"Unspiritual" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... own Caesarean creed, and protests his unchanged adherence to it. Then he relates its unanimous acceptance, subject to the insertion of the single word of one essence, which Constantine explained to be directed against materializing and unspiritual views of the divine generation. But it emerged from the debates in so altered a form that he could not sign it without careful examination. His first scruple was at of the essence of the Father, which was ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... it was effected, in what sense not effected, we know nothing. But this by mere human meditation, this profound difficulty we may humanly understand and measure, viz., the all but impossibility of reaching the man who stands removed to an extent of fifteen centuries. But here comes in the unspiritual mind which thinks only of facts—yet mark me so far, Rome by an augury of wicked gods stretched to a period of 1,200 years. Yet how open to doubt in one sense! Not, I am sure, in any sense understood by man, but I doubt not in the ominous sense intended. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... "I feel about discouraged. Of what use is all our praying and longing for the Holy Spirit, when our own church members are so cold and unspiritual that all His influence is destroyed? You know I made a special plea to all the members to come out to-night, yet only a handful were there. I feel like giving up the struggle. You know I could make a better living in literary work, and the ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... lightly passed over, for they are too valuable. The flesh is impatient of all delay, both in decision and action; hence all carnal choices are immature and premature, and all carnal courses are mistaken and unspiritual. God is often moved to delay that we may be led to pray, and even the answers to prayer are deferred that the natural and carnal spirit may be kept in check and self-will may bow before the will ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... tells us exultantly in her journal how successful were her raids upon the parsons, and in what dread all unspiritual ministers stood of her visitations. And the same rigid censorship prevails in many quarters still. The preacher who thunders so defiantly against spiritual foes is trembling all the time beneath the critical ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... right, one wrinkled hand resting on the neck of the Newfoundland. It was a typical Italian face, large-cheeked and large-jawed, with good eyes,—a little sleepy, but not unspiritual. His red-edged cassock allowed a glimpse of red stockings to be seen, and his finely worked cross and chain, his red sash, and the bright ribbon that lit up his broad-brimmed hat, made spots of cheerful colour in the shadow of ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the stimulus to the worth while endeavour. The inventors who have enriched the world endured derision seeing the things invisible to others. The truth is that it is the unspiritual world that makes the least progress in things material. The men of faith and vision are back of all advance. They have endurance, patience, and strength. The sense of another world where motives are rightly measured, the sense of a great cloud ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... that delightful inconsistency so often brought to bear on the so-called or self-styled "supernatural," first describe the "indescribable," and then, in the language of the unspiritual Dr. Lynn, tell how it is all done; for, of course, I found it all out, like a great many others of the enlightened and select audience which gathered at Miss Annie Eva Fay's first drawing-room reception in the Queen's ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... secondly, besides this Spontaneousness there is this other great characteristic of Growth—Mysteriousness. Upon this quality depends the fact, probably, that so few men ever fathom its real character. We are most unspiritual always in dealing with the simplest spiritual things. A lily grows mysteriously, pushing up its solid weight of stem and leaf in the teeth of gravity. Shaped into beauty by secret and invisible fingers, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... without beauty, and, therefore, not without weight; but I cannot see enough of difference between the two accounts to warrant the hypothesis that the first refers to an unspiritual man, the second to a spiritual. The first account says that 'man was made in God's image.' The second says of the man which it describes, that 'God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... grass, proper creatures of the earth to which he is returning. The saintly vicar visits him considerately; is repelled with politeness; goes on his way pondering inwardly what kind of place there might be, in any possible scheme of another world, for so absolutely unspiritual a subject. In fact, as the breath of the infinite world came about him, he clung all [242] the faster to the beloved finite things still in contact with him; he had successfully hidden from his eyes ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... difficulty and delay that calls for persevering prayer, that the true blessing and blessedness of the heavenly life will be found. We there learn how little we delight in fellowship with God, and how little we have of living faith in Him. We discover how earthly and unspiritual our heart still is, how little we have of God's Holy Spirit. We there are brought to know our own weakness and unworthiness, and to yield to God's Spirit to pray in us, to take our place in Christ Jesus, and abide in Him as our only plea with the Father. There our own will and strength ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... the Son of David, are all tokens that the crowds hailed Him as their King, and were all permitted and welcomed by Him. All this is in absolute opposition to His usual action, which had been one long effort to damp down inflammable and unspiritual Messianic hopes, and to avoid the very enthusiasm which now surges round Him unchecked. Certainly that calm figure, sitting on the slow-pacing ass, with the noisy multitude pressing round Him, is strangely ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... doubt a temptation to this man. The soft, rounded throat line, the oval cheek's rich coloring so easily moved to ebb and flow, the carmine of the full red lips: every detail helped to confirm the impression of a sensuous young creature, innocent as a wild thing of the forests and as yet almost as unspiritual. She was a child of the senses, and the man sitting beside her was weighing and appraising her with ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... in the rest of Europe, gloomily utilitarian. The military in stone, however, is neither ornamental nor useful. Strange that the Kaiser, who was reputed to have quick intelligence, should not have felt how excruciatingly unspiritual and truly uninspiring the glory-statuary and architecture was. The German army was one of the greatest military organizations the world has seen, and it was in 1914 a potential terror to every nation ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... ambition, this will not prove to be an argument in favor of Socialism, but a terrible indictment of it. For the road the dictatorship is now taking, which indeed offers it the only possible hope of even a passable economic success, is the barren, heartless, unspiritual, materialistic tyranny of machine-like "industrialism" which the I. W. W. represents. In the two chapters immediately following, VIII and IX, the reader will learn something of the loss of all moral standards ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... solitude. On asking to be shut up in a cell, he had said to himself: "The thought of Glory is a temptation of my unquickened and unspiritual nature. It has already betrayed me into an act of cowardice and inhumanity, and it will drive me out into the world and fling me back again, as it drove out and flung back Brother Paul." But the result of his solitude ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... of divine truth, the mouth through which the Gods speak in the ears of men, then the Indian nation must purify itself, then the Indian nation must spiritualise itself. Shall your Scriptures spiritualise the whole world while you remain unspiritual? Shall the wisdom of the Rishis go out to Mlechchas in every part of the world, and they learn and profit by it, while you, the physical descendants of the Rishis, know not your own literature and love ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... love or could have loved, Though accident, blind contact, and the strong Necessity of loving, have removed Antipathies—but to recur, ere long, Envenomed with irrevocable wrong; And Circumstance, that unspiritual God And Miscreator, makes and helps along Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,[502] Whose touch turns Hope to dust,—the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... throb in sympathy with every effort and struggle, and who thrill with joy at every success. How should this thought check and rebuke every worldly feeling and unworthy purpose, and enshrine us, in the midst of a forgetful and unspiritual world, with an atmosphere of heavenly peace! They have overcome—have risen—are crowned, glorified; but still they remain to us, our assistants, our comforters, and in every hour of darkness their voice speaks to us: "So we grieved, so we struggled, so we fainted, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to have belonged to a sort of Christy Minstrel Company over here) cracked jokes all the time with a gentleman amongst the audience in a good-natured but flippant and very unspiritual manner, and even the ladies joined in the undignified punning and "play upon words" that went ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... indissolubly the obligation of Christian evangelism. However it may be discharged, discharged it is to be, by every true servant. I am sometimes half disposed to think that it would have been better for the Church if there had never been any men in my position, on whom the mass of unspiritual, idle because busy, and silent because little-loving, Christian professors contentedly roll the whole obligation to preach God's Gospel. My brethren, the world is not going to be evangelised by officials. Until all Christian people wake ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... word. Disillusion was complete. The voice, the face, were those of as unspiritual a woman as he could easily have met with, and his life's story was ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... or seems to know, that we mourn or rejoice, and if she could feel with us she would; but she cannot quite do so. Like Ariel, she would be grieved with the grief of Gonzalo, were her affections human. She has then a wild, unhuman, unmoral, unspiritual interest in us, like a being who has an elemental life, but no soul. But sometimes she is made to go farther, and has the same kind of interest in us which Oberon has in the loves of Helena and Hermia. When we are loving, and ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... love or could have loved: Though accident, blind contact, and the strong Necessity of loving, have removed Antipathies—but to recur, ere long, Envenomed with irrevocable wrong; And Circumstance, that unspiritual god And miscreator, makes and helps along Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod, Whose touch turns hope to dust—the dust we ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... the particular form of Montanism, reappeared again and again, with peculiar local and temporal variations, in the history of Christianity.[6] To the bearers of it, the historic Church, with its crystallized system and its vast machinery, always seemed "unspiritual" and traditional. They believed, each time the movement appeared, that they had found the way to more abundant life, that the Spirit had come upon them in a special manner, and was through them inaugurating ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... the creative artist, has been a friend and leader in the life of the spirit: to Mr Arnold he was only a sort of unspiritual innkeeper. To Mr Arnold, Maurice de Guerin, with his second-hand Quinetism, was a friend and leader in the life of the spirit; others scarcely find him so. "This is this to ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... the lasting claims of Christianity upon the human race are due to its own intrinsic teachings, which are quite independent of those wonders which can only have had a use in startling the solid complacence of an unspiritual race, and so directing their attention violently to this new system of thought. Exactly the same may be said of the new revelation. The exhibitions of a force which is beyond human experience and human guidance ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... our inner life altogether, if they can. And then, what is our outer life worth? It is worth nothing. If the inner life get thin and shallow, the outer life must become a perfunctory discharge of duties. Our preaching will be empty, and our conversation and intercourse unspiritual, unenriching and flavourless. We may please our people for a time by doing all they desire and being at everybody's call; but they will turn round on us in disappointment and anger in the day when, by living merely ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... talk to me of eating,' said Emmeline, drooping like a sensitive plant. 'We find it so coarse, so unspiritual, my sisters and I. One can't think of one's soul while ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... balance between a formless spirituality and an unspiritual formalism. The end of religious observance is the love of God, but the love of God requires more than feeling; it must impregnate life. Dubnow, in his summary of Jewish history, formulates an epigram, which, like most of its kind, becomes in its conciseness ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... who exposed the fabrication of the queen's letters. Indeed he was so sturdy a critic that he scorned to read the fictitious Hardenberg, although the work contains good material. He more than shared the unspiritual temper of the school, and fearing alike the materialistic and the religious basis of history, he insisted on confining it to affairs of state. Having a better eye for institutions than his master, and ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... have the soul of courage without the rough outside which so often accompanies it; and his diction, being on a level with his themes, never offends that fine detecting spiritual taste which instinctively takes offence when spiritual things are viewed through unspiritual moods and clothed in words which smack of the senses. Combine all his characteristics, his intrepidity of disposition and intellect, his deep experience of religious truth, the sad earnestness of his faith, his penetration of thought, his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... seductive eyes; the provoking half-smile, teasing, alluring; the red lips, full and young through the carmine paint; all of her seemed to breathe a different kind of a power than he had ever before experienced—unspiritual, elemental, strong as some heady wine. She represented youth, health, beauty, terribly linked with evil wisdom, and a corrupt and irresistible power, possessing a base and ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... easy in this respect as most other boys. However, after no little examination into the subject, and, by-the-bye, confusion, I came to the resolution of guiding myself as well as I could by what little knowledge I might possess; and unspiritual as this reliance on my own efforts evidently was, I, in unison with it, farther resolved, that should I omit what I knew to be right, I would refrain, at all events, from that which I judged to be wrong—and I do not see what I ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... Institution—be it Church, or Sect, or Code, or Scripture—which claims to be the sole accredited agent of the Eternal God, relaxes its hold upon the ever-expanding life of Humanity, all those developments of human nature which cease to be amenable to its control come to be regarded as mundane, as unspiritual, as carnal, as matters with ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... thoughts in the dead language that befitted one cut off from life, to whom Dutch was never aught but the unintelligible jargon of an unspiritual race, he was leaving his house on a bleak evening when one clapped him on the shoulder, and turning in amaze, he was still more mazed to find, for the first time in fifteen years, a fellow-creature tendering a friendly smile and a friendly hand. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... emotion of which by its very nature she could not bring herself to speak. It could mean nothing to Walter in his yet unspiritual state. She felt that when he came to her he would insist on some satisfaction, and there was no satisfaction that she could give to the sort of claim he would make. Therefore she awaited his coming with ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... such a task; and none but a sceptic will doubt the value of the conclusions which may be thus reached. But all this is quite consistent with our position. The welfare of the soul is not involved in such matters as I have mentioned. A man is not good or bad, spiritual or unspiritual, according to the view he takes of them. Men may differ widely regarding them, and not only be equally honest, but equally sharers of the mind of Christ. And this is peculiarly the case with many questions of the present day, such as the antiquity ...
— Religion and Theology: A Sermon for the Times • John Tulloch
... by our congregations, with its element of display and self-aggrandizement, its active proselytism, and its open contempt of all religions but its own, was for a long time extremely repellent. To his simple mind, the professionalism of the pulpit, the paid exhorter, the moneyed church, was an unspiritual and unedifying thing, and it was not until his spirit was broken and his moral and physical constitution undermined by trade, conquest, and strong drink, that Christian missionaries obtained any real hold upon him. Strange as it may ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... here is their sculptural representation of the phantom; (lower figure, Plate XIX.), and I think you will at once agree with me in feeling that it would be impossible to conceive anything more completely unspiritual. You might more than doubt that it could have been meant for the departed soul, unless you were aware of the meaning of this little circlet between the feet. On other coins you find his name inscribed there, but in this you have his habitation, the haunted Island of Leuce ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Confucius did not treat.— That he was unreligious, unspiritual, and open to the ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... Portion of this work: it ends in the view that bounds us when we look on the practical world with the outward unspiritual eye—and see life that dissatisfies justice,—for life is so seen but in fragments. The influence of fate seems so small on the man who, in erring, but errs as the egotist, and shapes out of ill some use that can profit himself. But Fate hangs a shadow so ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and the sallow skin which the position of the cotton-spinner at work and the close fluffy atmosphere in which he lives tend to develop. Up to six months ago, he had been a mill-hand and a Wesleyan class-leader. Now, in consequence partly of some inward crisis, partly of revolt against an 'unspiritual' superintendent, he had thrown up mill and Methodism together, and come to live on the doles of the Christian Brethren at Clough End. He had been preaching on the moors already during the day, and was tired out; but the pallor of the harsh face only made the bright, commanding eye more ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as much as to say that He was defiled with the stain and vice of original sin. But observe still more direful utterances. When Christ, praying in the Garden, was streaming with a sweat of water and blood, He shuddered under a sense of eternal damnation, He uttered an irrational cry, an unspiritual cry, a sudden cry prompted by the force of His distress, which He quickly checked as not sufficiently premeditated (Marlorati in Matth. xxvi.; Calvin in Harm. Evangel.). Is there anything further? Attend. When Christ Crucified exclaimed, My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me, ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... round before the too-small looking-glass. There was utter satisfaction in each gesture of that whole operation, as if her spirit, long starved, were having a good meal. In this rapt contemplation of herself, all childish vanity and expectancy, and all that wonderful quality found in simple unspiritual natures of delighting in the present moment, were perfectly displayed. So, motionless, with her hair loose on her neck, she was like one of those half-hours of Spring that have lost their restlessness and are content ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the most part, but real, unorganized as yet, but conscious that that which rudely interrupts their dream of centuries possesses over them at least two advantages,—power and material prosperity,—the things which unspiritual humanity, the world over, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... in their largest colony in Babylon, or in Jerusalem, or in Rome, or Alexandria, or the smaller colonies everywhere, was full of the idea, the hope, of a kingdom. He was absorbed with more or less confused and materialized, unspiritual ideas of a coming glory for his nation through a coming king. But among the followers of this Jesus there is something else coming into being, a new organization never even hinted at in their Scriptures. It is called the church. ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... equation" enters equally into the conclusions of those who assign a very late origin to the liturgies, pushing them along as far as the sixth or seventh century. If one happens to have a rooted dislike for prescribed forms of worship, and believes them in his heart to be both unscriptural and unspiritual, it will be the most natural thing in the world for him to disparage whatever evidence makes in favor of the early origin of liturgies. Hammond is sensible when he says in the Preface to his valuable work entitled Liturgies Eastern and ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... it is directed.(76) Nor can we doubt that experience confirms the fact. Though we must not rashly judge our neighbour, nor attempt to measure in any particular mind the precise amount of doubt which is due to moral causes, yet it is evident that where a freethinker is a man of immoral or unspiritual life, whose interests incline him to disbelieve in the reality of Christianity, his arguments may reasonably be suspected to be suggested by sins of character, and by dislike to the moral standard of the Christian religion, and, though not on this account necessarily ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... religious experience: he read Paley's Evidences. 'I took in the whole argument,' wrote Manning, when he was over seventy, 'and I thank God that nothing has ever shaken it.' Yet on the whole he led the unspiritual life of an ordinary schoolboy. We have glimpses of him as a handsome lad, playing cricket, or strutting about in tasselled Hessian top- boots. And on one occasion at least he gave proof of a certain dexterity of conduct which deserved to be remembered. He went out of bounds, and a master, riding ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... hymns. There were layers upon layers of emotion sunk beyond memory in Ranny's soul. So that what happened to him now had the profound and vehement, though secret, force of a revival. The submerged feelings rose in him; they were swollen, intensified, dominated beyond recognition by the virile and unspiritual passion that leaped up and ran together with them and made them one. It gave them an obscure ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... parlor, leaning forward in awed expectation to catch the message from beyond, was upsetting, literally and figuratively. Miss Tamson Black, perched upon the slippery cushion of a rickety and unstable music stool, slid to the floor with a most unspiritual thump and a shrill squeal. Primmie clutched her next-door neighbor—it chanced to be Mr. Augustus Cabot—by the middle of the waistcoat, and hers was no light clutch. Mr. Abel Harding shouted several words at the top of his lungs; afterward there was some dispute as to just what ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... general complaint, however, was that directing itself against the extravagance and luxury of life in which the dignified clergy indulged. The cost of these unspiritual pleasures the great prelates had ample means for defraying in the revenues of their sees; while lesser dignitaries had to be active in levying their dues or the fines of their courts, lest everything should flow into the receptacles of their superiors. So ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... sensitive feelings, and keen faculties, subjected to the rough rasping of coarse, self-satisfied, unspiritual natures, had almost lost their equilibrium. As to natural condition no one was sounder than she; yet even now when she had more than begun to see its falsehood, a headache would suffice to bring her afresh under the influence of the hideous ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... third fastidious Etonian, who was clearly bored by the ladies, and was amusing himself with the adjutant and a cigarette in a distant corner. His eyes came back at last to the pasteur. An able face after all; cool, shrewd, and not unspiritual. Very soon, he, the parson—whose name was Everett—and Elizabeth were drawn into conversation, and Marietta under Everett's good-humoured glance found himself ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ideas which Mrs. Eddy has added to Quimbyism are her theory that the Godhead is more feminine than masculine, and her qualified disapproval of matrimony. Quimby himself had a large family and saw nothing unspiritual in marriage. In defining the real purpose of marriage Mrs. Eddy says nothing about children; "to happify existence by constant intercourse with those adapted to elevate it, is the true purpose of marriage." In her chapter on marriage ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... straight—her religion is a religion of failure! It comes back to that criticism of Nietzsche's—it's a slave-morality. The world belongs to the devil; and the idea of taking it away from the devil seems to be presumptuous. Even if it could be done, the attempt would be "unspiritual'; for the 'world' is something corrupt—something that ought not to be saved. So you see, she's perfectly willing for the Belgians to have ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair |
