"Facts of life" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an amount of preliminary instruction which would require half-a-year's study, and they will then thoroughly appreciate the quite marvellous ingenuity and beautiful skill with which M. Mace has brought the great leading anatomical and physical facts of life out of the depths of scientific learning, and made them literally comprehensible ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... indeed dropped, and a more harmonious form of art than the Euripidean was created for comedy by Menan'der, when the Athenians, after passing through their disputatious period, had settled down into a tranquil acceptation of the facts of life. Yet this return to harmony of form and purity of perception did not abate the influence of Euripides. Here and there throughout his tragedies he had said, and well said, what the Greeks were bound to think and feel upon ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... a principle, whereby, as he conceived, man might again be reconciled to the world and God, and all things be viewed as the manifestation of a power that is benevolent; he also sought to apply his principle to the facts of life. He illustrates his fundamental hypothesis by means of these facts; and he tests its validity with the persistence and impressive candour of a scientific investigator. His optimism is not that of an eclectic, who can ignore inconvenient difficulties. It is not an attempt to ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... shall have a store of sweet knowledge on the subject that will enable us to live well ourselves and fit us to bring into the world such children as will amaze us with their health of body and purity of mind. No alteration of the facts of life is necessary, but only a change of attitude. Why, when Trilby brought the bare foot into prominence, it was gravely debated whether or not such an indecency should be permitted. It was assumed that a naked foot was indecent. Why a foot ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... fails to reckon first with the homemaking career of girls is therefore blind to the facts of life. All education, all training, must be considered in its bearing on the one vocation, homemaking. The time will come when the occupations of boys and men must likewise be considered in relation to homemaking, but that problem is not the province ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... bath we return invigorated to the world of concrete experience dear alike to the common-sense thinker and the modern investigator. Do the facts of life, as ordinarily presented, or as systematised in reflection, at all point in the direction of the doctrine of immanent ideas? It will be seen that this question admits of an affirmative answer. But the term "idea" must be taken as embracing ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... a fool, if I am ignorant. Yes, doctor, I sail on a wide sea of ignorance, but I have taken soundings of some of its shallows and some of its depths. Your profession deals with the facts of life that interest me most just now, and I want to know something of it. Perhaps I may find it a calling such as would ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... became aware that she was silently weeping. The gathering darkness under the trees enveloped them. It absorbed her outline into the shadowy background of the wood, from which her face emerged in a faint spot of pallor; and the same obscurity seemed to envelop his faculties, merging the hard facts of life in a blur of feeling in which the distinctest impression was the sweet sense of ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... for the pupil to attempt to learn the exercise here given unless he has carefully studied the Building, Ice, Presidential, and English Sovereign Series. The meaning of In., Ex., and Con. can be understood in application to the facts of life, the events of History and the principles and details of the Arts and Sciences, only by a complete mastery of all that ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... what poor guardians (he may reason) of the inward spirit of righteousness, are some supposed careful walkers according to its letter and form. And yet all the while he admits, as such, no moral world at all: no [9] theoretic equivalent to so large a proportion of the facts of life. ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... speculations of Henry Adams, his thrusts at philosophy, seem as futile as those of that very great American John Burroughs. It is the facts of life as seen through his personality, the changes in our political history as analyzed so skilfully by him after the manner of no other man that make ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... the protection of an older woman or of a male relative is done away with, and a girl is permitted to go about quite unattended, the best and the surest protection that she can have is the kind of modesty that takes fright at even a bare mention, a bare allusion, to certain ordinarily ignored facts of life. ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... punishment of sin, heaven and hell, are not only misleading but unethical. What sensible man really believes in these notions as popularly assumed and presented, and what have they to do with Christianity? They do not square with the facts of life, much less do they interpret life. They go straight in the teeth of the scientific method, which, even where the Christian facts are concerned, is the only method which carries weight with the modern mind. The consequence ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... this does not mean that sex, either as a word or as a fact of nature, should be over-emphasized with people who are too young to appreciate the fundamental facts of life. As already suggested, it is not desirable that any parts of the curricula for schools should be known to the pupils as "sex" studies; but we need such terms as "sex-hygiene" and "sex-instruction" to indicate to teachers ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... different creed. To me it seems more consonant with the facts of life. Man as he is can neither enter into nor create a great society nor enjoy peace which comes of love. Hitherto the new birth of the Spirit, which bloweth where it listeth, has been for a few in every generation. The hour of rebirth ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... such a question should remember that the facts of life, social and economic, all make the upsetting of the man in his work seldom a safe or a happy solution. In the first place, the position of a man who even temporarily depends upon his wife's vocational success and relinquishes his ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... us to be blind to the facts of life, but to take all the facts into our vision. A partial view of the so-called facts certainly will lead to tumultuous alternations of hope and fear, of joy and sorrow. But if you will take them all into account, you can be quiet and at rest. For here is a fact as real as the troubles and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... crowded House he read a speech distinguished by extraordinary dignity and severity: "My lords", he said at one point, slapping the table, though those eyes remained royally null: "when will your lordships learn to recognize the facts of life?" and, having proposed His Lordship's Majesty, the Lord of the Sea, to be Regent during His Majesty's illness, such Regency not to exceed a period of three years, he ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... the dream of philosophers that theoretical and abstract science could and some day perhaps would succeed in putting into formulae and into general terms all that was significant in the concrete facts of life. It has been the tragic mistake of the so-called intellectuals, who have gained their knowledge from textbooks rather than from observation and research, to assume that science had already realized its dream. But there is no indication that science ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... sex and of any age, adolescent or centenarian, as the secret of life's happiness, endurance, and worth. It may be permitted, then, briefly to survey the main truths, and, therefore, the main teachings of the past, as they may be read by those who seek in the facts of life the key to its meaning and ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... because it is contained in the Bible Genesis, nor because it was conceived by the great and gifted Harvey as a possible solution of the whole difficulty, but because it presents, as we have before said, a satisfactory explanation of all the phenomenal facts of life with which we are acquainted. If Mr. Herbert Spencer will descend from his stilted theory of "molecular machinery worked by molecular force," and tell us what it all means; and, at the same time, turn us out a single plastide particle, or fungus spore, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... in the world—in the hearts of unnumbered thousands of men and women in whom we should never suspect it; among the wise and thoughtful, among the young and gay, who seldom assuage and never betray their thirst—this is one of the most wonderful and touching facts of life. It is not more heart that is needed, but more light; not more force, but a wiser direction to be given to very real ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... Mr. Joseph Cuthbertson, Grace's father, has none of the Colonel's boyishness. He is a man of fervent idealistic sentiment, so frequently outraged by the facts of life, that he has acquired an habitually indignant manner, which unexpectedly becomes enthusiastic or affectionate when ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... pleader preserves his sense of right; they feel no more, they apply set rules that leave cases out of count. Borne along by their headlong course, they are neither husbands nor fathers nor lovers; they glide on sledges over the facts of life, and live at all times at the high pressure conduced by business and the vast city. When they return to their homes they are required to go to a ball, to the opera, into society, where they can make clients, acquaintances, protectors. They all eat ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... It seemed to open to them a world of artistic beauty and joy of which they had never dreamed; and to loosen the bands of an austere conception of life, which began to appear to them too narrow for the facts of life. Wilhelm Meister, read in Carlyle's translation at the same time, exercised a similar liberating and enchanting power upon my father. The social enthusiasms of George Sand also affected him greatly, strengthening whatever he had inherited of his father's generous discontent with ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... truth of his theories could never be tested, as he died in 1829, at the age of eighty-three, from the effects of an operation; and Madame de Balzac and her family were left to face the stern facts of life, denuded of the rose-coloured haze in which they had been clothed by the kindly old enthusiast. Balzac's mother certainly had a hard life, and from what we hear of her nervous, excitable nature—inherited apparently from her mother, Madame Sallambier—we can hardly ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... Rasba, in the intervals of navigating the big mission boat, would stand by gazing at the furious energy of his companion. Rasba had seized upon a few great facts of life, and dwelt in silent contemplation of them, until a young woman with a library disturbed the echoing halls of his mind, and brought into them the bric-a-brac of the thought of the ages. Now, from that brief experience, he could gaze with nearer understanding at this young man who regarded ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... biological data, and he must therefore leave these to the specialists in scientific enquiry, but he is by no means precluded from using his own common-sense in drawing conclusions from the ordinary plain facts of life observable around him. It is when we come to consider this most important question in its bearing upon the mental side of the human being that the ordinary layman feels himself to be no less competent to form an opinion than ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... at his superior pityingly. "I know you're ten nines per cent monk, Babe, but I did think you pulled your nose out of the megacycles often enough to learn a few of the facts of life. Did you ever hear of ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... enters into the very essence of the most famous contemporary speculations. It is certain that the science of Political Economy, the only department of moral inquiry which has made any considerable progress in our day, would fail to correspond with the facts of life if it were not true that Imperative Law had abandoned the largest part of the field which it once occupied, and had left men to settle rules of conduct for themselves with a liberty never allowed to them till recently. The bias indeed of ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... he approached the heavens. The gaiety of the best Paganism, as in the playfulness of Catullus or Theocritus, is, indeed, an eternal gaiety never to be forgotten by a grateful humanity. But it is all a gaiety about the facts of life, not about its origin. To the pagan the small things are as sweet as the small brooks breaking out of the mountain; but the broad things are as bitter as the sea. When the pagan looks at the very ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... life, or encounter what she must at the polls. When you talk, gentlemen, of sheltering woman from the rough winds and revolting scenes of real life, you must be either talking for effect, or wholly ignorant of what the facts of life are. The man, whatever he is, is known to the woman. She is the companion, not only of the accomplished statesman, the orator, and the scholar; but the vile, vulgar, brutal man has his mother, his ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of the basic facts of life—of Faith, Honour, Truth-speaking, Falsehood, Betrayal, Sin—that he did not turn, not to moral interpretations, as others do, but to the holy purposes of his noble and passionate Art. For any man, Sin is only ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... recognition of this fact; in part it is an effort to transform them into the forms of the aesthetic. Art celebrates, but also creates, this luxury of feeling, and war also in its own dramatic movement transforms ugly and plain facts of life by including them in ecstatic states, and surrounding ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... learned men from the official schools. There are certain forms of science which accord perfectly with docility. David's manner showed no irony; it expressed rather a stoical, baffled kind of melancholy. In abstract questions he did not lack courage of thought, but when faced with the facts of life he was a mixture, or rather a succession, of timidity and stiffness, diffident modesty, and firmness of conviction. In short he was a man, like other men, complex and contradictory, not all in one piece. The trouble ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... speechless at the awful enormity of the thought. Abravanel rose from behind his desk with an effort, and shambled over to lay a thin and feather-light arm on the younger man's shoulders. "Those are the facts of life my boy. And since we cannot escape them, we must live with them. Costa is just a man doing his duty. So try and put up with him. For my sake if not ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... personality. They are, after all, in a sense, mere accidents, and have no more to do with the real man than the clothes he wears. True, the manner in which one dons one's clothes, as the manner in which one deals with the accidental facts of life, affords a certain index to the true man; but the clothes themselves, and the accidental facts, appear, at all events, to be matters of fate. And if you can obtain knowledge of a man through actual contact with his personality, you do not trouble to draw conclusions ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... a glittering illusion with which we gild the hard, cold facts of life—until all the world ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... d'Angibault," she tells us, was the result of a walk, a meeting, a day of leisure, an hour of far niente, followed by Reverie, that play of the imagination which, clothes with beauty and perfects, and interprets, the isolated and small events and facts of life. There are books of hers in early life that are simply self-revelations—outpourings of her indignations. She is not at her best in these. "Indiana," written in her age of revolt, is too obviously a pamphlet ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... Byron with minute attention, and once more he was introduced to a master of expression. Byron is a little out of fashion now, alas! and yet what a thinker the man was! His lightning eye pierced to the very heart of things, and his intense grip on the facts of life makes his style seem alive. No wonder that the young Ruskin learned to think daringly under such a master! Now many people fancy that our great critic must be a man of universal knowledge. What do they think of this narrow early ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... uplands of Scotland. Only the sands and the sea looked distant, though really they were near; and I worried about the groups of cattle gossiping so pleasantly together about their cuds and calves. They had a placid air of ignoring such large facts of life as incoming tides, and could never have read what happened to Mary and her cows on the sands of Dee, a resort only less fashionable in the cattle world ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... ttingen.[5] "The world has for several millenniums tried to subdue matter to preconceptions and the world has failed. Now the procedure is reversed.'' "From facts to ideas''—there lies our road, let us for once observe the facts of life without prejudice, without maxims built on preconceptions; let us establish them, strip them of all alien character. Then finally, when we find nothing more in the least doubtful, we may theorize about them, and draw ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... opinion that the amelioration of life, the bringing of the facts of life into harmony with the conscience, will come, not as the result of the personal efforts of individual men, but of itself as the result of a certain possible reconstruction of society effected in some way or other. The idea is promulgated that men ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... admitting of debarcation on the home side; if we got out on the other, and made for the bridge, we should certainly be seen and cut off. Then it was that I blessed my stars that our elder brother was with us that day,—he might be little good at pretending, but in grappling with the stern facts of life he had no equal. Enjoining silence, he waited till we were but a little way from the fated landing-place, and then brought us in to the opposite bank. We scrambled out noiselessly, and—the gathering darkness favouring us—crouched behind ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chance—the Armenian hotel-keeper had evidently unearthed it for his benefit—a copy of a London halfpenny paper, a paper that feeds the public with the ugliest details of all the least important facts of life by the yard, inventing others when the supply is poor. He read it over vaguely, with a sense of cold distress that was half pain, half nausea. Somehow it stirred his sense of humor; he returned slowly to his normal, littler state. But it was not the contrast which ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... must cooperate in the improvement of the farmer's condition. He must have the chance to be educated in the widest possible sense—in the sense which keeps ever in view the intimate relationship between the theory of education and the facts of life. In all education we should widen our aims. It is a good thing to produce a certain number of trained scholars and students; but the education superintended by the State must seek rather to produce a hundred good citizens than merely one scholar, and it must be turned now and then from the class ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... being frivolous. YOU have never been frivolous. But I have been frivolous—for ever since I have learned to love you, I have been so wrapped up in my love, with my happiness gilding everything about me, that I have never really faced the prosaic facts of life or discussed with you what our marriage will really necessitate. And now, at this eleventh hour, I realise that I have led you on in ignorance to an act which will perhaps take a great deal of the sunshine out ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... and hated him too; but she did not know the true reason of the hatred—that only came out afterwards. Woman-like, she exaggerated in order that she might move him; but her motive was good, and what she said was not out of keeping with the facts of life. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... on medieval ideals gradually lost their worth. They were not in relation to the altered facts of life; they had become an empty convention which could be turned to very unromantic uses. The movement for the emancipation of women was not consciously or directly a movement of revolt against an antiquated chivalry. It was rather a part of the development of civilization ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... cure our ills. But millions voted for a poison that would have destroyed us. From that time on I dreamed of a new kind of school, not the kind we had that turned out men to grope blindly between good and folly. But a school based on the fundamental facts of life and labor, the need of food and housing, and the sweating skill that brings man most of his blessings. A school from which no man could come out ignorant. That school should teach the eternal facts, and he that ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... to say, that it will appear to him a trivial thing to spend great effort on embellishing the form in which he delivers it. Literature, to be worthy of the name, must, it is true, deal with noble matter—the riddle of our existence, the great facts of life, the changing passions of the human heart, the discernment of some deep moral truth. It is easy to lay too much stress upon the mere garment of thought; to be too precise; to give to the arrangement of words an attention that should rather be paid to the promotion of fresh ideas. A writer ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... understand a mental no less than topographical limitation. The penetrating sympathy of genius will, even from a village, traverse the whole world. What I mean is, that unless by personal experience, no matter through what avenues, a man has gained clear insight into the facts of life, he cannot successfully place them before us; and whatever insight he has gained, be it of important or of unimportant facts, will be of value if truly reproduced. No sunset is precisely similar to another, no two souls ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... for Rob MacNicol when the body of his father was brought home to their poor lodgings. It was his first introduction to the hard facts of life. ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... without disgrace. I do not mean that it is probably true; to me all these overpowering optimisms which, by means of a few untested a priori postulates, affect triumphantly to disprove the most obvious facts of life, seem very soon to become meaningless. I conceive it to be no comfort at all, to a man suffering agonies of frostbite, to be told by science that cold is merely negative and does not exist. So far as the statement is true it is irrelevant; so far as it pretends to be relevant it is ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... we've both forgotten them proves that they are important," said Clovis; "you must have noticed that it's always the important things that one forgets, while the trivial, unnecessary facts of life stick in one's memory. There's my cousin, Editha Clubberley, for instance; I can never forget that her birthday is on the 12th of October. It's a matter of utter indifference to me on what date her birthday ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... perfect flower, we are told, that blooms on the fair stem of marriage. Yet it is the very citadel of ignorance, when it should be the school in which are taught the beautiful phenomena of physical life. Home! where the simplest, purest facts of life are converted into a nasty mystery and deliberately endowed with the characteristics of impurity and sin; for what else is the meaning of that solemn formula, which most of us have been taught, that we were conceived in sin? What else ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... the picture is true. But the underlying belief in the uniform coincidence of inward goodness and outward good needs to be modified by the deeper teaching of the New Testament before it can be regarded as covering all the facts of life. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... upon the deck of the Korosko. It was easy to feel strong and self-confident in the comfortable deck-chair, with the slippered Arab handing round the coffee and liqueurs. But they had been swept out of that placid stream of existence, and dashed against the horrible, jagged facts of life. Battered and shaken, they must have something to cling to. A blind, inexorable destiny was too horrible a belief. A chastening power, acting intelligently and for a purpose,—a living, working power, tearing them out ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... It seems, then, that the advocates of corporate and personal religion are both, in a measure, right: and that once again a middle path, avoiding both extremes of simplification, keeps nearest to the facts of life. We have no reason for supposing that these principles, which history shows us, have ceased to be operative: or that we can secure the best kind of spiritual progress for the race by breaking with the past and the institutions in which it is conserved. ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... reconstructs the England of the seventeenth century? It has always seemed to me the very high-water mark of Macaulay's powers, with its marvellous mixture of precise fact and romantic phrasing. The population of towns, the statistics of commerce, the prosaic facts of life are all transmuted into wonder and interest by the handling of the master. You feel that he could have cast a glamour over the multiplication table had he set himself to do so. Take a single concrete ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not to argue against the existence of any God, which would be sheer lunacy, but to take the attributes affirmed by Theism as composing its Deity and inquire whether they are compatible with each other and with the facts of life. Finding that they are not, the Atheist simply sets Theism aside as not proven, and goes on his way without further afflicting himself with ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... facts of life. Let us recall our own love—our marriage, our honeymoon. Has not sexual union over and over again been the physical expression of our love without thought or intention of procreation? Have we all been wrong? Or is ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... indicator of the writer's character. The same hand that in the famous Snob Papers so savagely, and in at least one case so intemperately, satirised types of English society, afterwards produced novels in which fidelity to the essential facts of life is the most conspicuous quality. So, too, might it have been in the case of the 'Peripatetic Philosopher,' whose weekly criticisms of Melbourne men and manners in 1867-68 has correctly been judged the best writing of its kind yet done in Australia. ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... been advocated to solve this problem of life. We may divide them into two classes, namely the monistic theory, which holds that all the facts of life can be explained by reference to this visible world wherein we live, and the dualistic theory, which refers part of the phenomenon of life to another world which is now ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... it is principally from lack of opportunity, or disinclination to be otherwise. This may disgust those of my feminine readers who refuse to acknowledge, with Professor Lester Ward, that man is essentially a polygamous animal, but the more experienced in the sorrowful facts of life will own the truth ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... am brought up against the practical, commonplace, everyday life of these people. My friend Mrs. Burke has a fund of common sense and worldly wisdom which is worth more than any Ph.D. or S.T.D. represents, to help a man to meet the hard facts of life successfully; and she has been very nice and considerate in making suggestions to me—always wrapped up in a humor all her own. I have found it practically impossible to get into touch with the farmers of the neighborhood without becoming more or ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... escaping. And the fact of evil, physical and moral, is precisely the chief and most fruitful source of religious scepticism; it is not the abstract question whether there is a God, but the practical and insistent problem whether the Divine goodness can be reconciled with the facts of life and experience, that is agitating men's minds, and sways their decision ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... smoked on in silence, weighing the pictorial wisdom of the white man and verifying it by the facts of life. He nodded his head several times, and grunted once or twice. Then he knocked the ashes from his pipe, carefully refilled it, and after a thoughtful pause, ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... with Mick McKenna," Rand said. "Fortunately, Mick and I have worked together before. I was able to tell him the facts of life, and he'll be a good boy now. When last heard from, Farnsworth was beginning to blow his hot breath on the ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... letter from his father forwarded to him from the hotel, that was even more unpleasant than the majority of the paternal epistles to which he was accustomed. Mr. Knight, probably from honest conviction and a misreading of the facts of life, was one of those persons who are called Pacifists. Although he never carried out the doctrine in his own small affairs, he believed that nations were enjoined by divine decree to turn the other cheek ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... she appreciated the grim reality of life. She was no longer sheltered, secluded, one of the "fortunate class." Ways and means would occupy most of her time henceforth. And it was not the privations she shrank from but the contacts with the ugly facts of life; a side she had found extremely picturesque in novels, but knew from, occasional glimpses to be ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... authority over their "inferiors," the dependent whites. There were few occupants of jails or penitentiaries; poorhouses were often tenantless, and asylums for the insane were not numerous or crowded. Beggars and tramps were unknown. Judged by the facts of life the system of slavery and large proprietors was not so bad as it appeared; and as the South came into full self-consciousness, say with the inauguration of Polk and Dallas, the problems of adjustment ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... freshness of feeling which it reveals and conveys. An art which discloses fatigue, weariness, exhaustion of emotion, deadening of interest, has parted with its magical spell; for vitality, emotion, passionate interest in the experiences of life, devout acceptance of the facts of life, are the prime characteristics of art in those moments when its veracity and power are at the highest point. A great work of art may be tragic in the view of life which it presents, but it must show no sign of the succumbing of ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... too perfectly to fit the haphazard facts of life. There was still the dead man to be explained. And a theory, however perfect, did not bring him any nearer to solving the personal problems concerned. What was one to do with a man who was at once sane and irresponsible? He could give up Clare like a man, he told himself, if it were necessary ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... tell. It was that I wanted to be truthful. I couldn't bear deceiving him as to the facts of life. And yet I wasn't truthful, for with a false delicacy I told him too obscurely.—Why was I half-wiser than my fellow-women? And not entirely wiser! Why didn't I tell him pleasant untruths, instead of half-realities? It was my want of self-control, so that I could neither conceal things ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... with perception or insight, though he had eloquence and an eye for broad effects. She had thought him curiously ignorant of human nature, born to be deceived, full of child-like illusions, never understanding the real facts of life, save in the way of business—and politics. Women he never seemed by a single phrase or word to understand, and yet now he startled her with a sudden revelation and insight of which she had not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... help him, and I did help him. Is there any one, knowing anything of the facts of life, who will censure me when I admit that I—with deliberation—simply tided him over, did not make for him and present to him a fortune? What chance should I have had, if I had been so absurdly generous to a man who deserved nothing but punishment for his selfish ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... the employment bureaus, backed by the stern facts of life, the colleges are yielding. On examination I found that curricula are already being modified. None but the sorriest pessimist could doubt the nature of the final outcome, on realizing the pooling of brains which is going on in such associations as the Intercollegiate ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... this world of marts and exchanges, this age of trade and traffic, passionate figures rise up and demand of life what its fever is, in "Foma Gordyeeff" it is a Russian who so rises up and demands. For Gorky, the Bitter One, is essentially a Russian in his grasp on the facts of life and in his treatment. All the Russian self-analysis and insistent introspection are his. And, like all his brother Russians, ardent, passionate protest impregnates his work. There is a purpose to it. He writes because he has something to say which the world should hear. From that clenched fist of ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... achievements of mortal existence, it must be owned, and a statement which I conceive the course of your life, for one, will not go to confirm; but a man must have had a good deal of experience, of what he is talking of, before he could make so sweeping a generalisation from the facts of life; and I am afraid Mr Blunt has some reason for what he says. Medical men receive many confidences in sick rooms, you know; and some, among others, which had better be reserved for the lawyer. What I have seen in this way leads me to imagine that my grandfather's ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... would be plausible and at the same time redound to his credit. His disappointment was so bitter now, his hopes of winning Crystal and glory had been so bright, that he found it quite impossible to go back to the hard facts of life—to his own poverty and the unattainableness of Crystal de Cambray—without making a great effort to win back what Victor de Marmont ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... contradiction, at least a contrast and a supplement to the teaching of Deuteronomy. We have noted the absoluteness—or idealism—of that Book's doctrines of Morality and Providence; they leave no room for certain problems, raised by the facts of life. But Jeremiah had bitter experience of those facts, and it moved him to state the problems to God Himself. He owns the perfect justice of God; but this only makes his questioning ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... light-heartedness, her optimism, did not show themselves in that inane way. But this seriousness of hers was of a new kind, of the kind that bespeaks sobriety and saneness of soul. And that kind of seriousness—the deep, inward gravity of a person whose days of trifling with themselves and with the facts of life, and of being trifled with, are over—would have impressed Jennings equally had she come in laughing, had her ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... had acquired he learned many things. Chief of them, as he believed, are four great facts of life and nature from which the soul cannot escape—that there will always be sorrow and suffering in the world; that these are caused by clinging to things that are always changing or dying; that the only way to obtain peace is to renounce these things and care for them no longer; ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... in, "which, twenty years ago, only the family doctor was supposed to be familiar with or permitted to discuss are now being agitated in women's clubs, books, newspapers, and the public schools. You can't smother sin or the facts of life unless they occur separately. In the case of Nan Brent they have developed coincidently; so we find it hard to regard ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... a man as Emerson is not in his doctrines, but in his spirit, his heroic attitude, his consonance with the universal mind. His thought is a tremendous solvent; it digests and renders fluid the hard facts of life ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... that he was one of those who see things so objectively that they impress one as automatons. They don't learn, they know. They live in the world as if it was their home. They use their passions and desires as animals use their instincts. They have no diffidence before the great facts of life. And having this franchise in their pockets, so to speak, this permanent pass to every quarter of the City of the World, having this animal candour of outlook, they are naturally inarticulate. They are easily misunderstood because self-expression is foreign to them and they have no interest in ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... give a clear impression. If you take even those English authors whom we know Burns to have most admired and studied, you will see at once that he owed them nothing but a warning. Take Shenstone, for instance, and watch that elegant author as he tries to grapple with the facts of life. He has a description, I remember, of a gentleman engaged in sliding or walking on thin ice, which is a little miracle of incompetence. You see my memory fails me, and I positively cannot recollect whether his hero was sliding or walking; ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... experience and their interpretations lies the secret of the contrast between our two words existence and life. Even before we define the difference, we feel it. To exist is one thing; to live is another. Existence is comprised of the bare facts of life alone—the universe in which we live, our heritage and birth, our desires and their satisfactions, growth, age and death. All the facts that science can display before us comprise existence. But life is something more. Life is existence clothed in spiritual meanings; existence ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... soul's palate than the shadow-joys of young Hercules Bascombe—Helen and horses and all! Poor Helen I cannot use for comparison, for she had no joy, save indeed the very divine, though at present unblossoming one of sisterly love. Still, and notwithstanding, if the facts of life are those of George Bascombe's endorsing—AND HE CAN PROVE IT—let us by all means learn and accept them, be they the worst possible. Meantime there are truths that ought to be facts, and until he has proved that there is no ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... from man's social needs. Early man is logical, but he comprehends the necessity of not pushing logic too far—he is capable of holding at the same time two mutually contradictory views, and of acting on each as may suit his convenience; he makes his dogma yield to the facts of life (a saving principle not confined to savages, but acted on to a greater or less extent by all societies). He slays sacred animals for divinatory and other religious purposes, for food, or in self-defense; he fears their anger, but his fear is overcome by hunger; he offers profuse apologies, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... exactly," Helen pondered. "It's the facts of life, I think—d'you see what I mean? What really goes on, what people feel, although they generally try to hide it? There's nothing to be frightened of. It's so much more beautiful than the pretences—always more interesting—always better, ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... said the Violinist. "He has not built the tomb because he is not his father. The old man would have done it in a minute, only he lacked imagination. You bet he never day-dreamed, and yet what skill he had, and what adventures! He never saw anything but the facts of life, yet how magnificently he ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... else to think about. Just as well that elections had been suspended and bade fair to continue indefinitely in abeyance. If he, a member of the intelligentsia, wasn't sufficiently acquainted with the political and military facts of life to make rational decisions, it certainly behooved ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... facetiousness which tickled her simple sense of humour, and a certain coarseness of nature; but what took her perhaps was the blatant sexuality which was their most marked characteristic. She had a genteel refinement which shuddered at the facts of life, she looked upon the bodily functions as indecent, she had all sorts of euphemisms for common objects, she always chose an elaborate word as more becoming than a simple one: the brutality of these men was like a whip on her thin white shoulders, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Astier-Rehu, in high spirits, took his pupil's arm. The poet pointed to the pathetic group on the opposite pavement. 'Ah, yes,' said the historian, 'Ah, yes.' He had in truth no eyes for anything outside books, nor any direct and personal perception of the facts of life. Indeed, from the way in which he took Freydet off, saying as he did so, 'You may as well go with me as far as the Institute,' it was clear that he did not approve the habit of mooning in the streets when you ought to be better employed. Leaning gently on his favourite's arm, he began to tell him ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... term throughout Europe was coles (or colis) from caulis, a stalk, and virga, a rod. The only serious English literary term, yard (exactly equivalent to virga), as used by Chaucer—almost the last great English writer whose vocabulary was adequate to the central facts of life—has now fallen out of literary and even ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... from her like a garment worn for play. It was the spiritual woman only I was seeing, one who faced these real and awful facts of life with the calm, blissful assurance of knowing the truth, of giving her life for humanity because ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... cannot tell; but one thing is certain, from the first he never intended marriage. That he had pangs of self-reproach for the part he had played, his words above quoted may be taken as sufficient evidence, but alike from temperament and deliberate consideration of the facts of life he was incapable of the contrition that troubles human nature to its depths.[94] Yet in our judgment of him it is well to remember the ideas then current in Germany regarding the relations between love and marriage. In his seventy-fourth year Goethe himself said: "Love is something ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... may incline you to suspect their author of a repugnance to unvarnished truth; but,—without prejudice to Othello,—since varnish brings out in wood veins of beauty invisible before the application, why not also in the sober facts of life? When the transparent artifice has been penetrated, the familiar substance underneath will be greeted none the less kindly; nay, the observer will perhaps regard the disguise as an oblique compliment to his powers of insight, and his attention may thus be better ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... decide for himself how far this second conceivable view would fit in with the facts of life. He will, I think, agree with me that Jones' view, of the 'Existential Import' of Propositions, would lead ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... so profound a study of human nature as to think that if they have shown a man to be of loose life with regard to women they have shown him to be one that would tell needless lies to a jury—a conviction unsupported by the familiar facts of life and character. Different men have different vices, and addiction to one kind of "upsetting sin" does not imply addiction to an unrelated kind. Doubtless a rake is a liar in so far as is needful to concealment, but it does not follow that he will ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... Now, who is it that can view these perturbations of the world with a tranquil and rational hope? I answer, that it is only he who views his own time in the light of the eternal purposes of God. The religious man is bound to be an optimist, not with the foolish optimism which blinks the facts of life; but with the ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... succeeded to a pessimistic reaction from simple Pagan enjoyment; they were surrounded with gloomy questionings about human destiny and Divine Justice, and they replied by looking steadily at the facts of life and asserting the supreme worth of innocence, ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... doubtless it was the origin of the verbal accuracy for which she afterward became notable. Patient investigation had always been a pleasure, but from that time forward it became a principle also. She understood from what her father had said that to know the facts of life exactly is a positive duty; which, in a limited sense, was what he had intended to teach her; but the extent to which she carried the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... York City, when he first went there to live and before he became confused and disconcerted by the facts of life, Enoch went about a good deal with young men. He got into a group of other young artists, both men and women, and in the evenings they sometimes came to visit him in his room. Once he got drunk and ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... send his next arrow. Like death, he has all seasons for his own; his ingenuity is infernal. Whoever tries to forestall or appease him might better be at work in Augean stables; because, after all, we must admit that the facts of life are on his side. It is not intended that we shall be very comfortable. There is a terrible amount of total depravity in animate and inanimate things. From morning till night there is not an hour without its cross to carry. The weather thwarts us; servants, ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... breakfastless and stupid with hunger, and the local authorities have no power to feed them as in England, and in most European countries. Then again, even where the physical conditions are reasonable, the programme lacks actuality. It is unpractical, out of touch with the facts of life and locality, a veritable castle hung absurdly in the air and not based on any solid foundation. The view still lingers in high places that the business of education is to break the spirit of a people, ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... liked at that time nearly as well; and, indeed, the story of Haidee soon became too sad for me. But very certainly by the end of this year, 1834, I knew my Byron pretty well all through. . . . I never got the slightest harm from Byron; what harm came to me was from the facts of life and from books of a baser kind, including a wide range of the works of authors popularly considered extremely instructive,—from Victor ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold |
