"Rightness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rightness of the protest. 'But I can't help it. I was just thinking how he got his feet wet in pushing the boat off.' She laughed again. 'When we were safely off, someone came down to the shore and shouted to Mr Fuge to bring the boat back. You ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... mother has ruined; he does not care for it a pin: he is not the less confident of a nature that is immortal. In virtue of this belief in life, he is indifferent to the form of it. When, later in the play, he seems to fear death, it is death the consequence of an action of whose rightness ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... Palmer's idea; and for some time the attempt to carry it into effect was followed up at Oxford. Plans of "Association" were drawn up and rejected. The endeavour brought out differences of opinion—differences as to the rightness or the policy of specific mention of doctrines; differences as to the union of Church and State, on the importance of maintaining which, as long as possible, Mr. Newman sided with Mr. Palmer against Mr. Keble's more uncompromising view. A "third formulary" was ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision. I forgot to observe, when speaking of the New Testament, that you should read all the histories of Christ, as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us, to be Pseudo-evangelists, as those they named Evangelists. Because these Pseudo-evangelists ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... husband with loving eyes, you might have divined that, however kind-hearted, she was not indulgent, neither lenient to her own faults nor to those of others; perfectly unassuming, but with a sense of duty, a feeling of the absolute rightness of some deeds and of the absolute wrongness of others, which would be, even to those she loved best ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... And that's what I've been thinking of, all these weeks of misery—your perfect sincerity. I've asked myself whether it would be possible for you to find yourself in such a position as mine; and how you would act, how you would speak. You're my ideal of truth and rightness, Bertha; I've ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... Great Violation consists in the claim by individuals to have taken, without having moved, sites and soils called "estates", "domains", "plots": for, as rent tends to rightness when paid to the fifty millions of a nation, fifty-millionfold is its wrongness when paid to one; and as rent is right when paid to the thousand million inhabitants of a planet, a thousand-millionfold is its ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... of the Western World," or in Mr. Masefield's "Nan"—are so removed from our ken that we cannot really tell, and therefore do not care, whether an absolute illusion is maintained. The poetry which may and should exist in naturalistic drama, can only be that of perfect rightness of proportion, rhythm, shape—the poetry, in fact, that lies in all vital things. It is the ill-mating of forms that has killed a thousand plays. We want no more bastard drama; no more attempts to dress out the simple dignity of everyday life in the peacock's feathers of false ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... they point, but a substitute for or representative of that—an anticipation of or prevision of it, a symbol of a fact. Their own kind or degree of reality is sometimes called 'validity'—a term I do not like: it might be more simply named 'rightness' with the connotation of a certain incumbency and imperativeness as well as of an appeal or adjustment to our nature as we know it; or perhaps all we can say is that their reality—it seems a paradox that an ideal should possess 'reality'—consists in their ...
— Progress and History • Various
... Moses' early manhood came when he woke to a realization of his kinship with the despised and oppressed serfs and an appreciation of the cruel injustice of which they were the helpless victims. Was Moses justified in resisting the Egyptian taskmaster? Are numbers essential to the rightness of a cause? What right had Ramses II to demand forced labor from the immigrants within his border? Was he justified in his method of exacting tribute? Is peonage always disastrous not only to its victims but also to ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... was not on one of these occasions, but once when he had come in on no better pretext than that of simply wanting to (she had after all virtually invited him), that she mentioned how only one song in a thousand was successful and that the terrible difficulty was in getting the right words. This rightness was just a vulgar "fluke"— there were lots of words really clever that were of no use at all. Peter said, laughing, that he supposed any words he should try to produce would be sure to be too clever; yet only three weeks after his first encounter with Mrs. Ryves he sat at ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... are willing to tolerate very much uncertainty. Rather than live with the discomfort of not knowing why, they will create an explanation or find some answer, any answer, and then ever after, assert its rightness like a shipwrecked person clings to a floating spar in a storm. This is how I explain the genesis of many ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... missionary of some sort, and Lucy had a vague idea that the influence of a good woman was always effective in such cases. She never imagined that the youth would test her pretty, heartfelt opinions and her glowing faith in the rightness of things in the cold, ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... momentum with which the goal is reached. It is like an accumulation of evidence, a constellation of associations. AB foretells C; but ABCDEF rushes yet more strongly upon G. So it is that the irresistibleness, the "unalterable rightness" of a piece of music increases from ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... faithful, obedient fabric he divined honour and exultation. Poised upon uncertainty, she was sure. The camber of her white-scrubbed decks, the long, clean sheer of her hull, the concave flare of her bows—what was the amazing joy and rightness of these things? And yet the grotesque passengers regarded her only as a vehicle, to carry them sedatively to some clamouring dock. Fools! She was more lovely than anything they would ever see again! He yearned ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... imitation of all those classes of society which profess to have opinions. It would thus become an established element in the temper of the age. Nor need we fear that the result of this would be any flaccidity of conviction, or lethargy in act. A man would still be penetrated with the rightness of his own opinion on a given issue, and would still do all that he could to make it prevail in practice. But among the things which he would no longer permit himself to do, would be the forcible repression in others of any opinions, ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... not a question of courage, but one of mental process. Some people come of a caste to whom war or the idea of fighting for their country is second nature. They take it for granted, like death and taxes. If they ever permitted themselves seriously to question the rightness of it; to submit patriotism and courage to an acid analysis, they might suddenly turn arrant cowards. How much harder is it, then, for people who have never even faced the idea of it before to be suddenly placed up against the ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... tradition of that extraordinary in the romantic handed down to us, as the most attaching and inviting spell of Italy, by all the old academic literature of travel and art of the Salvator Rosas and Claudes. This is the main tribute I may pay in a few words to an impression of which a sort of divine rightness of oddity, a pictorial felicity that was almost not of this world, but of a higher degree of distinction altogether, affected me as the leading note; yet about the whole exquisite complexity of which I can't pretend to ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... any organism, is to be set right—to have all its parts brought into harmony with each other; the one comfort is to know this cure in process. Rightness alone is cure. The return of the organism to its true self, is its only possible ease. To free a man from suffering, he must be set right, put in health; and the health at the root of man's being, his rightness, ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... being able to agree solemnly with her sentiment as he was accustomed to do, in recognition of having had his way in one supreme instance; when he made her elope with him—the most momentous step imaginable in a young lady's life. He had been really trying to acknowledge it by taking the rightness of her feeling for granted on every other occasion. It had become a sort of habit at last. And it is never pleasant to break a habit. The man was deeply troubled. I said: ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... the inexhaustible supply of oysters. At the musical evening the music was as admirably rendered as it was completely neglected. And at both parties only those people were present as to whose social status and absolute "rightness" there could be no question. Indeed the dancer, whose foot had been trodden upon at the former, might console herself with the thought that none but a noble boot had caused her pain; while at the latter the sounds of heavy breathing, which mingled inharmoniously with Mlle. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 18, 1891 • Various
... the Dutch leaf-treatment generally, and elaborate demonstration, by the aid of many plates, of the infinite superiority of Turner, closing with what sounds a strange admission after such teachings and such arguments:—'Remember always that Turner's greatness and rightness in all these points successively depend on no scientific knowledge. He was entirely ignorant of all the laws we have been developing. He had merely accustomed himself to ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... certainly did—to know every phrase, every word which was coming. None could have been other, or been placed otherwise than it was—and that's the highest praise one can give to anybody's prose, isn't it? One jumped to the perfect rightness of the whole—a rightness so perfect as to make the sentences ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... securing its territory; but from this on the vanquished were not eaten, and it was morally wrong to eat them. They were kept alive and put to work at raising harvests for their conquerors, hence arose the institution of slavery, and hence its moral rightness even in this country of the free, down to the beginning of the generation to ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... theatre parties, receptions, were being given for her not only by her old friends—who seemed to her to grow more numerous daily—but by their daughters and by many others who made up for lack of tradition by that admirable sense of rightness which makes fashionable society in America such a waste of efficiency and force. And whether the younger women privately hated her or had fallen victims to that famous charm was of little public consequence. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the whip-snapping of the ring-master, but with the consummate art that conceals art. When his prosodic effects are obvious they lose their power; we can see how the trick is done and we do not marvel. But when we feel vaguely the haunting quality of a melodious line or the perfect metrical rightness of a phrase without knowing why the melody haunts us or the phrase just fits, then we both marvel and applaud; then the poet's gift, his divine authorization, is patent, and we recognize ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... enough simply to reply, in respect to Kate, that she was indeed a luxury to take about the world: she expressed no more surprise than that at her "rightness" to-day. Wasn't it by this time sufficiently manifest that it was precisely as the very luxury she was proving that she had, from far back, been appraised and waited for? Crude elation, however, might be kept ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... and illustrations are as powerful as it is ever in the nature of evil things to be (there is no final strength but in rightness). Nothing more witty, nor more inventively horrible, has yet been produced in the evil literature, or by the evil art, of man: nor can I conceive it possible to go beyond either in their specialities of corruption. The text is full of blasphemies, ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... Inspiring. It grips my imagination. I think of the other men who must be at work. Working as I do rather in the dark as yet. With whom I shall presently join up... The attempt may fail; all things human may fail; but on the other hand it may succeed. I never had such faith in anything as I have in the rightness of the work I am doing now. I begin at that. But here is where my difficulty comes in. The top of my brain, my innermost self says all that I have been saying, but—The rest of me won't follow. The rest of me refuses to attend, ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... name—should it really leak out, despite all his precautions—would come to stand for atheism and immorality, a catchword of ill-omen for a century or two; but he smiled on, relying upon the inherent reasonableness and rightness ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... features were in entire harmony with his Jewish name. He was indeed a Jew, and, young though he was, had all the depth, self-control, and steadfastness of purpose of that strange race. He also had, as the sequel will show their indifference as to the rightness of the means employed so long as the end ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... happy and so convinced of the essential rightness of a world which had produced George Remington that she had a friendly smile for every one, even for unshaven men who kept their battered derby hats on their heads, had viciously smelling cigars in their mouths, ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... a certain rude rightness in this plea might have been found exasperating; but as she had often watched Sir Claude in apprehension of displeasures that didn't come, so now, instead of saying "Oh hell!" as her father used, she ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... Quentin from the Warden down were the three that rotted there together in solitary. And here at the end of my days, reviewing all that I have known of life, I am compelled to the conclusion that strong minds are never docile. The stupid men, the fearful men, the men ungifted with passionate rightness and fearless championship—these are the men who make model prisoners. I thank all gods that Jake Oppenheimer, Ed Morrell, and ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... and cried out again, 'Lord, how couldst thou find out such a word as this?' for I was filled with admiration at the fitness and at the unexpectedness of the sentence. The fitness of the word; the rightness of the timing of it; the power and sweetness and light and glory that came with it also, were marvellous to me to find. I was now for the time out of doubt as to that about which I was so much in doubt before. I seemed ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... their own home was safe, the sorrow of other homes, devastated and mourning, weighed heavily upon Mary Ballard, and she needed to listen to the stirring editorials of the Tribune, which Bertrand read with dramatic intensity, to bolster up her faith in the rightness of this war between men who ought to be brothers in their hopes and ambitions for the national life of their ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... scene between Nina and Hilary Jesson in the third act; yet we await with eager anticipation the discomfiture of the Ridgeley family; and when we realize that it is to be brought about by the disclosure to Filmer of Annabel's secret, the manifest rightness of the proceeding gives us a little shock of pleasure. Mr. Somerset Maugham, again, in the last act of Grace, employs an ingenious device to keep the tension at a high pitch. The matter of the act consists mainly of a debate as to whether ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... it was not right when you were "lenient" and gave them protection. You cannot mean that. The rightness or wrongness must be a matter of law, not of personal discretion, and for you to attempt to substitute your discretion is to set up a little autocracy m place of the settled laws of the land. This would justify a charge of "Kaiserism" right ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... study were of a two times border; inside part show tiny yellow and white hemispheres, outside part show much large yellow globes. When I behold Chrysanthemums to me alone I say, "Can it be English flower-book is of a rightness? 'That a heart to desolation is now left?' Perhaps the foreign game we cannot play." and ...
— Seven Maids of Far Cathay • Bing Ding, Ed.
... will doubtless remember having met me in South Africa at the time when the Rev. J.J. Doke was assisting you in your campaign there and I subsequently returned to England deeply impressed with the rightness of your attitude in that country. During the months before war I wrote and lectured and spoke on your behalf in several places which I do not regret. Since returning from military service, however, I have noticed from the papers that you appear to be adopting a more militant ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... perfectly adapted to his mood and to his powers. There are no novel ideas in "Snow-Bound," nor is there any need of them, but the thousands of annual pilgrims to the old farmhouse can bear witness to the touching intimacy, the homely charm, the unerring rightness of feeling with which Whittier's genius recreated his own lost youth and painted for all time a ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Great faith, rightness of mind, influence over other men, and finally, personal success and satisfaction come of service to the ideals of the profession. Were these strengths reflected throughout the officer body, it could well happen that because of the shining example, the American ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... or fight. This sledgehammer blow at England's pride might well have caused war had not sober patriots on both sides of the Atlantic, aghast at this shocking possibility, smoothed the way to an understanding, and had not the British Government itself acknowledged the rightness of the demand for arbitration. So the danger vanished, but Roosevelt, and every other thoughtful American, said to himself, "Suppose England had taken up the challenge, what had we to defend ourselves with?" And we compared the long roll of the great British Fleet with the paltry ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... the sweetness, of this little explanation, with a kind of intimated desire, constituting almost an appeal, for rightness, which seemed to pervade it, left a fragrance in the air after she had vanished. Ransom walked up and down the room, with his hands in his pockets, under the influence of it, without taking up ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... only a stage toward something better. It is but the impulse, God-given I believe, toward a far more vital contact with the truth. We shall one day forget all about duty, and do every thing from the love of the loveliness of it, the satisfaction of the rightness of it. What would you say to a man who ministered to the wants of his wife and family only from duty? Of course you wish heartily that the man who neglects them would do it from any cause, even were it fear of the whip; but ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject any thing, because any other person, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by Heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision. I forgot to observe, when speaking of the New Testament, that you should read all the histories of Christ, as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us to be Pseudo-evangelists, as those they ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... they are the rightest we can attain to for the time being, and until we see something righter. But above all, that opinions on this subject really are either right or wrong, or more right and less right; and that of this rightness or wrongness we really have some kind of perception, however difficult it may be to give an account of it, and that in accordance with such perception we may come to change our opinions or those of other people, ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... unconscious of the threatened crack—crash! It does not happen. A sort of magnetism sticks it together; it is in the air; it makes things go right that ought to go wrong. Awfully naughty place; no sort of idea of rightness here. Humming and strumming, and singing and smoking, splashing, and sparkling; a buzz of voices and booming of sea! If they could only be happy like ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... in my mental and moral distress was the uncertain values of nearly every aspect of the case. There is an invincible sense of wild rightness about passionate love that no reasoning and no training will ever altogether repudiate; I had a persuasion that out of that I would presently extract a magic to excuse my deceits and treacheries and assuage my smarting shame. And round these deep central preoccupations were others of acute ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... theory can be of decisive importance here. To every consequent ethical consciousness there is a standard of value, a primordial value which determines the single ethical judgments as their last presupposition, and the "rightness" of this basis, the "value" of this value can as little be discussed as the "rationality" of our logical principles. There is here revealed a possibility of ethical scepticism which evolutionistic ethics ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... a trite thing to say in praise of a great genius; but when you reflect that Shakespeare is read throughout the civilized world, the simple fact that the splendor of his poetry is balanced by the rightness of his message becomes significant and impressive. It speaks not only for Shakespeare but for the moral quality of the multitudes who acknowledge his mastery. Wherever his plays are read, on land or sea, in the crowded cities of men or the far silent places of the earth, there the solitary man finds ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... pass. But it was the termination of the discussion, a termination which left Ju victor, not because of the rightness of his views, but because there was no man in Orrville capable of joining issue with him in debate with any hope of success. Action rather than words was the prevailing feature with these people, and, in his way, Ju Penrose was equal, if not superior, not only in debate, but ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... we explained already, in the doctrine of identity and iteration, because the mental series exactly tallies with the material series. It required an insight that could rank things in order and series; or, rather, it required such rightness of position, that the poles of the eye should coincide with the axis of the world. The earth has fed its mankind through five or six millenniums, and they had sciences, religions, philosophies; and yet had failed to see the correspondence ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson |
