"Saving grace" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the excellent bargains offered to retailers and jobbers at his great emporium. A counter-illustration is found in the case of a certain bishop, recently elected, of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, who is accused of being a white man. A colored editor who possesses the saving grace of humor, along with other talents of a high order, gravely observed, in discussing this rumor, that "the poor man could not help it, even if he were white, and that a fact for which he was in no wise responsible should not be allowed to stand ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... next in the path of progress, having a machine ready-made, so to speak, and having nothing to do but to get into it and fly, did not, in many cases, exercise this saving grace of caution. And that—at least in my view—is why a good many of what one may call the second flight ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... mundane, and had come to the surface, sputtering and blowing, with his face well smeared with mud from the shallow depths. Whereupon he remarked that such an existence was a poor way of serving the Lord, and turned cynic. His wit was his saving grace. It was likewise his capital and stock-in-trade. By it he won a place for himself in the newspaper world, and later, as a credit asset, had employed it successfully in negotiating for the Social Era. It taking over the publication of this sheet he had remarked that life was altogether too ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... it—and in loving-kindness, however ingenuously, they sought our welfare. When I came from the unkind night into the light and warmth of that plain temple, Parson Lute, of Yellow Tail Tickle, whom I knew and loved, was seeking to persuade the shepherds of our souls that the spread of saving grace might surely be accomplished, from Toad Point to the Scarlet Woman's Head, by means of unmitigated doctrine and more artful discourse. He was a youngish man, threadbare and puckered of garment—a quivering little aggregation of bones and ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... Price was liked by the settlers. He never interfered with what they considered their relaxations, and he had the saving grace ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... what's right, He has to try with all his might. Though true and kind in deed and word, Fred's not a vessel of the Lord. But I have hopes of him; for, oh, How can we ever surely know But that the very darkest place May be the scene of saving grace! ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... it is certain that the resemblance of his speeches to pamphlets accounts for that 'dinner-bell' effect of his which has puzzled some people and shocked others. Burke always argued the point, if he only argued one side of it, and it is the special as it is the saving grace of the pamphlet that it must, or at least should, be an argument, and not merely an invective or an innuendo, a ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... are not skilled preachers. They may have very limited education, but they can take the Book, read it, explain its message through the light of their own individual experiences, and by this means of witnessing to the power of the saving grace of God in their own lives, they are able to lead many to Jesus. Is not this after all the kind of preaching our Lord has sent us into the world ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... starved to death, and there would have been neither Miracles nor Mosaic Law, Ten Commandments nor Vicarious Atonement. Talmage and other industrious exploiters of intellectual tommyrot, now ladling out saving grace for fat salaries, might be as unctuously mouthing for Mumbo Jumbo, fanning the flies off some sacred bull or bowing the knee to Baal. The Potiphar-Joseph episode deserves the profoundest study. It was an awful crisis in the history of the human race! How thankful we, who live in these ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... lamp-carrier! have a care and look to thyself; content not thyself with only that which will maintain thee in a profession, for that may be done without saving grace; but I advise thee to go to Aaron, to Christ the trimmer of our lamps, and beg of him thy vessel full of oil, that is, grace for the seasoning of thy heart, that thou mayest have wherewith not only to ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... way to gain this ease and control is not by stiffening up to master one's self, but by relaxing, letting go of one's self. Practice in the speech of pleasantry may have great value in giving a man repose, in giving him that saving grace, an appreciation of the humorous, in affording him a means of relief or enlivenment to ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... more distant than the other tribes I had visited, a quality which is often a saving grace. They were very willing to be photographed, and among my subjects were three women of the nobility, called rajas, who had many coins sewn on their skirts in a way that looked quite well. One wore a head ornament such as I had not ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... have wiggled her way in before he could shut the door in her face. Then there would have been the devil to pay, for she would have seen to it that he was hopelessly compromised. No doubt she would have run out on the balcony and screamed for help. Her failure was the one saving grace ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the work has been deeply interesting to all who have been acquainted with it, and particularly so to myself. Never were the power and mercy of God more manifestly displayed, and never did his saving grace shine through a more feeble instrumentality. But God can work according to his will; and, blessed be his name, the heathen shall ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... water stand in my eyes now to remember what she said. But I didn't feel so then, my heart and my soul were rebellious, and love for Dan alone kept me under, not love for God. And in fact, if ever I'd got to heaven then, love for Dan'd have been my only saving grace; for I was mighty high-spirited, as a girl. Well, Dan he never made open profession; but when he left the house, he went and asked Faith to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... bolts, and stones in overflight and falling in remittent showers—would have dispersed them in ordinary mood; but they were under protection—the Madonna was leading them—to be afraid was to deny her saving grace. And then there was no shrinking on the part of the Princess Irene. Even as she took time and song from the choir, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... in itself, was yet informed with the saving grace of comedy, a thing to which Lester was especially responsive. Although not in the least inclined to relax his attitude of aloofness, he found his mind, in the minutest degree, tickled by the mysterious appearance; the corners of his mouth ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... plainly need it. I can sin much, but I cannot correspondingly repent. O Lord, give me a molten heart. Give me tears; give me a fountain of tears. Give me the grace of tears. Drop down, ye heavens, and bedew the dryness of my heart. Give me, O Lord, this saving grace. No grace of all the graces were more welcome to me. If I may not water my couch with my tears, nor wash Thy feet with my tears, at least give me one or two little tears that Thou mayest put into Thy bottle and write in Thy book!' If your heart is ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... He felt the torrent of grief that rent her. No sob escaped her lips; there was no convulsive movement of shoulder. She rode beside him, still as the desert before the sand-storm breaks, her soul seared with white-hot iron that knows no saving grace of sob or tear. She rode as Boadicea might have ridden to battle; there was not a yielding line in her body. But over and over in her woman's heart there rang the cry: "I am so tired! If the long ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... vulgar boast about escaping from the fetters of religion. He spares us any flouts of intellectual superiority. He is apparently an evolutionist, but withal finds little saving grace in that doctrine, and is not uninclined ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... as opposed to ours, we must also remember that the south Italian does not trouble himself about the objective truth of any miracle whatever; his senses may be perverted, but his intelligence remains outside the sphere of infection. This is his saving grace. To the people here, the affair of Moses and the Burning Bush, the raising of Lazarus, and Egidio's cow-revival, are on the identical plane of authenticity; the Bible is one of a thousand saints' books; its stories may be as true as theirs, or just as untrue; ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... "Concerning our dear Esquimaux congregation, we may truly and thankfully declare that we have perceived a continued work of the Holy Spirit within their souls, leading them to a better acquaintance with themselves as depraved creatures, who stand in daily need of the saving grace of our Almighty Saviour. They are earnest in prayer to him that he would preserve them from falling back into their former wicked and superstitious courses." The accounts from Nain were to the same effect: "Our communicants," say they, "have made a perceptible advance both in the knowledge ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous
... honourable standing as a university student, but accepted as a candidate for holy orders, with permission to preach in the Lutheran establishment. This student of divinity knew nothing of God or salvation, and was ignorant even of the gospel plan of saving grace. He felt the need for a better life, but no godly motives swayed him. Reformation was a matter purely of expediency: to continue in profligacy would bring final exposure, and no parish would have him as a pastor. To get a valuable "cure" and a good "living" he must make ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... Levi, too, was a saving grace in those empty hours after Cynthia's going. Swelling with pride, he followed Sandy about from cabin to factory; from factory to Home-school. In vain he struggled to suppress any outward show of the pride and delight he took in everything he saw. He sought to keep things upon ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... it first stood. Of course it would have been better if I had totally reformed and rewritten the book in pellucid English; but that is beyond me, and I feel at any rate this book must be better than it was, for there is less of it; and I dimly hope critics will now see that there is a saving grace in disconnectedness, for owing to that disconnectedness whole chapters have ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... common-place, weakly pretentious architecture, that very little of the distinctive character of the old road was left. Certainly, from Tiemann's to the Deaf and Dumb Asylum—about two miles of straight road—there was little that had any saving grace of honorable age, except here and there where some pioneer shanty had squatted itself long enough ago to have acquired a pleasant look of faded shabbiness. The tavern and the stage-office, it is true, kept enough of their old appearance to make a link between those days ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... this prayer in the market-place, These advertised humilities—decreed By proclamation, that we may be freed, And mercy find for once, and saving grace, Even while we forfeit all that made the race Worthy of Heavenly favor—and profess Our faith and homage only through duress, And dread of danger which we ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... confusion. All her life, the giant slave had tended her, guarded her steps and her sleep, taught her the exercises that had made her feared by all the turbulent crew outside; and she was now permitted the saving grace of remembrance. She gave him her hand, and allowed him to place it upon his head, always his favorite means of expression when she followed an outburst of rage with contrition; and in softer tone she begged for an answer to the riddle that ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... to this young man, and also there came with it, or perhaps preceded it, the slightest shade of a feeling that he was better educated than she was—that his mind was better. He seemed to look it, and the saving grace in Carrie was that she could understand that people could be wiser. She had seen a number of people in her life who reminded her of what she had vaguely come to think of as scholars. This strong young man beside her, with ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... was the saving grace of humour. This, of course, is not altogether a quality distinct in itself, but rather a particular mode in which love or tenderness or pity may manifest itself. This humour is ever glinting forth from his writings. Some of his poems—The Farmer's ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... nephew of Mr. Plunket—he inherits the talent which is traditional in the Plunket family, and is said not to be without some of the national spirit that still hides itself in odd nooks and corners of estranged Irish minds. But he has none of the saving grace of his country or family. A solemn voice that seems to come from the depths of some divine despair, and from the recesses of his innermost organs, together with a certain funereal aspect in the close-shaven face, gives him an air that suggests the cypress and the cemetery. But with deadly want ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... with supercilious eyebrows and spotless broadcloth, to concede that these unfortunate members of a non-human class sometimes betray traces of saving grace after all, it might better become you to wish that some of their saving graces appertained to yourself. At your best showing, you are a pharisee and a hypocrite, and he is not; he stands confessed; your sin is still secret in ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne |
