"Civilisation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fellows, in search of the criminal. In vain I strove to quell the excitement, to stay the clamour, and to restore order; discipline and obedience indeed were at an end, distinctions of rank no longer existed, the ordinary restraints of civilisation were discarded, our frightful situation had reduced us to the condition of wild beasts, and my entreaties that the matter might be dealt with in something like judicial form might as well have been urged ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... music of an indifferent gramophone, recklessly mocking the sublime grandeur of the age-old antiquities. Laughter and gay music and devil-may-care colonists awaking echoes that have been more or less silent to civilisation for how many ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... became dominant in America; but the political connection was broken off mainly because English statesmen could only regard it from the shopkeeping point of view. When a new world began to arise at the Antipodes, our rulers saw an opportunity not for planting new offshoots of European civilisation, but for ridding themselves of the social rubbish no longer accepted in America. With purblind energy, and eyes doggedly fixed upon the ground at their feet, the race had somehow pressed forwards to illustrate the old doctrine that a man never goes so far as when ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... and Ketla chiefs, and baptized Ari. What is all this? and what is this, too, which the Esquimaux children taken in Markland told the Northmen, of a land beyond them where the folk wore white clothes, and carried flags on poles? Are these all dreams? or was some part of that great civilisation, the relics whereof your antiquarians find in so many parts of the United States, still in existence some 900 years ago; and were these old Norse cousins of ours upon the very edge of it? Be that as it may, how nearly did these fierce Vikings, some of whom seemed ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... was a shade paler than ordinary, but otherwise there was nothing in her appearance to arouse comment. Mackenzie sprang up from his chair as she approached and went forward to meet her. "I tried to find you directly I came, Miss Clinton," he said in his loud voice, which no course of civilisation would avail to subdue. "I've brought those sketches I ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... go back to slavery," he continued, "I shall bear it more philosophically. It was making me a brute, but I think there'll be no more danger of that. The memory of civilisation will abide with me. I shall remind myself that I was once a free man, and that ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... Bible Society was and is at its highest point of human service when distributing either the Old or the New Testament in Christian countries, Spain, England, or another. Few there be to-day in any country who, in the interests of civilisation, would deny to the Bible a wider distribution. In a remote village of Spain a Bible Society's colporteur, carrying a coloured banner, sold me a copy of Cipriano de Valera's New Testament for a peseta. The villages of Spain that ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... significance upon modern charts, even before the New Worlds appeared, when America, Australia, and the Eastern Archipelago were introduced upon the globe. The progress of Western Europe eclipsed the Oriental Powers which hitherto represented the civilisation of mankind, and two points alone remained, which, shorn of their ancient glory, still maintained their original importance as geographical centres, that will renew those struggles for their possession which fill the bloody pages of ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilisation and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... carcasses of the slaughtered buffalo, which had been done, and he now made the offer that, if I pleased, he would have the skins carefully dressed, and the skulls and horns preserved, so that I might take the whole back with me to civilisation, as trophies, upon my return. Of course I thanked him for his exceedingly generous offer, which I gladly accepted so far as the three buffalo killed by myself were concerned; and therewith we parted ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... that Vanamee had loved her, and less wonder, still, that his love had been so intense, so passionate, so part of himself. Angele had loved him with a love no less than his own. It was one of those legendary passions that sometimes occur, idyllic, untouched by civilisation, spontaneous as the growth of trees, natural as dew-fall, strong ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... now past twelve o'clock, when I found that it was necessary to change the chaise at every post. The country also, as well as the roads, had changed much for the worse. Cultivation was not so great, the roads were mountainous, and civilisation generally disappeared. It was nearly dark when I arrived at the last post, from whence I was to take horses to Mount Castle. As usual, the chaise also was to be changed; and I could not help observing that each change was from bad to worse. Rope harness was used, and the vehicles ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... welcome as in a club, and he could only be said to be out of place in his own country house, more especially at the time of an election for Gloucester. The modern love of landscape, of country life as an aesthetic pleasure, was unknown to him. Civilisation, refinement, seemed to him to be confined to London and Paris, to Bath or Tunbridge Wells. "Now sto per partire, and I ought in point of discretion to set out to-morrow, but I dare say 'twill be Friday evening before I'll have the courage to throw myself ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... must be very blind to the place which birds have taken in the progress of civilisation who can suppose it possible that they should think only of utility in such a question as the disposal of their tails. It is a common notion among those who have acquired some smattering of the theory of evolution that fishes developed into reptiles, reptiles into birds, and birds into ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... that I am now a Mandarin. I have taken the step on consideration. I think that any one who contributes to putting down this rebellion fulfils a humane task, and I also think tends a great deal to open China to civilisation. I will not act rashly, and I trust to be able soon to return to England; at the same time, I will remember your and my father's wishes, and endeavour to remain as short a time as possible. I can say that if I had not accepted the command, I believe the force would have ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... understand you. Certainly I should understand this language if I heard it from the Kings of Hanover or of Saxony. But I have, hitherto, looked upon Prussia as one of the Great Powers which, since the peace of 1815, have been guarantors of treaties, guardians of civilisation, defenders of the right, the real arbiters of the Nations; and for my part I have felt the divine responsibility of this sacred office, without undervaluing at the same time the heavy obligation, not unconnected with danger, which it imposes ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... justice and bravery. With great severity he examines his own conscience before proceeding to any action, however small. War he makes with all possible humanity, and only for the furtherance of civilisation. Nothing is more hated by Shakspere than a government of weak hands. From such an unfortunate cause came the Wars of the Two Roses. It seems that, in order to bring this fact home to the understanding of the people, Shakspere put the sanguinary ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... dragged on it was owing to their inherent troublesomeness and implied no doubt of her capacity to bring them to a solution and to administer the very considerable fortune that Mr. Temperly had left. She used, in a superior, unprejudiced way, every convenience that the civilisation of her time offered her, and would have lived without hesitation in a lighthouse if this had contributed to her general scheme. She was now, in the interest of this scheme, preparing to use Europe, which she had not yet visited ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... Ledger, a daily newspaper started by Mr. Newbery, another bookseller in St. Paul's Churchyard. Goldsmith was engaged to write for this paper two letters a week at a guinea a-piece; and these letters were, after a short time (1760), written in the character of a Chinese who had come to study European civilisation. It may be noted that Goldsmith had in the Monthly Review, in mentioning Voltaire's memoirs of French writers, quoted a passage about Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes as follows: "It is written in imitation of the Siamese Letters of Du Freny ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... mouth of the Missouri, and at first the explorers passed by the scattered farms and little villages where white men lived. But these were the farthest outposts of civilisation; soon they were left behind, and the little band of white men were in a land inhabited only by Redskins. The current was so swift and the wind so often in the wrong direction that sails were almost useless, and the boats were rowed, punted and towed upstream with ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... itself from the eighteenth dynasty, upon the way, and so reach the celebrated pulpit rock of Abousir. The pulpit rock is supposed to have been called so, because it is a rock like a pulpit. When you have reached it you will know that you are on the very edge of civilisation, and that very little more will take you into the country of the Dervishes, which will be obvious to you at the top. Having passed the summit, you will perceive the full extremity of the second cataract, embracing wild natural beauties of the most dreadful variety. Here all very ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hereafter. We also have our dog-doctors, our dogs' infirmaries, our homes and charities, and, in the end, our dogs' secluded cemeteries. Such things, in the case of dumb animals, point, we judge, to a higher grade of civilisation, and ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... vacuous, there is not, generally speaking, much attempt to make the best of our spiritual privileges. We teach our children, as we were taught ourselves, to give importance only to the fact of exclusiveness, expense, rareness, already necessarily obtruded far too much by our struggling, imperfect civilisation. We are indeed angry with little boys and girls if they enquire too audibly whether certain people are rich or certain things cost much money, as little boys and girls are apt to do in their very far from innocence; but we teach them by our example to think about such things every time ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... strike situation has this dual aspect. First it is a mechanico-material struggle, two mechanical forces pulling asunder from the central object, the bone. All it can result in is the pulling asunder of the fabric of civilisation, and even of life, without any creative issue. It is no more than a frog under a cart-wheel. The mechanical forces, rolling on, roll over the body of life and ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... no barbarians in the East, Lady Maulevrier. I come from the cradle of civilisation, the original fount of learning. We were scholars and gentleman, priests and soldiers, two thousand years before your British ancestors ran wild in their woods, and sacrificed to their unknown gods or rocky altars reeking with human blood! I know the errand upon which ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the characteristic is now more marked than ever. It is a fixed condition of their national being, an expression of the cumulative ambition that is the source of their varied progress. Yet from time to time men have arisen among them who not only have given intimate views of a new civilisation, but have added something to the permanent stock of what Matthew Arnold used to call 'the best that is known and thought in the world.' Even when the independent nationhood of the United States was still but an aspiration, Benjamin Franklin ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... a banner as in battle right here among our quiet hills. And those he leads seem to be the people we know, the men, and the women, and the boys! He is the hero of a new age. In olden days he might have been a pioneer, carrying the light of civilisation to a new land; here he has been a sort of moral pioneer—a pioneering far more difficult than any we have ever known. There are no heroics connected with it, the name of the pioneer will not go ringing down the ages; for it is a silent leadership and its success is measured by victories ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... the finest in all Europe. In his cell, the man, as good as condemned, waited his trial, a stranger far from help and kindred, an object of terror and of horror to many, of compassion to a few. But however men thought of him, he had sinned against British civilisation, and would now have ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... fortune she could have become rich enough to slay a fatted calf, would never have given the shin-bone of it to a prodigal like Jasper, even had he been her own penitent son, instead of a graceless step-nephew. Therefore, as all civilisation proceeds westward, Jasper turned his face from the east; and had no more idea of recrossing Temple Bar in search of fortune, friends, or kindred, than a modern Welshman would dream of a pilgrimage to Asian shores to re-embrace ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in silence there. Nature with her terrible club, "Survival of the Fittest"; and Civilisation with her cruel sword, "Supply and Demand," beat them back, and they give way inch by inch, fighting to the end. But it is in a dumb, sullen way, that is not sufficiently ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... social problem. Whether he accept such tentative reconstructions as those suggested in The World Set Free or In the Days of the Comet is relatively unimportant, the essential thing is that he should view life with momentarily undistracted eyes; and see both the failures of our civilisation and its potentialities for a ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... were originally of an evil kind. Sir John Lubbock ('The Origin of Civilisation') says: 'The baying of the dog to the moon is as much an act of worship as some ceremonies which have been so described by travellers.' I think he would admit that fear is the origin of the worship. In his ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... large part of his time and energies to the management of his estate. His son, on the contrary, preferred St. Petersburg to the country, served in one of the public offices, loved passionately French plays and other products of urban civilisation, and left the entire management of the property to a German steward, popularly known as Karl Karl'itch, whom I shall introduce to the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... kinds. Some, very few and seen there but seldom, led mysterious lives, had preserved an undefaced energy with the temper of buccaneers and the eyes of dreamers. They appeared to live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers, enterprises, ahead of civilisation, in the dark places of the sea; and their death was the only event of their fantastic existence that seemed to have a reasonable certitude of achievement. The majority were men who, like himself, thrown there ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... no barbarian." Not the sugary condolence of the post-prandial speaker, but this last sentence concerns us. Yes, it is admitted that one is a Philistine; but, a barbarian?—No, not at any price! Unfortunately, poor Holderlin could not make such flne distinctions. If one reads the reverse of civilisation, or perhaps sea-pirating, or cannibalism, into the word "barbarian," then the distinction is justifiable enough. But what the aesthete obviously wishes to prove to us is, that we may be Philistines ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Republic, or Progress, or Civilisation, under the form of Jesus Christ driving a locomotive, which was passing through a virgin forest. Frederick, after a ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... succession the course of geographical advance in Christendom down to the death of Prince Henry (1460). Setting aside the Ptolemy, which represents the knowledge of the world at its height in the pre-Christian civilisation, and the Edrisi which represents the Arabic followers of Ptolemy, whose influence upon early Christian geography was very marked, all the maps reproduced belong to the science of the Christian ages and countries. The two Mappe-mondes above referred to are both placed in the introductory ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... beautiful isle, at the time of our tale, the churches and houses of Christian men had begun to rise. The natives had begun to cultivate the arts of civilisation, and to appreciate, in some degree, the inestimable blessings of Christianity. The plough had torn up the virgin soil, and the anchors of merchant-ships had begun to kiss the strand. The crimes peculiar to civilised men had not yet been developed. The place had all the romance and freshness ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... Life of Sir Francis Drake, Works, vi. 366. In Rasselas, chap. xi., he considers also the same question. Imlac is 'inclined to conclude that, if nothing counteracts the natural consequence of learning, we grow more happy as our minds take a wider range.' He then enumerates the advantages which civilisation confers on the Europeans. 'They are surely happy,' said the prince, 'who have all these conveniences.' 'The Europeans,' answered Imlac, 'are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... were moving through Hampshire fields at a rather sober pace. He was assailed with a poignant feeling of annoyance and resentment that this war should be forced upon them. England looked so good in the morning sunshine, and the comforts of English civilisation were so hard to leave. The sinister uncertainty of the Future brooded over them ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... a stride which was more like the spring of a maddened bull, towards Philip. The veneer of a spurious civilisation seemed to have fallen from him. He was the great and splendid animal, transformed with an overmastering passion. There was murder in his eyes. His great right arm, with its long, hairy fingers and its single massive ring, was like the limb of some prehistoric ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... an observatory fitted with circular instruments for star positions was set up at Alexandria, the then centre of civilisation. We know almost nothing about the instruments used by Hipparchus in preparing his star catalogues and his lunar and solar tables; but the invention of the astrolabe is attributed ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... the Great, Greece, Rome, and Palestine had ceased to exist. Civilisation had passed Eastward, for Constantinople was the metropolis of Europe; and from the East, Rome, Spain, Gaul, and Germany were governed by satraps with various titles. It seemed as though the vitality of Europe had been quenched, and as though Rome had been buried, but it was only apparently so. ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... consider the difficulty, that, if these canals are necessary for existence in Mars, how did the inhabitants ever reach a sufficiently large population with surplus food and leisure enabling them to rise from the low condition of savages to one of civilisation, and ultimately to scientific knowledge? Here again is a dilemma which is hard to overcome. Only a dense population with ample means of subsistence could possibly have constructed such gigantic works; but, given ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... that there is an intermediate form between the two. It is doubtful as to whether this is a transition form. It was first brought to my notice by Mr. T. A. Joyce, as in use amongst some negro peoples in Central Africa possessing an old, high and possibly introduced civilisation, and is figured in Messrs. Torday and Joyce's Notes Ethnographiques ... Bakuba ... et Bushongo (Annales du Congo) pp. 24 and 182. In this loom the warp is stretched between an upper beam and a lower beam at an angle of about 90 degrees, and the weaver ...
— Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms • H. Ling Roth
... will have no traffic with them. I have lived too long away from the petty restrictions of civilisation to be bound down by them now, for I come from a region where a man's sword and not his rank preserved his life." As he spoke he again raised his huge weapon aloft, but now held it by the blade so that it stood out against the bright window like a black cross of ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... Science in England State of the Fine Arts State of the Common People; Agricultural Wages Wages of Manufacturers Labour of Children in Factories Wages of different Classes of Artisans Number of Paupers Benefits derived by the Common People from the Progress of Civilisation Delusion which leads Men to overrate the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Complete Contents of the Five Volumes • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in the name of civilisation, I would wish to ask you if you have much sale for SMASHUP's Concentrated Essence of Cucumbers (registered), in ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... opinions, and the unorthodox his sentiment. But his books marked an epoch in religious criticism. "The Life of Jesus" was the outcome of a visit to Palestine in pursuance of research studies of Phoenician civilisation. A feature is the importance given to scenic surroundings which he could so happily describe. Renan died on October 2, 1892, widely admired, honoured, and also condemned, and was buried ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... she cried. "This 'Olgate offers to put us on shore safe, and you refuse—refuse to give him up the money. You must not. You must bargain with him. Our lives depend on it. And you will arrange that he leaves us sufficient to get to civilisation again." ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... basis of the tales is slight; yet who can think of the Greeks without remembering the story of Troy, or of Rome without a backward glance at AEneas, fabled founder of the race and hero of Virgil's world-famous Latin epic? Any understanding of German civilisation would be incomplete without knowledge of the mythical prince Siegfried, hero of the earliest literature of the Teutonic people, finally immortalized in the nineteenth century through the musical dramas of Wagner. Any understanding of English civilization would be similarly incomplete ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... into the interior and discovered to his surprise, not the huts of savages, but a beautiful city, with palaces and museums. This city was the capital of the Aztecs, a remarkable people, notable alike for their ancient civilisation and their wealth. Their national drink was chocolate, and Montezuma, their Emperor, who lived in a state of luxurious magnificence, "took no other beverage than the chocolatl, a potation of chocolate, flavoured with vanilla and other ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... the intimacy; and, worse still, everybody objected to it. All the forces of Nature combined, and the vast scheme of the universe itself had been ordered so as to unite those two young things; but, on the other hand, the whole machinery of civilisation was set in readiness to keep them apart. And the first intimation they had of this ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... In many unnamed ways his knowledge of the world blessed those about him. The small improvements, the little advances in civilisation which the English intruders were introducing into those parts, he adopted: a more orderly house, an increased neatness, a few more acres brought under the plough or the spade, whole roofs and few beggars—these things were to be seen at Morristown, and ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... United States, that the American people is one of which we may well be proud—a great and highly civilised people, with whom we are connected by every tie of blood, and every relation of business—they are a people who bear our civilisation, in many things improved, our language, literature, laws, and religion. In an educational point of view the nation is prominent, and her silent children have the advantages of spacious institutions, supported by her revenues. It is greatly to be regretted ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... seem a pitiable state of mind. No one could be less like a Germanic hero than this French artist; and yet the Germans were in error when they counted on an easy victory over him and his like, when they made sure that a conscious barbarism must prevail over an unconscious civilisation. ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... appears strange that, in so early a stage of civilisation, the monks should be so alive to the beauties of nature. The contemplative habits of monastic life must at all times have imparted to the mind a feeling of abstract beauty, independent of any idea of real utility. Secure of an uniform, peaceful ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... house, if "faither was in," they were quiet as mice. In short, Hob moved through life in a great peace - the reward of any one who shall have killed his man, with any formidable and figurative circumstance, in the midst of a country gagged and swaddled with civilisation. ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... time, meant civilisation. When, according to the wondrous dreamer of Bedford Gaol, Mr Worldly Wiseman referred Christian, if he should not find Mr Legality at home, to the pretty young man called Civility, whom he had to his son, and who could take off a burden ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... would answer to Meredith's description of the comic muse. Throughout The Egoist, by George Meredith, a comedy in which Clara Middleton's life comes near to being tragic, the air would clear at any moment if Sir Willoughby and Clara had not both lost through over-civilisation the power of saying precisely what they mean. The book is the story of how Clara tries to find words, and of how, when she finds them, the conversational genius of Willoughby seemingly deflects them from the meaning she intends them to bear. It was in the mid-region ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... face to face with a great trouble, and she had to encounter it alone, and with no weapons and with no armour save those which Nature provides. She was not specially an exile from civilisation; churches and philosophers had striven and demonstrated for thousands of years, and yet she was no better protected than if Socrates, Epictetus, and all ecclesiastical establishments from the time of Moses had ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... men be the measure of a civilization, ours is far below theirs. We have not slaves beneath us, but we have them among us. Barbarism is not at our frontiers, but at our doors. We bear within us greater things, but we ourselves are how much smaller! Strange paradox: that their objective civilisation should have created great men as it were by accident, while our subjective civilisation, contrary to its express mission, turns out paltry halflings. Things are becoming ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... proprietors as selfish as the landlords."[718] "Divide the land into small allotments and very soon the cunning and rapacious would 'acquire' the estates of other men, and so we should come back to the present state of chaos. In fact, the parcelling out of the land means putting back the clock of civilisation ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... the human family were nomads, and many of our good old instincts still survive, but civilisation has killed others. In every cross-bred species of animals or plants there are "reverts" or "throwbacks," and the human family produces plenty of them. Every civilised country has its "throwbacks," and the more monotonous civilisation becomes, the more cast-iron its rules, and the more scientific ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... expulsion of man from the garden. Seduced by the serpent, man stretches out his hand after the food which is forbidden him, in order to become like God, and eats of the tree of knowledge. The first consequence of this is the beginning of dress, the first step in civilisation; other and sadder consequences soon follow. In the evening the man and his wife hear Jehovah walking in the garden; they hide before Him, and by doing so betray themselves. It is useless to think of denying what has taken ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... white house in a small park. It stood on much higher ground than the Abbey House, and was altogether different from that good old relic of a bygone civilisation. Briarwood was distinctly modern. Its decorations savoured of the Regency: its furniture was old-fashioned, without being antique. The classic stiffness and straightness of the First French Empire distinguished the gilded ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... by geographers that Easter Island must have formed a portion of a vast Polynesian continent peopled by some kindred race to those that designed the colossal monuments of an extinct civilisation, now almost overgrown with vegetation, that are yet to be found as evidences of a past age amidst the forests ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... interest there is turns on an improbable story rather than on the development of character. Evidently Gay reckoned largely on the opportunities he had afforded himself for satire on the Court, and for contrasting the noble and untutored savage with the man tainted by the vices of civilisation." ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... walk with my family and friends, I rush in front of them volleying vociferous shouts of happiness; or even leap up round them attempting to lick their faces. It is in this power of beginning again with energy upon familiar and homely things that the dog is really the eternal type of the Western civilisation. And the donkey is really as different as is the Eastern civilisation. His very anarchy is a sort of secrecy; his very revolt is a secret. He does not leap up because he wishes to share my walk, but to follow his own way, as lonely as the wild ass of ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... interest Mary gazed on the scene one can imagine. Somewhere at the back of these swamps was the spot where she was to settle and work. That it was near the coast she knew, for all that more distant land was unexplored and unknown: most of what was within sight, indeed, was still outside the pale of civilisation; through the bush and along the creeks and lagoons moved nude people, most of whom had never seen a white face. It might well seem an amazing thing to her, in view of the fact that there had been commerce with the coast for centuries. Vessels had plied to it ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... population may become permanently degraded, who does not know? For who that walks through the by-streets of any great city does not see? Moreover, and this is one of the most fearful problems with which modern civilisation has to deal—we interfere with natural selection by our conscientious care of life, as surely as does war itself. If war kills the most fit to live, we save alive those who—looking at them from a merely physical point of view—are most fit ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... a tambo, or shed, built for the use of travellers— the first sign of civilisation we had met since we left the ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... Novelist after Novelist had entrenched himself—amongst those subtle recesses in the ethics of human life in which Truth and Falsehood dwell undisturbed and unseparated. The vast and dark Poetry around us—the Poetry of Modern Civilisation and Daily Existence, is shut out from us in much, by the shadowy giants of Prejudice and Fear. He who would arrive at the Fairy Land must face the Phantoms. Betimes, I set myself to the task of investigating the motley world to which our progress in humanity—has attained, caring ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... deserved to be a Duke. But then he's something better—a fixed memory, a firm fame; For long as the World "drops a line," it cannot drop his name. 'Tis something like a Jubilee, this tenth of Janua-ree! Punch brims a bumper to its hero, cheers him three times three, For if there was a pioneer in Civilisation's host, It was the cheery-hearted chap who schemed the Penny Post. And when the croaking cravens, who are down on all Reform, And shout their ancient shibboleth, and raise their tea-pot storm, Whene'er there's talk of Betterment in any branch of State, And vent their venom on the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... philosophic to deplore the imperfection, than to deride the folly of human nature, when the fact that the superstitious sentiment is not only a result of mere barbarism or vulgar ignorance, to be expelled of course by civilisation and knowledge, but is indigenous in the life of every man, barbarous or civilised, pagan or Christian, is fully recognised. The enlightening influence of science, as far as it extends, is irresistible; and its progress ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... piece off the rock I sat on; it did not mark so well as the shop chalks do; but it gave the effect. And I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realising that this Southern England is not only a grand peninsula, and a tradition and a civilisation; it is something even more admirable. It is a piece ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... whiskerandos, originally peasants, trained since boyhood in victorious armies, and accustomed to move among subject and trembling populations, could ill brook their change of circumstance. There was one man of the name of Goguelat, a brute of the first water, who had enjoyed no touch of civilisation beyond the military discipline, and had risen by an extreme heroism of bravery to a grade for which he was otherwise unfitted—that of marechal des logis in the 22nd of the line. In so far as a brute ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... buckles and belts and the finishings and hems of their garments were all what we should now call beautiful, rough as the men were; nor in their speech was any of that drawling snarl or thick vulgarity which one is used to hear from labourers in civilisation; not that they talked like gentlemen either, but full and round and bold, and they were merry and good-tempered enough; I could see that, though I felt shy and ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... most discouraging thing about pitying people. It does them no manner of good," said Miss Vane, "and just hurts you. Don't you think that in an advanced civilisation we shall cease to feel compassion? Why don't you preach against common pity, as you did against ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... a professed soldier and follow the Douglas. Catharine sighed deeply and shook her head at the history of bloody Palm Sunday on the North Inch. But apparently she had reflected that men rarely advance in civilisation or refinement beyond the ideas of their own age, and that a headlong and exuberant courage, like that of Henry Smith, was, in the iron days in which they lived, preferable to the deficiency which had led to Conachar's catastrophe. ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... to the sea in summer would hardly suit the form of European, or at least British civilisation; but we do not see why, in the one continent more than in the other, one's country lodgings should be required to resemble a town-house. In the Clyde, which we have mentioned as a resort for summer loiterers, there is ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... between peoples of the same race, tongue, and faith; and were but petty squabbles in comparison with that epic crusade in which the remnants of the old Gothic conquerors slowly made head against, and finally overthrew and expelled, an Oriental religion, a foreign blood, and a civilisation in many respects more brilliant than anything which Europe could show. The contrast between Castile and Granada is more picturesque than the difference between Lothian and Northumberland. The Spanish ballads have the advantage, then, of being connected with imposing ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... up in those valleys?' he asked. 'You get nothing but a few wild conquerors rushing east and west, and then some squalid khanates. And yet all the materials were there—the stuff for a strong race, a rich land, the traditions of an old civilisation, and natural ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... sympathies were divided, with paralysing effect, it would seem, upon his interest in drama.[23] Even the formidable antagonism of Braccio, the Florentine Commissary, is buttressed, if not based, upon a resolve to defend the rights of civilisation against militarism, of intellect against brute force. "Brute force shall not rule Florence." Even so, it is only after conflict and fluctuation that he decides to allow Luria's trial to take its course. Puccio, again, the former general of Florence, superseded by Luria, and now serving under ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... orchards and white farm-houses. As the early sun streamed upon the most prominent of these, leaving the others in deep shade, the effect was strangely novel and imposing. In more remote regions, where the forest has never yet echoed to the woodman's axe, or received the impress of civilisation, the first approach to the shore inspires a melancholy awe, which ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the term I mean not so much attainment in general, as mood in particular. Whether or when such mood may become universal may be to you a matter of doubt. As for me, I often think that when the era of civilisation begins—as assuredly it shall some day begin—when the races of the world cease to be credulous, ovine mobs and become critical, human nations, then will be the ushering in of the ten thousand years of a ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... influence of your conquests on the restoration of her trade and the civilisation of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... development, they correspond to similar stages which the ancestors of the civilised races may be supposed to have passed through at more or less remote periods of their history. Thus when we arrange all the known peoples of the world according to the degree of their savagery or civilisation in a graduated scale of culture, we obtain not merely a comparative view of their relative positions in the scale, but also in some measure an historical record of the genetic development of culture from a very early time down to ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... all parts of Russia, with the exception of the government of St. Petersburg, from which they have been banished. In most of the provincial towns they are to be found in a state of half-civilisation, supporting themselves by trafficking in horses, or by curing the disorders incidental to those animals; but the vast majority reject this manner of life, and traverse the country in bands, like the ancient Hamaxobioi; the immense grassy plains of Russia affording pasturage for ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... demeanour, still did they, on great occasions, expose their charms to the public gaze, for which error, no doubt if they had had souls, beautiful as they were, they would have been damned to all eternity. Civilisation, as Menou hath said, must extend both far and wide, before other nations will be so polished as to imitate us in the splendour, the security, and the happiness of our harems; and when I ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... horror of it all seemed to freeze the understanding, and it was difficult to realise that one was part and parcel of this world of ours. Literally, horror was piled upon horror. And this was the twentieth century of which men boasted; this was civilisation! Built by men's hands, the result of centuries of work. Now look at them; those beautiful architectural monuments, destroyed, in a few months, by the vilest spawn that ever contaminated the earth. A breed that should and would be ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... as the "Kultur-Kampf", a term that denotes a struggle for civilisation against the forces of reaction. For some years the strife was of the sharpest kind. The Roman Catholic bishops continued to ban the "Old Catholics", while the State refused to recognise any act of marriage or christening performed ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... smile at this description, and feel some surprise, how compositions, involving such gross absurdities, were tolerated by an audience having pretence to taste and civilisation But something may be said for ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... stairways; crossed the Park, which was in that place narrow; and plunged upon the farther side into the rude shelter of the forest. So, at a bound, she left the discretion and the cheerful lamps of Palace evenings; ceased utterly to be a sovereign lady; and, falling from the whole height of civilisation, ran forth into the ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... anthropology, just as state, city, village, and now village-community, are loosely used in history. The great fact to understand is that the social group of the higher races was based on blood kinship at the time when they set out to take their place in modern civilisation, and that we cannot understand survivals in folklore unless we test them by their position as part of a tribal organisation. The point has never been taken before, and yet I do not see ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... herself at this moment. I say, Jeff, compared with Driver's Court, this is a palatial apartment, and you are a great improvement on Black Sal; but for ah that, don't you look forward to seeing a little civilisation—to eating with a fork, for instance, and hearing an 'h' aspirated; and—oh, Jeff, it will be heavenly to wear ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... as yet, naturally, beyond what I have read in the paper; but the subtle sense of my experience tells me that there is all the chance of an interesting case in this. That's your temptation. As for myself, I don't mind admitting that—especially in these country cases, where the resources of civilisation are not always close at hand—I'm never loth to have a friend with me who isn't too proud to be made use ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... is drawing to a close. The stormy period of the Mount Pleasant settlement was over. The hard work, the difficulties and dangers of the life of a new settler on the extreme edge of civilisation, had been passed, and nothing remained but to continue to devote attention and energy to the estate, and to reap ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... Nasmyth's own definition of engineering; namely, common sense applied to the use of materials. In his case, common sense has been more especially applied to facilitating and perfecting work by means of Machine Tools. Civilisation began with tools; and every step in advance has been accomplished through their improvement. Handicraft labour, in bone, stone, or wood, was the first stage in the development of man's power; and tools or machines, in iron or steel, are the last and most efficient method of economising ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... were not too far advanced when he finished studying the Indians, Hubbard expected to cross the country to the St. Lawrence and civilisation; otherwise to retrace his steps over his upward trail. In the event of our failure to discover the Indian encampment, and our finding ourselves on the George short of provisions, Hubbard planned to run down the swift-flowing river in our canoe to the George River Post at its ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... know much about anything, but, thinking as clearly and as impersonally as it is in me to think, I begin to believe that divorce, far from deserving the stigma attached to it, is a step forward in civilisation. ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... dead past be made to live again before the reader's eyes with all its accessories of faded pomp and forgotten mystery. To such students as seek a story only, and are not interested in the faith, ceremonies, or customs of the Mother of Religion and Civilisation, ancient Egypt, it is, however, respectfully suggested that they should exercise the art of skipping, and open this tale ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... the light of the old civilisation was fast fading away. Perhaps we may look upon the so-called splendour of the reign of Dagobert in France as the spasmodic scintillations of its latest moments of existence. The kingdom of Dagobert, after 631, was almost an empire. ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... it, there are those strange negative and positive, attractive and repellant polar forces which appear in the phenomena of electricity and magnetism, agencies of such potency and universal avail in modern civilisation. ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... the better I liked her. She had been tenderly and carefully brought up, in an atmosphere of singularly rare refinement for the polar regions, for her father was the most important man of his tribe and ranked at the top of Esquimaux civilisation. I made long dog-sledge trips across the mighty ice floes with Lasca—that was her name—and found her company always pleasant and her conversation agreeable. I went fishing with her, but not in her perilous boat: I merely followed along on ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... more painful to me, until at length the fatal fascination was complete, and my trip became practically an exercise of devotion to that sheep. I carried it everywhere and ministered fondly to its wants. Not for the world would I have alluded to mutton in its presence. And when we returned to civilisation I parted from the creature with sincere regret and the consciousness that I had humoured my affections at the expense of my digestion. The sheep did not give me so much as a look of farewell, but fell to feeding on the grass beside the ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... means by which that end can be attained' (p. 21). My second point was the need of substituting for that assumption a conscious and systematic effort of thought. 'The whole progress,' I argued, 'of human civilisation beyond its earliest stages, has been made possible by the invention of methods of thought which enable us to interpret and forecast the working of nature more successfully than we could, if we merely followed the line of least resistance ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... and a heart is more or less red in these days," nodded Palla. "Everybody knows that the old order is ended—done for. Without liberty and equal opportunity civilisation is a farce. Everybody knows it except the stupid. And ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... tell you," he interrupted, "as everything is in a man's life. Only the asses won't see it! Why am I here now, an outcast from civilisation, instead of being a happy man enjoying all the pleasures of London? Simply because eleven years ago—I lost my head for ten minutes ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... of the People The Beauty of Life Making the Best of It The Prospects of Architecture in Civilisation ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... of each day. Every device is tried to tickle his dead palate; but the succession of dainties is of no avail, for the man cannot assimilate what is set before him, and he becomes soft of muscle, devoid of nerve—a weed of civilisation. Are not the cases analogous to those of the sound reverent student and the weary blase skimmer of books? So, in sum, I say that, even if our enormous output of printed matter goes on increasing, and if the number of readers increases by millions, ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... tribes further to the south possess horses, and hunt the buffalo and deer. Some are even more savage than the Dakotahs, while others, again, have made slight progress towards civilisation, and live in settled villages, while they rudely cultivate the ground, ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... on Feydeau's book, "Picturesqueness in no wise detracts from accuracy," might well be applied to his own "Romance," which fascinates the reader with its evocation of a long vanished past and its representation of a civilisation buried for centuries in mystery. The weaving in of the wonders wrought by Moses and Aaron, of the overwhelming of the Pharaoh, whether Thotmes or Rameses, is skilfully managed, and imparts to the portions of the Biblical narrative used by him a verisimilitude and a sensation ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... of the road where Hamil sat his horse was an old pump—the last indication of civilisation. He dismounted and tried it, filling his cup with clear sparkling water, neither hot nor cold, and walking through the sand offered it to ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... well the temperaments of its sponsors, but abroad, where public opinion, imperfectly instructed, may imagine it represents a serious national feeling. The continuance of it is an intolerable negation of civilisation; it is supported by no public men of credit; it has been disproved again and again. Ridicule may be left to give the menace the coup de grace! And this," he laughed, "in face of what you and I know, eh? Ah! how long will the British public be lulled ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... pebble stone, without any chimneys, the fire being made in the midst thereof. The good man, wife, children, and other of their family, eat and sleep on the one side of the house, and their cattle on the other, very beastly and rudely in respect of civilisation. They are destitute of wood, their fire is turf and cow shardes. They have corn, bigge, and oats, with which they pay their king's rent to the maintenance of his house. They take great quantity of fish, which they dry in the wind and sun; they dress their meat very filthily, and eat it ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... theory is that, being turned loose here with the rest, they may speak to anybody; but the fact is, they can't. Sometimes I should like to hail some of these unfriended spirits, but I haven't the courage. I'm not individually bashful, but I have a thousand years of Anglo-Saxon civilisation behind me. There ought to be policemen, to show strangers about and be kind to them. I've just seen two pretty women cast away in a corner, and clinging to a small water-colour on the wall with a show of interest that would melt ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Mrs. Halsey, that it isn't a question of what we in our ignorance and prejudice might think wicked, but it's a question of what's taught in this book, looked at without the eye of prejudice and tradition. What we call civilisation is too ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... trade-person's cart, which is not likely at this time of day. Fighting, young gentlemen, is a brutal practice, dating back to the very earliest ages of mankind, and no doubt imitated from the wild beasts whom they saw around them. Whereas you live in these later days, in the midst of civilisation in its highest, most cultivated forms, so that there is no excuse ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... little City of Hope grew rapidly, and was becoming an important centre of civilisation and commerce, though it was only made of paper and chips, and bits of matchboxes and odds and ends cleverly put together with glue and painted; except the people in the street. For it was inhabited now, and though the men and women did not move about, they looked as if they might, if they were ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... old civilisation is crumbling beneath our feet, the thought of poetry crosses the mind like the dear memory of things that have long since passed away. In our passionate desire for the new era, it is difficult to refrain oneself ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... What is blasphemy in one country is piety in another. Progress tends to reduce it from a crime to an affair of taste. To deal with it in the bad spirit of the old laws, which are only unrepealed because they have been treated as obsolete, is to outrage the conscience of civilisation, and to violate that liberty of the press which Bentham justly called 'the foundation of all other liberties.' If opinions are not forced on people's attention, if they are expressed in publications which are sold, which can be patronised or neglected, ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... thorough appreciation of fiscal and economic truths was at least as indispensable for the life of the Roman Empire as the acceptance of a Messiah; and it was only in the hands of a great statesman like Gregory VII. that Christianity became at last an instrument powerful enough to save civilisation. What the moral renovation of Rousseau did for France we all know. Now Rousseau's was far more profoundly social than the doctrine of Mr. Carlyle, which, while in name a renunciation of self, has all its foundations in the purest individualism. Rousseau, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... of the elements, without perceiving their magnificence; they had speculated on and attempted to decipher the secret language of the terrestrial and celestial phenomena. The discovery of the beauty of nature, and with it the revival of aesthetics, was an essential part of the new-born civilisation. This fact was accomplished—in an almost sentimental way—by the troubadours and minnesingers. But the relationship of St. Francis to nature was something very different. The co-ordination of man and beast—in his sermon to the birds, for ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... treated by himself and as the product of stationary, if not reactionary, conditions. Having lived most of his life far away from the main currents of culture, in a province where St. Bernardino had been spending his last energies in the endeavour to call the world back to the ideals of an infantile civilisation, Crivelli does not belong to a movement of constant progress, and therefore is not within the ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... hundred miles away.) Excellent opening for young men fresh from first-class public school or college-life: who should, of course, be prepared to "rough it" a little before making competence or large fortune, by delightful pursuit of agriculture. No restrictive civilisation. No drains. Excellent supply of water and heavy floods as a rule, during three months of year, bringing on Spring crops without expense of irrigation. Very low death-rate, most of population having recently ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various
... the book has any general intention, my aim has been, while not ignoring the defects of American civilisation, to dwell rather on those features in which, as it seems to me, John Bull may learn from Brother Jonathan. I certainly have not had so much trouble in finding these features as seems to have been the case with many other British critics of America. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... valuable 'History of Civilisation' is a vast repertory of knowledge that we could wish to see universally circulated throughout the country, as tending to convey information that is much required, and of which too many ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... that truth, beauty, knowledge, and character must be harmonised and blended in every real and adequate development of the human spirit. To the growth of every flower earth, sun, and atmosphere must contribute; in the making of a man all the rich forces of nature and civilisation must ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... forsakest me and the Muses. Thou sidest with them who have broken our statues, unroofed our temples, desecrated our altars, and banished us from among mankind. Thou rejectest the glory of standing alone in a barbarous age as the last witness to culture and civilisation. Thou despisest the gifts of the Gods and the Muses, of which I am even now the bearer. Thou preferrest the mitre to the laurel chaplet, and the hymns of Gregory to the ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... the fact that the whole tendency of social development is to narrow the range of the belief, to restrict the scope of its authority, and to so attenuate it that it becomes of no value precisely where it is supposed to be of most use. The belief in God is least questioned where civilisation is lowest; it is called into the most serious question where civilisation is most advanced. To-day the belief in God is only universal in the sense that some representatives of it are to be found in all societies. The majority may still profess to have it, but it has ceased to be universal ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... the interests of civilisation," he answered, "and in that case it is our duty. Now look here, Ewart, this will have to be a secret. It is essential that we should not get ourselves laughed at because, for one thing, the scoffers may get into serious ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... days he had cast occasional glances at this man, seated in the criminal dock with a gaoler on either side of him, his fine, nervous features gaining an added distinction from the sordidness of his surroundings. Now, in the garb of civilisation, seated amidst luxury to which he was obviously accustomed, with a becoming light upon his face and this strange, fascinating flow of words proceeding always from his lips, the man, from every external point of view, seemed amongst ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... —What was their civilisation? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers. The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: It is meet to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehovah. The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... far as Redding in thirty-three days. It had its share of tribulation. The men worked fourteen and sixteen hours at times. Several bad jams relieved the monotony. Three dams had to be sluiced through. Problems of mechanics arose to be solved on the spot; problems that an older civilisation would have attacked deliberately and with due respect for the seriousness of the situation and the dignity of engineering. Orde solved them by a rough-and-ready but very effective rule of thumb. He built and abandoned structures which would have furnished opportunity for a winter's ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... of the land question that suited the Nationalists, namely, to cause the death of the head of the family, and to get the rest out of the country. It did not say much for the civilisation of the nineteenth century, but after the brutalities of the spring of 1871 in Paris, there can be no doubt how thin is the veneer over the barbarity of even the most civilised; those deeds were perpetrated in the heart of the European capital specially devoted to amusement: what I describe ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... doubt occurred in the Appian Way, the fashionable street of Imperial Rome, when Catullus talked gay nonsense to Lesbia, and Horace received the congratulations of his friends over his new volume of society verses. History repeats itself, and every city is bound by all the laws of civilisation to have one special street, wherein the votaries ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... centuries, so far as they were not occupied in struggling against the eclipse of civilisation which began in the fifth century, were occupied in working out the implications of these syntheses. The results were codified in Catholic theology and in the civil and canon law of the early Middle Ages. But one more step remained; after nearly a thousand years Aristotle was rediscovered, ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... "must such a man lack audiences? If civilisation were in its right mind, he would hold a chair in some great university, and lecture daily to hundreds ... this man is alive. His fire wakes kindred fire ... why must we leave the business of teaching ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Median Wall, there remain two outward and visible signs of the older civilisation that flourished in happier times. There are, at frequent intervals, low flat mounds composed of old sunbaked bricks the sites of ancient cities; so numerous are these that they seem to justify the Chaldean ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... being in every way inferior to the powerful machines I saw working along the southern frontier. Nevertheless it is a useful means of reconnaissance, nor is a journey in it devoid of interest. An armoured train! The very name sounds strange; a locomotive disguised as a knight-errant—the agent of civilisation in the habiliments of chivalry. Mr. Morley attired as Sir Lancelot would seem scarcely more incongruous. The possibilities of attack added to the keenness of the experience. We started at one o'clock. A company of the ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... the metropolis of the world. York at that period being the residence of the Emperor Severus, his court and family were conveyed hither; and the government of the world transferred to an obscure island in the west, once the ultima Thule[vi] of civilisation, its native inhabitants hardly yet emerged from a state of barbarism, and addicted to the most ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... STRANGER, really gives the impression of having been a visionary. For instance, his author friend Albert Engstroem, has told how one evening during a stay far out in the Stockholm skerries, far from all civilisation, Strindberg suddenly had a feeling that his little daughter was ill, and wanted to return to town at once. True enough, it turned out that the girl had fallen ill just at the time when Strindberg had felt ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... in that respect to the Boers or British. The marauders were also mentally superior to the black races within the colony, and altogether more interesting savages, braver in battle, and capable of a higher civilisation. One of these tribes, numbering about ten thousand, was in alliance with the British, but the whole population of the Cape able to bear arms, and the troops, taken together, did not reach twenty thousand men. The nature of the country favoured the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... often stopped and compelled to sweep the muddy crossing; and even the dogs were allowed to worry him, without his daring to beat them off. Happily those days of fanatical intolerance are for ever passed; and the irresistible march of civilisation, by gradually weakening his prejudices, has humanised even the intolerant ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... England were placed in bottles, and the bottles piled on one another, it would reach within five hundred miles of the moon. He asked us if this were not an intolerable state of things and a disgrace to our boasted civilisation? Of course, there could be no two questions about it. We are not unreasonable, down in Troy. We only want a truth to be brought home to us. The missionary said that if only a man would deny himself his morning ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Ridingers are very angry, and declare they are half-a-century in civilisation before some of the Lancashire folk, and that this neighbourhood is a paradise compared with some districts not far from Manchester.'—Ellen Nussey to Mrs. Gaskell, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... according to practical wisdom—in order that you, not I, might carry the basket. Next, philosophically, or according to the intuitions of the pure reason—in order that you might, by beholding the magnificence of that great civilisation which your fellows wish to destroy, learn that you are an ass, and a tortoise, and a nonentity, and so beholding yourself to be nothing, may be moved ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in ...
— The Geneva Protocol • David Hunter Miller
... hall. Still further, our company was to be increased, and our festive board to be graced, by the presence of Waboose and her mother. Little had we imagined, when all this was planned, that we were to have the addition of our old friend Macnab, and that glorious beam from the sun of civilisation, his ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... they had not dug up so much earth to prove it I should have known," said he, "that the Odyssey was written not at the beginning of a civilisation nor in the splendour of it, but towards its close. I do not say this from the evening light that shines across its pages, for that is common to all profound work, but I say it because of the animals, and especially because of the dog, who was the only one ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... differences between men and men neutralised each other, if we took the average of a very large number. But this did not prove that the individual was not of considerable importance. If the victory of Salamis depended on Themistocles, then the entire civilisation of ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... from the seas by five hundred miles of mountain, swamp, or desert. The great river is their only means of growth, their only channel of progress. It is by the Nile alone that their commerce can reach the outer markets, or European civilisation can penetrate the inner darkness. The Soudan is joined to Egypt by the Nile, as a diver is connected with the surface by his air-pipe. Without it there is only suffocation. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... Providence with an equal hand, turned to the advantage of the democracy; and even when they were in the possession of its adversaries, they still served its cause by throwing into relief the natural greatness of man; its conquests spread, therefore, with those of civilisation and knowledge; and literature became an arsenal, where the poorest and weakest could always find ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... on the subject of the Arabic numerals and cipher; as neither the querists nor respondents seem to have duly appreciated the immense importance of the step taken by introducing the use of a cipher. I would commence with observing, that we know of no people tolerably advanced in civilisation, whose system of notation had made such little progress, beyond that of the mere savage, as the Romans. The rudest savages could make upright scratches on the face of a rock, and set them in a row, to signify units; ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... attached no great importance to the matter. There is a good deal that the policeman knows and accepts with undisturbed equanimity, which if plainly expressed would, no doubt, form a somewhat grim commentary on our complex civilisation. ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... appraising the girl before him, quite approved her taste. The dress was old and somewhat faded, but its severe simplicity and its dull tints just set off the girl's dusky beauty. Shoes and stockings she had none, but what matter? any touch of civilisation would have ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... have not empires before now only been saved from oblivion by a few buried potsherds, and whole races of mankind by childish picture-scratchings on a reindeer bone? Tout lasse, tout passe, tout casse. The individual—his arts, his possessions, his religion, his civilisation—is always as an envelope, merely, to be torn asunder and cast away. Nothing subsists, nothing endures but life itself, endlessly self-renewed, endlessly one, through the endless divergencies of its manifestations. And, as Julius March was to find, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... at the piano and played a tune that was popular at the time—I do not remember what. I was in a hurry to leave the store, the home of these two victims of civilisation. ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... of the wide grasp of the all-absorbing metropolis, we may adduce the horror of the Pentonvillians at the proposed new cattle-market. How many years ago is it since Copenhagen Fields were almost beyond the regions of civilisation, known only as a prairie lying between London and the Copenhagen Tea-gardens? Let any one, whose knowledge of the district goes back fifteen or twenty years, answer this question. But now, Copenhagen House itself ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... that we deign to learn from these Orientals,—we who glory in our civilisation. We do not copy their silence or their abstemiousness, nor that invariable mindfulness of his own personal dignity which always adheres to a Turk or to an Arab. We chatter as much at Cairo as elsewhere, and ...
— An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids • Anthony Trollope |
