"Virtue" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is known as "trumpet mediumship," the sound of the voice of the communicating spirit is increased in power by the use of a trumpet shaped arrangement of paper, card-board, tin, or aluminum. There is no particular virtue in the material used, and anyone may make a serviceable trumpet out of heavy paper or thin card-board. The principle of the use of the "spirit trumpet" is precisely that of the well-known megaphone, i.e., it MAGNIFIES the sound, and increases its carrying power. A spirit ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... the court, for the father was one of the valientes of the prison, and those who feared his prowess, and wished to pay their court to him, were always fondling the child. What an enigma is this world of ours! How dark and mysterious are the sources of what is called crime and virtue! If that infant wretch become eventually a murderer like his father, is he to blame? Fondled by robbers, already dressed as a robber, born of a robber, whose own history was perhaps ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... terrible, repose is a dream, prudence is useless; mere reason alone serves simply to dry up the heart; there is but one virtue, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... his great head. "My dear friend, I fear you recognize the virtue only when she carries the ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... injustice. There was not a wrong which had driven the Boer from Cape Colony which he did not now practise himself upon others—and a wrong may be excusable in 1835 which is monstrous in 1895. The primitive virtue which had characterised the farmers broke down in the face of temptation. The country Boers were little affected, some of them not at all, but the Pretoria Government became a most corrupt oligarchy, venal and incompetent to the last degree. ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Joe had met the type before, especially in hand-to-hand combat. They talked, usually insultingly, sometimes bringing up such matters as your legitimacy, or the virtue of your wife or sister, or your own supposed perversions. They talked, and by so doing hoped to enrage you, provoke you into foolish attack. Joe was untouched by such tactics. He circled again, his ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... last ten years have been women. If morality were to be made a test, women would do more voting than men. The ratio of law-abiding women to men is as one to every 103; of drunken women to drunken men, one to every 1,000. Reasoning from these facts, if sobriety, virtue and intelligence were necessary qualifications, women enfranchised would largely reflect these elements in ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... station—might travel farther and fare worse; and that the playing with his own thoughts, in the shape of essay-writing, was the most harmless of amusements. His practical acquiescence in things does not promise much fruit, save to himself; yet in virtue of it he became one of the forces of the world—a very visible agent in bringing about the Europe which surrounds us today. He lived in the midst of the French religious wars. The rulers of his country were execrable Christians, but most ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... element deeper and more powerful. The Egyptian mind was conservative to reaction. Plato in his "Laws," says: "Long ago the Egyptians appear to have recognized the very principle of which we are now speaking—that their young citizens must be habituated to the forms and strains of virtue. These they fixed, and exhibited the patterns of them in their temples, and no painter or artist is allowed to innovate upon them, or to leave the traditional forms or invent new ones. To this day no alteration is allowed in these arts nor in music ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... protect the city against the attacks of the infidels. After long consideration, prayer, and inquiry into the private character of the various princes, Godfrey de Bouillon was chosen as possessing in the highest degree the requisite qualities of virtue, piety, wisdom, and valor. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, before the assembled Crusaders, Godfrey took an oath to rule justly and to defend with his life the Holy City. But so great was his piety and humility that he ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... apprehension is that, notwithstanding all exertions to the contrary, under the present system of things the morals and intelligence of the people will be on a level with their liberties. Whether my continued silence in such circumstances is a virtue, or a crime; or whether I should retire from the country, or remain and make one Christian, open, and decisive effort to secure for my fellow-countrymen a free constitution and equal rights among their churches, is a perplexing question to me, as well as to my brothers. It is believed by ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... government of states; and, by necessary consequence, ought to be trained up in the same exercises as men, as well for the forming of the body as the mind. Nor does he so much as except those exercises, wherein it was customary to fight stark naked, alleging(1001) that the virtue of the sex would be ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... other parents endeavour to implant good principles in the hearts of their children, and then leave them to their self-control; ever keeping a watchful eye on the influences which surround them, and using their proper authority, when it becomes necessary, to restrain from evil, and guide in the way of virtue. The child that has never learned to depend upon himself, or to control his own passions, and to do right because it is right, will hardly be able to sustain himself when the presence ...
— The Nest in the Honeysuckles, and other Stories • Various
... the treatment she received and compare it to that accorded to her mother. It occasioned great surprise to find herself admiring her father's manner more than that of her husband. Mr. Farnshaw had the virtue of frankness in his mastery, John used subterfuges; Mr. Farnshaw was openly brutal, John secretly heartless; her father was a domineering man, her husband even more determined, more inflexible. While considering the possibility of escape by running away, ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... remarkably short time he was able to repay Barney Bill. The day when he purchased the postal order was the proudest in his life. The transaction gave him a princely feeling. He alone of boys, by special virtue of his origin, was capable of such a thing. Again, his welcome in the painting world confirmed him in the belief that he was a personage, born to great things. Posed on the model throne, the object of the painter's intense scrutiny, he swelled ingenuously with the conviction of his supreme ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... "The virtue of a gift lies in part, but no altogether, with the giver. Whiles, it may be bestowed unworthily, but I'm thinking it's no often. The bond that will drag Carroll back to the North again, to his death, if need be, has ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... clay of our mould, and piece together the primitive skeleton of the physical being we now wear; but the mind steadily refuses to recognize a human past without some discipline in the arts, some exercise in rude virtue, and some proverbial lore handed down from sire to son. The tree of knowledge is of equal date with the tree of life; nor were even the tamer of horses, the worker in metals, or the sower, elder than those twin guardians of the soul,—the poet and the priest. Conscience ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... then; you probably will be,—for a spy, by excited Turks. Heigh-ho! I'm weary, dead weary, and virtue has gone out of me." Dick dropped into a chair, and was fast asleep in ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... influential Greeks. "He had many virtues and great abilities," says a competent critic. "His conduct was firm and disinterested, his manners simple and dignified. His personal feelings were warm, and, as a consequence of this virtue, they were sometimes so strong as to warp his judgment. He wanted the equanimity and impartiality of mind, and the elevation of soul necessary to make a great man."[A] In spite of his defects, he might have done good service to the Greek ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... countries, but requires a good soil: and whatever good quality the soil in Europe may have, it shoots but a foot and a half high; and yet, on this sand of the Missisippi, it rises, without any culture, three feet and a half, and four feet high. Such is the virtue of this sand all up the Missisippi; or, to speak more properly, for the whole length of its course; if we except the accumulated earth of the Lower Louisiana, across which it passes, and where it cannot leave any dry sand-banks; because it is straitened within its ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... and rigid principle to which they might attach their arguments.—As advocates and councilors of the crown they espoused the case of their client and, through professional zeal, derived or forced precedents and texts to his advantage.—By virtue of being administrators and judges the grandeur of their master constituted their grandeur, and personal interest counseled them to expand a prerogative in which, through delegation, they took part.—Hence, during four centuries, they had spun the tissue of "regalian rights," the great net ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... for Chester Naismith. It was he who, acting for the misguided loyalists and recommended by certain young aristocrats who by virtue of their own dissipations had come to know him as a man of infinite resourcefulness and daring, planned and carried out the pillaging of the palace vaults. Almost under the noses of the foreign guards ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... but he found, as a kind of reward, that Bobby Galleon was more of a friend than before. Now that Cards had departed Galleon came a little out of his shell. He anticipated, obviously with very considerable enjoyment, that year when he would have Peter all to himself. Bobby Galleon's virtue was, at any rate, that one was not conscious of him, and during the time of Peter's popularity he was useful without being in the very least evident. When that year was over and he had seen the last shining twinkle of Cards' charms and fascinations he looked ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... coffin of our beloved is there soothing comfort in the satisfactory reflection that perhaps at some distant epoch, by the harmonious operation of "Natural Selection" and by virtue of the "Conservation of Force," the "Survival of the fittest" will certainly ensure the "Differentiation" the "Evolution" of our buried treasure into some new, strange, superior type of creature, to us for ever unknown and utterly unrecognizable? Tormented ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... sacrifices which they did not want and for the welfare of Babylonian colleges that had ceased to exist. The old generation merely believed its beliefs; if the new as much as professed them, it was only by virtue of the old home associations and the inertia of indifference. Practically, it was without religion. The Reform Synagogue, though a centre of culture and prosperity, was cold, crude and devoid of magnetism. Half a century of stagnant reform ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... was suggested by him of the bridge, that in order to meet the wishes of two such excellent men, and such admirable representatives of pure Protestant virtue and spirit, it would be best to pass both presentments on the present occasion, and drop or postpone some of the minor ones until next term—a suggestion which was eagerly received by both parties, inasmuch as it satisfied ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... the handkerchief to the Magician, Whereupon Jack; who was surrounded by a host of evil spirits, with his sword of sharpness, at one blow cut off his head, and regained the handkerchief for the Prince; the enchantment was ended in a moment and the lady restored to her virtue and goodness. ...
— The Story of Jack and the Giants • Anonymous
... countries, and were the shepherds or rather the pilots of mankind, whom they guided by persuasion, and not by force. Hephaestus and Athena, brother and sister deities, in mind and art united, obtained as their lot the land of Attica, a land suited to the growth of virtue and wisdom; and there they settled a brave race of children of the soil, and taught them how to order the state. Some of their names, such as Cecrops, Erechtheus, Erichthonius, and Erysichthon, were preserved and adopted in later times, but the memory of their deeds has passed ...
— Critias • Plato
... hasten over this portion of my narrative. It is sad to dwell upon the history of human frailty, or to relate the oft-told tale of passion and villainy triumphant over virtue. A few days before Christmas, when the marriage ceremony was to be performed, they unfortunately spent one evening together alone, and he left her—ruined. Repentance followed sin, and the intervening time was passed by Mary in a state of the greatest mental ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... about his rush basket, which had been carelessly mislaid, he seemed to think with larcenous intentions, to remember Mr. Polly at all. Mrs. Johnson had tried to fob him off with a similar but inferior basket,—his own had one handle mended with string according to a method of peculiar virtue and inimitable distinction known only to himself—and the old gentleman had taken her attempt as the gravest reflection upon his years and intelligence. Mr. Polly was left very largely to the Larkins trio. Cousin ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... second campaign my plans were postponed. However, the measures I had been obliged to take could not remain secret. Some refractory conscripts, some deserters, appeared armed, at different places; they had to be maintained, and without an order ad hoc, but by virtue of general instructions, one of my officers possessed himself of the public funds for the purpose.... The guilty ones are ... myself, for whom I ask nothing, not from pride, for the haughtiest spirit need not feel humiliated at receiving ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... interesting type. He had a disagreeable disposition profoundly modified by a public school and university training. Two antagonistic forces made him. He was the spirit of scurrility incarnate, that was, as people say, innate; and by virtue of those moulding forces he was doing his best to be an English gentleman. That mysterious impulse which compels the young male to make objectionable imputations against seemly lives and to write rare inelegant words upon clean ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... of it is with Opal, she won't fight. She has been rigidly trained in the principles of virtue and propriety from her very birth, and yet she horrifies every one at times by shocking ideas—that no one knows where she gets, nor, worse ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... women, tortured men; you might persuade me if I did not know that to-night you have taken my friends, that you will drag them before unjust judges, and condemn them on the evidence of perjured informers, as you condemned William Orr. Human endurance can bear no more. Patience is a virtue of the Gospel, but it becomes cowardice in the face of certain wrongs. Go, I have done with you. Go, torture, burn, shed innocent blood, and then, like the adulterous woman, eat and wipe your mouth, and say ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... wiser than they came, if only in reference to their homely duties of farmstead and family. John Cross was none of those sorry and self-constituted representatives of our eternal interests, who deluge us with a vain, worthless declamation, proving that virtue is a very good thing, religion a very commendable virtue, and a liberal contribution to the church-box at the close of the sermon one of the most decided proofs that we have this virtue in perfection. Nay, it is somewhat doubtful, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... mores? Undoubtedly it is because they are dogmatic in form, invented or imposed by theological authority or philosophical speculation. They do not grow out of the experience of life, and cannot be verified by it. The reasons are in ultimate physiological facts, by virtue of which one is a woman and the other is a man." There is, however, more to be said on this ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... which Gertrude, the stepmother of Pauline and wife of the General's old age, feels for the lover of Pauline. The main interest of the drama lies in the struggle between these two women, every detail of which is elaborated with true Balzacian gusto and insight. We expect to see virtue triumphant, and Pauline united to the excellent Ferdinand. When they both die of poison, and Gertrude becomes repentant, we feel that the denouement is not satisfactory. The jealousy of the woman and the hatred of the man ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... St. Edward the Confessor, A heroe adorned with every virtue. He died on the 5th of January, 1065, And mounted into Heaven. Lift up ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... Cowley, preferred the solitude of a garden, and the conversation of a friend, to any consideration, so much as a regard, of those unhappy people, whom, in our own wrong, we call the great. True greatness, if it be any where on earth, is in a private virtue; removed from the notion of pomp and vanity, confined to a contemplation of itself, and centering ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... your connexion, my grandson, Barnes:—in all respects a most eligible union. The rank of life of the parties suits them to one another. She is a good young woman, and Barnes has experienced from persons of another sort such horrors, that he will know the blessing of domestic virtue. It was high time he should. I say all this in perfect frankness ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pomegranate, king of fruits, wears a regal crown; the crocodile, symbol of hypocrisy, sheds deceitful tears. In short, almost everything that was in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, and in the waters under the earth, was seized by the device-maker, and converted into a symbol of some virtue, vice, or other quality of the mind. Nor was there only one emblem taken from each object; by varying the circumstances, they were multiplied to an enormous amount. Menestrier gives no less than 514 different devices, founded upon the properties of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... in virtue, in character, in fact in everything. We own nothing; we only hold it in trust. We have nothing except what some One else is supplying. What we call our ability, our genius, and so on, comes by the creative breath breathing afresh upon and through what the patient creative ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... happy are the women whose confessions are so pure and innocent as yours have been to-day! Do but lift up your eyes again, my Katie; that sin is forgiven you; and by God and by your king it shall be accounted to you as a virtue." ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... greater act of virtue even in your life, Mrs. Elsmere, than when you wrote Langham ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of this flight of oratory—much admired for its general power by Mr. Chadband's followers—being not only to make Mr. Chadband unpleasantly warm, but to represent the innocent Mr. Snagsby in the light of a determined enemy to virtue, with a forehead of brass and a heart of adamant, that unfortunate tradesman becomes yet more disconcerted and is in a very advanced state of low spirits and false position when Mr. ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... Nostrums, Patriots and Corncutters! Quacks, Turks, Enthusiasts, and Fire Eaters. Mother Midnights, Termagants, Clare Market, and Robin Hood Orators, Drury Lane Journals, Inspectors, Fools, and Drawcansirs, dayly Tax the Public by Virtue of the Strangeness the Monstrosity or delicacy of their Nature or Genius, And hither I am come, knowing you were fond of Monsters, To exhibit Mine, the newest & I hope the greatest Monster of them all, for the Public is a common Bank, upon which every Genius and every Beauty has ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... showed the resentment which might have been expected under the circumstances. On the contrary, they seemed to recognize the right of the strange car to the joint use of the highway, and to blame their horses for not behaving better. Verily, forbearance is an American virtue. ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... you think that which costs us least trouble is generally the most worth having? I know a noble fellow who has fought his way upward through sins and temptations you would like him, by the way, for he was once an atheist. He is, by virtue of all he has passed through, all he has overcome, one of the fines men ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... live at all, who, for fear and danger of death shunneth his country's service or his own honour, since death is inevitable and the fame of virtue immortal.'—SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT. ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... little he had thought there could not be in the world such suffering as his; how clear now that his peculiar sorrow was strange to no hour of unfortunate time; an old story, innocence and virtue—God knew he had no pride in his own virtue—preyed upon by cunning vice. He read Hamlet again. Oh, what depth of anguish! What a portrayal of grief and madness! Horace shook with the sobs that nearly ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... lofty virtue could not have produced a happier expression upon any face than appeared on the mild countenance ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... "For years," Mr. George would explain, "we had father and mother to keep as well; then they died, and Dick and me saw daylight." By which he meant no harm at all, but only stated a fact, and concealed the virtue of it. ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... marched straight up to a house which she had no design of entering, thrown open the parlor blinds, and admitted the sunlight, with its fading influence, on the best carpet, and then proceeded down the street with the bearing of triumphant virtue. It was related that in a number of instances the indignant housewife, on entering her best parlor, found that the sun had been streaming in there all day, right ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... only exist by virtue of concession from the State, and the present relation of the Church to the ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... immediately put her finger on her lips to enjoin him to be silent. He, however, informed me of this act of friendship of the little heroine, who had not told me of it herself." I admired the Countess's virtue, and Madame de Pompadour said, "She is giddy and headlong; but she has more sense and more feeling than a thousand prudes and devotees. D'Esparbes would not do as much most likely she would meet him more than half-way. ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... matters. The premier asked Brown to go, saying that all his colleagues were agreed upon his eminent fitness for the mission. Brown declined the mission, contending that Mr. Holton, besides being fully qualified, was, by virtue of his official position as minister of finance, the proper person to represent Canada. He kept urging the importance of taking action early, before the American movement against the renewal of the treaty could gather headway. ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... admonished his brethren to walk in the ways of the Lord, so that they might become worthy of His grace and help. Especially he impressed upon his brethren and his sons the virtue of chastity and a steadfast moral life. He told them all that had happened to him, the hatred of his brethren, the persecutions of the wife of Potiphar, the slander, envy, and malice of the Egyptians, to show how that those who fear ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... one can to a certain extent assess the values of past education by reference to the demeanor of adults who have been through it. One of the chief aims of education should be to stimulate the great virtue of curiosity. The worst detractors of the American race—and there are some severe ones in New York, London, and Paris!—will not be able to deny that an unusually active curiosity is a marked characteristic ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... world. First, by the purity, the simplicity, the single-heartedness, the fervour and perseverance of her original character she qualified herself to subdue all the nations of mankind. Next, having conquered the earth by her virtue and by the spirit of liberty, she was able to maintain her ascendancy for centuries under the emperors, notwithstanding all her astonishing profligacy and anarchy. And, lastly, after her secular ascendancy had been destroyed by the inroads of the northern barbarians, she rose like ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... this cabildo is at present deprived of this jurisdiction—given to it by a canonical law by special brief and indult of his Holiness, obtained by your Majesty, ordering the senior bishop to govern, by virtue of which the reverend father, Fray Pedro Arce, archbishop of Zubu, is governing this church, a holy person and one of blameless life—this cabildo answered that no one can give what he does not possess; that the said bishop ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... that instant. But Sandford, who never felt resentment but against those in whom he saw some virtue, calmly replied, ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... happiness the end of life and the test of virtue, and maintains that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, and wrong as they tend to produce the reverse," a theory characterised by Carlyle, who is never weary of denouncing it, as "reducing the infinite celestial ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... through a long afternoon of pain. Gameness was one of the fundamentals of her creed, and he had showed the white feather. It added to his punishment, too, that he worshiped pluck with all the fervor of one who knew he had none. Courage seemed to him the one virtue worth while; cowardice the unpardonable sin. He made no excuses for himself. From his father he inherited the fine tradition of standing up to punishment to a fighting finish. His mother, too, had been a thoroughbred. Yet he was a weakling. His heart pumped water instead ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... style we shall demand something better, and the demand will create the supply. But to swing from bareness and boredom to the other extreme of abstruseness and complexity is no remedy: in these latter qualities there exists no special compensating virtue. Listening to a song as it is sung is very different to reading the verse at leisure. The sense of the song must be caught as it flies, the verse can be read and re-read if necessary, until its ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... favourite subject, and went on decrying hypocrisy and cant, mingling sarcasms and bitter observations on the false delicacy of the English. It is strange, but true as strange, that he could not, or at least did not, distinguish the distinction between cause and effect, in this case. The respect for virtue will always cause spurious imitations of it to be given; and what he calls hypocrisy, is but the respect to public opinion that induces people, who have not courage to correct their errors, at least to endeavour to conceal them; and Cant is the homage that Vice pays to Virtue.[1] ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... me maybe in the river, enticing me across the rotten plank of the bridge. (Seizing bottle.) Will you tell me on the virtue of your oath, is death lurking in that ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... and the most distant reminiscences, like the most immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined, her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the domestic tete-a-tete—she gathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve as fuel ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... of the way between the little towns of St. Enimie and Le Rozier is enchanted ground by virtue of unrivalled scenery. In time the influx of tourists must make the river-side population rich. The sandy bed of the Tarn must attain the preciousness of a building site near Paris. This materialistic view of the question affords mixed feelings. I have in mind the frugality ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... seems to be a power at work in the world, by virtue of which every living thing grows and develops. And it tends toward splendor. Seeds become trees, and weak little nations grow great. But the push or the force that is doing this, the yeast as it were, ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... you as a man of true virtue, and know you to be a person of sound understanding; for however I may have acted in opposition to the principles of religion, or the dictates of reason, I can honestly assure you I had always the highest veneration for both. The world and I may now shake hands, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... one who has broken open a cabinet or rummaged an old desk. The contents of Balzac's letters are so private, so personal, so exclusively his own affairs and those of no one else, that the generous critic constantly lays them down with a sort of dismay, and asks himself in virtue of what peculiar privilege, or what newly discovered principle it is, that he is thus burying his nose in them. Of course he presently reflects that he has not broken open a cabinet nor violated a desk, but ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... harassed the country people, and inflicted unprecedented barbarities. The temple itself was dedicated to Jupiter Olympius, and the reluctant and miserable Jews were forced to join in all the rites of pagan worship, including the bacchanalia, which mocked the virtue ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... another thing. There was the English sugar-planter from the Tawi-Tawi group, who never lost sight of the ranking officer, who dressed in flannels, changed his clothes three times a day, and who expressed his only ideas to me by virtue ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... Surface, "that you never have such reason to hate your fellow-men as I have had, my boy. For that has been the keynote of my unhappy life. God, how I hated them all, and how I do yet!... Not least Weyland, with his ostentatious virtue, his holier-than-thou kindness, his self-righteous magnanimity tossed even to me ... the broken-kneed idol whom others passed with averted face, and there was none so poor to do ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... unworthy of such constancy, and that she had no intention whatever of rewarding it, even if the opportunity arrived. But this was the mere speculation of a pessimist; he might be altogether wrong, for he had never denied the existence of high virtue, in ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... companions at Eton, George Lyttelton, afterwards known as the "good Lord Lyttelton," statesman and orator, stands foremost by virtue of the generous warmth of a friendship continued throughout the novelist's chequered life. To Lyttelton Tom Jones was dedicated; it was his generosity, as generously acknowledged, that supplied Fielding, for a time, with the very means of subsistence; ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... Establish vs to keep the right Scepter, and suffer vs of our selues to raigne to the good profite of the land, and to the subduing of the people, together with the enemies, and to the maintenance of virtue. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt
... one of the young men, offering a new light upon the royal virtue of punctuality; but from the enthusiasm with which they availed themselves of the rest of Lord Borrodaile's side of the bench, it was obvious they had hurried to the spot with the intention of securing front ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... for all to be occupied in the highest arts, nor for any, guiltlessly, to pass their days in a succession of pleasures, the most perfect mental culture possible to men is founded on their useful energies, and their best arts and brightest happiness are consistent, and consistent only, with their virtue. ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... women and animals are sincere. Once civilization has introduced a demand for such comforts as, for instance, feminine virtue, sincerity is out of place. ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Epameinondas, will pronounce with truth these men to have really been colleagues in government and war rather than those who were constantly struggling to get the better of one another instead of the enemy. The true cause of this was their virtue, guided by which they sought no glory or gain for themselves from their deeds, from which envious rivalry always results, but both, inflamed by a noble desire to see their country reach its climax of power and renown in their own time, used ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... after the said works to-fore made. And forasmuch as idleness is so much blamed, as saith Saint Bernard, the mellifluous doctor, that she is mother of lies and step-dame of virtues, and it is she that overthroweth strong men into sin, quencheth virtue, nourisheth pride, and maketh the way ready to go to hell; and John Cassiodorus saith that the thought of him that is idle thinketh on none other thing but on licorous meats and viands for his belly; and the holy Saint Bernard aforesaid ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... nothing for the heat, Grudging the shortness of the long summer day. A poor woman follows at the reapers' side With an infant child carried close at her breast. With her right hand she gleans the fallen grain; On her left arm a broken basket hangs. And I to-day ... by virtue of what right Have I never once tended field or tree? My government-pay is three hundred tons; At the year's end I have still grain in hand. Thinking of this, secretly I grew ashamed; And all day the thought ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... Heathcliff's judgment. He appeared to have bent his malevolence on making him a brute: he was never taught to read or write; never rebuked for any bad habit which did not annoy his keeper; never led a single step towards virtue, or guarded by a single precept against vice. And from what I heard, Joseph contributed much to his deterioration, by a narrow-minded partiality which prompted him to flatter and pet him, as a boy, because he was the head of the old family. And as he had been in the habit of accusing Catherine ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility. The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... with the single-barrel was woodcock shooting; woodcock being by virtue of rarity a sort of royal game, and a miss at a woodcock a terrible disappointment. They have a trick of skimming along the very summit of a hedge, and looking so easy to kill; but, as they fly, the tops of tall briers here, willow-rods next, or an ash-pole often intervene, ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... of classicism. During its next period, and indeed down to the present day, French painting will preserve the essence of its classic traditions, variously modified from decade to decade, but never losing the quality in virtue of which what is French is always measurably the most classic thing going; but of this next period certainly Prudhon is the precursor, who, with all his classic serenity, presages its passion for "storms, clouds, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... strength hath lain; And not thine only, it hath been our gain: Nor ours alone, for every people's voice, Because thou hast been good, doth now rejoice. Beneath the shelter of that fruitful vine— Thy goodness—hath pure Virtue reared her shrine. Freedom hath lift her flag, and flung it free, Rejoicing in a god-like liberty. Truth hath her gracious lineaments revealed To humble souls, beneath Victoria's shield. Mercy, whose message bore thy first command, Hath carried festival to ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... him by the sea To put his virtue to the test, And there, without conviction, he Threw off the following, by request:— "Ocean," he said, "I see your waves are wet" (Bravely he spoke, but in his heart he funked 'em), "So to your further progress here I set A ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... of excuse is thus given: "In the barbarous country which I govern both virtue and the decencies of life are unknown. I have been unable to free myself from them, and, therefore, I blush. China has her wise men; that is a happiness which I envy. They would have prevented my being wanting in the respect due to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... strangely concomitant with adversity. The intuitive person is a person who has suffered. When conditions press sufficiently hard, a new table of distribution may be the only means for survival. Thus we proceed to make a virtue of necessity and so come to the recognition of other values which we denominate spiritual because we have not as yet spatialized them. The caterpillar has to mount the twig to find the tender green that is his food, but, he solaces himself ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams
... Minister and the Consular administration, if, in a matter subject to consular treatment, the Foreign Minister, owing to the origination of diplomatic or political circumstances, has found reason to interfere by virtue of the right the laws are meant to bestow upon him. When thus a matter is simultaneously treated by different authorities, that each within its province has to treat it, the possibility of a conflict can hardly ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... sober-minded man,—who, from his childhood upward had been fed, clothed, armed, and furnished with the means of instruction from this very magazine,- -think the fitter plan? Will he insist that the rust is not rust, or that it is a rust sui generis, intentionally formed on the steel for some mysterious virtue in it, and that the staff and astrolabe of a shepherd-astronomer are identical with, or equivalent to, the quadrant and telescope of Newton or Herschel? Or will he not rather give the curious inquisitor ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... suffering, the agony of heart, I have endured, be any atonement in the sight of God? Oh, promise me, Ada, that should death claim me as his own, you will strive, by every means in your power, to lead him back to virtue—to preserve him from the ignominy, the punishment which, even I acknowledge, he has deserved at the hands of ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... art;—how the Madonna, when she assumed the characteristics of the great Diana of Ephesus, at once the type of Fertility, and the Goddess of Chastity, became, as the impersonation of motherhood, all beauty, bounty and graciousness; and at the same time, by virtue of her perpetual virginity, the patroness of single and ascetic life—the example and the excuse for many of the wildest of the early monkish theories. With Christianity, new ideas of the moral and religious responsibility ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... against Pyrrhus. Consul in 282 and 278 B.C. These three great soldiers were selected as types of Roman virtue. Cp. Verg. Aen. ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... purpose of standing for Westminster in the Conservative interest, an attempt was made to drive him down the throats of the electors by clamorous assertions of his unprecedented commercial greatness. It seemed that there was but one virtue in the world, commercial enterprise,—and that Melmotte was its prophet. It seemed, too, that the orators and writers of the day intended all Westminster to believe that Melmotte treated his great ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... said, "we are each of different nations, and your people are at war with mine. Why should I trust you? why should I believe in your words? How do I know that I am not talking to one who believes it to be a virtue to slay ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... receive. The woman with the Madonna face may unmask and show the lineaments of a common shrew in her chamber. And the virago may soften into the gentleness of a saint as she gives way to the penitence of her own thoughts. The dignified man with the air of virtue and authority might show himself as a nimble-motioned rascal, timid and furtive, if he believed only God saw him. Not one of us ever acts absolutely true to what we know we are except when the door between us and every other man is closed. It is barely possible that sometimes in the presence of a ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... they had nothing to fear, either at home or abroad, they began in earnest to improve their Concerns, as they were sure they were working for themselves, and in no Danger of being dispossessed, by Virtue of chimerical ...
— The True Life of Betty Ireland • Anonymous
... chimerical, men, to whom integrity and conscience are idle sounds, men, who are content to catch the word of their leader, who have no sense of the obligation of any law but the supreme will of him that pays them, and who know not any virtue but diligence in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... however, still remained to be subdued: and that Thrace should be committed to Lysimachus. Perdiccas reserved for himself the command of the horse-guards, the post before held by Hephaestion, in virtue of which he became the guardian of Philip Arrhidaeus, the nominal sovereign. It was not for some time after these arrangements had been completed that the last rites were paid to Alexander's remains. They were conveyed ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... Learn the virtue of action. Who inquires whether momentum comes from mass or velocity? But velocity has this ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... Of a damosel which came girt with a sword for to find a man of such virtue to draw it ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... I see; that pleases me," said Rolla, giggling. "Robeckal thought you would stamp and cry, but I said right away: 'The little one is smart, she will not throw her fortune away.' What is the use of virtue, anyway? It hardly brings one dry bread, so the sooner you throw it overboard the better it is. Oh, you will make your way, never fear. Your face is handsome, and who knows but that you will have your own elegant house and carriage one of these days? The ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... believe that the decision of the "Christian boy," by God's blessing, made me the Christian man; for in after years I was thrown amid trials and temptations which must have drawn me away from God and from virtue, had it not been for my settled habit ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... required for the moralizing of the lower classes of the South? Ability to make moral discriminations grows slowly. Ability to appreciate moral motives grows still more slowly. These people were trained in a school in which virtue was ignored. They have lived under conditions which have put a premium on theft. Slavery always makes thieves. The heredity of the passion for stealing is just as clearly marked as the heredity of the Roman nose or the faculty for music. The transmission of the tendency toward the ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., May, 1888., No. 5 • Various
... find in Christianity the religion most admirably adapted to fill their spiritual needs and shape their ideals. In the year 476 the barbarian Odoacer ascended the throne of the Caesars. He still pretended to govern by virtue of the authority delegated to him by Zeno, emperor at Constantinople; but the rupture between East and West was becoming final and after the reign of Justinian (527-565) it was practically complete. Henceforth the eastern empire had little or nothing to do ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... rule German children of all classes are treated as children, and taught the elementary virtue of obedience. Das Recht des Kindes is a new cry with some of the new people, but nevertheless Germany is one of the few remaining civilised countries where the elders still have rights and privileges. I heard of an Englishwoman the other ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... of some, however, especially of the young men whom Aminta had rejected, an incredulousness of such virtue might have been read. It was hard to conceive how she came to be at midnight in the room of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... had not been reckoned on by the high-spirited Master of Angus; and indeed obedience, save to the head of the name, was so little a Scottish virtue that Sir Patrick was by no means unprepared ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... saucer. It was a large meal, even for a growing boy; but every mouthful seemed to put a new sinew into his frame. While he was eating, he drew the cork from the bottle. It contained whiskey. Tom had heard that there was virtue in whiskey; that it was invigorating to a tired man, and he was tempted, under these extremely trying circumstances, to experiment upon the beverage. He would certainly have been excusable if he had done so; but our hero had a kind of horror of the article, which would ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... liberal and generous to all his children in the matter of money, and I have special cause to remember his kindness when I think of the way in which he paid some Cambridge debts of mine—making it almost seem a virtue in me to have told him of them. In his later years he had the kind and generous plan of dividing his surplus at the year's end ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... horrors served up to them of late in cold blood, he might reveal the calm atrocities, the surpassing tragedies concealed under family life. But he chooses in preference gentler events,—those where scenes of purity succeed the tempests of passion; where woman is radiant with virtue and beauty. To the honor of the Thirteen be it said that there are such scenes in their history, which may have the honor of being some day published as a foil of tales to listeners,—that race apart from others, so curiously energetic, and so interesting ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... such houses have sufficed for the happy shelter of large families of strong boys and blooming girls, as sound in body and soul, if not so refined and variously accomplished, as are reared in mansions of more pretension. Love, virtue, industry, and mutual helpfulness made true homes and ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... wizard can be found to help in time of famine, until it is "revealed" that Ikardlituarssuk "had formerly sat on the knee of one of those present when the wizards called up their helping spirits." In virtue of which very distant connection he proceeds ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown
... remember had he so deeply felt the sting of conscience. He, the Grand Duke Peter Nicholaevitch, in love with this little rustic? Impossible! It was the real Peter, tired of the sham and make-believe of self-restraint and virtue, who had merely kissed a country girl. He was no anchorite, no saint. Why had he tied himself to such a duty from a ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... seizing him by the collar and shaking him; 'do you hear me? Why don't you jump up and hurrah at the downfall of such a scoundrel? Ha! ha! We've been on his track for months; but we've run him down at last; and then he made a virtue of necessity, and told all—all about the children, and about you, and about Ned; all lies, all lies—every word of them: Ned he swore was as honest a fellow as ever lived, or something to that effect. You, he admitted, had committed no forgery; not a word ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... three camps, each somewhat sharply defined and each somewhat ignorant of the other's doings in detail. The combination of either two against the other, in organized mutiny, might very well prove successful, wherefore it was my task to keep all apart by virtue of the authority which I had myself usurped. The midship's cabin suite, of three rooms, was occupied by myself and my two bold young mates—when the latter were not elsewhere engaged. We made what might be called the ruling classes. Forward of our cabin, and accessible only from the deck, was ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... indulgence; and that hatred of hypocrisy, which had hitherto only shown itself in a too shadowy colouring of his own youthful frailties, now hurried him, from his horror of all false pretensions to virtue, into the still more dangerous boast and ostentation ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society—the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society—this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... These stories were all revived and put in circulation, and every thing was made to appear as unfavorable for Edward as possible. Richard himself, on the other hand, feigned a very strict and scrupulous regard for virtue and morality, and deemed it his duty, he said, to do all in his power to atone for and wipe away the reproach which his brother's loose and wicked life had left upon the court and the kingdom. Among other ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... itself, in a somewhat crude and rough way to be sure, yet by virtue of substantial lines of division, into a few sub-series or groups. The first of these belongs to the Revolutionary period, what may be called the destructive period, since it witnessed the destruction of the ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... equal advantages of education. "If you complain of education in sons, what shall I say in regard to daughters, who every day experience the want of it?" She expressed a strong wish that the new Constitution might be distinguished for its encouragement of learning and virtue. Nothing more fully shows the dependent condition of a class than the methods used to secure their wishes. Mrs. Adams felt herself obliged to appeal to masculine selfishness in showing the reflex action woman's education would ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... sublime Tintorettos at Venice, a measureless Crucifixion in especial, which showed without loss of authority half-a-dozen actions separately taking place? Yes, that might be, but there had surely been nevertheless a mighty pictorial fusion, so that the virtue of composition had somehow thereby come all mysteriously to its own. Of course the affair would be simple enough if composition could be kept out of the question; yet by what art or process, what bars and bolts, what unmuzzled dogs and pointed guns, perform ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... admission of this showed in his strong brown face. His mordant eyes mocked her while he went into a whimsical argument to show that highgrading was really a virtue, since it tended to keep the rich from growing richer and the poor poorer. He wanted to know by what moral right Verinder owned the Mollie Gibson and the Never Quit ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... star symbolizing the seven verses of the opening Sura (Al-Fatiha) of the Holy Koran; the seven points on the star represent faith in One God, humanity, national spirit, humility, social justice, virtue, and aspirations ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... disgrace to them as is the lack of virtue to the women of my country, hence every citizen, no matter how wealthy, had some regular trade, business or profession. I found those occupations we are accustomed to see accepted by the people of inferior birth ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... endowed with it; and this can happen only when the attribute is one of greater importance, for the time being, than most of the other attributes. If those members of the species which have but ordinary shares of it, nevertheless survive by virtue of other superiorities which they severally possess; then it is not easy to see how this particular attribute can be developed by natural selection in subsequent generations. The probability seems rather to be, that by gamogenesis, this extra endowment will, on the average, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... do to us, sir?" asked the sailor, in a tone which showed that he looked up to the young doctor for counsel in difficulty. The feeling that, in virtue of his education and training, he ought to be in some sort an example and guide to his comrades in misfortune, did much to make Mark shake off his despondency and pluck ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... the annual land and malt taxes are regularly anticipated every year, by virtue of a borrowing clause constantly inserted into the acts which impose them. The bank of England generally advances at an interest, which, since the Revolution, has varied from eight to three per cent., the sums of which those taxes are granted, and receives payment ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... the kinship between conduct that keeps us within the law and conduct that makes civilized life worthy to be called such, deserves to be noted with emphasis. The Chinese sage, Confucius, could not tolerate the suggestion that virtue is in itself enough without politeness, for he viewed them as inseparable and "saw courtesies as coming from the heart," maintaining that "when they are practised with all the heart, a moral ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... my estimate of the experiment instituted by the Colonization Society, I may indulge too much my wishes and hopes, to be safe from errors. But a partial success will have its virtue, and an entire failure will leave behind a consciousness of the laudable intentions with which relief from the greatest of our calamities was attempted in the only mode presenting a chance of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... again, and the scrape, scrape of pens continued until four o'clock, by which time the girls were thankful to fold the sheets in their envelopes and make them ready for post. Rhoda read over her second effort in a glow of virtue, and found it a model of excellence. No complaints this time, no weak self-pity; but a plain statement of facts without any personal bias. Her father and mother would believe that she was entirely contented; but Harold, having been through the same experiences, would read between the lines ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... native heath—and I daresay we have one or two with us—he might claim that humour was also the prerogative of Robert Burns. He might claim, also, that certain other great characteristics of Cowper were to be found almost simultaneously in Burns. There is virtue in the almost. Cowper was born in 1731, Burns in 1759. At any rate humour has been a rare product among the greater English poets. It was entirely absent in Wordsworth, in Shelley, in Keats. Byron possessed a gift ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... course, who like summer rains and boast of their liking. This is nothing. One might as well boast of his appetite for toasted cheese. Does one pin himself with badges if he plies an enthusiastic spoon in an ice-cream dish? Or was the love of sack ever a virtue, and has Falstaff become a saint? If he now sing in the Upper Choir, the bench must sag. But persons of this turn of argument make a point of their willingness to walk out in a June rain. They think it a merit to go tripping across the damp grass to ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... lives return To slowly earn thy strength of soul; Through suffering only couldst thou learn The virtue that hath made ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... of Godmamma. They said she gave herself great airs, and considering that every one knew that years ago she had been the amie of that good-looking Englishman at the Embassy these high stilts of virtue were ridiculous. I suppose to be an amie is something wicked in French, but it doesn't sound very bad, does it, Mamma? And, whatever it is, I wonder if poor papa knew, as he was at the Embassy, and it might have been one of his friends, mightn't it? I expect ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... too. A father and mother and seven children, and me, the penniless orphan: we all wanted money—all cried for it. At last my cry was answered in a black way; I saw the sight of money at last; a purse heaped, overflowing with money, was put into my hands. My brain got giddy at the sight; sin and virtue became all one to me at the sight. Gold, gold! my father would hardly ever give me one poor shilling; the people with whom I lived hardly ever had a shilling among them. I became the mistress of a rich man—a married man; his wife and children were living there before my eyes—a profligate ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... will begin to believe there is such virtue in the banner when thou hast held three battles with thy relation Magnus, and hast ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... them both off, scot free; and that makes them loyal. But it would go hard with anyone who tried to escape to the mainland and tell on them—to say nothing of me.... Mrs. Clover has ever since been quite convinced of the virtue of vitriol. She keeps a supply handy most of the time, in case of emergencies. And she sleeps lightly; don't forget that. I hate to think of what she might do if she thought you meant to run away ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... I should abandon you here, and what would you do then? You are pretty, you are a woman of sensibility, but many men would take but little account of your virtue. Your lover has left you to me; for all he knew I might be the vilest wretch; but as it is, cheer up, you have nothing ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Menthon is due the credit of the mountain hospice. He was the originator of the idea and the founder of the institution. He has since been canonized as a saint and he well deserved the honor, if it be a virtue to sacrifice oneself, as we believe, and to try and save the lives of one's fellows! It is no easy existence which St. Bernard chose for himself and followers. The very aspect of the pass is grand but gloomy. None of the softness of nature is seen. There is no verdure, no beauty of coloring, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... to the end of time, though I had been surrounded by a legion of tempters. The mad folly that the world calls love had never had any part in my madness, and here at least extremes met, and the vice of heartlessness became the virtue of constancy. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... said the banjo, "drank 'dog's-nose,' my father drank 'dog's-nose,' and I drink 'dog's-nose.' If that ain't heredity, there's no virtue ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... collection of peninsulas; and as certain shipowners possess wharfs far up in the town, to which their ships must find their way, the virtue of patience is frequently inculcated by a long detention at drawbridges, while heavily-laden vessels are slowly warped through the openings. The equanimity of the American character surprised me here, as it often had before; for, while I was devising ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... types of men, and which is the basis of most manly friendships, Emerson probably never felt. One cannot conceive of him as caring deeply for any person who could not teach him something. He says, "I speculate on virtue, not burn with love." Again, "A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to me." Pure intellectual values seem alone to have counted with Emerson and his followers. With men his question was, "What can you teach ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... that she rather took to BLAKE—that outcast of society, And when respectable brothers who were fond of her began to look dubious and to cough, She would say, "Oh, my friends, it's because I hope to bring this poor benighted soul back to virtue and propriety, And besides, the poor benighted soul, with all his faults, ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... a traitor: I mean, he has a face that would make him the more perfect traitor if he had the heart of one, which is saying neither more nor less than that he has a beautiful face, informed with rich young blood, that will be nourished enough by food, and keep its colour without much help of virtue. He may have the heart of a hero along with it; I aver nothing to the contrary. Ask Domenico there if the lapidaries can always tell a gem by the sight alone. And now I'm going to put the tow in my ears, for thy chatter and the bells together are more than I can endure: so say no ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Religion and the Monarchy were twin sisters, and he speaks sadly in "Le Medecin de Campagne" of the downfall of both these powers. "With the monarchy we have lost honour, with our unfruitful attempts at government, patriotism; and with our fathers' religion, Christian virtue. These principles now only exist partially, instead of inspiring the masses, for these ideas never perish altogether. At present, to support society we have nothing but selfishness."[] Elsewhere, he laments the atheistic ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... probabilities were greatly in favour of a comfortable competence being easily procured, but when he knew that difficulties and dangers would beset them at every step. Surely had laying up beforehand been the duty of a child, our Saviour would have exhibited this virtue among that constellation of virtues which shone forth from his character; for he knew that we were to follow his example. Why then did he act thus, whilst we hesitate to follow his steps? Because he knew the truth, nature, and extent, ...
— Christian Devotedness • Anthony Norris Groves
... with Fosseuse, who, being dependent on me, kept herself within the strict bounds of honour and virtue. Had she always done so, she had not brought upon herself a misfortune which has proved of such fatal consequence to myself as well ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... of heaven Where the year's node renders the shades of night Equal unto the periods of light. For when the sun is midway on his course Between the blasts of northwind and of south, Heaven keeps his two goals parted equally, By virtue of the fixed position old Of the whole starry Zodiac, through which That sun, in winding onward, takes a year, Illumining the sky and all the lands With oblique light—as men declare to us Who by their diagrams have charted well Those regions of the sky which be adorned With ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... stories for herself, the student applied herself and learned by magic. She was extremely proud of the new accomplishment, and would have read constantly if Miss Watts had not settled upon literary pursuits as the reward of virtue. ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... imitation of good models. He took a deep interest in the poetry of primitive and unlettered men, and deduced from that his criteria of excellence; namely, sincerity, naturalness, strength and fulness of expression. The virtue of the greatest poets, such as Homer, Shakspere and Ossian, lay—so he said—in the fulness and fidelity with which they had felt and expressed the life of their nation and their epoch. Thus he became the founder ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... you? Wouldn't you like them good ladies next door, and that nice gentleman opposite, all to kinder rise up and say, 'Oh, what a dear good little girl Sarah Walker is?'" The interpolation of a smacking sound of lips, as if in unctuous anticipation of Sarah Walker's virtue, here ensued—"Oh, what a dear, good, sw-e-et, lovely little ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... Reginald, "he'll miss his ring more than his brother! And remember, Cicely, you get a pound for finding the ring, and you win a pair of gloves if you can tempt Simon to stray from the paths of honesty and virtue! By Jingo, I'll give you the gloves if you can even make him tell ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... until 1817. There was power in both these productions. The former was bold, popular, startling, and not without a show of learning. It was intended for the masses. The latter was a complement of the former; more heavy, but by virtue of its weight adapted to that class of people, everywhere abundant, who suspect either danger or puerility in every earnest sentence. The author held that it was the province of Protestantism to develop Christianity and Christian theology to a pure faith of reason. Issuing ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... so forth, answer we; true enough! And yet withal we have to remark, that imperfect Human Society holds itself together, and finds place under the Sun, in virtue simply of some approximation to perfection being actually made and put in practice. We remark farther, that there are supportable approximations, and then likewise insupportable. With some, almost with ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... matters duly attended to, some minutes were given to the enjoyment of the fine views to be obtained from the loggias, and looking at the statues of Miss Rideout, representing Sacrifice, Charity, Virtue, and Wisdom. They then spent a short time over the exhibit in the lower part of the building; and there Captain Raymond and Lucilla met with a pleasant surprise in coming suddenly and unexpectedly upon Mr. Austin and his son Albert, the English gentleman ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley
... decoction by boiling in hot water a preparation of parched grains which he carried with him. This he accomplished in an angle of the old corral fence out of the wind. There is no comfort nor even virtue in eating cold dust with one's sandwiches. Leander sunk his great white tushes through the thick slices of whole-wheat bread and tasted the paste of peanut meal with which they were spread. He ate standing and slapped his leg to warm his ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... kibokos with a sort of elephantine sporty air. They were men of all heights and thicknesses, but each alike impressed me with the Prussian military mold that leaves a man no imagination of his own, and no virtue, but only an animal respect for whatever can make to suffer, or appease ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... operations; and enabled us, although at the cost of much blood, to free a large portion of India from a race that was a scourge—faithless, intriguing and crafty; cruel, and reckless of life. The Mahrattas, conquering race as they were, yet failed in the one virtue of courage. They could sweep the land with hordes of wild horsemen, could harry peaceful districts and tyrannize over the towns they conquered; but they were unable to make an effective stand against British bayonets and British sabres. They were a race of freebooters; ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... part of "all the glories" of France (as of most other countries) is made up of these military men: and a fine satire it is on the cowardice of mankind, that they pay such an extraordinary homage to the virtue called courage; filling their history-books with tales about it, and nothing ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various |
