"Moralist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... classes, have been encouraged,) in early habits of moral delinquency, with the intention of extricating himself in time from the dominion of his passions, and of becoming, like Henry, in after-life a pattern of religion and virtue, "the mirror of every grace and excellence." The divine, the moralist, and the historian know that authenticated instances of such sudden moral revolutions in character are very rare,—exceptions to the general rule; and among those exceptions we cannot be justified in numbering ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... thought above the dollar. You will find it prevailing everywhere on the Continent of Europe. To the German the United States is Dollarica, and the salient American personality, next to the policeman who takes bribes and the snuffling moralist in office, is the Dollarprinzessin. To the Italian the country is a sort of savage wilderness in which everything else, from religion to beauty and from decent repose to human life, is sacrificed to profit. Italians ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... alone passed his hands across his eyes. Why? Perhaps to wipe away a tear, perhaps to smother a sigh. Alas! we know that Moliere was a moralist, but he was not a philosopher. "'Tis all the same," he said, returning to the topic of the conversation, "Pellisson ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... moralist?" cried Joseph. "Mankind are forever in search of it, yet no man has ever found it." "What is happiness!" exclaimed she, with enthusiasm. "It is to have the power of ruling destiny—it is to stand upon the Himalaya of your might; when, stretching forth your imperial ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... man who deals in murder, must have very incorrect ways of thinking, and truly inaccurate principles; and so far from aiding and abetting him by pointing out his victim's hiding-place, as a great moralist[1] of Germany declared it to be every good man's duty to do, I would subscribe one shilling and sixpense to have him apprehended, which is more by eighteen-pence than the most eminent moralists have subscribed for that purpose. But what then? ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... man's folly," is as instructive a moralist in the end of the nineteenth century as in the beginning of the seventeenth. This, in a sense, is true of all great moralists, but the distinction of Earle, as I understand it, is that his characters are so often really people of our own day, with idiosyncracies that seem almost more applicable to ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... intemperance to be but the one result that, out of all those arising from the absence of legislation, was the most wretched. For him, drunkenness had a teeming and reproachful history anterior to the drunken stage; and he thought it the first duty of the moralist bent upon annihilating the gin-shop, to "strike deep and spare not" at those previous remediable evils. Certainly this was not the way of Mr. Cruikshank, any more than it is that of the many excellent people who take part in temperance agitations. His former ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... of the tenement-house district ten miles into the country in ten minutes, and thereby, through sunshine and fresh air and solitude, would solve a hundred problems that now vex the statesman and the moralist. A young botanist in Kansas has just announced his purpose to cross the milkweed and the strawberry, so that hereafter strawberries and cream may grow upon the same bush. His task may be doomed to failure, but that youth at least understands that thought turned ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... aid and guiding orders come; Who voluntary cares and labours take, The sufferers' servants for the service' sake; Of these a, part I give you—but a part, - Some hearts are hidden, some have not a heart. First let me praise—for so I best shall paint That pious moralist, that reasoning saint! Can I of worth like thine, Eusebius, speak? The man is willing, but the Muse is weak; - 'Tis thine to wait on woe! to soothe! to heal! With learning social, and polite with zeal: In thy pure breast although the passions dwell, They're train'd by virtue, and ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... with his additions, and so we go on until no one could say whether it is more his story or mine. In this story of Peter Pan, for instance, the bald narrative and most of the moral reflections are mine, though not all, for this boy can be a stern moralist; but the interesting bits about the ways and customs of babies in the bird-stage are mostly reminiscences of David's, recalled by pressing his hands to his temples ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... seems a matter of growth or of atrophy, according to your point of view. She grew more scientific, as she fancied, but she lost the freshness and inspiration of her earlier novels. The reason seems to be that her head was turned by her fame as a moralist and exponent of culture; so she forgot that she "was born to please," and attempted something else for which she had no particular ability: an historical novel in Romola, a drama in The Spanish Gypsy, a theory of social reform in Felix Holt, a study of the Hebrew ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... my dear fellow; as a banker you are excellent when you have any money to spare, but as a moralist you are ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... For the critics in the audience arose and condemned Shelley because he was a socialist, or because he was not one. Some of these critics seized upon the word libidinous. Oh! there was their clue! The lecturer arose like an outraged moralist to repudiate the scandalous charge of libidinousness. I was so disgusted I vowed I would never go to ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... were wont to display, and as the complement was to be returned substantially, he might be tempted to employ a superior artist on the occasion. It was chiefly under such circumstances that the powers of Johnson were called into action. By what arguments the stern moralist would have endeavoured to justify the deception, for it deserves no better name, is more than I can undertake to decide, and I submit the query to his ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.02.23 • Various
... went back to unburden himself of his unwelcome companion, Mackenzie could not suppress the thought that a good many unworthy notions hatched beneath that dignified white hair. But surely Dad might be excused by a more stringent moralist than the schoolmaster for abandoning poor Rabbit after her complexion had suffered in the ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... of His best captains—My five pickt men, He always called them—and placed those five captains and their thousands under them in the strongholds of the town. On the margin of this page our versatile author speaks of that step of Emmanuel's in the language of a philosopher, a moralist, and a divine. 'Five graces,' he says, 'pickt out of an abundance of common virtues.' This summing-up sentence stands on his stiff and dry margin. But in the rich and living flow of the text itself our author ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... the hot fit, loaded fire-arms in its hand! To the soldier himself, revolt is frightful, and oftenest perhaps pitiable; and yet so dangerous, it can only be hated, cannot be pitied. An anomalous class of mortals these poor Hired Killers! With a frankness, which to the Moralist in these times seems surprising, they have sworn to become machines; and nevertheless they are still partly men. Let no prudent person in authority remind them of this latter fact; but always let force, let injustice above all, stop short clearly on this side of the rebounding-point! ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... very important question for every moralist to answer. I see that last week England took carriage and horses and went out to Epsom Downs to see the Derby races. The race was won by Sir George Frederick; that is the name of the successful horse. All the particulars come by telegraph. There is much now being done for the turf in this country ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... curious study for the moralist to observe how the first thought of crime develops itself in the recesses of the human heart, and how this poisoned germ grows and stifles all other sentiments; an impressive lesson might be gathered from this struggle of two opposing principles, however weak it may be, in perverted natures. In cases ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... weakling, he seems pretty nearly to have lost the pluck and prowess which had won Guinevere's love under the walls of Carmelide, and of which the last display is in the great fight with his sister's lover, Sir Accolon. All this may not excuse Guinevere's conduct to the moralist; it certainly makes that conduct artistically probable and legitimate to the critic, as a foundation ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... moment the voice of the youthful moralist had failed her; but anxiety in behalf of her sister overcame her feelings, and she ended ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... standing. The earliest notice which I have found of him from an outsider is a passage in Crabb Robinson's diaries.[26] Robinson met him on July 10, 1811, and describes him as a 'pious sentimentalist and moralist,' who spoke of his prospects 'with more indifference than was perhaps right in a layman.' The notice is oddly characteristic. From 1814 my father was for nine years a member of the committee of the Church Missionary Society, after which time his occupations made attendance impossible. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... question. I thought of more than one incident in my own career which might be harshly received by a strict moralist. It is true that I have always been engaged on what I believed was a lawful task; but the due execution of that task had sometimes involved actions which I should have shrunk from in ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... summer evening, he steps into the estimable circle and mingles the smoke of his pipe with their refined conversation. This obviously is rather imaginative—Uncle Venner is a creation with a purpose. He is an original, a natural moralist, a philosopher; and Hawthorne, who knew perfectly what he was about in introducing him—Hawthorne always knew perfectly what he was about—wished to give in his person an example of humorous resignation and of a life reduced to the simplest and homeliest elements, ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... the little refined moralist; and Petrea left the table, the gentlemen, and a political discussion, which she had begun with Henrik, in order to sit on one side and relate to Gabriele the Travels of Thiodolf, which was one of the greatest enjoyments ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... produced by being whirled rapidly along in a post-chaise; but he who has in youth experienced the confident and independent feeling of a stout pedestrian in an interesting country, and during fine weather, will hold the taste of the great moralist ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... equal in standing, perhaps, he was thus obsequiously and gratuitously ducking. Such a state of things could not last. W—— must change the air of Oxford or be suffocated. He chose the former; and let the sturdy moralist, who strains the point of the filial duties as high as they can bear, censure the dereliction; he cannot estimate the struggle. I stood with W——, the last afternoon I ever saw him, under the eaves of his paternal dwelling. It was in the fine ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... on the bill which suspended for a year the securities for personal liberty, M. Royer-Collard, while supporting the Government, marked the independence of his character, and the mistrustful foresight of the moralist with regard to the power which the politician most desired to establish. He demanded that the arbitrary right of imprisonment should be entrusted only to a small number of functionaries of high rank, and that the most exalted of all, the Ministers, should in every case be considered ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... office, we may remark in passing, was a wonderful place—a place in which a moralist might find much material for mental mastication. Here, on an extensive series of shelves, were deposited in large quantities the evidences of man's defective memory; the sad proofs of human fallibility. There were caps and comforters ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... religion, it is really a system of sociology.... Confucius was a moralist and statesman, and his disciples are moralists and economists."—Education in Korea, by Mr. Pom K. Soh, of the Korean Embassy to the United States; Report of U.S. Commissioner of Education, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... that we can form a just estimate of the real reward of virtue, or the real punishment of vice. That the great are not as happy as they seem, that the external circumstances of fortune and rank do not constitute felicity, is asserted by every moralist: the historian can seldom, consistently with his dignity, pause to illustrate this truth; it is therefore to the biographer we must have recourse. After we have beheld splendid characters playing their ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... accountant in England can be more accurately acquainted with the succession of months than Mr. Larkins must have been with the comparative state of Bengal and English months. How are we to account for this gross inaccuracy? If you have a poet, if you have a politician, if you have a moralist inaccurate, you know that these are cases which, from the narrow bounds of our weak faculties, do not perhaps admit of accuracy. But what is an inaccurate accountant good for? "Silly man, that dost not know thy own silly trade!" was once well said: but ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... persons: several of my friends immediately advised me to print it; but it is only quite lately that I have allowed myself to be persuaded, that without being a learned naturalist, a skilful geographer, or a profound moralist, a traveller may yet interest by the faithful and succinct account of the situations in which he has found himself, the adventures which have happened to him, and the incidents of which he has been a witness; that if a simple ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... To Jeffrey as an individual I shall ever be ready to show every kind of individual courtesy; but of Judge Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review I must ever think and speak as of a bad politician, a worse moralist, and a critic, in matters of taste, equally incompetent and unjust." [Footnote: "The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey," iii. pp. 124-5.] Walter Scott, before long, was led to entertain the same opinion of the Edinburgh ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... profound moralist, and though possessed of one of the keenest intellects of all time, did little to advance medical science. He did not practise medicine, but studied it as a branch of philosophy, and instead of observing and investigating, attempted to solve the problems of health and disease ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... moralist, in this verse, declares the same high morality that Christ himself preached. Merit or sin, according to him, does not depend on the overt act alone. Both depend on the mind. Hence the injunction against even ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... popular moralist, in that preliminary attempt to define the nature of Justice—what is right, are both alike trying, first in this formula, then in that, to occupy, by a thought, and by a definition which may convey that thought into the mind of another—to occupy, or cover, a certain ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... tolerable harmony with the universe. By aiming at too much, by dismissing collateral aids, by extending itself to the farthest verge of the conceivable and possible, it loses its elasticity and vigour, its impulse and its direction. The moralist can no more do without the intermediate use of rules and principles, without the 'vantage ground of habit, without the levers of the understanding, than the mechanist can discard the use of wheels and pulleys, and perform every thing by simple motion. If the mind of man ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... School," with its predilection for the Middle Ages, included Novalis, Tieck, and also the two brothers Schlegel, who were critics rather than poets. One of the most unique and original of the German writers was Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825), essentially a philosopher and moralist, yet with a pervading ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the less fatal because the misrepresentation which give rise to it has what the artist considers a moral end. The thing for mankind to know is, not what are the motives and influences which the moralist thinks ought to act on the laborer or the artisan, but what are the motives and influences which do act on him. We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... labourers to have no holidays, because of the bees? And am I never to have change of air, because the bees don't? Mr Boffin, I think honey excellent at breakfast; but, regarded in the light of my conventional schoolmaster and moralist, I protest against the tyrannical humbug of your friend the bee. With the highest ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... couldn't. I suggested in an earlier chapter that the issue of honesty and dishonesty was a futile one, and I placed faith in the creative men. They hate shams and the watering of goods on a more trustworthy basis than the mere routine moralist. To them dishonesty is a contradiction of their own lusts, and they ask no credit, need none, for being true. Creation is an emotional ascent, which makes the standard vices trivial, and turns all that is valuable in virtue to ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... another, on the attainment by them of rights of person and property, and, at last, on their admission to the full privileges of citizenship, it will be acknowledged that of all the 'Decisive Battles of History,' this has been, to the moralist and philosopher, the most interesting; even as it will be (I cannot doubt) the one followed by the happiest Peace which ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... It was well observed by a heathen moralist, that it is not because things are difficult that we dare not undertake them. Be, then, bold in spirit. Indulge no doubts. ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... excursite touches as those of Goldsmith would be too costly materials for sustaining it. His whole manner has a still depth of feeling and reflection, which gives back the image of nature unruffled and minutely. His chaste pathos makes him an insulating moralist, and throws a charm of Claude-like softness over his descriptions of homely objects, that would seem only fit to be the subjects of Dutch painting; but his quiet enthusiasm leads the affections to humble things without a vulgar ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Yet, though unable on strictly moral grounds to justify all the warlike enterprises which make up so large a part of our subsequent Indian history, it is impossible, probably, for even the most rigid moralist to avoid some feelings of national pride in the genius of our countrymen, who in the short space of a single century have built up an empire of a magnitude unequalled even by the Caesars, and have governed and still are governing ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... moralist. I see.' observed the Marchesa, putting on a sweet smile as she rose and came ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... an artist, and one of the very greatest, but even before and beyond that he was intensely a moralist, as only the moralists of our true and noble time have been. Not Tolstoy, not Ibsen himself, has more profoundly and indignantly felt the injustice of civilization, or more insistently shown the falsity ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... circumspacious theatre. The allusion is to the visit of Cato to the games of Flora, given by Messius. When his presence in the theatre was known, the dancing-women were not allowed to perform in their accustomed lack of costume, whereupon the moralist obligingly ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... fame, his universal reputation, if he had been satisfied with his name of M. Le Rond, or Mr. Allround? What would have become of Metastasio under his true name of Trapasso? What impression would Melanchthon have made with his name of Schwarzerd? Would he then have dared to raise the voice of a moralist philosopher, of a reformer of the Eucharist, and so many other holy things? Would not M. de Beauharnais have caused some persons to laugh and others to blush if he had kept his name of Beauvit, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Indeed," said he, becoming very grave, "I don't say that it does not happen even now, sometimes. For you know love is not a very reasonable thing, and perversity and self-will are commoner than some of our moralist's think." He added, in a still more sombre tone: "Yes, only a month ago there was a mishap down by us, that in the end cost the lives of two men and a woman, and, as it were, put out the sunlight for us for a while. Don't ask me about ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... not intend to discuss here either the "will'' of the philosopher, or the "malice'' or "ill-will'' of criminal law, nor yet the "freedom of the will'' of the moralist. We aim only to consider a few facts that may be of significance to the criminal lawyer. Hence, we intend by "will'' only what is currently and popularly meant. I take will to be the *inner effect of the more powerful impulses, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... illustration of these active illusions is that of the moral and religious life. With respect to our real motives, our dominant aspirations, and our highest emotional experiences, we are greatly liable to deceive ourselves. The moralist and the theologian have clearly recognized the possibilities of self-deception in matters of feeling and impulse. To them it is no mystery that the human heart should mistake the fictitious for the real, the momentary and evanescent ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... which inspired the Founder of Buddhism, and led him to formulate a scheme of life, in virtue of which he takes rank (as it seems to me) as the greatest educationalist, as well as the greatest moralist, that the world has ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... America. The possession of such talent, and its cultivation, show genius and industry which any man might emulate; and, when the colored men shall be represented in all the arts and sciences by those who are able to occupy front ranks, they will need no moralist to assert their rights: they can then maintain their own position. The human mind is so constituted, that it will always pay homage to genius, let it be exhibited under a white ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... ludicrous, yet are they the natural growth of the human mind and such as, with more or less change in the drapery, I can apply to my own heart, or at least to whole classes of my fellow-creatures. How often are not the moralist and the metaphysician obliged for the happiest illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human thought and action to quotations, not only from the tragic characters, but equally ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... both are applied in the same way for curing the sick, it is evident that not the spiritual meaning of religion is responsible for the cure, but the psychological process of believing. But if that is the case, it is clear that here again the psychologist, and not the moralist, will give the correct account of the real process involved. In short, it is psychology, psychology in its scientific modern form, which has to furnish the basis for a full understanding of psychotherapy. From psychology it cannot be difficult to ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... a committee of men of high rectitude, it was decided to act without fear or favour in a strictly impartial manner, so Philip's half-million of bullion was divided between the Prince of Orange and the rigid moralist, Elizabeth, who is credited with having spent her share on the Navy, a very admirable ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... years, spelt by th' unlettered Muse, The place of fame and elegy supply. And many a holy text around she strews That teach the rustic moralist ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... as the object of burglary is to provide the burglar with money to spend, and as in many instances it has achieved this object, therefore the burglar is a public benefactor and the police are ignorant sentimentalists. No highway robber has yet harrowed us with denunciations of the puling moralist who allows his child to suffer all the evils of poverty because certain faddists think it dishonest to garotte an alderman. Thieves and assassins understand quite well that there are paths of acquisition, even of the best ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... great mercantile companies rests on the validity of the laws which have been ascertained to govern the seeming irregularity of that human life which the moralist bewails as the most uncertain of things; plague, pestilence, and famine are admitted, by all but fools, to be the natural result of causes for the most part fully within human control, and not the unavoidable tortures inflicted by wrathful ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiators' show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to, fight hereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... indifference upon such an end. For Confucius in his teaching treated only of man's life on earth, and seems to have had no ideas with regard to the human lot after death; if he had any ideas he preserved an inscrutable silence about them. As a moralist he prescribed the duties of the king and of the father, and advocated the cultivation by the individual man of that rest or apathy of mind which resembles so much the disposition aimed at by the Greek and Roman Stoic. Even as a moralist, he seems to have sacrificed ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... an excellent sterling character; and that, you know, Mr. Linden, tells more in the bosom of a family than all the shining qualities which captivate the imagination. I am sure, Mr. Linden, that the moralist is right in admonishing us to prefer the gold to the tinsel. I have now been married some years, and every year seems happier than the last; but then, Mr. Linden, it is such a pleasure to contemplate the growing graces of the sweet pledge of our mutual love.—Adolphus, my dear, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... far below go out? She hated her indecision. It was new to her, and she felt it to be a weakness. Whatever she had been till now, she had certainly never been a weak woman, except perhaps from the absurd point of view of the Exeter Hall moralist. Scruples had been strangers to her, a baggage she had not burdened herself with on ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely know whither Tolstoy has vanished. We know not what to do with this small and noisy moralist who is inhabiting one corner of a great ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... excelled the most of them in the power to make myself agreeable. The reading and study of the past few years enabled me to shine as a conversationalist, and in my present regenerated mood I had, on the other hand, no temptation to play the pedant or moralist. I tried to be amusing and to appear clever; and I was pleased to read a favorable verdict upon my effort in the attentions of men as a rule unsusceptible, and in the amazed ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... O moralist, frown not so dark, Purse not thy lip severe; 'T will warm the heart if ye but hark The mirth of "yester year." To-day we wear too grave a face; We slave,—we buy and sell; Forget a while mad Mammon's race In ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... of skill, and, if it doesn't call for a conspicuous display of virtues, it lays all the greater emphasis on its own few, stringent rules. Like all other sports, it demands a certain kind of integrity, in which the moralist could easily pick holes, but which nevertheless constitutes its saving grace. Well, in this game of love I—cheated. I said, one day, that I had won, when I hadn't won. I said it to people who welcomed my victory, not ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... a moralist, a thinking Christian? Thou mayest there trace—and the pursuit shall profit thee—the steps of the sainted apostle; he who was so signally called forth, to hear witness to the truth of ONE, whom he had erst reviled. Yon cordelier will show you the bay, where his vessel ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... moralist, and the friend and instructor of Xenophon, had publicly taught, in the streets of Athens, for thirty years. His method was to convince people how little they really knew, by asking a series of searching questions which ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... in near protectors. When the great world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe. Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better; for the only reality then is the family, and, within the family, the heart; and the greatest thoughts come from the heart—so says the moralist." ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... pursued the moralist, "that civilization doesn't necessarily mean benefit to the class which ought to be considered first. But that's another question. It ought to benefit them, and eventually ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... the moralist?—"Portray life as it is. Delude not the senses by deceptive appearances. Arouse your hero? call to his aid stern philosophy and sober reason. They will dissipate the rainbow-glories of unreal pleasure, and banish the glittering meteors of unsubstantial happiness. ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... 'Tis always very vague, cloudy poetry that describes unknown torments; it seems to be a popular style, however, for all the poetry of the present day is confined to misty complaints in cloudy language. No moralist is specific in his sorrows. All lovers cry out in chorus that they suffer horribly. Each suffering deserves an analysis and a name. By way of example, my dear Edgar, I will describe one torment that I am sure you have never known or even heard of, ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... he deliberately sipped his coffee and took a cigarette; he offered Mark one and it was declined. 'What do you suspect me of having done?' demanded Mark. 'Oh, my dear fellow, I don't suspect you,' replied Caffyn, 'I know. You can't play the moralist with me, you high-minded old paragon!' He spoke with a kind of savage jocularity. 'I tell you I know that you got your fame and fortune, and even that charming Mabel of yours, by a meaner trick than ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... kindness. "How is it, (said one of the company,) that; this savage animal is so attached to Mr. Johnson?" From a very natural cause, replied Mallet: "the bear is a Russian philosopher, and he knows that Linnaeus would have placed him in the same class with the English moralist. They are two barbarous animals of one species."—Johnson disliked Mallet for his tendency to infidelity, and this sarcasm turned his dislike into downright hatred. He never spoke to him afterwards, but ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... these varieties of impostors; but the other two families which compose the second class are objects of paramount interest. The eccentricities and even the obliquities of great minds merit the scrutiny of the metaphysician and the moralist, and they derive a peculiar interest from the state of society in which they are exhibited. Had Cardan and Cornelius Agrippa lived in modern times, their vanity and self-importance would have been checked by the forms of society, and even if ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... each group separated in some degree from that which follows and that which goes before, but yet each united, in its own several parts, by some strong bond of connexion, and each by a finer and less apparent ligament attached to the other groups that surround it. In short, if, as the great poet moralist has said, "All the world is a stage, and all the men and women in it only players," the life of each man is a drama, with the events thereof divided into separate scenes, the scenes gathered into grand acts, and the acts all tending to the great tragic conclusion of ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... talent; that of exploding unexpectedly and almost, as it seemed, unintentionally. Gilbert made good jokes by the thousand; but he never (in his best days) made the joke that could possibly have been expected of him. This is the last essential of the Victorian. Laugh at him as a limited man, a moralist, conventionalist, an opportunist, a formalist. But remember also that he was really a humorist; and may still ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... evil custom died out slowly in this kingdom. Even a great moralist like Dr. Johnson had something to say in its defence, and Sir Walter Scott, who might well have laughed to scorn any imputation of cowardice, was prepared to accept a challenge in his old age for a statement he had made in his Life ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... shadows of Innsbrueck, Munich, Nueremberg and Heidelberg; but just as I was about to put pen to paper I glanced into a little volume on these very topics lately published by that famous novelist and moralist, M. Ernest Feydeau, the fruit of a summer's observation at Homburg. This work produced a reaction; and if I chose to follow M. Feydeau's own example when he wishes to qualify his approbation I might call his treatise by any vile name known to the speech of ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... dace and redfins hide; the same irresistible charm that fixes a row of city gamins, like ragged and disreputable fish-crows, on the end of a pier where blear-eyed flounders sometimes lurk in the muddy water. Let the philosopher explain it as he will. Let the moralist reprehend it as he chooses. There is nothing that attracts human nature more powerfully than the sport of tempting the ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... farewell, Horace—whom I hated so, Not for thy faults, but mine: it is a curse To understand, not feel thy lyric flow, To comprehend, but never love thy verse; Although no deeper Moralist rehearse Our little life, nor Bard prescribe his art, Nor livelier Satirist the conscience pierce, Awakening without wounding the touched heart, Yet fare thee well—upon Soracte's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... only knew that I came from the Mission ship, and they passed the word. Every rowdy that came up was warned, and one poor rough, who chanced to blurt out a very common and very nasty Billingsgate word, was silenced by a moralist, who observed, "Cheese it. Don't cher see the Mission ship bloke?" I watched like a cat, and I soon saw that the ordinary hurricane curses were restrained on my account, simply because I came from the vessel where all are welcome—bad and ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... Spectator. For example, he tells us that he wishes that country clergymen would borrow the sermons of great divines, and devote all their own efforts to acquiring a good elocution: [Footnote: Spectator 106.] here we detect the practical moralist and the man who likes a thing good of its kind, but not the enthusiast. He upholds the observance of Sunday on account of its social influences rather than for its religious meaning; [Footnote: Spectator 112.] Swift's famous Argument ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... national vice of England." Perhaps, however, Puritan hypocrisy was not so widespread or so powerful in the time of Shakespeare as it is nowadays; perhaps, too, Shakespeare was not so good a hater as Mr. Swinburne, nor so strenuous a moralist as Coleridge was, at least in theory. In any case it is evident that Shakespeare found it harder to forgive Lucio, who had hurt his vanity, than Angelo, who pushed lust to outrage and murder, which strange, ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... trace the movement of matter materialistically; for it is in the act of manifesting its own powers, and not, as Socrates and the Scholastics fancied, by obeying a foreign magic, that matter sometimes assumes or restores the forms so precious in the healer's or the moralist's eyes. At the same time, the manner in which the moral world rests upon the natural, though divined, perhaps, by a few philosophers, has not been generally understood; and Locke, whose broad humanity could ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... the contrary, it is in history that the lessons of morality are delivered with most effect. The priest may provoke our suspicion—the moralist may fail to work in us any practical conviction; but the lessons of history are not such as vanish in the fumes of unprofitable speculation, or which it is possible for us to mistrust, or to deride. Obscure as the dispensations of Providence often are, it sometimes, to use Lord Bacon's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... the nature of English and European ethics. Hearn was an artist to the core, and as a writer he pursued with undivided purpose that beauty which, as Keats reminded us, is truth. In his creative moments he was a beauty-lover, not a moralist. But when he turned critic he at once stressed the cardinal importance of ethics in the study of literature. The art which strives to end in beauty will reveal even more clearly than more complex forms of expression the personality of the artist, ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... perfect action. How shall you contemplate with indifference the career of an artist whom genius or good guidance has compelled to exercise his peculiar skill, to indulge his finer aptitudes? A masterly theft rises in its claim to respect high above the reprobation of the moralist. The scoundrel, when once justice is quit of him, has a right to be appraised by his actions, not by their effect; and he dies secure in the knowledge that he is commonly more distinguished, if he be less loved, than ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... thousand additions, is flown into the family secrets of the city. How strange and yet how true of human nature is it, that we stand ever ready to point the finger of scorn at those we fancy in the downward path, while refusing ourselves to receive the moralist's lessons. ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... expedition could no longer be delayed. Alfonso, for his part, bold general in the field and able man of affairs as he might be, found no courage to resist the conqueror. It is no fiction of a poet or a moralist, but plain fact of history, that this King of Naples, grandson of the great Alfonso and father of the Ferdinand to be, quailed before the myriads of accusing dead that rose to haunt his tortured fancy in the supreme hour of peril. The chambers of his palace in Naples ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... throne. Had, then, rich Pagans before his time no charity—no pity?—no money available for hopeless poverty? Not much—very little, I conceive; about so much as Shakspeare insinuates that there is of milk in a male tiger. Think, for instance, of that black-hearted reprobate, Cicero, the moralist. This moral knave, who wrote such beautiful Ethics, and was so wicked—who spoke so charmingly and acted so horribly—mentions, with a petrifying coolness, that he knew of desolate old women in Rome who passed three days in succession without tasting food. Did not the wretch, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... with the right to look forward to happy, useful years. The story breeds generous thoughts on the theme of young womanhood: it handled the problem neither from the superior altitude of the conventional moralist nor the cold aloofness of the latter-day realist—Flaubert's attitude in ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... Merchants slow driving to the busy port Their ponderous wains: Religion's holy priests Leading her red-robed votaries to the steps Of some vast temple: young and old, with hands Crossed on their breasts, hastening to walks and shades Suburban, where some moralist explained The laws of mind and virtue. On a rock A varied group appeared: some dragged along The rough-hewn block; some shaped it into form; Some reared the column, or with chisel traced Forms more than human; while Content ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... fellow's strength and courage, and so complete their despair of being a match for his swiftness and cunning, that after the seventh night the watchers refused to go out any longer; and poor Bolt himself was confined to his bed by an attack of what a doctor would have called rheumatism, and a moralist, rage. My indignation and sympathy were greatly excited by this mortifying failure, and my interest romantically aroused by the anecdotes I had heard of Will o' the Wisp; accordingly, armed with a thick ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is too often assumed—that sublimation can be carried out easily, completely, or even with unmixed advantage. If it were so, certainly the old-fashioned moralist would be confronted by few difficulties, but we have ample reason to believe that it is not so. It is with sexual energy, well observes Freud, who yet attaches great importance to sublimation, as it is with heat in our machines: only a certain proportion can be transformed into work. Or, ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... sociologists who had built thereon new theories of human progress. Also the question of the multiplied personalities clearly extends far beyond the field of the biologist, and must be turned over to the consideration of the psychologist—if, indeed, it does not fall rather within the scope of the moralist. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... point: the preference for the refined rather than the rude or ugly. Thus he will dislike a joke because it is coarse without asking if it is really immoral. He objects to a man sitting down on his hat, whereas the austere moralist should only object to his sitting down on someone else's hat. This sensibility is barren because it is universal. It is useless to object to man being made ridiculous. Man is born ridiculous, as can easily be seen if ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... of pedagogical thought disapproves, I know, of miscellaneous reading, and no modern moralist will agree with Madame de S['e]vign['e] that "bad books are better than no books at all"; but Madame de S['e]vign['e] may have meant books written in a bad style, or feeble books, and not books bad in the moral sense. However, I must confess ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... Thoreau as a saunterer, or as a naturalist, or as an essayist, that I wish to speak, but as a moralist, and this in relation to American politics. Thoreau lived in a dark day of our political history. At one time he made a declaration of independence in a small way, and refused allegiance and poll-tax to a Government built on a corner-stone ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... Fielding, in Kennington, who got 32 votes. And they made no secret of the fact that the expenses of these elections had been paid by one of the established political parties in order to split the vote of the other. From the point of view of the abstract moralist there was nothing to be said against the transaction; since it was evident that Socialist statesmanship must for a long time to come consist largely of taking advantage of the party dissensions between the Unsocialists. It may easily happen ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... lies affect me now no more; they will be all as much despised as the story of the seraglio and the handkerchief, of which I am persuaded he was the only inventor. That man has a malignant and ungenerous heart; and he is base enough to assume the mask of a moralist, in order to decry human nature, and to give a decent vent to his hatred of man and woman kind.—But I must quit this contemptible subject, on which a just indignation would render my pen so fertile, that after having fatigued you with a long letter, I would surfeit ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... of differing humours to reconcile them in the end according to the alternative title, or "Humours Reconciled." These last plays of the old dramatist revert to caricature and the hard lines of allegory; the moralist is more than ever present, the satire degenerates into personal lampoon, especially of his sometime friend, Inigo Jones, who appears unworthily to have used his influence at court against the broken-down old poet. And now disease claimed Jonson, and he was bedridden for months. He had succeeded ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... accents low, The sportive kind reply: Poor moralist! and what art thou? A solitary fly! Thy joys no glittering female meets, No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets, No painted plumage to display: On hasty wings thy youth is flown; Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone— ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... The moralist it could not spoil, To hold an empire in his hands; Sir Walter, and the brood who sprang From ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... hope of a better state of things, for every means of repression and constraint that human ingenuity could invent has been applied to regulate their action; but all in vain—they have remained unchanged, and in the eyes of the moralist as perverse as ever. If, however, the latter be true—that is, if the social mechanism be false—then there is a chance for a better future; for our incoherent and absurd societies are changing more ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions, which in his unregenerate state served but to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him, a little turned, to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men. When Cervantes, with such proficiency of fondness dwells upon the Don's library, who sees not that he has been a great reader of books of knight-errantry—perhaps was at some time of his life in ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... revealed their names would have given them as much worldly fame as any moralist has obtained—but they contemned it! Their religion was raised above all worldly passions! Some profane writers, indeed, have also concealed their names to great works, but their motives were ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... everything that is supposed to lead to it. It must be able, in other words, not only to satisfy the virtuous of the wisdom of their virtue, it must be able to convince the vicious of the folly of their vice. Vice is only bad in the eye of the positive moralist because of the precious something that we are at the present moment losing by it. He can only convince us of our error by giving us some picture of our loss. And he must be able to do this, if his system is worth anything; ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... smoothly as usual. No one had inquired after her health, though she had missed three meetings in succession; people had received her little compliments and cheery small-talk with the driest of negatives or affirmatives; she had an uncomfortable feeling that she was being cold-shouldered. That high moralist, Mrs Flint, edged her chair away from the poor lady of set purpose, and Miss Joliffe found herself at last left isolated from all, except Mrs Purlin, the builder's wife, who was far too fat and lethargic to be anything but ignorantly good-natured. Then, ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... Tatler, a periodical published three times a week. This discussed matters of interest in society and politics, and occasionally published an essay on morals and manners. Steele was a good-natured, careless individual, with a varied experience as soldier, playwright, moralist, keeper of the official gazette, and pensioner. He says that he always "preferred the state of his mind to that of his fortune"; but his mental state was often fickle, and too much dependent on bodily luxuries, though he was patriotic enough to sacrifice his ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... neither of them belonged originally to that neighborhood in which he had, several years ago, purchased large property. It was said he had got her in London; and nothing was more certain than that she issued forth the English language clothed in an inveterate cockney accent. She was a high moralist, and a merciless castigator of all females who manifested, or who were supposed to manifest, even a tendency to walk out of the line of her own peculiar theory on female conduct. Her weight might be about eighteen stone, exclusive of an ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... to the majority of murderers, they are very incorrect characters." This aphorism offers a valuation of the predaceous temperament, and of the disciplinary effects of its overt expression and exercise, as seen from the moralist's point of view. As such it affords an indication of what is the deliverance of the sober sense of mature men as to the degree of availability of the predatory habit of mind for the purposes of the collective life. It is felt that ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... to find between the covers of this little book words of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism. However humiliating for my self esteem, I must confess that the counsels of Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are more fit for a moralist than for an artist. Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praise worthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... refer to two eminent authorities. Now be so good as to listen. The great moralist says: "To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the paternal till without ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... to be changed into Italian money. As he meditated a route downtown, he recalled the only adieu still left unpaid. To be sure the cross had remained for three years at Novelli's but it might go forever any day, and with it a great resource for a weary moralist. Farewells were plainly in order, and with no other thought he walked back to the shop and greeted Novelli, who without waiting to be asked produced the crimson parcel that contained the precious relic. As John ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... speculative truth as well as truth practical, we must think it a blot upon the splendor of Oxford and Cambridge that both of them, in a Christian land, make Paley the foundation of their ethics; the alternative being Aristotle. And, in our mind, though far inferior as a moralist to the Stoics, Aristotle is often less of a ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... where every one wishes to be equal. This outward distinction, this look of being a great lady, is one of the most precious gifts which God, the God of women, can bestow on them."[*] To paint her character aright, Balzac says, it would be necessary to blend in one word virtues which a moralist would consider it impossible to find united in a single human being; and her "sublime education" was a crown to the whole ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... see,' says Hazlitt, rather naively, 'how the same subject is treated by two such different authors as Shakespeare and Wycherley.' Macaulay's remark about the same coincidence is more to the point. 'Wycherley borrows Viola,' says that vigorous moralist, 'and Viola forthwith becomes a pander of the basest sort.' That is literally true. Indeed, Hazlitt's love for the dramatists of the Restoration is something of a puzzle, except so far as it is explained by early associations. Even then it is hard to explain the sympathy ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... nunneries. He may have begun his work with the purpose of attacking a mischievous and superstitious system that mutilates human life, but he certainly continued it because he became interested in his creations. Diderot was a social destroyer by accident, but in intention he was a truly scientific moralist, penetrated by the spirit of observation and experiment; he shrunk from no excess in dissection, and found nothing in human pathology too repulsive for examination. Yet The Nun has none of the artificial violences of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... imaginative design or literary execution; he was before all else a thinker, a student of political phenomena, a searcher after the causes of events, an analyst of motives, a psychologist of individual character and of the temper of peoples, and, after a fashion, a moralist in his interpretation of history. He cared little, or not at all, for the coloured surface of life; his chief concern is to seize the master motive by which men and events are ruled, to comprehend ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden |
