"Human activity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... background, no permanent root." That this is a literal truth probably neither Dr. Butler nor anyone else would contend; but it hits off with great force and with substantial accuracy the prevailing character of thought in the circles most active and most influential in almost every department of human activity at the present time. And the tendency which President Butler describes as arising out of our absorption in current problems is still more manifest in the spirit of our actual dealings with those problems themselves. On every ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle. Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars; but this is not due to human activity but to human repose. There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply walking about. Our world would be more silent if it were more strenuous. And this which is true of the apparent physical ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... condition determines the worth of imaginary personalities. From the gods to the characters of comedy, all are, in proportion to their beauty, natural and exhilarating expressions of possible human activity. We sometimes remould visible forms into imaginary creatures; but our originality in this respect is meagre compared with the profusion of images of action which arise in us, both asleep and awake; we constantly dream of ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... fever of reforming everything! I WILL be satisfied with the library! The city hall is enough for a beginning. And it's really an excellent library. It's—it isn't so bad. . . . Is it possible that I am to find dishonesties and stupidity in every human activity I encounter? In schools and business and government and everything? Is there never ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... or mystical? That is a question of supreme importance to the moral philosopher. On the answer to it hangs the rationality of a spiritual life; nay, the existence of spirituality itself among the types of human activity. For the fanatic and mystic are only spiritual in appearance because they separate themselves from the prevalent interests of the world, the one by a special persistent aggression, the other by a general passivity and unearthly calm. The fanatic is, notwithstanding, nothing but a worldling ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... to be combined with the other tablets. The fact that both the right isosceles and right scalene triangles produce Life forms in great variety seems to prove that, as Goldammer says, "the right angle predominates in the products of human activity." ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... who said this was a journalist of ripe years, highly educated, widely experienced, acquainted with men and life. He was world-weary with that weariness which comes of the journalist's incessant contact with every phase of human activity, good and ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... should be especially noted that, active and original as the Emperor is, he is not, and never has been, caught by FADS either in art, science, literature, or in any other field of human activity. The great artists who cannot draw or paint, and who, therefore, despise those who can and are glorified by those who cannot; the great composers who can give us neither harmony nor melody, and therefore have a fanatical ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... intellect developing with companionship and human intercourse; the whole spreading tree of social progress, the trunk of which is specialized industry, and the branches of which comprise every least and greatest line of human activity and enjoyment. This growing tree, springing up wherever conditions of peace and prosperity gave it a chance, we shall see continually hewed down to the ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... the words "cooperation" and "competition" are not here used in a merely industrial and commercial sense; they are intended to cover the whole field of human activity. Two voices singing a duet—that is cooperation—Socialism. Two voices singing each a different tune and trying to drown each other—that is competition—Anarchism: each is a law unto itself—that is to ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... might object to this. They might say that this was true of the woman of the past, who was excluded from all other avenues of human activity. The woman of the present day has other interests besides those of Love. But I claim that this is true of only a small percentage of women; and in even this small minority of women, social, scientific and artistic activities cannot take the place of love; no matter ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... XIV assumed the reins of government France suddenly and wonderfully came to her maturity; it was as if the whole nation had burst into splendid flower. In every branch of human activity—in war, in administration, in social life, in art, and in literature—the same energy was apparent, the same glorious success. At a bound France won the headship of Europe; and when at last, defeated in arms and politically shattered, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... difficulties that are easily surmounted. But of all diversions the theatre is undoubtedly the most entertaining. Here we may see others act even when we cannot act to any great purpose ourselves. The highest object of human activity is man, and in the drama we see men, measuring their powers with each other, as intellectual and moral beings, either as friends or foes, influencing each other by their opinions, sentiments, and passions, and decisively determining their reciprocal relations and ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... JOSLYN GAGE spoke at length of the brilliant record of women in the past in every department of human activity—in art, science, literature, invention; of their heroism and patriotism in time of war, and their industry and endurance in many equally trying emergencies in time of peace. Woman has so fully proved her equality with man in every position she has filled, that it is too late ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... sculptures and paintings, tapestry and enamels: the very utensils of common domestic use were beautiful. Men did not prate of art: they wrought in love and simplicity. The very word art, as denoting a product of human activity different from the ordinary daily tasks of men, was unknown. If painting was an art, even so was carpentry. A mason was an artist: so was a shoemaker. Astronomy and grammar were arts: so was spinning. Apothecaries ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... almost every day afield from, Theoule. Of course we had taken in the scenery, sketched it and spoken about it, but only as a background or accompaniment. From Cannes to Menton it is the human side of the Riviera that gets you. Nature is a sort of musical accompaniment to the song of human activity. Between Cannes and the Italian frontier, where the railway does not skirt the coast, you have the tramway. It is with you always, night and day, and makes itself heard at every curve. (The road ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... aristocratic sympathies, as seen in his writings, seem to suggest that he was of good family. Padua was a populous and busy place, where opportunities for public speaking were abundant and the public life vigorous; thus Livy was early trained in eloquence, and lived amid scenes of human activity. About 30 B.C. he settled at Rome, where his literary talents secured the patronage and friendship of Augustus. But though a courtier he was no flatterer. 'Titus Livius,' says Tacitus (Ann. iv. 34), 'pre-eminently famous for eloquence and truthfulness, extolled ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... have felt quite comfortable even in a slight excess of gluttony after such introductory words of blessing. You felt that the occasion had been met, that something like perfection had been attained. James was willing to admit shortcomings in thatching, or in any department of human activity, so long as his superiority in pre-prandial supplication was admitted. But it so happened that Fate, whose delight it is to imperil even the stablest reputations, sent his way a South-country Brother with a gift in prayer truly appalling. At a gathering at which James was present, this stranger ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... the birth of Mickiewicz, Russia was bringing to a close a prodigious period of development in almost every field of human activity. It was really the birth-throe of a nation that was to move powerfully, and to dominate—partially—the new age. And the splendid and never again to be equalled pageant of the life of Catherine the Great, with its wild dreams of world dominance and of the glorious revival ...
— Sonnets from the Crimea • Adam Mickiewicz
... of human activity Henry displayed natural powers of the highest order, at the highest stretch of industrious culture. He was "attentive," as it is called, "to his religious duties," being present at the services in chapel two or three times a day with unfailing regularity, ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... conception of the absolutely necessary and immutable substance, the other to the conception of a consummate perfection. There is an interpretation of life appropriate to each of these conceptions. Both agree in regarding life seriously, in defining reason or philosophy as the highest human activity, and in emphasizing the identity of the individual's good with the good of the universe. But there are striking ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Arbeiderakademier, where mechanics who have an ambition to acquire a better knowledge of their trades and general culture, may attend lectures in the evenings, delivered by scientific men, successful mechanics, and other specialists. The range of subjects includes every branch of human activity. ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... others in every branch of human activity: art and science, industry and commerce, literature and philosophy. We have within us, from the start, that which will distinguish us from the vulgar herd. Now to what do we owe this distinctive character? To some throwback of atavism, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... better than the common run of humanity, but in their field they think and work with an intensity, an integrity, a breadth, boldness, patience, thoroughness, and faithfulness—excepting only a few artists—which puts their work out of all comparison with any other human activity.... In these particular directions the human mind has achieved a new and higher quality of attitude and gesture, a veracity, a self-detachment, and self-abnegating vigor of criticism that tend to spread out and must ultimately spread out ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... bears itself easily in society greater than human. To attain to this height it was needful that there should be no aimless expatiation of the intellect, no facile diffusion of the sympathies over the wide field of human activity and human character. All the strength of mind and heart and will that was in Milton went into the process of raising himself. He is like some giant palm-tree; the foliage that sprang from it as it grew has ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... the integral relationship of the expression of the sexual instinct with every phase of human activity. Until we recognize this central fact, we cannot understand the implications and the sinister significance of superficial attempts to apply rosewater remedies to social evils,—by the enactment of restrictive and ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... New York, that huge cosmopolitan city, the commercial capital of the New World, where colossal fortunes are made and lost with the giddiest rapidity. Its position as being the chief artery of human activity, is incomparable, but the town—qua town—has this point in common with all huge agglomerations of commercial buildings. It is utterly commonplace. I merely passed through it on my way to rejoin my ship at Newport, but with me there came on one of those splendid steamers, veritable floating ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... upon this animated scene of human activity, and broke and sparkled in colored light up in the rippling waves of the ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... for five momentous days. Quite unlike the "Seven Days" in the delightful farce-comedy of that name, in which everything happened, here nothing seemed to happen. We were miles from a post-office, and newspapers disturbed us not. The world of human activity was as though it were not. Politics as we left it was a disturbing memory, but no fresh outbreaks aggravated our discomfort. We were at rest and we rested. A good recipe for long life, I think, would be: withdraw from life's turmoil ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... city, the sack of the treasures of the whole earth, which furnish such splendid spoil, recall a remark of Buckle. He says that the history of the world shows enormous progress in all kinds of knowledge, in institutions, in commerce and manufactures, and in every pursuit of human activity, but not in knowledge of moral principle. The most ancient wisdom in morals is also the most modern. Time and the progress of civilization have added nothing to the demands of the conscience or to moral perception. The golden rule is an axiom of the most ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... whatever their race might be, here they were simply Canadians with all the rights of Canadian citizenship assured to them. He was glad to see so many of his German friends present. They represent a great nation whose achievements in every department of human activity, in learning, in industrial enterprise, in commerce, were the envy and admiration of the world (excursus here in glorification of the great German people): To these, his German fellow citizens, he would say that no matter how deep their devotion to the Vaterland (Mr. Jones pronounced it ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... have always appeared somewhat insufficient when applying our timid methods of induction to the revolutions of the creative epochs which have decided the fate of humanity. Jesus lived at one of those times when the game of public life is freely played, and when the stake of human activity is increased a hundredfold. Every great part, then, entails death; for such movements suppose liberty and an absence of preventive measures, which could not exist without a terrible alternative. ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... demands on ourselves and on one another. What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity. If it commends itself, then any theological beliefs that may inspire it, in so far forth will stand accredited. If not, then they will be discredited, and all without reference to anything but human working principles. It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit, and ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... preacher. It was not in him to try to change the ideas of those who were doing well with what ideas they had. All that he desired was to live so that it might be known that his God was the God of the whole wide round of human activity, a God who blessed the just and the unjust. Toyner desired to be constantly blessing both the bad and the good with the blessing of love and home which had been given to him. It was inevitable that to carry ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland, and that is, the way to be happy. Yet that is the whole of culture, and perhaps two-thirds of morality. Can it be that the Puritan school, by divorcing a man from nature, by thinning out his instincts, and setting a stamp of its disapproval on whole fields of human activity and interest, leads at last directly to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rules which one can accept without their modifying one's life. While Christ's teaching is not only a doctrine which gives rules which a man must follow, it unfolds a new meaning in life, and defines a whole world of human activity quite different from all that has preceded it and appropriate to the period ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... and nearly all of the labor of the race would cease. The tilling of the soil, the mining, the building, the manufacturing, and the transportation and exchange of the products of field and factory, constitute nearly the whole of human activity. In the astral life no food is required and one is clothed with astral matter from which garments are fashioned almost with the ease and rapidity of thought. No houses are needed for shelter. The astral body is not susceptible to degrees of heat and cold, and nothing there corresponds to our temperatures. ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... not retire, and since he hackled with his old master, the untameable man, now more than sixty years old, still kept his place, still flouted the accepted order, still read sinister motives into every human activity. New machinery had increased the prosperity of the enterprise, but to no considerable extent. Competition continued keen as ever, and each year saw the workers winning slightly increased power through the ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... brilliantly. On that side of the house were no lights in any windows. No sounds of any human activity came to him. The house was large, with numerous gables that prevented ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... intelligently appreciate. The nature of a work of art, and the mode in which it is produced, are subjects well worthy of careful study. Architecture and music, poetry, painting and sculpture, have in times past constituted a vast portion of human activity; and without knowing something of the philosophy of art, we need not hope to understand thoroughly the philosophy ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... department or the man still subject to its provisions was the exception and not the rule. From that day to this there has scarcely been in France what is known elsewhere as the Jewish question. Hebrews are found in every line of human activity; they have the same civil, political, and religious standing as men of other blood and confessions; they are illustrious in finance, in politics, in science, and in the arts. They are, moreover, passionate patriots, and to the casual observer scarcely ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... what he is, and what he is depends largely upon what he has been. Men have nowhere more conspicuously failed to escape themselves than in their works. Literary history, especially, is a practically unused treasure- house of moral illustration and teaching; for in no other record of human activity is the dependence of a man's work on his nature more constantly and strikingly brought out. The subtle relation between temperament, genius, environment, and character is in constant evidence to the student of literature; and he learns at last the primary ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... language as a human activity is its direct correspondence to and expression of all the inner motives and forces of the users, we have here a key to the survival to our day, an unknown period past its own time, of ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... the city's livingness. The air seemed charged with human activity, with toil-pulsations. She was all crowded about with human beings, and felt the mystery of what might be termed crowd-touch. Here, surely, was life—life thick, happy, busy, daring, ideal. Here was pioneering—a reaching forth to a throbbing future. So, as the boat landed, ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... the protection of the State, or the Church, or as secret brotherhoods, like free-masonry. But now that the resistance has been broken, they swarm in all directions, they extend over all multifarious branches of human activity, they become international, and they undoubtedly contribute, to an extent which cannot yet be fully appreciated, to break down the screens erected by States between different nationalities. Notwithstanding the jealousies which are bred by ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... must find room for the spiritual factor, and for that religious life and temper in which it finds expression. This place must be found, not merely in the phenomenal series, as we might find room for any special human activity or aberration, from the medicine-man to the Jumping Perfectionists; but deep-set in the enduring stuff of man's true life. We must believe that the union of this life with supporting Spirit cannot in fact be broken, any more than the organic ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... scenes filled his heart; and his mind reacted from the blandishments of a luxurious materialism and a refined egotism of life. It was like falling back upon the normal conditions of existence thus to behold the 'ills that flesh is heir to' in the midst of a city where such rich outward provision for human activity and enjoyment fills the senses. Excessive civilization has its morbid tendencies, and great refinement in one direction is paralleled by an equal degree of savagery in another. There is in absolute relation between the facilities ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... reason, or even contrary to reason. He teaches that there are three qualities of contemplation, according to its intensity: mentis dilatatio, an enlargement of the soul's vision without exceeding the bounds of human activity; mentis sublevatio, elevation of mind, in which the intellect, divinely illumined, transcends the measure of humanity, and beholds the things above itself, but does not entirely lose self-consciousness; and mentis alienatio, ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... is not, of course, the clue to the Freudian theory. The real clue is sex. A sexual motive is to be attributed to all human activity. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... the scruples of those who find something cynical in the idea that the desire for Inequality is compatible with a respectable form of human character. It is true, he says, that man does not live by bread alone; but he denies that he means to say "that all human activity is motived by the desire for inequality"; he would assert that only "of all productive labor, except the lowest." The only actions independent of the desire for inequality, however, are those performed in the name of art, science, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... anything that will restore the right to the individual citizen to engage in business; I am ready to make a stand against the few plutocrats who now usurp the avenues of human activity; and I believe that we will be able to enlist men in support of the idea that the rights of the majority transcend the aggressions of ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... they never ought to act on other motives. He asserts merely that, as far as the arts of production are concerned and of buying and selling, the action of self-interest may be counted upon as uniform. What Adam Smith says of political economy, Mr. Buckle[33] would extend over the whole circle of human activity. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... have that enables us to be on the crest of that great wave, that we know for what we are working, we understand the tendencies which make for the future. Hence in our Theosophical Society we must above all else hold up this word, and work for it in every phase of human activity. That word marks out for your Theosophical Lodges what movements you should help, and what movements you should not help. It is no use to pour water into a broken vessel, and every vessel that has not on it the name or the principle of Brotherhood is a broken vessel that ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... would have been unintelligible to a Greek. Not that the Greeks were without a sense of what we call the beauties of nature, but that they treat them habitually, not as the centre of interest, but as the background to human activity. The most beautiful descriptions of nature to be found in Greek poetry occur, incidentally only, in the choral odes introduced into their dramas; and among all their pictures of which we have any record there is not one that answers to the description of a landscape; the subject ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... enter yet; and the other into which he has been exiled back again—and between this region where his soul moves and the earth where his body is, there is so little harmony of thought or feeling that he cannot undertake any human activity, nor unite the demands of the two worlds. He knows that what ought to be cannot be in the world he has returned to, so that his life is perplexed; but in this incessant perplexity he falls back on prone submission to the heavenly will. The time ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... hundreds of miles of streets crammed with industry, frugality, and prudence? Some of the most brilliant men I have known have been failures, and not through lack of character either. And some of the least gifted have been marvellously successful. It is impossible to point to a single branch of human activity in which success can be explained by the conventional principles that find general acceptance. I hear you, O reader, murmuring to yourself: "This is all very well, but he is simply being paradoxical for his own diversion." ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... reminds us that the instincts are the prime movers, the mental forces, the sources of energy, the springs of human action, the impulses and motives which determine the goals and course of all human activity, mental and physical. These instincts, being the fundamental elements of our constitution, must be clearly defined, and their history in the individual and the race determined. For this purpose, comparative and evolutionary psychology is necessary, for the life of the emotions and the play of motives ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... universal supremacy of the historical spirit. To such a degree has this spirit permeated all our modes of thinking, that with respect to every branch of knowledge, no less than with respect to every institution and every form of human activity, we almost instinctively ask, not merely what is its existing condition, but what were its earliest discoverable germs, and what has been the course of its development.—INGRAM, History of Political Economy, 2. Wir dagegen stehen keinen ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... power. Imagine a Western boy or man being willing to study from early childhood to middle-age before he may hope to be able to show what he has been learning! Verily "the East is East, and the West is West"—the two poles of human activity ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... Flying Machines the aim has been to present the subject in such a manner as will appeal to boys, or beginners, in this field of human activity. ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... instructive debate at which we have just assisted, that the meridian of Greenwich is not a scientific one, and that its adoption implies no progress for astronomy, geodesy, or navigation; that is to say, for all the branches and pursuits of human activity interested in the unification ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... the wilderness had not only lost its glamour, but had become a thing to flee from. Even the rude motley of Hazleton was a welcome change. Here at least—on a minor scale, to be sure—was that which she craved, and to which she had been accustomed—life, stir, human activity, the very antithesis of the lonely mountain fastnesses. She bestowed a glad pressure on her husband's arm as they walked up the street, Bill carrying the sack of gold perched carelessly ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... lack of an ideal her sons and daughters wasted their time in the pursuit of idle things. It was the natural reaction after an age of unusual force and brilliancy. In the shadow of the great achievements of the sixteenth century in all lines of human activity, the seventeenth, lost in admiration, could imagine no surer way to equal attainment than to imitate what had gone before. Literature became stilted and full of mannerisms and underwent a process of refinement which ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... All human activity might be classified under three heads,—play, work, and drudgery,—but just what activities belong under each head and just what each of the terms means are questions of dispute. That the boundaries between the three are hazy and undefined, ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... after all, an unwarranted assumption that severed the intellect from its natural connection with human activity? No doubt it seemed to simplify the problem to suppose that the functioning of the intellect could be studied as a thing apart, and unrelated to the general context of the vital functions. Again, ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... modern Science on your Earth, based on the scientific method of investigation, its devotees adopted a spirit of skepticism concerning all problems of human activity not susceptible to measurement with the foot-rule, or analysis with the test tube, with the result that the newer Science of Psychology was invented to supply a reasonable and material explanation for the subtle and mystifying phenomena of ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... most ardent desire to see this fertile soil well tilled, for it will yield an abundant harvest. Mankind is dying in strife and despair; the torrent of human activity is everywhere seething and foaming. Here ignorance buries its victims in a noisome den of slime and filth; there, the strong and ruthless, veritable vampires, batten on the labour and drain away the very life of the weak and helpless; farther away, science stumbles against the wall of the Unknown; ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... glimpsed water, the haze of heat and great distance, the thread-like gossamer of roads, the half-guessed shimmer of towns and cities in the mirage of summer, all the opulence of earth and the business of human activity. Millions dwelt in that haze, and beyond them, across the curve of the earth, hundreds of millions more, each actuated by its own selfishness or charity, by its own conception of the things nearest it. Not one in ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... time, which the sportsman supposed to be a bird. It came from behind the great acclivities that ran opposite his place by the pools. Brendon suddenly perceived that it was no natural noise but arose from some human activity. It was, in fact, the musical note of a mason's trowel, and when presently it ceased, he was annoyed to hear heavy footsteps in the quarry—a ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... wisely and well, so also should they learn how to participate in the government, local and national, which their work supports. Moreover the right study of a trade or profession induces a perception of the inter-relationship of all human activity. ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... the main, regions that are inhabited by human beings produce either food-stuffs or something of value that may be exchanged for food-stuffs; and inasmuch as food and shelter are the chief objects of human activity, regions that will not furnish them ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... midday. Everybody assuming to be Anybody, was in town. The rumble of carriages passing to and fro was incessant,—the swift whirr and warning hoot of coming and going motor vehicles, the hoarse cries of the newsboys, and the general insect-like drone and murmur of feverish human activity were as loud as at any busy time of the morning or the afternoon. There had been a Court at Buckingham Palace,—and a "special" performance at the Opera,—and on account of these two functions, entertainments were going on at almost every ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... colonies where there happens to be a surplus of males. Most of them will be wives, and every American-born husband is a possible President of these United States. Any one of these girls may be a four-years' queen. There is no sphere of human activity so exalted that she may not be called upon ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... long succession of them, filled with melancholy evidences of incapacity and defeat in almost every department of human activity—plans of abortive military campaigns, prospectuses of moribund business enterprises, architectural and engineering drawings of structures never to be reared, charts, models, unfinished musical scores, finally a huge papier-mache ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... constitution—that simple variations in brain physiology are the sufficient reason for its cataclysms; but a great many efforts will be made to prove the contrary before this highest of all spheres of human activity is declared to have no meaning—no thread which runs from age to age and links mankind, the genius and the man who plods, in a common and ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... to be an introduction to a book. It is really a personal expression of good will toward one whom I was glad to meet and touch for a moment in that strange whirlpool of human activity last summer ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... the hypothesis that all living matter has sprung from pre-existing living matter, came from a contemporary, though a junior, of Harvey, a native of that country, fertile in men great in all departments of human activity, which was to intellectual Europe, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, what Germany is in the nineteenth. It was in Italy, and from Italian teachers, that Harvey received the most important part of his scientific education. ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... another and larger chamber, which served as a chapel for the celebration of funeral rites, were often covered with painted bas- reliefs, representing scenes from the owner's life or whatever in the way of funeral offering and human activity could minister to ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... dark fields and darker mountains beyond them. From time to time little side roads branched off. They undoubtedly led to houses, but no speck of lamp light appeared anywhere. This part of the world was empty, with the loneliness of a landscape from which every hint of human activity ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... department of human activity of which it was true. If a man wanted to be a preacher, he would find that people had set up divinity-schools and established scholarships for which he could contend. And the same was true if he wished to be an engineer, or an architect, or a historian, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... long time this dropping fire was the one sign of human activity that came to disturb me as I walked. The lanes were profoundly still. They would have been sad but for the sunshine and the singing of the larks. And as it was, there came over me at times a feeling of isolation that was not disagreeable, and yet was enough to make me ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... must have suggested the contrast of his own life; but he was pleased with the fancy that their musical genius had come to him through heredity, for it confirmed his opinion that "if a man made himself an expert in any particular branch of human activity there would result the strong tendency that a peculiar aptitude towards the same branch would be found among some ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Classicist," "Page was interested in that one of the main tenses which we call the Present." In his after life, amid all the excitements of journalism, Page could take a brief vacation and spend it with Ulysses by the sea; but actuality and human activity charmed him even more than did the heroes of the ancient world. He went somewhat into Baltimore society, but not extensively; he joined a club whose membership comprised the leading intellectual men of the town; probably his most congenial associations, however, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... to be the beau ideal of the whole race. "As among flowers the cherry is queen, so among men the samurai is lord," so sang the populace. Debarred from commercial pursuits, the military class itself did not aid commerce; but there was no channel of human activity, no avenue of thought, which did not receive in some measure an impetus from Bushido. Intellectual and moral Japan was directly or indirectly the ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... of international relations. I will not now embark on the troubled sea of foreign policy. But on one point I will touch, since it was raised by the last speaker, and that is the question of our foreign trade. In no department of human activity, I will venture to say, are the intentions of the Almighty more plainly indicated, than in this of the interchange of the products of labour. To each part of the habitable globe have been assigned its special gifts for the use and delectation ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... all wrong. The past can take care of itself, and we need not even worry very much about the future; but if we are true to our own natures, we must be up and doing in the present. Time is short, and mastery in any field of human activity is so long a process that it forbids us to waste our moments. Yet we must learn also how to wait and endure. In short, we must not become slaves to either indifference or impatience, but must make it our business to play ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... are ever on the alert to reduce to a minimum the weak or unworthy offerings, and to secure a maximum of articles embodying mature thought and fit expression. The pronounced tendency toward short methods in every channel of human activity, is reflected in the constantly multiplying series ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... his mail, he often looked out and wondered why he had been so long indifferent to that extraordinary scene of human activity and hopefulness. How had a short-lived race of beings the energy and courage valiantly to begin enterprises which they could follow for only a few years; to throw up towers and build sea-monsters and found great businesses, when the frailest ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... I protest with all my strength. Far from entertaining the absurd idea of doing away with religion, education, property, labour, and the arts, when we say that the State ought to protect the free development of all these kinds of human activity, without helping some of them at the expense of others—we think, on the contrary, that all these living powers of society would develop themselves more harmoniously under the influence of liberty; and that, under such an influence no one of them would, as is now the case, be a source ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... of his office stood Red King. Other horses were hitched here and there, but there was no human being in sight. The quiet peace of the waning afternoon had settled over town; it was the period when human activity slackens. ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... risen among wise and far-sighted men a perception of the need for setting certain departments of human activity entirely free from legal interference. This has nothing to do with any sympathy these liberators may themselves have with immoral views. A man with the strongest conviction of the Divine ordering of the universe and of the superiority of monarchy to all ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... of what had been once homes and dwelling-places of men. Grass-grown cellar excavations, moss-grown stones and bits of walls; little else; but a number of those lying soft and sunny in the September light. Soft, and sunny, and lonely; no trace of human habitation any longer, where once human activity had been in full play. Silence, where the babble of voices had been; emptiness, where young feet and old feet had gone in and out; barrenness, where the fruits of human industry had been busily gathered and dispensed. ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... you are in fact too severe," said the Judge, smiling at the outbreak of his friend; "and I, as far as regards myself," continued he, gravely, but cheerfully, "wish that a clearer idea of one's country accompanied every step of human activity. If there be a love which is natural and reasonable, it is the love of one's country. Have I not to thank my country for everything that I have? Are they not its laws, its institutions, its spiritual life, which have developed my whole being, as man and as a citizen? And are they not the ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... readers that in the third and longest study I have said little, save incidentally, either of treatment or prevention. The omission of such considerations at this stage is intentional. It may safely be said that in no other field of human activity is so vast an amount of strenuous didactic morality founded on so slender a basis of facts. In most other departments of life we at least make a pretence of learning before we presume to teach; in the field of sex we content ourselves with the smallest ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... about the premises; there was no sound of human activity and no dog barked. Nayland Smith drew a long breath, glanced back along the way we had come, then went on, following the wall, I beside him, until we came to the gate. It was unfastened, and we walked up the stone path through a wilderness of weeds. Four windows of the house were visible, two ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... is one primarily intended to show the progress in the industry, the science, and the art, not only of the American nation, but of all other nations, in the great and wonderful century which has just closed. Every department of human activity will be represented there, and perhaps I may be allowed, as honorary president of the athletic association which, under European management, started to revive the memory of the Olympic games, to say that I am glad ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... write a poem on Money, Casti? I almost feel capable of it myself. What can claim precedence, in all this world, over hard cash? It is the fruitful soil wherein is nourished the root of the tree of life; it is the vivifying principle of human activity. Upon it luxuriate art, letters, science; rob them of its sustenance, and they droop like withering leaves. Money means virtue; the lack of it is vice. The devil loves no lurking-place like an empty purse. Give me a thousand pounds to-morrow, and I become the most virtuous man in England. ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... believing. Everybody recognizes this in the case of the amatory infatuations of the adolescents who see angels and heroes in obviously (to others) commonplace and even objectionable maidens and youths. But it holds good over the entire field of human activity. The hardest-headed materialist will become a consulter of table-rappers and slate-writers if he loses a child or a wife so beloved that the desire to revive and communicate with them becomes irresistible. The cobbler believes that there is nothing ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... educational and, as such, instructs the brain and hand of man. Friendly rivalry follows, which is the spur to industrial improvement, the inspiration to useful invention and to high endeavor in all departments of human activity. It exacts a study of the wants, comforts, and even the whims of the people, and recognizes the efficacy of high quality and low prices to win their favor. The quest for trade is an incentive to men of business to devise, invent, improve and economize in ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... practical rule of life. Another notable sermon is on "The Sovereignty of Law," an admirable disquisition on the supremacy of law in the intellectual life, the physical existence, the domain of morals and in every department of human activity. Dr. Peabody's style is forcible and virile, and his compactness of statement, enables him to put "infinite riches in a ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... censured, is relatively unimportant. The simplisme of M. Zola is not absolute, as but one of the three constituent modalities is omitted, that one being morality. The lack is, however, no less fatal, inasmuch as the void produced by the absence of one of the noblest faculties of human activity must usually be ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... Stuart dynasty, tacitly admitted the military primacy of France. Nor was this superiority of the French confined to the science of war. It passed unquestioned in the arts of peace. Even Rome at the height of her power could not dominate every field of human activity. She could rule the people with authority and overcome the proud; but even her own poets rendered homage to Greece in the realms of art, sculpture, and eloquence. But France was the aesthetic as well as the military dictator ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... men passing into other men's pockets. He said, 'The only way to save this money is to go into business—sell as well as buy.' He saw that if the colored race was to become economically self-sufficient, it must engage in every form of human activity. Himself a successful business man as shown by Tuskegee's millions, he has led his race to ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... of Physical Training finds also a significant opportunity and an urgent duty in the fact that various types of physical exercise are intimately associated with social, ethical, and moral consequences. No other human activity gives the same opportunity for the development of a social spirit and personal ethical standards as do play, games, and sports of children and adolescents. Unsupervised, these activities degenerate and bring unmoral practices and an anti-social ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... to have been the central idea of the beautiful creed which, for 1800 years, has tuned the heart and formed the mind of the noblest of mankind. From this centre it radiated out and spread, as time went on, into the full circle of human activity, flinging its own philosophy and its own peculiar grace over the common detail of the common life of all of us. Like the seven lamps before the Throne of God, the seven mighty angels, and the seven stars, the seven sacraments shed over us a never ceasing stream of blessed influence. First there ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... the desire for the easy acquisition of wealth, he could have pursued his career for a much longer period than he actually did. As for my wife, with a woman's natural tendency to read a romance into any and every development of human activity, she held fast to the opinion that the Pirate's extraordinary career was the outcome of an overmastering passion for herself. The probability is, that in his brain all these motives operated at different times. The natural love of plunder, inherent ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... or sometimes diverged, have with endless subtlety, and courageous thoroughness, traced the long and sinuous paths of sexual energy in personality and in life, indeed in all the main manifestations of human activity. ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... facts of science, distinguishing the facts themselves from any hypothetical and interpretative gloss—yet with Haeckel's interpretations and speculative deductions from the facts, especially with the mode of presentation, and the crude and unbalanced attacks on other fields of human activity, my feeling of divergence occasionally ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... am not mistaken, these words of Germany's greatest poet express accurately what the German people during the last hundred years has been striving for—national culture and national pre-eminence in every field of human activity. To advocate the reduction of Germany to a land of isolated scientists, poets, artists, and educators is tantamount to a call for the destruction of the ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... business-jealousy that one porter hates another, and the reason for it lies in the fact that two of a trade know each other's weaknesses, that one always knows how the other tries to hide his lack of knowledge, how deceitful fundamentally every human activity is, and how much trouble everybody takes to make his own trade appear to the other as fine as possible. If you know, however, that your neighbor is as wise as you are, the latter becomes a troublesome witness in any disagreeable matter, and if he is often thought of in this ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... statesmen may be found among their ranks. Among those whose achievements we shall study later are The Venerable Bede, Boniface, Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Fra Angelico, Savonarola, Luther, Erasmus,—all these, and many others who have been leaders in various branches of human activity, were monks. ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... machinery. Mystified, he gazed blankly at Manuel. Of course it was impossible. What could functioning machinery be doing at the bottom of an abandoned hole in the ground? And where there were no signs of human activity to account for the phenomenon? A more forsaken looking place it would be hard to imagine. Not that the surrounding country wasn't ruggedly beautiful and grand; the hills were covered with live-oak, yucca grass, chulla, manzanita, and starred with the white blossoms of ...
— The Seed of the Toc-Toc Birds • Francis Flagg
... like the one by which they had come to the gate, quite as pensive and as tall and as isolated from the sky, and as absorbed in its own mysteries. But here it seemed to have been conquered by human activity. Not far away voices, cries, laughter resounded. Here and there were evidences of left-off games. The narrow footpaths often led to wider paths of sand. The sisters quickly followed the winding path in the direction from which the children's voices sounded ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... longer possible. The currents of economic life, like most other phases of human activity, have swept beyond the local forests, the grass lands, the tilled fields, the oven and the carpenter's bench, and gaining momentum in their ever-widening course, they have ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... fused with the peoples whom they conquered. They introduced, too, into communities which had grown stagnant and weakly, a fresh and invigorating atmosphere that acted as a stimulant in every sphere of human activity. The Kassite, for instance, was a unifying and therefore a strengthening influence in Babylonia. He shook off the manacles of the past which bound the Sumerian and the Akkadian alike to traditional lines of policy based on unforgotten ancient rivalries. His concern was ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... novelist should doubt his ability to cope with his task. He imagines it more gigantic than it is. And yet literary creation being only one of the legitimate forms of human activity has no value but on the condition of not excluding the fullest recognition of all the more distinct forms of action. This condition is sometimes forgotten by the man of letters, who often, especially in his youth, is inclined to lay a claim of exclusive superiority ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... trade, but something which concerned our morals, our politics, and even our spiritual life. Though it, no doubt, involved Free Trade, what both the Mallets pleaded for was "the policy of Free Exchange" a policy entering and ruling every form of human activity, or, at any rate, everything to which the quality of value inured, and so ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Language—which is wholly a social product for a social need—is the chief vehicle of symbolical operation, and the only means by which abstraction is affected.... Language is the creator and sustainer of that ideal world in which the noblest part of human activity finds a theatre, the world of thought and spiritual insight, of knowledge and duty, loftily elevated above that of sense and appetite. Into this ideal world man absorbs the universe as in a transfiguration. It is here that ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... some cases has become the great town and in others has decayed away and disappeared from the map. In an age when wool was our great export, flock keeping was naturally a most important calling, and the ley, or meadow land, would be quickly taken up and associated with human activity. When bridges were scarce, fords were important, and it is easy to see how the inn, the smithy, the cartwright's booth, etc., would naturally plant themselves at such a spot and form ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... and Musadieu, who played with ideas as one tosses a ball, without perceiving that they continually exchanged the same ones, protested in the name of thought and of human activity. ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... category includes the entries dealing with the natural environment and the effects of human activity. ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... series of these simple, and at the same time sublime, compositions, of which you alone know the secret. Three other choruses of the same kind as that of the Blacksmiths, which should sum up the most poetical methods of human activity, and which should be called (unless you advise otherwise) Labourers, Sailors, and Soldiers, would form a lyric epic of which the genius of Rossini or Meyerbeer would be proud. I know I have no right to make any such claim, but your kindness ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... representatives of one age succeed those of another. The whole is calm and quiet. The fierce contests, the angry broils, private and public—now throwing the whole city into a ferment of innocent alarm, now deluging its streets with blood—the rage of plagues, sealing up the sources of human activity, and causing the stillness of the grave to settle over the scene—all these we must supply; and surely the thoughtful mind is busy in doing this as it contemplates the passing train. We conceive rival claimants for the ducal throne, contending, regardless of dying counsel, until death again settles ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... night had come. Every sound of human activity had long ago ceased. It was the quiet time when one may most easily probe an intense experience. I felt that more was to be known,—something which the minister longed to tell,—something to which what he had caused me to read was to serve as a prelude. I suspected how powerless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... fragments without real importance—dwarfed reflections of ideal truths for which neither language nor institutions provide any adequate expression! How is it possible to take seriously what is so manifestly relative and temporary as the various existing forms of human activity? Above all, how is it possible to take one's self seriously, to spend one's thought on the petty interests of a petty individuality, when the beatific vision of universal knowledge, of absolute being, has once dawned on the dazzled beholder? The charm ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the mine entrance. By unspoken agreement they moved to a position directly in front of the pool. If the ghost appeared, it would be almost over their heads. The shelf was too high for them to see into the water, but they were in a position where any human activity couldn't ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... conception of life is evidently an ethical conception. And it comprises the whole reality as well as the human activity which domineers it. No action is to be removed from the moral sense; nothing is to be in the world that is divested of the importance which belongs to it in respect of moral aims. Life, therefore, as the Fascist conceives it, is serious, austere, religious; entirely balanced in a world sustained ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... knots in trammelling and obstructing human activity was believed to be manifested at marriage not less than at birth. During the Middle Ages, and down to the eighteenth century, it seems to have been commonly held in Europe that the consummation of marriage could be prevented by any one who, while the wedding ceremony was taking place, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer |
