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Spiritual   Listen
noun
Spiritual  n.  A spiritual function, office, or affair. See Spirituality, 2. "He assigns supremacy to the pope in spirituals, and to the emperor in temporals."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Spiritual" Quotes from Famous Books



... is a name which no man of this generation should pronounce without respect; for it belongs to one of the high-priests of modern literature, to whom all contemporary minds are indebted, and by whose intellect and influence a new spiritual cultus has been established in the realm of letters. It is yet impossible to estimate either the present value or the remote issues of the work which he has accomplished. We see that a revolution in all the departments of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... monks his displeasure might mean fasting, exile to some sterner community, or even imprisonment in chains. Over the layman also he could hold any punishment save only corporeal death, instead of which he had in hand the far more dreadful weapon of spiritual excommunication. ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... enterprise is less to be wondered at than the eagerness with which he copies the enterprise of others. The Canadian, like the native of old France, is a thinking animal. He is ever doubting, ever mistrustful. In spiritual matters, he is guided by his curate, who, if he wishes to stand well with him, must meddle with nothing else. And who will say that such a people are incapable of improvement? Railroads, intercourse with others, and time, will yet make the Canadian think for himself much sooner than ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger

... artistically dainty, elegantly rhetorical sort, whose chief defect lay in its lack of individuality, and the utter absence of all colors, sounds, and motives by which Russian nationality and life are conveyed. The poetry of this school contains no sharply cut features of spiritual physiognomy. All of them flow together into a featureless mass of ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... In swearing a lawful oath, a Covenant with God is made, 23 whether given to confirm an assertion, 23 or given to confirm an explicit promise, 26 The civil or moral use of the oath depends on its spiritual character, 29 The oath distinct from ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham

... had, and has, a certain success. Its infinitesimal treatment being a nullity, patients are never hurt by drugs, when it is adhered to. It pleases the imagination. It is image-worship, relic-wearing, holy-water-sprinkling, transferred from the spiritual world to that of the body. Poets accept it; sensitive and spiritual women become sisters of charity in its service. It does not offend the palate, and so spares the nursery those scenes of single combat in which infants were wont to yield at length to the pressure of the spoon and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... strength and activity, then for shrewdness, finally for unselfishness and righteousness.—An ultimate "power, not ourselves, making for righteousness," a personality.—Our knowledge of this personality may be valid, even though very incomplete.—Religion.—Conformity to the spiritual in or behind environment is likeness to God.—The ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... Religion. Many who never dream of doubting the certainty of human knowledge, in so far as it relates to their secular or scientific pursuits, are prone to cherish a skeptical spirit in regard to religious or spiritual truths; and this, not because they have examined and weighed the evidence to which Theology appeals, and found it wanting, but rather because they have a lurking suspicion that men, with their present faculties, are incapable of rising to ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... they may drop the book, to pass at once into the region of thought without words. We may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, and probably are, unless there is some particular reason to suppose the contrary. But we get glimpses now and then of a sphere of spiritual possibilities, where we, dull as we are now, may sail in vast circles round the largest ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... words of my text primarily applied to money matters, you see that they are studiously general, universal. The Apostle, after his fashion, is lifting up a little 'secular' affair into a high spiritual region; and he lays down in my text a broad general law, which goes to the very depths of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... saints, St. Peter and St. Chad—prayed with all their strength. Yet the prayer availed not. Sharper and sharper grew Godwin's agony, till, as the slow hours went by, his very soul reeled beneath this spiritual pain, and the death which he had ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard

... dined at the chateau every Thursday, and often came during the week to chat with his penitent. She became enthusiastic like himself, talked about spiritual matters, handling all the antique and complicated ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... united the business of agriculture and the administration of punishments. The church of England was then regarded by statesmen as the religion of the empire, and to clergymen of the episcopal persuasion the spiritual interests of the settlements ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West

... gradually disappearing. In the domination of the fanatics, which succeeded, matters were so much changed, that, far from permitting the use of indelicate or profane allusions, they wrapped up not only their most common temporal affairs, but even their very crimes and vices, in the language of their spiritual concerns. Luxury was using the creature; avarice was seeking experiences; insurrection was putting the hand to the plough; actual rebellion, fighting the good fight; and regicide, doing ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... human history "all great women and mythical ladies were serpents"; but when monumentally or pictorially represented, they appeared "with the head of a woman, while the body was that of a reptile." This figure represented Wisdom and Passion, or the spiritual and material planes of human existence. The mythical woman whom Hercules met in Scythia, and who was doubtless the original eponymous leader of the Scythian people, had the head of a woman and the body of a serpent.(73) Even the Mexicans ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble

... opening of the fifth century, seems the first pope who grasped the conception of Rome's universal ecclesiastical dominion. The capture of Rome by Alaric ended the city's claims to temporal supremacy; it confirmed the spiritual ascendancy of her ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee

... promulgate are notable by way of answer; their actions are still more notable. Revolt, sullen, revengeful humour of revolt against the upper classes, decreasing respect for what their temporal superiors command, decreasing faith for what their spiritual superiors teach, is more and more the universal spirit of the lower classes. Such spirit may be blamed, may be vindicated, but all men must recognise it as extant there, all may know that it is mournful, that unless altered it will ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... the general characteristics of Italian States, referred to them only occasionally. The deliberate choice and adaptation of political] expedients, which gives so great an interest to the other States is what we find least of all at Rome, since here the spiritual power could constantly conceal or supply the defects of the temporal. And what fiery trials did this State undergo in the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, when the Papacy was led captive to Avignon! All, at first, was thrown into confusion; ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... your Excellency extends to the spiritual interests of the empire permit me to bring forward the wish and the petition that the Mass which I composed by order of His Eminence the Prince Primate of Hungary for the Dedication- Festival of the Basilica at Gran, and performed there on the 3lst August, may ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated

... question, "What were to be the future relations of the Mother Country to the Colonies?" The Dean proposed to follow the same course, with this difference: that the empire of which he had to speak was a spiritual empire, and the question he would consider was what ought to be the policy of the Church of England towards fellow-Christians separated from it on ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy

... educational influence as had been brought to bear upon them. That they used a finer accent than their servants, signified only that they had grown up amid falsities, and were enabled, by the help of money, to dwell above-stairs, instead of with their spiritual kindred below.' ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... same truth. Two people can have a very good time together for a while, and like each other very much, but the time comes when their thoughts fly apart unless that one bond of union is there—unless they love the same spiritual truth." ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham

... Fetishes, the Egyptian charms in which the dreaded ghost "sits,"[FN12] meaning, is "bound," they have invented idols, a manifest advance toward that polytheism and pantheism which lead through a triad and duad of deities to monotheism, the finial of the spiritual edifice. In Eastern Africa I know but one people, the Wanyika near Mombasah, who have certain images called "Kisukas;" they declare that this great medicine, never shown to Europeans, came from the West, and Andrew Battel (1600) found idols amongst the people whom he calls Giagas ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... passed out into the night, and our last look showed him standing in his quaint little territory, thrown out in strong relief by the lamplight, gazing in rapt devotion upon his treasures, all the religious fervour of the true Breton temperament shining out of his spiritual face, thinking perhaps of the "one far-off Divine event" that for him was ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various

... and complete than the physical changes which sometimes occur in lands that are swept by the tornado and desolated by the earthquake. That morning George Foster had risen from his straw bed a miserable white slave, hopeless, heartless, and down at spiritual zero— or below it. That night he lay down on the same straw bed, a free man— in soul, if not in body—a hero of the most ardent character—up at fever-heat in the spiritual thermometer, or above it, and all because his heart throbbed ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne

... A sort of spiritual asphyxiation overtook one at last, in which the mere stony Briticism of the London hotel seemed to have a part. If you awoke again into that taste of soft-coal smoke, went down to another of those staggering lamp-lit breakfasts. But why staggering? "Can you not take ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... notion of what Poetry is, and of what by nature it aims to do. My sole intent has been to clarify that notion, which (if the reader has been patient to follow me) reveals the Poet as a helper of man's most insistent spiritual need and therefore as a member most honourable in any commonwealth: since, as Ben Jonson says: "Every beggarly corporation affords the State a mayor or two bailiffs yearly; but solus rex, aut ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... music of a more popular character. It would seem, then, that he is a millionaire malgre lui, and that, no matter what he writes, money flows into his coffers. Indeed, an extraordinary man. Despite his spiritual dependence upon Wagner, and in his Tone-Poems, upon Liszt and Berlioz, he has a very definite musical personality. He has amplified, intensified the Liszt-Wagner music, adding to its stature, also exaggerating it on the purely ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... load the belly and fill it but do not satisfy, so also this wisdom does not free from spiritual hunger nor banish blindness. But it oppresses with the weight of sins and with the guilt of hell. Whoever therefore, for the removing of the blindness of ignorance seeks to learn other arts and knowledge desires to ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton

... the law of life, as laid down by the eagle-eyed prophet Isaiah, in that remarkable chapter commencing, "Ho, every one that thirsteth"—whether it be after knowledge, or any other earthly or spiritual good—come unto me and I will give you that which you seek. This is the spirit of the text, and these are the words at the commencement of the ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... reminiscent, nor the prophet to assume the mantle of Solomon Eagle. New Year's Day belongs to nobody but yourself, and what you are going to make of the 365 days which follow it. You regard the date as a kind of spiritual Spring Cleaning, and to good housewives there is all the vigorous promise of a Big Achievement even in buying a pot of paint and shaking out a duster. And, though Fate usually helps to enliven Christmas-time by arranging a big railway ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King

... of these findings of fact we have the testimony of the Rev. John Eliot, than whom no one is better known for his labors in behalf of the spiritual welfare of the Indians of eastern Massachusetts, and for his works in their language, including that monumental work which went through two editions, Eliot's Indian Bible. It is thought that Eliot began his study of the Indian language about 1643, but it is ...
— John Eliot's First Indian Teacher and Interpreter Cockenoe-de-Long Island and The Story of His Career from the Early Records • William Wallace Tooker

... Chaucer, Spencer and Sidney revelled in the feudal halls and enchanted vistas of the middle ages; Shakespeare delineated the British mind in its grave and comic moods; Milton reflected the sober aspect and spiritual aspirations of the Puritanical era; while at later periods Pope, Goldsmith and Cowper pourtrayed the softer features of an advanced civilization and ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins

... with a result that was to me both satisfactory and disappointing. I was quite sure that the character was what I had been seeking, and I was equally satisfied that the play was not. The action had neither the body nor the strength to carry the hero; the spiritual quality was there, but the human interest was wanting. The final alterations and additions were made five years later ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles

... should flower most freely into splendour, this chill, malign obsession most nips and cripples. The law that makes getting and keeping an imperative necessity poisons and destroys the freedom of men and women in love, in art and in every concern in which spiritual or physical beauty should be the inspiring and determining factor. Behind all the handsome professions of romantic natures the gaunt facts of monetary necessity remain the rulers of life. Every youth who must sell his art and capacity for gain, every girl who must ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... Considerations tending to the Happy Accomplishment of England's Reformation in Church and State, written in 1647 and published in 1649, had proposed a central "Office of Addresse," an information service dispensing spiritual and "bodily" information to all who wished it. The holder of this office should, he said, correspond with "Chiefe Library-Keepers of all places, whose proper employments should bee to trade for the ...
— The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) • John Dury

... Commons.—To the Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal (To the Honourable the Commons) of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... years had spent one day a week in bed. She took no exercise and a great deal of baking soda and tried to fight her fat with baths. Fifteen or twenty years had worked a startling change in the two sisters, Flora the beautiful, and Sophy the plain. It was more than a mere physical change. It was a spiritual thing, though neither knew nor marked it. Each had taken on weight, the one, solidly, comfortably; the other, flabbily, unhealthily. With the encroaching fat Flora's small, delicate features seemed, somehow, to ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber

... (Koran chaps. xviii.) with Al-Khizr (the "evergreen Prophet") who had drunk of the Fountain of Life and enjoyed flourishing and continual youth. Moses is represented as the external and superficial religionist; the man of outsight; Al-Khizr as the spiritual and illuminated man ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... one had penetrated to the farthest corner of the farthest attic, a little parcel of spiritual gloom would have already arrived there. The sense of disaster was in the abode. The cook was prophesying like anything in the kitchen. Durand in the garage was meditating upon such of his master's pithy remarks as he had been ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... them for the builder's use; but we, as Free and Accepted Masons, use it for the more noble and glorious purpose of divesting our hearts and consciences of all the vices and superfluities of life, thereby fitting our minds as living and lively stones for that spiritual building, that house not made with hands, eternal in the Heavens. I also present you with a new name; it is CAUTION; it teaches you, as you are barely instructed in the rudiments of Masonry, that ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan

... people he likes, and compelled to live with the people he does not like. This, to Shelley, seemed the most galling of tyrannies; and free love was, to his feeling, the essence and test of freedom. Love must be spontaneous to be a spiritual bond in the beginning and it must remain spontaneous if it is to remain spiritual. To be bound by one's past is as great a tyranny to pure spirit as to be bound by the sin of Adam, or by the laws of Artaxerxes; and those of us who ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... did so; and with an army marched over Mercia into North-Wales, and made all the inhabitants subject to him. The same year King Ethelwulf sent his son Alfred to Rome; and Leo, who was then pope, consecrated him king, and adopted him as his spiritual son. The same year also Elchere with the men of Kent, and Huda with the men of Surrey, fought in the Isle of Thanet with the heathen army, and soon obtained the victory; but there were many men slain and drowned on either hand, ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown

... so; but no one is anxious for the answer Death brings. One can only smile at the crass stupidity of most of the explanations given by those who deny the existence of super-natural agencies and powers. The region of spiritual dynamics is destined to be ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips

... Having had occasion to send his minister, the parson of Carmunnock parish, some bags of oatmeal from his mill, the minister suspected from some cause or other that he had got short weight or measure. The worthy miller was rather nettled at being thus impeached by his spiritual overseer, and that same night proceeded to the manse with the necessary articles required for determining the accuracy of the minister's suspicions. When this was done, it was found there remained something to the good, instead of a deficiency; this the miller swung ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour

... jumping, while over there a rider was biting the sand, and towards evening the doctors had several patients. It may be stated that although not perfectly equipped in the matter of ambulances, we had three physicians with us, Doctors Visser, Marais, and Shaw. Our spiritual welfare was being looked after by the Reverends Nel and Martins, but not for long, as both these gentlemen quickly found that commando life was unpleasant and left us spiritually to ourselves, even ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen

... the two young men were sealing this covenant of friendship with this look of spiritual recognition, the cannon was thundering forth on all sides. The earth trembled from the reports of the pieces; all the elements seemed unloosed; the storm howled as if to mingle the noise of human strife ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach

... the foot, the forehead you loved, you shall see no more. The loves, the fears, the frailties that are born with the flesh, with the flesh they shall die. Let them die! There is that in man that cannot die—a seed, a germ an embryo, a spiritual essence. Higher than she was on earth, as the tree is higher than the seed, the man than the embryo, so shall you behold her; ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner

... much more concerned with the possibility of any return to live with Alan and his all-exacting creed than anything else. Fountain caught himself wondering whether indeed she had imagination enough to lay much hold on those spiritual terrors with which she had no doubt been threatened. In this, however, he misjudged her, as will ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... not have been the fact," Mark persisted. "I fancy we can dispense with the idea that Sir Charles was removed by spiritual agency. Now, would it not have been possible for anyone to have taken ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White

... the Corts, or shall we rather say the Ponce de Leon, of scientific discovery, who, failing to find what he sought,—the Principle of Life, (the Fountain of Eternal Youth,)—yet found enough to render his name immortal and to make mankind his debtor. Spinoza is the spiritual Magalhaens, who, emerging from the straits ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... of about thirty-five years of age. He had refused various solicitations from congregations, to accept of a residentiary charge, and had devoted himself to the missionary's work, where the presence of a spiritual teacher was ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro

... 'bearing up,' or, as another phrase went, 'leaning hard.' Frances Ridley Havergal was her favourite author, and Frances Ridley Havergal's little book Lean Hard, was kept on her dressing-table. (The girls, however, averred that she never opened it.) Aunt Clara's spiritual life must be imagined as a continual, almost physical leaning on Christ. Nevertheless she never complained, and she was seldom depressed. Her desire, and her achievement, was to be bright, to take everything cheerfully, to look obstinately ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... of the human mind, was to the people a second revelation. Employed at first exclusively for the Church, for the propagation of ruling ideas, it had begun to sap them. The dogmata of temporal power, and spiritual power, incessantly assailed by these floods of light, could not be long without being shaken, first in the human mind and afterwards in things, to the very foundations. Guttemberg; without knowing it, was the mechanist of the New World. In creating the communication of ideas, he had ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... Philip would not willingly sanction the landing of a Spanish army on English shores. Thus, among the more ardent Catholics, especially the refugees at the Seminary at Rheims, a crown in heaven was held out to any spiritual knight-errant who would remove the obstacle. The enterprise itself was not a difficult one. Elizabeth was aware of her danger, but she was personally fearless. She refused to distrust the Catholics. Her household was full of them. She admitted anyone to her ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude

... 'discourses' not sermons; and the interpretation of certain portions of Scripture, which was sometimes undertaken by any member of the congregation who felt equal to it, was called 'prophesying.' These were the only modes of spiritual instruction employed by the first settlers, until they procured clergymen from England, or appointed ministers from among their own elders; and these means were highly valued by the settlers, who had abandoned home, and kindred, and the comforts of civilized ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb

... police-court and the criminal cell. He loosed his hold on the young man's shoulder, and told him to rise from the half-kneeling posture, to which fear, rather than Dino's strength, had brought him. And when Hugo stood before him, he spoke in the tone of one to whom the spiritual side of life was more real, more important than any other, and it seemed to Hugo as if he spoke from out some ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... "to confer with the Viceroy." That was one of his perquisites. The Viceroy knew nothing of Mellishe except that he was "one of those middle-class deities who seem necessary to the spiritual comfort of this Paradise of the Middle-classes," and that, in all probability, he had "suggested, designed, founded, and endowed all the public institutions in Madras." Which proves that His Excellency, though dreamy, had experience of the ways of ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... own soul; our sensible attainments in this grace of the Spirit and in that; in secret prayer, in love to God, in forgiveness of injuries, in goodwill to all men, and in self-denial that no one knows of,—in things like these we possess what may be called the pocket-money of the spiritual life. All these things, at their best, are not the true jewel that no thief can break through nor steal; but though they are not our best and truest riches, yet they have their place and play their part in sending us up the pilgrim ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte

... of their family had been proscribed, denounced, and sentenced to death by a committee miscalled a "Committee of Public Safety," and that the nobility were being ruthlessly sacrificed. Saddest of all this for him was the news that his wife, that woman of heroic character, of marvelous spiritual charm, and of liberal and philanthropic mind, had been imprisoned and was in danger of perishing on the scaffold. This word—and nothing more! The darkness of life behind walls seven feet thick was not lightened for many a long ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow

... that its prophecies are not of private interpretation, nor its texts designed to be bandied about as the watch-words of party, to inflame disagreement into enmity, or to smite down our opponents with the spiritual staff of misapplied scripture. A docile mind alone is wanting to such an understanding of the sacred volume as will make us wise unto salvation; but many are the gifts which a Christian teacher requires, and diligent should be his labour before he attempts to guide others, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West

... are not spiritual, it is only the soul that is in the body that is here spoken of as the image and likeness ...
— The Pastor's Son • William W. Walter

... lawlessness, of inhabitants who had left some other place under a cloud, of frontier towns "west of God," hard layouts and conscienceless "courthouse crowds"—notwithstanding all this, the Southwest has been and is religious-minded. This is not to say that it is spiritual-natured. It belongs to H. L. Mencken's "Bible Belt." "Pass-the-Biscuits" Pappy O'Daniel got to be governor of Texas and then U.S. senator by advertising his piety. A politician as "ignorant as a ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie

... of a literary classic we should aim at more than a mere intellectual apprehension of its technique and other external features. The soul should rise into sympathy with it, and feel its spiritual beauty. All literary study that falls short of this high end, however scholarly or laborious it may be, is essentially defective. The externalities of a piece of literature are comprehended in vain, unless they lead to a fuller understanding and appreciation of its spirit and life. Unfortunately, ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter

... permits not to the slight responsibilities of new recruits—not till sleepless nights have grown to us familiar will Thought seem to take, as it were, strength, not exhaustion, from unrelaxing exercise—nourish the brain, sustain the form by its own untiring, fleshless, spiritual immortality; not till many a winter has stripped the leaves; not till deep, and far out of sight, spread the roots that support the stem—will the beat of the east wind leave ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... common, will not, when served up in the lump, satisfy the craving and sustain the life of another. The nineteenth century must produce its own literature, as it raises its own corn, and fabricates its own garments. The intellectual and spiritual treasures of the past should indeed be reverently preserved and used; but they should be used as seed. Instead of indolently living on the stores which our fathers left, we should cast them into the ground, and get the product fresh every season—old, and yet ever new. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... ambassadors, are awed and frightened. Baroncelli and Cecco, two demagogues, seize this occasion to poison their fickle minds, and blame Rienzi openly for all that has occurred. Their specious reasoning that the Tribune must be very wicked indeed, since the spiritual and temporal authorities alike disapprove of him, is strengthened by the sudden appearance of Adrian, who, wild with grief at his father's death, publicly declares he has vowed to slay the Tribune. The people—who, ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber

... them with effusion, especially in public: he smiles and bows and beckons across the street to them. But when they pass over he turns away, and he speedily loses them in the crowd. The recognition's purely spiritual—it isn't in the least social. So he leaves all his belongings to other people to take care of. He accepts favours, loans, sacrifices—all with nothing more deterrent than an agony of shame. Fortunately we're a little faithful band, and we do what we ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James

... has the olive is spiritual as no landscape can ever be from which the olive is absent; for where is there spirituality without some hue ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... conspicuous names among the many religious teachers who did good service in the early times of colonial development. During the first periods of Canadian history, the priest or clergyman was, as often as not, a guide in things temporal as well as spiritual. Dr. Strachan was not simply the instructor in knowledge of many of the Upper Canadian youth who, in after times, were among the foremost men of their day, but was as potent and obstinate in the Council as he was vigorous and decided in the pulpit. When communications ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot

... Froude, whose translations of his letters, though free and sometimes loose, are vivid, racy, and idiomatic. Froude was by no means a blind admirer of Erasmus. His favourite heroes were men of action, and he regarded Luther as the real champion of spiritual freedom. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... I was called Turk-Tattle all over the parish. The next Sunday all the old women kept their daughters at home, and the parson had not half his congregation. He would have brought me into the spiritual court, but I was revenged upon him, for he had a handsome daughter whom I initiated into the science. But I repented it afterwards, for it was talked of in town. And a lady of quality that shall be ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve

... the meadows, and now and then the hoot of the owl round the church tower made the watchers start. To watch that calm and earnest face was their great help in that hour of alarm; those sightless eyes, and broad, upraised spiritual brow seemed so replete with steadfast trust and peace, that the very sight was soothing and supporting to the young husband and wife, and when the long strokes of twelve resounded from the church tower, Mr. Clare, turning towards them, ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... opened, and it was only during the first days of this fortnight that the party in the shanty had to endure any serious discomfort. The twins didn't mind the physical discomfort at all; what they minded, and began to mind almost immediately, was the spiritual discomfort of being at such close quarters with Mrs. Bilton. They hardly noticed the physical side of that close association in such a lovely climate, where the whole of out-of-doors can be used as one's living-room; and their morning dressing, ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

... Soaking and stained, with a smear of blood on his white shoulder and another on his brow, there was still in his whole pose and set of face the trace of an inflexible resolution. His opponent's duller and more material mind quailed before the fire and intensity of a higher spiritual nature. ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle

... gentle beings, disposed to cherish him with fond hospitality." Both writers have expressed themselves well, but meseems each has secured, as often happens, a fragment of the truth and holds it to be the whole Truth. Granted that such spiritual creatures as Jinns walk the earth, we are pleased to find them so very human, as wise and as foolish in word and deed as ourselves: similarly we admire in a landscape natural forms like those of Staffa or the Palisades which favour the works of architecture. Again, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... in Ville-Marie, but returned to the convent at Quebec which she had left in a moment of caprice. Mdlle. Mance, who was Madame de Bullion's friend, remained at the head of the Hotel Dieu. The Sulpicians eventually obtained control of the spiritual welfare, and in fact of the whole island, though from necessity and policy the Jesuits were at first in charge. It was not until 1653 that one of the most admirable figures in the religious and educational history of Canada, Margaret Bourgeoys, a maiden of Troyes, came to ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot

... as men of close ambition. They are so in some respects. Their ambition is to keep close to the college of fishermen, not of cardinals; and to the doctrine of the inspired apostles, not to the decrees of interested and aspiring bishops. They contend for a spiritual creed and a spiritual worship: we have a Calvinistic creed, a Popish liturgy, and an Arminian clergy." At a later period of the session a motion was made in the commons by Sir William Meredith, for abolishing the subscription to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... we must, in experience, recognise, we notice one fundamental distinction: quantification, measurability, appear the attributes of the physical; quality, ideality, of the spiritual. The apprehension, therefore, of the doctrine of Energy should accomplish in clarity and security the abolition of the intolerable contradictions which have hitherto involved the search for Reality amid its appearances. We think it suggests ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip

... for the Burial of the Dead the church only (or the churchyard) is named as the place. The Church evidently has no thought of any other place as appropriate for the burial of her children. It is the spiritual home of all the baptized. Christian consolations are preeminently there imparted. These considerations, in addition to those of reverence and convenience, mark this as the proper place for ...
— The Worship of the Church - and The Beauty of Holiness • Jacob A. Regester

... the doctor belonged to the class of people who at times of spiritual suffering feel a craving for movement. After standing for five minutes by his wife, he walked, raising his right foot high, from the bedroom into a little room which was half filled up by a big sofa; from there he went into the kitchen. ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... in Northcote's Reynolds (ii. 94-97) renders it likely that Sir Joshua is 'the friend of ours.' Northcote, quoting Mr. Courtenay, writes:—'His table was frequented by men of the first talents. Politics and party were never introduced. Temporal and spiritual peers, physicians, lawyers, actors, and musicians composed the motley group.' At one of these dinners Mr. Dunning, afterwards Lord Ashburton, was the first who came. 'On entering, he said, "Well, Sir Joshua, and who [sic] have you got ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... not consult some discreet and learned person, her spiritual director? Remorse (entirely due, no doubt, to a conscience too delicately sensitive) is not in our line of affairs. We only advise in cases of undesirable ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... materially for evil the masses of the people. The solid structure was preserved—not to grow any longer, not to produce a new Camillus or a new Regulus, a new Scipio Africanus or a new Tiberius Gracchus, but to form an endurable shelter for civilized mankind, until a fresh spiritual life was developed out of Palestine to ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude

... still Perfection. It is still the goal to the color-blind and normal alike, whatever they call it, however, they visualize it. That is its only importance; it is The Goal..... In things spiritual the same obtains—whether one's vision embraces Nirvana, or the Algonquin Ocean of Light, or a pallid Christ half hidden in floating clouds—Drene, it is all one, all one. It is not the Goal that changes; only our intelligence concerning its ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers

... Sir George Birdwood says: "The intimate absorption of Hindu life in the unseen realities of man's spiritual consciousness is seldom sufficiently acknowledged by Europeans, and, indeed, cannot be fully comprehended by men whose belief in the supernatural has been destroyed by the prevailing material ideas ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... She placed her enthusiastic eye to the window of the box. The Devil preluded with a few proverbs and wise saws, and unfolded to her view scenes of love, in which he led her fancy so adroitly from the spiritual to the carnal, that she was scarcely aware of the gradation. If she were about to turn away her eyes with shame, the offensive object changed itself at once into a sublime image, which again attracted her attention. Her cheeks ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger

... Europe, suddenly, and without warning, the reality of that age, which had changed so imperceptibly, was revealed. The material civilisation and defence of the empire were, at least as organised things, seen to be dead; its spiritual virility and splendour were about to ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton

... present ignorance is made to rest in the most distorted views of God and the Bible and the laws of her being; and like the poor slave "Uncle Tom," her religion, instead of making her noble and free, and impelling her to flee from all gross surroundings, by the false lessons of her spiritual teachers, by the wrong application of great principles of right and justice, has made her bondage but more certain and lasting, her degradation ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... appears to me a part of the natural evolution from barbaric law and restriction, and a necessary demonstration of the spiritual equality of the sexes. I regard it also as the nurse and developer of many small virtues in which women are especially deficient,—punctuality, unvarying quality of work, a sense of business honor and of personal fidelity, each to all and all to each. But I cannot feel that ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... physical happenings, such as the rising of the sun, the coming of winter, or the flashing of the lightning; but the myth of Cupid and Psyche has nothing to do with the forces of nature—it is wholly spiritual in ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester

... normal Christian life begins in the sacramental act by which the regenerate child is made one with God, being made a partaker of the divine nature, and develops through sacramental experience and constant response to the will of God to that spiritual capacity which is the medium of the Beatific Vision and which we call sanctity or purity. "The pure in heart ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... gentlemen are seldom less than 100 pounds per annum, and none more than 200 pounds per annum. They appear to be most of them about 150 pounds per annum, besides their several parsonage houses and surplice fees; and most of them have lectureships in town, or livings in the country, or some other spiritual preferment of ...
— London in 1731 • Don Manoel Gonzales

... lose nothing, am I entitled to play with other men's fortunes? Am I all this time deceiving myself with some wretched sophistry? Am I, then, an intellectual Don Juan, reckless of human minds, as he was of human bodies; a spiritual libertine? But why this wild declamation? Whatever I have done, it is too late to recede; even this very moment delay is destruction, for now it is not a question as to the ultimate prosperity of our worldly prospects, but the immediate safety of our very bodies. Poison! O God! ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... Newton sought for the laws of God in the movement of the stars, in the falling of a stone, in the stir of the great waters, so this Newton of the spiritual world sought for the secrets of life and death, looking deep into the heart of man, marking its toil, its suffering, its little joys, with a soul attuned to catch every quiver of the life of the world. And ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding

... the carefully chosen words of the kindergarten songs and games suggest thought to the child, the thought suggests gesture, the melody begets spiritual feeling. ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... enormous proportion of the earth's fruits, thus placed by the caprice of destiny at their disposal, these holy men did very little work in the world. They fed their flocks neither with bread nor with spiritual food. They taught little, preached little, dispensed little in charity. Very few of the swarming millions of naked and hungry throughout the land were clothed or nourished out of these prodigious revenues of the Church. The constant ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... to come, for it is not too much to say that while the language of Tyndale and of Cranmer continues to be heard on earth, the devotions then put into form will keep on moulding the religious thought and firing the spiritual imagination of this race. ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington

... seventeen years residence in Labrador, complete master of the Esquimaux language, and deservedly beloved and respected both by Christians and heathens, and possessing an invincible zeal to promote their temporal and spiritual welfare, was a man eminently qualified to undertake the commission, and to conciliate the affections of unknown heathen. He had also previously made himself acquainted with the use of the quadrant, and with other branches of science, useful on ...
— Journal of a Voyage from Okkak, on the Coast of Labrador, to Ungava Bay, Westward of Cape Chudleigh • Benjamin Kohlmeister and George Kmoch

... discipline or the creed of the church. The king sanctioned it on the 26th of December; but the bishops, who sought to cover their interests with the mantle of religion, declared that it encroached on the spiritual authority. The pope, consulted as to this purely political measure, refused his assent to it, which the king earnestly sought, and encouraged the opposition of the priests. The latter decided that they ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet

... bears his mighty bulk as it wafts its own bubbles. If this is true of all the narrower manifestations of human progress, how much more must it be true of those broad movements in the intellectual and spiritual domain which interest all mankind? But in the more limited ranges referred to, no fact is more familiar than that there is a simultaneous impulse acting on many individual minds at once, so that genius comes in clusters, and shines rarely as a single star. You may trace a common motive ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... the vicar's wife, timidly confided to Jan that Mr. Withells had told her husband that he cared only for "spiritual marriage"— whatever that might be; and that, as yet, he had met no woman whom he felt would see eye to eye with him on this question. "He doesn't ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker

... man, and unquestionably his spiritual character was the fundamental secret of his transcendent power. A keen ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser

... book republished in America with preface and notes by a well-known rabbi, Dr. Isaac Leeser of Philadelphia. Although the orthodox priest found much in the book to criticize, he was forced to commend its ability.—It insists on the importance of the spiritual and moral aspects of the faith delivered to Abraham, and deprecates a superstitious reverence for the mere letter of the law. It presents Judaism as a religion of love, and the Old Testament as the inspiration of the teachings of Jesus. Written more ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... and then advisory boards might be called from the various Universities and organized professions, and from authoritative Colonial bodies to recommend men to be added to the voting peerage. Life peers already exist. The law is represented by life peers. The lords spiritual are representative life peers—they are the senior bishops, and they are appointed to represent a corporation—the Established Church. So a generally non-hereditary functional nobility might come into being without any ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells



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