"Morally" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to explain. You have pleaded your youth as an excuse for your first 'false step,' as you call it. But I tell you that a girl who is old enough to sin is old enough to know better than to sin. And if you were not morally and spiritually blind you would see this. Secondly, you have pleaded your necessities—that is, your interests—as a just cause and excuse for your matrimonial engagement with Governor Cavendish, and for your eavesdropping ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Frostwinch's parties were apt to be anything but lively. One was morally elevated by being able to look on the comely and high-bred face of Mrs. Bodewin Ranger, but that fine old lady had a sort of religious scruple against saying anything in particular in company, a relic of the days of her girlhood, when cleverness was not the fashion ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... last scrap of your independence. That's a much more important matter even than not treating her shabbily. They're doing their best to kill you morally—to render you incapable of ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... ought soon to be brought in contact with it; that, instead of being kept in dreary confinement, they should rather be accustomed to serve and to endure; and that there was every reason to strengthen them physically and morally from their infancy. The nurses and maids, always ready to take a walk, never failed to carry or conduct us to such places, even in our first years; so that these rural festivals belong to the earliest impressions that ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... American citizenship. It is fundamental of our institutions that they seek to guarantee to all our inhabitants the right to live their own lives under the protection of the public law. This does not include any license to injure others materially, physically, morally, to Incite revolution, or to violate the established customs which have long had the sanction ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Calvin Coolidge • Calvin Coolidge
... Anti-Slavery feeling; that he thought it was wrong and should continue to think so; but that was not the question we had to deal with now. Slavery existed, and that, too, as well by the act of the North, as of the South; and in any scheme to get rid of it, the North, as well as the South, was morally bound to do its full and equal share. He thought the Institution, wrong, and ought never to have existed; but yet he recognized the rights of Property which had grown out of it, and would respect those ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... study under private tutors, Emma was still left morally and physically to the care of her pious friend. Dora planted in hope, and now the precious shoot was caused to spring forth by Him who giveth the increase. This precious shoot of moral strength, ungainly, and without form or comeliness to the world, she watered, tended, and watched, with ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... ages, and is still, in the Roman Church. Dr. Arnold's definition may be found fault with, but it has a very real meaning. "The essential point in the notion of a priest is this: that he is a person made necessary to our intercourse with God, without being necessary or beneficial to us morally,—an unreasonable, immoral, spiritual necessity." He did not mean, of course, that the priest might not have all the qualities which would recommend him as a teacher or as a man, but that he had a special ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Hardie. "I can't deny I'm leader. The move was a mistake, considered prudentially; but it was morally justifiable. I'll defend it ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... daughter "good repute, temperate, read and write;" second daughter, "harlot;" third daughter "good repute, temperate;" and the two youngest are given simply as "unmarried." This family seems to have had as high an average mentally and morally as any family in the whole tribe, only one in six being distinctly immoral. In the next generation, the eldest son had two children, the eldest daughter four, and the third daughter, who married a first cousin, had one child. It would be of great interest to know more of this ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... characterize their particular set; but when it came to the nicer distinctions that mark true individuality, it would not have been easy to find two men more essentially different in character. The first was bold, morally and physically, aspiring, self-possessed, shrewd, singularly adapted to succeed in his schemes where he knew the parties, intelligent, after his tastes, and apt. Had it been his fortune to be thrown earlier into a better ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... INSTINCTIVE IMPULSE.—To be morally free—to be more than an animal—man must be able to resist instinctive impulse, and this can only be done by exercise of self-control. Thus it is this power which constitutes the real distinction between a physical and a moral life, and that forms ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... rankling of an old smart in this plea for rebels, which, while it is not intended to justify rebellion in itself, is devised as a vindication of rebels against rebels. There is manifest satisfaction and a high zest, and something of the morally awful and solemnly remonstrative, in the way in which the past is evoked to visit its ghostly retribution upon us. The old sting rankles in the English breast. She is looking on now to see us hoist by our own petard. These pamphlet pages, with their circumscribed limits and their less ambitious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... much mischief. Whatever a society, or a majority of it, desires, that is right. He who opposes this, who calls down war and vengeance on the Nation, is a monster. Order is always found in the agreement of the majority. The minority is always guilty, I repeat it, even if it is morally right. Nothing but common sense is needed to see that truth."—Ibid. (On the execution of Louis XVI.), p. 447. "Had the nation the right to condemn and execute him? No thinking person can ask such ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... in many instances suffered the same decline. Trivial meant three ways; it was what might be heard at the crossroads or on any route you chanced to be traveling, and its value was accordingly slight. Lewd meant belonging to the laity; it came to mean ignorant, and then morally reprehensible. Common may be used to signify ill-bred; vulgar may be and frequently is used to signify indecent. Sabotage, from a French term meaning wooden shoe, has come to be applied to the deliberate and systematic scamping of one's work in order to injure one's employer. Idiot (common ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... alike, and that there is a difference between those who rise above law and those who burst through it. Said Mary, "Freedom without a sense of responsibility, is license, and license is a ship at sea without rudder or sail." That the careless, mentally slipshod, restless, and morally unsound should look upon her as one of them caused Mary more pain than the criticisms of the unco guid. It was this persistent pointing out by the crowd, as well as regard for the unborn, that caused William and Mary ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... over a regiment, if the soldiers to whom I am unknown are roused by the sight of the imperial eagle, then all the chances will be mine. My cause will be morally gained, even if secondary obstacles rise to prevent its success. It is my aim to present a popular flag—the most popular, the most glorious of all,—which shall serve as a rallying-point for the generous and the patriotic of all parties; to restore to France her dignity without ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Orphan-Houses being in that street, and I long therefore to be able to remove the Orphans from thence as soon as possible. (2) I become more and more convinced, that it would be greatly for the benefit of the children, both physically and morally, with God's blessing, to be in such a position as they are intended to occupy, when the New Orphan-House shall have been built. And (3) because the number of very poor and destitute Orphans, that are waiting for admission, is so great, and there are constantly fresh applications ...
— Answers to Prayer - From George Mueller's Narratives • George Mueller
... supplanting their Yellow brethren and even now they are so powerful in eastern Tibet that this hope may not be unreasonable, should political troubles shake the hierarchy of Lhasa. In spite of the tendency to borrow both what is good and what is bad, some sects are on a higher grade intellectually and morally than others. Thus the older sects do not insist on celibacy or abstinence from alcohol, and Tantrism and magic form the major part of religion, whereas the Gelugpa or established church maintains strict discipline, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... products of education, which may be dissolved by a strong appeal to the more primitive instincts which they seek to repress. An artist may, for example, through a vivid portrayal, so excite the animal lust and cruelty which lurk hidden in all of us as to make the most morally reprehensible objects acceptable. Nature has taken many a revenge on civilization through art. Although no one should demand that these appeals be entirely excluded, yet when they operate alone, without the sublimation of insight, they are flagrantly ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... military and political skills, his prudence (which he sometimes unfortunately gave up), his natural bravery and generosity, his conjugal virtues, which (though sometimes impeached) were both naturally and morally great; his cause, which was certainly, in its original interests, the cause of Rome; all these circumstances entitled him to a more distinguished and more respectable character than any of his historians have thought ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... three (the words are JA, DUA, TELO); all larger numbers are for him merely many (PINA). Yet, although in culture he stands far below all the settled agricultural tribes, there is no sufficient reason for assuming him to be innately inferior to them in any considerable degree, whether morally or intellectually. Any such assumption is rendered untenable by the fact that many Punans have quickly assimilated the mode of life and general culture of the other tribes; and there can be no doubt, we think, that many of the tribes that we have classed as Klemantan and Kenyah are very closely ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... that man by nature is morally good. His natural impulses are from birth wholly virtuous, and require only to be left to their own operation to issue in a life of perfection. Those who favour this contention claim the support of Scripture. Not only does the whole tone of the Bible imply the inherent ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... the fact is, my head is heavy, but there is hope, or if not, I am better than a poor shell fish—not morally when I set the whelp upon it, but have more blood and spirits; things may turn up, and I may creep again into a decent opinion of myself. Vanity will return with sunshine. Till when, pardon my neglects and impute it to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... demand. It is nothing to the contrary that they do not demand the whole of this just now. Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it as a legal ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... border democracy. More than any thing else, it gave the backwoodsmen their code of right and wrong. Though they were a hard, narrow, dogged people, yet they intensely believed in their own standards and ideals. Often warped and twisted, mentally and morally, by the strain of their existence, they at least always retained the fundamental virtues of hardihood ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... unprecedented happiness and satisfaction. There had been a flaw in his life, and it was as neatly mended as was humanly possible. But after a season the stream of events followed less clearly, and there were shades in his reveries. Helena was a fragile woman, of little staying power, physically or morally, and since the time that he had originally known her—eight or ten years before—she had been severely tried. She had loved herself out, in short, and was now occasionally given to moping. Sometimes she spoke regretfully of the ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... princedom by means of moral commonplaces, the "connection of princedom with social conditions" follows quite naturally. Listen: "An individual sequestrates the state, and more or less sacrifices a whole people, not only materially, but also morally, to his person and his supporters, institutes a graduated series of ranks, divides the people, as if they were fat and lean cattle, into various classes, and, solely on the ground of affection for his own person, makes every member of the State the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... prose idyll "My Winter Garden" tries to persuade himself that he was glad he had never travelled, "having never yet actually got to Paris." Monotony, he says, "is pleasant in itself; morally pleasant, and morally useful. Marriage is monotonous; but there is much, I trust, to be said in favour of holy wedlock. Living in the same house is monotonous; but three removes, say the wise, are as bad as a fire. Locomotion is regarded ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... Tad, "there's one thing we've all agreed on, no matter who we've meant to vote for. That is, that a member of our school committee should be an upright, honest man, one fit morally to look out for our dear children. Ain't that so? Well, then, I ask you this: Would you consider a man fit for that job who deliberately came between a father and his child, who pizened the mind of that child against his own parent, and when that parent come ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and stands may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... churchmen continued to insist upon the orthodox view, and at last the Pope himself intervened. Fortunately for the world, the seat of St. Peter was then occupied by Benedict XIV, certainly one of the most gifted, morally and intellectually, in the whole line of Roman pontiffs. Tolerant and sympathetic for the oppressed, he saw the necessity of taking up the question, and he grappled with it effectually: he rendered to Catholicism a ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... hands in his pockets. I felt as if within a few moments I had, morally speaking, taken several steps nearer to him. He looked weary, just as he faced me then, looked preoccupied and as if there were something one might do for him. I was terribly conscious of the limits of my young ability, but I wondered what such ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... Worms and Ratisbon he entered in 1541, with all his old severity, and with a violence even beyond his wont, into a bitter correspondence which had just then begun between Duke Henry of Brunswick—Wolfenbuttel, a zealous Catholic, and morally of ill repute with friend and foe, on the one side, and John Frederick and the Landgrave Philip, the heads of the Schmalkaldic League, on the other. He published against Duke Henry a pamphlet 'Against Hans Worst.' The ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... happiness than in this world. This world is a school; this world is where we develop moral muscle. It may be that we are here simply because men cannot advance only through agony and pain. If it is necessary to have pain and agony to advance morally, then nobody can advance in heaven. Hell will be the only place offering opportunities to any gentleman who wishes to increase ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... domination through intrigue, that he had already received a letter from Flaxman giving precisely opposite advice, and did not intend to tell Stephen anything about it. Stephen's impulsive candour, however, appealed to him much more than Flaxman's reticence. It would indeed be physically and morally impossible for him—anonymous letters or no—to lock the scandal much longer within his own breast. It had become a living and burning thing, like some wild creature straining at ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that teaching is that might makes right, and that the German nation has been chosen to exercise morally, mentally and actually, the over-lordship of the world and must and will accomplish that task and that destiny whatever the cost in bloodshed, misery ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... stirred; they, in all cases, would move their brute fears, threaten, scold, drive; he, a part of the time at least, would appeal to the manhood sentiments, persuade, entreat, expostulate; they would regard them as morally hopeless, to be cruelly treated, and made money of; he, as those for whom hope lives, and on whom redeeming influences should be used, and efforts made for coining from them gold purer ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... anecdotes dealing with what happened when Old Man Hooper winked his wildcat eye, I began in spite of myself to share some of their sentiments. For no matter how flagrant the killing, nor how certain morally the origin, never had the most brilliant nor the most painstaking effort been able to connect with the slayers nor their instigator. He worked in the dark by hidden hands; but the death from the hands was as certain as the rattlesnake's. Certain of his ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... Home' or 'The Sailors' Home.' It is not an ancient building, but it was nevertheless built in the days of the sailing-ship, and is a reminder of the times when sailing-ships used to lie out in the Madras Roads and the 'Sailors' Home' offered seamen entertainment more physically and morally wholesome than that which was provided in the low-class hotels and saloons which laid themselves out for the spoliation of Jack ashore—and of the time when the wreck of a sailing-ship on the Coromandel coast was not an uncommon occurrence and parties of distressed seamen were ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... red man's pagan heart is tickled in its vanity, and he dies in the odour of sanctity—and of a filth his out-of-door life has never taught him how to avoid. The Indian is like a raccoon: in his proper surroundings he is clean morally and physically because he knows how to be so; but in a cage he is filthy because he does not know ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... worship Vishnu but holds fast to Civa as the only manifestation of the supreme divinity, he will notice that such an one quickly becomes obscene, brutal, prone to bloodshed, apt for any disgusting practice, intellectually void, and morally beneath contempt. If the Civaite be an ascetic his asceticism will be the result either of his lack of intelligence (as in the case of the sects to be described immediately) or of his cunning, for he knows that there are plenty ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... I may feel, I want to prolong the agony as long as possible. All my patients are like that. And so are those who are morally diseased; one of them, and a bad case, too, is at this very ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... time for treating. She made no scruple of begging peace of us in '63, that she might lie by and recover her advantages. Was not that a wise precedent? Does not she now show that it was? Is not policy the honour of nations? I mean, not morally, but has Europe left itself any other honour? And since it has really left itself no honour, and as little morality, does not the morality of a nation consist in its preserving itself in as much happiness as it can? ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... population of about 400 inhabitants, white, black, and mongrel. The littoral was an extensive hog-and cattle-ranch, with here and there a patch of sugar-cane; there was no commerce.[39] There were no roads. The people, morally, mentally, and materially poor, were steeped in ignorance and vice. Education there was none. The very few who aspired to know, went to la Espanola to obtain an education. The few spiritual wants of the people were supplied by monks, many of them as ignorant and ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... accustomed to the continual screaming and howling of that naughty boy, just as one accustoms one's self to piano practising or the din of a factory; perhaps too, they comforted themselves with the thought that it was most fortunate that such a morally depraved child had come under ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... don't see why they didn't have a perfect right to run away," said Trenwith, "legally and morally. They didn't owe anything in the way of gratitude ...
— A Campfire Girl's Happiness • Jane L. Stewart
... told Marie-Yvonne that. I shall not tell her. I have suffered enough for a youthful folly; an act of mad generosity. I refuse to allow an infamous woman to wreck my future life as she has disgraced my past. Legally, she has passed out of it; morally, legally, she is not my wife. For all I know ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... only three months ago a minister of the Crown, declared, in opposing the second reading of the Bill, that "a time would come when there would be very few Dutchmen who would not blush when they told their children that they had not helped their fellow-countrymen in their hour of need."[226] Morally, though not legally, the Afrikander members had gone over to the enemy no less than the rebels who had taken up arms against their sovereign. This was the ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... one fact connected with the case, all writers of practical experience are inclined to agree. They declare that the Boer of the past was a very much finer fellow than the Boer of the present—finer morally and physically; and that in his obstinate determination to resist the march of progress he has allowed himself to suffer deterioration. The reason for this deterioration is not difficult to comprehend. In the first place, as we all know, nothing in creation stands ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... man's life is always more or less a struggle; he is a swimmer upon an adverse sea, and to live at all he must keep his limbs in motion. If he grows faint-hearted or weary and no longer strives, for a little while he floats, and then at last, morally or physically, he vanishes. We struggle for our livelihoods, and for all that makes life worth living in the material sense, and not the less are we called upon to struggle with an army of spiritual woes and fears, which now we vanquish and now are vanquished by. Every ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... belief is contrary to fact; I assert that no man ever yet was in the slightest degree or way the worse for continence or better for incontinence. From incontinence during unmarried life all are worse morally; a clear majority, are, in the end, worse physically; and in no small number the result is, and ever will be, utter physical shipwreck on one of the many rocks, sharp, jagged-edged, which beset the way, or on one of the banks ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... is," rejoined Viola quickly; "the more men a woman has the more developed she is, the better for her morally, if there is no conventional disgrace attaching to it. Amongst the Greeks, Aspasia and all those women of her class were far more intellectual, more developed than the wives who were kept at home to spin and ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... saucy Pipkin, though a very winning one, and it had all the health and strength the poor Pot lacked—physically. Morally—morally, that young Pipkin was in a most unwholesome condition. Already its fair, smooth surface was scratched and fouled. It was unmindful of the treasure of good it contained, and its responsibility to keep that good intact. And it seemed destined to crash itself to pieces ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... situation result from James having taken the trouble to make the tool? Does it not exist independently of this circumstance? However harsh, however severe James may be, he will never render the supposed condition of William worse than it is. Morally, it is true, the lender will be to blame; but, in an economical point of view, the loan itself can never be considered responsible for previous necessities, which it has not created, and which it relieves to a ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... privileges granted by this instrument to loyal States." But an interpretation of the Constitution which can be conceived of as forming a possible part of it only by impeaching the sanity of its framers, cannot be an interpretation which the American people are morally bound to risk ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... view of paving the way for a future loan, I tell you frankly that I admire you very much. Your public record and private life prove you to be one of God's noblest—and rarest—works, an honest man. That you are the equal morally and the superior mentally of any man who has presumed to criticize you must be conceded. The prejudices of honesty are entitled to consideration and the judgment of genius to respect bordering on reverence; but in this age of almost universal inquiry ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... fallen out about something. He found that the Blind Creek Indians were in the wrong and effected a better understanding all around. Of the Indians on the Upper Pelly, he writes in his report, "The Pelly Indians are sober, honest and provident. Morally their standard is very high. It seems too bad that so far no provision has been made for a school for the children, as they are a very bright, clever-looking crowd. I see a great field here for good, active Christian work." This is finely spoken—a good admonition both to Church ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... persons interested in the public welfare had a double answer. First, there was at stake a question of principle important enough to be the sole ground of a decision. Was it right, for the sake of a material benefit, to outrage natural and Christian morality? Was it morally lawful, for the purpose of loading with furs the Quebec stores and the Rochelle ships, to instil into the Indian veins the accursed poison which inflamed them to theft, rape, incest, murder, suicide—all the frightful frenzy of bestial ...
— The Great Intendant - A Chronicle of Jean Talon in Canada 1665-1672 • Thomas Chapais
... the essence of Greek tragedy. That in conception it was ideal, is universally allowed; this, however, must not be understood as implying that all its characters were depicted as morally perfect. In such a case what room could there be for that contrast and collision which the very plot of a drama requires?—They have their weaknesses, errors, and even crimes, but the manners are always elevated above reality, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... healthy elephant as to kill a native Australian or a Central- African savage. If it is more culpable to kill an ignorant human savage than an elephant, it is also more culpable to kill an elephant than an echinoderm. Many men are both morally and intellectually lower than many quadrupeds, and are, in my opinion, as wholly destitute of that indefinable attribute called soul as all the lower animals commonly are ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... then lying to God and man. It is always the purest and most innocent girls, too," (he was thinking jealously of Sina Karsavina) "who become the prey of the vilest debauchees, tainted physically and morally. Semenoff once said to me, 'the purer the woman, the filthier the man who possesses her,' ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... poisoning), then it will be the tendency of the mass of men to miss that too. The point might be put in many ways; you may say if you will that the poor are always at the tail of the procession, and that whether they are morally worse or better depends on whether humanity as a whole is proceeding towards heaven or hell. When humanity is going to hell, the poor ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... things which in themselves are morally neither good nor bad, but they are productive of consequences, which are strongly marked with one or other of these characters. Thus commerce, though in itself a moral nullity, has had a considerable influence in tempering the human mind. It was the ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... one so morally deformed is no less to be pitied than a physical cripple; but in our pitying let us drop a tear, too, for the men who are striving to carry on a great enterprise, whose working hours are not limited by the whistle, and whose hair is fast turning white through the struggle to hold in ...
— A Message to Garcia - Being a Preachment • Elbert Hubbard
... years, i.e. in 1431; with his usual punctuality, Martin V. duly convoked it for this date to the town of Basel, and selected to preside over it the cardinal Julian Cesarini, a man of the greatest worth, both intellectually and morally. Martin himself, however, died before the opening of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... Sire." "But I do, and I alone have the right to judge. I have not asked your concurrence, but your signature, which is a mere matter of form, and cannot compromise you in the least." "Sire, a minister who countersigns the decree of his sovereign becomes morally responsible. Your Majesty has declared by proclamation that you granted a general amnesty. I countersigned that with all my heart; I will not countersign ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... swells to-nite with pride cos we've tuk the town by storm. If peepel warnt all Demmycrats before, they is now, cos our speechyfyin has struck in purty deep. The meetin was a grand suckcess fizzically, morally, ...
— The Bad Boy At Home - And His Experiences In Trying To Become An Editor - 1885 • Walter T. Gray
... now, as at first by discoveries which startled her very soul, and seemed to disturb the pillars of the world. She was aware of the forced control he kept over himself, not to burst forth upon her, and she would have fled morally, and brought herself round to his ideas and sworn eternal faith to him, if it would have done any good. But she knew very well that his uneasy nature would not be ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... had welcomed him with open arms; it had ushered him into a new and wondrous world. His hands had fallen to men's tasks, experience had come to him by leaps and bounds. In a rush he had emerged from groping boyhood into full maturity; physically, mentally, morally, he had grown strong and broad and brown. Having abandoned himself to the tides of circumstance, he had been swept into a new existence where Adventure had rubbed shoulders with him, where Love had smiled into ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... largely endowed by Nature, both morally and physically. During the time of his brief authority he settled a turbulent country, and put down some crimes, such as female infanticide, with which all the power of Britain has not always coped successfully. It would have been profitable ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... become an accomplished fact, the world qualified it at once as a crime. This strong condemnation proceeded, of course, from the West of Europe; the Powers of the Centre, Prussia and Austria, were not likely to admit that this spoliation fell into the category of acts morally reprehensible and carrying the taint of anti-social guilt. As to Russia, the third party to the crime, and the originator of the scheme, she had no national conscience at the time. The will of its rulers was always accepted by the people as the expression of an ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... compared with that of Mme. de Pompadour; though, were the merits and demerits of both carefully tested, the results would hardly be in favor of Louise. Strong in diplomacy and intrigue, she was unscrupulous and wanton—morally corrupt; she did nothing to further the development of literature and art; if she favored men of genius it was ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... about my ears; and it wasn't the violence of its fall that terrified me; it was my own nakedness. I wasn't prepared to find myself morally undressed. ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... images like the old heathen Greeks." And again somebody ought to say to him, "The best religion may not worship graven images, because it may see beyond them. But if you do not worship graven images, it is only because you are mentally and morally quite incapable of graving them. True religion, perhaps, is above idolatry. But you are below idolatry. You are not holy enough yet to worship ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... the black-headed bunting to the broad-winged heron, from the water-vole to the otter, from the minnow on one side of the tidal boundary to the porpoise on the other—big and little, beasts and birds (of prey or not)—that should not be encouraged and protected on this beautiful river, morally the property of the greatest ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... know not? But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life? As old as the Caucasian man,—perhaps older,—these creatures have kept their counsel beside him, and there is no record of any word or sign that has passed from one ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... which can correct this abuse is much desired. In mercantile pursuits the business man who gives a letter of recommendation to a friend to enable him to obtain credit from a stranger is regarded as morally responsible for the integrity of his friend and his ability to meet his obligations. A reformatory law which would enforce this principle against all indorsers of persons for public place would insure great caution in making recommendations. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... claim! A piece of paper without signature, sent away in the air! In law it has no validity at all, and morally it has no power, when I love another ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... those efforts in terms which tally wonderfully well with his direct personal comments in "My Confession," of a date long posterior to "Anna Karenin." "Have my peasants become any the richer?" he writes; "have they been educated or developed morally? Not in the slightest degree. They are no better off, and my heart grows more heavy with every passing day. If I could but perceive any success in my undertaking; if I could descry any gratitude—but no; I see false routine, vice, distrust, helplessness! I am wasting ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... done by alcohol, apart from its action as a remedy. People rush to the public houses and take it to ward off the danger, or to relieve them when they begin to feel ill, and the result is very bad morally. He had seen this in different epidemics. Or people got in spirits to face the danger, and many became intoxicated and less able ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... attack on the attitude of President Wilson. Colonel —— listened, and when the outburst was done, said: "Very well! Then I, too, will speak frankly. I have known President Wilson for many years. He is a very strong man, physically and morally. You can neither frighten him ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Constantine, in the province of Constantine. Officers of the corps of infantry were eligible to the new regiments, holding the same grade; the men were to be drawn from any infantry corps in the army, on their own application, if the Minister of War saw proper. None were accepted but men physically and morally in excellent condition; the officers had, for the most part, already served with credit; the under-officers and soldiers had been many years in the service; and even many corporals, and not a few ensigns and lieutenants, voluntarily relinquished their positions to serve in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Smoking generally sallows their complexion. Smoking often leads them to lying. Smoking often leads them to stealing. Smoking often leads them to drinking. Smoking degenerates the boy physically, mentally, and morally. Smokers cannot excel in athletic sports, such as boating, cricket, cycling. Smokers are always at the bottom of the class in school and college, and backward at all kinds of study. Excessive smoking causes mental and physical laziness in boys ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... world were rapidly converging towards the great lawsuits which should either confirm the inventor's rights to the offspring of his brain, or deprive him of all the benefits to which he was justly and morally entitled, he continued to find solace from all his cares and anxieties in his new home, with his children and friends around him. He touches on the lights and shadows in a letter to his brother, who was still in England, dated New ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... parting the waves with bare limbs, tossing from her the foam of breakers. She felt that in this granddaughter, rather than in the good Agatha, the patrician spirit was housed. There were points to Agatha, earnestness and high principle; but something morally narrow and over-Anglican slightly offended the practical, this-worldly temper of Lady Casterley. It was a weakness, and she disliked weakness. Barbara would never be squeamish over moral questions or ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... food-supplies, the slower and less mobile they become. Owing to the great space which they require for their deployment, it is extraordinarily difficult to bring them into effective action simultaneously. They are also far more accessible to morally depressing influences than compacter bodies of troops, and may prove dangerous to the strategy of their own leaders, if supplies run short, if discipline breaks down, and the commander loses his authority over the masses which he can only ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... which they had taken more than once of late—to the distant Emminster Vicarage. It was through her husband's parents that she had been charged to send a letter to Clare if she desired; and to write to them direct if in difficulty. But that sense of her having morally no claim upon him had always led Tess to suspend her impulse to send these notes; and to the family at the Vicarage, therefore, as to her own parents since her marriage, she was virtually non-existent. This self-effacement in both directions had been quite in consonance ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... those of a drunken man, although everything was in prodigal profusion at Vaux, and the surintendant's wines had met with a distinguished reception at the fete. The Gascon, however, was a man of calm self-possession; and no sooner did he touch his bright steel blade, than he knew how to adopt morally the cold, keen weapon as his guide ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... don't act on education principles. Folks used to fight with fist. Now one shoots the other down. Times are not improving morally. Folks don't even think it is wrong to take things; that is stealing. They drink up all the money they can get. I don't see no colored folks ever save a dollar. They did long time ago. Thaes worse ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... thing as male and female virtues, male and female duties, etc. My opinion is that there is no difference, and that this false idea has run the ploughshare of ruin over the whole field of morality. My idea is that whatever is morally right for a man to do is morally right for a woman to do. I recognize no rights but human rights. I know nothing of men's rights and women's rights; for in Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female.... I am persuaded ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... modifications which rendered it little more than the apprenticeship of our day, was permitted under the Mosaic dispensation; but it is contrary to the whole tenor of Christianity; and a system which lowers man as an intellectual and responsible being is no less morally than politically wrong. That it is a political mistake is plainly evidenced by the retarded development and apparent decay of the Southern States, as compared with the ceaseless material progress of the North and West. It cannot be doubted that in Alabama, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... You remember that time about two years ago when I ran you in as a suspect and down at headquarters you bellyached so loud because I took a bum old coin off of you? Well, when I went through that yellow overcoat and found your luck piece, as you call it, in the right-hand pocket, I felt morally sure, knowing you like I did, that as soon as you missed it you'd be coming back to try to find it. And sure enough you did ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... freedom. (And this is exactly what contemporaneous philosophy has thus formulated: "Will is neither determinate nor indeterminate, it is determinative.") "Even when a very obvious reason leads us to a thing, although morally speaking it is difficult for us to do the opposite, nevertheless, speaking absolutely, we can, for we are always free to prevent ourselves from pursuing a good thing clearly known ... provided only that we think it is beneficial thereby to give evidence of the ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... night I came to you a man utterly and hopelessly ruined—morally dead of a blow dealt me an hour before I saw ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... name the name of Christ, should depart from iniquity. To what end should such be comprehended in this of exhortation of his? to no purpose at all: for the more an erroneous person, or a deceiver of souls, shall back his errors with a life that is morally good, the more mischievous, dangerous, and damnable is that man and his delusions; wherefore such a one is not ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... or fifteen feet of the old Boston road (along which the British marched and retreated), divided from it by a fence, and some trees and shrubbery of Mr. Alcott's setting out. Whereupon I have called it "The Wayside," which I think a better name and more morally suggestive than that which, as Mr. Alcott has since told me, he bestowed on it,—"The Hillside." In front of the house, on the opposite side of the road, I have eight acres of land,—the only valuable portion of the place in a farmer's eye, and ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... the same with our spiritual life. When the individual man in us chafes against the lawful rule of the universal man we become morally small, and we must suffer. In such a condition our successes are our greatest failures, and the very fulfilment of our desires leaves us poorer. We hanker after special gains for ourselves, we want to enjoy privileges which none else can share with us. But everything that is ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... situation which of all others they most wished to avoid, and then give the signal for a pitched battle, by begging the enemies would shake hands with one another. Now she had heard it reported in Yorkshire that there was some coolness between the Elmours and Miss Turnbull; but she was morally certain there could be no truth in this report, for a variety of the very best reasons in ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... three stood in silence, gazing dreamily, with three pairs of Pendleton eyes, down toward the site of the old slave market. Directly in their line of vision, an over-laden mule with a sore shoulder was straining painfully under the lash, but none of them saw it, because each of them was morally incapable of looking an unpleasant fact in the face if there was any honourable manner of avoiding it. What they beheld, indeed, was the most interesting street in the world, filled with the most interesting ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... impossible," replied the king; "for that whilk is impossible, is either naturally so, exempli gratia, to make two into three; or morally so, as to make what is truth falsehood; but what is only difficult may come to pass, with assistance of wisdom and patience; as, for example, Jingling Geordie, look here!" And he displayed the recovered treasure to the eyes ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... leaders—the answer to the question is at once apparent. The logic of the situation is clear. For what other body of people in a state are so clearly the state's leaders as the teachers? Always intellectually and, for the most part, in these days, morally and physically, the teachers in our schools mold the coming generation and guide it into paths of progress and accomplishment. This is true of the teachers of a state more than of any other group of people within its ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... whose standard of opinion is higher than common, or sympathy among those with whom it is lower. Such was the fact, as respected Admirals Oakes and Bluewater. No two men could be less alike in temperament, or character, physically, and in some senses, morally considered; but, when it came to principles, or all those tastes or feelings that are allied to principles, there was a strong native, as well as acquired affinity. This union of sentiment was increased by common habits, ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... 151 of Mr. Sinnett's "Occult World," the author's much abused, and still more doubted correspondent assures him that none yet of his "degree are like the stern hero of Bulwer's" Zanoni.... "the heartless morally dried up mummies some would fancy us to be" and adds that few of them "would care to play the part in life of a desiccated pansy between the leaves of a volume of solemn poetry." But our adept omits saying that one or two degrees ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... he resumed; 'can I? Am I able? Why didn't I practise different handwritings while I was young? How a fellow regrets those lost opportunities when he grows up! But there's one comfort: it's not morally wrong; I can try it on with a clear conscience, and even if I was found out, I wouldn't greatly care—morally, I mean. And then, if I succeed, and if Pitman is staunch, there's nothing to do but find a venal doctor; and that ought to be simple enough in a place like London. By all accounts the town's ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... accustomed to look upon the power of England as irresistible,—morally, physically,[see Note 35] and intellectually,—she has now in this age the command of mind and matter sufficient to enable her almost to move the earth, and shall the tunnel under the Thames, the tube over the Conway, and the bridge over the Menai, be our only wonders? ...
— A Letter from Major Robert Carmichael-Smyth to His Friend, the Author of 'The Clockmaker' • Robert Carmichael-Smyth
... the trunks of trees; and that clean, thrilling sap of the earth, that vitality of the exhaustless mother which never goes for nothing, had produced one heavenly flower at last—shooting forth with irrepressible energy a soul unspoiled and morally sublime. When the top decays, as it always does in the lapse of time, whence shall come regeneration if not from below? It is the plain people who are the eternal breeding grounds of ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... not susceptible of being held as a mere theory. It is hoary with time. It takes hold of eternity, voices the infinite, and governs the universe. No greater opposites can be conceived of, physically, morally, and spiritually, than ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... the Creator there! Yet so it is. Man, exercising his reason and conscience in the path of love and duty which his Creator points out, is God's noblest work; but man, left to the freedom of his own fallen will, sinks morally lower than the beasts that perish. Well may every Christian wish and pray that the name and the gospel of the blessed Jesus may be sent speedily to the dark places of the earth; for you may read of, and talk about, but ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... by my producing department for the Middle Western Moving Picture Theatres. These girls had all been around the Studios for about six months, practicing and working hard, and this was the first experience for most of them. They were a wonderful bunch of girls, mentally and morally. Four of the girls had their mothers with them as chaperones. One of them saved $275.00 in 24 weeks out of a salary of $50.00 ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... and protect the interests of their craft or trade, and to see that it is honourably as well as economically conducted, each with a body of officials to superintend its affairs; they were associations for mutual help, and of great benefit to the general community, religiously and morally, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... pleasant, lighted cabins on board the Enchantress Isis, waiting for them not far away. They realized that something was the matter out there, that a lot of Arabs were making a row; but it interested and amused them impersonally. If somebody had robbed or murdered somebody else, morally it was a pity, of course: but it added to the picturesqueness of the scene, and would be nice to tell about at home. I felt myself overflowing with a sudden, new tenderness for the Set, so often troublesome. This that was going to happen—unless we could stop it —was in truth the affair of ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... are barbarians. Deeds of cruelty and of barbarity there may be among the Russians, as there are among all peoples, and the dehumanizing conditions inevitable to warfare may perhaps increase the number of them, but the outrages of Louvain, Termonde, Rheims and Liege are morally and physically ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... other work of power; nor did the Puritan patronage of literature prove fruitful in other fields. If Puritanism was thus infertile, it nevertheless prepared the soil. It impressed upon New England the stamp of the mind; the entire community was by its means intellectually as well as morally bred; and to its training and the predisposition it established in the genius of the people may be ascribed the respect for the book which has always characterized that section, the serious temper and elevation of its later literature and the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... mind and body, but the coming in such close contact with the opposite sex. Did you ever know a lady who danced to excess to live to be over twenty-five years of age? If she does she is, in most instances, broken in health physically and morally. Doctors claim it to be a most harmful exercise physically for both sexes. The average age of the excessive male ...
— From the Ball-Room to Hell • T. A. Faulkner
... 1952, investigated this affair, unanimously condemned the Holmes-Casey-Klein tanker deals as "morally wrong and clearly in violation of the intent of the law," and as a "highly improper, if not actually illegal, get-rich-quick" operation which was detrimental to the interests of ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... warped morally, as well as physically—do you know how those natures feel? A thousand times more strongly than the even, straight natures in everyday life. Then think of such a nature brought face to ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy |
