"Ennobling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and its idols became the models of beauty. But, however highly the Greeks may have succeeded in the Beautiful and even in the Moral, we cannot concede any higher character to their civilization than that of a refined and ennobling sensuality. Of course this must be understood generally. The conjectures of a few philosophers, and the irradiations of poetical inspiration, constitute an occasional exception. Man can never altogether turn aside his thoughts from infinity, and some obscure recollections will always remind ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... absorbing study; but not one of them touched her heart. Her acquaintance with Alfred had made her fastidious. He had had sense enough to respect her, and his companionship had given her a fine foretaste of the love that is ennobling, the love that makes for high ideals of character and conduct, for fine purpose, spiritual power, and intellectual development, the one kind worth cultivating. In these more sophisticated youths she found nothing soul-sustaining. She philandered with some of them ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... their immediate superiors, we shall find reason to confess that the independence which has been gained since the total decay of the feudal system, has been dearly purchased by the loss of kindly feelings and ennobling attachments. They are less contented, and in no respect more happy—that look implies hesitation of judgment, and an unwillingness to be convinced. Consider the point; go to your books and your thoughts; and when next we meet, you will feel little inclination ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... by a virtuous, thrifty, cheerful, and cleanly woman, may be the abode of comfort, virtue, and happiness; it may be the scene of every ennobling relation in family life; it may be endeared to a man by many delightful associations; furnishing a sanctuary for the heart, a refuge from the storms of life, a sweet resting-place after labor, a consolation in misfortune, a pride in prosperity, and ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... substance of which is the white fire of Dante's love. And the thought will arise that this purely intellectual love of a scarce-noticed youth for a scarce-known woman is a thing which does not belong to life, neither sweetening nor ennobling any of its real relations; that it is, in its dazzling purity and whiteness, in fact a mere strange and sterile death light, such as could not and should not, in this world of ours, exist twice over. And, lest we should ever be tempted to think of this ideal love for Beatrice as of a wonderful ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... "Outlines of Astronomy." This is, indeed, a masterly work, in which the characteristic difficulties of the subject are resolutely faced and expounded with as much simplicity as their nature will admit. As a literary effort this work is admirable, both on account of its picturesque language and the ennobling conceptions of the universe which it unfolds. The student who desires to become acquainted with those recondite departments of astronomy, in which the effects of the disturbing action of one planet upon the motions of another planet are considered, will turn ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... of the future Man and of the Mother of Men; the enlarging and ennobling the moral ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... sculpture, arouse the emotions and direct them-if the art is good-into proper channels. Meunier's sculptured figures, Millet's Angelus or Man with the Hoe, the oratorio of the Messiah or a national song like the Marseillaise, have a stirring and ennobling effect upon the soul; while such a poem as Moody's Ode in Time of Hesitation, a story like Dickens's Christmas Carol, or a play like The Servant in efficacious than many a sermon. The study of any art has a refining influence, teaching exactness and restraint, proportion, measure, discipline. ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... heart was ever open to the overflowings of the wounded spirit. She had never been accustomed to lavish the best feelings of her nature on frivolous pursuits or fictitious distresses, but had early been taught to consecrate them to the best, the most ennobling purposes of humanity—even to the comforting of the weary soul, the binding of the bruised heart. Yet Mary was no rigid moralist. She loved amusement as the amusement of an imperfect existence, though her ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... builds an altar to it and causes to be proclaimed a feast to the Lord who has led them out of the land of Egypt. They must imitate the worship of the true God, a worship of sincere devotion and honest intention, with their offering, the calf, in the attempt to introduce a refined and ennobling worship. ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... those that come into the market are not found in the solid rock, but as loose grains in sand-beds. True jewel mines are few, unproductive, and easily exhausted. From this one would be inclined to suppose that precious stones actually undergo an ennobling process in the warm soil of ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... attempting something more than a passing entertainment, if we propose to enter on a consideration of the works produced by the most distinguished nations in their most brilliant periods, and to institute an inquiry into the means of ennobling and ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... catch the inspiration of its writers, and you will soon discriminate the inspired from the uninspired. With the statements of the true is necessarily more or less error; the Truth we want, the falsity we leave behind. Whatever is good and pure and ennobling is of God; whatever is evil, erroneous, degrading, is from man's misconception ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... purpose is to make everything good, man's highest privilege, as well as duty, is to co-operate with him in realizing that purpose. Are men to-day as a whole growing happier and nobler? In what practical ways may a man contribute to the happiness and ennobling of his fellow men? ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... poisonous air. Were she told all, would she not pity us? For if she love you, as I think she must, Would not some generous impulse stir in her, Some latent, unsuspected spark illume? How love thrills even commonest girl-clay, Ennobling it an instant, if no more! You said that she is proud; then touch her pride, And turn her into marble with the touch. But yet the gentler passion is the stronger. Go to her, tell her, in some tenderest phrase That will ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... fairly. So far was he from cherishing any bitterness, that he received the successful rival within the circle of his nearest friends. By being sincere, true to nature and conscience, Marian retained, not only the friendship and respect of her lovers, but also her ennobling influence over them. While they saw that Merwyn was supreme, they also learned that they would never be dismissed with indifference from her thoughts,—that she would follow them through life with an affectionate interest and good-will scarcely less than she would bestow on brothers cradled ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... short years of his boyhood. There he learned to love the aspect of fields and groves, the memory of which was his solace long after, in many dark and trying hours, for we find in the midst of the toils of the camp, that his spirit yearns for rural peace and solitude. The love of nature is ever ennobling; it perhaps contributed to form the character of ...
— A sketch of the life and services of Otho Holland Williams • Osmond Tiffany
... year 1580 the religious of the holy Society of Jesus arrived at the islands. They, in the manner of swift angels ennobling and glorifying those hidden plains, expanded the habitation of Japhet, in order that he might possess the famous tents of Shem. Immediately, or very near the beginning, the superior detached excellent soldiers of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... us in silence. They know in advance that the man before them is no longer the guilty creature they sought; and instead of bringing hatred, revolt, and despair, or punishments that degrade and kill, they will come charged with ennobling, consoling and ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... get at the truth. During the whole of this half-year there has been a spirit of unhappiness, of mischief, and of suspicion in our midst. Under these circumstances love cannot thrive; under these circumstances the true and ennobling sense of brotherly kindness, and all those feelings which real religion prompt must languish. I tell you all now plainly that I will not have this thing in Lavender House. It is simply disgraceful for one girl ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... trees." As upon paper heat of fire may cause to appear characters before invisible, so, when he turned, the flame of a great passion had brought all that was highest in this gentleman's nature into his countenance, softening and ennobling it. "Whatever my thoughts before," he said simply, "I have never, since I awoke from my fever and remembered that night at the Palace, meant other than this." Coming back to MacLean he laid a hand upon his shoulder. "Who made us knows we all do need forgiveness! Am I no more to you, ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... master spirit of his time, its Censor, as Macaulay is its Panegyrist, and Tennyson its Mirror. He has saturated his nation with a wholesome tonic, and the practice of any one of his precepts for the conduct of life is ennobling. More intense than Wordsworth, more intelligible than Browning, more fervid than Mill, he has indicated the pitfalls in our civilisation. His works have done much to mould the best thinkers in two continents, in both of ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... "Reverence is an ennobling sentiment; it is felt to be degrading only by the vulgar mind, which would escape the sense of its own littleness by elevating itself into the antagonist of what ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... kind of you, I'm sure, to notice my humble labours," replied the old lady, expanding at once under the first word of flattery. "My brother tells me you're connected with a great newspaper. How ennobling that must be! It gives you such a wide scope for ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... alertness and intelligence of the natives must be to some extent an inheritance from the generations of strenuous clansmen whose blood flows in their veins. Life in a historical district is bound to have an ennobling effect on a man, especially if he feels knit to the past by lineal descent from the historical actors. A glamour of romance clings to hill and glen. The dalesman you meet on the highway can tell you ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... knowing how the time passed; Eric could not help thinking how very very different their relative positions might have been; how, while he might have been aiding and ennobling the young boy beside him, he had alternately led and followed him into wickedness and disgrace. His heart was full of misery and bitterness, and he felt almost indifferent to all the future, and weary of ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... cringing at detonations too far off to be of danger. Try as he would to make his feet go forward, his hands pulled against the stretcher handles, until Hastings turned and repaid him with a longer string of oaths. These, and a memory of the ennobling words of Bonsecours, gave him strength for a new spurt; yet both soon began to ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... condition; and it would be unfortunate if this did satisfy him. In many cases man shakes off this blind law of necessity, by his free spontaneous action, of which among many others we have an instance, in his ennobling by beauty and suppressing by moral influence the powerful impulse implanted in him by nature in the passion of love. Thus, when arrived at maturity, he recovers his childhood by an artificial process, he founds a state of nature in his ideas, not given him ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... establish such a principle as rotation in office or removal without sufficient cause. Not one there was who would not have shrunk from such a dangerous precedent, a policy certain to produce an inferior class of public servants, and take away from political life all that is lofty and ennobling, except in positions entirely independent of presidential control, such as the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... also others who regarded Northern men as cowards, who, even if willing to fight, would not at best be equal, a half dozen of them, to one Southern man. These false notions were sincerely entertained. The Southern people regarded slavery as ennobling to the white race, and free white labor as degrading to the people of the free States, and hence were confident of their own superiority in arms and otherwise. There were even some people North who had so long heard the Southern boasts of superior courage that ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... proceeds to develop it into a definite system of what may be termed scientific theology. And not only so, but he assures the world that this system of scientific theology is the highest, the purest, and the most ennobling form of religion that mankind has ever been privileged to know in the past, or, from the nature of the case, can ever be destined to know in the future. It is a system, we are told, wherein the most fundamental truths of Theism ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... a service of real and paramount patriotism, he composed a work on the grammar and orthoepy of the Latin language. Cicero and himself were the only Romans of distinction in that age who applied themselves with true patriotism to the task of purifying and ennobling their mother tongue. Both were aware of a transcendent value in the Grecian literature as it then stood; but that splendour did not depress their hopes of raising their own to something of the same level. As respected the natural wealth of the two languages, ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... with his brother and sixty followers, entered the precincts of a temple and died by their own hands.* Takauji and his captains, lamenting the brave bushi's death, sent his head to his family; and history recognizes that his example exercised an ennobling influence not only on the men of his era but also on subsequent generations. After Masashige's fall a similar fate must have overtaken Yoshisada, had not one of those sacrifices familiar on a Japanese field of battle been made for his sake. Oyamada Takaiye gave his horse to the Nitta ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... ennobling effect of war. "War," he said, "opens the most fruitful field to all virtues, for at every moment constancy, pity, magnanimity, heroism, and mercy, shine forth in it; every moment offers an opportunity to ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... my return from Paris, I grew restless again, with a longing for more responsibility and a larger and freer life; with, perhaps, an admixture of something not so ennobling—the desire for a bigger income. Never was I indifferent to the comforts that money can bring, though never, I must confess, was I gifted with the capacity for money making or money saving. The pleasures of life (the rational ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... this terrace, and it has witnessed many terrible scenes, fire and slaughter and religious strife, but it has also seen more that is ennobling and inspiring. In its strength this terrace has supported those who passed their days upon it, imbuing them, and those who live there yet, with the serenity that comes of a faith built on a sure foundation. This ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... the establishment of a common truth, and in the sacrifice of cherished ideals and convictions which prove to be wrong. If carried to its logical conclusion, such a cosmopolitan broad-mindedness, such a cross-fertilisation of intellectual products, must give rise to the ennobling idea that there is only one truth, and that the external forms are only fleeting waves upon the vast ocean of human ideals. The attempt was made in Alexandria by the Judaeo-Hellenic philosophers. Unfortunately, however, the Hebrews, with all their adaptability, ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... journey of life, I would say: "Don't think too much of the amount of salary your employer gives you at the start. Think, rather, of the possible salary you can give yourself, in increasing your skill, in expanding your experience, in enlarging and ennobling yourself." A man's or a boy's work is material with which to build character and manhood. It is life's school for practical training of the faculties, stretching the mind, and strengthening and developing the intellect, not a mere mill for grinding ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... a great deal of good, and it has affected me much and opened my eyes in many ways. It is an ennobling thing to think that God is more in the soul of man than He is in aught else outside of Himself. They are happy people who have once got a hold of this glorious truth. In particular, the Blessed Augustine ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... Jesus Christ, God's sacrifice for a world's sin, it brings to us the clear consciousness of pardon, the calm sense of communion, the joyful spirit of adoption, righteousness rooted in our hearts and to be manifested day by day in our lives; it brings all elevation and strengthening and ennobling for the whole nature, and is the one power that makes us really men as God would have us all ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... dance, and inflamed their passions with the most costly wines. It can not be denied that a man who is trained from infancy amidst such scenes could acquire elegance of manner which those engrossed in the useful and ennobling employments of life rarely attain. Neither can it be denied that this is as poor a school as can possibly be imagined to prepare one wisely to administer the affairs of a nation of twenty millions of people. In fact, Louis XIV. never dreamed of consulting the interests of the people. It was ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... eternal Rome. I love thee, my sacred country! And I swear that I will love all thy sons like brothers; that I will always honor in my heart thy great men, living and dead; that I will be an industrious and honest citizen, constantly intent on ennobling myself, in order to render myself worthy of thee, to assist with my small powers in causing misery, ignorance, injustice, crime, to disappear one day from thy face, so that thou mayest live and expand tranquilly in the majesty of thy right and of ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... with the execrable sin which calls down vengeance upon this house. I cannot even dwell upon my past life. All that is dark, threatening, secret, and revengeful slips from me under her eye, and I dream of what is pure, true, satisfying, and ennobling. And this by the influence of her smile, rather than of her words. Have I been given an angel to degrade? Or am I so blind as to behold a saint where others (Felix, let us say) would see only a pretty woman with ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... is not in touch with conscience and neither to ourselves, nor to others, does it inspire ennobling sentiments. A proper name for it is ambition—a selfish quality, whose essence bears no relation to the aspiration of boy and girl, man and woman, toward what ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... railway trains, the penny post, and the halfpenny paper, together with the centralization of general opinion and all government which has resulted therefrom. But above all reasons were the loss of the qualifying ancestral lands, a link with the soil; and the ennobling of landless men. Once divorced from its influence over some countryside a peerage resting on heredity was doomed; for no one can defend a system whereby men of no exceptional ability, representative of nothing, are legislators ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... past. They saw war as they saw history, through an iridescent mist, deodorised, scented indeed, with all its essential cruelties tactfully hidden away. They were inclined to regret it as something ennobling, to sigh that it could no longer come into their own private experience. They read with interest, if not with avidity, of their new guns, of their immense and still more immense ironclads, of their incredible ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... and even our factories might become imposing objects if appropriately conceived, for is not labor ennobling? Anything that is worth doing, is worth doing well; and if any of our manufacturing towns are hideous, they are not necessarily so.[24] There is a certain grandeur about many such places, with their myriad chimneys ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... of free Levi? and when Aunt Rhody's cabin was in flames did he not bring out one of the negro babies in his coat? That dare-devil courage which had first caught her girlish fancy, thrilled her even to-day as the proof of an ennobling purpose. She remembered that he had gone whistling into the burning cabin, and coming out again had coolly taken up the broken air; and to her this inherent recklessness was clothed with the ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... The devout, ennobling feelings which had inspired every heart were scattered to the four winds; we dispersed like a flock of doves threatened by a hawk, and the search for the places marked by a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... traditional right of Anglo-Saxons to rebel against injustice. We have traveled centuries and centuries since then—measured in events, in achievements, in depth of insight into the secrets of nature, in breadth of view, in sweep of sympathy, and in the rise of ennobling hope. Physically we are to-day nearer to China than we were then to Ohio. Socially, industrially, commercially the wide world is almost a unit. And these thirteen states have spread across a continent to which ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... we are all born for hell. One need not agree with him. In the presence of the possibly monstrous and the impossibly blasphemous, there is always a recourse. It is to turn away, though it be to Zeus, a belief in whom, however stupid, is ennobling beside the ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... was upon me there; The soul of Beauty and enduring Life Vouchsafed her inspiration, and diffused, Through meagre lines and colours, and the press Of self-destroying, transitory things, 770 Composure, and ennobling Harmony. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... demanded rigid service, as the clerks who saw him bent lower to their task, but Helen did not notice the two until they were about to pass through a far door. Her cheeks reddened as they went out, for it hurt her pride that Prescott should see her there—a mere clerk, honest and ennobling though she knew ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... the soul is, and how easily by example, or conduct, or fashion it may be so perverted as to lose its clear vision and higher aims, its pure tastes and ennobling emotions, we have to make it our ambition and endeavour that our life may be kept free ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... to have been to sing his praises. Surrounded with splendors like these, the plain title of "Mr." Dexter would have been infinitely too mean and common. He therefore boldly took the step of self-ennobling, and gave himself forth—as he said, obeying "the voice of the people at large"—as "Lord Timothy Dexter," by which appellation he has ever since been ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in pictures where loving human faculty has lifted ordinary motives into our sympathy; but where the subject is the grandest landscape affluence of the world, effect, in the ordinary sense, ceases to be of value. We need the thing, and no human ennobling of it. In this picture we have it; no spectral cloud-pile, but a real Chimborazo, with the hoar of eternity upon its scalp, looks down upon the happy New-Yorker in his first May perspiration. And ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Tarleton, Balfour, and Weymies; monsters who disgraced the brave and generous nation they represented, and completely damned the cause they were sent to save. But what better was to have been expected of those, who, from early life, if tradition say true, discovered a total dislike to the ennobling pleasures of literature and devotion, but a boundless passion for the brutalizing sports of the bear-garden and cock-pit? Bull-baiters, cock-fighters, and dog worriers, turned officers, had no idea of conquering the Americans, ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... religious equality as had then come to be sanctioned by responsible politicians in England. They were ready to make great sacrifices in defence of their political creed. But the principles and purposes with which they started, and to which they kept, did not succeed in purifying and ennobling all their parliamentary strategy and political conduct. They intrigued, they bribed, they bought, they cajoled, they paltered, they threatened, they made unsparing use of money and of power, they employed every art to carry out high and national purposes which the most unscrupulous cabal ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... American verses, that they have a real innate harmony, something not dependent on the number of syllables in each line, or capable of being dissected out into feet, but growing in them, as it were, and created by the fine ear of the writer. Their sentiments, too, are exalted and ennobling; eminently genial and honest, they stamp the author for a good man and true,—Nature's aristocracy.... For some unexplained reason Halleck has not written, or at least not published, anything new ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... element of society, only to be considered as human beings at election time; at all other times merely as animals that had to be fed, in order to keep them from becoming an active peril. The philosopher, even the Stoic, whose creed was by far the most ennobling in that age, seems to have left the dregs of the people quite out of account; though his philosophy nominally took the whole of mankind into its cognisance, it believed the masses to be degraded and vicious, ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... the difference in the world between "working" and "being worked." To work is a privilege and a boon to either man or woman, and, properly regulated, it ought to be a pleasure. To be worked is degrading. To work is dignified and ennobling, for to work means the exercise of the mental quite as much as the physical self. But the average working girl puts neither heart nor mind into her labor; she is merely a machine, though the comparison is a libel upon the functions ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... supreme loyalty to life of the individual. Wherever this loyalty is instinctive, vivid, there some precious tradition has been bequeathed to a people that still burns in their blood. Latin patriotism is ardent like man's one great love for woman, ennobling the giver as well as the loved one; it is tender like the son's love for the mother, with the sanctity of acknowledgment of the debt of life. Can any vision of "internationalism" take the place of these powerful ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... self-help and co-operation; in alleviating the inevitable suffering that follows some great catastrophe on land or sea, or great transitions of industry, or great fluctuations and depressions in class prosperity; in giving the means of healthy recreation or ennobling pleasures to the denizens of a crowded town. The vast sphere of education opens endless fields for generous expenditure, and every religious man will find objects which, in the opinion not only of ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... when Turner was "really great." He is, and was, really great, from the time when he first could hold a brush, but he never was so great as he is now. The Crossing the Brook, glorious as it is as a composition, and perfect in all that is most desirable and most ennobling in art, is scarcely to be looked upon as a piece of color; it is an agreeable, cool, gray rendering of space and form, but it is not color; if it be regarded as such, it is thoroughly false and vapid, and very far inferior to the tones of the same kind given by Claude. The reddish ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... above the jagged battlements. The deep blue sky, the shining snow, the huge, dark, rocky bases, the different shades of color harmoniously blending, the soft and rugged shapes contrasting vividly—well may impress the soul with pleasure-relieving awe, with awe-ennobling pleasure. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... industrious natives would gladly settle round it, and engage in that peaceful pursuit of agriculture and trade of which they are so fond, and, undistracted by wars and rumors of wars, might listen to the purifying and ennobling truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ." At Zumbo, the most picturesque site in the country, they saw the ruins of Jesuit missions, reminding them that there men once met to utter the magnificent words, "Thou art ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... is placed beyond hazard or jeopardy. The guaranty of religious freedom, of the freedom of the press, of the liberty of speech, of the trial by jury, of the habeas corpus, and of the domestic institutions of each of the States, leaving the private citizen in the full exercise of the high and ennobling attributes of his nature and to each State the privilege (which can only be judiciously exerted by itself) of consulting the means best calculated to advance its own happiness—these are the great and important ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Tyler • John Tyler
... that the Desert were my dwelling-place, With one fair Spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race, And, hating no one, love but only her! Ye elements!—in whose ennobling stir I feel myself exalted—Can ye not Accord me such a being? Do I err In deeming such inhabit many a spot? Though with them to converse ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... calculation of the sordid gain to be derived from their Government's maintenance. It undermines the self-reliance of our people and substitutes in its place dependence upon governmental favoritism. It stifles the spirit of true Americanism and stupefies every ennobling trait ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... rick-burning. The better advice will to a certainty not be taken by ninety-nine out of every hundred of our bothy-men; for it is one of the grand evils of the system, that it removes its victims beyond the ennobling influences of religion; and, on the other hand, at least this much may be said for the worse counsel, that the system costs the country every year the price of ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... Boy", because it has more story plot, and the adventure is in a more restricted field, but it discloses no less the nobility of a right-minded child, and how loyalty wins the way to noble deeds and life. This is another beautiful literary creation of Hector Malot which every one can recommend as an ennobling book, of interest not only to childhood, page by page to the thrilling conclusion, but to every person who loves ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... stood apart, watching her and listening to her in silence. Not a look that had crossed her face, not a word that had fallen from her, had escaped him. Unconsciously on her side, unconsciously on his side, she now wrought on his nature with a purifying and ennobling influence which animated it with a new life. All that had been selfish and violent in his passion for her left him to return no more. The immeasurable devotion which he laid at her feet, in the days that were yet to come—the unyielding courage which cheerfully accepted the sacrifice ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... made, no man ever saw him hesitate, no man ever saw him hold back from that which was necessary to give it effect.' Though his own political views changed, Gladstone always paid tribute to the moral influence which Peel had exercised in political life, purifying its practices and ennobling ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... Upanishads, however, does not rest upon their antiquity, but upon the vital message they contain for all times and all peoples. There is nothing peculiarly racial or local in them. The ennobling lessons of these Scriptures are as practical for the modern world as they were for the Indo-Aryans of the earliest Vedic age. Their teachings are summed up in two Maha-Vakyam or "great sayings":—Tat twam asi (That thou art) and Aham Brahmasmi (I am Brahman). This oneness of Soul ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... you," Erlcort answered, dryly. "I consider that passage one of the finest in modern fiction—one of the most ennobling ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... warmly. "Revenge yourself on your enemy, if you consider the destruction of his property a noble revenge. Destroy the king's palaces; rob him, if you choose, of his most ennobling enjoyment! Rob him of his pictures; do like the Saxons, who yesterday destroyed Charlottenburg. Send your soldiers to my house; there hang splendid paintings bought by me in Italy by the king's order. I know that ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... that have passed since our language assumed a comparatively fixed literary form, have a much more valuable function to perform. Character is more valuable than knowledge and a taste for pure and ennobling literature is a safeguard for the young ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... Bunker Hill and Yorktown. This is indeed an auspicious day for you. The God of Battle is with you. The dawn of a conquered peace is breaking upon you. The plaudits of an admiring world will hail you wherever you go, and it will be an ennobling heritage, surpassing all riches, to have been of the Army of the Tennessee on ...
— The Battle of Atlanta - and Other Campaigns, Addresses, Etc. • Grenville M. Dodge
... political philosophy that shall make the Indians, as individuals and as a tribe, subjects of American law and beneficiaries of American institutions, by making them first American citizens, and clothing them as rapidly as their advancement and location will permit, with the protecting and ennobling ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... the effect of this connection with royalty, in ennobling an ancient and loyal race, the marriage produced a lasting influence on the fortunes of the family. That they were proud of the alliance appears from the circumstance that the children of that marriage used to wear ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... something ennobling in the blacksmith calling. It not only strengthens the muscles but ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... multitude, Jesus admonished them to give heed to the teachings of the Twelve, and continued with a discourse embodying the sublime principles He had taught among the Jews in the Sermon on the Mount.[1470] The Beatitudes, the Lord's Prayer, and the same splendid array of ennobling precepts are set forth, and the same wealth of effective comparison and apt illustration appear, in both Matthew's and Nephi's versions of this unparalleled address; but a significant difference is observed in every reference to the fulfilment of the Mosaic ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... of the flag, to any but the best and wisest of your sons. Such a school for moral training has never been devised as one of the floating colleges that carry guns. The youngest midshipman acquires habits of command, the oldest captain practises the ennobling virtue of obedience; and these, we take it, form the alpha and omega of man's useful existence. Power gives self-respect, responsibility gives caution, and subjection gives humility. With all these united, as they are in every rank in the service, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... elapsed ere Homer's lamp appeared, And ages ere the Mantuan swan was heard. To carry nature lengths unknown before, To give a Milton birth, asked ages more. Thus genius rose and set at ordered times, And shot a dayspring into distant climes, Ennobling every region that he chose; He sunk in Greece, in Italy he rose, And, tedious years of Gothic darkness past, Emerged all splendor in our isle at last. Thus lovely Halcyons dive into the main, Then show far ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... welcomed on the City Exchange as "Lockerby of Ellenmount, gentleman." "I hae lived lang enough to hae seen this day," he said, with happy tears; and David felt a joy in his father's joy that he did not know again for many years. For while a man works for another there is an ennobling element in his labor, but when he works simply for himself he has become the greatest of all slaves. This slavery David now willingly assumed; the accumulation of money became his business, his pleasure, the sum of his ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... the roads, and the talk that went on was of one kind—love. He said that newspapers containing love-stories were finding their way into the people's houses, stories about love, in which there was nothing elevating or ennobling. The people listened, accepting the priest's opinion without question. And their submission was pathetic. It was the submission of a primitive people clinging to religious authority, and Bryden contrasted the weakness and incompetence ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... startling, there is nothing sensational in the book. The reader observes only the growth and movement of the poison in the girl's system, its effect on her way of life, and its remarkable power over her mind. Horror or disgust at her condition is not for one moment evoked. The style is pure and ennobling, and while our sympathies may be touched, we are at the same time fascinated and entertained, from the first page to the last. Of quite different texture is "The Guardian Angel," a perhaps more readable story, so far as form is concerned, much lighter in character, and less of a study. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... the patriot, who was no match for the machinations of the European statecraft which has borne its lamentable fruits in the recent cataclysm we have all witnessed. He was thrown on the resources with which he was more familiar: those of an ennobling idea and of the exactions of self-devotion in its cause. Immediately after his eyes had been opened at Szczekociny to the new peril that had burst upon his country he sent out another order, bidding ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... you think that such men have an ennobling influence upon life? Might not such men ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... first healthful shock of honest resentment, Tom became a man of one idea. Somewhere in the land of the living dwelt a man who had robbed him, intentionally or otherwise, indirectly, but none the less effectually, of the ennobling love of the one woman; to find that man and to deal with him as Joab dealt with Amasa became the one thing ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... way, I, who saw nothing to object to in the 'Life in the Sick Room,' object very much to her argument in behalf of it—an argument certainly founded on a miserable misapprehension of the special doctrine referred to in her letter. There is nothing so elevating and ennobling to the nature and mind of man as the view which represents it raised into communion with God Himself, by the justification and purification of God Himself. Plato's dream brushed by the gate of this doctrine when it walked ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... that the Desert were my dwelling-place, With one fair Spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race, And, hating no one, love but only her! Ye Elements!—in whose ennobling stir I feel myself exalted—can ye not Accord me such a being? Do I err In deeming such inhabit many a spot? Though with them to converse can rarely be ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... priests and nuns and hermits and fanatics, and sees how they have distorted His beautiful scheme of things with their narrow ideas. Trying to eliminate the red out of His spectrum, instead of ennobling and glorifying it all with ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... character, another type another. A change in the music of a state, wrote Plato, will be followed by changes in its constitution. It is of the utmost importance, said Aristotle, to provide in education for the use of the ennobling and the fortifying moods. These philosophers knew that music creates a spiritual world, in which the spirit cannot live and move without contracting habits of emotion. In this vagueness of significance but intensity of feeling lies the magic of music. A melody occurs ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... for their own artistic qualities. It does not, indeed, follow that the influence of the great sculptors upon the religious ideals of the people was a negligible quality; we have abundant evidence, both direct and indirect, that it was very great. But it was exercised chiefly by following and ennobling traditional notions rather than by daring innovation, and therefore can only be understood in relation to the general development both of religious ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... the development and lower the morality of our sons? No! we believe that women ought to be free and equal before the law, so that they may become mothers of free and equal sons and daughters, helping in each other's development, ennobling and no longer ...
— The First Essay on the Political Rights of Women • Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet
... invited, too. Oh, I see it all now; it's clear as daylight. I've suspected the truth for some time, but I've refused to credit it. Now everything is explained. I took you at your word; I believed in you and your husband and looked up to you as literary people—people who were interested in fine and ennobling things. I admired you for the very reason that I thought you didn't care, and that you didn't need to care, about society and fashionable position. I kept saying to you that I envied you your tastes, and let you see that I considered myself your real inferior in my determination ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... superiors and inferiors. It is pleasant to have some one to whom we can look up, as better endowed than ourselves; and it is pleasant to have others who can look up to us. And our best and most ethical judgment approves of this feeling. In particular, there is no feeling so ennobling as reverence; but there would be no proper place for reverence if we were equal. It would not, therefore, be easy to think that an ideal state of ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... Biography, and works of fiction all contribute their share; while poetry enjoys the cumulative privilege of uniting in itself the incentives to Art which are commanded by all other branches of Literature as well as the ennobling sentiments inspired by religion, patriotism and other affections of the human heart. An elevating mission, indeed, be it only directed in a worthy course. Frivolity and license are alike the bane of literature and art. Earnestness of purpose and severity of moral tone ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... was plain, his work arose before him, alluring, ennobling, inspiring. And Nancy loved him! ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... Married" was the full title, and another almost as applicable would have been "Bits Cut Out of a Story because They Prevented its Marching." If you have any memory you do not need to be told how that splendid study, so ennobling, so penetrating, of woman at her best, took the town. Tommy woke a famous man, and, except Elspeth, no one was more pleased ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... featly danc'd; Bright to the moon their various dresses glanc'd: They footed owre the wat'ry glass so neat, The infant ice scarce bent beneath their feet: While arts of minstrelsy among them rung, And soul-ennobling bards heroic ditties sung.— O had M'Lauchlan,[67] thairm-inspiring Sage, Been there to hear this heavenly band engage, When thro' his dear strathspeys they bore with highland rage; Or when they struck old Scotia's ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... sometimes displayed an obliquity of taste in their female favourites. As if conscious of the power of ennobling others, some have selected them from the lowest classes, whom, having elevated into divinities, they have addressed in the language of poetical devotion. The Chloe of Prior, after all his raptures, was a plump barmaid. Ronsard addressed ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... from circumstances. For the ideal must always be a paradox when compared with the ordinary conditions of human life. Neither the Stoical ideal nor the Christian ideal is true as a fact, but they may serve as a basis of education, and may exercise an ennobling influence. An ideal is none the worse because 'some one has made the discovery' that no such ideal was ever realized. And in a few exceptional individuals who are raised above the ordinary level of humanity, the ...
— The Republic • Plato
... been strangers, by virtue of a successful contract or a towering speculation. The effect of such a state of things upon our civilization is easy to be seen. A low motive is sure to bring down its followers to its own level. A people without a lofty and ennobling object is sure to fall into decay. The grasping spirit which everywhere pervades our society is fast lowering our people to the level of a race of mercenary jobbers. Truth, justice, honor, purity, and even religion, are in a great measure lost sight of in the general scramble for gold, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... felt by all the best men, that the best thing of all was not to be born, and the next best to die. Of all views of the world possible to a tender and poetically organized mind in the kindred Caesarian age this was the noblest and the most ennobling, that it is a benefit for man to be released from a belief in the immortality of the soul and thereby from the evil dread of death and of the gods which malignantly steals over men like terror creeping over children ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... art the centre, in whose close embrace, From all the wild circumference, each line Directly runs to find its resting-place: Upon their swiftest wings, to perch on thine Ennobling breast, which is their only butt, The arrows of all high desires ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Wine's emulous neighbour, though but stale, Ennobling all the nymphs of water, And filling each man's heart with laughter— Ha! give ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... She determined to throw her whole heart into her task, and work as no junior French mistress had ever worked before; she determined never to lose patience, never to grow cross, never to indulge in a sarcastic word, always to be a model of tact and forbearance. She determined to wield such an ennobling influence over the girls in her form-room that they should take fire from her example, and go forth into the world perfect, high-souled women who should leaven the race. She determined also to be the life and soul of the staff-room—the general peace-maker, confidante, and consoler, beloved ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... seen Thomson's attack on the Apocrypha?" And so the two go on exchanging notes on their respective bundles of literary lumber, but without endeavouring to gain the least understanding of any author's meaning, and without tasting in the smallest degree any one of the ennobling properties of ripe thought or beautiful workmanship. The main thing is to be able to say that you have read a book. What you have got out of it is quite another thing with which no one is concerned; so that in some societies where the pretence of being "literary" is kept up the bewildered outsider ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... rocky shores. O native Britain! O my Mother Isle! How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy To me, who from thy lakes and mountain-hills, Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas, 185 Have drunk in all my intellectual life, All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts, All adoration of the God in nature, All lovely and all honourable things. Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel 190 The joy and greatness of its future being? There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul Unborrowed from ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... tended by Ephraim and Viola, an ennobling influence gradually came over the heart of the old gambler, and so deeply touched it, that calm peace crowned his closing days. It was strange that the events of that memorable night, and the vicissitudes that had preceded it, had left no recollection ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... Bible fluttered the faith of the flappers in Oxford, or whether his long silences made the undergraduates more stupid than they would otherwise have been, I care little: I only know that he was what I call great and that he had an ennobling influence over my life. He was apprehensive of my social reputation; and in our correspondence, which started directly we parted at Gosford, he constantly gave me wise advice. He was extremely simple-minded and had a pathetic belief ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... that equal poise of soul which made her entrance into a room the prelude to higher thoughts and finer feelings. She was naturally kind without consciousness of a mission, neither seeking to enslave nor enfranchise, but by a silent outflowing of goodness ennobling whatever company she was in. Nor was her tongue the prattling servant of her beauty, but a guide of cheerful converse; for just as she charmed without device or scheme of fascination, so she possessed the art of speaking well without seeming to have ever studied it. ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... The reference is to the death at sea of his brother Captain John Wordsworth. The poet can no longer see things wholly idealized. His brother's death has revealed to him, however, the ennobling virtue of grief. Thus a personal loss is converted into human gain. Note especially in this connection ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... in one sense empurpling, pall over your University life. Oxford has many gifts for those who are willing to receive them; do not, my friend, be content with the least which she can give. The maxim of Mr. Browning, that the grasp of a man should exceed his reach, if not an ennobling maxim, must not be ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... Lumley, with all my heart. I think it is ennobling to a man to love a girl because of her pure and sterling qualities irrespective of her looks, and I would count it foul disgrace to do anything to win her unless I saw my way quite clearly to ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... the hall. He must have heard what they said, for before they could move he had laid his hands on their three brown heads. "Bless you, my children," he said, "God will lift up the light of his countenance upon you, for you have given yourselves to a noble work. In serving dumb creatures, you are ennobling the human race." ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... and sobbed and cried. It was a beautiful and restful place, covered with old acacia trees. The inscription over the gateway was one of my earliest puzzles. Tod ist nicht Tod, ist nur Veredlung menschlicher Natur (Death is not death, 'tis but the ennobling of man's nature). On each side there stood a figure, representing the genius of sleep and the genius of death. All this was the work of the old Duke, Leopold Friedrich Franz, who tried to educate his people as he had educated himself, partly ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... Puritans were taunted by their adversaries for their frequent fasts, and the severity of their lives; and they certainly were far enough from agreeing with Mr. Newman. Whatever there is of good, or self-denying, or ennobling, in his system, is altogether independent of his doctrine concerning the priesthood. It is that doctrine which is the peculiarity of his system and of Romanism; it is that doctrine which constitutes ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... his heart was light and warm as though flooded with first love—not troubled by it, as youth in first love is wont to be—but bathed in it; he, the ardent young officer, bathed in a glow of affection, ennobling, exalting him, making him free of a ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... unfitted to guide the passions which they are able to excite. We want a poetry which shall speak in clear, loud tones to the people; a poetry which shall make us more in love with our native land, by converting its ennobling scenery into the images of lofty thoughts; which shall give visible form and life to the abstract ideas of our written constitutions; which shall confer upon virtue all the strength of principle and all the energy of passion; which shall ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... children playing at a cottage door, being wholly separate from that which we find in the fields or commons around them; and the beauty of architecture, or the associations connected with it, in like manner often ennobling the most tame scenery;—yet not so but that we may always distinguish between the abstract character of the unassisted landscape, and the charm which it derives from the architecture. Much of the majesty of French landscape consists in its grand and grey village ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... Guernsey, and the funeral was in consequence a public one. "For though Mr. Brock had enriched his country with numerous and inappreciable benefits—though he bequeathed to it an inestimable heritage in his deeds and in his example—he died in honorable and ennobling poverty, resulting from his disinterestedness, his integrity, and his patriotism.[162] The public, we say, were pleased, were gratified, were proud in seeing that their representatives and rulers ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... and childish language which excited not unjust ridicule, and long delayed the general recognition of his genius. He has a marvellous felicity of phrase, an unrivalled power of describing natural appearances and effects, and the most ennobling views of life and duty. But his great distinguishing characteristic is his sense of the mystic relations between man and nature. His influence on contemporary and succeeding thought and literature ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... that made the passion; it was rather the passion that made the man mad. As we understand him, it seems to us that Swift's was an eminently majestic spirit, moved by the tenderest of human sympathies, and capable of ennobling love—a creature born to rule and to command, but with all the noble qualities which go to make a ruler loved. It happened that circumstances placed him early in his career into poverty and servitude. He extricated himself from both in time; but his liberation ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... anxiety. What was the sustaining spirit of such martyrdom? I asked myself again and again. Was it the zeal of true religion, or was it the energy of loyalty, that bore them up against every danger, and enabled them to brave death itself with firmness?—and if this faith of theirs was thus ennobling, why could not France be of one mind and heart? There came no answer to these doubts of mine, and I slowly advanced toward the altar, still deeply buried in thought. What was my surprise to see that two candles stood there, which bore signs of having been recently ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... people whose cuticle is not white. It is, however, but bare justice to say that, as Negroes are by no means deficient in self-love and the tenderness of natural affection, such gratifying fulfilment of a family's hopes exerts an elevating and, in many cases, an ennobling influence on every one connected with the fortunate household. Nor, from the eminently sympathetic nature of the African race, are the near friends of a family [38] unbenefited in a similar way. This is true, and distinctively human; but, naturally, ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... reflected that you really never knew what to expect of children), this appeal produced an immediate and extraordinary result. Lucy, who had been fidgeting about and trying to help with the packing, became suddenly solemn and dignified, while an ennobling excitement mounted to Harry's face. Never particularly obedient before, they became, as soon as the words were uttered, as amenable as angels. Even Jenny stopped feeding long enough to raise herself and pat her mother's cheek with ten caressing, ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... contemptible of mankind, are liable to become the subjects of an enduring passion; only then it raises them; for though strong affection, especially, if unrequited, sometimes wears and enervates the mind, its influence is, in the main, undoubtedly ennobling. But, though such affection is bounded by no rule, it is curious to observe how generally true are the old sayings which declare that a man's thoughts return to his first real love, as naturally and unconsciously as the needle, that has for a while ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... the thought of using a rich wife as an advancement; but then, on the other hand, he would gain a companion whose divine sweetness would be an ennobling inspiration. ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn |
