"Rightness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plan for him, if this prove feasible at all. Double your velocity, you double your momentum. One's weight is given,—weight growing less and less;—but not, or not in the same way and degree, one's velocity, one's rightness of aim. Weight given: it is only by doubling or trebling his velocity that a man can make his momentum double or treble, as needed! Friedrich means to try it, readers will see how,—were the Fort of Schweidnitz once had; for which object Friedrich watches ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... his hateful rightness, before Henry's drowsy eyes (how long it was since he had slept!), and he slipped for a moment into a dream, the straw ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... spite of such an obstacle, its fine quality would be injured, no matter how great its intensity; and, instead of a moral blessing, it would become a moral curse. An exquisite expression of the necessity of this personal sense of rightness may be read into ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... are no novel ideas in "Snow-Bound," nor is there any need of them, but the thousands of annual pilgrims to the old farmhouse can bear witness to the touching intimacy, the homely charm, the unerring rightness of feeling with which Whittier's genius recreated his own lost youth and painted for all time a true ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the Western World," or in Mr. Masefield's "Nan"—are so removed from our ken that we cannot really tell, and therefore do not care, whether an absolute illusion is maintained. The poetry which may and should exist in naturalistic drama, can only be that of perfect rightness of proportion, rhythm, shape—the poetry, in fact, that lies in all vital things. It is the ill-mating of forms that has killed a thousand plays. We want no more bastard drama; no more attempts to dress out the simple dignity of everyday life in the peacock's feathers ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... he was thoroughly like himself. There was a kind of rightness and nobleness in what he did; but it was in the wrong place. If he had only been as prompt inside Gethsemane to do what he was bidden as outside it to do what he was not bidden! How much better if ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... was speaking, and Erica went away quickly to see to the necessary preparations. Herr Haeberlein had come, and she did not for a moment question the rightness of her father's decision; but yet in her heart she was troubled about it, and she could see that both her aunt and Tom were troubled too. The fact was that for some time they had seen plainly enough that Raeburn's health was failing, and they ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... may seem a trite thing to say in praise of a great genius; but when you reflect that Shakespeare is read throughout the civilized world, the simple fact that the splendor of his poetry is balanced by the rightness of his message becomes significant and impressive. It speaks not only for Shakespeare but for the moral quality of the multitudes who acknowledge his mastery. Wherever his plays are read, on land or sea, in the crowded cities of men ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... precisely to none of these things, but which are concerned with the perception of beauty, in forms and colours, musical sounds, human faces and limbs, words majestic or sweet; and this sense of beauty may go further, and may be discerned in qualities, regarded not from the point of view of their rightness and justice, but according as they are fine and noble, evoking our admiration and our desire; and these are ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... singly nor the conflict of all taken together. His points are often cleverly and faithfully put, and our attention is so riveted on this cleverness and faithfulness that we take for granted the rightness of his deductions, slovenly, illogical or false though they may be. What we most remark in his books is how the purely artistic element in his nature—of a very high grade and very true instincts—is dwarfed of full development and stunted ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... a type of that rightness which the soul demands. It demands that we shall not live alternately with our opposing tendencies in continual see-saw of passion and disgust, but seek some path on which the tendencies shall no longer oppose, but serve each other to a common end. It demands that we ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with which the goal is reached. It is like an accumulation of evidence, a constellation of associations. AB foretells C; but ABCDEF rushes yet more strongly upon G. So it is that the irresistibleness, the "unalterable rightness" of a piece of music increases from beginning ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... the international tension was greater than ever before. If The Leader could doubt the rightness of any of his actions, he doubted it then. There was great danger of war. Prime Minister Winston had said flatly that The Leader must withdraw his demands or fight. The Leader was greatly agitated. He demanded my prediction. ...
— The Leader • William Fitzgerald Jenkins (AKA Murray Leinster)
... of any preceding tragedy, or of any play by Lyly, Greene, or Peele. In none of them shall we find anything approaching the masterful grip upon its spectators, the appeal to their sympathies, the alternation of fear and hope, the skilful subordination of many incidents to one purpose, the absolute rightness yet horror of the conclusion (the inset play), of Kyd's tragedy. It will repay us to examine some of the details ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... propre!" the Doge said, in whispered abstraction, using the French which so exactly expresses the rightness of an inner feeling that will not let one do a thing however much he may wish to. Then a wave of confusion passed over his face, evidently at the echo of his thoughts in the form of words come unwittingly from his lips. He tried to retrieve ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... representative of that—an anticipation of or prevision of it, a symbol of a fact. Their own kind or degree of reality is sometimes called 'validity'—a term I do not like: it might be more simply named 'rightness' with the connotation of a certain incumbency and imperativeness as well as of an appeal or adjustment to our nature as we know it; or perhaps all we can say is that their reality—it seems a paradox that ...
— Progress and History • Various
... The rightness of the Council in selecting Denry as mayor was confirmed in a singular manner by the behaviour of the football and of Callear at the ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... and illustrations are as powerful as it is ever in the nature of evil things to be (there is no final strength but in rightness). Nothing more witty, nor more inventively horrible, has yet been produced in the evil literature, or by the evil art, of man: nor can I conceive it possible to go beyond either in their specialities of corruption. The text is full of blasphemies, ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... universe in conflict with the incomprehensibly ethical soul of the Agnostic, is as incredible as a black horned devil, an active material anti-god with hoofs, tail, pitchfork, and Dunstan-scorched nose complete. To believe completely in God is to believe in the final rightness of all being. The ethical system that condemns the ways of life as wrong, or points to the ways of death as right, that countenances what the scheme of things condemns, and condemns the general purpose in things ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... or morals. We do not intend going into a discussion of the details of "Right and Wrong," for we have touched upon that phase of the subject in other works. But we feel justified in calling your attention to the fact that the human mind intuitively recognizes the "Rightness" of the living up to that which comes to us from the highest parts of the mind—the highest product of our unfoldment. And it likewise intuitively recognizes the "Wrongness" of the falling back into that which belongs to the lower stages of our mentality—to the animal part of us, that is ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... heart of an abstract science. I wonder, sometimes, whether the appreciators of art and of mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied. Before we feel an aesthetic emotion for a combination of forms, do we not perceive intellectually the rightness and necessity of the combination? If we do, it would explain the fact that passing rapidly through a room we recognise a picture to be good, although we cannot say that it has provoked much emotion. We seem to have recognised intellectually ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... the despised and oppressed serfs and an appreciation of the cruel injustice of which they were the helpless victims. Was Moses justified in resisting the Egyptian taskmaster? Are numbers essential to the rightness of a cause? What right had Ramses II to demand forced labor from the immigrants within his border? Was he justified in his method of exacting tribute? Is peonage always disastrous not only to its victims but also to the ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... a bench outside the door of the auberge. He could hear the voice of the landlord inside, grumbling and growling, to what purport he couldn't determine. But it wasn't difficult to guess; and before Duchemin was finished he had testimony to the rightness of his surmise, finding himself the cynosure of more than a few pair of eyes set in the ill-favoured faces of natives ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... And you have perpetuated this traffic in flesh on the specious reasoning that a court judgment of half a millennium ago is as good today as when it was handed down. Never once did anyone have the moral courage to re-examine that old decision. Never once did any human question the rightness of that decision. None of us are immune. We all based our conduct upon an antiquated law and searched no further. Everyone was happy with the status quo—or at least not so unhappy that they wanted to change it. Even I would have been content had ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... witnessed; automatic motor phenomena occur; and it always seems, after the surrender of the personal will, as if an extraneous higher power had flooded in and taken possession. Moreover the sense of renovation, safety, cleanness, rightness, can be so marvelous and jubilant as well to warrant one's belief in ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... Washington Square that they might have passed for its inner consciousness as it might have stood for their outward form; and the question as to which the house now seemed to affirm their intrinsic rightness was that of the social disintegration expressed by widely-different architectural physiognomies at the other end of Fifth Avenue. As Ralph pushed the bolts behind him, and passed into the hall, with its ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... left him, came back. And came back in a way that made it more intolerable than ever. For the clear flame of it had lost its clarity; the confidence that had fanned it was gone—the sense of his own rightness. The irresistible surge of passion that had carried him off, had destroyed that. The flame smoked ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... for Wordsworth of the arrival of this enthusiastic Columbus. Under his sister's genial influence he was groping his way doubtfully out of the labyrinth of poetic conventions, beginning to see a new pathos and sublimity in human life, but not yet convinced, except by fits and starts, of the rightness of his own vision. Stubborn and independent as Wordsworth was, he needed some friendly voice from the outer world to give him confidence in himself. Coleridge rendered him this indispensable service. He read to his visitor one of his experiments, the story of the ruined cottage, afterward ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... thought, that we are all in an especial manner sprung from God, and that God is the Father of men as well as gods, full sure he would never conceive aught ignoble or base of himself.... Those few who hold that they are born for fidelity, modesty, and unerring rightness in dealing with the things of sense, never conceive aught base or ignoble of themselves." He means that, for the real Stoic, self-respect is the necessary consequence of his intellectual conception of his place ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... indeed to be Mr. Chorley's, and is one of his very best papers, I think. There is to me a want of colour and thinness about his writings in general, with a grace and savoir faire nevertheless, and always a rightness and purity of intention. Observe what he says of 'many-sidedness' seeming to trench on opinion and principle. That, he means for himself I know, for he has said to me that through having such largeness of sympathy he has been charged with want of principle—yet 'many-sidedness' is certainly ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... to the meaning of the word "finished." What finishes a picture is not the quantity of detail in it, but the rightness of the general effect. A picture is not limited only by its frame. Whatever be the subject, there must be a principal object on which your eyes rest continually: the other objects are only the complement of this, they ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... thing, the very soul of goodness would have gone out of it. It is just because we do not know, save with the deeper knowledge that contradicts appearances,—the knowledge that is rightly termed faith,—that an unselfish action is in accord with the general rightness of the universe, and therefore must prevail in the end, that there is anything praiseworthy in it. The determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God were that this should be fully demonstrated in the experience of Jesus, as it has been in the experience ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision. I forgot to observe, when speaking of the New Testament, that you should read all the histories of Christ, as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us, to be Pseudo-evangelists, as those they named Evangelists. Because these ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... would thus become an established element in the temper of the age. Nor need we fear that the result of this would be any flaccidity of conviction, or lethargy in act. A man would still be penetrated with the rightness of his own opinion on a given issue, and would still do all that he could to make it prevail in practice. But among the things which he would no longer permit himself to do, would be the forcible repression in ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... permanence in a great city of the United States."[9] In this crusade of civic warriors Frank Nelson ranked as "a flaming sword," to use the colorful phrase of his friend Mr. Ralph Holterhoff. He was a constant worker in planting the first seeds of the moral rightness of the cause, the crusader whose faith clarified the fundamental religious background inherent in good government. During the initial campaign of 1924, Mr. Nelson, preaching this gospel from his pulpit, carried ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... choice are essential elements of interest in the pedagogical sense. On the other hand, we may say of the same boy, in the sociological sense: "He has not discovered his health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness interests." We thus imply that interests, in the sociological sense, are not necessarily matters of attention and choice. They are affinities, latent in persons, pressing for satisfaction, whether the persons are conscious of them either generally or specifically, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... beside him, and they looked at each other while the leaves whispered around them and the birds fluttered and chirped. He discovered again the feeling of rightness, sitting beside Gistla. There was a solidity about her, a quiet maturity that he seemed able to feel in himself only when he was with her. And that too was strange, because in American terms of age, she ...
— George Loves Gistla • James McKimmey
... cold. Do not withhold the charity of your friendship from the hungry, dreary girl who waits. When the helping hands and generous hearts of such benefactors as every city knows,—women whose names are familiar to us as synonyms of charity, wisdom, rightness, but whose names we here repress because publicity would detract from the modesty of their conduct,—when such women stretch out hands of benefaction to their poor, ignorant, wicked sisters in our great towns, ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... appearance was already sapped." George himself, as a boy, had already begun to "question the final rightness of the gentlefolks," declaring his rebellion by "resolving to marry a viscount's daughter" and blacking the eye of her half-brother. He is transported to the house of Nicodemus Frapp, baker, of Chatham, where he again rebels, this time against the threat of being burned for ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... clearness of vision about earthly things which went far beyond her own. She could not quite comprehend it—she would never have thought of it herself —but she dimly felt that the earl's judgment was correct, and that, strange as his conduct might appear, he was acting after that large sense of rightness which implies righteousness; a course of action which the world so often ridicules and misconstrues, because the point of view is taken from an altitude not of this world, and the objects regarded there-from are things not ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... was a boy of thirteen or fourteen and some queer inherited strain of scepticism had set me doubting whether Mr. Bartlett, the vicar, did really know with certainty all about God, that as a further and deeper step in doubting I began to question the final rightness of the gentlefolks, their primary necessity in the scheme of things. But once that scepticism had awakened it took me fast and far. By fourteen I had achieved terrible blasphemies and sacrilege; I had resolved to marry a viscount's daughter, and I had blacked ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... that can be gathered and by confronting the first pronouncement by others fetched from every quarter of experience, has power to minimise the error and reach a practically just estimate of absent values. This achieved rightness can be tested by comparing two experiences, each when it is present, with the same conventional permanent object chosen to be their expression. A love-song, for instance, can be pronounced adequate or false by various lovers; and it can thus remain a sort of index ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... creatures. He is not a preaching saint—still less a persecuting one: not even an anxious one. Of his prayers we hear little—of his wishes, nothing. What he does always, is merely the right thing at the right moment;—rightness and kindness being in his mind one: an extremely exemplary ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... settles itself comfortably into the literary landscape, incorporates itself subtly into the unconscious thought of men, becomes corpuscular in the blood of the language. It comes down to us in the accent of those who have loved and quoted it, invigorated by our subtle sense of the permanent rightness of its phrasing and our knowledge of the pleasure it has given to thousands of others. The more it is ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... choreographic circle; her sister Edith was, as every one said, so very much more fetching. Edith was so striking an example of success that Isabel could have no illusions as to what constituted this advantage, or as to the limits of her own power to frisk and jump and shriek—above all with rightness of effect. Nineteen persons out of twenty (including the younger sister herself) pronounced Edith infinitely the prettier of the two; but the twentieth, besides reversing this judgement, had the entertainment ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... or PRUDENCE (phronesis)—thoughtfulness, rightness of intention, following the guidance of reason, the right direction of the energy or will.—"Republic," bk. iv. ch. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the Dutch leaf-treatment generally, and elaborate demonstration, by the aid of many plates, of the infinite superiority of Turner, closing with what sounds a strange admission after such teachings and such arguments:—'Remember always that Turner's greatness and rightness in all these points successively depend on no scientific knowledge. He was entirely ignorant of all the laws we have been developing. He had merely accustomed himself to ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... inevitable. One seemed—I certainly did—to know every phrase, every word which was coming. None could have been other, or been placed otherwise than it was—and that's the highest praise one can give to anybody's prose, isn't it? One jumped to the perfect rightness of the whole—a rightness so perfect as to make the sentences sound quite ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... these two, that fitted with peculiar rightness into the mood of Nature at that moment. Youth was king, and with all his followers had clambered over winter and seized the earth. The red remainders of autumn were almost over-powered. Standing ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... German nation on the road to a freer civilization." The dogma that might makes right was adopted at Berlin—as Acton wrote in 1886—and the mere fact that the Reformation was successful was accounted a proof of its rightness by historians like Waitz ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the earth." Just so far as we are able to prove our rightness, the world—nay the whole universe of God—is ours. Our Heavenly Father has never said: "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther, upon the road to knowledge." Everything invites us; get wisdom, get understanding, and to thy knowledge ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... of the ordinary reader there is a feeling of rightness or wrongness about the thought sequences. That less intelligent subjects have this sense of fitness to a much less degree is evidenced by their passing over words so mutilated in pronunciation as to deprive them of all meaning. The transposition ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... hostile, stupid, interfering face. Claire had never thought that by any malign possibility they could be supposed to be doing wrong. She could not connect wrong with either her love or Winn's. If there was one quality more than another which had distinguished it, it had been its simple sense of rightness. She had seen Winn soften and change under it as the hard earth changes at the touch of spring. She had felt herself enriched and enlarged, moving more unswervingly than ever toward her oldest prayer—that she might, on the whole, be good. She hardly prayed at all about ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... injustice. She had seemed to hate him. If she hadn't been his mother Mr. Twist would have been certain she hated him, but he still believed that mothers couldn't hate their children. It was stark against nature; and Mr. Twist still believed in the fundamental rightness of that which is called nature. She had accused him of gross things—she, his mother, who from her conversation since he could remember was unaware, he had judged, of the very existence of such things. Those helpless ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... other homes, devastated and mourning, weighed heavily upon Mary Ballard, and she needed to listen to the stirring editorials of the Tribune, which Bertrand read with dramatic intensity, to bolster up her faith in the rightness of this war between men who ought to be brothers in their hopes and ambitions for the national ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... future in hope," he went on,—"if ever I might be counted worthy to resume the labour I had righteously abandoned; having had the rightness confirmed by the light I had received in carrying out ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... speak, it was to throw new light on the matter." I know not why any one should ever speak otherwise!—But if we look at his general force of soul, his healthy robustness everyway, the rugged down-rightness, penetration, generous valour and manfulness that was in him,—where shall we ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... sweetness, of this little explanation, with a kind of intimated desire, constituting almost an appeal, for rightness, which seemed to pervade it, left a fragrance in the air after she had vanished. Ransom walked up and down the room, with his hands in his pockets, under the influence of it, without taking up even once the book about Mrs. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... clear in his mind from this, the Anarchism of Tolstoy and that other brand of William Morris, neither of which waves any flag of black, nor counsels violence; they present that conception of untrammelled and spontaneous rightness and goodness which is, indeed, I hazard, the moral ideal of all rightly-thinking men. It is worth while to define very clearly the relation of this second sort of Anarchism, the nobler Anarchism, ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... used to declaring Phil's all-rightness to his other sisters that the defensive attitude was second nature. His tone was not lost upon Lois and she ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... take His exposition of Psalm cx. as for me final. And that exposition guarantees at once a typical mystery latent in Gen. xiv. and the rightness of its development in the passage ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... of his novels, he excels by reason of a Shakespearean sense of character and by the richness and rightness of his faculty of humour. He had a quick eye for contemporary types, and an amazing power of building out of them men and women whose individuality is full and rounded. You do not feel as you do with Richardson that his fabric is spun silk-worm-wise out of himself; on the contrary you know ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... harsh words and startling roughness of expression, declare the awful, eternal disaster that would befall every soul that did not accept the peculiar brand of salvation which he and his church alone offered. He listened to the long arguments planned to prove the rightness, and therefore righteousness, of the evangelist himself and his denominational way, and the equal wrongness, and therefore unrighteousness, of every other minister and church not of his way. Then as he heard these utterances most emphatically ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... seeing as in everything else comes from long sustained effort after rightness and comes unsought. It never comes ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... this utilitarian theory stands the metaphysical one that would make the beauty or intrinsic rightness of things the source of their efficiency and of their power to survive. Taken literally, as it is generally meant, this idea must, from our point of view, appear preposterous. Beauty and rightness are relative to our judgment and emotion; they in no ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... than all the thunders of law or terrors of judgment. Let it unveil for you not only the depths of the love of God, but the darkness of your own selfish rebellion from Him. Measure your crooked lives by the perfect rightness of Christ's. Learn how you have missed the aim which He reached, who could say, 'I delight to do Thy will, O my God!' And let that same infinite love that teaches sin announce frank forgiveness and prophesy perfect purity. Then, with heart fixed ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... conveying nothing particular to Mr. Laing's brain, is to deny that right has reference to the consequences of action as bearing on human progress and evolution, which is to deny the very theory he wishes to uphold. No intuitionist could have spoken more strongly. Then we are assured that we "feel" rightness, or that "right is right"—apparently as a simple irresoluble quality of certain actions—and with same breath, that "it is better for ourselves and others to act on these rules," where he jumps off to utilitarianism again; and then we are forbidden ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... clearer expression of the notion than in the fact that the same word pietas, which expresses the due fulfilment of man's duty to god, is also the ideal of the relations of the members of a household: filial piety was, in fact, but another aspect of that rightness of relation, which reveals itself in the worship of the gods. No doubt that, in the city-life of later periods, this ideal broke down on both sides: household worship was neglected and family life became less ...
— The Religion of Ancient Rome • Cyril Bailey
... the contemplation of the "beauty of this old man in his citizen's cap," however eager and serious the contemplation may be, adds much to his experience; it may be doubted whether as a result of his effort toward the understanding of the rightness and loveliness of the lines of the cap and the exquisiteness of the choice of folds, which the critic has pointed out to him with threatening finger, he feels that life is a fuller ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... The great old gods of democracy—Washington, Jefferson, Adams—had seen visions, and the visions had endured. Only yesterday Roosevelt had proclaimed his gallant doctrines. He had died proclaiming them, and the world held its head higher, because of his belief in its essential rightness. ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... their fearlessness, their complacent rusticity, their childish notions of the uses of wealth, their personal modesty and communal vanity, their happy oblivion to world standards, their extravagance of speech, their political bigotry, their magisterial down-rightness, their inflammability, and their fine self-reliance. They saw these traits, we say, reflected in him as in a flattering hand-glass, perceived the blemishes rather plainer than the charms, and liked ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... recognition of the rightness of things. "These still contain air." He tested two more and then brought all three back to where Dalgard stood, the canister strapped into place, the mask ready in his hand. With infinite care the merman fitted two of the cylinders into the canister ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... them regard only the dry and hard consideration of the consequences of actions, not taking into their moral estimate the qualities from which those actions emanate. If the assertion means that they do not allow their judgment respecting the rightness or wrongness of an action to be influenced by their opinion of the qualities of the person who does it, this is a complaint not against utilitarianism, but against having any standard of morality at all; for certainly ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... phrase-weaving with one who, even among the foremost of his literary countrymen, is confessedly a master in that craft. The judges to whom I do submit our case are those Englishmen and others whose conscience blends with their judgment, and who determine such questions as this on their essential rightness which has claim to the first and decisive consideration. For much that is irregular in the arrangement and sequence of the subject-matter, some blame fairly attaches to our assailant. The erratic manner in which lie launches his injurious statements against the hapless ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... reason for it is that men are still living the lives of the animals, and have not even dreamed of the life that belongs to them as men. That is something about which I feel very strongly myself,—that is part of my duty as a man who seeks worship and rightness to mark that difference in my own life ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... enough simply to reply, in respect to Kate, that she was indeed a luxury to take about the world: she expressed no more surprise than that at her "rightness" to-day. Wasn't it by this time sufficiently manifest that it was precisely as the very luxury she was proving that she had, from far back, been appraised and waited for? Crude elation, however, might be kept at bay, and the circumstance none the less demonstrated that they were all swimming ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... Northern and Southern States of America has the special interest for English boys of having been a struggle between two sections of a people akin to us in race and language—a struggle fought out by each side with unusual intensity of conviction in the rightness of its cause, and abounding in heroic incidents. Of these points Mr. Henty has made admirable use in this story of a young Virginian planter, who, after bravely proving his sympathy with the slaves, serves with no less courage and enthusiasm under Lee ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... that of simply wanting to (she had after all virtually invited him), that she mentioned how only one song in a thousand was successful and that the terrible difficulty was in getting the right words. This rightness was just a vulgar "fluke"— there were lots of words really clever that were of no use at all. Peter said, laughing, that he supposed any words he should try to produce would be sure to be too clever; ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... out. After all, in this age of transition when so much is counted good that once was counted bad, and so much counted bad that was once good, it doesn't matter much what our words are so long as they convey reassurance, dependability, and a sense of the rightness of living with rather than against the best ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... first quaint effect of deliberate unreason. They were in many respects so right; she clung to that, and shirked more and more the paradoxical conviction that they were also somehow, and even in direct relation to that rightness, absurd. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... Quentin from the Warden down were the three that rotted there together in solitary. And here at the end of my days, reviewing all that I have known of life, I am compelled to the conclusion that strong minds are never docile. The stupid men, the fearful men, the men ungifted with passionate rightness and fearless championship—these are the men who make model prisoners. I thank all gods that Jake Oppenheimer, Ed Morrell, and I were ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... right and a clear call to be the voice of that conscience. They may err, of course; they may mistake the voice of party for the voice of conscience: 'Jameson's Ride' and 'The Year of Shame'—one or both—may misread that voice. Judge them as severely as you will by their rightness or wrongness, and again judge them by their merits or defects as literature. Only do not forbid the poet to speak and enforce the moral conviction that ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of the species for the species," and without significance per se; we are "episodes in an experience greater than ourselves," "incidental experiments in the growing knowledge and consciousness of the race." Mr. Wells's fundamental act of faith is a firm belief in "the ultimate rightness and significance of things," including "the wheel-smashed frog on the road, and the fly drowning in the milk." In other words, all is just as it has to be; regrets, remorses and discontents exist only for the "unbeliever" ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the inexhaustible supply of oysters. At the musical evening the music was as admirably rendered as it was completely neglected. And at both parties only those people were present as to whose social status and absolute "rightness" there could be no question. Indeed the dancer, whose foot had been trodden upon at the former, might console herself with the thought that none but a noble boot had caused her pain; while at the latter ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 18, 1891 • Various
... from one of the houses where she was a governess, express precisely the same feeling, and movement of mind. But notice the instinctive rightness and swiftness of Emily's, the ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... SOCRATES: And if rightness attaches to any of them, should we not speak of a right opinion or right pleasure; and in like manner of the ...
— Philebus • Plato
... of gold. That his record per se is strikingly vivid and faithful is the first general impression which his novels make upon the reader, whether English or colonial. There is about them much of that air of 'rightness' which Hall Caine has noted to be one of the most enduring qualities of good fiction, whatever its literary style may be. They are cheerful, virile, soundly moral, and take far more account of the good than of the bad in human nature. ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... great problem whether after all a genetic historical theory can be of decisive importance here. To every consequent ethical consciousness there is a standard of value, a primordial value which determines the single ethical judgments as their last presupposition, and the "rightness" of this basis, the "value" of this value can as little be discussed as the "rationality" of our logical principles. There is here revealed a possibility of ethical scepticism which evolutionistic ethics ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... her unhappiness lay too deep in subliminal abysses to struggle to the surface of her consciousness. That he should go to the one house and she to the other was as right as it had been ten years before. It was so right that she was stupefied by its rightness. It was so right that the rightness acted on her like an opiate. It was a minute in which sheer helplessness might have relaxed her hold on her substitute for love had she not had such pressing need to make use of it there ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... our answer to this question our treatment of boy and girl respectively. Probably we are on the whole correct in instituting no deep distinction of any kind in the nurture, either physical or mental, of children during their early years. Nor can there be any doubt, at least so far, as to the rightness of educating them together, and allowing them to compete, in so far as we allow competition at all, freely both in work ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... violence with patient justice — assured of the rightness of our cause, and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom, and may He watch over the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... being the cause of a like breach in others, and others younger than myself. I have never allowed the dictum of the law to interfere with what I deemed to be a moral development in any youth for whom I am responsible. I cannot say that the trial made me alter my course of life, of the rightness of which I was too convincingly persuaded, but it made me much more careful, and it probably sharpened my sense of responsibility for the young. Reviewing the results of the trial as a whole, it doubtless did incalculable harm, and it intensified our national ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... heroic bravery to do the thing thought to be true, in spite of all enemies of flesh or spirit, in despite of all temptations or menaces. Man is accountable for the uprightness of his doctrine, but not for the rightness of it. Devout enthusiasm is far easier than a good action. The end of thought is action; the sole purpose of Religion is an Ethic. Theory, in political science, is worthless, except for the purpose of being ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... already a certain righteousness in their lives; these things happen like a thunderclap only in strange exceptional cases, and the same movements of the mind that have brought them to God will already have brought their lives into a certain rightness of direction and conduct. Yet occasionally there will be someone to whom the self-examination that follows conversion will reveal an entirely wrong and evil way of living. It may be that the light has come to some rich idler doing ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... the rightness of the protest. 'But I can't help it. I was just thinking how he got his feet wet in pushing the boat off.' She laughed again. 'When we were safely off, someone came down to the shore and shouted to Mr Fuge to bring the boat back. You know his quick way of talking.' ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... picked it out for an experiment. And yet my consciousness was truly cognitive. The sentence is 'about realities' which my psychological critic—for we must not forget him— acknowledges to be such, even as he acknowledges my distinct feeling that they ARE realities, and my acquiescence in the general rightness of what I read of them, to be true knowledge ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... tall silk hat, the long frock-coat, the light grey trousers, the tiny yellow buttonhole rose, and the marvellous puffed cravat anchored about with black pearl-headed pins—but an imperative need for justification was upon her. Her own mission, the absolute rightness of her own mission, were so clear to herself that she never doubted anyone might misunderstand when she pointed upwards to the skies, and the ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... him turn from a purpose his mind was once set upon. He knew that his action involved more than his own personal welfare, and herein had lain the source of his doubt. But he had clearly argued every point with himself, and through it all had felt the rightness of ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... rightness and wisdom been adopted by Marie Louise's father and his allies, as was so nobly advocated by the sister of Marie Antoinette, there would have been a clean sheet in history about them, though it is obvious in many quarters that the historians have extended all the arts of ambiguity ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... Defence Association of our days. It probably was Mr. Palmer's idea; and for some time the attempt to carry it into effect was followed up at Oxford. Plans of "Association" were drawn up and rejected. The endeavour brought out differences of opinion—differences as to the rightness or the policy of specific mention of doctrines; differences as to the union of Church and State, on the importance of maintaining which, as long as possible, Mr. Newman sided with Mr. Palmer against Mr. Keble's ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... note with not a few tears for poor Miss Smith-Waters's disappointment. That is the worst of living a life morally ahead of your contemporaries; what you do with profoundest conviction of its eternal rightness cannot fail to arouse hostile and painful feelings even in the souls of the most right-minded of your friends who still live in bondage to the conventional lies and the conventional injustices. It is the good, indeed, who are most against you. Still, ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... have married any woman who would have suspected him of such brutality. He could only marry a woman who was consummately suitable to him, in whom nothing jarred, nothing offended; and his cousin Lucia was such a woman. The very fact that she was his cousin was an assurance of her rightness. It followed that, love being the expression of that perfect and predestined harmony, he could only marry for love. Not for a great estate, for Court House and the Harden Library. No, to do him justice, ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... truth, duty, honor, purity, uprightness, excellence, integrity, rectitude, virtuousness, faithfulness, justice, righteousness, worth, goodness, morality, rightness, worthiness. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... But if on the other hand the time and the mood were favourable, if the piece were solemn or mournful, or of a melting sweetness, it seemed for a moment to bring a sense of true values into life, to make him feel, by a silent inspiration, the rightness and the perfection of the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to ask, can that method of conduct be wrong which has won this triumphant issue? It may be ironically true that we love Him most for those very acts of His which we are least likely to imitate; but is not this our tacit testimony to the essential rightness of these acts? In our better, or our softer moments; or in those moments when we are most conscious of the cruelty of life, and most in need of love, do we not feel, as the life of Jesus grows before us, that this is ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... they are right, that they are the rightest we can attain to for the time being, and until we see something righter. But above all, that opinions on this subject really are either right or wrong, or more right and less right; and that of this rightness or wrongness we really have some kind of perception, however difficult it may be to give an account of it, and that in accordance with such perception we may come to change our opinions or those of other people, ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... itself is only a stage toward something better. It is but the impulse, God-given I believe, toward a far more vital contact with the truth. We shall one day forget all about duty, and do every thing from the love of the loveliness of it, the satisfaction of the rightness of it. What would you say to a man who ministered to the wants of his wife and family only from duty? Of course you wish heartily that the man who neglects them would do it from any cause, even were it fear of the whip; but the strongest and most operative sense ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... missionary of some sort, and Lucy had a vague idea that the influence of a good woman was always effective in such cases. She never imagined that the youth would test her pretty, heartfelt opinions and her glowing faith in the rightness of things in the cold, sceptical light ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... people may think of the rightness or wrongness is nothing in comparison to my own deep knowledge, my innate conviction that it was wrong. But we will not talk of that any more, if you please. It is done—my sin is sinned. I have now to put it behind me, and be truthful for ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the lines of thought that brought that unseen cruelty out of the night high over the houses of Filmington-on-Sea. That, in a sense, is the cause of this killing. Cruel it is and abominable, yes, but is it altogether cruel? Hasn't it, after all, a sort of stupid rightness?—isn't it a stupid reaction to an indolence at least ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... believe it. But there are few stainless Galahads. Strength and rightness do not depend on the past, but the present. The finest strength I have seen, has been in ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... seductive harmonies and balances of which the delicacy dawns on him as he gazes. The more he looks the more will he get of that curiously gratifying thrill which comes of the recognition of unostentatious rightness. ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... your best clothes. It's easy to conceive wrongness in the application of it. It's easy to conceive a person wanting to go to church and likely to benefit by going to church, but staying away because of feeling too shabby. But you can't help seeing the rightness at the bottom of it—the idea of presenting yourself decently at worship, as before princes. That makes ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... the Buddhist brother's jewels is the Dharma, i.e. the Law or Essential Rightness revealed by the Buddha. That the Master laid a firm practical foundation for his religion cannot be denied, and if Jews and Christians reverence the Ten Words given through 'Moses,' much more may Buddhists reverence the ten moral precepts of Sakya Muni. ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... Mr. Coventry Patmore's poetry, cannot be otherwise than consummate. Often the word has a fulness of significance that gives the reader a shock of appreciation. This is always so in those simplest odes which we have taken as the heart of the author's work. Without such wonderful rightness, simplicity of course is impossible. Nor is that beautiful precision less in passages of description, such as the landscape lines in Amelia and elsewhere. The words are used to the uttermost yet with composure. And a certain justness of utterance increases the provocation ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... have seen me wearing it in the dear old days. Greeny brown it was in colour; but it wasn't the colour that drew your eyes to it—no, nor yet the shape, nor the angle at which it sat. It was just the essential rightness of it. If you have ever seen a hat which you felt instinctively was a clever hat, an alive hat, a profound hat, then that was my hat—and that was ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... any organism, is to be set right—to have all its parts brought into harmony with each other; the one comfort is to know this cure in process. Rightness alone is cure. The return of the organism to its true self, is its only possible ease. To free a man from suffering, he must be set right, put in health; and the health at the root of man's being, his rightness, is to be free from wrongness, that is, from sin. ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... again how a certain rude rightness in this plea might have been found exasperating; but as she had often watched Sir Claude in apprehension of displeasures that didn't come, so now, instead of saying "Oh hell!" as her father used, she observed him only to take refuge in a question ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... there was a perfectness of the soul {171} transcending all particular virtues, whether of Temperance or Courage or Wisdom, namely, that absolute Rightness or Righteousness which gathered them all into itself, so at the end of these three stages of education there is a higher mood of thought, wherein the soul, purified, chastened, enlightened, in communing with itself through Dialectic (the Socratic art of questioning transfigured) ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... of genius the sorrow of youth about to die, and the sure, triumphant consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit. He expected to die; he was willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced toward the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country's cause and a heart devoid ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... above. To begin with happiness or pleasure. Taking happiness to mean the balance of pleasures over pains, and degrees of happiness the proportions of this balance, it will be sufficient if I confine myself to the word 'pleasure.' One statement, then, of the test of the morality or rightness of an action is that it should result in a larger amount of pleasure than pain to all those whom it affects. But it is at once objected that there is the greatest variety of pleasures and pains, intellectual, moral, aesthetic, ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... 'If God cares I should have my desire, he will give it me; if he does not care I should have it, neither will I care. In the meantime I will do my work.' The man with God's righteousness does not love a thing merely because it is right, but loves the very rightness in it. He not only loves a thought, but he loves the man in his thinking that thought; he loves the thought alive in the man. He does not take his joy from himself. He feels joy in himself, but it comes to him from others, not from ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... reflected, would increase in me all that the child found least to her taste. I was, as I have said, unable to picture her with tastes changed. But a failure of imagination may occasionally issue in paradoxical rightness, for the imagination relies on the common run of events which the peculiar case may chance to contradict. As a fact, I do not think that Elsa ever did change greatly. I began to be sorry for her as well as for myself. Considered as an outlook in life, as the governing factor ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... inviting spell of Italy, by all the old academic literature of travel and art of the Salvator Rosas and Claudes. This is the main tribute I may pay in a few words to an impression of which a sort of divine rightness of oddity, a pictorial felicity that was almost not of this world, but of a higher degree of distinction altogether, affected me as the leading note; yet about the whole exquisite complexity of which I can't pretend ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... fair girl appeared in the pathway and came to meet me, smiling, and said 'Well?' to me, and lifted me, and kissed me, and put me down, and led me by the hand, there was no amazement, but only an impression of delightful rightness, of being reminded of happy things that had in some strange way been overlooked. There were broad red steps, I remember, that came into view between spikes of delphinium, and up these we went to a great avenue between very old and shady dark trees. All down this avenue, you know, between ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... as I do rather in the dark as yet. With whom I shall presently join up... The attempt may fail; all things human may fail; but on the other hand it may succeed. I never had such faith in anything as I have in the rightness of the work I am doing now. I begin at that. But here is where my difficulty comes in. The top of my brain, my innermost self says all that I have been saying, but—The rest of me won't follow. The rest of me refuses ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... habitually present to him, and never not seen. It was involved, as we explained already, in the doctrine of identity and iteration, because the mental series exactly tallies with the material series. It required an insight that could rank things in order and series; or, rather, it required such rightness of position, that the poles of the eye should coincide with the axis of the world. The earth has fed its mankind through five or six millenniums, and they had sciences, religions, philosophies; and yet had failed to see the correspondence of meaning between every part ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... feelings a bit; and it didn't do me any harm." He felt of his necktie, and settled his collar as well as he could, thankful for the friendly darkness. "Indeed, I am all right!" he assured her, earnestly. "Trivets aren't a circumstance to me, as far as rightness is concerned. Now if you'll forget all about it, Miss Montfort, please, I shall be as happy as the bounding roe,—or the circumflittergating cockchafer!" he added, as a ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... God has made, and his ear open to all the music he has put into the world, and then never let his hands touch a piece of work that is crooked or straggling or false, till, after years and years of rightness, they are fit to make a violin like the squire's, a violin that can say everything, a violin that an angel wouldn't be ashamed to ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a nature that is immortal. In virtue of this belief in life, he is indifferent to the form of it. When, later in the play, he seems to fear death, it is death the consequence of an action of whose rightness ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... towered, with his hateful rightness, before Henry's drowsy eyes (how long it was since he had slept!), and he slipped for a moment into a dream, the straw falling from ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... with feelings of lively approbation, and most Englishmen with feelings of acute disapprobation. If such moral judgements were mere feelings, neither of them would be wrong. There could be no question of objective rightness or wrongness. Mustard is not objectively nice or objectively nasty: it is simply nice to some people and nasty to others. The mustard-lover has no right to condemn the mustard-hater, or the mustard-hater the mustard-lover. If Morality were merely a matter of feeling or emotion, actions ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... from this on the vanquished were not eaten, and it was morally wrong to eat them. They were kept alive and put to work at raising harvests for their conquerors, hence arose the institution of slavery, and hence its moral rightness even in this country of the free, down to the beginning of the ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... growing up in Lady Harman's mind if you have felt it yourself, but if you have not then you may find it a little difficult to understand. You see it comes, when it comes at all, out of a phase of disillusionment. All children, I suppose, begin by taking for granted the rightness of things in general, the soundness of accepted standards, and many people are at least so happy that they never really grow out of this assumption. They go to the grave with an unbroken confidence that somewhere behind all the immediate injustices and disorders of life, behind the antics ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... their hands, and have worshiped the stones they had set up. This element of mystical wonder and awe lasted long through the ages, and is still felt when work is done in the old way by keeping close to nature, necessity, and faith. From the first, ideas of sacredness, of sacrifice, of ritual rightness, of magic stability, of likeness to the universe, of perfection of form and proportion glowed in the heart of the builder, and guided his arm. Wren, philosopher as he was, decided that the delight of man in setting up columns was acquired through worshiping in the groves of the forest; ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... had been shrewd, keen, but unsympathetic. And the result had been a strained relation between him and Barry. The boy had felt himself misunderstood. Gordon had sat in judgment. Constance had tearfully agreed with Gordon, and Mary, torn between her sense of Gordon's rightness, and her own championship of Barry, had been strung to ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... less, while manners have this intrinsic utility, in the apprehension of the performer and the beholder alike, this sense of the intrinsic rightness of decorum is only the proximate ground of the vogue of manners and breeding. Their ulterior, economic ground is to be sought in the honorific character of that leisure or non-productive employment of time and effort without which good manners ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... complex, too demanding, and it failed to carry with it necessary elements of mental and spiritual consent. (St. Paul had the same experience with his own Judaism.) What Luther sought was a peace-bringing rightness with God. He was typically and creatively one of William James' "divided souls" and he found the solution for his fears, his struggles and his doubts in simply taking for granted that a fight which he was not able ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... divine appeal, however far she may have fallen short of it, has stood, and stood, and stood. In the last resort, it is the only inducement worth anything; the only lever that lifts.—There is that li,—that inevitable rightness and harmony that begins in the innermost when there is the balance and duty is being done, and flows outward healing and preserving and making wholesome all the phases of being;—let that harmony of heaven play ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... find expressed in many forms, but always with the same underlying idea. A favourite watch-word with the Greeks is the "middle" or "mean", the exact point of rightness between two extremes. "Nothing in excess," was a motto inscribed over the temple of Delphi; and none could be more characteristic of the ideal of these lovers of proportion. Aristotle, indeed, has made it the basis ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... greed in I know not what connection, unless you speak of the war waged over the land; and yet you ought to know that both parties in England have by Act after Act confessed the absolute justice and rightness of that agitation, Unionist no less than Liberal, and both boast of their share in answering the Irish appeal. They are both proud today of what they did. They made inquiry into wrong and redressed it. But you, it seems, can only feel sore and angry that intolerable conditions imposed by your laws ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... smiling, but the women laugh, and their laughter does not displease, for whatever women do in whatever circumstances appears to have a rightness of its own. It seems right that they should scream when danger to themselves is imminent, and it seems right that they should laugh when the danger ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... have not danced; lamented to you, and you have not mourned." You use to tell over some words in your prayers, and are not so serious in any approach to God, as in twenty other things of the world. Whatever you plead of your heart's rightness, and have recourse to it, when your conversation cannot defend you, yet your hearts are the worst of all, and have no uprightness towards God; for you know that what duties you go about, it is not from an inward principle, but from education, or custom, or constraint. Are ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... Bergson. The extent of my introductory remarks is an almost involuntary tribute to the material and provocative nature of Bergson's discussions, just as the frequent use by the author of this book of the actual words of Bergson are a tribute to the excellence and essential rightness of his style. The Frenchman, himself a free and candid spirit, would be the last to require unquestioning docility in others. He knows that thereby is the philosophic breath choked out of us. If we read him in the spirit in which he would wish to be read, we shall find, however ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... own in her pocket, and a demeanour in her person equal to fifty millions. When they arrived at Mortgrange, the moon was indeed still in the sky, but the honey-pot, to judge by the appearance of the twain, was empty: twain they were, and twain would be. The man wore a look of careless all-rightness, tinged with an expression of indifferent triumph: he had what he wanted; what his lady might think of her side of the bargain, he neither thought nor cared. As to the woman, let her reflections be what they might, not a soul would come to the knowledge of them. ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... really leak out, despite all his precautions—would come to stand for atheism and immorality, a catchword of ill-omen for a century or two; but he smiled on, relying upon the inherent reasonableness and rightness of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill |
