"Sweetness and light" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cordial parfait amour, while the ice cream repeated the design, and was served in a garden hat of straw-colored candy wreathed with natural roses. The human flowers around the table against such a background of "sweetness and light" made the scene ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... light play of the intellect is only possible on a high level, when the current thought has become a part of the daily life, so that a word suggests infinite perspectives to the swift intelligence. It is not what we know, but the flavor of what we know, that adds"sweetness and light" to social intercourse. With their rapid intuition and instinctive love of pleasing, these French women were quick to see the value of a ready comprehension of the subjects in which clever men are most interested. ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... all the houses were Early English, and all the people dressed like ancient Greeks, and all the manners Renaissance, or, perhaps, Gothic. The poet thought they were Gothic, and probably he was right. In this town the talk was mostly about Art, and many fine things were said in regard to "sweetness and light." Everybody claimed to be an artist of some kind, whether painter, musician, novelist, dramatist, verse-maker, reciter, singer, or what not. But although they seemed so greatly devoted to the Graces and the Muses, it was but the ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... I was sweetness and light because a lot depended on his decision. "Just trying to help, chief, get things ready in case you wanted more info. And this isn't really an operation, just a reconnaissance. I can do that as well as any of the experienced operators. And it may give me the experience ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... bee-hive, which kills or drives away its superfluous members, and the polity of Sparta, which put the cripples and the aged to death, are essential to permanent success in the venture of communism in the natural order. "Sweetness and light" are enjoyed by the few only at the sacrifice of the unwholesome and ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... was considered vile enough to rank that middle-aged, loud-voiced lady with the Domitians and Attilas of history. There was a softening influence, happily, in the person of Miss Dulcibella, who was slim and sentimental, talked about sweetness and light, loved modern poetry, spent all her available funds upon dress, and was wonderfully girlish in her tastes and habits at ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Pound. According to Doctor Todd, the journal which secured the services of David Malcolm was to be congratulated; he recited my high achievements, my graduation with honors in the largest class in the history of McGraw, my winning of the junior oratorical contest with a remarkable oration on "Sweetness and Light." Mr. Pound was less fulsome in his praises, for he was by nature a pessimistic man, but he could vouch for my honesty, though, to be frank, he had been disappointed by my abandoning my purpose to enter the ministry; yet he had known me from infancy, he had had a little part in the development ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... even defective moral vision, though retarding needed changes, may be used by the powers that balance our complex life to hold, its course steady in chaos of change. These gifts may add patience and love, sweetness and light, to the zeal of the reformer and yet not dull his ardor for the ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... in the outer world, we should seek to leave the irritation and annoyance behind when we cross the threshold of our dwelling. Into it the roughness and bluster of the world should never be permitted to come. It should be the place of "sweetness and light," and every member may do something to make it so. It is a bad sign when a young man never cares to spend his evenings at home—when he prefers the company of others to the society of his family, and seeks his amusement wholly beyond its circle. ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... qualifications by getting their windows broken." Those who go deeper than the surface will perhaps surmise that Harvard has had better material to work upon than some colleges; not perhaps material of finer abilities, but material that has been more under the influence of sweetness and light. Possibly her graduates are as superior at making dinner speeches as are her trustees ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... of modern monasteries. A half mile distant is another tower and the ruins of other monasteries, and every inch of earth in that part of the city is associated with the life and labor of the great apostle of peace and love, whose theology of sweetness and light and gentleness was in startling contrast with the atrocious doctrines taught by the Brahmins and the hideous rites practiced at the shrines of the Hindu gods. But these towers are not the oldest relics of ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... Howells has written of "Daisy Miller" in a similar vein, speaking of her "indestructible innocence and her invulnerable new-worldliness." "It was so plain that Mr. James disliked her vulgar conditions that the very people to whom he revealed her essential sweetness and light were furious that he should have seemed not to ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... and above all other things to a strong personality of character which implied a powerful will. The early Persians chose the bravest and most capable of their nobles for kings, and these kings were mild and merciful. Xenophon makes Cyrus the ideal of a king,—the incarnation of sweetness and light, conducting war with a magnanimity unknown to the ancient nations, dismissing prisoners, forgiving foes, freeing slaves, and winning all hearts by a true nobility of nature. He was a reformer of barbarous methods of war, and as pure in morals as ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred, culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various |
