"Moralize" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nations or the natural growth of institutions which fill modern treatises on political philosophy seem hardly ever to have attracted the attention of Plato and Aristotle. The ancients were familiar with the mutability of human affairs; they could moralize over the ruins of cities and the fall of empires (Plato, Statesman, and Sulpicius' Letter to Cicero); by them fate and chance were deemed to be real powers, almost persons, and to have had a great share in political events. The wiser ...
— The Republic • Plato
... ere long, and all superstition end in accurate science. Meanwhile, many, even of the enlightened, will cling to the unforgotten fancy which gave rise to the word lunatic, and in cases of mental derangement will moralize with young Banks in the Witch of Edmonton (1658), "When the moon's in the full, ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... knowledge of men, and of a good art struggling to free itself from self-consciousness. But it does mean that Balzac, when he wrote it, was under the burden of the very traditions which he has helped fiction to throw off. He felt obliged to construct a mechanical plot, to surcharge his characters, to moralize openly and baldly; he permitted himself to "sympathize" with certain of his people, and to point out others for the abhorrence of his readers. This is not so bad in him as it would be in a novelist of our ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... extremest verge. He is most wonderful in his last half-hidden smile or frown ... by that flash of the moment of parting the one that sees it shall be encouraged or terrified afterward for many years. The greatest poet does not moralize or make applications of morals ... he knows the soul. The soul has that measureless pride which consists in never acknowledging any lessons but its own. But it has sympathy as measureless as its pride and the one balances the other and neither can stretch too far while it stretches ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... the moral of the 'Iliad,' I insist upon your telling me what is the moral of a rattlesnake or the moral of a Niagara. I suppose the moral is—that you must get out of their way, if you mean to moralize much longer. The going-up (or anabasis) of the Greeks against Troy, was a fact; and a pretty dense fact; and, by accident, the very first in which all Greece had a common interest. It was a joint-stock ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... They struggled for a century, but they struggled against property and they were beat. As long as the monks existed, the people, when aggrieved, had property on their side. And now 'tis all over," said the stranger; "and travellers come and stare at these ruins, and think themselves very wise to moralize over time. They are the children of violence, not of time. It is war that created these ruins, civil war, of all our civil wars the most inhuman, for it was waged with the unresisting. The monasteries were taken by storm, they were sacked, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... weazen, dried-apple old woman among them, who took occasion to doubt the constancy of husbands under such circumstances of bereavement; and there was another lady (with a lap-dog), old enough to moralize on the lightness of human affections, and yet not so old that she could help nursing the baby now and then, or laughing with the rest when the little woman called it by its father's name, and asked it all manner of fantastic questions concerning him, in the joy ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... "We need not moralize about it," said Mary. "She is unhappy, not because of her beauty, but in spite of it; besides, though she and her husband don't get on together, she may have other sources of happiness. It would give me great ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... little,—zee, zee, zee is nearly the limit of his vocabulary; but his lively demeanor and the grace and agility of his movements are in themselves an excellent language, speaking infallibly a contented mind. (It is a fact, on which I forbear to moralize, that birds seldom look unhappy except when they are idle.) His diminutive size attracts attention even from those who rarely notice such things. About the first of December, a year ago, I was told of a man who had shot a humming-bird only a few ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... the 'county families' es-chewing all men who are not 'landed proprietors,' and the farmers never looking higher than to the fly on the uppermost turnip-leaf! Do you know at all what English country-life is, which the English praise so, and 'moralize upon into a thousand similes,' as that one greatest, purest, noblest thing in the world—the purely English and excellent thing? It is to my mind simply and purely abominable, and I would rather live in a street than be forced to live it out,—that English country-life; ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... other is the way of faith: the ancient saints felt as keenly as any moralist could feel the brokenness of its promises; they confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims here; they said that they had here no continuing city; but they did not mournfully moralize on this; they said it cheerfully, and rejoiced that it was so. They felt that all was right; they knew that the promise itself had a deeper meaning: they looked undauntedly for "a ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... successful, and pretending to shut the door, watched my receding footsteps till I turned a distant corner. I now pass the house of the other physician to whom I was recommended to apply, several times every week, and I often moralize over the apprehension and anxieties with which I then viewed the two or three steps which led to his dwelling. When I arrived opposite his house I stopped and calculated the chances of mounting these steps without falling. I first rested my hand upon the wall and ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... may soft humanity put on, And sit, and rhyme and think on Chatterton; And that warm-hearted Shakspeare sent to meet him Four laurell'd spirits, heaven-ward to intreat him. With reverence would we speak of all the sages Who have left streaks of light athwart their ages: And thou shouldst moralize on Milton's blindness, And mourn the fearful dearth of human kindness To those who strove with the bright golden wing Of genius, to flap away each sting Thrown by the pitiless world. We next could tell Of those who in the cause of freedom fell: Of our own Alfred, of Helvetian ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... had been almost all-engrossing—enthusiasm was over. He loved her not only for her beauty, but for her faithful enthusiasm; but the power of others to provoke in him a momentary interest, and passion even, was something which he did not pretend to understand, explain, or moralize about. So it was and so he was. He did not want to hurt Aileen's feelings by letting her know that his impulses thus wantonly strayed to ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... I only moralize upon the subject, but as to the difficulty, I must leave it as I find it, unless, as I hinted at first, I could prevail with Satan to set pen to paper, and write this part of his own History: No question, but he could let us into the secret; but to be plain, I doubt I shall ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... finds herself so near, so very near her lost home. How precious are such moments—how few we have in life! They are created from our very sorrows; without our cares our joys would be less lively. But we have no time to moralize. Catharine flies with the speed of a young fawn to climb the cliff-like shoulder of that steep bank; and now; out of breath, she stands at the threshold of her log-house. How neat and nice it looks compared with the Indians' ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... things with curious eyes, And moralize; And in this wisdom of the Holly-tree Can emblem see Wherewith, perchance, to make a pleasant rhyme,— One which may ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... and theological works. Then come novels. John Lyly was ingenious; he combined good advice and storytelling. Not skillfully, hiding the sermon amid lively talk and adventure, but blazoning the fact that he was going to moralize as long as he would. He shows no timidity, even declares upon one of his title-pages that in this volume 'there is small offense by lightness given to the wise, and less occasion of looseness proffered to the wanton.' Such courage in this day would be apt seriously to ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... Frank Crane and so botched his Writ with Proverbs.... A weakness that we must allow for. Whenever Dreiser, abandoning his fundamental scepticism, yields to the irrepressible human (and perhaps also divine) itch to label, to moralize, to teach, he becomes a bit absurd. Observe "The 'Genius,'" and parts of "A Hoosier Holiday" and of "A Traveler at Forty," and of "Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural." But in this very absurdity, it seems to me, there is a subtle proof that ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... has time to moralize or eppisode to any extent amidst the music, laughter and gay voices, the endless procession passin' by. To most a seen of happiness, but to me they seemed like shadders; the Reality of life, my beloved pardner, wuz lost, lost to me. A pleasant lookin' ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... have the reader censure me for commencing this article as a traveller and ending it with an attempt to moralize. In reviewing in my mind the interesting scenes I have endeavored to describe, I have been led back to the thoughts that arose when I trode among the ruins of prostrate temples, and they were connected in my mind; and I will venture again to say, that he is unworthy ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... at ease, on the hopes that my mother will be able to procure favour for me, and a deliverance from this man; and so I have leisure to moralize. But if I had not, I should not forbear to intermingle occasionally these sorts of remarks, because you command me never to omit them when they occur to my mind: and not to be able to make them, even in a more ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... that Schiller occupies with Kant a middle stage between the older pragmatic historians, upon whom Faust[83] pours his scathing ridicule, and the later school of Ranke, whose principle was to extinguish self and simply tell what happened and how. He does not moralize like his predecessors, nor is he guilty of treating the distant past with patronizing condescension. At the same time he wishes to instruct and does not hesitate to point out where the instruction is to be found. He aims to be impartial to the extent ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas |
