"Moralist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a woman of no uncertain caste, a woman handsome in a daring and costly gown, and as yet not old, but in whose eyes flickered a curious febrile glare ("as though," commented P. Sybarite, moralist, "reflected back from the ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... limitations, the modern distinction between the Artist and the Moralist. With the one Form is all in all, with the other Tendency. The aim of the one is to delight, of the other to convince. The one is master of his purpose, the other mastered by it. The whole range of perception and thought is valuable to the one as ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... behaved to Mrs. Fitzherbert, and the utter falsehood of the denial which he had given to the reports that a marriage ceremony had taken place between them—a falsehood which, be it remembered, he had declared to Charles Fox upon his honor to be a truthful statement. The moralist may be a little puzzled how to make up his mind as to the bearing of this incident upon the character of George the Fourth. Does it relieve the murky gloom of George's life by one streak of light if we ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... moralist, who does not face facts, would have them all marry. Certainly this is an easy way to settle the matter, but is it wise? is it even right? Moreover, even if this were possible and there was no surplus of women, would this solution be ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... connexion with the author's personal history. In the preface we are told that Robinson Crusoe is an allegory, and in one of the chapters we are told why it is an allegory. The explanation is given in a homily against the vice of talking falsely. By talking falsely the moralist explains that he does not mean telling lies, that is, falsehoods concocted with an evil object; these he puts aside as sins altogether beyond the pale of discussion. But there is a minor vice of falsehood which he considers it his duty to reprove, namely, telling stories, ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... who flees from reality. Zarathustra had more courage in his body than any other thinker before or after him. To tell the truth and TO AIM STRAIGHT: that is the first Persian virtue. Am I understood?... The overcoming of morality through itself—through truthfulness, the overcoming of the moralist through his opposite—THROUGH ME—: that is what the name Zarathustra means in ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... time softens the hardest outside. Richardson yielded as entirely as any curate exposed to a shower of slippers. He evidently wrote under the impression that he was not merely an imaginative writer of the highest order, but also a great moralist. He was reforming the world, putting down vice, sending duelling out of fashion, and inculcating the lessons of the pulpit in a far more attractive form. A modern novelist is half-ashamed of his art; he disclaims earnestly any serious ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... strength and courage, and so complete their despair of being a match for his swiftness and cunning, that after the seventh night the watchers refused to go out any longer; and poor Bolt himself was confined to his bed by an attack of what a doctor would have called rheumatism, and a moralist, rage. My indignation and sympathy were greatly excited by this mortifying failure, and my interest romantically aroused by the anecdotes I had heard of Will o' the Wisp; accordingly, armed with a thick bludgeon, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... then, would remove, in a great degree, the 'vantage ground on which she stood with reference to himself. Difficult, indeed, was the part she found herself compelled to play on those delicate occasions. She could not, as a moralist and disciplinarian, proverbially strict, seem in any degree to countenance the charges brought by Hugh against Felix; nor, on the other hand, was it without a command of temper and heroic self-denial, rarely attained, that she was able to keep, her ...
— Lha Dhu; Or, The Dark Day - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... simple poetic beauty of this class of superstitions have doubtless often induced the moralist to hesitate in exposing their absurdity, and, like Burns in view of his ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... as the bedrock of morality, the student—especially in the West—is apt next to test "Intuition" as a probable basis for ethics. In the East, this idea has not appealed to the thinker in the sense in which the word Intuition is used in the West. The moralist in the East has based ethics on Revelation, or on Evolution, or on Illumination—the last being the basis of the Mystic. Intuition—which by moralists like Theodore Parker, Frances Power Cobb, and many Theists, is spoken of as the "Voice of God" in the human soul—is identified ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant
... Badawi, eunuch meets knight; the Kazi hob-nobs with the thief; the pure and pious sit down to the same tray with the bawd and the pimp; where the professional religionist, the learned Koranist and the strictest moralist consort with the wicked magician, the scoffer and the debauchee- poet like Abu Nowas; where the courtier jests with the boor and where the sweep is bedded with the noble lady. And the characters are ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... admirable sentiment on the part of Mr. Mill (with which every absolute moralist will agree), but it contains a complete refutation of his own position, and is a capital instance[209] of the vigorous life of moral intuition in one who professes to have eliminated any fundamental distinction between the "right" and the "expedient." ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... odd to note how opinions differ as to the greatness of Thackeray and the value of his books. Some regard him as the greatest novelist of his age and country and as one of the greatest of any country and any age. These hold him to be not less sound a moralist than excellent as a writer, not less magnificently creative than usefully and delightfully cynical, not less powerful and complete a painter of manners than infallible as a social philosopher and incomparable as a lecturer on the human heart. They accept Amelia Sedley ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... between the covers of this little book words of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism. However humiliating for my self esteem, I must confess that the counsels of Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are more fit for a moralist than for an artist. Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praise worthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... of the opinion, first luminously suggested by Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must not be judged as a political moralist of our time and race would be judged. He thinks that Machiavelli was in earnest, as none but an idealist can be, and he is the first to imagine him an idealist immersed in realities, who involuntarily transmutes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Jackson's favourite allusion had been brought up (Archer fancied not without intention) by their hostess. The Beaufort failure, or rather the Beaufort attitude since the failure, was still a fruitful theme for the drawing-room moralist; and after it had been thoroughly examined and condemned Mrs. van der Luyden had turned her scrupulous ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... nature, defending and justifying it in all the hostile suits brought against it by imperfect sympathy, by theological acrimony, by false dogmas. Yet he never was for a moment the apologist of selfishness, vice, or folly; no stricter moralist than he is to be found; no worshipper of veracity more faithful; no wiser or more tender pleader of the claims of reverence and self-consecration! In fact, it was the richness of his reverence and the breadth of his religion that enabled him to throw the mantle ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... following from an essay on George Bernard Shaw by Robert Blatchford, the English Socialist: "Shaw is something much better than a wit, much better than an artist, much better than a politician or a dramatist; he is a moralist, a teacher of ethics, austere, ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... contrast with the turpitudes and trivialities of the present day. There is no turning back the course of history; but if Aristophanes' efforts have remained abortive, they are not therefore inglorious. Is the moralist to despair and throw away his pen, because in so many cases his voice ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... oysters is a mere trap for the inexperienced, as every description of expensive wines, liqueurs, coffee, and costly suppers are in more general request, and the wanton extravagance exhibited within its vortex is enough to strike the uninitiated and the moralist with the most appalling sentiments of horror and dismay. Yet within this saloon (see plate) did we enter, at four o'clock in the morning, to view the depravity of human nature, and watch the operation of licentiousness upon the ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... could say whether it is more his story or mine. In this story of Peter Pan, for instance, the bald narrative and most of the moral reflections are mine, though not all, for this boy can be a stern moralist; but the interesting bits about the ways and customs of babies in the bird-stage are mostly reminiscences of David's, recalled by pressing his hands to his temples ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... Louise kissed the little refined moralist; and Petrea left the table, the gentlemen, and a political discussion, which she had begun with Henrik, in order to sit on one side and relate to Gabriele the Travels of Thiodolf, which was one of the greatest enjoyments of ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... Riel, Cavalier Tunes, Time's Revenges, and many more, he achieves beauty, or nobility, or fitness of phrase such as only a poet is capable of. It is in these last pieces and their like that his fame lies for the future. It was his lot to be strong as the thinker, the moralist, with "the accomplishment of verse," the scholar interested to rebuild the past of experience, the teacher with an explicit dogma in an intellectual form with examples from life, the anatomist of human passions, ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... mother, is a proceeding, the very idea of which is somewhat revolting in the average individual.... There are many roues in St. James' who would shrink before it; yet you, the enlightened philosopher, the moralist——" ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... he was only an amateur in science, his profession, as we know, being the ministry. There is hardly another case in history of a man not a specialist in science accomplishing so much in original research as did this chemist, physiologist, electrician; the mathematician, logician, and moralist; the theologian, mental philosopher, and political economist. He took all knowledge for his field; but how he found time for his numberless researches and multifarious writings, along with his every-day duties, must ever remain ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the sick, it is evident that not the spiritual meaning of religion is responsible for the cure, but the psychological process of believing. But if that is the case, it is clear that here again the psychologist, and not the moralist, will give the correct account of the real process involved. In short, it is psychology, psychology in its scientific modern form, which has to furnish the basis for a full understanding of psychotherapy. ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... in general. She wrote: "He gave me wit, but I reformed his heart." M. d'Haussonville has proved, without doubt, that her restraint modified many of his maxims that were tinged with the spirit of the commonplace and trivial. While Mme. de Sable—essentially a moralist and a deeply religious woman—was more of a companion to him, and though his maxims were, for the greater part, composed in her salon, Mme. de La Fayette, by her tenderness and judgment, tempered the tone of them before they reached ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... immutable law of conduct, than there can be an immutable position for the steering-wheel of an aeroplane. The business of the pilot of an aeroplane is to keep his machine aloft amid shifting currents of wind. The business of a moralist is to adjust life to a constantly changing environment. An action which was suicide yesterday becomes heroism today, ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... living for ourselves, is but a mean as well as a false philosophy. Why this eternal reference to self? Is self alone to be consulted? Is even our happiness, did it truly consist in repose, really the great end of life? I doubt if we cannot ascend higher. I doubt if we cannot say with a great moralist, 'If virtue be not estimable in itself, we can see nothing estimable in following it for the sake of a bargain.' But, in fact, repose is the poorest of all delusions; the very act of recurring to self brings about us all those ills of self from which, in ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... master of minute life-like detail, an inimitable imitator of truth; Hogarth's paintings are like Wesley's or Whitefield's sermons, they are stern, unvarnished denunciations of vice and profligacy; Fielding was the easy, large-hearted moralist, who hated above all sins cant and knavery, loved to banter the parsons, to bring fops and boobies upon his stage, and to place in contrast the wide difference that then separated manners in town and in country. Perhaps Thackeray owes more to Fielding than to any ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... was a moralist and a Humanist rather than a truly evangelical reformer, taught: "In itself the Law is nothing else than a Gospel; that is, a good, certain message from God by means of which He instructs us concerning His will." (Frank 2, 312.) While Zwingli thus ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... have yet accomplished in America. The possession of such talent, and its cultivation, show genius and industry which any man might emulate; and, when the colored men shall be represented in all the arts and sciences by those who are able to occupy front ranks, they will need no moralist to assert their rights: they can then maintain their own position. The human mind is so constituted, that it will always pay homage to genius, let it be exhibited under a ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... he hates intensely and effectually, he loves intensely, comprehensively, and gallantly. To love with power is a proof of a large soul, and to hate well is, according to the great moralist, a thing in itself to be loved. Ireland is, therefore, through all its sects, parties, and religions, an amicable nation. Their affections are, indeed, so vivid, that they scruple not sometimes to kill each other with kindness: but we hope that the march ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... the many more neglected and sunken, whose distained stones the brier-tangle half conceals, and whose forget-me-nots have long since died for want of water. One may even muse unprofitably (despite the moralist) in our picturesque cemeteries, and as unprofitably in those abroad, with their crowds of crosses and monotony of immortal wreaths. In fact, whether on grounds philosophical or religious, it is not good to brood on mortality for itself ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... relates them, warming his cold style into a glow of satisfaction, is a practical satire upon his endeavor to resuscitate the virtues of antique republics in that Italy. To do this was his principal aim as a moralist; to revive the grand style of Pindar was his object as an artist. Each attempt involved impossibility, and argued a visionary ambition dimly conscious of its scope. Without freedom, without the living mythology ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... pervading it. It either tells a tale calculated to interest human nature and revive feeling, or sets forth a sentiment which human nature entertains, so that it shall be turned to better account. This involves the field which song has it in its power to cultivate and improve. But neither the pure moralist, nor the accomplished critic, must expect a very great deal to be done on this field at once. The song-writer has difficulties to contend with, both in regard to those by whom he would have his songs sung, and the airs to which he writes them. If in the latter case he would willingly ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the reader by any common-place declamations upon these moral topics. No great subtilty of distinction is requisite to mark the differences between Vanity and Pride, since those differences have been pointed out by every moralist, who has hoped to please mankind by an accurate delineation of the failings of human nature. Whatever distinctions exist, or may be supposed to exist, between the characters in which pride or vanity predominates, it will readily be allowed, that there is one thing in which they both agree—they ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... gladly have received some military information from the general, who was in a condition to tell all he knew; which, however, could not have been much, under the circumstances. He concluded that it would be best for him not to awaken the tipsy moralist; and, after waiting a short time on the spot to avoid suspicion, he joined Major Platner, who was smoking his cigar under ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... Esop was with boys at play, And had his nuts as well as they, A grave Athenian, passing by, Cast on the sage a scornful eye, As on a dotard quite bereaved: Which, when the moralist perceived, (Rather himself a wit profess'd Than the poor subject of a jest) Into the public way he flung A bow that he had just unstrung: "There solve, thou conjurer," he cries, "The problem, that before ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... bounty, draws to her personages of differing humours to reconcile them in the end according to the alternative title, or "Humours Reconciled." These last plays of the old dramatist revert to caricature and the hard lines of allegory; the moralist is more than ever present, the satire degenerates into personal lampoon, especially of his sometime friend, Inigo Jones, who appears unworthily to have used his influence at court against the broken-down ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... Anaximander Pythagoras and his school Xenophanes Zeno of Elea Empedocles and the Eleatics Loftiness of the Greek philosopher Progress of scepticism The Sophists Socrates His exposure of error Socrates as moralist The method of Socrates His services to philosophy His disciples Plato Ideas of Plato Archer Butler on Plato Aristotle His services The syllogism The Epicureans Sir James Mackintosh on Epicurus The Stoics Zeno ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... extravagance at Trouville a moralist might feel inclined to say much, but we are here for a summer holiday, and we must be gay both in manner and attire. It is our business to be delighted with the varied scene of summer costume, and with all the bizarre combinations of colour that the beautiful Parisians ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... his choicest phraseology. He informs us, that "Sarmiento's History of the Peruvian Incas altogether surpasses that of Dr. Johnson's Rasselas and the Happy Valley." The history of Dr. Johnson's "Rasselas" is related, we believe, by Boswell. The great moralist composed his beautiful and philosophical, but somewhat gloomy romance, in the evenings of a single week, in order to obtain the means of defraying the expenses of his mother's funeral. The story is a touching one; but Mr. Wilson's comparison is so inapt, that we cannot ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... made a full-length appearance before the French public,—not in his character of a political philosopher, but as a moralist. Robespierre, a few days before his fall, declared atheism to be aristocratic, reinstated l'Etre supreme, and gave a festival in his honor. There religious matters had rested. Deism, pure and simple, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... the hot fit, loaded fire-arms in its hand! To the soldier himself, revolt is frightful, and oftenest perhaps pitiable; and yet so dangerous, it can only be hated, cannot be pitied. An anomalous class of mortals these poor Hired Killers! With a frankness, which to the Moralist in these times seems surprising, they have sworn to become machines; and nevertheless they are still partly men. Let no prudent person in authority remind them of this latter fact; but always let force, let injustice above all, stop short clearly on this ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... grow, bud, blossom, and bear glorious fruit,—then idealism is hopelessly a lost cause. If it be not possible to promote things ideally good through these very forces of commercial and industrial life, then the outlook is a gloomy one for the social moralist ...
— The business career in its public relations • Albert Shaw
... hunter after samples of the bathetic which might have rewarded the attention of Arbuthnot or Pope, the text of these pageants must be as barren and even to them it would presumably be as tedious a subject of study as the lucubrations of the very dullest English moralist or American humorist; a course of reading digestible only by such constitutions as could survive and assimilate a diet of Martin Tupper or Mark Twain. And yet even in the very homeliest doggrel of Heywood's ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... {28} scarcely gives leisure to the moralist to say so much, but that he (laden with old mouse-eaten records, authorizing {29} himself, for the most part, upon other histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundation of hearsay, having much ado to accord differing writers, and to pick truth out of partiality; ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... seemed to be denied to him on other terms, but the patriotic one of rescuing his exhausted country from the miseries of a protracted civil war; and whatever might be the decision of a scrupulous moralist on the case, it is certain that Elizabeth at least had small title to reprobate a compliance of which, under the reign of her sister, she had herself set the example. But the character of the protestant ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... story, and not propounding theories in this book; and chiefly I am telling of the ideas and influences and emotions that have happened to me—me as a sort of sounding board for my world. The moralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his measure and say, "At this point or at that you went wrong, and you ought to have done"—so-and-so. The point of interest to the statesman is that it didn't for a moment occur to us to do so-and-so ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... and ursine kindness. "How is it, (said one of the company,) that; this savage animal is so attached to Mr. Johnson?" From a very natural cause, replied Mallet: "the bear is a Russian philosopher, and he knows that Linnaeus would have placed him in the same class with the English moralist. They are two barbarous animals of one species."—Johnson disliked Mallet for his tendency to infidelity, and this sarcasm turned his dislike into downright hatred. He never spoke to him afterwards, but has gibbeted him in his octavo dictionary, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... in this infatuation of Van Twiller's which the sober moralist will love to look upon—the serene unconsciousness of the person who caused it. She went through her role with admirable aplomb, drew her salary, it may be assumed, punctually, and appears from first to last to have been ignorant that there was a miserable slave wearing ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... below go out? She hated her indecision. It was new to her, and she felt it to be a weakness. Whatever she had been till now, she had certainly never been a weak woman, except perhaps from the absurd point of view of the Exeter Hall moralist. Scruples had been strangers to her, a baggage she had not burdened ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... conspicuous advance in the tenderer feelings of affection and sympathy. Those relating to the sexes and the care of progeny are in this class proverbial for their intensity, offering, in fact, a favorite type for the poet and moralist. The pining of the 'love-bird' for its absent mate, and the keen distress of a hen on losing her chickens, furnish abundant evidence of vivid feelings of the kind in question. Even the stupid-looking ostrich has heart enough to die for love, as was the case with a male in the Rotund ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... a sterner moralist than I would have had no pity, and would have hurled on her all the weight of those bitter truths of which she was so ignorant; would have shown her that pit of earthly scorn upon whose brink she stood; would have torn down all that perfect, credulous faith of hers, which could have ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... prospect of obtaining professional honours as was enjoyed by any man of his standing. The earliest notice which I have found of him from an outsider is a passage in Crabb Robinson's diaries.[26] Robinson met him on July 10, 1811, and describes him as a 'pious sentimentalist and moralist,' who spoke of his prospects 'with more indifference than was perhaps right in a layman.' The notice is oddly characteristic. From 1814 my father was for nine years a member of the committee of the Church Missionary ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... view. He is a physiognomist, a physiologist, a bit of an anatomist, a bit of a mesmerist, a bit of a geologist, a Flemish painter, an upholsterer, a micrological, misanthropical, sceptical philosopher; but he is no moralist, and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the rights of the native and the claim which he has to the protection of the law. We hold, and rightly, that British justice, if not blind, should at least be colour-blind. The view is irreproachable in theory and incontestable in argument, but it is apt to be irritating when urged by a Boston moralist or a London philanthropist upon men whose whole society has been built upon the assumption that the black is the inferior race. Such a people like to find the higher morality for themselves, not to have it imposed upon them by those who ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of Sidney is, in truth, what would now be called a Philosophy of Poetry. It is philosophy taken from the side of the moralist; for that was the side to which the disputants had confined themselves, and in which—altogether apart from the example of others—the interest of Sidney, as man of action, inevitably lay. It is philosophy as conceived by the mind of a poet. But, none the less, it pierces to the ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Glasgow. Others of his works are a treatise on Logic and A System of Moral Philosophy, the latter not published till 1755, nine years after his death. Hutcheson fills a large space in the history of philosophy, both as a metaphysician and as a moralist. He is in some respects a pioneer of the "Scotch school" and of "common sense" philosophy. He greatly developed the doctrine of "moral sense", a term first used by the third Earl of Shaftesbury; indeed, much of his whole moral system may be traced to Shaftesbury. ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... no charity—no pity?—no money available for hopeless poverty? Not much—very little, I conceive; about so much as Shakspeare insinuates that there is of milk in a male tiger. Think, for instance, of that black-hearted reprobate, Cicero, the moralist. This moral knave, who wrote such beautiful Ethics, and was so wicked—who spoke so charmingly and acted so horribly—mentions, with a petrifying coolness, that he knew of desolate old women in Rome who passed three ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... fame. Hence, as Poetry is powerful to elevate or degrade, to purify or to corrupt a people, much depends on the spirit of the Poetry which they may put into the hands of the youth of a country; as well observed by an eminent moralist: 'Let me write the poems or ballads of a people, and I care but little ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... "Sa'di' ' prosperous, the surname of the "Persian moralist," for whom see my friend F. F. Arbuthnot's pleasant booklet, "Persian Portraits" (London ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... efforts to disguise his satisfaction on going away. There are days when a flask of champagne at a cabaret, and a red-cheeked partner to share it, are too strong temptations for any young fellow of spirit. I am not going to play the moralist, and cry "Fie!" For ages past, I know how old men preach, and what young men practise; and that patriarchs have had their weak moments, too, long since Father Noah toppled over after discovering the vine. ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dominant disposition was accordingly well known; they were indifferent to public matters and therefore their candidate was as indifferent as themselves. Had they shown too great a concern for the nation this would have prevented their election; the State to them was a troublesome moralist and remote creditor. Their candidate must choose between them and this intruder, side with them against it, and not act as a pedagogue in its name or as bailiff on its behalf. When power is born on the spot and conferred to-day by constituents who are to submit to it to-morrow ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... say, it is pleasure. That it is, of course; but he will maintain that nothing "taken by itself" is either good or bad, from the moralist's point of view. The cruel man may will to see suffering, and may enjoy it. The moral man may hold that the cruel man, his act of will, and his pleasure, should all be snuffed out, in the interest of humanity, as ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... the publication of a little volume called "Nature" gave conclusive evidence of his talent, and, followed as it was by his "Essays," "Representative Men," and "Conduct of Life," established his reputation as seer, interpreter of nature, poet and moralist—a reputation which has held its own against the ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... different kind which appeared recently in the Atlantic Monthly, was written by an Englishman, a moralist of the modern school. His lesson is addressed to women and the main point of it, developed in a most interesting and reassuring way, is that they are too much afraid of conventional ideas, of public opinion. They ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... of every moralist and philanthropist is, 'Let us put a stop to this prostitution, open and clandestine.' This cannot be effected at present, much as it is to be desired; the demand for it is too great, even possibly greater than the supply. ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... Parisienne, were collected in his 'Monsieur et Madame Cardinal' (1873); and 'Les Petites Cardinal', (1880). They are not intended 'virginibus puerisque', and the author's attitude is that of a half-pitying, half-contemptuous moralist, yet the virility of his criticism has brought ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the Hebrew rest till, as is well known, he had, at last, got out of the law a network of prescriptions to enwrap his whole life, to govern every moment of it, every impulse, every action. The Greek notion of felicity, on the other hand, is perfectly conveyed in these words of a great French moralist: "C'est le bonheur des hommes"—when? when they abhor that which is evil?— no; when they exercise themselves in the law of the Lord day and night?—no; when they die daily?—no; when they walk about the New Jerusalem with palms in their hands?—no; ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... both men must have led them to look with indifference upon such an end. For Confucius in his teaching treated only of man's life on earth, and seems to have had no ideas with regard to the human lot after death; if he had any ideas he preserved an inscrutable silence about them. As a moralist he prescribed the duties of the king and of the father, and advocated the cultivation by the individual man of that rest or apathy of mind which resembles so much the disposition aimed at by the Greek and Roman Stoic. Even as a moralist, he seems ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... the moralist, 'had arrived at that part of his youth in which young men commonly choose for themselves, and show, by the result of their choice, whether they will, through the succeeding stages of their lives, enter into and walk in the path of virtue or that of vice, he went out into a solitary place fit for ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... of the man who was, for the time being, neither the moralist nor the criminal. With a swift out-reaching he drew her to him, crushed her in his arms, covered ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... though good works or gospel obedience, and true holiness be absolutely necessary unto salvation, (as being the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith in every believer) the greatest saint being the best moralist, yet there are no ways meritorious of man's salvation; no, this depends upon God's eternal purposes, Rom. ix. 11. Eph. i. 4.—We find it often said in scripture, that it shall be rendered to every man according ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... function. One is gold and the other brass, or something very like it. But on reflection I can enter into it—his having, under the circumstances, accepted Mr. Sloane's offer and been content to do his duties. Ce que c'est de nous! Theodore's contentment in such a case is a theme for the moralist—a better moralist than I. The best and purest mortals are an odd mixture, and in none of us does honesty exist on its own terms. Ideally, Theodore hasn't the smallest business dans cette galere. It offends my sense of propriety to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... handled [by the Review] probably still more so. But my moral feelings must not be compromised. To Jeffrey as an individual I shall ever be ready to show every kind of individual courtesy; but of Judge Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review I must ever think and speak as of a bad politician, a worse moralist, and a critic, in matters of taste, equally incompetent and unjust." [Footnote: "The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey," iii. pp. 124-5.] Walter Scott, before long, was led to entertain the same opinion of the Edinburgh Review as Southey. A severe and unjust review ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... distinction in store for me, would have induced me to prolong my suit. However, I was not going to despair when in sight of land. The widow was evidently softened. A little time longer, and the most scrupulous moralist, the most rigid advocate for employing time wisely, could not have objected to my daily system of courtship. I was none of your sighing, dying, ogling, hand-squeezing, waist-pressing, oath-swearing, everlasting-adoring affairs, with an interchange of ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... moralist, as is particularly evidenced by the notes in his journal which have not been made public. In many things which befell him in his daily life he was as ingenuous as a child. His personality, on the whole, presented itself in such a manner as to ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... man's folly," is as instructive a moralist in the end of the nineteenth century as in the beginning of the seventeenth. This, in a sense, is true of all great moralists, but the distinction of Earle, as I understand it, is that his characters are so often really people of our own day, with idiosyncracies that seem almost more applicable ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... many weeks did they come upon a Mormon household whose management was not such as the moralist would approve, and in those cases before Halsey's passionate denunciation sins were confessed ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... and subsequent reflection, have enabled me to trace, indeed, some remote connection between this passage in the English moralist and a portion of the character of Ligeia. An intensity in thought, action, or speech, was possibly, in her, a result, or at least an index, of that gigantic volition which, during our long intercourse, failed to give other and more immediate evidence of its existence. Of all the women ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... good is it." Such a word has often been blessed and made effectual, and we should not shrink from speaking it. The right time for speaking it should be chosen, but it should not be left by us unsaid. When Paley the great moralist was a student at Cambridge he wasted his time in idleness and frivolity, and was the butt of his fellow-students. One of them, however, took courage to remonstrate with him, and did so with good effect. One morning he came to his bedside and said to him earnestly, ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... one of the very greatest, but even before and beyond that he was intensely a moralist, as only the moralists of our true and noble time have been. Not Tolstoy, not Ibsen himself, has more profoundly and indignantly felt the injustice of civilization, or more insistently shown the falsity of its fundamental pretensions. He did not make his books a ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... morality, properly so called, and of political economy—the one inveighing against spoliation by an exposure of its moral ugliness, the other bringing it into discredit in our judgment, by showing its evil consequences. Concede that the triumph of the religious moralist, when realized, is more beautiful, more consoling and more radical; at the same time it is not easy to deny that the triumph of economical science is more facile and ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... voluntary cares and labours take, The sufferers' servants for the service' sake; Of these a, part I give you—but a part, - Some hearts are hidden, some have not a heart. First let me praise—for so I best shall paint That pious moralist, that reasoning saint! Can I of worth like thine, Eusebius, speak? The man is willing, but the Muse is weak; - 'Tis thine to wait on woe! to soothe! to heal! With learning social, and polite with zeal: In thy pure breast although the passions dwell, They're train'd by virtue, and no ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... individual into a straight-jacket from its earliest infancy; or to shape every human being according to one pattern; not into a well-rounded individuality, but into a patient work slave, professional automaton, tax-paying citizen, or righteous moralist. If one, nevertheless, meets with real spontaneity (which, by the way, is a rare treat,) it is not due to our method of rearing or educating the child: the personality often asserts itself, regardless of official and family barriers. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... of wealth has always been a chief proclivity of our race. The earliest of all books (Job) mentions it with sharp reproof, as though even then it had become a theme with the moralist. In olden time, wealth was even more unreliable than at the present day, especially as the mere possession of gold was enough to endanger one's life. The modern capitalist avoids this by devolving the custody of his cash on some bank and holding its stock instead of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... believe," said he. "Yet in matters of so delicate a nature men of honour keep their own counsel very closely. It is possible you may not be aware of much in his daily life that you would disapprove—much that, under the circumstances, though I am no rigid moralist, appears inexcusable ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... an old fool to have grudged Waldemar his model. As I watch him gradually building up his statue, watch the goddess gradually emerging from the clay heap, I ask myself—and the case might trouble a more subtle moralist than me—whether a village girl, an obscure, useless life within the bounds of what we choose to call right and wrong, can be weighed against the possession by mankind of a great work of art, a Venus immortally beautiful? Still, I am ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... remorse. He could not understand how he could be at the same time so tormented, and have such a good appetite. Luckily he remembered reading in the works of some moralist or other that sorrow sharpened hunger wonderfully. This maxim set his conscience at rest, and the result was, that the unfortunate pullet was eaten up to ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... respect to such apparitions is very seldom accurately or distinctly questioned. A supernatural tale is in most cases received as an agreeable mode of amusing society, and he would be rather accounted a sturdy moralist than an entertaining companion who should employ himself in assailing its credibility. It would indeed be a solecism in manners, something like that of impeaching the genuine value of the antiquities exhibited by ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... mountain and the tree, it may have no ethical significance at all, only a symbolical meaning. The best art is inspired more by an intellectual force than by a vital sympathy. Of course to succeed as a novelist in England to-day, one must have a dash of the moralist, because an English audience is far more preoccupied with moral ideals than with either intellectual or artistic ideals. The reading public desires that love should be loyal rather than passionate; it thinks ultimate success a more impressive thing ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... well-informed, impressive phrase-making for the bewilderment of the ignorant—these and a dozen other arts were tried in vain. People began to laugh at the Tory leader, and likened him to Issachar crouching down between two burdens, or to that moralist who said that he always sought "the narrow path which lies between right and wrong." His colleagues fell away from him, and he was unduly ruffled by their secession. "It is time," exclaimed the Liberal leader, "to have done with this fooling"; and though he was ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... great genius on geometry, though its practical and speculative morals were vicious in the extreme, it might appear, that in voting the statue, they honoured only the geometrician. But Rousseau is a moralist, or he is nothing. It is impossible, therefore, putting the circumstances together, to mistake their design in choosing the author, with whom they have begun ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... must not suppose that a philosopher or moralist uses in his own case the licence which his theory itself would allow him. A man in his own person is guided by his own conscience; but in drawing out a system of rules he is obliged to go by logic, and follow the exact ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... said the straightforward moralist. "Quite so! dear me! Well, well, I must wish you good morning, for really I am so overwhelmed with work that I hardly know which way to turn—bye, bye. I will take care to keep you posted up in—." Here Mr. Prigg's cab drove off, and I could not ascertain whether the posting up was to be in ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... edifying; and so may be passed over: but, as a certain great philosopher told us, in very humble and simple words, that we are not to expect to gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles, we may, at least, demand, in all persons assuming the character of moralist or philosopher—order, soberness, and regularity of life; for we are apt to distrust the intellect that we fancy can be swayed by circumstance or passion; and we know how circumstance and passion WILL sway ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... between Turgenev and Tolstoi is that Turgenev was always an artist; Tolstoi always a moralist. It was not necessary for him to abandon novels, and write tracts; for in every novel his ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... men removed from Norfolk Island were added to the gangs, their tendencies became more alarming and apparent: they were of the worst possible description, and defied all remedy.[257] No artifices of language will enable the moralist to describe them. ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... which he had, several years ago, purchased large property. It was said he had got her in London; and nothing was more certain than that she issued forth the English language clothed in an inveterate cockney accent. She was a high moralist, and a merciless castigator of all females who manifested, or who were supposed to manifest, even a tendency to walk out of the line of her own peculiar theory on female conduct. Her weight might be about eighteen stone, ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the state and the moralist must answer. The knowledge of contraceptive methods may yet for a time be denied to the woman of the working class, but those who are responsible for denying it to her, and she herself, should understand clearly the dangers to which she is exposed because of the laws which force her into the hands ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... and tirades! His approximation at times to the confines of French realistic art is of the most accidental or incidental kind. For Gissing is at heart, in his bones as the vulgar say, a thorough moralist and sentimentalist, an honest, true-born, downright ineradicable Englishman. Intellectually his own life was, and continued to the last to be, romantic to an extent that few lives are. Pessimistic he may at times appear, but this is almost entirely ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... literature, may caress himself with the notion that he is an immoralist, that his soul is full of soothing sin, that he has cut himself loose from the revelation of God. But all the while there is a part of him that remains a sound Christian, a moralist, a right thinking and forward-looking man. And that part, in times of stress, asserts itself. It may not worry him on ordinary occasions. It may not stop him when he swears, or takes a nip of whiskey behind the door, or goes motoring on Sunday; it may even let him alone ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... to provide the burglar with money to spend, and as in many instances it has achieved this object, therefore the burglar is a public benefactor and the police are ignorant sentimentalists. No highway robber has yet harrowed us with denunciations of the puling moralist who allows his child to suffer all the evils of poverty because certain faddists think it dishonest to garotte an alderman. Thieves and assassins understand quite well that there are paths of acquisition, even of the best things, that are barred to all men of honor. Again, has ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... fortunate indeed in having such a book as this of Ptah-hotep for the most ancient complete literary work extant. For not by any magical texts, or hymns and prayers, should we be so well shown the conditions of that early time; but our moralist, by advancing counsels of perfection for every contingency, has left us a faithful record of his age. The veil of five-and-a-half thousand years is rent, and we are met with a vivid and a fascinating picture of the domestic and social ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... mere animal ferocity of passion, and an imagination creative chiefly because unbridled: it was, what true poetry is always, the quintessence of general mental riches, the purified result of strong thought and conception, and of refined as well as powerful emotion. In his writings, we behold him a moralist, a philosopher, a man of universal knowledge: in each of these capacities he is great, but also in more; for all that he achieves in these is brightened and gilded with the touch of another quality; his maxims, his feelings, his opinions are transformed ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Fair"—he allows no considerations of what the reader may think "nice" or "pleasant" to shackle his sincerity or his determination; and it is therefore to Time's Laughingstocks that the reader who wishes to become intimately acquainted with Mr. Hardy as a moralist most frequently recurs. We notice here more than elsewhere in his poems Mr. Hardy's sympathy with the local music of Wessex, and especially with its expression by the village choir, which he uses as a spiritual ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... his development, Martin found himself face to face with economic morality, or the morality of class; and soon it became to him a grisly monster. Personally, he was an intellectual moralist, and more offending to him than platitudinous pomposity was the morality of those about him, which was a curious hotchpotch of the economic, the metaphysical, the sentimental, and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... their years, spelt by th' unletter'd muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist to die. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... present to Sense. Thus, at the aspect of a windmill, the mind forms images of many characteristic facts relating to it; and the kind of images will depend very much on the general disposition, or particular mood, of the mind affected by the object: the painter, the poet, and the moralist will have different images suggested by the presence of the windmill or its symbol. There are indeed sluggish minds so incapable of self-evolved activity, and so dependent on the immediate suggestions of Sense, as to be almost destitute of the power of forming distinct images beyond the ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... recognized their existence and counted with them. He said one day, with a flash of cynical wisdom worthy of a La Rochefoucauld, [Footnote: La Rochefoucauld: Francois La Rochefoucauld was a French writer and moralist of the seventeenth century.] that honest statesmanship was the employment of individual meanness for the public good. He never asked perfection of any one; he did not even insist, for others, upon the high standards he set up for himself. At ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... renovation of the family, by a higher conception of marriage, and so on. These ends can only be reached by a heartier development of the sympathetic instincts. The sympathetic instincts can only be developed by the Religion of Humanity.' Looking at the problem in this way, even a moralist who does not expect theology to be the instrument of social revival, might still ask whether the sympathetic instincts will not necessarily be already developed to their highest point, before people will be persuaded to accept the religion, which is at bottom hardly more ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... a formal bond of plunder; it must be a treaty fitter for the cavern of conspiracy than for the chamber of council; its pledge must be like that of Catiline, the cup of human blood! No; the most powerful reprobation which ever shot from the indignant lip of the moralist, would not be too strong for the baseness which stooped to such a treaty, or the folly which entangled itself in its toils. No burning language of prophecy would be too solemn and too stinging for the premeditated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... He who omits or neglects any of these perceives but a part of a complete whole. Nature Study develops in the pupil a sympathetic attitude toward Nature for the purpose of increasing the joy of living. It leads him to see Nature through the eyes of the poet and the moralist as well as through those of ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Butler has helped many men in the intelligent formation of their character, and what higher praise could be given to any author? Butler will lie on our table all winter beside Bunyan; the bishop beside the tinker, the philosopher beside the poet, the moralist beside the evangelical minister. ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... the brightest flower in the crown of Shakespeare's merits;" "Shakespeare is the greatest moralist of all times;" "Shakespeare exhibits such many-sidedness and such objectivism that they carry him beyond the limits of time and nationality;" "Shakespeare is the greatest genius that has hitherto existed;" "For the creation of tragedy, comedy, history, idyll, idyllistic ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... and the uncertainty of their duration, which led her to observe that all earthly Joys must be imperfect. She was proceeding to illustrate this doctrine by examples from the Lives of great Men when the Carriage came to the Door and the amiable Moralist with her Father and Sister was obliged to depart; but not without a promise of spending five or six months with us on their return. We of course mentioned you, and I assure you that ample Justice was done to your Merits by all. "Louisa ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... "What is happiness, sweet moralist?" cried Joseph. "Mankind are forever in search of it, yet no man has ever found it." "What is happiness!" exclaimed she, with enthusiasm. "It is to have the power of ruling destiny—it is to stand upon the Himalaya of your might; when, stretching forth your ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... that as it is the business of the physician to cure the body, so it is the aim of the moral teacher to cure the soul. We may carry this figure further and conclude that as the physician must know the anatomy and physiology of the body before he can undertake to cure it of its ills, so the moralist must know the nature of the soul and ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... have hardly ever got farther than a loose notion that England had most likely behaved like a bully all through, but that her victim was beyond all question an obstreperous and irreclaimable ruffian, whose ill-treatment must be severely condemned by the moralist, but over whom no sensible man can be expected to weep ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... happiest exercise! her highest joy. One glorious motive sway'd each active mind Whether the bard, to rhymes no more confin'd, Rapidly sketch'd with glance intensely keen, His bird's-eye prospect of our human scene, Or the fair moralist, in polish'd prose, Describ'd the living manners as they rose. One glorious motive clear in each we prize. Bright as the vestal flame, which never dies. The philanthropic wish, from heaven inspir'd, That keeps the toiling mind ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley
... to refer to two eminent authorities. Now be so good as to listen. The great moralist says: "To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... edifice of our faith crumbles. If we be not under the curse of God for Adam's sin, there was never a need for a Saviour, the Incarnation and the Atonement become meaningless, and our Lord is reduced to the status of a human teacher of a disputable philosophy—a peasant moralist with certain delusions of grandeur—an agitator and heretic whom the authorities of his time executed for stirring up the people. In short, the divinity of Jesus must stand or fall with the divinity of the God of Moses, and this in turn rests upon the historical truth of Genesis. ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... suffering in the ninth circle, the circle of treason, the poet taking no notice of other sins, v.g., sacrilege, avarice, suicide, of which the fallen apostle may have been guilty. Furthermore, Dante as a master psychologist and moralist would teach us the lesson that the evil doer may come to damnation through one sin if that acquires such an ascendency over his will as to become a capital sin or predominant passion of his life. Then the besetting passion is ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... went deliberately to the door and let himself out. He gained the street without being intercepted, and drew a long breath of relief when he felt the soft night air playing on his heated brow. The moralist would have said that he came off victor; but he had a sense, as he went out along the pavement, of being only a defeated and degraded man. There was not even the excitement of gratified vanity, for an offered love which did not include perfect trust in his honor was ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... impartiality, a curious undercurrent of prejudice upon one point: the preference for the refined rather than the rude or ugly. Thus he will dislike a joke because it is coarse without asking if it is really immoral. He objects to a man sitting down on his hat, whereas the austere moralist should only object to his sitting down on someone else's hat. This sensibility is barren because it is universal. It is useless to object to man being made ridiculous. Man is born ridiculous, as can easily be seen if you look at ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... vices! But flattery is merely a virtue out of place—kindness gone wrong. From the point of view of the moralist, that is. From the point of view of the ordinary mortal, it is what no men—and few women—can ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... From the moralist's point of view the animal world, in which our own cosmic nature has been severely trained for millions of years, is no better than a gladiatorial show, and we cannot expect, within a few centuries, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... embedded in all great poetry. At the worst, to seek for truth in poetry is a protest against the constant tendency to read it for the sake of the emotions which it stirs, the tendency to make it a refined amusement and nothing more. That is a deeper wrong to art than any which the theoretical moralist can inflict. Of the two, it is better to read poetry for ethical doctrines than for fine sensations; for poetry purifies the passions only when it lifts the reader into the sphere ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... thanked God he had a soft heart.' In the heat of the Rebellion, the Republicans spared More, although he had refused to take the Covenant. Campbell says of him, 'He corresponded with Descartes, was the friend of Cudworth, and, as a divine and a moralist, was not only popular in his own time, but has been mentioned with admiration both by Addison and Blair.' One is rather amused at the latter clause. That a man of More's massive learning, noble eloquence, and ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... that distinction both as a tragedian and as a moralist. For not only in his plays, but all his other works, there is the purest morality, animated by piety, and rendered more touching by the fine and delicate sentiments of a most tender ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... the moralist who could treat disdainfully of Chivalry. It was a marvellous principle, that which could make of plighted faith a law to the most lawless, of protection to weakness a pride to the most ferocious. While the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... three parts right. It will, for instance, enable a man to lead the life he needs in order to preserve his physical and mental vigour at its highest. Even from the moralist's point of view it is all round desirable, for nothing is so morally deteriorating as a life of narrow and cramped pinching, when all one's best years are spent in hungering and longing for what one ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... scamp "end as a member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, or by the guillotine, or in an unhappy marriage." It were easy to dilate on the fact that in interpreting the phrases of the satirist into the language of the moralist we often require to read them backwards: Byron's own statement, "I hate a motive," is, however, more ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... society are almost equally diverse. Strange and mysterious tribes, each with different characteristics, here live side by side. Vile mongrel breeds of men multiply to astonish the ethnologist and the moralist. Here roam the Comanches and the Apaches, the most remorseless and bloodthirsty of all the North American aboriginal tribes. Mexican bandits traverse the plains and lurk in the mountain passes, and American outlaws and desperadoes here ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... glory of being seen talking to a Cora Pearl. Now what do you think he has done. He has actually brought out a complete edition of his pieces, with a preface, in which, Papa tells me, he plays the moralist. He has unfolded all the vice—crowded the theatres to see a bad woman in a consumption—painted the demi-monde—with a purpose! All the world has laboured under the idea that the purpose was piles of gold. But now, the locker being ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... the night Her voice died from the window, yet e'en then Fluttered and fell likewise a kerchief white; But that no doubt was accident, for when She sought her couch she deemed her conduct quite Beyond the reach of scandalous commenter,— Washing her hands of either gallant wight, Knowing the moralist might compliment her,— Thus voicing Siren with the words ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... Hampstead, who got 27 votes, and Mr. Fielding, in Kennington, who got 32 votes. And they made no secret of the fact that the expenses of these elections had been paid by one of the established political parties in order to split the vote of the other. From the point of view of the abstract moralist there was nothing to be said against the transaction; since it was evident that Socialist statesmanship must for a long time to come consist largely of taking advantage of the party dissensions between the Unsocialists. ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... leader dropped straight out of heaven, was probably at best very imperfect, one-sided, and at least as much of a product as a producer. The crudity of the method is even regarded as a proof of its morality. Your common-place moralist likes to call everything black or white; he despises all qualifications as casuistical refinements, and plumes himself on the decisive verdict, saint or sinner, with which he labels the adherents ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... circumspacious theatre. The allusion is to the visit of Cato to the games of Flora, given by Messius. When his presence in the theatre was known, the dancing-women were not allowed to perform in their accustomed lack of costume, whereupon the moralist obligingly retired, ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... his Jill: else I fear that we should get fighting for them. Indeed," said he, becoming very grave, "I don't say that it does not happen even now, sometimes. For you know love is not a very reasonable thing, and perversity and self-will are commoner than some of our moralist's think." He added, in a still more sombre tone: "Yes, only a month ago there was a mishap down by us, that in the end cost the lives of two men and a woman, and, as it were, put out the sunlight ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris |
