"Civilisation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The first settlers were, as a rule, rough people who had to make their living, and little time to think of anything beyond, but we are indebted to them, for they are everywhere the necessary pioneers of civilisation—the mass whose dead bodies form a bridge for their more fortunate successors. Then the gold discoveries brought out a lower class. However, the second generation is a great improvement on the first, and, no doubt, the usual rule of amelioration ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... and Oudh, Mr. J.C. Nesfield puts forward the view that the whole basis of the caste system is the division of occupations, and that the social gradation of castes corresponds precisely to the different periods of civilisation during which their traditional occupations originated. Thus the lowest castes are those allied to the primitive occupation of hunting, Pasi, Bhar, Bahelia, because the pursuit of wild animals was the earliest stage in the development of human industry. Next above these ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... were of two kinds. Some, very few and seen there but seldom, led mysterious lives, had preserved an undefaced energy with the temper of buccaneers and the eyes of dreamers. They appeared to live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers, enterprises, ahead of civilisation, in the dark places of the sea; and their death was the only event of their fantastic existence that seemed to have a reasonable certitude of achievement. The majority were men who, like himself, thrown ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... privations by the hundred thousand, yonder across the sea they perish by the million: for where the rich are pinched, how can the poor live? Already 700 out of the 1000 millions of our race have perished, and the empires of civilisation have crumbled like sand-castles in a horror of anarchy. Thousands upon thousands of unburied dead, anticipating the more deliberate doom that comes and smokes, and rides and comes and comes, and does not fail, encumber the streets of London, Manchester, Liverpool. The guides of the nation ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... at Martinique, in the Marquesas and Tahiti. He had parted with the Impressionists and sought for a new aesthetik of art; to achieve this he broke away not only from tradition, even the tradition of the Impressionists, but from Europe and its civilisation. To this half-savage temperament devoured by the nostalgia of the tropics the pictures of his contemporaries bore the fatal stamp of the obvious, of the thrice done and used up. France, Holland, Spain, Italy—what corner was there left in ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... is not even Valparaiso; but it is a city of civilisation; and but two days' ride from the pestilential stew, where we nursed our lives doggedly on quinine and hope, the ultimate hope of evasion. The lives of most Englishmen yonder, who superintend works in the interior, are held on the same tenure: you know them ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... reader's attention and secures his interest in Frank Henniker's development towards civilisation and virtue. His experience of absolute solitude after Jackson's death serves to bring out his sympathies with animals and flowers; while, on the arrival of Mrs Reichardt, he proves himself a ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... passer-by. Evidences of modernity, buildings that might have been anywhere else, were not lacking; but these huge piles of iron and stone served only to bring into sharper contrast the remnants of an earlier civilisation. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... lost as you seem to imagine, my friend," exclaimed a pompous but rather weak voice. Joe looked up. It was Mr Hazlit, whose bloodless countenance and shrunken condition had become more apparent than ever after he had been enabled to reclothe himself in the garments of civilisation. ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... within the territory of her majesty, and equal in that respect to the Boers or British. The marauders were also mentally superior to the black races within the colony, and altogether more interesting savages, braver in battle, and capable of a higher civilisation. One of these tribes, numbering about ten thousand, was in alliance with the British, but the whole population of the Cape able to bear arms, and the troops, taken together, did not reach twenty thousand men. The nature of the country favoured the action of savage assailants, especially such ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... back to slavery," he continued, "I shall bear it more philosophically. It was making me a brute, but I think there'll be no more danger of that. The memory of civilisation will abide with me. I shall remind myself that I was once a free man, ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... the modern industrial communities; and the decay of the ceremonial code—or as it is otherwise called, the vulgarisation of life—among the industrial classes proper has become one of the chief enormities of latter-day civilisation in the eyes of all persons of delicate sensibilities. The decay which the code has suffered at the hands of a busy people testifies—all depreciation apart—to the fact that decorum is a product and an exponent of leisure class ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... that men here are ignorant of tools and arts, and have no civilisation, and yet contrive to be social in their habits and wise in ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite under foot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To hold ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Civilisation had indeed forced the turgid river to run within the narrow channels hewn by established custom, but, released from the bondage of convention, the soul of Elisabeth Durward was that of sheer primitive woman, and the pivot of all her ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... with its hundreds of millions of toiling slaves, with its old, old civilisation reaching back for untold years prior to the dawn of history in the West, with its manners and customs so worn into the national character that they almost form the character itself, with its fertile plains, its sandy deserts, its lofty mountains, its mighty rivers, its torrid ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... because he is a good barker, nor should a man be considered a good man because he is a good talker; but I see only pity in their faces that their mother is so far behind the times. These boys of ours are so much attracted by the glimpses they have had of European civilisation, that they look down upon their own nationality. They have been abroad only long enough to take on the veneer of Western education; it is a half-and-half knowledge; and it is these young men who become the discontented ones of China. When they return they do not find employment immediately, ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... parts of Russia, with the exception of the government of St. Petersburg, from which they have been banished. In most of the provincial towns they are to be found in a state of half-civilisation, supporting themselves by trafficking in horses, or by curing the disorders incidental to those animals; but the vast majority reject this manner of life, and traverse the country in bands, like the ancient Hamaxobioi; the immense grassy plains of Russia affording pasturage for their herds of ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... that Burke was over, and heard all that is to be known of the expedition. And Bob's a man that goes with his eyes open. I wish you could talk to him. Lots of information in the back country that never gets down here into civilisation ." ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... fancy began to take hold of me. "Love no longer blind. Love refusing any more to be the poor blind fool— sport of gods and men. Love no longer passion's slave. His bonds broken, the senseless bandage flung aside. Love helping life instead of muddling it. Marriage, the foundation of civilisation, no longer reared upon the sands of lies and illusions, but grappled to the rock of truth—reality. Have you ever read 'Tom Jones?'" ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... of—Never again—never again! Ah! God! it was true he would hold his beloved one—never again. And often unavailing rebellion against destiny would rise up in him, and he would almost go mad and see red once more. Then he would rush away from civilisation out into the wild. ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... may, perhaps, appropriately, by way of introduction, refer to some episodes and illustrations of book-burning, to show the place the custom had in the development of civilisation, and the distinction of good or bad company and ancient lineage enjoyed by such books as their punishment by burning entitles to places on the shelves of our fire-library. The custom was of pagan observance long ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... sweep the muddy crossing; and even the dogs were allowed to worry him, without his daring to beat them off. Happily those days of fanatical intolerance are for ever passed; and the irresistible march of civilisation, by gradually weakening his prejudices, has humanised even the ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... speak with two voices on such a point as the moral quality of political machinery, or that speaking with one voice upon such a point in America, it should even seem to speak with another voice in Ireland, would clearly be a disaster to the Church and to civilisation. From the moment therefore, in 1886, when the issue between Dr. M'Glynn and the Archbishop of New York was defined, as I have shown, and the Irish National League, with a quasi-indorsement from the Archbishop of Dublin, had arrayed itself practically and openly on the ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... earliest traces of western civilisation the finger-ring appears. Fig. 84 is an Etruscan ring of gold, now in the British Museum; upon the face are chimerae opposing each other. The style and treatment of this subject partake largely of the ancient character of Eastern art, and, like that, ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... of opinion. What is blasphemy in one country is piety in another. Progress tends to reduce it from a crime to an affair of taste. To deal with it in the bad spirit of the old laws, which are only unrepealed because they have been treated as obsolete, is to outrage the conscience of civilisation, and to violate that liberty of the press which Bentham justly called 'the foundation of all other liberties.' If opinions are not forced on people's attention, if they are expressed in publications which are sold, which can be patronised ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... thirty years ago, Japan adopted the outward forms of Western civilisation, her action was regarded by many as a stage trick—a sort of travesty employed for a temporary purpose. But what do they think now, when they see cabinets and chambers of commerce compelled to reckon with ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... upon them, we will have no traffic with them. I have lived too long away from the petty restrictions of civilisation to be bound down by them now, for I come from a region where a man's sword and not his rank preserved his life." As he spoke he again raised his huge weapon aloft, but now held it by the blade so that ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... the hardy frames of the ancient Celtic hunters. In early ages wild beasts abounded in the numerous and extensive forests of Britain and Ireland; but men were few, for the conditions under which the maintenance of a dense population is possible did not then exist. As civilisation progressed, men rapidly multiplied, and the demand for food increased. The pursuit of game became merely the pastime of the rich; and tame sheep and oxen furnished meat to the lowly as well as to the great. Nor were the fruits of the earth neglected; ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... socialistic culture, too, makes the individual of value only as a member of society. This, Eucken affirms, is only true in the most primitive societies. As civilisation progresses, man becomes conscious of himself, and an inner life, which in its interests is independent of, and often opposed to society, develops. His own thought becomes important to man, and as his ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... short work of the whole business by either dying of their own grief and ill-treatment, or else getting killed in cold blood by order of their lords and masters. Why, one of the finest proofs of an improvement in our civilisation is the freedom of thought and action given to women in the present day. Personally speaking, I admit to a great fondness for old-fashioned ways, and particularly for old-fashioned manners,- -but I cannot shut my mind to the fact that ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... constitutional experiment of which I witnessed the inauguration during my visit to India this winter. It promises to rally as seldom before in active support of the British connection those classes that British rule brought within the orbit of Western civilisation by the introduction of English education, just about a century ago. It has not disarmed all the reactionary elements which, even when disguised in a modern garb, draw their inspiration from an ancient civilisation, remote indeed from, though not ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... ants and white ants eat up all gardens, and plantations, and clothes, and furniture; till it is a serious question whether in some hot countries man will ever be able to settle, so strong have the ants grown, by ages of civilisation, and not competing ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... scornfully. 'What do you mean by civilisation? Do you call it civilising men to make them weak, flabby creatures, with ruined eyes and dyspeptic stomachs? Who is it that reads most of the stuff that's poured out daily by the ton from the printing-press? Just the men and women who ought to spend their leisure hours ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... days he had cast occasional glances at this man, seated in the criminal dock with a gaoler on either side of him, his fine, nervous features gaining an added distinction from the sordidness of his surroundings. Now, in the garb of civilisation, seated amidst luxury to which he was obviously accustomed, with a becoming light upon his face and this strange, fascinating flow of words proceeding always from his lips, the man, from every external point of view, seemed amongst ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... called himself. Likewise a Champion of the Dispossessed. He has an intense sympathy with the indigenous populations, and thinks the British system of conquering and corrupting native races simply a disgrace to civilisation. With all of which sentiments I entirely agree. Luke has taken to him immensely, chiefly, I fancy, because he was once private secretary to some Administrating Rajah in an Eastern-Archipelago or Indian Island, and as Luke is hankering after a colonial governorship, he wants to scrape up ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... obtain plenty of old clothes from charitable white men. It had been the commissioner's duty to give one blanket annually to each live native, and thus that garment became to him the Queen's livery, and an emblem of civilisation; it raised the savage in the scale of humanity and encouraged him to take the first step in the march of progress. His second step was into the grave. The result of the gift of blankets was that the natives ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... became dominant in America; but the political connection was broken off mainly because English statesmen could only regard it from the shopkeeping point of view. When a new world began to arise at the Antipodes, our rulers saw an opportunity not for planting new offshoots of European civilisation, but for ridding themselves of the social rubbish no longer accepted in America. With purblind energy, and eyes doggedly fixed upon the ground at their feet, the race had somehow pressed forwards to illustrate the old doctrine that a man never goes so far as when he ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Revival of Learning in Europe," gives the nobler spirit of the earlier pioneers of the Renaissance, men like Cyriac of Ancona and Filelfo, devoted pedants who broke ground in the restoration to the modern world of the civilisation and learning of ancient Greece and Rome. It gives this, the nobler and earlier spirit, as finely as The Tomb at St. Praxed's gives the later and grosser. In Browning's hands the figure of the old grammarian becomes heroic. "He settled Hoti's business," true; but he did something more than ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... intolerance as by its obvious distrust of the genius of our own wonderful language. I have in these five years, and from this place, Gentlemen, counselled you to seek back ever to those Mediterranean sources which are the well-heads of our civilisation: but always (I hope) on the understanding that you use them with a large liberty. They are effete for us unless we add and mingle freely the juice of ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... brought to our virgin land, first the bean, then the pea, and finally the cereal, that best of safeguards against famine. They taught us the care of herds, and the use of bronze, the material of the first metal implement. Thus the dawn of civilisation arose over France. With the bean did those ancient teachers also involuntarily bring us the insect which to-day disputes it with us? It is doubtful; the Bruchidae seem to be indigenous. At all events, I find them levying tribute ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... punishment but on trial and judgment by the magistrate.' The subsequent acts of the government fully carried out these constitutional provisions. It is matter of deep grief and humiliation, that the emigrants from this country, while boasting of superior civilisation, refused to second this honourable policy, intended to set limits to one of the greatest of social evils. Slaves come into Texas with their masters from the neighbouring states of this country. One mode of evading ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... of the shipwreck of an Atlantic Liner and of the thrilling adventures that befall a small party of survivors stranded in Labrador. Their efforts to reach civilisation have an epic character, yet a romantic thread runs through the ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... simple enough," he said; "we must avoid all traces of civilisation, and keep to the wilds. The rest lies with chance and ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... certainly resist the valiant reconstruction of economic life with a vigour in exact proportion to their baseness, stupidity and narrowness of outlook. They will, as classes, come up for a moral judgment, on whose verdict the whole future of Western civilisation depends. If they cannot achieve a considerable, an unprecedented display of self-sacrifice, unselfish wisdom, and constructive vigour, if the community as a whole can produce no forces sufficient to restrain their lower tendencies, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... as old as life, property and the pocket invented theft, late-born among the arts. It was not until avarice had devised many a cunning trick for the protection of wealth, until civilisation had multiplied the forms of portable property, that thieving became a liberal and an elegant profession. True, in pastoral society, the lawless man was eager to lift cattle, to break down the barrier between robbery and ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... us there is ample scope and need. There are the spectres of ignoble hopes, the lethal influences of a huge material civilisation wafted to us from over seas, which must be laid. Oh, that a protest might be made ere it becomes more difficult, ere this wild, beautiful land of ours be viewed only as a lure to draw money from the cockney tourist, and the immemorial traditions ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... civilisation of India was a concrete unity of many-sided developments in art, architecture, literature, religion, morals, and science so far as it was understood in those days. But the most important achievement of Indian thought was philosophy. It was regarded ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... only as a strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that we know radio-activity to-day. This—this is the dawn of a new day in human living. At the climax of that civilisation which had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover suddenly ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... records the experience of several lengthy visits paid by the author to Inishmaan and Aranmor, the chief islands of the Aran group. He gives an intimate account of the general manner of life on these islands, so isolated from civilisation, where the life is in some ways the most primitive that is left ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... and although it was with exceeding modesty of demeanour, still did they, on great occasions, expose their charms to the public gaze, for which error, no doubt if they had had souls, beautiful as they were, they would have been damned to all eternity. Civilisation, as Menou hath said, must extend both far and wide, before other nations will be so polished as to imitate us in the splendour, the security, and the happiness of our harems; and when I further ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... have been all poached out by the enlightened peasantry, to prevent the Cythrawl Sassenach (which means you, my little dear, your kith and kin, and signifies much the same as the Chinese Fan Quei) from coming bothering into Wales, with good tackle, and ready money, and civilisation, and common honesty, and other like things of which the Cymry stand in ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... consciousness without an opportunity of putting them to practical tests—until now, when the world is in the throes of a war crisis. And they attempt to apply their theories of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in a vast nation made up of various races in different stages of civilisation, only just entering upon full capitalist development, where the proletariat, the wage workers, constitute fewer than 20,000,000 out of a total population of 180,000,000! And yet there are supporters of the Bolsheviks in Britain ...
— Bolshevism: A Curse & Danger to the Workers • Henry William Lee
... career, Mr. Alfred Bates Richards says: "He has done more than any other six men, and is one of the best, noblest and truest that breathes. While not on active service or on sick leave he has been serving his country, humanity, science, and civilisation in other ways, by opening up lands hitherto unknown, and trying to do good wherever he went. He was the pioneer for all ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... difference, and was perhaps not even the chief difference, which existed between them. They sprang from different stocks. They spoke different languages. They had different national characters as strongly opposed as any two national characters in Europe. They were in widely different stages of civilisation. Between two such populations there could be little sympathy; and centuries of calamities and wrongs had generated a strong antipathy. The relation in which the minority stood to the majority resembled the relation in which ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a foe, kissing like Judas, denying like Peter, impure of thought, even where by physical bias or political prudence still pure in act, the woman of modern society is too often at once the feeblest and the foulest outcome of a false civilisation. Useless as a butterfly, corrupt as a canker, untrue to even lovers and friends because mentally incapable of comprehending what truth means, caring only for physical comfort and mental inclination, tired of living, but afraid of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... with Extracts from his Chronology of the Egyptians, with reference to the Exodus of the Israelites, revised by the Author. Dr. Lepsius, it may be mentioned, was at the head of the scientific expedition appointed by the King of Prussia to investigate the remains of ancient Egyptian and Ethiopian civilisation, still in preservation in the Nile valley and the adjacent countries; and in this cheap volume we have that accomplished traveller's own account of what that expedition was able ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various
... violence in a fundamentally different relation to man. Nothing can alter the fact that, the very moment woman resorts to violence, she places herself within the jurisdiction of an ethical law, which is as old as civilisation, and which ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... faded sign to indicate that it was the office of a Justice of the Peace—a pleasing collocation of words, to those who could divorce it from any technical significance—Justice, Peace—the seed and the flower of civilisation. ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... on, and conquest accompanied civilisation, and Art spread, or rather its products were carried by the victors among the vanquished from one country to another. And the customs of cultivation covered the face of the earth, so that all peoples continued to use ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... talents, for war especially, were considerable; and judged fairly—not as mated with an empty treasury, without other army than the capricious will of his subjects afforded, and amidst his bitterest foes in the jealous chiefs of his own country, against the disciplined force and comparative civilisation of the Saxon—but as compared with all the other princes of Wales, in warfare, to which he was habituated, and in which chances were even, the fallen son of Llewellyn had been the most renowned leader that Cymry had known since the ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... are tired of your Western civilisation," he said as he rose and helped her to her feet (his hands were long and delicate, and she grew breathless at the touch of them). "You must come along to my little city in the hills where the law is the sword ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... fatigue, we took a somewhat regretful look at that steam marvel of civilisation, which had brought us thus far on our journey, and to which we now bade farewell for a month, at least, for a much ruder and more ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... an easy task; for no more would be necessary than to put the similar roots, having the same meaning, side by side. But, unfortunately for the scholar who undertakes to prove the question, the Romans were in this island four hundred years, colonised it partly, and partly gave it their own form of civilisation. As before mentioned, the inhabitants adopted with avidity the Roman dress, language, and literature. That language must therefore be supposed to have entered deeply into the composition of the present Cumrian tongue. The sceptical examiner may therefore reasonably ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... bar to put prisoners to on his left. In the well in the middle is a table with benches round it. A few other benches are in disorder round the room. The autumn sun is shining warmly through the windows and the open door. The women, whose dress and speech are those of pioneers of civilisation in a territory of the United States of America, are seated round the table and on the benches, shucking nuts. The conversation is ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... nations, and bear an unceasing testimony to their religious sentiments. The world, instead of being external to the Church, was to be adopted by her and imbued with her ideas. The first, the doctrinal or intellectual part of the work, was chiefly performed in the Roman empire, in the midst of the civilisation of antiquity and of that unparalleled intellectual excitement which followed the presence of Christ on earth. There the faith was prepared for the world whilst the world was not yet ready to receive it. The empire in which was concentrated all the learning ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... game more plentiful; the rich meadows, the wide heaths and forests were more attractive than the heavy corn-lands and the sandy wastes of the older province. Here, in the deep seclusion of country life, the boy passed his first years; it was far removed from the bustle and turmoil of civilisation. Naugard, the nearest town, was five miles distant; communication was bad, for it was not till after 1815 that the Prussian Government began to construct highroads. In this distant province, life went on as in the olden days, little altered by the changes which ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... specially careful to avoid any semblance of a quarrel with the Methodist minister, and had in every way shown his willingness to regard Mr. Puddleham's flock as being equal to his own in the general gifts of civilisation. To Mr. Puddleham himself, he had been very civil, sending him fruit and vegetables out of the Vicarage garden, and lending him newspapers. When the little Puddlehams were born, Mrs. Fenwick always inquired after ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... in opposite camps, now and more often in the heart, both of them, of each living man—that the true human interest of history resides. The progress of industries, the growth of material and mechanical civilisation, are interesting, but they are not the most interesting. They have their reward in the increase of material comforts; but, unless we are mistaken about our nature, they do not highly concern us ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... statement that Gildas found security in this retreat appears to be an error. There still remain some fragments of a priory. The Flat Holm, 2 m. farther off, though of about the same circumference (1-1/2 m.), is a far less imposing object in the sea-scape, but is more amenable to the influences of civilisation. It is occupied by a lighthouse and a farm, and is sometimes made the excuse for a channel trip by visitors from the neighbouring watering-places, as it affords amongst other attractions ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... Celt, and Teuton. The chief difference which we notice between this older system and the conditions of modern agricultural life—for the manor was pre-eminently a rural organism—lies in the enormous part then played in the organisation of society by the idea of Tenure. For, through all Western civilisation, from the seventh century to the fourteenth, the personal equation was largely merged in the territorial. One and all, master and man, lord and tenant, were "tied to the soil." Within the manor there was first the land held in demesne, the "in-land"—this was the perquisite ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... tropics, the wild beasts would become fewer, the gloom would lighten, and the horror of the place would slowly lift. Yet as one emerges nearer to the edge of London, and nearer to the beautiful influence of the hills, the houses become uglier, the streets viler, the gloom deepens, the errors of civilisation stand bare to the ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... is her fairy knight," asked Stangrave, "whom one half hopes to see riding down from that grand old house which sulks there above among the beech-woods as if frowning on all the change and civilisation below!" ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... before him, save to get far away from any who could have had the least knowledge of him previously. No fugitive from justice ever felt more nervous haste. He pushed on, never pausing till he reached the very verge of civilisation in the far south-west. Not that he would be a hermit or misanthrope, but perchance find a people destitute of the gospel. He would bring it to them. He must preach Christ till death. This should be his joy and comfort; henceforth no other love ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... Berger de Xivrey, Traditions Teratologiques; also Hippeau's edition of the Bestiare de Guillaume de Normandie, Caen, 1852, and such medieaval books of Exempla as the Lumen Naturae; also Hoefer, Histoire de la Zoologie; also Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilisation Francaise, Paris, 1885, vol i, pp. 368, 369; also Cardinal Pitra, preface to the Spicilegium Solismense, Paris, 1885, passim; also Carus, Geschichte der Zoologie; and for an admirable summary, the article Physiologus ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... that we all really feel that this Meredithian passage is not so insolently masculine as in mere logic it would seem? I think it is for this simple reason: that there is something about Meredith making us feel that it is not woman he disbelieves in, but civilisation. It is a dark undemonstrated feeling that Meredith would really be rather sorry if woman were civilised by man—or by anything else. When we have got that, we have got the real Pagan—the man ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... prehensile thing, but it is too far from his eyes; the elephant's trunk is better, and it is probably to their trunks that the elephants owe their sagacity. It is here that the bee, in spite of her wings, has failed. She has a high civilisation, but it is one whose equilibrium appears to have been already attained; the appearance is a false one, for the bee changes, though more slowly than man can watch her; but the reason of the very gradual nature of the change ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... may command more or less respect, the deep-rooted feeling is a sense of the intrinsic superiority of the Middle Kingdom and its sons to the barbaric subjects of a vague territory known as the "Kingdom without"—that is, without the pale of the ancient civilisation. By grace, the Christian will welcome you as a fellow-subject of the Kingdom of God, but on this ground only, and on no preconceived assumption of your ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... rubbish-heap; the jagged, splintered boles of leafless trees rose in every direction from heaps of brass shell-cases, of tin cans, of bits of uniform and equipment. The wind came in puffs laden with an odour as of dead rats in an attic. And this was what all the centuries of civilisation had struggled for. For this had generations worn away their lives in mines and factories and forges, in fields and workshops, toiling, screwing higher and higher the tension of their minds and muscles, polishing brighter and brighter the mirror of ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... say that the religion of the Greeks was the spiritual side of their political life. And we must add that in one respect their religion pointed the way to a higher political achievement than they were ever able to realise in fact. One fatal defect of the Greek civilisation, as is familiar to students of their history, was the failure of the various independent city states to coalesce into a single harmonious whole. But the tendency of religion was to obviate this defect. We find, for example, that at one time or another ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... France during the early middle ages had far outstripped the Northern provinces in art, learning, and the refinements of civilisation. Roman culture had made its way into Southern Gaul at an early date and had been readily accepted by the inhabitants, while Marseilles and Narbonne had also known something of Greek civilisation. Bordeaux, Toulouse, Arles, Lyons and other towns were flourishing and ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... right. He says that Civilisation is in the melting-pot and that all thinking men can read the writing on ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... contributing to put a stop to the outbreak. That was not done till some time afterwards, when, by a general amnesty, and a guarantee being given for their safety, the Maroons were induced to break up their confederacy, and return within the pale of civilisation. ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... the old man pompously, "the London pavements are a disgrace to civilisation! Don't tell me that I am crazy. Don't tell me it is the best-paved city in the world. I've heard that statement before, and I stick to my own opinion. My opinion, I trust, sir, is worth as much as any other man's. It is a wonder there are not ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... stairways; crossed the park, which was in that place narrow; and plunged upon the farther side into the rude shelter of the forest. So, at a bound, she left the discretion and the cheerful lamps of palace evenings; ceased utterly to be a sovereign lady; and, falling from the whole height of civilisation, ran forth into the woods, a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Honesty remaining in him can have much relish for the calling of a Spy. I tried hard to persuade myself that this was a kind of Diplomatic Employment; that I was intrusted with Secrets of State; and that by faithfully carrying out my Instructions, I was serving the cause of Civilisation, and in my humble way helping to maintain the Peace of Europe. For in all ages there have been, and in all to come there must be, sober and discreet Persons to act as Emissaries, to inquire into the conditions of the People, and bring back Tidings of the Nakedness or Fertility of the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... illustrates Mr. Nasmyth's own definition of engineering; namely, common sense applied to the use of materials. In his case, common sense has been more especially applied to facilitating and perfecting work by means of Machine Tools. Civilisation began with tools; and every step in advance has been accomplished through their improvement. Handicraft labour, in bone, stone, or wood, was the first stage in the development of man's power; and ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... wholly removed, inasmuch as some obscurity must be admitted to remain as to the manner in which the structure of the larva is aborted; this obscurity is likely to remain till we know more of the early history of civilisation among bees than I can find that we know at present; but I believe the difficulty was reduced to such proportions as to make it little likely to be felt in comparison with that of attributing instinct to any other cause than inherited habit, or inherited ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... Peralta, who had lately been "very frantic," "through too much hardship and melancholy," was there set on shore, after his long captivity. Don Juan, the captain of the "Money-Ship," was landed with him. Perhaps the two fought together, on the point of honour, as soon as they had returned to swords and civilisation. ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... on; and this is the reason why there is so little improvement in the world, because men do not ask God to improve their hearts and stir up their wills. I say, very little improvement. Men talk loudly of the enlightenment of the age, and the progress of the species, and the spread of civilisation, and so forth: but when I read old books, and compare old times with these, I confess I do not see so much of it as all this hopeful talk would lead me to expect. Men in general have grown more prudent, more ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... 200,000,000 inhabitants of more or less dark-skinned races. It was long a terra incognita, but it is now being explored in all directions, and attempts are everywhere made to bring it within the circuit of civilisation. It is being parcelled out by European nations, chiefly Britain, France, and Germany, and with more zeal and appliance of resource ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of the Sung-kiang force, and that I am now a Mandarin. I have taken the step on consideration. I think that any one who contributes to putting down this rebellion fulfils a humane task, and I also think tends a great deal to open China to civilisation. I will not act rashly, and I trust to be able soon to return to England; at the same time, I will remember your and my father's wishes, and endeavour to remain as short a time as possible. I can say that if I had not accepted the command, I believe the force would have broken up, ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... puppy, in that coat and topper. No mistaking you for anything but what you are—the sickly product of an effete civilisation. Don't be frightened, you haven't gone off in the least; you're a little pale, but prettier ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... bedroom, and to supply them with toilette requisites according to her own very limited notions and possessions. The Dame was a very homely, hard-featured lady, deaf, and extremely fat and heavy, one of the old uncultivated rustic gentry who had lagged far behind the general civilisation of the country, and regarded all refinements as effeminate French vanities. She believed, likewise, all that was said against Queen Mary, whom she looked on as barely restrained from plunging a dagger into Elizabeth's ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have not empires before now only been saved from oblivion by a few buried potsherds, and whole races of mankind by childish picture-scratchings on a reindeer bone? Tout lasse, tout passe, tout casse. The individual—his arts, his possessions, his religion, his civilisation—is always as an envelope, merely, to be torn asunder and cast away. Nothing subsists, nothing endures but life itself, endlessly self-renewed, endlessly one, through the endless divergencies of its manifestations. And, as Julius March was to find, hide from it, deny it, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... come to the crown of the animal kingdom—man. And in the Sikkim Himalaya are to be found men of all the stages of civilisation from the most primitive to the most advanced. Inhabiting the forests at the foot of the mountains are certain jungle peoples of extreme interest simply by reason of their primitiveness. They represent the ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... and this was the greatest step in the making of Scotland. The Celtic dynasty now held the most fertile district between Forth and Tweed, a district already English in blood and speech, the centre and focus of the English civilisation accepted by the Celtic kings. Under this Malcolm, too, his grandson, Duncan, became ruler of ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... under his own movable roof; he has shared the hospitality of the desert caravan; he has taken his turn in the night-watch against thieves; and he has dwelt as a lodger in their more permanent abodes of trellis-work and felt. As a picture of the raw material from which Chinese civilisation has been finally evolved—the primitive stage of Tartar nomad communities—these sketches possess a great sociological value; while from the point of view of the reader for amusement alone they are full of liveliness and local colouring.' ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... collections de mineralogie, d'entomologie, de botanique, etc. Elle s'est d'ailleurs occupee avec succes de l'application des sciences et des arts a l'industrie. C'est, en un mot, une nature et une civilisation differentes des ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... the frivolous and useless thing which Mr. Bright, and Mr. Frederic Harrison, and many other liberals are apt to call it, has a very important function to fulfil for mankind. And this function is particularly [15] important in our modern world, of which the whole civilisation is, to a much greater degree than the civilisation of Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and tends constantly to become more so. But above all in our own country has culture a weighty part to perform, because here that mechanical ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... exceptions have been much animadverted upon by unthinking persons. I have shown that according to the code of morality, that is in vogue among people whose Christianity and civilisation are unquestionable, a lie may sometimes be honourable. However casuists may argue, the world is agreed that a lie for saving life and even property under certain circumstances, and for screening the honour of a confiding woman, is not inexcusable. The goldsmith's son who ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... softer type of character, and may hope that it will make civilisation more humane and compassionate. . . . Unfortunately, experience shows that none is so cruel as the disillusioned sentimentalist. He thinks that he can break or ignore nature's laws with impunity; and then, when he finds that nature has no sentiment, he rages like a mad dog ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... of history which are now, for the most part, only to be found in a few scarce works of reference, rarely consulted, except by students. It will be obvious that such a task has presented difficulties, since he who undertakes it must for a time forget his civilisation, and think with the mind and speak with the voice of a Zulu of the old regime. All the horrors perpetrated by the Zulu tyrants cannot be published in this polite age of melanite and torpedoes; their details have, therefore, been ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... which I believe it describes the transformation, or rather the evolution, of a primitive character into a character with an intelligence of perception and a sympathy which is generally supposed to be the outcome of long processes of civilisation and culture. The book has so many friends—this has been sufficiently established by the very large sale it has had in cheap editions—that I am still disposed to feel it was an inevitable manifestation in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Poetry at this as at all times was a more or less unconscious mirror of the genius of the age; and the brave and admirable spirit of Enquiry which made the eighteenth century the turning-time in European civilisation is reflected faithfully in its verse. An intelligent reader will find the influence of Newton as markedly in the poems of Pope, as of Elizabeth in the plays of Shakespeare. On this great subject, however, these indications must ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... the wide grasp of the all-absorbing metropolis, we may adduce the horror of the Pentonvillians at the proposed new cattle-market. How many years ago is it since Copenhagen Fields were almost beyond the regions of civilisation, known only as a prairie lying between London and the Copenhagen Tea-gardens? Let any one, whose knowledge of the district goes back fifteen or twenty years, answer this question. But now, Copenhagen House itself is brought within the limits ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... which meant, in the words of the Prime Minister of England, "Hell let loose." He had never heard any one speak of it as something to be desired. At best it was only a "ghastly necessity," something which should not be resorted to until "all the resources of civilisation were exhausted." ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... themselves of the hats of civilisation, and tied round their heads the red handkerchiefs proper to their profession; then he gave her the wheel, and going to the cabin, came back with a black flag neatly embroidered in white with a skull and crossbones, Dorothy's work, and sternly ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson |
