"Rightness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... left him, came back. And came back in a way that made it more intolerable than ever. For the clear flame of it had lost its clarity; the confidence that had fanned it was gone—the sense of his own rightness. The irresistible surge of passion that had carried him off, had destroyed that. ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... expected of them? Are we to decline upon a genial determinism, and to sweep away all belief in moral responsibility? No! because even if we are determinists, we have to take into account the fact that society does for some reason advance. When we consider the fact that the rightness of humanitarian principles, of anti-slavery movements, of popular education, of Factory Acts, of public hospitals is universally admitted; when we compare the current principles of the nineteenth-century man with the current principles, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... was over, usage robbed it of the first quaint effect of deliberate unreason. They were in many respects so right; she clung to that, and shirked more and more the paradoxical conviction that they were also somehow, and even in direct relation to that rightness, absurd. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... and a number of the works of Daniel Defoe. He had discussed them with his father and at the latter's suggestion had set down his impressions. His father had assured him that it was well done, but had said to Mrs. Irons that it showed "a remarkable rightness of mind and temper and unexpected aptitude in ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... recipes for exact proportions and mixtures, no thermometer for controlling temperatures, no stencil or pattern set down upon paper for laying out the designs. The perfection of the finished work depends upon the potter's sense of rightness and the skill developed by practicing the methods of her ancestors with such variation as her own originality and ingenuity ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... of labor among the sexes was not in any sense an arrangement dictated by the men, but a habit into which both men and women fell, to begin with, through their difference of organization—a socially useful habit whose rightness no one questioned and whose origin no one thought of looking into. There is, moreover, a tendency in habits to become more fixed than is inherently necessary. The man who does any woman's work is held in contempt not only ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... was so striking an example of success that Isabel could have no illusions as to what constituted this advantage, or as to the limits of her own power to frisk and jump and shriek—above all with rightness of effect. Nineteen persons out of twenty (including the younger sister herself) pronounced Edith infinitely the prettier of the two; but the twentieth, besides reversing this judgement, had the entertainment of thinking all the others aesthetic vulgarians. Isabel had in the ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... it was not right when you were "lenient" and gave them protection. You cannot mean that. The rightness or wrongness must be a matter of law, not of personal discretion, and for you to attempt to substitute your discretion is to set up a little autocracy m place of the settled laws of the land. ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... would always pay to do the right thing, the very soul of goodness would have gone out of it. It is just because we do not know, save with the deeper knowledge that contradicts appearances,—the knowledge that is rightly termed faith,—that an unselfish action is in accord with the general rightness of the universe, and therefore must prevail in the end, that there is anything praiseworthy in it. The determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God were that this should be fully demonstrated in the experience of Jesus, as it has been in the experience of many a one of His followers since. Once ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... not. But it is a question if the contemplation of the "beauty of this old man in his citizen's cap," however eager and serious the contemplation may be, adds much to his experience; it may be doubted whether as a result of his effort toward the understanding of the rightness and loveliness of the lines of the cap and the exquisiteness of the choice of folds, which the critic has pointed out to him with threatening finger, he feels that life is a fuller ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... consists in the claim by individuals to have taken, without having moved, sites and soils called "estates", "domains", "plots": for, as rent tends to rightness when paid to the fifty millions of a nation, fifty-millionfold is its wrongness when paid to one; and as rent is right when paid to the thousand million inhabitants of a planet, a thousand-millionfold is its ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... motion. No other painter ever floated a boat quite rightly; all other boats stand on the water, or are fastened in it; only his float in it. It is very difficult to trace the reasons of this, for the rightness of the placing on the water depends on such subtle curves and shadows in the floating object and its reflection, that in most cases the question of entirely right or entirely wrong resolves itself into the "estimation of ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... or visions witnessed; automatic motor phenomena occur; and it always seems, after the surrender of the personal will, as if an extraneous higher power had flooded in and taken possession. Moreover the sense of renovation, safety, cleanness, rightness, can be so marvelous and jubilant as well to warrant one's belief in a radically new ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... fallacy of many taken singly nor the conflict of all taken together. His points are often cleverly and faithfully put, and our attention is so riveted on this cleverness and faithfulness that we take for granted the rightness of his deductions, slovenly, illogical or false though they may be. What we most remark in his books is how the purely artistic element in his nature—of a very high grade and very true instincts—is dwarfed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... her note with not a few tears for poor Miss Smith-Waters's disappointment. That is the worst of living a life morally ahead of your contemporaries; what you do with profoundest conviction of its eternal rightness cannot fail to arouse hostile and painful feelings even in the souls of the most right-minded of your friends who still live in bondage to the conventional lies and the conventional injustices. It is the good, indeed, who are most against you. ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... people come of a caste to whom war or the idea of fighting for their country is second nature. They take it for granted, like death and taxes. If they ever permitted themselves seriously to question the rightness of it; to submit patriotism and courage to an acid analysis, they might suddenly turn arrant cowards. How much harder is it, then, for people who have never even faced the idea of it before to be suddenly placed up against the ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... Poems and Fancies,' the article calling itself by that name, seems indeed to be Mr. Chorley's, and is one of his very best papers, I think. There is to me a want of colour and thinness about his writings in general, with a grace and savoir faire nevertheless, and always a rightness and purity of intention. Observe what he says of 'many-sidedness' seeming to trench on opinion and principle. That, he means for himself I know, for he has said to me that through having such largeness of sympathy he has been charged with want of principle—yet ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... leaf-treatment generally, and elaborate demonstration, by the aid of many plates, of the infinite superiority of Turner, closing with what sounds a strange admission after such teachings and such arguments:—'Remember always that Turner's greatness and rightness in all these points successively depend on no scientific knowledge. He was entirely ignorant of all the laws we have been developing. He had merely accustomed himself to see impartially, intensely, ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... the same room with father or mother, though their occupations may be quite apart. Sir Hugo's watch-chain and seals, his handwriting, his mode of smoking and of talking to his dogs and horses, had all a rightness and charm about them to the boy which went along with the happiness of morning and breakfast time. That Sir Hugo had always been a Whig, made Tories and Radicals equally opponents of the truest and best; and the books he had written were all seen under the same consecration of loving belief ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... how a certain rude rightness in this plea might have been found exasperating; but as she had often watched Sir Claude in apprehension of displeasures that didn't come, so now, instead of saying "Oh hell!" as her father used, she observed him ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... rent is thought a patriot at Cork. Where the enforcement of the law is not popularly deemed coercion the law-breaker does not suppose himself to be in the right, and still less do his associates think him morally praiseworthy. A thief does not in general hold any theory about the rightness of larceny, and there is no society in the United Kingdom at least who deny the moral validity ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... appreciated nice hands. The man's head was bent over his work, so that she could only obtain a foreshortened glimpse of his face, but he possessed a supple length of limb that even the heavy travelling-rug tucked around his knees failed to disguise, and there was a certain soigne air of rightness about the way he wore ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... down were the three that rotted there together in solitary. And here at the end of my days, reviewing all that I have known of life, I am compelled to the conclusion that strong minds are never docile. The stupid men, the fearful men, the men ungifted with passionate rightness and fearless championship—these are the men who make model prisoners. I thank all gods that Jake Oppenheimer, Ed Morrell, and ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... bench outside the door of the auberge. He could hear the voice of the landlord inside, grumbling and growling, to what purport he couldn't determine. But it wasn't difficult to guess; and before Duchemin was finished he had testimony to the rightness of his surmise, finding himself the cynosure of more than a few pair of eyes set in the ill-favoured faces of natives of ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... particular to Mr. Laing's brain, is to deny that right has reference to the consequences of action as bearing on human progress and evolution, which is to deny the very theory he wishes to uphold. No intuitionist could have spoken more strongly. Then we are assured that we "feel" rightness, or that "right is right"—apparently as a simple irresoluble quality of certain actions—and with same breath, that "it is better for ourselves and others to act on these rules," where he jumps off to utilitarianism again; and then we are forbidden ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... handed down to us, as the most attaching and inviting spell of Italy, by all the old academic literature of travel and art of the Salvator Rosas and Claudes. This is the main tribute I may pay in a few words to an impression of which a sort of divine rightness of oddity, a pictorial felicity that was almost not of this world, but of a higher degree of distinction altogether, affected me as the leading note; yet about the whole exquisite complexity of which I ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... though his wife was not particularly happy in it. The visit was repeated again and again with business-like determination by the Mayor, who seemed to have schooled himself into a course of strict mechanical rightness towards this woman of prior claim, at any expense to the later one and to ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... about our artist's ears, the already celebrated portrait of "Madame G.?" It is an experiment of a highly original kind, and the painter has had in the case, in regard to what Mr. Ruskin would call the "rightness" of his attempt, the courage of his opinion. A contestable beauty, according to Parisian fame, the lady stands upright beside a table on which her right arm rests, with her body almost fronting the spectator ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... is at heart a missionary of some sort, and Lucy had a vague idea that the influence of a good woman was always effective in such cases. She never imagined that the youth would test her pretty, heartfelt opinions and her glowing faith in the rightness of things in the cold, sceptical ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... obtaining unity between things which otherwise must have remained distinct in similarity, and as it may consist with every other kind of unity, and persist when every other means of it fails, it may be considered as lying at the root of most of our impressions of the beautiful. There is no sense of rightness, or wrongness connected with it, no sense of utility, propriety, or expediency. These ideas enter only where the proportion of quantities has reference to some function to be performed by them. It cannot be asserted that it is right or that it is wrong ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... next half hour, Saxon tried to feel out her husband's attitude, to find if he doubted the rightness of the violence he and his brother teamsters committed. But Billy's ethical sanction was rock-bedded and profound. It never entered his head that he was not absolutely right. It was the game. Caught in its tangled meshes, ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... to declaring Phil's all-rightness to his other sisters that the defensive attitude was second nature. His tone was not lost upon Lois and ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... of the rightness or wrongness is nothing in comparison to my own deep knowledge, my innate conviction that it was wrong. But we will not talk of that any more, if you please. It is done—my sin is sinned. I have now to put it behind me, and be truthful for evermore, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision. I forgot to observe, when speaking of the New Testament, that you should read all the histories of Christ, as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us, ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... There is, in fact, no other hopeful plan for him, if this prove feasible at all. Double your velocity, you double your momentum. One's weight is given,—weight growing less and less;—but not, or not in the same way and degree, one's velocity, one's rightness of aim. Weight given: it is only by doubling or trebling his velocity that a man can make his momentum double or treble, as needed! Friedrich means to try it, readers will see how,—were the Fort of Schweidnitz once had; for ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... which they point, but a substitute for or representative of that—an anticipation of or prevision of it, a symbol of a fact. Their own kind or degree of reality is sometimes called 'validity'—a term I do not like: it might be more simply named 'rightness' with the connotation of a certain incumbency and imperativeness as well as of an appeal or adjustment to our nature as we know it; or perhaps all we can say is that their reality—it seems a paradox that an ...
— Progress and History • Various
... Christ who died for us all! Let it smite upon your heart with a rebuke mightier than all the thunders of law or terrors of judgment. Let it unveil for you not only the depths of the love of God, but the darkness of your own selfish rebellion from Him. Measure your crooked lives by the perfect rightness of Christ's. Learn how you have missed the aim which He reached, who could say, 'I delight to do Thy will, O my God!' And let that same infinite love that teaches sin announce frank forgiveness and prophesy perfect purity. Then, with heart fixed upon Christ's ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... believe that if a thing is right, it will sooner or later pay; and in social questions, make the profitableness of any scheme a test of its rightness. It is a rough test; not an infallible one at all, but it is a fair one enough to ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the sweetness, of this little explanation, with a kind of intimated desire, constituting almost an appeal, for rightness, which seemed to pervade it, left a fragrance in the air after she had vanished. Ransom walked up and down the room, with his hands in his pockets, under the influence of it, without taking up even once the book about Mrs. Foat. He occupied the time in asking himself ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... was unhappy, her unhappiness lay too deep in subliminal abysses to struggle to the surface of her consciousness. That he should go to the one house and she to the other was as right as it had been ten years before. It was so right that she was stupefied by its rightness. It was so right that the rightness acted on her like an opiate. It was a minute in which sheer helplessness might have relaxed her hold on her substitute for love had she not had such pressing need to make use of it there ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... matter, as follows:—It might seem to the reader that the different "strokings" of the vulva, with the fingers, or the penis, all the contact being outside the vagina, that all of these methods of excitation smack of masturbation, and so are of doubtful rightness. In reply to ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... belief in the justice of the British cause. "Certainly I engaged in that struggle with all my might," he said long afterwards in his farewell speech at Johannesburg, "because I was, from head to foot, one mass of glowing conviction of the rightness of our cause." ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... in any undertaking make its first question, How much am I going to get by it? but, How much am I going to do by it? And making this the first question, the getting will flow in with a generous profusion, and with a spontaneousness and rightness of direction that are absent when our first thought is of ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... black-haired chap, whose Jewish features were in entire harmony with his Jewish name. He was indeed a Jew, and, young though he was, had all the depth, self-control, and steadfastness of purpose of that strange race. He also had, as the sequel will show their indifference as to the rightness of the means employed so long as the ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... had been shrewd, keen, but unsympathetic. And the result had been a strained relation between him and Barry. The boy had felt himself misunderstood. Gordon had sat in judgment. Constance had tearfully agreed with Gordon, and Mary, torn between her sense of Gordon's rightness, and her own championship of Barry, had been strung ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... 2. There is the rightness of their will, by which they are conformed to the justice of God. Hence, it follows that, in a certain sense, their pain is voluntary, and ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... mean the balance of pleasures over pains, and degrees of happiness the proportions of this balance, it will be sufficient if I confine myself to the word 'pleasure.' One statement, then, of the test of the morality or rightness of an action is that it should result in a larger amount of pleasure than pain to all those whom it affects. But it is at once objected that there is the greatest variety of pleasures and pains, intellectual, moral, aesthetic, sympathetic, sensual, and so on; and it is asked how ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... we are all in an especial manner sprung from God, and that God is the Father of men as well as gods, full sure he would never conceive aught ignoble or base of himself.... Those few who hold that they are born for fidelity, modesty, and unerring rightness in dealing with the things of sense, never conceive aught base or ignoble of themselves." He means that, for the real Stoic, self-respect is the necessary consequence of his intellectual conception of his place in the universe, and that self-respect must ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... did not conceive of it, and now sat, mellowed by the rightness of his tea, white-haired, smooth-shaven, pink-gilled, white-waistcoated, the picture of old age at its best, as he smiled gallantly at the extremely pretty girl behind the table. Unlike Sylvia he knew exactly why he did not like her and he wasted no time in thinking about it. "What ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... organize and cooeperate toward making betterment an actuality. But new people were always flocking in—people from the farms, villages and country-towns of the Middle region—and bringing with them the uncontaminated rustic ideals of rightness and decorum: a clean stream pouring into a turbid pool, and the time was to come when it would make itself felt. Meanwhile, the city remained—to Raymond—a gross, sharp village, one full of folk who, whether from the Middle West or from Middle ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... of that conscience. They may err, of course; they may mistake the voice of party for the voice of conscience: 'Jameson's Ride' and 'The Year of Shame'—one or both—may misread that voice. Judge them as severely as you will by their rightness or wrongness, and again judge them by their merits or defects as literature. Only do not forbid the poet to speak and enforce the moral conviction that is ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the path did not dip back. It reached straight up. But Johnny would not abandon it. He seemed to feel it inextricably united with his own rightness of decision, and since he was inevitably right, so inevitably the path must ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... impression given by your numerous testimonials as to the character of the word gradely, is one of decency, order, rightness, perfectness. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various
... in everything else comes from long sustained effort after rightness and comes unsought. It never comes from effort ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... make a perfect violin must keep his eye open to all the beautiful things God has made, and his ear open to all the music he has put into the world, and then never let his hands touch a piece of work that is crooked or straggling or false, till, after years and years of rightness, they are fit to make a violin like the squire's, a violin that can say everything, a violin that an angel wouldn't be ashamed to ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... better. It is but the impulse, God-given I believe, toward a far more vital contact with the truth. We shall one day forget all about duty, and do every thing from the love of the loveliness of it, the satisfaction of the rightness of it. What would you say to a man who ministered to the wants of his wife and family only from duty? Of course you wish heartily that the man who neglects them would do it from any cause, even were it fear of the whip; but the strongest and most operative sense of duty would not satisfy you ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... unintellectual crowd." Some people, on reading a passage like this, will rush to the conclusion that Shelley was a prig. But the prig is a man easily wounded by blows to his self-esteem, not by the miseries and imperfections of humanity. Shelley, no doubt, was more convinced of his own rightness than any other man of the same fine genius in English history. He did not indulge in repentance, like Burns and Byron. On the other hand, he was not in the smallest degree an egolator. He had not even such an innocent egoism as Thoreau's. He was always longing to give ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... with social fairness; but if it is shown that interest is simply the "natural price" of capital representing the actual "productive power" of the capital, there is nothing further to say. You may have similar qualms over rent and the rightness and wrongness of it. The enormous "unearned increment" that accrues for the fortunate owner of land who toils not neither spins to obtain it, may seem difficult of justification. But after all, land is only ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... recognition of having had his way in one supreme instance; when he made her elope with him—the most momentous step imaginable in a young lady's life. He had been really trying to acknowledge it by taking the rightness of her feeling for granted on every other occasion. It had become a sort of habit at last. And it is never pleasant to break a habit. The man was deeply troubled. I said: "Really! To go ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... the Doge said, in whispered abstraction, using the French which so exactly expresses the rightness of an inner feeling that will not let one do a thing however much he may wish to. Then a wave of confusion passed over his face, evidently at the echo of his thoughts in the form of words come unwittingly ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Dagonet, both, from Ralph's earliest memories, so closely identified with the old house in Washington Square that they might have passed for its inner consciousness as it might have stood for their outward form; and the question as to which the house now seemed to affirm their intrinsic rightness was that of the social disintegration expressed by widely-different architectural physiognomies at the other end of Fifth Avenue. As Ralph pushed the bolts behind him, and passed into the hall, with its ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit. He expected to die; he was willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced toward the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country's cause and a heart devoid of hate ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke |
