"Pragmatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... should care to see again, though doubtless all have value in their way. One that attracted our attention was a picture of "Christ disputing with the Doctors," by Albert Duerer, in which was represented the ugliest, most evil-minded, stubborn, pragmatical, and contentious old Jew that ever lived under the law of Moses; and he and the child Jesus were arguing, not only with their tongues, but making hieroglyphics, as it were, by the motion of their hands and fingers. It is a very ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lately taken a violent dislike to Wright, though he had been fond of him in better days. He used to denounce him as a disagreeable and pragmatical little muff, and was as loud as any of them in condemning his announced determination to "sneak." Had he known that Wright had acted under Montagu's well-meant, though rather mistaken advice, he might have ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... question was agitated between the two pragmatical potentates, it so happened that a mule laden with supplies for the fortress arrived one day at the gate of Xenil, by which it was to traverse a suburb of the city on its way to the Alhambra. The convoy was headed by a testy old corporal, who had long served under the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... trough." On the other hand, a fat, dull-headed, and modest Englishman asked for a place, because he had been born in Liverpool! and had seen the world beyond the woods and waters, too! And another fussy, talkative, pragmatical little gentleman rested his pretensions on his ability to draw and paint maps!—not projecting them in roundabout scientific processes, but in that speedy and elegant style in which young ladies copy maps at first chop boarding-schools! ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future—so we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic. It is left to the few to be persistently concerned with the nuances of relationships—and even this few only in certain hours especially ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... history since independence from British administration in 1946, Jordan was ruled by King HUSSEIN (1953-1999). A pragmatic ruler, he successfully navigated competing pressures from the major powers (US, USSR, and UK), various Arab states, Israel, and a large internal Palestinian population, through several wars and coup attempts. In 1989 he resumed parliamentary ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... new possibilities presented by the ever-newly-created opportunities of ever-new time. We get a right to the type of voluntaristic conception of man which most of us live by—with a reasonable harmony between our science and our pragmatic needs and critical ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... general assent which this proposition will doubtless command, it is deserving of special emphasis at the present time. Students of religion have latterly shifted attention from its claims to truth to its utility and subjective form. This pragmatic and psychological study of religion has created no little confusion of mind concerning its real meaning, and obscured that which is after all its essential claim—the claim, namely, to offer an illumination of life. ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... created to keep the bounds of social order, on duty at every street corner, alert to check every outbreak of individuality. Do ladies aspire to ride bicycles? Or wear bloomers? There is the small boy to face. It is a question for him. Conciliate him, and you may laugh at the pragmatic. His, too, is a healthy barbarism, beneficent in its action, that thinks scorn of eyeglasses and spectacles, and leads him to denounce quadruple vision, as, indeed, all departure from the simplicities of physical perfection. A human scarecrow he abhors, and will follow such an one through six streets ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... By a pragmatic of 1500, all persons, whether natives or foreigners, were prohibited from shipping goods in foreign bottoms, from a port where a Spanish ship could be obtained. [59] Another prohibited the sale of vessels to foreigners. [60] Another offered a large premium on all vessels of ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... grand function. Dietrich, solemnly appointed 'Patrician,' had Italy ceded to him by a 'Pragmatic' sanction, and Zeno placed on his head the sacrum velamen, a square of purple, signifying in Constantinople things wonderful, august, imperial—if they could only be made to come to pass. And he made them ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... England is mixed up in it only because her present king is a Hanoverian and not an Englishman. This is the matter as far as I can make it out. Charles VI., Emperor of Germany, died in October, 1740. It had been arranged by a sort of general agreement called the Pragmatic ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... apologetic for today depends less upon the arguments of speculative theology and the findings of biblical science than upon sociological considerations. The church is dealing with a pragmatic public which insists upon knowing what this or that institution accomplishes for the common good. The deep and growing interest in social science, the crying needs that it lays bare, together with socialistic dreams of human welfare, compel Christian workers ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... them. He was dazzled by a fair heroine. He could not take them up into his imagination as real beings as he did men. But then how living are his men, whether coarse or noble! What a picture, for instance, is that in A Legend of Montrose of the conceited, pragmatic, but prompt and dauntless soldier of fortune, rejecting Argyle's attempts to tamper with him, in the dungeon at Inverary, suddenly throwing himself on the disguised Duke so soon as he detects him by his voice, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... History, and more particularly of that of the Romans; and the history of his own country was familiar to him even in detail. Fortunately for him it had not as yet been treated in a diplomatic and pragmatic spirit, but merely in the chronicle-style; in other words, it had not yet assumed the appearance of dry investigations respecting the development of political relations, diplomatic negotiations, finances, &c., but exhibited ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... year, 1740, in which Frederic II succeeded his father, the Emperor Charles VI died, leaving his hereditary dominions to his daughter Maria Theresa, wife of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, of the House of Lorraine. By an instrument called the Pragmatic Sanction, which was the subject of protracted negotiations, the Powers had agreed to acknowledge her right. She was & sensible and reasonable woman, much the best that had ever reigned; but she was without culture or superior talent, and he husband was not able to supply the deficiency. ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... Cromwell, starting up and addressing Pearson, "thou hast not touched Mark Everard, in whom there was no guilt, for he was deceived by him who passed between us—neither hast thou put forth thy hand on the pragmatic Presbyterian minister, to have all those of their classes cry sacrilege, and alienate them ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... principal object had been to secure to his descendants in the female line the many crowns of the House of Hapsburg. With this view he had promulgated a new law of succession, widely celebrated throughout Europe under the name of the Pragmatic Sanction. By virtue of this law, his daughter, the Archduchess Maria Theresa, wife of Francis of Lorraine, succeeded to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... power or knowledge, may arise in connection with any situation. It is unfortunate that the terms "problematic situation" and "feeling of inadequacy" have been discussed almost entirely in connection with situations when the result has some pragmatic value. There is no question but what the situation arousing thinking must be a live one and a real one, but it need not be one the answer to which will be useful. It is true that with the majority of people, both children and adults, a problem of this type will be more often effective ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... repeat, was a very good dinner indeed—the Huxleys, I took it, must be well to do—the company agreeable; a bit pragmatic, however, I thought. The gentleman by the name of Spencer said he loved music and wished to hear Mrs. Watterson sing, especially Longfellow's Rainy Day, and left the others of us—Huxley, Mill, Tyndall and myself—at table. Finding them a little off on the Irish question as well ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... gentleman took an athletic pull at his liquor, and continued his discourse. He had been discussing more to himself than to me the merits of Professor James and Monsieur Bergson, and had inquired was I aware of the nature of the Pragmatic Sanction. The gentleman behind the counter remarked, that he had one on his bicycle, but that they were no good. This statement was denounced by the Philosopher as an unnatural and clumsy falsehood, and, anathematising the ignorance of his interrupter, ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... might expect, all Italy desolate and depopulated looked to Justinian to succour her in her misery if she was not to perish under her ruins and her debts. The first step in that work was undertaken in the very year of the peace, in the August of the year 554, and it took the form of a solemn "Pragmatic Sanction" addressed to Narses and to Antiochus, the Prefect of Italy,[1] in Ravenna. It had for its object the social peace of Italy, the re-establishment of order out of the chaos of the Ostrogothic war; and it is significant of the true position ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... seems to stand in definite relationship to her system of ideas. That these have a constructive tendency is shown by the translation of her cruder thoughts into the setting of the occult with the suggestion of propaganda and in their pragmatic value. With her "new religion" she has provided herself with an argument in favor of a life of desultory prostitution and general vagabondage. She was advised to go to a hospital but refused, though she will certainly be committed ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... a body of belief and speculation. When the Bolsheviki seized the government of Russia and began to attempt to carry out their ideas, Bolshevism became a living movement in a world of reality and subject to the acid test of pragmatic criteria. It must be judged by such a matter-of-fact standard as the extent to which it has enlarged or diminished the happiness, health, comfort, freedom, well-being, satisfaction, and efficiency of the greatest number of individuals. ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... jealousy of the commercial prosperity of Holland being the real motive. Long negotiations took place on the subject of the treaty; and in December, 1718, the republic consented to modify some of the articles. The Pragmatic Sanction, published at Vienna in 1713 by Charles VI., regulated the succession to all the imperial hereditary possessions; and, among the rest, the provinces of the Netherlands. But this arrangement, though guaranteed ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... Barstein's fellow-councillors in Zionism, a pragmatic inexhaustible debater in the small back room, and the voluble little man now loomed suddenly large as a possible authority ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... the aesthetic life plays in determining one's choice of a religion. Men, I said awhile ago, involuntarily intellectualize their religious experience. They need formulas, just as they need fellowship in worship. I spoke, therefore, too contemptuously of the pragmatic uselessness of the famous scholastic list of attributes of the deity, for they have one use which I neglected to consider. The eloquent passage in which Newman enumerates them[301] puts us on the track of it. Intoning them as he would intone a cathedral service, he ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the charms of his parentless cousin—the daughter of the minister's brother, who had settled in France and taken to himself a French wife—and he became her defender against those inhabitants of the Manse and the parish—from his brother Wattie to the pragmatic schoolmaster—whose prejudices ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... (1431-1447) had been victorious over the council of Basel; but neither France nor Germany was prepared to forgo the reforms passed by the council. France secured their validity, as far as she herself was concerned, by the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (July 7, 1438); Germany followed with the Acceptation of Mainz (March 26, 1439). The theory of the papal supremacy held by the Curia was thus at ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... and Leo X. came together, and, after conferring, determined that the Pragmatic Sanction should be repudiated; Leo, because he must increase his revenues, and Francis, because he desired to use appointments to rich vacancies as rewards for his friends. Leo's tastes, as we know, were magnificent, and needed much more money than he could command; a fact ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... though it was as terrible, almost, as the one Mugridge had caused to be given to Johnson. But the expression of Wolf Larsen's face never changed. He did not change his position either, but continued to gaze down with a great curiosity. For all his pragmatic certitude, it seemed as if he watched the play and movement of life in the hope of discovering something more about it, of discerning in its maddest writhings a something which had hitherto escaped him,—the key to its mystery, as it ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... natural that they should wish to pursue it at the first favourable opportunity of conquest. That opportunity came to Prussia when Charles VI died and the Archduchess Maria Theresa succeeded to her father by virtue of a law (the Pragmatic Sanction), to which all the Powers of Europe had subscribed. Frederick had subscribed to it. But, nevertheless, in the name of Prussia, without any proper excuse or even decent pretext, he took possession of Silesia, thereby robbing the ally whom he had bound himself to defend, and committing ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... former's accession; at all events Francis did not evince much indulgence for the man whose wife he had seduced. Under date April, 1518, the Journal dun Bourgeois de Paris mentions the arrest of several advocates and others for daring to discuss the question of the Pragmatic Sanction. Disome was implicated in the matter but appears to have escaped for a time; however in September of that year we find him detained at Orleans and subjected to the interrogatories of various royal Commissioners. The affair was then adjourned till the following year, when no further ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... the Habsburgs could continue in their efforts to assimilate, by one process or another, the Southern Slavs in the Empire, it was necessary to induce them to accept the Pragmatic Sanction, for Charles VI., the reigning Emperor, had lost his only son and wished to secure the succession to Maria Theresa. It is interesting to see that Croatia negotiated independently of Hungary, that she recognized the Pragmatic Sanction in 1713, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... reader his detachment or attachment to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas is not nearly so important as his personal impressions of both the little things and the big things of our contemporary life. Whether you are pragmatic or not, you must, if you are at all in love with life, become a Jamesonian after you have read the "Letters"! And his son, Mr. Henry James, who, we may hope, may resemble his father in time, has arranged them so well, and ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... clear that Mr. Joshua Brigham regarded these transactions as so many Pragmatic Sanctions, that were to clear the moral and legal atmospheres of any atoms of difficulty that might exist in the forms of old opinions, to his getting easily out of debt, in the one case, and suddenly rich in the other. I dare say ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... chords in the heart as well as the brain. No writer's work leaves a better taste in the mouth; he makes us think better of the world, of righteousness, of ourselves. Yet no writer is less of a Puritan or a Philistine; none writes with less of pragmatic purpose or a less obtrusive load of positive fact. He scorns such overladen pedantry, and never loses a chance to lash it. He tells us that he has "never been inside the reading-room of the British Museum," and "expounds ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... to be so—but there seems to be a suggestion that we may be wrong. Is it possible that the laugh is not the test of the joke? Here is a question over which the philosophers may wrangle. Is there an Absolute in the realm of humor, or must our jokes be judged solely by the pragmatic test? Congreve once told Colly Gibber that there were many witty speeches in one of Colly's plays, and many that looked witty, yet were not really what they seemed at first sight! So a joke is not to be recognized even by its appearance or by the company ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... to the rescue from the philosophical camp; but the assault was but a very short one; since, tested by Pragmatic methods (that is, the testing of the truth of a religion by its appeal to human consciousness), if one fact stood out luminous and undisputed, it was that the Catholic Religion, with its eternal appeal in every century and to every type of ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... various necessary human contacts and relations; to the great body of knowledge important to life, which human beings have got together; to the prevailing philosophical interpretations of the universe and of life; and to the pragmatic organizations, conventions, and controls which human society has instituted. In addition to these, some students of biology are going into various careers, each demanding special adjustments which biology may aid notably. Such are medicine and its ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... The pragmatic value of this idea is that it introduces a much needed refinement into the ancient controversy about nature and nurture, innate quality and environment. For the pseudo-environment is a hybrid compounded of "human nature" and "conditions." To my mind ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... the poor, nor a slave to the great, Neither factious in church, nor pragmatic in state, He keeps himself quiet within his own sphere, And finds work sufficient in preaching ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... marks of his final and mystical period is his greater courage to "be himself" in this respect—and this means necessarily a return, or an advance, to a position which the late William James undoubtedly would have acknowledged as "pragmatic." To combat the assertion of over-developed individualism that we are ends in ourselves, that we have certain inalienable personal "rights" to pleasure and happiness merely because we happen to appear here in human shape, ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... religious teachers have had a deep sense of the power of evil in human life. Jesus apparently was not interested in the philosophical question of the origin of evil, but accepted the fact of evil in a pragmatic way, and saw his own life as a ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... officers and soldiers in that army should not be troubled or kept down for Anabaptism or the like. This had been the more necessary because the next in command under him, the Scottish Major-general Crawford, was an ardent and pragmatic Presbyterian. "Sir," Cromwell had written to Crawford on one occasion, when an Anabaptist colonel had been put under disgrace, "the State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies. I advised you formerly ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... wage return is not an educator's criterion, in spite of the pragmatic recommendation of the Cleveland Survey. The Survey's recommendation for a reorganization of the school system is based on the belief that the school is, or should be, an integral expression or reflection of the life of the community; ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... calamity—thine heart with dread—thy mind with illusions—thy bosom with groans. Know that when thou neglectest my counsels, the gods will refuse their aid. Dare, then, to affranchise thyself from the trammels of superstition, my self-conceited, pragmatic rival, who mistakes my rights; renounce those empty theories, which are usurpers of my privileges; return under the dominion of my laws, which, however severe, are mild in comparison with those of bigotry. It is in my empire alone that true liberty reigns. Tyranny is unknown ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... scythe; to Philips the urbane, not saying much but coming to the essential point, our scout and cartographer, who knew all the places on the map between the Somme and the Rhine and heard the call of Pittsburgh; to Russell, that pragmatic, upstanding expert in squadrons and barrages, who saved all our faces as reporters by knowing news when he saw it, arbiter of mess conversations, whose pungent wit had a movable zero—luck to them all! May Robinson have a stately mansion on the Thames where he can study nature at leisure; ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Catiline's conspiracy in the Sergestus, furens animi, who dashes upon the rock in his mad eagerness to win, and obtrudes etymology in the phrase segnem Menoeten (1. 173). One is tempted to suspect that the whole narrative of the boat-race is filled with pragmatic allusions. If the characters of his epic must be connected with well-known Roman families, it is at least interesting that the connections are indicated in the fifth book and not in the passages where the names first meet the reader. Does it not appear that the body of the book ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... poet weans his eyes from their pragmatic character in varying degree. Wordsworth, in poetic mood, seems to have kept them half closed.[Footnote: See A Poet's Epitaph, and Sonnet: Most Sweet it is with Unuplifted Eyes.] Mrs. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... electing the abbot. The re-establishing this ancient order was the object of several statutes enacted in England during the course of the fourteenth century, particularly of what is called the statute of provisors; and of the pragmatic sanction, established in France in the fifteenth century. In order to render the election valid, it was necessary that the sovereign should both consent to it before hand, and afterwards approve of the person elected; and though the election was still ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... controversy, and thus into all the terrible temptations—worse than the temptations to whoredom or wine—that accompany a life of controversy. The three scoundrels that fell upon Valiant at the mouth of the lane were Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and Pragmatic. In other words, the besetting temptations of many men who are set as defenders of the truth in religion, as well as in other matters, is to be wild-headed, inconsiderate, self-conceited, and intolerably ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... and specialization which degrade men to the level of machines; concentration and segregation of industries, the factory system, high finance and international finance, capitalism, trades-unionism and the International, standardized education, "metropolitan" newspapers, pragmatic philosophy, and churches "run on business methods" and recruited ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... I will outline to the Congress in the weeks ahead represent a reaffirmation, not an abdication, of Federal responsibility. They represent a pragmatic rededication to social compassion and national excellence, in place of the combination of good intentions and fuzzy follow-through which too often in the past ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Richard Nixon • Richard Nixon
... of learning, have been socializing the future leaders in social progress so that their inspiration has been drawn from a concrete knowledge of social problems and from the belief that humanity can, by proper effort, control conditions of living. Then pragmatic results have furthered this belief until inspiration has come from the achievement of results themselves rather than from any recognition of Christian influence in social life. The Christian religion is doubtless responsible for those things most worth ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... traditionally pragmatic and eclectic; most important elements of religion are Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism; ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... society in the adjustment of sexual instincts to the peculiar conditions that obtain in our modern civilized life. To spread the knowledge that will help civilized humanity on towards the best possible adjustment of sex and life, and therefore to a pragmatic solution of sexual problems, is the task or the ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow |
