"Puritanic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... best writing are keyed to that instinct of personal discipline and civic responsibility which characterized the seventeenth century emigrants from England. These successors of Roger Ascham and Thomas Elyot and Philip Sidney were Puritanic, moralistic, practical; and with their "faith in God, faith in man and faith in work" they built an empire. Lowell's own mind, like Franklin's, like Lincoln's, had a shrewd sense of what concerns the common interests of all. The inscription beneath his bust on the exterior of Massachusetts ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... sadly confessed, made but few friends. Their uncle's reasonable prejudices extended to morning visits, which he called a frivolous waste of time; and he had a similar dislike to evening parties; not on account of a puritanic disapproval of dancing, or of young people of different sexes meeting and having opportunities of getting acquainted with each other, but the hours were so irrational, and the conventional dress so unbecoming and dangerous to health, that he had prohibited Jane and Elsie from accepting the invitations ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... and woods, the days and nights, the changing seasons, in which another great nature poet of ours declares they "speak in various language." But nothing could be farther from the didactic mood in which "communion with the various forms" of nature casts the Puritanic soul of Bryant, than the mood in which this German-blooded, Kentucky-born poet, who keeps throughout his song the sense of a perpetual and inalienable youth, with a spirit as pagan as that which breathes from ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... the Old Puritanic Sunday Laws having fallen into "innocuous desuetude," an attempt to give them a partial enforcement in Boston compelled a little legislative action and the result was what might have been expected in a State in which religious opinions are allowed to ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... liked, he was partly born into, and partly he created it. The child of a race which came from England, robust and Puritanic, he had in his veins the blood of judges—of those judges who burned witches and persecuted Quakers. His fancy is as much influenced by the old fanciful traditions of Providence, of Witchcraft, of haunting Indian magic, as Scott's ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... Adams rode from Boston to Philadelphia on horseback, to attend the first meeting of Congress. His journal contains an interesting account of this long and fatiguing tour. Coming from the puritanic simplicity of Boston, he was evidently deeply impressed with the style and splendor which met his eye in New York. In glowing terms he alludes to the elegance of their mode of living, to the architectural grandeur of their country seats; to the splendor of Broadway, and to the magnificent new ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... among which was seen a lion; the natural history of the region being as little known as its geography, which was put down most fantastically awry. The other adornment was the portrait of old Colonel Pyncheon, at two thirds length, representing the stern features of a Puritanic-looking personage, in a skull-cap, with a laced band and a grizzly beard; holding a Bible with one hand, and in the other uplifting an iron sword-hilt. The latter object, being more successfully depicted by the artist, stood out in far ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "Old house of Puritanic wood Through whose unpainted windows streamed On seats as primitive and rude As Jacob's pillow when he dreamed, ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... nation, among Azevedo's work we should be quick to appreciate such a pithy book as the Livro de uma Sogra,—the Book of a Mother-in-Law. And when the literature of these United States is at last (if ever, indeed!) released from the childish, hypocritical, Puritanic inhibitions forced upon it by quasi official societies, we may even relish, from among Azevedo's long shelf of novels, such a sensuous ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... now consider, is not a scenic Nation placed precisely in that predicament of soliloquising; for its own behoof alone; to solace its own sensibilities, maudlin or other?—Yet in this respect, of readiness for scenes, the difference of Nations, as of men, is very great. If our Saxon-Puritanic friends, for example, swore and signed their National Covenant, without discharge of gunpowder, or the beating of any drum, in a dingy Covenant-Close of the Edinburgh High-street, in a mean room, where men now drink mean liquor, it was consistent with ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... and abundant. If he had judged fit to take my contract off my hands in any way, I think he would have been less able to do so than any of his New England contemporaries. In him, as I have suggested, the Quaker calm was bound by the frosty Puritanic air, and he was doubly cold to the touch of the stranger, though he would thaw out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke. I myself never got so far with him as to experience this geniality, though afterwards we became such friends as an old man and a young man could be who rarely ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the moral tone of society at that time would warrant so stringent a measure. A public flogging was prescribed as the penalty which would be inflicted upon all who failed to obey the statute, and it is altogether probable that the law was administered with the same Puritanic rigor which had brought it into existence. Other provisions there were, animated by this same spirit, which were levelled at the social evils incident to the practice of holding slaves. A woman who had intrigued with her own ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Puritanic feeling still prevailed in the town among the Dissenters against amusements as late as the end of the first quarter of the present century. Whether it was from the recollection of what popular amusements had been, or against ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... a variety of elements. The shyness and reserve characteristic of many cultivated Englishmen, was accentuated in his case by a natural austerity and an absorption in serious thought. But though his temper was puritanic and inclined to moroseness, there was no sourness or cynicism in it. "If," he wrote to Miss Symonds, "I am rather a melancholy bird, given to physical fatigue and depression, yet I have never known for a moment what it was to be weary of life, as the youth of this ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... crack a brace of quarts with yonder puritanic, roundheaded soldiers, up yonder at the town; and rat me but I passed myself for the best man of the party; twanged my nose, and turned up my eyes, as I took my can—Pah! the very wine tasted of hypocrisy. ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... of state tempests; hollow blasts of wind seemingly at a distance, and secret swellings of the sea, often precede a storm." Such were the prognostics discerned by the politic Bishop Williams in Charles the First's time, who clearly foresaw and predicted the final success of the Puritanic party in our country: attentive to his own security, he abandoned the government and sided with the rising opposition, at the moment when such a change in public affairs was by ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... it, he breathed, dispensed it. How conceive the clear-sighted celestial Powers as opposing his claim to that estate? Not they. He knew, for he had them safe in the locked chamber of his breast, to yield him subservient responses. The world, or Puritanic members of it, had pushed him to the trial once or twice—or had put on an air of doing so; creating a temporary disturbance, ending in a merry duet with his daughter Nesta Victoria: a glorious trio when her mother ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and her repellent air, and passed all by without taking the slightest notice of any one, until a fresh storm restored to her at once her dread and her affability. [Which reminds one of the elder (and puritanic) Cato who said that he "embraced" his wife only when it thundered, but added that he did enjoy ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... sect which arose among the Nedj tribe in Central Arabia, whose aims were puritanic and the restoration of Islamism to its primitive simplicity in creed, worship, and conduct; in creed they were substantially the same ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... merciful modifications of the austere code whose pitiless action it so clearly discerns. In his long and patient brooding over the spiritual phenomena of Puritan life, it is apparent, to the least critical observer, that he has imbibed a deep personal antipathy to the Puritanic ideal of character; but it is no less apparent that his intellect and imagination have been strangely fascinated by the Puritanic idea of justice. His brain has been subtly infected by the Puritanic perception of Law, without being warmed by the Puritanic faith ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... the pen away from him [saying]: 'God can be honored not alone by work, but also by rest and recreation; for that reason He has given the Third Commandment and commanded the Sabbath.'" (243.) This report of Mathesius certainly offers no ground for a Puritanic explanation of the incident ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... as a species of Puritanic barbarism, that no later than the year 1757, a man of genius was persecuted because he had written a tragedy which tended by no means to hurt the morals; but, on the contrary, by awakening the piety of domestic affections with the nobler passions, would rather ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... unlike Dore's conception of Don Quixote. He must have had Indian blood in his veins, judging from his very dark eyes, his stiff, lank hair, worn somewhat long, and his high cheek-bones. Also, although he was arrayed in puritanic black, his barbaric love of color betrayed itself in a red tie and in a scarlet handkerchief which was twisted loosely round a soft slouch hat, It was the hat and the brilliant red of tie and handkerchief which had caught ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... to visit Eustacia boldly, by day, and on the easy terms of a relation, since the reddleman had spied out and spoilt his walks to her by night. The spell that she had thrown over him in the moonlight dance made it impossible for a man having no strong puritanic force within him to keep away altogether. He merely calculated on meeting her and her husband in an ordinary manner, chatting a little while, and leaving again. Every outward sign was to be conventional; but the one great fact would be there to satisfy him: he would see ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... bound, her lips quick to smile, and her eyes shine like twin dreamstars. She seemed to be moving to some rapturous music unheard save only by herself. At night, alone with her heart, she dared hardly name to herself the meaning of it all, a puritanic modesty withheld her. Yet all the sweet humility of which she was possessed could not banish from her memory the lingering clasp of a hand, the warm light that fell from eyes that glanced at her. For the present, these were grace sufficient ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... congregation had now a brief interval of provisional peace, till, on March 13, 1555, Richard Cox, with a band of English refugees, arrived. He had been tutor to Edward VI., the young Marcellus of Protestantism, but for Frankfort he was not puritanic enough. His company would give a large majority to the anti-Knoxian congregation. He and his at once uttered the responses, and on Sunday one of them read the Litany. This was an unruly infraction of the provisional agreement. Cox and his party (April 5) represented to Calvin that they had given ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... Burebistas, and the god Dekaeneos. The people, which had morally and politically fallen into utter decay through unexampled drunkenness, was as it were metamorphosed by the new gospel of temperance and valour; with his bands under the influence, so to speak, of puritanic discipline and enthusiasm king Burebistas founded within a few years a mighty kingdom, which extended along both banks of the Danube and reached southward far into Thrace, Illyria, and Noricum. No direct contact with the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... of Buddhist ceremonial are of the synagogue type (though in no way derived from Jewish sources) for, though there is no prayer, they consist chiefly of confession, preaching and reading the scriptures. But this puritanic severity could not be popular and the veneration of images and relics was soon added to the ritual. The former was adopted by Buddhism earlier than by the Brahmans. The latter, though a conspicuous feature of Buddhism in ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... one of the countless Scots who, having been trained at home in strict frugality and stern Puritanic principles, have fought their way to success in England. He was born 6th April 1773 in the parish of Logie Pert, Forfarshire. His father, also named James Mill, was a village shoemaker, employing two or three journeymen when at the height of his prosperity. His mother, Isabel Fenton, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... reality, a counterfeit American Lutheranism. The new school movement, headed by Schmucker, Kurtz, and Sprecher, and constantly prating "American Lutheranism," was essentially Calvinistic, Methodistic, Puritanic, indifferentistic, and unionistic, hence nothing less than truly Lutheran. From his professor's chair and in the press Schmucker denied and assailed every doctrine distinctive of Lutheranism. In every issue of the Observer ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... criminals, fixing sheriffs' and clerks' fees, and issuing writs of attachment.[23] One of the members was a clergyman: owing to him a law was passed forbidding profane swearing or Sabbath-breaking; a puritanic touch which showed the mountain rather than the seaboard origin of the men settling Kentucky. The three remaining laws the Legislature enacted were much more characteristic, and were all introduced by the two Boons—for ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the most puritanic and exclusive of all sects, earnestly regarding themselves as the custodians of the only absolutely true light, their ministers insist on certain prerogatives as the condition of giving their services at ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... is, in that sense, no novel, but a true picture of life, without coloring." In Berlin, things are no better and no worse than in other large cities. Whether Greek-Orthodox St. Petersburg or Catholic Rome, Germanic-Christian Berlin or heathen Paris, puritanic London or gay Vienna, approach nearer to Babylon of old is hard to decide. "Prostitution possesses its written and its unwritten laws, its resources, its various resorts, from the poorest cottage to the most splendid palace, its numberless grades from the lowest to the ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... him feel deeply uncomfortable; and though he was at a loss to conceive how he could be an object of interest to a sharp Parisienne he had an indefinable sense of being enclosed in a magnetic circle, of having become the victim of an incantation. If Madame Clairin could have fathomed his Puritanic soul she would have laid by her wand and her book and dismissed him for an impossible subject. She gave him a moral chill, and he never named her to himself save as that dreadful woman—that awful woman. He did justice to her grand air, ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... fowls were at the same time emitted; and I found myself the next moment locked in alone with half-a-dozen sitting hens. In the twilight of the place all fixed their eyes on me severely, and seemed to upbraid me with some crying impropriety. Doubtless the hen has always a puritanic appearance, although (in its own behaviour) I could never observe it to be more particular than its neighbours. But conceive ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mottoes was authoritatively adopted. The early charters were thoroughly liberal in spirit and intent, so much so as to be fully in harmony with the present attitude of the university.[34] Under the Puritanic development, however, this liberality was discarded, only to be restored in 1691, when William and Mary gave to Massachusetts a new and broader charter. From that time a new life entered into the college, that put it uncompromisingly on the liberal side a century ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... superficial. Haunted by the fame of Schiller, he devoted himself to poetry, and imitated the German poets, or tried to imitate them, for he never succeeded in grasping the true meaning of German poetry, nor in understanding erotic literature. To the Rabbinical student, with his puritanic spirit and austere manners, it was a collocation of poetic figures of speech and ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... those long conversations, which seem, for a time, to keep the dead one still in the company of the living. There is nothing difficult to understand or shameful to relate in all this; and the friends of the Countess, delicate-minded women like Mme. de Souza, puritanic-minded men like Sismondi, misanthropic or scoffing people like Foscolo or Paul Louis Courier, found nothing at which to take umbrage, nothing to rage or laugh at, in this long intimacy between a woman over fifty and a ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee) |
