"Civilised" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... our destination before the news of the actual commencement of hostilities could reach the enemy's cruisers in the Eastern seas. One thing, however, I remembered; it was, that bad news travels fast, and I have come to the conclusion that no news is worse than that which tells of two civilised nations going to war. ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston
... encouraged general censure of any profession[964]; but he was willing to allow a due share of merit to the various departments necessary in civilised life. In a splenetick, sarcastical, or jocular frame, however, he would sometimes utter a pointed saying of that nature. One instance has been mentioned[965], where he gave a sudden satirical stroke to the character of an ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... In all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature. In the beginning, this is not altogether to be reprobated; it is the rude homage which Ignorance, conscious of its disgrace, offers to Learning; but ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... upon leaving London on the third of September, and had, his wife declared, out of pure malignity, taken his family to Fareham, a place she hated, rather than to Chilton, a place she loved, at least as much as any civilised mortal could love the country. Never, Hyacinth protested, had her husband been so sullen ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... only its own, man, without anything special, appropriates the instincts of all. This admirable creature, with foes on every side, is forced to be constantly on the alert, and hence to be always in full possession of all his faculties, unlike civilised man, whose native force is enfeebled by the mechanical protections with which he has surrounded himself. He is not afraid of the wild beasts around him, for experience has taught him that he is their master. His health is better than ours, for we live in a time ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the great brome-grass by the wood! But to-day I have to listen to the lark's song—not out of doors with him, but through the window-pane, and the bullfinch carries the rootlet fibre to his nest without me. They manage without me very well; they know their times and seasons—not only the civilised rooks, with their libraries of knowledge in their old nests of reference, but the stray things of the hedge and the chiffchaff from over sea in the ash wood. They go on without me. Orchis flower and cowslip—I cannot number them all—I hear, as it were, the patter of their feet—flower and bud ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... breaks windows, puts out street-lamps, tears the tiles from the house-roofs, damages piers and moorings, and chases police and watchmen into their holes. It is Nature's loud war-cry, in the very midst of the civilised town, to all the recollections of his childhood, to his imagination and his love of Nature; and he obeys it like an old trumpeter's horse that hears the signal of his youth, and instantly ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... a liberal civilisation was still a dogma; for dogma is the only thing that makes argument or reasoning possible. America, under all its swagger, did still really believe that Europe was its fountain and its mother, because Europe was more fully civilised. Dickens, under all his disgust, did still believe that America was in advance of Europe, because it was more democratic. It was an age, in short, in which the word "progress" could still be used reasonably; because the whole ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... in yellow and Daphne in pink—both looking as fresh as daisies and as civilised as orchids—consisted of Lady Walmer, a smart, good-looking, commonplace woman, rather fatter than she wished to be, but very straight-fronted, straightforward, and sporting, with dark red hair and splendid jewels; a faded yet ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... First of all, great enterprise had been shewn by the German merchants and adventurers in different parts of the world, especially in Africa and in the Pacific. They, in those difficulties which will always occur when white traders settle in half-civilised lands, applied for support to the German Government. Bismarck, as he himself said, did not dare to refuse them ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... rage of hers, and every pause she comes to in her speech is our pause, so intense is the evocation, so unerring the expression of an impulse which, whether or no it be atrophied in our more hesitant and civilised consciousness, is ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... their version of the incident. If it departs widely from the truth, he will find reason to suspect the fact. But, instead of charging the men with untruthfulness, or attempting to extort the truth by threats, or bullying, or torture (as is so often done in more highly civilised courts), he keeps silence, shrugs his shoulders, and tells them to go away and think it over, and to come back another day with a better story. In the meantime he hears the version of some other ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... with the magi, it endowed India with wonderful traditions, it civilised Greece to the ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... fundamental principle of social life in its different stages of development remains the same; and in no circumstance can the truth be ignored that all human complexities must harmonise in organic unity with life, failing which there will be endless conflict. Most things in the civilised world occupy more than their legitimate space. Much of their burden is needless. By bearing this burden civilised man may be showing great strength, but he displays little skill. To the gods, viewing ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... might make Mr. Jacks memorable as a satirist. It brings philosophy down from the air, like a peaceful thunderbolt, to shatter the vain illusions we entertain of our material success and our civilised strides forward. The fact that when you have begun to read the book you may experience some difficulty in knowing how to take it is in the book's favour. And why should you complain so long as from the outset you are continuously entertained and amused? ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... average, just as a small number of Finns and Cossacks give 98 cubic inches, or considerably more than that of the German races. It is evident, therefore, that the absolute bulk of the brain is not necessarily much less in savage than in civilised man, for Esquimaux skulls are known with a capacity of 113 inches, or hardly less than the largest among Europeans. But what is still more extraordinary, the few remains yet known of pre-historic man do not indicate any material diminution in the size of the brain case. A Swiss skull of the stone ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... enthusiasm. He turned from the map, and with assumed indifference said: "I like not the look of the country. Woods and water, water and woods, are all you have marked on it. I prefer a land of fertile fields and civilised society." ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... known of them at the time of Bert's visit, was one called "Crazy Colin," a strange being, half wild, half civilised, with the frame of an athlete, and the mind of a child. Although more than thirty years of age, he had never shown much more sense than a two-year-old baby. He even talked in a queer gibberish, such as was suitable to that stage of childhood. Everybody was kind to him. His clothes and his food were ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... seeing nature," as Reynolds phrased it; and the following sentence makes clear what is meant, for he says of painting "perhaps it ought to be as far removed from the vulgar idea of imitation, as the refined, civilised state in which we live is removed from a gross state of nature";[77] and again: "If we suppose a view of nature, represented with all the truth of the camera obscura, and the same scene represented by a great artist, how little and how mean will the one appear in comparison of the ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... may be 'hedged about' by cobweb statutes; I will not swear it is not so; there may exist laws that make such things property; but sure I am that the hissing contempt, the loud-mouthed indignation of all civilised society, 'would sibilate and roar at the bloodless poltroon who should engage law on his side to obtain for him the restitution ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... operation, which being once established its utility is undoubted, as it would be a necessary possession of every empire, and it were hardly too much to say, of every individual of competent means in the civilised world. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... or two yet to come it will be the basis of the common speech of the people and the language of worship. It is chiefly in matters of trading and handicrafts that English is taking its place, though here as elsewhere it stands to the discredit of the civilised race that blackguard English is the first ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... war the war was going to be. When we returned in the beginning of December we were Martians. For three months we had been vividly soldiers. We had been fighting not in a savage country, but in a civilised country burnt by war; and it was because of this that the sights of war had struck us so fiercely that when we came back our voyage in the good ship Archimedes seemed so many years distant. Besides, if I were not to tell you of my leave ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... we trust, believe that, born in a civilised country, formed to gentle manners, trained in a merciful religion, and living in enlightened and polished times, where even foreign hostility is softened from its original sternness, we could have thought of letting loose upon you, our late beloved brethren, these fierce tribes of savages and cannibals, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... sentence: "On the whole they [i.e. the studies of earlier society] suggest that the differences which, after ages of change, separate the civilised man from savage or barbarian, are not so great as the vulgar opinion would have them.... Like the savage, he is a man of party with a newspaper for a totem ... and like a savage he is apt to make of his ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... cultivating a taste for macaroni and dark bread with pallid butter. Still, they were merry enough until they reached Genoa, and perceived that there was no reasonable prospect of their being able to make anything at all in the over-civilised and over-entertained towns ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... mother had transmitted to him a nature at once fierce and affectionate, passionate and cunning. Half-child, half-savage, he seemed to be bound by none of the restraints that civilised men early learn to place upon their instincts. He expressed his anger, his sorrow, his love, with all the abandon that characterised the natives of those sunny shores where the first years of his life were spent. Profoundly simple in his modes of feeling, ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... attack the minds of the Queen and the Prince, and indeed of a large portion of the civilised world, were much occupied with a serious foreign embroilment into which the Government had been drawn by what many people considered the restless and interfering policy of Lord Palmerston, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He had gone so far as to send a ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... nothing more nor less than the world of individuality, there are no absolute rights and wrongs, there are no qualitative questions at all, but only quantitative adjustments. Equally strong in the normal civilised man is the desire for freedom of movement and the desire for a certain privacy, for a corner definitely his, and we have to consider where ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... take your fun any way you please. Only remember—no friendships with Lunda folk. Play with them under the black flag, if that gives you amusement; and see that your Viking-craze keeps within the bounds of civilised laws." ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... to consider one more objection that has been raised against Swadeshi. The objectors consider it to be a most selfish doctrine without any warrant in the civilised code of morality. With them to practise Swadeshi is to revert to barbarism. I cannot enter into a detailed analysis of the position. But I would urge that Swadeshi is the only doctrine consistent with the law of humility and ...
— Third class in Indian railways • Mahatma Gandhi
... the resistlessness of the current that has set against those literal interpretations which she seems to hug more and more closely the more religious life is awakened at all? The clergyman is wanted as supplementing the doctor and the lawyer in all civilised communities; these three keep watch on one another, and prevent one another from becoming too powerful. I, who distrust the doctrinaire in science even more than the doctrinaire in religion, ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... no love for the Athole and Great Glen folks as ye ken; but I could long syne have got letters of fire and sword that made Badenoch and Nether Lochaber mine if I had the notion. Don't interrupt me with your nonsense, cousin; I'm telling Elrigmore here, for he's young and has skill of civilised war, that there may, in very few weeks, be need of every arm in the parish or shire to baulk Colkitto. The MacDonald and other malignants have been robbing high and low from Lochow to Loch Finne this while back; I have ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... forest almost as stealthily as an animal, their keenness of sight, their acute sense of hearing, their knowledge of jungle lore and of the habits of animals, and their ability to stand long and hard physical strain, are the envy of us civilised men when we find ourselves among them. Particularly is this shown when tracking. They will note the slightest indication of the passage of the animal they are after—the faintest footprint, a stone overturned and showing the moisture on its under surface, a broken ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... inspect Lough Mask House and the ruins of the adjacent castle in the first place. I had but just passed a magnificent field of mangolds, many of which weighed from a stone to a stone and a half, when I came upon a sight which could not be paralleled in any other civilised country at the ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... our vices. Is an assegai so much more savage than a shell? Is there any great gulf fixed between a Chaka and a Napoleon? At least they are not hypocrites, and they are not vulgar; that is the privilege of civilised nations. ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... fortune, if aught below is certain, which that acquisition holds out. What is a curacy, but a synonym for starvation? If we accuse the Eremites of old of wasting their lives in unprofitable wildernesses, what shall we say to many a hermit of Protestant, and so-called civilised times, who hides his head in a solitude in Yorkshire, and buries his probably fine talents in a Lincolnshire fen? Have I genius? Am I blessed with gifts of eloquence to thrill and soothe, to arouse the sluggish, to terrify the sinful, to cheer and convince the timid, to lead ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... infernal throne,' it is taken as a matter of course that the King will visit his successor. Well, let His Majesty betake himself and his tact and a full cargo of Victorian Orders to Constantinople, by all means. But, on the way, nestling in the very heart of Europe, perfectly civilised and strifeless, jewelled all over with freedom, is another country which he has not visited since his accession—a country which, oddly enough, none but I seems to expect him to visit. Why, I ask, ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... is that, with all their thoroughness in plotting, they have no savoir faire; they are educated beyond the capacity of their breeding; and the older, lazier, civilised nations have—as the saying is—caught the barbarian stiff. It is—as you choose to look at it—a tragedy of tactlessness or a triumph of tact; and for our time, anyway, the last word upon the Church of Christ—call it Eastern or Western, ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... reinforcements of troops from Berwick, with which the deputy resolved to repair the credit of the English arms, and to set the Irish an example of civilised warfare. How did he do this? Dispatching provisions by sea to Lough Foyle, he succeeded this time in marching through Tyrone, 'and in destroying on his way 4,000 cattle, which he was unable to carry away. He had left Shane's cows to rot where he had killed them; and thus being ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... first and foremost really comes to, I think, is the fact that at an hour when the civilised peoples are on exhibition, quite finally and sharply on show, to each other and to the world, as they absolutely never in all their long history have been before, the English tradition (both of amenity and of energy, I naturally mean), should have ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... it seems, persuading civilised men that, as they are strong, so the obligation rests on them to set the world in order, carry tillage into its wildernesses, and clean up its bloodstained corners. Yet as a political philosophy it lacks the first of all essentials, and as Mr. Kipling develops ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to have possessed mentally—even if I had but just turned twelve!—and that now filled out its frame or case for me from every lighted window, up and down, as if each of these had been, for strength of sense, a word in some immortal quotation, the very breath of civilised lips. How I had anciently gathered such stores of preconception is more than I shall undertake an account of—though I believe I should be able to scrape one together; certain it is at any rate that half the beauty of the whole ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... virtue of interest; the more since with the changes chronicled, come also changes in the character of both the inhabitants and the employments of these regions. With a civilised people extending themselves over new lands, cattle form ever the advance guard. Then come the farms. This is the procession of a civilised, peaceful invasion; thus is the column marshalled. First, the pastoral; next, the agricultural; third and last, the manufacturing;—and per consequence, ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... contributed to abash him; for every one who had any pretensions to respectability wore over the coats with which nature had provided them, clothes of a cut that looked wonderful in the eyes of the untutored Bruin. His own aspect was, meanwhile, not less odd in the opinion of the more civilised animals. His untrimmed hair and beard, his ragged coat, his queer gait, and the unrestrained gape of wonder with which he stared around him, were sufficient to excite the attention of the most indifferent, and it was with a tolerably large ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... the uncovered wigwams standing about, one a large oblong with three fireplaces in it. Lying near the wigwams were old clothes of a quite civilised fashion, pots, kettles, a wooden tub, paint-cans and brushes, paddles, a wooden shovel, broken bones, piles of hair from the deer skins they had dressed, and a skin stretcher. Some steel traps hung in a tree near, and several iron pounders ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... Roman Law has been built the law of the greater part of the civilised world. The Greek is a ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... husband, left by her children, a nullity in society, then piety becomes her one and last resource. In nearly every part of the world, the cruelty of the civil laws against women is added to the cruelty of Nature. They have been treated like weak-minded children. There is no sort of vexation which, among civilised peoples, man cannot ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... inspection but an assemblage of artificial men and factitious passions, which are the work of all these new relations, and have no foundation in nature. Reflection teaches us nothing on that head, but what experience perfectly confirms. Savage man and civilised man differ so much at bottom in point of inclinations and passions, that what constitutes the supreme happiness of the one would reduce the other to despair. The first sighs for nothing but repose and liberty; he desires only to live, and to be ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... tolah or suburb, called the Kusbee tolah. Here live the miserable outcasts who minister to the worst passions of our nature. These degraded beings are banished from the more respectable portions of the community; but here, as in our own highly civilised and favoured land, vice hovers by the side of virtue, and the Hindoo village contains the same elements of happiness and misery, profligacy and probity, purity and degradation, as the fine home cities that are a name in ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... of the birds as himself, they were accustomed to pay nightly visits to the forbidden ground, and carry off many of the plumpest fowl. The wood was known to shelter many a wandering fox, who, although dwelling so near the city, could not be prevailed on to abandon their roguish habits and live in a civilised manner. These birds were particularly to their taste, and it required the greatest agility to keep off the cunning invaders, for, though they had no great courage, and would not attempt to resist a bold dog, they frequently ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... the first edition of the "Descent of Man" Mr. Darwin wrote: "It is a more curious fact that savages did not formerly waste away, as Mr. Bagehot has remarked, before the classical nations, as they now do before modern civilised nations..."(414/2. Bagehot, "Physics and Politics," "Fortnightly Review," April, 1868, page 455.) In the second edition (page 183) the statement remains, but a mass of evidence (pages 183-92) is added, to which reference occurs in the reply to ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... but we do not deserve it in the same degree as the Munster and Connaught folks. We dislike the Connaught people just as much as you do in England. We hate dirt, and lawlessness and disorder, and therefore we claim to be superior to the rest of the poor counties. This is, of course, the civilised part of Donegal. But wherever you go, you see nothing like the dirt of counties Galway ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Nazareth, a small town in Galilee, which before his time was not known to fame. The precise date of his birth is unknown. It took place in the reign of Augustus, probably some years before the year one of the era which all civilised peoples date from the day of his birth. Jesus came from the ranks of the common folk. His father, Joseph, and his mother, Mary, were people in humble circumstances, artisans living by their handiwork in ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... cattle which were not driven off behind the army killed upon the spot. They seemed to be fiercely revelling, rather than carrying out a military expedition. Our hair would stand on end nowadays at the horrible traits of that fierce, half-civilised age, which the Zaporozhtzi everywhere exhibited: children killed, women's breasts cut open, the skin flayed from the legs up to the knees, and the victim then set at liberty. In short, the Cossacks ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... will say a good word for you, when it comes to that, and you will need it. Sir Guy will have Ticonderoga soon, and Mr. Howe New York; so that, with my loyal cousins and the king in possession, we shall at least be in civilised society." ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... development of the faculty which unites all these in the highest form of activity must be secured mainly by personal effort. The richest and most accessible material for this highest education is furnished by art; and the form of art within reach of every civilised man, at all times, in all places, is the book. To these masterpieces, which have been called the books of life, all men may turn with the assurance that as the supreme achievements of the imagination they have the power of awakening, stimulating, ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... recalled and formed up in the centre of the plain, where the king critically inspected them, while I, at his invitation, rode beside him. And I feel bound to say that seldom have I seen a finer body of men, either savage or civilised, which, after all, is not to be greatly wondered at, seeing that, as the king's own special regiment of bodyguards, they were, naturally, the very pick and flower of the ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... civilised world will rejoice to hear that the differences between Mr. C. B. COCHRAN and M. DESCHAMPS have at last been amicably settled. The great fight for the world's heavy-weight championship is fixed to take place at Olympia on November 17th. DEMPSEY ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... The more civilised we become the more complex and serious will be our problems—unless sensible and merciful yet thorough methods are adopted for dealing with the evils. I think that my pages will show that the methods now in use for coping with some of our great evils do not lessen, but considerably ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... Monday, March 24.—Prince ARTHUR explained in speech nearly two hours long the bearings of Irish Land Purchase Bill. In course of his exposition the happy accident by which civilised man is furnished with two coat-tails was strikingly illustrated. On the Treasury Bench, behind Prince ARTHUR, sat, on either hand, OLD MORALITY and JOKIM. Supposing the Prince had had only one coat-tail, differences might ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... (proper) been issued to my patrons when a benevolent subscriber, whose name I am bound to conceal, apprised me that he had personal and precise information concerning a project to pirate the production. England and Anglo-America, be it observed, are the only self-styled civilised countries in the world where an author's brain-work is not held to be his private property: his book is simply no book unless published and entered, after a cost of seven presentation copies, at "Stationers' Hall"—its only aegis. France, Italy and Austria treat such volumes as private MSS.: here ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... was prevalent over the whole of civilised Europe a most extraordinary superstition concerning the small Arctic bird resembling, but not so large as, the common wild goose, known as the barnacle or bernicle goose. MAX MUELLER(1) has suggested that this word was really derived from Hibernicula, ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... settle up his wrongs in a more civilised manner. Then, seeing that every plea was to him a source of fresh delight, I ceased to argue, and became silent, holding on to the bars of my cage and watching him as he cruised slowly round and round the buoy. Presently he talked to me. They were like neat ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... becoming acquainted with its inhabitants, their manners and customs. I must confess that I had formed a higher estimate of the peasants. When we read in the history of that country that the first inhabitants had emigrated thither from civilised states; that they had brought knowledge and religion with them; when we hear of the simple good-hearted people, and their patriarchal mode of life in the accounts of former travellers, and which we know that nearly every peasant in Iceland can ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... captain and Mr. (afterwards Sir Joseph) Banks—the naturalist of the expedition—to start next day for a sight of the strange animals. They, too, were fortunate enough to witness the antics of the kangaroos; and so one of the most important of the natives of Australia became known to the civilised world. ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... only since they have been guilty of many acts of atrocity that I have separated myself from them. I told them that I would remain their friend, and do my utmost to defend and advance their cause, if they would act justly, and if resolved on war, would carry it on according to the customs of the civilised nations of the earth. But when I found that they had begun to massacre the unarmed and defenceless people, and had scalped those they had slain in fight, I told them that I could no longer remain their friend. To do them justice, they replied that I was ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... obliged to return, trusting to his powers of acting the repentant prodigal to avert the torrent of his father's wrath. The breach of discipline which he had committed was as readily overlooked in Nepaul as it would have been in other more civilised countries, when the offender has good interest to back him; and promotion to the command of a company was given him as the reward of his services while ensign. About this period Jung Bahadoor received the intelligence of the advancement of his uncle, Mahtabar Singh, to the office of prime minister. ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... in which hard biscuit figured as bun, and water was made to do duty for tea. In this latter part of the game, by the way, the children did but carry out in jest a practice which is not altogether unknown in happier circumstances and in civilised society. ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... by day? Should I show the letter to Ralph?—it would be useless. What would avail any advice or assistance which his reckless courage could give, against an enemy who combined the ferocious vigilance of a savage with the far-sighted iniquity of a civilised man? ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... dull perplexities, all her bitterness of ennui, all her questionings and doubts, were swept away on the keen desert wind into the endless plains. She had come from her last confession asking herself, "What am I?" She had felt infinitely small confronted with the pettiness of modern, civilised life in a narrow, crowded world. Now she did not torture herself with any questions, for she knew that something large, something capable, something perhaps even noble, rose up within her to greet all this nobility, all this mighty frankness and fierce, undressed ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... her opinion of it. Everyone would blame her for what had happened, everyone would jeer at her, and say that the moment an opportunity of escape had presented itself Anna had seized it, preferring an existence of loneliness and hardship—any sort of existence—to all the pleasures of civilised life in Susie's company. Peter would certainly be very angry with her, and reproach her with not having made Anna happy enough. Happy enough! The girl had cost her at least three hundred a year, what with ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... may think in our own hearts, Epic and Theory have to remain the exception. Battles indeed have been fought, but when you survey the field in preparation for them you are summoned to observe the preluding courtesies of civilised warfare in a manner becoming a chivalrous gentleman. It never was the merely flinging of your leg across a frontier, not even with the abrupt Napoleon. You have besides to drill your men; and you have often to rouse your foe with ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... tractate on education as a whole, I must risk something for the sake of brevity, and will venture to lay down dogmatically that the objects of literary studies as a part of education are (1) the formation of a personality fitted for civilised life, (2) the provision of a permanent source of pure and inalienable pleasure, and (3) the immediate pleasure of the student in the process of education. None of these objects is exclusive of either of the others. They cannot in fact be separated in the concrete. ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... of these latter days, in regard to hotel accommodation, when business or pleasure takes him from the bosom of his family, it is the sumptuous character of the palaces in all the principal towns of all civilised countries wherein he may be received, and where he may make his temporary abode. To persons used to such comforts, the accommodation of the last century would excite surprise in quite another direction. Here is a description of the inn accommodation of Edinburgh, furnished by Captain ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... him had ended with the beating. It was too bad, for there might have been a decent memory to build on. The fruit-dealer, however, had been badly frightened by the truant-officer (in the uniform of a patrolman), and he was just civilised enough to be a little ashamed that his boy could so far forget the world and all refined and mild-flavoured things, as to stare through bars at animals for seven hours a day. In the process of that beating, hell ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... of the Archipelago European intercourse has, in some degree, civilised the manners of the Turks, but as the traveller advances into the interior, civilisation sensibly decreases. On approaching the central plateau of Asia Minor, he perceives that cultivation seldom extends beyond the distance of half a league round a village; the inhabitants are secreted ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... was a Northern secret, soon forgotten, or an abortive development, cut short by the Tartars; the second was an Arabic secret, jealously guarded as a commercial right; the third alone added much direct new knowledge to the main part of the civilised world. ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... exclaimed Mrs Gilmour, laughing. "But the criticism will not apply to the Romans, who were almost as civilised and ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... labour. In this place I found incredible stores: mountains of percussion-caps, more chambers of fuses, small-arm cartridges, shells, and all those murderous explosive mixtures, a-making and made, with which modern savagery occupied its leisure in exterminating itself: or, at least, savagery civilised in its top-story only: for civilisation was apparently from the head downwards, and never once grew below the neck in all those centuries, those people being certainly much more mental than cordial, though I doubt if they were genuinely mental either—reminding one rather of that composite ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... reproach, under the thin disguise of cold civility and humiliating advice. O! to be a sturdy savage, stalking in the pride of his independence, amid the solitary wilds of his deserts, rather than in civilised life, helplessly to tremble for a subsistence precarious as the caprice of a fellow-creature! Every man has his virtues, and no man is without his failings; and plague on that privileged plain-dealing of friendship, which, in the hour of my calamity, cannot reach forth the helping ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... deep, enamelled starching-dish, and Billy MacLaggan drank thereof, and then raised his head, with his immoral-looking beard hanging in a sodden point like a wet deck-swab, and asked for more. That is, he asked as well as any Christian and civilised goat could ask, by standing up on his hind legs like a circus-horse and making strange, unearthly noises. Then he rammed his wicked old nose into the dish again, and pushed it all round the room, trying to sop up more liquor, which wasn't there, ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... Sheldon, "not different at all, only wider and more free. Do you not see that at present it is an elegant monopoly, belonging to a few select persons, who have been refined and civilised up to a certain point? The difficulty is that we can't reach that point all at once—why, it has taken you thirty or forty centuries to reach it!—and at present we can't get further than the municipal art-gallery, and lectures on the ethical outlook of Browning. But that is not what we are aiming ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is," he cried, "to get back to civilization. That notion that civilization isn't poetical is a civilised delusion. Wait till you've really lost yourself in nature, among the devilish woodlands and the cruel flowers. Then you'll know that there's no star like the red star of man that he lights on his hearthstone; no river like the red river of man, ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... Indians are now just in that transition stage in which they particularly require a helping hand to lift them up to a respectable position in life, and to afford them the means of gaining their livelihood as a civilised Christian people. As one of their own Chiefs has said, "the time is passed for my people to live by hunting and fishing as our forefathers used to do; if we are to continue to exist at all we must learn to gain our living in the same way as ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... first Celtic immigration. The descendants of these first immigrants are distinguished from the new-comers by the name of Goidels, and it is probable that they were at one time settled in Britain as well as in Ireland, and that they were pushed across the sea into Ireland by the stronger and more civilised Britons. At all events, when history begins Goidels were only to be found in Ireland, though at a later time they colonised a part of what is now known as Scotland, and sent some offshoots into Wales. At present the languages derived from that of ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... Cetewayo, the great Zulu King, To civilised England they captive did bring; He sent back the Zulu, where first he drew breath, Unguarded and helpless, to ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... this does not prevent the hardships of savage life weighing more heavily in many ways upon women than on the stronger men. In primitive societies women have a position quite as full of anomalies as they hold among civilised races. Among some tribes their position is extremely good; among others it is undoubtedly bad, but, speaking generally, it is much better than usually it is held to be.[3] Obviously the causes must be sought in the environment and in social organisation. ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... that Fil-de-Ver, our donkey, decided to abandon civilised life in favour of a more roaming career in the woods, which he doubtless felt was his only true vocation. He had fared ill at the hands of the Germans, and during the entire Winter our own boys ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... galoshes and solemnly and laboriously vanished. Mixed bands of attaches, consular personnel, casuals, emissaries, newspaper men, and mission specialists scattered into unfeigned flight toward those several and distant sections of "God's Country," divided among civilised nations and lying far away somewhere in ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... in judging of the conduct of his fellow-men, in proportion as he is unable to place himself in their position, or to realise to himself their modes of thought and principles of action—if the child, for instance, is liable to error in judging the actions of the man,—or the savage of the civilised man,—surely there is far more room for error in men's judgment of the ways of God, in proportion as the difference between God and man is greater than the difference between a ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... what are you doing with life, O Man! O Average Man of the world - Average Man of the Christian world we call civilised? What have you done to pay for the labour pains of the mother who bore you? On earth you occupy space; you consume oxygen from the air: And what do you give in return for these things? Who is better that you live, and strive, and toil? Or that you live through the toiling and striving of others? ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... blink, then, lulled by the motion of the cab, he fell asleep. They sat quiet, and had reached a more civilised part of London, when Sir Tancred said, "Do you think I could hold him ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... and habitation to the emotions which that mystery aroused. Even the savage lived, not by bread alone, but in a mental world peopled with forms answering to his capacities and needs. As time advanced—in other words, as the savage opened out into civilised man—these forms were purified and ennobled until they finally emerged in the mythology and art ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the wrong person. Already throughout the supper Aida, ignoring the fact that the whole structure of civilised society is based on the rule that at a meal a man must talk first to the lady on his right and then to the lady on his left and so on infinitely, had secretly taken exception to the periodic intercourse—and ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... and intelligence. To both it seemed not only inevitable, but the object of the citizen's dearest hopes, that the rule of the people should bring with it, in ever-ascending degree, the ordering and moralising of the worker's toil. Yet neither had the smallest belief that any of the great civilised communities would ever see the State the sole landlord and the sole capitalist; or that Collectivism as a system has, or deserves to have, any serious prospects in the world. To both, possession—private and personal possession—from the child's first toy, or the tiny garden where ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with greater organisation for devouring; the disease of Ottomanism is threatened by a more deadly hungerer, and Prussianism has inserted its crab-pincers into the cancer that came out of Asia. Those claws are already deeply set, and the problem for civilised nations is first to disentangle the nippers that are cancer in a cancer, and next to deprive of all power over alien peoples the domination that has already been allowed ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... just behind that silver birch; and don't talk so much about women and things you don't understand. What is the use of your bothering about fists and whips and muscles and all the dreadful things invented for the confusion of obstreperous wives? You know you are a civilised husband, and a civilised husband is a creature who has ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... civilised world been so convulsed, so overwhelmed with sorrow, at the death of one man as it was when in January, 1885, the news flashed along the telegraph wires that Khartum had fallen, ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... His own good time, or the power of civilised nations will be exerted to perform His will," replied Ada. "Our religion teaches us, remember, not to wish evil even to our worst enemies. But, ah, there comes out the other mistico to the assistance ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... of more than ordinary merit, and the remainder as good, bad, and indifferent. Those written in foreign languages—and there were many of them—we could neither read nor understand, but they gave us the impression that the fame of John o' Groat's had spread throughout the civilised world. There were many references to Stroma, or the Island of the Current, which we could see in the Pentland Firth about four miles distant, and to the difficulties and danger the visitors had experienced ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... dead there will remain, however, just one badge of our race—our superstition. I am proud to tell you that we are the most superstitious people now left among the civilised nations of the world. This is a distinction in these days when that poetry of life, as Goethe names it, is all but gone from the face of the earth. Manxmen have not yet taken the poetry out of the moon and the stars, and the mist of the mountains and the wail ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... Combe, Barbour, and Combe, employs 1500 highly-paid mechanics, and ships off its iron machinery to all parts of the world. The printing establishment of Marcus Ward and Co. employs over 1000 highly skilled and ingenious persons, and extends the influence of learning and literature into all civilised countries. We might add the various manufactures of roofing felt (of which there are five), of ropes, of stoves, of stable fittings, of nails, of starch, of machinery; all of which have ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... roses; here every thing that falls from the bosom of the former is rich and luxuriant, and every thing that proceeds from the latter is novel, extraordinary, in a word, it is oriental; and faults, which in more civilised communities would be considered inconsistent with good taste, are here ever pleasing, and seem necessary to ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... to the gallery and pit was served out at daybreak to the Eighth and Fifteenth Cossacks of the Don, those fierce, semi-civilised ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... terrific golf-shots in the direction of square-leg, and the enemy's ranks were composed of the same material. Tom and Dick, in ordinary circumstances, would have gone in to bat in such a match with a feeling of lofty disdain, as befitting experts from the civilised world, come to teach the rustic mind ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... leave of absence before he went to find out whether Miss Stanley was kindly disposed to the idea of marrying him. Now why he did that, it is not possible to state, but the thing proving him quite hopeless as a civilised product is that it never struck him there was anything so very peculiar in ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... letters and discourses written by contemporaries, by witnesses of the transaction, by persons themselves bearing a share in it, and other writings following that again regular succession), concur in representing these facts in this manner. A religion which now possesses the greatest part of the civilised world unquestionably sprang up at Jerusalem at this time. Some account must be given of its origin; some cause assigned for its rise. All the accounts of this origin, all the explications of this cause, whether taken from the writings ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... no civilised country in the world so bare as Spain, and no part of the Peninsula so sparsely populated as the Castiles. The road ran for the most part over brown and barren uplands, with here and there a valley where wheat and olives ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... to show how the names of our streets require either to be corrected, or explained by their historian. The French, among the numerous projects for the moral improvement of civilised man, had one, which, had it not been polluted by a horrid faction, might have been directed to a noble end. It was to name streets after eminent men. This would at least preserve them from the corruption of the people, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... struggle we shall continue to the end to act as a civilised nation, to whom the heritage of a Goethe, a Beethoven or a Kant is as sacred as our own hearth and home. We answer for that in our own name and on ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... to man and society, it is still employed by practical men. By it men arrived at the various examples of the formula, Whatsoever has never been (e.g. a State without artificial distinctions of rank; negroes as civilised as the white race) will never be; which, being inductions without elimination, could at most form the ground only of the lowest empirical laws. Higher empirical laws can be got, when a phenomenon presents (as no negation can) ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... observed Madame Bernard, "I'd change it. When we get civilised, I believe children will go by number until they get old enough to choose their own names. Fancy a squirming little imp with a terrible temper being saddled with the name of 'William,' by authority of Church and State. Except to his doting parents, ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... by this invention was, that it would serve as a universal language, to be understood in all civilised nations, whose goods and utensils are generally of the same kind, or nearly resembling, so that their uses might easily be comprehended. And thus ambassadors would be qualified to treat with foreign princes, ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... has been educated, and has used his eyes in a civilised country, reads an account of people and things hitherto unknown to him, he can, from the description and from his own general knowledge, form a very correct idea of what the country contains. But then he has used his eyes—he has seen those objects, between which ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... depends on the experiences through which we have passed in previous lives, and is necessarily an individual possession. It differs where the past experience is different, as in the savage and the civilised man, the dolt and the talented, the fool and the genius, the criminal and the saint. The voice of God would speak alike in all; the experience of the past speaks differently in each. Hence also the consciences of men at a similar evolutionary level speak alike on broad questions of ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant
... world-wide enough: Scotland, India, and America being all obligatory scenes. But of these India was strange to me except in books; I had never known any living Indian save a Parsee, a member of my club in London, equally civilised, and (to all seeing) equally accidental with myself. It was plain, thus far, that I should have to get into India and out of it again upon a foot of fairy lightness; and I believe this first suggested to me ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... involved here. It is far better to laugh at a negro for having a black face than to sneer at him for having a sloping skull. It is proportionally even more preferable to laugh rather than judge in dealing with highly civilised peoples. Therefore I put at the beginning two working examples of what I felt about America before I saw it; the sort of thing that a man has a right to enjoy as a joke, and the sort of thing he has a duty to understand and respect, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... a quiet day, in order that the world may be encouraged to contemplate those ideals for which it has erected churches in which it bows the knee. Well, one whole day in the year given up to the memory of those who died that the civilised world might live—who also died for an ideal—will help us to remember that they died at all. Without some such enforced remembrance, the world will, alas! only too quickly forget. And in forgetting how they died, will also forget what they died ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... vi. p. 7. The only lie which degrades a man in his own estimation and in that of others, is that told for fear of telling the truth. Au reste, human society and civilised intercourse are built upon a system of conventional lying. and many droll stories illustrate the consequences of disregarding the dictum, la verit n'est ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton |
