"Facts of life" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... manner, we accept her revelations thankfully, and beg her to allow us to make our own philosophic and other explanations in attempting to account for the existence, sequences and relations of the facts of life. ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... force which rushes beneath the facts of life, caring nothing for conditions, not asking what one desires or what one thinks best, caring as little about a past as about a future—save its own future—the force which can laugh at man's institutions and batter over in one sweep what he likes to call his wisdom, was sweeping them ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... anybody who handled the bare facts of life so graciously as this Miss Euphrasia? She did it by taking right hold of them, by their honest handles,—as they were meant ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... were the unique product of the Jewish religious genius. They were pre-eminently preachers of righteousness. Fearless and undaunted, they told the house of Israel their sins and the house of Jacob their transgressions. They contemplated the facts of life from the highest point of view. For them religion and morality were blended, ethics and politics were one. Theirs was peculiarly a social message; the demand for justice underlies all their thinking and speaking. They had a veritable passion ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that station. In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the redeeming facts of life. Still, one must look about sometimes; and then I saw this station, these men strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine of the yard. I asked myself sometimes what it all meant. They wandered here and there with their absurd long staves ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... days when the writer of these stories was a guest aboard our little hospital vessel, we remember realizing how vast was the gulf which seemed to lie between him and the circumstances of our sea life in the Northland. Nowhere else in the world, perhaps, do the cold facts of life call for a more unrelieved material response. It is said of our people that they are born with a netting needle in their hand and an ax by the side of their cradle. Existence is a daily struggle with adamantine facts and ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... nations have you seen in your travels, good sir?" asked Alleyne Edricson. His young mind hungered for plain facts of life, after the long course of speculation and of mysticism on ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fashion, the Greek tragic poets had succeeded to a pessimistic reaction from simple Pagan enjoyment; they were surrounded with gloomy questionings about human destiny and Divine Justice, and they replied by looking steadily at the facts of life and asserting the supreme worth of ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... of my book, and read it—first of all in a Hindostani translation. My host—he was a minister of some religious body, a man of worthy but prosaic mind—expressed surprise that a 'wild romance' should absorb me so much. I answered that those who have wide experience of the hard facts of life often find interest in romance. Had he known what were the hard facts to which I alluded, I wonder what that excellent person ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... the true reason of the hatred—that only came out afterwards. Woman-like, she exaggerated in order that she might move him; but her motive was good, and what she said was not out of keeping with the facts of life. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... said a voice, and Astier-Rehu, in high spirits, took his pupil's arm. The poet pointed to the pathetic group on the opposite pavement. 'Ah, yes,' said the historian, 'Ah, yes.' He had in truth no eyes for anything outside books, nor any direct and personal perception of the facts of life. Indeed, from the way in which he took Freydet off, saying as he did so, 'You may as well go with me as far as the Institute,' it was clear that he did not approve the habit of mooning in the streets when you ought to be better employed. Leaning gently on his favourite's ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... when after many a mile in sun and wind — maybe rain — you reach at last, with the folding star, your destined rustic inn. There, in its homely, comfortable strangeness, after unnumbered chops with country ale, the hard facts of life begin to swim in a golden mist. You are isled from accustomed cares and worries — you are set in a peculiar nook of rest. Then old failures seem partial successes, then old loves come back in their fairest form, but this time with never a shadow of regret, then old ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... each case, we can never go on at all; and yet, in spite of this, when conscience does become the dictator of the daily life of a group of men, it forces our admiration as no other modern spectacle has power to do. It seemed but a mere incident that this group should have lost sight of the facts of life in their earnest endeavor to put to the test the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... conscience suggesting odd things to him. Would it not be possible now to shut one's ears for the next half hour? Angry words were only little perturbations in the air. If you shut your ears till they were all over, what harm could be done? All the big facts of life would remain the same. The sea, the sky, the hills, the human beings around you, even your desire of sleep for the night and your wholesome longing for breakfast in the morning, would all remain, and the angry words would ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... seldom much studied, it becomes unreliable as an indicator of the writer's character. The same hand that in the famous Snob Papers so savagely, and in at least one case so intemperately, satirised types of English society, afterwards produced novels in which fidelity to the essential facts of life is the most conspicuous quality. So, too, might it have been in the case of the 'Peripatetic Philosopher,' whose weekly criticisms of Melbourne men and manners in 1867-68 has correctly been judged the best writing of its kind yet done in Australia. In these articles, remarkable ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... crops would cure our ills. But millions voted for a poison that would have destroyed us. From that time on I dreamed of a new kind of school, not the kind we had that turned out men to grope blindly between good and folly. But a school based on the fundamental facts of life and labor, the need of food and housing, and the sweating skill that brings man most of his blessings. A school from which no man could come out ignorant. That school should teach the eternal facts, and he that denied the facts would then be known for a fool or a rogue—and ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... we return invigorated to the world of concrete experience dear alike to the common-sense thinker and the modern investigator. Do the facts of life, as ordinarily presented, or as systematised in reflection, at all point in the direction of the doctrine of immanent ideas? It will be seen that this question admits of an affirmative answer. But the term ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... living God.' Those whom I have to teach want a living God, who cares for men, works for men, teaches men, punishes men, forgives men, saves men from their sins; and Him I have found in the Bible, and nowhere else, save in the facts of life which ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... of spiritual longing in the world—in the hearts of unnumbered thousands of men and women in whom we should never suspect it; among the wise and thoughtful, among the young and gay, who seldom assuage and never betray their thirst—this is one of the most wonderful and touching facts of life. It is not more heart that is needed, but more light; not more force, but a wiser direction to be given to ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... minute attention, and once more he was introduced to a master of expression. Byron is a little out of fashion now, alas! and yet what a thinker the man was! His lightning eye pierced to the very heart of things, and his intense grip on the facts of life makes his style seem alive. No wonder that the young Ruskin learned to think daringly under such a master! Now many people fancy that our great critic must be a man of universal knowledge. What do they think of this narrow early training? The use and purport ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Our conclusion then must be that Cicero, always impressionable, and in his way also religious, had in this year 45 a real religious experience. He was brought face to face with one of the mysterious facts of life, and with one of the great mysteries of the universe, and the religious instinct awoke within him. How many others, even in that sordid and materialistic age, may have had the like experience, with or without ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... life, grimmer than any that Shakespeare imagined—was being enacted in literal truth by the Parisian playgoers themselves. It would seem that Ducis and his countrymen deemed the purpose of art to be alone fulfilled when the artistic fabric was divorced from the ugly facts of life. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... the only thing which the whole human race pants to know, remains unknown: our beloved ones, shall we meet them, and how?—the great secret of the universe. We ask for bread, and these philosophers give us a stone. What help could come from them: or from any one? Death is simply one of the hard facts of life." ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... Godfrey's youthful career. Within a few days he received a letter from his father forwarded to him from the hotel, that was even more unpleasant than the majority of the paternal epistles to which he was accustomed. Mr. Knight, probably from honest conviction and a misreading of the facts of life, was one of those persons who are called Pacifists. Although he never carried out the doctrine in his own small affairs, he believed that nations were enjoined by divine decree to turn the other cheek ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... assurance. She was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing to be on her guard against; and with no better preparation than this, she was to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called "the facts of life." ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... laws. In Love's deep woods, I dreamt of loyal Life:- the offence is there! Love's jealous woods about the sun are curled; At least, the sun far brighter there did beam. - My crime is, that the puppet of a dream, I plotted to be worthy of the world. Oh, had I with my darling helped to mince The facts of life, you still had seen me go With hindward feather and with forward toe, Her much-adored delightful ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... animal creation. As the naturalist studied lions and tigers, so the novelist studied men and women. Yet he was no mere reporter. Photography and proces-verbal were not the essentials of his method. Observation gave him the facts of life, but his genius converted facts into truths, and truths into truth. He was, in a word, a marvellous combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he bequeathed to his disciples; the former was entirely his own. The distinction between such a book as M. Zola's L'Assommoir ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... precisely the chief and most fruitful source of religious scepticism; it is not the abstract question whether there is a God, but the practical and insistent problem whether the Divine goodness can be reconciled with the facts of life and experience, that is agitating men's minds, and sways their decision for ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... was there? She followed him with a timorous gaze, with a gaze for ever expecting, patient, and entreating. And in her eyes there was the wonder and desolation of an animal that knows only suffering, of the incomplete soul that knows pain but knows not hope; that can find no refuge from the facts of life in the illusory conviction of its dignity, of an exalted destiny beyond; in the heavenly consolation of a belief in the momentous origin ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... account the actual facts of life, and not be misled into following any proposal for achieving the millennium, for re-creating the golden age, until we have subjected it to hard-headed examination. On the other hand, it is foolish to reject a proposal merely because it is advanced by visionaries. ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... could dream She would have guessed my heart so well? Dull boors See deeper than we think, and hide within Those leathern hulls unfathomable truths, Which we amid thought's glittering mazes lose. They grind among the iron facts of life, And ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... correct and simple observations. "From facts to ideas,'' says ttingen.[5] "The world has for several millenniums tried to subdue matter to preconceptions and the world has failed. Now the procedure is reversed.'' "From facts to ideas''—there lies our road, let us for once observe the facts of life without prejudice, without maxims built on preconceptions; let us establish them, strip them of all alien character. Then finally, when we find nothing more in the least doubtful, we may theorize about them, and draw inferences, modestly ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... relative is done away with, and a girl is permitted to go about quite unattended, the best and the surest protection that she can have is the kind of modesty that takes fright at even a bare mention, a bare allusion, to certain ordinarily ignored facts of life. ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... and meaningful. Moussorgsky seems to have crept closer to life than most artists, to have seized emotions in their nakedness and sharpness, to have felt with the innocence of a child. One of his collections is entitled "La Chambre d'Enfants." And that surprise and wonder at all the common facts of life, the sharpness with which the knowledge of death comes, characterize not alone this group, but all the songs. He is throughout them the child who sees the beetle lie dead, and who expresses his wonder and trouble directly from ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... outer pillar for support, and gradually the noise of the street drew him back again to reality and to the solid facts of life once more. He had been badly scared, for in some cases when nothing that can be expressed in words takes place, an infinitely greater thing, that no words can express, has occurred mentally. To Leh Shin's bewildered ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... think that you and my aunts are quite right about shielding me—about keeping me from brushing up against life, and the real facts of life. It seems to me that there's only one way to develop—really. And that way is to learn to accept things as they come; to meet situations—no matter how appalling they may be, with one's eyes open. If I," she was warming to her subject, "am never to tire myself out, working ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... the trees enveloped them. It absorbed her outline into the shadowy background of the wood, from which her face emerged in a faint spot of pallor; and the same obscurity seemed to envelop his faculties, merging the hard facts of life in a blur of feeling in which the distinctest impression was the sweet sense of ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... "which, twenty years ago, only the family doctor was supposed to be familiar with or permitted to discuss are now being agitated in women's clubs, books, newspapers, and the public schools. You can't smother sin or the facts of life unless they occur separately. In the case of Nan Brent they have developed coincidently; so we find it hard to regard her as ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... and hopeful the moral individualism of the time. It implies the recognition that there is a genuine ground for moral action, which may be brought home to any individual mind that will deal honestly and directly with the facts of life. Morality is not a useful fiction which must be protected against inquisitiveness and cherished in ignorance and servility; it is a body of compelling truth that will convince wherever there is a capacity to observe and reason. It requires no higher sanction than the individual, because the individual ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... State. The Republican Party, through which President Roosevelt had to work, was by no means an ideal instrument. He believed in Republicanism, with a faith only less devoted than that with which he embraced the fundamental duties and spiritual facts of life. But the Republicanism which he revered must be interpreted by himself; and the party which bore the name Republican was split into several sections, mutually discordant if not actually hostile. It seems ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... the influence of Scott; and realism began to assert its right to substitute itself for romance. The adjustment of character to its appropriate background, the closer connection of fiction with the actual facts of life, the focussing of attention on the normal and the usual rather than on the abnormal and the exceptional—all these steps in advance were more easily taken in the freer form of the novel than they could be in the more restricted formula of the drama; and for the first time in its history prose-fiction ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... worked; and the essential element of his spirit resides precisely in this haphazard and various looseness. His exceeding coarseness is itself an expression of one of the most fundamental qualities of his mind—its jovial acceptance of the physical facts of life. Another side of the same characteristic appears in his glorification of eating and drinking: such things were part of the natural constitution of man, therefore let man enjoy them to the full. Who knows? Perhaps the Riddle of the Universe would be solved by ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... draw together and develop, will give very different values from those given by the existing systems (if they can be called systems) to almost all the great matters of conduct. Under scientific analysis the essential facts of life are very clearly shown to be two—birth and death. All life is the effort of the thing born, driven by fears, guided by instincts and desires, to evade death, to evade even the partial death of crippling or cramping or restriction, and to attain to effective procreation, to the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... schemes of every kind for the reform and betterment of mankind. Why do they not succeed? Some fail, perhaps, because they are imprudent and ill-considered, in that they expect too much of human nature and do not take into account the stubborn facts of life. But why does not the wisest and noblest plan do more than half what its advocates hope and pray and labor so heroically to bring about? Because there are not enough men fine enough of soul, large enough of sympathy, ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... the facts of experience and their interpretations lies the secret of the contrast between our two words existence and life. Even before we define the difference, we feel it. To exist is one thing; to live is another. Existence is comprised of the bare facts of life alone—the universe in which we live, our heritage and birth, our desires and their satisfactions, growth, age and death. All the facts that science can display before us comprise existence. But life is something more. Life is existence clothed in spiritual ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... began as a realistic pessimist and ended as a pessimistic mystic. Felicien Rops could never have been a romantic, though the macabre romanticism of 1830 may be found in his designs. A realist, brutal, bitter, he was in his youth; he saw the grosser facts of life, so often lamentable and tender, in the spirit of a Voltaire doubled by a Rabelais. There is honest and also shocking laughter in these early illustrations. A fantaisiste, graceful, delicate—and indelicate—emerged after the lad went up to Paris, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... of mythology are in all nations the same, consisting of the facts of nature and the facts of life. The heavens and the earth, day and night, the sun and moon, storms, fire, ocean, and rivers, love and beauty, life and progress, war, wisdom, doom, and chance,—these, among all nations, supply the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... perfectly with docility. David's manner showed no irony; it expressed rather a stoical, baffled kind of melancholy. In abstract questions he did not lack courage of thought, but when faced with the facts of life he was a mixture, or rather a succession, of timidity and stiffness, diffident modesty, and firmness of conviction. In short he was a man, like other men, complex and contradictory, not all in one piece. The trouble is that, in an intellectual and a man of science, the ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... of some shop window, a dark flash of jet, or a flutter of lace on a woman's dress caught her eye, but she did not see it. She had nothing in common with anything of that kind; she had to do with the primal facts of life. Coming as she was out of the country quiet, she was quite unmoved by the thundering rush of the city streets. She might have been deaf and blind for all the impression it had upon her. Her own nature had grown so intense that it apparently had emanations, and ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Esmeer and all the men I knew. I draw no lessons and offer no panacea; I have to tell the quality of life, and this is how it is. This is how it will remain until men and women have the courage to face the facts of life. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... trivial thing to spend great effort on embellishing the form in which he delivers it. Literature, to be worthy of the name, must, it is true, deal with noble matter—the riddle of our existence, the great facts of life, the changing passions of the human heart, the discernment of some deep moral truth. It is easy to lay too much stress upon the mere garment of thought; to be too precise; to give to the arrangement of words an attention ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... a crowded House he read a speech distinguished by extraordinary dignity and severity: "My lords", he said at one point, slapping the table, though those eyes remained royally null: "when will your lordships learn to recognize the facts of life?" and, having proposed His Lordship's Majesty, the Lord of the Sea, to be Regent during His Majesty's illness, such Regency not to exceed a period of three years, ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... only to emphasize their value to young children. There are still those who find no room in their own reading, and would give none in the reading of the young, except for facts. They confuse facts and truth, and forget that there is a world of truth that is larger than the mere facts of life, being compact of imagination and vision and ideals. Dr. Hamilton Wright Mabie convinced us of ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... home! the perfect flower, we are told, that blooms on the fair stem of marriage. Yet it is the very citadel of ignorance, when it should be the school in which are taught the beautiful phenomena of physical life. Home! where the simplest, purest facts of life are converted into a nasty mystery and deliberately endowed with the characteristics of impurity and sin; for what else is the meaning of that solemn formula, which most of us have been taught, that we were conceived in sin? What else is the meaning of the hush and blush ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... about them (since duty obtains only as between them and other phenomena), and so throwing them over if I find it hard to get them satisfied,—it is that by refusing to take up a tragic attitude, I deal in the long-run most satisfactorily with the facts of life. "All is vanity" is here the last word of wisdom. Even though in certain limited series there may be a great appearance of seriousness, he who in the main treats things with a degree of good-natured scepticism and radical levity will find that the practical fruits of his epicurean ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James |
