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Beneficent   Listen
adjective
Beneficent  adj.  Doing or producing good; performing acts of kindness and charity; characterized by beneficence. "The beneficent fruits of Christianity."
Synonyms: See Benevolent.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Beneficent" Quotes from Famous Books



... duties of charity and benevolence—but she gradually wasted away—her heart was broken. I stayed with her for three years, when she died, leaving a considerable sum to me, and the remainder of her wealth to beneficent institutions. This is about five years ago, since when I have been living on the property, which is nearly all expended by my extravagance. The stigma on my birth is, however, the only subject which has weighed upon my spirits—this ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat

... put the youngest of them to shame. It is this ebullience of youthful energy, this inexhaustible vitality, which is the admiration and despair of his contemporaries. Surely when a schoolboy at Eton he must somewhere have discovered the elixir of life, or have been bathed by some beneficent fairy in the well of perpetual youth. Gladly would many a man of fifty exchange physique with this hale and hearty octogenarian. Only in one respect does he show any trace of advancing years. His hearing is not quite so good as it was, but still ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook

... holds with St. Augustine Absolute Evil is impossible because it is always rising up into good. He considers the theory of a beneficent or maleficent deity a purely sentimental fancy, contradicted by human reason and the aspect of the world. Evil is often the active form of good; as F. W. Newman says, "so likewise is Evil the revelation of Good." With him all existences ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... You want, first, a large backlog, which does not rest on the andirons. This will keep your fire forward, radiate heat all day, and late in the evening fall into a ruin of glowing coals, like the last days of a good man, whose life is the richest and most beneficent at the close, when the flames of passion and the sap of youth are burned out, and there only remain the solid, bright elements of character. Then you want a forestick on the andirons; and upon these build the fire of lighter stuff. In this way you have at once a cheerful blaze, and the fire ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... to Elspeth's behaviour, it can never be known which was the passage quoted in the House; but we may be sure of one thing—that it did the House good. That book did everybody good. Even Pym could only throw off its beneficent effects by a tremendous effort, and young men about to be married used to ask at the bookshops, not for the "Letters," but simply for "Sandys on Woman," acknowledging Tommy as the authority on the subject, like Mill on Jurisprudence, ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie

... call Taste was subdued by the need for deeper motive; just as the nicer demands of the palate are annihilated by urgent hunger. Moving habitually amongst scenes of suffering, and carrying woman's heaviest disappointment in her heart, the severity which allied itself with self-renouncing beneficent strength ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... every instance of Indian hostility has ended in the triumph of the whites, the advance of the army of colonization a step further, and the gradual subjugation of American savagery, animate and inanimate, to the beneficent influences of civilization. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... scarcely a stone's throw from the rush and turmoil of the whirlpool of wheeled traffic which centres around the junction of the Rue Richelieu with the Avenue de l'Opera. It is as an oasis in a turbulent sandstorm, a beneficent shelf of rock in a whirlpool of rapids. The only thing to be feared therein is that a toy aeroplane of some child will put an eye out, or that the more devilish diabolo will crack ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield

... incident for a great drama; something tragical in the depth and stir of its emotions. Even the imagination of the boy could not be insensible to its materials; and Coningsby was picturing to himself a beneficent and venerable gentleman pressing to his breast an agitated youth, when his reverie was broken by the carriage stopping before ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... world at a primitive stage of thought, and even to some extent in the highest civilization, the sight of the sexual organs or of the sexual act, the image or even the names of the sexual parts of either man or woman, are believed to have a curiously potent influence, sometimes beneficent, but quite as often maleficent. The two kinds of influence may even be combined, and Riedel, quoted by Ploss and Bartels,[38] states that the Ambon islanders carve a schematic representation of the vulva on their fruit trees, in part to promote the productiveness of the trees, and in ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... divine vengeance upon crime. Even on the unseemly legends of a popular mythology He casts His shadow, and is dimly discerned in the ode or the epic, as in troubled water or in fantastic dreams. All that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, all that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect or fragmentary, natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... The supreme deity was addressed as Baal or "Lord," and was adored in the form of the Sun. And as the Sun can be baleful as well as beneficent, parching up the soil and blasting the seed as well as warming it into life, so too Baal was regarded sometimes as the friend and helper of man, sometimes as a fierce and vengeful deity who could be appeased only by blood. In times of national or individual distress his worshippers ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce

... fatal dose of "Alexander's Wine," which he innocently believed to be a beneficent remedy, was in ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins

... and every wholesome and beneficent usage, I accept thankfully as part of the inheritance which good, or wise, or brave men have left as their legacy for my use and assistance; but it is my bounden duty to measure them all by the standard of God's unchanging law: by it I will prove them; I will use them or reject ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival

... beneficent authority to prevent subjects of the Transvaal from trespassing on their neighbour's land, the Resident is to exercise a general supervision over the interests of all the natives in the country. Considering that they number about a million, ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard

... effect than that of these rude and hazardous antiquities was produced by Fenelon's "Telemachus," with which I first became acquainted in Neukirch's translation, and which, imperfectly as it was executed, had a sweet and beneficent influence on my mind. That "Robinson Crusoe" was added in due time, follows in the nature of things; and it may be imagined that the "Island of Falsenberg" was not wanting. Lord Anson's "Voyage round the Globe" combined the dignity ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... 217 chests of Spanish dollars, and a hundred barrels of copper coin. A pound sterling was worth eleven pounds of the old-tenor currency of Massachusetts, and thirty shillings of the new-tenor. Those beneficent trucks carried enough to buy in at a stroke nine tenths of the old-tenor notes of the province,—nominally worth above two millions. A stringent tax, laid on by the Assembly, paid the remaining tenth, and Massachusetts was restored to ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman

... of the terrible, as well as the beneficent, belongs to the "Befana," the Epiphany visitor who to Italian children is the great gift-bringer of the year, the Santa Klaus of the South. "Delightful," say Countess Martinengo, "as are the treasures she puts in their ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles

... of sewage disposal, therefore, is to distribute the organic matter in the sewage so that these beneficent bacteria may most rapidly and thoroughly accomplish their purpose. During the last fifty years, a great deal of study has been expended on this problem, and while it has not as yet been entirely solved, certain essential ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden

... affection are the natural laws of the moral world. There is no despair where there has been no disobedience. Christus Salvator stands out before the world in majesty and power. Virtue is enthroned in a universe which is beneficent. ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... said Ford solemnly. "It's like—well, I've never been sick a day in my life since I can remember, but I should think it might be like a—a sort of beneficent fever, you know. Haven't you ever had a touch ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde

... gently, "Rosy, dear, Mrs. Casaubon is come to see you again; you would like to see her, would you not?" That she colored and gave rather a startled movement did not surprise him after the agitation produced by the interview yesterday—a beneficent agitation, he thought, since it seemed to have made her turn to ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... him on the bankruptcy which drove him from the details of trade to the richer fruition of literary promise, we may consider it a beneficent working of Providence, which afforded to Irving a still earlier emancipation from the law, cheered as it might have been by the kindness of Mr. Hoffman ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various

... symbols of agriculture; the bird Ibis, the crocodile, the dog Anubis, and other animals, whose physical characteristics impressed the as yet childish man, who saw in them the symbol, either of the beneficent power of nature which moved him to thankfulness, or of a destructive power which he dreaded and whose anger he sought to avert. The religion of Egypt was not of a purely spiritual character. To the man whose eye is not yet open to the manifestation of the ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten

... Whole-Wheat Toast. Sterilized Stewed Apples—Zephyrettes. Cup of Somnolina. (A beverage from which everything pleasant and harmful has been extracted by a beneficent process.) ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... gospel of art for art's sake."[1] Like Scott, he "recognized the abiding value in literature of integrity, sincerity, purity, charity, faith. These are beneficences, and Irving's literature, walk around it and measure it by whatever critical instruments you will, is a beneficent literature." ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee

... course, be driven into other trades, after suffering much distress. And, on this account, I would call in Parliament, because then there would be a temporary compensation offered to the temporary sufferers by a far-sighted and, beneficent measure. Besides, without Parliament, I am afraid the masters could not do it. The fork-grinders would blow up the machines, and the men who worked them, and their wives and their children, and their lodgers, and their ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade

... once peace-making in its general tendency and business-like in its practicable special application.... As a result of insurance, men gradually find themselves involved in a social network of complicated but beneficent relations of which individuals are usually very imperfectly aware but by means of which modern ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... all human suffering, either of the soul or body. Faith was necessary to this pious healing. To the Muenchener beer is the river of health. His faith in it dates from his earliest infancy, and he resorts to its beneficent influence at least seven times a day, and drinks his last Kruegl with apparently the same relish as the first. The quantity which Germans drink is something incredible. Bavarian students usually take from five to seven masses per day. ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... methods are more direct. They depend less upon finesse, more upon inherent right and strength. But it is to the women who shone so conspicuously in France for more than two hundred years that we may trace the broadened intellectual life, the unfettered activities, the wide and beneficent influence of the ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... which yields the emblem was all inadequate to set forth the divine gift which is compared to it, because as soon as the sun has risen, with burning heat, it scatters the beneficent clouds, and the 'sunbeams like swords' threaten to slay the tender green shoots. But this mist from God that comes down to water the earth is never dried up. It is not transient. It may be ours, and live ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... most likely to use only the mischievous half of the force—the half which invents imaginary ailments for him and cultivates them; and if he is one of these—very wise people, he is quite likely to scoff at the beneficent half of the force and deny its existence. And so, to heal or help that man, two imaginations are required: his own and some outsider's. The outsider, B, must imagine that his incantations are the healing-power that is curing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... mount. To the instructions there uttered, the mighty ones of every age,—the founders of empires, statesmen, law-givers, philanthropists, patriots, and wise men, have sought for their noblest conceptions, and their most beneficent regulations, and it would be impossible to estimate the influence of those instructions upon all the after history of the world. But if the Almighty there revealed himself as the God of kingdoms, the all-wise and infinitely good ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... shadows before? Did the silently-waving pinions of the angel who "troubled the waters" give any hint of his beneficent approach? However that may be, certain it is that on the morning of the day in which the hitherto untroubled depths of Lyle's womanly nature were to be stirred by the mightiest of influences, there came to her a prescience, thrilling ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour

... pleasure grounds at Holkham, and I had an aesthetic love for their gorgeous plumes. As I hunted under and amongst the shrubs, I secretly prayed that my search might be rewarded. Nor had I a doubt, when successful, that my prayer had been granted by a beneficent Providence. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... the most beneficent, but the most benevolent of human beings. Not content with being a perfect saint yourself, which (forgive me for saying) does not always imply prodigious compassion for others; not satisfied with being the most disinterested, nay, the reverse of all patriots, for you sacrifice your very slender ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... Sleep, that fillst the human breast with peace, When night's dim curtains swing from out the West, In what way, in what manner, could we rest Were thy beneficent offices to cease? O Sleep, thou art indeed the snowy fleece Upon Day's lamb. A welcome guest That comest alike to palace and to nest And givest the cares of life a glad release. O Sleep, I beg thee, rest upon my eyes, For I am weary, worn, and sad,—indeed, Of thy great mercies have ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed

... more easily enlightened than many. Government by opposition, by balance and control, is contrary to principle; whereas absolutism might be requisite to the attainment of their higher purpose. Nothing less than concentrated power could overcome the obstacles to such beneficent reforms as they meditated. Men who sought only the general good must wound every distinct and separate interest of class, and would be mad to break up the only force that they could count upon, and ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... which has forced anthropologists to include the Celtic race among those peoples described as 'sanguine-bilious.' As a rule they are by no means friendly or even humane, these fays of Brittany, and if we find beneficent elves within the green forests of the duchy we may feel certain that they are French immigrants, and therefore more polished than the ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... melancholy mien. She remained a long time in meditation in the thicket of roses, but her meditations had evidently no bitterness in them, and a miraculous serenity seemed to have spread itself over her heart like a beneficent balm. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... the pebble that was so round, so smooth and innocent-seeming, whether its part had been that of beneficent sprite, or malevolent demon, he who troubles to read ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al

... boy," he said, approaching with an expression of beneficent happiness, "I've done with gardening. Let's go for a walk like reasonable beings. I've had enough of this"—his face was convulsed for an instant with ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... this address, lifted his eyes beyond Warboise and perceived the womenkind gathered around their doorways, listening. Nothing of the sort had happened in all his long and beneficent rule. He was scandalised. He lost ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... possible, with due regard for their physical safety, in order that they might suffer the mortification of seeing their flag go down. Two hours had been assigned, in the British mind, for the accomplishment of that beneficent result, after which "terms for Baltimore" ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education; for he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with Nature. He will make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely; she as his ever beneficent mother; he as her mouth-piece, her conscious self, ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... that no one ever saw on railway bookstalls. While Mademoiselle Lemaire was not in fact and verity a suffering, patient, bed-ridden lady, but a princess who escaped from her disguise at night into glory and great beneficent splendour. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... double duty—the day scholars departing just as the more advanced classes assembled, and the trustees gladly gave the use of the building for so beneficent a purpose. But it was not to be expected that the poor young overworked teacher could do double duty too. She was, in fact, only a girl, not much in advance of the "night scholars," either in age or acquirements, and well calculated to profit with them by superior advantages. Another hired ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow

... and treat with one another like foes. Who will take an apology for a Friend? They must apologize like dew and frost, which are off again with the sun, and which all men know in their hearts to be beneficent. The necessity itself for explanation,—what explanation ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... and as much good to his realm as a Bourbon could; Pier Leopoldo of Tuscany, Don Filippo I. of Parma, Francis III. of Modena, and the Popes Benedict XIV., Clement XIV., and Pius VI. were all disposed to be paternally beneficent to their peoples, who at least had repose under them, and in this period gave such names to science as those of Galvani and Volta, to humanity that of Beccaria, to letters those of Alfieri, Filicaja, Goldoni, Parini, and ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... in him a sort of stoicism, the result of long acquaintance with solitude and danger. He remembered his old love as a flower he had once admired as he passed it, a treacherous flower, with thorns that had wounded him. There are flowers that are beneficent, and flowers that are poisonous, and the last are sometimes the most beautiful. They should not be blamed, he thought; it was their nature to be hurtful; but it was well to pass them by and ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)

... ignorant people. But the most ignorant people in modern Britain are to be found in the upper class, the middle class, and especially the upper middle class. I do not say it with the smallest petulance or even distaste; these classes are often really beneficent in their breeding or their hospitality, ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton

... prove, at least, that Galds was careful not to be caught enslaved by any dogma, and they show, too, that he set no store by the letter of the law, and prized only the spirit. That is the secret of his fondness for the dangerous situation of the beneficent lie, or justifiable false oath, which brought him severe criticism when he first used it in Los condenados (II, 16), and which nevertheless he repeated in an equally conspicuous climax in Sor Simona (II, 10). Galds defended ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos

... wearied out, I turned homeward, and diverging from the direct road, I was led past the house where the Misses Arbour lived. I was faint, and some beneficent inspiration prompted me to call. I went in, and found that the younger of the two sisters was out. A sudden tendency to hysterics overcame me, and I asked for a glass of water. Miss Arbour, having given it to me, sat down by the side of ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford

... she would leave it with him, the letter that was so dear to him! she would not take it from him, since he was so bent on carrying it with him to the grave. Her tears flowed afresh, but they were beneficent tears this time, and brought healing and comfort with them. She arose and kissed his hands, kissed him on the forehead, uttering meanwhile but that one word, which was ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... Already, in less than an hour, I had died a thousand deaths. And yet this neighbour, balanced and equable, calm-voiced and almost beneficent despite the harshness of his first remarks, had been in the jacket ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... the final test by which one judges one's friends. "After all, he's a decent fellow." We must be able to use that formula concerning our friends. Kindliness of heart is not the greatest of human qualities—and its general effect on the progress of the world is not entirely beneficent—but it is the greatest of human qualities in friendship. It is the least dispensable quality. We come back to it with relief from more brilliant qualities. And it has the great advantage of always going with a broad mind. Narrow-minded people are never kind-hearted. You may be inclined ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett

... I have ever met, in my small course of reading. There is a majesty, a truth, an ever-burning fire, lustrous, yet natural and most beneficent, like the sun's glory on a summer day, in his immortal words, that kindles and irradiates, yet consumes not the soul; a grand simplicity, that never strains for effect; a sweet pathos, that elicits tears without evoking them; a melody that flows on, like the harmony of the eternal sea, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... manifestation of that energy and unanimity of which on many former occasions the people of the United States have given such memorable proofs, and the exertion of those resources for national defense which a beneficent Providence has kindly placed ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... and a breath of hostile circumstance may put an end to it; but in its own manner and degree, and while it lasts, it is one of the golden states of consciousness, and a man enjoying it feels this mysterious gift of existence to have been a kindly boon from some beneficent power. ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... child are well and have passed a good night, or the contrary if it is otherwise. At one time, when there was the announcement of a birth on a door the creditors of the family were not allowed to knock for nine days; but I believe this custom has died out, although it must have had the beneficent virtue of promoting ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis

... which has prevailed in England. Whether the English system or any other may be the best is not now the question. But in answering that question it is material to know that Ireland has accepted and, at any rate for two centuries, has followed that system. The landlord has been to his tenants a beneficent or, occasionally, a hard master, and the tenants have acknowledged themselves as dependent, generally with much affection, though not unfrequently with loud complaint. It has been the same in England. Questions of tenant-right, of leases, ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope

... but believe it, and indeed it is, your duty to be happy. You are very young; let not this check for more than a moment retard your glorious course; hold on, beloved one. The sun of youth is not set for you; it will restore vigour and life to you; do not resist with obstinate grief its beneficent influence, oh, my child! bless me with the hope that I have ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

... as I bowed, and inquired how my honoured presence had the felicity to be. I said that through seeing his auspicious countenance the mists of the night had turned into sunshine, and that by reason of his beneficent sheep his good deeds would be remembered by the Gods. He said that since I had set my magnificent foot in his Kingdom the crops would probably yield seventy per cent more than the average. I said that the fame of the King had reached to ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling

... grace is shed On the quick and on the dead By dark Powers beneficent, Over-grief they ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles

... was always, for her beneficent dragon, under arms; living up, every hour, but especially at festal hours, to the "value" Mrs. Lowder had attached to her. High and fixed, this estimate ruled on each occasion at Lancaster Gate the social ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James

... party questions; has always confined his attention to his business affairs. It was because of this that Mr. Balfour sent for him to confer anent the light railways, which have proved such a blessing to the country. It was Mr. Worthington who carried out most of these beneficent works. Besides this, Mr. Worthington has built railways to the amount of three-quarters of a million in Ireland alone. He has employed 5,300 men at one time, and his regular average exceeds 1,500 all the year round. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... ceremonies. A surge of bitter feeling against the man who stood between her and Miltoun almost made her cry out. That man had captured her before she knew the world or her own soul, and she was tied to him, till by some beneficent chance he drew his last breath when her hair was grey, and her eyes had no love light, and her cheeks no longer grew pale when they were kissed; when twilight had fallen, and the flowers, and bees no longer cared ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... old man, always nursed by women, had the misfortune to marry, for his third wife, the most infamous woman in Roman annals (Valeria Messalina), under whose influence the reign, at first beneficent, became disgraceful. Claudius was entirely ruled by her. She amassed fortunes, sold offices, confiscated estates, and indulged in guilty loves. She ruled like a Madame de Pompadour, and degraded the throne which she ought to have exalted. The influence of ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... statesmen, whether in or out of power, especially in England, and that opprobrium of our century, the English and the Franco-Bonapartist press, have decided to do all that their clever brains can scheme towards preventing this noble American people from working out its mighty and beneficent destinies, and from elaborating and making more glorious than ever its own already very glorious history. As well might the brainless and heartless conspirators against human progress and human liberty endeavor to arrest the rotation of a planet by ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... and he thought, "This is the last sunset I shall ever see." He had the strong abiding faith of his time and party, and he looked beyond the clouds with an awe and a light in his eyes. Verses learnt at his mother's knee came back to him; he said them over to himself, and the tender, solemn, beneficent words fell like balm upon his troubled heart. He thought of his mother who had died young, and then of scenes and occurrences of his childhood. All earthly hope was past, there could be no more struggling; in a little while ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston

... sometimes, if they were worthy, touched his feet, and he would give them a little look from his quiet intense eyes, and the least inclination of his head, a movement and look a king might have envied, it was at the same time so reserved and yet graciously beneficent. His hair and beard were long and slightly curling and tawny at the ends, and his face was dusted with grey ash which emphasised his rather potent eyes. His features in profile were pure Greek, and on his ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... it out as it were from the bright blue glorious firmament above, and, if it could be, from the all-searching eye of the Creator of men who were thus disfiguring His image by their furious passions, and dishonouring Him by the infraction of all the precepts of that mild, that beneficent religion, which He in His unsearchable love sent His only Son to ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston

... speeches, and thinks that they will stand in lieu of independence. He collects his revenue, and informs us that to be taxed is the highest privilege of an ornate civilisation. He pointed to the gunboat in the bay when it came, and called it the divine depository of beneficent power. For a time, no doubt, British "tenderness" will prevail. But I shall have wasted my thoughts, and in vain poured out my eloquence as to the Fixed Period, if, in the course of years, it does not again spring to the front, ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope

... blazing log fire. Miss Mitchell, having snatched a private chat with her two old school friends, was radiant. Jessop, who had heard full details of the occasion, had insisted on coming over to bake the cakes, and hovered in the background like a beneficent deity, sending in fresh batches of hot crumpets. There were chocolates in little silver bonbonnieres and even crackers, though it was not yet Christmas. Aunt Nellie was there and enjoyed the music, and Dr. Tremayne and Dr. ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil

... were furnished, the result of their morning success seemed little short of divine interference in their behalf. Happy and contented in the belief that they were not forgotten by their heavenly Father, these poor "children in the wood" looked up with gratitude to that beneficent Being who suffereth not even a sparrow to ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill

... society has learned to conform to it is the test and gauge of the progress in civilization which that society has achieved. The command "to love one another," to check the barbarous impulses inherited from the pre-social state, while giving free play to the beneficent impulses needful for the ultimate attainment of social equilibrium,—or as Tennyson phrases it, to "move upward, working out the beast, and letting the ape and tiger die,"—was, in Lessing's view, the task set before us by religion. The true religious feeling was thus, in his opinion, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... anoci-association is that, although inhalation anesthesia confers the beneficent loss of consciousness and freedom from pain, it does not prevent the nerve impulses from reaching and influencing the brain, and therefore does not prevent surgical shock nor the train of later nervous impairments so well described by Mumford. Anoci-association excludes fear, pain, ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile

... darkness, awaiting his boy's return. The solemn gladness of his heart gave nature a tongue. Through the desolation flying overhead—the wailing of the Mother of Plenty across the bare-swept land—he caught intelligible signs of the beneficent order of the universe, from a heart newly confirmed in its grasp of the principle of human goodness, as manifested in the dear child who had just left him; confirmed in its belief in the ultimate victory of good within us, without which nature has neither music ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Dante's homage to Beatrice. The inspiration of chivalry was the love of woman; but that love was spiritual. It aimed not at a personal union, to die away in marriage, but at a deathless fruition in heroic achievements. This ideal appropriation of love, to engender self-abnegating valor and beneficent deeds, originated from the meeting of the two currents of martial history and the Christian religion in a ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... stain upon it". Well might the sober critic Max Mueller pronounce his moral code "one of the most perfect which the world has ever known". No wonder that in contemplating that gentle life Edwin Arnold should have found his personality "the highest, gentlest, holiest and most beneficent ... in the history of thought," and been moved to write his splendid verses. It is twenty-five hundred years since humanity put forth such a flower: who ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott

... weak and deficient, by the overruling plenitude of her power. She is never to intrude into the place of the others, whilst they are equal to the common ends of their institution. But in order to enable Parliament to answer all these ends of provident and beneficent superintendence, her powers must be boundless. The gentlemen who think the powers of Parliament limited may please themselves to talk of requisitions. But suppose the requisitions are not obeyed? What! shall there be no reserved ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... is it not beautiful?" he kept exclaiming as he held it up, still kneeling on the ground and exhibiting its various beauties. "Walter, I tell you that this is the most beautiful of the eight thousand different kinds of birds which our beneficent Creator has placed on this earth, to adorn it for the sake of us mortals. Not one of them possesses these spiral-tipped tail wires nor these beautiful breast fans. Then look at the colours. What art can in any way approach them! ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... the true liberal spirit of Christian piety, tolerance and humanity displayed by Las Casas, a popish Spanish priest; in the noble indignation, the inflexible fortitude, and the intrepid patriotism and virtue of Orozimbo; in the valour, the beneficent wisdom, and the, ardent connubial fidelity and affection of the young Alonzo, in the tenderness, the simplicity, the conjugal and maternal virtues of Cora, and in the artless display of vivid patriotism in the old blind man and his boy—there ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter

... arranged in codes and invested with supernatural sanction. But in Hindustan and Ionia alike, material prosperity, no doubt partly the result of the accepted codes, produced culture of the intellect and culture of the pleasures. With these came the "beneficent demon, doubt, whose name is legion and who dwells amongst the tombs of old faiths." The doubting intellect, acting on the codes, produced the conception of justice-in-itself, of merit as divorced from the effect of action on others, the ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... "Your beneficent intentions towards dearest Harry will be more than ever welcome, now he is reduced to a younger brother's slender portion! Many years since, an advantageous opportunity occurred of providing for him in this province, and ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... forces of the district to subdue the mutinous serfs and preserve order. Protests and remonstrances innumerable were addressed to the emperor, pointing out the absolute impracticability of carrying his beneficent scheme into effect, based chiefly on the ground that the serfs themselves were opposed to emancipation. This, of course, occasioned a great deal of anxiety and trouble at head-quarters. It was rather a hard state of things that the very peasants whom he was striving ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... food per acre as any other kind of grain. This was of incalculable advantage to the English settlers of New England, who would have found it much harder to gain a secure foothold upon the soil if they had had to begin by preparing it for wheat and rye without the aid of the beautiful and beneficent American plant.[27] The Indians of the Atlantic coast of North America for the most part lived in stockaded villages, and cultivated their corn along with beans, pumpkins, squashes, and tobacco; but their cultivation was of the rudest sort,[28] and population was too sparse for ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... admit their degeneracy, and confess themselves, as they really were, collectively incompetent; yet the defence which they brought forward would have been valid only so long as the blemishes were the rare exceptions in the working of an institution which was still generally beneficent. It was no defence at all when the faults had become the rule, and when there was no security in the system itself for the selection of worth and capacity to exercise its functions. The clergy, as I have already said, claimed ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... of the earth, and Capital is the sworn foe to Labour." Hear, hear, hear, with the clattering of many glasses, and the smashing of certain pipes! Then the orator went on. "That Labour should be the salt of the earth has been the purpose of a beneficent Creator;—that Capital should be the foe to Labour has been man's handywork. The one is an eternal decree, which nothing can change,—which neither the good nor the evil done by man can affect. The other is an evil ordinance, the fruit of man's ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope

... noble and the generous steed. When the shades of night impend, the reproaches of the feeling, or the expostulations of the timid traveller no longer protect him from the lash; and the dread of Mr. Martin's act ceases to effect for a time its beneficent purpose; when the stiffened joints—the cracked hoofs—the greasy legs—and stumbling gait of the worn-out animal are all put into agonized motion by belabouring him upon the raw! The expression is Hibernian, but the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20. No. 568 - 29 Sept 1832 • Various

... arbitrary arrangements had always been made in the interest and for the security and well-being of the weaker State, as, for example, when the Congress of Berlin decided on the independence of Roumania and Serbia, in accordance with the will of the people. This beneficent action on the part of the Great Powers infringed none of the principles of international law, whereas the Treaty of London took away from the smaller Power nearly everything of value it possessed and stripped it ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... into the Freedom of the Will, "if such things are the offspring of a distempered brain, let my brain be possessed evermore of that blessed distemper! If this be distraction, I pray God that the whole world of mankind may all be seized with this benign, meek, beneficent, beatific, glorious distraction! The peace of God that passeth all understanding; rejoicing with joy unspeakable and full of glory; God shining in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of God ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte

... their plumage, some of which would warble so sweet 'twas great joy to hear while the discordant croakings and shrill clamours of others might scarce be endured. Here, too, are trees (like the cocos) so beneficent to yield a man food and drink, aye, and garments to cover him; or others (like the maria and balsam trees) that besides their timber do distil medicinal oils, and yet here also are trees so noxious their mere touch bringeth a painful disease of the skin and to sleep in their shadow ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol

... humanities and Christian culture, whom the sin of his forefathers and the crime of his rulers had set in barbarous conflict against others of like training with his own,—a man who, but for the curse which our generation is called on to expiate, would have taken his part in the beneficent task of shaping the intelligence and lifting the moral standard of a ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... he always remained, the hub round which the wheel of Concord's fortunes slowly and contentedly revolved. He was at this time between forty-five and fifty years old, in the prime of his beneficent powers. He had fulfilled the promise of his unique youth—obeyed the voice at eve, obeyed at prime. The sweet austerity of his nature had been mellowed by human sorrows—the loss of his brothers and of his ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... number of barbarians, it was whilst yet our race was hardy from its combat with adverse forces in this then new land. We have not forgotten the strange power which Masusaelili is able to exert over a limited number of persons at one time. We are not unaware of the beneficent results of those laws and customs that compel the most of our people, between the ages of eighteen and fifty, to perform physical labor during twelve hours of each week; but we maintain that the elements of contest and danger are necessary concomitants ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... Regimes have come and gone, but this perennial column still marches out of the past incongruously garbed in peaked caps, black frockcoats faced with green braid, and girt at the waist with a green woollen scarf. This is the daily memorial of the eccentric, despotic, but beneficent bishop, who lived a life of almost abject poverty, devoting the revenues of the most wealthy seigneury in New France[20] to the maintenance of his beloved Seminaire. He has left his name also to the splendid university which completes the work so ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... The first religion of Egypt was pure and simple; its sacrifices were fruits and flowers; temples were erected to the sun, Ra, throughout Egypt. In Peru the great festival of the sun was called Ra-mi. The Phoenicians worshipped Baal and Moloch; the one represented the beneficent, and the other the injurious powers ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... it is greater than maternity. Woman herself, all that she is, all that she has ever been, all that she may be, is but the outworking of this inner spiritual urge. Given free play, this supreme law of her nature asserts itself in beneficent ways; interfered with, it becomes destructive. Only when we understand this can we comprehend the efforts of the ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger



Words linked to "Beneficent" :   beneficence, benefic, benefit, benevolent, philanthropic, maleficent, kind, eleemosynary, charitable



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