|
|
|
More "Refine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... children;' and added, 'Ah! dear God! Thou hast done clumsily in exalting children—such poor little simpletons—so high. Is it just and right that Thou shouldst reject the wise, and receive the foolish? But God our Lord has purer thoughts than we have; He must, therefore, refine us, as said the fanatics; He must hew great boughs and chips from us, before He makes such children and ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... be present all the While the Metamorphosis is under the Operation, and to look on very attentively, and that they may have the less Reason to doubt, to perform the whole Operation with their own Hands, while I stand at a Distance, and don't so much as put my Finger to it. I put them to refine the melted Matter themselves, or carry it to the Refiners to be done; I tell them beforehand, how much Silver or Gold it will afford: And in the last Place, I bid them carry the melted Mass to several Goldsmiths, to have it try'd by the Touchstone. They find the exact Weight ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... Virgil was used to pour out a great number of verses in the morning, and pass the day in retrenching the exuberances, and correcting inaccuracies; and it was Pope's custom to write his first thoughts in his first words, and gradually to amplify, decorate, rectify, and refine them. Others employ, at once, memory and invention, and, with little intermediate use of the pen, form and polish large masses by continued meditation, and write their productions only, when, in their opinion, they have completed them. This last was Johnson's method. He never ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... world, would fain ignore the God-given law to "be fruitful and multiply." Regardless of the affected horror of anaemic prudes and ancient wall-flowers, the woman of to-day insists upon being recognized as a vital force—is even beginning to comprehend that, refine it as you will, differentiate it as you may, it is the same vital force which fills the cradle that sways the scepter. As she aspires to share with man the regency of this world, she will scarce thank Carpenter and Maxwell for a premise from which the conclusion must be inevitably ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... abuse condemned, and use allowed and approved. The Savior is at the hilarious merry-making of the marriage, contributing to the festivity. His own parable is on record, bidding men put the gospel into all the forms and developments of life, to refine and fit them for human enjoyment. The long list of exceptions with which men are forbidden to bring the gospel leaven into contact has been added by men, not by Christ. He was condemned for the very same reason for which hundreds condemn a so called liberal Christian to-day; ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... maxim, but it has rarely been found a truism. They who feel it, feel also the virtue which dictated the aphorism. Men whose object is to enlighten the nations or exalt the judgment or (the least ambition) to refine the tastes of others—men who feel that this object is dearer to them than a petty and vain ambition—feel also that all who labor in the same cause are united with them in a friendship which exists in one climate as in another—in a I republic or in a despotism: these are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... in all frontier regions, the population was chiefly male. The brave women who took their share of the common work and hardship were treated with much respect, and did their part well, no doubt, but they had little leisure for those arts which brighten the lives and refine the characters ...
— Andrew Jackson • William Garrott Brown
... Chineses are an Ancient, Wise, Polite, and most Ingenious People; so the Muscovites begun to reap the Benefit of this open Trade; and not only to grow exceeding Rich by the bartering for all the Wealth of those Eastern Countries; but to polish and refine their Customs and Manners, as much on that side as they have from their European Improvements ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... biography show that beautiful women, if true, gentle, and unselfish, have great power with their own sex, and almost unbounded influence over men. Your power, therefore, is subtle, penetrating, and reaches the inner life, the very warp and woof of character. If a beautiful statue can ennoble and refine, a beautiful woman can accomplish infinitely more. She can be a constant inspiration, a suggestion of the perfect life beyond and an earnest of it. All power brings responsibility, even that which a man achieves ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... friendship between the two; and of late years Lord Driffield's interest in David's development and career had become particularly warm and cordial. He had himself largely contributed to the subtler sides of that development, had helped to refine the ambitions and raise the standards of the growing intellect; his advice, owing to his lifelong commerce with and large possession of books, had often been of great practical use to the young man; his library had for years been at ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... such a maiden as her mother must have been, one of Nature's own ladies, but more refined in type, texture, and form, as the American atmosphere and food and life always refine the children of European stock,—slenderer, more delicate, finer of complexion, and with a soft, exquisite sweetness of voice, more thrilling than her mother's, larger and more robust heartfeltness of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... many years from the same roots; and although the canes from old stools, as they are called, produce less sugar than those of the first year's planting, the juice is clearer, and requires far less trouble to prepare and refine. Before another year came round, the boys made a pair of wooden rollers of eighteen inches in diameter. These were covered with strips of hoop iron, nailed lengthways upon them at short intervals from each other, thereby obtaining a better ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... in an age of literary pedantry and moral prudery, fancied that it was his duty to refine the style of his great ancestor, and to remove allusions open to ignorant misconstruction. Instead, therefore, of giving an exact transcript of the original poems, he set himself to soften down their harshness, to clear away their obscurity, to amplify, transpose, and mutilate according to ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Sir Philip broke the Charm, and sigh'd out, Oh, the monstrous Effects of Passion! Say rather, Oh, the foolish Effects of a mean Education! (interrupted his Majesty of Bantam.) For Passions were given us for Use, Reason to govern and direct us in the Use, and Education to cultivate and refine that Reason. But (pursu'd he) for all his Impudence to me, which I shall take a time to correct, I am oblig'd to him, that at last he has found me out a Kingdom to my Title; and if I were Monarch of that Place (believe me, Ladies) I would make you all Princesses and Duchesses; ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... had not shaved without crying. I'd spend 3/4 of an hour whetting away on my hand—no use, couldn't get an edge. Tried a razor strop-same result. So I sat down and put in an hour thinking out the mystery. Then it seemed plain—to wit: my hand can't give a razor an edge, it can only smooth and refine an edge that has already been given. I judge that a razor fresh from the hone is this shape V—the long point being the continuation of the edge—and that after much use the shape is this V—the attenuated edge all worn off and gone. By George I knew that was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ceased to satisfy the natural cravings of the great body of Taoist followers. Chuang Tzu had already placed the source of human life beyond the limits of our visible universe; and in order to secure a return thither, it was only necessary to refine away the grossness of our material selves according to the doctrine of the Way. It thus came about that the One, in whose obliterating unity all seemingly opposed conditions were to be indistinguishably blended, ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... heart a consuming pyre Of flame, to brighten and refine:— A singer, in the starry choir, That will not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... which he may never grasp, who rules in gorgeous state Fertile Africa's dominions. Happier, happier far my fate! Though for me no bees Calabrian store their honey, nor doth wine Sickening in the Laestrygonian amphora for me refine; Though for me no flocks unnumbered, browsing Gallia's pastures fair, Pant beneath their swelling fleeces, I at least am free from care; Haggard want with direful clamour ravins never at my door, Nor wouldst thou, if more I wanted, oh my friend, deny me more. Appetites subdued will make ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... subordinates to present their views, and to weigh them in the light of reason, is at the same time the surest way to win their confidence and to refine one's own information and judgments. However, to leave final decision to them in matters which are clearly in the area of one's own responsibility, is fatal to the character of self and to the integrity ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... pardon, fut issi gran, si s'en esmeurent mult li cuers des genz, et mult s'en croisierent, porce que li pardons ere si gran. Villehardouin, No. 1. Our philosophers may refine on the causes of the crusades, but such were the genuine feelings of a ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... kingdom who would not have full work. And when we had supplied the physical wants of our population (a greater task than it appears at the first view), we should have introduced from every corner of the world the luxuries which refine civilization; the artisan building himself a house would then make it more comfortable and healthy, with wood floors, carpets, better furniture, &c.; and the master manufacturer erecting a house would have marble stairs and floor in his entrance hall, doors, &c. of mahogany, furniture, of rarer ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... much from fear, as from ignorance. His insight is anything but profound. He has no suspicion of deeper waters. Through the whole course of the present story, he never attempts to fathom Crosbie's feelings, to retrace his motives, to refine upon his character. Mr. Trollope has learned much in what is called the realist school; but he has not taken lessons in psychology. Even while looking into Crosbie's heart, we never lose sight of Courcy ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... dirty skill to freight such a drunken ship with so much gilded dirt"—was one of the mildest of his phrases, as, "breathing out these and many other passions," he harangued those who had "no thought, no discourse, no hope, and no work but to dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, and load gold." ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... that once arrayed him, The charm Admitto te ad gradum, With touch of parchment can refine, And make the veriest coxcomb shine, Confer the gift of tongues at once, And fill with sense the vacant dunce. Trumbull's Progress of Dullness, Ed. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... that moment—before the brain had begun to refine on the situation—what was asked of him. He was to be Melrose's tool and accomplice in all that Melrose's tyrannical caprice chose to do with the lives of human beings; he was to forfeit the respect of good men; he was to make an enemy of Harry ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... some rigid law that it would be death to break. Then, you know, at home we are always talking about people, and discussing them; but we always talk of each person for what he is in himself, and I always thought a person could refine himself if he tried, and was sincere, and not conceited. But he seems to judge people according to their origin and locality and calling, and to believe that all refinement must come from just such training and circumstances as his own. Without exactly saying so, he puts everything ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... Then he added, "When you think of it, sir, probably the first metal they ever used was aluminum—where our ancestors used copper—and they had a beryllium age next, instead of iron. And right now, sir it's probably as expensive for them to refine iron as it is for us to handle titanium and beryllium and osmium—which are duck soup for them! Our two cultures ought to thrive as long as we're friends, sir. They know it already—and we'll find it out in ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... in the year 2022 without permission from the Board. Gulflex and other oil companies protest to Number One as they say we might open up a hole that will spill all the petroleum out of the earth all at once, so fast they couldn't refine it. A spark could ignite it and set the globe on fire like it was a brandied Christmas pudding. But then another earthquake shakes Earth from the rice fields of China to the llamas in Peru just when it looks as if we were about to be tossed ...
— Operation Earthworm • Joe Archibald
... manners that make a similar impression with personal beauty; that give the like exhilaration, and refine us like that; and, in memorable experiences, they are suddenly better than beauty, and make that superfluous and ugly. But they must be marked by fine perception, the acquaintance with real beauty. They must always show self-control: you shall not be facile, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... think on these things,"—on these scattered fragmentary sacraments of Him whose number is not two, nor seven, "but seventy-times seven;" that is the way—I think, the only way—to be ready to recognise our Saviour, and to prepare to meet our God; that He may be to us, too, as a refiner's fire, and refine us—our thoughts, our deeds, ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... a great many reasons against copious profanity of speech. Here you have the artistic reason, and, by implication, that which forbids its use in literature—namely, its ineffectiveness. But though she selects, Mrs. Woods does not refine. She exhibits the life of the travelling show in its habitual squalor as well as in its occasional brightness. How she has managed it passes my understanding: but her book leaves the impression of confident ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... books, or art: For wit and humour differ quite; That gives surprise, and this delight, Humour is odd, grotesque, and wild, Only by affectation spoil'd; 'Tis never by invention got, Men have it when they know it not. Our conversation to refine, True humour must with wit combine: From both we learn to rally well, Wherein French writers most excel; [2]Voiture, in various lights, displays That irony which turns to praise: His genius first found out the rule For an obliging ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... whether knowledge of the facts is good or bad for the child depends entirely upon the impression it makes upon him. Undoubtedly the country child is in a better position to receive instruction, but whether this instruction tends to refine his feelings and elevate his heart depends altogether upon how it is given. Probably the average country boy has no more spiritual conception of the matter than the average city boy, though he may have a more wholesome and, so to speak, utilitarian thought of it. His interest at ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... the contrast between vulgar and ideal sentiments; it is a positive means of exhibition. Continued prose in Comedy is nothing but the natural language, on which the poet has failed to employ his skill to refine and smoothe it down, while apparently he seems the more careful to give an accurate imitation of it: it is that prose which Molire's Bourgeois Gentilhomme has been speaking his whole ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... literature an almost aristocratic daintiness and feeling for the refined and select. As compared with the British school, the leading American school is marked by an increased delicacy of finesse, a tendency to refine and refine, a perhaps exaggerated dread of the platitude and the commonplace, a fondness for analysis, a preference for character over event, an avoidance of absolutely untempered seriousness and ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... say you will agree with me, that as there is no Moral in these Jests, they ought to be discouraged, and looked upon rather as pieces of Unluckiness than Wit. However, as it is natural for one Man to refine upon the Thought of another, and impossible for any single Person, how great soever his Parts may be, to invent an Art, and bring it to its utmost Perfection; I shall here give you an account of an honest Gentleman of my Acquaintance who ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... genealogy can not always be admitted for political lying; I shall therefore desire to refine upon it, by adding some circumstances of its birth and parents. A political lie is sometimes born out of a discarded statesman's head, and thence delivered to be nursed and dandled by the rabble. Sometimes it is produced a monster, and licked into shape; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... action on her powers 600 Becomes herself harmonious; wont so oft In outward things to meditate the charm Of sacred order, soon she seeks at home To find a kindred order, to exert Within herself this elegance of love, This fair-inspired delight; her temper'd powers Refine at length, and every passion wears A chaster, milder, more attractive mien. But if to ampler prospects, if to gaze On Nature's form, where, negligent of all 610 These lesser graces, she assumes the port Of that Eternal Majesty ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... new fashion shall these woods to-day Hear love discoursed; and it shall well be seen That my divinity is present here In its own person, not its ministers. I will inbreathe high fancies in rude hearts; I will refine and render dulcet sweet Their tongues; because, wherever I may be, Whether with rustic or heroic men, There am I Love; and inequality, As it may please me, do I equalise; And 'tis my crowning glory and great miracle ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... little American girl, who has been brought up to cultivate her mind, to refine her taste, to care for her health, to be a helpful daughter and a good sister, to visit the poor and teach in Sunday schools; when a good, sweet, modest little puss of this kind combs all her pretty hair backward till it is one mass ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... thy generous indignation check'd, Nor check'd the tender tear to Misery given; From Guilt's contagious power shall that protect, This soften and refine the soul for Heaven. But dreadful is their doom whom doubt has driven To censure Fate, and pious Hope forego: Like yonder blasted boughs by lightning riven, Perfection, beauty, life, they never know, But frown on all that pass, a ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... is to be thwarted in what would best raise and refine him. That great, bright leading star of a well-placed affection is not to be allowed to help him through all the storms and quicksands in ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... organization than the ordinary. The vitality of nature animates him who has insight to discern her at first hand, whereas his followers miss the freshness of the morning, because, instead of discovering, they must be content to illustrate and refine. Those of our writers who betray Turguenieff's influence are possibly his superiors in finish and culture, but their faculty of convincing and presenting is less. Their interest in their own work seems less serious than his; they may entertain us ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... and follies that refined. When shall we both renew them? when, restored To the gay feast and intellectual board, Shall I once more enjoy with thee and thine Those whims that teach, those follies that refine? Even now, as, wandering upon Erie's shore, I hear Niagara's distant cataract roar, I sigh for home,—alas! these weary feet Have many a mile ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the months, adjusted himself somewhat to these conditions. He had become, he thought, more used to the German way of living. To get the best out of it, he realized that one must coarsen instead of refine the senses and aptitudes. Instincts should be strengthened, roughened, rather than checked or made more esthetic. The German puts a heavy hand on things. He takes big bites at existence. Thunderous might envelops and clouds his ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... a sculptor, a painter in sound. When he died, the greatest fountain of melody that ever enchanted the world, ceased. His music will instruct and refine forever. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... appear. Even if they hear us they will not, or are not suffered to obey. If we would behold them we must create the power of vision in our own natures. They are about us always, only we cannot see or feel their presence; our senses are too gross. To succeed we must refine our senses until they acquire an aptitude beyond the natural. Then without any will or any intervention on their parts, we may triumph, perhaps even when they do not know that we ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... will burne like the lanthorne. [Sidenote: 13. Saltpeter and brimstone.] Saltpeter in many places, as at Ouglits, Yaruslaue, and Vstiug, they make and some smal store of brimstone vpon the riuer Volgha, but want skil to refine it. [Sidenote: 14. Iron.] Their iron is somewhat brittle, but a great weight of it is made in Corelia, Cargapolia, and Vstiug Thelesna. Other mine they haue none gowing within ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt
... its full panoply, and then crush into dazzled submission any potential rivalry. She meant also to exert an educational influence, for she allowed that Olga had great gifts, and she meant to train and refine those gifts so that they might, when exercised under benign but autocratic supervision, conduce to the strength and splendour of Riseholme. Naturally she must be loyally and ably assisted, and Georgie realized that the tableau of King Cophetua (his tableau as ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... your style. These should be selected with great discrimination and care, with reference both to their style and their moral tendency. Poetry, to a limited extent, tends to elevate the mind, cherish the finer sensibilities of the heart, and refine the taste. ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... this separation in motives must lead also to a distinction in the machinery of the work. The philanthropists address themselves, not to the artisan merely, but to the laborer in general, desiring in any possible way to refine the habits or increase the happiness of our whole working population, by giving them new recreations or new thoughts: and the principles of Art-Education adopted in a school which has this wide but somewhat indeterminate aim, are, or should be, very different from those adopted ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... understand that he meant to live freely and largely, and be as interested as occasion demanded. Rowland saw no reason to regard this as a menace of dissipation, because, in the first place, there was in all dissipation, refine it as one might, a grossness which would disqualify it for Roderick's favor, and because, in the second, the young sculptor was a man to regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his passions to his genius to be dealt with, and to find that he could live ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... drinking. Many a scene of riot and orgies did those log-walls witness. Such is generally the life in a lumber-camp: hard, wholesome labour in the day, loud revelling at night. The rough, adventurous life, with no home charm or female influence to refine or restrain, is probably the principal reason of such low practice of ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... adumbrate what man in himself calls "love," spelled all out in capitals. I repeat, the need is the same. From the amoeba, up the ladder of life to you and me, comes this passion of perpetuation. And in yourself, refine and sublimate as you will, it is none the less blind, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... crowing of some distant chanticleer, moved lazily in the sluggish air. It was a season of general repose, just such a day, I think, as a saint would choose to assist his fancy in describing the sunny regions whither his thoughts delight to wander, or a poet would select to refine his ideas of the climate of Elysium. At length I arrived at the old meeting-house where I had often gone, when a lad with my father ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... each day pregnant with its own suggestion: saw his life as a tapestry, the design of which was woven upon a background of surpassing natural beauty—the climax and gradual decrescendo of the year. He had emerged from that long period of semi-idleness in which he had been able to do no more than refine a mass of half-finished work; and was now feeling a fresh joy in a renewed and strong-flowing power; an excitement in the evolving of new ideas. September found ready for the printer five new works; the first of them and ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... promulgation, even its conception, was pronounced a crime whose penalty was death. And Bruno, who, from the depths of infamous superstition, had risen into the pure light of heaven, to a theory whose principles, though they might not satisfy, could not fail to refine, elevate, and encourage the soul long groveling in the mire of ignorance, or languishing in the dark dungeons of Scholasticism,—Bruno died for the truth. More foolish than the savages of whom Montesquieu speaks, who cut down trees to reach their fruit, these judges of Bruno destroyed the tree ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... white woman differs far more from a white man than a negress or pigmy woman from her equivalent male. The education, the mental disposition, of a white or Asiatic woman, reeks of sex; her modesty, her decorum is not to ignore sex but to refine and put a point to it; her costume is clamorous with the distinctive elements of her form. The white woman in the materially prosperous nations is more of a sexual specialist than her sister of the poor and austere peoples, of the prosperous classes ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... should cease to overawe profligacy, and to win and to shame men into decency, fidelity, and love of unsullied virtue—it is easy to see that this influence, which has hitherto been exerted to strengthen and refine our society, will operate entirely to its corruption and debasement; that domestic happiness and private honour will be extinguished, and public spirit and national industry most probably annihilated along ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... to observe the steps by which, were it only through impulses of self-conservation, and when searching with a view to more effectual destructiveness, war did and must refine itself from a horrid trade of butchery into a magnificent and enlightened science. Starting from no higher impulse or question than how to cut throats most rapidly, most safely, and on the largest scale, it has issued even at our own stage of advance into a science, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... notions of man that we possess. Literature refines, science deepens, various devices extend it. Those who act on the knowledge at hand are the men of affairs. And all the while, research studies their results, artists express subtler perceptions, critics refine and adapt the general culture of the times. There is no other way ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... those who by nature and training should be its helpers hinder it instead. Why do they do this? Because their fastidious, aesthetic natures are outraged by a crudeness which they themselves could easily refine away if they chose; because also they recoil at a lack of conformity to existing conventions—conventions so hampering to the inner spirit of the Newness, that in order to incarnate at all it must of necessity ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... laugh, that he could scarce contain himself; but still he kept a grave countenance; and, when the Master had ended his song, and said:—"How likes it thee?" he answered:—"Verily, no lyre of straw could vie with you, so artargutically(4) you refine your strain." "I warrant thee," returned the Master, "thou hadst never believed it, hadst thou not heard me." "Ay, indeed, sooth sayst thou," quoth Bruno. "And I have other songs to boot," said the Master; "but enough of this at present. Thou must know that I, such as ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... and subjected to all the cruelties and deprivations of a bondman. His natural abilities were above mediocrity, but having never had the advantages of an education, or the privileges of a society calculated to cultivate and refine his natural aspiring intellect, and to direct his indomitable will in the acquirement of the more imperishable graces of the human heart, he had come to manhood with a determined, selfish disposition, to accomplish whatever gratified his vanity or ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... don't you see, then, that you must stand up for art all the more unflinchingly if you intend to write plays that will refine the theatre-going public, or create a new one? That is why I can't endure to have you even seem to give ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... thus have been rendered superfluous, while the community would not have profited at all. We, on the contrary, were able to find excellent employment for the labour thus saved, which could be utilised in producing things that would elevate and refine, and for which the increased productiveness of labour had created ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... remain a manly people. Corinth, yes; Sybaris, no. Whoever becomes effeminate makes himself a bastard. He must be neither a dilettante nor a virtuoso: but he must be artistic. In the matter of civilization, he must not refine, but he must sublime. On this condition, one gives to the human race ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... temperament, for by seeing divers customs abroad, even if they be of rather an extraordinary nature, they learn to be reasonable, kind and patient with considerably greater ease than they would have done had they remained at home. Indeed those who desire to refine men in their worldly conversation need no other fire and no better cement than this, because those who are naturally rough become gentle, and the gentle become even more gracious. Gherardo di Jacopo Stamina, ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... I shall recommend, without paint, will not cost, or need not, over 37-1/2 cents, with cover, etc. Now, if we wish hives for ornament, it is well enough to expend something for the purpose; but it is well not to refine too much, as there are limits which, if passed, will render it unfit for bees. Therefore, when profit is an object, the extra expense will or ought to be made up by the bees, in return for an expensive domicil. But will they do it? The merits of the one under consideration are fully given. ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... impeccability without the warmth of camaraderie. Speech, like a man, should be alive. It need not, of course, be boisterous. It may be intense in a quiet, modest way. But if it too sedulously observes all the Thou shalt not's of the rhetoricians, it will refine the vitality out of itself and leave its ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... random. reason ill, falsely &c. adj.; misjudge &c. 481; paralogize[obs3]. take on faith, take as a given; assume (supposition) 514. pervert, quibble; equivocate, mystify, evade, elude; gloss over, varnish; misteach &c. 538[obs3]; mislead &c. (error) 495; cavil, refine, subtilize[obs3], split hairs; misrepresent &c. (lie) 544. beg the question, reason in a circle, reason in circles, assume the conclusion. cut blocks with a razor, beat about the bush, play fast and loose, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... on the following day, distinguish themselves by any festive performances; the tables of the antechamber were covered with gold and pearls, and robes and garlands decreed the rewards of those who could refine elegance ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... newsboys, and I object to hearing them use such words as 'screamer,' 'bully,' and 'buster.' In fact, I fail to see the advantage of writing books about such people unless it is done in a very different way. I cannot think they will help to refine the ragamuffins if they read them, and I'm sure they can do no good to the better class of boys, who through these books are introduced to police courts, counterfeiters' dens, gambling houses, drinking saloons, and all sorts ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... life, and have only to notice the coincidence that while the Virgin was miraculously using the power of spiritual love to elevate and purify the people, Eleanor and her daughters were using the power of earthly love to discipline and refine the courts. Side by side with the crude realities about them, they insisted on teaching and enforcing an ideal that contradicted the realities, and had no value for them or for us except in ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... than real, for the stems of the accented notes give us the binary metre. But the illustration serves to show how Dr. Riemann is disposed to refine upon ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... matter-of-fact conception of education throughout this chapter. I may now return to the charge by adding that the banality of our college students' thinking stares us in the face; if we wish to quicken it, to refine it, we should have them study other media of expression qua expression besides their own (that is what Europe did in the Renaissance, and the example of the Renaissance is still pertinent); that if Mr. Flexner's reasoning were valid the French might without detriment convey their "ideas" in Volapuek ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... features, rather indeterminate of old, have become curiously refined, almost delicate, almost supercilious (in the pride of young strength), but not quite either. It is noticeable generally that an orderly mental existence has great power to regularise the features, and in so doing, to refine them. Hence perhaps this refinement of feature in George; for if, in the effort to gain promotion, he has been putting his heart into his work—the routine work of his ship and the Naval barracks—it follows that his mental existence ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... well-proportioned buildings, finely finished detail of stately colonnade, and shady perspective of quay and boulevard. After years of this subtle training the eye instinctively revolts from the vulgar and the crude. There is little in the poorer quarters of our city to rejoice or refine the senses; squalor and all-pervading ugliness are not least among ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... impelling force than philosophy. English young men never played in order to expand their lungs, to increase their circulation, to develop their muscles in power and agility, to improve their figures, to add grace to their bearing, to awaken and refine their intellectual powers, or to make them manly, courageous, and chivalrous. They played enthusiastically for the mere love of play, and all these, and other advantages resulted from ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... resentment, he became attached to his little flock, especially the younger ones, and was loved in return by them, without reserve or doubt. He did much to improve, not alone the minds of the older pupils, but to soften and refine the manners of the young men under his charge; while the young women, always inclined to idealize, found how pleasant it was to receive little acts ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... effect upon me was tragical; that my lively emotions underneath the shock deepened into a settled gloom; that my faculties (notoriously eminent) in a short time became clouded, nay, eclipsed—necessitating my removal (I will not refine) to a madhouse. Hey, is it ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... had a nap in the old armchair. Face down on his knee was La Rotisserie de la Refine Pedauque, and just before he fell asleep he had been thinking: 'As a people shall we ever really like the French? Will they ever really like us!' He himself had always liked the French, feeling at home with their wit, their taste, their cooking. Irene and he had paid many ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Tai-hua, came into the title. He also had two sons; but the eldest, whose name was Hu, died at the age of eight or nine; and the only survivor, the second son, Chia Ching, inherited the title. His whole mind is at this time set upon Taoist doctrines; his sole delight is to burn the pill and refine the dual powers; while every other thought finds no place in his mind. Happily, he had, at an early age, left a son, Chia Chen, behind in the lay world, and his father, engrossed as his whole heart was with the idea of attaining spiritual life, ceded the succession ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... with an image of Saint Catharine, and the panels of the room are painted with subjects from her life, mostly copied from Italian masters. The pictures of St. Catharine and her legend very early impressed her on my mind as the type of ideal beauty—of all that can charm, irradiate, refine, exalt, in the best of ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... in every hundred pounds of lead there are four pounds of pure silver, but of course it costs a good deal to refine." ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... her delicate profile stand out against a background of pain and sorrow, like a lovely cameo whose dainty workmanship has been obliterated by the hand of time. Moral suffering can refine and accentuate the character of a beautiful face, is indeed nearly always kind to it. But here the mental distress was only the feeble reflection of a crushing and deadening material torture. In the evenings, when the hour of rest came at last, Rose, ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... and prevent redness and roughness, and to make the skin soft, smooth, white and delicate, producing a perfectly natural appearance. It teaches how to cure and refine a coarse skin, so that it will be ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... men," he was saying, "and suppose that one of them possessed a genius for the creation of noble and beautiful works of art of any sort, which would afford great pleasure to many people and would refine and elevate their tastes. But suppose that at the same time he was living such a private, even secret, life as made him a source of wickedness and corruption, an endless influence for evil. Then would such a man, do you think—" his voice sank lower and ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... their morals pure, Their judgment nice, or their decisions sure; Merit they have to mightier works unknown, A style, a manner, and a fate their own. We, who for longer fame with labour strive, Are pain'd to keep our sickly works alive; Studious we toil, with patient care refine, Nor let our love protect one languid line. Severe ourselves, at last our works appear, When, ah! we find our readers more severe; For, after all our care and pains, how few Acquire applause, or keep it if they do! Not so these sheets, ordain'd to happier ...
— The Village and The Newspaper • George Crabbe
... know her on my arrival at Vailima in August, 1892, when within a single day we established a firm friendship that only grew closer until her death. The three stanzas by Louis so completely expressed her that it seems useless for a man to add anything or to refine upon it: ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... assure his readers who are not readers of the original, that the discipline which Juno is here said to have suffered from the hands of Jove, is not his own invention. He found it in the original, and considering fidelity as his indispensable duty, has not attempted to soften or to refine away the matter. He begs that this observation may be adverted to as often as any passage shall occur in which ancient practices or customs, not consonant to our own, either in point of delicacy or humanity, may be either expressed ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... All virtues flourish, and all glories flame?— Say,—if ere noon with idiot laugh you lie Wallowing in wine, or cog the dubious die, Or act unshamed, by each indignant bust, The midnight orgies of promiscuous lust!— Go, lead mankind to Virtue's holy shrine, With morals mend them, and with arts refine, Or lift, with golden characters unfurl'd, The flag of peace, and still a warring world!— —So shall with pious hands immortal Fame Wreathe all her laurels round thy honour'd name, High o'er thy tomb with chissel bold engrave, "THE TRULY NOBLE ARE THE GOOD ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried." Zech. xiii, 9. "I bought the field ... and weighed him the money, even seventeen shekels of silver. And I ... weighed him the money in the balances." Jer. xxxii, 9, 10. A shekel was 224 grains, troy weight, which is ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... time-defying buildings, but they knew of no way to roof them except by thatching them. Their roads were marvels of engineering construction, but they could not build bridges except frail ones made out of osier cables. No wheels ran along the smooth, well-paved, magnificent highways. They could refine gold and silver and make weapons of tempered copper, but they were entirely ignorant of the use of iron. The greatest human development has depended upon that last metal. The great nations are those which have had the steel-tempered sword blades in their hands. They could administer a colony ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... means to be honest solely because honesty is right, and not because honesty is profitable, there is a perpetual and beautiful tendency of his honesty to refine and ...
— Heart's-ease • Phillips Brooks
... Virtue now, nor noble blood, Nor wit by love is understood; Gold alone does passion move, Gold monopolizes love; A curse on her, and on the man Who this traffic first began! A curse on him who found the ore! A curse on him who digged the store! A curse on him who did refine it! A curse on him who first did coin it! A curse, all curses else above, On him who used it first in love! Gold begets in brethren hate; Gold in families debate; Gold does friendship separate; ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... engage: For he had joined th' Mechanics' Institute— And in its praises I would not be mute. Mechanics! It deserves your best support, And to its rooms you often should resort. There you may learn from books to act your parts, While they refine and ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... courts, no fine buildings. They had no magistrates to administer law; no avarice to carry them to court. In fine, although without vices, they knew nothing of the arts,—of splendid virtues,—nor of any of the things which refine a people. They appeared to be rather an oak forest than a sensible ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... ages, and conditions. No yard connected with a dwelling is complete without a flower-bed. The cultivation of flowers is eminently promotive of health, refinement of manners, and good taste. Constant familiarity with the most exquisite beauties of nature must refine the feelings and produce gentleness of spirit. Association with flowers should be a part of every child's education. Their cultivation is suitable for children and young ladies in ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... place: Then Dulcinea still shall reign Without a rival or a stain; Nor shall fate itself control Her sway, or blot her from my soul: Constancy, the lover's boast, I'll maintain whate'er it cost: This, my virtue will refine; This will ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... rivalled La Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere was the Earl of Chesterfield, and he only could have done so from his very intimate connexion with France; but unfortunately his brilliant genius was spent in the impossible task of trying to refine a boorish young Briton, in "cutting ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... of Europe and America, who believe, rightly or wrongly, that they are preparing the esthetics of the future). It must be here admitted that there exists an altogether special manner of feeling, dependent on temperament at first, which many cultivate and refine as though it were a precious rarity. There lies the true source of their invention. Doubtless, to assert this pertinently, it would be necessary to establish the direct relations between their physical and psychical constitution and that of their work; to note even the particular states ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... man some day, and if properly trained he may be a useful factor in the uplifting and refining of the world. I love little children," she went on rapturously, looking at Jimmy as if he wasn't there at all, "and I would love to train one, for service in the world to uplift and refine." ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... kind of moral stuff civilized society is composed. The atmosphere is charged with it; we breathe it with every breath and drink it with our mother's milk. Culture and education refine these things slightly but leave them basically untouched. A whole world of literature has been created to justify this kind of life as the only normal one. And this is the more to be wondered at seeing that these are the evils which make life the bitter struggle it ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... attention of the inventors of the age to the great need of a process for oxidizing coal or oil at a low degree, within an insulated vessel. With such an invention electricity would be obtained at such a low cost that it would be used exclusively to light and heat our houses, to smelt, refine, and manipulate our metals, to propel our cars, wagons, carriages, and ships, cook our food, and drive all machinery requiring ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... day—begin. Those ground-windows will stand open all the summer noon, and the flower stands will be gay and fragrant; and the shaded parlour will be the cool retreat of the wearied husband, when he comes in to rest from his professional toils. There will stand the books destined to refresh and refine his higher tastes; and there the music with which the wife will indulge him. Here will they first feel what it is to have a home of their own—where they will first enjoy the privacy of it, the security, ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... up in every land for teaching this mathematical faith; and yet it may be equally jure divino that no one shall be compelled to avail himself of that apparatus, or be punished for doubting or denying the proposition. But the Presbyterians of 1644 did not so refine or argue. They stood stoutly to the necessary identity of Presbyterianism and absolute Anti-Toleration. And so Presbyterianism missed the most magnificent opportunity she has had in her history. Had her offer to England been "Presbytery with a Toleration," ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... lips of La Gioconda those subtle and poisonous curves. Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had any one told him of this picture that 'all the thoughts and experience of the world had etched and moulded therein that which they had of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias?' He would probably ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... of other peoples when the short story pre-eminently flourished among them. But when one has said a thing like this, it immediately accuses one of loose and inaccurate statement, and requires one to refine upon it, either for one's own peace of conscience or for one's safety from the thoughtful reader. I am not much afraid of that sort of reader, for he is very rare, but I do like to know myself what I mean, if I mean anything ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of a man, This marred one heedless day, This heart take Thou to scan Both within and without: Refine with fire its gold, Purge thou its dross away— Yea, hold it in Thy hold, Whence none can pluck ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... it be pure, And fit to serve the lungs with lively breath: Hence do I likewise minister perfume[s] Unto the neighbour brain—perfumes of force To cleanse your head, and make your fancy bright, To refine wit and sharp[293] invention, And strengthen memory: from whence it came, That old devotion incense did ordain To make man's spirit more apt for things divine. Besides a thousand more commodities, In lieu whereof ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... a stern and fiery blast The world's rude furnace must thy blood refine, And many a gale of keenest woe be passed, Till every pulse beat ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... asserted that, through the knowledge of languages, enabling her to penetrate into the mysteries of the older world, she had become a sorceress, like the Celtic druidesses; and how as Abelard and Heloise sat together at home there, to refine a little further on the nature of abstract ideas, "Love made himself of the party with them." You conceive the temptations of the scholar, who, in such dreamy tranquillity, amid the bright and busy spectacle of the "Island," lived ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... idea at all. For I ask any one, whether, taking the smallest atom of dust he ever saw, he has any distinct idea (bating still the number, which concerns not extension) betwixt the 100,000th and the 1,000,000th part of it. Or if he think he can refine his ideas to that degree, without losing sight of them, let him add ten cyphers to each of those numbers. Such a degree of smallness is not unreasonable to be supposed; since a division carried on so far brings it no nearer the end of infinite division, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... yet retains its freshness. Sketches from Lord Byron are more valuable than finished pictures from others; nor are we at all sure that any labour which he might bestow in revisal would not rather efface than refine those outlines of striking and powerful originality which they exhibit when flung rough from the hand of a master."—Biographical Memoirs, by SIR ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed. All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the human form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reveries of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... serve your pleasure. Why should my person, throne, and wealth be booty To one harsh, jealous master? No, all beauty Is heaven's gift, and like the sun, should shine To glad earth's children, and their souls refine. I hate proud man, and like to make him feel He may not crush ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... question—the refining or the vulgarizing influence of man upon nature, and the opposite. Now, did the summer Bostonians make this coast refined, or did this coast refine the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... that the sun is giving off! True, we only get an infinitesimal portion of that energy—but what we do get is more than enough for us. Power houses can be established very conveniently in the tropics, where they will cool the air, and the energy can be used to refine metals. That means that the surplus heat of the tropics will find a use. Weather control will also be possible by the direction-control of great winds. We could set huge director tubes on the tops of mountains, and blow the winds in whatever direction best ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... in Andersen in a hundred disguises, not with the rudimentary features of the old story, but modernized, individualized, and carrying on his shield an unobtrusive little moral. In "Jack the Dullard" he comes nearest to his primitive prototype, and no visible effort is made to refine him. In "The Most Extraordinary Thing" he is the vehicle of a piece of social satire, and narrowly escapes the lot which the Fates seem especially to have prepared for inventors, viz., to make the fortune of some unscrupulous ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... heav'n's own Promethean heat; Italia's gales shall bear my song In soft-link'd notes her woods among; Upon the blue hill's misty side, Thro' trackless deserts waste and wide, O'er craggy rocks, whose torrents flow Upon the silver sands below. Sweet land of melody! 'tis thine The softest passions to refine; Thy myrtle groves, thy melting strains, Shall harmonise and soothe my pains. Nor will I cast one thought behind, On foes relentless, friends unkind: I feel, I feel their poison'd dart Pierce the life-nerve within my heart; 'Tis mingled with the vital heat That bids my throbbing ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... are not valuable only because of the available information they give; when they do not instruct, they elevate and refine. ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... action. Does the silk-worm expend her yellow labors For thee? for thee does she undo herself? Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships For the poor benefit of a bewitching minute?[1] Why does yon fellow falsify highways And put his life between the judge's lips, To refine such a thing, keeps horse and men To beat their valors for her? Surely we're all mad people, and they[2] Whom we think are, are not: we mistake those: 'Tis we are mad in sense, they but ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. If ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... Cavendish is returned from France. He confirms and adds to the amiable accounts we have received of the Duc d'Aiguillon's behaviour to our prisoners. You yourself, the pattern of attentions and tenderness, could not refine on what he has done both in good-nature and good-breeding: he even forbad any ringing of bells or rejoicings wherever they passed—but how your representative blood will curdle when you hear of the absurdity of one of your countrymen: the night after the massacre at St. Cas, the Duc ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... "Refine Vincart!" repeated Claudet, sternly, "what business have you to mix up her name with those creatures to whom you refer? Mademoiselle Vincart," added he, "has nothing in common with that class, and you have no right, Monsieur de Buxieres, to use ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... to refine the somewhat rude household in which she dwelt occurred to her, she discovered that the work was already well begun, for the chief condition of success was present—the disposition to do as she would like. The Atwoods soon surmised that the family was ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... which converts itself to money; talent which glitters to-day that it may dine and sleep well to-morrow; and society is officered by men of parts, as they are properly called, and not by divine men. These use their gifts to refine luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic, and piety, and love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they find beauty in rites and ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... "As we refine, our checks grow finer," said Emerson. As life becomes more elaborate and ambitious, the critical tests increase. Contemporary fame can be created for the artist by favorable contemporary comment; but it rests with himself, after all; it rests in the abiding significance ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... companion who feels for his own or for other people's misfortunes, and who is perhaps obliged to affect or resort to his very pleasantry sometimes, because he feels more acutely than the gravest. The sources of tears and smiles lie close to, ay and help to refine one another. If Dante had been capable of more levity, he would have been guilty of less melancholy absurdities. If Rabelais had been able to weep as well as to laugh, and to love as well as to be ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Thee, goddess, thee, Britannia's isle adores; How has she oft exhausted all her stores, How oft in fields of death thy presence sought, Nor thinks the mighty prize too dearly bought! 130 On foreign mountains may the sun refine The grape's soft juice, and mellow it to wine, With citron groves adorn a distant soil, And the fat olive swell with floods of oil: We envy not the warmer clime, that lies In ten degrees of more indulgent skies, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... vision to divine What he with delving hand explores! Feed me with flame that shall refine To finest gold the rugged ores His strong hands ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... aesthetic sense. Where, on the contrary, insensibility to higher forms of beauty does not exclude a natural love of the lower, we have every reason to be encouraged; there is a true and healthy taste, which only needs experience to refine it. If a man demands light, sound, and splendour, he proves that he has the aesthetic equilibrium; that appearances as such interest him, and that he can pause in perception to enjoy. We have but to vary his observation, to enlarge his thought, to multiply his discriminations ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... on the lyre, used to make his scholars go to hear one that lived near him, and played ill, that they might learn to hate discords." He says again of himself, "A clownish way of speaking does more to refine mine than the most elegant. Every day the foolish countenance of another is advertising and advising me. Profiting little by good examples, I make use of them that are ill, which are everywhere to be found. I endeavour to ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... palfrey of him. Fie on all such sophistications! It will never do, Master Groom! Something of his honest shaggy exterior will still peep up in spite of you,—his good, rough, native, pine-apple coating. You cannot "refine a scorpion into a fish, though you rinse it and scour it with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... all the manners, whether negative or positive, by which hypotheses are ever tested. She can reduce their number, as some are found more open to objection. She can perhaps become the champion of one which she picks out as being the most closely verified or verifiable. She can refine upon the definition of this hypothesis, distinguishing between what is innocent over-belief and symbolism in the expression of it, and what is to be literally taken. As a result, she can offer mediation between different believers, and ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... leave them all even more bewildered than the boldest definition would have done. But that's quite a different thing. The furthest we have gone in the way of definition—unless indeed this too belongs but to our invincible tendency to refine—is by the happy rule we've made that Lorraine shall walk with me every morning to the Works, and I shall find her there when I come out to walk home with me. I see, on reading over, that this is what I meant by "our" in speaking above of our little daily heroism in that direction. The heroism is ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... the charge of the subjects. This I doubt not but that, in a short time, both king and people shall be safe at home, and feared abroad. To conclude, I shall be very glad to hear any man make objection against this design, so that he do so with an intention to refine and perfect the work; but if any shall speak against it with a mind to hinder and destroy it, I must entreat him to pardon me, if I do scarce think him to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... many books have been written, so much discussion has taken place. But I do not think it is so. I cannot see that even in this short chapter I have left out anything that is important in Buddhism. It is such a simple faith that all may be said in a very few words. It would be, of course, possible to refine on and gloze over certain points of the teaching. Where would be the use? The real proof of the faith is in the results, in the deeds that men do in its name. Discussion will not alter these ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... in the waning of that first winter, began actually to refine his own superlative elegance by spraying his superior garments with perfume, by munching tiny confections reputed to scent the breath desirably, by a more diligent grooming of the always superb moustache, the little boy suspected no motive. He saw these works only as the outward signs of an inward ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... to die, So heavenly, that on high Change could not glorify Nor death refine her: Pure gold of perfect love, On earth like heaven's own dove, She cannot ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... artificial ones; and though the great rivers are commonly more or less turbid, if you will look long enough, you may find a spring that sparkles as no water does which drips through your apparatus of sands and sponges. So there are families which refine themselves into intellectual aptitude without having had much opportunity for intellectual acquirements. A series of felicitous crosses develops an improved strain of blood, and reaches its maximum perfection at last in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... can not always be admitted for political lying; I shall therefore desire to refine upon it, by adding some circumstances of its birth and parents. A political lie is sometimes born out of a discarded statesman's head, and thence delivered to be nursed and dandled by the rabble. Sometimes it is produced a monster, and licked into shape; at other times it ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... creep in, creep in, Afar from the fret, the toil and the din, Where the spring of love forever flows, As clear as light and as sweet as the rose; (Creep into my heart), Where the dreams never wilt but their tints refine, Rooted in beautiful thoughts of thine; Where morn falls cool on the soul, like sleep, And the nights are tranquil and tranced and deep; Where the fairest thing of all the fair Thou art, who hast somehow crept in there, Deep into my ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... for heroes proved, In liberating strife. Who more than self their country loved. And mercy more than life! America! America! May God thy gold refine, Till all success be nobleness, And ev'ry gain divine! America! America! God shed His ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... more imaginary than real, for the stems of the accented notes give us the binary metre. But the illustration serves to show how Dr. Riemann is disposed to refine upon the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... separation in motives must lead also to a distinction in the machinery of the work. The philanthropists address themselves, not to the artisan merely, but to the laborer in general, desiring in any possible way to refine the habits or increase the happiness of our whole working population, by giving them new recreations or new thoughts: and the principles of Art-Education adopted in a school which has this wide but somewhat indeterminate aim, are, or ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... will leave them all even more bewildered than the boldest definition would have done. But that's quite a different thing. The furthest we have gone in the way of definition—unless indeed this too belongs but to our invincible tendency to refine—is by the happy rule we've made that Lorraine shall walk with me every morning to the Works, and I shall find her there when I come out to walk home with me. I see, on reading over, that this is what I meant by "our" in speaking above of our little daily heroism in that ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... it Grafts or Buds the Tree; In other things we count it to excel, If it a Docile Scholar can appear To Nature, and but imitate her well; It over-rules, and is her Master here. It imitates her Makers Power Divine, And changes her sometimes, and sometimes does refine: It does, like Grace, the fallen Tree restore To its blest State of Paradise before: Who would not joy to see his conquering hand O'er all the vegetable World command? And the wild Giants of the Wood receive What Law he's pleas'd to give? He bids th' ill-natur'd ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... Honoria, 'why have you been so unfaithful to your original? why have you, like all artists, been trying to soften and refine ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... to feel intuitively the drift of sentiment and conviction, and so to adjust the uses of art to life as to exalt the one, and enrich and refine the other, involved not only the possession of gifts of a high order, but that training which puts a man in command of himself and of his materials. Addison was fortunate in that incomparably important education which assails a child through every sense, and above all through ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... not how to make fine sugar; they only used to boil and skim the juice, which when cold left a black paste. But after they came under the Great Kaan some men of Babylonia who happened to be at the Court proceeded to this city and taught the people to refine the sugar with the ashes ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... privacy was invaded by some patronizing, loud-voiced nouvelle-riche with a low-bred physiognomy that no millions on earth could gild or refine, and manners to match; some foolish, fashionable, would-be worldling, who combined the arch little coquetries and impertinent affectations of a spoilt beauty with the ugliness of an Aztec or an Esquimau; some silly, titled old frump who frankly ignored his tea-making wife and daughters and talked ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Mechanics' Institute— And in its praises I would not be mute. Mechanics! It deserves your best support, And to its rooms you often should resort. There you may learn from books to act your parts, While they refine and elevate ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... helped to soften and refine manners by the stress which it laid upon such "Christian" virtues as humility, tenderness, and gentleness. By dwelling on the sanctity of human life, Christianity did its best to repress the very common practice ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... circumstances, and wondered at them in her own simple way. Her ambition was a little quickened, and the answer was as much out of the usual course of things as the question; the poor girl attempting to refine ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... indeed. As many as sixty heats have been taken off in succession without giving the lining any attention. The absence of any reagent leaves the iron simply pure and homogeneous to a degree never realized in muck bars made by the old puddling process. Thus the expense of a reheating and rerolling to refine the iron is obviated. It was such iron as here results that Bessemer, in his early experiments, was seeking to obtain when he was diverted from his purpose by his splendid discoveries in the art of making steel. So effective is the new process, that even from the poorest grades of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... the pages of this narrative, I discover some places in which I certainly appear to justify her opinion. I even justified it at the time. Before she and Mr. Keller were out of my hearing, I began to see "under the surface," and "to refine" on what ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... creation—to tread humbly in the footsteps of the Maker—to reproduce the images that revolve within it, and to form, from its own ideas, a mimic representation of the actual world. This is the source of all art and all poetry; of every thing, in fact, which tends to adorn and refine our nature. It is this uncontrollable desire to work on and fashion the rough materials that lie under our hands that gives the first impulse to civilization, and impels us onward in the progress of improvement. And wherever we discern the faintest indication that such a principle is at ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... unconscionable, after so many years of cohabitation, as to take exceptions to an expedient by which she would not only enjoy the conversation of her husband, but even the fruits of those talents which the knife would so remarkably refine. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... action bearing on their brows the impress of their noble origin, and cultivating in their hearts the pure and exalted feelings that should ever distinguish those who bear the image of their Maker. Association is destined to do much for poor, suffering humanity—to elevate, refine, redeem the race and restore the purity and love that made the bowers of Eden so surpassingly beautiful. You, sir, and your associates are pioneers in a noble reform. May the blessing ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... thus far found in the world. It is most easily converted into kerosene or lamp oil, and contains a larger proportion of such oil. It is the finest petroleum in the world, except that found in Indiana and Ohio, and that costs more to refine. ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... the end of the wonderful net, where all the arteries close in a terminating point; which arteries taking their rise and origin from the left capsule of the heart, bring, through several circuits, ambages, and anfractuosities, the vital spirits, to subtilize and refine them in the ætherial purity of animal spirits. Nay, in such a studiously meditating, musing person, you may espy so extravagant raptures of one, as it were out of himself, that all his natural faculties for ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... is complete without a flower-bed. The cultivation of flowers is eminently promotive of health, refinement of manners, and good taste. Constant familiarity with the most exquisite beauties of nature must refine the feelings and produce gentleness of spirit. Association with flowers should be a part of every child's education. Their cultivation is suitable for children and young ladies in all ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... of the Bible is to be loved and prized for this, as for a thousand other things,—that it has preserved a purity of meaning to many terms of natural objects. Without this holdfast, our vitiated imaginations would refine away language to mere abstractions. Hence the French have lost their poetical language; and Mr. Blanco White says the same thing ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... orgies did those log-walls witness. Such is generally the life in a lumber-camp: hard, wholesome labour in the day, loud revelling at night. The rough, adventurous life, with no home charm or female influence to refine or restrain, is probably the principal reason of such low practice of ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... of water sheathes electric power sufficient to charge 100,000 Leyden jars and blow the Houses of Parliament to atoms. Farraday amazes us by his statement of the energy required to embroider a violet or produce a strawberry. To untwist the sunbeam and extract the rich strawberry red, to refine the sugar, and mix its flavor, represents heat sufficient to run an engine from Liverpool to London or from Chicago to Detroit. But because nature does her work noiselessly we must not forget that each of her gifts also involves ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... me with bounteous treasure You tyrants think 'twas all to serve your pleasure. Why should my person, throne, and wealth be booty To one harsh, jealous master? No, all beauty Is heaven's gift, and like the sun, should shine To glad earth's children, and their souls refine. I hate proud man, and like to make him feel He may not crush ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... personality, had an air of distinction and destiny. The drawing had been done by a wandering duchess who had seen the girl sketching in the foothills, when on a visit to that "Wild West" which has such power to refine and inspire minds not superior to Nature. Its replica was carried to a castle in Scotland. It had been the gift of Diana Welldon on a certain day not long ago, when Flood Rawley had made a pledge to her, which was as vital to him and to his future as two thousand dollars ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... each other from the first moment they met, and tried to make out that they neither had ever since had a thought that was not the other's; they believed this. The commonplaces of the passion ever since it began to refine itself from the earliest savage impulse, seemed to have occurred to them for the first time in the history of the race; they accused themselves each of not being worthy of the other; they desired to be very good, and to live for the ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... We will behold a brighter world than this, With less of curse and much of noble bliss; For God's kind hand in all our conflicts here Is clearly seen and doubts must disappear; The end He has in view is most benign; The fire will dross consume and gold refine. ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... to polish the manners, refine the taste, or impart accomplishments, but to renovate the character by a permanent inward change. The main dependence for bringing this about was the power of the Holy Ghost—the only power that can impart or maintain spiritual life in man. This ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... the place of truth; If so divinely sweet thy numbers flow, And thy young heart melts with such tender woe; What {p.107} praise, what admiration shall be thine, When sense mature with science shall combine To raise thy genius, and thy taste refine! ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... it, as little a gainer by the revolution as morals. The pieces which were best calculated to form and refine 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 ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... man, This marred one heedless day, This heart take Thou to scan Both within and without: Refine with fire its gold, Purge thou its dross away— Yea, hold it in Thy hold, Whence none ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... pronounced a crime whose penalty was death. And Bruno, who, from the depths of infamous superstition, had risen into the pure light of heaven, to a theory whose principles, though they might not satisfy, could not fail to refine, elevate, and encourage the soul long groveling in the mire of ignorance, or languishing in the dark dungeons of Scholasticism,—Bruno died for the truth. More foolish than the savages of whom Montesquieu speaks, who cut down trees to reach their fruit, these judges of Bruno destroyed ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... beast, and the object of his pursuit, once a woman, may also become a beast, and then shift shapes to a tree or a bird or a star. But in the civilised races the genius of the people tends to suppress, exclude and refine away the wild element, which, however, is never wholly eliminated. The Erinyes soon stop the mouth of the horse of Achilles when he begins, like the horse in Grimm's Goose Girl, to hold a sustained conversation.(1) But the ancient, cruel, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... no great collection of wits of several parts or nations, so neither could there be any succession of wits of several times, whereby one might refine the other, in regard they had not history to any purpose. And the manner of their traditions was utterly unfit and unproper for amplification of knowledge. And again the studies of those times, you shall find, besides wars, incursions, and rapines, which were then almost every where betwixt states ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... Carlyle and Emerson play upon these words, they are at once removed from mechanical definition, and we dimly perceive that each word is larger than the outreach of the thought of man. Another generation than ours shall define and refine them. In heaven, in some other aeon, we shall find out what they ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... than patch them with fancy work or with heterogeneous matter. The learned, indeed, as Lane tells us (i. 74; iii. 740), being thoroughly dissatisfied with the plain and popular, the ordinary and "vulgar" note of the language, have attempted to refine and improve it and have more than once threatened to remodel it, that is, to make it odious. This would be to dress up Robert Burns in plumes borrowed ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... build ships, refine sugar, dredge oysters, distill liquor and brew beer. They manufacture carpets, leather and paper goods, make chocolate, cut diamonds as well as produce gold and silver articles and pottery. The farmer uses his cow like one of the family. He keeps her in the house when the weather is cold, ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... Gonzales had invented. None of the harshness and squeakiness of tone that you associate with the ordinary instrument. Partly a new method of making the records and partly a system of qualifying chambers that refine and purify the tones. It is wonderful enough to deceive anybody, and, of course, he had all his records ready ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... forbidding divorce, in extending or restricting what a man may dispose of by testament, in favoring or interdicting substitutions, it is chiefly in view of some political, economical or social advantage, either to refine or consolidate the union of the sexes, to implant in the family habits of discipline or sentiments of affection, to excite in children an initiatory spirit, or one of concord, to prepare for the nation a staff of natural chieftains, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... great many reasons against copious profanity of speech. Here you have the artistic reason, and, by implication, that which forbids its use in literature—namely, its ineffectiveness. But though she selects, Mrs. Woods does not refine. She exhibits the life of the travelling show in its habitual squalor as well as in its occasional brightness. How she has managed it passes my understanding: but her book leaves the impression of confident familiarity with this kind of life, of knowledge not merely accumulated, but assimilated. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... artists having done all that is possible in realizing the national conceptions of the Gods, the younger ones, forbidden to change the scheme of existing representations, and incapable of doing anything better in that kind, betake themselves to refine and decorate the old ideas with more attractive skill. Their aims are thus more and more limited to manual dexterity, and their fancy paralyzed. Also, in the course of centuries, the methods of every art continually improving, and being made subjects of popular inquiry, praise ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Purity divine, From ev'ry least corruption free; Our ev'ry sense from sin refine, And purify our ...
— The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book • Various
... cultivate their morals, refine their tastes, manners, habits. I wish to lift from them that ever-depressing sense of hopelessness which ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... preferment, with the proviso that they should resign their English benefices when restored to 'those they had been obliged to relinquish. The statute of Henry IV. against multiplying gold and silver was now repealed; the subjects were allowed to melt and refine metals and ores, and extract gold and silver from them, on condition that it should be brought to the Mint, and converted into money, the owners receiving its full value in current coin. These, and several other bills of smaller importance being passed, the two houses adjourned ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... their views, and to weigh them in the light of reason, is at the same time the surest way to win their confidence and to refine one's own information and judgments. However, to leave final decision to them in matters which are clearly in the area of one's own responsibility, is fatal to the character of self and to the integrity of ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... Operation, and to look on very attentively, and that they may have the less Reason to doubt, to perform the whole Operation with their own Hands, while I stand at a Distance, and don't so much as put my Finger to it. I put them to refine the melted Matter themselves, or carry it to the Refiners to be done; I tell them beforehand, how much Silver or Gold it will afford: And in the last Place, I bid them carry the melted Mass to several Goldsmiths, ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... a scale and with a distinctness that cannot be mistaken. To this end he keeps a deep hold of the savage, the unrefined, and marshals the elements and influences that make for the virile, the heroic, the sane, the large, and for the perpetuity of the race. We cannot refine the elements,—the air, the water, the soil, the sunshine,—and the more we pervert or shut out these from our lives the worse for us. In the same manner, the more we pervert or balk the great natural impulses, ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... I have been able to indicate how, by its essential nature, by the primordial power it embodies, all Beauty, and particularly Beauty in art, tends to fortify and refine the spiritual life of ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... We seek not to refine; but all moral power issues out of moral forces. And it may be well, therefore, rapidly to sketch the history of religion, which is the greatest of moral forces, as it sank and rose in this island through ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... can the sense refine Till not a pulse rebellious stirs, And, since she never can be mine, Makes it ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... she contributes unwillingly to the world, would fain ignore the God-given law to "be fruitful and multiply." Regardless of the affected horror of anaemic prudes and ancient wall-flowers, the woman of to-day insists upon being recognized as a vital force—is even beginning to comprehend that, refine it as you will, differentiate it as you may, it is the same vital force which fills the cradle that sways the scepter. As she aspires to share with man the regency of this world, she will scarce thank Carpenter and Maxwell for a premise from which ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... seemed to him the sordid tragedy of his sister's life, and he resented as a monstrous thing his daughter's involvement in such an affair. This was the natural man; the scientific observer took another side, urging that life was life and could not be escaped, refine ourselves as we may; also that a sensible girl of mature years would benefit rather than otherwise by being made helpful to a woman caught in ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... if a whirlwind of enlightenment should waft it to the skies, although each thread would be immeasurably above its present condition, the relation of one to another would still be the same. If the baser wool should be transmuted into gold, the very same process would refine and sublimate the precious metal, in a corresponding ratio; and the equilibrium of God's ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... wrongly, that they are preparing the esthetics of the future). It must be here admitted that there exists an altogether special manner of feeling, dependent on temperament at first, which many cultivate and refine as though it were a precious rarity. There lies the true source of their invention. Doubtless, to assert this pertinently, it would be necessary to establish the direct relations between their physical and psychical constitution and that of their work; to note even the particular states ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... for salvation by sending perfection embodied in Christ. We may not attach ourselves to any system or effort as absolutely true or good, nor condemn any as utterly false. All knowledge and arts are related to religion. They refine man and aid him in his emancipation from whatever is sinful ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... afternoon, Jolyon had a nap in the old armchair. Face down on his knee was La Rotisserie de la Refine Pedauque, and just before he fell asleep he had been thinking: 'As a people shall we ever really like the French? Will they ever really like us!' He himself had always liked the French, feeling at home with their ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the awe of Nature, the awe of the unseen dies out in him. Meeting with no visible superior, he is apt to become not merely unpoetical and irreverent, but somewhat of a sensualist and an atheist. The sense of the beautiful dies out in him more and more. He has little or nothing around him to refine or lift up his soul, and unless he meet with a religion and with a civilization which can deliver him, he may sink into that dull brutality which is too common among the lowest classes of the English lowlands, ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... by some great armed demonstration, to exhibit the Riseholme spirit in its full panoply, and then crush into dazzled submission any potential rivalry. She meant also to exert an educational influence, for she allowed that Olga had great gifts, and she meant to train and refine those gifts so that they might, when exercised under benign but autocratic supervision, conduce to the strength and splendour of Riseholme. Naturally she must be loyally and ably assisted, and Georgie realized that the tableau ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... design, discovers new prospects of advantage, and possibilities of improvement, will not easily be persuaded that his project is ripe for execution; but will superadd one contrivance to another, endeavour to unite various purposes in one operation, multiply complications, and refine niceties, till he is entangled in his own scheme, and bewildered in the perplexity of various intentions. He that resolves to unite all the beauties of situation in a new purchase, must waste his life in roving to no purpose from province to province. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... said: "We must have two sexes and if the women insist on becoming men I suppose the men must refine themselves into women.... I dread the effect of this woman's movement upon civilization because I know what happened to the Roman republic when women attained their full rights. They married without going to church and were divorced without going to court." After having discussed ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... them," he said, "it is no longer the fault of religion. There have been times when the church seemed afraid, but she is so no longer. Analyze, dissect, use your microscope or your spectrum till the last atom of matter is reached; reflect and refine till the last element of thought is made clear; the church now knows with the certainty of science what she once knew only by the certainty of faith, that you will find enthroned behind all thought and matter only one central idea,—that idea which the church has never ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... being hissed and pelted by the mob, and it is hard for a minister to convince himself of the admiration of a nation when a strong bodyguard is necessary to secure him from the constant danger of personal attacks. Bute's character did not refine under the tests imposed upon it. His objectionable qualities grew more and more unpopular. The less he was liked the less he deserved to be liked. Adversity did not magnify that small soul. In his mean anger he sought for mean revenge. Every person who ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... happen to one than anywhere else. And he gave Rowland to understand that he meant to live freely and largely, and be as interested as occasion demanded. Rowland saw no reason to regard this as a menace of dissipation, because, in the first place, there was in all dissipation, refine it as one might, a grossness which would disqualify it for Roderick's favor, and because, in the second, the young sculptor was a man to regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his passions to his ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... cil pardon, fut issi gran, si s'en esmeurent mult li cuers des genz, et mult s'en croisierent, porce que li pardons ere si gran. Villehardouin, No. 1. Our philosophers may refine on the causes of the crusades, but such were the genuine feelings of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... a friendship such as mine Such feelings must thy heart refine As seldom mortal mind gives birth, 'Tis love, without a stain of earth, Fratello del ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... flowers, such as I like for Aimee. You should wear a light-coloured muslin dress, very low and very short, up to the knees, your arms bare, and the skirts exceedingly full (the body of which would be transparent, and refine and reveal the divine shape of your angelic bosoms), your legs, perfectly naked, would be visible amongst a mass of folds of muslin, and would be covered by little open-work stockings of rose-coloured silk, fastened at the instep by bows, like the dress, ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... source, and delivering men from the power of it. Unless you do that, I do not say you do nothing, but you pour a bottle full of cold water into Vesuvius, and try to put the fire out with that. You may educate, you may cultivate, you may refine; you may set political and economical arrangements right in accordance with the newest notions of the century, and what then? Why! the old thing will just begin over again, and the old miseries will appear again, because ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... came to this country. I had everything to learn; I could not even speak my own language; my speech was a dialect heard in that part of the country where I was brought up. I have had to cultivate and refine myself. I had to study other languages, Italian, French and German. I learned them all in America. So you see there is no need for an American to go out of his own country for vocal instruction or languages; all can be learned right here at home. I am a living proof of this. What ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... upon themselves, are mistaken. All those Dissenters who deprecate it as a judgment, or would vote against it as such if it were in their power, are mistaken." In short, though he did not suppose that the movers of the Bill "did it in mere kindness to the Dissenters, in order to refine and purge them from the scandals which some people had brought upon them," nevertheless it was calculated to effect this object. The Dissenter being a man that was "something desirous of going to Heaven," ventured the displeasure of the civil magistrate at the command ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... ground-windows will stand open all the summer noon, and the flower stands will be gay and fragrant; and the shaded parlour will be the cool retreat of the wearied husband, when he comes in to rest from his professional toils. There will stand the books destined to refresh and refine his higher tastes; and there the music with which the wife will indulge him. Here will they first feel what it is to have a home of their own—where they will first enjoy the privacy of it, the security, the freedom, the consequence in the eyes of others, the sacredness in their own. Here ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... been aiming to have, so far as could be, two suits to a man, a common, every day suit, and one better for Sabbaths, &c., it being thought that this would tend to refine and elevate the prisoners. Hence, he left them with a generous supply, well fitted up. But it would need more or less renewing and refitting in the fall, which it did not receive, but was made to answer by patching. Hence, patched and ragged clothes would ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... of the finest grain and marking, and to have it French-polished. It would be too fine to be of use; and its possessor would fear to scratch it, and would preserve it as a show, seeking some plainer vehicle to carry his coals. In like manner, do not refine too much either the products of the mind, or the sensibilities of the taste which is to appreciate them. I know an amiable professor very different from Dr. Dryasdust. He was a country clergyman,—a very interesting plain preacher. But when he got his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... shall gather home my crops in season due, Lies a joy, which he may never grasp, who rules in gorgeous state Fertile Africa's dominions. Happier, happier far my fate! Though for me no bees Calabrian store their honey, nor doth wine Sickening in the Laestrygonian amphora for me refine; Though for me no flocks unnumbered, browsing Gallia's pastures fair, Pant beneath their swelling fleeces, I at least am free from care; Haggard want with direful clamour ravins never at my door, Nor wouldst ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... majority of women who for a great length of time have shirked this problem by any one of these methods. By individuals and by groups woman has always been seeking to develop the business of life to such proportions, to so diversify, refine, and broaden it that no half failure or utter failure of its fundamental relations would swamp her, leave her comfortless, or prevent her working out that family which she knew to be her part in the scheme of things. ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... was glad to find he had established Sunday schools over all the islands. I talked to him of Europe, and his former voyage to England. "Ah!" said he, most emphatically, "the English, the cruel English, to murder me with goodness, and refine upon my torture—took me to Europe, and showed me the court of England, the delicacy of exquisite life; they showed me gods, and showed me heaven, as if on purpose to make me feel the ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... and the reptile glimmeringly adumbrate man, so do these yearnings and desires adumbrate what man in himself calls "love," spelled all out in capitals. I repeat, the need is the same. From the amoeba, up the ladder of life to you and me, comes this passion of perpetuation. And in yourself, refine and sublimate as you will, it is none the less blind, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... a maiden as her mother must have been, one of Nature's own ladies, but more refined in type, texture, and form, as the American atmosphere and food and life always refine the children of European stock,—slenderer, more delicate, finer of complexion, and with a soft, exquisite sweetness of voice, more thrilling than her mother's, larger and more robust heartfeltness of tone,—and with the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... for mate. It's no use; they can't spake the language, and it's no use t'achin' thim. They're good min to wurruk—all bone and sole leather, but ye can't refine thim." ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... it the most helpful conditions for its full growth and development. Education should be the complete preparation of the young thing for fullness of life; involving the evolution and the balanced training of all its faculties, bodily, mental and spiritual. It should train and refine senses, instincts, intellect, will and feeling; giving a world-view based on real facts and real values and encouraging active correspondence therewith. Thus the educationist, if he be convinced, as I think most of us must be, that all isn't quite ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... at least chose to begin it once. Her idea of self-improvement ruled her even at school. It was to cultivate her tastes. She always said there was enough of hard practicality and useful knowledge forced on us by necessity, and that the thing most needed was to soften and refine our minds. She picked up every scrap of information concerning painting, sculpture, poetry, music, &c., as if ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... household; those who by nature and training should be its helpers hinder it instead. Why do they do this? Because their fastidious, aesthetic natures are outraged by a crudeness which they themselves could easily refine away if they chose; because also they recoil at a lack of conformity to existing conventions—conventions so hampering to the inner spirit of the Newness, that in order to incarnate at all it must of necessity sweep ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... numerous, stationary, civilized societies, where man's wants are multiplied, where his interests clash, that he is obliged to have recourse to government, to laws, to public worship, in order to maintain concord. It is then, that men approximating, reason together, combine their ideas, refine their notions, subtilize their theories; it is then also, that those who govern them avail themselves of invisible powers, to keep them within bounds, to render them docile, to enforce their obedience, to oblige them to live peaceably. It was thus, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... ranks that sacrifice themselves for women with bundles or children in arms, for old ladies, or for very young and pretty ones—to the men who give no odds to the most helpless creature alive. These are the men who do not act upon the promptings of human nature like the laborer, and who do not refine upon their duty like my young gentlemen, and make it their privilege to befriend the idea of womanhood; they are men who have paid for their seats and are going to keep them. They have been at work, very probably, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... of Greater Greece, as if anticipating Plato, he has, like the philosophic kings of the Platonic Republic, already something of the monk, of monastic ascesis, about him. Its purpose is to fit him for, duly to refine his nature towards, that closer vision of truth to which perchance he may be even now upon his way. The secrecy again, that characteristic silence of which the philosopher of music was, perhaps ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... Bill J., in the waning of that first winter, began actually to refine his own superlative elegance by spraying his superior garments with perfume, by munching tiny confections reputed to scent the breath desirably, by a more diligent grooming of the always superb moustache, the little boy suspected no motive. ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... may be sung by soldiers on the march, by the artisan at the loom, by the peasant following his team, by the mother among her children, and by the maiden sitting at her wheel listening for the step of her lover. Religion is thus brought in to refine and hallow the sweet necessities and emotions of life, to cheer its weariness, and to exalt its sordidness. The German life revolves like the village festival with the pastor in the midst—joy and laughter and merry games do not fear the holy man, for he wears no unkindness in his eye, but ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... been very largely due to the instinct of democracy (and the instinct of democracy is like the instinct of one woman, wild but quite right) that the people who were trying to purify the Press were also trying to refine it; and to this the democracy very naturally and very justly objected. We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... fear of lust or license. Men will, on the whole, continue to prefer one partner, and friendship will refine the grossness of sense. There are worse evils than open and avowed inconstancy—the loathsome combination of deceitful intrigue with the selfish monopoly of property. That a child should know its father is ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... the means. When an intense effort is applied, the melodramatic tendency is to honor that effort, despite its uselessness, instead of honoring the product of the effort rather than the effort itself. But, you are right, I admit, for we have still a few places left to refine in the ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... individual member, and that in return for this protection each individual should submit to the law of the community. Faith lets God down into the hearts of lawmakers, and a sense of accountability to him must, most certainly, have a grand tendency to refine laws in their first conception. At least it happens to be true that wherever God is feared and law made the basis of the legislation and policy of a nation, that nation is, in fact, found to excel in those ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... rich beds of coal furnished the coal-oil that was worth pumping, and then he found how it came up with the living springs. He studied until he knew what it looked like, smelled like, tasted like, and how to refine it. Now said he in his letter to his cousin, "I understand the oil business." His cousin answered, "All right, ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... a great many changes during the last few weeks. He had begun to grow rather captivated by Miss Chivvey and in his efforts to polish, refine and educate her had become rather carried away himself. But towards the end she began to show signs of rebellion; she was bored, though impressed. He took her to a serious play and explained it all the time, during which she openly yawned. Finally, when she insisted ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... certain phases of religion. We will purify, refine and beautify our religion, just as we have our table etiquette and our housekeeping. The millennium will come only through the scientific acceptance of piety. When Church and State separated it was well, but when Science ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... with his own good-faith the inadequacy of their appeal. Music alone hitherto had really helped HIM, and taken him out of himself. To music, instinctively, more and more he was dedicate; and in his desire to refine and organise the court music, from which, by leave of absence to official performers enjoying their salaries at a distance, many parts had literally fallen away, like the favourite notes of a worn-out spinet, he was ably seconded by a devoted youth, the deputy organist of the grand-ducal chapel. ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... year 2022 without permission from the Board. Gulflex and other oil companies protest to Number One as they say we might open up a hole that will spill all the petroleum out of the earth all at once, so fast they couldn't refine it. A spark could ignite it and set the globe on fire like it was a brandied Christmas pudding. But then another earthquake shakes Earth from the rice fields of China to the llamas in Peru just when it looks as if we were about to be tossed into an ...
— Operation Earthworm • Joe Archibald
... religious instruction permissive in other Indian schools which are not wholly or mainly supported by private endeavour? Is not the "harmonious combination of secular and religious instruction" for which the Maharajah of Jaipur pleads better calculated than our present policy of laisser faire to refine and purify Indian religious conceptions, and to bring about that approximation of Eastern to Western ideals, towards which the best Indian minds were tending before the present revolt ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... harmonious thoughts-to a million-year Goal. It needs twelve years of normal healthful living to effect even slight perceptible change in brain structure, and a million solar returns are exacted to sufficiently refine the cerebral tenement for ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... on the female side, was not only excusable, but expedient; and, finally, my uncle held that whereas a man is a rude, coarse, sensual animal, and requires all manner of associations to dignify and refine him, women are so naturally susceptible of everything beautiful in sentiment and generous in purpose that she who is a true woman is a fit peer for a king. Odd and preposterous notions, no doubt, and capable of much controversy, so ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the hottest Sun, from May till Michaelmas: Then pressing them well, Tun the Liquor up in a very strong Iron-Hooped Vessel to prevent its bursting. It will appear very thick and muddy when newly press'd, but will refine in the Vessel, and be as clear as Wine. Thus let it remain untouched for three Months, before it be drawn off, and it will ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... of our literary development which corresponds to that of other peoples when the short story pre-eminently flourished among them. But when one has said a thing like this, it immediately accuses one of loose and inaccurate statement, and requires one to refine upon it, either for one's own peace of conscience or for one's safety from the thoughtful reader. I am not much afraid of that sort of reader, for he is very rare, but I do like to know myself what I mean, if I mean ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to cure and prevent redness and roughness, and to make the skin soft, smooth, white and delicate, producing a perfectly natural appearance. It teaches how to cure and refine a coarse skin, so that it ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... is hugely animal still, that is because primitive men abound and will have their pasture. Since the lead is ours, the leaders must bow their heads to the sentence. Jealousy of a woman is the primitive egoism seeking to refine in a blood gone to savagery under apprehension of an invasion of rights; it is in action the tiger threatened by a rifle when his paw is rigid on quick flesh; he tears the flesh for rage at the intruder. The Egoist, who is our original male in giant form, had no bleeding ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... years ago it seemed, as regarded all aesthetic creation, that man had exhausted the old models, and knew not where to look for new. Now the aim of Art is to interest or please, by gratifying the sense or taste for the beautiful or human genius in making; also to instruct and refine; and it is evident that Science is going to fulfill all these conditions on such a grand scale in so many new ways, that, when man shall be once engaged in them, all that once gratified him in the past will seem as childish things, to be ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... the knowledge of languages, enabling her to penetrate into the mysteries of the older world, she had become a sorceress, like the Celtic druidesses; and how as Abelard and Heloise sat together at home there, to refine a little further on the nature of abstract ideas, "Love made himself of the party with them." You conceive the temptations of the scholar, who, in such dreamy tranquillity, amid the bright and busy spectacle of the "Island," lived in a world of something like shadows; and ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... would refine her; prune away all that reminded him of her wild growth, so that it might no longer humiliate him to think to what a companion he had sunk. How happy they would be! Of course the world would censure him if it knew, but the world was stupid and prosaic, ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... pathetic side, the prose, mixed with the elevated language of verse, serves to mark the contrast between vulgar and ideal sentiments; it is a positive means of exhibition. Continued prose in Comedy is nothing but the natural language, on which the poet has failed to employ his skill to refine and smoothe it down, while apparently he seems the more careful to give an accurate imitation of it: it is that prose which Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme has been speaking his whole ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... if in heaven a hell we find, 'Tis all from thee, O Jealousy! 'Tis all from thee, O Jealousy! Thou tyrant, tyrant Jealousy, Thou tyrant of the mind! All other ills, though sharp they prove, Serve to refine, and perfect love: In absence, or unkind disdain, Sweet hope relieves the lover's pain. But, ah! no cure but death we find, To set us free From Jealousy: O Jealousy! Thou tyrant, tyrant Jealousy, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Fie, Collonel, refine your Tast;——A common Woman! I'd as soon dine at a common Ordinary: Give me a Woman of Condition, there's Pride as well as Pleasure in ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... me to-night not to REFINE in the education of my children. 'Life (said he,) will not bear refinement: you must ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... and trifles, fly; Where God resides appear no more; Omniscient God, thy piercing eye Can every secret thought explore: O may thy grace our hearts refine, And fix our ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... whose every thought is born of Beauty, Truth and Love. I envy not the one who looks with a cold and indifferent spirit on these immortal creations of the old masters—these poems written in marble and on the canvass. They who oppose every thing which can refine and spiritualize the nature of man, by binding him down to the cares of the work-day world alone, cheat life of half ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... harmonious; wont so oft In outward things to meditate the charm Of sacred order, soon she seeks at home To find a kindred order, to exert Within herself this elegance of love, This fair-inspired delight; her temper'd powers Refine at length, and every passion wears A chaster, milder, more attractive mien. But if to ampler prospects, if to gaze On Nature's form, where, negligent of all 610 These lesser graces, she assumes the ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... attributes which beautify and refine human existence were personified by the Greeks under the form of three lovely sisters, Euphrosyne, Aglaia, and Thalia, the daughters of Zeus and Eurynome (or, according to later ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... pictures, and ornaments, and so resting satisfied in a somewhat indolent feeling of goodness, and not troubling ourselves with too much effort of reason. A love of the beautiful undoubtedly tends to elevate and refine the mind, but the follies of the false love and the dangers of an inordinate love are numerous and deadly. It is absurd that a man should either be or pretend to be absolutely absorbed in the worship of a dado or a China tea cup so as to ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... never been touched by those forces in our civilization which so dwarf and cripple the race, but who had been taught to find in their natural environment those things that alone have the power to truly refine and glorify life. ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... foremost of the three in that executive efficiency which did so much to give their plans the uniform success already mentioned. Kindness and warm affection, clearness of moral vision, and purity of heart, with a lively relish for quiet intellectual pleasures, for society and books adapted to refine, improve and elevate, were among the characteristics common ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... the monstrous Effects of Passion! Say rather, Oh, the foolish Effects of a mean Education! (interrupted his Majesty of Bantam.) For Passions were given us for Use, Reason to govern and direct us in the Use, and Education to cultivate and refine that Reason. But (pursu'd he) for all his Impudence to me, which I shall take a time to correct, I am oblig'd to him, that at last he has found me out a Kingdom to my Title; and if I were Monarch of that Place (believe ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... is that von Schoenvorts and Olson while out hunting the other day discovered oil about fifteen miles north of us beyond the sandstone cliffs. Olson says there is a geyser of oil there, and von Schoenvorts is making preparations to refine it. If he succeeds, we shall have the means for leaving Caspak and returning to our own world. I can scarce believe the truth of it. We are all elated to the seventh heaven of bliss. Pray God we ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... make this Powder Mill a school of instruction for a few selected men, so as to have them ready for service at the Augusta Powder Works when they should commence operations—similarly to what had been done at the Refinery at Nashville, where men were being taught to refine saltpetre and distill charcoal. Before the occupation of Nashville by the Federal forces, these men, together with the machinery and articles of the Refinery in that city, were removed to the Augusta Works; ...
— History of the Confederate Powder Works • Geo. W. Rains
... cease to be the pure, the delicate, and timid creatures that they now are—if they should cease to overawe profligacy, and to win and to shame men into decency, fidelity, and love of unsullied virtue—it is easy to see that this influence, which has hitherto been exerted to strengthen and refine our society, will operate entirely to its corruption and debasement; that domestic happiness and private honour will be extinguished, and public spirit and national industry most probably ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... elevation upon the human mind, and to teach it to regard the things of this world with generous feelings, to inspire men with a scorn of mere temporal advantage, to give birth to living convictions, and to keep alive the spirit of honorable devotedness; if you hold it to be a good thing to refine the habits, to embellish the manners, to cultivate the arts of a nation, and to promote the love of poetry, of beauty, and of renown; if you would constitute a people not unfitted to act with power upon all other nations, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... which for a while do trouble the Aire, do withall purge and refine it: And our trust is that through the most wise Providence and blessing of GOD, the Truth by our so long continued agitations, will be better cleared among us, and so our service will prove more acceptable to all the Churches of Christ, but more especially to you, while we have ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... buzzard, tickled wid de compliment, 'I'm so larnid in dat music, I disdains to sing; I criticises de birds dat does.' 'Den,' says Mars Milburn, 'I needn't say to ye, P'ofessor Buzzard, dat dis little bell will be very pleasin' to yo' refine taste.' Wid dat he takes a little piece o' wire an' fastens de tea-bell to de bird's foot an' says, 'Buzzard, let me hear ye play!' De buzzard flew and de bell tinkled, an' all de other buzzards hear ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... have no making power; Then give us making will, adopting thine. Make, make, and make us; temper, and refine. Be in us patience—neither to start nor cower. Christ, if thou be not with us—not by sign, But presence, actual as the wounds that bleed— We shall not bear ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... day to die, So heavenly, that on high Change could not glorify Nor death refine her: Pure gold of perfect love, On earth like heaven's own dove, She cannot wear, above, ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... detail of stately colonnade, and shady perspective of quay and boulevard. After years of this subtle training the eye instinctively revolts from the vulgar and the crude. There is little in the poorer quarters of our city to rejoice or refine the senses; squalor and all-pervading ugliness are not least among the curses that ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... own intractable character, without religious faith to ennoble it, without even imagination to refine it—the unconscious disclosure of the one tender and loving instinct in her nature still piteously struggling for existence, with no sympathy to sustain it, with no light to guide it—would have touched the heart of any man not incurably depraved. Amelius spoke ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... the poets of the Renaissance: they determined to sing not only with beauty, but with care. The movement began in the verse of MAROT, whose clear, civilized, worldly poetry shows for the first time that tendency to select and to refine, that love of ease and sincerity, and that endeavour to say nothing that is not said well, which were to become the fundamental characteristics of all that was best in French poetry for the next ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... possessed of peculiar dignity, and points out a propriety of conduct, which men of station are obliged to maintain. In the commerce of superiors and inferiors, it is the object of ambition, and of vanity, to refine on the advantages of rank; while, to facilitate the intercourse of polite society, it is the aim of good breeding to ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... behold, there was all manner of gold in both these lands, and of silver, and of precious ore of every kind; and there were also curious workmen, who did work all kinds of ore and did refine it; and thus ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... Christian churches and congregations, heirs of Heaven and children of God, to preach the truth, to administer the rites of baptism, communion, and marriage, to dispense charities, and in every way to quicken and refine the religious life of individuals and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... tongue recoils from speaking the horrors and atrocities of war thus brought into the bosom of a peaceful home. All the amenities and charities of domestic life are outraged, are annihilated. All that is dearest to man; all that tends to refine, to soften him—to make him a noble and a better being—all these are trampled under foot by a brutal soldiery—all these are torn from his heart for ever! He will tell you that he detests war so much that he almost despises its glories; and that he detests it because he has known its evils, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various
... something to be accomplished that can be accomplished in no other way, and that he is pleased for the sake of that gain to let us suffer? The things that are worth while come through pain. Joy does not make us stronger nor bring us nearer God; nor does it refine, ennoble, or enrich us. The pure gold comes from the fire only and the tempered steel also must have passed through the flame. God would have us pure as gold and as strong as steel, and to have us so he can not spare the flame. We must pass through the furnace ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... the coincidence that while the Virgin was miraculously using the power of spiritual love to elevate and purify the people, Eleanor and her daughters were using the power of earthly love to discipline and refine the courts. Side by side with the crude realities about them, they insisted on teaching and enforcing an ideal that contradicted the realities, and had no value for them or for us except in ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... ignorant in anything, yet such an excessive humility, as if he had known nothing, that they frequently resorted, and dwelt with him, as in a college situated in a purer air; so that his house was a university in less volume; whither they came not so much for repose as study, and to examine and refine those grosser propositions, which laziness and consent made current in vulgar ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... wise men." Montaigne tells us that "Pausanias, an ancient player on the lyre, used to make his scholars go to hear one that lived near him, and played ill, that they might learn to hate discords." He says again of himself, "A clownish way of speaking does more to refine mine than the most elegant. Every day the foolish countenance of another is advertising and advising me. Profiting little by good examples, I make use of them that are ill, which are everywhere to be found. I endeavour to render myself as agreeable ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... having— impeccability without the warmth of camaraderie. Speech, like a man, should be alive. It need not, of course, be boisterous. It may be intense in a quiet, modest way. But if it too sedulously observes all the Thou shalt not's of the rhetoricians, it will refine the vitality out of itself and ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... and coarse nature which she had done her utmost to refine, with infinite pains; but, of course, it could be only superficially changed.... Margaret has not left in the hearts and minds of those who knew her any deep witness of her integrity and purity. She was a great humbug—of course, with much talent and moral ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... and historical knowledge covers a natural lack of aesthetic sense. Where, on the contrary, insensibility to higher forms of beauty does not exclude a natural love of the lower, we have every reason to be encouraged; there is a true and healthy taste, which only needs experience to refine it. If a man demands light, sound, and splendour, he proves that he has the aesthetic equilibrium; that appearances as such interest him, and that he can pause in perception to enjoy. We have but to vary ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... Porto Rico was excluded, because our conscience was shocked at the notion that some part of it might have been produced by slaves. But what was thus forbidden directly, was allowed circuitously; we were willing to refine and export this slave-grown sugar, and to take the hemp and tallow of Russia in its stead, which seemed to be an easy way of letting down our consciences. This savoured of hypocrisy. If the United States ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... hand in mine, Let its velvet touch on my horny palm, Comfort, encourage, embolden, refine,— This grosser clay, by its ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... You tyrants think 'twas all to serve your pleasure. Why should my person, throne, and wealth be booty To one harsh, jealous master? No, all beauty Is heaven's gift, and like the sun, should shine To glad earth's children, and their souls refine. I hate proud man, and like to make him feel He may not crush free woman 'neath ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... thoughts-to a million-year Goal. It needs twelve years of normal healthful living to effect even slight perceptible change in brain structure, and a million solar returns are exacted to sufficiently refine the cerebral tenement for ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... and Olson while out hunting the other day discovered oil about fifteen miles north of us beyond the sandstone cliffs. Olson says there is a geyser of oil there, and von Schoenvorts is making preparations to refine it. If he succeeds, we shall have the means for leaving Caspak and returning to our own world. I can scarce believe the truth of it. We are all elated to the seventh heaven of bliss. Pray God we shall not ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... said: There must be hewers of wood and drawers of water, scavengers and coalheavers, day labourers and domestic servants, or the work of society will come to a standstill. But, if you educate and refine everybody, nobody will be content to assume these functions, and all the world will want ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... were strangest because they did not seem to be actors. They did not refine living into a cult, with every pleasure and pain classified and weighed out and valued. No, they actually lived. It was hard to realize this, but in the end she did, and with ever increasing wonder, with also ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... a sheep has a vast amount of oil in it," explained one of the workmen, "and it is impossible to do anything until this grease has been extracted; so we put a bunch of skins under a heavy press and then collect the grease that runs out, refine, and ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett
... Coleridge elsewhere says, "has preserved a purity of meaning to many terms of natural objects. Without this holdfast, our vitiated imaginations would refine away language to mere abstractions." This is merely saying that our Bible, designed for common people centuries ago, is a monument of Saxon English. Clearly that is an accident of our translation, and not an essence of the Bible itself. As much may be ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... many a stern and fiery blast The world's rude furnace must thy blood refine, And many a gale of keenest woe be passed, Till every pulse ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... the words we remove the idea of His presence far from us, into a region which we can neither see nor know; and gradually, from the close realization of a living God who "maketh the clouds his chariot," we refine and explain ourselves into dim and distant suspicion of an inactive God, inhabiting inconceivable places, and fading into the multitudinous formalisms ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... the Teacher of all truth." The wide range of truth secured through reading acts in two ways upon the reader. It spiritualizes his character, and it makes him mighty in action. Knowledge on almost any subject has a marked tendency to sharpen one's wits, to refine his tastes, to ennoble his spirit, to improve his judgement, to strengthen his will, to subdue his baser passions, and to fill his soul with the breath of life. It is only upon truth that the soul feeds, and by means of knowledge that the character grows. "It cannot be that people ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... the establishment of civilization. The African's barbarity must be first here assailed, and the infinite resources upon the coasts and maritime rivers must be developed to his view, to pre-dispose him to refine his condition, and adopt the civilized habits of life; nor is there any site which I have met with upon the Windward Coast of Africa, more calculated to promote this beneficent undertaking, than the island of Bance, from its locality of situation, ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... vanity is so predominant, require the greatest care, for the failing is difficult to eradicate and would, if not cured, be a source of great unhappiness in after life. To prevent such a result, generally, means are taken to refine the taste of the patient (if I may use the word), and call out the quality most opposed to the infirmity, viz., that of looking out for beauties instead ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... names, like servants. Think what an hourly pin-prick of insult that must be. Ever since her letter came, I've been thinking about it, the things she told me, about what happens when they try to raise themselves and refine themselves, how they're made to suffer intimately for trying to be what I thought we all wanted all Americans to be." He looked at Marise with troubled eyes. "I've been thinking how it would feel to be a Negro myself. What a different life would ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... at one end of the furnace come hot air and gas, which burn in the furnace, producing sufficient heat to melt the charge and refine it of its impurities. Lime and other nonmetallic substances are put in the furnace. These melt, forming a "slag" which floats on the metal and aids materially in the ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... that the thoughts within do immediately dispose of facial tissue without. Mental brightness gives facial illumination. The right act or true thought sets its stamp of beauty in the features; the wrong act or foul thought sets its seal of distortion. Moral purity and sweetness refine and beautify the countenance. The body is a show window, advertising and exhibiting the soul's stock of goods. Nature condenses bough, bud and shrub into black coal; compacts the rich forces of air and sun and soil into peach and pear. In the kingdom of morals, there are people who seem ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... humour differ quite; That gives surprise, and this delight, Humour is odd, grotesque, and wild, Only by affectation spoil'd; 'Tis never by invention got, Men have it when they know it not. Our conversation to refine, True humour must with wit combine: From both we learn to rally well, Wherein French writers most excel; [2]Voiture, in various lights, displays That irony which turns to praise: His genius first found out the rule For an obliging ridicule: ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... clear, and free from worldly lust, We will behold a brighter world than this, With less of curse and much of noble bliss; For God's kind hand in all our conflicts here Is clearly seen and doubts must disappear; The end He has in view is most benign; The fire will dross consume and gold refine. ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... permanently good; which requires that a distinction be made between what must have some excellence because so many people like it, and what is good in a book whether many people like it or not. Such discrimination may not help the young novelist to make money, but it can refine judgment and ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... housekeeping appeals to an interest so universal that children of all times and nations yield to its power. It is therefore necessary to take account of its influence in their development and to dignify it with the approval of the school. We must refine and enrich it by our direction and suggestion without robbing it of ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... terminating point; which arteries taking their rise and origin from the left capsule of the heart, bring, through several circuits, ambages, and anfractuosities, the vital spirits, to subtilize and refine them in the ætherial purity of animal spirits. Nay, in such a studiously meditating, musing person, you may espy so extravagant raptures of one, as it were out of himself, that all his natural faculties for that ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... men, why are women so infatuated as to be proud of a defect? Rousseau has furnished them with a plausible excuse, which could only have occurred to a man, whose imagination had been allowed to run wild, and refine on the impressions made by exquisite senses, that they might, forsooth have a pretext for yielding to a natural appetite without violating a romantic species of modesty, which gratifies the pride and libertinism ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... still, that is because primitive men abound and will have their pasture. Since the lead is ours, the leaders must bow their heads to the sentence. Jealousy of a woman is the primitive egoism seeking to refine in a blood gone to savagery under apprehension of an invasion of rights; it is in action the tiger threatened by a rifle when his paw is rigid on quick flesh; he tears the flesh for rage at the intruder. The Egoist, who is our original male ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for warp or woof! Till cunning come to pound and squeeze And clarify,—refine to proof *2* The liquor filtered by degrees, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... without finding one single soothing exception. "Yes, sir, a set of ingrates!" she repeated accusingly. "Spend your life trying to teach them what to do and how to do it! Cram ideas into those that haven't got any, and yank ideas out of those who have got too many! Refine them, toughen them, scold them, coax them, everlastingly drill and discipline them! And then, just as you get them to a place where they move like clock-work, and you actually believe you can trust them, then graduation ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... Trunk Station. As they walked down the hill and by the Cathedral, Agatha felt excited. She had soon discovered that it was one thing to find a silver vein and another to raise the capital one required to open up the mine and refine the ore. The cost of these operations, as calculated by Scott, seemed enormous, and people rich enough to help either wanted the largest share of the profit or were frankly skeptical. George had got promises of some support, but much depended on the result of Scott's ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... how to cure and prevent redness and roughness, and to make the skin soft, smooth, white and delicate, producing a perfectly natural appearance. It teaches how to cure and refine a coarse skin, so that it will be clear ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... rewarding partisan services, and promoting sectional and personal schemes, little or nothing has been devoted to the encouragement of the arts and sciences, and the cultivation of those higher walks of human attainment which exalt and refine a people, and fit them for the purest ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... and the crowing of some distant chanticleer, moved lazily in the sluggish air. It was a season of general repose, just such a day, I think, as a saint would choose to assist his fancy in describing the sunny regions whither his thoughts delight to wander, or a poet would select to refine his ideas of the climate of Elysium. At length I arrived at the old meeting-house where I had often gone, when a lad with my ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... In fact, to refine the Russian tongue the more thoroughly, something like half the words in it were cut out: which circumstance necessitated very frequent recourse to the tongue of France, since the same words, if spoken in French, were another matter altogether, and one could use even blunter ones ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... that in the treatment of inversion the most satisfactory result is usually obtained when it is possible by direct and indirect methods to reduce the sexual hyperesthesia which frequently exists, and by psychic methods to refine and spiritualize the inverted impulse, so that the invert's natural perversion may not become a cause of acquired perversity in others. The invert is not only the victim of his own abnormal obsession, he is the victim of social hostility. We must seek to distinguish the part in his ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... people as well as in that of the preachers, "clothed without sin." "To the ferocity, to the barbarity of feudal times had succeeded the vices of a semi-civilization, whilst waiting till manners and customs should refine themselves under the action ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... received more literary improvements than Curio, and had a more accurate and delicate manner of speaking, which he conducted with great taste and elegance; but, (by being too minute and nice a critic upon himself,) while he was labouring to correct and refine his language, he suffered all the force and spirit of it to evaporate. In short, it was so exquisitely polished, as to charm the eye of every skilful observer; but it was little noticed by the common people in a crowded Forum, which is ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... us, O Purity divine, From ev'ry least corruption free; Our ev'ry sense from sin refine, And purify our souls ...
— The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book • Various
... log-walls witness. Such is generally the life in a lumber-camp: hard, wholesome labour in the day, loud revelling at night. The rough, adventurous life, with no home charm or female influence to refine or restrain, is probably the principal reason of such low practice of life in the ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... a wild life I lived. I had no friends, no ties, nothing, in fact, to refine or purify. The hatred in my heart kept me from being loved by my associates, and nothing kept me from sinking to the lowest depths of degradation but my love for Ruth. Often, when I was on the point of yielding to the low and the depraved, my love for her saved me. That was a pure force ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... [58] so brilliant world of Greater Greece, as if anticipating Plato, he has, like the philosophic kings of the Platonic Republic, already something of the monk, of monastic ascesis, about him. Its purpose is to fit him for, duly to refine his nature towards, that closer vision of truth to which perchance he may be even now upon his way. The secrecy again, that characteristic silence of which the philosopher of music was, perhaps not inconsistently, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... this in England, Paul," she said, laying a hand on his arm—"lots of places like this out-of-doors in the fresh air, under the stars and trees, where people can go and drink their tea or coffee, and listen to music that must refine ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... They had taken, for their walk, to the cropped, rain-freshened grass, after finding it already dry; and the chairs, turned away from the broad alley, the main drive and the aspect of Park Lane, looked across the wide reaches of green which seemed in a manner to refine upon their freedom. They helped Charlotte thus to make her position—her temporary position—still more clear, and it was for this purpose, obviously, that, abruptly, on seeing her opportunity, she sat down. He ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... years from the same roots; and although the canes from old stools, as they are called, produce less sugar than those of the first year's planting, the juice is clearer, and requires far less trouble to prepare and refine. Before another year came round, the boys made a pair of wooden rollers of eighteen inches in diameter. These were covered with strips of hoop iron, nailed lengthways upon them at short intervals from each other, thereby obtaining a better grip upon the canes, and preventing the wood from being ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... says, 'I am the genius of Beauty and Art. And my recipe is pictures and statues, and all that will refine the mind, and lift the taste.' That is the popular gospel of this day, in a great many quarters. Yes, and have we never heard of a period in European history which was, as they call it, 'the Renaissance' of art and the death of morality? Do ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... 'till Sir Philip broke the Charm, and sigh'd out, Oh, the monstrous Effects of Passion! Say rather, Oh, the foolish Effects of a mean Education! (interrupted his Majesty of Bantam.) For Passions were given us for Use, Reason to govern and direct us in the Use, and Education to cultivate and refine that Reason. But (pursu'd he) for all his Impudence to me, which I shall take a time to correct, I am oblig'd to him, that at last he has found me out a Kingdom to my Title; and if I were Monarch of that Place ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... See Havelock Ellis's Man and Woman.] An adult white woman differs far more from a white man than a negress or pigmy woman from her equivalent male. The education, the mental disposition, of a white or Asiatic woman, reeks of sex; her modesty, her decorum is not to ignore sex but to refine and put a point to it; her costume is clamorous with the distinctive elements of her form. The white woman in the materially prosperous nations is more of a sexual specialist than her sister of the poor and austere peoples, of the prosperous classes more so than the peasant ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... should aim to cultivate their morals, refine their tastes, manners, habits. I wish to lift from them that ever-depressing sense of hopelessness which ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... more bewildered than the boldest definition would have done. But that's quite a different thing. The furthest we have gone in the way of definition—unless indeed this too belongs but to our invincible tendency to refine—is by the happy rule we've made that Lorraine shall walk with me every morning to the Works, and I shall find her there when I come out to walk home with me. I see, on reading over, that this is what I meant by "our" in speaking above of our little daily heroism in that direction. The heroism ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... but the cruel artifice of fate, Thus to refine and vary on our woes, To raise us from despair and give us hopes, Only to plunge us in the gulf again, And make us doubly ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... on the wall of the Gallery at Munich. The head and neck, the whole personality, had an air of distinction and destiny. The drawing had been done by a wandering duchess who had seen the girl sketching in the foothills, when on a visit to that "Wild West" which has such power to refine and inspire minds not superior to Nature. Its replica was carried to a castle in Scotland. It had been the gift of Diana Welldon on a certain day not long ago, when Flood Rawley had made a pledge to her, which was as vital to him and to his future as two ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... for what it is,—we should think there might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this,—that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... "Home-keeping hearts," said Longfellow, "are happiest." What is a good wife, a good mother? Is she not a gift out of heaven, sacred and delicate, with affections so great that no measuring line short of that of the infinite God can tell their bound; fashioned to refine and soothe and lift and irradiate home and society and the world; of such value that no one can appreciate it, unless his mother lived long enough to let him understand it, or unless, in some great crisis of life, when all else failed him, he had a wife to reenforce ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... unrivalled, so that rumour asserted that, through the knowledge of languages, enabling her to penetrate into the mysteries of the older world, she had become a sorceress, like the Celtic druidesses; and how as Abelard and Heloise sat together at home there, to refine a little further on the nature of abstract ideas, "Love made himself of the party with them." You conceive the temptations of the scholar, who, in such dreamy tranquillity, amid the bright and busy spectacle of the "Island," lived in a world of something like shadows; and that for ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... proved In liberating strife Who more than self their country loved, And mercy more than life! America! America! May God thy gold refine, Till all success be ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... however, to refine upon this statement of the matter. The course of external events, in so far as it affects one person, whether as proceeding from or reacting upon him, reveals character, and has meaning as an interpretation of inward life. It is a series outward indeed, but parallel with the states of will, ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... Corsican tyrant lay his lascivious hands upon her ancient liberties, her reformed and Protestant religion, her respectable Sovereign and his Consort, her mansions, her humble cottages, and those members of the opposite sex whose charms reward, and, in rewarding, refine us? Or shall we meet his flat-bottomed boats with a united front, a stern 'Thus far and no farther,' and send them home with their tails between their legs? That, gentlemen, is the ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... wrong; that it has stirred in them a noble ambition to raise themselves in life; and taught them, at the same time, that the only safe and sure way of rising is to fear God and keep his commandments; and so has really done more to civilize and refine them—to make them truly civilized men and gentlemen, and not vulgar savages—than if they had known a smattering of a dozen sciences. I say that the Bible is the book which civilizes and refines, and ennobles rich and poor, high ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... the Augustan History, p. 123. Mosheim (p. 465) seems to refine too much on the domestic religion of Alexander. His design of building a public temple to Christ, (Hist. August. p. 129,) and the objection which was suggested either to him, or in similar circumstances to Hadrian, appear to have no other foundation than an improbable report, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... now shall deem, Because among us seem No dubious symptoms of a realm's decline— Wealth blind with its excess 'Mid far-diffused distress, And pride that kills, professing to refine— ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... I hope, will elevate and refine our patriotism by teaching men a wider sympathy and a deeper understanding of other peoples, nations, and languages. I sincerely hope it will educate us up to what I have called ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... fanciful estimate may see a little cruelty of another kind in it, is of no austere or pedagogic character. The author has borrowed not a little from the classical comedy—Plautine or even Aristophanic rather than Terentian—to strengthen and refine the domestic interlude or farce; and the result is certainly amusing enough. The plot turns on the courtship of Dame Christian Custance [Constance], a widow of repute and wealth as well as beauty, by the gull and coxcomb, Ralph ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... falsely &c. adj.; misjudge &c. 481; paralogize[obs3]. take on faith, take as a given; assume (supposition) 514. pervert, quibble; equivocate, mystify, evade, elude; gloss over, varnish; misteach &c. 538[obs3]; mislead &c. (error) 495; cavil, refine, subtilize[obs3], split hairs; misrepresent &c. (lie) 544. beg the question, reason in a circle, reason in circles, assume the conclusion. cut blocks with a razor, beat about the bush, play fast and loose, play fast and loose with the facts, blow hot ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... they might, in New England, go to Bryant, to Emerson, to Hawthorne; and it is more than excusable that those who were endeavouring to refine the very crude community in the midst of which they were anxiously holding up the agate lamp of Psyche, should see nothing to applaud in the vague and shadowy rhapsodies then being issued by a dissipated hack in Philadelphia. What the New England critics wanted, patriotically as well as ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... High education exists already for the wealthy, and commercial enterprise will increase the means of it as the demand increases. If you see a grain of gold in the dust of common life, and likely to be lost there, rescue it for the crucible, but most such grains of gold find out the way to refine themselves. As for gilding the earthen pots, I take leave to think that it would be labor wasted—that they are, in fact, more serviceable without ornament, plain, well-baked clay. Help those who are helpless and protect those who are weak as much as you please, but don't vex the strong and capable ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... things must happen to one than anywhere else. And he gave Rowland to understand that he meant to live freely and largely, and be as interested as occasion demanded. Rowland saw no reason to regard this as a menace of dissipation, because, in the first place, there was in all dissipation, refine it as one might, a grossness which would disqualify it for Roderick's favor, and because, in the second, the young sculptor was a man to regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his passions to his ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... Vailima in August, 1892, when within a single day we established a firm friendship that only grew closer until her death. The three stanzas by Louis so completely expressed her that it seems useless for a man to add anything or to refine upon it: ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... soon after became a victim had an equally fatal effect in disenchanting the dream of his existence. Those imaginary, or, at least, retrospective sorrows, in which he had once loved to indulge, and whose tendency it was, through the medium of his fancy, to soften and refine his heart, were now exchanged for a host of actual, ignoble vexations, which it was even more humiliating than painful to encounter. His misanthropy, instead of being, as heretofore, a vague and abstract feeling, without any ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... and surrender in all kind and courteous and affectionate ways: and these submissions and ministries to each other, of which you all know (none better) the practice and the preciousness, are as good for the yielder as the receiver: they strengthen and perfect as much as they soften and refine. But the real sacrifice of all our strength, or life, or happiness to others (though it may be needed, and though all brave creatures hold their lives in their hand, to be given, when such need comes, as frankly as a soldier gives his life in battle), is yet always a mournful ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... air, swarm with countless myriads of undistinguished and indistinguishable human creatures, until the beauty of the world is befouled and the glory of the Heavens bedimmed. To stem back that tide is the task now imposed on our heroism, to elevate and purify and refine the race, to introduce the ideal of quality in place of the ideal of quantity which has run riot so long, with the results we see. "As the Northern Saga tells that Odin must sacrifice his eye to attain the higher wisdom," concludes ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... minor creation—to tread humbly in the footsteps of the Maker—to reproduce the images that revolve within it, and to form, from its own ideas, a mimic representation of the actual world. This is the source of all art and all poetry; of every thing, in fact, which tends to adorn and refine our nature. It is this uncontrollable desire to work on and fashion the rough materials that lie under our hands that gives the first impulse to civilization, and impels us onward in the progress of improvement. And wherever we discern the faintest indication ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... conception, was pronounced a crime whose penalty was death. And Bruno, who, from the depths of infamous superstition, had risen into the pure light of heaven, to a theory whose principles, though they might not satisfy, could not fail to refine, elevate, and encourage the soul long groveling in the mire of ignorance, or languishing in the dark dungeons of Scholasticism,—Bruno died for the truth. More foolish than the savages of whom Montesquieu speaks, who cut down trees to reach their fruit, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... incestuous or amorous god may become a beast, and the object of his pursuit, once a woman, may also become a beast, and then shift shapes to a tree or a bird or a star. But in the civilised races the genius of the people tends to suppress, exclude and refine away the wild element, which, however, is never wholly eliminated. The Erinyes soon stop the mouth of the horse of Achilles when he begins, like the horse in Grimm's Goose Girl, to hold a sustained conversation.(1) But the ancient, cruel, and grotesque savage element, nearly overcome ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... never been a majority of women who for a great length of time have shirked this problem by any one of these methods. By individuals and by groups woman has always been seeking to develop the business of life to such proportions, to so diversify, refine, and broaden it that no half failure or utter failure of its fundamental relations would swamp her, leave her comfortless, or prevent her working out that family which she knew to be her part in the scheme of things. It is from her conscious attempt to make the best of things when they are proved ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... to think more of his art and less of his popularity. Less impetuous, less fecund, perhaps, in melodic invention, he began to study how to wed dramatic situations and music. This led him to enrich his harmonies, and to refine his instrumentation, which in his earlier works is frequently coarse and vulgar in the extreme. At this stage he gave us "La Forza del Destino" and "Ada." Now the hack writers of opera books would no longer suffice him. He had already shown ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... education?' To which I answered: 'Considering only under what heavy loads a man of the Lower Classes, especially of the Peasant sort, has to struggle through his life, one would think it was better neither to increase his knowledge nor refine his sensibility. But when one reflects that he, as well as those of the Higher Classes, is to last through Eternity; and withal that good instruction may [or might, IF it be not BAD] increase his practical intelligence, and help him to methods of alleviating himself in this world, it must be ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... perfection embodied in Christ. We may not attach ourselves to any system or effort as absolutely true or good, nor condemn any as utterly false. All knowledge and arts are related to religion. They refine man and aid him in his emancipation from whatever is sinful ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... an age of staid and decorous subsidence from the energetic restlessness of the seventeenth—an age in which men eschewed revolution and innovation, and devoted themselves assiduously to conserve, consolidate, polish, refine, and make the best of what ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... wholly at the mercy of Lapierre. For somewhere behind that barrier of logs was the woman he loved. He shuddered at the thought. He knew Lapierre. Knew that the man's white blood and his education, instead of civilizing, had served to heighten and to refine the barbaric cruelty and savagery of his heart. He knew that Lapierre would stop at nothing to gain an end. His heart chilled at the possibilities. He dreaded to act—yet he knew ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... of factious Day, To cast, in envy of thy peace, Her balls of discord in thy way: Here Beauty's day doth never cease; Day is abstracted here, And varied in a triple sphere. Hero, Alcmane, Mya, so outshine thee, Ere thou come here, let Thetis thrice refine thee. Love calls to war; Sighs his alarms, Lips his swords are, The field ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... the process of refining is finished. A few refiners improve the quality of their refined oil by redistilling it after treating it with acid and alkali. All distillates of petroleum have to be treated with acid and alkali to refine them. There is one thing peculiar about the distillates of petroleum, and that is that the run which follows naphtha, which is called "the middle run oil," is the highest test oil that is made, running as high ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... modest style, not practiced in early plays, is achieved admirably in The Busie Body. Yet, as she says in the epilogue, she has not followed the critics who balk the pleasure of the audience to refine their taste; her play will with "good humour, pleasure crown the Night." In dialogue, in plot, and particularly in the character of the amusing but inoffensive Marplot, she fulfills her simple theory of comedy designed not for reform ...
— The Busie Body • Susanna Centlivre
... indignation check'd, Nor check'd the tender tear to Misery given; From Guilt's contagious power shall that protect, This soften and refine the soul for Heaven. But dreadful is their doom whom doubt has driven To censure Fate, and pious Hope forego: Like yonder blasted boughs by lightning riven, Perfection, beauty, life, they never know, But frown on all that pass, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... fine sayings. With Emerson alone we are rich in sunlight, but poor in rain and dew,—poor, too, in soil, and in the moist, gestating earth principle. Emerson's tendency is not to broaden and enrich, but to concentrate and refine. ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... warden had been aiming to have, so far as could be, two suits to a man, a common, every day suit, and one better for Sabbaths, &c., it being thought that this would tend to refine and elevate the prisoners. Hence, he left them with a generous supply, well fitted up. But it would need more or less renewing and refitting in the fall, which it did not receive, but was made to answer by patching. Hence, patched and ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... here indicated, while it is more searching than any corporal punishment, does not have any of its disadvantages. It is more searching, because it never blunts the child's sensibilities, but rather tends to refine them, and to make them ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... merely the dreamer. In her, life was so puissant and rich, that action seemed necessary to its glorious development—action, but still in the woman's sphere—action to bless and to refine and to exalt all around her, and to pour whatever else of ambition was left unsatisfied into sympathy with the aspirations of man. Despite her father's fears of the bleak air of England, in that air she had strengthened the delicate health of her childhood. Her elastic step—her eyes full ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... frontier regions, the population was chiefly male. The brave women who took their share of the common work and hardship were treated with much respect, and did their part well, no doubt, but they had little leisure for those arts which brighten the lives and refine the characters ...
— Andrew Jackson • William Garrott Brown
... fortuitous nor wrought in vain; But that is may his worthy cradle be, Whereof I speak, shall so the heaven ordain. For where men look for fruit they graff the tree, And study still the rising plant to train; And artist uses to refine the gold Designed by him the precious ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... step further in the logic of that reasoning. Put yourself in the mental attitude of a man looking for deer. His eye sweeps rapidly over a side hill; so rapidly that you cannot understand how he can have gathered the main features of that hill, let alone concentrate and refine his attention to the seeing of an animal under a bush. As a matter of fact he pays no attention to the main features. He has trained his eye, not so much to see things, as to leave things out. The odd-shaped rock, the ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... God, all this sorrow and anxiety may lead to a good end. I used to think I would like to practice interviewing. Jonathan's friend on "The Exeter News" told him that memory is everything in such work, that you must be able to put down exactly almost every word spoken, even if you had to refine some of it afterwards. Here was a rare interview. I shall ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... has a grade of petroleum that differs from any other thus far found in the world. It is most easily converted into kerosene or lamp oil, and contains a larger proportion of such oil. It is the finest petroleum in the world, except that found in Indiana and Ohio, and that costs more to refine. ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... old story, but modernized, individualized, and carrying on his shield an unobtrusive little moral. In "Jack the Dullard" he comes nearest to his primitive prototype, and no visible effort is made to refine him. In "The Most Extraordinary Thing" he is the vehicle of a piece of social satire, and narrowly escapes the lot which the Fates seem especially to have prepared for inventors, viz., to make the ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... rude church of the Moravian sisters to a cathedral with "glimmering tapers," swinging censers, chancel, altar, cowls, and "dim mysterious aisle." After his visit to Europe Longfellow returned deeply imbued with the spirit of romance. It was his mission to refine our national taste by opening to American readers, in their own vernacular, new springs of beauty in the literatures of foreign tongues. The fact that this mission was interpretive, rather than creative, hardly detracts from Longfellow's true originality. It merely indicates that his inspiration ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... so but those who possess, or fancy they possess, it. To hear them speak, you would believe that their hearts would be cold if that elixir did not flow about them, that their eyes would be dim if that flame did not refine their vision, that they would be lonely if this strange companion abandoned them. You would suppose that it imparted some glad hope to spring, some fine charm to summer, some tranquil joy to autumn, some consolation to winter, which ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... manners, continued the Bishop; you are intelligent, I know. You will succeed therefore, if you intend it seriously. Our misfortune is, that we are encumbered with dull and stupid peasants, whom the Seminary has been able only partly to refine, and who render us ridiculous. You must certainly have gone ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... God, if we aim at happiness at all. We must know, many of us, that strange shadow which falls upon us when we say, "I feel so happy to-day that some evil must be going to befal me!" It is true that afflictions must come, but they are not to spoil our joy; they are rather to refine it and strengthen it. And those who have yielded themselves to joy are often best equipped to get ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... constant and persevering, as are ordinarily expected in the employments of active life, he would seem, so far, in respect to his principles and his habits, to have an advantage over others, inasmuch as intellectual labor is, in itself, better suited to refine and elevate the affections, and removes one farther from the scenes and objects of temptation. If we add to this, that the student is usually under a more uniform superintendence, and comes more frequently and habitually under the influence of moral precept and religious observances, and that the ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... Parsees (and in some degree the Sadder) exalt Ormusd into the first and omnipotent cause, whilst they degrade Ahriman into an inferior but rebellious spirit. Their desire of pleasing the Mahometans may have contributed to refine their theological systems.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... now are—if they should cease to overawe profligacy, and to win and to shame men into decency, fidelity, and love of unsullied virtue—it is easy to see that this influence, which has hitherto been exerted to strengthen and refine our society, will operate entirely to its corruption and debasement; that domestic happiness and private honour will be extinguished, and public spirit and national industry most probably annihilated along ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... pleasure to the day. Thee, goddess, thee, Britannia's isle adores; How has she oft exhausted all her stores, How oft in fields of death thy presence sought, Nor thinks the mighty prize too dearly bought! 130 On foreign mountains may the sun refine The grape's soft juice, and mellow it to wine, With citron groves adorn a distant soil, And the fat olive swell with floods of oil: We envy not the warmer clime, that lies In ten degrees of more indulgent skies, Nor at the coarseness of our heaven repine, Though o'er ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... deepest desire was that he might be a blessing to them. He came "not to be ministered unto, but to minister;" not to have friends, but to be a friend. He chose the Twelve that he might lift them up to honor and good; that he might purify, refine, and enrich their lives; that he might prepare them to be his witnesses, the conservators of his gospel, the interpreters to the world of his life and teachings. He sought nothing for himself, but every breath he drew was full ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... no courts, no fine buildings. They had no magistrates to administer law; no avarice to carry them to court. In fine, although without vices, they knew nothing of the arts,—of splendid virtues,—nor of any of the things which refine a people. They appeared to be rather an oak forest than a sensible ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... flesh, clothes their substance gross refine; Each bulky lout grows light like gossamere; Celestial thrones before purged ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... him. The distance between them depended very much upon their way of looking at things. He knew that her experience had dragged her through the valley of humiliation. His unselfish devotion had reacted to refine and elevate his own spirit. When he heard the suggestion, after her second departure, that she might marry Wain, he could not but compare himself with this new aspirant. He, Frank, was a man, an honest man—a better man than the ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... the skilled purveyors of countless forms of pleasure—the theatres and restaurants, the green and blossoming suburbs, the whole shining shifting spectacle of nights and days—every sight and sound and word had combined to charm her perceptions and refine her taste. And her growing friendship with Raymond de Chelles had been the most ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... table; and, best of all, there is the glad face of the sweet English wife. The happy scene was characteristic of the time, just when the simpler and more innocent luxuries of the higher class spread, not to spoil, but refine the middle. The dress, air, mien, movements of the young couple; the unassuming, suppressed, sober elegance of the house; the flower-garden, the books, and the music, evidences of cultivated taste, not signals of display,—all bespoke the gentle fusion of ranks ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... often, though unconsciously, much in sympathy with those unsophisticated Italian workmen. With him, as with them, and with the writer of the Letter to a Friend upon the occasion of the death of his intimate Friend,—so strangely! the visible function of death is but to refine, to detach from aught that is vulgar. And this elfin letter, really an impromptu epistle to a friend, affords the best possible light on the general temper of the man [154] who could be moved by the ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... that executive efficiency which did so much to give their plans the uniform success already mentioned. Kindness and warm affection, clearness of moral vision, and purity of heart, with a lively relish for quiet intellectual pleasures, for society and books adapted to refine, improve and elevate, were among the characteristics common to ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... often called King Cotton. Thousands upon thousands of people scan the newspapers each day to see what price its staple is bringing. From its bounty a vast army of toilers, who plant its seed, who pick its bolls, who gin its staple, who spin and weave its lint, who grind its seed, who refine its oil, draw daily bread. Does not its proper production deserve the best thought that ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... seen manners that make a similar impression with personal beauty; that give the like exhilaration, and refine us like that; and, in memorable experiences, they are suddenly better than beauty, and make that superfluous and ugly. But they must be marked by fine perception, the acquaintance with real beauty. They must always show self-control: you shall not be facile, apologetic, or leaky, but ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... experience profounder than his own, yet tallying in essentials: Thackeray's remarks seem to gather up into final shape the scattered oracles of the years. Gratitude goes out to an author who can thus condense and refine one's own inarticulate conclusions. The mental palate is tickled by this, while the taste is titillated by the grace and fitness ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... soul—how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the physical impulse began? How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! Was the soul ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... 11 And behold, there was all manner of gold in both these lands, and of silver, and of precious ore of every kind; and there were also curious workmen, who did work all kinds of ore and did refine it; and thus they ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... small observances not only conduce to the comfort of woman, but they refine and do away with the rough and selfish side of man's nature, for without this refining contact with gentle womanhood, a man will never lose the innate roughness with which nature ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... principles that should regulate clothing, the rules of cleanliness, the advantages of early rising and domestic exercise, as readily communicated as the principles of mineralogy, or rules of syntax? Are not the rules of Jesus Christ, applied to refine domestic manners and preserve a good temper, as important as the abstract principles of ethics, as taught by Paley, Wayland, or Jouffroy? May not the advantages of neatness, system, and order, be as well illustrated in showing how they contribute to the happiness of a family, as by showing ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... been rendered superfluous, while the community would not have profited at all. We, on the contrary, were able to find excellent employment for the labour thus saved, which could be utilised in producing things that would elevate and refine, and for which the increased productiveness of labour had created ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... years of cohabitation, as to take exceptions to an expedient by which she would not only enjoy the conversation of her husband, but even the fruits of those talents which the knife would so remarkably refine. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... whole career; my teacher also came to this country. I had everything to learn; I could not even speak my own language; my speech was a dialect heard in that part of the country where I was brought up. I have had to cultivate and refine myself. I had to study other languages, Italian, French and German. I learned them all in America. So you see there is no need for an American to go out of his own country for vocal instruction or languages; all can be learned right here at home. I ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... nice little American girl, who has been brought up to cultivate her mind, to refine her taste, to care for her health, to be a helpful daughter and a good sister, to visit the poor and teach in Sunday schools; when a good, sweet, modest little puss of this kind combs all her pretty hair backward till it is one mass of frowzy confusion; when she powders, and paints under ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... of matter, unchangeable in its essence, though subject to mutations of quality and form in an eternal succession of seeming decay and regeneration; comparing it to water, air, or fire, as each endeavored to refine on the doctrine of his predecessor, or was influenced by a different class ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... democratic spirit through beauty. Its enemies are of its own household; those who by nature and training should be its helpers hinder it instead. Why do they do this? Because their fastidious, aesthetic natures are outraged by a crudeness which they themselves could easily refine away if they chose; because also they recoil at a lack of conformity to existing conventions—conventions so hampering to the inner spirit of the Newness, that in order to incarnate at all it must ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... honourable customs, even though he might be perverse in nature, he learns to be tractable, amiable, and patient, with much greater ease than he would have done by remaining in his own country. And in truth, he who desires to refine men in the life of the world need seek no other fire and no better touchstone than this, seeing that those who are rough by nature are made gentle, and the gentle become more gracious. Gherardo di Jacopo Starnina, painter of Florence, being ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... Cherish the tulip, prune the vine, But freely let the woodbine twine, And leave untrimm'd the eglantine: Nay, my friend, nay,—since oft thy praise Hath given fresh vigour to my lays; Since oft thy judgment could refine My flatten'd thought or cumbrous line, Still kind, as is thy wont, attend, And in the minstrel spare ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... place it into a practical form for the common reader. We hope, however, that this work will give the reader a greater longing to extend his inquiries into these most interesting subjects, so rich in everything that can refine the taste, enlarge the understanding and improve the heart. It has been our object, so far as possible, to avoid every expression of opinion, whether our own or that of any school of thinkers, and to supply first, facts, and secondly, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... evangelization; that is to say, there is in civilization no energy inherently calculated to yield gospel facts. By carrying schools and arts, trade and manufacture, among people that are now savages you may be able to refine the quality of their deviltry, but that is not even the first step towards making angels, or even saints ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... other things we count it to excel, If it a docile scholar can appear To Nature, and but imitate her well: It over-rules, and is her master here. It imitates her Maker's power divine, And changes her sometimes, and sometimes does refine: It does, like grace, the fallen-tree restore To its blest state of Paradise before: Who would not joy to see his conquering hand O'er all the vegetable world command, And the wild giants of the wood receive What laws he's pleased to give? He bids the ill-natured crab ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... the time the raw material leaves the earth in the form of iron ore, crude petroleum, logs, or coal, through all of the processes of production, it is owned by the industrial master, not by the worker. Workers separate the product from the earth, transport it, refine it, fabricate it. Always, the product, like the machinery, is the possession ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... to be honest solely because honesty is right, and not because honesty is profitable, there is a perpetual and beautiful tendency of his honesty to refine and ...
— Heart's-ease • Phillips Brooks
... his new dramas, Ennius was born; who, when he was grown to man's estate, having seriously considered the genius of the people, and how eagerly they followed the first satires, thought it would be worth his pains to refine upon the project, and to write satires, not to be acted on the theatre, but read. He preserved the groundwork of their pleasantry, their venom, and their raillery on particular persons and general vices; and by this means, avoiding the danger ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... believe it to be common to all of us who are not seamen. With the seaman, wonder changes into fellowship and close affection; but to all landsmen, from youth upwards, the boat remains a piece of enchantment; at least unless we entangle our vanity in it, and refine it away into mere lath, giving up all its protective nobleness for pace. With those in whose eyes the perfection of a boat is swift fragility, I have no sympathy. The glory of a boat is, first its steadiness of poise—its ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... society of the loose and the dissolute. There is at all times and everywhere open to him a society of persons of the opposite sex of his own age and of pure thoughts and lives, whose conversation will refine him and drive from his ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... The fascination of such works springs less from the desire which each author feels to show his skill in putting forth choice and delicate ideas than from the mysterious working of the human intellect. It is characteristic of man to purify and refine everything that he lays up in the treasury of his thoughts. What human faces, what monuments of the dead are not made more beautiful than actual nature in the artistic representation? The soul of the reader ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form.... She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... is the same. It is to be put on, primarily, by faith. It is given in Christ to simple belief. He that hath faith thereby has the righteousness which is through faith in Christ, for in his faith he has the one formative principle of reliance on God, which will gradually refine character and mould conduct into whatsoever things are lovely and of good report. That righteousness which faith receives is no mere forensic treating of the unjust as just, but whilst it does bring with it pardon and oblivion from past transgressions, it makes a man in the depths of his being ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... existence; mild conquerors, and just lawgivers; and the City of the Seven Hills owed to the proximity of her seven Etrurian sisters all her early wisdom in politics, all her knowledge of the arts which refine and preserve; and to their love of those arts, and of the peace in which they flourish, the permission of her existence in those early centuries which preceded the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... pagan antagonists; their doctrine was not burdened with barbarous traditions dating back to times of savagery; and all the ignominies that stained the old Phrygian religion must not prejudice us against it nor cause us to slight the long continued efforts that were made to refine it gradually and to mould it into a form that would fulfil the new demands of morality and enable it to follow the laborious march of Roman society on the road of ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... subjected to all the cruelties and deprivations of a bondman. His natural abilities were above mediocrity, but having never had the advantages of an education, or the privileges of a society calculated to cultivate and refine his natural aspiring intellect, and to direct his indomitable will in the acquirement of the more imperishable graces of the human heart, he had come to manhood with a determined, selfish disposition, to accomplish whatever gratified his vanity or administered to the wants of ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... and in fear and in much trembling," until he had achieved the conquest of the island to Christ. Nor, again, how it came to pass that, when Augustine died and his work slackened, another Pope, unwearied still, sent three saints from Rome, to ennoble and refine the people Augustine had converted. Three holy men set out for England together, of different nations: Theodore, an Asiatic Greek, from Tarsus; Adrian, an African; Bennett alone a Saxon, for Peter knows ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... watering-places, etc., where they affect to make a palfrey of him. Fie on all such sophistications! It will never do, Master Groom! Something of his honest shaggy exterior will still peep up in spite of you,—his good, rough, native, pine-apple coating. You cannot "refine a scorpion into a fish, though you rinse it and scour it with ever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... sat by, drinking in every word with the delight all artists feel in their own beautiful world, and learning to see how sacred good gifts are, how powerful, and how faithfully they should be used for high ends, each in its own place helping to educate, refine, and refresh. ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... of his art; and he held, that, by striking out this course, and setting the successful example of introducing always into his most whimsical pieces some beautiful faces or agreeable forms, he had done more than any other man of his generation to refine a branch of art to which the facilities of steam-printing and wood-engraving were giving almost unrivalled diffusion and popularity. His opinion of Leech in a word was that he turned caricature into character; and would leave behind him not a little ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... To refine it, a good man who ran a whisky-still tried his plan of the worm that never dies, with the oil. The vapor condensed and was caught in the form of an oil that was nearly white. This oil burned with a steady flame, if ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
Copyright © 2025 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
