"Immoral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them were John Hancock,[1] of Revolutionary fame, and afterwards governor of the Commonwealth, and Peter C. Brooks, a distinguished merchant of Boston, father-in-law of Edward Everett. The "Salem Gazette" of Sept. 16, 1794, says: "Considering the acknowledged immoral tendency of Lotteries, it is astonishing how much is said in the Boston papers in favor of that which our Legislature has lately instituted for Harvard College. Our late worthy Governor Hancock, in a public ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 1: Curiosities of the Old Lottery • Henry M. Brooks
... source of error which we must guard against. Social immorality is not always detected even when it exists. Much that is socially immoral both in politics and in business escapes observation. Nevertheless, the agencies for ferreting out and holding up to public condemnation offences against society, are far more efficient and active to-day than they ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... be perfect religious freedom, not, however, covering immoral practices; that there shall be no established or state church; that no religious test shall be required for the performance ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... the peculiar social structure of the people. In perusing the following fragmentary account the reader must first of all divest his mind of what he would, according to white man's standards, consider moral or immoral. Such things must be viewed from the standpoint of the people believing in them. The Masai are moral in the sense that they very rigorously live up to their own customs and creeds. Their women are strictly chaste in ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... does not, in fact, apply this reckoning; he may possibly not have time, at the urgent moment, to work it out; his heroism is inspired by the universal praise or blame that reward self-devotion or punish shrinking from it, and thus render acts moral or immoral by the habitual association of ideas. The martyr or patriot does not, indeed, stop to calculate; he does not feel the subtle egoism that is hidden in the desire for applause; he believes himself to be acting with the perfect disinterestedness ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... acting thus?' Then that foremost king of Bharata's race eyed with pity that perpetrator of wicked deeds, and believing that he had lost his senses, said, 'Mayst thy heart grow in virtue! Never set thy heart again on immoral deeds! Thou mayst depart in peace now with thy charioteers, cavalry and infantry.' Thus addressed by Yudhishthira, the prince, O Bharata, was overpowered with shame, and bending down his head, he silently and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of this recipe for poetic achievement stands revealed in the cynicism with which expositions of the frankly immoral poet end. If the quest of wickedness is a powerful stimulus to the emotions, it is a very short-lived one. The blase note is so dominant in Byron's autobiographical poetry,—the lyrics, Childe Harold and Don Juan—as to render quotation tiresome. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... brought 10,000 French soldiers to the shores of the Dey, and cost him his entire realm. The bulk of the Mauresque and Turkish population quitted Algeria with their families on the arrival of the French. Those who remain are the poorer classes, and now live, if report speaks true, in an immoral state. These events took place in the reign of that peaceful ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... me, too in his pulpit, that I was in favor of the circulation of immoral literature. Let me tell you the truth. Several gentlemen, so-called, were trying to exclude from the mails, books called infidel. I said the law should be modified. It is impossible for anybody to reach the depth of one who will print or circulate obscene books. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... happy one; and the personal setting, which is in Boccaccio a mere framework, has here considerable substance and interest. In the second place, the accusation of looseness is wildly exaggerated. There is one very coarse but not in the least immoral story in the Heptameron; there are several broad jests on the obnoxious cloister and its vices, there are many tales which are not intended virginibus puerisque, and there is a pervading flavour of that half-French, half-Italian courtship of married women which ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... the displeasure of the spirits, and that serious evil will come upon him if he does not comply with their request. The money obtained is generally spent in orgies during the night. These sorceresses and male magicians are usually unscrupulous and immoral, and are often implicated, not only in the intrigues of the noblest families, but also in murders and ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... melancholy exemplifications of the effects of ignorance in the close of life. They have seen the neglect of early cultivation, and the subsequent estrangement from all knowledge and thinking, except about business and folly, result in such a stupefaction of mind, that irreligious and immoral persons, expecting no more than a few days of life, and not in a state of physical lethargy, were absolutely incapable of being alarmed at the near approach of death. They might not deny, nor in the infidel sense disbelieve, what was said to them of the awfulness of that event and its consequences; ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... consequences may be both irrevocable and bitter; nor is it denied that fear of consequences may operate as a deterrent from certain kinds of sin. What is denied is that such consequences are rightly to be described as "punishment."]: and the conception of vicarious "punishment" is not merely immoral, but unintelligible. Vicarious suffering, indeed, there is: an enormous proportion of the sufferings of mankind—and the sufferings of Christ are a conspicuous case in point—arise directly as the result of others' sin and may be willingly borne for others' sake. And Christ died because ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... be said, that those clauses, being immoral, are null and void—we reply, it is true they are not to be observed; but it is also true that they are portions of an instrument, the support of which, AS A WHOLE, is required by oath or affirmation; and, therefore, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the same sum, namely, $1,000,000,000 in addition to the surrender of the province of Alsace and a considerable part of Lorraine. The great addition to the national wealth, therefore, effected by the immoral confiscation of the lands in question disappeared with compound territorial interest added under the ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... reject, tells of its state in Shropshire during the years of his youth, from 1615 onwards:—"We lived in a country that had but little preaching at all: In the Village where I was born there was four Readers successively in Six years time, ignorant Men, and two of them immoral in their lives; who were all my School-masters. In the Village where my Father lived, there was a Reader of about Eighty years of Age that never preached, and had two Churches about Twenty miles distant: His Eyesight failing him, he said ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... learning, and philosophy. Rome as a great nation lasted about five hundred years; and the last three centuries of her life after the death of Commodus, about 192 A. D., illustrate curiously the fact that, even if a people be immoral, cruel, and base in many ways, their existence as an independent state may be continued long, if military requirements be understood, and if the military forces be preserved from the influence of the effeminacy of the nation as a whole. In Rome, the ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... his life, had a secret dread of Absolute Beauty. It had always been like a fetish to him, something to fear, really. For it was immoral and against mankind. So he had turned to the Gothic form, which always asserted the broken desire of mankind in its pointed arches, escaping the rolling, absolute beauty ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... pronounced that no promise can bind the faithful against the interest and duty of their religion; and that the sultan may abrogate his own treaties and those of his predecessors. The justice and magnanimity of Amurath had scorned this immoral privilege; but his son, though the proudest of men, could stoop from ambition to the basest arts of dissimulation and deceit. Peace was on his lips, while war was in his heart: he incessantly sighed for the possession ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... of the age in a remarkable degree. His Mistress, or, Love Verses, and his other Anacreontics or paraphrases of Anacreon's odes, were eminently to the taste of the luxurious and immoral court of Charles II. His Davideis is an heroic poem on the troubles ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... when we speak of his character. It is really either of his likeness or unlikeness to Jesus Christ we speak, and then, through Him, his likeness or unlikeness to God Himself. And thus it is that the adjective 'moral' usually accompanies our word 'character'—moral or immoral. A man's character does not have its seat or source in his body; character is not a physical thing: not even in his mind; it is not an intellectual thing. Character comes up out of the will and out of the heart. There are more good minds, as we say, in the world than there ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... next consider Artificial Control. The forces in modern life which make for birth control are so strong that only convincing reasons will make people desist from it. It is said to be unnatural and intrinsically immoral. This word unnatural perplexes me. Civilisation involves the chaining of natural forces and their conversion to man's will and uses. Much of medicine and surgery consists ...
— Love—Marriage—Birth Control - Being a Speech delivered at the Church Congress at - Birmingham, October, 1921 • Bertrand Dawson
... than dramatic, the Restoration critics were at one in judging blank verse too "low" for a poem of heroic dimensions; and though Addison gave it the preference in epic poetry, Johnson was its persistent foe, and regarded it as little short of immoral. But for that matter, Gray could endure no blank verse outside of Milton. This is curious, that rhyme, a mediaeval invention, should have been associated in the last century with the classical school of poetry; while blank verse, the nearest English ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... ag'in you. Still, as the responsible chief of this camp, I would like to hear why you reckons Wolfville is a good place to elope to. I don't s'ppose it's on account of them drunkards over in Tucson makin' free with our good repoote an' lettin' on we're light an' immoral ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... imitation. And accordingly I think it proper to let the world know there is no encouragement given that such as are vain, idle, trifling, flesh-pleasing, or such as are on any account vicious or immoral, will be admitted here; or, if such should by disguising themselves obtain admittance, that they will not be allowed to continue members after they are known to be such; nor will it be well taken, if, on any pretense whatever, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... When other girls were convicted of being in love with married men, it had always sounded so immoral! But no one could think of Honor as such. She was plainly an upright ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... Sir Thomas's own emphatic, and repeated, and indignant denial and repudiation of Montaigne. Montaigne, with all his fascinations for literary men, and they are great; and with all his services to them, and they are not small; is both an immoral and an unbelieving writer. Whereas, Sir Thomas Browne never wrote a single line, even in his greenest studies, that on his deathbed he desired to blot out. A purer, a humbler, a more devout and detached hand never put English pen to paper than was ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... charitable experience will be likely to consider this separation of man and wife justifiable. Says Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell: "I have not the slightest doubt that it is a wrong; and a great wrong, to give help to the family of a drunkard or an immoral man who will not support them. Unless the woman will remove her children from his influence, it should be understood that no public or private charity, and no charitable individual, has the right to help perpetuate and maintain such families as are brought forth by ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... clubs and your camps, in your mischievous moods and your philosophic moods, always indeed theoretically, you consider all women immoral (except just, of course, your own mothers); but practically, when your good-feeling is awakened, or your honest faith honestly appealed to, you will believe in a woman's honour with a heartiness and strength for which she will look in vain in her own sex. According to your jests, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... which is and that which is not law, must be made by Mind and as Mind. Law is either a moral or an immoral force. The law of God is the law of Spirit, a moral and spiritual force of immor- tal and divine Mind. The so-called law of matter is an [10] immoral force of erring mortal mind, alias the minds of mortals. This so-called force, or law, at work in ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... and took up more room. Women have such an exquisite sense of things—just as they have now in regard to big obstructive hats in the theatres. They know that most of the plays are inferior and some of them are immoral, and they attend the theatres with head-dresses that will prevent as many people as possible from seeing the stage and being corrupted by anything that takes place on it. They object to the men seeing some of the women who are now on the stage. It happened, as to the private Bastiles, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... "have you of the immoral conduct of the son? Of his mistreatment of his mother, and his elopement with ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... It is immoral for a woman to live as the wife of a man whom she abhors. The home should be pure. Children should be well-born. Their parents ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the opportunity to commit sin. Unclean pictures are sought after and feasted upon, paragraphs relating to cases of divorce and seduction are eagerly read, papers and books of an immoral character and tendency greedily devoured, low and disgusting conversation indulged in ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... people. The priests exercise great ingenuity to preserve the confessional. The better educated classes have long ago deserted the confessional, but it still holds sway over the common people and hangs like a dark shadow over the immoral deeds of the priests. Along with it flourishes the performance of penance. These two hand-maidens in wrong-doing often thrive in ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... for such conceited phrases as "beautiful budburstiness of bosom,"—"her twin eyes shone forth liquidly lustrous"—and innumerable expressions in the same namby-pamby dialect. But dellacruscan folly is but a trifle compared with the immoral tendency of the descriptions of the gahzeeyah, or dancing girls of Egypt, and the luscious comments on their polluted ways and manners. We thought the Harpers had done publishing ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... that these feelings may not soon be changed. But in all communities opinions sometimes run into extremes; and there are not a few among us who, dazzled by the beneficial results of a long peace, have adopted the opinion that war in any case is not only useless, but actually immoral; nay, more, that to engage in war is wicked in the highest ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... "astrologers ascribe the most powerful influence to the moon on every person, both for success and health, according to her zodiacal and mundane position at birth, and her aspects to other planets. The sensual faculties depend almost entirely on the moon, and as she is aspected so are the moral or immoral tendencies. She has great influence always upon every person's constitution." [362] This is the doctrine of a book published not thirty years ago. Another work, issued also in London, says, "Cynthia, 'the queen of heaven,' as the ancients termed her, or the MOON, ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... allow the liberty to do anything to make it worthy of rational veneration: we would have a peerage, of which we were so jealous that it formed almost an assembly of automatons; we would have virtuous women, only for them to be pursued by immoral men. Peterborough feared, he must say, that we were an inconsequent people. His residence abroad had so far unhinged him; but a pipe would have stopped ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... men are already in the fading glory of the "Good Old Times"—always applying those words, in so far as they have any meaning at all, chiefly to the farming and land-owning classes. Before the century is much older we shall see the same class harrassed, embarrassed, and eaten up by a rotten and immoral poor law system, about to be mended, and their prospect of high prices growing less and less, as sliding scales and all artificial props are removed out of the way of things finding their own level—down, down, down towards ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... men in pulpit—I cannot think of one rival—that the essence of Christianity is its practical morals; it is there for use, or it is nothing: If you combine it with sharp trading, or with ordinary city ambitions to glaze over municipal corruptions or private intemperance, or successful frauds, or immoral politics, or unjust wars, or the cheating of Indians, or the robbing of frontier natives, it is hypocrisy and the truth is not in you, and no love of religious music, or dreams of Swedenborg, or praise of John Wesley or of Jeremy Taylor, ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... friendship between confederate corporations, I speak to matters of fact. There is the Declaration of Independence, and there is the Constitution of the United States—let them speak for themselves. The grossly immoral and dishonest doctrine of despotic State sovereignty, the exclusive judge of its own obligations, and responsible to no power on earth or in heaven, for the violation of them, is not there. The Declaration says, it is not in me. The Constitution says, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... undergo a great many trials," sighed Mr. Pricker. "Could you believe, my friends, that they contemplate depriving us of our respectable cue, and replacing it with a light, fantastic, and truly immoral wig?" ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Marcus, in mock horror. "To think that one whom I thought so good can prove so immoral. Do you then wish to tempt ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... happiness. For a disposition which should require the prospect of happiness as its necessary condition would not be moral, and hence also would not be worthy of complete happiness—a happiness which, in the view of reason, recognizes no limitation but such as arises from our own immoral conduct. ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... written by a cynical woman who has lived in the Islands only a few months. I read part of it to father, the part which says that "the Filipinos are a worthless, shiftless, lazy people; improvident, untrustworthy and immoral!" After I had read that he thought a ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... comfortably rich. 2. The decently comfortable. 3. The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious. 4. The very poor, who are apt to be immoral. ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... that there was high reason. In the advance of civilization, and in the corresponding decay of idolatrous religions, there was fast arising a new growth of cravings amongst men. Mythological and desperately immoral religions, that spoke only to the blind sense of power, had been giving way through the three previous centuries to a fearful extent. They had receded from the higher natures of both Greece and Rome as the sea has locally receded from many shores of the earth. Such natures ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... them carefully in this respect is likely to agree to this assertion. It is as natural for a lot of children to condemn the mention of useless detail, because of its waste of time, as it is for them to condemn selfish or immoral conduct. ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... for goodness but goodness itself. Remember heaven and hell are utterly immoral institutions, if they are meant as reward ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... almost as cared-for an appearance as those in a prosperous suburb of London; and it is only quite occasionally, when you catch a glimpse of tawny rock and of white breakwater against the blue sea, that by a reminiscence of Naples you can persuade yourself it is as immoral as they say. For, not unlike the Syren City, Cadiz lies white and cool along the bay, with gardens at the water's edge; but it has not the magic colour of its rival, it is quieter, smaller, more restful; and on the whole lacks that agreeable air of wickedness which the Italian ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... because men had now more leisure and more means for entering upon matrimony. Possibly promiscuous love-making also occurred as a result of the festival gladness, agricultural districts being still notoriously immoral. Some evidence points to the connection of the feast with Lug's marriage, though this has been allegorised into his wedding the "sovereignty of Erin." Perhaps we have here a hint of the rite of the sacred marriage, for the purpose of magically fertilising ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... more playful poems; or to speak more generally, compositions which would be enjoyed or passed over, according as the taste and humour of the reader might chance to be; provided they contained nothing immoral. In the present age periturae parcere chartae is emphatically an unreasonable demand. The merest trifle he ever sent abroad had tenfold better claims to its ink and paper than all the silly criticisms on it, which proved no more than that the critic was not one of those, for whom the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... happiness, lasts no longer than a flash of lightning, but the lottery gave five days' existence to that magnificent flash. What social power can to-day, for the sum of five sous, give us five days' happiness and launch us ideally into all the joys of civilization? Tobacco, a craving far more immoral than play, destroys the body, attacks the mind, and stupefies a nation; while the lottery did nothing of the kind. This passion, moreover, was forced to keep within limits by the long periods that occurred between the drawings, and by the ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... studies [Footnote: Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, 1566.] about forty years after Machiavelli's death. His views and his method differ widely from those of that great pioneer, whom he attacks. His readers were not arrested by startling novelties or immoral doctrine; he is safe, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... river-bank, an Irishwoman washing some clothes, surrounded by her children, whose babbling sounds pleasantly along the edge of the shore; and she also answers in a sweet, kindly, and cheerful voice, though an immoral woman, and without the certainty of bread or shelter from day to day. An Irishman sitting angling on the brink with an alder pole and a clothes-line. At frequent intervals, the scene is suddenly broken by a loud report like thunder, rolling along the banks, echoing and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... action of this kind, and yet it seems to us that the time may come when a man who made his fortune by supplying men with arms for the purpose of killing each other will be looked upon as one engaged in a highly immoral enterprise." Is it not a terrible indictment of the so-called Christian church to say, "There is no code in modern ethics that would condemn" war ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... reared this daughter in her situation, assuredly without the slightest assistance from outsiders, and with heavy sacrifices—if I had reflected on the view of life which this woman had formed, I should have understood that there was, decidedly, nothing bad or immoral in the mother's act: she had done and was doing for her daughter all that she could, that is to say, what she considered the best for herself. This daughter could be forcibly removed from her mother; but it ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... our actions there exist only the simple and essentially non-moral relations of cause and effect. If I am guilty of a certain excess or imprudence, I incur a certain danger, and have to pay a corresponding debt to nature. And as this imprudence or excess will generally have had an immoral cause—or a cause that we call immoral because we have been compelled to regulate our life according to the requirements of our health and tranquillity—we cannot refrain from establishing a connection between this immoral ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... man in his private life may be proud, irritable, rude, crude, coarse, faulty, absurd, ignorant, immoral—grant it all, and yes be great. He is not great on account of these things, but in spite of them. The seeming inconsistencies and inequalities of his nature may contribute to his strength, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... of course, an immoral and selfish letter. Ernest knew exactly how it would strike Miss Ironsyde; but he also knew that many people without principle would ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... rough two days of it, but done. CONSUMMATUM EST; NA UMA. I believe the WRECKER ends well; if I know what a good yarn is, the last four chapters make a good yarn - but pretty horrible. THE BEACH OF FALESA I still think well of, but it seems it's immoral and there's a to-do, and financially it may prove a heavy disappointment. The plaintive request sent to me, to make the young folks married properly before 'that night,' I refused; you will see what would be left of the yarn, had I consented. This is a poison bad world for the romancer, this Anglo-Saxon ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my earliest manhood I perceived that if the people at large were neither ignorant nor immoral, there could be no motive for a sudden and violent change of Government; and if they were, there could be no hope but a change for the worse. My feelings and imagination did not remain unkindled in this general conflagration (the ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... successor, Shaban, was an utter profligate, cruel, faithless, avaricious, immoral, and pleasure-loving. Gladiators played an important part at his court, and he often took part in their contests. Horse-racing, cock-fights, and such like amusements occupied him much more than state affairs, and the whole court followed his example. As ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Morrises' lives; when they were to separate; but she knew no more than he. "I hope he doesn't come here," she said vigorously: "I should refuse to speak to him or have him at my table. Outrageous! I can't make out why you take it so coolly. Mina Raff's a rotten immoral woman; it doesn't matter how it's arranged. Why," she gasped, "she can be no more than Peyton's mistress, no better than the women ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... great reputation by Jane Eyre, added to Thackeray's vogue by dedicating to him in rarely eloquent words the second edition of her novel, against which preachers fulminated because of what they called its immoral tendencies. Then in rapid succession Thackeray wrote Pendennis, Henry Esmond, The Newcomes, The Virginians, Lovel the Widower and The Adventures of Philip. All these are masterpieces of wit, satire and humor, cast ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... an age so universally immoral as scarcely to be termed immoral, since immorality may be defined as a departure from the morals that obtain a given time and in a given place. So that whilst from our own standpoint the Cinquecento, taken collectively, is an age of grossest licence and immorality, from the standpoint ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... distinguish this essentially Cockney literature, developed only in the London suburbs, and feeding the demand of the rows of similar brick houses, which branch in devouring cancer round every manufacturing town,—from the really romantic literature of France. Georges Sand is often immoral; but she is always beautiful, and in the characteristic novel I have named, "Le Peche de Mons. Antoine," the five principal characters, the old Cavalier Marquis,—the Carpenter,—M. de Chateaubrun,—Gilberte,—and the really passionate and generous lover, are all as ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... sympathies. But the Norfolks with their Catholic sympathies who had previously so long exercised a leading influence on the government, would not give way to him. Norfolk's son, the Earl of Surrey, adopted the immoral plan of ensnaring the King, who though dying was yet supposed to be still susceptible to woman's charms, by means of his sister, in order to draw him back to the side of his family and the strict Catholics: ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... dismissal could get abroad, in cheating his master, in order to win the favour of the debtors by arbitrarily diminishing the amount of their debts. It seems strange that our Saviour should have drawn a moral out of so immoral an incident. Perhaps He was using a well-known story, and even making allowances for the admiration with which in the East resourcefulness, even of a fraudulent kind, was undoubtedly regarded. But the principle seems clear enough, that if the Christian ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... we sorrow to think, to misuse the Divine gift of artistic inspiration. The poet may devote his genius to animalism, like Byron, or to teach immoral license, like Swinburne; the painter may crowd his canvas with degrading ideas and vulgar representations, and the artificer may be ingenious in the production of forms of ugliness and degrading grotesqueness. ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... started dissecting at the hospital, I felt horribly indecent. It was a female thigh! I felt as if it ought to be clothed, somehow—I sort of kept thinking the Pater or someone would come into the lab, and round on me for being immoral. If it had been a male thigh I wouldn't have cared ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... Anarchists, whatever they be called; the blind and immoral mob that has been misled by wretches ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... not the least doubt that from his own orthodox point of view the situation was growing immoral. For Sue to be the loved one of a man who was licensed by the laws of his country to love Arabella and none other unto his life's end, was a pretty bad second beginning when the man was bent on such ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... customs of the natives could not fail to leave an impression upon the simple aliens, and invite imitation on their part. On the other hand, the whole life of the Egyptians, their crude notions of religion, and their immoral ways, were calculated to inspire the more enlightened among the Israelites with disgust. The hostility of the Egyptians toward the "intruders," and the horrible persecutions in which it expressed itself, could not but bring out more ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... immoral about powdering one's nose, you know, Jean. Did Great-aunt Alison tell you it ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... virtuous person, only that, so to speak, he has unluckily backed the losing side. Thus, for example, Colonel Jack is a thief from his youth up; Moll Flanders is a thief, and worse; Roxana is a highly immoral lady, and is under some suspicion of a most detestable murder; and Captain Singleton is a pirate of the genuine buccaneering school. Yet we should really doubt, but for their own confessions, whether they have villainy enough amongst ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... danger. For the first time he saw, what the whole civilized world outside of France had seen with surprise and indignation, that the conviction of Captain Dreyfus rested upon the testimony of a staff-officer of noble blood who lived openly and shamelessly on the immoral earnings of his mistress, and who was the self-acknowledged agent of a maison de toleration on commission. In the person of this distinguished member of the "condotteri" was centred the so-called "honor of the army." As for the so-called ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... of it were considered as atheists, because they opposed pagan idolatry; and their religion was, on this account, reckoned a destructive and pernicious enthusiasm. If, therefore, the rulers of a state are to prohibit the propagation of all doctrines, in which they apprehend immoral tendencies, an opening will be made, as I have before observed, for every species of persecution. There will be no doctrine, however true or important, the avowal of which will not, in, some country or other, be ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... it; admitted everything save the imputation that my relations with Agatha Geddis had been in any sense wilfully immoral. ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... the overthrow of Addington and the formation of a Ministry of the talented men of all parties. Here, then, is the origin of the broad-bottomed or All the Talents Administrations which produced so singular a muddle after the death of Pitt. The Fox-Grenville bargain cannot be styled immoral like that of Fox and North in 1782; for it expressly excluded all compromise on matters of conviction. Nevertheless it was a tactical mistake, for which Pitt's exasperating aloofness was largely responsible. Few occurrences in this time of folly and blundering were ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... marks of many such chastisements; that in the principal department of human conduct (which is the most tangible and easily traced, and therefore the most obtainable specimen of the rest) the minds of pre-historic men were not so much immoral as UNmoral: they did not violate a rule of conscience, but they were somehow not sufficiently developed for them to feel on this point any conscience, or for it to prescribe to them ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... said the president, with mock gravity, "I consider the whole affair, however ridiculous, most immoral and reprehensible. What, shall a crack-shot make a target of an elder? Never! Let us seek more appropriate butts for our barrels! You may perhaps look upon the whole as a piece of pleasantry but let me tell you that you ran a narrow chance of being indicted for a breach ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... poem of By the Fireside, with ante-nuptial love—but poems expressing the isolating passion of one sex for the other; chiefly in youth, or in conditions which resemble those of youth, whether moral or immoral. These celebrate the joys and sorrows, rapture and despair, changes and chances, moods, fancies, and imaginations, quips and cranks and wanton wiles, all the tragedy and comedy, of that passion, which is half ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... his work at a point or two, leaving the proof of my sayings mostly to the honesty of the reader. It will not require so great an effort of his honesty now, as it once would, to own that Zola's books, though often indecent, are never immoral, but always most terribly, most pitilessly moral. I am not saying now that they ought to be in every family library, or that they could be edifyingly committed to the hands of boys and girls; one of our first publishing houses is about to issue an edition even of the Bible "with those passages omitted ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... it was all finished. Here was twelve o'clock at night and an absent wife—a detestable combination. Twelve o'clock at night outside a house is an immoral hour, inside a house it is non-moral, but respectable. There is nothing in the street at that time but dubiety. Who would be a husband listening through the tolling of midnight for a muffled footfall?—And he had told her not to go: had given an order, ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... witness, and got so deservedly roasted by the newspapers—well, nothing is now too good for him. So, you see, the people Aunt Abby insists on entertaining are apt to be a rather dubious lot. I don't mean she'd pick up with anybody openly immoral, you know; but she certainly manages to fill her houses—she's got several—with a wild crew of adventurers and—esses—to call 'em by their ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... fail to remember after all, that such severity as we use, quickens the desire of pleasing, and deadens the diffusion of immoral sentiments, or indelicate language, in England; where, I must add, for the honour of my country, that if such liberties were taken upon the stage as are frequent in the first ranks of Italian society, they would be hissed ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... models in obscenity. When Benedict XIV. ascended the pontifical throne he established a severe censorship, and inaugurated the harsh system to which I have already alluded, with the effect of banishing immoral productions from the stage, though without improving its intellectual tone. In the eighteenth century Goldoni appeared and gave to the world his graceful comedies, which were followed by the lyric dramas of Metastasio and the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... example, it aids us to see that, altho romance is ever young and ever true, what is known as "neo-romanticism," with its reckless assertion of individual whim, is anti-social, and therefore probably immoral. ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... object that it is an immoral trade, which caters to the worst passions of the nature of the Chinese. Let it be proved so; let us see something more than mere prejudice; let it be shown to be worse than the conduct of the farmer, at home, who raises and sells barley to make whiskey; or of the distiller, who ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... unjustified love of power, saying: "Upon Sinai all Israel heard the words of God, 'I am thy Lord.' Wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the congregation of the Lord?" [568] They knew no bounds in their attacks upon Moses, they accused him of leading an immoral life and even warned their wives to keep far from him. [569] They did not, moreover, stop short at words, but tried to stone Moses, [570] when at last he sought protection from God and called to Him for assistance. He said: "I do not care if they insult me or Aaron, but ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... had made a raid upon the club to which Gropphusen belonged. Rumours were spread abroad of unlawful and immoral practices carried on there. A certain number of the members, Gropphusen among them, had managed to escape; the rest ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... but very opposite: one would have the prejudices of town artisans, and the other the prejudices of county magistrates. Each class would speak a language of its own; each would be unintelligible to the other; and the only thriving class would be the immoral representatives, who were chosen by corrupt machination, and who would probably get a good profit on the capital they laid out in that corruption. If it be true that a Parliamentary government is possible only when the overwhelming majority of the representatives ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... Holy Land, Henry I. was crowned at Westminster. He was educated to a higher degree than William, and knew the multiplication table up to seven times seven, but he was highly immoral, and an armed chaperon stood between him and ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... such a law, and other laws fixing a low price for a certain number of seats at the theatres, or obliging the managers to give one free performance every month, as the law does in Paris, and should then forbid indecent and immoral plays— ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of the human mind. It regards the myth not as an accident of primitive life, but as a natural function, a mode of activity proper to man during a certain period of his development. Later, the mythic creations seem absurd, often immoral, because they are survivals of a distant epoch, cherished and consecrated through tradition, habits, and respect for antiquity. According to the definition that seems to me best adapted for psychology, the myth is "the psychological objectification ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... slave of every tyrant, it is well prepared for vice: it will admit a criminal thought, as well as a sentimental error, and the same plausibility which could successfully insinuate a sceptical principle, can excite to an immoral practice. In the circles of gay dissipation, every remaining scruple is easily dissipated; the poison of "evil communications" is voraciously swallowed, and "good ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... sea-coast, under a mild climate, abounding in all the means calculated to afford pleasure and delight. [73] Amare, 'to indulge in illicit intercourse with the other sex:' amare is often used to denote an immoral intercourse between the sexes. [74] Vasa caelata, vessels adorned with figures, and wrought with the caelum, the chisel. Caelare and caelatura denote the art of making raised figures in metal, alto relievo. ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... stratum, which, instead of leading, is getting more and more opposed to the great bulk of the most vigorous elements of the society. The stage is ceasing to be a truly national organ, and begins to suit itself to the tastes of the unprincipled and servile courtiers, who, if they are not more immoral than their predecessors, are without the old heroic touch which ennobled even the audacious and unscrupulous adventurers of the Armada period. That is to say, the change is beginning which became palpable in the Restoration ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... I don't want to! What's the good of being sentimental? Father's a dear—I'm awfully fond of him—but you've no idea how I worry him! He has that delightful early Victorian view that short skirts and smoking are immoral. You can imagine what a thorn in the flesh I am to him! He just heaved a sigh of relief when the war took me off. You see, there are seven of us at home. It's awful! All housework and mothers' meetings! I have always been the changeling. I don't want to go ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... Either the League, it was argued, can, as asserted, protect the countries which give up commanding positions to potential enemies, or it cannot. In the former hypothesis France's insistence on a military convention is mischievous and immoral—in the latter Italy stands in as much need of the precautions devised as her neighbor. But her spokesmen were still plied with the threadbare arguments and bereft of the countervailing corrective. And faith in the efficacy of the League was sapped by the very men who were ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... even told a lie. Hamlet asked her where her father was, and she said he was at home, when he was really listening behind a curtain.' Poor Ophelia! It is considered angelic in Desdemona to say untruly that she killed herself, but most immoral or pusillanimous in Ophelia to tell her lie. I will not discuss these casuistical problems; but, if ever an angry lunatic asks me a question which I cannot answer truly without great danger to him and to one of my relations, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... pink floor of the kitchen and the view from the windows, I would have given anything in the world to outbid, yes, even to obliterate the Belfast lady; but this, unfortunately, was not only illegal and immoral, but it was impossible. So, calling the mother in from the stables, I succeeded, after fifteen minutes' persuasion, in getting permission to occupy the house for one week, beginning with the next morning, and returned in triumph to my weary constituents, who thought ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... valuable demands. Psychological laws can also be helpful in fraudulent undertakings or in advertisements for unfair competition. The psychotechnical scientist cannot be blamed if the results of his experiments are misused for immoral purposes, just as the chemist is not responsible if chemical knowledge is applied to the construction of anarchistic bombs. But while psychology, as we have emphasized before, cannot from its own point of view determine the value of the end, the psychologist as a human being is certainly willing ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... ancient, savage superstitions as well as ingenious but fanciful speculation, but its essence is always magic. It attempts to attain by magical or sacramental formulae and acts not only prosperity and power but salvation, nirvana and union with the supreme spirit. Some of its sects practise secret immoral rites. It is sad to confess that degenerate Buddhism did not remain uncorrupted ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... with the Cardinal de Rohan before the period of her marriage. A worse selection in itself, or one more disagreeable to Maria Theresa, than that which sent to her, in quality, of ambassador, a man so frivolous and so immoral as Prince Louis de Rohan, could not have been made. He possessed but superficial knowledge upon any subject, and was totally ignorant of diplomatic affairs. His reputation had gone before him to Vienna, and his mission opened under the most unfavourable auspices. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... ironically. And what used you to say to me about charity? Yet the enjoyment derived from charity is a haughty and immoral enjoyment. The rich man's enjoyment in his wealth, his power, and in the comparison of his importance with the poor. Charity corrupts giver and taker alike; and, what's more, does not attain it's object, as it only increases poverty. Fathers who don't want to work crowd ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Madrid, so recently as 1822, enumerates thirty editions of it in Spain alone, in the course of the sixteenth century. Impressions were multiplied in Italy, and at the very time when it was interdicted at home on the score of its immoral tendency. A popularity thus extending through distant ages and nations, shows how faithfully it is built on the principles ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... from his pastorate, after twenty-five years of service, by an almost unanimous vote was not one of ecclesiasticism or theology, but of morals among the young people. He insisted upon vigorous action in relation to the loose and as he thought immoral reading of the youth of the town. As this involved some prominent families he had ...
— Jukes-Edwards - A Study in Education and Heredity • A. E. Winship
... maintain this position most stiffly, what compensation he will accept to go to church some Sunday and sit during the sermon with his wife's bonnet upon his head? Not a trifle, I'll venture. And why not? There would be nothing irreligious in it, nothing immoral, nothing uncomfortable—then why not? Is it not because there would be something egregiously unfashionable in it? Then, it is the influence of fashion. And what is the influence of fashion but the ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... testimony on which the lives of his enemies hung. His piety caused him to doubt those whose evidence was adverse to his wishes, though they appeared to be trying to speak the truth. "The credibility of a witness perhaps cannot be impeach'd in court, unless he has been convicted of perjury: but an immoral man, for instance one who will commonly prophane the name of his maker, certainly cannot be esteemed of equal credit by a jury, with one who fears to take that sacred name in vain: It is impossible he should in ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... Society has at last taken action, looking to the destruction of improper, immoral and friendless cats, and agents are at work capturing the nocturnal prowlers, and turning them over to the proper authorities of the society, who ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... definition may be found fault with, but it has a very real meaning. "The essential point in the notion of a priest is this: that he is a person made necessary to our intercourse with God, without being necessary or beneficial to us morally,—an unreasonable, immoral, spiritual necessity." He did not mean, of course, that the priest might not have all the qualities which would recommend him as a teacher or as a man, but that he had a special power, quite independent of his personal character, which could act, as it were, mechanically; that out of him ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and its effects on the lowest classes of our great cities, the cheap lodging house affords a favorable field. Here we have crowding, unsanitary conditions, immoral atmosphere, and all the attendant evils. A good description of such lodging houses in New York City has been given by Jacob Riis, in the ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... decide—you, the mother. You gave it life, you may make that life a blessing or a curse, as you inculcate good or evil; for if through your neglect, or through bad example, you let evil passions obtain an ascendency, that child may grow into a dissolute and immoral man; his career may be one of debauchery and profaneness; and then, when he comes to die, in the agonies of remorse, in the delirium of a conscience-stricken spirit, he may gasp out his last breath with a curse on your head, for having given him life, but not a disposition to use it aright, ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... the hotel could turn the evidence over to the police and you'd go to penitentiary, you would, for bringin' a girl from one State to 'nother f'r immoral purp'ses—" He paused to let the majesty of his words sink in. "But—the hotel is ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... expect a periodical return of such convulsions; but experience should steadily curtail their ravages, and remedy their immoral tendencies. Young men have before them lessons of manifold wisdom taught by the severest of masters—experience. They should be studied; and that they may be, I shall, from this general survey, turn to a specific enumeration of the ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... his wealth. He may know that tomorrow he will be as rich as he is today, or richer, but he can not prognosticate what his riches will mean to him tomorrow—whether he will find in them more or less felicity, whether they will be a blessing or a burden. Neither has the base man, the immoral man, any clear vision of futurity. He lives in doubts and fears, and is begirt with clouds and confusion. He half fears that there is a law of God, and half doubts it; half believes in retribution, and half doubts it; half believes in moral cause and ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... full of the plague, of open moral sewers and unholy cesspools. The street reeks with the smut and filth of wrong sex knowledge, and our boys and girls are getting experience in the laboratory of the immoral. The Sunday school can help our common, public health by helping the parent. It should major on parental instruction and keep it up until the parents have been helped to the adequate fulfillment ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... letters, are sensitive to their misapplication. Hence arises a species of satire, or, if you will, satirist—THE SCRIBLERO-MASTIX. He must attack individuals. A heavily-resounding lash should scourge the immoral and the profane. Light stripes may suffice for quelling the less nocent dunces. In commonplace prose criticism, whatever form it may take, this can be done without supposed personal ill-will; for the Mastix is then only doing a duty plainly prescribed. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... Lamaseries. The nuns, most unattractive in themselves, shave their heads, and practise witchcraft and magic, just as the Lamas do. They are looked down upon by the masses. In some of these nunneries strict confinement is actually enforced. The women of the nunneries are quite as immoral as their brethren of the Lamaseries, and at their best they are but a low ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... that a leading clergyman of the city, having read the newspaper account, felt impelled to preach a sermon, calling upon all decent people to rally against the doctrines which were being taught to the children by an immoral School Board. As the bewildered professor had lectured in response to my invitation, I endeavored to find the animus of the complication, but neither from editor in chief nor from the reporter could I discover anything more ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... diamond rings and a coach, all places will be open to him. The leaders of upper New York were, a few years ago, porters, stable boys, coal-heavers, pickers of rags, scrubbers of floors, and laundry women. Coarse, rude, uncivil, and immoral many of them still are. Lovers of pleasure and men of fashion bow and cringe to such, and approach hat in hand. One of our new-fledged millionaires gave a ball in his stable. The invited came with tokens of ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... probably regard it as much sin to read them. So little did the young man appreciate her objections to this exciting kind of literature that he had actually recommended to his aunt some stories which no amount of humour and cleverness could prevent that pious lady regarding as debasing and absolutely immoral. How Lady Doughty felt under all the circumstances of Roger's love, as compared with his general conduct, will be best ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... their dice: it is an entirely clever picture; so clever that nothing in its kind has ever been done equal to it; but it is also an entirely base and evil picture. It is an expression of delight in the prolonged contemplation of a vile thing, and delight in that is an 'unmannered,' or 'immoral' quality. It is 'bad taste' in the profoundest sense—it is the taste of the devils. On the other hand, a picture of Titian's, or a Greek statue, or a Greek coin, or a Turner landscape, expresses delight in the perpetual contemplation of a good and perfect thing. That is ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... further states: "That as your petitioner is informed and believes, and therefore alleges the fact to be, that said restraint of said minor by said E—— is for immoral purposes" ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... expressed and defined by the decrees of a perfect democracy we should know. Those decrees would reveal the human community to itself, and it is possible that the revelation would not be altogether agreeable to our moral sense. We might then discover that the common will is capable of being grossly immoral. So far it has been impossible for us to make this discovery because no organ exists for expressing the common will on the human scale, and even those which express it on the national scale are not perfect. I am far from saying ...
— Progress and History • Various
... untrustworthy person. This is just as true in hypnotism as it is in the moral realm. Bad companions corrupt. And since the hypnotic subject is in a condition especially susceptible, a little association of this kind, a little submission to the inferior or immoral, will produce correspondingly more detrimental consequences. Third, since hypnotism is an abnormal condition, just as drunkenness is, one should not allow a public hypnotizer to experiment upon one and make one do ridiculous things merely for amusement, ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... The rest was left contingent on the value of my professional exertions; in other and more expressive words, on the baseness of my nature, the cupidity of my motives, the poverty of my family, the general moral (or rather immoral) resemblance between myself and—HEEP. Need I say, that it soon became necessary for me to solicit from—HEEP—pecuniary advances towards the support of Mrs. Micawber, and our blighted but rising family? Need I say that this necessity had been foreseen by—HEEP? That those advances ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... its most unwelcome characteristics, but is also deprived of most of its power, and it may very easily become an ally of unrighteousness, and an indulgence to sin. The reproach that the Christian doctrine of salvation through faith is immoral in its substance derives most of its force from forgetting that 'repentance towards God' is as real a condition of salvation as is 'faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.' We have here the Apostle's deliverance about one of these twin thoughts. We have three stages—the root, the stem, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... began to go out again, it might have been perceived—had any one cared to notice—how much the different characters of his father and wife had influenced him and kept him steady. Not that he broke out into any immoral conduct, but he gave up time to pleasure, which both old Mr. Wilkins and Lettice would have quietly induced him to spend in the office, superintending his business. His indulgence in hunting, and all field sports, had hitherto been only occasional; they now ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of a Lombardy poplar," remarked Mrs. West. "Nothing but spindle till you're most to the top. It does seem fairly immoral, ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... brutal discipline which for ages had characterized all school instruction, believed it by its very nature immoral, and tried to substitute for this a strict but loving discipline— a "thinking love," he calls it—and to make the school as nearly as possible like a gentle and refined home. To a Swiss father, who on visiting his school exclaimed, "Why, this is not a school, but a family," ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... not a moral sort of fellow,' he said, 'and I never make any pretensions to the character of a moral sort of fellow. I am as immoral as need be. At the same time, in bringing any distress upon the lady who is the subject of the present conversation, or in unfortunately compromising her in any way, or in committing myself by any expression of sentiments towards her, not perfectly reconcilable with - in fact with ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... the condition that the women were trained to war. In war times the children were led out to look upon the struggle, and become accustomed and hardened to blood. The teachings of the best minds were immoral. "He may lie," says Plato, "who knows how to do it." Profane swearing was enjoined by the example of their best writers. Oaths are of common occurrence in the writings of Seneca and Plato. Aristippus taught that adultery and theft ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... Bernhardi believes in the morality, one might almost say in the sanctity, of war. To him war is not a necessary evil, but, on the contrary, the source of every moral good. To him it is pacificism which is an immoral doctrine, because it is the doctrine of the materialist, who believes that enjoyment is the chief end of life. It is the militarist who is the true idealist because he assumes that humanity can only achieve its mission ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... use of this light, wantonly extinguished it. They were not willing to retain God in their knowledge and to fetter themselves with the restraints which a pure knowledge of Him imposed. They corrupted the idea of God in order to feel at ease in an immoral life. The revenge of nature came upon them in the darkening and confusion of their intellects. They fell into such insensate folly as to change the glorious and incorruptible nature of God into the images of men and beasts, birds and reptiles. This ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... company birds keep. Foreign birds often get into good society, but British birds are inseparable from low associates. There is a whole street of them in St. Giles's; and I always find them in poor and immoral neighbourhoods, convenient to the public-house and the pawnbroker's. They seem to lead people into drinking, and even the man who makes their cages usually gets into a chronic state of black eye. Why is this? Also, they will do things for people in short-skirted velveteen coats with bone buttons, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... and nobles, he never descended to gross adulation, and never wrote a line of approval of the usurpation of Henry IV., although his bread depended on Henry's favor, and he was also the son of the king's earliest and best friend. He was not a religious man, nor was he an immoral man, judged by the standard of his age. He probably was worldly, as he lived in courts. We do not see in him the stern virtues of Dante or Milton; nothing of that moral earnestness which marked the only other great man with whom he was contemporary,—he who is called the "morning star" of the Reformation. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... with a suggestion that should be patent to thousands. If gnats are strained at and camels are swallowed, there is certainly a pardonable satire in congratulating those who devour the latter on their noteworthy powers of digestion. As an immoral institution the Louisiana Lottery, evil as it is, cannot be compared with Monte Carlo, which arrays itself in facile splendors of enticement and smiles in mirrors and gildings on the rash gamesters whom it ruins. But the Louisiana Lottery, which ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... who recruit women for immoral purposes watch all places where young women are likely to be found under circumstances which will give them a ready means of acquaintance and intimacy, such as picture shows, dance-halls, sometimes waiting rooms in large department stores, railroad stations, manicuring ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... precisely the morals and religion of the aristocracy, who, though aestheticised in parts, quietly used, in bulk, their fortified position to graft on Mr. Purcey's ethics the principle of 'You be damned!' In the eyes of the majority he was probably an immoral and irreligious man; but in fact his morals and religion were those of his special section of society—the cultivated classes, "the professors, the artistic pigs, advanced people, and all that sort of cuckoo," as Mr. Purcey called them—a section of society supplemented by persons, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... real, native Californian is a distinctive type; as far from the Easterner in psychology as the extreme Southerner is from the Yankee. He is easy going, witty, hospitable, lovable, inclined to be unmoral rather than immoral in his personal habits, and easy to meet ...
— The City That Was - A Requiem of Old San Francisco • Will Irwin
... me every day, is to see a master-piece and a disgrace put on the same level. They exalt the little, and they lower the great, nothing is more imbecile nor more immoral. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... refused to make; she lessened the hardship of taking her common-sense prescriptions by veiling them in medical hocus-pocus—a compromise of the disagreeable truth which her father had always inveighed against as both immoral and unwholesome. ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... young women, who looked at me with the bold eyes of prostitutes. In their petticoats and morning wrappers, with bare arms, with coal black hair twisted up onto the nape of their neck, with embroidered Oriental slippers which showed their ankles and silk stockings, they looked like the immoral figures of some symbolical painting, by the side of the dying man. Between the easy-chair and the bed, there was a table covered with a white cloth, on which two plates, two glasses, two forks and two knives, were waiting for the cheese omelette which had been ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... land was the present administration of law and the carrying on of prosecutions. Sir Robert could fancy this to be very much improved by the appointment of a public prosecutor by the State, which would give the State a power to prevent vexatious, illegal, and immoral prosecutions, and reduce the expenses in an extraordinary degree. Part of the maintenance of the poor, according to the Poor Law, might be undertaken by the State. A great calamity must be foreseen, when the innumerable railroads ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... highest order of genius can represent Nature thus. An inferior artist produces either something entirely immoral, where good and evil are names, and nobility of disposition is supposed to show itself in the absolute disregard of them, or else, if he is a better kind of man, he will force on Nature a didactic purpose; he composes what are called moral tales, which may edify the conscience, ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... written upon the question whether married people have a right to decline the responsibilities of wedlock. The practice of inducing abortion is not only immoral but criminal, because it is destructive to both the health of the mother and the life of the embryo being. If both the parties to a marriage be feeble, or if they be not temperamentally adapted to each other, so that ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... invention of printing, and indeed long before, those fearful of change have attempted to check criticism by attacking books. These were classified as orthodox or heterodox, moral or immoral, treasonable or loyal, according to their tone. Unhappily this habit continues and shows itself in the distinction between sound and unsound, radical and conservative, safe and dangerous. The sensible question to ask about a book is obviously whether it makes some contribution to a clearer ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... religion, but in his later days he became ascetic. Abu Nuwas is recognized as the greatest poet of his time. His mastery of language has led to extensive quotation of his verses by Arabian scholars. Genial, cynical, immoral, he drew on all the varied life of his time for the material of his poems. In his wine-songs especially the manners of the upper classes of Bagdad are revealed. He was one of the first to ridicule the set form of the qasida (elegy) ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to feel strong and easy in the sense of being an honourable man; but now he was thrown violently out of the path in which he had meant to walk rightly. What he was about to do was necessary, was inevitable, yet in his relation to Kate he was in the position of an immoral man, a betrayer, an adulterer, with a vulgar secret, which he must support by lying and share with servants. And what was the outlook? What would be the end? Here was a situation from which there was no escape. Let there be no false glamour, no disguise, ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... a theatre would be a noble protest of the highest kind against the sort of play, chiefly translated and adapted from the French, which infests our boards, the low tone of which, even where it is not decidedly immoral, does more harm than any amount of the rough, honest plain-spokenness of Shakspere, as judged by our more fastidious, if not always purer manners. The representation of such plays forms the real ground of objection to theatre-going. We believe that other objections, which ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... startled me!' she answers, turning her hazel eyes upon him. She has been waiting these last five minutes for him to speak, and knew that he was about it. But take notice that these small deceits in the gentle sex are natural, and by no means immoral. ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... "Every place is immoral," he said. "Of course you do find spicy bits in Paris. Go to one of the students' balls, for instance. That's lively, if you like, when the cocottes begin to let themselves loose. You know what they ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... confident that the Catholics all over the country would fall on the Protestants without waiting for orders, [431] But Avaux was entirely mistaken. That he should have supposed James to be as profoundly immoral as himself is not strange. But it is strange that so able a man should have forgotten that James and himself had quite different objects in view. The object of the Ambassador's politics was to make the separation between England and Ireland eternal. The object of the King's politics ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 'Tout le monde est braconnier ici,' added my informant with a sincerity that was very pleasing. Of course, he was a poacher himself when reposing from his theological and philosophical studies. I thought none the worse of him for that. After all, poaching in France generally means nothing more immoral than neglecting to take out a gun license, and to respect the President's decrees with regard to the months that are open and ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... not reproduce the precepts respecting prayer, simply because immoral men among the heathen worshipped their gods as devoutly as moral men did. He did not reproduce the Lord's prayer, because he would not consider that it belonged to the heathen, or the promises that ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... the land. Joshua refused the offer, but formed their appearance so frightfully that the residents of Jericho were struck with fear of them. (11) In Jericho the spies put up with Rahab. She had been leading an immoral life for forty years, but at the approach of Israel, she paid homage to the true God, lived the life of a pious convert, and, as the wife of Joshua, became the ancestress of eight prophets and of the prophetess Huldah. (12) She had opportunity in her own house of beholding ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... is the ministerial head of the Church, but he is not its absolute sovereign; on the contrary, facts prove that he is subject to the jurisdiction of the Church; for well-known instances are on record of popes being deposed on the score of erroneous doctrine and immoral life, whereas no pope has ever attempted to condemn or excommunicate the Church. Both the pope and the Church have received authority to bind and loose; but the Church has practically exerted that authority against ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... studied by writers either on the genesis of social emotion or on the practice of education. To be sure, teachers have been alive to the pros and cons of allowing children and students to room together; but that has been with view to the possibility of direct immoral or unwholesome contagion. This danger is certainly real; but we, as psychological observers, and above all as teachers and leaders of our children, must go deeper than that. Consider, for example, the possible influence of a school chum and roommate upon a girl in her teens; for this is ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... under the suspicion of his more bigoted associates, and gave special offence to his superior, Prior Patrick Hepburn (the nephew of Prior John, who had founded St Leonard's College), a violent, coarse, immoral young noble, emulous of the debaucheries and vices, as well as of the cultured hauteur, of the young French ecclesiastics of rank among whom his youth had been passed. Knox has given a graphic ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... Mo. 14th. Talk with James Teare on the immorality of drinking. Query:—Is it per se a sin to drink a little? He does not affirm it in pure abstract, but says that no action can be purely abstract; and that as to uphold an immoral system is immoral, as the drinking system is immoral, as moderate draughts uphold the drinking system, and, in fact, cannot be drunk by the community without giving birth to drunkenness—ergo, moderate drinking is an immoral practice. He does not at all judge those who do not see it; only says ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall |
