Free translatorFree translator
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Worldliness   /wˈərldlinəs/   Listen
Worldliness

noun
1.
The quality or character of being intellectually sophisticated and worldly through cultivation or experience or disillusionment.  Synonyms: mundaneness, mundanity, sophistication.
2.
Concern with worldly affairs to the neglect of spiritual needs.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Worldliness" Quotes from Famous Books



... of his early letters to Bjoernson, he had written: 'When I read the news from home, when I gaze upon all that respectable, estimable narrow-mindedness and worldliness, it is with the feeling of an insane man staring at one single, hopelessly dark spot.' All his life Ibsen gazed until he found the black spot somewhere; but it was with less and less of this angry, reforming feeling of the insane man. He saw the black spot at the core of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... what he had said about Milton. He read some extracts, after Johnson's death, from the Meditations, and wrote contemptuously of them. {18} But if Cowper had always possessed, in addition to his fascinating other-worldliness the healthy worldliness of Dr. Johnson, perhaps we should all have been the happier. To me that collection of Prayers and Meditations seems one of the most helpful books that I have ever read, and I am surprised that it is not constantly reprinted in a ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter

... He was accustomed to, and often rather amused by his cousin's honest worldliness and outspoken skepticisms—that candid confession of badness which always inclines a kindly heart to believe the very best ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... every breeze! A path has been appointed me. I have walked in it as steadily as I could. I am what I am; that which I am not, teach me in the others. I will bear the pain of imperfection, but not of doubt. E. must not shake me in my worldliness, nor —— in the fine motion that has given me what I have of life, nor this child of genius make me lay aside the armor, without which I had lain bleeding on the field long since; but, if they can keep closer to nature, and learn to interpret ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... dared not show itself. The idea of the priest was not quite forgotten; but there was much—much even of what was good and useful—to obscure it. The beauty of the English Church in this time was its family life of purity and simplicity; its blot was quiet worldliness. It has sometimes been the fashion in later days of strife and disquiet to regret that unpretending estimate of clerical duty and those easy-going days; as it has sometimes been the fashion to regret the pomp and dignity with which well-born or scholarly bishops, furnished with ample leisure and ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... was in the air. The literature, philosophy and religion of the day drifted toward an ascetic scheme of life and stimulated the tendency to acquire holiness, even at the cost of innocent joys and natural gratifications. They show that worldliness was advancing in the church, which called for rebuke and a return to Apostolic Christianity; that the church was failing to satisfy the highest cravings of the soul. True, it was well-nigh impossible for the church, in the midst of such a powerful ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart

... know that she considered the whole organization conspicuous and common, nor that she did not wish Ethel to learn to do the work of a servant, etc., or run the risk of meeting girls of humble origin. So after some sharp rebukes administered to her by the old lady on the sin of worldliness and the fact that she was not doing a mother's duty by her daughter, she consented, mentally declaring that she would see that Ethel should forget all about ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson

... wasting words. 'Rast had acquired the synonym at the business men's carnival in Boggs City the preceding fall. Sometimes he substituted the words "pie-eyed," "skeed," "lit up," etc., just to show his worldliness. ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon

... began to be galled and irritated by the insatiate assumption and swollen authority of "the best of mothers." The furious reproaches which she heaped upon him when she saw in Acte a possible rival to her power drove him to take refuge in the facile and unphilosophic worldliness of Seneca's concessions, and goaded him almost immediately afterwards into an atrocious crime. He naturally looked on Britannicus, the youthful son of Claudius, with even more suspicion and hatred than that with which ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... extreme worldliness to a life of piety and prayer was deep and permanent. Hers was no half-way character. While she was of the world, she pursued its follies with entire devotion of heart; and when she once renounced it as unsatisfying, and unworthy of her immortal ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart

... hopefulness of youth, the serene happiness of useful and contented men and women;—some shadowed by recent sorrow, where perhaps patriots, as in the olden time, learn to endure for the sake of a beloved country;—or others, perchance, where worldliness, discord, and egotism have severed hearts that should be united. God grant the number of the latter may be few! Happy should we be, could we know that our arrival would bring one more smile to the lips of the gay, a single ray of support or consolation to the souls of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... the sacred book of the pre-Mohammedan Persians, and the religion of the Old and New Testaments, makes it in a sense easy for us to understand these followers of Zoroaster. Persian poetry, with its love of life and this-worldliness, with its wealth of imagery and its appeal to that which is human in all men, is much more readily comprehended by us than is the poetry of all the rest of the Orient. And, therefore, Goethe, Platen, Rueckert, von Schack, Fitzgerald, ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... together with Baggs of the British office. His pride and confidence received a severe shock. She glanced at him with unaffected welcome, but the air of one who was looking upon his face for the first time. It was not until he had spent a full hour in doleful self-commiseration, that his sense of worldliness came to his relief. In a flash, he was joyously convincing himself that her pose during the presentation was artfully—and very properly—assumed. He saw through it very plainly! How simple he had been! Of course, she could not permit him to ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon

... rajas. And he who is resolute, patient, not subject to anger, free from malice, and is not skilful in action from want of a selfish desire to reap its fruits, wise and forbearing, is said to be under the influence of sattwa. When a man endowed with the sattwa quality, is influenced by worldliness, he suffers misery; but he hates worldliness, when he realises its full significance. And then a feeling of indifference to worldly affairs begins to influence him. And then his pride decreases, and uprightness becomes more prominent, and his conflicting moral sentiments are reconciled. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... more glad of the delay of Elvira and her aunt up-stairs than she would have been, if she could ever have guessed what work a designing, flattering tongue could make with a vain, frivolous, selfish brain, with the same essential strain of vulgarity and worldliness. ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... acquainted with Catherine's natural good qualities, and more and more attached to his home, had Mr. Beaufort, with the generosity of true affection, desired to remove from her the pain of an equivocal condition by a public marriage. But Mr. Beaufort, though generous, was not free from the worldliness which had met him everywhere, amidst the society in which his youth had been spent. His uncle, the head of one of those families which yearly vanish from the commonalty into the peerage, but which once formed a distinguished peculiarity in the aristocracy of England—families ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... me great pleasure to have some humble part in echoing across the American continent these glowing utterances from the lips of this modern Deborah, the Christian prophetess raised up by God for the deliverance of His people from captivity to worldliness and religious apathy. "Would God that all the Lord's people," men and women, "were prophets, and that the Lord would ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth

... depart, Youth flies—love dies—and from the joyous heart Hope's gushing fountain ebbs too soon away, Nor spares one drop for that disastrous day, When from the barren waste of after life, The weariness, the worldliness, the strife, The soul looks o'er the desert of its way To the green gardens of its early day: The paradise, for which we vainly mourn, The heaven, to which our ling'ring eyes still turn, To which ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler

... world, some attempt to regard them with the same freedom from ill-temper, whether on private or public grounds, as we may hope will be felt by those who will call us ancient! Otherwise, the looking before and after, which is our grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifference or bitterness than was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven. Except on the ground of a primitive golden age and continuous degeneracy, I see no rational footing for scorning the whole present population ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot

... Never in all his life had he been such a prey to exterior influences, been twisted and turned to and fro, weather-cock fashion, thus. It was absurd, of course, to take things too seriously, yet he could not but fear the Archdeacon's well-intentioned bit of worldliness and his own disposition to court whatever family prejudice pronounced taboo, were in process of leading him ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... soul! behold her: what decorous calm! She, with her week-day worldliness sufficed, Stands in her pew and hums her decent psalm With decent dippings at the name of Christ! And she has mov'd in that smooth way so long, She hardly can believe ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... appointed by the First Consul"; men will be placed there who are "cultivated, devoted to the government and friendly to toleration; they will not confine themselves to teaching theology, but will add to this a sort of philosophy and correct worldliness."—A future cure, a priest who controls laymen and belongs to his century, must not be a monk belonging to the other world, but a man of this world, able to adapt himself to it, do his duty in it with propriety and discretion, accept the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... all who have anywhere come to know it, Christmas is the festival of the better worldly self. But better than worldliness, it is on the Shield to-day what it essentially has been through many an age to many people—the symbolic Earth Festival of the Evergreen; setting forth man's pathetic love of youth—of his own youth that ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen

... to remorse, she saw herself disloyal to her man, her sovereign and bread-winner, in whom (with what she had of worldliness) she took a certain subdued pride. She expatiated in reply on my lord's honour and greatness; his useful services in this world of sorrow and wrong, and the place in which he stood, far above where babes and innocents ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... on a long list of old associates which Dr. Clarke's book has led me to call to mind and look up, are, I have been surprised to find, among those who did "run well for a time," but they have turned back and ceased mental labor. Some have fallen into worldliness and a fashionable life, and are broken down under it. Others, restricted to some narrow creed of thought, have not dared to open their eyes to the light of any new day that is dawning on the world, until, ceasing to grow, they have, according to a law of nature, fallen into decay, invalidism, and ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... she was a child. It had come from here, where an aged city had tried to conquer the country and had failed, for the spirit of woods and open spaces, of water and trees and wind, survived among the very roofs. The conventions of the centuries, the convention of puritanism, of worldliness, of impiety, of materialism and of charity had all assailed and all fallen back before the strength of the apparently peaceful country in which the city stood. The air was soft with a peculiar, undermining softness; it carried with it a smell of flowers and fruit and earth, and if all the ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG

... and permanency in the Theocracy that was before unknown. See above, Ch. 15, No. 11. The change to the kingly form of government constituted a new era in the Hebrew commonwealth. Although the motives which led the people to desire a king were low and unworthy, being grounded in worldliness and unbelief, yet God, for the accomplishment of his own purposes, was pleased to grant their request. The adumbration in the Theocracy of the kingly office of the future Messiah, not less than of his priestly and prophetical office, was originally contemplated in its establishment; and ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... is that in no respect did she blench from the situation as she found it. She "faced life steadily and faced it whole." A Europe ravaged by dissensions lay before her; a Church which gave the lie to its lofty theories, no less by the hateful worldliness of its prelates than by its indifferent abandonment of the Seat of Peter. Above this sorry spectacle the mind of Catherine soared straight into an upper region, where only the greatest minds of the day were her comrades. Her fellow-citizens were unable to ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa

... combinations of moral qualities, infinitely varied, which compose the harsh physiognomy of what we call worldliness in the living groups of life, must unavoidably present themselves in books. A library divides into sections of worldly and unworldly, even as a crowd of men divides into that same majority and minority. The world has an instinct for recognizing its own, and recoils ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various

... recounted with such detail and such relish by Joinville, the whole force of this contrast becomes delightfully apparent. One seems to see in them, compressed and symbolized in the characters of these two friends, the conflicting qualities of sense and spirit, of worldliness and self-immolation, of the most shrewd and literal perspicacity and the most visionary exaltation, which make up the singular ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... Clark, in 1676; "but have you better hearts than your forefathers had?" Thomas Walley's "Languishing Commonwealth" maintains that "Faith is dead, and Love is cold, and Zeal is gone." Urian Oakes's election sermon of 1670 in Cambridge is a condemnation of the prevalent worldliness and ostentation. This period of critical inquiry and assessment, however, also gives grounds for just pride. History, biography, eulogy, are flourishing. The reader is reminded of that epoch, one hundred ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... not, at this moment, to dim yours by dwelling upon it, you know how long, how constantly, how ardently I have loved Lady Flora Ardenne; how, for her sake, I have refused opportunities of alliance which might have gratified to the utmost that worldliness of heart which so many who saw me only in the crowd have been pleased to impute to me. You know that neither pleasure, nor change, nor the insult I received from her parents, nor the sudden indifference which I so little deserved from herself, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... gold sparkled the spirits of the saints, silent for the same reason that Beatrice smiled not. By divine election, Saint Peter Damian descended and spoke with Dante, accusing the churchmen of the time of worldliness and luxury. "Cephas and our Lord came on earth barefoot and poorly clad, but these men are covered with gorgeous raiment and ride upon sleek palfreys." As he closed, a thunder cry of approval went up ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb

... it is preached to men outside the Kingdom or to those within it. The birds are continually carrying off the seed from thoughtless and hardened hearers; opposition and persecution and temptation still scorch up the seed in others; and worldliness and love of money still choke that which was beginning to grow well in many hearts. And we can see all these characters, in those who were first called to be members of the Church of Christ. The Jews, generally, in ...
— The Kingdom of Heaven; What is it? • Edward Burbidge

... golden wings But seldom unfurl from their chrysalis; And thus I retain my loveliest things, While the world, in its worldliness, does not miss ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod

... more regal, Than wings of swans, than doves, than dim-seen eagle? What is it? And to what shall I compare it? It has a glory, and nought else can share it: The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy, Chacing away all worldliness and folly; Coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder, Or the low rumblings earth's regions under; And sometimes like a gentle whispering Of all the secrets of some wond'rous thing That breathes about us in the vacant air; So that we look around ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats

... was in his heart—there was no mistake about it. It was plain that he had put by all worldly thoughts when he shut up his account book, and that his mind was as free from every earthly association as his Sunday coat was from dust. The slave of worldliness, who is driven, by perplexing business or adventurous speculation, through the hours of a half-kept Sabbath to the fatigues of another week, might envy the unbroken quiet, the sunny tranquillity, which hallowed the weekly rest of ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... will, nor warmth of love, nor clearness of vision, left for better things. That is the history of the fall of many a professing Christian, who never apostatises, and keeps up a reputable appearance of godliness to the end; but the old worldliness, which was cut down for a while, has sprung again in his heart, and, by slow degrees, the word is 'choked'—a most expressive picture of the silent, gradual dying-out of its power for want of sun and air—and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... of the friends I had left on the other side of the mountains. I had not succeeded as I had hoped in my work. I came to the West expecting to meet with opposition, and I found only indifference. I expected infidelity, and found worldliness. I had around me a company of good Christian friends, but they were no converts of mine; they were from New England, like myself, and brought their religion with them. Upon the real Western people I had made no impression, and could not see how I should make any. Those who were religious seemed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... swing of a pendulum from one extreme to the other. For a generation many natural pleasures had been suppressed; now the theaters were reopened, bull and bear baiting revived, and sports, music, dancing,—a wild delight in the pleasures and vanities of this world replaced that absorption in "other-worldliness" which ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... Malabar fisherman, and all his remaining habit was a strip of matting girded around his waist. Now this Shaykh was a Darwaysh who for many years had fled the world and all worldly pleasures; who lived a holy life of poverty and chastity and other-worldliness whereby his semblance had become such as I, O auspicious King, have described to thee. From early dawn that day Prince Bahman had been watchful and vigilant, ever looking on all sides to descry some one who could supply ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... married state has thus the countenance and sanction of the society and its elders, matrimony is not regarded as a meritorious act. It has in it, they say, a certain large degree of worldliness; it is not calculated to make them more, but rather less spiritually minded—so think they at Amana—and accordingly the religious standing of the young couple suffers and is lowered. In the Amana church there are three "classes," orders or grades, the highest consisting of ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff

... quite near to Mr. Bowen. I wanted to study his face, and as I listened in silence, the conversation between the pastor and this member of his flock was a new and beautiful revelation to me. The one seemed to help the other, while no stain of worldliness marred the even flow of their words. After awhile Mrs. Blake handed the minister a well-worn Bible. He opened it and turned the leaves thoughtfully, pausing at last at the 103d Psalm. I looked at Mr. Bowen while Mr. Lathrop was reading. His lips were softly moving as if in responsive worship, ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter

... arrangement of the seasons we are constantly kept at the door of Divine mercy, begging "Give us this day our daily bread." That eternal voice preaching through all our temporal interests is to us the solemn, never-ceasing protest against worldliness, earthliness, vanity, living for time, living for the body; and, above all, against every impure or ungodly method of attempting ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King

... Bendigo took to politics; that is to say, he, for a consideration, directed at Parliamentary elections the proceedings of the "lambs" in his native town of Nottingham. Now he had given up even that worldliness, and had taken to preaching. His fame had brought together a large congregation. The Hall was crowded to overflowing, and the proceedings were, as one of the speakers described it, conducted "by shifts," the leaders, including Bendigo, going downstairs ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy

... a quarrel, but the order is so entirely opposed to the monastic spirit. What I mean is—well, their worldliness is repugnant to me—fashionable friends, confidences, meddling in family affairs, dining out, letters from ladies who need consolation.... I don't mean anything wrong; pray don't misunderstand me. I merely mean ...
— Celibates • George Moore

... opinion; and it is not you, 'mon cher,' you Frenchman, that I am angry with, but somebody else that stands behind you. You, Frenchman, and your compatriots, I love oftentimes for your festal gaiety of heart; and I quarrel only with your levity and that eternal worldliness that freezes too fiercely—that absolutely blisters with its frost—like the upper air of the Andes. You speak of Kate only as too readily you speak of all women; the instinct of a natural scepticism being to scoff at all hidden depths of truth. Else you are civil ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... of endless turnings and qualifications, and the deluded worshipers of self vainly imagine that they can gratify every worldly desire, and at the same time possess the Truth. But the lovers of Truth worship Truth with the sacrifice of self, and ceaselessly guard themselves against worldliness ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen

... understand how it might be more sorrowful than the loss of houses and lands. It was the husband's first frown, his first petulant word; it was the key that opened Elma's understanding to the true estate of the past. She could no longer blind her eyes, as she had done, to a certain worldliness in her husband, and which had also reached her through him. This morning, that revealed so much, Horace had impatiently exclaimed as Elma held forth her Bible to ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur

... they are. Some author has wisely said: "That the world should be full of worldliness seems as right as that a stream should be full of water or a living body full of blood." To conquer this world, to get out of it a full, abounding, agreeable life, is what we are put here for. Else, why such gifts ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... Sister. She was quick-tempered, volatile, inclined to be a trifle vain. Alas that it is so hard to keep a child's heart like a garden enclosed as with a fragrant hedge, laden with the blossoms of sweet thoughts,—safely shut in from the chilling winds of worldliness! She was lovable withal, generous, affectionate, and would make a fine ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley

... Quintessence of worldliness, Mrs. Mountstuart appeared through his farthest window, swinging her skirts on a turn at the end of the lawn, with Horace De Craye smirking beside her. And the woman's vaunted penetration was unable to detect the histrionic Irishism of the fellow. Or she liked him for his acting and nonsense; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... and, beside it, he describes a religious assembly of the same period. The first gathering appears to be altogether worldly: the second has nothing of the world about it. Yet, he says, Mary Godolphin lived her life at Court without being tainted by any shadow of worldliness, whilst many a man went up to those solemn assemblies with the world raging ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham

... of a congregation at the usual age, which would in all probability have arrested my intellectual development, and have stereotyped my creed for many a long year; and then also they would have acknowledged me as a Christian. A little more stupidity, a little more worldliness, a little more mental dishonesty in me, or perhaps a little more kindness and management in others, would have kept me in my old state, which was acknowledged and would still be acknowledged as Christian. To try to disown me now, ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... of the Church exposed the Church to worldliness whereby selfish men, or men carried away with partisan zeal, took advantages of its privileges or contended fiercely for important appointments. The clergy all too frequently ingratiated themselves with wealthy members of their flocks that they might ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... medieval temper that he has not struck upon in these seemingly careless and too rugged lines of his.... I know no other piece of modern English prose or poetry in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit—its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I have said of the central Renaissance, in thirty pages of 'The Stones of Venice,' put into as many lines, Browning's also being the antecedent work." (Modern Painters, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... and Mrs. Grote always keeps me in a rather nervous state of breathless apprehension as to what she may say or do next. I cannot talk much, either to her or Charles Greville; neither of them understands a word that I say. Her utter unusualness perplexes me, and his ingrain worldliness provokes me; but I listened with great pleasure to some political talk between Charles Greville, Mr. Grote, and the Italian patriot, Prandi. You know that, fond as I am of talking, I like listening better, when I can hear ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... there any heart so sheathed in worldliness, or benumbed by sorrow, or hardened in its very nature, as to feel no gentle thrill responding to these terms? Surely, in some way these little ones have "touched the finer issues" of our being, and given us an unconscious benediction. Some of you are Mothers, and have acquired the holiest laws ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin

... inured myself to extreme worldliness of soul and begun a deliberately reckless response to the fisherman's letter, I looked out through my window to see the Cradlebow trudging manfully down the lane, with a grotesquely antiquated portmanteau in his hand, ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... of the place, and in the revelation of her naked soul and inner nature, that it was with something of the instinct of outraged modesty that she seemed to shrink before this apparition of the outer world and outer worldliness. In an instant the nearer past returned; she remembered where she was, how she had come there, from whom she had come, and to whom she was returning. She could see that she had not only aimlessly wandered from the world but from the road; and for that instant she ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte

... attractions of her childhood were passed, she could have no hold on him or his such as would have been hers had she grown to be a woman beneath his roof. There was a thoughtfulness too about her,—a thoughtfulness which some, perhaps, may call worldliness,—which made it impossible for her not to have her own condition constantly in her mind. In her father's lifetime she had been driven by his thoughtlessness and her own sterner nature to think of ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope

... me, Davy, dear. You are in love with her, and to you she is an angel. But I am of her own sex, and see her as she is; no matter who she likes, she will never be content to make a bad match, as they call it. She told me so once with her own lips. But she had no need to tell me; worldliness is written on her. David, David, you don't know these great houses, nor the fair-spoken creatures that live in them, with tongues tuned to sentiment, and mild eyes fixed on the main chance. Their drawing-rooms are carpeted market-places; you may see the stones bulge through the flowery pattern; ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade

... a revival meeting at Grand Forks, North Dakota, I preached one afternoon on the subject of worldliness. An attorney and his wife from Langdon, North Dakota were staying in the city to attend the meeting. After hearing this sermon the wife would not attend the services any more. At the close of the Sunday afternoon service, two days later, the attorney came ...
— Personal Experiences of S. O. Susag • S. O. Susag

... when will you sever the fetters which fashion, wealth, and worldliness have bound about you, and prove yourselves worthy the noble mission for which you were created? How much longer will heartless, soulless wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters waltz, moth-like, round the consuming flame of fashion; and, by neglecting their duties and deserting ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... many forms of recreation which, in themselves might be harmless, and, under certain circumstances, unobjectionable, but they have become associated with worldliness and godlessness, and have proved snares and temptations to many a young heart and life; and, therefore, the law of love would lead you to avoid them, discountenance them, and in no way give encouragement to others to participate ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson

... Lancelot with one of those kindly thoughtful smiles, which came over him whenever his better child's heart could bubble up through the thick crust of worldliness. ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley

... the enterprise. His father opposed his purpose; but he met him with a text of St. Mark, "There is no man that hath left house or brethren or sisters or father for my sake, but he shall receive an hundred-fold." On this the elder Maisonneuve, deceived by his own worldliness, imagined that the plan covered some hidden speculation, from which enormous profits were expected, and therefore withdrew his opposition. [ Faillon, La Colonie Franaise, I. ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman

... a man of excessive social vanity; and much as he despised mankind, he certainly still liked to enjoy its admiring consideration. Mme. d'Albany, on the other hand, had been brought up in the full worldliness of a canoness of Ste. Wandru, and had grown accustomed to a certain amount of state and of luxury; and these worldly tendencies, thrown into the background by the passion, the poetry which sprang ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... Cambridge with a young Roman Catholic priest, who was working there. His new friend was a very simple-minded man; he seemed to Hugh the only man of great gifts he had ever known, who was absolutely untouched by any shadow of worldliness. Hugh knew of men who resisted the temptations of the world very successfully, to whom indeed they were elementary temptations, long since triumphed over; but this man was the only man he had ever known who was gifted with ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... were incumbent on him as a father, and here nothing disturbed his serenity. It is true that, from an appreciation of the lustre which would reflect back upon himself from allowing his son to become a decidedly fashionable young man, he had encouraged him in extravagance, dissipation, and heartless worldliness; he had brought him up to be supercilious, expensive, unprincipled, and useless. But then, he was gentlemanlike, dignified, and sought after; and now, the father reflected, with satisfaction, that, if he could accomplish his well-conceived scheme, he would pay his son's debts ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... woes and vices and even ruin of their fellows. These influences must be resisted, the fiends of Hell in human form must be grappled with, and 'the prey be taken from the mighty'. People must be aroused from their indifference and selfishness; the cold-blooded carelessness and worldliness of formal religionists must be assailed as well as help rendered to those who are ready to perish. Our fighting programme must include all this, if we are to be consistent professors of holy consecration to ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard

... and furnishes both inducements and aids to the formation of manly Christian character. There is much, of course, to lift the depressed and inspire the weak; but the great peculiarity of the discourses is the resolute energy with which they grapple with the worldliness and sin of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various

... thereat, but the froward gnashed with their teeth and spake evil of Gerard. A certain man, therefore, one of the great ones of the State, came near to him, and rebuked his words and deeds, for the man himself took more pleasure at that time in worldliness than in the things of God. "Why," said he, "dost thou disquiet us, and bring in new customs? Cease from this preaching, and do not disturb or frighten men." But Gerard made answer with wisdom and constancy: "I would not willingly suffer you to go to Hell," and the man said ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis

... made her appearance from the inner cabin, though strikingly handsome, had not that in her appearance which would justify the implied eulogium of the British admiral's last speech. There was an appearance of art and worldliness in the expression of her countenance that was only so much the more striking when placed in obvious contrast to the ingenuous nature and calm purity that shone in every lineament of the face of Ghita. One might very well have passed for ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper

... this hidden psychological drama had ever reached the bishop's ken. His daughter's attitude seemed her mother's obstinacy and worldliness reincarnated, and he was distressed also by more dangerous elements, by inexplicable sympathies, antipathies, and rebellions, until the whole fabric of his careful plans seemed ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... religions of our honored land. The generality of denominational membership (we speak in love) desire a Christianity that will go with them to the halls of pleasure; that will dine with them at the banquets; that will smile on them as they walk in the ways of sin and worldliness, calming their fears with her flattering words and peace offerings. Primitive Christianity, they consider, was good enough for primitive days, but she would be a horrid enough old maid in these days of progress. In this fast driving age the Christianity that crowned the ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr

... to conceal his own painful lack of worldliness. He had imagined that he had in his pockets heaps of money to pay for a meal for a handful of people. He was mistaken; that was all, and the incident had no importance, for a few pounds more or less could not matter in the least to a gentleman of his income. Yet he felt guilty of being a waster. ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett

... path to happiness than worldliness, revelry, high life: for the whole object of it is to transform our miserable existence into a succession of joys, delights and pleasures,—a process which cannot fail to result in disappointment and delusion; on a ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... eighty thousand dollars, is represented by Bishop Myriel. The character is drawn with great force, and is full both of direct and subtle satire on the worldliness of ordinary churchmen. The portion of the work in which it figures contains many striking sayings. Thus, we are told, that, when the Bishop "had money, his visits were to the poor; when he had none, he visited the rich." "Ask not," he said, "the name ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... down with quiet and cruel exactness in The Beaver Coat and The Conflagration. Mrs. Wolff, the protagonist of both plays, rises into a figure of epic breadth—a sordid and finally almost tragic embodiment of worldliness and cunning. When he approaches the peasants of his own countryside his touch is less hard, his method not quite so remorseless. And thus, perhaps, it comes about that in the face of these characters ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... will be able to explain perhaps better—" And in an instant Mr. Phirrips had executed one of those feats of prestidigitation for which he was renowned in contracting circles, left George with the bishop, and gone off with his highly prized quarry, the sporting peer. George, despite much worldliness, had never before had speech with a bishop. However, the bishop played his part in a soothingly conventional way, manipulated his apron and his calves with senile dignity, stood still and gazed ardently at ceilings and vistas, and said ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... are a sort of sacrilegious ministers in the temple of intellect. They profane its shew-bread to pamper the palate, its everlasting lamp they use to light unholy fires within their breast, and show them the way to the sensual chambers of sense and worldliness." IRVING.] ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... Then her worldliness struggled with her conventional position, and she relapsed into innuendo. "He ought to have someone look after him, to see him die decently, for he can't live beyond the autumn, and the only person who can get in is that fat, greasy Dr. Shapless, who ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick

... doctrine all truly good works which God appointed and ordained were despised and utterly set at naught [by the Papists]. For instance, lord, subject, father, mother, son, daughter, servant, maid were not regarded as good works, but were called worldliness, dangerous estates, and lost works." (W. 30, 2, 291.) The Table of Duties is a protest against such perverted views. For here Luther considers not only the calling of preachers and teachers, but also all those of government and subjects, of fathers, mothers, and children, of masters ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... presence rather humbled and over-crowed. When the woman that a man loves laughs at his moral enthusiasms, it is like a black frost on the delicate tips of budding trees. It is up-hill work, as we all know, to battle with indolence and selfishness, and self-seeking and hard-hearted worldliness. Then the highest and holiest part of our nature has a bashfulness of its own. It is a heavenly stranger, and easily shamed. A nimble-tongued, skilful woman can so easily show the ridiculous side of what seemed heroism; and what is called common-sense, so generally, is only some ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... that is born of woman," I was accustomed to spend some hours a day at his workshop. The quaintness of his remarks, and their not infrequent truth,—a truth condensed and pointed by the limited sphere of his view,—gave a raciness to his talk, which mere worldliness and general cultivation would at once ...
— Chippings With A Chisel (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... consolation is that I have helped him, that I have lifted a money-burden from his life; I have done that, I tell myself, over and over; but then I wonder, have I done anything but put the reckoning off? I have given all his other children a new excuse for extravagance, an impulse towards worldliness which they did not ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair

... a very great difference, come to live among them! 'By their fruits ye shall know them.' To comfort the widow and the fatherless, and keep ourselves unspotted from the world!—thee's always preached that, father! I really can't see any more worldliness here than among many households with us,—and I'm sure if we haven't been the widow and the fatherless this summer, we've ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... ungodliness and worldliness, are always found in company; but it is sometimes difficult to determine which of the two goes first, and draws the other after it. You seldom meet a man who neglects this great salvation, and neglects also the gains and the pleasures of life. Those ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... in which there does not exist a few green spots where human tenderness and sympathy are found to grow. The atmosphere of the gold-regions of California was, indeed, clouded to a fearful extent with the soul-destroying vapours of worldliness, selfishness, and ungodliness, which the terrors of Lynch law alone restrained from breaking forth ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne

... have only found one who could perform the task. They all shake their heads and say, "Ours is not a language, only slang, which we use when required." Taking their slang generally, according to Grellmann, Hoyland, Borrow, Smart, and Crofton, there is certainly nothing very elevating about it. Worldliness, sensuality, and devilism are things helped forward by their gibberish. Words dealing with honesty, uprightness, fidelity, industry, religion, cleanliness, and love ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... halo of bright hair; the sleeping babe in the fine dusk; the silence, the adoration in that white room! He saw, too; a vision of the past, when Noel herself had been the sleeping babe within her mother's arm, and he had stood beside them, wondering and giving praise. It passed with its other-worldliness and the fine holiness which belongs to beauty, passed and left the tormenting realism of life. Ah! to live with only the inner meaning, spiritual and beautifed, in a rare wonderment such as he had experienced ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... perfection as her sister Emily, but in combination with more general novel-gift. Her actual course of writing was short, and it could probably in no case have been long; she wanted wider and, perhaps, happier experience, more literature, more man-and-woman-of-the-worldliness, perhaps a sweeter and more genial temper. But the English novel would have been incomplete without her and her sister; they are, as wholes, unlike anybody else, and if they are not exactly great they have the quality of greatness. Above all, they kept novel and romance ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... consistent with intense worldliness, intense selfishness, intense hardness of heart; while the grander features of human character—self-sacrifice, disregard of pleasure, patriotism, love of knowledge, devotion to any great and good cause—these have no tendency to bring men ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... great ambition, but he was not a courtier in any sense of the word and could not be compared in Urraca's eyes with her carpet knight, Don Gomez. So she was loath to change her mode of life, and he was in a state of constant irritation at her worldliness; and as a natural consequence of it all, after a year of turmoil and confusion, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... the visible churches that tells most against them today in the minds of educated men is not worldliness or unfaithfulness; it is their inability to shake off their untenable position as judges of others. The "Church" in Jesus' day judged him unfit to live. Upon Luther, Wesley, and many of the best servants of the human race the churches ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell

... among their parasites than their equals, and who yet, by aid of an agreeable manner, natural talents, and a certain graceful and light cultivation of mind (not the less pleasant for its being universally coloured with worldliness, and an amusing rather than offensive regard for self), never lose their legitimate station in society; who are oracles in dress, equipages, cookery, and beauty, and, having no character of their own, are able to fix by a single word a character upon any one else. Thus, while Mauleverer rather ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... enters as a thread in all our duties, and by adopting which men of knowledge belonging to all the modes of life convert their respective duties and penances into terrible weapons for destroying the ignorance and evils of worldliness, men of foolish understandings regard acts that are productive of visible fruits, that are fraught with the highest puissance, and that are deathless, as fruitless after all and as deviations (from the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... silent. The last remark of his wife made a deep impression upon his mind. Certain it was that his knowledge of woman was rather more extensive and of a different character from that which he had expected to acquire, when he lived amid the green fields of the country, ere the stain of worldliness ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various

... the peaceful confidence of this final counsel is legitimate only when we have obeyed the other two. I have no business, for instance, to expect God to save me from the natural consequences of my own worldliness or folly. If I have taken up a course from eager desires for earthly good, or from obedience to any inclination of my own without due regard to His will, I have no right, when things begin to go awry, to turn round to God ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... He was the foremost of English sentimentalists, and he had that taint of insincerity which distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment, like Goldsmith's, for example. Sterne, in life, was selfish, heartless, and untrue. A clergyman, his worldliness and vanity and the indecency of his writings were a scandal to the Church, though his sermons were both witty and affecting. He enjoyed the titilation of his own emotions, and he had practiced so long at detecting ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... are pretty sure to find them in some other, —if we are women. She, good and pure soul, whose whole life was given to self-denying toil, had yet something angelically coquettish in her manner, a spiritual-worldliness which was the clarified likeness of this- worldliness. O, had they seen the Hotel Dieu at Montreal? Then (with a vivacious wave of the hands) they would not care to look at this, which by comparison was nothing. Yet she invited them to go ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... who visited Western Canada a few years ago, when everybody had money, wrote letters to one of the London papers about us. Commenting on our worldliness, he said: "The people of Western Canada have only one idea of hell, and that is buying the ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung

... as it was, Mrs. Mortemer died cherishing with her last breath a profound conviction that her son would soon be a bishop. That he was not likely to become a bishop was due to the fact that with all his worldliness, with all his wealth, with all his love of wire-pulling, with all his respect for rank he held definite opinions and was not afraid to belong to a minority unpopular in high places. He had too a simple piety that made his church a power ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... better opportunities of acquiring correct information than almost any of their contemporaries, inasmuch as one was the son of the all-powerful minister, and the other was the intimate friend and confidential adviser of the chief dispenser of ecclesiastical patronage, the sycophancy and worldliness of the clergy about the Court in the middle of the eighteenth century must have been flagrant indeed. The writers referred to are, of course, Horace Walpole and John, Lord Hervey. Both of them, however, are so evidently actuated by a bitter animus against the Church that their ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... only thinks of 'propriety.' I think of something far deeper—a girl's first notions about those sort of things. It is cruel to meddle with them before their time—to take the bloom off the peach and the scent off the rose; to put worldliness instead of innocence, and conceited folly instead of simple, solemn, awful love. I would rather die, even now—you will think I am always ready for dying—but I would rather die than live to think and feel about love like some women—ay, and not bad women either, ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... to myself. The type of my countenance was there; but, oh, transformed to an ideal, such as I now, for the first time, saw possible—ennobled in every defective line—purified of its taint from worldliness—inspired with high aspirations—cleared of what it had become cankered with, in its transmission through countless generations since first sent into the world, and restored to a likeness of the angel of whose illuminated lineaments it was first a copy. So thought Stephania of me. Thus did ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... not insensible of the need of spiritual renovation in our Society. I feel and confess my own deficiencies as an individual member. And I bear a willing testimony to the zeal and devotion of some dear friends, who, lamenting the low condition and worldliness too apparent among us, seek to awaken a stronger religious life by the partial adoption of the practices, forms, and creeds of more demonstrative sects. The great apparent activity of these sects seems to them ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... that he was moved out of his usual indifference, that some long-dormant spring of nobility was quickened to a renewed life, that a girl's truth and purity, refining his selfish passion, had bitten deep into the man's callous worldliness. For long he sat in a sombre silence with his head leaning on his hand, his keen mind busy with the problem—so I shall always believe—as to how he might even yet save me from ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine

... after his death which neatly illustrates his lack of worldliness. His modesty was proverbial, and once Daubigny, on introducing him to an American picture dealer, warned him not to ask less than five thousand francs for the first picture he sold to the man. The American went to Daumier's atelier, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... revival of learning, artists were free to give greater importance to secular subjects, and an element of worldliness, and even of immorality, invaded the realm of art as it invaded the ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement

... game, as games come up and go, constitute a worldly kind of life, the Babingtons were worldly. There surely never was a family in which any kind of work was so wholly out of the question, and every amusement so much a matter of course. But if worldliness and religion are terms opposed to each other, then they were not worldly. There were always prayers for the whole household morning and evening. There were two services on Sunday, at the first of which the males, and at both of which the females, were expected ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope

... now the die was cast, and a soul that could have been pastorally satisfied with a lot of the humble type indicated, had been caught in a whirl, or entangled in a mesh, or involved in a complication—whichever you like—of Extravagance, or Worldliness, or Society, or Mammon-worship, or Plutocracy, or Pactolus—or all the lot—and there was an end of ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... into the living-room. Warrington longed to sit beside Patty, but of a sudden he had grown diffident. It amused him to come into the knowledge that all his address and worldliness would not stand him in good stead in the presence of Patty. Words were no longer at his command; he was no longer at his ease. He was afraid of Patty; and he was very, very lonely. That empty house over the way was no longer home. There were moments when he regretted his plunge into politics. He ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath

... Roswell, "was similar to that of other boys brought up with the best surroundings in a Massachusetts village, where the college atmosphere prevailed. He had his boyish pleasures and his trials, his share of that queer mixture of nineteenth century worldliness and almost austere Puritanism, which is yet characteristic of many ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... innocence of Jesus, however, is based not only, negatively, on the absence of any recorded word or act to the contrary and his absolute exemption from every trace of selfishness and worldliness, but, positively, also on the unanimous testimony of John the Baptist and the apostles, who bowed before the majesty of his character in unbounded veneration, and declare him 'just,' 'holy,' and 'without sin.' It is admitted, moreover, by ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... suppose that their best chance of success in life lay in creating a sensation. Of what use can it be to create a sensation? Who profits by it? What influence can this sort of thing have upon the morals of a great and vital nation? If Christ with His warnings against worldliness were to come down to-day, after giving Him one hearing the crowd would not crucify Him, they ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith

... good that he had got from Eton, with something better, not to be got at Eton or any other school. He had those pleasant manners and that perfect ease in dealing with men and with the world which are the inheritance of Eton, without the least tincture of worldliness. I remember well the look he then had, his countenance massive for one so young, with good sense and good feeling, in fact, full of character. For it was character more than special ability which marked him ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... — N. selfishness &c adj.; self-love, self-indulgence, self-worship, self-interest; egotism, egoism; amour propre [Fr.], &c (vanity) 880; nepotism. worldliness &c adj.; world wisdom. illiberality; meanness &c adj.. time-pleaser, time-server; tuft- hunter, fortune-hunter; jobber, worldling; egotist, egoist, monopolist, nepotist; dog in the manger, charity that begins at home; canis in praesepi [Lat.], foes to nobleness, temporizer, trimmer. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... people, is not the generous, the upright, and morally spotless life, so much as the wandering, the monastic, or the secluded forest life of the ascetic, regardless of its spiritual character. In other words, it is not a stern and noble victory over sin and worldliness in the common relationships of life, but a fleeing from the sin and duties and responsibilities of life into the mutt, or wilderness, which has fascinated the inhabitants of this peninsula as the best ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... Charley, straightening himself up and speaking in a dignified tone, "yes, I'm fixin' to do better. I'm preparin' fer to shake worldliness. I'm done quit so'shatin' wid deze w'ite town boys. Dey've been a goin' back on me too rapidly here lately, an' now I'm a goin' back ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris

... thinking of?' she mused. . . . 'What a half-and-half policy mine has been! Thinking of marrying for position, and yet not making it my rigid plan to secure the man the first moment that he made his offer. So I lose the comfort of having a soul above worldliness, and my compensation for not having it likewise!' A minute or two more and in ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... leisure in wearing garments of excessive fineness, either to attire themselves, as if they were the brides of men, or to bestow them on people outside." One must admit that here and there in the writings of the period, there are references to this worldliness in some monasteries; but whatever may have been the state of things at a later date, there does not seem to be evidence of graver misdeeds in these early years of monasticism in England. Bede uses perhaps unnecessary severity in ...
— Early Double Monasteries - A Paper read before the Heretics' Society on December 6th, 1914 • Constance Stoney

... we right? We have no balance to weigh one another's sins, and coarser and finer are but human words; but faults in the higher nature may be less venal than those in the lower, and to the eye of Him who is Love, a sin against Love may seem a hundred times more base. No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to un-Christianize society than evil temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond

... time of great activity and change, and intense worldliness. "Men run to and fro and knowledge is increased." Would that we could feel that there is an increase also in integrity and virtue, and respect for Religion. We all know that it is not so. So far as we can form accurate ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller

... tergiversation in the swift conversion. When to this full measure of lay perfection the complexion of Levite godliness was superadded by election to the deaconate in the Baptist Church, it will readily be seen that two young people, in whom the hard worldliness of wealth and easy conditions had not bred home agnosticism, were material for all the credulities of parent worship. Kate, a year older than Wesley, soon encountered the influences which gave the first shock to her faith and gradually tinctured her sentiments with a clearer insight into ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... said the brother of Jabaster; and he advanced, and pressed him to his bosom. Had it been Miriam, Alroy might have at once expired; but the presence of this worldly man called back his worldliness. The revulsion of his feelings was wonderful. Pride, perhaps even hope, came to his aid; all the associations seemed to counsel exertion; for a moment he seemed the ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli

... disappears. Its hymns are not real hymns, but versified theological dissertations, or sermons in rhyme. Born of the union of princes with professors, it retains the distinct likeness of both its parents, not altogether harmoniously blended; and when it is accused of worldliness, of paleness of thought, of being a police institution rather than a Church, that is no more than to say that the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... gentlefolks were brought up wholly in the society of their elders. At thirty-five she had more reluctance than her mother to face an unforeseen occasion, certainly more than her grandmother, who had preserved some cheerful inheritance of gayety and worldliness from colonial times. ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett

... day's landscape in Italy is expressed with an obscurity not unfrequent with its author. It appears to be,—On the voyage of life are many moments of pleasure, given by the sight of Nature, who has power to heal even the worldliness and the uncharity ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... gives its poetry to peasant life. Here one has conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction and without polish, surely the most prosaic form of human life; proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build; worldliness without side-dishes. Observing these people narrowly, even when the iron hand of misfortune has shaken them from their unquestioning hold on the world, one sees little trace of religion, still less of a distinctively ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... significant fact of existence. I supposed that it was because the history of his early years was known to but few and that the men with whom he came into contact, nice enough fellows at the clubs, friends of Jack Ballard, had taken his worldliness for granted. He had missed the filthy story perhaps, or if he had heard it, had ignored its point and turned away to topics he understood. Business, too, had taken some of his time and Marcia had taken more. The clubs, I had inferred, had not ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... Prussia, mother of the future King. It is a striking and consoling and instructive proof that what is called the world, the great world, is not necessarily worldly in itself, but only by that inward worldliness which, as rebellion against the spirit, creeps into the cottage as well as into the palace, and against which no outward form is any protection. Forms and rules may prevent the outbreak of wrong, but cannot regenerate right, and may quench the spirit and poison inward truth. The Queen ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... of a girl who on her fifteenth birthday resolves to make herself useful in the world; but who, forgetting that her home where she is needed is her proper sphere of action, is betrayed into worldliness, while her simple loving cousin Isabel, without pretension or self-consciousness, delights in serving those near her and in making ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks

... that among those that are thus cry'd out upon, there are persons yet Clear from the great Transgression; but indeed, all the Unreformed among us, may justly be cry'd out upon, as having too much of an hand in letting of the Devils into our Borders; 'tis our Worldliness, our Formality, our Sensuality, and our Iniquity that has help'd this letting of the Devils in. O let us then at last, consider our ways. 'Tis a strange passage recorded by Mr. Clark in ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather

... subordinate governors in India; with the difference, however, that it was a heathen, not a Christian power, that Pilate represented, and that it was the spirit of ancient Rome, not that of modern England, which inspired his administration. Of this spirit—the spirit of worldliness, diplomacy and expediency—he was a typical exponent; and we shall see how true to it he ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker

... how often she had heard of Lady Southdown from that excellent man the Reverend Lawrence Grills, Minister of the chapel in May Fair, which she frequented; and how her views were very much changed by circumstances and misfortunes; and how she hoped that a past life spent in worldliness and error might not incapacitate her from more serious thought for the future. She described how in former days she had been indebted to Mr. Crawley for religious instruction, touched upon the Washerwoman of Finchley ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... demand so much of the variety of life in the arrangement. It is the simplicity and remoteness from the full effect of natural appearances in the work of the early Italian schools that made their painting such a ready medium for the expression of religious subjects. This atmosphere of other-worldliness where the music of line and colour was uninterrupted by any aggressive look of real things is a better convention for the expression of such ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... strongest sense of healing balm to my sore heart, and seemed in a wonderful way to lift me up into the atmosphere where my Philippe was gone, making me feel that what kept me so far—far from him was not death, nor his coffin, but my own thick husk of sin and worldliness. Much more there was, which seems now to have grown into my very soul; and by the time it was over I was weeping tears no longer bitter, and feeling nothing so much as the need to speak to ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... even when accident has given their imagination no such impulse as Anne Percy's had received from the works of Byam Warner. Mind and body respond the moment they enter that mysterious belt which divides the moderate zones, upon whose threshold the spirit of worldliness sinks inert, and within whose charmed circle the principle of life is king. Those of the North with the call of the tropics in their blood have never a moment of strangeness; ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton



Words linked to "Worldliness" :   otherworldliness, mundanity, naivete, outwardness, worldly, externality, sophistication, quality, mundaneness



Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org