"Saintliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... affairs. I am not now prepared to take up the view of the fanatic Bulgar-worshippers who must not only exalt the Bulgarian nation as a modern Chosen People, but must represent Servian, Greek, and Turk as malignant and devilish in order to throw up in the highest light their ideas of Bulgarian saintliness. ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... forgiven him," I snapped out. "He may have reason, and justice, and saintliness on his side, yet I ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... as disclosed in Peter's words, "It is good to be here." Peter knew when he was in good company. He was not very wise himself, but he had sense enough to recognise wisdom in others. He was not himself a finished saint, but he had a hearty appreciation of those who had attained saintliness. He had reverence, power to recognise, and ungrudgingly to worship, what was good. He had an honest delight in seeing his Master honoured, a delight which, perhaps, some of us envy. It was not a forced expression, ...
— How to become like Christ • Marcus Dods
... a mighty man, so inlocked with the rugged forces of his age. His sitters have come from more peaceful, nobler walks of life,—and their portraits are beloved even more than they are admired. Not yet are they the pride of pompous galleries, but the glory and saintliness ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... would arouse my jealous rancor, as a living barrier between her mother and myself. But she was really dear to me. I revered Dora for her fortitude, and Lucy appealed to me as the embodiment of her mother's saintliness ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... deeply of his cigarette, and faced the little man again. And The Master looked so benevolent that he seemed absolutely cherubic, and there was absolutely no sign of anything but the utmost saintliness about him. His eyes were clear and mild. His complexion was fresh and translucent. The wrinkles that showed upon his face were those of an amiable and a serene soul filled with benevolence and charity. He looked like one of those irritatingly ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... the spirit of the age was beginning to set against monasticism. It was the period when perhaps there was more of license and less of saintliness than at any other, and when the long continuance of the Great Schism had so injured Church discipline that the clergy and ecclesiastics were in the worst state of all, especially the monastic orders, who owned no superior but the Pope, and between the two rivals could avoid ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... villages. Sister Simona is a runaway nun, thought slightly demented, who devotes herself to nursing the wounded of the war. She attempts to save the life of a young Alfonsist spy by declaring him her own son. This serves only to destroy her reputation for saintliness, and the situation is suddenly saved by an offer to ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... communions. That day is so called because questions that have arisen in the minds of "the men" in connection with doctrine and with experience are on that day set forth, debated out, and solved by much meditation and prayer; age, saintliness, doctrinal and experimental reading, and personal experience all making their contribution to the solution of the question in hand. Just such a question, then, and handled in such a manner, was that ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... rise thereto that dwelt not in anchorite's cell, and scourged him on the bare back every morrow, and ate but of black rye-bread, and drank of ditch-water. Deary me, but I would not like that! I'd put up with a bit less saintliness, I would!" ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... forsooth! and due encouragement to such a miracle of saintliness and capacity; light terms indeed to apply to such ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... pronouncement that "the mass of a Christian congregation are about as innocent as men and women can well be in a world where natural temptations are so rife, and so many social adjustments discountenance heroic saintliness" [3]—the latter a truly admirable feat of circumlocution. And sometimes, as we have seen, sin and evil are themselves in essence negated—generally in virtue of some pseudo-philosophic or pseudo-scientific "doctrine of a universe"—as when we read that ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... "The saintliness of a Daughter of Charity," said Vincent, "rests on faithful adherence to the Rule; on faithful service to the nameless poor; in love and charity and pity; in faithful obedience to the doctor's orders . . . It keeps us humble to be quite ...
— Life of St. Vincent de Paul • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... them even now," he replied, like a man bitterly ashamed. "He constrains me to them. And is that goodness, righteousness? I said he was a saint; but now! Is it saintliness to torture a fellow-creature?" ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... great sinner. God forbid brethren, that we should ever make such an inference. But this we infer for our own encouragement, that past sin does not necessarily preclude from high attainments. We must "forget the things that are behind." We must not mourn over past years of folly as if they made saintliness impossible. Deep as we may have been once in earthliness, so deep we may also be in penitence, and so high we ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... remoteness of a psychic super-humanity, godlike in wisdom and ethereal in constitution, do not conceal the trend of mental evolution. The medium is often a strange blend of spiritual and carnal tendencies, of knowledge and ignorance, of delicate perception and denseness. Those who expect saintliness as the first attribute of psychic advancement will certainly be disillusioned. These gifts and graces may appear, not only without any corresponding degree of culture and learning, but associated with a certain vulgarity of thought ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Georgie's mother was with difficulty restrained from going up to the parlor to tell Joe what she thought of a man who put his mother before his wife. Virginia was bravely enduring the horrors of approaching darkness. Susan reproached herself for her old impatience with Jinny's saintliness; there was no question of her cousin's courage and faith during this test. Mary Lou was agitatedly preparing for a visit to the stricken Eastmans, in Nevada, deciding one day that Ma could, and the next that Ma couldn't, spare her ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... Version renders—"Look unto Abraham your father; for when he was but one I called him and I blessed him and made him many." And in Bombay the young contemporary missionary who most nearly resembled Carey in personal saintliness, scholarship, and self-devotion, John ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... business of the former to live by the full standard. All classes, however, accepted the standards as valid, and the layman conformed to them at times, or as far as worldly life would permit. Elizabeth of Thuringia seems to be the ideal of the married woman, but her saintliness interfered with her other duties, and even her own time does not seem to have been sure in its judgment of her. That she was flogged is a fact which has many relations to her character and her age.[428] ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... attitude of Burke and Wordsworth in their later years. He was influenced more by persons than by principles. One does not find any real vision of a Republic in his work as one finds it in the work of Shelley. He had little of the saintliness of spirit which marks the true Republican and which turns politics into music in The Masque of Anarchy. His was not one of those tortured souls, like Francis Adams's, which desire the pulling-down of the pillars of the old, bad world more than love or fame. There is no utterance of ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... elder person whom (for wide-mindedness, gentleness, and saintliness) I could bear to consult; and to this person, a middle-aged man, I wrote for advice. He replied by a long letter of the most tender warning. I had better not weaken my influence with my friend, he wrote, by going back suddenly or without her ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... War, that of St. Louis is one of the most renowned. Although flourishing in a century which produced personages like Frederick, Emperor of Germany, and our first great Edward, who far excelled him in genius and prowess—as wise rulers in peace and mighty chiefs in war—his saintliness, his patience in affliction, his respect for justice and the rights of his neighbours, entitle him to a high place among the men of the age which could boast of so many royal heroes. In order to comprehend the crusade, of which ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... offences and allaying suspicion, especially in the eyes of such a worldly-wise man as the Prior of Chadwater. A proud bearing, a goodly following, a gorgeous retinue, would be a far better proof of orthodoxy in his eyes than any saintliness of life and conduct. Mortimer would know that right well, though, as he had been elected as the secular agent to assist the prior in his work today, plainly no stigma of any kind was thought to rest upon his household. Sir Oliver knew that Mortimer was a larger property than Chad, and that ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... as Christian ethics. He asserted that the true motive of morality is not the salvation of the individual man but the Progress of humanity. In fact, with Fichte Progress is the principle of ethics. That the Christian ideal of ascetic saintliness detached from society has no moral value is a plain corollary from the idea of earthly Progress. [Footnote: X. Leon, La Philosophie de ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... contact with other characters such as the Archbishop and the Governor, men overlaid with long-deposited crusts of convention, she wins a vague pity from them, but her simplicity, naturalness and saintliness are nearly as repugnant to social convention as her goodness is to villany; and Browning has, all through the poem, individualised in Pompilia the natural simplicity of goodness in opposition to the artificial moralities of conservative society. ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... dance in short skirts! Some day I will give you an exhibition in this room! Now don't look like that," I added quickly; "I was only joking. I would not defile the air around your saintliness for the world! But I want to tell you this: my dancing is recognised as an art. I rank everywhere with the men and women who are called artists, the men and women who are ever striving to realize in some manner a particular ideal of beauty through ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... often lunched at the Berkeley and frequently dined at Willis's. Also he had laughed at the antics of Arthur Roberts, and gazed through a pair of gold-mounted opera-glasses at Empire ballets and at the discreet juggleries of Paul Cinquevalli. The romance of cloistered saintliness was not his. If it had been he might never have rebelled. For how often it is romance which makes a home for religion in the heart of man, romance which feathers the nest of purity in which the hermit soul delights to dwell! Is it not that bizarre silence of the Algerian waste which leads ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... dashing uniform. But the passion of this officer was a true love, and many young hearts will think it noble. He loved this woman because she was virtuous; he loved her virtue, her modest grace, her imposing saintliness, as the dearest treasures of his hidden passion. This woman was indeed worthy to inspire one of those platonic loves which are found, like flowers amid bloody ruins, in the history of the middle-ages; worthy to be the hidden principle of all the actions of a young man's life; a love as high, as ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... purveyors of the playhouse in Ben Jonson's, the fox-hunting squires and town wits of Cowper's, like their successors after them, were not specially anxious to distinguish nicely between more or less abominable varieties of saintliness. Hence, when Master Harry Bailly's tremendous oaths produce the gentlest of protests from the "Parson," the jovial "Host" incontinently "smells a Lollard in the wind," and predicts (with a further flow of expletives) that ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... was stilled— That single rounded mound cracked lengthliwise And one came forth in grave-clothes. For a space He stood and gazed about him with a smile Superior; then laying off his shroud Disclosed his two attenuated legs Which, like parentheses, bent outwardly As by the weight of saintliness above, And so sprang upward and was lost to view Noting his headstone overthrown, I read: "Sacred to memory of George K. Fitch, Deacon and Editor—a holy man Who fell asleep in Jesus, full of years And blessedness. The dead in ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... you perhaps can track only in part, but of which others know nothing. A father's integrity—a mother's sweet goodness—the quiet air of a happy home—a domestic courage and patience, at which you have looked very closely, and whose every line and lineament you know—some ancestral saintliness, which is a household tradition and no more, but which has never withered in the fierce light of public estimate,—these things have inspired and nourished your nobler part. They are the refreshing dew and ...
— Beside the Still Waters - A Sermon • Charles Beard
... the men had been joined by many of the peasants and were approaching the castle. They were Jonas, Mathison, and Zacharia, seditionists; but they were going through the country in the garb of holy men, stirring up the people under cover of saintliness. ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... actually sinful as in sex-love, it is evident that sexual love, in its emotional, or psychic aspect, was at the root of the "ecstacies" which are so ardently described in ecclesiastical history as "evidences of saintliness." ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... animated by the draughts he takes from his wine-cask. When his devotions and communions are over, we shall greet him. See, he rises! What a glory emanates from his face! It causes me to feel eager to slake my thirst at the same holy place! My life seems so earthly, so lacking in heavenliness and saintliness! ...
— Adventures in the Land of Canaan • Robert Lee Berry
... our gaze to the spiritual garden, the Church of Christ. The various flowers there are the faithful, adorned with piety and virtue, and spreading the fragrance of saintliness with which God is pleased. In the Canticle of Canticles the Lamb of God is pictured as feeding among the lilies. A beautiful thought! It tells us how the Lamb of God, our divine Saviour, is fond of the flowers of God, the God-loving souls, as is the ...
— The Excellence of the Rosary - Conferences for Devotions in Honor of the Blessed Virgin • M. J. Frings
... responded, "you no longer had any faith left. I suspected it. And your rigidity and saintliness of life, in which I detected such great despair, made me anxious for you. How many hours did I not spend at times in striving to calm you! And you must listen to me again, you must still let me save you. I am not a sufficiently learned theologian ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... ideal of a contemplative life which had hitherto obtained, a new ideal, the ideal of the courtier's life, was upheld; ecclesiastical saintliness was contrasted with knightly honour. Beauty, which at the dawn of the Christian era had fallen into ill repute and had become associated with unholy, and even diabolical, practices, had again come into its kingdom. Above everything it was the beauty of woman which was re-discovered—or rather, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... early Victorian saintliness about you, Emily Walderhurst, which makes my joy," she said. "You remind me of Lady Castlewood, Helen Pendennis, and Amelia Sedley, with the spitefulness and priggishness and catty ways left out. You are as nice as Thackeray thought they were, ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... who was so gentle, so patient, who had suffered so much, and not learned to hate, who had kept his faith so true! What did his faith mean to the thugs of the General Fuel Company? What had his philosophy availed him, his saintliness, his hopes for mankind? They had fetched him one swipe as they passed him, and left him lying—alive or dead, it was all ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... are visible imperfections in the record of every great saint; but that is no reason for allowing such traces of human infirmity to discredit what is pure and good in their work. More particularly, it would be a great pity to let our minds dwell on the favourite materialistic theory that saintliness, especially as cultivated and venerated by Catholicism, has its basis in "perverted sexuality." There is enough plausibility in the theory to make it mischievous. The allegorical interpretation ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... him or you wouldn't ask. Have you ever had to face someone who is simply incarnate Saintliness and Disapproval, who—' ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... shall write to-day, was the first of the great writers born in the nineteenth century, and he lived from 1801 to 1890. Besides being a master of English prose he was no mean poet; but above all else he was a man of immense personal power, which was strangely associated with a manifest saintliness which compelled diffidence from those admitted to ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... equally proficient in every line of activity. Only one actual poet within our period, William Morris, can be taken as representative of such a type, and he does not afford a strong argument for the poet's distinctive virtue, inasmuch as tradition does not represent him as numbering remarkable saintliness among ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... alighted, and there was Miss Philippa Furlong sitting behind the chauffeur in the Newberrys' motor. She was looking as beautiful as only the younger sister of a High Church episcopalian rector can look, dressed in white, the colour of saintliness, on a beautiful morning ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... the saintliness of Holy Bishop Gudmund has affected me so much, my lord, that I forgot to have all the bells of the church rung. ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... treaty obligations, scorn for weaker peoples. We in England would feel even deeper sadness than weighs upon us now if we could suppose that such principles had been embraced by the nation whose thinkers have done so much for human progress and who have produced so many shining examples of Christian saintliness; but when those principles have been ostentatiously proclaimed, when a peaceful neutral country which the other belligerent had solemnly and repeatedly undertaken to respect has been invaded and ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... spirit, which there can be little doubt about, may not threaten the existence of Spain, but it threatens the existence of the last great fortress of mediaeval splendour and beauty and romance. France, the chosen land of Saintliness and Catholicism, has been swept clear of mediaevalism. England, even though it is the chosen land of Compromise, has in the sphere of religion witnessed destructive revolutions and counter-revolutions. What can save the Church in Spain from perishing by that sword ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... 1115; had been successively Prior of Canterbury and Abbot of Peterborough; built at both those places as well as at Rochester; famous for saintliness, and a great authority on canon law; perhaps best known generally by Sterne's comments in "Tristram Shandy" on the terrible excommunication curse contained in his "Textus Roffensis"; ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... indulgently. As a man he was so exquisitely worldly that he fully merited the name of the Heavenly Worldling bestowed on him by an admiring duchess, and withal his texture was shot with a pattern of such genuine saintliness that one felt that whoever else might hold the keys of Paradise he, at least, possessed a private latchkey to ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... Paris, where the Roman Catholic system was at that time showing more corruption than it has ever done before or since in any other place, naturally threw him into sympathy with the Reformed. The reaction that half a century later filled the Gallican Church with saintliness had not set in; her ecclesiastics were the tools of a wicked and bloodthirsty court, who hated virtue as much as schism in the men whom they persecuted. The Huguenots were for the most part men whose instincts for truth and virtue ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a trifle sorry for him. Further, he belonged to the O'Brien nation, a stock to whom reverence was due. A stock not easily forgotten. The historic memory could reconstruct forgotten glories of station and battle, of terrible villainy and terrible saintliness, the pitiful, valorous, slow descent to the degradation which was not yet wholly victorious. A great stock! The O'Neills remembered it. The O'Tools and the MacSweeneys had stories by the hundred of love and hate. The Burkes and the Geraldines and ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... grasping her small black bag, went into the dining-room and returned, bearing a beaten egg, which she handed to her sister. In her walk there was the rigid austerity of a saint who has adopted saintliness not from inclination, but from the force of a necessity against which rebellion has been in vain. Her plain, prominent features wore, from habit, a look of sullen martyrdom that belied her natural kindness of heart; and even her false brown front was arranged in little hard, ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... wonderful, that from such a man should come one side of the perfection of that idealism which Giotto had begun. Fra Angelico's angels, saints, Saviour, and Virgin are more divinely calm, pure, sweet, endowed with a more exulting saintliness, a more immortal youth and joy, and a more utter self-abnegation and sympathetic tenderness than are to be found in the saints and the angels, the Saviour and the Virgin of other painters. Neither is it surprising ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... marvellous. Other heads elsewhere have no doubt achieved similar results by other means, though we have never come across an example equally remarkable. The goal can be reached, presumably, by the road of saintliness. It might be reached, though it is doubtful, by the road of Puritanism and "efficiency," the appeal to abstinence and "living hard." It cannot be reached, that is certain, by merely disciplinary methods and the appeal to fear, for the ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... the world of theology. We may search the famous 'Rule and Exercises of Holy Living' from cover to cover, and not learn that Jeremy Taylor would have thought that any activity of the district-visitor or the Salvation lassie came within the category of saintliness. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse |
