"Civilised" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... my power which is to come, in sh' Allah, it would have been easy to procure for thee the post of a teacher in some school or of lay-reader in some lesser mission. But thy espousal of a barbarous superstition, which no civilised and cultured person can so much as tolerate, has put it quite beyond my ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... for anxiety, you mean, my dear? Hardly for her, though it was unlucky that she was as unknowing as you, and I don't see how she is to be taken over these roads into a more civilised place. But I shall stay on and see them through with it, and I daresay we shall do very well. I am used enough to looking after my own daughters, and nobody particularly wants me ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bottom she had a different morality. Of course the morality of civilised persons has always much in common; but our young woman had a sense in her of values gone wrong or, as they said at the shops, marked down. She considered, with the presumption of youth, that a morality differing from her own must be inferior ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... them by divine help. Thus Plato may be said to represent in a figure—(1) the state of innocence; (2) the fall of man; (3) the still deeper decline into barbarism; (4) the restoration of man by the partial interference of God, and the natural growth of the arts and of civilised society. Two lesser features of this description should not pass unnoticed:—(1) the primitive men are supposed to be created out of the earth, and not after the ordinary manner of human generation—half ...
— Statesman • Plato
... recalled and formed up in the centre of the plain, where the king critically inspected them, while I, at his invitation, rode beside him. And I feel bound to say that seldom have I seen a finer body of men, either savage or civilised, which, after all, is not to be greatly wondered at, seeing that, as the king's own special regiment of bodyguards, they were, naturally, the very pick and ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... 7. The only lie which degrades a man in his own estimation and in that of others, is that told for fear of telling the truth. Au reste, human society and civilised intercourse are built upon a system of conventional lying. and many droll stories illustrate the consequences of disregarding the dictum, la verit n'est pas ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... in the cool of the evening. As all houses belonging to the more civilised indigenous races in Borneo are built on the same principle as Jok's, a description of this ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... they seem a bit far-fetched, especially now that I'm home. At any rate, I dare not mention them yet.... I arrived in Glasgow this afternoon, and got made as civilised-looking as was possible in a couple of hours. I had intended coming on here by rail and steamer, but an out-of-date time-table deceived me, and too late I found that the winter service just started gave no train after five. At the hotel ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... and had therefore arrived at the age when civilised man attains to manhood and is ripe to give life to a new generation, but is prevented from doing so by his inability to maintain a family. Consequently he was about to begin the ten years' martyrdom which a ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... given in a toast his preference for "a dreamer rather than a Catiline," as between Jefferson and Burr. During the campaign, pamphlets appeared describing Jefferson as a wild philosopher, one who believed the savage more independent and happy than the civilised man; who preferred newspapers to government; who believed that a little rebellion now and then was a good thing; who esteemed property and obligations of so little value as to declare that the actions of one generation ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... Mr. Escot, "that a wild man can travel an immense distance without fatigue; but what is the advantage of locomotion? The wild man is happy in one spot, and there he remains; the civilised man is wretched in every place he happens to be in, and then congratulates himself on being accommodated with a machine that will whirl him to another, where he will be just as ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... the Wainwright party had not complained at all when deprived of even such civilised advantages as a shelter and a knife and fork and soap and water, but Mrs. Wainwright complained bitterly amid the half-civilisation of Arta. She could see here no excuse for the absence of several ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... books has been the bookworm. I say "has been," because, fortunately, his ravages in all civilised countries have been greatly restricted during the last fifty years. This is due partly to the increased reverence for antiquity which has been universally developed—more still to the feeling of cupidity, which has caused all owners to take care of volumes which year by year ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... which the attention of every man throughout the land should be directed is, that the new constitution offered to us for acceptance is unknown to any other civilised country. Parts of it are borrowed from the United States; some of its provisions are imported from the British colonies, whilst others are apparently the inventions of the unknown and irresponsible Abbe Sieyes, who is the ingenious constitution-maker of the Cabinet. But the ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature. In the beginning, this is not altogether to be reprobated; it is the rude homage which Ignorance, conscious of its disgrace, offers to Learning; but after awhile, ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... "That's the folly. It seems to me that some one among your generals must be blundering very badly if Antwerp is to be so scandalously neglected. The lesson that it might teach if properly handled! The enormous value of its example to those parts of the civilised world that are still on the fence!—Holland, for ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... realisation albeit upon unprofitable lines of the alchemist's dreams; there was a considerable amount of discussion and expectation in that more intelligent section of the educated publics of the various civilised countries which followed scientific development; but for the most part the world went about its business—as the inhabitants of those Swiss villages which live under the perpetual threat of overhanging rocks and mountains go about their business—just as though the possible ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... exhibition, and not a little displeased at being so egregiously bitten, I passed on to the next, which was "Mr. Higgenbotham's Royal Menagerie. The Noblest Collection of Wild Beasts ever seen in the Civilised World." ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... fair" church and free school which had been erected in Derry at a cost of more than L4,000. Roads had been made which had converted one of the most barbarous places in the kingdom into one of the most civilised. The society and the companies, the petition went on to say, had enjoyed this estate without interruption until Hilary Term a deg. 6 Charles I (1631), when the Attorney-General, Sir Robert Heath, exhibited an information against the mayor, ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... How often is it repeated, although in so doing the speakers betray their own shortcomings, that strategy is a mere matter of common-sense? Yet the plain truth is that strategy is not only the determining factor in civilised warfare, but that, in order to apply its principles, the soundest common-sense must be most carefully trained. Of all the sciences connected with war it is the most difficult. If the names of the great captains, soldiers and sailors, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... help to assassinate the Baron. I refused it, and he went over to the other side. The secret tribunal in which cases are prepared for public trial is a hellish machine for cruelty and injustice. It has been abolished in nearly every other civilised country, but the courts and jails of our beautiful Italy continue to be the scene of plots in which helpless unfortunates are terrorised by expedients which leave not a trace of crime. A prisoner is no longer a man, but a human agent to incriminate others. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... deep as life itself. The history of the past becomes a prophecy of the future. Jesus has drawn men of all sorts, of every stage of culture and layer of civilisation, and of every type of character to Him, and the power which has carried a peasant of Nazareth to be the acknowledged King of the civilised world is not exhausted, and will not be till He is throned as Saviour and Ruler of the whole earth. There is only one religion in the world that is obviously growing. The gods of Greece and Rome are only subjects for studies in Comparative Mythology, the labyrinthine pantheon of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... here every thing that falls from the bosom of the former is rich and luxuriant, and every thing that proceeds from the latter is novel, extraordinary, in a word, it is oriental; and faults, which in more civilised communities would be considered inconsistent with good taste, are here ever pleasing, and seem necessary to the unity of ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... I do b'lieve it's Mr Macgregor," cried the astonished Bounce as the reckless rider dashed up to the camp fire, and, springing from his horse with a yell that savoured more of a savage than a civilised spirit, cried— ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... not prevent the hardships of savage life weighing more heavily in many ways upon women than on the stronger men. In primitive societies women have a position quite as full of anomalies as they hold among civilised races. Among some tribes their position is extremely good; among others it is undoubtedly bad, but, speaking generally, it is much better than usually it is held to be.[3] Obviously the causes must ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... productions of the human intellect. The first of these is the Treatise on the Law of War and Peace, by Grotius. It appeared about two centuries ago; and from that period downwards, international law became a solid fact, which all civilised countries have recognised, and which even the French Convention, during the Reign of Terror, dared, in its madness, to outrage but for a moment. The second is the Essay on the Human Understanding, by Locke. It struck down, as with the blow of a hatchet, the wretched mental ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason?' I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between a savage and civilised man. It is the difference between a wild and ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... theory of mine, to wit, that mankind is forgetting the use of its nose; and not only of nose, but of eyes and ears and all other natural appliances which help to capture and intensify the simple joys of life. We all know the civilised, the industrial eye—how atrophied, how small and formless and expressionless it has become. The civilised nose, it would seem, degenerates in the other direction. Like the cultured potato or pumpkin, it swells in size. The French are civilised ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... forenoon, she struck a high-road, marching in that place uphill between two stately groves, a river of sunlight; and here, dead weary, careless of consequences, and taking some courage from the human and civilised neighbourhood of the road, she stretched herself on the green margin in the shadow of a tree. Sleep closed on her, at first with a horror of fainting, but when she ceased to struggle, kindly embracing her. So she was taken home for a little, from all her ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Mysticism is passing over the civilised nations. It is welcomed by many: by more it is mistrusted. Even the minds to which it would naturally appeal are often restrained from sympathy by fears of vague speculative driftings and of transcendental emotionalism. Nor can it be doubted ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... power, which could not be gratified in any European community. It was her pleasure to dwell apart, surrounded by dependants and slaves, and out of reach of that influence and restraint which are necessarily endured by each member of a civilised society. She had become more violent in her temper than formerly, and treated her servants with great severity when they were negligent of their duties. Her maids and female slaves she punished summarily, and boasted that ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... came to Siegen, an ancient and antique town on the side of a high hill, looking, as one of the party observed, as though they had reached the end of the world. And, indeed, it seemed almost like the end of the civilised world; for they were informed that the road from thence to Berlenburg was in such a miserable condition that they could take their carriage no farther. They resolved, however, to make the attempt, and providing themselves with a tandem horse (vorspann) and a guide, and sending on their luggage, ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... incredible things; but when I add that my inn is in a Wiltshire village, the headquarters of certain gentlemen who follow a form of sport which has long been practically obsolete in this country, and indeed throughout the civilised world, some of my readers will have no difficulty ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... he wore dagger and sword, a safe practice as it deters attack and far better than carrying hidden weapons, derringers and revolvers which, originating in the United States, have now been adopted by the most civilised nations in Europe. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... divided, like most other barbaric races, into several fluctuating and ill-marked tribes, whose names are loosely and perhaps interchangeably used by the few authorities which remain to us. We must not expect to find among them the definiteness of modern civilised nations, but rather such a vagueness as that which characterised the loose confederacies of North American Indians or the various shifting peoples of South Africa. But there are three of their tribes which stand fairly well marked off from one another ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... revering him. So that, whatever we may think in our own hearts, Epic and Theory have to remain the exception. Battles indeed have been fought, but when you survey the field in preparation for them you are summoned to observe the preluding courtesies of civilised warfare in a manner becoming a chivalrous gentleman. It never was the merely flinging of your leg across a frontier, not even with the abrupt Napoleon. You have besides to drill your men; and you have ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... undertaking is required to determine its practical operation, which being once established its utility is undoubted, as it would be a necessary possession of every empire, and it were hardly too much to say, of every individual of competent means in the civilised world. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... somewhat slackened his weariness had once more become almost insupportable, and he felt that he might need his strength and senses. In the meanwhile he was somewhat bewildered by the encounter, for it was certainly astonishing to fall in with a man who spoke three civilised languages and wore spectacles in ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... which he believed himself to be surrounded, if these grounds are false, how can we still keep in substance to conclusions that are admittedly based on false premises? We can say with tolerable certainty that had primitive man known what we know about nature the gods would never have been born. Civilised man does not discover gods, he discards them. It was a profound remark of Feurbach's, that religion is ultimately anthropology, and it is anthropology that gives to all forms of theism ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... fastened upon them, till their broken bonds fell away without positive effort on their part, they showed a greater sublimity than if they had violently conquered their freedom. Most nations sink lower and lower under tyranny; the Italians grew steadily more and more civilised, more noble, more gentle, more grand. It was a wonderful spectacle—like a human soul perfected through suffering and privation. Every period of their history is full of instruction. I find my ancestral puritanism particularly appealed to by ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... Marcus. "As soon as I get to any civilised place I will send you enough commissions to make the beggars in these parts rich for life, and at a very different figure. Let ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... to benefit and themselves, legislating for their proteges in the fashion of a permanent providence. They know that a very large part of the population must labour with their hands for hire—that this is an indispensable condition of all civilised society. They know likewise that the labour-market is necessarily full of vicissitude, that work of particular kinds is constantly shifting its place, now from one street to another, now from one town ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... and in 1848 a garrison was placed in Bloemfontein and the district incorporated in the British Empire. The emigrants made a futile resistance at Boomplaats, and after a single defeat allowed themselves to be drawn into the settled order of civilised rule. ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to him, "that you have just committed one of the most terrible offences open to civilised mankind—a crime even worse (Heaven help me if I exaggerate) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... properly set, takes from twenty to thirty days to heal, after which the patient can begin moving about; and a broken arm does not require to be kept in a sling more than fifteen or twenty days. If these cures are somewhat more rapid than with our more civilised methods of bone-setting, it is merely due to the wholesome climate and the fact that the natives spend most of their days out in the open air and in the sun, undoubtedly the best cure for any complaint of that ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... an expression which impressed me at the time as being most cruel and unfair to the claimant for the honours of a new discovery in natural history; since the discovery was alleged to have been made in a region which had never before—nor, indeed, has since, until now—been penetrated by civilised man; or from which, at all events, no civilised traveller has ever again emerged, if indeed he had been successful in penetrating it. Such being the case, as the course we were pursuing would take us through the very heart of this unknown and unvisited region, I resolved to maintain a most ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilised nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or speculation.... Such a uniform and constant difference [between the negroes and the whites] could not happen in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... the snow of Petrograd from his galoshes and solemnly and laboriously vanished. Mixed bands of attaches, consular personnel, casuals, emissaries, newspaper men, and mission specialists scattered into unfeigned flight toward those several and distant sections of "God's Country," divided among civilised nations and lying far away somewhere in ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... that profaneness exists in the Church, therefore I consider it a token of the Church. Yes, certainly, just as our national form of cursing is an evidence of the being of a God, and as a gallows is the glorious sign of a civilised country,—but in no other ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... the reviews that greeted his boisterous invasion of the regions of song. "Mr. CHEPSTOWE," said one, "has struck a note which is destined to vibrate so long as the English language is spoken in civilised lands. He is no ordinary rhymester, struggling feebly in the bonds of convention. With a bold and masterful on-rush, he cleaves his way unhesitatingly to the very heart of things, tears it out, and lays it, palpitating and bleeding, before the eyes of humanity. We have only ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... there are extremes, which every critic should avoid. Some imagine that a writer of a former century should be tried, either by the standard which prevails in the cultured and civilised nineteenth, or by the exposition of moral principles and practice which is to be found in the Scriptures. Now, it is obviously, so far as taste is concerned, as unjust to judge a book written in the style and manner of one age by the merely arbitrary and conventional ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison. But on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Sutter's Fort Captain Sutter His offer of accommodation Various matters to be seen to A walk through the Fort Desertion of the guard to the "diggings" Work and whisky Indians and their bargains A chief's effort to look like a civilised being Yankee traders Indians and trappers "Beats beaver skins" Death to the weakest A regular Spanish Don and his servant Captain Sutter a Swiss Guard His prejudice in ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... to more civilised work, there is embroidery in gold and silver wire, allied to the art of the goldsmith, and on leather (Illustration 94), allied to the art of the saddler. It would be difficult to set any limit to the directions in ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... ordained it that his art, like his country's tutelary goddess Athena, should step perfect and fully armed from the brain of its creator. The Antigone, produced in 440, discusses one of the deepest problems of civilised life. On the morning after the defeat of the Seven who assaulted Thebes Polyneices' body lay dishonoured and unburied, a prey to carrion birds before the gates of the city which had been his home. His two ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... it may be observed that the neighbourhood must have been kept in a high state of cultivation during the Roman empire for the maintenance of so numerous and luxurious a population of the city, instead of the absence of necessaries of civilised life that we now see there; and that good state of things must have continued in later Christian periods, when the district formed "the third Palestine," and deputed bishops to the synods ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... has been educated, and has used his eyes in a civilised country, reads an account of people and things hitherto unknown to him, he can, from the description and from his own general knowledge, form a very correct idea of what the country contains. But then he has used his eyes—he has seen those objects, between which the parallel ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... connection formed a sort of support or background. This man, whose modernity of bearing and externals seemed to separate them by a lifetime of experience, clearly belonged to the London which surrounded and enclosed his own silences with civilised roar and the tumult of swift passings. On the surface the small, dingy book-crammed study obviously held nothing this outer world could require. The Vicar said as much courteously and he glanced round the room as he spoke, ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the case for the prosecution, asked the jury to return a verdict against the prisoner for as malicious and premeditated a crime as ever disgraced the annals of any civilised country. His cleverness and education had only been utilised for the devil's ends, while his reputation had been used as a cloak. Everything pointed strongly to the prisoner's guilt. On receiving Miss Dymond's letter announcing ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... advance on a straight and unbroken highway of progress. You find that the Kurnai of Australia are more civilised, as regards the evolution of the modern Family, than were the Picts who built crannogs and dug canoes, and cultivated the soil, and had domesticated animals, and used iron, all of them things that the Kurnai never dreamed ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... to the great Roman Empire. From that little village on the Palatine Hill, founded some 750 years B.C., Rome had spread and conquered in every direction, until in the time of Augustus she was mistress of the whole civilised world, herself the centre of wealth, civilisation, luxury, and power. Antioch in the East and Alexandria in the South ranked next to her as ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... The story shows the advantages of good manners and pleasant behaviour; and the natives do not now cook and eat each other, but live on fish, vegetables, pork, and chickens, and dwell in houses. 'What the Rose did to the Cypress' is a story from Persia, where the people, of course, are civilised, and much like those of whom you read in 'The Arabian Nights.' Then there are tales like 'The Fox and the Lapp' from the very north of Europe, where it is dark for half the year and daylight for the other half. The Lapps are a people not fond of soap ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... into classes, my lord, are not artificial. They are the natural outcome of a civilised society. (To LADY MARY.) There must always be a master and servants in all civilised communities, my lady, for it is natural, and whatever is ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie
... "not different at all, only wider and more free. Do you not see that at present it is an elegant monopoly, belonging to a few select persons, who have been refined and civilised up to a certain point? The difficulty is that we can't reach that point all at once—why, it has taken you thirty or forty centuries to reach it!—and at present we can't get further than the municipal art-gallery, and lectures on the ethical outlook of Browning. But ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... across the Bristol Channel, then at Spezzia, between the coast and the ironclad San Bartolommeo, and finally by means of gigantic apparatus between America and England, he must give the names of those who, in the different civilised countries, have contributed to the improvement of the system of communication by waves; while he must describe what precious services this system has already rendered to the art of war, and ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... repression and main force. The first of these concern that unfortunate body of criminal and vicious persons, whose unsocial propensities are constantly straining and endangering the bonds of the social union. They exist in the midst of the most highly civilised communities, with all the predatory or violent habits of barbarous tribes. They are the active and unconquered remnant of the natural state, and it is as unscientific as the experience of some unwise philanthropy has shown it to be ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... Primpton, he found his people as he had left them, doing the same things, repeating at every well-known juncture the same trite observations. Their ingenuousness affected him as a negro, civilised and educated, on visiting after many years his native tribe, might be affected by their nose-rings and yellow ochre. James was astounded that they should ignore matters which he fancied common knowledge, and at the same time accept beliefs that ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... close the primitive barbarian is to the most civilised man. No one could have been more carefully trained than Lord Alfred Blakeney. No one possessed more of that suave self-control which distinguishes a man of the governing classes from the members of the mob. Yet Lord Alfred collapsed suddenly under the strain to which he had been subjected. ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... was no fair testing of the relative advantages of defence and offence in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78; and so it remains that in an actual and practical sense no firm decision has yet been established. All civilised nations are, however, assiduously practising the methods ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... an ax and pruning-knife. Glancing this way and that, as if to assure himself that no one was near, a precaution that might almost be set down as a useless exhibition of timidity in that wild out-of-the-way place, so far from the habitation of civilised man. Duffel, when satisfied that no human eye was upon him, dismounted, and leading his steed by the bridle a short distance to the left, paused, looked around him again, and then lifting a pendant prong of a bush, with a very slight exertion of strength, he moved back a large mass of ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... more which might be adduced, are abundantly compensated by the poet's vital relation to the religion of his age. No poet whose fame is co-extensive with the civilised world, except Shakespeare and Goethe, has ever been greatly in advance of his times. Had Milton been so, he might have avoided many faults, but he would not have been a representative poet; nor could Shelley have classed him with Homer ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... have been the most civilised before the time of the Incas were the Aymaras, whose descendants still inhabit the shores of Lake Titicaca. Their language differs from the Quichua, though ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... a refracting telescope—so far as the expression has any definite meaning—is to be measured by the diameter of its object-glass. There has, indeed, been some honourable rivalry between the various civilised nations as to which should possess the greatest refracting telescope. Among the notable instruments that have been successfully completed is that erected in 1881 by Sir Howard Grubb, of Dublin, at the splendid observatory at Vienna. Its dimensions may ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... means peltry) I cannot discover. Perhaps some words have dropped out. A good description of a Kirghiz hut (35 feet in diameter), and exactly corresponding to Polo's account, will be found in Atkinson's Siberia, and another in Vambery's Travels. How comfortable and civilised the aspect of such a hut may be, can be seen also in Burnes's account of a Turkoman dwelling of this kind. This description of hut or tent is common to nearly all the nomade tribes of Central Asia. The trellis-work forming the skeleton of the tent-walls is (at least among the Turkomans) loosely ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... of terrible passions which lie slumbering under what, in ordinary cases, have appeared harmless bosoms, but which now run riot, and overcame every principle of restraint. It is a melancholy fact, but, nevertheless, a fact, despite its melancholy, that, even in a civilised country like this, with a generally well-educated population, nothing but a well-organised physical force keeps down, from the commission of the most outrageous offences, hundreds ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... the early religion underwent in later periods, when foreign elements were added and foreign ideas altered and remoulded the old tradition. We must confine ourselves to a single epoch, in which the native Roman spirit worked out unaided the ideas inherited from half-civilised ancestors, and formed that body of belief and ritual, which was always, at least officially, the kernel of Roman religion, and constituted what the Romans themselves—staunch believers in their own traditional history—loved to ...
— The Religion of Ancient Rome • Cyril Bailey
... selfishness; the thought of it often enough troubles me. If I were rich, I should be a generous and good man; I know I should. So would many another poor fellow whose worst features come out under hardship. This isn't a heroic type; of course not. I am a civilised man, that's all.' ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... he remarked. "I am not at all sure that our having become too civilised for crime is a healthy ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... an English sense? Just as there are Greeks here who believe in Kulbash Pasha, and would say, Stay at home and till your currant-fields and mind your coasting trade. Don't try to be civilised, for civilisation goes badly with brigandage, and scarcely suits trickery. And you are aware, Mr. Atlee, that trickery and brigandage are more to Greece ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... regions, and have as little toleration for myself here, as for them. What can they want here? if they had a true relish of the ocean, why have they brought all this land luggage with them? or why pitch their civilised tents in the desert? What mean these scanty book-rooms—marine libraries as they entitle them—if the sea were, as they would have us believe, a book "to read strange matter in?" what are their foolish concert-rooms, if they come, as they would fain be thought to do, to listen to the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... For hundreds of grave men in and near London had risen that very morning from their beds uplifted by the radiant thought: "To-day I can go to the Club again." Mr. Prohack had long held that the noblest, the most civilised achievement of the British character was not the British Empire, nor the House of Commons, nor the steam-engine, nor aniline dyes, nor the music-hall, but a good West End club. And somehow at the doors of a good West End club there ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... decided that he should not vote! What wisdom—what research it must have required to evolve this truth! It was left for the Court of Common Pleas for Columbian county, Ohio, in the United States of North America, to find out what Solomon never dreamed of—the courts of all civilised, heathen, or Jewish countries, never contemplated. Lest the wisdom of our courts should be circumvented by some such men as might be named, who are so near being born constitutionally that they might be taken ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... this breach of etiquette with stern promptness. "This conduct at table is disgraceful, sir—perfectly disgraceful—unworthy of a civilised being. I have been a teacher of youth for many years, and never till now did I have the pain of seeing a pupil of mine choke in his breakfast-cup with such deplorable ill-breeding. It's pure greediness, sir, and you will have the goodness ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... science, who is also an excellent writer and the very prince of debaters, Professor Huxley, in a discourse at the opening of Sir Josiah Mason's College at Birmingham, laying hold of this phrase, expanded it by quoting some more words of mine, which are these: "The civilised world is to be regarded as now being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result; and whose members have for their proper outfit a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of one another. Special local and ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... other cases where war is not only inevitable, but actually desirable from a standpoint of world advantage. Imagine a highly civilised and progressive nation, a strong prosperous nation, wisely and efficiently governed, as may be true, some day, of the United States of America. Let us suppose this nation to be surrounded by a number of weak and unenlightened states, ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... alone. The Cumri either retained, which is more probable, a still more ancient, or invented a grammar, now peculiar to themselves. This, although it be simple and scientific in the highest degree, is so completely at variance with all the other grammars of the civilised world, that scholars who have to acquire it late in life feel the strongest repugnance to its forms and principles, and are tempted to regard a language more fixed and unchangeable in its principles than any other existing, as more slippery and grasp-escaping ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect. On this side he is the very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great openness and trustfulness of nature. In addition, he has little experience of the corrupt products of civilised life, and ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... will never truly succeed either in acquiring the accomplishment or in using it half-acquired as a distraction; though the one is the most perfect of distractions, and though the other is unsurpassed by any other accomplishment in elegance or in power to impress the universal snobbery of civilised mankind. Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental *sine qua non* of complete living. I am extremely anxious to avoid rhetorical exaggerations. I do not think I am guilty of one in asserting that he who has not been "presented to the freedom" of literature has ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... certain that millions, I say deliberately, millions, in every civilised land are waiting for the message that will save them from the hideous abyss of materialism into which modern money-worship is driving them headlong, and many of the leaders of the new Social Movements have already ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... and more grotesque. All about was heavy blackness. The slender branches of the burning pine writhed and hissed; they might have been a pyramid of rattlesnakes caught in spouting flame. Overhead the stars had disappeared beyond a heavy cloud of smoke. It was a sight to strike terror to the heart of civilised man; small wonder that the superstitious children of the mountain and ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... seem to be only less popular than Shakespeare, and every year sees a fresh output. But of late there has sprung up a custom of confusing the old with the new, the genuine with the imitation; and the products of civilised days, 'ballads' by courtesy or convention, are set beside the rugged and hard-featured aborigines of the tribe, just as the delicate bust of Clytie in the British Museum has for next neighbour the rude and bold 'Unknown Barbarian Captive.' To contrast by such enforced juxtaposition ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... might be as weel to say a word or two abaat Haworth itseln. It's a city at's little nawn, if onny, in th' history o' Ingland, tho thare's no daat but it's as oud as Methuslam, if net ouder, yet wi' being built so far aat o' th' latitude o' civilised nashuns, nobody's scarcely nawn owt abaat it wal lately. Th' faanders of it is sed to be people fra th' Eastern countries, for they tuk fearful after em in Haworth i'th line o'soothsayers, magishuns, an' istralegers; but whether they cum fra th' East ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... industrial methods of the machinery, hardware, and other staple English manufactures, passed into the Western Continent of Europe and America, destroying the old domestic industry and establishing in every civilised country the reign of steam-driven machinery. The factors determining the order and pace of the new movement in the several countries are numerous and complex. In considering the order of machine-development, it must be remembered that the different nations did not start from ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... supposed to be the best in South America. If you are going to include all the talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to say what I have always said, that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilised." ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... last twenty years, William had lived in affluence, bordering upon splendour, his friends, his fame, his fortune, daily increasing, while Henry throughout that very period had, by degrees, lost all he loved on earth, and was now existing apart from civilised society; and yet, during those twenty years, where William knew one ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... I should not like you to think that Wales was more barbarous than England, or Llywelyn less civilised than Edward I. Giraldus Cambrensis saw a prince going barefoot, and the fussy little Archbishop Peckham saw that Welsh marriage customs were not what he liked; and many historians, who have never read a line of Welsh poetry, take for granted ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... taxidermy; all, therefore, co-exist without rivalry. Whereas, in these small colonies, there is but one fame, and as that leads directly to rupees and rank, no man willingly accords it to his neighbour. And, finally, such semi-civilised life abounds in a weary ceremoniousness. It is highly improper to smoke outside your bungalow. You shall pay your visits at 11 A.M., when the glass stands at 120o. You shall be generally shunned if you omit your waistcoat, ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... manufacturing towns. But I use the canaille for my purpose—I don't mean to enthrone it. You comprehend?—the canaille quiescent is simply mud at the bottom of a stream; the canaille agitated is mud at the surface. But no man capable of three ideas builds the palaces and senates of civilised society out of mud, be it at the top or the bottom of an ocean. Can either you or I desire that the destinies of France shall be swayed by coxcombical artisans who think themselves superior to every man who writes grammar, and whose ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this will never do! You are getting altogether too civilised. I shall have no playmate left at this rate," cried her father, laughing. "Can't you be satisfied with two grown-up daughters, mother, and leave Mops to me ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... study and set to work upon a development of the demonstrations with which he had astounded not only London, but the whole civilised world. ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... in our days to the pinnacle of fame which is his by right; the festival of his tercentenary was acknowledged by the whole civilised world as the natural utterance of joy and pride of our small country in being able to count among its children the ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... noon we met again for dinner, and again about 7 p.m. for supper, which meal being over, Butler, Cook, and I would repair to the sitting room, and round a glorious fire smoked or read or listened to Butler's piano. It was the most civilised experience I had had of up-country life since I left Highfield and was very enjoyable. I did not, however, remain very long ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... bargain, the laggard posts of the Pacific may perhaps inform me in six months, perhaps not before a year. The following lines represent my part of the contract, and it is hoped, by their pictures of strange manners, they may entertain a civilised audience. Nothing throughout has been invented or exaggerated; the lady herein referred to as the author's muse has confined herself to stringing into rhyme facts or legends that I saw or heard during two months' residence upon the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... restrictions, bigoted though devout, and inspired in all and through all by an unconquerable love of independence. With manners they had nothing to do, with progress still less. Isolation from the civilised world, and contact with Bushmen, Hottentots, and Kaffirs, kept them from advancing with the times. Their slaves outnumbered themselves, and their treatment of these makes anything but enlivening reading. From all accounts the Boer ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... for novelty, their riotous longings for new adventures, new risks, new pleasures, these suffered, no doubt, from the reverse side of starvation, from surfeit. No getting out of it—a maladjusted animal, civilised man! There could be no garden of his choosing, of "the Apple-tree, the singing, and the gold," in the words of that lovely Greek chorus, no achievable elysium in life, or lasting haven of happiness for any man with a sense of beauty—nothing which could compare with the captured ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... never hesitated to coin a word when wanted, such as "she snorted and sparked," fully to represent the original. These, like many in Rabelais, are mere barbarisms unless generally adopted; in which case they become civilised and common currency. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... although national and private munificence has increased the number of public libraries so widely that almost every reader is within reach of books, the private library still flourishes. There are men all through the civilised world to whom a book is a jewel—an individual possession of great price. I have been asked to gossip about my books, for I also am a bibliophile. But when I think of the great collections of fine books, ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... supreme exponent, and achieved through him its realisation in this astounding war. But his fascination was more than national; all over the world his ruthless strength dominated minds as the Napoleonic legend had dominated minds. Englishmen turned in disgust from the slow, complex, civilised methods of their national politics to this uncompromising, forceful figure. Frenchmen believed in him. Poems were written ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... this coast is but little known to the English. The ladies having returned home, we prepared to leave this douar early in the morning; and with no small regret did I quit this abode of simple and patriarchal hospitality; a pleasing contrast was here formed to the dissipation and pleasure of civilised life—to the life of fashionable society, where the refinements of luxury have multiplied their artificial wants beyond the proportion of the largest fortunes, and have brought most men into the class of the necessitous, ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... way to know a little river is not to glance at it here or there in the course of a hasty journey, nor to become acquainted with it after it has been partly civilised and spoiled by too close contact with the works of man. You must go to its native haunts; you must see it in youth and freedom; you must accommodate yourself to its pace, and give yourself to its influence, and follow its meanderings whithersoever ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... trouble brought; And left them in chaotic state No longer masters of their fate. In those days 'twas 'Woe to the weak,' Saxons and Danes had made us squeak, Then came the Normans in great force And civilised us in due course. They tried the same with Ireland green; But only sowed a feud between The land they'd conquered and Erin, Leading to endless quarrelling. England accepts the Reformation, Catholic still the Irish nation Cromwell Sees Cromwell with them battle join Boyne And William beat them ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... story man caught with the goods. 'Then turn to your right and go straight ahead and it's just a little piece.' I ain't ever hurt you, lady, and I wouldn't, not for a hundred dollars. But I'm awful sore being told it's just over yonder. How far is it, measured in something civilised, like blocks?" ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... Garry. From that point they would take the overland trail on the great plains to St. Paul, and there, boarding the flat-bottomed steamers on the Mississippi, would once more begin travelling in a civilised manner. ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... connection with appropriation of a Seat. The Colonel, of course, in the row at the door of the House, between eleven and noon. Two hundred Members waiting to get in as soon as doors opened. "Nothing like it seen in civilised world since the rush for Oklahoma," says Lord PLAYFAIR, who has been in the United States. "Then, you remember, the intending settlers, gathering from all parts, bivouacked on line marked by military, and on appointed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 25, 1893 • Various
... places, assimilating all there was to assimilate; gazing and noting the thousand things there were to be seen and heard, and sleeping exactly three hours. Few people would believe the extraordinary condition to which twelve hours of chaos can reduce a large number of civilised people who have been forced into an unnatural life. It is indeed extraordinary. Half the Legations are abandoned, excepting for a few sailors; others are being evacuated, and most people have even none of the necessities of life with them. For instance, at eight o'clock I discovered ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... word," said McIntyre. "The Fort end of your field won't be bad in one way. You'll find the people quite civilised. Indeed, The Fort is quite the social centre for the whole district. Afternoon teas, hunts, tennis, card-parties, and dancing parties make life one gay whirl for them. Mind you, I'm not saying a word against them. In this country anything clean in the ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor |
