"Utilitarian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... verger was surrounded by a protecting wall, of more or less architectural pretense, with towers and accessories conforming to the style of the period, and decorative and utilitarian fountains, benches and seats were also ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... rising above delightful lawns, makes a good impression—from a distance. Postcard views of it sell freely to visitors. But the best part of our hospital is hidden behind that turreted facade, and is much too "ugly" and utilitarian ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... ventilation in our case, cannot be had, without considerable expense. Can it be had for nothing, by the industrious bees? Those busy insects, which are so indefatigably plying their wings, are not engaged in idle amusement; nor might they, as some would-be utilitarian may imagine, be better employed in gathering honey, or in superintending some other department in the economy of the hive. They are at great expense of time and labor, supplying the rest of the colony with pure air, so conducive in every way, ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... in our day, less utilitarian than those of an earlier era, Borrow must have been an interesting man of letters had he not written his four great books. Single-minded devotion to the less commercially remunerative languages has now become respectable and even estimable. Students of the Scandinavian ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... The utilitarian impulse, though frequently blamed for the "desecration" of our churchyards, is really less accountable for these conversions than the culpable neglect which in too many cases has forced the only measure of correction. Therefore they who would keep the sacred soil unmolested should take ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... Lane, Baldwin's Buildings and Portpool Lane open out. The former consists largely of workmen's model dwellings, comfortable and convenient within, but with the peculiarly depressing exteriors of the utilitarian style. Further north these give way to warehouses, breweries, and manufactories. East of its southern end in Holborn were two old inns, the Old Bell and Black Bull. The former was a coaching inn of great celebrity in its day, and picturesque ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... are very much at one; here Milton and the modern advocates of the Real or Physical Sciences in Education are very much at one. Given a lofty and varied idea of utility, no man has ever been more strenuously utilitarian than Milton was in this tract. The very novelty of the scheme it proposed consisted in the proclamation of utility as the test of the studies to be pursued and as ruling the order in which they should come.—What, then, was that "rank conservatism," ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... transit instrument with the proper appliances, and the necessary books and tables, and in a single clear night he can tell his position within a hundred yards by observations of the stars. This, from a utilitarian point of view, is one of the most important operations ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... Insull wears his Chicago as a shirt front. But most of us have parted company with the town. It is a background designed and marvelously executed for our conveniences. The great metronomes of the loop with their million windows, the deft crisscross of streets, the utilitarian miracles of plumbing, doorways, heating systems and passenger carriers—these are ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... as soldiers received early consideration. Black troops had fought in the Revolution; why, then, should not black men now fight in a war of which they themselves were the ultimate provocation? The idea pleased the utilitarian side of the Northern mind and shocked no Northern prejudice. In fact, as early as the spring of 1862 General Hunter, in the Department of the South, organized a negro regiment. In July, 1862, pending consideration of a bill ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... old Sherwood Forest: it had fallen into the possession of a noble agriculturist; a modern utilitarian, who had no feeling for poetry or forest scenery. In a little while and this glorious woodland will be laid low; its green glades be turned into sheep-walks; its legendary bowers supplanted by turnip-fields; and "Merrie Sherwood" will exist ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... process began beautifully, even to my uninformed eyes, in the likeness of herring-bone masonry, crimson on white, but it seemed to me marvelous that anything should yet be discoverable in needle process, and that of so utilitarian character. ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... to tie a knot, and that all knots are not alike nor tied in the same way. There are three kinds of knots—the overhand knot, the square knot and the "Granny" knot. Each of these has its use, its place, and a utilitarian value. ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... many things in our historic educational traditions. It throws light upon the clash of aims manifested in different portions of the school system; the narrowly utilitarian character of most elementary education, and the narrowly disciplinary or cultural character of most higher education. It accounts for the tendency to isolate intellectual matters till knowledge is scholastic, academic, and professionally ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... us as we read the pages of the past, and in its richness and variety at least the eighteenth century would be difficult to rival. Prosaic London, with her borough councils, her Strand improvements, and her immense utilitarian flats, still retains the glamour of her bygone days, and if her present buildings are without much attraction, they are glorified by the halo of their association ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... Whether the utilitarian or the intuitive theory of the moral sense be upheld, it is beyond question that there are a few subtle-souled persons with whom the absolute gratuitousness of an act of reparation is an inducement to perform it; while exhortation ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... M., to be as disagreeably statistical and as praiseworthily matter-of-factish as the most dogged utilitarian could desire. I shall give you a full, true, and particular account of the discovery, rise, and progress of this place, with a religious adherence to dates which will rather astonish your unmathematical mind. But let me first describe the spot as it looked to my wondering and ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... except what led to some practical object in life. Education was considered by their founders as merely a step to making money. Science became a trade—a mere handmaid to art. Mammon was all in all. Their instruction was entirely utilitarian. Mechanics and Medicine, Hydraulics and Chemistry, Pneumatics and Hydrostatics, Anatomy and Physiology, constituted the grand staples of their education. What they taught was adapted only for professional students. One would suppose, from examining their course of study, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... one cannot separate the utilitarian side,—the fitting of the child for the struggle of life,—from its main purpose,—the development of moral character. The moral aspect alone gives to human life its true character, its real value. As there is ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... perfectness of his own character. And think how different the divine and the human standards of perfection! Not the outward fair colour and proportion merely, not the perfect fitness and adaptation, not the most utilitarian employment of every grain of dust, so that nothing is lost,—not even the grandest scale of working, is enough; but the dust on the moth's wing must be plumage, and the white chalk cliffs must be made of minute shells, each one of which shines like spun silver or is figured like cut glass. ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... killing the travellers, is an instance to the point. The goldsmith's son who died with a falsehood on his lips for allowing his lawful prince to escape from the hands of his pursuers did a meritorious act of loyalty. Then, again, the germ of the utilitarian theory may be detected in the second line of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... prior to the educating influences of the Revolution was mostly utilitarian. That he had a peach orchard as early as 1760 is proven by an entry in his diary for February 22: "Laid in part, the Worm of a fence round the Peach orchard." Just where this orchard stood I am not quite certain, but it was probably on the slope ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... 1. Utilitarian—that he could see by his opponent's face what he was driving at, and what effect his own remarks ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... man not physical, or apparently explained and limited by the transient conditions and necessities of his present state, anything which gives an inkling of immortality? Our utilitarian morality is the offspring and adjunct of our condition here. But is there not an aspiration to character which points to something more spiritual and higher than conformity to the utilitarian code? Heroism and ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... Puritanism, Franklin stands for the worldly and secular side of American character, and he illustrates the development of the New England Englishman into the modern Yankee. Clear rather than subtle, without ideality or romance or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, intensely practical and utilitarian, broad-minded, inventive, shrewd, versatile, Franklin's sturdy figure became typical of his time and his people. He was the first and the only man of letters in colonial America who acquired a cosmopolitan fame and impressed his characteristic Americanism upon the mind of Europe. He was the embodiment ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... that "rights" are not primitive and transcendent; their existence rests upon purely utilitarian grounds. The right to liberty and life is limited by the community's welfare. So is the right to property. But in estimating advantage we must beware of a superficial calculation. The concept of justice, and the enthusiasm for it, have been of enormous value to man's happiness. It is of extreme ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... we did, in the seventies of the last century; we who were still within sight and hearing of the great fighting years of an earlier generation, and still scorched by their dying fires. Balliol, Christ Church, Lincoln—the Liberal and utilitarian camp, the Church camp, the researching and pure scholarship camp—with Science and the Museum hovering in the background, as the growing aggressive powers of the future seeking whom they might devour— ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... art gallery, however, which flattered him most. He knew nothing of art, and underneath his pretentions cared less, for he was a complete utilitarian; but it had become fashionable to have an elaborate art gallery, and he forthwith disbursed money right and left to assemble an aggregation ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... pillared smoking-room of a certain exclusive club, for he was a man acquainted with the smoother side of life. He had various gifts which were apparently of no account in British Columbia, and he had enjoyed an education that had, it seemed, unfitted him for anything strictly utilitarian. There are a great many men of his description chopping trees and driving cattle in Western Canada. Indeed, his story was one which, with slight variations, may be heard frequently in that country. Financial disaster had overtaken ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... is an amazing man," Virginia mused, her fiancee in mind. "It would be interesting to discover what he can't do—along utilitarian lines, I mean. Is he as good a miner underground as he is in ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... to describe, should in the first place teach us how noble a thing it is to construct works of beauty and utility, not only for our own gratification, but for the benefit of posterity also. The selfish and unreflecting, even the modern utilitarian, will perhaps laugh at the thought, and say: 'What folly to undertake such labors for the benefit of posterity! We will labor for ourselves.' I would ask such persons, what would have been our state if the ancients had entertained such ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... expectations," but of what? The Mountains look hardly nearer than from Greeley; one only realizes their vicinity by the loss of their higher peaks. This house is freer from bugs than the one at Greeley, but full of flies. These new settlements are altogether revolting, entirely utilitarian, given up to talk of dollars as well as to making them, with coarse speech, coarse food, coarse everything, nothing wherewith to satisfy the higher cravings if they exist, nothing on which the eye ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... orifice practically obliterated. The menses had never appeared, and there seemed to be no sexual desire. Micklucho-Maclay found that one of the most primitive of all existing races—the New Hollanders—practiced ovariotomy for the utilitarian purpose of creating a supply of prostitutes, without the danger of burdening the population by unnecessary increase. MacGillibray found a native ovariotomized female at Cape York who had been subjected to the operation because, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... these wants? And if some of them are of that peculiar nature that they can only be satisfied by knowledge, or by theoretical contemplation, is this knowledge, is this theoretical contemplation, not useful,—useful even in the eyes of the most decided Utilitarian? Might it not happen that what he calls theoretical philosophy seems useless and barren to the Utilitarian, because his ideas of men are too narrow? It is dangerous, and not quite becoming, to lay down the law, and say from the very first, 'You must not have more than certain wants, and ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... Cecily, Cecily! Surely such a utilitarian occupation as the watering of flowers is rather Moulton's duty than yours? Especially at a moment when intellectual pleasures await you. Your German grammar is on the table. Pray open it at page fifteen. We will repeat ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... Expedition rather more "popular" than scientific, since the publication and scientific discussion of the observations will be carried out elsewhere; but if, while showing the difficulties under which we had to work, it emphasizes the value of Antarctic Expeditions from a purely utilitarian point of view, and the need for further continuous research into the conditions obtaining in the immediate neighbourhood of the Pole, it will have ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... beguilement. She was curious, she told herself, to see whether a man like Hilmer would be impressed by feminine artifice... Did a black silk gown, with spotless lace at wrist and throat, spell the acme of Hilmer's ideal of womanhood? Was woman to him something durable and utilitarian or did his fancy sometimes carry him to ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... mourning, had been showily and expensively united to his heiress; the Hotel de Chelles had been piped, heated and illuminated in accordance with the bride's requirements; and the young couple, not content with these utilitarian changes had moved doors, opened windows, torn down partitions, and given over the great trophied and pilastered dining-room to a decorative painter with a new theory of the human anatomy. Undine had silently assisted at this spectacle, and at the sight of the old Marquise's abject ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... man, Grim utilitarian, Loving woods for hunt and prowl, Lake and hill for fish and fowl, As the brown bear blind and dull ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... boxes from home, never any Christmas presents, except those that came from the school. While the other girls were clamoring for mail, Harriet stood in the background silent and unexpectant. Miss Sallie picked out her clothes, and Miss Sallie's standards were utilitarian rather than aesthetic. Harriet, with no exception, was the worst dressed girl in the school. Even her school uniform, which was an exact twin of sixty-three other uniforms, hung upon her with the grace ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... the wheat-elevator, oil-tanks, a slaughter-house with blood-marks on the snow, the creamery with the sleds of farmers and piles of milk-cans, an unexplained stone hut labeled "Danger—Powder Stored Here." The jolly tombstone-yard, where a utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled as he hammered the shiniest of granite headstones. Jackson Elder's small planing-mill, with the smell of fresh pine shavings and the burr of circular saws. Most important, the Gopher ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... about the learned Herr Professor who regarded unnecessary adornment with contempt and favoured sensible, utilitarian clothes for women? His wife, who was an obliging creature, adopted 'dress reform.' And what do you think he did? He eloped with ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... father," Sara exclaimed. "You know he's a terrible democrat, and utilitarian to the backbone. He's dying to introduce electric cars here ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... a brutal headache and a conviction of nightmare heightened by the outlandish tone of his surroundings. He lay on a narrow bed in a whitely antiseptic infirmary, an oblong metal cell cluttered with a grimly utilitarian array of tables and lockers and chests. The lighting was harsh and overbright and the air hung thick with pungent unfamiliar chemical odors. From somewhere, far off yet at the same time as near as the bulkhead above him, came the unceasing ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... Japan is utilitarian; in no other country are articles of common use so artistic. The furniture of a Japanese house is scanty. We see no walls hung with pictures with showy gilt frames, no portieres or curtains, none of the sofas, ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... Wyllyses; but the next morning she rose with the chickens, and before the October sun, to pursue, as usual, her daily labours. It was truly surprising how much Patsey Hubbard found time to do in a single day, and that without being one of your fussy, utilitarian busy-bodies, whose activity is all physical, and who look upon half an hour passed in quiet thought, or innocent recreation, as so much time thrown away. Our friend Patsey's career, from childhood, had been one of humble industry, self-forgetfulness, and ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... utilitarian!" exclaimed the Historian; "who cares anything about that? It is the romance of the thing that would ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... Alfonso of injustice, while the cardinal's numerous friends considered his banishment too severe a punishment. Ippolito had a great following in Ferrara. He was a lavish man of the world, while the duke, owing to his utilitarian ways and practical life, repelled the nobility. A party was formed which advocated a revolution. The house of Este had survived many of these attempts. One had occurred when Ercole ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... furniture. Selma had been used to formalism in household garniture—to a best room little used and precise with the rigor of wax flowers and black horse-hair, and to a living room where the effect sought was purely utilitarian. Her new home, in spite of its colored glass and iron stag, was arranged in much this fashion, as were the houses of her ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... the "fine old school"—who, exasperated by the, to him, incomprehensible and insupportable turn of mind developed by his heir (whom he loved well enough, notwithstanding, in his own way), had hoped, in good utilitarian fashion, that a prolonged period of contact with the world, lubricated by a plentiful supply of money, might shake his "big sawney of a son" out of his sickly-sentimental views; that it would show him that gentlemen's ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... pushed its workers, together with the gasworks, market gardens, and other utilitarian features round the screen of Splash Point. The boulevards going west and north are full of fine houses and brilliant shops and are lined with well grown trees. The continuation of Terminus Road will take us in a little over a mile to the old ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... this matter-of-fact, utilitarian age of Business one finds instances of that love of daring for its own sake, with an insatiable longing for new scenes and novel sensations, which in the days of chivalry moved the mass of men to put saddle ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Somewhere, years ago—in Italy perhaps, but I think at the Taylor Institution, Oxford—I saw the drawings made by Rafaelle for Leo X. of furniture and decoration in his new palace; be it observed in parenthesis, that one who has not beheld the master's work in this utilitarian style of art has but a limited understanding of his supremacy. Among them were idealizations of flowers, beautiful and marvellous as fairyland, but compared with the glory divine that dwells in a garland of Odontoglossum ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... arts, lacks any model in the realm of nature, it has had to work out its own laws, and its spontaneity and directness are the result. It has not become imitative, utilitarian or bound by arbitrary conventions. As Berlioz says in the Grotesques de la Musique: "Music exists by itself; it has no need of poetry, and if every human language were to perish, it would be none the less the most poetic, the grandest and the freest of all the arts." When we reach the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... these I fain would speak. We are apt to blunt our literary sense by reading far too much, and to lessen our capacity for getting the great delights from books by making reading into a routine and a drudgery. Of course I know that reading books has its utilitarian side, and that we have to consider printed matter (let me never call it literature!) as the raw material whence we extract some of the information necessary to life. But long familiarity with an illiterate peasantry like the Italian one, inclines me ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... with a building material, if we ask what can we best do with it, and for what is it ill fitted. The purposes for which brick can be best used depend, of course, upon its qualities. Speaking generally, such purposes are very numerous and very various, especially the utilitarian purposes, though rich and varied ornamental work can also be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... a very utilitarian age. Start almost any subject, propose almost any scheme, adventure, or investment, and the question is asked, "Will it pay?" The multitude are cautious; the lower stratum, the unsuccessful—the poor and the oppressed—are envious and often bitter and ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... was born in Scotland, and inherited a considerable property. She had been highly educated, and was a woman of rare original powers, and extensive and varied information. She was brought up in the utilitarian principles of Jeremy Bentham. She visited this country in 1824. Returning to England in 1825, she wrote a book in a strain of almost unbounded eulogy of the American people and their institutions. She saw only one stain upon the American character, one thing in the condition of ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... homophones are of two kinds, either scientific and utilitarian, or aesthetic. The utilitarian objections are manifest, and since confusion of words is not confined to homophones, the practical inconvenience that is sometimes occasioned by slight similarities may ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... evolved weird music from them all), an Italian dulcimer, a Welsh crwth that was unpronounceably interesting (some of the strings you twanged with your thumb and some you played with a bow); Chinese, Japanese, Indian vases, some alas! sufficiently small for utilitarian purposes, Salviati glass, feather embroidery, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... that they sprang from related rather than identical originals, did it explain how and how variously their forms have been modified in the long process of their descent—it would pass beyond its strict utilitarian bounds. This it refrains from doing. And thus everything it contains it rigorously subjects to the test of serviceability. It helps you to bring more and more words into workaday harness—to gain such mastery over them that you can speak ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... under my feet, how could I be but angry that modern Italy—ah, so small a thing!—has chased out the great and ancient order that had dwelt here so long in quietness, and has established after our pattern a utilitarian school, and thus what was once a guest-house is now a pension of tourists. But in the abbey itself I forgot my anger, I was ashamed of my contempt of those who could do so small a thing. This place was founded ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... his plentiful board. Often have we seen him entering his gateway, followed by the mendicant, who would soon return thither literally laden down with provisions from his well-stored larder. His wife was no less hospitable, not less charitable and kind to the poor, but more cautious. She was of the utilitarian school, and could not bear to see anything go to waste, or anything unworthily bestowed. Not so easily touched with the appearance of sorrow as her husband was, but always ready to relieve the wants of those she knew to be destitute, she would herself administer to the sick with ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... the university, that his real education had then to begin. He had found himself totally ignorant of modern languages and modern history, of science, and indeed of all the ideas with which the modern world was teeming. The chief defender of Greek told him blithely that he was indulging the utilitarian heresy; that the object of his education had been to harden and perfect his mind, so as to make it an instrument capable of subtle appreciation and ardent self-improvement. When Hugh pleaded the case of immense numbers of boys who, after they had been ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... honor and the principles on which it rests, a little more attention and analysis are necessary; and what I shall say will support my contention that all honor really rests upon a utilitarian basis. There are two natural divisions of the subject—the honor of women and the honor of men, in either side issuing in a well-understood esprit de corps. The former is by far the more important of the two, because the most essential feature in woman's life ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... child's nature is either starved, or else left to find haphazard expression along more or less secret channels. When the school system, under plea of the practical (meaning by the practical the narrowly utilitarian), confines the child to the three R's and the formal studies connected with them, shuts him out from the vital in literature and history, and deprives him of his right to contact with what is best in architecture, music, sculpture, ...
— Moral Principles in Education • John Dewey
... education was planned for sons of gentlemen, Locke urged the establishment of "working schools" for children of the laboring classes. This was in line with his utilitarian ideas, as the intent was not so much intellectual training, as the formation of steady habits and the preparation for success in industrial pursuits. Locke's plan was for a sort of manual training school, the first appearance of such ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... the present age, especially when he happens to dwell on the other side of the Atlantic. There he uses the wonders of Nature as advertising boards for puffing quack medicines or patent stoves, and the picturesque and the grandiose are only appreciated by him in proportion to their utilitarian value." ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... Phil," drawled Rosenlaube; "it will be easy enough. But I don't agree with Phipps-Herrick about the reason or method. We are going to have a new era after the war. But it will not be a utilitarian age. It will be a return to beauty and form and culture—not with a 'k.' First of all, we are going to kill a great many Germans. Then we are going to Berlin to knock down all the ugly statues in the Sieges-Allee ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... public-houses have done their work, comes a greater or lesser amount of riot, rude debauchery, and vice; and then, voila tout—the fair is over for a year. One can easily imagine the result of the transition when, from the quiet country, the fair removes to the city or suburb. In such places every utilitarian element is wanting, and the gilt ginger-bread and gewgaws are only a speciously innocent attraction towards the drinking and dancing booth where the mischief is done. Well-wishers to society are unromantic enough not to regret the decidedly waning glories of ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... reproach is just. In our hurry of utilitarian progress, we have either forgotten the Indian altogether, or looked upon him only in a business point of view, as we do almost everything else; as a thriftless, treacherous, drunken fellow, who knows just enough to be troublesome, ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... for physical activity on the Ertak; she was primarily a fighting ship, small and fast, with every inch of space devoted to some utilitarian use. I knew just how Correy felt, because I'd felt the same way a great many times. I was young, then, one of the youngest commanders the Special Patrol Service had ever had, and I recognized Correy's ...
— The Terror from the Depths • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... may be badly carried out, they may be accompanied with much oppression of the governed by the governing body, but they are always aimed at, and occasionally secured. Of the Ten Commandments, four pertain to Religious Worship; six are Utilitarian, that is, have no end except to ward off evils, and to further the good ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... they did long ago to Marcus Aurelius. Mr. J.S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, 'Utilitarianism,' (1864, pp. 45, 46), of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality." Again he says, "Like the other acquired capacities above referred to, the moral faculty, if not a part of our nature, is a natural out-growth from it; capable, like them, in a certain ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... noble platitude. Not only historically, but also in the worst modern sense this is rhetoric. It is not unreasonable to conclude that such a preoccupation with rhetoric, such a sustained search for all possible means of persuasion, should have strengthened rather than weakened the utilitarian theory of poetry. The school-master endeavored to mould the characters of his students by examples from heroic poetry; the teacher of rhetoric, in turn, taught them that to persuade an audience they must prove, please, and move, and that ficticious ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... inspiration was spiritual: Machiavelli's frankly pagan, and with the latter Fortune takes the place of God. Dante did not love the Papacy, but Machiavelli, pointing out how even in ancient Rome religion was politic or utilitarian, leads up to his famous attack upon the Roman Church, to which he attributes all the shame and losses, political, social, moral, national, that Italy has suffered at her hands. And now for the first time the necessity for Italian Unity is laid plainly down, and the Church and its temporal ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... temples, pagodas; thrones, emblems of mythology; and, in short, there is hardly a purpose in the useful and ornamental arts to which ivory is, or has not been in some way extensively employed. At present, the ivory carvings of Dieppe are the finest in Europe; but the genius of the present age is utilitarian, and so are its applications of ivory. If we desire high art in the fabrication of this material, we must go back a few centuries, or be satisfied with the beautiful productions of China or Hindostan. We could scarcely give a more apt illustration of this truth than by pointing to ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... better the morale, the more profound its mystery from the utilitarian angle of judgment. There is something miraculous in the power of a bald and unhesitating announcement of reverse to steel the temper of men attuned to making sacrifices and to meeting emergencies. No one can touch the deepest ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... has been strictly utilitarian, having respect to conditions of collision, of carriage, and of support. But now, on the surface of our piece of pottery, here are various bands and spots of color which are presumably set there to make it pleasanter to the eye. Six of the spots, seen closely, you discover are intended to represent ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... was at the height of my strength. I am beginning to feel now a little more tolerant towards the boy who wrote this than the man who criticised it in 1865; but he was quite right.' The critic of 1865, I may note, is specially hard upon the lad of 1850 for his ignorance of sound utilitarian authorities. He writes against an allusion to Hobbes, 'Ignorant blasphemy of the greatest of English philosophers!' The lad has misstated an argument from ignorance of Bentham and Austin. 'I had looked at Bentham at ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... everywhere regarded as mere beasts of burden rather than as human beings. When, however, they had the question put to them, as Gervaise had done, they were ready to give a hearty agreement, although it was the utilitarian rather than the humanitarian side of the question that recommended it to them. After three hours' rest the journey was renewed, and just at nightfall the galley anchored off an islet lying to the ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... five hundred acres of the best forest land still accessible (say within ten miles of their respective centers), and gradually convert it into walks, drives, arbors, &c., for the recreation and solace of their citizens through all succeeding time. Should a portion be needed for cemetery or other utilitarian purposes, it may be set off when wanted; and ultimately a railroad will afford the poor the means of going thither and returning at a small expense. If something of this sort is ever to be done, it cannot be done too soon; for the forests are annually disappearing and the price of wood near our ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... Red were not in need of frocks, for before they left England their mother had stocked their boxes as though she was never to see a draper's shop again. But then, she had been in a severely utilitarian mood, and when she cut out the garments it had not occurred to her that Fashion would ever come across the ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... commingled apprehension and satisfaction at the fact that Kate Barrington, late of Silvertree and its gossiping, hectoring, wistful circles, was in the foreground. She had had an Idea which could be utilized in the high service of the world, and the most utilitarian and idealistic public in the world ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... tour. These showed, Chesterton thinks, the two qualities most often denied to Browning, passion and beauty. They are the contradiction to critics, other than ours, who regard Browning as wholly a philosophic poet, which is to say a poet who wrote poetry not for its own sake but for purely utilitarian purpose; not that poetry of the emotions is not useful—it is ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... ignorant as I am of antiquarian matters, this sounds very curious; and I send it you in case you may find it worthy of insertion, as provocative of discussion, and with the utilitarian idea that I may gain some ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... maleficent act can be prevented: by the voluntary absence of the active, or by the resistance of the passive agent. Whence two systems of morals arise, not antagonistic but concurrent; religious or philosophical morality, and the morality to which I permit myself to apply the name economical (utilitarian). ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... dunghill was in most houses literally and without exaggeration the cleanest spot, and the only one where one could stand without loathing. But if the general aspect of things left much to be desired from a utilitarian point of view, its strangeness and picturesqueness would not fail to compensate an imaginative youth for the want of order and comfort. The strong contrast of wealth and poverty, of luxury and distress, that gave to the whole country ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... our conception of the outer appearance of that little house we imagined. Unless it happens to be the house of an exceptionally prosperous member of the utilitarian professions, it will lack something of the neat directness implicit in our description, something of that inevitable beauty that arises out of the perfect attainment of ends—for very many years, at any rate. It will almost ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... imaginative ideas in solving the great business problems of the present and the future instead of in forming rhymes and metres. To do this I must command unlimited resources; but what does money mean except the opportunity to gratify ideals? With this I can force my imagination to produce utilitarian results." ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... The utilitarian spirit of the age is strikingly exhibited in the intense desire to diminish the quantity of time necessary to pass from one spot of the earth's surface to another, and to communicate almost instantaneously with a remote ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Parton was born in a cooler and calmer atmosphere, where men are accustomed to give a reason for the faith that is in them, and hence it is necessary, in opening any discussion such as he had provoked, that he should assign some ground of opposition or support—Christian, Pagan, utilitarian, constitutional, optimist, or pessimist. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... written by fools or for any foolish purpose. I never knew anything about them before, and I had no right to have undertaken the History of Ireland." His publishers, who had less scruples, or more utilitarian views, insisted on the completion of his task. Whatever their motives may have been, we may thank them for the result. Though Moore's history cannot now be quoted as an authority, it accomplished its work for the time, and promoted an interest ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... Philistine majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers; but a moment's reflection will show that this utilitarian application corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the shedding of innocent blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for the murder of one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a mangy sheep or an ox with the ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... deck together, betrayed the same general impression which prevails throughout the Continent (Germany in particular), that we are a thoroughly material people, having little taste for or appreciation of anything which is not practical and distinctly utilitarian. Nothing can be further from the truth; yet I have the greatest difficulty in making people comprehend that a true feeling for science, art, and literature can co-exist with our great practical genius. There is more intellectual activity in the Free States than in any other part of the world, a more ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... life"—that is our ultimate comment. An appreciation of tragedy involves, therefore, a sure discernment of the essential disharmony of existence, yet at the same time, a feeling for the moral values which it may create; neither the optimist nor the utilitarian ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... his meaning in an abstract form. He is sensible that moderation is better than total abstinence, and that asceticism is but a one-sided training. He makes the sagacious remark, that 'those who are able to resist pleasure may often be among the worst of mankind.' He is as much aware as any modern utilitarian that the love of pleasure is the great motive of human action. This cannot be eradicated, and must therefore be regulated,—the pleasure must be of the right sort. Such reflections seem to be the real, though imperfectly expressed, ...
— Laws • Plato
... which he endeavored to show all the benefits provided by prohibition. But he did it with figures. There was a column showing the increase of accounts in savings banks and another devoted to the decrease of inmates in hospitals, jails and almshouses. From a utilitarian point of view the figures, if correct, could hardly fail to be impressive, but little has been said by either side about the spiritual aspects of rum. Unfortunately there are no statistics on that, and ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... classes, however, the balance is in favor of the West. In the East, while, without doubt, there always has been and is now a pure and natural affection, it is also true that this natural affection has been more mixed with utilitarian considerations than in the West. Christian Japanese, however, differ little from Christian Americans in this respect. The differences between the East and the West are largely due to the differing industrial and family conditions induced by the ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... were taken to bring the question to an issue. Mr. Hume, a parsimonious economist, of niggard principle and grovelling sentiment, undertook the office of coercing the Irish. He gave notice of a motion for a call of the House. This man, a mean utilitarian, had been rejected by the country of his birth and the country of his adoption, and found refuge in an Irish constituency, that returned him without solicitation and without expense. He repaid them and the country by ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... different. Our pedantry wants even the saving clause of Enthusiasm. The election is now matter of necessity and not of choice. Knowledge is now too broad a field for your Jack- of-all-Trades; and, from beautifully utilitarian reasons, he makes his choice, draws his pen through a dozen branches of study, and behold—John the Specialist. That this is the way to be wealthy we shall not deny; but we hold that it is NOT the way to be healthy or wise. The whole mind becomes narrowed and circumscribed to one 'punctual spot' ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson |
