"Beneficent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... morning and evening twilight. He contemplates it as the prime mover in a variety of machines, as impelling ships across the ocean, raising balloons to the region of the clouds, blowing our furnaces, raising water from the deepest pits, extinguishing fires, and performing a thousand other beneficent agencies, without which our globe would cease to be habitable. No one can doubt that all these views and contemplations have a direct tendency to enlarge the capacity of the mind, to stimulate its faculties, and to ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... of greater import brought in by Mr. Burnand's editorship than the literary tone. It was tolerance, political and religious, and wider sympathy than had lately been the case. The heavy political partisanship of Tom Taylor gave way to the more beneficent neutrality of Mr. Burnand—a personal neutrality, at least, even though Whig proclivities still coloured the cartoons to a certain, yet not unreasonable degree. And a larger religious tolerance and warmer magnanimity developed in Punch, such as ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... in the struggle of chastity against licentiousness, to which the religious sanction brings reinforcement. But the Hebrew God has a savage and vindictive quality, which only slowly and partially disappears. Originally, it is probable, the God of the sun and fire, beneficent to illumine, malevolent to burn, he remains always in some degree a ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... that in the true liberal spirit of Christian piety, tolerance and humanity displayed by Las Casas, a popish Spanish priest; in the noble indignation, the inflexible fortitude, and the intrepid patriotism and virtue of Orozimbo; in the valour, the beneficent wisdom, and the, ardent connubial fidelity and affection of the young Alonzo, in the tenderness, the simplicity, the conjugal and maternal virtues of Cora, and in the artless display of vivid patriotism in the old blind ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... will be slow in their progress, and likely, if not proceeded upon with caution and management, rather to create a spirit of resistance, or to occasion them to emigrate still further from the seat of government, than answer the beneficent views with which they might be undertaken. In fact, it seems to me the proper system of policy to observe to them is to interfere as little as possible in their domestic concerns and interior economy; to consider them rather as distant communities dependent upon the Government ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... of Quissac rises the residence of beneficent owners, master and mistress, alas! long since gone to their rest. From its terrace the eye commands a vast and beautiful panorama, a richly cultivated plain dotted with villages and framed by the blue Cvennes. ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Norfolk, occupying the elbow of the coast, having the Wash on the west and the German Ocean on the north, lies the deanery of Heacham, a district in which the Le Stranges have for at least seven centuries exercised their beneficent influence. Heacham itself is a large township extending over some 4,900 acres. The manorial rights appear to have extended over the whole parish. The series of Court Rolls is almost unbroken for the reign of Edward III. During the ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... may rail against money, Spurn its beneficent power; Bears spurn impossible honey, Foxes the grapes that are sour. Men, who can never be funny, Scoff at the funny man's dower; Lands where it seldom is sunny Find ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... good; not by revolution but by evolution has man worked out his destiny. We shall miss the central feature of all progress unless we hold to that process now. It is not a question of whether our institutions are perfect. The most beneficent of our institutions had their beginnings in forms which would be particularly odious to us now. Civilization began with war and slavery; government began in absolute despotism; and religion itself grew out of superstition which was oftentimes marked with human sacrifices. So out of our present ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... prayer that God would crown it with honor, protect it from treason, and send it down to our children, with all the blessings of civilization, liberty and religion. Terrible in battle, may it be beneficent in peace. Happily, no bird or beast of prey has been inscribed upon it. The stars that redeem the night from darkness, and the beams of red light that beautify the morning, have been united upon its folds. As long as the sun endures, or the stars, may it wave over a nation neither ...
— The Flag Replaced on Sumter - A Personal Narrative • William A. Spicer
... has closed over this race They are holy demons upon the earth, Beneficent, averters of ills, guardians of mortal men.' (Hesiod, Works ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... perfectly willing to believe that doughnuts were a very beneficent institution; but just then he was too busily occupied to be sentimental ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... supporter of the canals, or that, like DeWitt Clinton, he had been removed as canal commissioner on purely political grounds. The issues were national—not state. Van Buren clearly saw the force and direction of public sentiment. Yet his sub-treasury measure, so beneficent in its aims that its theory was not lost in the necessities growing out of the Civil War, proved the strongest weapon in the armory of his opponents. Webster, with mingled pathos and indignation, denounced his "disregard ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... strength and peace and greatness as a nation; in all that touches the permanence and security of our Government and the beneficent institutions on which it rests; in all that affects the character and dispositions of our people and tests our capacity to enjoy and uphold the equal and free condition of society, now permanent and universal ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... guard your gates, who punish souls, who devour the bodies of the dead, who advance over them at their examination in the places of destruction, who give right and truth to the soul and to the divine khu, the beneficent one, the mighty one, whose throne is holy in Akert, who is endowed with soul like Ra and who is praised like Osiris, lead ye along the King of the North and of the South, (Usr-Maat-Ra-setep-en-Amen), the son of the ...
— Egyptian Literature
... merciful, lenient, beneficent, compassionate, benign, tender; graceful, elegant; courteous, debonair, complaisant, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... by the words "Lead, kindly Light"? It suggests something that has life (moves on before), and sheds a beneficent light on ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... private one. I am one of that number who have long loved and esteemed Mr Pope; and had often declared it was not his capacity or writings (which we ever thought the least valuable part of his character), but the honest, open, and beneficent man, that we most esteemed, and loved in him. Now if what these people say were believed, I must appear to all my friends either a fool, or a knave; either imposed on myself, or imposing on them; so that I am as much interested ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... could not at first discover the beating. Stiff and suffering as these young fellows were, it was no easy matter to get the window back into place and re-light the fire. They had tied flasks of liquor about their waists; and this beneficent fluid they used with that sense of appreciation which only a pioneer can feel toward whiskey. It was hours before Catherine rewarded them with a gleam of consciousness. Her body had been frozen in many places. Her arms, outstretched ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... they viewed matters, a moral defense for their labor system—sound, logical, invincible. It warranted them in drawing together for the protection of an institution so necessary, so inevitable, so beneficent. ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... and she remembered Wilhelmina, and thought of the happiness of little Hilda Maginnis and her mother. Was it nothing that God had endowed her with this beneficent power? How could she shrink from the blessedness of dispensing the divine mercy? Her imagination took flame at the vision of a life of usefulness and devotion to those ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... with whose mysterious secrets she alone, perhaps, in the world, was acquainted, resigned like the Mussulman, and as fatalistic; with the Jew, expectant of the Messiah's coming; with the Christian, a worshipper of Christ, whose beneficent morality she practised—she invested the whole in the fantastic colours and supernatural dreams of an imagination steeped in the light of the East, and, it would seem, the revelations of the Arabian astrologists. A strange and yet sublime medley, which it is much easier to ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... make oblations to his cenotaph twice a year, and propitiate his ghost with offerings of water to allay his thirst in the lower world. The primaeval serpent-worship is perpetuated in the reverence paid to traditional village-snakes. Of the local ghosts some are beneficent. Sometimes they are only mischievous, like Robin Goodfellow, and will milk the cows, and sour the milk, or pull your hair, if you wander about at night in certain well-known uncanny places. A more dangerous ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... she is the Moon. He is beneficent; but she is malignant, like the female demon of the Algonquins. They have a bark house, made like those of the Iroquois, at the end of the earth, and they often come to feasts and dances in the Indian villages. Jouskeha raises ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... have wished to know, at least, what children, besides Francois, Madame Arouet had: once for all, How many children? Name them, with year of birth, year of death, according to the church-registers: they all, at any rate, had that degree of history! No; even that has not been done. Beneficent correspondents of my own make answer, after some research, No register of the Arouets anywhere to be had. The very name VOLTAIRE, if you ask whence came it? there is no answer, or worse than none.—The fit "History" of this man, which might be one of the shining Epics of his Century, and the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... to Ceylon, and Krishna, the divine cowherd, perhaps some fabled hero sprung from the indigenous tribes. Siva is the mountain-god of the Himalayas and a moon-deity, and in his character of god of destruction the lightning and cobra are associated with him. But he is really worshipped in his beneficent form of the phallic emblem as the agent of life, and the bull, the fertiliser of the soil and provider of food. Devi, the earth, is the great mother goddess. Sprung from her are Hanuman, the monkey-god, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... threw her arms round his neck, and kissed him. The people who witnessed this touching scene, became silent. With folded hands and tearful eyes they admired her who had ever been an affectionate and grateful daughter as well as a beneficent sovereign, and their prayers ascended to heaven for her welfare. Half carried in the arms of her father, Louisa entered the palace, and ascended the staircase. The doors of the large reception-room were open. The king met her; her two oldest sons stood behind him, and her two youngest ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... directing belief. If the public reservoir is not filled by an intermittent flow, by sudden freshets, by obscure infiltrations of the mystic faculty, it is regularly and openly fed by the constant contributions of the normal faculties. On the other hand, confronting faith, by the side of that beneficent divination which, answering the demands of conscience and the emotions, fashions the ideal world and makes the real world conform to this, it poses the testing process which, analyzing the past and the present, disengages possible laws and the probabilities of the future. Doctrine likewise has its ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... have, indeed, miscalculated on thee. I calculated on a prudent son, Who would have blessed the hand beneficent That plucked him back from the abyss—and lo! A fascinated being I discover, Whom his two eyes befool, whom passion wilders, Whom not the broadest light of noon can heal. Go, question him! Be mad enough, I pray thee. The purpose of thy father, of thy emperor, Go, give it up ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the people among whom he dwelt. Hers, however, was the nobler motive, and the less selfish, for it involved self-sacrifice, even though it was mistaken, and could lead only to wrong action. It would cost him nothing to carry out his large, beneficent purposes. Indeed, they would add to his pleasures and enhance his reputation. She was but a woman, and saw no other path of escape from the conditions of her lot except the thorny one ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... of all—the waiting. Most of that day he crouched and waited and watched, as the sun's work was done; that great bright orb, his ally; he had known times when it was beneficent and times when it was cruel, but now in his ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... STEPHEN (1804-1875).—Poet and antiquary, ed. at Cheltenham and Oxf., became parson of Morwenstow, a smuggling and wrecking community on the Cornish coast, where he exercised a reforming and beneficent, though extremely unconventional, influence until his death, shortly before which he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. He wrote some poems of great originality and charm, Records of the Western Shore (1832-36), and The Quest of ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Nature wore her mildest, most beneficent aspect. She very evidently cared nothing for the squalid tragedies of human fate. Her hills were bathed in gentle light. Her sunshine lay warm along the cottage fronts. In the gardens her hopeful bees, cheated into thoughts of summer, droned round the ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... manifest. There were no more dissensions on board the vessels as to places of worship, and the Catholics were, as a consequence, enabled to observe their religious duties without fear of annoyance. The beneficent influence of this policy extended to the settlement, where the people lived in peace, and were not subject to the petty quarrels which arose through a difference ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... walked the London streets, peopled an imaginary world of my own with a few hundreds of such beings, made flesh and blood, and pictured them as a kind of beneficent aristocracy seven feet high, with minds and manners to match their physique, and set above the rest of the world for its good; for I found it necessary (so that my dream should have a point) to provide them with a foil in the shape of millions of such people as we meet every day. I was egotistic ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... the Roman Catholics were of course quarrelling with it, and therefore the Roman Catholics must be kept down. Such had been Mr. Daly's general outlook into life. But now the advancing evil of the time was about to fall even upon himself, and upon his beneficent labours, done for the world at large. It was whispered in County Galway that the people were about to rise and interfere with fox-hunting! It may be imagined that on this special day Mr. Daly's heart was low beneath his black-striped waistcoat, ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... modern church with a dome and two towers now occupies the summit, with a paved road leading up to it. It is chiefly noted, first, by antiquaries, as having originally been a great temple of Quetzalcoatl, the beneficent deity, famous in story; and, secondly, for the fierce struggle around the mound and on the slopes between the Mexicans ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... seen that God's creation of the world is due to his goodness. His first act of kindness was that he gave being to the things of the world. He showed himself especially beneficent to man in enabling him to attain perfect happiness by means of the commandments and prohibitions which were imposed upon him. The reward consequent upon obedience was the real purpose ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... often forget that, in order to make effective such a universally beneficent law, any means are justified. It will be, I hope, only a matter of years before this distrust of the "sneak" will have died out, and the Dry Agent will come to be regarded with the reverence and respect due to one who devotes his life ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... Like all the poets of this late period, his verse lacks form, is rugged and pompous, moving upon the stilts of classic reminiscences, and coining monstrous new expressions for itself; but its feeling is always sincere. It was the last gleam of a setting sun of literature that fell upon this one beneficent figure. He was born in the district of Treviso near Venice, and crossed the Alps a little before the great Lombard invasion, while the Merovingians, following in the steps of Chlodwig, were outdoing each other in bloodshed and cruelty. ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... been baffled in the most mysterious way; and just when baffled, and there seemed no choice but to cut his own throat or some one else's, up turned grim Arabella Crane, in the iron-gray gown, and with the iron-gray ringlets,—hatefully, awfully beneficent,—offering food, shelter, gold,—and some demoniacal, honourable work. Often had he been in imminent peril from watchful law or treacherous accomplice. She had warned and saved him, as she had saved him from the fell Gabrielle Desmarets, who, unable to bear the sentence of penal servitude, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The Trumpet-Major. This worthy, who was deaf and talked in an uncompromisingly loud voice, had been struck in the head by a piece of shell at Valenciennes in '93. His left arm had been smashed. Time and Nature had done what they could, and under their beneficent influences the arm had become a sort of anatomical rattle-box. People interested in Corp'el Tullidge were allowed to see his head and hear his arm. The corp'el gave these private views at any time, and was quite willing ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... different regions of the earth are placed in respect to their capacity of production for animal and vegetable food, we shall see that this adjustment of the constitution of man, both to the differences of climate and to the changes of the seasons, is a very wise and beneficent arrangement of Divine Providence. To confine man absolutely either to animal or vegetable food would be to depopulate a large part ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... the earth as a godlike existence with personal powers, and represented as a beneficent mother bestowing peace and plenty on all her worthy worshipers. In evidence of this we find the names, Maa-emae (mother-earth), and Maan-emo (mother of the earth), given to the Finnish Demeter. She is always represented as a goddess of great powers, and, after suitable invocation, is ever willing ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... Christian community I am quite convinced that we should see that our social problems were there solved. I think then we shall be right to insist that what is needed is not less otherworldliness but more: that more otherworldliness would work a social revolution of a beneficent character. The result might be that we should spend less of our national income on preparations for war and more in making the conditions of life tolerable for the poor; that we should begin to pay something of the same sort of care for the training of children that we now ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... proof argues that the world can owe its origin only to an intelligent first cause. The evidence for this is furnished by the cunning contrivances and beneficent adaptations of nature. These could not have come about through chance or the working of mechanical forces, but only through the foresight of a rational will. This argument originally infers God from the character of nature and history; and the extension of mechanical ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Virtue is undoubtedly beneficent; but the man is to be envied to whom her ways seem in anywise playful. And, though she may not talk much about suffering and self-denial, her silence on that topic may be accounted for on the principle ca va sans dire. The calculation of the greatest happiness is not performed quite ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... was numb to the passion and affairs of life. I suffered no agony of any sort; 'twas as though I had newly emerged from unconsciousness—the survivor of some natural catastrophe, fallen by act of God, conveying no blame to me—a survivor upon whom there still lingered a beneficent stupor of body. Presently I discovered myself in a new world, with which, thinks I, brisking up, I must become familiar, having no unmanly regret, but a courageous heart to fare through the maze of it; and like a curious child I peered about upon ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... to our supremacy as a nation and to the beneficent purposes of our Government than a sound and stable currency. Its exposure to degradation should at once arouse to activity the most enlightened statesmanship, and the danger of depreciation in the purchasing power of the wages paid to toil should furnish ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... however, aside from its bad name and its repulsive aspect, which its gay trappings do not conceal, its whole life is beneficent. It is a scavenger, being like that class ugly and repulsive, and holding literally, among insects, the lowest rank in society. In the water, it preys upon young mosquitoes and the larvae of other noxious insects. It thus aids in maintaining ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... life with nothing of what we call achievement, and yet a life beneficent to every other life that it touched, like a summer wind laden with a thousand invisible seeds that, dropping everywhere, spring up into flowers and fruit. It is a name which to most readers of these words is wholly unknown, and which will not be written, like that of so many of the ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... was a druggist, a fellow of a sharp wit, keen, crafty; and, being one even-tide in company with him, asked him of their King and his polity; to which the other answered, saying, "Well, our King is just and righteous in his governance, equitable to his lieges and beneficent to his commons and abhorreth nothing in the world save sorcerers; but, whenever a sorcerer or sorceress falls into his hands, he casteth them into a pit without the city and there leaveth them in hunger ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... his great career did he lose his affection for the useful arts and common interests of mankind. He is the founder of the American Philosophical Society, and of a college which grew into the present University of Pennsylvania. To him is due the origin of a great hospital which is still doing beneficent work. He raised, and caused to be disciplined, ten thousand men for the defense of the country. He was a successful publisher of the literature of the common people, yet a literature that was renowned. He could turn his attention ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... and refreshing as if the beneficent spirit of Carlo Borromeo still haunted the enchanted lake, prepared the three for a day of calm delights. The morning was spent floating over the lake in a luxuriously cushioned boat with a gay awning and a picturesque rower, to visit Isola Bella. Everyone knows what a little Paradise has ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... loud winds, winter—these were inimical; with these came the death pack, stealthy and untiring, following for ever the trail of the defenceless. Sunlight, soft airs, bright colours, kindness—these were beneficent havens to flee into. Such was the essence of her creed, the only creed she held, and it lay darkly in her heart, never expressed even to herself. But when she ran into the night to comfort the little fox, she was living up to her faith ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... hand-painting sofa cushions, and similar prime necessities of farm life. To transform his static savings into dynamic assets for itself was Worthington's basic purpose in holding its gala week. And now this beneficent plan was threatened by one individual, and he young, inexperienced, and a new Worthingtonian, Mr. Harrington Surtaine. This unforeseen cloud upon the horizon of peace, prosperity, and happiness rose into the ken of Dr. Surtaine ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... gift in the stores of the immortals. Then a wicked fairy came and turned the skeleton in her beautiful body to gold; and, lo! the princess who had been fashioned to bless mankind carried, hidden from sight by her innocent and beneficent charms, a terrible curse. Men came to kiss, and stayed to tear away her flesh with their teeth. When her skeleton has been torn forth, even to the uttermost rib, then the spell of the wicked fairy will be broken, and California be the most gracious ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... in aiding the amelioration of their less fortunate fellow-creatures, and in the dispensation of that charity which covers a multitude of sins they have made their vast wealth subordinate to the service of their day and generation—the humble but yet potent means to the most beneficent ends. By every consideration, therefore, the honoured name of Baird is entitled to a place ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... had a curious book on the virtues of plants, and he made decoctions of many kinds, which he administered to those in want of medicine. Before the Poor Law provided Union doctors, medical advice, except at the hospital, was almost out of reach of the poor. Mr. and Mrs. Yonge, like almost all other beneficent gentlefolks in villages, kept a medicine chest and book, and doctored such cases as they could venture on, and Mr. Stainer was in great favour as practitioner, as many of our elder people can remember. He was exceedingly charitable and kind, and ready to give his help ...
— Old Times at Otterbourne • Charlotte M. Yonge
... some reason or another, an extraordinary weakness for causing arrests to be made; and, exceedingly do I rejoice to think that by now the worms of the graveyard must have consumed him down to the very marrow of his bones. Would that certain other acquaintances of mine were similarly receiving beneficent attention! ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... wonderful world as this, and so I came away; and it was then that something occurred which (for everything so far has been sheer prologue) led to these remarks. I was passing the crowd about one of the gentlemen—the more brazenly confident one—who deny the existence of a beneficent Creator, when the words, "Looking like a dying duck in a thunderstorm," clanged out, followed by a roar of delighted laughter; and in a flash I remembered precisely where I was when, forty and more years ago, I first heard from ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... small schoolmasters; yet not only do I not question in literature the high utility of criticism, but I should be tempted to say that the part it plays may be the supremely beneficent one when it proceeds from deep sources, from the efficient combination of experience and perception. In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of mankind, a torch-bearing outrider, the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... barriers, and plunge forward again with ever accelerating force. The record of iron is at once a record of our glory and of our humiliation,—a record of marvellous, inborn, God-given genius, reaching forth in manifold directions to compass most beneficent ends, but baffled, thwarted, fiercely and persistently resisted by obstinacy, blindness, and stupidity, and gaining its ends, if it gain them at all, only by address the most sagacious, courage the most invincible, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... it on. If our intellectual and spiritual thought is aflame, whether as nation or individual, we may purify it, energize it, give it power to form and arrange the atoms around it—and we have a new literature, a new and beneficent, creative social vehicle of intercourse, mutual understanding, and human unification. Or if our mental or spiritual life is stale, and petty, or egoistic, or seeking for enjoyment only rather than action; if we have nothing in us to give ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... they are the rude exponents. The marvellous spread of Spiritualism, whose god is the UNKNOWABLE, and whose prophet was Swedenborg, is but the polished form of the Mpongwe Ibambo and Ilogo; the beneficent phantasms have succeeded to the malevolent ghosts, the shadowy deities of man's childhood; as the God of Love formerly took the place of the God of Fear. The future of Spiritualism, which may be defined as "Hades with Progress," is making serious inroads upon the coarse belief, worthy ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... meant ruin and destruction to the "Blue Mass Company," who had bought from a paternal and beneficent Government lands which didn't belong to it. The Mexican grant, of course, antedated the occupation of the mine by Concho, Wiles, Pedro, et al., as well as by the "Blue Mass Company," and the solitary partners, Biggs and Thatcher. ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... wealth. The effect of this upon the people was strikingly portrayed in their countenances. Instead of the depressed and gloomy looks seen on the desolated plains belonging to the Pasha of Damascus, health and hilarity everywhere prevailed. Under a wise and beneficent government, the produce of the Holy Land, it is asserted, would exceed all calculation. Its perennial harvests, the salubrity of its air, its limpid springs, its rivers, lakes, plains, hills, and vales, added to the serenity of its climate, ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... feeble old man, always nursed by women, had the misfortune to marry, for his third wife, the most infamous woman in Roman annals (Valeria Messalina), under whose influence the reign, at first beneficent, became disgraceful. Claudius was entirely ruled by her. She amassed fortunes, sold offices, confiscated estates, and indulged in guilty loves. She ruled like a Madame de Pompadour, and degraded the throne which she ought to have exalted. The influence of ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... only in that residue of it which survives, namely, the wisdom which it ought to have taught us. Englishmen are invited to consider the history of Ireland solely from that point of view. They are prayed to purge themselves altogether of pity, indignation, and remorse; these are emotions far too beneficent to waste on things outside the ambit of our own immediate life. If they are wise they will come to Irish history as to a school, and they will learn one lesson that runs through it like the refrain of a ballad. A very simple lesson it is, just this: ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... without any attempt at disguise, though carrying one under his arm, had not met with the untoward fate which it undoubtedly deserved. The darkness of the night and the thin sheet of rain as it fell had effectually wrapped his progress through the lonely streets in their beneficent mantle of gloom; the soft mud below had drowned the echo of his footsteps. If spies were on his track, as Jeanne had feared and Blakeney prophesied, he had certainly succeeded ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... aboriginal household, dried and undecayed. Father, mother, son and daughter, one by one, as death had overtaken them, had been brought thither, bound so as to keep in death the attitude that had marked them when at their rest in life, and there they bore their silent but impressive witness to the beneficent action of the unmoist air that had stayed decay and kept them innocuous to the living that survived them. In Peru, instances of this simple, wholesome process abound on almost every side; upon the elevated plains and heights, as also beside the sea, the dead of Inca lineage, with the lowliest ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... it yours to assuage for inadequate wage our unseemly contentions and quarrels, Be it yours to maintain your respectable reign in the sphere of Political Morals; And, relying no more on the shedding of gore or the rule of torpedoes and sabres, Make beneficent plots for dividing in lots the domains ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... every wholesome and beneficent usage, I accept thankfully as part of the inheritance which good, or wise, or brave men have left as their legacy for my use and assistance; but it is my bounden duty to measure them all by the standard of ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... and the submission of the Jews, and Gentiles with them, to his authority. The disciples of Jesus, believing him to be the Christ, believed that he was to come as such. He had come as Prophet, as Teacher, as a worker of beneficent miracles, but he had not yet come as Christ, as King. They were not asking about any second coming after his death and resurrection, for they did not believe that he was to die. They were asking for his present triumphant manifestation and ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... WERE THEY DONE AWAY WITH?—Under the beneficent influence of the early coal dews—subsequently spelt coal dues—which have existed from the earliest times, City and Metropolitan Improvements have sprung up into existence. Now, thanks to ignorant, but well-meaning ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., January 3, 1891. • Various
... before the dignified old man and kissed his hand respectfully. He patted her auburn hair softly. "Happy man for whom this sunny head shall shine! Joy and love beam in her eyes." He turned to his princely friend. "What an ocean of beneficent happiness lies in the young ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... philosophic idea was advanced—giving the lie to Miss Francis' dictum that no new thoughts were being thought—which was, briefly, that the Grass was essentially a good thing in itself; that the world had not merely made the best of a bad situation, but had been brought to a beneficent condition through the loss of the Western Hemisphere. Mankind had desperately needed a brake upon its heedless course; some instrumentality to limit it and bring it to realization of its proper province. The Grass had acted as such ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... mystery that shrouds a prophetic utterance, particularly if it be an ominous one (for so constituted apparently is the human mind that it will receive the impress of an evil prophecy far more readily than it will that of a beneficent one, possibly through subservient fear to the thing it dreads, possibly through the degraded, morbid attraction which the sense of evil has for the innate evil in the human mind), leads many people to pay a certain respect to superstitious theories. Not that they wholly believe in them or would ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... notorious fact that the public land laws have been deflected from their beneficent original purpose of home-making by lax administration, short-sighted departmental decisions, and the growth of an unhealthy public sentiment in portions of the West. Great areas of the public domain ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... a Secretary of Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce in the cabinet, after the manner of France, Italy, and Prussia, the farmer himself, individually, must work some important and radical changes in his social and industrial polity, and prepare himself for the generous assistance of a wise and beneficent Government. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... for instance, in long explorations while near one's own fireside, stimulating the restive or sluggish mind, if need be, by reading some suggestive narrative of travel in distant lands. One could enjoy the beneficent results of a sea bath, too, even in Paris. All that is necessary is to visit the Vigier baths situated in a boat on the Seine, far ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... committed to the principle that woman shall decide for herself whether she shall have a voice and vote in legislation or shall continue to be represented and legislated for exclusively by man. My own judgment is that woman's presence in the arena of politics would be useful and beneficent but I do not assume to judge for her. She must consider, determine and act for herself. Moreover, when she shall in earnest have resolved that her own welfare and that of the race will be promoted ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... flexibility, it can paint with vivid truthfulness the objects of the external world, it reacts at the same time upon thought, and animates it, as it were, with the breath of life. It is this mutual reaction which makes words more than mere signs and forms of thought; and the beneficent influence of a language is most strikingly manifested on its native soil, where it has sprung spontaneously from the minds of the people, whose character it embodies. Proud of a country that seeks to concentrate her strength in intellectual unity, the writer recalls with ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... act the ordeal of silence is imposed upon Tamino. Pamina cannot understand his apparent coldness, and is inclined to listen to the counsels of her mother, who tries to induce her to murder Sarastro. The priest, however, convinces her of his beneficent intentions. The lovers go through the ordeals of fire and water successfully, and are happily married. The Queen of Night and her dark kingdom perish everlastingly, and the reign of peace and wisdom is universally established. The humours of Papageno in his search ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... the scene, the sweet salt breath of the sea, thinking intently of Rachel Trant's experience, of her fatal weakness, of the unpitying severity of that rule of law under which we social atoms are constrained to live; of the evident fact that were we but wise and good we might always be the beneficent arbiters of our own fate; that there are few pleasures which have not their price; and after all, though she, Katherine, had paid high for hers, it had not cost too much, considering she had been groping in the dimness of imperfect knowledge. Oh, hew she wished she had never ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... Records contain many references to the wide and beneficent influence exerted by Mr. Griffin while acting in his two-fold capacity of teacher ...
— In Ancient Albemarle • Catherine Albertson
... human over-life may take either beneficent or maleficent or neutral aspects towards the general life of humanity. It may present itself as law and pacification, as a positive addition and superstructure to the Normal Social Life, as roads and markets and cities, as courts and unifying monarchies, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... the Constitution came at last under the tremendous pressure of civil war. We ourselves are witnesses that the Union emerged from the blood and fire of that conflict purified and made stronger for all the beneficent purposes of good government. ...
— Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. VIII.: James A. Garfield • James D. Richardson
... advantage of dealing with the estates as a whole instead of with individual holdings, and it substituted the principle of speedy purchase for that of dilatory litigation. This remarkable and generous measure initiated a great and beneficent revolution, but every popular and useful feature of the Act of 1903 was distorted or destroyed in the Land Act which the present Government passed at the instigation of the Irish Nationalist Party in 1909. In Mr. Wyndham's ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... when we behold that magnificent gleaming of the sea, which almost resembles liquid silver reflecting the stars of heaven, we are witnessing the frolicsome and joyous gambols of those myriads of little beings to whom the beneficent Creator has assigned ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... for the young man to consider is not what effect the tenant system has upon the welfare of the nation or what political ills may be connected with farm mortgages, but how to make use of these necessary and beneficent agencies for the acquirement of a farm. A system of tenancy which leads to absent landlordism and a permanent tenant class is thoroughly vicious, while a practice which enables a man to become, within a reasonable period, a land-owning farmer is a thoroughly ...
— The Young Farmer: Some Things He Should Know • Thomas Forsyth Hunt
... imagine any difference in opinions, merely speculative, ever can give just occasion to an unfavourable distinction among members of the same society, partakers of the same human nature, and children of one common indulgent Parent, the almighty and beneficent Creator of ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... academic duties. Take my arm, and we shall walk in the sunshine. Surely we cannot wonder that Eastern people should have made a deity of the sun. It is the great beneficent force of Nature—man's ally against cold, sterility, and all that is abhorrent to ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that only time, that beneficent healer, could deaden her child's pain. Fern's gentle nature was capable of quiet but intense feeling. Nea's faithful and ardent affections were reproduced in her child. It was not only the loss of her girlish dreams over which Fern mourned. Her woman's love had unconsciously rooted itself, and ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... pernicious in the activity of woman in the field of politics: I even believe that her activity in this respect will be highly salutary and beneficent not only for womankind, but for society in general. It will serve to instruct woman and give her a more extensive knowledge of the world and of life. She will not be considered as an outsider where society and government are concerned and will ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... deaths among the cases treated at the Institute was rather higher, if anything, than might have been expected had there been no Institute in existence. But to the public every Pasteur patient who did not die was miraculously saved from an agonizing death by the beneficent white magic of that most trusty of all wizards, the man ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... repaired roads, maintained a bridge priest and a rood priest, and held a great annual feast at which the brethren consumed as much as 6 calves, 16 lambs, 80 capons, 80 geese, and 800 eggs. It was a very munificent and beneficent corporation, and erected these almshouses for thirteen poor men and the same number of poor women. That hospital founded so long ago still exists. It is a curious and ancient structure in one storey, and is denoted Christ's Hospital. One of ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... least, that Galds was careful not to be caught enslaved by any dogma, and they show, too, that he set no store by the letter of the law, and prized only the spirit. That is the secret of his fondness for the dangerous situation of the beneficent lie, or justifiable false oath, which brought him severe criticism when he first used it in Los condenados (II, 16), and which nevertheless he repeated in an equally conspicuous climax in Sor Simona (II, 10). Galds defended the lie through which good may come, in ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... them—They are double taxes upon the gratitude of a worthy heart. Is it not enough for a generous mind to labour under a sense of obligation?—Pride, vain-glory, must be the motive of such narrow-minded benefactors: a truly beneficent spirit cannot take delight in beholding the quivering lip indicating the palpitating heart; in seeing the downcast countenance, the up-lifted hands, and working muscles, of a fellow-creature, who, but for unfortunate accidents, would ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... withhold from man,—that of stating the laws of his spiritual being and the beliefs he accepts without hindrance except from clearer views of truth,—he seems to want nothing for a large, wholesome, noble, beneficent life. In fact, the chief danger is that he will think the whole planet is made for him, and forget that there are some possibilities left in the debris of the old-world civilization which deserve a certain respectful consideration ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... ten pieces of gold are ten pieces! To me at least! And the potion, which was made after a recipe of that same Messer Laurens of Paris, cost no less. It is a love-philtre, beneficent to the young, but if taken by the old so noxious, that had you swallowed it," with a grin, "you had not been long Syndic, ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... again, there is again the same result; and so on perpetually. In all its dealings with inorganic nature it finds this unswerving persistence, which listens to no excuse, and from which there is no appeal; and very soon recognising this stern though beneficent discipline, it soon becomes extremely careful not to transgress. These general truths hold throughout adult life as well as throughout infantile life. If further proof be needed that the natural reaction is not only the most efficient penalty, but that no humanly devised penalty can replace it, we ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... grant, that my converts may attain to a perfect knowledge of the truth of the Gospel, be beneficent, and doing good works ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... from this? When we have completed the conquest of the earth, when we have discovered God's laws of matter and force and are able to keep them, it means the abolition of all unnecessary pain, unnecessary pain, I say; for all that pain which is not beneficent, which is not inherent in the nature of things, is remedial. And we preach the gospel, the coming of God's kingdom when pain shall be ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... order of knighthood, by the title of the Knights of the Illustrious Order of St Patrick, of which the king and his heirs were to be sovereigns in perpetuity, and the viceroys grand masters. The patent stated as the general ground of this institution, "that it had been the custom of wise and beneficent princes of all ages to distinguish the virtue and loyalty of their subjects by marks of honour, as a testimony to their dignity, and excellency in all qualifications which render them worthy of the favour of their sovereign, and the respect of their fellow-subjects; ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... name of a Church. It was simply a branch of the Civil Service of the State. But Wesley and his brother, and Whitefield and the rest, fully believed at first that they could do something to quicken the Church into a real, a beneficent, and a religions activity. Most of them had for a long time a positive horror of open-air preaching and of the co-operation of lay preachers. Most of them for a long time clung to all the traditional forms and even formulas amid which they had grown up. What Wesley and the others ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... majority; the tendency of hearts and minds to occupy themselves with it exclusively; the agreement of individuals AND THE STATE in making it the motive and the end of all their projects, all their efforts, and all their sacrifices,—engender general or individual feelings which, beneficent or injurious, become principles of action more potent, perhaps, than any which have heretofore ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... code "one of the most perfect which the world has ever known". No wonder that in contemplating that gentle life Edwin Arnold should have found his personality "the highest, gentlest, holiest and most beneficent ... in the history of thought," and been moved to write his splendid verses. It is twenty-five hundred years since humanity put forth such a flower: who knows ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... circumstances required, to entitle an action to be denominated virtuous. It must have a tendency to produce good rather than evil to the race of man, and it must have been generated by an intention to produce such good. The most beneficent action that ever was performed, if it did not spring from the intention of good to others, is not of the nature of virtue. Virtue, where it exists in any eminence, is a species of conduct, modelled upon a true estimate of the good intended to be produced. He that makes a ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... speak, however, of the beneficent humorist who next had my boyish heart after Goldsmith, let me acquit myself in full of my debt to that not unequal or unkindred spirit. I have said it was long after I had read those histories, full of his inalienable charm, mere pot-boilers as they were, and far beneath his ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... dictators have been beneficent despots, such as Jose Francia, who, upon Paraguay proclaiming her independence in 1811, got elected President, and soon afterwards managed to secure his nomination as Dictator for life. He ruled Paraguay autocratically but well ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... Iroquois. It is in each case a ramification of a widespread legend in the tribes of the American aborigines, of a personal human being, with supernatural powers, an instructor of the arts of life; an example of the highest virtues, beneficent, wise, and immortal. ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... you had worn a boy's coat, or a fishskin, always, I had sense enough to see that it was a saint at play. Have you read all the odd stories about the saints and the Virgin—how they appear and vanish, and wear odd clothes, and play beneficent tricks with people? It was like that to me. I don't know how to say it, but I think when good people play, they have to be very, very good, or they don't really enjoy it. I don't know how to explain it, but the moderate sort ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... blanches, and White Women, met by wayfarers in forests, or in the three fairies or wise women of folk-tales, who appear at the birth of children. But sometimes they have become hateful hags. The Matres and other goddesses probably survived in the beneficent fairies of rocks and streams, in the fairy Abonde who brought riches to houses, or Esterelle of Provence who made women fruitful, or Aril who watched over meadows, or in beings like Melusine, Viviane, and others.[143] In Gallo-Roman ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... but that love was spiritual. It aimed not at a personal union, to die away in marriage, but at a deathless fruition in heroic achievements. This ideal appropriation of love, to engender self-abnegating valor and beneficent deeds, originated from the meeting of the two currents of martial history and the Christian religion in ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... thither at will like the young hart or gazelle! We grieve naturally if our children's feet are deformed or misshapen at birth, but what a crime it is to destroy the form and strength of the foot as God has made it! It is true that the Manchu women in China rejoice in the feet which the beneficent Creator has given them. The Dowager Empress—of whom we have read so much of late, and who rules China with an iron rod, has feet like any other woman; but millions of her countrywomen have been robbed of nature's endowment through a foolish and wicked custom which has prevailed in China from ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... years of the influential periodical "Nordisk Tidsskrift for Kristelig Teologi," and also of the outstanding foreign mission paper, "Dansk Missionsblad." Through these papers he exerted a powerful and always beneficent influence upon the churches of both Denmark and Norway. His outstanding and richly blest service was cut short by death in 1842 when he was only 37 years old. He was carried to the grave to the strains of his own appealing hymn: ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... many a shopkeeper to keep his connection together, and himself out of the workhouse. Why should the exertions of intellect be termed low, in the case of the mechanic, and vast, profound, and glorious, in that of the minister? It is the same precious gift of a beneficent power to all his creatures. As well may the sun be voted as excessively vulgar, because it, like intellect, assists all equally to perform their functions. I repeat, that nothing that has mind is, of necessity, low; and nothing is vulgar ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... sun, moon, and stars,—for the red cross is the star of morning, the white the evening star,—is surrounded by the symbols of the principal phenomena in nature that are regarded as essentially beneficent to mankind. Thus the terraced pyramids are the clouds, for the clouds appear to the Indian as staircases leading to heaven, and they in turn support the rainbow. The two principal beasts of prey, who feed upon game, like man, and whose strength, agility, and acute senses ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... course, and deserving neither rest, nor gratitude, nor commendation. One really sometimes feels inclined to regret that Abud or somebody else was not more relentless—to pray for a Sir Giles Overreach or a Shylock among the creditors. For such a one, by his apparently malevolent but really beneficent grasping, would have in effect liberated the bondsman, who, as it was, was compelled to toil at a hopeless task to his dying day, and to hasten that dying day by ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... our new school has laid hold on, and exaggerated and perverted. But in Coleridge's field of view they were comprised along with the complimental truths which limit them, and in their conjunction and co-ordination with which alone they retain the beneficent power of truth. He saw what our modern theologians see, though it was latent from the vulgar eyes in his days; but he also saw what they do not see, what they have closed their eyes on; and he saw far beyond them, because he saw ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle |
