"Immoral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... light literature, and not only expunge the traces of antiquated books, and obtain a new kind of distraction, but that they may also lay by a long life as well as energy and strength; for it bears no point of similarity to those works, whose designs are false, whose course is immoral. Now, Sir Priest, what are your ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the throne in 1156, abdicated in 1159, shaved off his hair, and became a Buddhist monk, professing to retire from the world within the holy cloisters of a monastery. But nothing was farther from his thoughts. He was a man of immoral desires, and found his post on the throne a check to the debaucheries in which he wished to indulge. As a monk he exercised more power than he had done as a mikado, retaining the control of affairs during ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... doctrine of any sound political system is, that rights and duties should be in equilibrium. A monarchical or aristocratic system is not immoral, if the rights and duties of persons and classes are in equilibrium, although the rights and duties of different persons and classes are unequal. An immoral political system is created whenever there are privileged classes—that is, classes who have arrogated ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... novel, "John Percyfield," and enjoyed it so much that when I came upon his other book, "Education and the Larger Life," I bought and read it. But it has given me much discomfort. In that book he says that it is immoral for any one to do less than his best. I can scarcely think of that statement without feeling that I ought to be sent to jail. I'm actually burdened with immorality, and find myself all the while ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... courage, I might be prompted to confess, that the contrary would ensue from atheism. But the bulk of the world has long believed, or long pretended to believe in a Deity, yet morality and every commendable quality seem at a stand. The believer and the unbeliever we often see equally base, equally immoral. Superstition is certainly only the excess of religion. That evidently is attended often with immorality and cowardice. I am tempted to say, from observation, that the belief of a Deity is apt to drive mankind into vice and baseness; but I check myself in the assertion, ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... seduced by a Parisian student, comes to work in his factory. She has a child that she supports by her labor. This fact is discovered by some female gossip, and she is dismissed from the factory as an immoral woman, and descends to the lowest depths of prostitution,—still for the purpose of supporting her child. Jean Valjean, the reformed criminal, discovers her, is made aware that her debasement is the result of the act of his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sentiment when at its flood-tide will have swept away all such emblems. In replying to Dr Chapple, I have endeavoured to show that his proposal touches but the fringe of the problem, and even there after an unscientific and immoral manner. There is room for a measure of surprise that Dr Chapple should have undertaken to write his book with such a scant knowledge of the ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... Marriage is not an institution for the support of parents, or the settling of business difficulties. If you loved that old man you would not be asking advice. To marry a man you do not love is immoral. Marriage is to serve the best interests of children and to give happiness to the contracting parties. If your parents need your financial aid go to work and give them your earnings, but do not make ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... fortune to be familiarly acquainted with one of these worthies, who never lost an opportunity of declaiming, above all, against the infamy of the particular practice to which we have just alluded. Indeed, so broad was the ground he took, that he held it to be not only immoral, but, what was far worse, ungenteel, to swallow any thing stronger than small beer, before the hour allotted to dinner. After that important period, it was not only permitted to assuage the previous mortifications of the flesh, but, so liberal did he show himself ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... thread. Both these two emotions are fitting to a pure manhood in the presence of evil. They heighten each other. The perfection of righteous anger is to be tempered by sympathy. The perfection of righteous pity for the evildoer is to be saved from immoral condoning of evil as if it were only calamity, by an infusion of some displeasure. We have to learn the lesson and take this look of Christ's as our pattern in our dealings with evildoers. Perhaps our day needs ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... exasperated Pym would roar; "but want of interest is almost immoral. At your age the blood would have been coursing through my veins. Love! You are incapable of it. There is not a drop of sentiment in your ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... while loudly bawling for the emancipation of women from the yoke of men, nevertheless considered the only distinction a woman could achieve was through their favourable notice—an attitude of mind produced by moral and social codes so effectively calculated to foster immoral and untenable inconsistency! ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... received an anonymous letter, which called him immoral and perfidious, and warned him that his adventure was known to all. Camillo took fright, and, in order to ward off suspicion, began to make his visits to Villela's house more rare. The latter asked ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... Lovelock, the Honourable Augustus Lovelock. Well, they 're awfully handsome. Ella Maclane is dying to come to Baden-Baden. I wish you 'd write to her. Her father and mother have got some idea in their heads; they think it 's improper—what do you call it?—immoral. I wish you would write to her and tell her it is n't. I wonder if they think that Mrs. Vivian would come to a place that 's immoral. Mrs. Vivian says she would take her in a moment; she does n't seem to care how many she has. I declare, she 's only too kind. ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... the minds of the people, all abound with maxims of loyalty, with respect for religion, and the subordinations of civil society. These are all prohibited; and are replaced by fustian declamations, tending to promote anarchy and discord —by vulgar and immoral farces, and insidious and flattering panegyrics on the vices of low life. No drama can succeed that is not supported by the faction; and this support is to be procured only by vilifying the Throne, the Clergy, and Noblesse. This is a succedaneum for literary merit, and those who disapprove ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... immoral to sterilize healthy women, who become possessed with the old Roman passion for a childless life, or who simply wish to limit their families for any selfish or ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... is immoral, and points out Warm sin in ruddy specks upon his soul: Bigot, one folly of the man you flout Is more to God than thy lean ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... cited complete another line of symbolic truth. The primitive church was represented as a pure woman, the bride (chap. 12:1). During the reign of the papacy a false, immoral woman reigned over the kings of the earth, while the true woman, or church, was hidden 'in the wilderness' (chap. 12: 6). Under the reign of Protestantism her members were scattered in all parts of the city of Babylon. But, thank God, they are to be called out of their scattered condition, and as ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... he pub. a short poem, The Grumbling Hive, which in 1714 reappeared with a prose commentary, and various dissertations on the origin of moral virtue, etc., as The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits, and in 1729 was made the subject of a persecution for its immoral tendency. It was also vigorously combated by, among others, Bishop Berkeley and William Law, author of The Serious Call. While the author probably had no intention of subverting morality, his views of human nature were assuredly cynical ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... through, an' with no more conscience than cows, no matter who's run down in the stampede. "For which causes, bein' plumb tender an' sympathetic, I'm shore no good with kyards; an' whenever I dallies tharwith, it is onder the head of amoosements. "Do I regyard gamblin' as immoral? No; I don't reckon none now I do. This bein' what you—all church sharps calls moral is somewhat a matter of health, an' likewise the way you feels. Sick folks usual is a heap more moral than when their health's that excellent it's tantalizin'. "Speakin' of ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... abnormally developed in a single direction. His one object is to out-manoeuvre in a game of desperate and immoral chances. The tactical spirit in him has none of the higher ambition. It has felt itself in the degree only ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... into contact with any book, person, or opinion of which you absolutely comprehend nothing, declare that book, person or opinion to be immoral. Bespatter it, vituperate against it, strongly insist that any man or woman harbouring it is a fool or a knave, or both. Carefully abstain from studying it. Do all that in you lies to annihilate ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... of high character and a devout opponent of iconoclasm, was appointed, through the influence of Theodora, the restorer of images, in the reign of her son, Michael the Drunkard. But the uncle of the Emperor, the Caesar Bardas, who was a man of flagrantly immoral life, had divorced his own wife, and was living publicly with his son's widow. For this incestuous connection Ignatius repelled him from the communion. Fired with indignation at this insult, the Caesar determined to ruin both the Patriarch and his patroness, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... it is an entirely clever picture; so clever that nothing in its kind has ever been done equal to it; but it is also an entirely base and evil picture. It is an expression of delight in the prolonged contemplation of a vile thing, and delight in that is an 'unmannered,' or 'immoral' quality. It is 'bad taste' in the profoundest sense—it is the taste of the devils. On the other hand, a picture of Titian's, or a Greek statue, or a Greek coin, or a Turner landscape, expresses ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... secret. She was therefore bursting with information of which she could manifest no consciousness without confessing that she had been eavesdropping—a thing which she knew Miss Laura regarded as detestably immoral. She wondered at her aunt's silence. Except a certain subdued air of happiness there was nothing to distinguish Miss Laura's calm demeanor from that of any other day. Graciella had determined upon her own attitude toward her aunt. ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... effectively. Wherewith came on the question of raffles, an inexhaustible one, since some maintained that they were contrary to English law, and were absolutely immoral, while others held that it was the only way of disposing of really expensive articles. These were two statues sent by Mrs. White, and an exquisite little picture by Mrs. Grinstead, worth more than any ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... therefore, worked for more than a man who worked for intelligence. But having promised this, it might be said that the Luther of the eighteenth century and of the cultivated classes was Voltaire. As Luther had an antipathy to what was immoral, so Voltaire had an antipathy to what was absurd, and both of them made war upon the object of their antipathy with such masterly power, with so much conviction, so much energy, so much genius, that ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... consequences may operate as a deterrent from certain kinds of sin. What is denied is that such consequences are rightly to be described as "punishment."]: and the conception of vicarious "punishment" is not merely immoral, but unintelligible. Vicarious suffering, indeed, there is: an enormous proportion of the sufferings of mankind—and the sufferings of Christ are a conspicuous case in point—arise directly as the result of others' sin and may be willingly ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... eradicated, but sprang up again from time to time. And now her theory was this:- The Cranford people respected themselves too much, and were too grateful to the aristocracy who were so kind as to live near the town, ever to disgrace their bringing up by being dishonest or immoral; therefore, we must believe that the robbers were strangers—if strangers, why not foreigners?—if foreigners, who so likely as the French? Signor Brunoni spoke broken English like a Frenchman; and, though ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... from an honest labourer, left to himself, anything but sarcastic laughter or ferocious abuse. But even if true, the lecturer's facts would have been beside the point. To say that a work is aristocratic or democratic, moral or immoral, is to say something silly and irrelevant, or rather, silly if meant to be relevant to its value as art. In the work of Renoir and of Picasso, in all works of art for that matter, the essential quality, as every sensitive person knows, is the same. Whatever ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... reserved her dour Scottish comments upon the boy's school report for a more seemly occasion than the first day of his holidays; but Kerry had made no attempt to conceal his jubilation—almost immoral, his wife had declared it to be—respecting the lad's athletic record. His work on the junior left wing had gained the commendation of a celebrated international; and Kerry, who had interviewed the gymnasium instructor, had learned that ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... whatever they be called; the blind and immoral mob that has been misled by wretches to ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... man, the Deacon said, much given to the reading of pious books. Up late at night after he came, reading Scott's Commentary. Appeared to be as fond of serious works as other young folks were of their novels and romances and other immoral publications. He, the Deacon, thought of having a few religious friends to meet the young gentleman, if he felt so disposed; and should like to have him, Mr. Bradshaw, come in and take a part in the exercises.—Mr. ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... denunciations and calumnies of all persons, who seriously believe that every human institution which directly violates the constitution of nature, and the express commands of God, must necessarily be immoral. ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... so long must we judge human deeds from the outlook of our own individuality. War is one of the deeds of man, and as such we have to pass judgment on it categorically. Any compromise on this point would obscure the issues; nay, it would be almost immoral.... War, like everything else, should have light thrown upon it from every side before we pass judgment on it; but only to persons of second-rate intelligence can it seem that we should actually pass ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... appeared Serious rather than Absurd; or at best, have aimed rather at what is Unfashionable than what is Vicious. For my own part, I have endeavoured to make nothing Ridiculous that is not in some measure Criminal. I have set up the Immoral Man as the Object of Derision: In short, if I have not formed a new Weapon against Vice and Irreligion, I have at least shewn how that Weapon may be put to a right Use, which has so often fought the Battels of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the occasion for their interference and support. I am sorry to add, that their benevolent application was ineffectual, and that the reformation of an evil, productive of consequences equally impolitick and immoral, and generally acknowledged to have long disgraced our national character, is yet left to the unsupported efforts of piety morality and justice, against interest violence and oppression; and these, I blush to acknowledge, too strongly countenanced by the legislative authority of ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... bolder brag Of the dexterous "dodge," and the lots of "swag," The plundered house—or the stolen nag - The blazing rick, or the darker crime, That quenched the spark before its time - The wanton speech of the wife immoral, The noise of drunken or deadly quarrel, With savage menace, which threatened the life, Till the heart seemed merely a strop for the knife; The human liver, no better than that Which is sliced and thrown to an old woman's cat; And the ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... greatest prospective advantages that we see in the assiduous pursuit of agriculture, is the reformation it would work amongst the people. It is not in the ranks of modern farmers that you must look for the most ignorant or the most immoral men. We all know that when an individual enters upon an undertaking of the mode to accomplish which he is ignorant, he applies for information where it may be found, having learnt that a man unqualified ...
— Speeches of His Majesty Kamehameha IV. To the Hawaiian Legislature • Kamehameha IV
... any other arbitrary course of study, is a mental strait-waistcoat. It has a more immoral and degenerating effect upon the mind because it is applied directly. If physical restraint acts perniciously upon the reasoning powers, a far greater degree of harm must be caused by direct mental restraint. Yet nobody, from Arnold and Thring down to the professional crammer of to-day, seems ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... came here specially to do so; to take a mud-bath that would harden my skin against the pricks of life. To find immoral support about me. And I chose your company, because you're the most despicable, though you've still retained a spark of humanity. You were sorry for me, when no one else was. ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... egoist, who insists that his own advantage is his only proper aim. It assures him that he is throughout seeking his own advantage, when he aims at self-realization. On the other hand, it assures the man to whom egoism appears repellant and immoral, that self- realization implies that one must love one's neighbor as oneself. The immemorial quarrel between self-love and benevolence appears to be adjusted to the mutual satisfaction ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... that "the absence of any kind of spirituous liquors around the festive board and the fact that the ladies were present" were unique features of the entertainment. But, according to the same report, there was yet another: "'The Immoral Memory' was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... I found the effective sneer. In matters of private morals these were my most uncharitable years. I didn't want to think of these things any more for ever. I hated the people whose talk or practice showed they were not of my opinion. I wanted to believe that their views were immoral and objectionable and contemptible, because I had decided to treat them as at that level. I was, in fact, falling into the attitude ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... poor were disheartened. The great fortunes won by the officers were of little use while peace was denied for their enjoyment; the millions of Massena did not save him from the exposures and hardships of the battle-field, and he confessed that he loved luxury and immoral self-indulgence. Such voices had created ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... new and immoral methods into business, Mr Iver. It must be painful to you after all these years." Harry laughed good-humoredly. "I shall corrupt the Major too!" ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... well, and kept my health, and provided for my family, and maintained my position in the community. I felt I had a perfect right to drink liquor just as I had a perfect right to stop drinking it. I never considered my drinking in any way immoral. ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... themselves. Lunch-time came, but there was no lunch. There was not even bread. Philip and Suydam had tinned things, and the former some cake, which by tea-time that afternoon—so appallingly soon does the spoiled child of town get down to fundamentals—seemed an almost immoral luxury. But the luckless fifty, already unstrung by the worry of the last forty-eight hours, fed on salt sea air, and it was not until sundown that one of the British came to ask what should be done. Philip dug into his corned beef and ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... of his arrival, he gave orders for all his armed retainers, to the number of more than a hundred men-at-arms, to assemble in the cloisters of the monastery of the Blackfriars; for he was a man of a soldierly spirit, and though a loose and immoral churchman, would have made a valiant warrior; and going thither himself, he thence sent word to the Lord James Stuart at the priory, that if John Knox dared to preach in the cathedral, as was threatened, he would order his guard to fire on ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... brother felt about retaining the unhistoric passages of Scripture. Would he wish to see them sought for and sifted out? Or, again, what would he propose concerning such of the parables as are acknowledged by every liberal Churchman to be immoral, as, for instance, the story of Dives and Lazarus and the Unjust Steward—parables which can never have been spoken by our Lord, at any rate not in their present shape? And here we have a remarkable instance of his moderation and truly English good sense. "Do not touch one word ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... Parmarthi of the opposite sex and tend and serve them. This relation, which is known as Asra-patro, cannot exist between husband and wife, some other person having to be chosen in each case, and it results of course in an immoral connection. Following this is the further rite of Almo-Samarpana or offering of oneself, in which the disciple is required to give his wife to the Guru or preceptor as the acme of self-sacrifice. The guru calls the disciple by a female name of one of the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... not interrupt another in his talk, unless it is immoral, but hears him through, that he ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... be well to add to this review the closing words of the Elderton-Pearson memoir. "Nature is not concerned with the moral or the immoral, which are standards of human conduct, and the duty of the naturalist is to point out what goes on in Nature. There can now be scarcely a doubt that even in highly organized human communities the death-rate is selective, and physical ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... is not the moral sense only of men which is thus at work, modifying their words; but the immoral as well. If the good which men have and feel, penetrates into their speech, and leaves its deposit there, so does also the evil. Thus we may trace a constant tendency—in too many cases it has been a successful ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... expletives—imaginative phrases wherewith to round off a sentence. When he said "I'll bet you so and so," nobody ever thought of taking him up; but still I could not help thinking it my duty to put him down. The habit was an immoral one, and so I told him. It was a vulgar one—this I begged him to believe. It was discountenanced by society—here I said nothing but the truth. It was forbidden by act of Congress—here I had not the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... have sufficiently accomplished their purpose when they have met the call of that particular transient occasion in which they arose; and others, it may be thought on review, might as well have been suppressed from the very first. Things immoral would of course fall within that category; of these, however, I cannot reproach myself with ever having published so much as one. But even pure levities, simply as such, and without liability to any worse objection, may happen to have no justifying principle of life within ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the glory of the Empire and his father's deeds. Strange though it may appear, the son of the Great Napoleon and the morganatic husband of his mother were attached to each other in the most intimate way. If he perceived the immoral relations between Neipperg and Marie Louise, the Duke never seems to have divulged it; but taking into account the passionate love and devotion he had for his father's memory, it is barely likely that he knew either of the amorous connection or marriage having taken place between the ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... always the calm philosopher. I believe that from childhood to old age—when the race was run—he never was guilty of an immoral act or did an injustice to any human being. He was certainly one of the most conscientious men in all his doings that ever was born. Few men have wished to know another man more strongly than I to know Herbert Spencer, for seldom has one ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... talking about you to Grace Ferrall; I asked to be placed beside you at dinner; I told her I hadn't had half enough of you on the cliff. Now what do you think of yourself for being too nice to a susceptible girl? I think it's immoral." ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... the same it is a game which I, and others I know, play very often. I came to the conclusion that had I won I should have been rather pleased with myself, it is so easy to excuse oneself for winning money, while losing it seems to be foolishly immoral. I made no resolutions for the future, because on the few occasions I have tried to fortify myself in that way, something has occurred to upset me, and Mr. Sandyman, who was my housemaster at Cliborough and very wise, told me once that the weaker the man the more frequent his resolutions. ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... the mother. "You are always so unjust toward Hans Peter! When you become better acquainted with him, Mr. Thostrup, you will like him; he is a really serious young man, of uncorrupted manners. Do you remember, Laide, how he hissed that evening in the theatre when they gave that immoral piece? And how angry he is with that 'Red Riding Hood?' O, the good youth! Besides, in our family, you will soon meet with an old acquaintance—in a fortnight a lady out of Jutland will come here. She remains the winter here. Do you ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... that enabled him to exhibit them to every advantage. He sang like a veritable Orpheus, and sensitive women had been known to faint under the excitement of his Moo-lee-wha, or national song. He even danced,—a most rare faculty in Pekin, as in all China,—but this was frowned upon, as immoral, by his family. Comely indeed he was, especially on state occasions, when he appeared in all the radiance of rosy health, overflowing spirits, and the richest crapes and satins,—decorated with the high order of the peacock's feather, the red button, and numberless glittering ornaments of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... immoral view of original sin is the unscientific theory that evil came into the world with Adam and his seed. Let us ask what was the state of our globe in the pre-Adamite days, when the tyrants of the Earth, the huge Saurians and other monsters, lived in perpetual strife, in ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... repute, temperate, read and write;" second daughter, "harlot;" third daughter "good repute, temperate;" and the two youngest are given simply as "unmarried." This family seems to have had as high an average mentally and morally as any family in the whole tribe, only one in six being distinctly immoral. In the next generation, the eldest son had two children, the eldest daughter four, and the third daughter, who married a first cousin, had one child. It would be of great interest to know more of this last marriage, the third generation of consanguinity in marriage, and the fourth first-cousin ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... pastor writes, it was considered immoral to hate; now, however, Germans know that they not only may, but they must hate. Herr Lissauer's 'Hymn of Hate' against England is, he declares, a faithful expression of the feelings cherished in the depths of the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... scheme of life. If he doubles this fuse in to self, he becomes a non-connective. He cannot receive from the clean source, nor can he give. What he gets is by a pure animal process of struggle and snatch. He is a sick and immoral creature. Turning the fuse outward, he gives his service to men, and dynamos of cosmic force throw their energy through him to his people. He lives. According to the carrying capacity of his fuse is he loved and remembered and idealised ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... their distress to the tribute of compassion. Altogether, however, the "Spanish Friar," in both its parts, is an interesting, and almost a fascinating play; although the tendency, even of the tragic scenes, is not laudable, and the comedy, though more decent in language, is not less immoral in tendency than was usual in that ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... laxity had Cromwell or the Puritan ascendancy never existed. Beaumont and Fletcher, in their eagerness to please, took no thought of the after-effects of their plays; morality did not enter into their scheme of life. Yet they were not immoral, but merely unmoral. They lacked the high seriousness that gives its permanent value to Shakespeare's tragic work. They wrote not to embody the everlasting truths of life, as he did; not because they were oppressed with the weight of a new message striving for utterance; ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... line crossed the Satilla River. There lay the Dauntless, purchased by Rubens. Steam was up, and a quick job was made of transferring cargo and men from train to boat. Another tug brought a supply of coal, and soon after sunrise another expedition was on its way to Cuba. All this may be very immoral, but some who were on the expedition have told me that it was ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... were only two families on the Hill which followed primitive custom in "putting in cider" into the cellar in quantity for the winter. In five more a very small quantity was kept. In the other cases it was regarded as immoral to use the beverage. The writer was only once offered a drink of alcoholic beverage in six years' residence ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... the "King of Paris," as the capital fondly called the Duke, brought the wretched King no solace or power. His mother did not live to see the end of her son; she died in this the darkest period of his career, and must have been aware that her cunning and her immoral life had brought nothing but misery to herself and all her race. The power of the League party seemed as great as ever; the Duc de Mayenne entered Paris, and declared open war on Henri III., who, after some hesitation, threw ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... in their false custom, Immoral ditties are their delight; Vain and tasteless praise they recite; Falsehood at all times do they utter; The innocent persons they ridicule; Married women they destroy, Innocent virgins of Mary they corrupt; As they pass ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... Now, as a like uncertainty and variety of causes take place, even in natural objects, and produce a like error in our judgment, if that tendency to produce error were the very essence of vice and immorality, it should follow, that even inanimate objects might be vicious and immoral. ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... course, to put his clothes on. I guess we must be pretty old-fashioned in our notions, we Maine country folks, because so many of my pet ideas and beliefs have been changed since I came here. You know with us it has always gone without dispute that rich boys are mean and worthless, if not really immoral. But here they're not that way. I guess we never had much chance to study rich people up our way, mother. At the grammar school all the fellows looked down on wealthy boys; but we never had any of them around. The richest chap was Gilbert, whose father ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... of mind and with such habits of life George Muller, in the Easter season of 1820, was confirmed and became a communicant. Confirmed, indeed! but in sin, not only immoral and unregenerate, but so ignorant of the very rudiments of the Gospel of Christ that he could not have stated to an inquiring soul the simple terms of the plan of salvation. There was, it is true about such serious and sacred transactions, a vague solemnity which left a transient impression and ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... shut the door and struck a light. Then he opened the bottle of fizz and poured it out into a deep, enamelled starching-dish, and Billy MacLaggan drank thereof, and then raised his head, with his immoral-looking beard hanging in a sodden point like a wet deck-swab, and asked for more. That is, he asked as well as any Christian and civilised goat could ask, by standing up on his hind legs like a circus-horse and making strange, unearthly noises. Then he rammed his wicked old nose into ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... as I shifted my head to find a softer pillow of moss after this philosophic and immoral reflection, Nature gave me her silent answer. Three wild strawberries, nodding on their long stems, hung over my face. It was an invitation to taste and see ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... hardly aware, in her girlhood, of differing from others in this respect. In the well-regulated well-fed Summers world the unusual was regarded as either immoral or ill-bred, and people with emotions were not visited. Sometimes, with a sense of groping in a topsy-turvy universe, Anna had wondered why everybody about her seemed to ignore all the passions and sensations which ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... one. For Nora does not leave her husband for a lover, but to educate herself. The critics were used to lovers, and what we are used to is bearable, but a woman who leaves her husband and her children for school-books is unbearable, and much more immoral than the usual little wanton. So the critics thought in the 'eighties, and they thought truly, if it be true that morality and custom are interchangeable terms. The critics were right in a way; everybody is right in a way, for nothing is wholly ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... She could not switch her enthusiasm from the vote long enough to appreciate this lapse from good taste. Her mind did not work that way. We would have to begin at the beginning and lead up to kissing as a moral or immoral act, before she could give it any serious attention. And when she asked Bill to join the local league I interposed, lest the harmony of the ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... the extraordinary freedom of speech which Henry permitted, see L. and P., xii., ii., 952, where Sir George Throckmorton relates how he accused Henry to his face of immoral relations with Mary Boleyn ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... rant; but still it carries within it the germ of an excellence, which, sooner or later, must in the progress of national genius arrive at its full development. Meanwhile, it is a consolation to know that nothing really immoral is ever permanently popular, or ever, therefore, long deleterious; what is dangerous in a work of genius cures itself in a few years. We can now read "Werther," and instruct our hearts by its exposition of weakness and passion, our taste by its exquisite ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... misadventure. Agreements cannot be enforced when their performance would involve an offence against the law. There may be legal offence, it must be remembered, not only in acts commonly recognized as criminal, disloyal or immoral, but in the breach or non-observance of positive regulations made by the legislature, or persons having statutory authority, for a great variety of purposes. It would be useless to give details on the subject here. Again, there are cases ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... waxed suddenly animated. A subject had been broached which lay close to his heart. "The public schools constitute a godless sink of pollution!" he replied heatedly. "They are nurseries of vice! They are part of an immoral and vicious system of education which is undermining the religion of American children! I have always contended that we, the Holy Catholic Church, must control education! I hold that education outside of the Church ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... flagitious, immoral, sinful, vile, culpable, guilty, iniquitous, unlawful, wicked, felonious, illegal, nefarious, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... and clots of dull red. It was the whalers' paradise—a paradise of the loveliest tropical beauty, of palm-shaded beach and verdure-clad mountain imaginable; a paradise of wonderfully beautiful and utterly, hopelessly immoral native women; and, lastly, a paradise of cheap native grog, as potent and fiery as if Hell had been boiled down and concentrated into ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... immoral or unjust and how can I, a lover of truth and justice, support it? (2) Even if the claim be just in theory, the Turk is hopelessly incapable, weak and cruel. He does ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... don't look well," cried a jolly youth, against whom Bertha had frequently warned him; "but a glass of sherry will soon restore you. It would be highly immoral to leave you in this condition ...
— A Good-For-Nothing - 1876 • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the first. The earlier issues of the first five cantos were doubly anonymous. Neither author nor publisher subscribed their names on the title-page. The book was a monster, and, as its maker had foreseen, "all the world" shuddered. Immoral, in the sense that it advocates immoral tenets, or prefers evil to good, it is not, but it is unquestionably a dangerous book, which (to quote Kingsley's words used in another connection) "the young and innocent will do well to leave altogether unread." It is dangerous because it ignores ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... insincere and vacillating, that Alcibiades stood forth as a party leader. He was thirty-one years of age, belonged to an ancient and powerful family, possessed vast wealth, had great personal beauty and attractive manners, but above all, was unboundedly ambitious, and grossly immoral—the most insolent, unprincipled, licentious, and selfish man that had thus far scandalized and adorned Athenian society. The only redeeming feature in his character was his friendship for Socrates, who, it seems, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... his thin shrunken form, poorly clad, at his face, deeply lined with great furrows, made there by incessant toil and constant pain. I felt my joy in Suzee to wither in the grey shadow of his grief. Some people would have thought him doubtless an immoral old scoundrel, and that he had no business in his old age to try to be happy as younger men are, to wish, to expect it. But I cannot see that joy is the exclusive right of any particular age. A young man or young woman has no more right or title to enjoy than an old man or ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... custom, under which the state consulted Etruscan sages in certain emergencies and the government accordingly took steps to secure the traditional transmission of Etruscan lore in the noble families of Etruria, as well as the permission of the secret worship of Demeter, which was not immoral and was restricted to women, may probably be ranked with the earlier innocent and comparatively indifferent adoption of foreign rites. But the admission of the worship of the Mother of the Gods was a bad sign of the weakness which the government felt in ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... to the church to make good the promise of the optimist? Let us explore the "amen corner" and see how many pious souls we shall there find whose incomes are chiefly drawn from buildings rented for immoral purposes. Even while I write I see an old white-haired man, whose power in prayer is the pride of his church, making his rounds, collecting his monthly stipend from the keepers of negro brothels and the lowest ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... drama of Victor Hugo, Dumas, and the enlightened classes, is profoundly immoral and absurd, the DRAMA of the common people is absurd, if you will, but good and right-hearted. I have made notes of one or two of these pieces, which all have good feeling and kindness in them, and which turn, as the reader will see, upon one or two favorite ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... happened the young folks wanted to get up a quadrille, began to arrange it innocently enough before his face and eyes. Thereupon he jumped up in a huff, and flung himself out of the house, and the next Sunday delivered an extra blast on the 'immoral tendencies of the dance.' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sort of conquest that Jane Hastings delighted in—and sought to gain with any man who came within range. If the men had known what she was about, they would have denounced her conduct as contemptible and herself as immoral, even brazen. But in their innocence they accused only their sophisticated and superbly masculine selves and regarded her as the soul of innocence. This was the more absurd in them because she obviously excelled in the feminine art of inviting display of charm. To ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... language, I have deemed it proper to omit—with an apology to the Prudes for the absence of an appendix in which they might be given without offense. (I had it in mind to insert the music here, but am told by credible authority that in Japan music is moral or immoral without reference to the words that may be sung with it. So I omit—with reluctance—the score, as well ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... that I hope the poor little fellows may see the hideousness of sin, and loathe it as much as they do the vile tobacco-leaves you give them to suck, and the spirits and beer which you teach them to drink. Stop! hear me out. There is nothing immoral in drinking a glass of beer or in smoking, but in our case they are both forbidden by the Doctor, whom we are bound to obey. Both become vices when carried to excess, as you, Blackall, carry them, and ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... pen; Plautus, who composed the best comedies of antiquity while turning a mill-wheel; Seneca the philosopher, of whom it is said that the noblest act of his life was his death; Quintilian the rhetorician; the immoral Sallust, who speaks so eloquently of virtue; the two Plinys; Suetonius and Varro—in a word, all the Latin letters from the time when they stammered their first word with Livius Andronicus until they exhaled their ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... Sirens: the absolute resignation to the senses is license, is destruction; we may say the same thing of the opposite, the absolute suppression of man's sensuous being is simply his dissolution. Hence the extremes appear; the moral and the immoral extremes land us in the same place; they are the two mighty rocks which may smite together and crush the poor mortal who happens to get in between the closing surfaces. If we understand the image, it holds true of excess on either side; excessive indulgence ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... delicacy; that one told lies, and was not religious; a third only wanted to coin money under the cloak of marriage; another was not of a nature to make a woman happy; here she suspected hereditary gout; there certain immoral antecedents alarmed her. Like the Church, she required a noble priest at her altar; she even wanted to be married for imaginary ugliness and pretended defects, just as other women wish to be loved for the ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... Alexina irreverently called the A.A., had always been ostentatiously simple, albeit a butler and a staff of maids had contributed to their excessive comfort. In the eighties, evening toilettes during the summer were considered immoral; but by degrees, as time tooled in its irresistible modernities, they gradually fell into the habit of wearing out their winter party gowns at the evening diversions of the country season. Burlingame, ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... but one understands the fascination so well; and it gives so much pleasure to—twenty-two, that it is almost immoral for an old fogy like myself to monopolise it. I don't understand you in the ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... is a sort of stock-in-trade, axiomatic assertion, that if it were intended for man to know the future God would have revealed it to him; and as it is not thus revealed, it is unwise, or unlawful, or immoral to seek to read it. On the same principle and with just as much logic, it might be solemnly declared that we have no right to endeavor to surprise any of the secrets of the Universe; that if it had been intended for us to know the weight and composition of the stars, ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... the struggle for existence, and when they are not assured, the contrary is true. Among savages, infanticide and parricide are not only permitted but are obligatory and sanctioned by religion if the tribe inhabits an island where food is scarce (for instance, in Polynesia), and they are immoral and criminal acts on continents where the food supply ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... system of education has taught youths to think for themselves before either the mental or moral muscles are tough enough, with the result that she is the agnostic and materialistic nation of Europe, and her capital the most licentious and immoral in Europe. ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... lay school." He who thus expresses himself seeking to arouse Filipino hatred against the Japanese, to create suspicion first and trouble afterwards, is a stranger, and in the language in which he himself writes are written the theatrical works and the immoral novels that come to the Philippines. [3] In his language, too, were promulgated those laws and regulations in our country instituting cockfighting, lottery, billiard, created as sources of revenue for the ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... desire for a dissolution of an intolerable matrimonial alliance, is as fundamental to human nature as the one which inspires a desire for marriage, and is oft times far more moral. Therefore, to require the commission of immoral and degrading acts on the part of one of the parties to a marriage before a divorce can be granted, regardless of why it is desired, places an unwarranted premium upon immorality, and degrades society equally as much as it does the one committing ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... establishment below stairs revelled in beer at his expense. In the same journal appeared a report of a speech delivered by its own editor, who having said of Shakespeare, "We turn to the words of this immortal writer," had a "t" knocked out for him, and was represented as having spoken of "this immoral writer." I was with the dear old chief at the time at which the blunder was discovered and the most eloquent conversationalist at that time alive in England surpassed himself. The offending "reader" was a married man with a family, and a hard-working, conscientious creature, as a rule, ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... condemns only such austerities as, by diminishing the vigour of the constitution, make us less capable of being useful to others. Any indulgence, even in food, not necessary to health and strength, he condemns as immoral. All gratifications except those of the affections, are to be tolerated only as "inevitable infirmities." Novalis said of Spinoza that he was a God-intoxicated man: M. Comte is a morality-intoxicated man. Every question with him is one of morality, and no motive ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... sense and appreciation by them, while his stronger stomach did not pay him back next day as Killigrew's invariably did. Carminow was full of stories, all, needless to say, of a sanguinary nature; Killigrew capped them, or tried to, by would-be immoral tales of Paris; and Ishmael said very little, but, with his deadly clarity of vision for once working beneficently, sat there aware how young and somehow rather lovable they were through it all, while he himself, whom ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... of a valuable life, or as does his lordship the bishop in the delivery of a homily overflowing with persuasive eloquence. The burglar has his appreciation of pleasure, and the others theirs; and so long as the pleasures of the individual are not immoral and dishonourable, do not trespass upon the rights and liberties of others, let ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... an action—that is, whether it was conducive to one's welfare and that of the race, or the reverse. In this view, if a child places its hand on a hot stove, the action is "wrong," because it brings pain and unhappiness, although the act is neither moral or immoral. And another action is "right" because it brings happiness, well-being and satisfaction, present and future, although the act was neither moral nor immoral. In this view there can be neither reward nor punishment, ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... everything. I wish some learned person in Oxford or elsewhere would write an essay to show how little force has been able to achieve in the world. And the curious and the really remarkable thing is that it was this heresy which brought Germany herself to grief. It is because of the false and immoral belief in the all-powerfulness of force that Germany has fallen, and yet those opposed to Germany, though they conquered her, adopted only too much of ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... in a terrific phantom who was severely just; but when it seemed that the one quality of justice was gone, then I took refuge in the conviction that there could be no God at all. That WAS a refuge for the time, for it is better to believe in no God than to believe in an immoral God and it was long years before a better refuge found me. Yet, looking back now over these seven-and-twenty years, I see how that one little child's suffering has influenced countless lives! How it was just the most beautiful thing that could have ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... the trouble to record these circumstances, mentions that the probable effect of this new kind of industry upon the character of the people was most attentively considered by the founders. In Europe, as most of them had personally seen, the operatives were unintelligent and immoral, made so by fifteen or sixteen hours' labor a day, and a beer-shop on every corner. They caused suitable boarding-houses to be built, which were placed under the charge of women known to be competent and respectable. Land was assigned and money subscribed for schools, for ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... does not destroy the force of the golden rule and the ten commandments. Parts of the Bible are so true, so grand, so beautiful, that it is a pity it should have been bound in the same volume with sentiments and descriptions so gross and immoral. ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... never listened to a more immoral sentiment," she said. "I think you had better go to sleep again. But I understand," she added, as if she were ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... directed towards the abolition of war are denominated as not only "foolish but absolutely immoral." To indicate that in this prosecution of war for the increase of dominion, chivalry would be a weakness and magnanimity a crime, we are finally told that "the State is a law unto itself" and that "weak nations have ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... some of your time on line lone. Line doesn't allow of shirking. Oils do, and three square inches of flashy, tricky stuff in the corner of a pic sometimes carry a bad thing off,—as I know. That's immoral. Do line-work for a little while, and then I can tell more about your powers, as ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... advance of the psychologists. Here they agree in finding the "root of evil," the heart of the "old man" and best promise of the "new." Here is the raw material both of vice and of virtue—namely, a mass of desires and cravings which are in themselves neither moral nor immoral, but natural and self-regarding. "In will, imagination and desire," says William Law, "consists the life or fiery driving of every intelligent creature."[70] The Divine voice which said to Jacopone da Todi "Set ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill |
