"Human activity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... many medical readers that in the third and longest study I have said little, save incidentally, either of treatment or prevention. The omission of such considerations at this stage is intentional. It may safely be said that in no other field of human activity is so vast an amount of strenuous didactic morality founded on so slender a basis of facts. In most other departments of life we at least make a pretence of learning before we presume to teach; in the field of sex we content ourselves with the smallest and vaguest minimum of information, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the library! The city hall is enough for a beginning. And it's really an excellent library. It's—it isn't so bad. . . . Is it possible that I am to find dishonesties and stupidity in every human activity I encounter? In schools and business and government and everything? Is there never any ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... all, an unwarranted assumption that severed the intellect from its natural connection with human activity? No doubt it seemed to simplify the problem to suppose that the functioning of the intellect could be studied as a thing apart, and unrelated to the general context of the vital functions. Again, it was to simplify to assume that thought could be considered ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... Department of Physical Training finds also a significant opportunity and an urgent duty in the fact that various types of physical exercise are intimately associated with social, ethical, and moral consequences. No other human activity gives the same opportunity for the development of a social spirit and personal ethical standards as do play, games, and sports of children and adolescents. Unsupervised, these activities degenerate and bring ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... manufactured articles, to colonies where there happens to be a surplus of males. Most of them will be wives, and every American-born husband is a possible President of these United States. Any one of these girls may be a four-years' queen. There is no sphere of human activity so exalted that she may not be called ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... astrologers whom Moses met in Egypt—producing phenomena artificially, and allowing a law of necessity to be deduced from the result. And for Balzac the novel was something of the same kind—a synthesis of every human activity framed by one who, as he proudly claimed, had observed and analysed society in all its phases from top to bottom, legislations, religions, histories, and present time. What Balzac did in fiction and what he thought he did are separated by a gulf which could only have been bridged ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... combines the best of human qualities with sound knowledge of the capabilities and limitations of the armed forces. It recognizes in war a form of human activity whose conduct, like that of all other human activities, is subject to natural law. It applies to the mastery of the problems of war, therefore, the natural mental processes of human thought (see Chapter II); it adapts these natural processes to a specific purpose, and consciously develops ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... the hypothesis that all living matter has sprung from pre-existing living matter, came from a contemporary, though a junior, of Harvey, a native of that country, fertile in men great in all departments of human activity, which was to intellectual Europe, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, what Germany is in the nineteenth. It was in Italy, and from Italian teachers, that Harvey received the most important part of his scientific education. And it was a ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... has risen among wise and far-sighted men a perception of the need for setting certain departments of human activity entirely free from legal interference. This has nothing to do with any sympathy these liberators may themselves have with immoral views. A man with the strongest conviction of the Divine ordering of the universe and of the superiority of monarchy to all forms of government may nevertheless ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... in land and tools hinders human activity, and obstructs progress and the free development ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... every branch of human activity: art and science, industry and commerce, literature and philosophy. We have within us, from the start, that which will distinguish us from the vulgar herd. Now to what do we owe this distinctive character? To some throwback of atavism, men tell us. Heredity, direct in one case, remote ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... rumbling sound, like the rhythmic throb of machinery. Mystified, he gazed blankly at Manuel. Of course it was impossible. What could functioning machinery be doing at the bottom of an abandoned hole in the ground? And where there were no signs of human activity to account for the phenomenon? A more forsaken looking place it would be hard to imagine. Not that the surrounding country wasn't ruggedly beautiful and grand; the hills were covered with live-oak, yucca grass, chulla, manzanita, and starred with the white blossoms of wild thistle. But ...
— The Seed of the Toc-Toc Birds • Francis Flagg
... and all that follows. Why don't you write a poem on Money, Casti? I almost feel capable of it myself. What can claim precedence, in all this world, over hard cash? It is the fruitful soil wherein is nourished the root of the tree of life; it is the vivifying principle of human activity. Upon it luxuriate art, letters, science; rob them of its sustenance, and they droop like withering leaves. Money means virtue; the lack of it is vice. The devil loves no lurking-place like an empty purse. Give me a thousand pounds to-morrow, and I become the most virtuous man in ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... question of greater importance which must be answered by the Negro, and by the Negro alone: What kind of an American does the Negro intend to be? The answer to this question he must seek and find in every field of human activity and endeavor. First, he must answer it by negation. He does not intend to be an alien in the land of his birth, nor an outcast in the home of his fathers. He will not consent to his elimination as a political factor; he will refuse to camp ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... did not manifest itself in weakness and excess. It is as unreasonable to expect either tunefulness or humor in a musical comedy as to expect a statement of fact in an advertisement. In short, where any human activity is conventionalized, standards are arbitrarily fixed; and critical discernment grows dull if it does not altogether atrophy. It simply does not occur to the great majority of men that any activity should be judged otherwise than by comparing it with the stereotyped average of ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... collision with nations of higher moral culture; but in themselves they have full value and full right, so long as they attain the end of all instincts, and so far as we can speak of ends at all; in such naturalism, apart from human activity, the end consists only in the preservation of the individual and the species in ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... for the largest service. A person possessed of the humanitarian spirit realizes that the individual life is rooted in God, and consequently has a broader and deeper sense of human brotherhood, which enables him to keep in vital and sympathetic relation with human activity and experience. When these two aims blend, the best results are obtained, both for the individual ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... the practical knowledge imbibed in the common course of life. This is just as true of the military professions—the naval especially—as it is of civil callings; perhaps even more so, because the former are a more unnatural, and therefore, when attained, a more highly specialized, form of human activity. For the very reason that war is in the main an evil, an unnatural state, but yet at times unavoidable, the demands upon warriors, when average ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... the counter, in all buying and selling, competition is essential to the greatest success. Competition, the desire to excel, is universal and instinctive. It gives a zest to our work that would otherwise be lacking. In every sphere of human activity competition seems essential for ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... work of art, and the mode in which it is produced, are subjects well worthy of careful study. Architecture and music, poetry, painting and sculpture, have in times past constituted a vast portion of human activity; and without knowing something of the philosophy of art, we need not hope to understand thoroughly ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... these late-coming occupants, because an island environment asserts always some power to isolate. This is due not only to the encircling moat of sea, but also to the restricted insular area, too small to attract to itself the great currents of human activity which infuse cosmopolitan ideas and innovations, and too poor to buy the material improvements which progress offers. If the tourist in Sicily finds the women of Taormina or Girgenti spinning with a hand spindle, and the express trains moving only twelve miles an hour, he can take ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... Duchess and Musadieu, who played with ideas as one tosses a ball, without perceiving that they continually exchanged the same ones, protested in the name of thought and of human activity. ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... even in a slight excess of gluttony after such introductory words of blessing. You felt that the occasion had been met, that something like perfection had been attained. James was willing to admit shortcomings in thatching, or in any department of human activity, so long as his superiority in pre-prandial supplication was admitted. But it so happened that Fate, whose delight it is to imperil even the stablest reputations, sent his way a South-country Brother with a gift in prayer truly appalling. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... and symbols. Language—which is wholly a social product for a social need—is the chief vehicle of symbolical operation, and the only means by which abstraction is affected.... Language is the creator and sustainer of that ideal world in which the noblest part of human activity finds a theatre, the world of thought and spiritual insight, of knowledge and duty, loftily elevated above that of sense and appetite. Into this ideal world man absorbs the universe as in a transfiguration. It is here that he shapes the programme ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... chapter, he applies himself to setting to rest the scruples of those who find something cynical in the idea that the desire for Inequality is compatible with a respectable form of human character. It is true, he says, that man does not live by bread alone; but he denies that he means to say "that all human activity is motived by the desire for inequality"; he would assert that only "of all productive labor, except the lowest." The only actions independent of the desire for inequality, however, are those performed in the name of art, science, philanthropy, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... great man of action is less conditioned by principle than the tragedy of other types of greatness, because he is not limited by the universal restrictions of humanity, but by individual and accidental ones. He recognises, partly because of his unmetaphysical constitution, no limits to human activity, and in gaining his individual object, he reaches a relative end. It is otherwise with the thinker, the artist, the religious enthusiast and the lover. The thinker possesses the highest intellectual endowments; he represents cognisant humanity, and his ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... the evil against which he felt himself especially called to contend was painfully manifest to John Woolman. At the outset, all about him, in every department of life and human activity, in the state and the church, he saw evidences of its strength, and of the depth and extent to which its roots had wound their way among the foundations of society. Yet he seems never to have doubted for a moment the power of simple truth to ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... immutable substance, the other to the conception of a consummate perfection. There is an interpretation of life appropriate to each of these conceptions. Both agree in regarding life seriously, in defining reason or philosophy as the highest human activity, and in emphasizing the identity of the individual's good with the good of the universe. But there are striking differences ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry |
