"Moralizing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he has indulged his excursive moralizing beyond even the wide licence he took in the three preceding parts; but it bears the impression of more reading and observation. Though not superior in poetical energy, it is yet a higher work than ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... some time together, in friendly conversation, Wyeth returned to his party, and Captain Bonneville continued to press forward, and to gain ground. At night he sent off the sadly sober and moralizing chief of the Hudson's Bay Company, under a proper escort, to rejoin his people; his route branching off in a different direction. The latter took a cordial leave of his host, hoping, on some future occasion, to repay his hospitality ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... have left my hero happily married to his profession, the courtship and winning of which formed the theme of my tale, I may be permitted to indulge in a very little moralizing of a rather more explicit sort than ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... lost at sea, or mouldered at the wharves; that his imported broadcloths were long ago worn to tatters, and his cargoes of wine quaffed to the lees; and that the most precious leaves of his ledger have become waste-paper. Yet, his avocations were not so vain as our philosophic moralizing. In this world we are the things of a moment, and are made to pursue momentary things, with here and there a thought that stretches mistily towards eternity, and perhaps may endure as long. All philosophy that would abstract mankind from the present ...
— Old News - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... could not keep his satire impersonal enough to avoid incurring enmities. He boasts in the Peregrine of the unfeeling way in which he commented on that enthusiast to his followers, and we may believe his assurance that his writings brought general dislike and danger upon him. His moralizing (of which we are happy to say there is a great deal) is based on Tiresias's pronouncement. Moralizing has a bad name; but than good moralizing there is, when one has reached a certain age perhaps, no better reading. Some of us like it even in our novels, feel ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... protection. Here and there the Biblical simplicity is elaborated: Mordecai moves from Babylon to Shushan in order to be near Esther, and soldiers with bared axes stand round the king to secure the observance of the law that he shall not be approached. We have some moralizing on Haman's fall and the working of Providence ([Greek: to theion]), which teaches that "what mischief anyone prepares against another, he unconsciously contrives against himself." Less edifying is the addition that ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... something of the nature of a chorus appears in the ballet, it is a chorus that really dances to amuse and excite us in the intervals of operatic action; it is not a chorus of doddering and pottering old men, moralizing on an action in which they are too feeble to join. Of course if we are classical scholars we do not cavil at the choral songs; the extreme difficulty of scanning and construing them alone commands a traditional respect; but if we are merely modern spectators, we may be respectful, we may even ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... His moralizing reverie was however interrupted by her Ladyship, who perceiving a group of females decked in the extreme of Parisian fashions, "there," said she, "there is all that taffeta, feathers, flowers, and lace can ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... kid, now." Both gamblers, it seemed, were in the melancholy mood for moralizing. "Why, we was talkin' to Rouletta about you this morning. She's all bereaved up over this thing; she sent us here to cheer you. You was clean as an apple, then—and easier to pick—now you're just a common bar-fly, the same ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... extracts from Hartley's own letters, recollections of those among whom his latter life was passed—this, as it seems to us, should have sufficed. Mr. Derwent Coleridge brings too many church-bred and town-bred notions to the grave design of moralizing and philosophizing his brother's simple life and wayward self-indulgences. His motives will be respected, and his real kindness not misunderstood; but it will be felt that a quiet and unaffected little memoir of that strange and sorry career, and of those noble nor wholly wasted powers, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... them no sentimentalism nor moralizing; spoke not to any man of his "sins," but gave something good to eat, a buoying [Footnote: Buoying: enlivening, cheering.] word, or trifling gift and a look. He appeared with ruddy face, clean dress, with a flower or a green sprig in the lapel of his coat. Crossing the fields in summer, he would ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... is a fine view of Copenhagen. Before we had finished moralizing about views and heights, the afternoon had slipped imperceptibly away. Where we stood, the cowherd's long whoop at intervals, and, in answer to his call, the faint low of cattle, could be heard; and, from some cottages beyond the city walls, the bark of dogs, and noise of faggots being ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... Such audacity as that surpasses all imagination; she must really be mad about you. But take care, chevalier; you have jealous rivals to fear; it is an envied post to be favorite of the queen, when the queen is the real king. Pardon my moralizing, but I do not wish that the breath of chance should blow down what you have ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... internal structure to pieces, to find out how the motives and feelings work; but all the same, I hold strongly to diversity of gifts. I believe beauty is a gift, one of the good things of God; a very special talent, for which the owner must give account. But enough of this moralizing, for I want to speak of a certain fine afternoon in the year of our Lord, 18—well, never ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... of the tragedy is preceded by a dumb-show significant of what is forthcoming, and the first four are followed by choruses, moralizing the events. But the most notable fact about it is, that all except the choruses is in blank-verse; in which respect it was a great and noble innovation. And the versification runs abundantly smooth; beyond which little ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... good, however, to stay moralizing in a cemetery until a thunderstorm bursts over your head. I remained so long here that I had to run for refuge in a manner quite out of keeping with my solemn train of thoughts. I entered the first doorway that I saw open, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... underneath, so as to be crushed by the great stone if it disgraced him by falling in the process. As for the dynasties which have overlaid each other like Dr. Schliemann's Trojan cities, there is no need of moralizing over a history which instead of Finis is constantly ending with ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... entitled, and suffer all this in addition to all his physical ills, owing to his having been ornamented through life with an annoying prepuce,—the luckless heritage of having been born a Christian. Columbus in chains moralizing on the ingratitude of this world is nothing to the poor invalid with a swollen prepuce, innocently acquired, silently "cussing" the ignorance of ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... fiction pales beside this. Pope, condescending to the meanest complication of lies to justify a paltry vanity, taking advantage of his old friend's dotage to trick him into complicity, then giving a false account of his error, and finally moralizing, with all the airs of philosophic charity, and taking credit for his generosity, is altogether a picture to set fiction ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... religion; those who did were Romish, Jewish, Buddhist, or otherwise alien to him. All were tainted with the self-indulgence of this era: they had written into their covenant that only physical necessity could justify moralizing legislation, and that free speech was limited only by personal libel. Coffin thought sometimes he would be glad to see ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... one. At the same time he is too essentially the man of his own age to pass for a paler Addison or a more decorous Sterne. He has far more of the poet than any of the writers of the eighteenth century, and his moralizing, unlike theirs, is unconscious and indirect. The same poetical feeling is shown in his biographies; his subject is invariably chosen for its picturesqueness, and whatever is unessential to portraiture is thrown into the background. The result is that his biographies, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... that his books "are based on the axiom of the moral law."[2] The one notion is as unsound as the other. Conrad makes war on nothing; he is pre-eminently not a moralist. He swings, indeed, as far from revolt and moralizing as is possible, for he does not even criticize God. His undoubted comradeship, his plain kindliness toward the soul he vivisects, is not the fruit of moral certainty, but of moral agnosticism. He neither protests nor punishes; he merely smiles and pities. Like Mark Twain he might ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... contemporary Greeks. On occasion of the quarrel with the Aetolians it was reported of the Roman commander-in-chief that during battle he was solely occupied in praying and sacrificing like a priest; whereas Polybius with his somewhat stale moralizing calls the attention of his countrymen to the political usefulness of this piety, and admonishes them that a state cannot consist of wise men alone, and that such ceremonies are very convenient for ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... This might have appeared to any one else who had this, unfortunate man in his hands to afford a chance to nourish his soul as well as his body, and to bestow upon him some reproach, seasoned with moralizing and advice, or a little commiseration, with an exhortation to conduct himself better in the future. My brother did not even ask him from what country he came, nor what was his history. For in his history there is a fault, and my brother seemed to avoid everything which could remind him of ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... has been taken by some intelligent critics to be a moralizing allegory; the second, a moralizing fairy-tale. They are, therefore, a useful type both of Mr. Browning's poetic genius, and of the misunderstanding, to which its constantly intellectual ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the ruins, and moralizing when any one would stop to listen to him, had pointed this out. Mr. Dean was a carpenter, and kept a grocery store as well, so he could pity the lumbermen from the shelter of comparative affluence. When he saw the preacher's wife, he came ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... he failed in his larger poems, he had a genius little short of perfect in his handling of shorter forms. The Arthurian story which produced only middling moralizing in the Idylls, gave us as well the supremely written Homeric episode of the Morte d'Arthur, and the sharp and defined beauty of Sir Galahad and the Lady of Shallott. Tennyson had a touch of the pre-Raphaelite faculty of minute painting in words, and the writing ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... certain distinction in the description of the Ascension, as the rising figures soar past the constellations of stars, which disappear beneath their feet; for the rest, the symbolic so supplants the direct meaning, that in place of an epic we have a moralizing sermon. But there are traces of delight in the beauty of the outer world, in the sunshine, and sympathy is attributed ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... elapsed after this letter was dispatched, and Rachael had time to wonder with a little chill if she had been too cordial to Billy, and if Billy were laughing her cool little laugh at her one-time step-mother's hospitality and moralizing. ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... his experience and reflection, which wraps him in a most humorous sadness. Jaques, in fact, is a rake turned cynical philosopher. He regards man and nature as only so much material for observation and for moralizing. ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... illusions about her. He saw that while she believed herself to be acting under the influence of religion and other high matters, she was, in truth, a narrow and rather cold-hearted woman, with a strong element of worldliness, disguised in much placid moralizing. At the bottom of his soul he resented her treatment of him, and despised himself for submitting to it. But the old habit had become a tyranny not to be broken. Where else could he go for talk, for intimacy, for rest? And for all his ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... zeal, love, devotion—and to-morrow the smoke will roll, the cannon thunder, and the brute emerge all the same—just as he always does—just as he always does—stamping the flower into the mire, wringing the bird's neck, crushing the shell! Well, well, let's stop moralizing. What's she singing now? Hm! 'Kathleen Mavourneen.' Ha, Benjamin! What's the news ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... to moral inference and justification. The bloodier the fray the better for ballad purposes; no one feels the necessity of apology either for ruthless aggression or for useless blood-letting; the scene is reported as it was presented to the eye of the spectator, not to his moralizing faculty. He is expected to see and to sing, not to scrutinize and meditate. In those rare cases in which a moral inference is drawn, it is always so obvious and elementary that it gives the impression of having been fastened on at the end of the song, in deference to ecclesiastical ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... between the two poets. Pindar packs his [Greek: gnomai], his maxims or moral sentiments, into terse and sometimes obscure epigrams; he utters them in a didactic tone, as of one who can speak with the commanding voice of Delphic wisdom. The moralizing of Bacchylides is rather an utterance of quiet meditation, sometimes recalling the strain of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... in French, was exceedingly popular through-out Europe five or six hundred years ago. It is found in the language of every Christian nation of the period, and, extended by means of accessory incidents and much moralizing, is made to cover several pages in more than one old illuminated manuscript. In the Arundel MSS., in England, there is one of the many versions of the legend written in French so old that it is quite ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... wisdom of Providence had intrusted with the government of the world, fell asleep, and awoke to find himself the very monarch whose abject life and capricious violence had furnished the subject of his moralizing. Endowed with irresponsible power, tempted by passions whose existence in himself he had never suspected, and betrayed by the political necessities of his position, he became gradually guilty of all the crimes and the luxury which ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... confusion is gaining on me I think) has magnificently confounded places and persons in Robert Southey's urn by the Adriatic and devoted friendship for Lord Byron? And immediately the English observer of the phenomenon, after moralizing a little on the crass ignorance of Frenchmen in respect to our literature, goes on to write like an ignoramus himself, on Mme. Charles Reybaud, encouraging that pure budding novelist, who is in fact a hack writer of ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... monotony of a descriptive poem, the author introduced moralizing digressions: advice to the husbandman and the shepherd after the manner of the "Georgics"; compliments to his patrons, like Lyttelton, Bubb Dodington, and the Countess of Hertford; and sentimental narrative episodes, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... could assimilate "Locke on the Understanding," and appreciate a translation of the Memorabilia of Xenophon. Even after his study of this latter book he had a fondness for the calm reasoning of Socrates, and wished to imitate him in his manner of reasoning and moralizing. There is no question but that the great heathen had his influence across the abyss of time upon the mind of a young American destined also to fill, in many respects, the foremost place in his country's history. There ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... evil tidings than the brooklet ceases to ripple beneath the projected shadow of the roadside willow. The self-given promises of that tearful night of parting were forgotten. Vigilance had no place in Lizzie's scheme of heavenly idleness. The idea of moralizing in Elysium! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... situation at this moment was too critical, too full of peril and uncertainty, to afford opportunity for moralizing over Bungay's chances of escape. Only one possibility lay before me—there remained no choice, no necessity for planning. It is pure luck which pries open most doors of life, and it was upon luck alone I must rely now. I have often wondered since ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... pure and simple, it is—comment none, least of all, moralizing comment. The wish is sighed by "everybody," that such pleasant things may "last." Well, they did last the writer's time. But meanwhile the French revolution was a-preparing. A hundred years later it will come, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... knowledge that it is the better part of wisdom in this vale of tears to prepare for heaven. Of course this is fiction only in seeming and by courtesy, almost as far removed from the Novel as the same author's mammoth dictionary or Lives of the Poets. It has Richardson's method of moralizing, while lacking that writer's power of studying humanity in its social relations. The sturdy genius of Dr. Johnson lay ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... not delicate; but his companions, who were occupied in sowing their own oats, perhaps took it as a matter of course that he should be a rake, and were only struck with the exceptional circumstance that he was a pious and moralizing rake. ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... when she was a little girl. Chilian arranged for her to spend most of the mornings with him when he was at home. She liked so very much to hear him read. The histories of that time were rather dry and long spun out, but he had a way of skipping the moralizing and the endless disquisitions and adding a little more vividness to people and incidents. It inspired him to watch her face changing with every emotion, her eyes deepening or brightening, and the slight mark in ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... the events of a recent voyage, or a barely completed crime. The sage backward glance of the Chorus is quick to discover in present ruin a punishment for past crime; so that the plot becomes in a manner a picture of the resistless laws of moral justice. Speeches, a moralizing Chorus, actions not performed but reported in detail, a sense of divine retribution for sin, these are perhaps the qualities which, apart from the poetry itself, we recall most readily as typical of a Greek tragedy. These ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... serious we all are getting! It was your moths, Pierre, that set me moralizing this way. Our work with them is not yet done, either, for we must spread out the sheets of paper on which they are to lay their eggs. Then we can move the pairs of ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... the moral of the Northern Faust. Even the "Victory Feast" changes the whole spirit of Homer, on whom it is founded, by the introduction of the ethical sentiment at the close, borrowed, as a modern would apply what he so borrows from the moralizing Horace. Nothing can be more foreign to the Hellenic genius, (if we except the very disputable intention of the "Prometheus"), than the interior and typical design which usually exalts every conception in Schiller. But it is perfectly open to the modern poet to treat of ancient ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... such moralizing moved like a separate consciousness through the day, as it had for the sixteen years of his service. His rise in his profession had been comparatively rapid. Thirty had found him enshrined as an editor. At thirty-four he had acquired the successful air which distinguishes men who ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... false account; that they would have liked to draw me in for a share in the business, but that I kept well out of it; and that, being full of zeal for what so nearly concerned him, I came to give him timely notice that he might take his precautions. Then, moralizing, I discoursed solemnly about the many rogueries one sees every day here below; that, as for me, being tired with the world and its infamies, I wished to work out my soul's salvation, retire from all its noise, and live with some ...
— The Blunderer • Moliere
... This moralizing on funerals by the sexton's wife was a new phase of life to Mr. Penrose. He had never before met with anyone who took an interest in the matter. It was true that in the city from which he had lately come the question of wicker coffins and of cremation was loudly ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... entering at the turnpike, the gravedigger was admonished in a friendly way, "Look out! Here's the undertaker a coming, to see how you're a getting on with your work!" I believe it is well known in a constitutional country that Mr. Wopsle could not possibly have returned the skull, after moralizing over it, without dusting his fingers on a white napkin taken from his breast; but even that innocent and indispensable action did not pass without the comment, "Wai-ter!" The arrival of the body for interment ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... his fierce outbreak about taking orders from a negro when I was moralizing over the misfortune of marrying a jackass! I got a sort of parting in my hair, and went down ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... moralizing.—Two months passed away, and it was now the season of summer—that delicious season, fraught with more voluptuous pleasures than virgin spring, gloomy autumn or hoary winter. It was in rather an obscure street of Boston—in ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... performances of uncouth administrators were only the manifestations of a bottomless hatred, of a morbid desire to insult and to humble the Jews, and that these administrators were capable at any moment to proceed from moralizing to more tangible forms of ill-treatment. This danger intensified the state ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... that she would like to be a queen. At that moment this new idea of her brought me pure relief. I suppose there were obvious moralizings to be done; it was also possible to take the matter to heart, as a tribute to my position at the cost of myself. I felt no soreness, and I did no moralizing. I was honestly and fully glad that for any reason under heaven she wished ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... which in Sophocles was learned in more miscellaneous and active circles, and moulded by a more powerful imagination, in Euripides often sickens us with the tricks of a pleader, the quibbles of a schoolman, or the dullness of a moralizing declaimer. But as, in the peculiar attributes and character of his writings, Euripides somewhat forestalled his age—as his example had a very important influence upon his successors—as he did not exhibit till the fame of Sophocles ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not answer him in the same moralizing strain, but strove to obtain some farther information in regard to his proceedings proposed for the following day. But neither upon that, nor upon the subject of the note to Lord Sherbrooke, would ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... her, but yet he was frightened. After thinking a little and asking his wife several unimportant questions, he delivered himself of his opinions on the family, on infidelity . . . spoke listlessly for about ten minutes and got into bed again. His moralizing produced no effect. There are a great many opinions in the world, and a good half of them are held by people who have never ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... in the very courts of justice, does not character acquit or condemn as often as facts, and sometimes even in spite of facts?—Yet, [impolitic that I have been and am!] to be so careless of mine!—And now, I doubt, it is irretrievable.—But to leave moralizing. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... when the desires are satisfied, but that otherwise, even the richest and best substitution can offer no satisfaction. It is not daring, therefore, to infer the erotic starting-point. Again we see how the moralizing and training influence of rigidly-required work suppresses all superfluous states which themselves make express demands and might want ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... to the other end of the vessel, where they established themselves among the anchors, ready as ever to swallow an aliment, that seems to find an unextinguishable appetite for its reception among the vulgar. Here he continued his exhibition, now moralizing in the quaint and often in the pithy manner, which renders the southern buffoon so much superior to his duller competitor of the north, and uttering a wild jumble of wholesome truths, loose morality, and witty inuendoes, the latter of which never ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... roving eye now; he saw Rios and he told himself that the gamblers' goddess had whisked him in at the magic moment. For in one essential, as in no others, was Ruiz Rios a man after Jim Kendric's own heart: the Mexican was a man to play for any stake and do no moralizing over the result. ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... moralizing vein— (We know we have a happy knack that way. We have observed, moreover, that young men Are fond of good advice, and so are girls; Especially of that meandering kind, Which winding on so sweetly, treats of all They ought to be ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... fairy godmother can bestow upon him, saves Kielland from saying too much—from enforcing his lesson by marginal comments, a la George Eliot. But he must be obtuse indeed to whom this reticence is not more eloquent and effective than a page of philosophical moralizing. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... scale, considered of necessity from the modern viewpoint. We cannot believe that he had any pretensions to refined art in play building, or rather rebuilding, or to any superficial elegance of style, or to any moralizing pose. We believe him an entertainer pure and simple, who never restricted himself in his means except by the outer conventions and form of the Greek New Comedy and the Roman stage, provided his single aim, that of affording amusement, was attained. To establish ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... I take to moralizing, and I am afraid I waste a good deal of valuable time in speculating on the thoughts, ideas, and, so to speak, the inner life of my neighbours. It is curious to observe a large, well-dressed party seated at dinner, all apparently frank and open as the day, full of fun and good humour, ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... artificial brilliancy were substituted in their place. The rhetoric and philosophy of the schools had infected all the departments of literature. Simple narrative no longer suited the pampered taste of the readers or the writers of history. It must be highly seasoned with sentimentalism and moralizing, with romance and poetry. Tacitus, certainly, did not escape the infection. In the language of Macaulay, "He carries his love of effect far beyond the limits of moderation. He tells a fine story finely, but he cannot tell ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... it is life, with its duties and its stern sacrifices on both parts equally. Libertines, who seek for hidden treasure, are as guilty as other evil-doers who are more hardly dealt with than they. These reflections are not a mere veneer of moralizing; they show the reason of many unexplained misfortunes. But, indeed, this drama points its own moral—or morals, for they ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... that it alone deals with manliness and reality, and he complains that it is always difficult to convince youth that the higher planes of life contain anything but chilly sentiments. He contends that young people are therefore prone to receive moralizing and admonitions with polite attention, but when it comes to action, they carefully observe the life about them in order to conduct themselves in such wise as to be part of the really desirable world inhabited by men of affairs. Owing to this attitude, many young people living ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... to moralizing presently; but I will not here write down my reflections. Suffice it to say that every day in the year I meet children, and grown people too, for that matter, who are "wearing straw hats in the winter," ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... He nodded with a moralizing air, as if reflecting upon the sordid love of property which will make a man carry a jewel-case about with him when the next moment he might find himself in the sea. At least, that was my interpretation of the nodding. Then the brother and sister—for such I afterwards ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... should fall, and its strength lie in its persistence. He would bring what wit he had out of the playhouse, and speak his mind, like Defoe, to the people themselves every post-day. But he would affect no pedantry of moralizing, he would appeal to no passions, he would profess himself only 'a Tatler.' Might he not use, he thought, modestly distrustful of the charm of his own mind, some of the news obtained by virtue of the office of Gazetteer that Harley had given him, to bring weight ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... one might have lectured him for an hour without doing as much good as that little call and the chat that grew out of it, for, though nothing very wise or witty was said, many things were suggested, and every one knows that persuasive influences are better than any amount of moralizing. Neither Polly nor Will tried to do anything of the sort, and that was the charm of it. Nobody likes to be talked to, but nobody can resist the eloquence of unconscious preaching. With all his thoughtlessness, Tom was quick to see and feel these things, and was ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... no answer: and Cecilia, privately moralizing upon the different estimates of expence and economy made by the dissipated and the charitable, soon retired to her own apartment, determined firmly to adhere to her lately adopted plan, and hoping, by the assistance of her new and very singular ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... in a happily chastened frame of mind and body. And I rather suspect that Sandy's moralizing had the more force because it was preceded by my pancake turner! But one thing I know—Suzanne Estelle is terrified whenever I step into her kitchen. I casually picked up the potato-masher this morning while I was commenting upon last night's over-salty soup, and she ran ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... fellow mean? Ray asked himself. Did he still suspect, in spite of his efforts to conceal the fact, who Ruth Richards really was? And did he mean to imply, by his moralizing, that he knew how Ray longed to thrash him for his insolence, and yet knew he must not, for fear of ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... he delineates the events in her life, for which she is now chiefly remembered, with a naive simplicity that becomes piquant from its apparent artlessness. Nor does he indulge, to any disagreeable excess, in the superfluous moralizing which a less shrewd writer would have deemed essential to the effect. He leaves the story to assert its own moral. The reader, who chooses, may ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... its minor epic potentialities. Thus, in addition to turning Painter's prose into the sixains of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, he cuts the length of Painter's tale by about two-thirds. In the process, much of Painter's attention to historical detail, his complication of plot, and his tedious moralizing are mercifully lost. By way of amplification in the minor epic mode, Barksted expands as follows Mahomet's brief command in Painter that Hiren should "adorne herselfe with her most precious jewels, and decke her with the costliest apparell shee had" (see stanza ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... arose with quieter feelings, and felt leisure to attend to indifferent objects.—Still I continued in the church-yard, reading the various inscriptions, and moralizing on them with that kind of levity, which will not unfrequently spring up in the mind, in ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... plot. The author has no story to tell. His aim is to amuse the reader by odd and whimsical remarks on every subject and on every personage whose peculiarities promise material for humor and satire. Sterne is perpetually digressing, moralizing commenting on every trivial topic which enters into his story, until the story itself is completely lost, if, indeed, it can be said ever to have been begun. The absence of arrangement is so marked ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... little gal," said Dick, in a moralizing vein, "isn't this rayther undootiful conduct on your part? Ain't it a piece of ingratitude, when we go to the trouble of earning the money to pay for gingerbread for you to eat, that you ain't willing to ...
— Timothy Crump's Ward - A Story of American Life • Horatio Alger
... only 42; the odd numbers are on the other side. I must cross. What a lot of rubbish on the road; and do you think I would let my girl stand out bareheaded like that, gossiping with a lot of idle young chaps?" Thus thinking and moralizing Mrs. Rowles went down the street towards the eastern end ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... of moralizing; a few days before the Revolution occurred, whilst a man was driving me through the Place de la Concorde, I observed a scaffolding in the middle, and asked what it was for, and having informed me that it was for the purpose of erecting ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... has not chased the butterfly, And crushed its slender legs and wings, And heaved a moralizing sigh: Alas! how frail are ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... if everywhere and forever spring was the order of things. And is it not so? Is not the idea of the creation an eternal spring ever trembling on the verge of summer? It seemed so to the curate, who was not given to sad, still less to sentimental moralizing over the graves. From such moods his heart recoiled. To him they were weak and mawkish, and in him they would have been treacherous. No grave was to him the place where a friend was lying; it was but a cenotaph—the place where ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... is such a moralizing or muddizing, if I may be for once admitted to coin a new word to give these men their due, of Christianity now introduced and coming in fashion, many of the late pieces in request do evince. Now that Christianity should moralize men above all things, ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... to cavil at this moralizing and didactic temper, which animates a large part of the nation and is responsible for much of the British achievement. But its place is in the world of action not in that of letters, and it does not produce the greatest literature or the truest thought. The Greeks might have gained ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... true, Buried in clothes, exclaim'd the son of barter, "Got blesh my shoul! you'll shell this pretty garter?" Here let me pause;—the Muse, in sad affright, Turns from the dire disasters of that night; Quite panic-struck she drops her trembling plumes, And thus a moralizing theme assumes:— Know, gentle Ladies, once these shapeless walls, O'er whose grey wreck the shading ivy crawls, Compos'd a graceful mansion, whose fair mould Led from the road the trav'ller, to behold. Oft, when the morning ting'd the redd'ning ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... We snuff the battle as it were afar off. It is impossible to become so entirely absorbed in the story of the Cenci as to prevent the morning's telegram from home intruding, and so it came about that this time we did less moralizing than before. We were fortunate in being in Rome during Easter Week, which gave us an opportunity to hear the best music; and certainly there is no choir for vocal music which can rank with that of the Pope. It is the only choir I ever heard which I felt the finest organ would spoil. It produces ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... remarked, and should be readily granted, that patient plodding is less piquant than the by-play of inertia and revolt. The spirit of Nietsche is doubtless even now yawning mightily at such tedious moralizing; fresh proof of the "dull, gloomy seriousness," the hopeless {6} stupidity of our sublunary virtue. I believe that Nietsche has frankly confessed the real grievance of his class of mischief makers. ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Garrulity—how prone he is to make much of little things, and to elevate to the dignity of Important and Commanding Events that which is perchance only of the very slightest moment. By Prosing and Amplifying, by Moralizing and Digressing, by spinning of yarns and wearing of reflections threadbare, I might make a Great Book out of the pettiest and most uneventful career; but even in honestly transcribing my actual adventures, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... think with any charity of those who dwelt but in the twilight of your open day—the very verger, sleek, round, and smiling, as he stands by you in his sake-robes, shall, in his honest zeal, supply an antidote for the evil, moralizing on the vanity of such supplications, and winding up his simple homily with the significant—"Where the tree falleth, there it shall lie!" Think on that, rigid critic, and take heed how you fall!—nor, if you have the capacity for finding "good in every thing," will you disdain to learn the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... end is traditionally the season for moralizing and retrospect. Eheu! fugaces anni is a sigh that even the Latin primer teaches us; and though in schoolbook days calling the years fugacious seems absurd, we catch the meaning as they glide away. To schoolboys the man of fifty is immoderately old: thirty ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... false teeth, and quite as false a tongue, Which tells how virtuous was the world when—she and it were young. Or rather for these thirty years has moralizing told, How this good deed and that she'll do, before she grows old: Four-and-twenty sighs a-day, that our rude English sky Is not precise as she—and may wash off the dye Meretricious of her cheeks, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... in Ames at this juncture, "I think we have spent quite enough time moralizing. Suppose you now indicate your attitude on the cotton tariff. I'd like to know ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... stories of our own in the collection over which generations of Turks have laughed, the tales of Nasir Eddin. In reference to these, it may be noted that Turkish wit and humor are usually distinguished by a moralizing quality. When a man came to Nasir Eddin for the loan of a rope, the request was refused with the excuse that Nasir's only piece had been used to tie up flour. "But it is impossible to tie up flour with a rope," was the protest. Nasir ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... tyrannical; but alas! he answered not merely for his own misdeeds, but for the misdeeds, the tyrannical conduct of centuries of kingcraft. It was an inevitable consequence—and it will ever be so. But I am moralizing. ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... on paper, but there are moments when one derives one's best consolation from so moralizing; and this easy and simple justification of Providence, which refers all that appears inconsistent here to the retribution of a future state, is pointed out less as the duty than the happiness of mankind. This single argument of religion solves every difficulty, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... incident of his life is a patch of bright light, which stands out almost glaringly from the general shadow. The account is not merely, nor, indeed, entirely history. Looking always for a sermon or a subject for a philosophical lesson, Philo has tricked out the record of the facts with much moralizing observation on the general lot of mankind, and elaborated the part of Providence more in the spirit of religious romance than of scientific history. Yet the main facts are clear. Philo prepared a long philosophical "apologia" for the Jews and set out ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... distance. So fair, unfeatured, misty and sparkling at once, lay life before the young gazer. Mr. Falkirk might have moralized thus, standing close behind her as he was, still and silent; but it is not likely he did; useless moralizing was never in ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... party, old Crony was the most sensibly affected by the late rencontre; twenty bottles of soda-water could not have produced a more important change. His conversation and appearance had, in an instant, recovered their wonted steadiness; and before we were half across the market, Crony was moralizing upon the dangers of the scene from which we had so recently and fortunately escaped. But hearts young and buoyant as ours, when lighted up by the fire of enterprise, and provoked to action by potent charges of the grape, were not ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Much more goes into the making of a novel, they sarcastically pointed out, than pens, ink, and quires of paper. D'Argens, like Fielding, relished reflective passages and could approve, more readily than Mrs. Manley, of "an Historian that amuses himself by Moralizing or Describing." D'Argens's list of the features to be found in good history and good fiction shows him to be a thoroughgoing rationalist and separates his ideal from that of young readers, who, according to the preface to The Adventures of Theagenes ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... to moralizing. Who's got the most strawberries? The premium is to be the finest bunch in ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... smoky lanterns—concealing them with a decent, decorous, sacred duplicity even from Aunt Tabby, who trotted across the country on her father's old trotting mare, took her observations, and departed, shaking her head and moralizing on the text, "Cast ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... moralizing may also reveal itself here as that which it has always been—namely, resolutely MONTRER SES PLAIES, according to Balzac—I would venture to protest against an improper and injurious alteration of rank, which quite unnoticed, and as if with the best conscience, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... He accordingly produced the biography which had so much success. Judged solely as literature, the book is beneath contempt. The style is turgid, overloaded, and at times silly. The statements are loose, the mode of narration confused and incoherent, and the moralizing is flat and common-place to the last degree. Yet there was a certain sincerity of feeling underneath all the bombast and platitudes, and this saved the book. The biography did not go, and was not intended to go, into the hands of the polite ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... beautiful in unselfishness," said Daisy, in a rather prim, moralizing little tone. "Do you know, Jasmine, that I was once going to be frightfully selfish?—I should have been but for the Prince, but he spoke to me; he made up a lovely little story, and he told me ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... prevents further moralizing. No room for gravity when Johnnie Douglas is near. His mischievous spirit ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... were born in it, we live in it, and we shall die in it. If, therefore, I had Monsieur de Crebillon's pen, I should write the history of a bed, and what exciting and terrible, as well as delightful moving occurrences would not such a book contain! What lessons and what subjects for moralizing could one not draw ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... the humour for a little moralizing, I opened the lych-gate and entered the churchyard. The congregation were singing the last hymn, the Old Hundredth, if I remember rightly, and the sound of their united voices fitted perfectly into the whole scheme, giving it the one ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... could have given unto them on copperplate or canvas. The body of the stove itself was divided into panels, which had the Ages of Man painted on them in polychrome; the borders of the panels had roses and holly and laurel and other foliage, and German mottoes in black letter of odd Old-World moralizing, such as the old Teutons, and the Dutch after them, love to have on their chimney-places and their drinking-cups, their dishes and flagons. The whole was burnished with gilding in many parts, and was radiant everywhere ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)
... pseudo-Theocritus, Salamon Gessner, who sang of this same vale of Neto in his "Daphnis"? Alas, the good Salamon has gone the way of all derivative bores; he is dead—deader than King Psammeticus; he is now moralizing in some decorous Paradise amid flocks of Dresden-China sheep and sugar-watery youths and maidens. Who can read his much-translated masterpiece without unpleasant twinges? Dead ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... not marred by too much realism or sentiment or moralizing, older children will respond with interest to a discussion of human reproduction. Even when a child is approachable, if your own emotional balance is insecure, it is, perhaps, well to work out these objective and tangible activities with the children, ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... One takes 'oferhigian' as meaning 'to exceed,' and, inserting 'hord' after 'gehwone,' renders: The treasure may easily, the gold in the ground, exceed in value every hoard of man, hide it who will. The other takes 'oferhigian' as meaning 'to render arrogant,' and, giving the sentence a moralizing tone, renders substantially as in the body of this work. (Cf. 2813 ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... Kingsley the decent flow of fiction when the mood was on him. His notion of constructing a novel was to take equal parts of wooden melodrama and low comedy and stick them boldly together in a paste of impertinent drollery and serious but entirely irrelevant moralizing. And yet each time I read Ravenshoe—and I must be close upon "double figures"—I like it better. Henry did my green unknowing youth engage, and I find it next to impossible to give him up, and quite impossible to choose the venerated Charles as a substitute in my riper age. For here crops ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... for personal reactions, e.g., criticisms, interpretation, moralizing, personal philosophizing, or as mere facts entertainingly told: the idea ...
— A Guide to Methods and Observation in History - Studies in High School Observation • Calvin Olin Davis
... possessions of commodities (sellers and buyers, creditors and debtors, contracts, obligations, etc.), by which we can bring it down as common-law to the use and benefit of a still small bourgeois and half feudal society; or, with the help of pseudo-enlightened and moralizing jurists, a code (which is bad from a legal point of view) can be worked out suitable to the conditions of the particular society (as the Prussian land law). And, still again, after a great bourgeois revolution, a classical code for bourgeois society, such as the French "Code Civil," ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... good in the traditional bygone time long before Cyrus, when it appears to have been highly appreciated in the festivities of Glorious Jamshed, the founder of Persepolis. The poet Omar Khayyam, in moralizing over the ruins of the fallen splendour of that famous ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... aesthetic values. Civilization no less than religion must fight this. For it is as false in experience and as unclear in thinking as could well be imagined. Its defense, so far as it has any, is based upon the confusion in the pagan mind of morality with moralizing, a confusion that no good humanist would ever permit himself. Of course, the end of art is neither preaching nor teaching but delighting. For that very reason, however, art, too, must conform—hateful word!—conform to fixed standards. For the sense of proportion, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... on such occasions, if we are in a moralizing mood, that we may be keenly impressed with the truth of the saying, that the secret of happiness consists in keeping alive our susceptibilities by frugal indulgences, rather than by seeking a multitude of pleasures, that pall in exact ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... newspapers, and statistics by some one at best imperfectly acquainted with his subject, was attempted to be conveyed by means of questions and answers, supplemented by dreary and unnecessary remarks of a moralizing tendency. The persons in whose company Smeeton would send us round, in order that we may form a just conception of the "vice and deception in all their real deformity," of which he speaks, are ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... outline was slim and graceful, and the contour of her head charming,—facts that had evidently not escaped the observation of the expressman and Mr. Heckshill, and that might have accounted for the cautious reticence of the one and the comfortable moralizing of the other. ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... Moralizing was at an end when she got to the gardener's shop. The consultations and discussions which went on then, drove everything else out of her head. The matter in hand was a winter garden, for their ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... While we have been moralizing, Eric has eaten his supper, neatly packed up the few things left about, and, with Froll and his travelling-bag, starts from ...
— Eric - or, Under the Sea • Mrs. S. B. C. Samuels
... But we are moralizing, and this may not be the most showy inducement for the reader to visit Mr. Burford's Panorama, and admire its pictorial beauties. Let him do so; and before he leaves the place, turn about, and think for himself, and be assured there ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... Critical Rev., LIII (287-290), appeared in April, 1782. While the same poems are but slightly esteemed to-day, it must be recognized that the attitude of the reviewer was severe for his time. The age had grown accustomed to large draughts of moralizing and didacticism in verse, and the quality of Cowper's contribution was assuredly above the average. The Monthly Rev., LXVII, p. 262, gave the Poems a ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... what is that to me now? If he win the day, I am lost forever—for it is only through her I will be a better man—and surely, with Lawson's nature, he would willingly make the sacrifice. But here I am, moralizing like a preacher," cried the young man, as he arose and began pacing up and down the floor in an excited manner. "By heaven! it won't do to give up! If I ever expect to be a better man I must first ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... are again in the Acadian forest—a truce to moralizing—let us enjoy the scenery. The road we are on is but a few miles from the sea-shore, but the ocean is hidden from view by the thick woods. As we ride along, however, we skirt the edges of coves and inlets that frequently break in upon the landscape. There is a chain of fresh-water ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... (who had been sent out to play, while that Business was transacting) returned some in Tears, and others very disconsolate, for the Loss of a little Dormouse they were very fond of, and which was just dead. Mrs. Margery, who had the Art of moralizing and drawing Instructions from every Accident, took this Opportunity of reading them a Lecture on the Uncertainty of Life, and the Necessity of being always prepared for Death. You should get up in the Morning, says she, and to conduct yourselves, as if that ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous
... Moralizing thus, but always with an architectural or house-building background, she continued her work, noticing the sharp grooves and projecting mouldings that caught the dust, the high, ugly thresholds, the doors that swung the wrong way, compelling half a dozen extra steps in ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... already conceived of the possibility of this from Bjornson, who practises the same method, but I was still too sunken in the gross darkness of English fiction to rise to a full consciousness of its excellence. When I remembered the deliberate and impertinent moralizing of Thackeray, the clumsy exegesis of George Eliot, the knowing nods and winks of Charles Reade, the stage-carpentering and limelighting of Dickens, even the fine and important analysis of Hawthorne, it was with a joyful astonishment that I realized ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... half moralizing, and drawing, like a true lover, an omen of fear or hope from occurrences in which plain reason could have perceived neither type nor token, Clarence continued and concluded his day's journey. He put up at the same little inn he had visited three years ago, and watched ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with him over the bamboo picket, I found this islander a philosopher of nature—a wild heathen, moralizing upon the vices and follies of the Christian court of Tahiti—a savage, scorning the degeneracy of the people among ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... Thought will, now and then, take up a passing incident, and extract the moral. But how little the wiser are we for moralizing! we look into the mirror of truth, and see ourselves—then turn away, and forget what manner of men we are. Better for us if it were not so; if we remembered the image that held ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... good deal of philosophy, too, in a pipe, if one will but take the trouble to study it; great subjects for moralizing, much food for reflection; and all this outside of the physical enjoyment, the soothing influences of a quiet pipe, when the day is drawing to a close, and its cares require some gentle force to banish them away. It does not weaken the ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... this in order that you may understand that I have no need of advice, or of moralizing,—merely of money. Alas! I do not ask any thing of you for myself, my dear friend, but I am about to make a marriage for my daughter, and here we are actually, although secretly, fallen into absolute destitution. ...
— Mercadet - A Comedy In Three Acts • Honore De Balzac |
