Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Moral   Listen
verb
Moral  v. i.  To moralize. (Obs.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Moral" Quotes from Famous Books



... principle of German "Kultur" as respects the state is that the sole business of the government is to advance the interests of the state. No laws having been formulated in respect to the business of a state, the government is without moral responsibility, and the laws applicable to individual action do not apply to the state. Individuals may do wrong, but the state cannot do wrong. Individuals may steal and be punished therefor, but the state cannot steal. It is its business to expand and to appropriate. ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron

... procrastination and becomes addicted to all acts of cruelty and carnal pleasure. That person, however, who, possessed of faith and scriptural knowledge, is observant of the attribute of Goodness, attends only to all good things, and becomes endued with (moral) beauty and soul free from ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... and sat down limply. The shock was beginning to tell. He felt dull and had no reserve of moral strength to sustain him now his fury had gone. Gerald saw this and knew that guidance must come from him. He waited, however, and ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss

... of some of our old and respected families have occasionally been sadly stained "by hideous exhibitions of cruelty and lust," in certain instances the result of an unscrupulous disregard of moral duty and of a vindictive fierceness in avenging injury. It has been oftentimes remarked that few tragedies which the brain of the novelist has depicted have surpassed in their unnatural and horrible details those enacted in ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer

... thy lifetime, While the golden moon is shining, 80 Seek a house of doubtful morals, With the worthless men consorting, For a house must needs be moral, And a house must needs be noble, And for sense a husband wishes, And desires the best behaviour. Heedfulness will much be needed In a house of doubtful morals; Steadiness will much be wanting In a man's of ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous

... his chin. He knew that what Lounsbury had told him in the colonel's library was true. All legal and moral claims to the valuable town site across the river were gone. He could secure the Bend now only by underhand means. And here were those who would do what he ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates

... the tendency of the sutures to close in early life. It may be further said of the negro that, mentally, he is emotional far more than intellectual, and unmoral rather than immoral, he being apparently incapable of comprehending the moral conceptions of advanced man. ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris

... s'pose,—anyhow, mother says that the best way to please folks is to do as they want you to, instead of buying 'em things," said Tommy, feeling that, as he had led her into trouble, he was in honor bound to give her the benefit of the moral that ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various

... nectar of the gods, whose subtile, delicate influence is felt in body and brain, in every fibre of the nature not deadened and blunted by stronger and coarser stimulants. He who leaves out physical causes in accounting for mental and moral states, will usually come wide of the mark. But while giving the influences above referred to their due force, so far from ignoring, we would acknowledge with emphasis, the chief cause of man's ability to receive and appreciate ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe

... without it. This newcomer called himself George Pelham,[52] and asserted that he was the disincarnated spirit of a young man of thirty-two, who had been killed four or five weeks before by a horse accident. However that may be, this new control had more culture, more moral elevation, and a greater love of truth than the so-called French doctor. The latter benefited by the companionship; he tried to be more truthful, and seemed to make fewer appeals to his imagination; in ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage

... myself with the Pitti. Titian's "Duke of Norfolk" is there, and I loved him, seeing a certain likeness there to somebody whom I—like. A photo of him will be coming to you. Also there is a very fine Lely-Vandyck of Charles I. and Henrietta Maria, a quite moral painting, making a triumphant assertion of that martyr's bad character. I imagine he got into heaven through having his head cut off and cast from him: otherwise all of him would have ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous

... inclination to philosophise is not a temptation of the fiend; for slander has no better cloak to conceal its malice than the pretence that all it utters are maxims of philosophers, that evil speaking is moral reproval, and the exposure of the faults of others is nothing but honest zeal. There is no sarcastic person whose life, if you scrutinise it closely, will not be found full of vices and improprieties. And now, after ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... clear that, while the French lines could not be pierced, Verdun might be taken and the moral value of the capture would be enormous in Germany, France, and the neutral world, although the military value would be just nothing. Again, there remained the fair chance that the continued pressure upon France would lead the French to ask the British ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... trick was considered legitimate work of the "anticipatory" sort. The operative would order the treasure cached, would appoint the day and hour for the get-away—and a plain-clothes man would be waiting at the cache! The Vose-Mern system thus nabbed the culprit, who had revealed his lack of moral fiber by reason of the hothouse forcing of the situation; Mern insisted that if the germ were there it should be forced. By his plan the loot was pulled back and ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day

... the direction from which we approached it. The enthusiasm of this philosopher has grown with his years, and outlived his endurance: we carried our own knapsacks and supplies, therefore, and drew upon him for nothing but moral reflections and a general knowledge of the wilderness. Our first day's route was through the Gill-brook woods and up one of its branches to the head of Caribou Pass, which ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... Californian might choose to pursue; but it was important to Estenega's purpose that the governorship should be assured to him by the central government, and the eyes of the Mexican Congress directed elsewhere. He knew the value of the moral effect which its apparent sanction would have upon ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... "servants," poets in the service of an overlord; others, that it was a poem composed to the tune of a [31] chanso which it thus imitated in a "servile" manner. From the chanso the sirventes is distinguished by its subject matter; it was the vehicle for satire, moral reproof or political lampooning. The troubadours were often keenly interested in the political events of their time; they filled, to some extent, the place of the modern journalist and were naturally the partisans of the overlord in ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor

... have earned a hundred and twenty more by illustrations, since we have been married. And my wife's income (I like to be particular) is only five shillings and tenpence short of two hundred a year. Moral! we are rich ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins

... nor in the moral world, can the effects of any phenomenon go beyond the nature and extent of its causes. Mighty convulsions, like that which now shakes this continent, must have their roots in far distant times, and must gather their nutriment of passion and violence from a ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... that all overwrought people cannot have a chance to relax their nerves, and to learn the possibilities of happiness that are within them. Most of the jars and bickerings of domestic life, most of the mental and moral obliquities, depend upon threadbare nerves, either inherited or uncovered by friction incident to getting on in the world. I never understood the comforts that follow in the wake of a quiet, unambitious life, ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter

... (atonement). By the misogi the body was cleansed; by the harai all offences were expiated; the origin of the latter rite having been the exaction of certain penalties from Susanoo for his violent conduct towards the Sun goddess.* The two ceremonies, physical cleansing and moral cleansing, prepared a worshipper to approach the shrine of the Kami. In later times both rites were compounded into one, the misogi-harai, or simply the harai. When a calamity threatened the country or befell ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... moral character, the breadth of his legal knowledge, and his experience as congressman, cabinet member and diplomat, would have made Buchanan an excellent president in ordinary times; but he lacked the soundness of judgment, the self-reliance and the moral courage needed to face ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... to say which one he likes best, buying off the young lady who is persistently determined to find out, with five dollars for the flower bazaar, the posies, of course, to be sent to the sick of the parish. The moral atmosphere of a bazaar suits him exactly. He murmurs many times, "Never mind, the money all goes to the poor; it is all straight enough if the church gets it, the poor won't ask too many questions." ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams

... to the general and ignorant belief, except for the Senecas, the Iroquois were civilised people; their Empire had more moral reasons for its existence than any other empire I ever heard of; because the League which bound these nations into a confederacy, and which was called by them "The Great Peace," had been established, not for the purpose of waging war, but to ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... pretext. This seems to have been something of the nature of a cancerous ulcer, which had to be treated by the application of raw meat to open sores. Such details are only excusable in the present narrative on the ground that Bracciano's disease considerably affects our moral judgment of the woman who could marry a man thus physically tainted, and with her husband's blood upon his hands. At any rate, the Duke's lupa justified his trying what change of air, together with the sulphur waters of Abano, would do ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... even more," Beale went on. "I suggest that for some purpose, Doctor van Heerden desires to secure a mental, physical and moral ascendancy over you. In other words, he wishes to ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace

... Public, this outrageous way which you have got of expressing your displeasures is too much for the occasion. When I was deafening under the effects of it, I could not help asking what crime of great moral turpitude I had committed: for every man about me seemed to feel the offence as personal to himself, as something which public interest and private feelings alike called upon him in the strongest possible manner to stigmatize ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... the simple and unimposing forms of a diary, even in the instances where they may be thought to fail in awakening deep sympathy, or creating high excitement, will be found, he thinks, to possess a living moral undertone. In the perpetual conflict between civilized and barbaric life, during the settlement of the West, the recital will often recall incidents of toil and peril, and frequently show the open or concealed murderer, with his uplifted knife, or deadly gun. As a record of opinion, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... very natural desire for Cappy's ewe lamb—for a singularly direct and forceful individual was Matthew. It was his creed to take what he could get away with, provided that in the taking he broke no moral, legal or ethical code; and if any thought of the apparent incongruity of a sailor's aspiring to the hand of a millionaire shipowner's daughter had occurred to him—which, by the way, it had not—he would doubtless have analyzed ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne

... and bodily development, and neither gymnastics nor the military drill that became compulsory in the sixth grade had the slightest effect on him. And, of course, he suffered the more from it because he ascribed his lack of stature and muscle to what he had now begun to think of as his own moral weakness. ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman

... forty; in appearance a mixture of Julius Caesar, several unpleasant-featured Doges of Venice, and Voltaire in middle age. His looks were not entirely his fault and doubtless acquired for him, in his moral character, a worse definition than he deserved. He had travelled much in his pursuit of metallurgy and chemistry; at forty he saw rising before him the prospect of a peerage, due either for his extraordinary discoveries and inventions in our use of steel, or easily purchasable out of his immense ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... altered speeches of others, had created for himself a respectability that always vanished on an acquaintance with him; while the former declared that the population of a city was no proof of the amount of moral rectitude by which its government was conducted, seeing that he had found those of the city fathers with whom he had come in contact, very craggy headed men, and sadly deficient in everything but creating disorders and bringing disgrace upon the city: ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"

... It must be admitted that, in the present condition of the average Southern Negro, he is not a satisfactory neighbor nor a safe ruler. But that is not his fault; it is his misfortune. His illiteracy is a National peril; his moral weakness is a danger to himself and to the society in which he lives. But these are the results of the cruel and corrupting system in which we held him fast; the disabilities we have imposed upon him. And they suggest to us certain ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 44, No. 4, April, 1890 • Various

... Juan Mateos says of this passage: "The author seems to use the word 'quesos' [cheeses], alluding to 'casos' [cases] (a practical question of moral theology). I imagine that the text refers to the accusation made against those fathers of being casuists or adapters of the moral doctrine to their own convenience. From the context, one can deduce that 'cera' [wax] is used in the meaning of 'dinero' [money], and the meaning in ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Various

... The moral-religious literature of the Babylonians is not inferior in interest to the stories just mentioned. The hymns to the gods are characterized by a sublimity and depth of feeling which remind us of the odes of the Hebrew Psalter. The penitential hymns appear to contain expressions of sorrow ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... that," he added satirically, contemptuously, if you like, for, as we have said before, the lusty Stuart had but the lowest opinion of most Teutons. "What follows? Just this: prisoners escaping find a road, and, knowing themselves to be pursued, follow it. First moral, keep off the road; second moral, find another; better still—make our escape in ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton

... Lebanon mountaineer, of more sense, information and truth, than most others, respecting the moral character and godly fear of ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... such an honest and fearless face that it was extremely valuable to its owner in concealing a crookedness as resourceful as that of a fox, and a moral cowardice which made him a spineless tool in evil hands. A shock of tumbled red hair over a fighting face added to the appearance of combative strength. The Honorable Asa was conventionally dressed, and his linen was white, but his collar was innocent ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... confidence in his honesty. He wondered what Featherstone would do, and was not surprised when he made a gesture of resignation. Foster knew his comrade well, and imagined that Featherstone was very like Lawrence. The latter was physically brave, but sometimes gave way to moral pressure and vacillated when he should be firm. Both showed a certain lack of rude stamina; they were, so to speak, too fine in the grain. Foster, however, had other things to think about, and indeed felt rather like a culprit brought before ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss

... though the rich blood throbbed too painfully in the veins—which are the first signs of the decay of "fine" women. With middle age and the fullness of figure to which most women of her temperament are prone, had come also that indescribable vulgarity of speech and manner which habitual absence of moral restraint ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke

... that I had no moral right, before God and my countrymen, to allow you to hand this fine steamer over to the Yankee navy: but I was on board of the Belle for the purpose of seeing that no harm came to you, or any member of your family," said ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic

... increasing number of problems which must be faced, in this reconstruction period of our nation's life, demands leaders of broad intellect, clear vision and sound judgment. Coupled with these qualifications there must be developed a moral earnestness which will ...
— Dramatized Rhythm Plays - Mother Goose and Traditional • John N. Richards

... he rushing on between, by law of gravitation, law of ennui (which are laws of Nature both), with a narrow strip of sky in full gallop overhead; and has little encouragement to reflect, except upon his own sorrows, and delirious circumstances, physical and moral. 'How much happier, were I lying in my bed!' thinks the bewildered Tourist;—does strive withal to admire the Picturesque, but with little success; notices the 'BASTEI (Bastion),' and other rigorously prescribed points of the Sublime and Beautiful, which are to be 'done.' That you will ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle

... pleasure felt in the employment of an organ is wholly inadequate to account for this employment is to be found in the fact that the moral greatness of instinct, the point in respect of which it most commands our admiration, consists in the obedience paid to its behests, to the postponement of all personal well-being, and at the cost, ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler

... were left in an imperfect state, Sydney Smith probably supposing that no call would ever be made for their publication. They were written merely for popular effect, to be spoken before a miscellaneous audience, in which any abstract topics of moral philosophy would be the last to awaken an interest. The title of the book is accordingly a misnomer. It would lead no one to suspect the rich and diversified character of its contents. They present no ambitious attempts at metaphysical disquisition. They are free from dry technicalities ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various

... characteristic (for it is only in what a man loves that he displays his real nature), others, from certain prudential motives, are chosen directly opposite to the person's disposition. A mendacious umbrella is a sign of great moral degradation. Hypocrisy naturally shelters itself below a silk; while the fast youth goes to visit his religious friends armed with the decent and reputable gingham. May it not be said of the bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... when souls mount heavenward, whether in words or deeds, to be recognized as true worship. When our churches shall be adorned by art; when the theatre, now so little understood, is employed as a lever of moral power, equal if not greater than the church, for reaching the heart, and enriching the intellect; when these two forces approach each other, then shall we have a real church and true worship. Art in every form must be acknowledged as ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams

... same time of considerable importance—something she might never live to comment on—happening in the market-place. In other words, it is highly probable that her death had been hastened by the moral rather than the physical shock of the noise; by disappointment; by the bitter reflection that she would never survive to learn what this new scandal, evidently an interesting ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... is no indication of a hostile mind, because men in possession of the ruling authority are supposed to have a right to act without coercion in their own territories. As to the right of men to act anywhere according to their pleasure, without any moral tie, no such right exists. Men are never in a state of TOTAL independence of each other. It is not the condition of our nature: nor is it conceivable how any man can pursue a considerable course of action without its having some effect upon others; or, of course, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... tenth of such efforts the enemy had fled—experienced a similar feeling of terror before an enemy who, after losing HALF his men, stood as threateningly at the end as at the beginning of the battle. The moral force of the attacking French army was exhausted. Not that sort of victory which is defined by the capture of pieces of material fastened to sticks, called standards, and of the ground on which the troops had stood and were standing, but a moral victory that convinces ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... impressed by the moral qualities of the natives of Mallicolo, but by no means so in regard to their ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne

... The moral you can plainly see, To keep the tale from spoiling, The little colt you think is me— I ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin

... punishments—as in enforcing what is useful and expedient. How wide the scope of such a work! The power of society over its individual members, or, in other words, sovereignty, which is practically vested in the legislature, is a type of the Divine power which rules the physical and moral universe. "There is one Lawgiver," says the Apostle James. Not that the Supreme Being is the sole universal lawgiver in the sense of a creator of law, whose will alone determines the boundaries of right and wrong. God is the creator of the beings who are the subjects of ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood

... the better," said Angela. "If you only could see Mrs. Lamb, who used to be the very moral of a ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... rankled in the minds of a large body of people, and hastened the outbreak of the insurrection of 1837. The British government seems for a time to have been deceived by this victory of the lieutenant-governor and actually lauded his "foresight, energy and moral courage"; but ere long, after more mature consideration of the political conditions of the province, it dawned upon the dense mind of Lord Glenelg that the situation was not very satisfactory, and that it would ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot

... "dating from the time of Peter the Great," which bars the Jews from the Russian interior; that to admit them "would produce a very unpleasant impression upon our people, which, on account of its religious notions and its general estimate of the moral peculiarities of the Jews, has become accustomed to keep aloof from them and to despise them;" that the countries of Western Europe, which had accorded fall citizenship to the Jews, "cannot serve as an example for Russia, partly because ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... and decision, Ben was, in other respects, the counterpart of his father. His moral perceptions were weak, and the dissolute life he led had not contributed to strengthen them. He was the antipode of Lawry, who had been more willing to listen to the ...
— Haste and Waste • Oliver Optic

... Aristotle's Ethics which was translated into English from the Italian, and published in 1547, the passage to which both Shakespeare and Bacon refer is not rendered literally, but its general drift is given as a warning that moral philosophy is not a fit subject for study by youths who are naturally passionate and headstrong. Such an interpretation of Aristotle's language is common among sixteenth and seventeenth century writers. Erasmus, in the epistle at the close of his popular ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... learns to open his prison doors occasionally and escapes from his encircling gaol; first he learns to identify himself with the Immortal Triad, and rises above the body and its passions into a pure mental and moral life; then he learns that the conquered body cannot hold him prisoner, and he unlocks its door and steps out into the sunshine of his true life. So when Death unlocks the door for him, he knows the country into which he emerges, having ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant

... appeared in the simple garniture of nature, and softened by the adornments of art, charmed the eye and awakened the enthusiasm of a refined and imaginative mind. But the high moral courage, the stern yet lofty impulse of duty, which had achieved so great an enterprize; which had burst the strong links of kindred and country, and exchanged honor and affluence for reproach and poverty, and the countless trials of a wilderness, appealed directly ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney

... will lay a wager that I shall be accused of gross personality for showing him up. Many a less irreclaimable villain is transported; many a more honourable man is at present at the treadmill; and although we are the noblest, greatest, most religious, and most moral people in the world, I would still like to know where, except in the United Kingdom, debts are a matter of joke, and making tradesmen 'suffer' a sport that gentlemen own to? It is dishonourable to owe money in France. You never hear ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray

... filled with the deepest alarm those few patriotic statesmen who were not blinded by national vanity or by slavery to routine. The foreign policy of Prussia in 1805, miserable as it was, had been but a single manifestation of the helplessness, the moral deadness that ran through every part of its official and public life. Early in the year 1806 a paper was drawn up by Stein, [129] exposing, in language seldom used by a statesman, the character ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... passes of the hills. Academies and minor edifices of learning meet the eye of the stranger at every few miles as be winds his way through this uneven territory, and places for the worship of God abound with that frequency which characterize a moral and reflecting people, and with that variety of exterior and canonical government which flows from unfettered liberty of conscience. In short, the whole district is hourly exhibiting how much can be done, in even a rugged country and with a severe climate, under the dominion of mild laws, and ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper

... "The moral of that," returned the General, with a chuckle, "is, to quote from my poor old mammy again, 'Don't hatch until you're ready to ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow

... victim of bad laws and foul practices. "In England," said he, "Justice is the daughter of Publicity. Throughout the world deeds of villainy are done every day in kid gloves: but, with us, at all events, they have to be done on the sly! Here lies our true moral eminence as a nation. Utter then your 'fiat lux,' cast the full light of publicity on this dark villainy; and behold it will wither, and your oppressed and injured fellow-citizen be safe from ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... must be. Short of other materials, the marriage contract was written with a goose quill on the parchment head of a drum. Sir William found that Meg made him a very good wife in spite of her wide mouth, and they lived happily together, the moral being, we supposed, that it is not always the prettiest girl that makes the ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... their flat, ill-flavoured synthetic beer. A tragic symbol it seemed to me of the ignobility of man's nature, that he will be a slave in all the loftier aspects of living if he can but retain his freedom for his vices and corruptions. Had the Germans then, like the villain of the moral play, a necessary part in the tragedy of man; did they exist to show the other races of the earth the way they should not go? But the philosophy of this conception collapsed when I recalled that for more than a century the world had lost all sight of the villain and yet had not in the least ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... The moral I should draw from this is, that you cannot force style; you may prune, direct, and polish it, but you must accept that of your day, and only in accordance with that taste can your work be useful. Not accepting it idly or wearily, but cheerfully, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... such a procedure would have obliged them to leave the door of their sick master's room, just then a point of too lively interest to be deserted. So they consoled their mistress, and supported her with such strong moral cordials as compassionate persons in their rank and circumstances are ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... moral It sternly forbids its victim and intellectual improvement to learn to read even the of all classes of men." name of his ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... from the vigilance of our gun-boats, and they have once or twice actually attempted to storm our fortifications. The consequence is, that they have been soundly beaten, the majority have left their carcasses behind them, and the survivors have been taught a "moral lesson," which has kept them at a respectful distance. But the Arab cultivators are decent and industrious men, and form the servants of the town. Whether we shall ever make a great southern colony of the country adjoining the peninsula, must be a question of the future. But it is said that a very ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various

... "I used moral suasion," he declared. "Told her if she didn't own up to-night, I'd go to Doctor Hugh and tell him ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence

... of things, we may expect to see the heavy building for business purposes, which must soon take place even if there be no change in the character of business, conducted with a little system and uniformity. The streets themselves have been made so fine that it will require some moral courage—a thing for which Washington is not noted—to disfigure them by the hideous jumbles that accorded so well with the old ways. Such splendid monstrosities as the Treasury—as a whole, the worst public building ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various

... Justice is the moral signification of law. Injustice de- 391:18 clares the absence of law. When the body is supposed to say, "I am sick," never plead guilty. Since matter cannot talk, it must be mortal mind 391:21 which speaks; therefore meet the intimation with a pro- test. If you say, "I am sick," ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... in defending the big battleship which has come into action but little in the course of the war thus far. There is to be considered, however, the moral effect of Great Britain's big fleet, which has maintained control of the seas for four years. Similarly our American fleet is regarded as the first and decisive line of ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry

... line can take care of its front, but its flanks are especially vulnerable to modern firearms. The moral effect of flanking fire is as great as the physical effect. Hence, combat patrols to give warning or covering detachments to give security are indispensable on exposed flanks. This is equally true in ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss

... incomplete without its moral or at least its overtones of morals. And we come to that now as an honest reporter should. Our moral is very simple. Any good platitudinarian will already have forestalled it. It is that the goodly company riding about in these taxicabs upon which we have been speculating are none other ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... done great harm to his country.... Then as a man, he had commiserated her inconsequence, her contradictory and frivolous character, amounting almost to a crime, and her egoism as a beautiful woman and lover of luxury that had made her willing to suffer moral vileness in exchange ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... poetical description, detracts little from the dignity of the idea which it presents. Such were the friendships of Hercules and Iolaus, of Theseus and Pirithous, of Orestes and Pylades; and though These may owe the greater part of their fame to the later epic or even dramatic poetry, the moral groundwork undoubtedly subsisted in the period to which the traditions are referred. The argument of the Iliad mainly turns on the affection of Achilles for Patroclus, whose love for the greater hero ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... why should we demand that Art be useful or moral? It is both in its own way, for it awakens noble and honest sentiments in the soul. That was the opinion of Theophile Gautier, but Victor Hugo disagreed. The sun is beautiful, he used to say, and it is useful. That is true, but the sun is not an object ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens

... I so much admire it. I know no one such an adept at pointing a moral and adorning ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton

... events which led to the existence of Anne may be read in Johnson's "History of the Pyrates," where it is recounted in a style quite suggestive of Fielding. In spite of its sad deficiency in moral tone, the narrative is highly diverting. But as this work is strictly confined to the history of the pirates and not to the amorous intrigues of their forbears, we will skip these pre-natal episodes and come ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse

... with most bad habits is that they are so quickly formed in small children. The mother relaxes her care for a day or two, and a new trick appears, or the work of weeks on an old one is undone. What is true of physical habits is equally so of the moral habits. A tiny baby of a few months old knows very well if the habit of loud crying will procure for it what it wants, and if not cheeked will develop into the irritable whining adult we are all acquainted ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... hard to her sex as a long, steady struggle. In matters physical, this is the thing the muscles of the fair cannot stand. In matters intellectual and moral, the long strain it is that beats them dead. Do not look for a Bacona, a Newtona, a Handella, a Victoria Huga. Some American ladies tell us education has stopped the growth of these. No, Mesdames! These are not in Nature. They can bubble letters ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... the house in 20 minutes, and told the gentleman that I was a stranger in those parts and as such craved leave to pass the rest of the day and the night under his roof. I was a very unwelcome guest, but he could not kick me out, as the moral code would not permit it. He, however, shrewdly guessed why I was anxious to pass the night at ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji

... the righteousness of Christ as it is a grace in us, nor as it subjecteth the soul to the obedience of the moral law, but as it receiveth a righteousness offered to that sinner, that as such will lay hold on, and accept thereof. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, by being their redemption, and righteousness himself ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... was just the kind of person, Peter, who, being unable to sleep, would have wandered out into a terrible thunderstorm, in the middle of the night, and, being cold and wet and clammy, Peter, would have drawn moral lessons, and made epigrams upon the thunder and lightning. Epictetus, I ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol

... the limitations and infirmities of our human nature, and accomplished under blighting and unnerving and hopeless conditions all that her splendid equipment of moral and intellectual forces could have accomplished if they had been supplemented by the mighty helps of hope and cheer and light, the presence of friendly faces, and a fair and equal fight, with the great world looking ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain

... life of the personages, leaves very little room for the development and description of human character. As the fate of the hero is dependent altogether upon the caprice of superhuman powers, the moral elements of a drama are but faintly discernible. Thus the central action of Sakoontala hinges on the fact that the heroine, absorbed in thoughts of love, neglects to welcome with due respect the great saint Durvasas—certainly a trifling and venial fault—but he is represented as blighting her with ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson

... spirit as with a dew. This tree was covered with leaves which spoke all the languages of future races of men, and their united voices formed a perfect harmony. Its abundant fruit gave to the initiated who tasted it the knowledge of metals, stones, and plants, and also of physical and moral laws; but this fruit was like fire, and those who feared suffering and death did not dare to put it to their lips. Now, as she had listened attentively to the lessons of the serpent, Eve despised these empty terrors, and wished to taste the ...
— Thais • Anatole France

... don't care a hoot how it sounds. The only question of any interest to me, Peter, is whether or not Uncle Elbert has a moral right to a share in his own child. I say that he has such a right, and I say further that this is the only way in the world that he can assert his right. Oh, hang how it sounds! I'm the nearest thing to a son that he has in ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... credit for that—credit for being a man who would measure up to a situation. He was quite an athlete, and enjoyed boxing and fencing and swimming. If at any time in his life he could have conceived of a situation such as he encountered in his wife's room, he would have lived in a moral certainty of killing the man. And when the situation did come was it not a miracle that he should walk out into the night leaving them not only unharmed, but together? I ask you, Father—was it not ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood

... of that period. It was certainly by these persons also that the number of subordinate symptoms was increased to an endless extent, as may be conceived from the daily observation of hysterical patients who, from a morbid desire to render themselves remarkable, deviate from the laws of moral propriety. Powerful sexual excitement had often the most decided influence over their condition. Many of them exposed themselves in the most indecent manner, tore their hair out by the roots, with howling and gnashing of their teeth; and when, as was sometimes the case, ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker

... that the pedantic condemnation of one obscure woman, guilty by the letter of their law, would stir the heart of England and America to the depths, and steel our soldiers to further efforts against an enemy whose moral unlikeness to ourselves becomes more apparent with every new phase in ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers

... fitted to dissipate melancholy, and restore peace to the perturbed mind, than that of Teneriffe or Madeira. These advantages are the effect not of the beauty of the site and the purity of the air alone: the moral feeling is no longer harrowed up by the sight of slavery, the presence of which is so revolting in the West Indies, and in every other place to which European colonists have conveyed what they call their ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... reason was that Rossetti was afraid if he married her he would lose her. He doted on her, fed on her, still wrote sonnets just for her, and counted the hours when they parted until he could see her again. Miss Siddal was not quite firm enough in moral and mental fiber to cut out her own career. She deferred constantly to her lover, adopted his likes and dislikes, and went partners with him even in his prejudices. They dwelt in Bohemia, which is a good place to camp, but a very poor place ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... in any territory held by the troops of France or her allies; and all vessels which had come from English ports or from English colonies were to be confiscated, together with their cargoes. This challenge was too much for the moral equilibrium of the squires, the shipowners, and the merchants who dominated Parliament. It dulled their sense of justice and made them impatient under the pinpricks which came from the United States. "A ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson

... laws and customs just toward women? Are women ever preeminently fitted for high offices in the State? Is it for our honor and advantage when so fitted to avail ourselves of the whole united intellect and moral power of men and women side by side in peril and in duty? Such a life as this gives to all these questions the ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell

... minutes later, to see another ship not three miles away, reduced to a piteous mass of unrecognizability, wreathed in black fumes from which flared out angry gusts of fire like Vesuvius in eruption, as an unending stream of hundred-pound shells burst on board it, just pointed the moral and showed us what might ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... story of Doctor Merrill. It had been sketched briefly but vividly by John Minute. She knew also some of those scrapes which had involved Doctor Merrill's ruin, material and moral. ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace

... the moral sentiments in the human heart, in early life,—and every thing in fact which relates to the formation of character,—is determined in a far greater degree by sympathy, and by the influence of example, than by formal precepts and didactic instruction. If a boy hears his father speaking kindly ...
— Mary Erskine • Jacob Abbott

... all the more sincerely, thus following the free choice of his own judgment and reason, and not submitting to any restraint (obligation particuliere), which he hates in every shape. And he adds the following curious moral doctrine:—'This is the way of the world. We let the laws and precepts follow their way, but we keep ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis

... Wykeham, Hampshire, 1324, of an obscure family (whence his famous motto, "Manners makyth man," that is to say, moral qualities alone make a man of worth), clerk of the king's works in 1356, present at the peace of Bretigny, bishop of Winchester 1366, Chancellor in 1367, and again under Richard II. He died at eighty-four years of age, under Henry IV. The list of his benefices (Oct., 1366) fills more ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... superiority to him in a moral way might sit uneasily upon this sailor, I thought it would soften the matter down by giving him a chance to show his own superiority to me, in a minor thing; for I was far from ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... was sullen and reserved, and the village schoolmaster stigmatized him as obtuse in intellect; although, at a later period of life, he evinced ambition and very peculiar talents. But whatever might be his personal or moral irregularities, Ilbrahim's heart seized upon, and clung to him, from the moment that he was brought wounded into the cottage; the child of persecution seemed to compare his own fate with that of the ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells

... train," grumbled the driver. "Not that anybody ever comes on it, but I cal'late I'm s'posed to be there. Be more talk than a little if I wan't. Git dap, Dan'l! you're slower'n the moral law." ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln

... attributed the exulting affirmative to—the Crimean War! The Crimean War, after our five years of colossal nightmare, looks to us like a bicker of gnats in a beam; yet perhaps any war will do for a text, since any war will produce some moral upheaval in the generations concerned. Let us suppose, then, that the British were seriously turned to domestic politics in 1855; let us admit that they are so turned to-day, and ask ourselves fairly whether we are now in a better ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett

... approached this castle wearily, for they were on foot, and the dust upon their garments betokened that they had traveled far. They overtook a peasant, and asked him if it were likely they could get food and a hospitable bed there, for love of Christian charity, and if perchance, a moral parlor entertainment might meet with generous countenance—"for," said they, "this exhibition hath no feature that could offend the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... wrote to Coleridge. "don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses. It did well enough five years ago, when I came to see you, and was moral coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines to feed upon such epithets; but besides that the meaning of 'gentle' is equivocal at best, and almost always means poor-spirited, the very quality of gentleness is abhorrent ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... increase in proportion as the poorer classes gain knowledge; for by the method of instruction pursued in the Infant Schools, the knowledge there acquired is necessarily accompanied by the practice of industry, sobriety, honesty, benevolence, and mutual kindness; in fine, by all the moral and ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin

... and even as regards the Italy of the same period the friar Salimbene in his remarkable autobiography shows how little chastity was regarded in the religious life. Chastity could now only be maintained by force, usually the moral force of ecclesiastical authority, which was itself undermined by unchastity, but sometimes even physical force. It was in the thirteenth century, in the opinion of some, that the girdle of chastity (cingula castitatis) first ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... ordering "a chair with a cushion" to be placed near the palmer, took her seat in it, entered into conversation with him on the subject of his long and painful pilgrimage and was much edified by the moral lessons which he interspersed in his narrative. But no importunity could induce him to taste food: he was sick at heart, and required the aid of solitary meditation to overcome the painful recollections which continually assailed him The queen ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... fundamental with us, it is not easy, I say, to see how we can on religious accounts be dangerous to the state. For many things are comprehended in and follow from this faith. It is not a barren, unprofitable speculation, but a practical and restraining doctrine of the greatest moral efficiency. If it be not this to us, to all and every one of us, it is not what it ought to be and we wrongly understand or else wilfully ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware

... was a species of self-examination on the part of the great war-ship, through the medium of its mind—the captain. Here was the father of a tremendously large family going the rounds on Sunday morning to observe whether his moral precepts and personal example during the week had been attended with appropriate results—to see that his 'boys' were neat and clean, and ready for church, and that they had arranged their ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne

... reads may ask in wonder, "And was then the war to which we have been used to look back with exultation and pride,—was it but a horror and a crime?" No; it was something other and more than that; it had its aspects of moral grandeur and of gain for humanity; it was a field for noble self-sacrifice, for utmost striving of men and deepest tenderness of women, it had its heroes and martyrs and saints; it was in the large view the tremendous price of national unity and universal freedom. ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... collapse. The smaller nations had lost faith in their deities, because they had not been able to defend them from the victorious Greeks and Romans. But the conquerors had for other reasons equally lost faith in their own gods. It was an age of skepticism, religious decay and moral corruption. But there are always natures which must possess a faith in which they can trust. These were in search of a religion, and many of them found refuge from the coarse and incredible myths of the gods of polytheism in the purity and ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker

... recognize in his own mind the mingled beginnings of approval and disapproval which end in a personal theory. He was quite unaware, for instance, that he liked the contemptuous way in which she held at arm's length the moral laxities of the Quartier, and disliked the cool cynicism with which she flashed upon them there the sort of jeu de mot that did not make him uncomfortable on the lips of a Frenchwoman. He understood that she had nursed Nadie Palicsky through three weeks of diphtheria, during which ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)

... pointing to the coming philosopher. The Mississippi has power to bear up fleets for war or peace because the storms of a thousand summers and the snows of a thousand winters have lent depth and power. The measure of greatness in a man is determined by the intellectual streams and moral tides flowing down from the ancestral hills and emptying into the human soul. The Bach family included one hundred and twenty musicians. Paganini was born with muscles in his wrists like whipcords. What was unique in Socrates was first unique in Sophroniscus. John ran ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... line of every stanza is almost like a refrain. There is one other thing: the author does not show in the poem at all; that is, the poem is strictly a story, without comments by the author or any expressed moral. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester

... interests her world promptly, through the agency of schoolmistresses, older school-mates, her aunt, and a number of other responsible and authoritative people, assured her she must on no account think about. Miss Moffatt, the history and moral instruction mistress, was particularly explicit upon this score, and they all agreed in indicating contempt and pity for girls whose minds ran on such matters, and who betrayed it in their conversation or dress or bearing. It was, in fact, a group of interests ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... discovered, Delilah lies, The stigma's stuck on by the cynical wise, And nothing can ever remove it. We'll cast out Delilah and spit on her dead, (That revenge is remarkably human), And pity the victim of underhand tricks So be that it's moral (the sexes don't mix); But, oh, think what the cynical wise would have said If Judas were only ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... which he alluded to his former situation in life, struck me with astonishment, and created a curiosity to know more of his adventures; he had, I found, brought himself to his present degradation by a passion for gaming and driving, which had usurped every just and moral feeling. His father, I have since learned, felt his conduct deeply, and had been dead some time. His venerable mother having advanced him all her remaining property, was now reduced to a dependence upon the ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... transit from the room upstairs to the bin below, the vacant, irresponsible ensemble, the inscrutable determination to fulfill some strange obligation, enforced by what influence or moral unrest he could not tell, culminated in the mind of the young man ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder

... implanted in our fallen natures, and which, if not eradicated in the course of my education, ought, at least, to have lain dormant as long as possible, were, through the injudicious conduct of those to whom I had been entrusted, called into action and full activity at a very early age. The moral seeds sown by my parents, which might have germinated and produced fruit, were not watered or attended to; weeds had usurped their place, and were occupying the ground which should have supported them; and at this period, when the most assiduous cultivation was necessary ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... are so common that they have been made to point a moral in popular proverbs. According to an Italian saying translators are traitors ("I traduttori sono traditori''); and books are said to be done into English, traduced in French, and overset in Dutch. ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley

... the audience at large. While I confined this amusing and interesting project to the humours of the imagination I am still convinced that something of the sort would have helped enormously in clearing up the religious and moral atmosphere of the place. ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker

... made herself so remarkable by the incredible succors she demanded, that a physician of Paris, Dr. A——, published, in regard to her case, a satirical letter addressed to M. de Montgeron, in which, after attacking the girl's moral character, be assumed this strange position: "It is a sentiment universally established, that it is in the power of the Devil, when God permits, to communicate to man forces above those of Nature. Nor must it be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... cause. Thus He foretold to Ezechias: "Take order with thy house, for thou shalt die, and not live" (Isa. 38:1). Yet this did not take place, since from eternity it was otherwise disposed in the divine knowledge and will, which is unchangeable. Hence Gregory says (Moral. xvi, 5): "The sentence of God changes, but not His counsel"—that is to say, the counsel of His will. When therefore He says, "I also will repent," His words must be understood metaphorically. For men seem to repent, when they do not fulfill what ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... had left his family and property at the Dalles, availed himself of the opportunity afforded by the return of our boats to bring them down to Vancouver. This gentleman, as well as the Messrs. Applegate, and others of the emigrants whom I saw, possessed intelligence and character, with the moral and intellectual stamina, as well as the enterprise, which give solidity and respectability ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont

... was in truth the only explanation of his own cruel sufferings in which he could find any solace. It was not that he hated mankind, but that his destiny looked as if God hated him, and this was a horrible moral complexity out of which he could only extricate himself by a theory in which pain and torment seem to stand out as the main facts ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley



Words linked to "Moral" :   moral force, moralistic, mental, meaning, clean-living, incorrupt, signification, immoral, import, moral obligation, moral hazard, significance, moral excellence, virtuous, moral sense



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com