"Unedifying" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to declare, that he who proposes to abolish classical studies, proposes to render, in a great measure, inert and unedifying, the mass of English literature for three centuries; to rob us of the glory of the past, and much of the instruction of future ages; to blind us to excellencies which few may hope to equal, and none to surpass; to annihilate associations which are interwoven with our best sentiments, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... by side with the favourite songs of native growth. Instances of this will occur to every one familiar with our hymnology; but this can hardly happen in many cases. The translations on the principle of this volume may neither be uninteresting nor unedifying on that account, and it may be permitted to the Translator to trust that Paul Gerhardt in his present dress may be found stimulating and refreshing to many. Gerhardt was peculiarly a son of consolation. The Translator has found him so in the hour of trial, and ...
— Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs - Translated by John Kelly • Paul Gerhardt
... letters, Restif de la Bretonne, whose unedifying novels the Parisians of 2440 would assuredly have rejected from their libraries, published in 1790 a heroic comedy representing how marriages would be arranged in "the year 2000," by which epoch he conceived that all social equalities would have disappeared in a fraternal society ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... "the blessed Sacrament of the Altar . . . which is one of the chief Sacraments whereby our Saviour, for the salvation of mankind, has appointed the fruit of His death and passion to be daily renewed and applied." In this traditional view there is nothing unedifying, nothing injurious to the Christian life. But to Knox the wafer is an idol, a god "of water and meal," "but a feeble and miserable god," that can be destroyed "by a bold and puissant mouse." "Rats ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... her mother and grandmother had been before her. She described, while the crowd listened with intense interest, how Emlyn Stower had introduced her to the devil, who was clad in red hose and looked like a black boy with a hump on his back and a tuft of red hair hanging from his nose, also many unedifying details of her interviews with this ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... troubadour known to us is William IX, Count of Poitiers (1071-1127) who led an army of thirty thousand men to the unfortunate crusade of 1101. He lived an adventurous and often an unedifying life, and seems to have been a jovial sensualist caring little what kind of reputation he might obtain in the eyes of the world about him. William of Malmesbury gives an account of him which is the reverse of respectable. His poems, of which ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... over a snail which they had unearthed in the act of laying her eggs. There they were, still adhering to her—a cluster of little opaque white spheres, like soapy bubbles. He and John-Willy had used the occasion to try and add to their store of knowledge, and the memory of that unedifying discussion made Ishmael burn now. That time, too, when he stole his mother's Bible from her room that he might puzzle over portions of it which he had better have left unread. True, it had been John-Willy—whose household did not include a Bible and who could not read—who had started him ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... times in one week to study the inward significance of her dances, he declared. He treated me to a learned discourse concerning them, and was furious when one journal, slightly puritanical in tone, perhaps, said that they were generally unedifying, and in one case, ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... composed demeanour. The gladiatorial conflicts in which these two combatants took part were often a source of rare amusement even outside the pale of the Presbytery, and, inasmuch as they were both well fortified with weighty and telling arguments, the spectacle was not always unedifying. On the question of Union, as is well known, they took diametrically opposite views. Many a passage of arms passed between them on this questio vexata, while the younger and less athletic backers surrounded the arena, waiting the shock with eager ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... altar-tombs in the aisle of the parish-church. The Duke himself, however, was a man little attracted by ancient chronicles in stone and metal, even when they concerned his own beginnings. He allowed his mind to linger by preference on the many graceless and unedifying pleasures which his position placed at his command. He could on occasion close the mouths of his dependents by a good bomb-like oath, and he argued doggedly with the parson on the virtues of cock-fighting and ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... in 1669; and his "Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio; or The Method of Ramus," 1672. The first is insignificant; and the second even Professor Masson pronounces, "as a digest of logic, disorderly and unedifying." Both apparently belong to his school-keeping days: the little tract, "Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration," (1673) is, on the other hand, contemporary with a period of great public excitement, when Parliament (March, 1673) compelled the king to revoke his edict of ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett |
