"Ten Commandments" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conversation can stand a captious criticism like this? Are there not two versions of the ten commandments which were given out in the thunder and smoke of Sinai, and would the secretary hold that this would have been a sufficient reason to recall Moses from his "Divine Legation" at the court of ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... charitably of all men, hoping every thing for the best; and, though the horse-couper was a thought suspicious, both in look, speech, dress, and outward behaviour, still, ever and anon, we were bound by the ten commandments to consider him only in the light of a fellow-mortal in distress of mind and poverty of pocket; so we made a superscription for the poor man; and, though he did not look much like one that deserved our charity, nevertheless and howsoever, maybe he was a bad halfpenny, and maybe ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... cried the captain, who had found what he wanted; "if it had to wait for they, it would never go on at all. It goes on by government, and management, and discipline, and the stopping of younkers from their blessed foolery, and by the ten commandments, and the proverbs of King Solomon. You to teach your father how the world goes on! Off with your coat, and ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... "And the Lord spake unto you out of the midst of fire: Ye heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice. And he declared unto you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, even ten commandments; and he wrote them upon two tables of stone." Deut. iv, 12, 13. "And the Lord said unto Moses, Write thou these words; for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel.... And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... this instance, for not one in a thousand took the trouble to verify their facts, or even their quotations, when speaking of, or quoting Raeburn. The libel, to put it briefly, represented Raeburn as a man who had broken every one of the ten commandments. ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... to fall back upon his own resources. By practice he found out that it was not best to steal; that society lived more happily and peacefully when the property of each individual was respected. Similarly, God gave him the work of formulating each of the ten commandments. Slowly the moral treasure grew. The jurist gave law, the poet sang songs, the prophet poured out his rhapsody, the patriot and martyr died for principle, and the roll of the heroes lengthened. At last the pages of ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... said. "You're not tongue-tied all of a sudden, are you? Can't a woman take a little exercise without her family and friends coming snooping round and acting as if she'd broken the Ten Commandments?" ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... for his old soldiers. Its cost was nearly three million dollars. A colonnade of fifty-two huge fluted Corinthian columns and above them a rich frieze surround the church. The approach is by a score and more of stone steps and through enormous bronze doors on which the Ten Commandments are illustrated. ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... surrendered this precious blossom, but memory was tantalizingly tenacious; and in sorrowful hours of sore temptation, the brave, pure soul came swiftly to the rescue of famishing heart: "What? Is it so hard for us to keep the Ten Commandments? Do we ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... to the Ten Commandments that came through Moses. In a postscript you will find the names of the bright chicks who sent in the whole text in its complete form. Please give them my ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... form of human intellectual activity has thrown ethics overboard. What would a historian be who, instead of making researches, would moralise? What would a physician be who would stop to moralise? Or a great statesman, who would toe the chalk-line of your middle-class ten commandments? As for an artist, when he moralises, he is a fool and a knave. And please tell me, what sort of a business would the church do if all of us were moral? ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... justify the ungodly? "To him that worketh not, but believeth on him." Here is the work of the soul to be saved; Paul says to cease working at the task, and believe on, depend on, Him—He justifies the ungodly. God gave men ten commandments to keep. God's word says, "The man that doeth them shall live by them."—Gal. 3:12. But all men have failed to keep them; "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God."—Rom. 3:23. To illustrate: A father gives ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... laws were those of Ina, King of Wessex. Alfred the Great published a fuller code, commencing with the Ten Commandments, as the foundation of all law. Ethelstane and St. Dunstan, in the name of Edgar the Peaceable, added many other enactments, by which the lives, liberties, and property of Englishmen were secured as soundly as the wisdom ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... in fine linen, and honest men in the most shabby old rags; and still, notwithstanding the exceptions, knavery is a very hazardous game, and honesty, on the whole, by far the best policy. Still, most of the Ten Commandments remain at the core of all the Pandects and Institutes that keep our hands off our neighbours' throats, wives, and pockets; still, every year shows that the parson's maxim—"non quieta movere "—is as prudent for the health of communities as when Apollo recommended his votaries not to rake up ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge, And ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... Sermon on the Mount, by both of which the Khan was profoundly affected, and often recurred to them; but others, under the notion of conveying to him a more comprehensive view of the Scriptural ethics, repeated to him the Ten Commandments; although, with the sole exception of the two first, forbidding idolatry and Polytheism, there is no word in these which could have displeased or surprised a Pagan, and therefore nothing characteristic of Christianity. Meantime my second remark was substantially this which follows: What ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... spiritual life, the laws of civil life, and the laws of moral life are set forth in the ten commandments of the Decalogue; in the first three the laws of spiritual life, in the four that follow the laws of civil life, and in the last three the laws of moral life. Outwardly the merely natural man lives in accordance with the same commandments in the same way as the spiritual ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... resolutely and systematically to acquire graces of style as to master the intricacies of the 'dismal science.' At an early age, and with no advantages of position, he had gained extraordinary authority in Parliament. Sydney Smith said of him that he had the Ten Commandments written on his face, and looked so virtuous that he might commit any crime with impunity. His death probably deprived us of a most exemplary statesman and first-rate Chancellor of the Exchequer, but it can hardly have been a great loss to literature. Passages from ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... kite-flyers in the windy and cloud-navigated sky; and then, at another cadence of the hymn, back again to church, and the somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson (which he smiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs, and the dim lettering of the Ten Commandments in the chancel. ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... ten days, and then came the Holy Spirit. So the soul, which wishes to arrive at this perfection, must observe ten days, that is the ten commandments of the law. And with the legal commandments it will observe the Counsels; for they are bound together, and the one cannot be observed without the other. True, those who are in the world must observe the Counsels mentally, through holy desire, and those who are freed from the world must ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... Straitest among the strict, John Cotton Fletcher and his wife Mehitabel held all lightness of conduct or gamesomeness of speech as sin most devoutly to be prayed and striven against, and not only 'kept' the ten commandments with pious zeal, but, for the better serving of the Lord, invented an eleventh, which read 'Laugh not at all.' Holy days they knew, in number during the year fifty-four, namely, the fifty-two 'Sabbaths' and the governor's Fast and Thanksgiving days; holidays they held in utter ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Progress and hung in small red frames of about six inches square. The fire-place was filled with moss, and its mantel-shelf had its china sheep and sheperdesses, and a small looking-glass, the whole being surmounted by a gun hung transversely. The Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments worked in worsted, were suspended in a wooden frame between the windows, which had white muslin blinds, and opened on hinges, like a door. A cupboard made to fit the corner, in a manner to economise room, was filled with china mugs, cups and saucers of different sizes and patterns, some old tea-spoons ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... full of truth, "It is the nature of party in England to ask the assistance of men of genius, but to follow the guidance of men of character." This was strikingly illustrated in the career of the late Francis Horner—a man of whom Sydney Smith said that the Ten Commandments were stamped upon his countenance. "The valuable and peculiar light," says Lord Cockburn, "in which his history is calculated to inspire every right-minded youth, is this. He died at the age of thirty-eight; possessed of greater public influence ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... mockers of others. These be the heads of iniquity which spring from the lust of the flesh, of the eye, or of rule, either singly, or two combined, or all together; and so do men live ill against the three, and seven, that psaltery of often strings, Thy Ten Commandments, O God, most high, and most sweet. But what foul offences can there be against Thee, who canst not be defiled? or what acts of violence against Thee, who canst not be harmed? But Thou avengest what ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... southeast section, are the handsome homes and well-filled barns of an industrious and thrifty people. The traveller through this beautiful portion of the State can scarce keep from breaking one of the ten commandments as he witnesses a people so well to do and so happy in the possession of their ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... at staircase No. 5; or, if you should make a blunder in the twilight, Mrs. Dyer has too much good sense to be jealous for a mere effect of imperfect optics. But don't try to write the Lord's Prayer, Creed, and Ten Commandments, in the compass of a halfpenny; nor run after a midge or a mote to catch it; and leave off hunting for needles in bushels of hay, for all these things strain the eyes. The snow is six feet deep in some parts here. I must put on jack-boots to get at the post-office ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the Ten Commandments were suspended while a horse-trade was going on, so he did most of his business with strangers. Caught a Northerner nosing round his barn one day, and inside of ten minutes the fellow was driving off behind what Bill described as "the peartest piece of ginger ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... thy head liveth, O chief of the Jews, none hath missaid me. But I went forth this morning to the river and, casting my net into the Tigris on thy luck, brought up this fish." Therewith he opened the basket and threw the fish before the Jew who admired it and said, "By the Pentateuch and the Ten Commandments, [FN203] I dreamt last night that the Virgin came to me and said, 'Know, O Abu al-Sa'adat, that I have sent thee a pretty present!' and doubtless 'tis this fish." Then he turned to Khalifah and said to him, "By thy faith, hath any seen it but I?" Khalifah replied, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... moralities have been trimmed to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and only please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the harsh face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel. The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten commandments; and the bones and revolutions of the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you will; read good books if you will: but bear in mind, that you know already quite enough to lead you to REPENTANCE. You need neither book nor sermon to teach you those ten commandments which hang here over the communion table: all that books and tracts and sermons can do is to teach you how to KEEP those commandments in spirit and in truth: but I am sure I have seen people read books, and run about ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... a-standin' over him, and he thought 't was a ghost. 'T was higher up on the bank than him, and it kind of moved along down's if 't was coming right on to him, and he got on to his knees and begun to say his Ten Commandments fast's he could rattle 'em out. He got 'em mixed up, and when the boys heard his teeth a-chattering, they began to laugh and he up an' cleared. Dunnell's boys had been down the road a piece and was just coming home, an' 't was their old white hoss that had got out of the barn, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... permission to read it for a certain period one hour a day,[70] and those who could not afford even such expenses adopted what means they could. It is touching to read such incidents as that of one Alice Collins, sent for to the little gatherings "to recite the Ten Commandments and parts of the epistles of SS. Paul and Peter, which she knew by heart." "Certes," says old John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs, "the zeal of those Christian days seems much superior to this of our day, and to see the travail of them may well shame ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... love? What would they do for it? I'd have my fingers chopped off one by one for it. I'd break every one of the ten commandments for it. I'd ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... had caught the vital effect of the whole, and he meant to interpret it so that its truth should be felt by all who had received the light of the new faith in painting, who believed in the prismatic colors as in the ten commandments, and who hoped to be saved by tone-contrasts. For the others, Ludlow was at that day too fanatical an impressionist to care. He owed a duty to France no less than to America, and he wished to fulfil it in a picture which should ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... "brevity is the soul of wit," and certainly we realize the truth in a hazy sort of way, but the monologue writer should make brevity his law and seven of his ten commandments of writing. Frank Fogarty, who writes his own gags and delivers them in his own rapid, ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... of the clergy was also undertaken, and was much needed. In 1551 Bishop Hooper found in his diocese of 311 clergymen, 171 could not repeat the Ten Commandments, ten could not say the Lord's Prayer in English, seven could not tell who was its author, and sixty-two were ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... his way for another nip, after having thickly threatened to knock seven bells and the ten commandments out of the black at the wheel for faulty steering, when Jerry appeared before him and blocked the way to his desire. But Jerry did not block him as he would have blocked Lerumie, for instance. There was no showing of teeth, no bristling of neck hair. Instead, Jerry was all placation and appeal, ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... with the Mosaic Code in the Antiquities, but announces his intention to compose "another work concerning our laws." This work is, perhaps, represented by the second book Against Apion; or possibly the intention was never fulfilled. He does not set out the ten commandments at length, explaining that it was against tradition to translate them directly.[1] He refers probably to the rule that they were not to be recited in any language but Hebrew, though, of course, the Septuagint contained a full version. On the other hand, he describes the construction of the Tabernacle ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... believer in slavery, in polygamy, in wars of extermination, in religious persecution and intolerance and in almost everything that is now regarded with loathing, contempt and scorn. The Jehovah of whom he speaks violated, or commands the violation of at least nine of the Ten Commandments he gave. There is one thing, however, that can be said of Moses that cannot be said of any person who now insists that he was inspired, and that is, he was in ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... moral principles. The one who will have himself rooted and grounded in the fundamental principles of things can look with complacence upon the panorama of the world's progress. The Negro should plant one foot on the Ten Commandments and the other on the Binomial Theorem: he can then stand steadfast and immovable, however the rain of racial wrath may fall or the angry winds of prejudice may blow ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... there is one on earth) an honest man, as all will tell you who deal with him. At first mesmerism swayed him, but he learned through my forbearance to govern himself. He is a man that would not steal, commit adultery, or fornication, or break one of the Ten Commandments. I have now done, but I could write a volume on what I ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... ever, gave the matter a thought; but he subscribed generously when asked by the rector, and he kept the Ten Commandments scrupulously, so far as his home life was concerned. He respected the Church, as something which stood for solidity and the security of property, like Consols and the Mansion House, and he regarded Dissenters in much the same light as he did outside brokers, as persons ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... say that she was a witch, and and that she broke all the ten commandments, and put the sacraments under her feet; and listen,—they said that she mixed poison in her husband's drink, and ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... oftenest, and like a very mirror, the splendid and the sordid, the seamy side and the smooth, of Life at Cirey, in her experience of it. Published, fourscore years after, under the above title.] For the Ten Commandments are at a singular pass in cultivated France at this epoch. Such illicit-idyllic form of life has been the form of Voltaire's since 1733,"—for some three years now, when Friedrich and we first make acquaintance with him. "It lasted above a dozen years more: an illicit marriage after its ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses. Compulsory manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and night. Electric ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... partakes, and sits erelong Upon his bench a railing blackguard; Decides off-hand that right is wrong, And reads the ten commandments backward. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Chinamen, or Sandwich Islanders, or the Norwegian, Russian, or Italian in its benefits? Yet they do all share in it as soon as they become citizens. How absurd we should think the assertion that it was not the Lord's intention to hold the people of the United States under the law of the Ten Commandments, as they were given to the Jews alone, some four thousand years before the United States existed as a nation. Massachusetts never abolished slavery by legislative act; never intentionally abolished it. In 1780 that State adopted a new Constitution with a Bill of Rights, declaring ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... form, she and her nobles left the chapel and retired to her privy chamber. Two days after this, a proclamation was issued, forbidding the elevation of the host. It was also ordered that the Gospels and Epistles, the Creed, and Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Litany should be used in English. Her respect for the Bible, and her desire to have it spread throughout her realms, was still more clearly shown on the occasion of her progress from the Tower to Westminster, the day before ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... state, that "a Mason is obliged by his tenure to obey the moral law." It is scarcely necessary to say, that the phrase, "moral law," is a technical expression of theology, and refers to the Ten Commandments, which are so called, because they define the regulations necessary for the government of the morals and manners of men. The habitual violation of any one of these commands would seem, according to the spirit of the Ancient Constitutions, to ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... the distance would make the fellow's fees mount up. But Rogers was at least properly qualified (half those claiming the title of physician were impudent impostors, who didn't know a diploma from the Ten Commandments), of the same ALMA MATER as himself—not a contemporary, though, he took good care of that!—and, if report spoke true, ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... compelled action by the Legislature. The consumption of alcohol by persons in charge of motor vehicles is but one illustration of the way in which an old vice may become such a great evil in altered circumstances that stern measures have to be taken. Stealing was reprehended in the Ten Commandments, and so was covetousness. Theft was always punishable at common law; but, soon after company promotion became a feature of our commercial life in the latter part of the nineteenth century, firm action had to be taken by the Legislature to protect the public from the effects ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... Lights, &c. In Canons 80 to 84 among the things pertaining to the Church are enumerated (1) a great Bible and Prayer Book, (2) a Font of stone, (3) a "decent Communion Table covered in time of Divine Service with a carpet of silk or other decent stuff," (4) the "Ten Commandments to be set up" and "other chosen sentences written," (5) a Pulpit, (6) ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... immoral, but whatever his crimes were, I should never like Alec less. You see, he's been so awfully good and kind to me, I can look on with fortitude while he plays football with the Ten Commandments.' ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... consisted in committing to memory five to seven verses in the more important chapters of the New Testament and Psalms, commencing with the ten commandments in Exodus XX, 1-17. The passages assigned were read and studied every week in the school under the direction of the principal, in order that all the younger pupils, as well as the older ones, might be able to repeat them ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... both for the practitioner and the client. Rigidly held to, it will admit of no engineer going far wrong in the practice of his profession, and, broken, will not land him in jail. It is presupposed that engineers are men of intelligence. A man of intelligence will hold himself to the spirit of the Ten Commandments if he would attain to success, and to the letter of them if he would be happy during the declining days of his life. Most engineers realize this and accept it as their every-day working creed. Life to them, like the medium through which they give ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... and a sense of honor in an age when these were much-needed traits, and the ideal of a life of regulated service in place of one of lawless gratification was set up. What monasticism had done for the religious life in dignifying labor and service, chivalry did for secular life. The Ten Commandments of chivalry, (1) to pray, (2) to avoid sin, (3) to defend the Church, (4) to protect widows and orphans, (5) to travel, (6) to wage loyal war, (7) to fight for his Lady, (8) to defend the right, (9) to love his God, and (10) to listen to good and true men, while not often ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... got to other people's. Still, in most other countries, as a fashionable woman, she would have been esteemed a model of devotion to the duties of a wife and a mother, for she paid a personal attention to her household, and had actually taught all her children the Lord's prayer, the creed, and the ten commandments. She attended church twice every Sunday, and only staid at home from the evening lectures, that the domestics might have the opportunity of going (which, by the way, they never did) in her stead. Feminine, well-mannered, rich, pretty, of ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper |
