"Ethical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is clearly wrong. Either 'gowd' or 'lands' is a mere repetition of 'fee,' and if not,[8] the reading does not point any ethical antithesis between Kings Easter and Wester and their more chivalrous rival. As it happens, there are two other versions, shorter and less dramatic, but one of them distinctly giving, the other implying, the sense ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... sense, an ethical question, but it was quite as hard to determine by ordinary arguments whether I could have any permission to violate my promise to my father, as it was to estimate the exact measure of my obligations to myself and Miss Dodan. An incident ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... people when we act for ourselves means ethical consciousness or goodness, and better and ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... more revolutionary changes are seen to have occurred during the nineteenth century than in any century preceding. In these changes no department of thought and activity has failed to share, and theological thought has been quite as much affected as scientific or ethical. Especially remarkable is the changed front of Christian theologians toward miracles, their distinctly lowered estimate of the significance of miracle, their antipodal reverse of the long established treatment of miracles. Referring to this a British evangelical writer[1] ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... in explosive outbursts against parsons, miracles, and the "world-wide humbug" of the Resurrection. For, whereas the Philistine remained on Strauss's side in regard to these explosive outbursts, he would have been against him had he been confronted with a genuine and seriously constructed ethical system, based upon ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... generally," he says, "are to be received with qualification"; and he agrees with Bolingbroke in thinking that Warburton's whole theory rests on a fiction. He is still less satisfied with Paley's defence of the Church, which he pronounces to be "tainted by the original vice of false ethical principles," and "full of the seeds of evil." He conceives that Dr. Chalmers has taken a partial view of the subject, and "put forth much questionable matter." In truth, on almost every point on which we are opposed to Mr. Gladstone, we have on our side the authority ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... 7, l. 8. Follow nature.—The maxim in which the Stoics summed up their positive ethical teaching. ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... than to the priestly order, because the prophets were preachers of repentance and righteousness whose great aim was to make Israel a Jehovah-worshipping nation to the exclusion of other gods. Their utterances were essentially ethical and religious; their pictures of the future subjective and ideal. There was silently elaborated in their schools a spiritual monotheism, over against the crude polytheism of the people generally—a theocratic ideal inadequately apprehended by gross and sensuous Israel—Jehovism simple and sublime ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... that this book, founded on a strictly scientific but not forgetting a strong ethical basis, may be well known and widely read by the dear girls in their teens and the young women in ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... most prejudicially on character. The American answer to the Englishman trying to define what he meant by "gentlemen of leisure" "Ah, we call them tramps in America"—is not merely a jest, but enshrines a deep ethnical and ethical principle. Most Americans would, I think, agree strongly with Mr. Bosanquet's philosophical if somewhat cumbersomely worded definition of legitimate private property, "that things should not come miraculously and be unaffected by your dealings with them, but that you should be in contact ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... different view and makes the moral or ethical faculties supreme, in development and culture, the intellect being the instruments for acquiring facts and the propensities the steam to bring about the desired results. According to his views of man, our emotional faculties are of a higher or more God-like order ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... wherever I go in England," Bertram answered. "There's apparently no clear idea of what's right and wrong at all, in the ethical sense, as apart from what's usual. I was talking to a lady up in London to-day about a certain matter I may perhaps mention to you by-and-by when occasion serves, and she said she'd been 'always brought up to think' so-and-so. It seemed to me a very queer substitute ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... process by which physical nature casts its weaker products {58} aside, etc."[4] We cannot suppose that, if he had lived, he would have been content to have left the argument thus. That the end justifies the means, is scarcely a doctrine which can be accepted as the last word of an ethical defence of ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... But the popular fancy was fascinated. The whole flimsy furniture in the chambers of the general mind vanished. New emotions, new purposes, new sanctions appeared in its stead. There was a sad lack of ethical definitions, an over-zealous iconoclasm as to religion, but there were many high conceptions of regenerating society, of liberty, of brotherhood, of equality. The influence of this movement was literally ubiquitous; it was felt wherever ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... significance. The metaphysical principle, in itself, as it were, without hands or feet, becomes impressive, fascinating, of effect, when translated into a precept as to how it were best to feel and act; in other words, under its sentimental or ethical equivalent. The leading idea of the great master of Cyrene, his theory that things are but shadows, and that we, even as they, never continue in one stay, might indeed have taken effect as a languid, enervating, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... answered our purpose very well; but, having despatched the history of Joseph, or the story of the ten plagues, we then took to the Primer: and then there was, first, the looking over the system of theological and ethical teaching, commencing, "In Adam's fall we sinned all," and extending through three or four pages of pictorial and poetic embellishment. Next was the death of John Rogers, who was burned at Smithfield; and for a while ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... race is paramount in its unity; when the intellectual life of each is nourished from the same treasury of views and associations, of myths and sagas; when similar interests stir each breast; and the ethical judgment of all applies itself to the same standard. In such an age the form of poetical expression will also be common to all, necessarily ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... alone, is what will give us part in the holy value of life. The choice and the refusal of them is the Yea and the Nay of all that makes life worth living; and is the source, to the positivists, of the solemnity, the terrors, and sweetness of the whole ethical vocabulary. 'What then are the alternative pleasures that life offers me? In how many ways am I capable of feeling my existence a blessing? and in what way shall I feel the blessing of it most keenly?' This is the great life-question; it may be asked indifferently by any individual; ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... destruction of a pregnancy, except when its continuance threatens the life of the patient, is forbidden by law. The important ethical and religious aspects of the act which the law thus stigmatizes as criminal we may properly neglect. Although various religions present a diversity of teaching relative to its moral nature, all agree in regarding it as sinful. Equally important, ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... "amoral" as nature itself. But an ethereal spiritualism ideally transfigured the coarseness of those primitive customs. Just as the doctrine had become completely impregnated with philosophy and erudition, so the liturgy had become saturated with ethical ideas. ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... from mere fiction on the one hand and from allegory on the other, being "not conceived didactically, but didactic in its essence, as all good art is." He showed that Greek poetry dealt with the series of Nature-myths with which were interwoven ethical suggestions; that these were connected with Egyptian beliefs, but that the full force of them was only developed in the central period of Greek history, and their interpretation was to be read in a sympathetic analysis ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... which earlier generations were accustomed to feed the childish mind, contain a great deal that is barbarous, perverse, or cruel; and to this infiltration into children's minds, generation after generation, of immoral, cruel, or foolish ideas is probably to be attributed in part the slow ethical progress of the race. The commonest justification of this thoughtless practice is that children do not apprehend the evil in the bad mental pictures with which we foolishly supply them; but what should we think of a mother who gave her children ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... who will make a nation's laws so that I make its songs." Discuss the ethical and sociological significance of this with regard to (a) "Where do flies go in the winter-time?" (b) "I do like-an ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... combinations to do an act which might be lawful for the individual; second, of all branches of civil, as distinct from criminal, law, it is the one which most largely recognizes intent; that is to say, the ethical purposes of the combination. It has been urged in some judicial opinions that in matters of boycotts, strikes, etc., the law cannot go into the motive; this argument obviously proves too much, for it is no more easy to ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... responsibility, to acknowledge evil and deal with it as evil? That was, in effect, the gist of Mr. Flint's contention. She did not know. She had never (strangely enough, she thought) sought before to analyze the ethical side of her father's character. One aspect of him she had shared with her mother, that he was a tower of defence and strength, and that his name alone had often been sufficient to get difficult ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Morality, Sittlichkeit, a word of broader meaning than "morality," for it comprehends not only matters of ethical right and wrong, but the general temper and habit of mind of a people ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... into the Fire of Lightning, the rays of the moon and other attributes of the elementary life of heaven as well as into pious acts referring to it, the Apsarasas become divinities which represent phenomena or objects both of a physical and ethical kind closely associated with that life; thus in the Yajurveda Sunbeams are called the Apsarasas associated with the Gandharva who is the Sun; Plants are termed the Apsarasas connected with the Gandharva Fire: Constellations are the Apsarasas of ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... derived from him her interest in all high things, in philosophy, art and literature, but there always remained an interesting distinction in the way she reacted to her education. Terry remained always the rather transcendental philosopher, with a predominant ethical sense. Marie, as she developed, showed a deeper and subtler feeling for expression and a surer sensing of human character, a juster psychology. Her nature is essentially less beautiful, by far, than that of Terry, but more real, in a way, more robust, and so constituted ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... oratory. The day for oratory, as for toping, is past beyond redemption. 'Debating' is the best that can be done and appreciated by so abstemious a generation as ours. You will find a very decent level of 'debating' in the Oxford Union, in the Balham Ethical Society, in the Pimlico Parliament, and elsewhere. But not, I regret to say, in ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... Slowly, painfully, he fought his way to a tentative self-respect. He might not ever be anything big, a power as his father was, but he could be a hard worker, he could make a place. A few days before a famous speaker had given an address on an ethical subject at Yale. A sentence of it came to the boy's struggling mind. "The courage of the commonplace is greater than the courage of the crisis," the orator had said. That was his chance— "the courage of the commonplace." No fireworks for ...
— The Courage of the Commonplace • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... Life is the characteristic word of the great spiritual Gospel from which my text is taken. And no word can penetrate more deeply into the secret of Christ than this does. He was the sweetest, the most persuasive of moral teachers; but ethical principles and precepts are the common possession of humanity; and that in which Christ is pre-eminent over all sages is not so much that he gives us new matter of obedience, as that he infuses into us a fresh power to obey. I fail to see that he anywhere presents ...
— Strong Souls - A Sermon • Charles Beard
... is successful, but the joints show something clumsily. This, however, is technical merely. I commend the book to all who are interested, approvingly or critically, in the Jew. A dramatic theme runs through the book, the ethical question as to whether a man may be justified in killing, at her passionate request, a woman dearly loved who is slowly dying of ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... my ethical system continues to be ignored by the professorial world, it is Kant's moral principle that prevails in the universities. Among its various forms the one which is most in favour at present is "the dignity ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... truth which, as I believe, I have been allowed to apprehend. The knowledge of truth (in however small a degree) is a trust that we hold for the sake of others. What I fear for him and for you—for you even more than for him—is not that you will form wrong opinions on religious or ethical subjects, but that you will lack that moral earnestness that forces a man, whether he will or not, to look the facts of life in the face, that deadly earnestness that refuses to allow us to contemplate creeds as works of art, but forces us to ask whether these ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... Washington Gladden considered this book of sufficient importance to take it and the text from which the title was drawn as his subject for an entire sermon, in the course of which he said: "In its ethical and social significance it is the most important piece of fiction that has lately appeared in America. I do not think that a more trenchant word has been spoken to this nation since 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' And it is profoundly to be hoped that this book may do for the ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the Satires.—These were very varied. Besides personal satire, we have (1) ethical criticism, as ridicule of philosophers and attacks ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... simple," I answered. "I had not eaten anything for two days, and I detected the odor of that exquisite filet. Not the slightest ethical significance in the ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... that crime is the breaking of law, and that law is a force created by reason to control the rational, it may be granted that the acts of the lower animals lie outside of categories framed according to ethical precepts. To directly answer your not incurious question: I believe that a wolf cannot commit ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... paper and compose a letter on the subject was a very different matter, as Isabel's waste-paper basket could have testified. Her first experiments had been very serious, with urgent recommendations of hard physical labor; but this proved unsatisfactory. Then she attacked it from an ethical angle and suggested social service as a means of destroying the selfishness which she honestly believed to be ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... mockery, but as knowing that the Church must have an explanation to give, if she would only give it, and as myself unable to find any, even the most far-fetched, that can bring what we see at Oropa, Loreto and elsewhere into harmony with modern conscience, either intellectual or ethical. ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... still more closely, men began to see great ethical principles underlying the laws of the universe. In the long run, evil suffers, and, in the ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... good bit more; some of it regretful; all of it pungent and logical from Miss Van Brock's point of view; and Kent was no rock not to be moved by the small tempest of disappointed vicarious ambition. Wherefore he escaped when he could, though only to begin the ethical battle all over again; to fight and to wander among the tombs in the valley of indecision for a week and a day, eight miserable twirlings of the earth in space, during which interval he was invisible to his friends ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... than the passing phase of so-called Americanization. It means a genuine love of country, a reverence for our pioneer fathers, a respect for law, order, and truth. This Reader is rich in patriotic content. It is hoped that the ethical element in the selections will be found to be forceful as well as pleasing. The book emphasizes throughout the importance of the individual and social virtues. If it can help teachers to make clean, upright, ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... began to draw near the shadowed nook. Curiosity in a journalist is innate, and time nor change can efface it. Curiosity in those things which do not concern us is wrong. Ethics disavows the practice, though philosophy sustains it. Perhaps in this instance Maurice was philosophical, not ethical. Perhaps he wanted to hear the woman's voice again, which was excusable. Perhaps it was neither the one nor the other, but fate, which directed his footsteps. Certain it is that the subsequent adventures would never ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... and deep Orcus,—he whose coarse fibre never felt the shudder of the world at the shaking of the ambrosial locks, nor a thrill in the air when a hero fails,—what can this grand stoop of the ideal upon the actual world signify to him? To what but an ethical genius in men can appeal for guest-rites be made by the noble "Meditations" of Marcus Antoninus, or the exquisite, and perhaps incomparable, "Christian Morals" of Sir Thomas Browne? Appreciative genius is centrally the same with productive genius; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sometimes the reader will gather a profounder and juster meaning, than the author himself detected in his fiction. I mean, of course, those works where some theory or some dogma is expressly taught, where a vein of scholastic, or political, or ethical matter alternates with a vein of narrative and fictitious matter. I dislike the whole genus. Either one is interested in your story, and then your philosophy is a bore; or one is not interested ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... when I came to prepare my sermons. By this method I had a treasury of texts from which I could draw every week. Let my readers be careful to notice that word "Text." I have known men to prepare an elaborate essay, theological, ethical or sociological, and then to perch a text from the Bible on top ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... symbolised by it. This may be seen in the case of the names and emblems of nations and parties; and still more clearly in the history of those commercial entities—'teas' or 'soaps'—which are already made current by advertisement before any objects to be symbolised by them have been made or chosen. Ethical difficulties are often created by the relation between the quickly changing opinions of any individual politician and such slowly changing entities as his reputation, his party name, or the traditional personality of a ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... West were leaders, between 1830 and 1865. Those three generations have been the most notable in the three hundred years since the permanent settlements began. Each of them has revealed, in a noble fashion, the political, ethical, and emotional traits of our people; and although the first two of the three periods concerned themselves but little with literary expression of the deep-lying characteristics of our stock, the expression is not lacking. Thomas Hooker's sermon on the ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... companion had helped to draw the net closer round them. The Indian grunted, Li Tee smiled vacantly; but with their knives and fingers they finished what the dog had begun, and became equally culpable. But that they were heathens, they could not have achieved a delicate ethical responsibility in a more ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... que me digo: me is an ethical dative (indicating the person interested). Omit ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... of Cleopatra, by JACOB ABBOTT, a new volume of his Historical Series, publishing by Harper and Brothers, presents a subject of considerable delicacy for the pen of its grave and highly ethical author. He seems to be aware of the difficulty at the outset. "The story of Cleopatra," he observes, "is a story of crime. It is a narrative of the course and the consequences of unlawful love. In her strange and romantic history we see this passion portrayed with ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... music finds its best development when of a religious character. While operatic and even orchestral music in general, is written more for the sake of giving pleasure than with any clearly defined ethical purpose, the music of the Mass and Passion, religious ceremonies, entering into man's profoundest experiences, is given for spiritual enlightenment, and, being a part of the soul's needs, demands and receives higher treatment and more ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... defense she had made of Kilmeny, the heart of Moya was troubled. She knew him to be reckless. The boundaries of ethical conduct were not the same for him as for Lord Farquhar, for instance. He had told her as much in those summer days by the Gunnison when they were first adventuring forth to friendship. His views on property and on the struggle between capital and labor were radical. Could it be that they ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... that animals ought to exhibit the ethical single-mindedness of exceptional individuals! The "mere beast"—so belittled, as a rule that it is vouchsafed less "right to the earth" than is the sole of a man's foot! How significant this may be said to be of the mental attitude in which these gentlemen sat in judgment: ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... 'Pleasures of Memory.' Plethora, abstinence the sole remedy for Poetry, distasteful to Byron when a boy When to be employed as the interpreter of feeling Addiction to, whence resulting New school of 'The feeling of a former world and future' Descriptive Ethical, 'the highest of all See also Poets, self-educated ones Lord Byron's list of celebrated poets of all nations Unfitted for the calm affections and comforts of domestic life Querulous and monotonous lives of Female See also Polidori, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... with the Free Public Libraries, several ethical questions arise, which do not occur in respect to other libraries. One of the most pressing of these questions refers to the amount of Fiction read by the ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse. Whatever poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed he withheld and stifled. Surely it is no narrow and niggardly encomium to say, he is the great Poet of Reason, the first of Ethical authors in verse." Warton illustrated his critical positions by quoting freely not only from Spenser and Milton, but from recent poets, like Thomson, Gray, Collins, and Dyer. He testified that the Seasons had "been very instrumental in diffusing a general taste ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... limits of consanguinity much wider than among ourselves, approaches the influence of the forms of natal association which it had supplanted. In the present day, however, if we set aside its economic and steadily diminishing ethical sides, it cannot be compared in importance with the territorial groupings on which state ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... arguments sonnants et trebuchants, that is to say, by a bribe, he persuaded an officer of a certain Palladian Grand Council located at Paris to forget his pledges for the time required in transcribing them. That was not a very creditable proceeding, but in exposing Freemasonry ordinary ethical considerations seem to be ruled out of court, and it is idle to examine methods when we are in need of documents. By these documents, and by the editorial matter which introduces and follows them, Leo Taxil, as already observed, created ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... being a consumer of a great number of different things, has only a general knowledge, at best. The person with only a general idea as to values, pitted against a trained specialist, is at a great disadvantage. Therefore, to be on ethical ground the seller must be the friend of the buyer—not his antagonist. For a seller to regard the buyer as his prey is worse than non-ethical—it is immoral—a violation of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... time abandoned, the owners having fled to the garrisoned towns to escape the Confederate raiders; further, if we hadn't taken this stuff our adversaries would, if by chance they happened again to infest that locality. Anyhow, a hungry soldier is not troubled, in such matters, by nice ethical distinctions. We remained at Allen on the 28th, and until the evening of the following day, when we left there on the cars for St. Louis. But sometime near midnight the train stopped at Montgomery City, about midway between Allen and St. Louis, we were roused up, and ordered ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... difficulty lies in the application of this determinism to life. So many people persist in saying that it is only a logical account of the existence of the world, only an ontological solution, not a life-philosophy. The best man, who can not confute it, only says mournfully that it will not do for an ethical system; nothing good can come ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the aim of the present book makes it both superfluous and inappropriate to discuss the vexed problems connected with the origins of the Religion of Israel, its aspects in primitive times, its passage through a national to an ethical monotheism, its expansion into the universalism of the second Isaiah. What concerns us here is merely the legacy which the Religion of Israel bequeathed to Judaism as we have defined it. This legacy and the manner in ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... more in keeping with the conditions of symphonic concerts, orchestral accompaniments, to many songs by the classic composers, have been made by excellent musicians from the original piano-part. The ethical question involved in the presentation of such works in a form other than that written by the composer, need not be considered here. Each artist must decide the ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... many judicious men joined, and so there arose what was, in essence, an absolutely new Christian cult—a cult, to wit, purged of all the supernaturalism superimposed upon the older cult by generations of theologians, and harking back to what was conceived to be the pure ethical doctrine of Jesus. This cult still flourishes; Protestantism tends to become identical with it; it invades Catholicism as Modernism; it is supported by great numbers of men whose intelligence is ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... worth noting that the same ethical spirit that insists upon fixing the responsibility for social ills upon particular property interests—or property owners—insists with equal vehemence upon absolving the propertyless evil-doer from personal responsibility for his ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... into existence should have free play. Antagonistic beliefs must have the chance of proving their worth in open contest. It is this way scientific theories are tested, and in this way also, religious and ethical conceptions should be tried. But a fair struggle cannot take place when people are dissuaded from seeking knowledge, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... no account of the book-thief or biblioklept. "If they injure the owners," says Mr. Blades, with real tolerance, "they do no harm to the books themselves, by merely transferring them from one set of book-shelves to another." This sentence has naturally caused us to reflect on the ethical character of the biblioklept. He is not always a bad man. In old times, when language had its delicacies, and moralists were not devoid of sensibility, the French did not say "un voleur de livres," but "un ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... to be good until they have grown weary of hearing it, particularly as it is always represented to them as a comparatively simple matter, and when they go out in the world and find what a hard and complex thing duty is they are very apt to look back to the ethical instruction of their college as when in college they looked back to the admonitions of the nursery, and return to their alma mater in later years with much the feeling with which a man ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... to earth and reign visibly for one thousand years. That return was commonly placed in the immediate future. With that reign was connected the bodily resurrection of the saints. This belief, in somewhat varying form, was one of the great ethical motives in apostolic and post-apostolic times. It was a part of the fundamental principles of Montanism. It disappeared with the rise of a "scientific theology" such as that of Alexandria, the exclusion of ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... is more abundant than his lyrics or his dramas. It is of immense value, and owes its chief significance to the clearness with which it exhibits the progress of his ethical disintegration. In 'Emmeline (1837) we have a rather dangerous juggling with the psychology of love. Then follows a study of simultaneous love, 'Les Deux Mattresses' (1838), quite in the spirit of Jean Paul. He then wrote three sympathetic depictions of Parisian ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... land question—"At what point will you stop?"—is itself two-fold. You have to consider first, by what methods of land distribution you can maintain the greatest number of healthy persons; and secondly, whether, if, by any other mode of distribution and relative ethical laws, you can raise their character, while you diminish their numbers, such sacrifice should be made, and to what extent? I think it will be better, for clearness' sake, to end this letter with the putting of these two queries in their ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... generally, the mere verbal juggle at first escapes detection). Such, again, was Euler's argument, that minus multiplied by minus gives plus, because it could not give the same as minus multiplied by plus, which gives minus. So, some ethical writers begin by assuming, that certain general sentiments are the natural sentiments of mankind, and thence argue that any which differ are morbid and unnatural. Thus, lastly, Hobbes and Rousseau rested the existence of government and law ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... accomplish these ends it has sometimes seemed well to give parallel versions, and occasionally to give a version that will necessitate the discussion of such subjects as the use of dialect, the inclusion of items of terror or horror, and the soundness of the ethical appeal. These various problems are indicated in the notes accompanying ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... the Jewish world was prepared for anything, and it does not surprise us to find such discoveries in the domain of ethical culture as the doctrine that, for inflicting the forty stripes save one upon those who broke the law, the lash should be braided of ox-hide and ass-hide; and, as warrant for this construction of the lash, the text, "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib, but Israel ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... or of the "death-force" over love or over the "life-force" is attended by exquisite and poignant pleasure, a pleasure which culminates in unutterable ecstasy. The shallow ethical thinkers who regard "evil" as a negation are obviously thinkers whose consciousness has never penetrated into the depths of their own souls. Pain and pleasure for such thinkers must be entirely sensationalized. They cannot have experienced, ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the ethical code in God's revelation to be complete, and final, and perfect. The divine ethics should at least be above human ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... primitive meaning of the words by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy. The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality. The Tree of Knowledge is a Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... willing to disturb the harmony of mankind—whenever they have been desirous to render him unsociable, they have cried out that their gods ordained that he should be so. Thus they render mortals uncertain, make the ethical system fluctuate by founding it upon changeable, capricious idols, whom they represent much more frequently cruel and unjust, than filled with ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... and though education and culture may modify, they cannot change their predominant characteristics—a continual subordination of justice to expediency, an indifference to suffering, a disdain of ethical principles, a laxity of morals, and a complete ignorance of economics. The evil qualities of military hierarchies are always the same. The results of their rule are universally unfortunate. The degree may vary with time ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... political State and enforcing its communal principle only in opposition to these its elements. Consequently Hegel defines the relation of the political State to religion quite correctly when he says: "If the State is to have reality as the ethical, self-conscious realization of spirit, it must be distinguished from the form of authority and faith. But this distinction arises only in so far as the ecclesiastical side is in itself divided into several churches. Then only is the State seen to be superior to them, and ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... downward possibility—but he had a professional, a sort of half Scotland Yard, half master of hounds interest in a criminal. "See," he would muse, "how cunningly the creature works, now back to his earth, anon stealing an unsuspected run across country, the clever rascal;" and his ethical disapproval ever, as usual, with English critics of life, in the foreground, clearly enhanced a primitive predatory instinct not obscurely akin, a cynic might say, to those dark impulses he holds up to our reprobation. This self-realization in his fiction is one ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... It was characteristic of their talks together, this free range among ethical abstractions, especially on ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... designating himself and it was small wonder that his biographers almost unanimously interpreted these words to mean that he was poet laureate, or Caesarian poet. After the mischief, small enough, except perhaps in an ethical sense, had been done, he tried to correct it in a foot note on one of the pages of his "Memorie," in which he says that he was not "Poeta Cesario," but "poet to the Imperial theaters." In his capacity as a teacher his record seems to have been above reproach; ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... silence; and there are few, I presume, who will regret the omission of most of those anecdotes, which the industry of some editors has not only promulged, but discussed. Whatever is repugnant to modesty and virtue is considered, in ethical science, by a supposition very favorable to humanity, as impossible; and this amiable persuasion should be much more strongly entertained where the transgression wars with nature as well as virtue. ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... a large and growing class in this day—of the decay of ancient temples and the decline of the old-fashioned idealism that made men fancy they lived nobly because they professed and believed nobly. She had no ethical standards. She simply met each situation as it arose and dealt with it as common sense seemed in that particular instance to dictate. For a thousand years genius has been striving with the human race to induce it to abandon its superstitions ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... being without a leisured class; it narrows their horizon, but saves them from a vast deal of hysterical nonsense, social mischief and blatant self-advertising. Though great readers of English newspapers and magazines, and much influenced thereby in their social, ethical, and literary views, their interest in English and European politics is not very keen. A cherished article of their faith is that Russia is England's irreconcileable foe, and that war between the two is certain. Both their geographical isolation and their constitution debar them from having ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... ETHICAL SCHOOL OF THE MUSEUM. Some of the general results at which Aristotle arrived are very grand. Thus, he concluded that every thing is ready to burst into life, and that the various organic forms presented to us by Nature are those which existing ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... Vicar of Wrexham in the middle of the last century, and author of a book on Tacitus, from which I take the idea in the text. Hunter meant his work to be at once a philological and historical disquisition and a psychological and ethical analysis: he wrote it evidently from being thoroughly disgusted by what he had read in the Annals—(as well he might be);—and he laboured hard but in vain to show that the same faults which he found in that work he detected also in the History. ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... the transept are of the period of Francis I., with flowing lines and ornate decorations—"having passed the severity and ethical standards of maturity, and progressed well along the path to senility," as a vigorous Frenchman has put it. True enough in its application is this livid sentiment,—perhaps,—but its jewel-like south portal, like the "gemmed" ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... ethical sin will be wholly mine. You don't know what it'll mean to my boy to be associated with your firm; you don't know what it'll mean to the girl. He's been engaged to her ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... a great newspaper; for ethical authority its editorials might be compared only to the Herald's; for disinterested principle the Sun alone could compare with it; it had all the lively enterprise and virile, restless energy of the Tribune; all the gay, ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... instructive, from this point of view, to observe the dilemma into which Hamilton found himself driven by this identification of genuine fact with spurious theory. He believed that the fact of man possessing an ethical faculty could only be explained by the theory that man's will was not determined by motives; for otherwise man could not be the author of his own actions. But when he considered the matter in its other aspect, he found that his theory of Free-will was as little compatible with moral ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... pitfalls of antinomianism, to revive in a modified form the practical legalism of the Old Testament. The Protestant desires to show his gratitude to Christ by leading a correct life; but his distrust of his own higher nature compels him to go to some external authority for ethical guidance; and as he has repudiated the authority of the supernaturally-inspired Church, he is compelled to have recourse to the supernaturally-inspired Bible. Hence the traditional alliance between ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... discussion, and its views on unsettled questions in morals are discriminating and sound. It treats largely of Political Ethics—a department of morals of great importance to American youth, but generally overlooked in text-books. In the history of ethical opinions it is ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... freely admitted that philology is to some extent borrowed from several other sciences, and is mixed together like a magic potion from the most outlandish liquors, ores, and bones. It may even be added that it likewise conceals within itself an artistic element, one which, on aesthetic and ethical grounds, may be called imperatival—an element that acts in opposition to its purely scientific behaviour. Philology is composed of history just as much as of natural science or aesthetics: history, in so far as it endeavours ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... blood. Most social arrangements, including marriage, seemed to have become open questions to him. Why, then, this tone towards Louie and her friends? Was it that, apart from the influence of heredity, the young fellow's moral perception at this time was not ethical at all, but aesthetic—a matter of taste, of the presence or absence of certain ideal and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... greatly increase one's ability to read instruments of precision. Skill in applying mathematical formul will not greatly assist in estimating the value of merchandise. A knowledge of general psychology will not insure ability in selecting employees. Even great proficiency in discoursing upon ethical theories does not protect one from the temptation ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... happily for us, lasted only a few months, but it was followed by another serious danger when the question of introducing the Confucian Ethical Code as a state religion was brought forward. This would have imposed limitations on Christians, Mohammedans, and others, the alternative suggestion being that Christianity should be given this status, in which some saw far greater perils. Meetings ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... Christ reveals, and to which He calls us. To say that to Him we owe our highest ideal of righteousness, is only to affirm what no one now seriously denies. John Stuart Mill has, it is true, alleged certain defects against Christianity as an ethical system, yet Mill himself has frankly admitted that "it would not be easy now, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract to the concrete, than to endeavour so to live that Christ would approve ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... an author whose writings are intended to please must be ethical as well as aesthetic, if he respects himself and his readers. He wishes the pleasure he can give to do good, not harm. The good he feels capable of producing may be limited to the physical or may extend beyond to the moral; but it will be found in his work in ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... the economical sense of the ordinary housekeeper, and to the ethical sense of those who want no advantage of their neighbor. It prevents some from getting unduly rich and it helps to keep many ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... composition; Horace, Virgil, and others, acquired celebrity as gifted and accomplished poets. Among the subjects fitted to exercise and expand the intellect, religion was not overlooked. In the great cities of the empire many were to be found who devoted themselves to metaphysical and ethical studies; and questions, bearing upon the highest interests of man, were discussed in the ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... of the Mesa Ore-producing Company set forth his creed jauntily, without the least consciousness of need for apology for the fact that it happened to be divorced from morality. Its frank disregard of ethical considerations startled Miss Balfour without shocking her. She liked his candor, even though it condemned him. It was really very nice of him to take her impudence so well. He ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... peppercorn: I was willing to hold the huge estate of earth and heaven by any such feudal fantasy. It could not well be wilder than the fact that I was allowed to hold it at all. At this stage I give only one ethical instance to show my meaning. I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... the world. A great deal of this interment of our best thought-life is justified to ourselves by the plea that such thoughts are too sacred for utterance: a wretched sophistry, a miserable excuse for what is really our fear of criticism." There is nothing trivial or false about the critical and ethical views which Miss Cleveland gives bravely, although they are not invariably rendered with the felicity and pointed phrase which come from a careful selection of words and symbols. She is a little ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... bring to bear moral pressure upon human nature. And when the intellect is confused by a word or formula which conveys an ethical appeal, one may very easily find oneself committed to action which one's unbiased reason would never have approved. The very first requirement in connexion with any word or phrase which conveys a moral exhortation is, therefore, to analyse it and find out its true signification. ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... deep feeling, of any ethical consideration prompting her contrition, jarred upon me. She would be good because she did not want to starve or be otherwise punished. That was her view of it, ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... the paths of these two young scholars diverged. Emerson became an idealist and an ethical reformer. Elizur Wright became a realist and a political reformer. Realism seems to belong ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... proper ethical pose of a Father Confessor. I have excommunicated you. The charge against you is that you take an audacious advantage of the confessional, not to bless me, but to rejoice in my romantic vagrancy. For a man giving ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... hymner of the whole of life." He was also, of all the masters, the one spiritually most akin to Mahler. For Beethoven was also one of those who wish to endow their art with moral grandeur, give it power to rouse the noblest human traits, to make it communicate ethical and philosophical conceptions. He, too, came to his art with a magnanimous hope of invigorating and consoling and redeeming his brothers, of healing the wounds of life and binding all men in the bonds of fraternity. Torn between desire of self-expression, and fear of self-revelation, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld |
