"Saintliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a similar change in the attitude of Burke and Wordsworth in their later years. He was influenced more by persons than by principles. One does not find any real vision of a Republic in his work as one finds it in the work of Shelley. He had little of the saintliness of spirit which marks the true Republican and which turns politics into music in The Masque of Anarchy. His was not one of those tortured souls, like Francis Adams's, which desire the pulling-down of the pillars of the old, bad world more than ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... man is both possible and desirable. It is proved also that a so-called great man meant a great danger for mankind; a saintly man never could be dangerous. We do not need great men at all, we need good and saintly men. We ought not to seek after greatness, but after goodness and saintliness. Greatness is no real virtue, but goodness and saintliness are virtues. Greatness is only an illusion, but goodness and saintliness are realities. Christianity came to impress these realities on the human conscience and to sweep ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... spirituality. Spirituality is more than benevolence in the ordinary sense of the term. The spiritual man is benevolent to a signal degree, but his benevolence is of a peculiar kind. It is characterized by a certain serene fervor which we may almost call saintliness. ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... the temptation of throwing a brighter light on the redeeming points in the character of a robber and murderer by pointedly placing him in contrast with the even darker shades of hypocritical respectability and saintliness in the picture of his brother Franz. The language in which Schiller paints his characters is powerful, but it is often wild and even coarse. The Duke did not approve of his former protege; the very title-page of "The ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... happy and well-spent hours during which these poor Non-Jurors managed 'to fleet the time' in their own society, for they were, many of them, men of the most varied tastes and endowed with Christian tempers; whilst their writings exhibit, as no other writings of the period do, the saintliness and devotion which are supposed to be among the 'notes' of the Catholic Church. Two better men than Kettlewell and Dodwell are nowhere to be found, and as for vigorous writing, where is Charles Leslie ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... will, their sins; Vatel committed suicide because his Majesty had not fish enough for breakfast; the Princess Palatine died in a convent, and the Princess Conde in a prison; the fair Sevigne chose the better part, and the fairer Montespan the worse; the lovely La Valliere walked through sin to saintliness, and poor Marie de Mancini through saintliness to sin; Voiture and Benserade and Corneille passed away, and Racine and Moliere reigned in their stead; and Mademoiselle, who had won the first campaigns of her life and lost all the rest, died a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... as much vanity from its amorous exploits as from its dashing uniform. But the passion of this officer was a true love, and many young hearts will think it noble. He loved this woman because she was virtuous; he loved her virtue, her modest grace, her imposing saintliness, as the dearest treasures of his hidden passion. This woman was indeed worthy to inspire one of those platonic loves which are found, like flowers amid bloody ruins, in the history of the middle-ages; worthy to be the hidden principle of all the actions of a young man's life; ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... things," when great things—his Sun and his Moon—had been turned for him to Blood! But, as Pater suggests, there is "Philosophy" in all this, and more Philosophy than many suppose. It is unfortunate that the unworldly Coleridge and the worldly Thackeray should have both pitched upon Lamb's "saintliness" to make copy of. Nothing infuriated him more than such a tone towards himself. And he was right to be infuriated. His "unselfishness," his "sweetness," of which these good men make so much, were only one aspect of the Philosophy of his whole life. Lamb ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... times with poison. In spite of all that, he clung to his office, and labored to do his duty. Meanwhile the jealous abbot of St. Denis succeeded in establishing a claim to the lands of the convent at Argenteuil,—of which Heloise, long since famous not only for learning but also for saintliness, was now the head,—and she and her nuns were violently evicted and cast on the world. Hearing of this with indignation, Abelard at once offered the homeless sisters the deserted Paraclete and all its ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... but simple air of it, with a tang of scholarly mustiness, the whole of a fragrance never entirely lost to those who have known it intimately. Something of the spirit of George Herbert, that homely gentleman of unassuming saintliness, the epitome of everything that was best and most characteristic in the Anglican Church, has descended on country parsonages ever since and is only now beginning to wear thin. And it was the Church of Herbert, of Jeremy Taylor, of Traherne—how above all he would have loved ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... but of which others know nothing. A father's integrity—a mother's sweet goodness—the quiet air of a happy home—a domestic courage and patience, at which you have looked very closely, and whose every line and lineament you know—some ancestral saintliness, which is a household tradition and no more, but which has never withered in the fierce light of public estimate,—these things have inspired and nourished your nobler part. They are the refreshing dew and the fertilizing rain, the restful night and the kindling day, of God's ...
— Beside the Still Waters - A Sermon • Charles Beard |
