"Sobriety" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seaport by the coach, and instantly entered as an able-bodied landsman or marine, I know not which. His sobriety and attention to duty gained him the same good opinion of the officers in his new service which he had enjoyed in the army. He was afloat for several years, and behaved remarkably well in some actions. At length the vessel came into Plymouth, was paid off, and some of the ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... showing their good-will sometimes in visiting the sick and needy, sometimes in engaging in the work of teaching, or accompanying the preachers when advisable, and bound by their engagement to set an example of sobriety and seriousness ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... a lad of spirit," said Mr. Babington-Herle, with an extreme sobriety. "He's a lad eshtrornary spirit. Let's have ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... sunder friends, yet give to laws A place to stand and plead their cause. Though justice and sobriety Still find their safest ground in me, I spread temptation in man's way, And rob and ruin ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... all through—for head and heart one in a million. Of all the undergraduates I have known at Oxford during my twenty years of work there, he struck me as most certain by reason of his breadth and sobriety of judgment, intellectual force and sweetness of disposition to exercise a commanding influence for good in the public affairs of the country. Everyone admired and liked him and I know that his influence among his contemporaries, ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... merry matron," Bardon answered, as soberly as he could, for indeed the sight of Mistress Satchell in her Sunday best and in her most coming-on humor was not of a nature to strengthen sobriety. Lord Fawley gasped as the virago swaggered towards his companions, and young Ingrow popped his handkerchief into his mouth and bit at it while he stared with eyes of nursery wonder at the dame. Radlett ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... that the middle-class educator constantly makes the mistakes of the middle-class moralist when he attempts to aid working people. The latter has constantly and traditionally urged upon the workingman the specialized virtues of thrift, industry, and sobriety—all virtues pertaining to the individual. When each man had his own shop, it was perhaps wise to lay almost exclusive stress upon the industrial virtues of diligence and thrift; but as industry has become more highly organized, life becomes incredibly complex ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... more real for being less apparent.... His power consisted of three things: his devoted affection for his disciples, his disinterested love of truth, and the perfect harmony of his life and doctrine.... If he recommended temperance and sobriety, he also set the example; poorly clad, satisfied with little, he disdained all the delicacies of life. He possessed every species of courage. On the field of battle he was intrepid, and still more ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... The sobriety of the weekly journals contrasts refreshingly with the license of their diurnal brethren. Sporting papers are nearly the same all the world over; but, in the rest of these placid periodicals, there is little of violence ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... from that instance of disobedience in me he took a sort of dislike to me, which, I believe, was one cause of the dissipation which marked my succeeding years. I say dissipation, comparatively with the strictness, and sobriety, and regularity of Presbyterian country life; for though the will-o'-wisp meteors of thoughtless whim were almost the sole lights of my path, yet early ingrained piety and virtue kept me for several years afterward within the line of innocence. The great misfortune of ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... contrary, the pastor and the deacon were particularly gay, for men of their habitual sobriety. Although those were not the days of temperance, par excellence, neither of the guests was what might be termed even a moderate drinker. For a novelty in a sailor, Roswell Gardiner seldom touched anything but water, while the other two took their rum and water; but it was in ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... laddies," said Bulldog, "for the credit of the school and to please the Count. If I see ony laddie playing tricks I'll do my part to teach him sobriety, and if I see one copying from another, out he goes. Ye have one hour from this meenut, make the most o't," and the ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... little virtue of the circumstances of his exalted birth. He was wont to address his father's memory with a sobriety that lent to the fact of his illegitimacy a portentous air of seriousness, and he made no secret of the fact that he was the friend and the confidential correspondent of the present Earl of Clandennie. In his intercourse with the several Colonial ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... with a mingling of delicacy and significance which had in it something ethereal and mysterious, a hint of fairy-land. Far off, rising calmly in an immense slope, a slope that was classical in its dignity, profound in its sobriety, remote, yet neither cold nor sad, Etna soared towards the heaven, sending from its summit, on which the snows still lingered, a steady plume of ivory smoke. In the nearer foreground, upon a jagged crest of beetling rock, ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... parodies belong to a much earlier date, the fourteenth century. Such parodies, in which sacred things are the subject of harmless jest, are purely medieval in spirit, as well as in date. Exaggerated praises of wine were a foil to the sobriety of the Jew, the fun consisting in this conscious exaggeration. The medieval Jew, be it remembered, drew no severe line between sacred and profane. All life was to him equally holy, equally secular. So it is not strange that we find included in sacred Hebrew ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... animation that grew visibly greater in the inhabitants of the projectile? Their sobriety could not be questioned. Must this strange erethismus of the brain be attributed to the exceptional circumstances of the time, to that proximity of the Queen of Night from which a few hours only separated them, or to some secret influence of the moon acting on their nervous system? Their faces ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... exemplary moderation and sobriety of spirit, had healing methods much at heart, and studied to promote love and peace among his brethren in the ministry. He vigorously contributed to the recovery of the humanity of Christianity, which had been much lost in the differences of the times, and the animosities which followed thereupon. ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... common with Sanskrit. Far be it from me to stigmatize even such researches as unscientific, though it requires an effort for one brought up in the very straitest school of Bopp, to approach such inquiries without prejudice. Yet, if conducted with care and sobriety, and particularly with a clear perception of the limits within which such inquiries must be confined, they are perfectly legitimate; far more so than the learned dogmatism with which some of our most eminent scholars have declared a common origin of Sanskrit and Chinese ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... of evening had come to increase the dreariness of the place, when the party entered the ruins of William Henry. The scout and his companions immediately made their preparations to pass the night there; but with an earnestness and sobriety of demeanor that betrayed how much the unusual horrors they had just witnessed worked on even their practised feelings. A few fragments of rafters were reared against a blackened wall; and when Uncas had covered them slightly with brush, the temporary accommodations were deemed sufficient. The young ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... Englishman who thought he saw a vision would have blamed in turn his eyesight, his digestion, his sobriety, and his sanity before he allowed that he had anything to do with the supernatural. He now tells, without the least semblance of a blush, that he puts his faith in superstitions, and charms, and mascots, and ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... "In a party, whose members make no pretensions to sobriety, it would be too hard to expect that persons who are scarcely capable of taking care of themselves, should take care of other people. No; we have, in all these exploits, only the ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... life is but intoxication;" and Selina, who during her brief inebriation had lived in an ecstasy as golden as our drab existence affords, had to experience the inevitable bitterness of awakening sobriety, when the dying down of the flames into sullen embers coincided with the frenzied entrance of Aunt Eliza on the scene. It was not so much that she was at once and forever disrated, broke, sent before ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... what was still more remarkable in the case of a mind of such strength and pride, he had never yielded to any libertinism of thought, but had always limited his curiosity to natural inquiries.” He attributed, according to her statement, this religious sobriety of mind to the instructions and example of his father, who had a great respect for religion, and who had impressed upon him from his infancy the maxim, “that whatever is the object of faith cannot be the object of ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... his adventures; with knitted eyebrows he hears him moralizing on the awful destiny of the future. He is a silent listener; the conversation is carried on by the garrulous and interested youths and the happy, virtuous old monk. A forced sobriety, or the atmosphere of virtue which he dreads, has cast a gloom over him. His thoughts are still reeking with the blasphemy of the Masonic lodges, and, though restrained by politeness from intruding his unbelief, he expresses in scowls and ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... he lived for several years, earning small sums by lessons, playing the organ at one of the churches, the violin at another, singing at another and so on, in all managing to place himself upon the road to fortune—that of industry and sobriety. This part of his career lasted from 1748, when he left the choir of the cathedral, to 1752, when he became accompanist to the Italian master, Porpora, who was then living in Vienna in the house of an Italian lady, whose daughter's education he was superintending. ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... was Kitty, Frivolous and witty as ever bud that blew. Kitty lacked sobriety, yet she ran society, A leader whom the chaperons indulged a year or two; Corner-men, eligibles, dancing-dolls she knew,— Kitty then was slighted, ne'er again invited; What has she to write ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... But it is the fact that on the whole the Jewish codification of religion did not produce the evil results possible or even likely to accrue. The Jew was always distinguished for his domestic virtues, his purity of life, his sobriety, his charity, his devotion. These were the immediate consequence of his Law-abiding disposition and theory. Perhaps there was some lack of enthusiasm, something too much of the temperate. But the facts of life always brought their corrective. Martyrdom was the means ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... resolveth us, that the apostles saw that a wrangling wit would elude these reasons which he had given, and he had no other reasons to give, therefore he resolves all into the church's practice,—enough of itself to suffice any that will be wise to sobriety. Ans. If any seem to be blasphemous, we have no such custom, neither the churches of God. What! shall a wrangling wit elude the reasons given by the Spirit of God, in such sort, that he must give some other more sufficient proof for ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... launched himself upon Abner, just as he had done before, when Mrs. Whyland had first made them acquainted. He frankly admired the strength and the stature of the only man in the room who was taller and more robust than himself, as well as the intent sobriety of his glance and the ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... Emperor, if any of his old masters had failed to recognize him, it could not be by reminiscences of this kind that he could have recalled himself to them; for every one knows that he was distinguished at the military school for his application to work, and the regularity and sobriety of ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a cadaverous-looking snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled, or at the black cinder left by an ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... amused at his friend's vehemence. He sympathised with it, but had an unyouthful sobriety in ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... the mores of that time. All the writers repeat them. "In the Agricola, and in Seneca's letters to Marcia and Helvia, we can see that, even at the darkest hour, there were homes with an atmosphere of old Roman self-restraint and sobriety, where good women wielded a powerful influence over their husbands and sons, and where the examples of the old republic were used, as Biblical characters with us, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... than at present. It was much later that the imagination of Hindu writers took full wing and carried the people into the all but infinite reaches of Puranic chronology. One must wait for the elaboration of Vishnu Purana, for instance, in order to meet that apparent sobriety of mathematical detail which is utilized to add credibility to the most fantastic time ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... seem as if the Gin Act did much for the cause of sobriety. Public opinion among the populace was too decidedly against it to allow of its being made a reality. Gin was every day sold under various names, and, indeed, it was publicly sold in many shops under its own name. The Gin ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... vivacity, her proficiency in those classical studies to which he was himself addicted, and especially the attachment which she manifested to the reformed religion, endeared her exceedingly to the young king her brother, who was wont to call her,—perhaps with reference to the sobriety of dress and manners by which she was then distinguished,—his sweet sister Temperance. On her part his affection was met by every demonstration of sisterly tenderness, joined to those delicate attentions and respectful ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... log huts for their shelter, and food of the best and the strongest is taken up for their diet. But no strong drink of any kind is allowed, nor is any within reach of the men. There are no publics, no shebeen houses, no grog-shops. Sobriety is an enforced virtue; and so much is this considered by the masters, and understood by the men, that very little contraband work is done in the way of taking up spirits to these settlements. It may be said ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... yet I minded that he had bitten off the nose of Severin, the French gendarme, when the namu had made him mad. Now whether guided by pride in his discipline or by memory of evil-doing repented, he was strict in his enforcement of the prohibition of cocoanut toddy, and sobriety made ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... enacting every day, or perhaps twice a day, our celebrated Faun-and-Silenus entertainment for the diversion of the populace. I have not forgotten Giulio's besetting sin. How nearly he made me exceed the measure of sobriety at ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... said Francis, "will you have your coffee black, or with milk?" He was determined to restore a tone of sobriety. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... necessary as regimen. O great king, drink thou that which the honest drink and the dishonest shun, even humility, which is like a medicine that is bitter, pungent, burning, unintoxicating, disagreeable, and revolting. And drinking it, O king, regain thou thy sobriety. I always wish Dhritarashtra and his sons affluence and fame. Happen what may unto thee, here I bow to thee (and take my leave). Let the Brahmanas wish me well. O son of Kuru, this is the lesson I carefully inculcate, that the wise should never enrage such as adders ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... planter happened to be in the field with the overseer, two gentlemen rode from the house, where they had been to inquire for him. The sobriety of their garments showed that they belonged to the strictest ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... them; by our gratitude for them, and by a correspondent conduct as citizens and men; to render this country more and more a safe and propitious asylum for the unfortunate of other countries; to extend among us true and useful knowledge; to diffuse and establish habits of sobriety, order, morality, and piety, and finally, to impart all the blessings we possess, or ask for ourselves, to the whole ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... liken the state and person of a king than to that mighty Nazarite Samson; who being disciplined from his birth in the precepts and the practice of temperance and sobriety, without the strong drink of injurious and excessive desires, grows up to a noble strength and perfection with those his illustrious and sunny locks, the laws, waving and curling about his god-like ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... that the towns resemble frontier camps; of neglect of natural advantages, so that the hills are covered with brush, the lakes shut off by railroads, and the creeks lined with dumping-grounds; of depressing sobriety of color; rectangularity of buildings; and excessive breadth and straightness of the gashed streets, so that there is no escape from gales and from sight of the grim sweep of land, nor any windings to coax the ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... feel how thoroughly it is a characteristic New England town. If I wanted to give a foreigner some clear idea of what that excellent institution a New England town really is, in its history and in its character, in its enterprise and its sobriety, in its godliness and its manliness, I should be sure that I could do it if I could make him perfectly familiar with the past and ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... forcibly at first was the profound respect which the four lodgers manifested for Madame de la Chanterie. They all seemed, even the priest, in spite of the sacred character his functions gave him, to regard her as a queen. Godefroid also noticed their sobriety. Each seemed to eat only for nourishment. Madame de la Chanterie took, as did the rest, a single peach and half a bunch of grapes; but she told her new lodger, as she offered him the various dishes, not to imitate ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... an antechamber, where they were sheltered from the gaze of the passers-by, though all was moving gaiety about them. He fell upon his knee and bowed to kiss her fair hand. Despite the sobriety of his years, he was as eager and tender ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of an ingenuous temper, without murmuring did as he was commanded; and, being thus admitted to live with Lycurgus, he had an opportunity to observe in him, besides his gentleness and calmness of temper, an extraordinary sobriety and an indefatigable industry, and so, from an enemy, became one of his most zealous admirers, and told his friends and relations that Lycurgus was not that morose and ill-natured man they had formerly taken him for, but ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... foul grinning devil that sat astride of him—how much more would that have been pitiful! And then, if one could have seen and have realized as the roots from which arose those inner workings, the hopes, the longings for a better life that filled his heart during the intervals of sobriety, if one could have sensed but one pang of that hell-thirst that foreran the mortal struggle that followed, as that again foreran the inevitable fall into his kennel of lust, and then, last and greatest, if those righteous neighbors of his who never sinned and ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... time at or outside the cottage door with her needlework, in itself an occupation so apt to encourage musing and dreams, the bells were one of Jeanne's great pleasures. We know a traveller, of the calmest English temperament and sobriety of Protestant fancy, to whom the midday Angelus always brings, he says, a touching reminder—which he never neglects wherever he may be—to uncover the head and lift up the heart; how much more the devout peasant girl ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... I had joined the Psychical Research Society and had the advantage of reading all their reports. The world owes a great deal to the unwearied diligence of the Society, and to its sobriety of statement, though I will admit that the latter makes one impatient at times, and one feels that in their desire to avoid sensationalism they discourage the world from knowing and using the splendid work which ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the whole matter is that scientific and literary fortunes are, like money fortunes, made more by saving than in any other way—more through the exercise of the common vulgar essentials, such as sobriety and straightforwardness, than by the more showy enterprises that when they happen to succeed are called genius and when they fail, folly. The streets are full of sovereigns crying aloud for some one to come and pick them up, only the ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... around us have been profiting by the teachings of these meetings. When the question was clearly presented, "Shall we again have the legalized liquor traffic among us?" the activity of the friends of sobriety and order was as great as that of the selfish advocates of license. Meetings were held in every neighborhood. On election day, seventy-five ladies, of the noblest in the district, were at the voting place. Refreshments were furnished ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 44, No. 4, April, 1890 • Various
... small hours we found that, in accordance with his promise, he had indeed not gone to bed. There he was unmistakably in the hall. But he wasn't sitting up.... No.... Rather, he was lying down, back uppermost.... So much for his sobriety. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... he had never once acknowledged himself beaten, though he had known desperate circumstances; he saw that, as our civilization goes, money is accounted a rough gauge of merit, and a man's industry, tenacity, sobriety, self-control, and even virtue, are estimated and popularly assessed according to the amount of money which he owns, and he resolved that, let who will fail, he at least would have money and plenty of it. He bent his mind on one end for forty years; he was unscrupulous in all respects ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... title: "A New Revelation, or the Communion of the Incarnate Dead with the Unconscious Living. Important Fact, without trifling Fiction, by HIM." I have not the pleasure of knowing HIM; but certainly I must concede to HIM, that he writes like a man of education, and also like a man of extreme sobriety, upon his extravagant theme. He is angry with Swedenborg, as might be expected, for his "absurdities;" but, as to him, there is no chance that he should commit any absurdity, because (p. 6) "he has met with some who have acknowledged the fact of their having come ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... line, the music started, the circles began to sway. Darwin Powers, an old but frisky man, stood up beside the fiddlers, whistling, with sobriety and vigour, as they played. It was a pleasure to see some of the older men of the neighbourhood join the dizzy riot by skipping playfully in the corners. They tried to rally their unwilling wives, and generally ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... humor in everything she writes, and it has the virtue of non-boisterousness and sobriety in tone. There is no straining for wit: everything has the merit ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... from excitement. But you should have seen, how mother and grandmother rushed into my arms: how they grasped one my right, the other my left hand, as drowning men clutch at the rescuer's hands, and how that proud angry man stood before me with flashing eyes. All sobriety had left the three, together they cried to me in voices of impetuousity, of anger, of madness, of hope, of joy: "speak! tell us what ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... may be that poor human beings will not need to toil so hard, and to keep themselves up to their work by stimulants, but will have time to sit down, and look around them, and think of God, and of God's quiet universe, with something of quiet in themselves; something of rational leisure, and manful sobriety of mind, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... an apocryphal marvel, which has been interpolated in the text of St. Matthew? The other Evangelists, while, along with St. Matthew, narrating the rending of the veil, do not touch on this incident at all. The whole representation, it is argued, lacks the sobriety which is characteristic of the authentic miracles of the Gospels and broadly separates them from the ecclesiastical miracles, about which there is generally an ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... which it is to be collected that there are two methods by which man may be prepared for the reception of the divine influence: one by the drinking of purgatorial water, endowed by the Deity with a clarifying virtue; the other, by sobriety, solitude, the separation of the mind from the body, and the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... he came back to his chamber he found Dandtan and Trar awaiting him there. There was a curious hardness in Dandtan's attitude, a somber sobriety in Trar's carriage. ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... to watch her as she went about her household duties. Professor Fish had spoken truly when he said that Mary Pond knew how to create about her an atmosphere of serenity. The tones of her quiet voice, the gentleness of her movements, the kindly sobriety of her regard seemed to fortify her patient. For her part, a genuine compassion for the little man was mixed with some liking; he was a furtive and vulgar creature at the best, but his dependence on her, his helplessness and trouble, reached to the maternal in ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... which had trundled all that generation of Montgomerys, drew her apron before her eyes and wept. But quickly rallying to the need for immediate action she swallowed her pride and sent Arthur in quest of his uncle, who was well fitted by sobriety, industry and thrift, to cope with ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... speculation over mines, railway grants, and political power. Life was rapid, boisterous, and rough. Nothing had settled into the conventional grooves of habit. The whole community was fearless in its gayety. It had not learned to affect the sobriety and demureness of stupidity lest its frivolity should be likened to the crackling of thorns ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... I make ready To seek my last long home, Some cares I had for Neddy, But none for thee, my Tom: Sobriety and order You ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... lawyer suddenly came to his senses and grabbed at him. The clutching hand fell short, and there was an agile foot-race down the corridor, fruitless for Kenneth, since the fugitive suddenly developed sobriety enough to run like a deer. Beaten in the foot-race, Kenneth went back for a word ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... pensioners), and if invited to drink as the guest of another, he would drain tumbler after tumbler continuously, until his entertainer stopped him, and would appear no further over-seas at the end than at the outset. There was something pathetic in his comparative sobriety, ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... is well known, that Gravity, Preciseness, Solemnity, Sourness, formal Dress and Behaviour, Sobriety of Manners, keeping at a distance from the common Pastimes of the World, Aversion to Rites and Ceremonies in the publick Worship, and to Pictures, Images, and Musick in Churches; mixing Religion in common Conversion, ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... after, he was desired both on account of his sobriety and understanding, to accompany Sir William Wentworth, a worthy baronet of Yorkshire, who was then going to make the tour of Europe; with whom he travelled two or three years, and brought him home improved, to the satisfaction of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... moments when he is engaged in his occupation, and then no one is more sanguinary, pitiless, and wolfishly eager for booty, is a being who can be courteous and affable, and who takes pleasure in conducting himself with sobriety and decorum. ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... the mint and anise and cummin of such matters will fill and inflame and poison a man's mind and heart and conscience for months and for years, to the total destruction of all that for which churches and creeds exist; to the total suspense, if not the total and lasting destruction, of sobriety of mind, balance and breadth of judgment, humility, charity, and a hidden and a holy life. The penny of a perverted, partial, and fanaticised conscience has swallowed up the pound of instruction, and truth, and justice, ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... her from being swept away, like Madame Roland and most of the disciples of Rousseau, by the sanguinary torrent of revolutionary enthusiasm; and in times of wild passion and exaggeration she usually exhibited a singular soundness and sobriety of political judgment. She was sometimes mistaken, but on the whole it may well be doubted whether there is any other French writer or politician of the period of the Revolution whose contemporary judgments of men ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... doubt, was that they had attended some field-preaching. One old man, a minister by his dress, sat apart on a stone bench, and with closed eyes communed with himself. I ventured to address him, for in that horrid place he had a welcome air of sobriety and sense. ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... place. He had no desire of any reputation but that of an acute prognosticator of the changes in the funds; nor had any means of raising merriment, but by telling how somebody was overreached in a bargain by his father. He was, however, a youth of great sobriety and prudence, and frequently informed us how carefully he would improve my fortune. I was not in haste to conclude the match, but was so much awed by my parents, that I durst not dismiss him, and might, perhaps, have been doomed for ever to the grossness of pedlary, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... justice to liberality, and only through passing the bounds of liberality, do we arrive at the vicious extreme of prodigality. So penitential fasting intervenes between temperance in food and undue neglect of sustenance. But it is to be noted that the central virtue, so to speak, as justice, sobriety, chastity, is for all persons on all occasions: the more excellent side-virtue, as liberality, or total abstinence, is for special occasions and ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... ill-directed, first, because it is liable to aim at an impossibility—i.e. to extort from a master a wage so high that he prefers not to light his engine fires; next, because to raise the rate of wages does not secure continuous work, and idle days neither tend to sobriety nor give pay. Strikes which inflict vast loss upon the workers cause loss to the masters also, and make them less able to pay high wages. But beyond all these, if the Unions were wise, they would struggle against the system of wage-earning, wherever it is new and needless; that ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... Drugg's supposed fall from sobriety was both untrue and unkind. That the open bar at Lem Parraday's was a real and imminent peril to Polktown, however, was a fact now undisputed by the ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... that, at nineteen, had wrought wonders so great for France, was she not elated? Did she not lose, as men so often have lost, all sobriety of mind when standing upon the pinnacle of success so giddy? Let her enemies declare. During the progress of her movement, and in the centre of ferocious struggles, she had manifested the temper of her feelings by the pity which she had everywhere expressed ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... love, self-sacrifice, resignation, courage, religious feeling: we have the end of a beautiful love-tale, the end of a good woman, and the last earthly trial of a good man. And with all this, there is no vulgarization of sacred ground, no cheap parade of the heart's secrets; but a deep sobriety relieved with the most delicate humor. Moreover, the language is Charles Reade's at its best—which is almost as good as at its ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is perhaps the most perfect building in Italy for illustrating the fusion of Gothic and Renaissance styles, both of a good type and exquisite in their sobriety. The Gothic ends with the nave. The noble transepts and the choir, each terminating in a rounded tribune of the same dimensions, are carried out in a simple and decorous Bramantesque manner. The transition from the one style to the other is managed so ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... learned much more than I had ever known. At first I thought it terrible when, once in a month or so, Fanny became helpless and incapable from drinking gin. I came eventually to know what it meant to see ground for thankfulness, if not for hope, in a period of forty-eight consecutive hours of sobriety for my wife. ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... than in Medinet-Abu. Set in huge walls of massive masonry, which rise slightly above them on each side, with a projecting cornice, in their simplicity they look extraordinarily classical, in their sobriety mysterious, and in their great solidity quite wonderfully elegant. And they always suggest to me that they are giving access to courts and chambers which still, even in our times, are dedicated to secret cults—to the cults of Isis, of ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... descended from the Earl of Ailesbury into whose arms Charles II. fell under the stroke of his fatal illness. The ill-matched pair were married on Good Friday, April 17, 1772. At first Charles behaved with more sobriety and good humor than usual. A child of the marriage was expected, at least by the Scotch Jacobites, in 1773. There is a legend that a child was actually born, was intrusted to Captain John Carter Allen, was brought up by him as his own, and this infant, grown to manhood, became the father of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... afraid of what our wives would say about the $124 each had spent for the togs. At times our attitude toward our wives was not unlike that of drunken rabbits hunting brazenly for the dogs! But when we slipped into citizen clothes, sobriety and remorse covered us, and we shook sad heads. We wore the uniforms little about Paris; for our Sam Browne belts kept us returning salutes until our arms hurt. They couldn't break me of the habit ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... coat of blue, All studded with buttons gilt, spangled and new, The dear lady took Half askance from her book, As she modestly sat in the opposite nook. Familiarly he And modestly she Talked nonsense and sense so strangely commingled, That the dear lady's heart was delighted and tingled. A man of sobriety Renown and variety It could not be wrong to enjoy his society: O was it a sin For him to "drop in," And sometimes to pat her in ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... immediately. He sat down at the table where his comrades were mixing their drinks, and he, a man notorious for sobriety, drank almost at a gulp, without waiting for the sugar to melt, a full ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... of taste, for though he affected sobriety he had the choicest wines and the most delicious dishes on the table. A splendid salmon-trout was brought, which made him smile with pleasure, and seasoning the good fare with a jest, he said in Latin that we must ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... gatherings, and made them a scene of attraction for the entire nation. Thither the young and old of both sexes were accustomed to resort, and, assembled at their national forum, listened with profound attention and silence to each word spoken by their orators. "The unvarying courtesy, sobriety and dignity of their convocations led one of their learned Jesuit historians to liken them to the Roman Senate." [Footnote: W. C. Bryant's speech before the Buffalo Historical Society on the occasion of the re- ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... is no medium to tell of that wild adventure. The sober sequence of the military historian is out of place in recording deeds that knew not sequence or sobriety. Were I a bard, I would cast this tale in excited verse, with a lilt which would catch the speed of the reality. I would sing of Napoleon, not unworthy of his great namesake, who penetrated to the very window of the ladies' bedroom, where the framework had been driven in and men were pouring ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... without the slightest vestige of discipline in the ordinary sense of the word. Only two per cent. of those who passed through the institution failed to make good. What other educational establishment can boast such a record? And yet nothing was compulsory except sobriety. ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... a judgment of the manner of Churchmen's lives by their discourses, certainly one would take them for models of sobriety. But there is a great deal of difference between preaching and practising. This distinction is very solid, and daily experience confirms it. And if those gentlemen would do themselves justice, how many amongst them might ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... silent, listening intently, their eyes fixed upon the speaker. They were there for a purpose; they were there to find out why it was that their toil, their sobriety, their self-deprivation, left them at middle life with distorted and stiffened limbs, gray hair, and empty hands. They were terribly in earnest, and Bradley felt his kinship with them. ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... his second son from the cloister, and invest him with the purple of the soldier and courtier, in the place of the ecclesiastical purple; and determined to give him in marriage to the maiden, affianced to the dead man, which was wisely determined because wrapped round with continence and sobriety in all ways as was the little monk, the bride would be as well used and happier than she would have been with the elder, already well hauled over, upset, and spoiled by the ladies of the court. The befrocked, unfrocked, and very sheepish in his ways, followed the sacred wishes of ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... be distinguished by a hopeful and helpful accession to his character of honesty, uprightness, and self-respect, or by their conservation; or which should be the natal time for the benign rule over him of contentment, charity, and sobriety, or for the dominance of a seemly morality. That, likewise, might be deemed idle expectancy, which would foresee, as a result of the changed order of things, now being prospectively considered, a season in the Indian's experience, when should be illustrated ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... all that Mountjoy feared, he had now discovered. In a state of sobriety, the doctor was probably one of those men who are always ready to lie. In a state of intoxication the utterances of his drunken delirium might unconsciously betray the truth. The reason which he had given for Lord Harry's continued absence in Ireland, could not ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... who has tact will see that, in a monograph, the apparatus of demonstration, while needing to be complete, ought to be reduced to what is strictly necessary. Sobriety is imperative; all parading of erudition which might have been spared without inconvenience is odious.[224] In history it often happens that the best executed monographs furnish no other result ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... governor of New England. He carried things with a high hand. The colonies endured his oppression for three years, when, learning that his royal master was dethroned, they rose against their petty tyrant and put him in jail. With true Puritan sobriety they then quietly resumed their old form of government. This lasted for three years, when Sir William Phipps came as royal governor over a province embracing Massachusetts, Maine, and Nova Scotia. From this time till the Revolution, ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... reprove the cupbearer for making the king, my grandfather, drunk. To this day I remember the taste of those water-cresses; and for those who love to trace the characters of men in the sports of children, I may mention that my character for sobriety, if not for water-drinking, ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... sate the Cynic cub, With nothing in his bosom sympathetic; But from those groves derived, I deem, Where Plato nursed his dream Of immortality; Seeing that clearly Thy system all is merely Peripatetic. Thou to thy pupils dost such lessons give Of how to live With temperance, sobriety, morality, (A new art,) That from thy school, by force of virtuous deeds, Each Tyro now ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Revelation, or the Communion of the Incarnate Dead with the Unconscious Living. Important Fact, without trifling Fiction, by HIM." I have not the pleasure of knowing HIM; but certainly I must concede to HIM, that he writes like a man of extreme sobriety upon his extravagant theme. He is angry with Swedenborg, as might be expected, for his chimeras; some of which, however, of late years have signally altered their aspect; but. as to HIM, there is no chance that he should ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... portrayed as about to enter his bath. From his waist to his knees he is devoted to religion—mark the complete disappearance of the human aspect. From his neck to his waist he is devoted to public affairs; observe the tweed coat, the watch chain, and other signs of practical sobriety. But the head is, after all, the crown of the human being, and is devoted to art. This is why you cannot make out that it is a head. Note its pyramidal severity, its cunning little ears, its box-built, water-tightal structure. The hair you ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... Can't they take a lesson upon that subject from me? Some people have called me procrastinating. Yet you are witness, reader, that I was here kept waiting for the post-office. Will the post-office lay its hand on its heart, in its moments of sobriety, and assert that ever it waited for me? What are they about? The guard tells me that there is a large extra accumulation of foreign mails this night, owing to irregularities caused by war, by wind, by weather, in the packet service, which as yet does ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... visit, your sobriety, your nervous manner are indications enough. My time is valuable, and although your petite Paris here is very entertaining, I prefer the Baltic seashore. If you have anything to say to me, say it quickly, and to the point. I leave this afternoon ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... chronicle which was his first attempt at historical composition. He came to England at the right moment. The older generation of historians had laid down their pens towards the conclusion of the great war, and had left no worthy successors. The new-comer was soon to surpass them, not in precision and sobriety, but in wealth of detail, in literary charm, and in genial appreciation of the externals of his age. He recorded with an eye-witness's precision of colour, though with utter indifference to exactness, the tournaments and fetes, the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... that I am afraid that although these regular soldiers of the regular army, when elated with wine, choose to be devoted loyalists, their political sentiments may undergo many different changes upon their return to sobriety. At present, the shout of Vive le Roi, from the different troops of the line and national guards which are patroling the streets, is loud and reiterated. Napoleon has sent to-day his addresses and declarations to Bourdeaux, but the couriers have been imprisoned, and the civil authorities ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... elected, and had received a complimentary letter from the vicar thanking him for the fine example he had set for others. No, dear old Will, though he liked his glass of beer as well as anybody, would often go a whole week on tea and coffee; and she thought what a merit his sobriety had been. Merely considered as economy, it was a blessing. It is always the drink, and never the food, that runs away with one's ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell |
