"Ethical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... proclamations poured forth by the Communist authorities. They comprised not only decrees, but sensational stories of victories over the Versailles troops, denunciations of the Versailles government, and even elaborate legal arguments, including a not intemperate discussion of the ethical question whether citizens who were not adherents of the Commune should be entitled to the right of suffrage. The conclusion was that they should not. The lack of humor on the part of the authorities was shown by ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... not in virtue of anything he wrote which can be properly called Deism. Shaftesbury in his ethical and Bolingbroke in his political writings may perhaps be termed classical writers, but neither of them ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... self-restraint. Of these sentiments, all easily provoked, but not always easy to understand, the last had the greatest moral efficiency—because Mr Verloc was good. His mother and his sister had established that ethical fact on an unshakable foundation. They had established, erected, consecrated it behind Mr Verloc's back, for reasons that had nothing to do with abstract morality. And Mr Verloc was not aware of it. It is but bare justice to him to say that he had no notion of appearing ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... doubt, that through him suicide has become the normal way out of our troubles when these are beyond remedy. I will not express any opinion as to the ethical significance of this admitted result of his teaching, which many of us still find it so hard to reconcile ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... of Douglass extracts are given from letters of distinguished contemporaries who knew the orator. Colonel T.W. Higginson writes thus: "I have hardly heard his equal, in grasp upon an audience, in dramatic presentation, in striking at the pith of an ethical question, and in single [signal] illustrations and examples." Another writes, in reference to the impromptu speech delivered at the meeting at Rochester on the death of Lincoln: "I have heard Webster and Clay in their best moments, Channing and Beecher ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... as things of which Europe is not worthy; and take them away with him to a really careful museum, situated dangerously near Clapham. Many of the great men of that generation, indeed, had a sort of divided mind; an ethical headache which was literally a "splitting headache"; for there was a schism in the sympathies. When these men looked at some historic object, like the Catholic Church or the French Revolution, they did not know whether they loved or hated it most. Carlyle's two eyes ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... church and state in this country we have very largely neglected all effort toward religious education in our public schools, and even ethical training has been more or less of a secondary objective until very recently. A growing appreciation of the inadequacy of the ordinary Sunday school has led to a movement for giving systematic instruction and training in religious ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... moment's notice. He was never tired of repeating that 'character is formed by circumstances'; from which he placidly infers that no man deserves praise or blame for his conduct. The inference, it must be admitted, is an awkward one in any ethical system. It represents, probably, Owen's most serious objection to the religions of the world. The ultimate aim of the priest is to save men's souls; and sin means conduct which leads to supernatural punishment. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... philosophical. Cowfold, though it knew nothing, or next to nothing of abstractions, took immense interest in the creatures in which they were embodied. It would have turned a deaf ear to any debate on the nature of ethical obligation; but it was very keen indeed in apportioning blame to its neighbours who had sinned, and in deciding how far they had gone wrong. Cowfold in other words believed that flesh and blood, and not ideas, are the school and the religion for most of us, and that we learn a ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... ROMANTIC EPIC.—The Faerie Queene is the most perfect type which we have in English of the purely romantic poem. Four elements enter into its composition: "it is pastoral by association, chivalrous by temper, ethical by tendency, and allegorical by treatment" (Renton). Its subject was taken from the old cycle of Arthurian legends, which were brightened with the terrorless magic of Ariosto and Tasso. The scene of the adventures is laid in the enchanted forests and castles of the far away and unreal fairyland ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... of the emotion which he felt on hearing the music in the Portian basilica at Milan in the year 386 has always seemed to me a good illustration of the relativity of musical expression; I mean how much more its ethical significance depends on the musical experience of the hearer, than on any special accomplishment or intrinsic development of the art. Knowing of what kind that music must have been and how few resources of expression it can have had,—being rudimental in form, without ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... the Armed Forces. Whether war is an ethical institution is not a matter within the purview of the armed forces. Their primary function is, when called upon to do so, to support and, within the sphere of military effort, to enforce the policy of the ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... or dread—nothing beyond a few old stories, some Pagan, some Christian, which he has picked up from time to time, and to which he holds—much as a child holds to its fairy tales—uncritically and indifferently. Ethical distinctions are as unknown to him as to a kitten or a magpie. He is kindly by nature, and always anxious to please those who treat him well, and to win their affection. But the distinction between affection and esteem is one which ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... not written explicitly upon Ethics. In some quarters, however, so much has been made of Bergson as a supporter of certain ethical tendencies and certain social movements, that we must examine this question of ethical and political implications and try to ascertain how far this use ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... are chiefly a republication of addresses delivered to the Ethical Societies of London. Some have previously appeared in the International Journal of Ethics, the National Review, and the Contemporary Review. The author has to thank the proprietors of these periodicals for their consent to ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... regarding man as a subject of observation from whatever point of view—theological, historical, ethical, or philosophic—we find a general law of necessity to which he (like all that exists) is subject. But regarding him from within ourselves as what we are conscious of, we feel ourselves ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... change can efface it. Curiosity in those things which do not concern us is wrong. Ethics disavows the practice, though philosophy sustains it. Perhaps in this instance Maurice was philosophical, not ethical. Perhaps he wanted to hear the woman's voice again, which was excusable. Perhaps it was neither the one nor the other, but fate, which directed his footsteps. Certain it is that the subsequent adventures would never have ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... very simple," I answered. "I had not eaten anything for two days, and I detected the odor of that exquisite filet. Not the slightest ethical significance in ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... what we consider a fair and reasonable profit on our remedies. Our entire institution is conducted on the very highest and most ethical medical basis. The Physicians comprising our Consulting Staff are men of the best standing, of fine education, and having special experience in this branch of medical science; our remedies are made ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... why he should not indulge a very natural desire for Cappy's ewe lamb—for a singularly direct and forceful individual was Matthew. It was his creed to take what he could get away with, provided that in the taking he broke no moral, legal or ethical code; and if any thought of the apparent incongruity of a sailor's aspiring to the hand of a millionaire shipowner's daughter had occurred to him—which, by the way, it had not—he would doubtless have analyzed ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... of being a political State and enforcing its communal principle only in opposition to these its elements. Consequently Hegel defines the relation of the political State to religion quite correctly when he says: "If the State is to have reality as the ethical, self-conscious realization of spirit, it must be distinguished from the form of authority and faith. But this distinction arises only in so far as the ecclesiastical side is in itself divided into several churches. Then only is the State seen to be superior ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... the educational, which are very numerous, reading circles, literary clubs galore, free classes in chemistry, French, psychology, philosophy, etc., and all such organizations as the Jewish Culture Club, the Young People's Ethical Society, the Longan Parliamentary Class, and the Industrial and Business Women's Educational leagues. Religious bodies are parish meetings, committees of mission boards, and such organizations as the Theosophical Society; charitable or civic activities include the National Conference ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... pierced to the heart of the faith and "the miracle" of its survival. What was it other than the ever-present, ever-vivifying spirit itself, which cannot die,—the religious and ethical zeal which fires the whole history of the people, and of which she herself felt the living glow within her own soul? She had come upon the secret and the genius of Judaism,—that absolute interpenetration and transfusion of spirit with body and substance ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... a word of broader meaning than "morality," for it comprehends not only matters of ethical right and wrong, but the general temper and habit of mind of a people as ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... 12. Dorian. There were several 'modes' in Greek music, of which the chief were Dorian, Phrygian, and Lydian. Each was supposed to possess certain definite ethical characteristics. Dorian music was martial and manly. ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... thing that will draw men's hearts, that will satisfy men's needs, that will bind men to Him with cords of love. 'I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.' So, wherever you get what they call an ethical gospel which deals with moralities, and does not impart the power that will vitalise moralities, and make them into thankful service and sacrifices, in return for the great Sacrifice; wherever you get a gospel that falters in its enunciation of the sufferings of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... this field, but the author has no brief for one method as against the others. Each person must determine his own principles of action on the basis of his conception of the nature of the universe and his own scale of ethical values. ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... colleges, the one ethical principle kept before the athlete by his associates is this: Never break training rules. The pitcher who smokes a cigarette throws away his game. The punter who spends the night at a dance loses his one chance of making a goal. The sprinter who takes the glass of convivial beer ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... bring ourselves to study the structure and the tissues and the comparative anatomy of Institutions, and to go through all the drudgery which sluggards loathe and fools deride, the light of truth will be dim for us all; our Ethical, equally with our political Philosophy must remain in a condition of hopeless sterility. Nevertheless History too has her mission, though her time has not yet come. It will not always be that the past will be to ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... the sober elegance of his dress and an aristocratic air that was natural to him showed that the finer professional virtues had been cultivated in the midst of a life of frivolous temptations. These temptations had been no more of a disturbance to his ethical and spiritual nature than the academic honors, the financial successes, the numerous editions that had been his. Withal he was an awfully good fellow, for, after having talked at great length with me, he ended ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... different view and makes the moral or ethical faculties supreme, in development and culture, the intellect being the instruments for acquiring facts and the propensities the steam to bring about the desired results. According to his views of man, our emotional faculties are of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... Dene liked getting his own way. That morning he had resolutely brushed aside every objection, ethical or material, that had been advanced. To Malcolm Sage he considered that he owed a lot,* and with all the aggressiveness of his nature, he overwhelmed and engulfed objection and protest alike. To this was added the fact that the idea was his wife's, ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... prefers the first conception, though he might contend that his hypothesis is compatible with either of the three. That it is also compatible with an atheistic or pantheistic conception of the universe is an objection which, being shared by all physical science, and some ethical or moral, cannot specially be urged against Darwin's system. As he rejects spontaneous generation, and admits of intervention at the beginning of organic life, and probably in more than one instance, he is not wholly excluded from adopting the middle ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... he instinctively felt to lie in the creation of novel forms of beauty. Some peculiarities, either in his early education, or in the nature of his intellect, had tinged with what is termed materialism all his ethical speculations; and it was this bias, perhaps, which led him to believe that the most advantageous at least, if not the sole legitimate field for the poetic exercise, lies in the creation of novel moods of purely physical loveliness. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... view of the significance which Turner, with whom Ruskin stood in such close connexion, ascribed to it from the standpoint of the artist. For the way in which Ruskin in his Modern Painters speaks of the effect of the modern scientific concept of colours upon the ethical-religious feeling of man, shows that he deplores the lack of just what Goethe had long since achieved in his Farbenlehre where, starting with purely physical observations, he had been able to develop from them ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... enjoy them. No doubt we have a love of variety; but apart from that, we rather delight to have superiors and inferiors. It is pleasant to have some one to whom we can look up, as better endowed than ourselves; and it is pleasant to have others who can look up to us. And our best and most ethical judgment approves of this feeling. In particular, there is no feeling so ennobling as reverence; but there would be no proper place for reverence if we were equal. It would not, therefore, be easy to think that an ideal state ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... the profoundest esthetical and ethical significance, which might as well be disposed of now, so far as this discussion is concerned, regardless of the symmetrical continuity of the argument. There is a vast deal of ugly music in "Salome,"—music that offends ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... almost similar destiny. The latitude of morals persisted,— though with less ostentation: it has latterly contracted under the pressure of necessity rather than through any other influences. Certain ethical principles thought essential to social integrity elsewhere have always been largely relaxed in the tropics; and—excepting, perhaps, Santo Domingo—the moral standard in Martinique was not higher than in the other French coloniei. Outward decorum might be to some degree maintained; but ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... dwell on the Odyssean novelties in vocabulary, which were naturally employed by a poet who had to sing of peace, not of war, and whose epic, as Aristotle says, is "ethical," not military. The poet's rich vocabulary is appropriate to his novel ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... therefore reasoned that if the jury returned a verdict of "Not Guilty," his client's alternative confession could be written off as an obvious mistake; on the other hand, if he were found "Guilty," the fact of confession would be an ethical asset towards securing for him a lenient view ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... be obvious that the aim of the present book makes it both superfluous and inappropriate to discuss the vexed problems connected with the origins of the Religion of Israel, its aspects in primitive times, its passage through a national to an ethical monotheism, its expansion into the universalism of the second Isaiah. What concerns us here is merely the legacy which the Religion of Israel bequeathed to Judaism as we have defined it. This legacy and the manner in which ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... LETTER ALPHA}) The infirmity of human nature flows from four separate and distinct sources: (1) concupiscence (fomes peccati); (2) imperfection of the ethical judgment (imperfectio iudicii); (3) inconstancy of the will (inconstantia voluntatis); and (4) the weariness caused by continued resistance to temptation. In view of these agencies and their combined ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... and his knowledge of Judaism, he proves that the Jewish religion is not a rigid block of unalterable notions, but rather a body of ethical and philosophical teachings constantly undergoing a process of evolution, and changing its aspect according to the times and the environment. If this doctrine is the quintessence of the national genius of the Jew, it is nevertheless accessible, in theory and in practice, to ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... out of a full heart, with the hope that it might foster the love and appreciation of birds, and that the boy's sacrifice of his precious homing pigeon to his country at a time of peril might carry an ethical appeal to ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... glanced away. "All very ethical, of course. Well, in that case, we'll have to go to work." He pulled a fine chain from a case at his belt, and walked over to his ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... were the teachers of morality as well as of religion. Of their ethical teaching a valuable specimen is preserved in the Triads of the Welsh Bards, and from this we may gather that their views of moral rectitude were on the whole just, and that they held and inculcated many very noble and valuable principles of conduct. They were also ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... life embodied in a story that combines the utile and the dulce. This fable should not only please the reader by its succession of coherent events, and by the variety of its persons and fortunes, but should touch by appeals to the common kinship of humanity, and teach worldly conduct of ethical lessons by particular incidents, as well as by the general development. And when this end is attained, whether by design or instinct, technical rules are readily forgotten; even the great rule of unity of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... ratiocinative fallacies generally, the mere verbal juggle at first escapes detection). Such, again, was Euler's argument, that minus multiplied by minus gives plus, because it could not give the same as minus multiplied by plus, which gives minus. So, some ethical writers begin by assuming, that certain general sentiments are the natural sentiments of mankind, and thence argue that any which differ are morbid and unnatural. Thus, lastly, Hobbes and Rousseau rested the existence of government and law on a supposed ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... barbaric; and though education and culture may modify, they cannot change their predominant characteristics—a continual subordination of justice to expediency, an indifference to suffering, a disdain of ethical principles, a laxity of morals, and a complete ignorance of economics. The evil qualities of military hierarchies are always the same. The results of their rule are universally unfortunate. The degree may vary with ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... still represents for us the Japanese wife, worshipfully loving;—Hikoboshi appears to us with none of the luminosity of the god, but as the young Japanese husband of the sixth or seventh century, before Chinese ethical convention had begun to exercise its restraint upon life and literature. Also these poems interest us by their expression of the early feeling for natural beauty. In them we find the scenery and the seasons of Japan transported to the Blue Plain of High ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... and useful writer, Dr. Washington Gladden, "Applied Christianity." The salutary conviction that political economy cannot be relied on by itself to adjust all the intricate relations of men under modern conditions of life, that the ethical questions that arise are not going to solve themselves automatically by the law of demand and supply, that the gospel and the church and the Spirit of Christ have somewhat to do in the matter, has been settling itself ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... finds its best development when of a religious character. While operatic and even orchestral music in general, is written more for the sake of giving pleasure than with any clearly defined ethical purpose, the music of the Mass and Passion, religious ceremonies, entering into man's profoundest experiences, is given for spiritual enlightenment, and, being a part of the soul's needs, demands and receives higher treatment and more serious consideration than secular music. The very frame ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... only of a kind to enchain the attention of children. They also illustrate well the close affinity between the two chief branches of the great Aryan race, and are of considerable ethical value, reflecting, as they do, the philosophy of self-realisation which lies at the root of Hindu culture. They have been used from time immemorial by the best teachers of India as a means of building ...
— Hindu Tales from the Sanskrit • S. M. Mitra and Nancy Bell
... Wellington, public sentiment all over the country became every day more favorable to the views of the conspirators. The nation was rushing forward with giant strides toward colossal wealth and world-dominion, before the exigencies of which mere abstract ethical theories must not be permitted to stand. The same argument that justified the conquest of an inferior nation could not be denied to those who sought the suppression of an inferior race. In the South, an obscure jealousy of the negro's ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... over the man. She saw him with other eyes than Elliot's. The Government official admired him tremendously. Macdonald was an empire-builder. He blazed trails for others to follow in safety. But Gordon could guess how callously his path was strewn with brutality, with the effects of an ethical color-blindness largely selfish, though even he did not know that the man's primitive jungle code of wolf eat wolf had played havoc with Sheba's young life many ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... knowing that the Church must have an explanation to give, if she would only give it, and as myself unable to find any, even the most far-fetched, that can bring what we see at Oropa, Loreto and elsewhere into harmony with modern conscience, either intellectual or ethical. ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... terrible tradition of a lady who had haggled about the sum demanded and had received her dog's head in a parcel. Miss Barrett was eager to part with her six guineas and rescue her faithful companion from misery. Was this an occasion for preaching from ethical heights the sin of making a composition with evil-doers? Yet Browning, still "a fighter" and armed with desperate logic, must needs declaim vehemently against the iniquity of such a bargain. It is something to rejoice at that he was dexterously worsted in argument, being compelled to admit ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... made his way to the door three people stopped him, and he answered them heartily enough, but with an air of hurry which he would not have dreamed of showing to people of his own class. One was a little schoolmistress who told him with a sort of feverish meekness that she was troubled because an Ethical Lecturer had said that Dickens was not really Progressive; but she thought he was Progressive; and surely he was Progressive. Of what being Progressive was she had no more notion than a whale. The second ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... base their power to annul a legislative act on anything contained in the Constitution itself. If we accept this view of the matter, legislation must conform not only to the Constitution as interpreted by the judiciary, but to the political and ethical views of the latter as well. The President and Congress derive their authority from the Constitution, but the judiciary claims, as we have seen, a control over legislation not conferred by the Constitution itself. Yet, while laying claim to powers ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... a part of the general moral and religious quickening we have mentioned as beginning about 1825, and revealing itself in revivals, missions, a religious press, and belief in the end of the world as approaching. The ethical teaching of the great German philosopher, Emanuel Kant, denouncing all use of man as an instrument, began to take effect in America through the writings of Coleridge. Hatred of slavery was gradually intensified and spread. In 1832 rose the New England Anti-Slavery Society. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... by their fellows. They could see opportunities where others took the opposite view, and they had the courage of their convictions. They had standards of their own which they lived up to, and these standards differed widely from the ethical ideas of the majority. ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... films in the movies in behalf of Sunset Soap, oddly enough, seemed to enhance my scientific reputation. Even such austere purists as Guilford, the Cubist poet, congratulated me upon my fearless independence of ethical tradition. ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... goodness, at least with the feelings or emotions which enter into these ideals. You thus lay a basis in feeling and emotion on which may be built a truly manly character at a later period—without such a basis you can accomplish nothing ethical, now or at any future time. But when the recipient stage is past, and boys begin to assert themselves, they have a tendency to resist, if not to resent, professedly moral and religious teaching; and this chiefly because it then comes ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... the problem with all of Lloyd's satires except The Methodist, and the same as the problem with almost all satires between Pope and Burns or Blake. The satirist seems unwilling to probe, to find out what are the political, ethical, psychological, or aesthetic forces that cause the problems which the satirist condemns, and to recommend what can be done to change these forces. If the satirist notes any pattern at all, it is one of ineffective, ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... of mankind. Let us then hold its form to our imagination, pearly white as the palaces of the South, straight in its construction as rectitude, and let us present it to an admiring world, not only for aesthetic culture but ethical grandeur, religious progress, and political righteousness; and let us say to all, be he high or low, "who touches a stone in yon God-given edifice" is guilty of vandalism, is an iconoclast not at any time to be tolerated. He is tampering with the rights and privileges of a worthy ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... disposed to believe, however, that the fault is not wholly one of art. The conditions with which education has to contend are essentially hypothetical. It may be that the laws of heredity and psychology, when fixed, will evolve, at least, a more rational and a more ethical hypothesis. So far as eugenics is concerned with education, its limitation is defined and fixed. If the innate ability is not possessed by the child, no system of instruction, and no art of pedagogy, will ever draw it out. When the proper material is supplied by an adequate system of ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... only following the language of the original in the most offensive passages; but we see too plainly that he has dwelt too fondly upon those passages, and worked them up with especial care. We need not be prudish in our judgment of impassioned poetry; but when the passion has this false ring, the ethical coincides with the ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... lovers of adventure may revel in the masterly narrative of 'Tom Sawyer'. The artist may bestow his critical meed of approval upon the beauty of 'Joan of Arc'. The moralist may heartily validate the ethical lesson of 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'. Anyone may pay the tribute of irresistible explosions of laughter to the horse-play of 'Roughing It', the colossal extravagance of 'The Innocents Abroad', the irreverence and iconoclasm of that Yankee intruder into the hallowed confines of ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... italicised phrase is the first hypocritical phrase I ever wrote. I plead guilty to the grave offence of having suggested that a work of art is more than a work of art. The picture is only a work of art, and therefore void of all ethical signification. In writing the abominable phrase "but it is a lesson" I admitted as a truth the ridiculous contention that a work of art may influence a man's moral conduct; I admitted as a truth the grotesque contention that to read Mdlle. de Maupin may cause a man to ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... outstretched arms, and retains but a frigid recollection of Racine. With this literary taste is intimately connected an unhealthy and feverish condition of the moral sentiments, against which the lecturer directs his most eloquent attacks; so that his book may be commended for its sound ethical as well as critical instruction. The circumstance that the lectures were delivered before the University of Paris, renders this strain of remark still more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... a fierce seething whirlpool of conflicting passions, of hatred and bloodthirsty vengeance, had human crime plunged an entire community. We plume ourselves upon nineteenth century civilization, upon ethical advancement, upon Christian progress; we adorn our cathedrals, build temples for art treasures, and museums for science, and listen to preludes of the "music of the future;" and we shudder at the mention of vice, as at the remembrance of the tortures of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... blamed for man's own folly. In this physiological swing from desire to satiety, the apparent cause of man's weakness would be looked upon as the source of the evil—a thing unclean. There would be none of the ethical and altruistic element of modern "love" to protect her. Students agree that these elements in the modern sentiment have been evolved, "not from the sexual instinct, but from the companionship of the battlefield."[56] It is therefore probable that ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... and is mixed together like a magic potion from the most outlandish liquors, ores, and bones. It may even be added that it likewise conceals within itself an artistic element, one which, on aesthetic and ethical grounds, may be called imperatival—an element that acts in opposition to its purely scientific behaviour. Philology is composed of history just as much as of natural science or aesthetics: history, in so far as it endeavours to comprehend the manifestations of the individualities of peoples in ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... too busy, we were all too busy with our small plans and daily struggles, to take any interest in Locke or Gibbon or Hume, therefore the ageing philosopher sat forlornly among his faded, musty books, dreaming his days away on some abstruse ethical problem, or carving with his patient knife some quaintly ornate piece of furniture, while my own father (at the opposite pole of life) weeded his garden, read the daily paper or played cinch with the men at ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... delivered by Johnson from time to time contains a very full exposition of their ancient beliefs and mode of worship, together with the recent views introduced by Handsomelake, mingled up in one collection, presenting probably a better idea of their ethical and religious system than could be conveyed in any other manner, it is given entire, and will explain itself ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... Judge Hicks, who is a cross old man-eater, and get him to vote, and then I am going to call up Fleming, who would otherwise vote against us, and tell him that if he doesn't support our ticket, our grocery account will go elsewhere. I hate to do that like the mischief. It isn't considered ethical in national elections. But somehow we can't stop and discuss these fine points at 3.15 P.M. with our loving but excited wives. They don't seem to ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... may be to build, has much work yet remaining, as pioneer for the overgrowth of ages. It makes one step towards this object; it destroys error, and the roots of error. It leaves, what it is too often the duty of the reformer in political and ethical questions to leave, a vacancy. It reduces the mind to that freedom in which it would have acted, but for the misuse of words and signs, the instruments of its own creation. By signs, I would be understood in a wide sense, including what is properly meant by that term, and what I peculiarly ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... mathematical formul will not greatly assist in estimating the value of merchandise. A knowledge of general psychology will not insure ability in selecting employees. Even great proficiency in discoursing upon ethical theories does not protect one from the temptation ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... the spirit of Romanticism? What are the chief reasons for the popularity of The Ancient Mariner? Would you call this poem didactic? Select stanzas specially remarkable for melody, for beauty, for telling much in few words, for images of nature, for conveying an ethical lesson. What feeling almost unknown in early poetry is common in Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth's Hart-Leap Well, Burns's To a Mouse, On Seeing a Wounded Hare Limp by Me, A Winter Night, and Cowper's On a Goldfinch Starved ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... enough to recognize that all our thinking will be transformed under the influence of the struggle. It will be impossible for us, after the War, to do what we have done so widely hitherto: proclaim one range of ethical ideals and standards, and live to something widely different in practice. Either we shall have to abandon the standards, or bring our conduct measurably into harmony with them. We shall be unable longer to hold unconsciously in solution Christianity and ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... the ethical plane struck Phoebe speechless. She blushed and stammered, but had no reply to make. The seeming defeat really concealed a victory, however, for it instantly ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... purposes of dramatic unity results in action that is swift and throbbing with human and ethical interest. ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... not an unkind one; not a false one; a lover of order, labour, and peace. That, it seems to me, is enough to give me right to say all I care to say on ethical subjects; more, I could only tell definitely through details of autobiography such as none but prosperous and (in the simple sense of the word) faultless lives could justify;—and mine has been neither. Yet, if any one, skilled in reading the torn manuscripts ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... their very nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse. Whatever poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed he withheld and stifled. Surely it is no narrow and niggardly encomium to say, he is the great Poet of Reason, the first of Ethical authors in verse." Warton illustrated his critical positions by quoting freely not only from Spenser and Milton, but from recent poets, like Thomson, Gray, Collins, and Dyer. He testified that the Seasons had "been very instrumental ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... philosophy and science, from which, in my opinion, both have suffered ever since and are still suffering. The man of science, whatever his hopes may be, must lay them aside while he studies nature; and the philosopher, if he is to achieve truth must do the same. Ethical considerations can only legitimately appear when the truth has been ascertained: they can and should appear as determining our feeling towards the truth, and our manner of ordering our lives in view of the truth, but not as themselves dictating ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... a trumpery notion that uniformity in these things has any connection with the upbuilding of a people, has any ethical relation at all, and I have always wondered that so trumpery a notion should have so wide an influence. Moreover, is it not a little curious that, whereas the trend of biological evolution on its ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... land.' The salient features, therefore, of the Celtic conceptions of the other-world are their consonance with the suggestions made by Celtic scenery to the Celtic imagination, the vagueness and variability of these conceptions in different minds and in different moods, the absence of any ethical considerations beyond the incentive given to bravery by the thought of immortality, and the remarkable development of a sense of possible inter-relations between the two worlds, whether pacific or hostile. Such conceptions, as we see from Celtic legend, proved an admirable stimulus and provided ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... Sophoclean drama is always intensely personal, and is almost always centred in an individual destiny. In other words, it is not historical or mythical, but ethical. Single persons stand out magnificently in Aeschylus. But the action is always larger than any single life. Each tragedy or trilogy resembles the fragment of a sublime Epic poem. Mighty issues revolve about the scene, whether this is laid on Earth or amongst the Gods, issues far transcending ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... the Peace; the re-settlement, politically, of large tracts of Europe; the whole problem of disarmament, involving the future of British and American sea-power; the responsibilities of America in Europe; the economic adjustment of the world. But perhaps the greatest problem of all is the ethical one. How long shall we keep our wrath? Germany has done things in this war which shame civilisation, and seem to make a mockery of all ideas of human progress. But yet!—we must still believe in them; or the sun will go ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Leslie STEPHEN (1832-1904), K.C.B., Litt.D., at one time famous as a mountaineer; eminent literary editor and critic; President of the Ethical Soc.; editor of the earlier volumes of the "Dictionary of National Biography"; author of many works, including a biography of ...
— Noteworthy Families (Modern Science) • Francis Galton and Edgar Schuster
... talk with much solemnity of his ethical system, of which the Essay on Man is but a fragment, but we need not trouble ourselves about it. Dr. Johnson said about Clarissa Harlowe that the man who read it for the story might hang himself; so we may say ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... reader will gather a profounder and juster meaning, than the author himself detected in his fiction. I mean, of course, those works where some theory or some dogma is expressly taught, where a vein of scholastic, or political, or ethical matter alternates with a vein of narrative and fictitious matter. I dislike the whole genus. Either one is interested in your story, and then your philosophy is a bore; or one is not interested in it, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... admiringly; their hostess had expressed the views of them all. The company was looking now at the gray beard with glistening eyes; he had proved himself master of the argument, and all were desirous of proving their homage. Not one of the nice ethical points touched on had been missed; even the women had been eagerly listening, following, criticising. Here was a little company of people gathered together from rustic France, meeting, perhaps, for the first time at this board. And the conversation had, from the very beginning, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... leisured class; it narrows their horizon, but saves them from a vast deal of hysterical nonsense, social mischief and blatant self-advertising. Though great readers of English newspapers and magazines, and much influenced thereby in their social, ethical, and literary views, their interest in English and European politics is not very keen. A cherished article of their faith is that Russia is England's irreconcileable foe, and that war between the two is certain. Both their geographical isolation and their constitution ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... impatiently, and turned back to her desk, whereon lay the first lines of an essay on one of Addison's "Spectator" Essays. An extract from the essay had been given as subject, with the significant words: "Discuss this," inscribed beneath, and Mary's mood was not improved by the fact that with regard to ethical sentiments she seemed to have no idea to discuss. She was fifty times more at home with cut-and-dried figures about the correctness of which there could be no two opinions, whereas Etheldreda the Ready was invariably in the front rank for compositions. The two girls were indeed made "on different ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Philosophy wishes to discover the substantial purport, the real side of the divine idea, and to justify the so much despised reality of things; for Reason is the comprehension of the divine work. But as to what concerns the perversion, corruption, and ruin of religious, ethical, and moral purposes and states of society generally, it must be affirmed that, in their essence, these are infinite and eternal, but that the forms they assume may be of a limited order, and consequently may belong to the domain ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... one of the ablest among the French theologico-ethical writers, has published a translation of the Considerations on the Nature and Historical Developments of Christian Philosophy, by Dr. RITTER, of the University ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Catholics can make a presentable case for the theory that Shakespeare himself was a "crypto-Catholic," though the case is not more than presentable. Rome is abhorrent to Spenser, yet it is apparent that many of his ethical conceptions are infinitely nearer akin to those of mediaeval Catholicism than of the current Puritanism. Hooker, most earnest of Christians, was also the most liberal-minded of men. Jonson was half a Catholic. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... the warm defense she had made of Kilmeny, the heart of Moya was troubled. She knew him to be reckless. The boundaries of ethical conduct were not the same for him as for Lord Farquhar, for instance. He had told her as much in those summer days by the Gunnison when they were first adventuring forth to friendship. His views on property and on ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... one thing to consider ethical questions in relation to their bearing upon the future of the world at large, and another to have it suggested that you have been under observation yourself with a view to discovering if you found it possible to live up to your own ideas. It ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... was this: Pantheism does not place any one unconditional goal in front of man. The unbeliever passes his life interested in the many aims that man, as man, has. The Pantheist will therefore have difficulty in living a perfect ethical life. There are many cases in which, by deviating from the strictly ethic code, you do not harm anyone, you only injure your own soul. The Non-Believer will in this case only hardly, for the sake of impersonal ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... vegetarian, to whom abstinence from meat is part of his ethical code and his religion,—who would as soon think of taking his neighbour's purse as helping himself to a slice of beef,—is by nature a man of frugal habits and simple tastes. He prefers a plain diet, and knows that the purest enjoyment is to be found in fruits ...
— New Vegetarian Dishes • Mrs. Bowdich
... and perfect familiarity with the ways of the world and the weaknesses of average humanity, gave him an advantage which Lord John, with his nervous temperament, indifferent health, fastidious tastes, shy and rather distant bearing, and uncompromising convictions, never possessed. Russell's ethical fervour and practical energetic bent of mind divided him sharply from politicians who lived from hand to mouth, and were never consumed by a zeal for reform in one direction or another; and these qualities ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... mind, contain a great deal that is barbarous, perverse, or cruel; and to this infiltration into children's minds, generation after generation, of immoral, cruel, or foolish ideas is probably to be attributed in part the slow ethical progress of the race. The commonest justification of this thoughtless practice is that children do not apprehend the evil in the bad mental pictures with which we foolishly supply them; but what should we think of a mother who ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... egg instinctively stirs her spoon in one direction,—a form of movement usually recommended by no conscious association of ideas,—imagine that in the method of her action she is bearing testimony to the deepest ethical and ceremonial conceptions of remote ancestors; yet there can be no doubt that such is the case. Here also prevails the remarkable principle to which attention has already been directed. The mythology of the ancient worship has perished, but the notion which inspired the ritual practice has survived; ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... revealing of God—God manifest in the flesh. He had come into this world not merely to heal a few sick people, to bring back joy to a few darkened homes by the restoring of their dead, to formulate a system of moral and ethical teachings, to start a wave of kindliness and a ministry of mercy and love; he had come to save a lost world, to lift men up out of sinfulness ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... hand treatises abound which are exhaustive in their presentation of ethical theory. On the other hand books are plenty which give good moral advice with great elaborateness of detail. Each type of work has its place and function. The one is excellent mental gymnastic for the mature; the other admirable emotional pabulum for ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... age, sum up the complex life of nations and give them their distinctive features. They form that moral atmosphere which makes one period of history responsible and tributary to another. And indeed, in every human problem there is an ethical element. This imponderable factor, which often baffles our calculations, always remains the true, permanent driving force. For in the last analysis of human things, morality is what reachest ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... dominant. In the second volume essays dealing with philosophical questions, with abstract and concrete science, and with aesthetics, are brought together; but though all of them are tacitly evolutionary, their evolutionism is an incidental rather than a necessary trait. The ethical, political, and social essays composing the third volume, though mostly written from the evolution point of view, have for their more immediate purposes the enunciation of doctrines which are directly ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... develop the difference in point of ethical principles between the bourgeoisie and the laboring class, as well as the resulting difference in the political ideals of the two classes. The aristocratic principle assigned the individual his status on the basis of descent and social rank, whereas the principal for which the bourgeoisie ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... catholic and final truth. You forbid us to use our reason. You declare, in order to become Christians, that we have to accept authoritative statements. Oh, can't you see that an authoritative statement is just what an ethical person doesn't want? Belief—faith doesn't consist in the mere acceptance of a statement, but in something much higher—if we can achieve it. Acceptance of authority is not faith, it is mere credulity, it is to shirk the real issue. We must believe, if we believe at all, without authority. If we ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... responsibility of citizenship. And it is doing this in the genuine way, through the gospel of Christ, and education as the handmaid and helper of the gospel—that helper without which Christianity would be falsely conceived, and erroneously applied, and without which a failure would result in the ethical training of the colored race. The Association, by its educational work, is thus fulfilling the divine purpose in the call made to us ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 42, No. 3, March 1888 • Various
... theological questions he can with perfect consistency recognize the fact that the economic factor is the dominant, determining factor in every day human life, and the man who admits this simple truth believes in the Marxian Materialistic Conception of History. The political, legal, ethical and all human institutions have their roots in the economic soil, and any reform that does not go clear to the roots and affect the economic structure of society must necessarily be abortive. Any thing ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... with the anxiety he affected to dismiss, had no inclination to debate ethical problems. For a while he talked jestingly, and at length fell into a mood of silence. Nancy did not stay much longer; they parted without mention of the subject uppermost in ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... difference of opinion as to the nature of the person of Jesus, and as to His supernatural mission; but few would deny that, if they could feel sure that He was actually from above, they would accept His message because it contains all the ethical and spiritual knowledge that men need in ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... knew, likewise, that he was acting in conjunction with powerful financial interests in both North America and Europe. He knew him to be a man who would stop at no scruple, hesitate at no dictate of conscience, yield to no moral or ethical code; one who would play Rome against Wall Street, with his own unfortunate country as the stake; one who would hurl the fairest sons of Colombia at one another's throats to bulge his own coffers; and then wring from the wailing widows their ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... clear-sighted, loyal, personal, is its breath and immortality. Christ came, not to save himself, assuredly, but to save the world. His motive, his example, are every man's key to his own gifts and happiness. The ethical code he taught may no doubt be matched, here a piece and there a piece, out of other religions, other teachings and philosophies. Every thoughtful man born with a conscience must know a code of right and of pity to which he ought to conform; ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... to connect the Second and the Fourth. The First Treatise, or General Introduction, which has in it clear indication of a later date, may have been written last, when the whole design was brought into shape. Various reasons have been used for dating this final arrangement of the plan for an Ethical survey of human knowledge in fifteen treatises, and the suggested date is the year 1314. The whole work seems to have been planned. Besides the references to the Fifteenth Treatise, there is a glance forward to the matter of the Seventh Treatise ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... ethical, Fenton"—quietly—"but it certainly is good sense to shoot first and explain later when you're handling a chap like Avec. Better make ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... maturity. The allegorical drama had great influence, no doubt, in determining the scope and quality of the proper drama of comedy and tragedy; since, by its long discipline of the popular mind in abstract ideas, or in the generalized forms of ethical thought, it did much towards forming that public taste which required and prompted the drama to rise above a mere geography of facts into the empyrean of truth; and under the instructions of which Shakespeare learned ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson |
