"Moralist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all degrees of charity. He may not have made a close analysis of the value of his sacrifice, but must we suppose that God requires of the plain soldier in the excitement of battle the methodical precision of the moralist or the theologian? Can we who revere his heroism doubt that his God ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... and, being a solitary bush in the midst of a little plain of about a half a mile in extent, they had to make the most of it and the least of themselves. It would have been a refreshing sight for a moralist to have witnessed this instance of man— whose natural tendency is to try to look big—thus voluntarily endeavouring to ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... the mother, is a proceeding, the very idea of which is somewhat revolting in the average individual.... There are many roues in St. James' who would shrink before it; yet you, the enlightened philosopher, the moralist——" ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... point of view. He is a physiognomist, a physiologist, a bit of an anatomist, a bit of a mesmerist, a bit of a geologist, a Flemish painter, an upholsterer, a micrological, misanthropical, sceptical philosopher; but he is no moralist, and certainly ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... suggest that your great man, who thus stands for an inspired leader dropped straight out of heaven, was probably at best very imperfect, one-sided, and at least as much of a product as a producer. The crudity of the method is even regarded as a proof of its morality. Your common-place moralist likes to call everything black or white; he despises all qualifications as casuistical refinements, and plumes himself on the decisive verdict, saint or sinner, with which he labels the adherents and opponents of his party. And yet ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... subsequent reflection have enabled me to trace, indeed, some remote connection between this passage in the English moralist and a portion of the character of Ligeia. An intensity in thought, action, or speech was possibly, in her, a result, or at least an index, of that gigantic volition which, during our long intercourse, failed to give other and more immediate ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... combination of many kinds 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 through friendship ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... was held successively by four Sir Thomas Middletons, and if it acquired a war-like celebrity under the second, it obtained a peculiarly hospitable one under the fourth, whose daughter, the fruit of a second marriage, became Countess of Warwick and eventually the wife of the poet and moralist Addison. In his time the hospitality of Chirk became the theme of many a bard, particularly of Huw Morris, who, in one of his songs, has gone so far as to say that were the hill Cefn Uchaf turned into beef and bread, and the rill Ceiriog into beer or wine, they would be consumed in half a year ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... general, are not in much request. Dr. Johnson was asked why he was not more frequently invited out; and he said, 'Because great lords and ladies do not like to have their mouths stopped.' Garrick was not in this predicament: he could amuse the company in the drawing-room by imitating the great moralist and lexicographer, and make the negro-boy in the courtyard die with laughing to see him take off the swelling airs and strut of the turkey-cock. This was clever and amusing, but it did not involve an opinion, it did not lead to a difference of sentiment, in which the ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... forgive him. We must respect the dead, and sometimes the sooner they are dead the sooner we respect them. Let me sign that thing. Oh, he hasn't left me so much, but I won't quarrel with him now. What was it the moralist said?" he asked, pressing a blotting pad upon his name. "Said something about we must educate or we must perish. That's all right, but I say we must have money. Without money you may be honest," he went on, handing the check to the Major, "but your honesty ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... disinterested; a life of hardest toil is cheerfully borne, with the hope (for sole consolation) that dear ones will profit later by all the work, and live in a circle the patient toiler never dreams of entering. Surely he is a stern moralist who would deny this satisfaction to the breadwinner of ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... from reality. Zarathustra had more courage in his body than any other thinker before or after him. To tell the truth and TO AIM STRAIGHT: that is the first Persian virtue. Am I understood?... The overcoming of morality through itself—through truthfulness, the overcoming of the moralist through his opposite—THROUGH ME—: that is what the name ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the great estimation in which the father of our great moralist was held, we may quote a letter, dated "Trentham, St. Peter's Day, 1716," written by the Rev. George Plaxton, then chaplain to Lord Gower:—"Johnson, the Lichfield librarian, is now here. He propagates ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... Continent, and, conversely, to make the existence of English literature, or, at least, the writings of one Englishman, known to Frenchmen and Italians; to the Teuton and the Slav. If he "taught us little" as prophet or moralist; as a guide to knowledge; as an educator of the general reader—"your British blackguard," as he was pleased to call him—his teaching and influence were ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... political progress, to be sound, must be based ultimately on moral progress. It is of its very nature slow, and is therefore apt to escape the eyes of the moralist or cynic who dwells on the untoward signs of the present. But the Rome for which Mazzini and his compatriots yearned and struggled can hardly fail ultimately to rise to the height of her ancient traditions and of that noble prophecy of Dante: "There is the seat of empire. There never was, ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... of ethics, carefully followed out, to interpret to us the will of God. Whether this opinion is correct or not, it is superfluous here to discuss; since whatever aid religion, either natural or revealed, can afford to ethical investigation, is as open to the utilitarian moralist as to any other. He can use it as the testimony of God to the usefulness or hurtfulness of any given course of action, by as good a right as others can use it for the indication of a transcendental law, having no connexion ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... ministry to policy, as well as morality, and the natural history of the creature, which it is here proposed to reform, is brought out without any regard whatever to considerations which would inevitably affect a moralist, looking at the subject from any less earnest and practical—from any less elevated point ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... headlong, by the inexorable Nemesis, into the Tartarean abyss. The rest of the Caesars successively advanced to their seats; and as they passed, the vices, the defects, the blemishes of their respective characters, were maliciously noticed by old Silenus, a laughing moralist, who disguised the wisdom of a philosopher under the mask of a Bacchanal. [3] As soon as the feast was ended, the voice of Mercury proclaimed the will of Jupiter, that a celestial crown should be the reward of superior merit. Julius Caesar, Augustus, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Zwingli, who was a moralist and a Humanist rather than a truly evangelical reformer, taught: "In itself the Law is nothing else than a Gospel; that is, a good, certain message from God by means of which He instructs us concerning His will." (Frank 2, 312.) While Zwingli thus practically identified ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... name, their years, spelt by th' unlettered Muse,[14] The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... magnates have been discovering lately, he thought 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 tale of the Bottle, as told by ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... warmest friend and most powerful protector: and as the whole is intended, to recommend the practice of virtue, as the means of happiness; to whom could I address it with so much propriety, as to a PRINCE, who illustrates and enforces the precepts of the moralist ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... over: but, as a certain great philosopher told us, in very humble and simple words, that we are not to expect to gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles, we may, at least, demand, in all persons assuming the character of moralist or philosopher—order, soberness, and regularity of life; for we are apt to distrust the intellect that we fancy can be swayed by circumstance or passion; and we know how circumstance and passion WILL sway the intellect: how mortified vanity will form excuses for itself; and how temper turns ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was an old fool to have grudged Waldemar his model. As I watch him gradually building up his statue, watch the goddess gradually emerging from the clay heap, I ask myself—and the case might trouble a more subtle moralist than me—whether a village girl, an obscure, useless life within the bounds of what we choose to call right and wrong, can be weighed against the possession by mankind of a great work of art, a Venus immortally beautiful? Still, I am glad that the two alternatives need not be weighed ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... It was now. From the very night she came back to East Lynne, her love for Mr. Carlyle had burst forth with an intensity never before felt. It had been smoldering almost ever since she quitted him. "Reprehensible!" groans a moralist. Very. Everybody knows that, as Afy would say. But her heart, you see, had not done with human passions, and they work ill, and contrariness, let the word stand, critic, if you please, and precisely everything ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the Champ de Mars. From Montretout their guns would throw shells into the Champs Elysees; but we think that Valerien will silence them as soon as they open. Meat is getting more and more scarce every day. That great moralist, Dr. Johnson, said that he should prefer to dine with a Duke than the most agreeable of Commoners. I myself at present should prefer to dine with a leg of mutton than the most agreeable of human beings—Duke or Commoner. I hear, on what I believe to be good authority, that we shall ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... formerly inhabited by Sir James Thornhill, the painter, and after him by his famous son-in-law, Hogarth. Clare spent some pleasant days here, his kind host pointing out to him various memorials connected with the great satirist and moralist—the window through which Hogarth eloped with old Thornhill's only daughter; the place where he painted the 'Rake's Progress;' and the spot in the garden where he buried his faithful dog, with the inscription, ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... poetry of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it—who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer an equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of "passing emotion," and how to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... not apprehend it makes against her GENERAL position, that this nation can boast a female critic, poet, historian, linguist, philosopher, and moralist, equal to most of the other sex. To these particular instances others might be adduced; but it is presumed, that they only stand as exceptions against the rule, without tending to invalidate the ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... book in France. Armand Berquin, who, in addition to his own stories, translated Sandford and Merton into French, was born in 1750 and died in 1791. His L'Ami des Enfants, 1784, was in twelve small volumes, and it covered most of the ground that a moralist for the young could cover in those days. It is more like Priscilla Wakefield's Juvenile Anecdotes, to which we are coming, on a larger scale, than anything I can name; but no imitation, for M. Berquin came first. The idea of 'The Three Cakes' was borrowed ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... in private; but this was enough. It had broken up that confidence, unexpressed, but always a holy principle in both, which had so long held those two souls together, spite of everything that ought to have kept them apart, and did keep them apart, completely as the most rigid moralist ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... 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 sat near, And cheered ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... To the moralist I know he might have served as a figure of sinful discontent, but that is because it is the habit of moralists to ignore material circumstances,—if indeed one may speak of a recent meal as a circumstance,—with Mr. Polly circum. Drink, indeed, our teachers ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... wrote Wraxall, 'the Duchess of Devonshire, then in the first bloom of youth, hanging on the sentences that fell from Johnson's lips, and contending for the nearest place to his chair. All the cynic moroseness of the philosopher and the moralist seemed to dissolve under so flattering an approach.' Wraxall's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... 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
... land blessed by nature, the land where men took joy in living, the land of life, flowing with gaiety and love, the land of the Song of Songs and of Ruth. He drew Isaiah for them, not as a saintly Rabbi or a teller of mystical dreams, but a poetic Isaiah, patriot, sublime moralist, the prophet of a free Judea, the preacher of earthly prosperity, of goodness, and justice, opposing the narrow doctrines and minute and senseless ceremonialism inculcated by the priests, who were the predecessors of ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... at from the point of view either of a moralist, a sanitarian, or a humanitarian, the question is one which calls for prompt consideration and remedial action. For instance, according to the last Government census, the average number of persons inhabiting each house in the city of Bombay is ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... this act, whether it is to be considered as a just execution, or as a cowardly assassination. Considering the necessary falsehood, and breach of faith, under which it must have been perpetrated, the moralist can have no hesitation to execrate ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... that there can no more be an immutable law of conduct, than there can be an immutable position for the steering-wheel of an aeroplane. The business of the pilot of an aeroplane is to keep his machine aloft amid shifting currents of wind. The business of a moralist is to adjust life to a constantly changing environment. An action which was suicide yesterday becomes heroism today, and ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... more dangerous. It is a poultice which in time softens the hardest outside. Richardson yielded as entirely as any curate exposed to a shower of slippers. He evidently wrote under the impression that he was not merely an imaginative writer of the highest order, but also a great moralist. He was reforming the world, putting down vice, sending duelling out of fashion, and inculcating the lessons of the pulpit in a far more attractive form. A modern novelist is half-ashamed of his art; he disclaims earnestly any serious purpose; his highest aim is to amuse his readers, and his ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... horror!" cried the, melted moralist, tears running quick down his rugged cheeks; "melancholy indeed is this sight, humiliating to morality! such is human strength, such human felicity!— weak as our virtues, frail as ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... to interest human nature and revive feeling, or sets forth a sentiment which human nature entertains, so that it shall be turned to better account. This involves the field which song has it in its power to cultivate and improve. But neither the pure moralist, nor the accomplished critic, must expect a very great deal to be done on this field at once. The song-writer has difficulties to contend with, both in regard to those by whom he would have his songs sung, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the 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
... just about one hundred years after the death of Caesar, and who had access to the lost works of Pliny, was a moralist historian and a warm friend of the Germans. Over their shoulders he rapped the manners and morals of his own countrymen. "Vice is not treated by the Germans" (German, the etymologists say, is composed of Ger, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... it is, on the contrary, implied by the habitual expressions of the wisest aristocrats, that the completely developed persons whose Justice and Fortitude—poles to the Cardinal points of virtue—are marked as their sufficient characteristics by the great Roman moralist in his phrase, "Justus, et tenax propositi," will in the course of nature be opposed by a civic ardour, not merely of the innocent and ignorant, but of persons developed in a contrary direction to ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... taste: and that is what I mean. The ugly thing is to clutch and hold on. You did more for yourself by being polite and honest than even George Meredith could have done for you. What I mean by the sense of beauty, as applied to morality, is that a man must be a gentleman first, and a moralist afterwards, if he can. It is grabbing at your own sense of righteousness, if you use it to hurt other people. Your own complacency of conscience is not as important as the duty of not making other people uncomfortable. Of course there are occasions when it is right to stand up to a moral bully, ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had a certain pride of his own, which was not to be trifled with. Thus, though near neighbors, the parents of the young friends were more than strangers to each other. On Mervyn's side, however, this estrangement was unalloyed with bitterness, and simply of that kind which the great moralist would have referred to "defensive pride." It did not include any member of Marston's family, and Charles, as often as he desired it, which was, in truth, as often as his visits could escape the special notice of his father, was a ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... 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 be laughing ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... respectability; and when, after some two or three years, he made an offer of marriage, she was ready to accept; but M. Philipon bluntly and insolently refused his consent, through a strong personal dislike which he had conceived for the severe moralist ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... plunder; it must be a treaty fitter for the cavern of conspiracy than for the chamber of council; its pledge must be like that of Catiline, the cup of human blood! No; the most powerful reprobation which ever shot from the indignant lip of the moralist, would not be too strong for the baseness which stooped to such a treaty, or the folly which entangled itself in its toils. No burning language of prophecy would be too solemn and too stinging for the premeditated wretchedness, and incurable calamity, of such a bond. No; if we must violate ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... 17 Dionys. Halicarn. l. ii. p. 115. Plutarch in Numa, p. 60. The first of these writers relates the story like an orator, the second like a lawyer, and the third like a moralist, and none of them probably ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... suppose—as 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 ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... 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. ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... under the common fate of great ministers, whose employment exposes them to envy, and draws upon them the indignation of all who are disappointed in their pretensions. Their friends turning as violently against them, as they formerly fawned abjectly upon them.—Swift. Stupid moralist. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... Stevenson is always directly or indirectly preaching a sermon—enforcing a moral—as though he could not help it. "He would rise from the dead to preach a sermon." He wrote some first-rate fables, and might indeed have figured to effect as a moralist-fabulist, as truly he was from beginning to end. There was a bit of Bunyan in him as well as of AEsop and Rousseau and Thoreau—the mixture that found coherency in his most peculiarly patient and forbearing temper is what gives at once the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... "A moralist, dealing chiefly with death and the more sombre phases of life, a lover and interpreter of nature, a champion of democracy and human freedom, in each of these capacities he was destined to do effective service for his countrymen, and this ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... aisles, or so described even the tiny wild flowers of the fields. And he has not only seen their outward glories, but he has interpreted their hidden meanings. He has carried the symbolism of Nature on into the moral world. There is no greater moralist than he. He is stern in his demands for right, and truth, and sincerity in life and in work. This has been the keynote of his teachings throughout life. He hates a falsehood or a sham as much as Browning or Carlyle. He has taught his countrymen many things. No people love Nature ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... of 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 ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... I read with indignation the plausible epithets which men use to soften their insults; and, as a moralist, I ask what is meant by such heterogeneous associations, as fair defects, amiable weaknesses, etc.? If there is but one criterion of morals, but one archetype for man, women appear to be suspended by destiny, according to the ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... the idea 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 ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... 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, 1890-91, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... protest by embracing the Buddha among their incarnations. They had shown an advance in the succession of incarnations from the early embodiments of brute force, the fish, the tortoise, the boar, up to heroes, and from these to the ninth avatar, the Buddha, as a moralist and philosopher.[61] They left on record the prediction that a tenth should come—and he is yet to come—who, in a still higher range of moral and spiritual power, should redeem and renovate the earth, and establish ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... literary researches he has too often found amongst the writings of those, most illustrious for their genius and imagination, the least of that which is calculated to meet the approbation of the Christian, or even of the mere Moralist; and in conclusion he will take the liberty of addressing to those who may feel within them the stirrings of a mind capable of mighty things, the sublime words, slightly modified, of an Arabian sage and poet: O man, though the years of thy worldly fame ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... idea of being free, as to note his simple efforts to disguise his satisfaction on going away. There are days when a flask of champagne at a cabaret, and a red-cheeked partner to share it, are too strong temptations for any young fellow of spirit. I am not going to play the moralist, and cry "Fie." For ages past, I know how old men preach, and what young men practise; and that patriarchs have had their weak moments too, long since Father Noah toppled over after discovering the vine. Frank went off, then, to his pleasures at Bruxelles, in which capital many young fellows of ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... Five Senses. These are frequently exhibited as five distinct personages upon the Spanish stage. See Riccoboni, p. 98; but our moralist has represented them all by one character. In Shakespeare's "King Lear," the Madman says, "Bless thy Five Wits!" ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... a master of minute life-like detail, an inimitable imitator of truth; Hogarth's paintings are like Wesley's or Whitefield's sermons, they are stern, unvarnished denunciations of vice and profligacy; Fielding was the easy, large-hearted moralist, who hated above all sins cant and knavery, loved to banter the parsons, to bring fops and boobies upon his stage, and to place in contrast the wide difference that then separated manners in town and in country. Perhaps Thackeray owes more to Fielding than to any other ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... a great Paris moralist called Zola, and a strange old American father called Walt Whitman. And beauty, that can never be far away from strength, found many new and wonderful prophets in that little library,—poets and painters and musicians of whom ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... Lamb, but we must also look at the other side. Those who have read his celebrated essay on Hogarth will find that he possesses no great appreciation for that humour which is only intended to raise a laugh, and might conclude that he was more of a moralist than a humorist. He admires the great artist as an instructor, but admits that "he owes his immortality to his touches of humour, to his mingling the comic with the terrible." Those, he continues, are ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Prince meet fisherman and pauper, lamia and cannibal; where citizen jostles Badawi, eunuch meets knight; the Kazi hob-nobs with the thief; the pure and pious sit down to the same tray with the bawd and the pimp; where the professional religionist, the learned Koranist and the strictest moralist consort with the wicked magician, the scoffer and the debauchee- poet like Abu Nowas; where the courtier jests with the boor and where the sweep is bedded with the noble lady. And the characters are "finished and quickened by a few touches swift and sure as the glance of sunbeams." ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... and 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 ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... beautiful and perfect in nature is presented a fibre of absolute smoothness, roundness, and finish, the colors of which resemble, and in the sunlight even excel in brilliancy those of the two precious metals, silver and gold; while the moralist who loves to illustrate the workings of God's providence in bringing forth good out of evil, by comparing the disgusting silk-worm with its beautiful and useful product, may now enforce the lesson by the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... forth to make his own way in the world, by removing the moist impediments of filth and refuse from the way of his more fortunate fellows. Indeed, look upon him in what light you may, he is in some sort a practical moralist. Though far remote from the ivy chaplet on Wisdom's glorious brow, yet his stump of withered birch inculcates a lesson of virtue, by reminding us, that we should take heed to our steps in our journeyings through the wilderness of life; and, so far ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... ill wind that blows nobody good," remarked the purser, who was a bit of a moralist in a small way. "Now we have been complaining of a foul wind—and if we had had a fair one, we should have run past those rocks without ever seeing ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... concomitant purpose, rooted to no underlying beliefs or desires. It is firmly anchored, but above-ground. We have often heard Mr. Trollope compared with Thackeray,—but never without resenting the comparison. In no point are they more dissimilar than in the above. Thackeray is a moralist, a satirist; he tells his story for its lesson: whereas Mr. Trollope tells his story wholly for its own sake. Thackeray is almost as much a preacher as he is a novelist; while Mr. Trollope is the latter simply. Both writers are humorists, which seems to be the inevitable ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to submit to profane male eyes epistles received from the friends of her youth, in their simple entirety, instead of reading out an expurgated edition of the same. She had been brought up in a very dungeon of decorum by a terrible grandmother, a rigid moralist, whom no man ever yet beheld without a shiver; and during those first few weeks after her escape she was probably intoxicated by the novel sense of freedom, besides which, she was perfectly infatuated about "Reginald;" but all this could not exculpate her when arraigned ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... most astonishing of all. She had been standing when she undid the things; she left the ring and the photograph on the table, and she sank into a chair near the fire holding the bit of paper. The tone of it astonished and confused her. It was more the stern moralist asking to be forgiven for doing right than the guilty husband asking for mercy ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... With such encouragement, the reckless and avaricious among the colonists engaged in the trade, and the slaves were purchased when brought to the colonies by those who were blind to the evil, or preferred present ease or profit to all future good. Paley, the moralist, thought the American Revolution was designed by Providence, to put an end to the slave trade, and to show that a nation encouraging it was not fit to be intrusted with the government of extensive colonies. But the planter of the Southern ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... elsewhere, that he means to make his scamp "end as a member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, or by the guillotine, or in an unhappy marriage." It were easy to dilate on the fact that in interpreting the phrases of the satirist into the language of the moralist we often require to read them backwards: Byron's own statement, "I hate a motive," is, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... 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; and in ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... is concerned with the general effect that was actually produced by a remarkable book, and with the causes that produced it. It is not his easy task to produce a demonstration that if the readers had all been as wise and as virtuous as the moralist might desire them to be, or if they had all been discriminating and scientific critics, not this, but a very different impression would have followed. Today we may wonder at the effect of the New Heloisa. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Fouchette, humble child of the slums, had bravely cut out for herself a task that would have appalled the stoutest moralist. ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... fashion does the true aesthete tend to prefer, even like the austerest moralist, the delights which, being of the spirit, are most independent of circumstances and most ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... be admitted that there are cases beyond the reach of the moralist. Once, when a miserable-looking dyspeptic called upon a leading physician and laid his case before him, "Oh!" said the doctor, "you only want a good hearty laugh: go and see Grimaldi." "Alas!" said the miserable patient, "I am Grimaldi!" So, when Smollett, oppressed by disease, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... was not only a distinguished moralist and a leading politician, but perhaps the best known writer of his time upon statistical questions. He had the credit of suggesting Pitt's sinking fund,[212] and spoke with the highest authority upon facts ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... has to the protection of the law. We hold, and rightly, that British justice, if not blind, should at least be colour-blind. The view is irreproachable in theory and incontestable in argument, but it is apt to be irritating when urged by a Boston moralist or a London philanthropist upon men whose whole society has been built upon the assumption that the black is the inferior race. Such a people like to find the higher morality for themselves, not to have it imposed upon them by those who ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his writings, though no one could well be freer from any taint of the vice in his own life. Many a man may have indulged his inclinations to evil, with much less compunction, while he has imagined himself sheltered under the sanction of the moralist who watches one side of the entrance into ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... call it a determination of blood to the head, or of animal spirits to the wrong place, or—my dear Major, I am no moralist. I take people, you know, as I find them. But he is a bore; and I should not wonder if that sweet little woman had found it out ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... ministry. There is hardly another case in history of a man not a specialist in science accomplishing so much in original research as did this chemist, physiologist, electrician; the mathematician, logician, and moralist; the theologian, mental philosopher, and political economist. He took all knowledge for his field; but how he found time for his numberless researches and multifarious writings, along with his every-day duties, must ever remain a mystery to ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... "battlements to combat God with gold, silver and pearls; wherein the lances were great forked pins, and the arrows the little pins." With more simplicity, the Princess Louise wore her hair cased in a network of gold and jewels, and the austere French moralist who assailed the higher bristling ramparts of vanity would, perhaps, have borne in silence this more modest bastion of the flesh ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... dated this narrative in a peculiarly calamitous period, though well aware that virtue, like happiness, is supposed to flourish most in times of tranquility. Such times afford no subjects for the historian or the bard; and even the moralist is often led to revert rather to those stormy eras which roused the energies of the human soul, and compelled it to assert qualities of which they who have observed only the repose of domestic life can form no conception. Man, attempting with finite powers to compass the most stupendous designs ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... Life without art was to the beauty-loving Greek an impossibility, although he was equally conscious of the demands of reason and of morality. Thus it happened that art, which, on the purely hedonistic hypothesis, had been treated as a beautiful courtezan, became in the hands of the moralist, a pedagogue. Aristophanes and Strabo, and above all Aristotle, dwell upon the didactic and moralistic possibility of poetry. For Plutarch, poetry seems to have been a sort of preparation for philosophy, a twilight to which the eyes should grow accustomed, before emerging into ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... act was all that the most ardent moralist could have desired. Lily felt a new interest in herself as a person of charitable instincts: she had never before thought of doing good with the wealth she had so often dreamed of possessing, but now her horizon was enlarged by the vision of a prodigal philanthropy. ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... him. He is so bent on natural knowledge that we have a sense of incongruity when we see him engaging in politics as if he had no other interest. He throws himself with such zest into the language of the moralist, the theologian, the historian, that we forget we have before us the author of a new departure in physical inquiry, and the unwearied compiler of tables of natural history. When he is a lawyer, he seems only a lawyer. If he had not been the author of the Instauratio, his life ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... celebrated moralist of the age was the Duke de Rochefoucauld (1613-1680). He was early drawn into those conflicts known as the wars of the Fronde, though he seems to have had little motive for fighting or intriguing, except his restlessness of spirit and his attachment to the Duchess ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... the growing corruptions of the Church was made more systematically, and from the stand-point of a theologian rather than of a popular moralist and satirist, by John Wyclif, the rector of Lutterworth and professor of Divinity in Baliol College, Oxford. In a series of Latin and English tracts he made war against indulgences, pilgrimages, images, oblations, the friars, the pope, and the doctrine of transubstantiation. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... respect to such apparitions is very seldom accurately or distinctly questioned. A supernatural tale is in most cases received as an agreeable mode of amusing society, and he would be rather accounted a sturdy moralist than an entertaining companion who should employ himself in assailing its credibility. It would indeed be a solecism in manners, something like that of impeaching the genuine value of the antiquities exhibited by a good-natured collector for the gratification of ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... laughing. Moliere 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, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... often good-humoredly jeered at what he called her Puritanic scrupulousness in this respect. On an occasion such as at present, however, the use of an untruth would cause her not even a second thought, her reason so strongly supporting her course as even to overcome her instincts; a fact which a moralist might deplore but which ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... song, It was a Lording's daughter. There remain the Venus and Adonis sonnets and My flocks feed not. Mr. Swinburne may call these "dirty and dreary doggrel," an he list, with no more risk than of being held a somewhat over-anxious moralist. But to call the whole book worthless is mere abuse ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... shouldn't he?" interjected an old gippy warrior who defended the customs of the East. "We have no right to force our Western morals down an Oriental's throat. It is easy to be a moralist in a freezing climate like ours. The snow makes for virtue; the sun always warps morality. The harem is as ancient as the sun. And the harem will remain. It's no good of you fellows hoping to alter it. And, ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... us!" answered his comrade, who, if he had greater talents, was also apparently more of a moralist. ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... the burden which man's indolence refuses; and in Great Britain, the condition of women among the lower classes, revealed by the statistics of her mines and of her manufacturing districts, is such as to make a moralist blush. Behold her, with a strap around her waist, dragging the coal-cart in the mine, and so ignorant, that when asked if she knew Jesus, replied, "He ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... Of course no moralist, no man writing for a sensitive and strictly virtuous public, could further interest himself in this man. So I dismissed him at once from my mind, and returned to the literary contemplation of virtue ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... of his personal belief crossed Spencer's lips during the talk with the guide. Rather did he impress on his angry and vengeful hearer that a forgotten scandal should be left in its tomb. He took this line, not that he posed as a moralist, but because he hated to acknowledge, even to himself, that he was helped in his wooing by Helen's horror of his rival's lapse from the standard every pure minded woman sets up in her ideal lover. Ethically, he might be wrong; in his conscience he was justified. He had suffered too ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... must be judged, like any other interest, in the light of the greatest total good. We cannot say, "Work for work's sake," "Education for education's sake"; not even, "Morality for morality's sake"; it is work, education, morality, for the sake of the ultimately happiest human life. The moralist must not despise forms of art which have no ulterior, utilitarian value; but he must insist that no enjoyment of art is really, in the long run, good for man which influences his life in the unwholesome ways we have indicated. Since morality is that way of life that gives it its greatest ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... fall a few aphorisms, such as—'A great writer in France is invariably a great man; he writes in a language which compels him to think; it is otherwise in other countries'—and so on, and so on. Then, to prove your case, draw a comparison between Rabener, the German satirical moralist, and La Bruyere. Nothing gives a critic such an air as an apparent familiarity with foreign literature. Kant is ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... are a sordid, money-grubbing people, with no 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 cross the ocean in much ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... be said for "The Magnetic Lady," who, in her bounty, draws to her personages 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 ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... changed very little; but I should have suggested an alteration in a few places where he has laid himself open to be attacked. I hope I should have prevailed with him to omit or soften his assertion, that 'a Scotsman must be a sturdy moralist, who does not prefer Scotland to truth', for I really think it is not founded; and it is harshly said.] Dr Johnson wrote a long letter to Mrs Thrale. I wondered to see him write so much so easily. He verified ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... a smile recently achieved, a different way of wearing the beard, a little less of the stern moralist, a little more of the man of the world. A connoisseur of Hughes, who has studied him for nearly twenty years, after a recent observation, pronounced judgment: "It's the same Hughes, a trifle less cold, but just as dry." And the Secretary of ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... unfortunately the tirade here ends. '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
... the poet's mind but the poet's senses: in youth ginger was only too hot in his mouth, and the chimes at midnight only too favourite a music. At the same time he was not less a born preacher and moralist and son of the Covenanters after his fashion. He had about him, as has been said, little spirit of social or other conformity; but an active and searching private conscience kept him for ever calling ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ideal was ever realized. And in a few exceptional individuals who are raised above the ordinary level of humanity, the ideal of happiness may be realized in death and misery. This may be the state which the reason deliberately approves, and which the utilitarian as well as every other moralist may be bound in certain ...
— The Republic • Plato
... a philosopher, he is very much a moralist; it is because philosophy deals partly with morals that he thinks he cares for it. But here too his conclusions are of a very commonsense order. The Stoic notion that 'Virtue consists in being uncomfortable' strikes him as merely absurd; ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... mind forms images of many characteristic facts relating to it; and the kind of images will depend very much on the general disposition, or particular mood, of the mind affected by the object: the painter, the poet, and the moralist will have different images suggested by the presence of the windmill or its symbol. There are indeed sluggish minds so incapable of self-evolved activity, and so dependent on the immediate suggestions of Sense, ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... the wise 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 ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... region for the 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
... besides having "committed to memory many of the most interesting passages of that distinguished poet." The result is to be partially discerned many years later in certain tricks of Marshall's style; but indeed the influence of the great moralist must have penetrated far deeper. The "Essay on Man" filled, we may surmise, much the same place in the education of the first generation of American judges that Herbert Spencer's "Social Statics" filled in that of the judges of a later day. The "Essay on Man" pictures the universe ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... particular opinions of the individual; in Massinger it is rank republicanism; in Beaumont and Fletcher even 'jure divino' principles are carried to excess;—but Shakspeare never promulgates any party tenets. He is always the philosopher and the moralist, but at the same time with a profound veneration for all the established institutions of society, and for those classes which form the permanent elements of the state—especially never introducing a professional character, as such, otherwise than as respectable. If he must have ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... 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, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 of a very ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... reputation; yet it is remarkable, that the most furious of the Jacobins are silent on this head as far as it regarded her, and always mention the Cardinal de Rohan in terms that suppose him to be the culpable party: but, "whatever her faults, her woes deserve compassion;" and perhaps the moralist, who is not too severe, may find some excuse for a Princess, who, at the age of sixteen, possibly without one real friend or disinterested adviser, became the unrestrained idol of the most licentious Court in Europe. Even her enemies do not pretend that her fate was so much a merited ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... The moralist tells us that 'no lie can be lawful or innocent.' Now I take it that some of the old numbskulls who wrote such things in the church catechisms and books of that ilk ought to be drowned in the bottom of a well. A good clever lie of this sort would raise The Lifter more in my ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... stop not to enquire if they will bear the tug of life. He is trying them, however, on the "tug of war." Pen and needle are set to work philosophically, methodically, benignly. In this he is but a unit out of many thousands. His opinions are not singular. Amiable moralist!— delightful is the dream, sweetly sounding the wisdom; but is it practicable? John Bell's warfare, "The Assault," is, without a doubt, "confusion worse confounded;" it is not easy, at a view, to find legs and arms and heads in their anatomical order. We must trace the human ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... iambic and Latin hexameter count for nothing,—such form the staple of his theses and tirades! His approximation at times to the confines of French realistic art is of the most accidental or incidental kind. For Gissing is at heart, in his bones as the vulgar say, a thorough moralist and sentimentalist, an honest, true-born, downright ineradicable Englishman. Intellectually his own life was, and continued to the last to be, romantic to an extent that few lives are. Pessimistic he may at times appear, but this is almost entirely on the surface. For he was never in the ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... ragged, starving, and happy; and I need not tell such a fine moralist as you are, how it is the case, in the white as well as the black world, that happiness (republican leveller, who does not care a fig for the fashion) often disdains the turrets of kings, to pay a ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Steen in Holland, and George Morland in England, both topers, should have had this secret of simple charm so highly developed: one of nature's curious ironies, very confusing to the moralist. In the second Hague picture (opposite page 80) Leyden's genial tosspot has achieved a farther triumph—he has painted one of the most radiantly delicate figures in all art. One must go to Italy and seek among the early Madonnas ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... from the standpoint of the strict moralist I presume not; but it is my judgment the strict moralist wouldn't last long in ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... crime which is not carried out more leniently than the one which is completed; that we even ascribe a certain degree of accountability to an unintentional act of good or evil—although in these cases the moralist is compelled to see an ethically unjustifiable corruption of the judgment by external success or failure beyond the control of the agent. The first of these irregularities does not allow the man of good intentions to content himself with noble desires merely, but spurs him on to greater endeavors ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... charms of that sweet man Mr. M'Phun's eloquence, nor even the flattering distinction in store for me, would have induced me to prolong my suit. However, I was not going to despair when in sight of land. The widow was evidently softened. A little time longer, and the most scrupulous moralist, the most rigid advocate for employing time wisely, could not have objected to my daily system of courtship. I was none of your sighing, dying, ogling, hand-squeezing, waist-pressing, oath-swearing, everlasting-adoring affairs, with an ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... proportion to the extent to which the true principles of Western progress are assimilated by the subjects of the British king and the customers of the British trader. This latter must be taught patience at the hands, of the statesman and the moralist. It is a somewhat difficult lesson to learn. The trader not only wishes to acquire wealth; he not infrequently wishes that its acquisition should be rapid, even at the expense of morality and of the permanent interests of ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... intenser and deeper than a mere scenic meaning—a meaning out of the great deep that is behind and beyond all human and merely personal character. Nor was Shakespeare himself unconscious of his place as a teacher and profound moralist: witness that sonnet in which he bewails his having neglected sometimes the errand ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... 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: ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... stern and severe moralist as he was, was not a strict Calvinist. Anyone who takes the trouble to read 'The Manual of Religious Belief in a Dialogue between Father and Son, compiled by William Burness, Farmer, Mount Oliphant, and transcribed ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... The moralist rightly says, "There is nothing permanent in this uncertain world;" and even most friendships do not partake of the ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... too, though never a coward or 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 History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... which the Ethics is the first part. It looks back to the Ethics as the Ethics looks forward to the Politics. For Aristotle did not separate, as we are inclined to do, the spheres of the statesman and the moralist. In the Ethics he has described the character necessary for the good life, but that life is for him essentially to be lived in society, and when in the last chapters of the Ethics he comes to the practical ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... something very like it. But on reflection I can enter into it—his having, under the circumstances, accepted Mr. Sloane's offer and been content to do his duties. Ce que c'est de nous! Theodore's contentment in such a case is a theme for the moralist—a better moralist than I. The best and purest mortals are an odd mixture, and in none of us does honesty exist on its own terms. Ideally, Theodore hasn't the smallest business dans cette galere. It offends my ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... art and the German stage—on the lights and 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 ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... a moralist; anything but a moralist, y'know. But as a man of the world, with some experience, I knew that couldn't be. So I told her ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... what's the use in casting pearls before swine? 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 ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... habits of the gipsy which I have described, shocking to the moralist and sanitarian and disgusting to the person of delicate stomach, it may be, which please me, rather than the romance and poetry which the scholar-gipsy enthusiasts are fond of reading into him. He ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... Esop was with boys at play, And had his nuts as well as they, A grave Athenian, passing by, Cast on the sage a scornful eye, As on a dotard quite bereaved: Which, when the moralist perceived, (Rather himself a wit profess'd Than the poor subject of a jest) Into the public way he flung A bow that he had just unstrung: "There solve, thou conjurer," he cries, "The problem, that before thee lies." The people throng; he racks his brain, Nor can the thing enjoin'd explain. ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... then read from Emerigon, the principal authority of French lawyers on insurance, who denies the principles of the English statute; and M. Pothier, not a mere lawyer, but a philosopher and moralist, who protests against this doctrine, and appeals to the eternal laws of morality. He then cites the second volume Term Reports, p. 164, in which Judge Buller states, "I have heard Lord Mansfield say that the reason of that allowance was to favor the smuggling ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... a 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 ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... moralist who could treat disdainfully of Chivalry. It was a marvellous principle, that which could make of plighted faith a law to the most lawless, of protection to weakness a pride to the most ferocious. While the Church taught that personal duty consisted in scourgings and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Marlborough and took the field for the House of Hanover in 1715. My Lords Elchies and Kilkerran walked on either side of him—Kilkerran with the lack-lustre eye of the passionate mathematician, the studious moralist devoted to midnight oil, a ruddy, tall, sturdy man, well filling the crimson and white silk gown; Elchies, a shrivelled atomy with a hirpling walk, leaning heavily upon a rattan, both with ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... Monsieur, the only brother of Louis XIV. She always hated the French manners, and longed for her native sauer-kraut and sausages, which to her taste were finer than all the luxuries and dainties of the French cuisine. She was counted a severe moralist, and her tongue was more dreaded than a bayonet-charge. To be sure, her enemies more than hinted that her extraordinary virtue was trebly guarded by her ugliness. On the latter subject she says herself, "I must be cruelly ugly: I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... told that Robinson Crusoe is an allegory, and in one of the chapters we are told why it is an allegory. The explanation is given in a homily against the vice of talking falsely. By talking falsely the moralist explains that he does not mean telling lies, that is, falsehoods concocted with an evil object; these he puts aside as sins altogether beyond the pale of discussion. But there is a minor vice of falsehood which he considers it his duty to ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... eyes of the moralist, there were extenuating circumstances in Pons' case. Man only lives, in fact, by some personal satisfaction. The passionless, perfectly righteous man is not human; he is a monster, an angel wanting wings. The angel of Christian mythology has ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... sticking out from each corner of his emphatic chin. They were both young. They were both atheists, with a depressing fixity of outlook but great mobility of exposition. They were both pupils of the great Dr Hirsch, scientist, publicist and moralist. ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... composition—the dramatic, the narrative, the lyric, the didactic, the descriptive—is imbued with this spirit; and the reader may calculate with almost equal certainty on becoming acquainted with the belief of a poet as of a theologian or a moralist. Of the evils resulting from the practice, the most annoying and the worst is that some of the lesser poets, and all mere pretenders, in their desire to emulate the really great, feel themselves under a kind of obligation to assume opinions, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... indifferent to it. If the other animals venture to take liberties with him, he will repay them in their own coin, and get his quiet laugh at them at the same time; but the object generally for which he lives is the natural one of getting his bread for himself and his family; and, as the great moralist says, 'It is better to be bad for something than for nothing.' Badness generally is undesirable; but badness in its essence, which may be ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... constructed,' I said to him, as the second curtain fell amid yells of delight. 'Yes,' he answered, 'I suppose it's very funny.' I looked at him; he was little more than a boy. 'You are rather young,' I said, 'to be a moralist.' He gave a short laugh. 'Oh! I shall grow out of it in time,' he said. He told me his story later, when I came to know him better. He had played the farce himself over in Melbourne—he was an Australian. Only the ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... perceiving the frantic course of his master, had withdrawn from his service, and then either taken no part in the revolution which followed, or even appeared in arms against him, the most scrupulous moralist could have discovered nothing reprehensible in his conduct. History has in every age applauded the virtue, while it has commiserated the anguish, of the elder Brutus, who sacrificed his sons to the perhaps too rigorous laws ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... in him. "Still the complete moralist, old Jack!" he cheered. "I'll back you for a bushel of nuts to have it out with Charon as you ferry across. And here, for want of us, you turn to the hares! Sancie, you and I must get season tickets to Sarum, or ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... profession after 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 the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... consideration of circumstances belongs to the moralist, the politician, and the orator. To the moralist, in so far as with respect to circumstances we find or lose the mean of virtue in human acts and passions. To the politician and to the orator, in so far as circumstances make acts to be worthy of praise ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... three or four hours. There is light enough for what I have to settle there. I will spare my horse and save time in the end. Meantime I will think this affair out." So said Prosper galloping to Prosper on his feet, the late moralist. His plan was very simply to confront the Abbot with his ring. If that failed he would scour his own country, raise a troop, and lay leaguer on Saint Thorn. He had forgotten Galors. He was soon to have a reminder ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... moralist, many a stately poet, many a priestly chronicler attests the genius of Spanish literature, but if these had not been, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza had been its title to immortality. The admirable attributes of Spanish character nowhere found warmer appreciation than with our own countrymen. ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... be erased. He even gave vent to his royal indignation in a marginal note, to the effect that we should always express favorable judgments concerning the dead—a pious sentiment always dearer to writing masters than to historians. It seemed never to have occurred however to this remarkable moralist, that it was quite as reprehensible to strangle an innocent man as to speak ill ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... ultimately repose. This trite but unwearying theme, this impassioned commonplace of humanity, is the subject in every age of variation without end, from the Poet, the Rhetorician, the Fabulist, the Moralist, the Divine, and the Philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity of their sighs and groans, labour to put on record and to establish this monotonous complaint, which needs not other record or evidence than those very sighs and groans. What ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... enterprise, when it chanced that, being unable to compose myself to sleep, a few nights since, I took up, according to my custom on such occasions, an old copy of Montaigne, the usual companion of my vigils, the fellow-occupant of my pillow, and the only moralist whose musings one can read with pleasure on ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... hollowness, the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which all the pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose. This trite but unwearying theme, this impassioned common-place of humanity, is the subject in every age of variation without end, from the poet, the rhetorician, the fabulist, the moralist, the divine, and the philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity of their sighs and groans, labor to put on record and to establish this monotonous complaint, which needs not other record or evidence than those very sighs and groans. What is life? Darkness and formless ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey |
