"Ethical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... does not enter. No one can read it without receiving a new impulse to his thoughts, and one usually in the right direction. The author is evidently a man of heart as well as of intellect, and inclines to a generous view of most subjects. His book should be looked at rather in the light of an ethical treatise than of a novel. The plot is less in his mind than the moral. But such hybrid productions are apt to fail of their end. If we desire to study philosophy, commend us to the regular documents. We do not wish for truth, as she emerges dripping from the well, to be clothed in the garments of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... animals it is against the moral and ethical codes of all species of vertebrates for the strong to bully and oppress the weak; but it is almost everywhere a common rule of action with about ten per ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... was asking him to tell them exactly what it was that they were to discuss. Instinctively he looked at Martin as he spoke. As always, with the first word there came over him a sense of mastery and happiness, a desire to move people like pawns, a readiness to twist any principle, moral and ethical, if he might bend it to his purpose. Instinctively he pitched his voice, formed his mouth, spread his hands upon the broad arms of his chair exactly as an actor fills in ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... you quote from Theognis, I think has an ethical rather than a political object. The whole piece is ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the ethical plane struck Phoebe speechless. She blushed and stammered, but had no reply to make. The seeming defeat really concealed a victory, however, for it instantly converted Copernicus ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... in the Odinic religion, the destruction and regeneration of the world, has taken this beautiful sun-myth of Balder into its service. Balder is then no more merely the pure holy light of heaven; he symbolizes at the same time the purity and innocence of the gods; he is changed from a physical to an ethical myth. He impersonated all that was good and holy in the life of the gods; and so it came to pass that when the golden age had ceased, when thirst for gold (Gulveig), when sin and crime had come into the world, he was too good to live in it. As in Genesis fratricide (Cain ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... unhappiness and discontent with life, in so far as it was not the inevitable penalty of the ethical anarch, can only be ascribed to this same child-like irrationality—though in such a form it is irrationality hardly peculiar to Shelley. Pity, if you will, his spiritual ruins and the neglected early training which was largely their cause; but the pity due to his outward circumstances ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... development, in comparison with co-operation and social action." What, indeed, but a surrender of the paramountcy of struggle for life, is Huxley's celebrated Romanes lecture in which he supplants the cosmic process by the ethical? The French free-thinker, Charles Robin, gave expression to the verdict of exact science when he declared: "Darwinism is a fiction, a poetical accumulation of probabilities without proof, and of attractive explanations ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... his ethical consciousness what had he gained? Not merely a fine insight as in Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, an insight which enables him to treat with comprehending sympathy even great criminals and traitors, but a high serenity and steady poise which enables ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... perfect in our attributes if we could! Who would write vapid, savourless pages, if it were in his power to set them aglow with rare erudition, and dazzling conceptions of ethical and other abstract subjects? If I had been born a Dickens, lector benevole, I would have willingly, eagerly, proudly, favoured you with a "Tale of Two Cities" or a "David Copperfield;" of that you may be morally certain, however, it is ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... had no inconsiderable culture and refinement of manners, and that had made respectable progress in art and sciences—the Indians, Persians, Medians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians. They applied the term evidently in a political, not an ethical or an aesthetical sense, and as it would seem to designate a social order in which the state was not developed, and in which the nation was personal, not territorial, and authority was held as a private right, not as a public trust, or in which the domain vests ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... effect: and, above all, there is abundant room for study of manners, for proverbial and popular wisdom and witticism, for "furniture"—to use that word in a wide sense. Above all, the Italian mind, like the Greek, had an ethical twist—twist in more senses than one, some would say, but that does not matter. Manners, morals, motives—these three could not but displace, to some extent, mere incident: though there was generally ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... absurd characters, then, that we can find a mass of psychological and ethical suggestion. This cannot be found in the serious characters except indeed in some of the later experiments: there is a little of such psychological and ethical suggestion in figures like Gridley, like Jasper, like Bradley Headstone. But in these earlier books at least, such as The Old Curiosity ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... seldom that any of the great questions of the time are treated from an ethical standpoint. Old opinions and old usages furnish the standpoint for our press writers, our politicians, and our clergy. The question of national defence has been under discussion for years, and Samuel J. Tilden, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... punished by an eternity of happiness or misery—heaven or hell. Perhaps the man has lived but one or two years of reasonable understanding—or full three-score and ten—and has violated certain moral, ethical or even religious laws, perhaps only to the extent of refusing to believe something that his reason absolutely refused to accept—for this he is doomed to an everlasting sojourn in a place of pain, misery or punishment, ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... have superiors and inferiors. It is pleasant to have some one to whom we can look up, as better endowed than ourselves; and it is pleasant to have others who can look up to us. And our best and most ethical judgment approves of this feeling. In particular, there is no feeling so ennobling as reverence; but there would be no proper place for reverence if we were equal. It would not, therefore, be easy to think that an ideal state of society ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... fondi. Estate bieno. Esteem estimi. Estimable estiminda. Estimate (appraise) taksi. Estimate estimi. Estimate, appraisement taksado. Estimation estimado. Estrange forigi. Estuary estuario. Eternal eterna. Eternity eterneco. Ether etero. Ethereal etera. Ethical etika. Ethnography etnografio. Ethology etologio. Etiology etiologio. Etiquette etiketo. Etymology vortodeveno. Eucharist Euxkaristo. Eulogize lauxdegi. Eulogy lauxdego. Euphonic bonsona. Euphonious belsona. Europe Euxropo. European Euxropano. Evacuate malplenigi. Evade ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... why a woman should give her life to a man. Quite apart from the law, which proclaims that each individual must be the arbiter of his own fate, and not succumb to the wishes of others, it would be an ethical sin for you to marry the worthy Mr. Medlicott—not loving him. Surely, you ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... marvelous dramatic intensity, and in its ethical meaning has a force comparable only to Hawthorne's ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... Agatha, "there was that terrible box upon my sitting-room floor, and there were those two degraded wretches. The callous beasts stood above the box apparently quite insensible to the ethical enormity of their crime. But they were keen enough to see that it might be used as a lever with which to force more money from me. For when I demanded that they take the box away with them and dispose of it, they only laughed at me. They said that they had had enough of that ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... Though Nietzsche and Carlyle were in reality profoundly different, Carlyle being a stiff-necked peasant and Nietzsche a very fragile aristocrat, they were alike in this one quality of which we speak, the strange and pitiful audacity with which they applied their single ethical test to everything in heaven and earth. The disciple of Nietzsche, indeed, embraces immorality like an austere and difficult faith. He urges himself to lust and cruelty with the same tremulous enthusiasm ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... the distinguished ethical teacher, Dr. Stanton Coit, complains, like Houston Chamberlain, that our Bible has checked and blighted all other national inspiration: in his book "The Soul of America," he even calls upon me to repudiate unequivocally ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... Testament presents when compared with the Old, according to the ecclesiastical view of the matter, is just that existing between my ethical system and the moral philosophy of Europe. The Old Testament represents man as under the dominion of Law, in which, however, there is no redemption. The New Testament declares Law to have failed, frees man ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Greeks foolishness (I Cor. i. 23), and the central doctrine for the converted Apostle was that of the resurrection of Christ. The important thing for him was that Christ had been made man and had died and had risen again, and not what he did in his life—not his ethical work as a teacher, but his religious work as a giver of immortality. And he it was who wrote those immortal words: "Now if Christ be preached that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... young and aspiring mind. And now we are as one in our hopes and endeavours, and the years make little disparity between us. He was twenty-two when I was but fifteen,—but now that I am twenty-six and he thirty-three we are far better matched associates. From him I learnt much of the discontents,—ethical and religious,—of the world; from him I learnt how to speak in public. He was then an actor, a sort of wandering 'Bohemian,'—but he soon tired of the sordidness of the stage and aspired to higher platforms of work, and he had already begun to lead the people by his powers ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... We should expect the ethical code in God's revelation to be complete, and final, and perfect. The divine ethics should at least be above human criticism and beyond ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... my subsequent course of lectures; meantime accept this as one of the things, and the most important of all things, I can positively declare to you. The art, or general productive and formative energy, of any country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life. You can have noble art only from noble persons, associated under laws fitted to their time and circumstances. And the best skill that any teacher of art could spend here in your help, would not end in enabling you even so much ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... one thing a white man might do in such a case without disturbing the ethical, and he proceeded about it forthwith: Draw the devil's fangs; render him impotent for a few hours. He deliberately knelt on one of the outspread arms and calmly emptied the insensible man's pockets. He took everything—watch, money, passport, letters, pistol, keys—rose and dropped them ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... horrified its contemporaries had passed into the feeling of the time, so that he was able to accept it with a joyful heart. He was intensely moved by the grandeur of the struggle for life, and the ethical rule which it suggested seemed to fit in with his predispositions. He said to himself that might was right. Society stood on one side, an organism with its own laws of growth and self-preservation, while the individual stood on the other. The actions which were to the advantage ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... passages; but we see too plainly that he has dwelt too fondly upon those passages, and worked them up with especial care. We need not be prudish in our judgment of impassioned poetry; but when the passion has this false ring, the ethical coincides with ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... approved, at least tolerated in the past which are not in accord with the ethical conception ...
— The New York Stock Exchange and Public Opinion • Otto Hermann Kahn
... subdivisions, Aliscans, which some have put at the head of the whole. In fact, as we might expect, the esprit gaulois can seldom refrain altogether from pleasantry, and its pleasantry at this time is distinctly "the humour of the stick." But still the poem is a very fine one. Its ethical opening is really noble: the picture of the Court at Aix has grandeur, for all its touches of simplicity; the fighting is good; the marriage scene and its fatal interruption (for we hear nothing of the princess on William's second visit to ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... such security and equality of supply as to avoid both waste and famine: then the economy of medicine and just range of sanitary law: finally the economy of luxury, partly an aesthetic and partly an ethical question. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... God is known. Christians do not so start. We are still exploring God on the lines of Jesus Christ—rethinking God all the time, finding him out. That is what Jesus meant us to do. If Jesus had merely put before men an ethical code, that would have been to do what the moralists had done before him—what moralists always do, with the same naive idea that they are doing a great deal for us. His ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... presided as Professor of Moral Philosophy. I found that that great man died, after a lingering illness, in the beginning of the year 1822, perfectly resigned to his fate, and conversing, even on his deathbed, on the divine mysteries of Ethical Philosophy. Notwithstanding the little peccadilloes to which I have alluded in the latter pages of "Paul Clifford," and which his pupils deemed it ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not in virtue of anything he wrote which can be properly called Deism. Shaftesbury in his ethical and Bolingbroke in his political writings may perhaps be termed classical writers, but ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... had been greatly admired for being influenced by Sovietski, but it appeared now that this was not a good thing to be. It was evidently a rotten thing to be. The law could not touch you for being influenced by Sovietski, but there is an ethical as well as a legal code, and this it was obvious that Raymond Parsloe Devine had transgressed. Women drew away from him slightly, holding their skirts. Men looked at him censoriously. Adeline Smethurst started violently, and dropped a tea-cup. And Cuthbert Banks, doing his popular ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... son, Sir Leslie STEPHEN (1832-1904), K.C.B., Litt.D., at one time famous as a mountaineer; eminent literary editor and critic; President of the Ethical Soc.; editor of the earlier volumes of the "Dictionary of National Biography"; author of many works, including ...
— Noteworthy Families (Modern Science) • Francis Galton and Edgar Schuster
... with much solemnity of his ethical system, of which the Essay on Man is but a fragment, but we need not trouble ourselves about it. Dr. Johnson said about Clarissa Harlowe that the man who read it for the story might hang himself; so we may say about the poetry of Pope: the man ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... deep feeling, of any ethical consideration prompting her contrition, jarred upon me. She would be good because she did not want to starve or be otherwise punished. That was her view of ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... master-spirit immoral. There does not exist in the literature of the world one popular book that is immoral two centuries after it is produced. For, in the heart of nations, the False does not live so long; and the True is the Ethical to ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... industrial or social reform frankly on courage for other people, on believing in the inherent and eternal power of men of changing their minds, of being put up in new kinds and new sizes of men, in other words, on conversion—why is it that clergymen, atheists, ethical societies, politicians, socialists will all unite, will all flock together and descend upon him, shout and laugh him away, bully him with dead millionaires, bad corporations and humdrum business men, overawe him with mere history, argue him with statistics, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... I'll make you talk!" cried Perkins, and he began to kick with his heavy boots—until Connor stopped him, knowing that this was not ethical—it would ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... that Luther is concerned about Melanchthon as he was about Weller: he fears his young colleague is becoming a prey to morbid self-incrimination. It is again a case of "Puppensuenden" being expanded till they seem ethical monstrosities. But, as the opening words of the paragraph show, Luther had another purpose in writing to Melanchthon as he did. Melanchthon was a public preacher and expounder of the doctrine of evangelical grace. He must not preach that doctrine ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... ethics, he was still young enough and enthusiastic enough to lay down the general principle that a great corporation, being itself a creation of the law, must necessarily be law-abiding, and, if not entirely ethical in its dealings with the public, at least equitably just. Therefore his ideal in his own profession was the man who could successfully safeguard large interests, promote the beneficent outreachings of corporate capital, ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... represented by such stories as The Pig Brother,[1] which has now grown so familiar to teachers that it will serve for illustration without repetition here. It is the type of story which specifically teaches a certain ethical or conduct lesson, in the form of a fable or an allegory,—it passes on to the child the conclusions as to conduct and character, to which the race has, in general, attained through centuries of experience ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... more apparent, when we consider that the sum of the pleasant sensations of the individual, and the happifying emotions which flow from them, constitutes the sum of human happiness. All conditions of life which promote right living, ethical culture and moral growth, nourish and call forth emotions of truth and honesty, pure pleasure, adoration, worship, hope, affection, love and all the higher and nobler characteristics, build up life and increase its capacity for happiness. Through the action of an equally inexorable and unswerving ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... nature, is no virtue, for it is unconscious. A tigress has it, but we do not call it a virtue in her any more than we call her cruelty to her prey a vice; she is acting unconsciously in either case, knowing no distinction between good and evil. Fondness, in a word, is not an ethical virtue. In addition to all its enumerated shortcomings, it is, moreover, transient. A dog mother will care for her young for a few months with the watchfulness and temporary ferocity implanted in her by natural ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... historical spirit did not flourish for long. The interest in the universal lesson prevailed over that in the particular fact, and the tradition that was treasured was not of political events but of ethical and legal teachings. Moral rather than objective truth was the study of the schools, and when contemporary events are described, it is in a poetical, rhapsodical form, such as we find in the Psalms of Solomon, which recount Pompey's invasion ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... beating the egg instinctively stirs her spoon in one direction,—a form of movement usually recommended by no conscious association of ideas,—imagine that in the method of her action she is bearing testimony to the deepest ethical and ceremonial conceptions of remote ancestors; yet there can be no doubt that such is the case. Here also prevails the remarkable principle to which attention has already been directed. The mythology of the ancient worship has ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... occupied with the formation and elaboration of dogma. With a few notable exceptions, among whom may be mentioned Basil, Clement, Alquin and Thomas Aquinas, the Church fathers and schoolmen paid but scanty attention to the ethical side of religion. It was only after the Reformation that theology, Roman and Protestant alike, was divided into different branches. The Roman Catholic name for what we style Ethics is 'moral philosophy,' which, however, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... glance at the history of Israel proves that as long as the people lived on their native soil, and could live out their own lives, they showed neither skill nor desire for mercantile pursuits; that their legislation, their religion, their poetry and prophesying, and their ethical ideas presuppose a nation of shepherds and tillers of the soil. For the great change in the ruling disposition of the Jews, since their dispersion, those alone are responsible who now reproach them for it. The first Christians were Jewish ploughmen ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... seem something like a discussion of infinitesimals, but I think M. Halevy's co-operation has given M. Meilhac's plays a fuller ethical richness. To the younger writer is due a simple but direct irony, as well as a lightsome and laughing desire to point a moral when occasion serves. Certainly, I shall not hold up a play written to please the public of the Palais Royal, or even of the Gymnase, as a model of all the virtues. Nor ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... right and wrong; and seeing that the last-named are different in kind from the former, we give them a separate name, and speak of the moral or spiritual nature or capacity of man, as well as the intellectual or mental. Some (by the way) choose "moral" to include both, holding that ethical perceptions arise out of (or are intimately connected with) our sense of God. Others would make a further distinction, and confine "moral" to the (supposed) bare ethical perception of duty or of right and wrong, and add "spiritual" to distinguish the ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... their moral teaching. This is visible even in the external structure of the greatest of them, for they are nearly equally divided into two parts, the first of which is occupied with doctrinal statements and the second with moral exhortations. The ethical teaching of Paul spreads itself over all parts of the Christian life; but it is not distinguished by a systematic arrangement of the various kinds of duties, although the domestic duties are pretty fully treated. Its chief characteristic lies in the motives which ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... there is a distinct tendency among educated Hindus to give up the old line of defense against the Christian religion, and, admitting the ethical purity and truth of the teachings of Christ, to attack some particular doctrine, some dogma over which Christians themselves have been in controversy, to elaborate the criticisms of Ingersoll and Bradlaugh, ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... may I be pardoned for intruding one of my own small ethical ideas at this point, with the full realization that it depends upon an entirely personal point of view. As far as my own case goes, I consider it poor sportsmanship ever to refuse a lion-chance merely because the advantages are not all in my favour. ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... as a writer than he was voracious as a student, and in him first the division of philosophy into certain great sections, such as physical, mathematical, ethical, was clearly [147] drawn. We are, however, mainly concerned with his teaching in its more strictly philosophical aspects. His main doctrine was professedly antithetical to that of the Eleatics, who, it will be remembered, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... show that Shelley was in no sense an inflammatory demagogue; however visionary may have been the hopes he indulged, he based those hopes upon the still more Utopian foundation of a sudden ethical reform, and preached a revolution without bloodshed. We find in them, moreover, the germs of "The Revolt of Islam", where the hero plays the part successfully in fiction, which the poet had attempted without appreciable result ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... adult. The universal interest in missing-persons cases is overdrawn because of their dramatic appeal. In every case that comes to important notice, the missing person has left some important responsibilities that had to be satisfied. A person with no moral, legal, or ethical anchor has every right to pack his suitcase and catch the next conveyance for parts unknown. If he is found by the authorities after an appeal by friends or relatives, the missing party can tell the police that, Yes he did leave home and, No he isn't returning and, furthermore he does ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... with the authority of a law. "Fraud, injustice, oppression, peculation, engendered in India, are crimes of the same blood, family, and caste, with those that are born and bred in England." Outside the noble simplicity of that ethical doctrine Burke could not and would not budge. That sentence represents the whole difference between him and the man whom he afterwards accused, between him and the men of whom that man came to be the representative. Burke's morality was direct, uncompromising, unalterable by ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... lead, and various other causes (needless to mention), sailors, as a class, entertain the most liberal notions concerning morality and the Decalogue; or rather, they take their own views of such matters, caring little for the theological or ethical definitions of others concerning what ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... mockery, but as knowing that the Church must have an explanation to give, if she would only give it, and as myself unable to find any, even the most farfetched, that can bring what we see at Oropa, Loreto and elsewhere into harmony with modern conscience, either intellectual or ethical. ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... "The Settlement and Municipal Reform," James B. Reynolds in Proceedings of Twenty-third National Conference of Charities, pp. 138 sq. "Benevolent Features of Trades-Unions," John D. Flannigan in the same, pp. 154 sq. "The Ethical Basis of Municipal Corruption," Miss Jane Addams in "International Journal of Ethics," for April, 1898. "The Workers," Walter A. Wyckoff. "Working People and their Employers," Washington Gladden. "Problem of the Unemployed," Hobson. "The Unemployed," ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... after the rise of Cromwell, was not between the Puritans and the Episcopalians, but between the different sects of Puritans themselves. At first, the Independents harmonized with the Presbyterians. Their theological and ethical opinions were the same, and both cordially hated and despised the government of the Stuarts. But when the Presbyterians obtained the ascendency, the Independents were grieved and enraged to discover that ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... next to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading. I will be very frank—I ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and its flavor of literature, but rather that of the epicurean Ninon, brilliant, versatile, free, lax, skeptical, full of intrigue and wit, but without moral sense of spiritual aspiration. Literary portraits and ethical maxims have given place to a spicy mixture of scandal and philosophy, humanitarian speculations and equivocal bons mots. It is piquant and amusing, this light play of intellect, seasoned with clever and sparkling wit, but the note of delicacy and sensibility is quite gone. Society has divested ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... theological books were written in the local tongue, a sure sign of isolation and of the lack of interest in the common philosophical life of the world. In moral conduct, while the English clergy could not be held guilty of serious breaches of the general ethical code, they were far from coming up to the special standard which the canon law imposed upon the clergy, and which the monastic reformation was making the inflexible law of the time. Married priests abounded; there were said ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... generation. The young have been told to be good until they have grown weary of hearing it, particularly as it is always represented to them as a comparatively simple matter, and when they go out in the world and find what a hard and complex thing duty is they are very apt to look back to the ethical instruction of their college as when in college they looked back to the admonitions of the nursery, and return to their alma mater in later years with much the feeling with which a man visits ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... conventional brown-stone buildings and English basements. Nielje, the Dutch maid, stood at the half-opened door, regarding with suspicion the big, dark man who had pulled the bell so violently. Aunt Lucas was in New York at the meeting of a society devoted to Ethical Enjoyment. Though Nielje had been warned secretly of an expected visitor, this wild-looking young man with long black hair, wearing a flaring coat of many colours and baggy Turkish trousers, gave her a shock. Why did he come ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... monogamy in Christendom is commonly ascribed to ethical motives. This is quite as absurd as ascribing wars to ethical motives which is, of course, frequently done. The simple truth is that ethical motives are no more than deductions from experience, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... opinions on all subjects, on public affairs and public men, on such questions of speculation or ethical interest as astrology and witchcraft, often strikingly expressed in language always racy and sincere, are scattered through the published volumes of his writings, all printed without note or comment. It may at least be a tribute ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... when a race, like the ancient Egyptians, for instance, had reached a high degree of civilization, they idealized many of their religious beliefs and customs; hence, the serpent probably lost its initial and simple symbolical meaning, and stood for something higher and more ethical during the reign of the great Pharaohs, and the Golden Age of the Greeks and Latins. I am positive, however, that the snake's original significance was wholly phallic in character, and that its adoption as a symbol was simple ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... miles distant, into what a fierce seething whirlpool of conflicting passions, of hatred and bloodthirsty vengeance, had human crime plunged an entire community. We plume ourselves upon nineteenth century civilization, upon ethical advancement, upon Christian progress; we adorn our cathedrals, build temples for art treasures, and museums for science, and listen to preludes of the "music of the future;" and we shudder at the mention of vice, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... thinking life all over again. Just as, in early days, he had exchanged miracles and folk-tales for facts of natural science; so now he saw political institutions and social codes, literary and artistic canons, and ethical and philosophical systems, no longer as things valid and excellent, having relationship to truth—but simply as intrenchments and fortifications in the class-war, as devices which some men had used to deceive and plunder some other men. What a light it threw upon philosophy, for instance, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... manner. When he has worked up his description of a vice to be avoided or a virtue to be pursued, he generally drives home his lesson by the mention of some well-known person's name, thus importing into his literary practice the method taken by his father, as we have seen, to impress his ethical teachings upon himself in his youth. The allusion to Calvus and Catullus, the only one anywhere made to these poets by Horace, is curious; but it would be wrong to infer from it, that Horace meant to disparage these fine poets. Calvus had a great reputation ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... "The ethical character is the same; both exercise despotism over the better class of citizens; and decrees are in the one, what ordinances and arrets are in the other: the demagogue too, and the court favourite, are not unfrequently ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... exhaustion and degradation of his fellow—these things stirred in him the far deeper enthusiasms of the moral nature. Nay more! Together with all the other main facts which mark the long travail of man's ethical and social life, they were among the only "evidences" of religion a critical mind allowed itself—the most striking signs of something "greater than we know" working among the dust and ugliness of our common day. Attack wealth as wealth, possession as possession, and civilisation is undone. But bring ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... expanded to embrace the priest's and the doctor's libraries; the thoughts which he longed to be alone with involved close communion with their thoughts. It could not but prove a season of immense mental stimulation and ethical broadening. It would have its lofty poetic and artistic side as well; the languorous melodies of Chopin stole over his revery, as he dwelt upon these things, and soft azure and golden lights modelled forth the exquisite ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... "God bless my soul, I never thought of that," and Emmy would laugh; or else they talked politics. Hegisippe, being a Radical, fiche'd himself absolutely of the Pope and the priests. To be kind to one's neighbors and act as a good citizen summed up his ethical code. He was as moral as ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... are enacted in a pale and clear light of which the source is never visible. I have never seen sun, moon, or star in a dream. Again, to step into a farther region, I am a good deal occupied in real life by ethical considerations; but in dreams I have absolutely no sense of morality. I am afraid, in my dreams, of the consequences of my acts; but I commit a murder or a theft in a dream without the least scruple ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Religion has not meant chastity, for slavery made that impossible; it has not meant justice, for injustice forged their chains; it has not meant generosity, for they had nothing; it has been simple emotion. The ethical element has been absent, and it was through no ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., May, 1888., No. 5 • Various
... of every duty, industry, energy, and moral purity are the typical qualities of the genuine American. It is difficult to form any idea of the wide development of philanthropy, the significance of religion, and the practical application to life of ethical principles, the application of moral obligations in business, the upright, God-fearing life of the Americans, unless one has lived among them. They have neither prostitution, foundling hospitals, nor hospitals for venereal diseases. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... existing and preceding literary and emotional conditions in Germany.[5] Brockes had prepared the way for a sentimental view of nature, Klopstock's poetry had fostered the display of emotion, the analysis of human feeling. Gellert had spread his own sort of religious and ethical sentimentalism among the multitudes of his devotees. Stirred by, and contemporaneous with Gallic feeling, Germany was turning with longing toward the natural man, that is, man unhampered by convention and free to follow the dictates of the primal emotions. The exercise of human sympathy ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... Socrates taught, we can only say here that he was the first great ethical philosopher. The philosophers before him had sought to explain the mystery of the universe. He declared that all this was useless and profitless. Man's mind was superior to all matter, and he led men to look within, study their own souls, consider ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... been carefully classified, and the reader is led from the simpler exercises of the sensory apparatus through a variety of divisions to inner imitations and social play. The biological, aesthetic, ethical, and pedagogical standpoints receive much attention from the investigator. While this book is an illuminating contribution to scientific literature, it is of eminently practical value. Its illustrations and lessons will be studied and applied by educators, and the importance of this original presentation ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... guessed. The general thesis of the composition was of course to prove that Rabelais was by no means the low-minded old dog of Puritan conception; or, as Carter put it, that he was "not simply a George Moore"; but that his amazing writings bore witness throughout to a high and devoted ethical purpose. It is even conjecturable that Carter may have said puribus omnia pura; but if he did so, it was with so droll an accent that his audience laughed again. At all events his reading was punctuated ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... entering upon in the sixteenth century. Even the short sketch given will be sufficient to show that it was not in one department only that it operated; but that, in addition to its own domain of law proper, its influence was felt in modifying economical, political, and indirectly even ethical and religious conditions. From this time forth Feudalism slowly but surely gave place to the newer order, all that remained being certain of its features, which, crystallized into bureaucratic forms, were doubly veneered with a last trace of mediaeval ideas and a denser coating ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... concerned with making philosophical generalizations, or scientific laws, about the world in general. His natural, or unnatural, phenomena were simply saturated with moral significance: not that he saw any connexion between the ethical process and the cosmic process, but, like every one of his contemporaries, he employed the facts of animal and vegetable life to point a moral or to help out a sermon. The arguments he used appear to us puerile in their old-world ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... without giving it character, limits his personages to four or five that they may at least be human beings and not mere singers of songs or allegorical abstractions. And, like some of his predecessors, he takes an ethical theme, the praise and power of Chastity. Fletcher in The Faithful Shepherdess had taken the same; as Jonson had taken the praise of Temperance, which is also partly Milton's subject, in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, in which a grosser Comus is one of the characters. ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... extravagant fee for his late services to the Ditch Company. It is unnecessary to say that these words were not reported to the Colonel. It was, however, an unfortunate circumstance for the calmer, ethical consideration of the subject that the church sided with Hotchkiss, as this provoked an equal adherence to the plaintiff and Starbottle on the part of the larger body of non-church-goers, who were delighted at a possible exposure ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... industrial history of man is not a materialistic or merely utilitarian affair," but a matter of intelligence, a record of how men learned to think, and also an ethical record, "the account of the conditions which men have patiently wrought ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... and have made vigorous protests according to their lights. Many of these protests should have been heard, but were not, and only now are just beginning to be heeded. Such pioneers in the field of proper, healthful, ethical, religious, sane daily sex living, have been Sturgis and Malchow, who talked earnestly to an unheeding profession of these things, and now, I have the honor to write an introductory word to a book in this field, ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... man, after dinner, had been boring the company with a long discourse, in the course of which he had given utterance to ethical views as old as the hills, as though he had just discovered them. When he had done repeating his truisms, Charles Lamb gravely said: "Then, sir, you are actually prepared to maintain that a thief is ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... expression and the happy imaginings of the poem are endless. The spring of nature and of love has been caught and fixed in its many exquisite lines, as only Shakespeare elsewhere has done it; and, understood as we think it must be understood, it has that ethical background of sacrifice and self-forgetting which all love must have ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... then it is incumbent on the author, if he wishes to preserve his copyright, to revise and correct his speeches and addresses, so as to make them at least in details so far differ from the reported form. This thing ought Lord Rosebery to have done, on ethical and literary grounds, not to speak of legal and self-interested grounds; and I, for one, who from the first held exactly the view the House of Lords has affirmed, do confess that I have no sympathy ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... of our best thought-life is justified to ourselves by the plea that such thoughts are too sacred for utterance: a wretched sophistry, a miserable excuse for what is really our fear of criticism." There is nothing trivial or false about the critical and ethical views which Miss Cleveland gives bravely, although they are not invariably rendered with the felicity and pointed phrase which come from a careful selection of words and symbols. She is a little dazzled by the flowers and fruitage of a fancy which most of us are compelled to curb and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... of superior strength; for the workers are beginning to say, as they said to Mr. Cunniff, "Malthus be damned." In their own minds they find no sanction for continuing the individual struggle for the survival of the fittest. As Mr. Gompers has said, they want more, and more, and more. The ethical import of Mr. Kidd's plan of the present generation putting up with less in order that race efficiency may be projected into a remote future, has no bearing upon their actions. They refuse to be the "glad perishers" ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... doubt, that through him suicide has become the normal way out of our troubles when these are beyond remedy. I will not express any opinion as to the ethical significance of this admitted result of his teaching, which many of us still find it so hard to reconcile with ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... defeat its own desires; the true epicurean has to observe great sobriety; the way to certainty lies through radical doubt; virtue signifies not innocence but the knowledge of sin and its overcoming; by obeying nature, we command her, etc. The ethical and the religious life are full of such contradictions held in solution. You hate your enemy?—well, forgive him, and thereby heap coals of fire on his head; to realize yourself, renounce yourself; to save your soul, first lose it; in ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... connected. Near at hand lies the fear of a too open declaration of the most intimate feelings. In many old-style poets of modern times, in Hoelderlin, in Kleist, Grillparzer, and Annette von Droste-Huelshoff this fear assumes the character of ethical aversion to baring their feelings in public. But near, too, lies the hunt after interesting experiences—the need to "experience something" at any price—which marred the life of a romantic poet of Brentano's talents, and also affected the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Greece, while the interspersed literary criticisms are often subtle and suggestive, erring, when they do err, chiefly through what may be called the over-earnestness of his mind. He sometimes takes the poet too seriously; he is apt to read an ethical purpose into descriptive or dramatic touches which are merely descriptive or dramatic. But he has for his author not only that intense sympathy which is the best basis for criticism, but a real justness of poetic taste which ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... Matt Peasley failed to see a single sound reason why he should not indulge a very natural desire for Cappy's ewe lamb—for a singularly direct and forceful individual was Matthew. It was his creed to take what he could get away with, provided that in the taking he broke no moral, legal or ethical code; and if any thought of the apparent incongruity of a sailor's aspiring to the hand of a millionaire shipowner's daughter had occurred to him—which, by the way, it had not—he would ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... victory of malice or of the "death-force" over love or over the "life-force" is attended by exquisite and poignant pleasure, a pleasure which culminates in unutterable ecstasy. The shallow ethical thinkers who regard "evil" as a negation are obviously thinkers whose consciousness has never penetrated into the depths of their own souls. Pain and pleasure for such thinkers must be entirely sensationalized. They cannot have experienced, to any profound depth, the kind of pain ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... abstinence from meat is part of his ethical code and his religion,—who would as soon think of taking his neighbour's purse as helping himself to a slice of beef,—is by nature a man of frugal habits and simple tastes. He prefers a plain diet, and knows that the purest ...
— New Vegetarian Dishes • Mrs. Bowdich
... will interpret all their own various problems, for in terms of life all things we do must finally be formulated. Every observation we make, every thought of our minds, every act of our hands has in some degree an ethical basis. It involves something of right or wrong, and without adhesion to right, all thought, all action must end in folly. And there is no road to righteousness so sure as that which has right living ...
— Life's Enthusiasms • David Starr Jordan
... it in the drawing-room.' I must admit, for my part, without the slightest shame, that I have found a great many very excellent things in drawing-rooms. For example, I found Mr. Masterman in a drawing-room. But I merely mention this purely ethical attack in order to state, in as few sentences as possible, my difference from the theory of optimism and progress therein enunciated. At first sight it would seem that the pessimist encourages improvement. But in reality it is a singular truth that the era in which pessimism has been cried from ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... function of statesmanship is by degrees to accommodate the conduct of communities to ethical laws, and to subordinate the conflicting self-interests of the day to higher and more permanent concerns. But it is on the understanding, and not on the sentiment, of a nation that all safe legislation must be based. Voltaire's saying, that "a consideration of petty circumstances ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... absurd to treat the size of a corporation as in itself a crime. As Judge Hook says in his opinion in the Standard Oil Case: "Magnitude of business does not alone constitute a monopoly . . . the genius and industry of man when kept to ethical standards still have full play, and what he achieves is his . . . success and magnitude of business, the rewards of fair and honorable endeavor [are not forbidden] . . . [the public welfare is threatened only when success is attained] by wrongful or unlawful methods." Size may, and in my opinion ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... The ethical signification which is predominant in our use of the word and has made it little more than a synonym for moral purity is certainly not the original meaning, as is sufficiently clear from the fact that the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... whole doctrine of Intuitive Morality, which reigns supreme wherever the idolatry of Scripture texts has abated and the influence of Bentham's philosophy has not reached, but the metaphysical state of ethical science? What else, indeed, is the whole a priori philosophy, in morals, jurisprudence, psychology, logic, even physical science, for it does not always keep its hands off that, the oldest domain of observation and experiment? It has the universal diagnostic of the metaphysical mode of thought, ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... universal fallacy that because works like the comedies of Aristophanes discuss certain social or ethical problems, they are inspired by them. Aristophanes wrote to express his vision on life, his delight in life itself seen behind the warping screen of contemporary event; and for his purposes anything from Euripides to Cleon served as ground work. Not that he would think in those ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... of a full heart, with the hope that it might foster the love and appreciation of birds, and that the boy's sacrifice of his precious homing pigeon to his country at a time of peril might carry an ethical appeal to ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... opposed to the creation of peasant proprietors either on scientific grounds or for ethical reasons. "As a matter of economic evolution, small properties will have to go. But viewed from an ethical standpoint, surely nothing has been more conducive to the development of the worst side of human nature—of 'hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness' than the ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... that account they are perhaps more typical. He speaks as though Christ were simply an eminent but ill-reported and abominably served teacher of ethics—and yet of the only right ideal and ethics. He speaks as though religions were nothing more than ethical movements, and as though Christianity were merely someone remarking with a bright impulsiveness that everything was simply horrid, and so, "Let us instal loving kindness as a cardinal axiom." He ignores altogether the fundamental essential of religion, which is ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... between 1830 and 1865. Those three generations have been the most notable in the three hundred years since the permanent settlements began. Each of them has revealed, in a noble fashion, the political, ethical, and emotional traits of our people; and although the first two of the three periods concerned themselves but little with literary expression of the deep-lying characteristics of our stock, the expression is not lacking. Thomas Hooker's sermon on the "Foundation ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... lightness and the strength, the exquisite polish and the delicious wit, the lambent irony and the ordered movement, which no other language spoken by man has ever quite been able to produce. The Lettres are a work of controversy; their actual subject-matter—the ethical system of the Jesuits of the time—is remote from modern interests; yet such is the brilliance of Pascal's art that every page of them is fascinating to-day. The vivacity of the opening letters is astonishing; ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... study may help individuals to clarify their thinking within this field, but the author has no brief for one method as against the others. Each person must determine his own principles of action on the basis of his conception of the nature of the universe and his own scale of ethical values. ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... of both that they shall occupy not only separate beds, but separate rooms; these rooms communicating through a door which connects their respective dressing-rooms. This is unquestionably the best arrangement from the hygienic as well as from the ethical point of view. Health requires that one-third of the time shall be spent in sleep; the bed was made for sleep; and the most refreshing sleep can only be obtained by occupying the bed alone. If two persons occupy the same bed and one is restless, the sleep of the other is necessarily disturbed. ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... difference in thought was most pronounced. The art and poetry of the one breathes an atmosphere entirely distinct from that of the other. In Laotse and his followers and in Kutsugen, the forerunner of the Yangtse-Kiang nature-poets, we find an idealism quite inconsistent with the prosaic ethical notions of their contemporary northern writers. Laotse lived five ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... simple," I answered. "I had not eaten anything for two days, and I detected the odor of that exquisite filet. Not the slightest ethical significance in the choice, ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... with the Free Public Libraries, several ethical questions arise, which do not occur in respect to other libraries. One of the most pressing of these questions refers to the amount of Fiction read by the ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... work of the really great painters; and yet these doings of theirs are not great. Shall I write the commonplace that rings in sequence in my ear, and draws on my hand—"are not Great, for they are not (in the broad human and ethical sense) Good"? I write it, and ask forgiveness for the truism, with its implied uncharitableness of blame; for this trite thing is ill understood and little thought upon by any of us, and the implied blame is divided among us all; only let me at once partly ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it. The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties, now seemed to me of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... apply religion to the conditions around me. Every aspect of social life was in need of remedial treatment. Of course, I did not neglect the religious teaching, but what the situation demanded was ethical teaching, and, without making any splurge about my change of view, I worked at whatever my hand found to do ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... primitive man, and even succeeded in giving them a scientific appearance. Huxley, as is known, took the lead of that school, and in a paper written in 1888 he represented primitive men as a sort of tigers or lions, deprived of all ethical conceptions, fighting out the struggle for existence to its bitter end, and living a life of "continual free fight"; to quote his own words—"beyond the limited and, temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... transcendently shown, and of gratitude profoundly felt."... "But this can only come on the foundation of the other; it is the discharge from the responsibilities of sin involved in Christ's death and appropriated in faith, which is the motive power in the daily ethical dying to sin."... "The new life springs out of the sense of debt to Christ."... "It is the knowledge that we have been bought with a price which makes us cease to be our own, and live for Him who so ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... bodily and mental health. To picture the country a paradise is, however, mere silliness. There are in the country, as elsewhere, evidences of vulgarity in language, of coarseness in thought, of social impurity, of dishonesty in business. There is room in the country for all the ethical ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... beliefs and customs, and silently contradicting its ideas and practices. Even the doctrine of the future life, and the resurrection of the body, which plays so prominent a part in Egyptian religion, is carefully avoided, and the Ten Commandments have little in common with the ethical ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... than entertainment, present us with even a more vivid picture of customs than the Novelle. By their truthful touches of landscape and incident painting, by their unconscious revelation of contemporary sentiment in dialogue and ethical analysis of motives, they enable us to give form and substance to the drier details of the law-courts. One of these narratives I propose to condense from the transcript made by Henri Beyle, for the sake of the light it throws upon the tragedy of the Caraffa family.[207] It opens with an account ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... or the marbles of Venice, as things of which Europe is not worthy; and take them away with him to a really careful museum, situated dangerously near Clapham. Many of the great men of that generation, indeed, had a sort of divided mind; an ethical headache which was literally a "splitting headache"; for there was a schism in the sympathies. When these men looked at some historic object, like the Catholic Church or the French Revolution, they did not know whether they loved or hated it most. Carlyle's two eyes were out of focus, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... conclusion that systematic introspection with the aid of studied methods has been practiced in India for five thousand years. . . . India has developed certain valuable religious attitudes of mind and ethical notions which are unique, at least in the wideness of their application to life. One of these has been a tolerance in questions of intellectual belief-doctrine-that is amazing to the West, where for many centuries heresy-hunting was common, and bloody wars between nations over sectarian ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... top-dressing of philosophy, theology, and classic learning upon the foundation of an unformed and unstable mental and moral condition. Somehow, character must be built up, and character depends upon industry, upon thrift, upon morals, upon correct ethical perceptions. To have control of one's powers, to have skill in labor, so that work in any occupation shall be intelligent, to have self-respect, which commonly comes from trained capacity, to know how to live, to have a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... from similar sources, the same spirit is maintained. In spite of Humboldt, we venture to think that Schiller certainly does not narrate Greek legends in the spirit of an ancient Greek. The Gothic sentiment, in its ethical depth and mournful tenderness, more or less pervades all that he translates from classic fable into modern pathos. The grief of Hero in the ballad subjoined, touches closely on the lamentations of Thekla, in "Wallenstein." The Complaint of Ceres, embodies Christian grief and Christian ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... after ethical truths. It does you credit, Miss Shelton. You will probably join a college settlement when you are older, or at least write ...
— Three Little Cousins • Amy E. Blanchard
... earth and reign visibly for one thousand years. That return was commonly placed in the immediate future. With that reign was connected the bodily resurrection of the saints. This belief, in somewhat varying form, was one of the great ethical motives in apostolic and post-apostolic times. It was a part of the fundamental principles of Montanism. It disappeared with the rise of a "scientific theology" such as that of Alexandria, the exclusion of Montanism, and the changed conception of the relation ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... naturally quite proud, and when under the title of "Maternity" I read it once in secret to my Aunt Jerusha, she burst into tears as I went on, and three days later read it as a New Thought gem before the Enochsville Society of Ethical Culture. It was there pronounced a great piece of symbolic imagery, and prediction was made that some day in some more advanced age than our own, a Magazine would be found somewhere that would print it. This may be so, but I fear I shall not ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... man he finds traces of the dire effects of sin, which has corrupted both and has destroyed their natural harmony. As regards ethics, Baader rejects the Kantian or any autonomic system of morals. Not obedience to a moral law, but realization in ourselves of the divine life is the true ethical end. But man has lost the power to effect this by himself; he has alienated himself from God, and therefore no ethical theory which neglects the facts of sin and redemption is satisfactory or even possible. The history of man and of humanity is the history of the redeeming love ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... that other and rarer critical faculty, that spiritual tuning-fork by which a fine critic distinguishes between emotion and sentimentality, between rhetoric and rant. It is because Mr. Brock possesses this peculiar sensibility—part aesthetic, part ethical, and part intellectual, it seems—that he can be trusted to detect and dislike even the subtlest manifestations of that quality which most distinguishes Tennyson from Morris, Kipling from Walt Whitman, and the Bishop of London from the Vicar of Wakefield. That is why ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... matters of religion. He felt that it was not worth while engaging in argument of a kind that would have distressed his father and irritated himself, upon matters which he believed to be intellectual, while his father believed them to be ethical. Hugh often pondered over this condition of things, which he felt to be unsatisfactory, but no solution occurred to him; he said to himself that he valued domestic peace rather than a frank understanding upon matters to which he and his father attached ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... full exposition of their ancient beliefs and mode of worship, together with the recent views introduced by Handsomelake, mingled up in one collection, presenting probably a better idea of their ethical and religious system than could be conveyed in any other manner, it is given entire, and will ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... confirmed by authority so venerable: for I had previous and higher motives in my own conviction of the importance, nay, of the necessity of the distinction, as both an indispensable condition and a vital part of all sound speculation in metaphysics, ethical or theological. To establish this distinction was one main object of The Friend; if even in a biography of my own literary life I can with propriety refer to a work, which was printed rather than published, or so published that it had been well for the unfortunate author, if it had remained ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Freshman Full-Back" is that of character. The action has real dramatic quality and is staged with the local color of a college contest. But the great value of the action is ethical, for it shows that one may "wrest victory from defeat" and that it is a shameful thing to be a ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... his boots with the compound. He put on his store clothes of butternut dyed black, a white shirt and collar, and packed a carpet-sack with Spartan lingerie. He took his squirrel rifle from its hooks, but put it back again with a sigh. However ethical and plausible the habit might be in the Cumberlands, perhaps New York would not swallow his pose of hunting squirrels among the skyscrapers along Broadway. An ancient but reliable Colt's revolver that he resurrected from a bureau drawer seemed to proclaim ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... sentences in this line of thought in a sermon on "The Regenerative Force of the Gospel." His words are: "Christ never patches. The Gospel is not here to mend people. Regeneration is not a scheme of moral tinkering and ethical cobbling. In the Gospel, we move into a new world and under a new scheme. The Gospel does not classify with ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 9, September, 1889 • Various
... consistency recognize the fact that the economic factor is the dominant, determining factor in every day human life, and the man who admits this simple truth believes in the Marxian Materialistic Conception of History. The political, legal, ethical and all human institutions have their roots in the economic soil, and any reform that does not go clear to the roots and affect the economic structure of society must necessarily be abortive. Any thing that does go to the roots and does modify the ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... the partial failure of The Food of the Gods to furnish any ethical satisfaction is due to the fact that in this romance Mr Wells has identified himself too closely with the giants; a fault that indicates a slight departure from normality. The inevitable contrast between great and little lacks a sympathy and ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... quickly, seeing how he—already stiff and bristly—had at her words stiffened and bristled still more. "I do not mean to intimate that anything unethical has been done. In fact I am quite sure that everything has been quite ethical. And I am not questioning your professional standing or ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... of the portal of noble life seems to me to show still greater signs of being out of repair and in want of restoration, and that pillar is reverence,—that heaven-eyed quality which Dr. Martineau rightly places at the very top of the ethical scale. Let that crumble, and the character which might have been a temple sinks into a mere counting-house. When in these days children are allowed to call their father Dick, Jack, or Tom, and nickname their own mother; when they are allowed to drown the voice of the ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... be that in earlier ages, when men were personally familiar with the horrors of a barbarous ethical system, while at the same time they had the culture and refinement belonging to a high development of aesthetic civilisation, the presentation of a great terror immediately suggested the concomitant horror; and suggested it so vividly that ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... high moral principles, with a firm belief in the value and possibility of purity, and with sufficient knowledge of the subject in all its aspects to be a wise instructor, giving not only physiological information where that is desirable, but working specially for ethical and spiritual elevation. Physiological facts alone may not have the slightest effect upon the manner of living; there should be first and deeply implanted a spiritual desire for purity, when the knowledge of such facts ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... show the cost of each institution in the efforts and sacrifices of past generations and to quicken and make permanent the children's interest in public life and their sense of responsibility to their fellows." (Patriotic and Ethical) ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... desire. The history of man is made up of the struggle of normal instincts, emotions and purposes against the mistaken inhibitions and prohibitions, against mistaken praise and blame, reward and punishment. Moral and ethical ideals develop institutions, and these often press too heavily upon the life and activities of those who accept ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... righteousness of Wagner's claim to the title of poet than his acceptance of the Greek theory that a people's legends and myths are the fittest subjects for dramatic treatment, unless it be the manner in which he has reshaped his material in order to infuse it with that deep ethical principle to which reference has several times been made. In "The Flying Dutchman," "The Nibelung's Ring," and "Tannhauser" the idea is practically his creation. In the last of these dramas it is ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... anti-Semitism? Simple heart, do you not see it is just for our good—not our bad—qualities that we are persecuted? A jugglery—specious enough for the moment—with the word "good"; forceful "struggle-for-life" qualities substituted for spiritual, for ethical. And yet to doubt that the world would—and does—respond sympathetically to the finer elements so abundantly in Israel, is it not to despair of the world, of humanity? In such a world, what guarantee against the pillage of the Third Temple? And in such a world were life worth living ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... divided against itself can not stand," and its corollary, "This nation can not permanently endure half slave and half free." He saw dearly that American democracy must rest, if it continued to exist, upon the ethical ideal which presided over its birth—that of the absolute equality of all men in political rights. ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... Morality, Sittlichkeit, a word of broader meaning than "morality," for it comprehends not only matters of ethical right and wrong, but the general temper and habit of mind of a people as ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau |
