art. When his prosodic effects are obvious they lose their power; we can see how the trick is done and we do not marvel. But when we feel vaguely the haunting quality of a melodious line or the perfect metrical rightness of a phrase without knowing why the melody haunts us or the phrase just fits, then we both marvel and applaud; then the poet's gift, his divine authorization, is patent, and we ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... Southern Senator and statesman sat in his chair at his desk with a look of self-esteem that had its value. None doubted. All were great men; some, no doubt, were greater than others; but all were statesmen and all were supported, lifted, inspired by the moral certainty of rightness. To them the universe was serious, even solemn, but it was their universe, a Southern conception of right. Lamar used to say that he never entertained a doubt of the soundness of the Southern system until he found that slavery could not stand a war. Slavery was only a part ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... with which the goal is reached. It is like an accumulation of evidence, a constellation of associations. AB foretells C; but ABCDEF rushes yet more strongly upon G. So it is that the irresistibleness, the "unalterable rightness" of a piece of music increases from beginning ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... exposition of Psalm cx. as for me final. And that exposition guarantees at once a typical mystery latent in Gen. xiv. and the rightness of its development in the passage ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... born five years before me because then it would have spoiled everything," said Honor, securely confident of the eternal rightness of the scheme of things. "You would have been marching around in overalls when I was born, and when I was ten you would have been fifteen, and you wouldn't have looked at me,—and now you'd be through college and engaged to some ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... reference to the consequences of action as bearing on human progress and evolution, which is to deny the very theory he wishes to uphold. No intuitionist could have spoken more strongly. Then we are assured that we "feel" rightness, or that "right is right"—apparently as a simple irresoluble quality of certain actions—and with same breath, that "it is better for ourselves and others to act on these rules," where he jumps off to utilitarianism ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... No one spoke but working men, gentlemen I should call them, in every sense of the term. Even I was perfectly astonished by the courtesy, the reverence to Maurice, who sat there like an Apollo, their eloquence, the brilliant, nervous, well-chosen language, the deep simple earnestness, the rightness and moderation of their thoughts. And these are the Chartists, these are the men who are called fools and knaves—who are refused the rights which are bestowed on every profligate fop.... It is God's cause, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... and Southern States of America has the special interest for English boys of having been a struggle between two sections of a people akin to us in race and language—a struggle fought out by each side with unusual intensity of conviction in the rightness of its cause, and abounding in heroic incidents. Of these points Mr. Henty has made admirable use in this story of a young Virginian planter, who, after bravely proving his sympathy with the slaves, serves with no less courage and enthusiasm under Lee and ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... was a big, florid man, who moved about a committee hearing chamber with the ponderous smoothness of a luxury liner. He was never visited by a single doubt about the rightness of his chosen course—no matter how erratic it might appear to an onlooker. His faith in his established legislative procedures and in the established tenets of Science was complete. Since he wore the shield of both ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... his name—should it really leak out, despite all his precautions—would come to stand for atheism and immorality, a catchword of ill-omen for a century or two; but he smiled on, relying upon the inherent reasonableness and rightness ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... me than likening me to Tullus. I sometimes wish we were all like him, unplagued by imagination, innocent of Greek, quite sure of the admirableness of admirably administering the government, and of the rightness of everything Roman. What does he think of Propertius's peccadilloes, by the way? He is a friend of ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... 2. There is the rightness of their will, by which they are conformed to the justice of God. Hence, it follows that, in a certain sense, their pain is voluntary, and ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... last issue, each play in a separate volume, is right because (1) The print, paper, spacing, and simplicity of binding, are suited to the dignity of the work; (2) The edition has had brought to it fulness of knowledge and rightness of judgment; (3) Each volume is light to handle and easy to hold, ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... that name, seems indeed to be Mr. Chorley's, and is one of his very best papers, I think. There is to me a want of colour and thinness about his writings in general, with a grace and savoir faire nevertheless, and always a rightness and purity of intention. Observe what he says of 'many-sidedness' seeming to trench on opinion and principle. That, he means for himself I know, for he has said to me that through having such largeness of sympathy ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... Quentin from the Warden down were the three that rotted there together in solitary. And here at the end of my days, reviewing all that I have known of life, I am compelled to the conclusion that strong minds are never docile. The stupid men, the fearful men, the men ungifted with passionate rightness and fearless championship—these are the men who make model prisoners. I thank all gods that Jake Oppenheimer, Ed Morrell, and ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... sharply marked limitations, some areas of his mind very broad, some dogmatically narrow. Opinionated, obstinate, impulsive, of not very sound judgment, yet dictatorial because supremely certain of his rightness—courageous, unselfish, sincere—that was the way she now saw the editor of ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... and told her so with a growing pleasure in the rightness of her perceptions. "Peyton is altogether different from the men of the stage," he developed her observation; "and it is a capital thing he did play football; for, in the next year or so, until he grows used to your life, he'll have a collection of men to knock down. I'd like to tell you whatever ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... picture, these two, that fitted with peculiar rightness into the mood of Nature at that moment. Youth was king, and with all his followers had clambered over winter and seized the earth. The red remainders of autumn were almost over-powered. Standing with his hands behind him and his ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... fearlessness, their complacent rusticity, their childish notions of the uses of wealth, their personal modesty and communal vanity, their happy oblivion to world standards, their extravagance of speech, their political bigotry, their magisterial down-rightness, their inflammability, and their fine self-reliance. They saw these traits, we say, reflected in him as in a flattering hand-glass, perceived the blemishes rather plainer than the ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... have seen me wearing it in the dear old days. Greeny brown it was in colour; but it wasn't the colour that drew your eyes to it—no, nor yet the shape, nor the angle at which it sat. It was just the essential rightness of it. If you have ever seen a hat which you felt instinctively was a clever hat, an alive hat, a profound hat, then that was my hat—and that ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... a bench outside the door of the auberge. He could hear the voice of the landlord inside, grumbling and growling, to what purport he couldn't determine. But it wasn't difficult to guess; and before Duchemin was finished he had testimony to the rightness of his surmise, finding himself the cynosure of more than a few pair of eyes set in the ill-favoured faces of natives ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... the Doge said, in whispered abstraction, using the French which so exactly expresses the rightness of an inner feeling that will not let one do a thing however much he may wish to. Then a wave of confusion passed over his face, evidently at the echo of his thoughts in the form of words come unwittingly from ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... manner sprung from God, and that God is the Father of men as well as gods, full sure he would never conceive aught ignoble or base of himself.... Those few who hold that they are born for fidelity, modesty, and unerring rightness in dealing with the things of sense, never conceive aught base or ignoble of themselves." He means that, for the real Stoic, self-respect is the necessary consequence of his intellectual conception of his place in the universe, and that self-respect must as inevitably result in virtue. ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... whole of her proud, faithful, obedient fabric he divined honour and exultation. Poised upon uncertainty, she was sure. The camber of her white-scrubbed decks, the long, clean sheer of her hull, the concave flare of her bows—what was the amazing joy and rightness of these things? And yet the grotesque passengers regarded her only as a vehicle, to carry them sedatively to some clamouring dock. Fools! She was more lovely than anything they would ever see again! He yearned to drive her endlessly ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... in everything else comes from long sustained effort after rightness and comes unsought. It never ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... their daughters, even as their mothers taught them. There are no recipes for exact proportions and mixtures, no thermometer for controlling temperatures, no stencil or pattern set down upon paper for laying out the designs. The perfection of the finished work depends upon the potter's sense of rightness and the skill developed by practicing the methods of her ancestors with such variation as her own ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... came. And by staying steady and true through the worst that came, they would be of the greatest service. The Holy Spirit in them would reach out and talk to that outer crowd. He would make clear to them their awful sin in killing Jesus, the spotless purity and rightness of the absent Jesus, and the terrific fact that the prince of the world whom they rally to so faithfully is actually judged, doomed and damned. Then He adds, "now in a little bit I'll be gone from you. Then a little later, I'll ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... Zerboglio has very justly pointed out that individualism acting without the pressure of external sanction and by the simple internal impulse toward good (rightness)—this is the distant ideal of Herbert Spencer—can be realized only after a phase of collectivism, during which the individual activity and instincts can be disciplined into social solidarity and weaned from the essentially anarchist individualism ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... part he will be discovering subtle and seductive harmonies and balances of which the delicacy dawns on him as he gazes. The more he looks the more will he get of that curiously gratifying thrill which comes of the recognition of unostentatious rightness. ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... appeal, however far she may have fallen short of it, has stood, and stood, and stood. In the last resort, it is the only inducement worth anything; the only lever that lifts.—There is that li,—that inevitable rightness and harmony that begins in the innermost when there is the balance and duty is being done, and flows outward healing and preserving and making wholesome all the phases of being;—let that harmony of heaven play through you, and you are bringing mankind to virtue; you are ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... wreathed in simian smiles. The intense terror and revulsion which he inspired in me kept my unwilling eyes constantly wandering in his direction. Yet under all the terror was a bedrock confidence that there was, there must be somehow in the essence of things, an eternal rightness which would keep me safe from Captain Magnus. And as I looked across at Dugald Shaw and met for an instant his steady watchful eyes, I managed a swift little smile—a rather wan smile, I dare say, but still ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... says Sidgwick, [Footnote: The Methods of Ethics, Book I, chapter vi, Sec 1.] "is to render scientific—i.e., true, and as far as possible systematic—the apparent cognitions that most men have of the rightness or reasonableness of conduct, whether the conduct be considered as right in itself, or as the means to some end conceived as ultimately reasonable." The use here of the word "cognitions" calls our attention ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... confronted by the great problem whether after all a genetic historical theory can be of decisive importance here. To every consequent ethical consciousness there is a standard of value, a primordial value which determines the single ethical judgments as their last presupposition, and the "rightness" of this basis, the "value" of this value can as little be discussed as the "rationality" of our logical principles. There is here revealed a possibility of ethical scepticism which evolutionistic ethics (as well as intuitive or rationalistic ethics) ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... as a separate natural endowment, coeval with the creation of man. Every individual, it is maintained, has been endowed by nature with a distinct faculty or organ by which he can immediately and clearly {73} pronounce upon the rightness or wrongness of his own actions. In its most pronounced form this theory maintains that man has not merely a general consciousness of moral distinctions, but possesses from the very first, apart from all experience and education, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... rightness of everything, rather than his explanations, was convincing to Mrs. Perkins, and in a very short while she was sleeping the sleep of the just and serene; but to Thaddeus's eye there came no more sleep that night, and when morning came he rose unrefreshed. There were two problems confronting ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... self-government, the cry for Home Rule is either interested and fictitious—or when sincere—save in certain splendid exceptions, of whom Mr. Laing is the honoured chief, and the only Home Ruler who makes me doubt the rightness of my own conversion—it is a mere sentimental impulse shorn of practical power and working capacity. In any case it is a one-sided thing, leaving out of court Ulster, the integrity of the Empire, and the obligations of historic continuity. It is ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... characteristics. Certainly whatever is ethical in our foundations we, and all other peoples, will be expected to hold to. We feel it a duty to spread our moral truth abroad and our mores are necessarily right for us, and this idea of rightness of mores must imply a desire to make them prevail in the world. We may recognize, abstractly, other standards of conduct, but there is something in moral belief which, of course, cannot voluntarily be changed, and which must stand for the ultimately real in consciousness ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... spirit of rightness and wisdom been adopted by Marie Louise's father and his allies, as was so nobly advocated by the sister of Marie Antoinette, there would have been a clean sheet in history about them, though it is obvious in many quarters ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... generally, and elaborate demonstration, by the aid of many plates, of the infinite superiority of Turner, closing with what sounds a strange admission after such teachings and such arguments:—'Remember always that Turner's greatness and rightness in all these points successively depend on no scientific knowledge. He was entirely ignorant of all the laws we have been developing. He had merely accustomed himself to see ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... van." The shock of their intellectual attitude was over, usage robbed it of the first quaint effect of deliberate unreason. They were in many respects so right; she clung to that, and shirked more and more the paradoxical conviction that they were also somehow, and even in direct relation to that rightness, absurd. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... power on a level with goodness. It was one of the lessons of our Lord's life that they are not so; that the one grand thing in humanity is faith in God; that the highest in God is his truth, his goodness, his rightness. But if Jesus was a real man, and no mere appearance of a man, is it any wonder that, with a heart full to the brim of the love of God, he should be for a moment surprised that his mother, whom he loved so dearly, the best human being he knew, should not have taken it as a matter of ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... usual homage which mediocrity pays to genius—doing, here as always, infinite harm to the public, blinding them to what is beautiful, teaching them that irreverence which is the source of all vileness and narrowness of life, but harming the artist not at all, rather confirming him in the perfect rightness of his work and ambition. For to disagree with three-fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first elements of sanity, one of the deepest consolations in all moments of ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... as it were, to the company of all the other parts, so as at once neither to miss any touch of the luck (one keeps coming back to that), incurred by them, or to let them suffer any want of its own rightness. It was as right, through the spell he cast altogether, that he should have come into the world and have passed his boyhood in that Rugby home, as that he should have been able later on to wander as irrepressibly as the spirit moved him, or as that he should have found himself fitting as intimately ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... is menaced by certain dangers. We have seen in the chapter on ethics that men are by no means at one in their judgments as to the rightness or wrongness of given actions. And it requires a very little reflection to teach us that men are not at one in their religious notions. God and His nature, the relation of God to man, what the religious life ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... make a perfect violin must keep his eye open to all the beautiful things God has made, and his ear open to all the music he has put into the world, and then never let his hands touch a piece of work that is crooked or straggling or false, till, after years and years of rightness, they are fit to make a violin like the squire's, a violin that can say everything, a violin that an angel wouldn't be ashamed to ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... springs, inhuman or super-human, from the heart of an abstract science. I wonder, sometimes, whether the appreciators of art and of mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied. Before we feel an aesthetic emotion for a combination of forms, do we not perceive intellectually the rightness and necessity of the combination? If we do, it would explain the fact that passing rapidly through a room we recognise a picture to be good, although we cannot say that it has provoked much emotion. We seem to have recognised intellectually the rightness ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... my sad mother lived and could feel joy. This striking without thought is better than hunting; She showed more terror than an animal, She was more shiftless ... A little blood is lightly washed away, A common stain that need not be remembered; And a hot spasm of rightness quickly born Can guide me to kill justly ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... blame. You speak of Irish greed in I know not what connection, unless you speak of the war waged over the land; and yet you ought to know that both parties in England have by Act after Act confessed the absolute justice and rightness of that agitation, Unionist no less than Liberal, and both boast of their share in answering the Irish appeal. They are both proud today of what they did. They made inquiry into wrong and redressed it. But you, it seems, can only feel sore and angry that intolerable conditions ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... the most famous bearers of the title, Prince Rupert, is usually called in contemporary records the Palsgrave, from Ger. Pfalzgraf, lit. palace count, Ger. Pfalz being a very early loan from Lat. palatium. Trivet, Lat. tripes, triped-, dates back to Anglo-Saxon, its "rightness" being due to the fact that a three-legged stool stands firm on any surface. In the learned doublets tripod and tripos we have the Greek form. Spice, Old Fr. espice (epice), is a doublet of species. The medieval merchants recognised four "kinds" of spice, ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... is just because we do not know, save with the deeper knowledge that contradicts appearances,—the knowledge that is rightly termed faith,—that an unselfish action is in accord with the general rightness of the universe, and therefore must prevail in the end, that there is anything praiseworthy in it. The determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God were that this should be fully demonstrated in the experience of Jesus, as ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... said he was right. He always had been right. She who had once been impatient over his invariable, irritating rightness, loved it now. She thought and said that if there were a few men like Anthony at the head of departments we should win the War. We were losing it for want of precisely that specialized knowledge and that power of organization in which Anthony excelled. ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... have this intrinsic utility, in the apprehension of the performer and the beholder alike, this sense of the intrinsic rightness of decorum is only the proximate ground of the vogue of manners and breeding. Their ulterior, economic ground is to be sought in the honorific character of that leisure or non-productive employment of time and effort ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... and rightness is one of the noblest that can spring up in any breast; it is a ripe fruit of religion. The scientist, by his devotion to exact facts, to pure truth, is the religious man of our day, and the schools become religious educators in ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... ground and was accordingly exultant. After Mrs. Maldon's death she had felt somehow guilty of disloyalty; she passionately regretted having had no opportunity to assure the old lady that her suspicions about Louis were wrong and cruel, and to prove to her in some mysterious way the deep rightness of the betrothal. She blushed only for the moment of her betrothal. She had solemnly bound Louis to keep the betrothal secret until Christmas. She had laid upon both of them a self-denying ordinance ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... of these schools of thought must keep clear in his mind from this, the Anarchism of Tolstoy and that other brand of William Morris, neither of which waves any flag of black, nor counsels violence; they present that conception of untrammelled and spontaneous rightness and goodness which is, indeed, I hazard, the moral ideal of all rightly-thinking men. It is worth while to define very clearly the relation of this second sort of Anarchism, the nobler Anarchism, to the toiling constructive Socialism which many of us ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells |
