"Moral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... husbands; and the determination on the part of the latter to do so, is not unfrequently attended with a breach of confidence and good feeling never afterward fully healed. Men look close to the money result; women to the moral consequences. I doubt if there be one dram-seller in ten, between whom and his wife there exists a good understanding—to say nothing of genuine affection. And, in the exceptional cases, it will generally be found that the ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... families, and communities. You are one, Sir, whose righteousness consists in splitting the doctrines of Calvin into thousands of undistinguishable films, and in setting up a system of justifying-grace against all breaches of all laws, moral or divine. In short, Sir, you are a mildew—a canker-worm in the bosom of the Reformed Church, generating a disease of which she will never be purged, but by the shedding of blood. Go thou in peace, and do these abominations no ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... acquired—more coarsely, it is true—the same camaraderie? She was one of those for whom, seemingly, sex does not exist. Her air of good-fellowship with men was eloquent of a precise knowledge of what she might expect from them, and she was prepared to do her own policing,—not from any deep moral convictions. She belonged, logically, to that world which is disposed to take the law into its own hands, and she was the possessor of five millions ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... now on," Verna assured him. "But you see, Nadia hadn't seen that husband of hers for fifteen minutes, and was getting lonesome. Being afraid of all you men, she wanted me to come along for moral support. The real reason I came, though," and she narrowed her expressive eyes and lowered her voice mysteriously, "is that you two physicists are here. I want to study my chosen victims a little longer before I decide over which of you ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... at present cut a convict figure, The very Botany Bay in moral geography; Their loyal treason, renegado rigour, Are good manure for their more bare biography; Wordsworth's last quarto, by the way, is bigger Than any since the birthday of typography; A drowsy, frowzy poem, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... take away the pope from our midst or lessen the power which he presumes to have over the people." Such lamentations bore no fruit, and the simoniacal nomination of Reynolds was but the first of a series of appointments which robbed the episcopate of dignity and moral worth. ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... moral lectures and admonitions; Miss Bree had talked to him precisely as if he had a soul, for five years. He knew when she was coming back at one o'clock to dinner, or at nine in the evening, by the ringing of the bells. After she had told him so, he would be sitting at the door, watching for its ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... which we have just alluded. Nevertheless, he was not altogether free from it; and recent circumstances contributed to dispose him so much the more to admit a feeling which, like sin itself, is ever the most apt to insinuate itself at moments of extraordinary moral imbecility, and through the openings left by previous transgression. As his brig stood off from the light, the captain paced the deck, greatly disturbed by what had just passed, and unable to account for it. The boat of the Poughkeepsie was entirely concealed by the islet, ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... Every local association, every faint illustration of antiquity, each indication of the bygone manners of a simple age, are in this view to be treasured, not only as filling a page of a meagre history, but as so many moral ties to bind us closer in affection to the ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... say, don't get into a dissertation upon the moral character of the natives," cried Drummond, "because there is no end ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... Resurrection, Ascension, and present Sovereignty—these facts, with the truths that are deduced from them, and the great glimpses which they afford into the heart of God and the depths of things, are the foundations of all true thinking on moral and social and religious questions, and on not a few other questions besides. Christ in His Revelation gives us the ultimate truth on which we have ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... true to her ancestral blood, has excelled all the young men in Cambridge in moral science. Julia J. Thomas, of Cornell University, daughter of Dr. Mary F. Thomas, of Indiana, in the recent inter-collegiate contest, took the first prize of $300, over eight male competitors, in Greek. The recent decision in the United States ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... erratic; you are methodical to a fault. You are not a crank; therefore not a philanthropist. And you show a lamentable disregard to the moral qualities of those to whom you extend a ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... I said it, I felt all the time it wasn't really I, but that other strange girl who once lived at The Grange and looked exactly like me. I remember it, to be sure; but it was in my Other State: and, so far as my moral responsibility was concerned, my Other State and I were ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... strongly this, that no Administration is justified in advising the exercise of that prerogative, unless there be a fair, reasonable presumption, even a strong moral conviction, that after a Dissolution they will be enabled to administer the affairs of this country through the support of a party sufficiently powerful to carry their measures. I do not think ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... of that sort upon an unsuspecting child? Plainly, no; and there would be no alternative but for him to renounce city life and live with her in the mountains. But could he possibly do such a thing? Had he the requisite moral strength for a procedure so foreign from his nature? Was his desire for reformation as strong as he had once thought it? Perhaps his release from Marie Winship's threatening toils had something to do with his present relapse from good intentions. He remembered how he had been ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... brief remembered madness, an unexplained exception from her normal life; and in this instance she felt a peculiar vexation that her helpless fear had shown itself, not, as usual, in solitude, but in well-lit company. Her ideal was to be daring in speech and reckless in braving dangers, both moral and physical; and though her practice fell far behind her ideal, this shortcoming seemed to be due to the pettiness of circumstances, the narrow theatre which life offers to a girl of twenty, who cannot conceive ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... essential truth. The first was the ceremonial peculiarities of the Jewish race and history; the second was the absolute and eternal principles of morality and religion. These two parts the ritual law and moral law were closely joined in all the best representatives of the nation at all the best periods of its history. Yet there was a constant tendency to separate these. One party exalted the ritual element, another party the spiritual element; the priestly ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... joined them. His pantheistic religion made him indifferent to doctrine, and he asked the abbe, whom he knew by sight, to stay to dinner. The priest had the art of pleasing every one, and thanks to the unconscious tact that is acquired by the most ordinary men called by fate to exercise any moral power over their fellow creatures, and the baroness, attracted perhaps by one of these affinities which draw similar natures together, paid every attention to him, the fat man's sanguine face and short breath agreeing with her gasping obesity. By the time ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... the truth, Mrs. Flagg had not been particularly struck by the moral worth of her lodger, and this testimony led her to entertain doubts as to the ...
— Paul the Peddler - The Fortunes of a Young Street Merchant • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... they did not scalp or otherwise mutilate the bodies of the soldiers who fell within their lines. It is true they did not while the fight was in progress, probably owing to the good influence exerted over the warriors by Chief Joseph, who is, in reality, an Indian of remarkably high moral principles; but Lieutenant Van Orsdale writes, under date of ...
— The Battle of the Big Hole • G. O. Shields
... other men and our own failure in such a way as that we shall be intellectually convinced that, we have no right to complain of either: I do not mean merely the labour to put things in the right point of view: but the moral effort to look fairly at the facts not in any way disguised,—not tricked out by some skilful art of putting things;—and yet to repress all wrong feeling;—all fretfulness, envy, jealousy, dislike, hatred. I do not mean, to persuade ourselves that the grapes are sour; but (far ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... ornament, it is generally the opinion of the best authorities, derived from the study of the best styles and by a consideration of the principles of fitness and propriety which underlie the entire physical and moral world, that natural forms in ornamental and decorative art should not be literally copied or imitated. That is the aim of painting, sculpture, and the other representative arts, where the object is to present something to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... fun and thrills in all branches of sports and athletics. They are extremely high in moral tone, and cannot fail to be of immense benefit to every boy who ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... man who has ten thousand pounds: but then he has only one ten-guinea piece. What I mean is, that you can shew me no passage where there is simply a description of material objects, without any intermixture of moral notions, which produces such an effect.' Mr. Murphy mentioned Shakspeare's description of the night before the battle of Agincourt; but it was observed, it had MEN in it. Mr. Davies suggested the ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... these packs are rare; that of the "Fables" is believed to be unique. Of a date some quarter of a century antecedent to those just described we have an amusing pack, in which each card has a collection of moral sentences, aphorisms, or a worldly-wise story, or—we regret in the interests of good behaviour to have to add—something very much the reverse of them. The larger portion of the card is occupied by a picture ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... is a glorious fever,—that desire To Know! And there are few sights in the moral world more sublime than that which many a garret might afford, if Asmodeus would bare the roofs to our survey,—namely, a brave, patient, earnest human being toiling his own arduous way, athwart the iron walls of penury, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for a woman, when she forces herself to see the naked truth concerning the man she has loved, yet the man who has wronged her. She is born anew in that moment: it may be to love on, to blind herself, and condone and defend, so lowering her own moral tone; or to congeal in heart, become keener in intellect, scornful and bitter with her own sex and merciless towards the other, indifferent to blame and careless of praise, intolerant, judging all ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of an object lesson, one that comes in just in time to point the moral to my answer," he said. "If those fish, now in process of being eaten, were caught and kept in an aquarium tank, it might be more monotonous for them than furnishing fun and food to the first comer in the way of bigger fish. Possibly they might yearn ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... not think over-hardly of the few she has, for they are invaluable developers of her genius for putting "infinite riches in a little room"; while the constant tussle in their depths with moth and dust induces a daily enlargement of her moral biceps—and her patience. May their shadow never grow less (perish ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... deepest sentiments and a great deal of amazingly bad poetry. Clare wondered what was the matter, but asked no questions, and was indeed far too firmly convinced of the efficacy of the Trojan system to have any fears of mental or moral danger. ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... Person I have arranged with in these opening chapters, to say I for me, does not seem to me to be doing it very well. I think any one—any fairly observing person—would admit that I could do it better, and if it's going to be done at all, why should a mere spiritual machine—a kind of moral phonograph like this Mysterious Person—be put forward to take the ignominy of it? I have set my "I" up before me and duly cross-examined it. I have said to it, "Either you are good enough to say I in a book ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... claim to teach any great moral lesson, or even to be a guide to the young sportsman; but the habits of all birds and animals treated of here have been carefully studied, and, with the mode of their capture, have ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... it. It even permeated private and social life; there were Rings in our kitchen and household service; in our public schools, that kept the active intelligences of our children passive; there were Rings of engaging, handsome, dissolute young fellows, who kept us moral but unengaging seniors from the favors of the fair; there were subtle, conspiring Rings among our creditors, which sent us into bankruptcy and restricted our credit. In fact it would not be hazardous to say that all that was calamitous in public and private experience was ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... had a theory that certain human beings are born with moral antennae—a sort of extra combination beyond the natural of the senses of sight, smell, hearing and understanding—which made them apprehend situations and people even when these chanced to be of a hitherto unknown race or habit. ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... an airing with my charmer, complied with after great importunity. She was attended by the two nymphs. They both topt their parts; kept their eyes within bounds; made moral reflections now-and- then. O Jack! what devils are women, when all tests are got over, and we have completely ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... detachment took out their soldiers' hand-books and wrote in them their last will and testament, requesting their commander to witness the same and act as executor. The courage evinced by these men was not of that brutal order which ignores danger, but of the moral quality which, fully realizing that somebody must get hurt, quietly resolves to face whatever may happen in the performance of ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... holy memory, he who was called "The Great," has passed happily to the Lord. Truly he was "The Great," for in his knowledge of all the liberal sciences, both natural and moral, of civil law, canon law, and of theology, he was second to no one in the world, and all these branches of ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis
... choice on the part of the girl having always to be considered. Nevertheless, payment for the bride is always made to her parents in the form of grain, money, horses, saddles, blankets, or cattle. The bride's consent is necessary, custom requiring the young man to prove his moral strength, and ability to support a wife and himself, by erecting a neat house and permitting the girl of his choice to occupy it with him for four nights without being molested or having her presence observed. By preparing his breakfast ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... of the sanctities of a sweet humanity for a holy sake, blessing and blessed, had illumined his path, had lifted his eyes, had wrought a change in his moral atmosphere spiritually suffusive, potent, revivifying, complete. "She is as good as the saints in the Bible—an' plumb beautiful besides," he muttered ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... always covered himself with glory in this part, and "took the stage" with a Napoleonic attitude that brought down the house; for the big-headed boy, with solemn, dark eyes and square brow, was "the very moral of that rascal, ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... and in beautiful thoughts requires, therefore, a considerable exercise of the will and the attention, such as is not demanded by our lower enjoyments. Indeed, it is probably this absence of moral and intellectual effort which recommends such lower kinds of pleasure to a large number of persons. I have said lower kinds of pleasure, because there are other enjoyments besides those of the senses which entail no moral improvement in ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... the West India Isles and the Southern States, knew it as the mart where human beings were bought and sold; and Christians were reconciled to the traffic by the hope that it might contribute to the moral, if not physical, welfare of the captive, by his removal to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... Joyce's moral sense was an unknown quantity in her present development. Her father's true meaning affected her not at all; what she felt was—a loathing disgust, and a conviction that if she was to hold even Jude for herself ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... and I know that assumption of plain sense to pass off a monstrosity." Mrs. Mountstuart struck her lap. "Soh! but I've had to rack my brain for it: feminine disgust? You have been hearing imputations of his past life? moral character? No? Circumstances might make him behave unkindly, not unhandsomely: and we have no claim over a man's past, or it's too late to assert it. What ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... anything for certain about the origin of life and the principle of the Universe; but why should we suddenly shut up our enquiring apparatus and deny all the evidence of our reason—say, about the story of Christ, or the question of a future life, or our moral code? If you want me to enter a temple of little mysteries, leaving my reason and senses behind—as a Mohammedan leaves his shoes—it won't do to say to me simply: 'There it is! Enter!' You must show me the door; and you ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... found your uncle a truthful man, who was cautious enough to make no statements about his neighbours that he was not able to prove. Your informant, on the other hand, does not seem to have confined himself to facts. He made a charge of forgery against a gentleman whose moral and commercial integrity are unquestioned by all who know him. I know Marcus Weatherley pretty well, and am not disposed to pronounce him a forger and a scoundrel upon the unsupported evidence of a shadowy old ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... The moral of this puzzle is twofold: (1) Never take things for granted in attempting to solve puzzles; (2) always remember All Fools' Day when it comes round. I was not writing of any gardener and cook, but of a particular couple, in "a race that I witnessed." The statement of the eye-witness must ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... indescribable horrors in the vain endeavour to induce the man simply to cease from lying: one invention after another followed the most earnest asseverations of truth. The effect produced upon us by this clergyman's report of his experience was a moral dismay, such as we had never felt with regard to human being, and drew from us the exclamation, "The man could have had no imagination." The reply was, "None whatever." Never seeking true or high things, caring ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... who had spoken to her in shops and hung about her house-door; cabmen, upon her honour, in London, who, to gaze their fill at her, had found excuses to thrust their petrifaction through the very glasses of four-wheelers. She lost herself in these reminiscences, the moral of which was that poor Mr. Dawling was only one of a million. When therefore the next autumn she flourished into my studio with her odd companion at her heels her first care was to make clear to me that if he was now in servitude it ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... to draw some moral from every lesson. Not all lessons are didactic. If the pupils have sympathized with what is noble and just in the story, the statement of a moral at the conclusion is unnecessary. Yet in poems that are plainly didactic, for example, To a Waterfowl, Fourth Reader, p. 377, the moral lesson ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... armour-plating of vessels, and the terrible artillery of modern times, "the wooden walls of old England" are only fit to be used as store-ships or hospitals for a few years, and then sent to the ship-yards to be broken up for firewood. But though material conditions have changed, the moral forces are the same as ever, and courage, daring, skill, and endurance are the same in ships of ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... But do they make new Discoveries in the human Heart? Is there any other Greatness than that of Shakespear and Milton? Are there any other Passions than those that have been handled by Otway and Dryden? Is there any other Evangelic Moral than ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... or skirmish line can take care of its front, but its flanks are especially vulnerable to modern firearms. The moral effect of flanking fire is as great as the physical effect. Hence, combat patrols to give warning or covering detachments to give security are indispensable on exposed flanks. This is equally true in ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... know that God has forgiven—when you come to see the 'multitude of Thy tender mercies,' when the fear of punishment has passed out of your apprehension, then you are left with a heart at leisure from dread, to look the fact and not the consequences in the face, and to think of the moral nature, and not of the personal results, of your sin. And so one of the old prophets, with profound truth, says, 'Thou shalt be ashamed and confounded, and never open thy mouth any more because of thy sin, when I am pacified towards thee ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Williams's weight when he committed the murder. I ask you, gentlemen, if this little fellow should be guilty of a like crime to-night, to what extent would you, in reading of it in the morning, charge him with the moral discernment which is the first condition of moral responsibility? If Alfred Williams's story were this boy's story, would you deplore that there had been no one to check the childish passion, or would you say it was the inborn instinct ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... interesting from its connection with the history of Charles the Bold, who retired to La Riviere after the battle of Morat, and spent here those sad solitary weeks of which Philip de Comines tells with so many moral reflections; weeks of bodily and mental distress, which left him a mere wreck, and led to his wild want of generalship and his miserable death at Nancy. He had melted down the church-bells in this part of Burgundy and Vaud, to make cannon for the final effort ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... make my bill half a crown, and, as a trifling mark of my esteem, I gave the waiter the price of two of my ordinary dinners, for himself. I badly wanted to give him sixpence, but lacked the requisite moral courage, though I do not suppose he would have wasted a thought upon it either way, and if he had—but, as I say, I gave him a shilling. After all I do not suppose the poor fellow earned much more in a day than I earned in a week. And then (still with prudent thought for my gouty tendency, no doubt) ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... man. This part hath been covertly shew'd to Princes by ancient writers; who say that Achilles and many others of those ancient Princes were intrusted to Chiron the Senator, to be brought up under his discipline: the moral of this, having for their teacher one that was half a beast and half a man, was nothing else, but that it was needful for a Prince to understand how to make his advantage of the one and the other nature, because neither could subsist without the other. A Prince then being necessitated ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... Yes, he was—and especially so, and more than all else—on account of the joyousness of his soul. There was a contagious and a godlike hilarity in his broad, open brow, his frank, laughing eyes, and his mobile lips. He seemed to carry about with him a bracing moral atmosphere. The sight of him had the same effect on the dull man of ordinary life that the Himalayan air has on an Indian invalid; and yet Jack was head-over-heels in debt. Not a tradesman would trust him. Shoals ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... and perpetually modified; but Christianity itself is a fact so irresistibly established, that no one undertakes either to attack or to defend it. The Americans, having admitted the principal doctrines of the Christian religion without inquiry, are obliged to accept in like manner a great number of moral truths originating in it and connected with it. Hence the activity of individual analysis is restrained within narrow limits, and many of the most important of human opinions are removed from the range ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... the moral courage to own up and face ridicule, and it seems so mean to hide for fear of breaking my word. I will keep it this time, Rose, if I go to the ends of the earth to ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... horror? How should I ever cease to see the pale face of the murdered man, with its fixed, open eyes? How should I not say: "I will avenge thee, thou poor ghost?" Poor ghost! When I read Hamlet for the first time, with that passionate avidity which comes from an analogy between the moral situation depicted in a work of art and some crisis of our own life, I remember that I regarded the Prince of Denmark with horror. Ah! if the ghost of my father had come to relate the drama of his death to me, with his unbreathing lips, would ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... this case it was strikingly obvious. It was only engaging these ill-directed children by trifling rewards to apply their lively energies in improving instead of destroying the works of nature, as had formerly been their zealous practice. In a short time the change on the moral as well as the vegetable part of creation became very perceptible: the children grew industrious and peaceable; and instead of destroying trees, robbing nests, and worrying cats, the bigger boys, under Douglas's ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... insanity, during which he once attempted suicide. He sought literary occupation as an antidote to his disorder of mind, and besides a great number of lighter pieces which diverted him and his friends, composed "The Task," an able and delightful moral and domestic poetic treatise in blank verse, and in the same style of verse ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... She was unlike anything he had ever seen. Her moral standards, if she had any, he added mentally, were so different from his own that he was absolutely floored. He thought grimly that alone in a motor-car he had got among the multitude with a vengeance. "Have you ever been ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... more to become a mass of mere traders, producing nothing themselves, but buying cheaply and selling dearly, and thus deriving their support from the exercise of the power to tax the unfortunate people forced to trade with them; a state of things in the highest degree adverse to moral, intellectual, or political improvement. ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... Korosko to which he also adverts as an auxiliary method.... Clear as is the case for the railway from Suakim, as against the large expedition by the Nile, in every other view it is attended with the most formidable difficulties of a moral and political kind ... whether the 'turning of the first sod' of a Soudan railway will not be the substitution for an Egyptian domination there, of an English domination ... more unnatural, more costly, more ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... fiction—especially to those few who are dramatists as well as novelists—that they neglect what Shakespeare calls "the middle of humanity," and deal in eccentric characters above or below the people one really meets. Let those who are serious in this objection enjoy moral mediocrity in the person ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... only. Whether to Duerer and his friends it appeared even chiefly directed against prelates, or even against those who sat in high places; whether the popes, bishops and figures typical of the Church seemed to him to illustrate the moral in any pre-eminent degree, may be doubted. Still more doubtful is it whether there was any objection to papacy or priesthood as institutions connected with these figures in his mind. Unworthy popes, unworthy bishops, and an unworthy Rome were censured: but not popes, bishops, or Rome as the capital ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... strikes us most in these essays, is the author's wise moderation of statement, his habit of looking at all phases of a question, and of saying something appropriate on each. We believe he makes Ellesmere observe somewhere, that moral essays commonly require another essay from the opposite point of view to temper and qualify their meaning. This requirement has been closely kept in mind. There is no undue vehemence, no straining of favourite points, no clap-trap ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... she could do no more to beautify her person Sally turned again to the clothes-press, by now so far gone in self-indulgence, her moral sense so insidiously sapped by the sheer sensual delight she had of all this pilfered luxury, that she could contemplate without a qualm less venial experiments with the ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... in committing to memory the altered speeches of others, had created for himself a respectability that always vanished on an acquaintance with him; while the former declared that the population of a city was no proof of the amount of moral rectitude by which its government was conducted, seeing that he had found those of the city fathers with whom he had come in contact, very craggy headed men, and sadly deficient in everything but creating disorders and bringing disgrace upon the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... familiar friendship from a snuff-taker. This raised the concealed anger of the snuff-takers, who had hitherto maintained a stubborn neutrality while the argument was kept to smoke. They replied both by wit and invective—they affirmed snuff to have a moral use—"Dust to dust"—would remind them of the brevity of life—that the king and ministers patronized the habit, and gave away L10,000 worth of snuff-boxes in every year—that as to the nose being blockaded, that was a happy circumstance to London residents, and enabled them to acquire the French ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... otherwise. The young man could not but feel that Mrs. Kimball shared her daughter's views—was, in fact, their author—and that in the eyes of his future mother-in-law he had been guilty of a breach of etiquette far more serious than an infraction of the moral law. He left them with the understanding that he would accompany them to the ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... They do not appear to dream how fast our millions reduplicate, what triumphs the plough, and the engine, and loom, are making, how the principles of a well guarded representative system are spreading over the world, and what indomitable moral, and sound inductive principles lie at the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... by Socialism to substitute a governmental standard of happiness for individual desire and ambition is merely another attempt to legislate human mind and character. A government cannot make a man happy by law any more than it can make him moral or religious by the same means. All that law can do is to endeavor to place a man in such an environment that his moral or religious nature may be aroused and that his desire or ambition be encouraged. It was ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... cannot wonder at its irritation and opposition to the taxes imposed on all for the protection of American manufactures. On the other hand, it was a grave question whether the interests of the nation at large should be sacrificed to build up the interests of the South,—to say nothing of the great moral issues which underlie all material questions. In other words, in matters of national importance, which should rule? Should the majority yield to the minority, or the minority to the majority? In accordance with the democratic principles on which ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... him, Mrs. Houghton, to a moral; and do you stick to me. They generally go straight away to Thrupp's larches. You see the little wood. There's an old earth there, but that's stopped. There is only one fence between this and that, a biggish ditch, with a bit of a hedge ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... could not have been saved. But they had the children; and to the children was restored much of what their father had largely spoiled in the first place, and she nearly forfeited in the second. For the fact was that Sam did better; the despot is always a moral coward, and always something of the slave to a master. Moreover, her growing invulnerability to hurt through him set, in large measure, the attitude of the household; everybody was more comfortable. She discounted his ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... extent characteristic of the man, gathered greater dominion over him. He was not civil to the people towards whom civility would be useful, and he refused to shut his eyes to the logical defects or moral shortcomings in the measures promoted by his party. His abilities were still conceded in ample terms, his charm still handsomely and sincerely acknowledged. But a suspicion gradually got about that he was impracticable, ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... run in the interests of prostitution it has what may be regarded as a staff of women in the neighbouring streets. In some districts of New York it is found that practically all the prostitutes on the street are connected with some Raines Law hotel. These wise moral legislators of New York thought they were placing a penalty on Sunday drinking; what they have really done is to ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... however, marked the beginning of a new fashion. While Barclay's Ship of Fools and Mirror of Good Manners were addressed, like their medieval predecessors, to "lewd" people, with The Golden Book began the vogue of a new type of didactic literature, similar in its moral purpose and in its frequent employment of narrative material to the religious works of the Middle Ages, but with new stylistic elements that made their appeal, as did the novella, not to the rustic and unlearned, but to courtly readers. ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... in a manner, a plan of campaign; now all this needs long elaboration. These are the bases of our undertaking. It is necessary to disclose all to them—the consequences of the alliance, or rather the moral, that is to say material support which England lends us, or rather France—In short," said Croustillac, who began to be singularly mixed up in his politics, "I do not wish to receive my partisans till to-morrow, in the morning. I ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... all the collections. His only separate publication, a duodecimo volume of "Poems," appeared in 1855, and has been favourably received. Mr Carlile is much devoted to the interests of his native town, and has sedulously endeavoured to promote the moral and social welfare of his fellow-townsmen. His unobtrusive worth and elegant accomplishments have endeared him to a wide circle of friends. His latter poetical compositions have been largely ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... perfect State or an ideal commonwealth has sustained them on the march. Our boast has been that we are a "practical" people, and so our politics are, as they ever have been, experimental. Reforms have been accomplished not out of deference to some moral or political principle, but because the abuse to be remedied had become intolerable. Dissatisfaction with the Government and the conviction that only by enfranchisement and the free election of representatives can Parliament remove the ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... be slain by the noble knight, the enchantments which can only be broken by the outwitting of the evil witch, the lady who can only be won by perils bravely endured, form the material of moral lessons which no other method of teaching could so impress upon ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... adored this wife whom he now tended and sought to represent in correspondence: it was now, if not before, her turn to repay the compliment; mind enough was left her to perceive his unwearied kindness; and as her moral qualities seemed to survive quite unimpaired, a childish love and gratitude were his reward. She would interrupt a conversation to cross the room and kiss him. If she grew excited (as she did too often) it was his habit to come behind her chair and pat her ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... question if any English poet has surpassed 'The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins through Hell' in its peculiarly Dantesque qualities of severe and purged grandeur; of deep sincerity, and in that air of moral disappointment and sorrow, approaching despair, which distinguished the sad-hearted lover of Beatrice, who might almost have exclaimed, with one yet mightier than he in his misery and ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... temptations of the generality of the world are the ordinary motives to injustice or unrestrained pleasure; but there are other persons without this shallowness of temper; persons of a deeper sense as to what is invisible and future. Now, these persons have their moral discipline set them in that high region." The profound bishop means that while their appetites and their tempers are the stumbling-stones of the most of men, the difficult problems of natural and revealed and experimental religion are the test and the triumph of other men. As we have just seen ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... Nancy said, "and thank you kindly. Now I know you've been making pop-overs, and are afraid they will disagree with me. I'm glad—for I need the moral effect ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... in spite of their rather ridiculous way of talking. They do, a number of them, give the uninitiated an impression of moral laxity. Their phrases, "the free relation," "the rights of sex," "suppressed desires," "love without bonds," "liberty of the individual" do, when jumbled up sufficiently, make a composite picture of strange ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... nature reverent and tolerant, gentle and free from guile; the grim resignation which made life possible to the Stoic sage becomes in him almost a mood of aspiration. His book records the innermost thoughts of his heart, set down to ease it, with such moral maxims and reflections as may help him to bear the burden of duty and the countless annoyances ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... unfortunate author of the Savage type, who wrote an affecting monody on the death of his wife;—Thomas Scott, author of 'Lyric Poems, Devotional and Moral: London, 1773;'—Edward Thompson, a native of Hull, and author of some tolerable sea-songs;—Henry Headley, a young man of uncommon talents, a pupil of Dr Parr in Norwich, who, when only twenty-one, published 'Select Beauties of the Ancient English Poets,' accompanied by ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... advance their own fortunes, were the failures, the lost leaders, and, in some cases, the men whose names are embalmed in their own infamy. The ultimate secret of greatness is neither physical nor intellectual, but moral. It is the capacity to lose self in the service of something greater. It is the faith to recognize, the will to obey, and the ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke
... those with whom he had been brought in such close contact at St. Germains would little bear the inspection of a stern moralist. So he gave his allegiance where he could not give his esteem, and learned to respect sincerely the upright and moral character of one whom he yet regarded as an usurper. King William's government had little need to fear such a one. So he returned, as I have said, with a sobered heart and impoverished fortunes, to his ancestral ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the signs of the times, nor to see farther than we are necessarily led by the course of events; but it is impossible not to be struck with the aspect of that grandest of all moral phenomena which is suspended upon the history and actual condition of the sons of Jacob. At this moment they are nearly as numerous as when David swayed the sceptre of the Twelve Tribes; their expectations are the same, their longings are the same; and on whatever part of the earth's ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... steadily increasing, even on the admission of his slanderers, for three centuries, and that he now shines as a fixed star in the constellation of the great lights of modern times, not only because he succeeded in crossing the ocean when once embarked on it, but for surmounting the moral difficulties which lay in his way before he could embark upon it, and for being finally instrumental in conferring the greatest boon that our world has received from any mortal man since Noah ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... standards of ethics. Men whom you knew to be perjurers, ballot box stuffers and violaters of law were, because of those very qualities, allowed to occupy high station among you. Many of you felt that your ills could only have been cured in that way. We Negroes have felt that a moral revolution could have been effected, and would have left no residue of evil in its wake. But other methods prevailed and you now have among you a class of men who feel no compunctions of conscience at cheating. Having blunted their ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... was a promising lad, His intentions were good—but oh, how sad For a person to think How the veriest pink And bloom of perfection may turn out bad. Old Flash himself was a moral man, And prided himself on a moral plan, Of a maxim as old As the calf of gold, Of making that boy do ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... know! But I am to be pitied. And this hate, this terrible hate! Perhaps that would disappear if you men were not so afraid to love us, if you were not so—how shall I express it—so moral, as it's called. ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... lection with an ever-varying formula,—by which means the holy Name is often found in MSS. where it has no proper place,—but notes of time, &c., ['like the unique and indubitably genuine word [Greek: deuteroprotoi][150],' are omitted as carrying no moral lesson, as well as longer passages like the case of the two verses recounting the ministering Angel with the Agony ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... Golden River" is a delightful fairy tale told with all Ruskin's charm of style, his appreciation of mountain scenery, and with his usual insistence upon drawing a moral. None the less, it is quite unlike his other writings. All his life long his pen was busy interpreting nature and pictures and architecture, or persuading to better views those whom he believed to be in error, or arousing, with the white heat of a prophet's zeal, those whom he knew to ...
— The King of the Golden River - A Short Fairy Tale • John Ruskin.
... Manhood or Worth, that is in a man, is called his Morality, or Customariness. Fell Slaughter, one the most authentic products of the Pit you would say, once give it Customs, becomes War, with Laws of War; and is Customary and Moral enough; and red individuals carry the tools of it girt round their haunches, not without an air of pride,—which do thou nowise blame. While, see! so long as it is but dressed in hodden or russet; and Revolution, less frequent than War, has not yet got its Laws of Revolution, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... new prophecy on the ground of innovation;[218] they sought to throw suspicion on its content; in some cases even Chiliasm, as represented by the Montanists, was declared to have a Jewish and fleshly character.[219] They tried to show that the moral demands of their opponents were extravagant, that they savoured of the ceremonial law (of the Jews), were opposed to Scripture, and were derived from the worship of Apis, Isis, and the mother of the Gods.[220] To the claim of furnishing the Church with authentic oracles of God, set up by ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... but a variant of Siam. Patani and Pahang are Malayan states on the eastern side of the Malay Peninsula. Jabas is a corruption of Jawa (now commonly written Java), the name of the principal nation inhabiting the island—the most civilized and moral of the Malayan peoples. Samatra is only a variant of Sumatra—the largest island, next to Borneo, of the Malayan archipelago. Achin (or Achen) and Manangkabo (Manancabo) are states in the island of Sumatra; and Batachina evidently means "land of the ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson
... these books is manliness. The stories are wonderfully entertaining, and they are at the same time sound and wholesome. The plots are ingenious, the action swift, and the moral tone wholly healthful. No boy will willingly lay down an unfinished book in this series, at the same time he will form a taste for good literature and ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... our feet, a lamp to our path! Accept the book as a whole, and then treat all the portions of it just as you like. Confess all its words to be the words of the Lord, and then you may yourself be lords over them, and may perform moral miracles by turning the bread of life into stones for ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... spirit. There are probably fewer Socialists in Peckover than in any other quad in Oxford. The old feudal traditions, though somewhat mitigated, still survive. You still hear the characteristic Mayfair accent and recognise a curious lack of that Moral Uplift without which, as Sir ROBERTSON NICOLL finely says, a man is no better than a mummy. And yet I own to having been strangely attracted by these well-groomed scions of a vanishing breed, with their finely chiselled features, their clipped colloquialisms and their cheerful ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... ball," he went on; "here it lies upon this slab. Now, it is over there. What name shall we give to what has taken place, so natural from a physical point of view, so amazing from a moral? Movement, locomotion, changing of place? What prodigious vanity lurks underneath the words. Does a name solve the difficulty? Yet it is the whole of our science for all that. Our machines either make direct use of this agency, this fact, or they convert it. This trifling phenomenon, applied to ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... eighteenth century, underrated the force which the past exerts over the present; he could see nothing but prejudice and unreason in the attachment to provincial custom or time-honoured opinion; he knew nothing of that moral law which limits the success of revolutions by the conditions which precede them. What was worst united with what was best in resistance to his reforms. The bigots of the University of Louvain, who ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... of human virtue, the reformer of Wittenberg turned away with horror. He had little or no sympathy with the new cult. He despised reason as heartily as any papal dogmatist could despise it. He hated the very thought of toleration or comprehension. He had been driven by a moral and intellectual compulsion to declare the Roman system a false one, but it was only to replace it by another system of doctrine just as elaborate and claiming precisely the same infallibility. To degrade human nature ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... courage to choose a line for themselves. The material result of this new theory of life was to make me enormously conceited, and I moved among my comrades with a mysterious confidence, and gave myself the airs of a Byron in knickerbockers. My unpopularity increased by leaps and bounds, but so did my moral courage, and I accepted the belated efforts of my school-fellows to knock the intelligence out of me as so many tributes to the force of my individuality. I no longer cried in my bed at night, but lay awake enraptured at the profundity of my thoughts. After years of ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... means—allow me the phrase, a bit frivolous, but graphic—of noisy reclame, advertisement for a people; because, although a more civilised people may be conquered by one more barbarous, less cultured, less moral; although, also, the superiority in war may be relative, and men are not on the earth merely to give each other blows, but to work, to study, to know, to enjoy; yet the majority of men are easily convinced that he who has won in a war is in everything, or at least in many things, superior ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... may be their personal cleanliness in appearance, their moral impurity, according to all accounts, is most gross and detestable. We shall not pollute our page by the slightest mention of the abominable gratifications in which they are said to indulge, contrary to the most palpable ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... polygamy, on the ground that in a general meeting he expected that his religion would be free from attack. A learned Mahomedan judge, on the other hand, writes that among Indian Mahomedans "the feeling against polygamy is becoming a strong social if not a moral conviction." "Ninety-five out of every 100 are either by conviction or necessity monogamists." "It has become customary," he tells us, "to insert in the marriage deed a clause by which the intending ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... desires; and these become a part of our punishment, or of our reward, according to their kind. Those persons, therefore, in whom the virtue of patriotism has predominated continue to regard with interest their native land, unless it be so utterly sunk in degradation that the moral relationship between them is dissolved. Epaminondas can have no sympathy at this time with Thebes, nor Cicero with Rome, nor Belisarius with the imperial city of the East. But the worthies of England ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... came in bringing with him, not only the moral tonic of his presence, but also the very breath of the sea; its refreshing "tang," and good salt flavour. His smile and blessing was a spiritual sunshine that warmed and cheered and brightened the room. He was affectionate to all, but to Mistress Brodie and Ian Macrae, ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... bodily perfections, in the absence of all other recommendations, have incited a passion that carried all before it; but scarcely any one can point to a case where intellectual acquirements, apart from moral or physical attributes, have aroused such a feeling. The truth is that, out of the many elements uniting in various proportions to produce in a man's breast the complex emotion we call love, the strongest are those produced by physical attractions; the next ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... man who would measure up to a situation. He was quite an athlete, and enjoyed boxing and fencing and swimming. If at any time in his life he could have conceived of a situation such as he encountered in his wife's room, he would have lived in a moral certainty of killing the man. And when the situation did come was it not a miracle that he should walk out into the night leaving them not only unharmed, but together? I ask you, ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... enlist, a very small percentage was permitted to enlist in the Navy. Of this small number only a few were allowed the regular training and opportunities of combatants, to the DISCREDIT of our nation, not as yet, grown to that moral vision and all around ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... this group, in lieu of a more accurate name, may be called moralities, since they contain a moral ...
— A Syllabus of Kentucky Folk-Songs • Hubert G. Shearin
... government, but to find out a method of enforcing its laws. Governments have in general but two means of overcoming the opposition of the people they govern, viz., the physical force which is at their own disposal, and the moral force which they derive from the decisions of the ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... purpose of the doubly pointed obelus is plainly indicated here, as it accompanies two of these catchwords. Just so in the margin opposite 65, 17, a pointing finger is accompanied by the remark, "Beneficia beneficiis aliis cumulanda," while 227, 5 is decorated with the moral ejaculation, "o hominem in diuitiis miserum." Incidentally, it is obvious that the Morgan fragment was once perused by some thoughtful reader, who marked with lines or brackets passages of special interest to him. For example, ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... does not seem to please you," he cried, as if in hurt surprise. "'Tis true I have now no legal right to think of reviving the old hospitable traditions of the family; but you must remember, Adrian, you yourself have insisted on giving me a moral right to act host here in your absence—you have over and over again laid stress upon the freedom you wished me to feel in the matter. Hitherto I have not made use of these privileges; have not cared to do so, beyond an occasional duty dinner to our nearest neighbours. ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... that spring, most of which found its way into the Atlantic. "Edward Mills and George Benton," one of the contributions of this time, is a moral sermon in its presentation of a pitiful human spectacle ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... was more closely knit than any Celtic realm had been; the Danes were fewer than their Anglo-Saxon predecessors; and Alfred was made of sterner stuff than early British princes. He was typical of Wessex; moral strength and all-round capacity rather than supreme ability in any one direction are his title-deeds to greatness. After hard fighting he imposed terms of peace upon the Danish leader Guthrum. England ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard |
