"Moralizing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ive quite done with you. [Rising and holding up the sketch block] There! While youve been talking, Ive been doing. What is there left of your moralizing? Only a little carbonic acid gas which makes the room unhealthy. What is there left of my work? That. Look at it [Ridgeon rises to ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... I take to moralizing, and I am afraid I waste a good deal of valuable time in speculating on the thoughts, ideas, and, so to speak, the inner life of my neighbours. It is curious to observe a large, well-dressed party seated at dinner, all apparently frank and open as the day, full of fun and good humour, saying ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... his imported broadcloths were long ago worn to tatters, and his cargoes of wine quaffed to the lees; and that the most precious leaves of his ledger have become waste-paper. Yet, his avocations were not so vain as our philosophic moralizing. In this world we are the things of a moment, and are made to pursue momentary things, with here and there a thought that stretches mistily towards eternity, and perhaps may endure as long. All philosophy that would abstract mankind from the present ...
— Old News - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... (was it the critic? was it Jules Janin? the glorious confusion is gaining on me I think) has magnificently confounded places and persons in Robert Southey's urn by the Adriatic and devoted friendship for Lord Byron? And immediately the English observer of the phenomenon, after moralizing a little on the crass ignorance of Frenchmen in respect to our literature, goes on to write like an ignoramus himself, on Mme. Charles Reybaud, encouraging that pure budding novelist, who is in fact a hack writer of romances third and fourth rate, of questionable ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... Critical Rev., LIII (287-290), appeared in April, 1782. While the same poems are but slightly esteemed to-day, it must be recognized that the attitude of the reviewer was severe for his time. The age had grown accustomed to large draughts of moralizing and didacticism in verse, and the quality of Cowper's contribution was assuredly above the average. The Monthly Rev., LXVII, p. 262, gave the Poems a much ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... this in order that you may understand that I have no need of advice, or of moralizing,—merely of money. Alas! I do not ask any thing of you for myself, my dear friend, but I am about to make a marriage for my daughter, and here we are actually, although secretly, fallen into absolute destitution. ...
— Mercadet - A Comedy In Three Acts • Honore De Balzac
... pockets, and Newman, it may be said, should have begun somewhat earlier to moralize thus delicately. To this it may be answered that he might have made another fortune, if he chose; and we ought to add that he was not exactly moralizing. It had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made by ...
— The American • Henry James
... I am moralizing in the most interesting part of my tale, and your looks remind me to proceed. My father made no reproach in his letters and only took notice of my silence by inquiring into my occupations more particularly than ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... might have pondered with a little surprise on the strength of the currents that flow sometimes where the water looks calm; but he had no time, and in truth was in no mood for moralizing just then. His answer was somewhat abrupt, though gentle ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... devilish sight better temper than him. There's a hundred things that one's friend don't approve of, but shall he desert him for all that? Leave him to be plucked, and kicked, and abandoned; and, moralizing, with a grin over his fain, say, 'I told you. so!' No! no! Give me the fellow that'll stand by me—keep me out of evil, if he can, but stand by me, nevertheless, at all events; and not suffer me to be swallowed up at the last moment, when ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... was in no mood for pictures or moralizing. Her blood was coursing feverishly through her veins, her spirit had been made reckless by the wilful violence that she was doing her conscience, and also by her deep and growing dissatisfaction with herself, that was like an irritating wound. She was therefore prepared ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... serious we all are getting! It was your moths, Pierre, that set me moralizing this way. Our work with them is not yet done, either, for we must spread out the sheets of paper on which they are to lay their eggs. Then we can move the ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... he failed in his larger poems, he had a genius little short of perfect in his handling of shorter forms. The Arthurian story which produced only middling moralizing in the Idylls, gave us as well the supremely written Homeric episode of the Morte d'Arthur, and the sharp and defined beauty of Sir Galahad and the Lady of Shallott. Tennyson had a touch of the pre-Raphaelite faculty of minute painting ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... "Moralizing's out of place on a day like this," she added; "and such days are not frequent in the North. ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... is not marred by too much realism or sentiment or moralizing, older children will respond with interest to a discussion of human reproduction. Even when a child is approachable, if your own emotional balance is insecure, it is, perhaps, well to work out these objective and tangible activities with the children, as with a fellow ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... theory, the conception tragische Schuld—"tragic guilt"—plays a large part. It descends, no doubt, from the Aristotelian maxim that a tragic hero must neither be too good nor too bad; but it also belongs to a moralizing conception, which tacitly or explicitly assumes that the dramatist's aim ought to be "to justify the ways of God to man." In these days we look at drama more objectively, and do not insist on deciding ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... perfect the drama, the more baneful its influence;" the theater, even with Moliere, is a school of bad morals, "inasmuch as it excites deceitful souls to ridicule, in the name of comedy, the candor of artless people." Tragedy, said to be moralizing, wastes in counterfeit effusions the little virtue that still remains. "When a man has been admiring the noble feats in the fables what more is expected of him? After paying homage to virtue is he not discharged from all that he owes to it? What more would they have him ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... moralize on paper, but there are moments when one derives one's best consolation from so moralizing; and this easy and simple justification of Providence, which refers all that appears inconsistent here to the retribution of a future state, is pointed out less as the duty than the happiness of mankind. This single argument of ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... recherche, we can say that with few exceptions he has not written in a pornographic spirit. His descriptions are profound and true, and he does not attempt to make attractive what is ugly and immoral, although he cannot be blamed for moralizing. ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... erected; it must have been an exciting scene to witness, the engineer standing underneath, so as to be crushed by the great stone if it disgraced him by falling in the process. As for the dynasties which have overlaid each other like Dr. Schliemann's Trojan cities, there is no need of moralizing over a history which instead of Finis is constantly ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... considered of necessity from the modern viewpoint. We cannot believe that he had any pretensions to refined art in play building, or rather rebuilding, or to any superficial elegance of style, or to any moralizing pose. We believe him an entertainer pure and simple, who never restricted himself in his means except by the outer conventions and form of the Greek New Comedy and the Roman stage, provided his single aim, ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... written in the poet's mature and natural style, gives a vivid picture of the social life and surroundings of his Cambridge days: how much of the set and sententious moralizing of some of his formal biographers might we not have spared, for a report of the conversation on the road from London to Newstead. Of the others gathered round the same centre, Scrope Davies enlisted the ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... put no idea into my head," replied Phillis, with crisp obstinacy. "There! I am only moralizing for my own good, as well as yours. Small beginnings make great endings. If we once began to gossip, we might end by flirting; and, Nan, if you knew how I hate that sort of thing!" And Phillis ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... to moralizing I shall go distracted! Where did we put our jeweled hat pins? I've looked and looked, and—oh, there they are right under my nose. Goodness! is that a rap?—Ah, is it you, Miss Bess? Come right in. How fine you look in your ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... should fall, and its strength lie in its persistence. He would bring what wit he had out of the playhouse, and speak his mind, like Defoe, to the people themselves every post-day. But he would affect no pedantry of moralizing, he would appeal to no passions, he would profess himself only 'a Tatler.' Might he not use, he thought, modestly distrustful of the charm of his own mind, some of the news obtained by virtue of the office ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Apostles and its sequel The Kingdom (and to the further sequels which had been sketched out twelve years ago, though none has as yet seen the light) resemble those of the older type of oratorio in so far as they include narrative and dramatic incident and religious moralizing; but there is not a trace of the old lethargic taking things for granted, it is all a ringing sacramental challenge to the individual soul. Elgar's work is indeed the typical musical expression of recent Roman Catholic developments; but there are others also. There was Perosi, the Benedictine ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... familiar epistle. It describes the child as aged two years and two months (so long had he watched over it); gives sundry pieces of advice concerning its circulation, and the importance thereto of light and pleasant articles of food; and concludes, after some general moralizing on the shiftings and changes of this world having taken so wonderful a turn that mail-coach guards were become no longer judges of horse-flesh, "I reap no gain or profit by parting from you, nor will any conveyance of your property be required, for in this respect you have always been ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Schiller; even so, the delineation of life is the criticism of life. To show the scope of disillusion, monotony, repression—life's generous impulses narrowed and made timid by the social, economic, and political machine—would be a criticism of our modern world; there would be no need of moralizing. This the Russian novelists seem to have understood; they judged ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... Miss Adair's soft and proud young body against his, and a round, warm cheek fell against his silk-clad sleeve, as he perceived that his eminent author had plunged suddenly into the depths of healthy and innocent slumber, while he had been moralizing about her and the rest of the universe. He slipped his arm about her with cautious tenderness and made her comfortable, while he ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... due to all sorts of causes and irreconcilable matters. The workman and his strikes will be the first convenient target; then speculating and over-trading will have their turn; many other allegations will be made, totally irrelevant to the real issue, but satisfactory to the moralizing ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... is a fine view of Copenhagen. Before we had finished moralizing about views and heights, the afternoon had slipped imperceptibly away. Where we stood, the cowherd's long whoop at intervals, and, in answer to his call, the faint low of cattle, could be heard; ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... among them no sentimentalism nor moralizing; spoke not to any man of his "sins," but gave something good to eat, a buoying [Footnote: Buoying: enlivening, cheering.] word, or trifling gift and a look. He appeared with ruddy face, clean dress, with a flower or a green sprig in the lapel of his coat. Crossing ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... terrible agony of uncertainty his inside caused him such acute suffering that he pressed against the door in order to calm himself, shivering like a man in rags, as he did so. Then seeing that despite everything he could not turn his eyes away from the window, his anger changed into a fit of moralizing. He fancied himself a deputy; he was haranguing an assembly, loudly denouncing debauchery, prophesying national ruin. And he reconstructed Fauchery's article on the poisoned fly, and he came before the house and ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... very silly book. It abounds in trite moralizing, for instances of which we will merely refer the reader to pp. 65, 131, and 299. The author remarks exultingly, in his Introduction, that his is comparatively an uncultivated mind, We can only say, we should think so! Ignorance is plentiful everywhere, but it really seems as if it were reserved ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... His moralizing reverie was however interrupted by her Ladyship, who perceiving a group of females decked in the extreme of Parisian fashions, "there," said she, "there is all that taffeta, feathers, flowers, and lace can do; and yet you see by their loud talking, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... audacity as that surpasses all imagination; she must really be mad about you. But take care, chevalier; you have jealous rivals to fear; it is an envied post to be favorite of the queen, when the queen is the real king. Pardon my moralizing, but I do not wish that the breath of chance should blow down what you have ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... story, I must stop moralizing and say that when Sam made up his mind to volunteer, a number of boys in the neighborhood determined to follow his example, and, as Sam has already explained, the little company was organized, under Sam's command as captain. Of course Sam had no real military authority, and ...
— Captain Sam - The Boy Scouts of 1814 • George Cary Eggleston
... is traditionally the season for moralizing and retrospect. Eheu! fugaces anni is a sigh that even the Latin primer teaches us; and though in schoolbook days calling the years fugacious seems absurd, we catch the meaning as they glide away. To schoolboys the man of fifty is immoderately old: thirty marks a milestone on the ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... for wealth! Fancy what will be in his hands. I thought you would be moralizing on the way to bring him ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... girls; Especially of that meandering kind, Which winding on so sweetly, treats of all They ought to be and do and think and wear, As one may say, from creeds to comforters. Indeed, we much prefer that sort ourselves, So soothing). Good, a moralizing vein; That is the thing; but how to manage it? "Hence we may learn," if we be so inclined, That life goes best with those who take it best; That wit can spin from work a golden robe To queen it in; that who can paint at will ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... don't want your moralizing," the other cried roughly. "Listen, this is the low, mean story of it. You'll have little enough moralizing to do when you've ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... descriptions they give of this place. The fellows who write about it get into the heroics, and what with their descriptions, and pictures, and moralizing, you believe it is a second Babylon. It don't seem possible for any of them to tell the truth. Why, there isn't a single decent-sized house in the place. Oh, ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... as they (the spectres) were. This story, or dit, "saying," as it was called in French, was exceedingly popular through-out Europe five or six hundred years ago. It is found in the language of every Christian nation of the period, and, extended by means of accessory incidents and much moralizing, is made to cover several pages in more than one old illuminated manuscript. In the Arundel MSS., in England, there is one of the many versions of the legend written in French so old that it is quite as difficult for Frenchmen as for Englishmen to read it. But ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... "I'm not given to moralizing, particularly over a grave," observed Macloud, "but it's queer to think that the old pirate, who had so much blood and death on his hands, who buried the treasure, and who wrote the letter, lies at our feet; and we—or rather Croyden is the heir of that treasure, ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... well know how desperately given is John Dangerous to a wordy Garrulity—how prone he is to make much of little things, and to elevate to the dignity of Important and Commanding Events that which is perchance only of the very slightest moment. By Prosing and Amplifying, by Moralizing and Digressing, by spinning of yarns and wearing of reflections threadbare, I might make a Great Book out of the pettiest and most uneventful career; but even in honestly transcribing my actual adventures, one by one,—the things ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... or conduct lesson, in the form of a fable or an allegory,—it passes on to the child the conclusions as to conduct and character, to which the race has, in general, attained through centuries of experience and moralizing. The story becomes a part of the outfit of received ideas on manners and morals which is an inescapable and necessary possession of the heir ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... as Narcissus; I plainly tell you so," replied Aramis. "You know I hate moralizing, except when it is done by Athos. As to you, good sir, you wear too magnificent a baldric to be strong on that head. I will be an abbe if it suits me. In the meanwhile I am a Musketeer; in that quality I say what I please, ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... forever spring was the order of things. And is it not so? Is not the idea of the creation an eternal spring ever trembling on the verge of summer? It seemed so to the curate, who was not given to sad, still less to sentimental moralizing over the graves. From such moods his heart recoiled. To him they were weak and mawkish, and in him they would have been treacherous. No grave was to him the place where a friend was lying; it was but a cenotaph—the place where the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... he has indulged his excursive moralizing beyond even the wide licence he took in the three preceding parts; but it bears the impression of more reading and observation. Though not superior in poetical energy, it is yet a higher work than ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... hats, broken pipes and sticks, stopperless flasks, cracked, smoky lanterns—concealing them with a decent, decorous, sacred duplicity even from Aunt Tabby, who trotted across the country on her father's old trotting mare, took her observations, and departed, shaking her head and moralizing on the text, "Cast not ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... inference and justification. The bloodier the fray the better for ballad purposes; no one feels the necessity of apology either for ruthless aggression or for useless blood-letting; the scene is reported as it was presented to the eye of the spectator, not to his moralizing faculty. He is expected to see and to sing, not to scrutinize and meditate. In those rare cases in which a moral inference is drawn, it is always so obvious and elementary that it gives the impression ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... physical as well as mental organization, extracts from Hartley's own letters, recollections of those among whom his latter life was passed—this, as it seems to us, should have sufficed. Mr. Derwent Coleridge brings too many church-bred and town-bred notions to the grave design of moralizing and philosophizing his brother's simple life and wayward self-indulgences. His motives will be respected, and his real kindness not misunderstood; but it will be felt that a quiet and unaffected little ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... meaning 'to exceed,' and, inserting 'hord' after 'gehwone,' renders: The treasure may easily, the gold in the ground, exceed in value every hoard of man, hide it who will. The other takes 'oferhigian' as meaning 'to render arrogant,' and, giving the sentence a moralizing tone, renders substantially as in the body of this work. (Cf. 2813 ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... though,' I said, moralizing; for, in carrying on the threads of my stories, I had come to see that no climax could ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... playwrights, the novelists, Hobbes and Spinoza, all pursued, along widely different paths, those illusive secrets of the human heart which had escaped the notice of earlier generations. But La Rochefoucauld reduced the desultory psychology of his predecessors to a system, so that for us the moralizing tendencies of the seventeenth century in France seem to have found their final expression less in the sob of Pascal's conscience than in the resigned ironic nonchalance of La Rochefoucauld, who, as Voltaire so admirably says, "dissolves every virtue in the passions which surround ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... small brain to reflect upon the showers of spores which kept on falling through years and centuries, while perhaps not one in ten million fulfilled its apparent purpose, and reproduced the organism which gave it birth: surely he might have been excused for moralizing upon the thoughtless and wanton extravagance which Nature displayed ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... moral sense was not delicate; but his companions, who were occupied in sowing their own oats, perhaps took it as a matter of course that he should be a rake, and were only struck with the exceptional circumstance that he was a pious and moralizing rake. ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... thoughts, feelings, manners of the Scottish peasantry to whom he belonged, as they had never been interpreted before, and never can be again. Take the poem which stands first in the Kilmarnock edition. The Cotter's Dog, and the Laird's Dog, are, as has been often said, for all their moralizing, true dogs in all their ways. Yet through these, while not ceasing to be dogs, the poet represents the whole contrast between the Cotters' lives, and their Lairds'. This old controversy, which is ever new, between rich and poor, has never been set forth with more humour and power. No doubt ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... two dainty little white figures, bending, on each flank, to stop up his corners. But he puts the taller inside on the right, and outside on the left. And he puts his Greek chorus of observant and moralizing persons on each ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... if we are in a moralizing mood, that we may be keenly impressed with the truth of the saying, that the secret of happiness consists in keeping alive our susceptibilities by frugal indulgences, rather than by seeking a multitude of pleasures, that pall in exact proportion to their abundance. The stillness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... were aught but wind, or wind but air,) who always professes to believe that the object he has for sale is of sacrosanct antiquity, and the best of its kind, (if an onyx, for instance, not Oriental only, but Orientalissimo,) though he observes, in a sort of moralizing parenthesis, that he will not vouch for what the ignorant or the malicious may say. Here you must, we fear, range yourself on the side of malice and ignorance; non vale niente, the object ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... as an unmitigated misfortune,' declared Dave, in reply to some of my self-condemnatory moralizing. 'Let us admit that the fellow's letter did cause his death. Wasn't it because he wrote it quite as much or more than because you printed it? And even grant you it was your deed, all of it, haven't you been labouring to get that chap where ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... perishable coil of which mortals are formed, it is given us to behold how much more durable are the commonest utensils of daily use than the frames of those who boast themselves lords of the creation. But here am I moralizing, when I ought to be taking advantage of this glorious day by a promenade in the Bois de Boulogne, where I promised to conduct Madame d'O——; so ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... argues that his books "are based on the axiom of the moral law."[2] The one notion is as unsound as the other. Conrad makes war on nothing; he is pre-eminently not a moralist. He swings, indeed, as far from revolt and moralizing as is possible, for he does not even criticize God. His undoubted comradeship, his plain kindliness toward the soul he vivisects, is not the fruit of moral certainty, but of moral agnosticism. He neither protests nor punishes; he merely smiles and pities. Like ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... India, and which contained evidence of this ill-treatment of the Hindoos by their white masters. Kingsley spoke highly of this book. I said I thought it had hardly been appreciated in England. Kingsley thought the reason was it was too didactic—there was too much moralizing. Only the few could appreciate this: the many did not care for it in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... they would have liked to draw me in for a share in the business, but that I kept well out of it; and that, being full of zeal for what so nearly concerned him, I came to give him timely notice that he might take his precautions. Then, moralizing, I discoursed solemnly about the many rogueries one sees every day here below; that, as for me, being tired with the world and its infamies, I wished to work out my soul's salvation, retire from all its noise, and live with some worthy honest man, with whom I could spend the rest of my days in peace; ...
— The Blunderer • Moliere
... This moralizing on funerals by the sexton's wife was a new phase of life to Mr. Penrose. He had never before met with anyone who took an interest in the matter. It was true that in the city from which he had lately come the question ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... friendly way, "Look out! Here's the undertaker a coming, to see how you're a getting on with your work!" I believe it is well known in a constitutional country that Mr. Wopsle could not possibly have returned the skull, after moralizing over it, without dusting his fingers on a white napkin taken from his breast; but even that innocent and indispensable action did not pass without the comment, "Wai-ter!" The arrival of the body for interment (in an empty black box with the lid tumbling open), was the signal for a general ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... gratitude." The saying is a little too much like Rochefoucauld, and too true to be pleasant; but it was one of those keen remarks which Johnson appreciated because they prick a bubble of commonplace moralizing without demanding too literal an acceptation. He went home to sup with Reynolds and became his intimate friend. On another occasion, Johnson was offended by two ladies of rank at the same house, and by way of ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... know about your health, your occupations, your inclinations, and let it be in a long enough letter, with moralizing and plenty of ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... cared little for Voltaire and Rousseau, and was unmoved even by Diderot, whose so greatly praised Salons he found strangely saturated with moralizing twaddle and futility; in his hatred toward all this balderdash, he limited himself almost exclusively to the reading of Christian eloquence, to the books of Bourdaloue and Bossuet whose sonorously embellished periods were imposing; but, still more, he relished suggestive ideas condensed ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... superficial glance and looked deeper, and without moralizing or dragging in far-fetched similes or warnings, tried to comprehend one fundamental reality in wild nature—the universal acceptance of opportunity. From this angle it is quite unimportant whether ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... ethical and aesthetic values. Civilization no less than religion must fight this. For it is as false in experience and as unclear in thinking as could well be imagined. Its defense, so far as it has any, is based upon the confusion in the pagan mind of morality with moralizing, a confusion that no good humanist would ever permit himself. Of course, the end of art is neither preaching nor teaching but delighting. For that very reason, however, art, too, must conform—hateful word!—conform to fixed ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... little oracle," ejaculated her cousin; "there now, sir, you have a dissertation on matrimony, and a moral, the truth of which I doubt if you'll ever dispute. But my cousin has surely turned philosopher, and is moralizing in expectancy on her own engagement; but forgive me, Nell" (he continued, as the young lady cast a reproachful look at him that made him regret the allusion), "I did not intend to pain you by any reference to your affair d'amour; I had no idea it was an unpleasant subject with ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... to himself in a highly moralizing strain. "It ain't every young enlisted man," he was saying, "ez hez th' privilege of explainin' his wants ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... in the humour for a little moralizing, I opened the lych-gate and entered the churchyard. The congregation were singing the last hymn, the Old Hundredth, if I remember rightly, and the sound of their united voices fitted perfectly into the whole scheme, giving it ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... philosophic sometimes. Thought will, now and then, take up a passing incident, and extract the moral. But how little the wiser are we for moralizing! we look into the mirror of truth, and see ourselves—then turn away, and forget what manner of men we are. Better for us if it were not so; if we remembered the image ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... This moralizing is inspired by the pessimism of disenchanted age; but on that beautiful morning of the long ago, naught occurred to me save the wedlock of earth and heaven: I was near to nature's heart, listening to the ecstatic songs of the robins, the orioles ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... situation, that is, by putting a character in certain circumstances and working out the results, as The Birthmark (1843). His stories also fall into two groups, the imaginative, like Howe's Masquerade (1838), and the moralizing introspective, or, as they have been called, the "moral-philosophic," that is, stories which look within the human mind and soul and deal with great questions of conduct, such as The Ambitious Guest (1837). ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... far as he could get, though he cudgelled his memory to continue. Moralizing thus, he became drowsy, and was almost asleep when the train drew up at the station ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... be sad and say nothing.' He has, he says, a melancholy of his own, the result of his experience and reflection, which wraps him in a most humorous sadness. Jaques, in fact, is a rake turned cynical philosopher. He regards man and nature as only so much material for observation and for moralizing. ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... is only 42; the odd numbers are on the other side. I must cross. What a lot of rubbish on the road; and do you think I would let my girl stand out bareheaded like that, gossiping with a lot of idle young chaps?" Thus thinking and moralizing Mrs. Rowles went down the street towards the eastern ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... Dorn laughed gayly, "I'm not going to hurt Lizzie. She's good fun: that's all. And now look here, Mr. Preacher—you come moralizing around me about what I'm doing to some one else, which after all is not my business but hers; and I'm right here to tell you, what you're doing to yourself, and that's your business and no one's else. You're drinking ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... stood contemplating the ruins, and moralizing when any one would stop to listen to him, had pointed this out. Mr. Dean was a carpenter, and kept a grocery store as well, so he could pity the lumbermen from the shelter of comparative affluence. When he saw the preacher's wife, he came ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... and quite as false a tongue, Which tells how virtuous was the world when—she and it were young. Or rather for these thirty years has moralizing told, How this good deed and that she'll do, before she grows old: Four-and-twenty sighs a-day, that our rude English sky Is not precise as she—and may wash off the dye Meretricious of her cheeks, which are then like gold, (Though less tempting;) sweet and yellow as a marigold![2] Four-and-twenty ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... Denmark, were of no ordinary character. Denmark had been the ally of France in that severe struggle which forms the most considerable portion of modern history, and had proved a most faithful ally. Even at St. Helena, when contemplating his marvellous career and moralizing over the past, the first emperor of the dynasty which now governs France rendered justice to the complete devotion of the Kings of Denmark and Saxony, the only sovereigns, he said, who were faithful under all proof and the extreme of adversity. ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... manner did the patient duke draw a useful moral from everything that he saw; and by the help of this moralizing turn, in that life of his, remote from public haunts, he could find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... brightness of their eyes." The library, "containing, as I was told, 300,000 volumes, among which were 20,000 Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts," is briefly noticed; and the sight of the mummies in the Egyptian collection sets the Khan moralizing, not in the most novel strain, on these relics of bygone mortality. The sculptures were less to his taste—the Egyptian colossi are alluded to as "the work in former days, I suppose, of some of the mummies up stairs;" and the Grecian statues ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... intellect, and the law has proved powerless to set them right; in all civilized countries the list is indeed formidable of the splendid and inspiring productions, from the Bible downwards, which officials or the law courts have been pleased to declare "obscene." So that while the task of moralizing the community by force must absolutely fail of its object, it may at the same time suffice ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... in a happily chastened frame of mind and body. And I rather suspect that Sandy's moralizing had the more force because it was preceded by my pancake turner! But one thing I know—Suzanne Estelle is terrified whenever I step into her kitchen. I casually picked up the potato-masher this morning while I was commenting upon last night's over-salty soup, and she ran ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... with the expected hour of the visitation, but thrown out in a seeming vacuity of topics, as to the striking of the clock and so forth. The same desire to escape from the impending thought is carried on in Hamlet's account of, and moralizing on, the Danish custom of wassailing: he runs off from the particular to the universal, and, in his repugnance to personal and individual concerns, escapes, as it were, from himself in generalisations, and ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... hence that art which in Sophocles was learned in more miscellaneous and active circles, and moulded by a more powerful imagination, in Euripides often sickens us with the tricks of a pleader, the quibbles of a schoolman, or the dullness of a moralizing declaimer. But as, in the peculiar attributes and character of his writings, Euripides somewhat forestalled his age—as his example had a very important influence upon his successors—as he did not exhibit till the fame of Sophocles was already confirmed—and as his ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... nobody answered Devine, and instead of moralizing they presently went to sleep. They were up at sunrise the next day, and started soon afterward on a march that led them through tangled pine bush, the tall grass of natural swamp prairies, rotting muskegs, and over stony hill-slopes. It ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... such action. There are few—very few—cases of Seminal Weakness and Impotency that cannot now be cured. Of course, here as elsewhere, there are traps and humbugs, quacks and charlatans, false theories and empty moralizing; but there is also truth and knowledge, hope and certainty for such as are sufficiently in earnest to search for them. Prof. Civiale, by his indomitable perseverance, thorough study and experiment, and final conclusions and discoveries, has placed the means of a perfect restoration ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... contemplated the old man bending over the sweet fresh earth, (and then, glancing round, saw the quiet garden stretching away on either side with its boundaries lost among the thick evergreen,) something of that grateful and moralizing stillness with which some country scene (the rura et silentium) generally inspires us, when we awake to its consciousness from the troubled dream of dark and unquiet thought, stole over his mind: and certain old lines which his uncle, who loved the soft and rustic morality ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... might have wanted some salt pork. The story was truer of Cooper himself than of his innkeeper. Nature he could depict, and the wild life led in it, so that all men stood ready and eager to gaze on the pictures he drew. He chose too often to inflict upon them, instead of it, the most commonplace of moralizing, the stalest (p. 170) disquisitions upon manners and customs, and the driest discussions ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... so sharply attacked, it was contended on her behalf by some friendly critics that art and social morality have no necessary connection—a line of defense she would have been the last to take up for herself. In the present day her judges complain rather of her incessant moralizing, and on the whole with more reason. She indignantly denied that her novels had the evil tendencies imputed to them. Certainly the supposition of the antagonistic spirit of her writings to Christianity and marriage vanishes in proportion to the reader's acquaintance with ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... drawing these silent morals. No man occupied himself with me. Quiet voices, and games of chance, and glasses lifted to drink, continued to be the peaceful order of the night. And into my thoughts broke the voice of that card-dealer who had already spoken so sagely. He also took his turn at moralizing. ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... monotony of a descriptive poem, the author introduced moralizing digressions: advice to the husbandman and the shepherd after the manner of the "Georgics"; compliments to his patrons, like Lyttelton, Bubb Dodington, and the Countess of Hertford; and sentimental narrative episodes, such as ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... wrong, is but the expression of the instincts of his age. Our duty consists in helping him to pass through that stage without making permanent habits of these temporary impulses. This help must not be given through branding the acts as wicked or criminal, nor is moralizing itself generally effective. Help must come through providing adequate opportunities for play and games and work that will use up surplus energy both of mind and body. Above all, help must come through the healthy examples ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... supposed that he must have been looking forward to for days—dragging himself back to protect her—oh, it was too hopeless! Should she ever be able to explain to him why she had sent for him, and that her intentions had been the opposite of those of the moralizing meddler he would take her for? If only she could make it up to him somehow. She would have liked to reach over and pull him down into her arms, mother him and tell him not to mind—there was something so intolerably pathetic about his effort to ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of past deviltry to which he is not entitled, and suffer all this in addition to all his physical ills, owing to his having been ornamented through life with an annoying prepuce,—the luckless heritage of having been born a Christian. Columbus in chains moralizing on the ingratitude of this world is nothing to the poor invalid with a swollen prepuce, innocently acquired, silently "cussing" the ignorance of ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... has not chased the butterfly, And crushed its slender legs and wings, And heaved a moralizing sigh: Alas! how ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... under the infliction of this household moralizing, which might tend to damage the airy-fairy nature that Dick, as maiden shrewdness told her, had accredited her with. Her dead silence impressed Geoffrey with the notion that something in his words did not agree with her educated ideas, ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... green veil," adds he, among much similar moralizing, and embroiled discoursing, "I yet keep; still more inseparably the Name, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh. From the veil can nothing be inferred: a piece of now quite faded Persian silk, like thousands of others. On the Name I ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... introduction and the first task. The cruelty displayed by the hero's father is not unusual in folk-tales, but his method of getting rid of his son is. The benevolence of the snake, which is not motivated at all, may be at bottom connected with some such moralizing tradition as is found in Somadeva, "The Story of the Three Brahmin Brothers" (Tawney, 1 : 293), where two older brothers, in order to get rid of the youngest, who has been slandered by their wives ("Potiphar's wife" situation), order him to dig up an ant-hill in which lives ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... were fast becoming synonymous terms, and there were even moments when one almost fancied one heard the laughter of the gods. Let the dull brute civilized herd sweep by, all its moralizing and sophistries could not arouse so much as a single ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... exchanging it for Deism, or Atheism, or Ingersollism? Infidelity proposes to break down the altars of prayer, take away our Bibles and our days of worship, shut up the doors against all our Sunday-schools and turn more than a million of children into the streets, away from sweet song and moralizing influences, and the pure morals of the gospel of Christ. This would bereave the living of his rule of life, and rob the dying ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... a good deal of philosophy, too, in a pipe, if one will but take the trouble to study it; great subjects for moralizing, much food for reflection; and all this outside of the physical enjoyment, the soothing influences of a quiet pipe, when the day is drawing to a close, and its cares require some gentle force to banish them away. It does not weaken the power of thought, nor stultify ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... subject to his readers. Besides the general purpose of humanization, two other considerations guide him: the racial shortcomings of the English people and the needs of his age. The English are less in need of energizing and moralizing than of intellectualizing, refining, and inspiring with the passion for perfection. This need accordingly determines the choice in most cases. So Milton presents an example of "sure and flawless perfection of rhythm and diction"; Joubert is ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... and vivid Greek felt all the wonder and affection of contrast. He could spend hours in surveying its creeping progress, in moralizing over its mechanism. He despised it in ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... explanation of this tedious moralizing is that Lyly, wit and euphuist, possessed the Nonconformist conscience: "Beneath the courtier's slashed doublet, under his ornate brocade and frills, there stood the Puritan." This I believe to be a mistaken view of the case. As we shall later see reason to ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... to be given to the bullock and the Dutchman—we stood by the captain, taking the other books from his hands as he finished them. Sometimes, when we were apparently at our last gasp, he would skip a whole page of moralizing, or a bit of description; and always, as soon as he clearly foresaw the denouement—which he generally did at about the middle of the second volume—the work was handed over to us without a word ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... king. "Spare me this worn-out moralizing and come to the conclusion. You wish me to go, my good friend; you are dying for me to do so, for my own interest, of course. Draw up a decree placing the regency in your hands, and ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... copy of the song "Where, Oh Where, is Doctor Tappan?" an evidence of student interest in his whereabouts which had cheered and inspired him mightily. Then, as merely incidental, and by way of contrast, he referred in mild tones to the obnoxious print of the night before,—"no moralizing but a salutary and effective talk, which was ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... beside this. Pope, condescending to the meanest complication of lies to justify a paltry vanity, taking advantage of his old friend's dotage to trick him into complicity, then giving a false account of his error, and finally moralizing, with all the airs of philosophic charity, and taking credit for his generosity, is altogether a picture to ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... is charming!" said Sophie. "You will have an opportunity, Mr. Thostrup, of moralizing over the ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... "I'm moralizing," Marion said, laughing. "You yourself suggested that train of thought. I was wondering which of us was right in our notions, you or I; and, for all practical purposes, what difference ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... all the summer," was the motto which he adopted, together with the device of a tambourine, in reference to his future hopes. A letter which the well-known preacher, Celso Maffei of Verona, addressed to him, moralizing over the causes of his fall, and exhorting him to observe the laws of public and private justice, gave Lodovico an opportunity of issuing a manifesto to his adherents. In this curious document he defends his conduct, and declares that he has no reason to ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... feeling I find strengthened by his poem called An Equal Sacrifice, the only one of his pieces where anything like a ballad is attempted, and the only one in all three books which seems to be an undeviating failure. It is as flat as a pancake, and ends with flat moralizing. Mr. Frost ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... unsartain as the wind that blows, said Benjamin, with a moralizing air; and nothing is more varible than the wind, Mistress Remarkable, unless you hap pen to fall in with the trades, dye see, and then you may run for the matter of a month at a time, with studding-sails on both sides, alow and aloft, and with ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Thus, moralizing in my dream I perceived that Mr. Bumpkin after talking to some men betook himself to a Bus and proceeded on his way to the "Goose" at Westminster, whither he arrived in due time ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... military audience: what can be said fairly of its main characteristics? Perhaps this—that it is moderately reflective; that it is ready to give the untried speaker a break; that it does not like windiness, bombast or prolonged moralizing; that it refuses to be bullied; and that it can usually be won by the light touch and a little appeal to its sporting instinct. It is the little leavening in the bread which makes all the difference in its savor ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... use; I must not give up. The fellow is good; but what is that to me now? If he win the day, I am lost forever—for it is only through her I will be a better man—and surely, with Lawson's nature, he would willingly make the sacrifice. But here I am, moralizing like a preacher," cried the young man, as he arose and began pacing up and down the floor in an excited manner. "By heaven! it won't do to give up! If I ever expect to be a better man I ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... large pictures were thrown away: the whole length Vandykes went for a song! I am mortified now at having printed the catalogue. Gideon the Jew, and Blakiston(259) the independent grocer, have been the chief purchasers of the pictures sold already—there, if you love moralizing! Adieu! I have no more articles ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... time for argument. I said nothing, while he, melancholy and moralizing, continued in this style as long as he could venture to stay. He then rose and took his hat, saying, " Well, so much for the day; what may come to-morrow I know not; but, be it what it may, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... at a man of peace like me," said the white-haired Sir Wilfrid, with his quiet smile. "It takes all sorts, my dear Corry, to play the game of a generation—old and young. However, the situation is too acute for moralizing. Arthur, are you open to any sort of advice from an ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... frequent conversations with him over the bamboo picket, I found this islander a philosopher of nature—a wild heathen, moralizing upon the vices and follies of the Christian court of Tahiti—a savage, scorning the degeneracy of the people among whom fortune ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... recently driven into the large barrow; and he had, perhaps, read of the real or pretended excavation by Signor Ghormezano (1787) of a tumulus at the Sigean promontory. The "mind's eye," which had conjured up "the shattered heaps," images a skull of one who "kept the world in awe," and, after moralizing in Hamlet's vein on the humorous catastrophe of decay, the poet concludes with the Preacher "that there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave." After this profession of unfaith, before he returns to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... I have left my hero happily married to his profession, the courtship and winning of which formed the theme of my tale, I may be permitted to indulge in a very little moralizing of a rather more explicit sort than I have ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... such a pretty lover, John. If I could only paint you in your sackcloth and ashes, I should die in content. What is it like, mon ami, to feel like moralizing in a rose-garden by moonlight? What do they tell you—the roses? Of the dull earth from which they come? Don't they whisper of the kisses of the night winds, of the drinking of the dew—of the mad joy of living—the sweetness of dying? Or don't ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... his analytical presentation of human nature. The theological significance of Hill's play has not, to my knowledge, been recognized; thematic passages tend to be dismissed as tiresome and gratuitous moralizing and the plot is often regarded as empty melodrama or the representation of some ambiguous 'fate'. It is in this deliberate theological rationalization of his materials that Hill owes most to Mrs. Trotter's domestic tragedy and that he differs ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... 'a moralizing tar-bucket. Truly, this age is prolific in wonders. The march of intellect is abroad with a vengeance. But since these good people have been disappointed of their expected morning's amusement, perhaps you will favor them and myself with ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... wreck, I took to moralizing like the melancholy Jaques, though in a strain not quite so well worthy of record; and, losing sight of my company, was for some time thrown out. When I caught the dogs up, it was found Reynard was fairly gone to earth in an inaccessible ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... the mischief has come over Cousin Ulick to be banishing you from Castle Hermitage? But since he conformed, he was never the same man, especially since his last mis-marriage. But no use moralizing—he was always too much of a courtier for me. Come you to me, my dear boy, who is no courtier, and you'll be received and embraced with open arms—was I Briareus, the same way—Bring Moriarty Carroll (if that's his name), the boy you shot, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... the sixains of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, he cuts the length of Painter's tale by about two-thirds. In the process, much of Painter's attention to historical detail, his complication of plot, and his tedious moralizing are mercifully lost. By way of amplification in the minor epic mode, Barksted expands as follows Mahomet's brief command in Painter that Hiren should "adorne herselfe with her most precious jewels, and decke her with the costliest apparell shee ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... experience so far as to make himself a transparent medium for the emotions of mankind; but he still lacked a definite connection with the multifarious drama of human fellowship; he could not catch his cue and play his answering part, and therefore gave voice to a constantly murmurous, moralizing "aside." He delights to let the current of action flow around him and beside him; he warms his heart in it; but when he again withdraws by himself, it is with him as with the old toll-gatherer at close of day, "mingling reveries ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... induced me to translate the letter into English, for the benefit of a friend who did not know Yiddish; for the benefit of the present narrative, which was not thought of thirteen years ago. I can hardly refrain from moralizing as I turn to the leaves of my childish manuscript, grateful at last for the calamity ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... shall pay the terrible penalty. Louis XVI. was a gentle king; unwise, but never at heart tyrannical; but alas! he answered not merely for his own misdeeds, but for the misdeeds, the tyrannical conduct of centuries of kingcraft. It was an inevitable consequence—and it will ever be so. But I am moralizing. ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... the door brought to a sudden end this little touch of moralizing, and a wrinkled old porter thrust out a very ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... see that her outline was slim and graceful, and the contour of her head charming,—facts that had evidently not escaped the observation of the expressman and Mr. Heckshill, and that might have accounted for the cautious reticence of the one and the comfortable moralizing of the other. ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... Thus moralizing and dogmatizing, the Prince concluded his letter, and so the correspondence terminated. This last despatch was communicated at once both to the States-General and to the French government, and remained unanswered. Soon afterwards the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... life, my child," said the moralizing Vane; "and the stream flows through dulness at first, reserving its poetry for ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... strain of moralizing (in which the writer is not too anxious to proceed, for he cuts in it a most pitiful figure), we passed sundry criticisms upon poor Attwood's character, expressed our horror at his death—which sentiment was ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... But a truce to moralizing.—Two months passed away, and it was now the season of summer—that delicious season, fraught with more voluptuous pleasures than virgin spring, gloomy autumn or hoary winter. It was in rather an obscure street of Boston—in a modest two-story ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... not good, however, to stay moralizing in a cemetery until a thunderstorm bursts over your head. I remained so long here that I had to run for refuge in a manner quite out of keeping with my solemn train of thoughts. I entered the first doorway that I saw open, and thus I found myself in a cobbler's shop. The cobbler was seated ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... alone deals with manliness and reality, and he complains that it is always difficult to convince youth that the higher planes of life contain anything but chilly sentiments. He contends that young people are therefore prone to receive moralizing and admonitions with polite attention, but when it comes to action, they carefully observe the life about them in order to conduct themselves in such wise as to be part of the really desirable world inhabited by men of affairs. Owing to this attitude, many young people living in our cities at ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... energy, that it is lacking when the desires are satisfied, but that otherwise, even the richest and best substitution can offer no satisfaction. It is not daring, therefore, to infer the erotic starting-point. Again we see how the moralizing and training influence of rigidly-required work suppresses all superfluous states which themselves make express demands and might want ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... him. His notion of constructing a novel was to take equal parts of wooden melodrama and low comedy and stick them boldly together in a paste of impertinent drollery and serious but entirely irrelevant moralizing. And yet each time I read Ravenshoe—and I must be close upon "double figures"—I like it better. Henry did my green unknowing youth engage, and I find it next to impossible to give him up, and quite impossible to choose the venerated Charles as a substitute in my riper age. For here ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... his successor has not left, at Versailles, half so much occasion for moralizing; perhaps the neigbhboring Parc aux Cerfs would afford better illustrations of his reign. The life of his great grandsire, the Grand Llama of France, seems to have frightened Louis the well-beloved; who understood that loneliness is one of the necessary conditions of divinity, and, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... is life, with its duties and its stern sacrifices on both parts equally. Libertines, who seek for hidden treasure, are as guilty as other evil-doers who are more hardly dealt with than they. These reflections are not a mere veneer of moralizing; they show the reason of many unexplained misfortunes. But, indeed, this drama points its own moral—or morals, for they are of ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... The moralizing tendency which characterizes all of Herder's work, and which grew stronger as he advanced in years, rendered him indifferent to the purely artistic side of poetry. He makes no effort in his versions to bring out what is characteristically Oriental in the original; on the contrary, he often destroys ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... entirely in mathematics," could assimilate "Locke on the Understanding," and appreciate a translation of the Memorabilia of Xenophon. Even after his study of this latter book he had a fondness for the calm reasoning of Socrates, and wished to imitate him in his manner of reasoning and moralizing. There is no question but that the great heathen had his influence across the abyss of time upon the mind of a young American destined also to fill, in many respects, the foremost place in his country's history. There was one, at least, who had no premonition of this. His brother ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... pledge, and they would not give up the use of tobacco. The result was, that they continued month after month and year after year to pay rent on hired tenements. "The money they have expended for whiskey and tobacco," remarked Mr. Barnum, moralizing upon this topic, "would have given them homes of their own if it had been devoted to that object, and their positions, socially and morally, would have been far better. How many infatuated men there ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... endless task to recount the ways in which Browning exhibits the moralizing power of love: how it is for him the quintessence of all goodness; the motive, and inspiring cause, of every act in the world that is completely right; and how, on that account, it is the actual working in the man of the ideal of all perfection. This doctrine of love is, in my opinion, ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... divines. Here the lack of all possible moral sympathy would prove that his interest was purely verbal or pictorial, as it is; in all the books he reads and writes he clings to the skirts of his own morality and his own immorality. The champion of l'art pour l'art is always denouncing Ruskin for his moralizing. If he were really a champion of l'art pour l'art, he would be always insisting on Ruskin ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... yet effaced, we frequently find a buffalo head stuck up with a notice, that there is a spring in such & such a place; nearly all the skulls & shoulder blades along the road, are more or less written upon. Loyd he wrote a moralizing epitaph upon a very large old skull, stating that this animal had fulfilled the laws of nature, & that his head, still served as a seat to ...
— Across the Plains to California in 1852 - Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell • Lodisa Frizell
... Picture, pure and simple, it is—comment none, least of all, moralizing comment. The wish is sighed by "everybody," that such pleasant things may "last." Well, they did last the writer's time. But meanwhile the French revolution was a-preparing. A hundred years later it will come, with its ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... was seized with the desire to know what such a charming creature as Marianne thought. Ah! what a pretty girl! He had already inquired her name; he happened to know Uncle Kayser; the painter had formerly sent him a printed memoir On the Method of Moralizing Art ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... will suppose thee in a moralizing mood; that is, I will fancy the dice have run wrong—or your double-barrel has hung fire—or a certain lady has looked cross—or any such weighty cause of gravity has occurred, and you give me the benefit of your seriousness.—'My dear Etherington,' say you pithily, 'you are a precious ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... ballad is full of leaps and omissions; the style is simple to a fault; the diction is spontaneous and free. Assonance frequently takes the place of rhyme, and a word often rhymes with itself. There is a lack of poetic adornment in the style quite as conspicuous as the lack of reflection and moralizing in the matter. Metaphor and simile are rare and when found are for the most part standing phrases common to all the ballads; there is never poetry for poetry's sake. Iteration is the chief mark of ballad style; and the favorite form of this effective figure is what one may call incremental ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... which are advertised every day in the last page of the Times newspaper, and over which the late Mr. George Robins used to preside with so much dignity. There are very few London people, as I fancy, who have not attended at these meetings, and all with a taste for moralizing must have thought, with a sensation and interest not a little startling and queer, of the day when their turn shall come too, and Mr. Hammerdown will sell by the orders of Diogenes' assignees, or will be instructed by the executors, to offer to public competition, the library, furniture, plate, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... performed, or the chivalrous spirit which called it forth, that made this a memorable event to Harry; it was the angel visit—the kindling influence of a pure heart that passed from her to him. But I suppose the impatient reader will not thank me for moralizing over two whole pages, and I leave the further application of the moral to the discretion ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... the mountains. The sun was shining upon the cultivated hills and rolling lands far below us as we jogged along our winding way up the mountain. At every turn in the road new beauties presented themselves. But it was getting too chilly for moralizing, and both lackey and I were pleased when we reached the village upon the top of the mountain, which bears the name of Real del Monte. The house of entertainment here is kept by an English woman, who seems to be a part of the mining ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... hospitality throughout succeeding ages. The accompanying light and the protection from cold combined to establish the home circle. The ties of mated animals expanded through these influences to the bonds of family. Thus light was woven early into family life and has been throughout the ages a moralizing and civilizing influence. To-day the residence functions as a home mainly under artificial light, for owing to the conditions of living and working, the family group gathers chiefly ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... paste-and-scissors information compiled from books, newspapers, and statistics by some one at best imperfectly acquainted with his subject, was attempted to be conveyed by means of questions and answers, supplemented by dreary and unnecessary remarks of a moralizing tendency. The persons in whose company Smeeton would send us round, in order that we may form a just conception of the "vice and deception in all their real deformity," of which he speaks, are a couple of idiots, one Peregrine ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt |
