"Worldliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a poor foolish woman, Betty, for all my worldliness and wisdom; but I love you (softly), and that is why I appear weak before you. The blind envy those who see, the deaf those who hear; what one does not want another can not have. Karloff loves you, but you do ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... like a coward, desert helpless and unfortunate women to whom my word is given, I would have fulfilled your best hopes and ambitions, and have made your age glad with my grateful love and service. In your cold-hearted worldliness you have overreached yourself, and you wrong yourself more than me, even though I perish in the streets. But I won't starve. Mark my words: I'll place the Atwood name where you can't, with all your money, and I shall not make broken faith with those who trust me, the foundation ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... you. This is my wife. Nellie—this is Miss April." Nellie bowed stiffly in her black silk. (Naught of the fresh maiden about her now!) And it has to be said that Elsie April in all her young and radiant splendour and woman-of-the-worldliness was equally stiff. "And there are my two boys. And this is ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... earthward pull is ever acting on us, and, unless God hold us up, we too shall slide downwards. 'Hath a nation changed their gods, which yet are no gods? but My people hath changed their glory for that which doth not profit.' Idolatry and worldliness are persistent; for they are natural. Firm adherence to God is less common, because it goes against the strong forces, within and without, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... arrangement of the seasons we are constantly kept at the door of Divine mercy, begging "Give us this day our daily bread." That eternal voice preaching through all our temporal interests is to us the solemn, never-ceasing protest against worldliness, earthliness, vanity, living for time, living for the body; and, above all, against every impure or ungodly method of attempting ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... letters to Bjoernson, he had written: 'When I read the news from home, when I gaze upon all that respectable, estimable narrow-mindedness and worldliness, it is with the feeling of an insane man staring at one single, hopelessly dark spot.' All his life Ibsen gazed until he found the black spot somewhere; but it was with less and less of this angry, reforming feeling of the insane man. He saw the black spot at the core of the earth's fruit, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... remorse, she saw herself disloyal to her man, her sovereign and bread-winner, in whom (with what she had of worldliness) she took a certain subdued pride. She expatiated in reply on my lord's honour and greatness; his useful services in this world of sorrow and wrong, and the place in which he stood, far above where babes and innocents ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... make their acquaintance, that the girl became conscious of how much she herself had still to learn. All her desire was to learn, and it must be added that she regarded her mother, in perfect good faith, as a wonderful teacher. She was perplexed sometimes by her worldliness; that, somehow, was not a part of the higher life which every one in such a house as theirs must wish above all things to lead; and it was not involved in the reign of justice, which they were all trying to bring about, that such a strict account should be kept ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... ill-health, by bereavements, and, in some sense, by our way of religion. My home was intensely Evangelical, and I lived from my earliest days in an atmosphere where the salvation of the individual soul was the supreme and constant concern of life. No form of worldliness entered into it, but it was full of good works, of social service, and of practical labour for the poor. All life was lived, down to its minutest detail, "as ever in the great task-Master's eye." From our very earliest years we were taught the Bible, at first orally; and later on were ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... speech which, when tried by the sure test of natural, animated conversation, must be pronounced absurd and abominable. It is a wonder of wonders, that, in spite of such drawbacks, an individual here and there has been reclaimed from worldliness to the love and service ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... remaining habit was a strip of matting girded around his waist. Now this Shaykh was a Darwaysh who for many years had fled the world and all worldly pleasures; who lived a holy life of poverty and chastity and other-worldliness whereby his semblance had become such as I, O auspicious King, have described to thee. From early dawn that day Prince Bahman had been watchful and vigilant, ever looking on all sides to descry some one ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... lived who was actuated by a single motive: Saint Dominic probably had some trace of worldliness; Henry VIII. some touch of bigotry; and this was preeminently true of the Massachusetts elders. Doubtless there were among them men like Norton, whose fanaticism was so fierce that they would have destroyed the heretic like the wild beast, as a child of the devil, and an abomination ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... sense than anything else, ends by neutralizing and almost obliterating eschatology; it abandons the Nicene symbol, falls into an anarchy of creeds, into pure religious individualism and a vague esthetic, ethical, or cultured religiosity. What we may call "other-worldliness" (Jenseitigkeit) was obliterated little by little by "this-worldliness" (Diesseitigkeit); and this in spite of Kant, who wished to save it, but by destroying it. To its earthly vocation and passive trust in God is due the religious coarseness ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... between the few humble ceremonies in our homes or in our synagogues with the social, political and industrial problems upon which was riveted the attention of the men of light and leading. To most of us the faith of our fathers seemed little more than a medley of needless restraints, other-worldliness, and hostility to ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... Church exposed the Church to worldliness whereby selfish men, or men carried away with partisan zeal, took advantages of its privileges or contended fiercely for important appointments. The clergy all too frequently ingratiated themselves with wealthy members of their flocks that they ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... forthcoming. For now the die was cast, and a soul that could have been pastorally satisfied with a lot of the humble type indicated, had been caught in a whirl, or entangled in a mesh, or involved in a complication—whichever you like—of Extravagance, or Worldliness, or Society, or Mammon-worship, or Plutocracy, or Pactolus—or all the lot—and there was an end of ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... civilly, and accepted their invitations; but the conduct of these people towards the disinherited girls made him secretly repel their advances towards his prosperous self. It appeared to show such barefaced worldliness and selfishness, that he shrank from the most insinuating speeches ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... It had come from here, where an aged city had tried to conquer the country and had failed, for the spirit of woods and open spaces, of water and trees and wind, survived among the very roofs. The conventions of the centuries, the convention of puritanism, of worldliness, of impiety, of materialism and of charity had all assailed and all fallen back before the strength of the apparently peaceful country in which the city stood. The air was soft with a peculiar, undermining softness; it carried with it a smell of flowers and fruit and earth, ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... forms of recreation which, in themselves might be harmless, and, under certain circumstances, unobjectionable, but they have become associated with worldliness and godlessness, and have proved snares and temptations to many a young heart and life; and, therefore, the law of love would lead you to avoid them, discountenance them, and in no way give encouragement to others ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... quite near to Mr. Bowen. I wanted to study his face, and as I listened in silence, the conversation between the pastor and this member of his flock was a new and beautiful revelation to me. The one seemed to help the other, while no stain of worldliness marred the even flow of their words. After awhile Mrs. Blake handed the minister a well-worn Bible. He opened it and turned the leaves thoughtfully, pausing at last at the 103d Psalm. I looked at Mr. Bowen while Mr. Lathrop was reading. His lips were softly moving as if in responsive ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... father's house, Lady Laura had seen no spirit congenial to her own, no heart with the same feelings, no mind with the same objects. In every one she had met with, there had still been some apparent weakness, some worldliness, some selfishness; there had been coldness, or apathy, or want of principle, or want of feeling; and the bright enthusiasms of her young nature had been confined to the ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... Judge whether a man is not more likely to be bowed down in wholesome sense of his own sinfulness and unworthiness, if he has before him such an ideal as this of my text, than if it, too, has faded out of his life. I believe, for my part, that one great cause of the worldliness and the sinfulness and mechanical formalities that are eating the life out of the Christianity of this generation is the fact of the Church having largely lost any real belief in the possibility that Christian men may possess the fulness of God as their present ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the revival of learning, artists were free to give greater importance to secular subjects, and an element of worldliness, and even of immorality, invaded the realm of art as it invaded the realms of life ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... child was old enough Aunt Maria began to teach her the doctrines of the plain church and to warn her against the evils of vanity, frivolity and all forms of worldliness. ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... into the living-room. Warrington longed to sit beside Patty, but of a sudden he had grown diffident. It amused him to come into the knowledge that all his address and worldliness would not stand him in good stead in the presence of Patty. Words were no longer at his command; he was no longer at his ease. He was afraid of Patty; and he was very, very lonely. That empty house over the ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... apprehension as to what she may say or do next. I cannot talk much, either to her or Charles Greville; neither of them understands a word that I say. Her utter unusualness perplexes me, and his ingrain worldliness provokes me; but I listened with great pleasure to some political talk between Charles Greville, Mr. Grote, and the Italian patriot, Prandi. You know that, fond as I am of talking, I like listening better, when I can hear what I think worth listening to. I was ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... absorption of our life would blind us to it and make us deny it. Exclusive attention to the present would hide the future from us, although its dazzling prizes, scattered on the dark back ground of eternity, were burning there in everlasting invitation and hospitality. Thus, while the eager worldliness of our age practically vacates the faith in a future life, it does not logically disprove it; but leaves it for the ultimate test ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... "Their voluntary social arrangements," he wrote in "Spiritual Conferences," "are the tyranny of circumstance, claiming our tenderest pity, and to be managed like the work of a Xavier, or a Vincent of Paul, which hardly left the saints time to pray. Their sheer worldliness is to be considered as an interior trial, with all manner of cloudy grand things to be said about it. They must avoid uneasiness, for such great graces as theirs can grow only in calmness ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... path to happiness than worldliness, revelry, high life: for the whole object of it is to transform our miserable existence into a succession of joys, delights and pleasures,—a process which cannot fail to result in disappointment and delusion; ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... their golden wings But seldom unfurl from their chrysalis; And thus I retain my loveliest things, While the world, in its worldliness, does not miss What ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... temporarily, the lasting calling of some. Thus one prayed his whole life long, or was engaged in contemplation, and relieved others of the necessity of performing these duties. The consequence was, that the latter sank as deeply in worldliness and want of the interior spirit as the former were plunged in idleness and hypocrisy. But, on the other hand, when, in our day, the printer relieves the writer of a portion of the labor which might be his, the personal development ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... all were born but which she alone knew how to hold aloft with an unflinching hope! She had perhaps more glow and less serenity in her soul than Antonia, but she was an uncompromising Puritan of patriotism with no taint of the slightest worldliness in her thoughts. I was not the only one in love with her; but it was I who had to hear oftenest her scathing criticism of my levities—very much like poor Decoud—or stand the brunt of her austere, unanswerable invective. She did not quite understand—but never mind. ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... before—something that has been given in some special sense to us as a trust from the world. It is to me the steeple of democracy—of our democracy, England's democracy—the world's democracy. The hollow domes of Sts. Peter and Paul, and all the rest with their vague, airy other-worldliness, all soaring and tugging like so many balloons of religion and goodness, trying to get away from this world—are not to me so splendid, so magnificently wilful as the Metropolitan Tower—as the souls of these modern, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... vanished, and Felix rose, and kindly put his hand on his shoulder, and said, 'Do, Clem. You know it is not only my worldliness—mere man of business as I am—that bids us to hide grief within, and "anoint the head and ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and their worldliness they were ready to sacrifice for his sake is shown by those famous bonfires by the side of which all the 'talami' of Bernardino da Siena and others were certainly ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... to worldliness, I mean social worldliness. I have learned, I have been forced to learn, the justice of your once-proposed dealing with my Lans before he went to college. Your business sense cannot be questioned. Had the boy been placed in your hands then, I really believe his outlook on life would have been ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... the hymns, the stand taken by these latter critics, who renounce even Bergaigne's slight hold on mythology, is that the Rig Veda is thoroughly Indic. It is to be explained by the light of the formal Hindu ritualism, and even by epic worldliness, its fresh factors being lewd gods, harlots, and race-horses. Bloomfield, who does not go so far as this, claims that the 'Vedic' age really is a Brahmanic age; that Vedic religion is saturated with Brahmanic ideas and Brahmanic formalism, so that ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... superior to you American women—she has solidity and brain-power. That is why the English man is superior to the American. Now, ladies, you, with your pretty faces, your charming manners, your vitality, and shall I say it? your worldliness, have boys who are—well, equal to what you consider the English girl to be. Of course it is always unsafe to generalise, but as you generalise yourselves and sweepingly assert that the English ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... excessive fineness, either to attire themselves, as if they were the brides of men, or to bestow them on people outside." One must admit that here and there in the writings of the period, there are references to this worldliness in some monasteries; but whatever may have been the state of things at a later date, there does not seem to be evidence of graver misdeeds in these early years of monasticism in England. Bede uses perhaps unnecessary severity in speaking of ...
— Early Double Monasteries - A Paper read before the Heretics' Society on December 6th, 1914 • Constance Stoney
... attempt to regard them with the same freedom from ill-temper, whether on private or public grounds, as we may hope will be felt by those who will call us ancient! Otherwise, the looking before and after, which is our grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifference or bitterness than was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven. Except on the ground of a primitive golden age and continuous degeneracy, I see no rational footing for scorning the whole present population of the globe, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... essential become space, leisure and soul-expression for bringing children into the world. When evolving persons have reached individuality, and the elements of greatness are formative within them, they pay the price for reversion to worldliness in the extinction of name. The race that produced Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman, that founded our culture and gave us a name in English, is following the red Indian westward off the face of ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... philanthropies. They shrugged their shoulders sometimes at the mention of his parish at "The Cedars;" they regarded him as old-fashioned and unpractical. They sat conscience-stricken and abashed now; the tears of these bereaved black people smote their philosophy and their worldliness, and showed them how shallow they were. Tears answered to tears, and the college professors and the negro slaves ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... his appointment with her the next morning. He also dreaded an encounter with Mrs. Winthrop. He felt that the reaction from her moment of womanly pity would strand her still farther on the rocks of her worldliness. He was detained on his way to the hotel so that it was nearly twelve when he arrived. It was a relief to find Carey alone. There was an appealing look in her eyes; but David felt that he could bear no expression of sympathy, and he trusted she would ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... should make a profession of the religion of Christ, and yet thus ignore His Lordship. The authority of Jesus against a life of indifference in the church, of non-attendance, of want of cooperation in the work of the Lord, against carnality, pleasure-loving, worldliness, the lusts of the flesh, want of spirituality, and such like, is as direct and positive as that against rejecting the gospel of Christ; and yet how many church members, all over our land, are disregarding the authority of Jesus in these matters. ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... you do. I think you always will. Not because of the worldliness in you, though; but the other-worldliness, the sense of real beauty and truth. And I am glad that we have begun at all! It was a greater escape for me. I was in danger of all sorts of hardness and unbelief. I had begun to despise and hate things, because they did not work rightly ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... and day at acquiring an air of fashionable elegance, at first naturally laying it on in such manner as suggested that it should be scraped off with a knife, but with experience gaining a certain specious knowledge of forms. How the over-mature child at school had assimilated her uncanny young worldliness, it would have been less difficult to decide, if possible sources had been less numerous. The air was full of it, the literature of the day, the chatter of afternoon teas, the gossip of the hour. Before she was fifteen she saw the indiscretion of her childish frankness, ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... sins, and coarser and finer are but human words; but faults in the higher nature may be less venal than those in the lower, and to the eye of Him who is Love, a sin against Love may seem a hundred times more base. No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to un-Christianize society than evil temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... know what this ends in. Miss Gascoigne does not see it, but I do. She only thinks of 'propriety.' I think of something far deeper—a girl's first notions about those sort of things. It is cruel to meddle with them before their time—to take the bloom off the peach and the scent off the rose; to put worldliness instead of innocence, and conceited folly instead of simple, solemn, awful love. I would rather die, even now—you will think I am always ready for dying—but I would rather die than live to think and feel about love like some women—ay, and not bad women ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... ill-paid toil, that childlike spelling-out of what nature has written, which gives its poetry to peasant life. Here one has conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction and without polish, surely the most prosaic form of human life; proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build; worldliness without side-dishes. Observing these people narrowly, even when the iron hand of misfortune has shaken them from their unquestioning hold on the world, one sees little trace of religion, still less of a distinctively Christian creed. Their belief in ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... eighteenth century frivolity and worldliness took the place of Puritan sobriety and religion, New England children shared with their elders in that growing love of amusement, which found but few and inadequate methods of expression in the lives of either old or young. In the year ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... surrounding circumstances. Alfieri pursued an ideal, slowly formed, but strongly fashioned and resolutely followed. Of wealth he had plenty and to spare, but he disregarded it, and was a Stoic in his mode of life. He was an unworldly man, and hated worldliness. Goldoni, but for his authorship, would certainly have grown a prosperous advocate, and died of gout in Venice. Goldoni liked smart clothes; Alfieri went always in black. Goldoni's fits of spleen—for he was melancholy now and then—lasted a day or two, and disappeared ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Anderson, a shrewd, genial, ready Presbyterian divine of about 50, with something of the authority of his profession in his bearing. But it is an altogether secular authority, sweetened by a conciliatory, sensible manner not at all suggestive of a quite thoroughgoing other-worldliness. He is a strong, healthy man, too, with a thick, sanguine neck; and his keen, cheerful mouth cuts into somewhat fleshy corners. No doubt an excellent parson, but still a man capable of making the most of this world, and perhaps ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... promise Mrs. Garstein Fellows reckoned without the morbid sensibility of the bishop's disorganized nervous system and the unsuspected theological stirrings beneath the apparent worldliness of ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... us suppose that they are. Some author has wisely said: "That the world should be full of worldliness seems as right as that a stream should be full of water or a living body full of blood." To conquer this world, to get out of it a full, abounding, agreeable life, is what we are put here for. Else, why such ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... himself up and speaking in a dignified tone, "yes, I'm fixin' to do better. I'm preparin' fer to shake worldliness. I'm done quit so'shatin' wid deze w'ite town boys. Dey've been a goin' back on me too rapidly here lately, an' now I'm ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... So old Andrew was looking forward to the visit of his pastor with the hope that his example and admonition would have a steadying effect upon his frivolous son. Like Duncan Polite, the elder looked upon the young minister as the deliverer of the people of Glenoro church from the spirit of worldliness which he felt characterised them. So, when his daughter came to summon him to the house to put on a coat and collar, as the minister had been sighted on the road not half a mile away, he hurried in with great alacrity to ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... so bad, Mr. Weldon. She means well. It is only that I don't like tight frizzles and a hymn-book in combination. People should always have one point of absolute worldliness." ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... the visible churches that tells most against them today in the minds of educated men is not worldliness or unfaithfulness; it is their inability to shake off their untenable position as judges of others. The "Church" in Jesus' day judged him unfit to live. Upon Luther, Wesley, and many of the best servants of the human race the churches to which they belonged passed similar sentences. ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... no mistake about it. It was plain that he had put by all worldly thoughts when he shut up his account book, and that his mind was as free from every earthly association as his Sunday coat was from dust. The slave of worldliness, who is driven, by perplexing business or adventurous speculation, through the hours of a half-kept Sabbath to the fatigues of another week, might envy the unbroken quiet, the sunny tranquillity, which hallowed the weekly ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... idea of the worldly and the unworldly is found to emerge in literature as well as in life. In reality, the very same combinations of moral qualities, infinitely varied, which compose the harsh physiognomy of what we call worldliness in the living groups of life, must unavoidably present themselves in books. A library divides into sections of worldly and unworldly, even as a crowd of men divides into that same majority and minority. The world ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... the plain open four-posted belfry above had been clanging with a metallic sharpness that had an odd impatient worldliness about it, suddenly ceased. ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... mind to be in the excruciating position of one who, having started "God save the Queen" at a meeting, finds himself alone in the song. Why could not he and Clara behave together as, for instance, he and Janet Orgreave would behave together, with dignity, with worldliness, with mutual deference? But no! It was impossible, and would ever be so. They had been too brutally intimate, and the result ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... that they were going to serve our Lord, have found themselves in ten worlds at once, without knowing what to do, or how to help themselves. Youth and sensuality and the devil invite them and incline them to follow certain ways which are of the essence of worldliness. They see these ways, so to ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... she grew old, the novel for unfulfilled prophecy; and was a distinguished leader in a distinguished religious coterie: but she still prided herself upon having a green head upon grey shoulders; and not without reason; for underneath all the worldliness and intrigue, and petty affectation of girlishness, which she contrived to jumble in with her religiosity, beat a young and kindly heart. So she was charmed with Mr. Vavasour's manners, and commended them much to Lucia, who, a shrinking girl of seventeen, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... mysticism," but there is something else about Chretien which is also Celtic, though very far from being "mystic". We talk a great deal nowadays about Celtic melancholy, Celtic dreaminess, Celtic "other-worldliness"; and we forget the qualities that made Caesar's Gauls, St. Paul's Galatians, so different from the grave and steadfast Romans—that loud Gaulois that has made the Parisian the typical Frenchman. A ...
— Cliges: A Romance • Chretien de Troyes
... strange, more beautiful, more smooth, more regal, Than wings of swans, than doves, than dim-seen eagle? What is it? And to what shall I compare it? It has a glory, and nought else can share it: The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy, Chacing away all worldliness and folly; Coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder, Or the low rumblings earth's regions under; And sometimes like a gentle whispering Of all the secrets of some wond'rous thing That breathes about us in the vacant air; So ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... found her soul again and returned to her normal, healthy views of life, which included enjoyment and play, literature, music and the arts, without, however, a touch of that trivial thoughtlessness usually termed worldliness. Mrs. Franklyn, as I remembered her, was a quiet little woman, shallow, perhaps, and easily influenced, but sincere as a dog and thorough in her faithful Friendship. Her tastes at heart were catholic, and that ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... was accustomed to, and often rather amused by his cousin's honest worldliness and outspoken skepticisms—that candid confession of badness which always inclines a kindly heart to believe the very best ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... real hymns, but versified theological dissertations, or sermons in rhyme. Born of the union of princes with professors, it retains the distinct likeness of both its parents, not altogether harmoniously blended; and when it is accused of worldliness, of paleness of thought, of being a police institution rather than a Church, that is no more than to say that the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... second, the conflict is waged chiefly, as in the mysterious temptation in the wilderness, between Christ, man's Redeemer, and the devil, the adversary of man. In the first parable the obstacles to the progress of the kingdom lay in the heedlessness, the hardness, and the worldliness of men; in the second, the old serpent is the opposer, and wicked men are wielded as instruments ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... position, watching my coal fire, and thinking of the friends I had left on the other side of the mountains. I had not succeeded as I had hoped in my work. I came to the West expecting to meet with opposition, and I found only indifference. I expected infidelity, and found worldliness. I had around me a company of good Christian friends, but they were no converts of mine; they were from New England, like myself, and brought their religion with them. Upon the real Western people I had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... With their air of worldliness and mature wisdom they twittered on like a couple of sparrows—inconsequently, capriciously; and nothing that they said had the slightest originality, weight, or importance. But they both thought that their conversation was full of significance; which it was, though ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... are folkways which are positively harmful. Very often these are just the ones for which a definite reason can be given. The destruction of a man's goods at his death is a direct deduction from other-worldliness; the dead man is supposed to want in the other world just what he wanted here. The destruction of a man's goods at his death was a great waste of capital, and it must have had a disastrous effect ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... action, was constantly set before them. With such a mother to mould their infant minds and direct their childish understandings, there was not much fear of the younger Gurneys turning out otherwise than well. Those who shook their heads at the "worldliness" of the Gurneys, little dreamt of the remarkable lives which were being ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... May, "especially to my kind friends. I fear that Sir Ralph will ill supply his place. Miss Jane, who waited to receive him, has come back much hurt at the way he behaved to her. He looks upon them as gloomy Methodists, and inclined to censure his worldliness, and he partly hinted that they must no longer come to Texford as they had been accustomed to do in Sir Reginald's time, unless with an especial invitation. I am truly sorry for it, as Miss Jane used to enjoy her visits there; and though, now ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... life so easy to them. And we may add too: the absence of intellectual pride; the absence of the habit of dallying with moral truth. Everybody is to the child either a 'good' man or a 'bad.' They have an intense realisation of the unseen; an absence of developed vices and hard worldliness; a faculty of living in the present, free from anxious care and worldly hearts. But while thus they have special adaptation for receiving, they too need to come to Christ. These characteristics do not make Christians. They are to be directed to Christ. 'Suffer them ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... Miranda. But here a difficulty arose which she had not foreseen. Although Corbin had evidently forgiven her defection on that memorable evening, he had not apparently got over the revelation of her giddy worldliness, and was resignedly apathetic and distrustful of her endeavors. She was at first amused, and then angry. And her patience was exhausted when she discovered that he actually seemed more anxious to conciliate Julia Jeffcourt ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... told story of a girl who on her fifteenth birthday resolves to make herself useful in the world; but who, forgetting that her home where she is needed is her proper sphere of action, is betrayed into worldliness, while her simple loving cousin Isabel, without pretension or self-consciousness, delights in serving those near her ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... flesh, as Jesus did, did not many a moral leper go from the waters of his baptism, with new resolves and purposes, to sin no more? If he did not raise dead bodies, did not many, who were immured in the graves of pride, and lust, and worldliness, hear his voice, and come forth to the life—which is life indeed? No miracles! Surely his life was one long pathway of miracle, from the time of his birth of aged parents, to the last moment of his protest against the ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... appointed me. I have walked in it as steadily as I could. I am what I am; that which I am not, teach me in the others. I will bear the pain of imperfection, but not of doubt. E. must not shake me in my worldliness, nor —— in the fine motion that has given me what I have of life, nor this child of genius make me lay aside the armor, without which I had lain bleeding on the field long since; but, if they can keep closer to nature, and learn to interpret ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 16:15-16; see also Mark 8:29; Luke 9:20). Peter's faith had already shown its vital power; it had caused him to forsake much that had been dear, to follow his Lord through persecution and suffering, and to put away worldliness with all its fascinations, for the sacrificing godliness which his faith made so desirable. His knowledge of God as the Father, and of the Son as the Redeemer, was perhaps no greater than that of the unclean spirits; but while to them that knowledge was but an added cause of condemnation, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... noble!" cried Els in delight, "and if I should ever—-. Yet no, Isabella and I cannot be compared. My husband will never be numbered among the admirers of another woman, like your detestable brother-in-law. Besides, he is wasting time with Cordula. Her worldliness repels Eva, it is true, but I have heard many pleasant things about her. Alas! she is a motherless girl, and her father is an old reveller and huntsman, who rejoices whenever she does any audacious act. But he keeps his purse open to her, and she is kind-hearted ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... he worked with. "Canny" Scotchmen and shrewd Yankees—ay, even Swiss innkeepers—felt the touch of his quality. There was, or there seemed to be, a geniality in the fellow that, in its apparent contempt for all worldliness, threw men off their guard, and it would have smacked of meanness to distrust a fellow ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... composed it myself) you will read in the "Barchester Guardian," which I send you. While approving the END he rebuked the MEANS, and took the opportunity to read a much-needed lesson on JESUITRY and the dangers of worldliness in high ecclesiastical places. Let those wince who feel a sense of their own backslidings. When the Bishop had ended, I determined to walk once through the bazaar just to make sure that there were no lotteries nor games of chance—a ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... morality. Some are, no doubt. There are, no doubt, unclean men here; there are some who eat and drink more than is good for them, habitually; there are, no doubt, men and women who are living in avarice and worldliness, and doing things which the ordinary conscience of the populace points to as faults and blemishes. But I come to you respectable people that can say: 'I am not as other men are, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican'; ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... irrevocably fixed the end of life, and man could do nothing to alter it significantly in any respect. Arbitrary teleological determinism is, in the Christian religion, the philosophic root of other worldliness. And it was no alleviation of the state of affairs that miracles could happen in the realm of Nature, that is, that Nature was not determined, but was undetermined, accidental, or "free." On the contrary, it was a decided aggravation that there existed side by side with a perverse teleological ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... of the need of spiritual renovation in our Society. I feel and confess my own deficiencies as an individual member. And I bear a willing testimony to the zeal and devotion of some dear friends, who, lamenting the low condition and worldliness too apparent among us, seek to awaken a stronger religious life by the partial adoption of the practices, forms, and creeds of more demonstrative sects. The great apparent activity of these sects seems to them to contrast very strongly with our quietness ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... frame-makers, the artists' colourmen, and the dealers in old prints have their shops. To the convent school, the old woman and the young girl, walking daily through the streets to their work, brought with them that breath of worldliness which the advance of civilization seemed to render desirable to the curriculum of a ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... for all who have anywhere come to know it, Christmas is the festival of the better worldly self. But better than worldliness, it is on the Shield to-day what it essentially has been through many an age to many people—the symbolic Earth Festival of the Evergreen; setting forth man's pathetic love of youth—of his own youth that will not stay with him; and renewing his faith in a destiny ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... and showed her a photograph of his work. She looked at it long. For an instant her worldliness dropped from her. She glanced shrewdly at Lewis's face. He met her eyes frankly. Then she tossed the ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... was that it came, as a subject for indifference, money did, easier to some people than to others: she made the point in fairness, however, that you couldn't have told, by any too crude transparency of air, what place it held for Maud Manningham. She did her worldliness with grand proper silences—if it mightn't better be put perhaps that she did her detachment with grand occasional pushes. However Susie put it, in truth, she was really, in justice to herself, thinking of the difference, as favourites of fortune, between her old friend and her new. Aunt ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... found one who could perform the task. They all shake their heads and say, "Ours is not a language, only slang, which we use when required." Taking their slang generally, according to Grellmann, Hoyland, Borrow, Smart, and Crofton, there is certainly nothing very elevating about it. Worldliness, sensuality, and devilism are things helped forward by their gibberish. Words dealing with honesty, uprightness, fidelity, industry, religion, cleanliness, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... definiteness the limits of civil and spiritual authority, and to ascribe the overgrowth of error upon the Church he loved to the misconception and weakness of human nature. He did not place Venice, the superb,—with her pride and pomp and power and intellectual astuteness, with her faults and worldliness and her magnificent statesmanship,—against the spiritual kingdom of Christ's Church on earth and declare ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... woman, she thought us all shockingly full of worldliness, little guessing how much gaiety was due to her meek presence among us. We even gave dinner-parties in state, and what Richardson and I underwent from Eustace in preparation, no tongue can tell, nor Eustace's complacence ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of life have their share in your allegiance. Be half for God, and half for the world. Live partly for the world to come, and partly for this present world. By no means throw overboard religion altogether, but let it have its proper place, let it stand side by side with self-pleasing and worldliness. ...
— The King's Cup-Bearer • Amy Catherine Walton
... is an old-fashioned word, all but tabooed in modern polite society, but where will be found another which so well expresses the complete transformation in the life and character of a man who awakes from the sleep of selfish worldliness, to the better and higher principles of spiritual life? To every human being this awakening comes sooner or later. To some, gradually and naturally as the dawning of morning, and the bright effulgence of its rays is not recognised until the darkness and clouds have already rolled ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... spirit face to face with God, everywhere, always, and in everything it turned experience into a divine language for the monition and expression of the inner man. Such an instrument, in spiritual hands, might have served to dispel all natural illusions and affections, and to disinfect the spirit of worldliness and egotism. But Berkeley and his followers had no such thought. All they wished was to substitute a social for a material world, precisely because a merely social world might make worldly interests loom ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... in a time of great activity and change, and intense worldliness. "Men run to and fro and knowledge is increased." Would that we could feel that there is an increase also in integrity and virtue, and respect for Religion. We all know that it is not so. So far as we can form accurate ideas of the social and religious ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... of Mantua, and his experiences of disillusion and half voluntary self-degradation are those which had been faintly shadowed forth in Pauline, and exhibited more fully—and yet with a difference—in the Basil experiences of Paracelsus. Like the poet of Pauline, after his immersion in worldliness, Sordello again seeks solitude, and recovers a portion of his higher self; but solitude cannot content one who is unable to obtain the self-manifestation which his nature demands without the aid of others who may furnish an external body for the forces that lie suppressed within ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... extreme to the other. For a generation many natural pleasures had been suppressed; now the theaters were reopened, bull and bear baiting revived, and sports, music, dancing,—a wild delight in the pleasures and vanities of this world replaced that absorption in "other-worldliness" which characterized the extreme ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... wish to save her had suggested strange expedients to the priest. He tried the effect of two excesses—an excellent dinner, which might remind the poor child of past orgies; and the opera, which would give her mind some images of worldliness. His despotic authority was needed to tempt the young saint to such profanation. Herrera disguised himself so effectually as a military man, that Esther hardly recognized him; he took care to make his companion ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... swift conversion. When to this full measure of lay perfection the complexion of Levite godliness was superadded by election to the deaconate in the Baptist Church, it will readily be seen that two young people, in whom the hard worldliness of wealth and easy conditions had not bred home agnosticism, were material for all the credulities of parent worship. Kate, a year older than Wesley, soon encountered the influences which gave the first shock to her faith and gradually tinctured her sentiments with a ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... actress seated beside Yeager must have been in her very early twenties, but her pretty face, finely modeled, had the provocative effrontery that is the note of twentieth-century young womanhood. Its audacity, which was the quintessence of worldliness, ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... 'learned, ingenious, accomplished gentleman,' adding, 'the want of company is an inconvenience, but Mr. Cumberland is a million:' in spite of this eulogium, Cumberland has betrayed in his own autobiography unbounded vanity, worldliness, and an undue estimation of his own perishable fame. After all, amusing as personalities must always be, neither the humours of Foote, the vigorous satire of Churchill, nor the careful limning of Cumberland, whilst they cannot be ranked among talents of the highest ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Adair, the wealthy aunt aforesaid, pounced down on White Sands in a glamour of fashion and culture and outer worldliness. She bombarded Old Man Shaw with such arguments that he had to succumb. It was a shame that a girl like Sara should grow up in a place like White Sands, "with no advantages and no education," said Mrs. Adair scornfully, not understanding that wisdom and knowledge are ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... one of the most thrilling passages in the Bible. It has always been understood as a call to intimate religion, as the appeal of a personal Saviour to those who are loaded with sin and weary of worldliness. But in fact it expresses the sense of a revolutionary mission ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... truth. All great spiritual scriptures are full of the invitation not to test, but to taste; not to examine, but to eat. Their phrases are full of living water and heavenly bread, mysterious manna and dreadful wine. Worldliness, and the polite society of the world, has despised this instinct of eating; but religion has never despised it. When we look at a firm, fat, white cliff of chalk at Dover, I do not suggest that we should desire to eat it; that would be highly abnormal. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... there is victory over sin; power not to fulfill the lusts of the flesh. And you see a mark of the carnal state not only in unlovingness, self-consciousness and bitterness, but in so many other sins. How much worldliness, how much ambition among men, how much seeking for the honor that comes from man—all the fruit of the carnal life—to be found in the midst of Christian activity! Let us remember that the carnal state is a state of continual sinning and failure, ...
— The Master's Indwelling • Andrew Murray
... if this hour were thy last." You will recall, as I pronounce these words, the memento mori of the Ancients, their custom of exhibiting a skeleton at the feast, in order to remind the banqueters of the fate that awaited them. You will remember the other-worldliness of Christian monks and ascetics who decried this pleasant earth as a vale of tears, and endeavored to fix the attention of their followers upon the pale joys of the Christian heaven, and you will wonder, perhaps, that I should be harking back to these conceptions of the past. ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... in disposition; but they were thrown together, and friendship thus forced upon both. Unsuspecting and sanguine, it was natural to Evelyn to admire; and Caroline was, to her inexperience, a brilliant and imposing novelty. Sometimes Miss Merton's worldliness of thought shocked Evelyn; but then Caroline had a way with her as if she were not in earnest,—as if she were merely indulging an inclination towards irony; nor was she without a certain vein of sentiment that persons a little hackneyed in the world and young ladies a little ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book I • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... great pleasure to have some humble part in echoing across the American continent these glowing utterances from the lips of this modern Deborah, the Christian prophetess raised up by God for the deliverance of His people from captivity to worldliness and religious apathy. "Would God that all the Lord's people," men and women, "were prophets, and that the Lord would ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... great many people who act upon this idea. They feel that they can take a thing or let it alone, just as they please—even when the words preached are the judgments of God. Many hold that attitude not only toward preaching but toward the Bible also. They read, or hear read, what it says about worldliness, foolish actions and conversation, the wearing of gold for adornment; they read about being patient and holy and blameless, about not returning evil for evil, and about speaking evil of no man; yet they go ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... good is to be sought for itself and not for the sake of some ulterior gain. It is true, indeed, that Christianity has not always been presented in its purest form; too often have prudence, fear, other-worldliness been set forth as inducements to goodness, as if the Gospel cared nothing for the disposition of a man, and was concerned only with his ultimate happiness. Even a moralist so acute as Paley bases morality upon no higher ground than enlightened self-interest. But the most superficial reader of ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... they were overwhelmed with kindness, it was merely to excite a belief that they were the constant care and companions of her leisure hours. When they grew up they became the mere instruments of her ambition. The fate of one of them will show how their mother's worldliness was rewarded. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... And then she mentioned how often she had heard of Lady Southdown from that excellent man the Reverend Lawrence Grills, Minister of the chapel in May Fair, which she frequented; and how her views were very much changed by circumstances and misfortunes; and how she hoped that a past life spent in worldliness and error might not incapacitate her from more serious thought for the future. She described how in former days she had been indebted to Mr. Crawley for religious instruction, touched upon the Washerwoman of Finchley Common, which she had read with the greatest profit, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to me that somehow we might free ourselves of WORLDLINESS and GREEDINESS and just rise to the spiritual significance of the day. ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... he been such a prey to exterior influences, been twisted and turned to and fro, weather-cock fashion, thus. It was absurd, of course, to take things too seriously, yet he could not but fear the Archdeacon's well-intentioned bit of worldliness and his own disposition to court whatever family prejudice pronounced taboo, were in process of leading him a very ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... could not commend this church as a body, on account of their lack of spirituality, yet he testified, "Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments." In the midst of all the cold formalism of professors and surrounded by worldliness and iniquity, a few preserved their Christian integrity and were approved by the Lord. "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this ... to keep himself unspotted from the world." Jas. 1:27. All such overcomers have the promise of being clothed in white ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... when the daughters of New England gentlefolks were brought up wholly in the society of their elders. At thirty-five she had more reluctance than her mother to face an unforeseen occasion, certainly more than her grandmother, who had preserved some cheerful inheritance of gayety and worldliness from colonial times. ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... would be duly impressed with the presence and acquaintance of a live lord; and he instructed both his guests in the manner in which they should treat the subject of their experiment. Hazlet thought he had never enjoyed a breakfast party so much. There was a delicious spice of worldliness in the topics of conversation which was quite refreshing to him, accustomed as he was to the somewhat droning moralisms of his "congenial friends." Nothing which could deeply shock his prejudices was ever alluded to, but the discussions which were introduced came to him with all the charm of ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... She is now a magnificent creature of flesh and blood. Her face is proud and handsome; her figure large, well-proportioned, and somewhat voluptuous. No Bethlehem stable ever sheltered this haughty beauty; her home is in kings' palaces; she belongs distinctly to the realm of wealth and worldliness. She has never known sorrow, anxiety, or poverty; life has brought her nothing but pleasure and luxury. Her throne stands no longer in the sacred place of some inner sanctuary, where angel choristers make music. It is an elevated platform, at one side of the composition, ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... good. That very Quaresima or Lent of 1492 in which he died, still in his erect old age, he had listened in San Lorenzo, not without a mixture of satisfaction, to the preaching of a Dominican Friar, named Girolamo Savonarola, who denounced with a rare boldness the worldliness and vicious habits of the clergy, and insisted on the duty of Christian men not to live for their own ease when wrong was triumphing in high places, and not to spend their wealth in outward pomp ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... earth the wife, through the converting grace of God, has seen the "King in His beauty," and He has conferred upon her the pearl of great price, while the husband is an "alien from the covenant of promise, without God and without hope in the world," and imprisoned in worldliness and sin. Oh, that they might arm in arm go this day and see Him, who is not only greater and lovelier than any Joseph of earthly dominion, but "high over all, in earth, and air, and sky!" His touch is life. His voice is ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... recorded, is that if Keats had spent fifteen or twenty minutes more on his Grecian Urn, all of the stanzas would be as good as three of them. And so we think that if A. B. had put in, say, a half hour more on her sonnet she would not have rhymed "worldliness" and "moodiness." Of the harmony, counterpoint, thoroughbass, etc., of verse we know next to nothing—we play on our tin whistle entirely by ear—but there are things which we avoid, perhaps needlessly. One of these is the rhyming of words like utterly, monody, lethargy, ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... peace afforded to earnest believers in even the worst forms of Christianity are of great practical advantage to them. What deductions must be made from this gain on this score of the harm done to the citizen by the ascetic other-worldliness of logical Christianity; to the ruler, by the hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness of sectarian bigotry; to the legislator, by the spirit of exclusiveness and domination of those that count themselves pillars of orthodoxy; to the philosopher, by the restraints on the freedom of learning and ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the insatiate assumption and swollen authority of "the best of mothers." The furious reproaches which she heaped upon him when she saw in Acte a possible rival to her power drove him to take refuge in the facile and unphilosophic worldliness of Seneca's concessions, and goaded him almost immediately afterwards into an atrocious crime. He naturally looked on Britannicus, the youthful son of Claudius, with even more suspicion and hatred than that with which he regarded Octavia. Kings have rarely been able to abstain from acts of severity ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... than of letting out tucks in the frocks of a vigorously growing daughter. Here, besides various elegant accomplishments—the art of wearing a train, of composing a bouquet, of presenting a cup of tea—she acquired a certain turn of the imagination which might have passed for a sign of precocious worldliness. She dreamed of marrying a man of hierarchical "rank"—not for the pleasure of hearing herself called Madame la Vicomtesse, for which it seemed to her she should never greatly care, but because she had ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... understand me, and I am very sorry I have been carried away to-night by the music. It isn't dancing itself that's a sin, and I am not judging any of you; but I know in my heart that dancing and theatricals are wrong for me; they are the essentials of worldliness, those and horse-racing, and card-playing, and other things of the same sort. I want to keep clear of them all, as I know if I go in for any I shall be gradually more and more engrossed in them. And the very proof I have had to-night of how my ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... that they are only needed, longed for and obtained, after a period of spiritual decline and general worldliness. A Church that is alive and active needs no revival. A lifeless Church does. Better then, far better, to use every right endeavor to keep the Church alive and active, than permit it to grow cold and worldly, with a view and hope of a glorious awakening. Prevention is better than cure. We would rather ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... of St. Paul's cathedral we have to speak hereafter. As the momentous changes of the sixteenth century drew near, the godlessness and unbelief which did so much to alienate many from the Church found strong illustrations in the worldliness which seemed to settle down awhile on St. Paul's and its services. Clergymen appeared here to be hired (Chaucer's Prologue), and lawyers met their clients. Falstaff "bought Bardolph at Paul's." But before we come to the great changes, it will be well to go back and take note of ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... Mater, and becoming passionately addicted to French literature, his views respecting both Church and State became modified—at least in private. His entrance into English society had been highly successful, and as he had a due share of vanity, and was by no means free from worldliness, he had enjoyed and pursued his triumphs. But his versatile nature, which required not only constant, but novel excitement, became palled, even with the society of duchesses. There was a monotony in the splendour of aristocratic life which wearied him, and for some time he had persuaded ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... dreams of the future, had learnt her part perfectly in five days. She sang and acted with magnificent assurance, and with a vivid theatrical charm which awoke enthusiasm in the excitable breasts of the male chorus. Harry Burgess lost his air of fatigued worldliness, and went round naively demanding to be told whether he had not predicted this miracle. Even ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... us hope that we shall all live to see these absurd books about Success covered with a proper derision and neglect. They do not teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish; they do spread a sort of evil poetry of worldliness. The Puritans are always denouncing books that inflame lust; what shall we say of books that inflame the viler passions of avarice and pride? A hundred years ago we had the ideal of the Industrious Apprentice; boys were told that by thrift and work they would ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... openly lamented the latter's concentration on theosophical interests—when, as Miss Anthony put it, "there are so many live problems here in this world." Now she could not conceal her disapproval of the "other-worldliness" of Mrs. Besant, Mrs. Bright, and her daughter. Some remarkable and, to me, most amusing discussions took place among the three; but often, during Mrs. Besant's most sustained oratorical flights, Miss Anthony's interest would wander, and she would drop ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... ALLBUTT-INNETT, I am to mention here, had only just missed succeeding in the passing of Bar Exam owing to the inveterate malignancy of his stars and lack of a more industrial temperament; but from the coolness of his cheek, and complete man-of-the-worldliness, is a most judicious and tip-top adviser ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... us to become cruel or covetous men, who would let the beggar stand at our gate, and ourselves remain so poor as to have no inheritance in the kingdom of God; or to make us such "fools" as to survey our broad acres and teeming barns with self-love and worldliness, exclaiming, "Soul, take thine ease; thou hast much goods laid up for many years; eat, drink, and be merry;" or to tempt us to refuse the cross, and to depart sorrowful from Christ, because we had great possessions; or to ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... exactly a quarrel, but I have seen a great deal of them lately, and I have found them out. I don't mean in anything wrong, but the order is so entirely opposed to the monastic spirit. It is difficult to explain; I really can't.... What I mean is ... well, that their worldliness is repugnant to me—fashionable friends, confidences, meddling in family affairs, dining out, letters from ladies who need consolation.... I don't mean anything wrong; pray don't misunderstand me. I merely mean to say that ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... of all your evils is in the sinfulness of the nation. The principle of duty is weakened among you; that of moral obligation is loosened; that of religious obedience is destroyed. Look at the worldliness of all classes—the greediness of the rich, the misery of the poor, and the appalling depravity which is spreading among the lower classes through town and country; a depravity which proceeds unchecked because of the total ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... are in love with her, and to you she is an angel. But I am of her own sex, and see her as she is; no matter who she likes, she will never be content to make a bad match, as they call it. She told me so once with her own lips. But she had no need to tell me; worldliness is written on her. David, David, you don't know these great houses, nor the fair-spoken creatures that live in them, with tongues tuned to sentiment, and mild eyes fixed on the main chance. Their drawing-rooms are carpeted market-places; you may see the stones bulge through the flowery pattern; ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... Torcello, Murano, Treviso, Castelfranco, every convent and monastery loaded him with commissions, and it is significant of the spirit of the time, that in spite of the disapproval of the Holy See, his most ardent patrons, those who delighted most in his robust, uncompromising worldliness, were to be found in the religious houses. Then, when he went to rest in the summer heats in some villa on the Brenta, he left delightful souvenirs here and there. It was on such an occasion, for the Pisani, that he painted the "Family of Darius," ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... has buried in the earth shall grow up into a lofty pile, and shall keep on flourishing, and increasing, and benefiting mankind, long after he shall have ceased to tread his paternal fields. Indeed, it is the nature of such occupations to lift the thoughts above mere worldliness. As the leaves of trees are said to absorb all noxious qualities of the air, and to breathe forth a purer atmosphere, so it seems to me as if they drew from us all sordid and angry passions, and breathed forth peace and philanthropy. ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... acquainted with Catherine's natural good qualities, and more and more attached to his home, had Mr. Beaufort, with the generosity of true affection, desired to remove from her the pain of an equivocal condition by a public marriage. But Mr. Beaufort, though generous, was not free from the worldliness which had met him everywhere, amidst the society in which his youth had been spent. His uncle, the head of one of those families which yearly vanish from the commonalty into the peerage, but which once formed a distinguished peculiarity ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... mixture of faith and irresponsibility, freedom and formlessness, would persist and could be translated into terms of individual intellectual and moral discipline. In truth, it was, of course, a great mistake to conceive Americanism as intellectually and morally a species of Newer-Worldliness. A national intellectual ideal did not divide us from Europe any more than did a national political ideal. In both cases national independence had no meaning except in a system of international, intellectual, moral, and political relations. ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... make further noise. The soul of the seeker after Brahman may be compared to fresh butter. Discussions and argumentations of a seeker are like the noise caused during the process of purification by the fire of knowledge. As the water of egotism and worldliness is evaporated and the soul becomes purer, all noise of debates and discussions ceases and absolute silence reigns in the ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... other piece of modern English prose or poetry in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit,—its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I have said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of the Stones of Venice, put into as many lines, Browning's ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... of evidence. Look at the comparative impotence of the Church in its conflict with the growing worldliness of the world. I do not forget how much is being done all about us to-day, and how still Christ's Gospel is winning triumphs, but I do not suppose that any man can look thoughtfully and dispassionately on the condition, say, for instance, of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... world and the ensnaring tendencies of every thing that we possess. Weak and ignorant as is the imaginative and sensitive portion of our nature, it needs every possible help that it can find to counteract the paralysing effects of the worldliness of the world, of the lukewarmness of Christians, and of the enthralling nature of the universe of sight and sense. Our courage is wonderfully strengthened, and our love for things invisible is inflamed, by every thing ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... will, came just two months after John Fletcher's ordination. Little enough happened to her for a couple of years, save that she succeeded in increasingly impressing those around her that it was useless to invite her into paths of worldliness and frivolity. When a girl of nineteen she stayed for seven weeks in Bristol, renewing there her friendship with Miss Sarah Ryan—to whom Fletcher wrote some of his famous letters—through whom, and through Mrs. Crosby, Mary was introduced ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... worship of Amida Buddha, the Buddha of redemption and a future heaven, of a positive and eternal bliss, should be the Chinese form of the Indian faith is equally intelligible. After a like manner it is the humanism of our Protestant preaching today from which men are defecting into utter worldliness and indifference on the one hand and returning to mediaeval and Catholic forms of supernaturalism on ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... part is met by a corresponding irony on the part of Socrates. He must speak, for philosophy will not allow him to be silent. He is indeed more ironical and provoking than in any other of Plato's writings: for he is 'fooled to the top of his bent' by the worldliness of Callicles. But he is also more deeply in earnest. He rises higher than even in the Phaedo and Crito: at first enveloping his moral convictions in a cloud of dust and dialectics, he ends by losing his method, his life, himself, ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... however debased and morally barren, in which there does not exist a few green spots where human tenderness and sympathy are found to grow. The atmosphere of the gold-regions of California was, indeed, clouded to a fearful extent with the soul-destroying vapours of worldliness, selfishness, and ungodliness, which the terrors of Lynch law alone restrained from breaking forth in ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... the saints his heart was touched. His eyes were opened to the vanity of life and the reality of eternity compared with the worldliness of the life he had been leading. Inspired with enthusiasm at the lives of the saints, he said, "What they have done, I can do." The event of his life proved the earnestness ...
— The Autobiography of St. Ignatius • Saint Ignatius Loyola
... which is characterised by certitude, which enters as a thread in all our duties, and by adopting which men of knowledge belonging to all the modes of life convert their respective duties and penances into terrible weapons for destroying the ignorance and evils of worldliness, men of foolish understandings regard acts that are productive of visible fruits, that are fraught with the highest puissance, and that are deathless, as fruitless after all and as deviations (from the proper course) not sanctioned by the scriptures. In truth, however, that conduct, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... He, indeed, was the searcher of hearts, and those reproofs which were based on the perfect knowledge of "all that is in man," we may not imitate. But we may imitate him, where he with so much gentleness, patience, and pitying love, encountered the weakness, the rashness, the selfishness, the worldliness of men. When the young man came with such self-complacency to ask what more he could do, how kindly he was received, how gently convinced of his great deficiency! When fire would have been called from heaven ...
— An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism - With reference to the duty of American females • Catharine E. Beecher
... Chrysanthemum, White, Truth Chrysanthemum, Yellow, Slighted Love Cineraria, Always delightful Cinquefoil, Maternal Affection Circaea, Spell Cictus, Popular favour Citron, Ill-natured beauty Clematis, Mental beauty Clematis, Evergreen, Poverty Clianthus, Worldliness Clotbur, Rudeness Clover, Four-leaved, Be mine Clover, Red, Industry Clover, White, Think of me Cloves, Dignity Cobaea, Gossip Columbine, Folly Columbine, Red, Fearful Convolvulus, Bonds Convolvulus, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... perfectly able to sympathize and assist in quarrels of this personal and intelligible interest. In these days, too, rose Port-Royal, with its female reformers, saints, and theologians, offering an asylum to weary and repentant worldliness and passion, or a fresh field for vanity which had exhausted its ordinary irritants. On every side lay great temptations and great opportunities; and the women of the period seem to have been endowed with singular qualifications for the illustration ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... cannot be estimated. The inwardness and individualism of its teaching make its apparent effectiveness smaller than its real power, which works secretly and unobserved. The vices which Christ regarded with abhorrence are perversions of character—hypocrisy, hard-heartedness, and worldliness or secularity; and who can say what degree of success the Gospel has achieved in combating these? The method of Christianity is alien to all externalism and machinery; it does not lend itself to those accommodations and compromises without which ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Prioress, Madame Eglentyne, who rode with that very motley and talkative company on the way to Canterbury. There is no portrait in his gallery which has given rise to more diverse comment among critics. One interprets it as a cutting attack on the worldliness of the Church; another thinks that Chaucer meant to draw a charming and sympathetic picture of womanly gentleness; one says that it is a caricature, another an ideal; and an American professor even finds in it ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... of English sentimentalists, and he had that taint of insincerity which distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment, like Goldsmith's, for example. Sterne, in life, was selfish, heartless, and untrue. A clergyman, his worldliness and vanity and the indecency of his writings were a scandal to the Church, though his sermons were both witty and affecting. He enjoyed the titilation of his own emotions, and he had practiced so long at detecting the latent pathos that lies ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Materialist as I am,—cynic—scientist,—any harsh thing you choose to call me,—marriage in some freak, boyish corner of my mind, still defines itself as being the mutual sharing of a—mutually original experience. Certainly whether a first marriage be instigated in love or worldliness,—whether it eventually proves itself bliss, tragedy, or mere sickening ennui, to two people coming mutually virgin to the consummation of that marriage, the thrill of establishing publicly a man-and-woman home together is an emotion that cannot be ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... books, of cheerful cooperation in the tasks of those about her, that the Reverend Doctor could not find it in his heart to condemn her because she was deficient in those particular graces and that signal other-worldliness he had sometimes noticed in feeble young persons suffering from various chronic diseases which impaired their vivacity and removed them ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... after she had gone that I thought how astounding it would have been to me to hear a girl of her age show such an acquaintance with worldliness and scheming, had I not been personally so much concerned about one of the objects of her remarks. She certainly was a strange girl. But strange as she was it was a satisfaction to think that the aunt had such a friend and ally ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... Goldsmith and Oliver Wendell Holmes, owed his amazing influence largely to his cheerful and wholesome this-worldliness. He was a sentimentalist, but obviously different in spirit from the two great English writers of sentiment who were most nearly his contemporaries. Thackeray is sophisticated; fortune's buffets have left him still a tender interest in life, but pity rather ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... at Grand Forks, North Dakota, I preached one afternoon on the subject of worldliness. An attorney and his wife from Langdon, North Dakota were staying in the city to attend the meeting. After hearing this sermon the wife would not attend the services any more. At the close of the Sunday afternoon service, two days later, the attorney came ...
— Personal Experiences of S. O. Susag • S. O. Susag
... weakened the clergy most was their severance from the general sympathies of the nation, their selfishness, and the worldliness of their temper. Immense as their wealth was, they bore as little as they could of the common burthens of the realm. They were still resolute to assert their exemption from the common justice of the land, though the mild punishments of the bishops' courts ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... fine dusk; the silence, the adoration in that white room! He saw, too; a vision of the past, when Noel herself had been the sleeping babe within her mother's arm, and he had stood beside them, wondering and giving praise. It passed with its other-worldliness and the fine holiness which belongs to beauty, passed and left the tormenting realism of life. Ah! to live with only the inner meaning, spiritual and beautifed, in a rare wonderment such as he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy |
