"Moral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seven years younger than Waldo, he must have received much of his intellectual and moral guidance at his elder brother's hands. I told the story at a meeting of our Historical Society of Charles Emerson's coming into my study,—this was probably in 1826 or 1827,—taking up Hazlitt's "British Poets" and turning at once to a poem of Marvell's, which he ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... me. The events are romantic, but the moral is practical, old, everlasting—life, boy, life. Poverty by itself is no such great curse; that is, if it stops short of starving. And passion by itself is a noble thing, sir; but poverty and passion together—poverty ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... their habits of speaking, by unremitting attention to their language in private as well as in public. He maintained that no man can speak with ease and security in public till custom has brought him to feel it as a moral impossibility that he could be guilty of any petty vulgarism, or that he could be convicted of ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... of old sores, an atheist, a reviler of the Vedas, and taker of bribes, one whose investiture with the sacred thread has been delayed beyond the prescribed age, one that secretly slayeth cattle, and one that slayeth him who prayeth for protection,—these all are reckoned as equal in moral turpitude as the slayers of Brahmanas. Gold is tested by fire; a well-born person, by his deportment; an honest man, by his conduct. A brave man is tested during a season of panic; he that is self-controlled, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... engendered grew stronger with every circumstance tending to show resemblance, moral or physical, between my rival and myself. I had not then discovered the remarkable fact that we were of the same age; but I saw that we were of the same height, and I perceived that we were even singularly alike in general contour of person and outline of feature. I was galled, too, by the rumor ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to American readers will be found those works especially which reveal the intimate side of French social life-works in which are discussed the moral problems that affect most potently the life of the world at large. If inquiring spirits seek to learn the customs and manners of the France of any age, they must look for it among her crowned romances. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... invasive and destructive social ideas and their corresponding systems of labor. But they were baffled at the time by what appeared to be a political necessity, and so met the grand emergency of the age by concession and a spirit of conciliation. Many of them, indeed, desired on economic as well as on moral grounds the abolition of slavery, and probably felt the more disposed to compromise with the evil in the general confidence with which they regarded ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... this period a new type of education was introduced by the founding of Hampton Institute in 1875. This marked the beginning of the period of industrialism, the purpose of such education being to give the Negro children "combined mental, moral and industrial training."[21] Following the founding of Hampton, Tuskegee Institute was established; also being an industrial school. With these two institutions as centers, the ideals of the industrial propagandist radiated in ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... of our condition under a constitution founded upon the republican principle of equal rights. To admit that this picture has its shades, is but to say, that it is still the condition of men upon earth. From evil—physical, moral, and political—it is not our claim to be exempt. We have suffered, sometimes by the visitation of Heaven through disease, often by the wrongs and injustice of other nations, even to the extremities of war; and lastly, by ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... upon some experience, is for the most part speculative, of course, but I am confident that he gives us an excellent idea of how the military machine would work in practice, how its human constituent parts would feel inwardly, and what physical and moral effects a battle would have upon those civilians who inhabited and owned the battlefield. Whether or no the future will prove the truth of the author's somewhat Utopian conclusions, he certainly founds them upon a most exciting and convincing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... caterpillar. Yet how the two commune! However—we have our exits and our entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts. More than he dreams of, poor darling. And I am entirely at a loss for a moral! ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... predatory expeditions—the Crusades—was that they were led by the Normans, and were curiously like the raids of the Vikings. The indirect results of the Crusades are still treated of in students' essays, which generally close with the moral, "there is nothing evil which does not bring some good with it." Voltaire and Hume, on the other hand, regard the Crusades as the enterprises of lunatics. It is a difficult matter ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... non existent, the atmosphere, always bad, became in the early mornings intolerable, all combined to ruin the health of those who had to live there. But not only was one's health ruined, one's "nerves" were seriously impaired, and the tunnels had a bad effect on one's moral. Knowing we could always slip down a staircase to safety, we lost the art of walking on top, we fancied the dangers of the open air much greater than they really were, in every way we got ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... to international affairs. Our charity embraces the earth. Our trade is far flung. Our financial favors are widespread. Those who are peaceful and law-abiding realize that not only have they nothing to fear from us, but that they can rely on our moral support. Proposals for promoting the peace of the world will have careful consideration. But we are not a people who are always seeking for a sign. We know that peace comes from honesty and fair dealing, from moderation, and a generous ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Were separate schools desirable in themselves? Was there any obligation, legal or moral, to establish or maintain them? If so, what form ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... Tragedie of Euripides called Iphigeneia, translated out of Greake into Englisshe.' Among the royal manuscripts is also to be found a beautiful little volume of fourteen vellum leaves,[27] containing copies of moral apophthegms, in Latin, which Sir Nicholas Bacon had inscribed on the walls of his house at Gorhambury. On the first page, above the arms of Lady Lumley, which are splendidly emblazoned, is written in gold capitals, 'Syr . Nicholas . Bacon ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... of life in the Hebrew prophets. What he deemed their essential faith—Judaism stripped of ritual and legend—he declared to be in harmony with the scientific creed of the present: belief in the unity of moral law,—the Old Testament Jehovah; and belief in the eventual triumph of justice upon this earth,—the modern substitute for the New Testament heaven. This doctrine, which in most hands would be cold and comfortless enough, he makes vital, engaging, through the passionate presentation ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... increase the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these tempestuous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the contemplation of the moral deformity from which they spring. There must also be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the human heart, through ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... He grew crimson over the white unsunburned line upon his forehead, and his moustache straightened like a bar of rusty-red iron across his thin, tanned face. But he respected moral power and determination when he encountered them, and this salient woman ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... perfectly vain to attempt to stop enquiry in this direction. Depend upon it, if a chemist by bringing the proper materials together, in a retort or crucible, could make a baby, he would do it. There is no law, moral or physical, forbidding him to do it. At the present moment there are, no doubt, persons experimenting on the possibility of producing what we call life out of inorganic materials. Let them pursue ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... world are the ordinary motives to injustice or unrestrained pleasure; but there are other persons without this shallowness of temper; persons of a deeper sense as to what is invisible and future. Now, these persons have their moral discipline set them in that high region." The profound bishop means that while their appetites and their tempers are the stumbling-stones of the most of men, the difficult problems of natural and revealed and experimental religion are the test and the ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... inconsiderate enthusiasts are, when we assign real, in the place of exaggerated feelings. Thus the advocates for the doctrine of utility—the most benevolent, because the most indulgent, of all philosophies—are branded with the epithets of selfish and interested; decriers of moral excellence, and disbelievers in generous actions. Vice has no friend like the prejudices which call themselves virtue. La pretexte ordinaire de ceux qui font le malheur des autres est qu'ils ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Ker, the author of "The Lonely Island," has here written a stirring and highly imaginative tale of India and the North-West Frontier. The heroes are men of high character, and a bright, healthy moral tone is ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... the curious spectacle," said he thoughtfully, "of the individual man in a new untrammelled liberty trying to escape his moral obligations to society. He escapes them for a while, but they are there; and in the end he must pay ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... are best,' and that we must approach every question 'with an open mind'; but we shirk the logical conclusion that we were wiser in our infancy than we are now. 'Make yourself even as a little child' we often say, but recommending the process on moral rather than on intellectual grounds, and inwardly preening ourselves all the while on having 'put away childish things,' as though clarity of vision were not ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... our pastor's poor little salary for his own private use and behoof. His plan evidently was to throw the stigma of heresy upon the incumbent, and to this end, when our preacher was one day laboring hard to show us exactly where foreordination ends and free moral agency begins, the ex-minister arose, excitedly declaring such talk to be rank Arminianism, and denounced it as misleading sinners to the belief that they could be saved even if they were not so predestinated in the eternal mind of an all-wise, all-loving Jehovah, who ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... and half-done tasks, and because of the feelings of hate I had for the "Big Ape" and the "Bull of Apis," emotions that I was obliged to hide and disguise until I shuddered at the falsehoods I spoke and acted. These things gave me poignant remorse and excruciating moral distress, and to escape from these emotions I indulged in noisy sports and foolish laughter; and when my conscience troubled me most, and I dared not, therefore, appear before my parents, I took refuge with the servants, ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... Mac. Edit.; in others "ninety." I prefer the greater number as exaggeration is a part of the humour. In the Hindu "Katha Sarit Sagara" (Sea of the Streams of Story), the rings are one hundred and the catastrophe is more moral, the good youth Yashodhara rejects the wicked one's advances; she awakes the water-sprite, who is about to slay him, but the rings are brought as testimony and the improper young person's nose is duly cut off. (Chap. Ixiii.; p. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... immortal, and capable of becoming and doing much in this life would seem to be doubted even by their parents. The neglect of the girls in their physical, mental, moral, and religious education, is enough to draw pity even ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 2, February, 1889 • Various
... hardly understood the importance of the lesson which I then received; certainly not to the degree with which experience has confirmed it. But I have written it here, the sense, if not the actual language, because Millet has been so often misrepresented as seeking to point a moral through the subject of his pictures. When we recall the manner in which "The Angelus" was paraded through the country a few years ago, and the genuine sentiment of the simple scene—where Millet had endeavored to express "the things that ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... down a shower of most moral reproaches, and an assurance that Clara disowned and detested my alliance; and that where there had been an essential error in the person, the mere ceremony could never be accounted binding by the law of any Christian country. I wonder this ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... took place, and was attended with truly remarkable consequences and a deeply impressive moral. One day, very soon after their marriage, Aylmer sat gazing at his wife with a trouble in his countenance that grew stronger ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... he chose Tyrtamus, to whom he gave the name of Theophrastus, as his successor at the Lyceum. Theophrastus was the originator of the science of Botany, and wrote the "History of Plants." He also wrote about stones, and on physical, moral and ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... through the French, he reached a field behind the copse across which our men, regardless of orders, were running and descending the valley. That moment of moral hesitation which decides the fate of battles had arrived. Would this disorderly crowd of soldiers attend to the voice of their commander, or would they, disregarding him, continue their flight? Despite his desperate shouts that used to seem so terrible to the soldiers, despite ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... I agreed. "But," I went on, seizing the opportunity to point a moral, "that is merely a happy accident. Had it been blowing hard, and the weather threatening, it would probably not have made the slightest difference in the conduct of those men. You and Chips, by listening to and falling in with the fantastic proposals ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... that we are separated unto the gospel of life and salvation, set apart to God and His service, but, also, that God the Father has made ample provision in the death of His Son for all Christian believers to be cleansed from every stain of moral defilement, delivered from inbred sin, sanctified wholly, made perfect in love, and filled with the Spirit. We repeat, therefore, that it will be a matter of eternal thankfulness and gratitude to the redeemed soul, that ...
— The Theology of Holiness • Dougan Clark
... heart. She had written many brave letters to her Eastern friends, but the vital contests, the important factors of her life, she had not mentioned. She had given no hint of her mother's physical and moral degeneration, and she had set down no word of her longing to return; but now that she was within sight of the railway the call of the East, the temptation to escape all her discomforts, was almost great enough to carry her away; but into her mind ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... interesting, and sometimes productive of the happiest effects. The delight we feel in tracing the successive stages of that pilgrimage by which the saints of the Most High have "passed into the skies," is neither a faint nor fruitless emotion, but a healthful exercise of the moral sympathies. It purifies, while it elicits; the affections of the heart. As we trace the formation of their character, we are insensibly forming our own; and the observation by which we mark the development of their Christian virtues, is among the most efficient means by which ...
— The Baptist Magazine, Vol. 27, January, 1835 • Various
... her was the fleeting thought that her type stood usually for the material in woman, and I wondered if in her case outward appearances were as deceptive as they were in my wife—with her saint's eyes, and her distorted moral vision. Perhaps I was intuitively right, and that beneath Delilah Jeliffe's exterior there is a certain fineness, and that these funny fads of dress and decorations are merely in some way her striving toward the expression of her ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... brave living, and was so far spiritual; but perhaps not much further. The best in men reacted against the sensuality of the mid-century, and made Stoicism strong; but this formed only a basis of moral grit for the higher teaching; of which, while we know it was there, there is not very much to say. I shall come to it presently; meanwhile, to something else.—In literature, this was the cycle of Spain: the Crest-Wave was largely there during the first thirteen ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the use of vile language in abuse of umpires, and the many instances of "dirty" ball playing recorded against the majority of the League club teams of the past season. "The time was," says the same writer, "when a ball player's skill was the primary recommendation for an engagement, his moral qualifications being of a secondary consideration. To-day, however, while playing skill is, of course, one of the leading qualities that an applicant for honors on the diamond field must possess, it does not fill the whole bill by any means. ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... in the preceding article has led me to a further investigation. It may be right to acknowledge that so attractive is this critical and moral amusement of comparing great characters with one another, that, among others, Bishop Hurd once proposed to write a book of Parallels, and has furnished a specimen in that of Petrarch and Rousseau, and intended for another that of Erasmus with Cicero. It is amusing to observe how a lively ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... explained, the sum of ten shillings to that of four; and no sooner did Paul read the communication we have placed before the reader than, instead of gratitude to MacGrawler for his consideration of Paul's moral infirmities, he conceived against that gentleman the most bitter resentment. He did not, however, vent his feelings at once upon the Scotsman,—indeed, at that moment, as the sage was in a deep sleep under the table, it would have been to no purpose had he unbridled his indignation,—but ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... can hurt me. Suspicions, yes, moral presumptions, clues, anything you like, but not a scrap of material evidence. Nobody knows me. One person has seen me as a tall man, another as a short man. My very name is unknown. All my murders have been committed ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... the dark eyes of this grand daughter of the world, who was so superb a type of that moral ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have come to the home. The national finances have been strengthened, and public credit has been sustained and made firmer. In all branches of industry and trade there has been an unequaled degree of prosperity, while there has been a steady gain in the moral and educational growth of our national character. Churches and schools have flourished. American patriotism has been exalted. Those engaged in maintaining the honor of the flag with such signal success have been in a large degree spared from disaster and disease. An honorable peace has ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... hard, desperately hard, for Win to pay this tribute to Miss Rolls's unselfish interest in her moral welfare. She tried to be grateful, to feel that her late friend's sister had been brave and fine and unconventional thus to defend a strange girl against one so near. But despite reason's wise counsel, her heart was hot within her. She felt like a heathen assured by an earnest missionary ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... the moral turpitude of Mr. World he was scarcely ready, at first hearing, to accept this ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... political skies were overcast with the thunder clouds of approaching revolutions; France had just passed through another violent upheaval. Village conditions seemed to offer a veritable haven of refuge. The pristine artlessness of the peasant's intellectual, moral, and emotional life furnished a wholesome antidote to the morbid hyperculture of dying romanticism, the controversies and polemics of Young Germany, and the self-adulation of the society of the salons. Neither could the exotic, ethnographic, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... cultivation. The most important questions of the civilization of mankind are connected with the ideas of races, p 352 community of language, and adherence to one original direction of the intellectual and moral faculties. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... their duty they were not lacking in moral courage to perform that duty; and with no lapse of years shall we ever fail to insist that the principles for which the Rangers contended were eternally right, and that their opponents were ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... have seen Moses' behind—to lay his desecrating hands upon Elia! Has the irriverent ark-toucher been struck blind I wonder—? The more I think of him, the less I think of him. His meanness is invisible with aid of solar microscope, my moral eye smarts at him. The less flea that bites little fleas! The great Beast! the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... morals! Ah! how he had suffered the poison to penetrate him; even to his bones! How Marianne had deformed and moulded him at her fancy, and he still thought of her only with unsatisfied longings for her kisses and ardor! Ah! women! Woman! Yes, indeed, yes, woman was the great source of moral weakness and inactivity. She used politics in her own way, in destroying politicians. If he had only left office with head erect and not dragging the chain-shot of debt! But that bill of exchange! Who would ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... face haunted him. How long was this since that fatal night of discord and separation? Ten years. So long? Yes, so long. Ten weary years had made their record upon his book of life and upon hers. Ten weary years! The discipline of this time had not worked on either any moral deterioration. Both were yet sound to the core, and both were building up characters based on the broad ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... wonderful cloaks and blankets, quite paralysed with cold. I don't know if the exposition was a financial success—I should think probably not. A great deal of money came into France (but the French spent enormously in their preparations) but the moral effect was certainly good—all the world flocked to Paris. Cabs and river steamers did a flourishing business, as did all the restaurants and cafes in the suburbs. St. Cloud, Meudon, Versailles, Robinson, were crowded every night with ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... material: but it is invisible. The allegorical is that which is shadowy and doth but exist in the fantasy. If I say of these my daughters, they be my jewels, I speak allegorically: for they be not gems, but maidens. But I do not love them in an allegory, but in reality. Love is a moral and spiritual matter, but no allegory. So, Heaven is a spiritual place, but methinks not ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... Governor might be without the rectitude which both Benham and Stephen regarded as fundamental, she perceived clearly that, even if Vetch were lacking in the particular principle involved, he was not devoid of some moral excellence which filled not ignobly the place where principle should have been. She was prepared to concede that the Governor was a man of many defects and a single virtue; but this single virtue impressed her as ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... their chains; the continental kingdoms, bleeding by the sword until they lay in utter exhaustion, were suffered to retain all their abuses; the thrones, stripped of all their gold and jewels, were yet suffered to stand. Every pretext of moral and physical redress was contemptuously abandoned, and France herself exhibited the most singular of all transformations.—The republic naked, frantic, and covered with her own gore, was suddenly seen robed in the most superb investitures of monarchy; assuming ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... part of literary England wore the tags of political preference. Writers were often as clearly distinguished as were the ladies in the earlier day, when Addison wrote his paper on party patches. There were seats of Moral Philosophy to be handed out, under-secretaryships, consular appointments. It is not enough to say that Francis Jeffrey was a reviewer, he was as well a Whig and was running a Review that was Whig ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... of five or six with a reliable non-commissioned officer will do to remind them it's the United States they're bucking against," said Paisley. "There's a deal in the moral of these things. Crook—" Paisley broke off and ran to the door. "Hold his horse!" he called out to the orderly; for he had heard the hoofs, and was out of the house before Corporal Jones had fairly arrived. So Jones sprang off and hurried up, ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... returned and reported to me that each had found it impracticable to penetrate far into the Pedregal during the dark. . . . Captain Lee, having passed over the difficult ground by daylight, found it just possible to return to San Augustin in the dark, the greatest feat of physical and moral courage performed by any individual, in my ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... insisting that they must be differently and therefore separately educated. These draw a clear line between "equal" and "similar" education, and hold that no university course of studies can be laid out that will not present much of classical literature and much of the mental, moral and natural sciences, that cannot be studied and recited by boys and girls together, without serious risk of lasting ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... was expected home this day. He might have come. Surely he might give two such rare good friends a chance to have a chat together . . . in Malcolm's own house, too. Besides there was no better chance than now for a bit of moral calisthenics. Skag turned back. No one was very near to note that he was a bit pale. Still he was laughing. Even Nels, his Great Dane, would have thought him weird, he reflected. Had Bhanah been along, there could have been no possible explanation. ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... was not conscious of any question of right or wrong in what had taken place. Honour, in a rather worldly sense, had always supplied for him the place of all other moral considerations. The woman he loved had been ill-treated by her husband, and had come to him for protection. He had done his best, in spite of his love, to make her go back, and she had known how to refuse. Men, as men, would not blame him for ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... silent and very miserable. The lights of the big hanging kerosene lamps flickered and cast great shadows, showing the women all with heads very high and backs straight and stiff, the men in various attitudes of jellyfish, with heads hanging and feet screwed under their chairs in search of moral support. ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... concern, a solemn succession of discrowned tyrants and law-makers smitten by the cruel laws they had made. Sometimes, in its bold and not very delicate way, the Mirror for Magistrates is impressive still from its lofty moral tone, its gloomy fatalism, and its contempt for temporary renown. As we read its sombre pages we see the wheel of fortune revolving; the same motion which makes the tiara glitter one moment at the summit, plunges it at the next into the pit of pain and oblivion. Steadily, ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... personal god declines, as on analysis it must decline, morality declines with it. For morality in such cases is bound up, as you say, with the belief in a personal god. Civilisation, in fact, is once again on the rocks and society is no longer safe—why? Because by making your moral code issue from the lips of your personal god, it has become so much waste paper now that your personal god is beginning to be felt as an absurdity. Thus in a religion with a personal god, heresy ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... knowing how deep Herzog had led him in the mire. His moral sense had disappeared, but he had a vague instinct of the danger he had incurred. The financier's last words came to his mind: "Confess all to your wife; she can get you out of this difficulty!" He ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... to personal unhappiness and one that involved not only himself, but those dearest to him, in disgrace and sorrow, he felt himself weaken to the point of clutching at whatever would save him from the consequences of confession. Moral strength and that tenacity of purpose which only comes from years of self- control were too lately awakened in his breast to sustain him now. As stroke after stroke fell on the ear, he felt himself yielding beyond recovery, and had almost touched his ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... life, which is so revolting to comfortable people like M. Villemain, was in truth the only explanation of his own cruel sufferings in which he could find any solace. It was not that he hated mankind, but that his destiny looked as if God hated him, and this was a horrible moral complexity out of which he could only extricate himself by a theory in which pain and torment seem to stand out as the main facts in ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... anything distinctly. Thought as well as speech was curiously puerile. Only a slight acquaintance with this dark age is enough to make one feel as if among children. Want and ignorance and wars interminable had impoverished the mind of man and starved his moral nature. The scanty, slashed, ridiculous garments of the nobles and the wealthy betray an absurd poverty of taste and weakness of intellect.[49] One of the most striking characteristics of these small minds is their triviality; they are incapable of attention; ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... turned and regarded him stolidly, keeping as close together as possible for the sake of moral support and ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... such an inference. But however this may be, there is certainly no question concerning the intention of a correspondent who once wrote to me after reading some rather bragging claims I had made for fiction as a mental and moral means. "I have very grave doubts," he said, "as to the whole list of magnificent things that you seem to think novels have done for the race, and can witness in myself many evil things which they have done for me. Whatever in my mental make-up ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... entirely true. It was that awful truth, which is past human belief, which no man dares put into fiction. That man out there had been from his birth a distinct power for evil upon the face of the earth. He had menaced all creation, so far as one personality may menace it. He was a force of ill, a moral and spiritual monster, and the more dangerous, because of a subtlety and resource which had kept him immune from the law. He outstripped the law, whose blood-hounds had no scent keen enough for him. He had broken the ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... just as bad. Maybe worse. I don't think a man like Foxx Travis would lie if he didn't have some overriding moral ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... one pair, and never blacked, of course, but no stockings. They think it quite effeminate to sleep under a roof, except during the severest months of the year. There is a married daughter across the river, just the same hard, loveless, moral, hard-working being as her mother. Each morning, soon after seven, when I have swept the cabin, the family come in for "worship." Chalmers "wales" a psalm, in every sense of the word wail, to the most doleful of dismal tunes; ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... of much benefit to society at large. Impressed with a belief that the genius of Shakespeare soars above all rivalry, that he is the most marvellous writer the world has ever known, and that his works contain stores of wisdom, intellectual and moral, I cannot but hope that one who has toiled for so many years, in admiring sincerity, to spread abroad amongst the multitude these invaluable gems, may, at least, be considered as an honest labourer, adding his mite to the great cause of ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... manifest rectitude, and moral necessity of the divine decisions, will then satisfy the righteous, and their greater love to God reconcile them to the execution of his judgments on all the impenitent, why not as soon as they shall ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... who would simply be ground to powder and wrecked by psychological clearness of vision. Not to let yourself be overcome by the sadness of the world; to observe, mark, and insert everything, even the most anguishing things, and for the rest be of good courage, even though in the full grasp of moral superiority over that horrible invention, Life—aye, to be sure! Yet at times things get away from you a bit despite all the pleasures of Expressing. Does understanding everything mean forgiving everything? I don't know. There is something that I call the loathing of perception, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... his moral stamina crumbling within him. "I don't know—about that. Perhaps I'll be a drag to the expedition. ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... it at once by heart and repeated it to her brothers and sisters. It would have had a great effect upon Ambrose at any time, but just now he saw a dreadful fitness in it to his own secret. Pennie added a moral when she had finished, which really ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... more," Beale went on. "I suggest that for some purpose, Doctor van Heerden desires to secure a mental, physical and moral ascendancy over you. In other words, he wishes to enslave ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... undisturbed and gaze at the mountains, huge and lofty, rising in such unconquerable grandeur, upward toward the sky. Belton chose the mountain as the emblem of his life and he besought God to make him such in the moral world. ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... It was explained to them that the asteroids were, after all, natural resources, and that they had no moral right to make a large profit and deprive others of their fair share of the income from a natural resource, but they insisted that they had earned it and had a right ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... she once said when Olivia had made a somewhat disparaging remark about his want of steadiness, "you are far too critical. You judge men by Marcus's standard, but you must remember every one is not a moral son ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... swords, and Captain Hull and Lieutenant Morris received pieces of plate from the patriots of Philadelphia. Federalists laid aside for the moment their opposition to the war and proclaimed that their party had founded and supported the navy. The moral effect of the victory was out of all proportion to its strategic importance. It was like sunshine breaking through a fog. Such rejoicing had been unknown, even in the decisive moments of the War of the Revolution. It served to show how deep-seated had ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... fanatics had forced the King to act. Bossuet was not sanctimonious, but, to serve his own ends, proffered himself as spokesman and emissary, being anxious to prove to his old colleagues that he was on the side of what they styled moral conduct and good example. ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... as yet no vibration in it, for there can be no light without vibration. We must not make the mistake of supposing that Matter is evil in itself: it is our misconception of it that makes it the vehicle of evil; and we must distinguish between the darkness of Matter and moral darkness, though there is a spiritual correspondence between them. The true development of Man consists in the self-expansion of the Divine Spirit working through his mind, and thence upon his psychic and physical organisms, but this can only be by the individual's ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... surprise with the cool and deliberate patrons of vice, and especially with many, who, though they were often covered with a garb of outward morality, were full of rottenness within. Some, who pass for moral and religious persons, have in this thing exhibited a moral obliquity that has often ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... moreover, that the indulgence in such exhibitions did not for one moment blunt the gentler emotions of his heart, or vulgarize his inborn love of all that was beautiful and true. His own line was the axiom of his moral existence, his political creed:—"A thing of beauty is a joy forever"; and I can fancy no coarser consociation able to win him from this faith. Had he been born in squalor, he would have emerged a gentleman. Keats was not an easily swayable man; in differing with ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... Masonry, the providers of the funds for building Cathedrals, &c.; it naturally followed that, growing up alongside the Operative Science, there was a Religious symbolism being gradually formed which attached itself specially to the tools used by Masons, and thus formed the basis of Moral teaching—"to act on the Square," "to keep within the bounds of the Compasses," "to be Level in all your dealings," &c., &c. A wonderful, new, and Mystical form of Symbolism was opened to them with the advent of Geometry. The text-book of Geometry was unknown throughout the whole of Europe, ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... of greatest laxity in their moral habits—the want of a high standard of chastity—was not one which affected their camp life to any great extent, and it therefore came less under my observation. But I found to my relief that, whatever their deficiency in this respect, it was modified by the general quality of their ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... for the sort of friend to whom he might possibly unfold his experience: a young man like himself who sustained a private grief and was not too confident about his own career; speculative enough to understand every moral difficulty, yet socially susceptible, as he himself was, and having every outward sign of equality either in bodily or spiritual wrestling;—for he had found it impossible to reciprocate confidences with one who looked up to him. But he had no expectation of meeting ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... sure,' she said, 'I hope this heart-rending occurrence will be a warning to all of us, to accustom ourselves to rouse ourselves, and to make efforts in time where they're required of us. There's a moral in everything, if we would only avail ourselves of it. It will be our own faults if we ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... stories (sketches he called them) and added a few legendary tales of the Dutch settlers on the Hudson. Then came Poe, dealing with the phantoms of his own brain rather than with human life or endeavor. Next appeared Hawthorne, who dealt largely in moral allegories and whose tales are always told in an atmosphere of mystery and twilight shadows. Finally, after the war, came a multitude of writers who insisted on dealing with our American life as it ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... along with Mr. ——, I explain to him that I should be under the necessity of looking more closely into the business here from his conduct at Buddonness, which had given an instance of weakness in the Moral principle which had staggered my opinion of him. His answer was, 'That will be with regard to the lass?' I told him I was to enter no farther with him upon the subject." "Mr. Miller appears to be master and man. I am sorry about this foolish fellow. Had I known his train, I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... preparation of this volume, the author has had in his mind the intention to delineate the progress of a boy whose education had been neglected, and whose moral attributes were of the lowest order, from vice and indifference to the development of a high moral and religious principle in the heart, which is the rule and guide of ...
— Work and Win - or, Noddy Newman on a Cruise • Oliver Optic
... slain by Cuchullin; a treatise explaining the Ogham manner of writing which is preserved in this book; the privileges of the several kings and princes of Ireland, in making their tours of the Kingdom, and taking their seats at the Feis of Tara; and an antient moral and political poem as an advice to princes and chieftains, other poems and prophecies, etc., chronological and religious, disposed in no ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... arose was this: It is a great effort, a constant effort, sometimes a minutely recurring effort, to attain moral mastery over one's self, and though this certainly need not bring with it a feeling of self-satisfaction, much less ought to do so, it does bring with it a recognition of the value of this self-mastery. How strange, then, that Christianity, which ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... what is the general moral character of the Canadians; they are simple and hospitable, yet extremely attentive to interest, where it does not interfere with that laziness which is ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... this enigma, an answer which could only be the name of a man endowed with a truly inexplicable, and in some degree superhuman power. In a few minutes, the settlers re-entered the house, where their influence soon restored to Ayrton his moral and ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... Now, the moral of all this is that my testimony furthermore adds to the growing mystery of Franz Liszt. He heard hundreds of such pianists of my caliber, and, while he never committed himself—for he was usually too kind-hearted to wound mediocrity with cruel ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker |
