"Worldly-minded" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Bishop Watson's character simply from such samples as these, we might conclude that he was a covetous, unreasonably discontented, and worldly-minded man. But this would be a very unfair conclusion to arrive at. The Bishop gives us only one, and that the weakest side of his character. He was most highly esteemed by some of his contemporaries, whose good opinion ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... not understand a theology of sin and punishment, of atonement and redemption; and all the deep significance of His death has to be taken out of Christianity before they will believe it. It comes, too, from the morally cowardly and the worldly-minded, who desire a religion without the cross. If Christianity were only a creed to believe, or a worship in whose celebration the aesthetic faculty might take delight, or a private path by which a man might pilgrim ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... whom we have already introduced with the object of enlightening Henri de Valois respecting the doubt he had entertained with regard to Sylla—Francois de Joyeuse, young and worldly-minded, handsome and witty, was one of the most remarkable men of the period. Ambitious by nature, but circumspect by calculation and position, Francois de Joyeuse could assume as his device, "Nothing is too much," and ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... stones to guess at something of its probable value. The idea of in this way possessing herself of Flower's diamond never for a moment entered her head, but she was worldly-minded enough to wish that it could be her own, and she could not help owning to a feeling of satisfaction, even to a sense of compensation for the loss of Scorpion, while she held the beautiful glittering thing in her ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... little out of place—and felt it—amid this more or less gay company. But the drains of the Grand Hotel were known to be beyond question, and, coming to Rome so late in the season, the Reverend Canon Ebley felt it was wiser to risk the contamination of the over-worldly-minded than a possible attack of typhoid fever. The belief in a divine protection did not give him or his lady wife that serenity it might have done, and they traveled fearfully, taking with them their own ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... however highly estimated by the naturalist and the antiquary, were held in derision by the worldly-minded Tim. Surety, who exclaimed against the folly of expending money in the purchase of articles of no intrinsic value, calculated only to gratify the curiosity of those inquisitive idlers who affect their admiration of every uninteresting production ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... of intimate friendship, sympathy, whatever you like to call it: who could doubt what would happen? The more so, as there was no one to suggest that it might happen; no one to watch them or warn them, or waken them with worldly-minded hints; or else to rise up, after the fashion of so many wise parents and guardians and well-intentioned friends, and indignantly shut the stable door after ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Society high and low go packing. I would neither seek mine own people, nor allow myself to be sought by Elphin Montgomery's. I enwrapped myself in a fine garment of defiance. My sister Jane, who was harder and more worldly-minded than Agatha, would have had me don a helmet of brass and a breastplate of rhinoceros hide and force my way through reluctant portals; but Agatha agreed with me, clinging, however, to the hope that time would not only reconcile ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... if they please go to the workhouse; they know that it is for them the door of heaven. For my part, I am worldly-minded; I fear God, but yet more I fear the hell of poverty. To be destitute is the last depth of misfortune in society as now constituted. I am a man of my time; I ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... harm in this or that or the other worldly indulgence. He does not see the need of being so strenuous about little things. He is anxious to please everybody and can not bear to thwart the wishes of the worldly-minded. If the world dislikes any of the doctrines or the duties of religion he would have little said about them. In a word, he is all things to all men, in a very different sense from what Paul meant. In his sentiments, his associations, his pleasures, ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... Guadalquivir, while the neigh of steed and blast of trumpet vibrated in the air and resounded to the distant mountains. "But, above all," concludes the good father, with his accustomed zeal, "it was triumphant to behold the standard of the faith everywhere displayed, and to reflect that this was no worldly-minded army, intent upon some temporal scheme of ambition or revenge, but a Christian host bound on a crusade to extirpate the vile seed of Mahomet from the land and to extend the pure dominion of ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... disposed to toleration. He even goes the length of saying that some profane libellers whom his friend Coleridge was going to prosecute, were not half so dangerous enemies to religion as some wicked worldly-minded Christians. But it is no wonder, and implies no derogation from his charity, that he should have regarded the progress of opinions different from his own as a mediaeval monk would have regarded the progress of an army of Saracens ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... thee?" Amos likewise indignantly resents being placed on the same level with this begging fraternity: "I was no prophet," he says, "neither was I a prophet's son." And so when the people exclaimed in astonishment: "Is Saul also among the prophets?" they did not mean: "How is it that such a worldly-minded man finds himself in the company of such pious people?" Their meaning is better represented in a question like this: "How comes a person of such distinction to find himself in such ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... plain that she was on the side of the poet, not of the worldly-minded persons who advocated the law, business, money-making. She did not dread the prospect of being a poor man's wife. To be the wife of a poet, a man of courage and ambition and nobleness of heart, was far ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... in the course of the evening. Is there any use in such a journal as mine? Will the celebrated New Zealander, that is to be, discover the volumes amidst the ruins of Clapham? and shall I be quoted as the Pepys of the nineteenth century? But then I am by no means as racy as that worldly-minded little government clerk; or perhaps it may be that the time in which I live wants the spice and seasoning of that golden age of rascality in which my Lady Castlemain's white petticoats were to be seen flaunting in the wind by any ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... damnation. They were a quiet, simple, and unintellectual people. Such of them as occasionally read books knew nothing of any literature which was not religious. The stories they had followed through certain inexpensive periodicals were of the order which describes the gradual elevation of the worldly-minded or depraved to the plane of church-going and Sunday-school. Their few novels made it their motif to prove that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Any hero or heroine of wealth who found peace ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... loyalty to sister women, it is not a desire to better her country, which will make a woman neglect her husband. Society women, superficial, selfish, silly women, the butterflies of the ballroom, the seekers for every new sensation, the worldly-minded aspirants for social position, these are the women who neglect their homes; and not the brave, earnest, serious-minded, generous, unselfish women who ask for the ballot in order by its use to make the world better. In the twentieth ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... least, the religious element is a little out of place. An angel and a devil take an active part in the performance; miracles are worked on the stage; the unbelievers are so shockingly wicked, and the Christians so obtrusively good, that we—the worldly-minded—are sensible of a little recalcitration, unless we are disarmed by the simplicity of the whole performance. Religious tracts of all ages and in all forms are apt to produce this ambiguous effect. Unless we are quite in harmony with their assumptions, we feel that they deal ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... a little such invective occasionally, to refresh my zeal," he said, with provoking meekness. "It shows me where I am. It assures me that I am fighting the good fight. I do not blame my good mother; she is worldly-minded, and sees things from her stand-point. Neither she nor Susan can perceive anything but loss and disgrace, in the change from the handsome, fashionable church, where I used to preach, to the naked hall where our new ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... was the eldest of Uncle John's nieces, having just passed her eighteenth birthday. In the city she was devoted to the requirements of fashionable society and—urged thereto by her worldly-minded mother—led a mere butterfly existence. Her two cousins frankly agreed that Louise was shallow, insincere and inclined to be affected; but of the three girls she displayed the most equable and pleasant disposition ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... But in a purpose that lay much nearer to his heart he had failed lamentably; for, always sensitive to the charms of the other sex, Heine had conceived an overpowering passion for his cousin Amalie, the daughter of Salomon, only to meet with scornful rebuffs at the hands of the coquettish and worldly-minded heiress. There is no reason to suppose that Amalie ever took her cousin's advances seriously. Her father certainly did not so take them. On the other hand, there is equally little reason to doubt the sincerity ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... immediate practical outcome was disappointing, and the external history of the agitation is a record of failed experiments, spurious sciences, Utopian philosophies, and sects founded only to dwindle away or to be re-absorbed into some form of orthodoxy. In the eyes of the conservative, or the worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could not understand the enigmatic utterances of the reformers, the dangerous or ludicrous sides of transcendentalism were naturally uppermost. Nevertheless the movement was but a new avatar of the old Puritan spirit; ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers |
