"Civilised" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Institute would be on a wholly different footing. Its researches, if only to subserve the Country Life movement in the United States, would have to range over the civilised world, and to be historical as well as contemporary. It should be regarded as a contribution to the welfare of the English-speaking peoples, one aspect of whose civilisation—if there be truth in what I have written—needs to be reconsidered in the light which the Institute ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... enough: Scotland, India, and America being all obligatory scenes. But of these India was strange to me except in books; I had never known any living Indian save a Parsee, a member of my club in London, equally civilised, and (to all seeing) equally accidental with myself. It was plain, thus far, that I should have to get into India and out of it again upon a foot of fairy lightness; and I believe this first suggested to me the idea of the Chevalier Burke for a narrator. It was at first intended ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the sounds. They reminded me of what I had previously forgotten, that there was still a battle-field in the world where danger might be encountered and distinction won. True, I might have wished more civilised foes than the tawny denizens of the desert, and a more humane system of warfare than that pursued by the French in Africa. But my circumstances forbade over-nicety, and that day I enlisted as volunteer in the light cavalry, merely stipulating that I should be placed ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... country be less civilised than the inhabitants of the neighbouring islands, they are much honester; for they very seldom attempt to take any thing by stealth; and, it is certain, that when a thief is caught, they beat him to death with sticks. On the 18th, Governor Phillip was informed, ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... of liberty, disappeared; in Bohemia the national Protestant nobility lost their estates, or retained them only at the price of abandoning the religion, the language, and the feelings of their race, until the country of Huss passed out of the sight of civilised Europe, and Bohemia represented no more than a blank, unnoticed mass of tillers of the soil. In Hungary, where the nation was not so completely crushed in the Thirty Years' War, and Protestanism survived, the wholesale executions in 1686, ordered by the Tribunal ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... of spiritual awakening, of a calling to higher destinies, came upon the world, the civilised world which lay around the Mediterranean Sea, at the beginning of our era. The calling was concentrated in the life and death of the Founder of Christianity."[956] The writer of these words goes on to point out that the beginning of our era was "a time of general stirring in all ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... figure—(1) the state of innocence; (2) the fall of man; (3) the still deeper decline into barbarism; (4) the restoration of man by the partial interference of God, and the natural growth of the arts and of civilised society. Two lesser features of this description should not pass unnoticed:—(1) the primitive men are supposed to be created out of the earth, and not after the ordinary manner of human generation—half the causes of moral evil are in this way removed; (2) the arts are attributed to a divine ...
— Statesman • Plato
... one of the earliest Romanesque churches in Poitiers (Notre-Dame-la-Grande), and finding it as ill-proportioned, over-decorated, coarse, fat and heavy as any better class building by one of those highly civilised architects who flourished a thousand years earlier or eight hundred later. But such exceptions are rare. As a rule primitive art is good—and here again my hypothesis is helpful—for, as a rule, it is also free from descriptive qualities. In primitive art you will find no accurate ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... brutes, with this advantage that while each species has only its own, man, without anything special, appropriates the instincts of all. This admirable creature, with foes on every side, is forced to be constantly on the alert, and hence to be always in full possession of all his faculties, unlike civilised man, whose native force is enfeebled by the mechanical protections with which he has surrounded himself. He is not afraid of the wild beasts around him, for experience has taught him that he is their master. His health is better than ours, for we live in a time when excess of idleness in ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... In a less civilised country Logotheti's servants might have supposed that he retired to this solitude to practise necromancy or study astrology, or to celebrate the Black Mass. But his matter-of-fact Frenchmen merely said that he was 'an original'; ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... age of twenty-one we may imagine a bronzed and hardy youth, healthy in body and mind, able to bear hunger and hard physical labour ... not untouched by studies which awake in men the interest of civilised beings, and prepare them for the right use of leisure in future years, and though burdened with little knowledge, possessed of an educated sense of beauty, and an ingrained love of what is noble and hatred of all that is the reverse. ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... shudder piously when they are mentioned. There are people in America—and even in England!—who imagine that they were a very monument of malignity, pitilessness, and inhumanity; whereas in reality they were about the first SWEEPING DEPARTURE FROM JUDICIAL ATROCITY which the 'civilised' world had seen. This humane and kindly Blue Law Code, of two hundred and forty years ago, stands all by itself, with ages of bloody law on the further side of it, and a century and three-quarters of bloody English law on ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and science, should exist only for human life's sake and in order that men may live better in this world, is an idea not even mooted in politics and perhaps opposed by an official philosophy. The enterprise of individuals or of small aristocratic bodies has meantime sown the world which we call civilised with some seeds and nuclei of order. There are scattered about a variety of churches, industries, academies, and governments. But the universal order once dreamt of and nominally almost established, the empire of universal peace, all-permeating ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... distinct types. Religion tames the savage; Paganism makes him a crouching sensualist; the Egyptian sees a God in the stars of heaven; and then the mathematician, the musician, the poet, and the painter set to work, and these prophets of mysterious beauties realise civilised mankind. The visitor enters the museum, after ascending a noble flight of steps, by a massive carved oak door, into a fine entrance hall, the ceiling of which is highly coloured, and the general decoration of which is Grecian Ionic. Here he will observe, in addition to one or ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... North, have held their ground, not only in the wilder country where they have been unaffected by the European, but in the regions where he has conquered and ruled over them. They are more prolific than the whites, and their increase is not restrained by those prudential checks which tell upon civilised man, because, wants being few, subsistence in a warm climate with abundance of land is easy. Formerly two powerful forces kept down population:—war, in which no quarter was given and all the property of the vanquished was captured or destroyed, and the murders that went on at the pleasure ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... of him and his predecessors was witnessed by the very place they ruled; for at their departure there were very few buildings besides the church; just what civilised life absolutely requires, and no more. Their only capital was their cattle; for if rich men gave them money, they presently gave it to the poor. Of funds and halls for entertaining the worldly great they had no need, as such personages ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... by this invention was, that it would serve as a universal language, to be understood in all civilised nations, whose goods and utensils are generally of the same kind, or nearly resembling, so that their uses might easily be comprehended. And thus ambassadors would be qualified to treat with foreign princes, or ministers of state, to whose ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... more gradually transforming the industrial methods of the machinery, hardware, and other staple English manufactures, passed into the Western Continent of Europe and America, destroying the old domestic industry and establishing in every civilised country the reign of steam-driven machinery. The factors determining the order and pace of the new movement in the several countries are numerous and complex. In considering the order of machine-development, it must be remembered that the different nations did not start from an ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... forms of property which we all admit should be public and not private, and the freedom of individual enterprise is already limited by a hundred laws. Socialism and Individualism are opposing principles, which enter in various proportions into the constitution of every civilised society; it is merely a question of degree. One community is more Socialistic than another. The same community is more Socialistic at one time than at another. This country is far more Socialistic than it was fifty years ago, and for most of the changes ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner
... and sympathy with the people he found himself amongst. He discovered that they had an ancient civilisation of their own. To be sure, what remained of it hung in shreds and patches on some of them; but there were others, civilised after a fashion, which was not the Western one. He discovered traditions, folk-lore, ancient poetry, laws, a wealth of customs. Understanding the people, he came to love them. They interested him profoundly. He was going back to them ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... herd of cattle that the Englishmen had seen since their escape from the Mayubuna; and during the afternoon they saw other herds in the charge of peons, showing that the party were gradually approaching civilised territory; and about half an hour before sunset they marched into a small village, composed chiefly of adobe huts, where a halt was called for the night, and where our friends were confined in a ramshackle ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... when we used all to be in the Nursery, and from the window see the hounds come across the lawn, my Father and Mr. Jenney in their hunting caps, etc., with their long whips—all Daguerreotyped into the mind's eye now—and that is all. Perhaps you are not civilised enough to know what Daguerreotype is: no more do I well. We were all going on here as merrily as possible till this day week, when my Piscator got an order from his Father to go home direct!) So go he would the day after. I wanted ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... pistols. Months ago, after reading certain Belgian reports together, she and Miss Fowler had had dealings with one—a huge revolver with flat-nosed bullets, which latter, Wynn said, were forbidden by the rules of war to be used against civilised enemies. 'They're good enough for us,' Miss Fowler had replied. 'Show Mary how it works.' And Wynn, laughing at the mere possibility of any such need, had led the craven winking Mary into the Rector's disused quarry, and had shown her how to fire the terrible ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... together in English, as soon as I found out that she was an American. What an extraordinary nation! It quite makes one giddy to think of them. Fancy a child that had never been taught of the God who made her nor the Saviour who died for her, in a civilised Christian country! And yet she was naturally very sweet, I found, though high-tempered. She spoke beautiful French (they tell me Americans often do) but she seemed to know very little about her native country and had never seen a red Indian nor a buffalo. ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... two metals form the money of the most civilised nations, need not be gone into here at any length. 'Their qualities of utility, beauty, and scarcity,' says Adam Smith, 'are the original foundation of the high price of those metals, or of the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... fine palace of the Bolognettis, a good many houses with handsome carved windows and lintels as in Umbria, a nice circular church with fourteenth-century elaborate statued porch, and a very charming temple portico. Here also the people looked well-to-do and civilised, on the whole like Umbrians; whereas on the Olevano side, even on Sunday, they were in rags and miserably stolid. The little caffe where we eat was ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... back (how far was marked on the milestone) the road had left the swarming gate of Toulouse. Very far on (how far was marked on the milestone) it was to cross the Saone by its own bridge, and feed the life of Lyons. In between it met and surmounted (still civilised, easy, complete) this barbaric watershed of ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... everyone would jeer at her, and say that the moment an opportunity of escape had presented itself Anna had seized it, preferring an existence of loneliness and hardship—any sort of existence—to all the pleasures of civilised life in Susie's company. Peter would certainly be very angry with her, and reproach her with not having made Anna happy enough. Happy enough! The girl had cost her at least three hundred a year, what with her expensive education and all her clothes ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... choose as our destination. This struck me as a far too ambitious project for five men to undertake; but when, later on, we again discussed the matter, with a chart of the Pacific before us, and I discovered that the Sandwich Islands, the nearest civilised land, lay some fourteen hundred miles distant, I changed my opinion. I had already done one ocean trip in an open boat, and had no desire to ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... wanted to get in the wagons and be wheeled around, Pa kicked. After teaching the squaws how to put the children in the wagons and work them, we went off on the hunt, and when we came back every squaw had her papoose in a baby wagon, but instead of wheeling the wagon in civilised fashion, they slung the wagons, babies and all, on their backs, and carried the whole thing on their backs. Gee, but that made Pa hot. He says you can't do anything with a race of people that haven't got brain enough to imitate. He says monkeys would know better ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck
... strange that in the face of such authentic condemnation the horrid practice has not disappeared off the face of the civilised earth, until it is observed that it has received the shameless support of science, which for two generations has usurped an authority over conduct for which it possesses no credentials. The modern prostration of mankind before science is ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... following months. It is one of the chief characteristics of Rome that it seems to be one of the most central cities in Europe during the winter, whereas in the summer months it appears to be immensely remote from the rest of the civilised world. From having been the prey of the inexpressible foreigner in his shooting season, it suddenly becomes, and remains during about five months, the happy hunting ground of the silent flea, the buzzing fly and the insinuating mosquito. The streets ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... which the natives are active, this is the main stream of irritation. The natives are generally courtly, far from always civil, but really gentle, and with a strong sense of honour of their own, and certainly quite as much civilised as our ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reasons:—Since they have been used to the advantages of doing their little retail trade with our own go-ahead and carry-all-before-it right slick-up-an-end double-distilled essence of a genuine fine and civilised country, the everlasting 'possums have become habituated to some of the manners of our enlightened inhabitants. We have nothing to do but refuse the supply of cottons, and leave them all with as little shirts to their backs as wool on a skinned eel. Isn't it the intercourse with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... was obliged to return, trusting to his powers of acting the repentant prodigal to avert the torrent of his father's wrath. The breach of discipline which he had committed was as readily overlooked in Nepaul as it would have been in other more civilised countries, when the offender has good interest to back him; and promotion to the command of a company was given him as the reward of his services while ensign. About this period Jung Bahadoor received the intelligence of the advancement of his uncle, ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... "There are just four civilised houses in the whole place, counting this," said he. "There's the laird's—and saving the dear doctor's presence I must say his cousin is a damned queer fish, besides being as poor as he's cranky, and there are the two ministers, only one's away and the other's as dry as ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... the sick. The tendency of these heavy machines to stick in the mud and to break down bridges is so well known that it hardly needs mention. Putting these disadvantages on one side, with a supply of fuel ensured, and such roads as are afforded by a civilised country, a great future is probably before this means of transport for the wounded. A large number of patients might be carried at an even pace, and the camps would be saved all the trouble and ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... are not yet civilised). Of course if you ladies are against it we will drop the idea. It was only ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie
... on the inland fringe of the swamp—you may go some hundreds of miles before you get there—you can see the rest of the process. The mangroves there have risen up, and dried the mud to an extent that is more than good for themselves, have over civilised that mud in fact, and so the brackish waters of the tide—which, although their enemy when too deep or too strong in salt, is essential to their existence—cannot get to their roots. They have done this gradually, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... daylight crept underneath the waggon, and the sleepers, closely packed for shelter from the rain showers, awoke. Those who live under the conditions of a civilised city, who lie abed till nine and ten of the clock in artificially darkened rooms, gain luxury at the expense of joy. But the soldier, who fares simply, sleeps soundly, and rises with the morning star, wakes in an elation of body and spirit without an effort and with scarcely a yawn. There is no ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... memory of those millions who died for us no less. Sunday, too, is kept as a quiet day, in order that the world may be encouraged to contemplate those ideals for which it has erected churches in which it bows the knee. Well, one whole day in the year given up to the memory of those who died that the civilised world might live—who also died for an ideal—will help us to remember that they died at all. Without some such enforced remembrance, the world will, alas! only too quickly forget. And in forgetting how they died, will also forget what ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... flitted over one of the great squares to the south of Battersea, he had seen as it were a scattered squadron of ants running as if in fear or pursuit.... He knew what was happening.... Well, after all, man was not yet perfectly civilised. ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... Balkans generally, and of the Bulgarian people particularly, for at the present time (1914) I think it may safely be said that the Bulgarian people are somewhat under a cloud, and are not standing too high in the opinion of the civilised world. Yet, to give an honest record of my observations of them, I shall have to praise them very highly in some respects. Whilst it would be going too far to say that the praise is reluctant, it is true that it has been in a way forced from me, for I went to Bulgaria with the prejudice ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... "older than a tale written in any book." As we have tried to shew in the preceding chapter, biological science was partially prepared; the mutability of species and the orderly succession of organic life were in the air. But the application of the doctrine to man came as a greater shock to civilised sentiment than would have occurred a century earlier. It came as a disaster even to the clearest and calmest intellects, for it seemed to drag down to the dirt the nobility of man. Out of the fierce flame of the French Revolution, there had come ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... the kind of material—just as it stands, sometimes not half so civilised—that we allow into our country to over-run it by the thousands, allowing it to rub shoulders with us, to come into speaking distance with our women folks; their children—out of homes and hovels fathered by ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... island. The story shows the advantages of good manners and pleasant behaviour; and the natives do not now cook and eat each other, but live on fish, vegetables, pork, and chickens, and dwell in houses. 'What the Rose did to the Cypress' is a story from Persia, where the people, of course, are civilised, and much like those of whom you read in 'The Arabian Nights.' Then there are tales like 'The Fox and the Lapp' from the very north of Europe, where it is dark for half the year and daylight for the other half. The Lapps are a people not fond of soap ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... of office events in Haiti, or San Domingo, as it was still called then, occasioned him great anxiety. Before the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, Haiti had been the most prosperous and the most highly civilised of the West Indian islands. But after the French National Assembly had, in 1791, decreed equal rights between whites and mulattoes, troubles began. The blacks rebelled; the French rescinded the decree of 1791 and, changing their minds again, re-affirmed it. The blacks began murdering ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... conservatory. The only chair in the place is occupied by Emily; and John Edward, if the language of clothes can be relied upon, has evidently been sitting on the floor. They do not speak, but they give you a look that says all that can be said in a civilised community; and you back out promptly and ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... a trader calls, bringing and taking letters and exchanging for the produce of this place such necessities as we require from more civilised lands. ...
— The Mysterious Shin Shira • George Edward Farrow
... the island, and liberty to take exercise within certain limits. This opinion surprised me; but I considered it to be that of a man unacquainted with the nature of a voyage of discovery, and the interest it excites in every nation of the civilised world, and not the least in France. To be liberated in an honourable manner by an order of the French government, so soon as it should be informed of my detention, appeared to be certain; for whatever colour general De Caen might give to his proceedings, ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... formed, the respect for the clergy, the cheerful obedience to laws, the industry and peaceful happiness one saw at every step, made an impression on me I have never forgotten; and when I compare it with the discord, the crime, and the hatred of all authority which is now prevailing, alas! in most civilised countries, I look back to what I saw in Paraguay with a sigh of regret that such things are of the past. It was beautiful to see the respect paid to the Church (the acknowledged ruler of the place), the ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... war is not only inevitable, but actually desirable from a standpoint of world advantage. Imagine a highly civilised and progressive nation, a strong prosperous nation, wisely and efficiently governed, as may be true, some day, of the United States of America. Let us suppose this nation to be surrounded by a number of weak and unenlightened states, always quarrelling, ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... time Goldsmith had quitted his miserable dwelling at the top of Breakneck Steps, and had taken chambers in the more civilised region of the Inns of Court. But he was still often reduced to pitiable shifts. Towards the close of 1764 his rent was so long in arrear that his landlady one morning called in the help of a sheriff's officer. The debtor, in great perplexity, despatched a messenger ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... becomes a prophecy of the future. Jesus has drawn men of all sorts, of every stage of culture and layer of civilisation, and of every type of character to Him, and the power which has carried a peasant of Nazareth to be the acknowledged King of the civilised world is not exhausted, and will not be till He is throned as Saviour and Ruler of the whole earth. There is only one religion in the world that is obviously growing. The gods of Greece and Rome are only subjects for studies in Comparative Mythology, the labyrinthine ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... mind and body into a curious condition of subdued life, a sort of contemplative oriental placid state in which both cares and pleasures ceased to be acute, and the flight of time seemed gliding and even, and not marked by the distinct epochs which define our civilised life. Although this passive enjoyment was really agreeable—and, in fine weather and good health, perhaps a mollusc could affirm as much of its existence,—certainly an experience of the condition I have described enables one ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... her," observed Bowse. "I never like to wish an enemy worse luck than a good thrashing, if I can meet him in fair fight; but, to be sure, from what we hear of these fellows, they don't deserve much mercy from civilised men, though we have no reason to complain of the way ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... that second robbery; but nearly eight weeks had passed since the robbery at Carlisle, and even that was still a mystery. The newspapers had been loud in their condemnation of the police. It had been asserted over and over again that in no other civilised country in the world could so great an amount of property have passed through the hands of thieves without leaving some clue by which the police would have made their way to the truth. Major Mackintosh had ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... see their happiness. Sometimes they are tiresome. The bride is the chief offender. She quotes her Adolphus as the world-oracle, and dilates on her own recent domestic discoveries as if they were what civilised humanity had been waiting for through dark ages of perplexity. Her superior attitude towards unmarried friends ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... of anatomy. There is assuredly a germ and a promise in the phrase. It delights us, first, because it seems to recognise the organic, as distinct from the merely constructive, character of finely civilised architecture; and next, it persuades us that Vitruvius had in truth discovered the key to size—the unit that is sometimes so obscurely, yet always so absolutely, the measure of what is great and small among things animate and inanimate. And in spite of themselves ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... idlers, steeped in the too common business of having nothing to do. No, they had regularly sought and obtained a holiday from work or school; for all the activities of social and civilised life were going on full swing—fuller, indeed, than the average swing—in that remote, scarcely known, and beautiful little gem of the ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... lanky shy horses. On a quiet Sunday, after I'd brought Jim home, Mary would dress him and herself—just the same as if we were in town—and make me get up on one end and put on a collar and take her and Jim for a walk along the creek. She said she wanted to keep me civilised. She tried to make a gentleman of me for years, but ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... settlements as soon as we could. We expressed our wish to Sigenok, and he promised to return with us on the following day. Malcolm's great wish was to withdraw Sigenok from his savage companions, and to induce him to settle down as a civilised man and a Christian. We talked to him on the subject, but he replied, that he had been all his life accustomed to hunting, and fighting, and that he could not abandon them. The next day we set out, leaving the larger body ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... the reasoner, 'but the constitution of an Esquimaux is peculiarly adapted to the climate and food: what he enjoys would poison a European; and he also possesses skill to capture wild animals and fish, which the civilised man cannot exercise.' Is this true? We answer to the first objection: only partially true; and the second, we utterly deny. The constitution of vigorous men—and all Franklin's crew were fine, picked young fellows—has a marvellous adaptability. It is incredible ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... Divine attributes, the origin of evil, the necessity of human actions, the foundation of moral obligation, imply any high degree of intellectual culture. Such speculations, on the contrary, are in a peculiar manner the delight of intelligent children and of half civilised men. The number of boys is not small who, at fourteen, have thought enough on these questions to be fully entitled to the praise which Voltaire gives to Zadig. "Il en savait ce qu'on en a su dans tous les ages; c'est-a-dire, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the outlines, your worship. I will now go into details. Villiers Wyckliffe, my client, is the only son of the late Seymour Wyckcliffe, the eminent banker, whose name is known throughout the civilised world. On the death of his father, Mr. Wyckliffe, being disinclined for a business life, converted the bank into a company and retired. Now, given a young man of prepossessing appearance, of good birth and standing, with ample means, ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... last six months of his life, spent in conditions for which nothing in his previous existence in Cambridge or Berlin, in Grantchester or Tahiti, had in the least prepared him, were devoted—for we must not say wasted—to breaking up the cliche of civilised habits. But of this harassed time there remain to us the five immortal Sonnets, which form the crown of Rupert Brooke's verse, and his principal legacy to English literature. Our record would be imperfect without the citation of one, perhaps ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... the longing to return to inhabited countries. Pencroft and Neb, especially, who felt themselves at once so happy and so rich, would not have left their island without regret. They were accustomed, besides, to this new life in the midst of the domain which their intelligence had as it were civilised. But at any rate this ship brought news from the world, perhaps even from their native land. It was bringing fellow-creatures to them, and it may be conceived how deeply their hearts were moved at ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... the impulse of this enterprising era is largely due. He fully believed that a vast southern continent must exist, to balance the antipodes. So firm was his conviction, that he defined its extent as "greater than the whole civilised part of Asia, from Turkey to the extremity of China. Its trade would be sufficient to maintain the power of Great Britain, employing all its manufactories and ships." The position of this region of fancy was traversed by Cook, who found nothing but ocean. The doctrine of terrestial counterpoise ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... arrange so that her cheques on the Blankshire Bank may be cashed at any other bank in the kingdom. If she has occasion for it he will send money on her account to some other person's credit at any bank in the kingdom or the civilised world. If she desires to travel abroad, he will obtain a passport for her and provide her with "circular notes," which may be turned into money at any place ...
— Everybody's Guide to Money Matters • William Cotton, F.S.A.
... bad talker when the question in hand was either commercial or political. But as a rich man cannot go through life without being cultivated more or less by the frivolous herd, Mr. Granger had been compelled to conform himself somehow to the requirements of civilised society, and to talk in his stiff bald way of things which he neither ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Little Primpton, he found his people as he had left them, doing the same things, repeating at every well-known juncture the same trite observations. Their ingenuousness affected him as a negro, civilised and educated, on visiting after many years his native tribe, might be affected by their nose-rings and yellow ochre. James was astounded that they should ignore matters which he fancied common knowledge, and at the same time accept ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... having rights and duties, I mean, of course, the ruling power of society, the class which at present holds social and political control, and bears, therefore, the responsibility for the condition of those to whom it grants no share in such control. This ruling class in England, as in all other civilised countries, is the bourgeoisie. But that this society, and especially the bourgeoisie, is charged with the duty of protecting every member of society, at least, in his life, to see to it, for example, that no one starves, I need not now prove to my German ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... it surrenders its aircraft to make further collections easier. Rahn refuses to die, though it's let in the jungle. It's turned pirate stronghold. Fed and clothed by a few other cities like this one, it should be able to hold out. It's a racket, Evelyn. A stick-up. A hijacking of a civilised city. Sounds like Jacaro." ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... and not from metaphysical speculation; that we cannot draw an indictment against a whole people; that there is a species of hostile justice which no asperity of war wholly extinguishes in the minds of a civilised people. "Steady independent minds," he had once said, "when they have an object of so serious a concern to mankind as government under their contemplation, will disdain to assume the part of satirists and declaimers." Show the thing that you ask for, he cried during the American ...
— Burke • John Morley
... confident expectations. Gibbon believed that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few years ago we believed the world had grown too civilised for war, and the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was to be the inauguration of a new era. Battles, bloody as Napoleon's, are now the familiar tale of every day; and the arts which have made greatest progress are the arts of destruction. What next? ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... covers the town, blackening the buildings, soiling goods, and, mixing with the other gases already generated, forming one general conglomeration of deleterious vapours; the state of the inhabited cellars; the neighbourhood of which exhibits scenes of barbarism disgraceful for any civilised state to allow; an inefficient supply of that great necessity of life—water; inefficient drainage, which is only adapted to carry off the surface water;—these are but a sample of the general state of Liverpool, and at the same time very distinct ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... mental impulses—if he knew, when it was their honour to stand by him, and when it was their honour to betray him; when they were bound to protect and when to kill him—he might, by judging his times and opportunities, pass safely from one end of the mountains to the other. But a civilised European is as little able to accomplish this, as to appreciate the feelings of those strange creatures, which, when a drop of water is examined under a microscope, are revealed amiably gobbling each other up, ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... society believed to be utterly impracticable by the ancient philosophers. A review of history from the appearance of Christ to the present age, would finally demonstrate that the religion he established had invariably been found adapted to all possible grades in civilised society. For this reason, the assertion that the gospel was no longer in accordance with the continued progress of civilisation, could not for a moment ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... and the mass of the people, as indeed was in one sense obvious enough, had only too little of it. The pet 'state of nature' of theorists was a silly figment. The genuine savage was little better than an animal; and a savage woman, whose contempt for civilised life had prompted her to escape to the forest, was simply a 'speaking cat.' The natural equality of mankind was mere moonshine. So far is it from being true, he says, that no two people can be together for half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the sultan of Anak Sungei (Moco-moco), ambitious of imitating the sultan of Menangkabau, styles himself and his immediate subjects Malays, his neighbour, the Pangeran of Sungei Lamo, chief of the Rejangs, a very civilised Mahometan, and whose ancestors for some generations were of the same faith, seemed offended, in a conversation I had with him, at my supposing him (as he is usually considered) a Malay, and replied with some emotion, "Malayo tidah, sir; orang ulu betul sayo." "No ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... for this lady than for her brother, to reconcile so young a courtier as Lord Glenvarloch to the customs and habits of a sphere so new to him. In all civilised society, the females of distinguished rank and beauty give the tone to manners, and, through these, even to morals. Lady Blackchester had, besides, interest either in the Court, or over the Court, (for its source could not be well traced,) which created friends, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... dissensions;—to inculcate that spirit of union among themselves which alone could give strength against their enemies;—to endeavour to humanise the feelings of the belligerents on both sides, so as to take from the war that character of barbarism which deterred the more civilised friends of freedom through Europe from joining in it;—such were, in addition to the now essential aid of his money, the great objects which he proposed to effect by his interference; and to these he accordingly, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... "Civilised man restrains his impulses," the doctor answered. "You have lived too long in South Africa, Mr. Porter—I mean, Sir Charles Vandrift, if that's the right way to address such a gentleman. You appear to have imbibed the habits and manners ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... Umbrellas may be 'hedged about' by cobweb statutes; I will not swear it is not so; there may exist laws that make such things property; but sure I am that the hissing contempt, the loud-mouthed indignation of all civilised society, 'would sibilate and roar at the bloodless poltroon who should engage law on his side to obtain for him the restitution ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... reform the world—was not that always England's mission, if not especially the mission of her own party?—and here was an Englishman fighting for reform in that feverish place, and endeavouring to make his people happy and prosperous and civilised, by methods which certainly seemed to have more in common with the benevolent despotism of the Tory Party than with the theories of the Opposition. Bit by bit it came to pass that Helena Langley grew to look ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... traders and sent their goods all over the world. Ships took them to the mouth of the Nile, to the islands in the Cornish sea, to the flourishing cities of Crete almost as civilised as our own; while caravans of camels bore Phoenician wares across the desert to the Euphrates and the Tigris, most likely even to India itself. Soon the Phoenicians began to plant colonies which, like Tyre their mother, grew rich and beautiful, and far along the north ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... Monday, March 24.—Prince ARTHUR explained in speech nearly two hours long the bearings of Irish Land Purchase Bill. In course of his exposition the happy accident by which civilised man is furnished with two coat-tails was strikingly illustrated. On the Treasury Bench, behind Prince ARTHUR, sat, on either hand, OLD MORALITY and JOKIM. Supposing the Prince had had only one coat-tail, differences might have arisen between his two right hon. friends; sure ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... less civilised Benjamin, high potentate of the tribe of Mangeroma cannibals, is the second to whom I wish to express my extreme gratitude, although my obligations to him are of a slightly different character: in the first place, because he ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... of September we dined together at the Mitre. I attempted to argue for the superior happiness of the savage life, upon the usual fanciful topicks. JOHNSON. 'Sir, there can be nothing more false. The savages have no bodily advantages beyond those of civilised men. They have not better health; and as to care or mental uneasiness, they are not above it, but below it, like bears. No, Sir; you are not to talk such paradox: let me have no more on't. It cannot entertain, far less can it instruct. ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... the University of Cambridge, which is within three or four miles of the city. The resident professors at that university are gentlemen of learning and varied attainments; and are, without one exception that I can call to mind, men who would shed a grace upon, and do honour to, any society in the civilised world. Many of the resident gentry in Boston and its neighbourhood, and I think I am not mistaken in adding, a large majority of those who are attached to the liberal professions there, have been educated at this same school. ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... of the camps life had now become more civilised. In cases where the bed of gold-bearing gravel was large, and where, consequently, work would be continued for a long time, wooden towns had sprung up, with hotels, stores, drinking and gambling saloons. Work was here carried on methodically; water was, ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... intellect. The first of these is the Treatise on the Law of War and Peace, by Grotius. It appeared about two centuries ago; and from that period downwards, international law became a solid fact, which all civilised countries have recognised, and which even the French Convention, during the Reign of Terror, dared, in its madness, to outrage but for a moment. The second is the Essay on the Human Understanding, by Locke. It struck down, as with the blow of a hatchet, the wretched mental philosophy ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Aaron's rod, swallows all the rest. But in many directions, the world has become, or is becoming, international. Science and philosophy, and, to a lesser degree, theology and art, have become the common possession of all civilised nations. The effort to make commerce the expression of international fellowship, with which the name of Cobden is associated, failed, largely as the result of the German policy of high tariffs, but its defeat is only temporary, and the commercial interdependence ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... and accidental eclipse was amply compensated in the effect upon the civilised world which he subsequently exercised. So all-embracing, so systematic, so absolutely complete did his philosophy appear, that he seemed to after generations to have left nothing more to discover. He at once attained ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... what, in ordinary cases, have appeared harmless bosoms, but which now run riot, and overcame every principle of restraint. It is a melancholy fact, but, nevertheless, a fact, despite its melancholy, that, even in a civilised country like this, with a generally well-educated population, nothing but a well-organised physical force keeps down, from the commission of the most outrageous offences, hundreds ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... prejudice is only being overcome very slowly, and whenever women have had equal, or nearly equal, advantages they have proved themselves equal or superior to men. Women's inferiority in physical strength is immaterial, for, as mankind grows more civilised, force will be found in the brain and not ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... hour on the glorious future that awaited the combined arms of England and Russia when their hearts and their territories should run side by side and the great mission of civilising Asia should begin. That was unsatisfactory, because Asia is not going to be civilised after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old. You cannot reform a lady of many lovers, and Asia has been insatiable in her flirtations aforetime. She will never attend Sunday school or learn to vote ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... beyond nature, and in marked contrast with the temperance of normal animal life. Hence it has become one of the most fruitful sources of human misery and human degradation, and the satisfaction of its imperious cravings in civilised countries lies at the root of our worst social evils. This excessive development has to be fought against, and the instinct reduced within natural limits, and this will certainly never be done by easy-going self-indulgence within the marital relation any more than by self-indulgence ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... to a lucid reduction whether for approval or refutation. No rules can be given for finding everybody's meaning. The poets have their own way of expressing themselves; sophists, too, have their own way. And the point often lies in what is unexpressed. Thus, "barbarous nations make, the civilised write history," means that civilised nations do not make history, which none is so brazen as openly to assert. Or, again, "Alcibiades is dead, but X is still with us"; the whole meaning of this 'exponible' is that X would be the lesser loss to society. Even an epithet or ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... turned towards laying up treasures in heaven, where also the heart should be. One need scarcely add a word of reprobation as to the horrible doctrine of eternal torture, although that, too, is part of the teaching of Christ. The whole conscience of civilised mankind is so turning against that shameful and cruel dogma, that it is only now believed among the illiterate and uncultured of the Christians, and soon will be too savage even for them. It has, however, hardened the hearts of many in days gone by, and has made ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... suffered the humiliation of having portraits at five-and-twenty francs a-piece refused, because he failed to produce a likeness; and he reached the lowest degree of distress—he worked according to size for the petty dealers who sell daubs on the bridges, and export them to semi-civilised countries. They bought his pictures at two and three francs a-piece, according to the regulation dimensions. This was like physical decay, it made him waste away; he rose from such tasks feeling ill, incapable of serious work, looking at his large picture in distress, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... habits die out in you, new good habits spring up in you; old meannesses become weaker, new nobleness and manfulness become stronger; the old, selfish, covetous, savage, cunning, cowardly, brutal Adam dying out, the new, loving, brotherly, civilised, wise, brave, manful Adam growing up in you, day by day, to perfection, till you are changed from grace to grace, and glory to glory into the likeness of the ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... though containing some of the staple machinery of Eastern fiction, was evidently rather of Bedawin than civilised origin; and, as such, interested me, in spite of the inartificial manner in which it was told, the meagre details, and the repulsive incidents. Ismaeen's only qualities as a historian were animation and faith. He had heard the narrative from his father, to whom, likewise, it had been handed ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... once we part from the idea of such a rigid and eternal marriage bond—and the law of every civilised country and the general thought and sentiment everywhere have long since done so—then the whole question changes. If marriage is not so absolutely sacred a bond, if it is not an eternal bond, but a bond we may break on this account or that, then ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Illinois by a number of roughs; and Brigham Young, a man said to be "very much married," and who will now be the father of perhaps 150 children, was appointed his successor. Mormonism is disliked by the bulk of people mainly on account of its fondness for wives. The generality of civilised folk think that one fairly matured creature, with a ring on one of her left-hand fingers, is sufficient for a single household—quite sufficient for all the fair purposes of existence, "lecturing" included; but the Latter-day ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... in its indulgences. It is, I believe, an admitted fact that even people who are considered to be strictly temperate as a rule, habitually take more wine than is good for them. With regard to tobacco, I cannot help thinking that its introduction by civilised races has been an unmixed evil. History shows us that before it was known the most splendid mental achievements were carried put, and the most heroic endurance exhibited, things done which if it be possible to rival, it is quite impossible to excel. The soldier, and sailor, the night-watchman ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... confessed with Previsa Salonica, that place of steady disrespectability, which has maintained its bad character since the apostolic days, and even with Constantinople. This last is a gem of the earth, but, its beauties are to a great extent those of civilised elaboration. Courtiers form but one species, and breathe pretty much the same atmosphere throughout the world. He who has studied them throughout the world has marked only the circumstantial differences of locality producing their effect on a spring ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... everywhere by cable, as news always spreads nowadays, reached a certain far corner in one of the most beautiful provinces of India,—a corner scarcely known to the conventional traveller,—where, in a wondrous palace, lent to them by one of the most civilised and kindly of Oriental potentates,—a palace surrounded by gardens that might have been a true copy of the fabled Eden, Prince Humphry and the fair 'Gloria' of his life, were passing a happy, 'hidden-away' time ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... primitive and pathological principle of repression and main force. The first of these concern that unfortunate body of criminal and vicious persons, whose unsocial propensities are constantly straining and endangering the bonds of the social union. They exist in the midst of the most highly civilised communities, with all the predatory or violent habits of barbarous tribes. They are the active and unconquered remnant of the natural state, and it is as unscientific as the experience of some unwise philanthropy has shown it to be ineffective, to deal with them exactly as if ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... treaty of Leoben. The Romish hierarchy of Hungary exists in all its former splendour and opulence; never has the slightest attempt been made to diminish it; and those revolutionary principles, to which so large a portion of civilised Europe has been sacrificed, have here failed in making the smallest ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... tired, and the worse for his walk. It is scarcely possible to explain to any one who has not lived in the fens, what difficult and dangerous walking it is. A mile is as good as four, I have heard my father say, in those parts. My mother, who in the early part of her life had lived in a more civilised spot, and had been used to constant churchgoing, would often lament her situation. It was from her I early imbibed a great curiosity and anxiety to see that thing, which I had heard her call a church, and so often lament that she could never go to. I had seen houses ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... march to the Pole, and the heartrending account of his homeward journey, of Evans's sad death, of Oates's noble sacrifice, and of the martyr like end of Wilson, Bowers, and Scott himself have been published throughout the length and breadth of the civilised world. In "Scott's Last Expedition"—Vol. I. the great explorer's journals are practically reproduced in their entirety. Mr. Leonard Huxley, who arranged them in 1913, had had to do with Scott's first work, ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... displays while his enemies are exercising their cunning and dexterity in devising, and carrying into effect, torments which baffle description, but to the quality which is denominated courage among civilised nations. Tecumseh was one of the bravest men that ever lived, so was the celebrated Mackintosh. They must, however, be allowed to display their valour in their own peculiar manner. I shall further illustrate their remarkable and peculiar use of this quality by referring to ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... evident intention of laying violent hands on Turkey, by destroying with a treachery unworthy a civilised nation a Turkish squadron at Sinope, and England and France being bound by treaty to protect the Ottoman Empire, without delay each despatched a fleet into the Black Sea. That of England was under the command of Admiral Dundas, who had ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... for that of the Babylonians, and has forced the Babylonian king to treat with its Pharaoh on equal terms. In the track of war and diplomacy have come trade and commerce; Western Asia is covered with roads, along which the merchant and the courier travel incessantly, and the whole civilised world of the Orient is knit together in a common literary culture and ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... exclusively passed amid the ever-changing wonders of sea and land are also those who are most universally insensible to every aspect of Nature not directly associated with the human interest of their calling. Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civilised accomplishments which we all learn as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practised by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied. How much share have the attractions of Nature ever had in the pleasurable or ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... the venerable old warrior, doubled up from the effect of his wound, I thought what a curious, as well as painful sensation, it must be, to have one's shoulder a lead-mine; though, sooth to say, so many of us civilised mortals ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... is sweeping change, all chance unsound.'[125] Finally and above all, he stood firm in 'the old Christian faith.' Life was to him in all its aspects an application of Christian teaching and example. If we like to put it so, he was steadfast for making politics more human, and no branch of civilised life needs ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... that Jim Billings was a dangerous untamed animal; he is now a jolly, but quiet fellow. I was always rather afraid of him; but now I should not mind sailing in his vessel. The Puritan Mission has civilised him and hundreds on hundreds more, and I wish the parsons had ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... of the process of nature that each duration happens and passes. The process of nature can also be termed the passage of nature. I definitely refrain at this stage from using the word 'time,' since the measurable time of science and of civilised life generally merely exhibits some aspects of the more fundamental fact of the passage of nature. I believe that in this doctrine I am in full accord with Bergson, though he uses 'time' for the fundamental fact which I call ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... of loving "the little platoon to which I belong," but he urges that these domestic affections are in little danger of neglect. Men learned to love kith and kin, neighbours and comrades, while still in the savage state. The characteristic of a civilised morality, the necessary accompaniment of all the varied and extended relationships which modern existence has brought with it, must be a new and emphatic stress on my duty to the stranger, to the unknown producer with whom I stand in an economic relationship, and to the foreigner beyond ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... of the Jaw in the Civilised Races is the title of a pamphlet by Mr. F. HOWARD COLLINS. We haven't read it; but if it be in favour of the diminution of "jaw," we heartily recommend its study to all Members of Parliament, actual or intending, and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... silver in the sockets of eyes. He was demoralising. Through him we were becoming highly humanised, tender, complex, excessively decadent: we understood the subtlety of his fear, sympathised with all his repulsions, shrinkings, evasions, delusions—as though we had been over-civilised, and rotten, and without any knowledge of the meaning of life. We had the air of being initiated in some infamous mysteries; we had the profound grimaces of conspirators, exchanged meaning glances, significant ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... this war of the civilised nations That extends from the East to the West, Have arisen full many occasions For a man to put forth of his best; When the battle was raging its roughest, Men have spared themselves never a jot, But, gentlemen, yours is the toughest Affair of ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 9, 1914 • Various
... Virginian, I declare, Harry Warrington, thou art the most civilised young man possible!" says the Colonel. "My dear, shall ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ago, and the horse which he was driving shot dead. The police who were with him on the car were rolled out upon the road, and before they could recover themselves and pursue the Moonlighters had escaped.' And this is supposed to be a civilised country, and is a part of the ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... matters about which those interested desire information. You will perceive also that they are not savage to such an extent that they could not in course of time and through association with others become civilised and cultivated. You will likewise perceive how great hopes we cherish from the long and arduous labors we have for the past fifteen years sustained, in order to plant in this country the standard of the ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain |
