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Ethics   Listen
noun
Ethics  n.  The science of human duty; the body of rules of duty drawn from this science; a particular system of principles and rules concerting duty, whether true or false; rules of practice in respect to a single class of human actions; as, political or social ethics; medical ethics. "The completeness and consistency of its morality is the peculiar praise of the ethics which the Bible has taught."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Ethics" Quotes from Famous Books



... philosophical school there, where he taught a philosophy in opposition to that of the Stoics; philosophy he defined as "an activity which realises a happy life through ideas and arguments," summing itself up "in ethics, which are to teach us how to attain a life of felicity"; his system comprised "the three branches included in philosophy, viz., logic, physics, and ethics," but he arranges them in reverse order, logic and physics being regarded ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... approval filled the studio, and through the haze of cigarette smoke Mrs. Clement Westall, as her husband descended from his improvised platform, saw him merged in a congratulatory group of ladies. Westall's informal talks on "The New Ethics" had drawn about him an eager following of the mentally unemployed—those who, as he had once phrased it, liked to have their brain-food cut up for them. The talks had begun by accident. Westall's ideas were known to be "advanced," ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... moral ethics!" said West sleepily; "but really this place is awful. Agricultural implements in one corner, sacks of something in another, horns, saddles, tools—oh, I'm too sleepy to go on. Hallo! He has taken those two rifles away that were slung over ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn

... the present subject; for, according to the view which the individual thinker takes of the powers and relations of the mind itself will be his view of the duties and responsibilities which these powers and relations involve; in other words, Ethics or moral philosophy must be based upon metaphysics. Now, I wish to be as brief as possible in pointing out the theosophic view of the mind, and soul, and their powers and relations; and were it not that it is necessary for the unity of my remarks, ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell

... Esq., stopped a minute. But Albert said nothing. He detested Plausaby's ethics, but was not insensible ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston

... who felt it keenly and deeply. Alfred and Jane were heart-broken: they sat hand in hand in a little room, drawn closer by misfortune, and heard the groans at their door; and the tears of pity ran down their own cheeks hot with shame; and Alfred wrote on the fly-leaf of his "Ethics" a vow to pay every shilling his father owed these poor people—before he died. It was like him, and like his happy age, at which the just and the generous can command, in imagination, the ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... act of downright cruelty to some animal, or even to some human being. Today, when manufacturers are vying with each other to produce better, cleaner, and more universally enjoyable pictures, the script that violates Censorship rules or studio ethics by including any of the foregoing undesirable subjects stands but little show of reaching the production stage, if, indeed—which is extremely ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... of encouragement, for, not counting the younger men, who were hell bent for any kind of mischief, and constantly egged her on, old Ali Baba spent half of each day in the tent expounding to Grim the ethics of such situations; and they were as simple ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy

... Boers' country, actually said, that if the acquisition was as valuable as it was valueless, nevertheless he would repudiate it. When Mr Gladstone came into office, the Boers, who did not understand the ethics of election campaigns, expected him to reverse an act which he repudiated; and when they found that though he disapproved the act he did not intend to revoke it, they saw that they must take up arms, thinking that their cause would ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston

... himself which made them sensitive to his ideas as a photographic plate is to light, teaching them his truth in forms that did not at first show any effect on their thought, but were developed into strength and clearness by the experiences of the passing years. Christian ethics and theology are far more than an orderly presentation of the teaching of Jesus; in so far as they are purely Christian they are the systematic setting forth of truth involved, though not expressed, in what he said and did in his ministry ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees

... "pleasure," shall it find its desires satisfied, but in consciousness of right, of powers greatly and nobly spent. It comes to know itself in the motives which satisfy it, in the zest and power of rectitude. Christianity has liberated the world, not as a system of ethics, not as a philosophy of altruism, but by its revelation of the power of pure and unselfish love. Its vital principle is not its code, but its motive. Love, clear-sighted, loyal, personal, is its breath and immortality. Christ came, not to save Himself, assuredly, ...
— When a Man Comes to Himself • Woodrow Wilson

... have been extensively used by seminaries of other denominations than the Baptist. A native Christian literature has been created for the Telugus, beginning with the Bible, but now embracing church history, theology, ethics, and something of modern science. It must not be thought that the teaching is exclusively religious. Our seminary, and all our schools of lower grade, are affiliated with the government system of education, ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong

... ethics might makes right as elsewhere. They murder and destroy each other; some tribes have been almost wiped out and sold for slaves, as these Pawnee people. Depend upon it they will never take kindly to ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... conduct or temper of mind. How little then does Christianity deserve that title to novelty and superiority which has been almost universally admitted; that pre-eminence, as a practical code, over all other systems of ethics! How unmerited are the praises which have been lavished upon it by its friends; praises, in which even its enemies (not in general disposed to make concessions in its favour) have so often been unwarily ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce

... period. It must be admitted that he did not take into full consideration the differences which climatic influences and the varying degrees of racial intermarriage had worked in the populations of the several provinces. Thus the ethics of the northern and equatorial countries had become widely different from those in the southern and temperate zones. Nevertheless, such was Bolivar's faith in the destiny of South America as a whole that he would ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel

... to him, sirrah," cried Raja Vikram to Dharma Dhwaj, the young prince, who had fallen a little way behind, and was giving ear attentively to the Vampire's ethics. "Listen to him not. And tell me, villain, with these ignoble principles of thine, what will become of modesty, humility, self-sacrifice, and a host of other Guna or good qualities which - ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton

... either shocking or demoralizing the sentiment of the people; and the fact that the indefinite continuance of the circulation of an inconvertible but still legal tender currency is so generally advocated indicates how far we have wandered from old landmarks both in finance and in ethics." ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... commercial exchanges, the scope of their maritime ventures, the extent of their linguistic area, the measure of their territorial ambitions, or the range of their intellectual interests and human sympathies. From land to ethics, the rule holds good. Peoples in the lower stages of civilization have contracted spatial ideas, desire and need at a given time only a limited territory, though they may change that territory often; they ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... she went on, "that it is an occasion for the sacrifice of private ethics to a great purpose, the sooner to ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... Paul snapped. "And look, Stevens, we're busy now, but when you've got some time to do a little thinking, consider the ethics of warfare." ...
— Revolution • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... may be seen a big volume of Fenelon, Taylor's Holy Living and Dying, the Recit d'une Soeur, which have you read? Les Soirees de Saint Petersbourg, Prayers of the Ages, a volume of Goethe, Aristotle's Ethics and some other Greek books; the Life of Mrs. Fry, etc. etc. Such a queer hodge-podge of books as we brought with us, and such a book-case! The first thing "he" ever made for "her" ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... the circumstances, as I'll show you presently, aside from the medical ethics of the case. Aitken was the family ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve

... growth of pine for masts and planks. Mr. Lawrence had written pamphlets and essays on the Baconian theory, and I found my knowledge of the subject expanding and growing under his intelligent talk. His wife's father (J. Benjamin Smith) had taught Cobden the ethics of free trade. It was through the kind liberality of Miss Florence Davenport Hill that a pamphlet, recording the speeches and results of the voting at River House, Chelsea, was printed and circulated. When I visited Miss Hill and her sister and found them as eager ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence

... and remote to become prominent in their speculation or influential in their faith. Spiegel, indeed, thinks the conception was derived from Babylon, and added to the system at a later period than the other doctrines. The beginning of vital theology, the source of actual ethics to the Zoroastrians, was in the idea of the two antagonist powers, Ormuzd and Ahriman, the first emanations of Zeruana, who divide between them in unresting strife the empire of the universe. The former is the Principle of Good, the perfection of intelligence, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... practice he obeys them unconsciously. We seem to be threatened with a belief that God will never punish sin in one who has professed Christianity. This view cheapens sin and makes pardon worthless, it takes the iron out of the blood, and the backbone out of all our religion and ethics. It ruins Christians and disgraces Christianity. We sometimes seem to think that our nation or church or denomination is so important to the carrying on of God's work that he cannot afford to let any evil befall us, whatever we may do ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... assent of Maine, had exhibited in the Senate a map found in the French Archives and very damaging to the American claim. Later it appeared that the British Government also had found a map equally damaging to its own claims. The nice question of ethics involved, whether a nation should bring forward evidence that would tell against itself, ceased to have more than an abstract interest when it was demonstrated that neither map could be considered as one which the original negotiators ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton

... Paul has been enjoining will only be successful in the measure of our consecration, and the consecration will only be genuine in the measure of our purifying. Herein lies the broad and blessed distinction between the world's morality and Christian ethics. The former fails just because it lacks the attitude towards a Person who is the very foundation of Christian morality, and changes a hard and impossible law into love. There is no more futile waste of breath than that of teachers of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... to the Brotherhood of Humanity, the Promulgation of Theosophy and the Study of Ancient and Modern Ethics, Philosophy, Science ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky

... in reading, writing and arithmetic, given to illiterates, the course progresses so as to include History, Civics, Political Economy, Ethics, Nature study and Literature. Attached to the school there is a well stocked library from which books are issued under regulations relative to good conduct and progress made. There is also a weekly paper issued within the institution called "The Summary," to which the prisoners ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll

... have a long and honorable record of literary activity. Our Holy Scriptures, our Rabbinical Literature, our contributions to philosophy, to ethics, to law, our poetry, sacred and secular, our share in the world's history, all become part of the program which you have laid out for yourselves as a means of cultivation. In their due proportion they ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... the serious business. Some of the singular persons here affect vagaries and discuss pruderies or church matters, ethics and the like. Or we have some of the Concord people who give us parlor talks. Once in a while they arouse the gifted brothers, and then we have a genuine treat; Mr. Dwight and Mr. Bradford, Mr. Ripley, Mr. Capen, Burton and all hands get dragged in, and ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... is to the latter half of the cartilage that dealers and others mainly, if not wholly, devote their attention. A horse with the cartilage in this transition state will therefore pass muster, and a nice little point of ethics has again to be decided by the veterinary surgeon before giving his signature to a certificate of examination of an animal in ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks

... ambitious and fascinating excursion into symbolic ethics. Salom, the inexperienced daughter of a rich Aragonese farmer, elopes with a wild character, Jos Len, who does not repent till his sweetheart loses her mind as a result of his perversity. No play of Galds contains more glaring weaknesses of construction or greater flaws in logic, ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos

... think him so deeply learned in human nature, or in ethics, as some have thought him. Don't you remember how he stared at the following trite observations, which every moralist could have furnished him with? Complaining as he did, in a half-menacing strain, of the obloquies raised against him—'That ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... impossible here to do more than indicate the path out of the difficulties raised by Huxley in the letter to Kingsley quoted above. They involve an elaborate discussion, not only of Christian evidences, but of the entire subject-matter alike of Ethics and Metaphysics, of Philosophy as a whole, and of the philosophies of individual writers who have dealt in their different ways with the problems of existence and epistemology. It is, however, permissible to point out that, as has been exhaustively argued by Professor ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... of the "Ethics"! And I'm a monster of ingratitude, as bad as the Dragon of Wantley. Don't like Dr. Brown's friend's book at all. It's neither Scotch nor English, nor fish nor ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin

... generalizing). I want room to tell you how we are charmed with your verses in the manner of Spenser, etc. I am glad you resume the "Watchman." Change the name; leave out all articles of news, and whatever things are peculiar to newspapers, and confine yourself to ethics, verse, criticism; or, rather, do not confine yourself. Let your plan be as diffuse as the "Spectator," and I 'll answer for it the work prospers. If I am vain enough to think I can be a contributor, rely on my inclinations. ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... Veronica could attend again she found the men were discussing the ethics of the depreciation of house property through the increasing tumult of traffic in the West End, and agreeing with each other to a devastating extent. It came into her head with real emotional force that this must ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... Church and the Christian religion, and which is said to be far more numerous than the extremists are. In the evening the Radicals had a meeting in the Hall of Science, where Mr. Bradlaugh addressed them on the subject of religion and social ethics. His discourses here are generally very abtruse. None but a very intelligent audience, and educated in his system of philosophy would understand his logic or appreciate his wit and humor at the expense of royalty and Christianity. The hall will hold about 1,500 adults and his congregation ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner

... any power of Nature, however irresistible, that is not gifted with consciousness. Atheism may be consistent with fine taste, and fine taste under certain conditions may for a time regulate a polished society; but ethics with atheism are impossible; and without ethics no human order can ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli

... discovering for himself how far it really met the needs and claims of the intellect and the moral sense. Let us imagine him turning to his Homer, to those poems which were the Bible of the Greek, his ultimate appeal both in religion and in ethics; which were taught in the schools, quoted in the law-courts, recited in the streets; and from which the teacher drew his moral instances, the rhetorician his allusions, the artist his models, every man his conception of the gods. Let us imagine some candid and ingenuous youth, turning to his ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... ethics modern in this matter, apart from modern theory of nationalism, i.e. right of nations to ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon

... Emerson always beating down through the crust towards the first fire of life, of death and of eternity. Read where you will, each sentence seems not to point to the next but to the undercurrent of all. If you would label his a religion of ethics or of morals, he shames you at the outset, "for ethics is but a reflection of a divine personality." All the religions this world has ever known, have been but the aftermath of the ethics of one or ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... desperate step. I hope so for his Family's sake, including Father and Mother. People here have asked me if he is not going to give up the Business, &c. Yet there is Greatness about the Man: I believe his want of Conscience in some particulars is to be referred to his Salwaging Ethics; and your Cromwells, Caesars, and Napoleons have not been more scrupulous. But I shall part Company with him if I can do so without Injury to his Family. If not, I must let him go on under some 'Surveillance': he must wish to get rid of me ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome

... of ethics more disputed than the meaning of abstract right and wrong, and as I am not talking either on philosophy or ethics I will ask you to accept just such commonsense definitions as can be applied to the business world ...
— Morals in Trade and Commerce • Frank B. Anderson

... a hundred yards from the Maryland Private Hospital for Ladies and Gentlemen he saw Doctor Keene, the family physician, descending the front steps, rubbing his hands together with a washing movement—as all doctors are required to do by the unwritten ethics ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... religion, ethics, and constitutional government, any counterfeit could impose on them. Any atheist could pass himself off on them as a bishop, any anarchist as a judge, any despot as a Whig, any sentimental socialist as a Tory, any philtre-monger or witch-finder ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw

... loftiest songs and his noblest and most exalted prayers. The influence of the great conflict upon philosophers like Emerson is easily traced. American literature lost its note of unreality. Preaching became practical. There was a revival of ethics in politics. The war cleared the atmosphere of the country by sweeping away slavery with ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis

... out and condemned the errors of modern rationalism. From the fourteenth to the eighteenth, indifferentism and latitudinarianism are exposed. Throughout the rest of the catalogue, secret societies and communism are condemned; erroneous views, as regards church and state, natural and Christian ethics, and Christian marriage are expressed and denounced. Finally, are pointed out the errors that have been uttered in regard to the temporal power of the Pope, together with such as ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell

... of the Pagan superstition. Under these discouraging circumstances, a prudent magistrate might observe with pleasure the progress of a religion which diffused among the people a pure, benevolent, and universal system of ethics, adapted to every duty and every condition of life; recommended as the will and reason of the supreme Deity, and enforced by the sanction of eternal rewards or punishments. The experience of Greek and Roman history could not inform the world how far the system of national ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... of wishing to poison her; declared that young men stared at her; and found herself towards evening slowly sauntering down Jacob's street, when it struck her that she liked that man Jacob better than dirty Jews, and sitting at his table (he was copying his essay upon the Ethics of Indecency), drew off her gloves and told him how Mother Stuart had banged her on ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... but it seems to the present writer that the moral density shown by some of these birthright Quakers, upon matters outside of their wonted and trodden ethical territories, is due to their long refusal to recognize aesthetic values, and to see discriminations in the field in which ethics ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson

... man seems to have found it possible to represent worthily every science known to his time, and to have marked out several new fields for his successors to cultivate. His philosophy covers physics, cosmology, zooelogy, logic, metaphysics, ethics, psychology, politics and economics, ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton

... imaginations, the only antidote against the propensity to let slip the connotation of names, is the habit of predicating of them the properties connoted; though even the propositions themselves, as may be seen from the way in which maxims of Religion, Ethics, and Politics are used, are often repeated merely mechanically, not being questioned, but also not being felt. Much of our knowledge recorded in words is ever oscillating between its tendency, in consequence of different generations attending ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing

... he will pay over that same marked money. Then, he will get the letters he wants so much. And, just because it's a strictly business transaction between two lawyers, with everything done according to legal ethics——" ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana

... the woman had said to him, there had been a re-echo of his own thoughts,—of one side, at any rate, of his own thoughts. He knew that true affection, and the substantial comforts of the world, would hold their own against all romance. And he did not believe,—in his theory of ethics he did not believe,—that by yielding to what Mrs Baggett called fine feelings, he would in the long-run do good to those with whom he was concerned in the world. Were he to marry Mary Lawrie now, Mary Whittlestaff would, ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope

... most eminent of living experimental biologists. I would only dissent from some of his philosophical conclusions. I dissent from his statement that only the mechanistic conception of life can throw light on the source of ethics. Is there any room for the moral law in a world of mechanical determinism? There is no ethics in the physical order, and if humanity is entirely in the grip of that order, where do moral obligations come ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... subjects were introduced which could not be conversed on but must be discussed. On every one Miss Brande took the part of the weak against the strong, oblivious of every consideration of policy and even ethics, careful only that she championed the weak because of their weakness. Miss Metford abetted her in this, and went further in their joint revolt against common sense. Miss Brande was argumentative, pleading. Miss Metford was defiant. Between the ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie

... non—resistant, free-thinker, in ethics a Christian; Orator apt at the rhine-stone rhythm of Ingersoll. Carnivorous, avenger, believer and pagan. Continent, promiscuous, changeable, treacherous, vain, Proud, with the pride that makes struggle a thing for laughter; With heart cored out by the worm of theatric despair. ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters

... they mean by the love of country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something of what a child might mean by the love of jam. To one who loves his fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only his son. Here clearly the word 'love' is used unmeaningly. It is the essence of love ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... will probably find her knowledge strained to the breaking point, and will discover there is more to be known about dish-washing than she ever dreamed of before; while in cooking, if she will make an effort to look up the science, history, and ethics involved in the cooking and serving of a very simple meal, she will not be likely to regard the task as one beneath her, but rather as one beyond her. No one can so lead her away from false conventions ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne

... physical or metaphysical, commonly owes its success to its novelty; and is no sooner canvassed with impartiality than its weakness is discovered. Hobbes's politics are fitted only to promote tyranny, and his ethics to encourage licentiousness. Though an enemy to religion, he partakes nothing of the spirit of scepticism; but is as positive and dogmatical as if human reason, and his reason in particular, could attain a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume

... produced by conditions, not by nature. He can shew that many of the most detestable human vices are not radical, but are mere reactions of our institutions on our very virtues. The Anarchist, the Fabian, the Salvationist, the Vegetarian, the doctor, the lawyer, the parson, the professor of ethics, the gymnast, the soldier, the sportsman, the inventor, the political program-maker, all have some prescription for bettering us; and almost all their remedies are physically possible and aimed at admitted evils. To them the limit of progress is, at worst, the ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw

... the dancing shoes from our feet; Snatches our mouths from the hot forced meat; Drags us away from our warm padded stalls; From our ivory keys, our song books and balls; Orders man's hands from the children's go-carts; Closes our fool schools of "ethics" and "arts." Puts our ten fingers on triggers and swords, Marshals us into War's ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... science should in any way destroy the necessary conditions of civilized life and of the high standard of goodness which should form, elevate, and bring it to perfection. We must, however, remember that it was not rational science, nor the ethics of law, which established the a priori rules of a just and free society, but the necessities of society itself led to the a posteriori formulation of laws. Theoretic science subsequently explained these laws, ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... the wide staircase and in the gravely ornate drawing-rooms. And amid the motley crowd the genial host was omnipresent, with a warm greeting and a twinkling smile for each successive guest—a good story, a happy quotation, the last morsel of piquant gossip, the newest theory of ethics ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... music knows nothing of discord. God is harmony's selfhood. His universal laws, His unchangeableness, are not infringed in ethics any more than in music. To Him there is no moral inharmony; as we shall learn, proportionately as we gain the true understanding of Deity. If God could be conscious of sin, His infinite power would straightway reduce the ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy

... shown enough to indicate the incongruity of her existence with even the low standard of civilization that obtained at Logport in the year 1860. It needed but one more fact to prove the far-sighted poetical sagacity and prophetic ethics of those sincere advocates of extermination, to whose virtues I have done but scant justice in the beginning of this article. This fact was presently furnished by the Princess. After one of her periodical disappearances,—this time unusually ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... and biscuits. Then I drained my water bottle. Later on I learned another maxim of the front line,—"Go sparingly with your water." The bully beef made me thirsty, and by tea time I was dying for a drink, but my pride would not allow me to ask my mates for water. I was fast learning the ethics ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey

... in a high and stentorian key and expressive of everything but compliment. On the contrary, Three-fingered Hoover—a guileless man, if ever there was one—stood bravely up for Jake, imputing this artifice of his to a passion which knows no ethics so far as competition is concerned. It was true, as Hoover admitted, that poets seldom make good husbands, but, being an exceptionally good poet, Jake might prove also an exception in matrimony, providing he found a wife at his time of life. But as to the genius of the man there could be no question; ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field

... Man" and the "Moral Epistles" were designed to be parts of a great system of ethics, which Pope had long revolved in his mind, and wished to incarnate in poetry. At this time occurred the strange, mysterious circumstances connected with the publication of his letters. It seems that, in 1729, Pope had recalled ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al

... babe has inherited an evil and corrupt nature, and that it was conceived and born in sin. A monstrous doctrine, violating not only every parental instinct, but as well all the principles of psychology and ethics. Yea, verily, the Dark Ages are not yet wholly past! Yes, there are doubtless some who still look upon the church as a lifeboat, and who think that that lifeboat should offer safety and protection to those alone ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd

... seems a masterpiece of ethics or political economy, but it was hailed with rapture by the needy monarch. At once there was a wild excitement amongst the jobbers and speculators in places. The creation of an indefinite number of new judgeships and magistracies, to be disposed of at auction, was a tempting opportunity ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... slowly but surely, the idea is dawning on the social horizon that the persistence of conditions prejudicial to human prosperity is discreditable to a civilized community, and that economics if not ethics calls for ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards

... of God and the service of man." It is hinted in such words as these: "Unitarianism is a religion of love to God and love to man." "It is that free and progressive development of historic Christianity which aspires to be synonymous with universal ethics and universal religion." But because we have no creed which we impose as test of fellowship, specific statements of belief abound among us, always somewhat differing, always largely agreeing. One such we ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... echo of his priceless and imperishable praise. The delicate nobility of the central conception on which the hero's character depends for its full relief and development should be enough to efface all remembrance of any defect or default in moral taste, any shortcoming on the aesthetic side of ethics, which may be detected in any slighter or hastier example of the poet's invention. A man must be dull and slow of sympathies indeed who cannot respond in spirit to that bitter cry of chivalrous and manful agony at sense of the shadow of ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... plans for the newly struck-out future. In the later talk with Gantry he had learned many things about the political situation in his native State, things which were enlightening if not particularly encouraging. Trained in the ethics of a theoretical school, he knew only enough about practical politics to be very certain in his own mind that they were all wrong. And if Gantry's account could be trusted, there were none but practical politics in the State where his father was ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... tongue, and thought over those words. Oh, ethics! Oh, logic! Oh, wisdom! At his age! So they deprived him of his only remaining pleasure out of regard for his health! His health! What would he do with it, inert and trembling wreck that he was? They were taking care of his life, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... The code of ethics which Middendorf taught was very simple. His motto, as I have said, was, "True, pure, and upright in life." He might have added, "and with a heart full of love"; for this was what distinguished him from ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... possess a very high degree of probability to those that are a product of faith and hope, the greater portion of them approaching the latter. More than that, even in cases where the statements of principles, as in physics and ethics, seem thoroughly reliable, the variety of their application is so great and any individual's horizon is so narrow, that errors in their application to concrete cases must be very common. Correct theory about any matter by no means carries with it the correct application ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... you feel like that," he said, "we'll investigate further. You'll find it's all right, though. They're only two young Oxford fellows. Extremely nice, too, though rather infected with this pseudo-Darwinian business. Ethics of evolution ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton

... hate all religions, so far as I have had time to study them. They bind up with undisputed ethics more or less preposterous theories concerning life and death, the properties of matter, man, God, the universe, the laws of nature, the food we should eat, the relations of the sexes, the quality of the weekly day of rest. Gradually they push ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... was not within her power. She looked back and remembered how Fareham's protecting love had enfolded her with its gentle warmth, in those happy days at Chilton; how all she knew of poetry and the drama, of ethics and philosophy, had been learnt from him. She recalled his evident delight in opening the rich treasures of a mind which he had never ceased to cultivate, even amidst the vicissitudes of a soldier's life, in making her familiar ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... example of such a hero. The picture of Odin he drew from the prose Edda, mainly, and his purpose required that he paint the picture in the most attractive colors. So it happened that our English literature got its first complete view of Old Norse ethics and art. The memory of Gray's "dreadful songs" had ruled for almost a century, and ordinary readers might be pardoned for thinking that Old Norse literature, like Old Norse history, was written in blood. We have seen that Gray's imitators perpetuated the old idea, and that even Scott sanctioned it, ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby

... externalism makes for the practical inculcation of truthfulness,—a virtue which its religion and its ethics profess to honour above all others. The life of self-realisation, on the other hand, is a life of genuine self-expression; and a life of genuine self-expression is obviously a life of fearless sincerity. In such a life there is no place ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... Suppose we were to go over the chef-d'oeuvres of human genius, we should not find one in the position of entire independence of all others. Take, for example, the poems of Homer; the Republic and a few other of Plato's pre-eminent Dialogues; the great speeches of Demosthenes; the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle; the poems of Dante; Shakespeare, as a whole; Bacon's Novum Organum; Newton's Principia; Locke on the Understanding; the Mechanique Celeste of Laplace. No one of all these could produce its effect on the mind without referring to other works, previous, contemporary, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... court was less than forty feet. He could see the girl quite plainly as she set about the preparation of her evening meal. He forgot his danger, his hunger, his code of ethics, which did not permit him to gaze at a ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath

... magnanimity is very becoming to you, and so forth, it will get you a great deal of ill-will if you attempt to practise it to your own detriment. Your neighbours are so invariably, though perhaps insensibly, actuated by self-interest—self-interest—[Mr. Tomlinson is wrong here; but his ethics were too much narrowed to Utilitarian principles.—EDITOR.]—is so entirely, though every twaddler denies it, the axis of the moral world—that they fly into a rage with him who seems to disregard it. When a man ruins himself, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... disturbing to perfect complacency in one's self and the world? Our resuscitated Spirit was not a pagan philosopher, nor a philosophising pagan poet, but a man of the fifteenth century, inheriting its strange web of belief and unbelief; of Epicurean levity and fetichistic dread; of pedantic impossible ethics uttered by rote, and crude passions acted out with childish impulsiveness; of inclination towards a self-indulgent paganism, and inevitable subjection to that human conscience which, in the unrest of a new growth, was rilling ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... afraid that if there were any way of getting all the facts, it would not be hard to prove categorically that what has been holding the world back the last twenty-five years in its religious ideals, its business ethics, its liberty, candour, its courage, and its skill in social engineering, is the Very Good Little Boy. He may be comparatively harmless at first and before his moustache is grown, but the moment he becomes a grown-up or the moment he sits on committees with his ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... wise old Plato, with his pale and massive high-brow. Wrinkling it by thinking how his love he'd prosecute; Do you think Professor Agassiz learned all he knew by sighing? Or that Mr. Herbert Spencer thought out ethics at a ball? If our own lamented Emerson of love had been a-dying, We never should have heard ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock

... the time and to me. I do not know to this day which more interested him—that very pungency of phrase, or the critical events which inspired his reflections. He had no sense of responsibility; his mind loved talent, skill, and cleverness, and though it was scathing of all usual ethics, for the crude, honest life of the poor it had sympathy. I remember remarks of his in the market-place a year before, as he and I watched the peasant in his sabots and the good-wife in her ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... you home again directly the meal was over, though it must have wrung his manly heart to part from EMILY RAYBURN. Even, I, the veteran sportsman Punch, have qualms when a poor bird has been merely wounded, or when a maimed hare shrieks as the dog seizes it. I cannot, as I say, discuss the ethics of the question. The good shot is the merciful shot. But, after all, in killing of every kind, whether by the gun or the butcher's knife, there is an element of cruelty. And therefore, my pretty ROSE, you must keep away from the shooting. Besides, have I not seen a good shot "tailor" half-a-dozen ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various

... Greek history more familiar to us than this famous Athenian. There are passages in his life known to every schoolboy; we possess all the books he ever wrote; we know therefore his opinions upon all the important questions of life, religion, ethics, politics, manners, education, as well as upon finance and military tactics, not to speak of social intercourse and sport. And yet his early youth and late age are hidden from us. Like the models of Greek eloquence, which begin with tame obviousness, rise into dignity, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... As ethics or figures, or metaphysical reasoning, was the sort of talk he most delighted in, so no kind of conversation pleased him less, I think, than when the subject was historical fact or general polity. "What shall we learn from ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... now revealed to us, must prepare to follow the theological edifice upon which it was originally based. If the universe is non-ethical by our present standards, we must reconsider these standards and reconstruct our ethics. To hesitate to do so, however severe the conflict with old habits and traditions and sentiments may be, is to ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... authority, and picked up a precarious livelihood by making themselves useful in various ways. The Executive could always find a certain amount of work for such persons, though, if the truth must be told, the supply was often greater than the demand. The code of social ethics in vogue among this class was such as might have been expected from persons who had been reared to regard themselves as the objects of a special dispensation of fortune. They looked upon manual labour as degrading. Any person, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... Finally a bath and a luncheon cleared his brain, and he realized his position. He was on the brink of concocting a deliberate murder. Drusus had never wronged him; the crime would be unprovoked; avarice would be its only justification. Ahenobarbus had done many things which a far laxer code of ethics than that of to-day would frown upon; but, as said, he had never committed murder—at least had only had crucified those luckless slaves, who did not count. He roused with a start, as from a dream. What if Pratinas were wrong? What if there were really gods, and ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... thing that is in opposition to nature and virtue—in counting the lines in the Red Book, and carefully watching the importation of figurantes from the Continent—in roundly declaring that a man of fashion is a being of a superior order, and ought to be amenable only to himself—in jumbling ethics and physics together, so as to make them destroy each other—in walking arm in arm with a sneering jockey—talking loudly any thing but sense—and in burning long letters without once looking at their contents;... and so much for ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... whole domain of ethics, and the higher possibilities of sainthood of which the human spirit has shown itself capable, are at present outside his domain; and if a man of science seeks to dogmatise concerning the emotions and the will, and asserts that he can reduce them to atomic ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge

... now began to question the wisdom of looking at life as if it were a moral representation. Literature, he knew, could not exist without some meaning, and considerations of right and wrong were to a certain extent inseparable from the conception of life, but to insist on ethics as the chief interest of the human pageant was surely absurd. One might as well read Lycidas for the sake of its denunciation of "our corrupted Clergy," or Homer for "manners and customs." An artist entranced by ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... for the modern man. To be sure, his answer is given at the end of a long symbolic poem which contains much that is not exactly relevant to the main issue. It must never be forgotten that Faust is not the orderly development of a thesis in ethics, but a long succession of imaginative pictures. Some of them may seem too recondite and fantastic to meet our present-day demand for reality, but on the whole the poem deals with vital issues of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... for Ministers to gamble; but gambling was certainly not a misdemeanor that would have hardened with any special horror so hearty an Anti-Puritan as the man of whom I write. The Marconi case did not raise the difficult ethics of gambling, but the perfectly plain ethics of secret commissions. The charge against the Ministers was that, while a government contract was being considered, they tried to make money out of a secret tip, given them by the very ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton

... Juvenal ("Satires," Book III, v, 1), Grecian athletes wore protective charms in the arena, to counterbalance the magical devices of their opponents. It is probable that the ethics of modern athletic contests would not countenance such expedients. But so implicit was the confidence of the Roman citizen in his amulet, that a failure to avert sickness or evil of any sort was not attributed to inherent lack of power in the charm itself, but rather to some mistake ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... could do properly. The chief peril of the process, however, will be an inevitable tendency to make the spiritual landscape too large for the figures. I must ask for indulgence if such criticism traces too far back into politics or ethics the roots of which great books were the blossoms; makes Utilitarianism more important than Liberty or talks more of the Oxford Movement than of The Christian Year. I can only answer in the very temper of the age of which I write: for I also was born a Victorian; and sympathise not a little ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... those monsters. He also never made the mistake of reading himself into other men, any more than he made the artistic mistake of unlocking his heart and taking a hundred and fifty sonnets to do it. His clear objective picture is never vitiated by the desire to preach. He has no system of ethics, politics, or anything else to teach. Doubtless Shakespeare had his own views on all important matters of life and death; but in the drama the artist's business is to present us with the kaleidoscope of life, not to insist upon our interpreting it to certain ends, of which he is to be the ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... that time there was a strong feeling that it was dishonorable to blow a ship up with a powder-can concealed under the water, though highly laudable to burn her by means of a fire-raft floating on the water—a nice distinction in naval ethics that has since disappeared. [Footnote: James fairly foams at the mouth at the mere mention ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt

... department for The Ladies' Home Journal. Bok saw no reason why he should not, and told Mr. Curtis so, and promised to send over a trial instalment. The Philadelphia publisher then deftly went on, explained editorial conditions in his magazine, and, recognizing the ethics of the occasion by not offering Bok another position while he was already occupying one, asked him if he knew the ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok

... I do not for a moment dispute the legal right of Parliament to repeal all or any of the articles of the Treaty of Union with Ireland. I am writing now not upon the law, but upon the ethics of the constitution. My contention is, that, as things stand, the undoubted assent of Great Britain (or even perhaps of England, in the narrower sense) is morally requisite for the repeal or at any rate for the remodelling of the Treaty of Union. Note that Ireland ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey

... much the better for Chesterton. If Chesterton is a dangerous Romantic who likes Fairyland, at least Shaw is a dangerous eugenist who wants a super-man, and I am not sure that the fairies of Chesterton are not more useful than the ethics of Shaw; there is no doubt that they are less grown up. If Shaw is a philosopher, he is not one of this Universe; he is of another that shall be entirely sub-Shavian. If Chesterton is a philosopher, it is because ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke

... contrition for having in play used the words 'By the busy bee' as an infantile equivalent to an oath. One difficulty was that he declined to repeat what was put into his mouth, or to take first principles in ethics for granted. When his mother reads a text to him (May 1832), he retorts, 'Then I will not be like a little child; I do not want to go to heaven; I would rather stay on earth.' He declines (in 1834) to join in a hymn which expresses ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... idea, then, is the foundation of the "case for Home Rule." It might indeed be styled the whole case, but this anthem of nationality may be transposed into many keys. Translated into terms of ethics it becomes that noble epigram of Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman's for which I would exchange a whole library of Gladstonian eloquence: "Good government is no substitute for self-government." In Ireland we have enjoyed neither. ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle

... temples in Bangkok and royal ceremonial, suggests on the contrary that it is a mixed faith in which the Brahmanic element is strong. Yet though this element appeals to the superstition of the Siamese and their love of pageantry, I think that as in Burma it has not invaded the sphere of religion and ethics more than the Pitakas themselves allow. In art and literature its influence has been considerable. The story of the Ramayana is illustrated on the cloister walls of the royal temple at Bangkok and Indian mythology has supplied ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... the "quarters," where "Uncle Remus" conducted a whole university of history and zooelogy and philosophy and ethics and laughter and tears. Down in the cabins at night the printer's boy would sit and drink in such stores of wit and wisdom as could not lie unexpressed in his facile mind, and the world is the richer for every moment he spent in that primitive, ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... sentence to the end of the paragraph Brande draws freely, for the purpose of his own argument, on Mr. Balfour's "Naturalism and Ethics."—Ed. ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie

... first time at this board. And the conversation had, from the very beginning, been such as one commonly expects to hear only among the upper ranks of metropolitan circles. Who would have looked to see a company of Norman provincials talking morality, and handling ethics with the skill ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... long-term and short-term effects of famine and disease. The intimate or personal hardships endured by the individual settlers because of disease and famine cannot be enumerated, but the persistent influence that the summation of all the individual suffering had on the general spirit and ethics of early Virginia ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes

... idolatrously out to find themselves in others find in the end only another I. The religions perhaps work best and longest. But even here average humanity, where the mystical sense is feeble, are thrown back in the end upon ethics—and go somewhat grimly through life doing their duty, living upon the husks of doctrine, the notions and ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various

... in the trial between Rationalism and Supernaturalism which is vexing the age. In rich and prosperous communities Christianity has been too prone to degenerate into a mere credence of dogma; it must reassert itself as the type of ethics. It is also good that the clergy, intrusted with the defence of the faith delivered to saints, be compelled to place themselves on a level with the ripest scholarship of the day. For ends such as these the life of this critic and protester has abundantly wrought. If he has pulled down ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... do a great deal in this direction. When I was a college officer. I used to be very much opposed to hazing; not because hazing is not wholesome, but because sophomores are poor judges. I remember a very dear friend of mine, a professor of ethics on the other side of the water, was asked if he thought it was ever justifiable to tell a lie. He said Yes, he thought it was sometimes justifiable to lie; "but," he said, "it is so difficult to judge of the justification that I usually ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various



Words linked to "Ethics" :   scruples, hedonism, Inner Light, Christ Within, philosophy, need, prescriptivism, ethics panel, motive, eudemonism, morality, moral sense, ethical, Light Within, bioethics, ethicist, sense of right and wrong, casuistry, moral philosophy, light



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