"Wrongness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Divine Being, though by considering Him the proof gains in cogency. Or rather, apart from God we shall prove certain acts wrong, and other acts obligatory as duties, philosophically speaking, with an initial and fundamental wrongness and obligation. In the present section we have proved once for all, that what is wrong philosophically, or is philosophically a duty, is the same also theologically. Thus the initial and fundamental obligation is transformed into an ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... between Romanism and Protestantism is not at all a question of relative supernaturalism, nor of rightness and wrongness, but wholly one of the difference between the systems of economics ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... is overlooked in time. Maybe that is what God will do with everybody. He'll wipe out all the wrongness and meanness, and see through it to the good. I hope that's the way it's going to be, for that's ...
— Mary Cary - "Frequently Martha" • Kate Langley Bosher
... ear but moderately, one looked in vain for that magic of expression which transmutes thought and feeling into poetry. But if the expression wanted magic, that which was expressed seemed an enchantment almost. The gentle spirit, with its vein of tender pessimism, in puzzled revolt against the wrongness and cruelty of a shadowy world, the brooding thought too whimsical to be bitter, the fancy too refined to be boisterously merry—all these conspired to fascinate us as we came to perceive and appreciate them beneath the rather stiff little verses. To read Miss Coleridge's ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... forms he may consider the state of mind of the artist. He cannot be sure that because the forms are wrong the state of mind was wrong; because right forms imply right feeling, wrong forms do not necessarily imply wrong feeling; but if he has got to explain the wrongness of form, here is a possibility he cannot overlook. He will have left the firm land of aesthetics to travel in an unstable element; in criticism one catches at any straw. There is no harm in that, provided the critic never forgets that, whatever ingenious theories he may put forward, ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... which now hold back the progress that must be made towards social recovery and the Great Peace, is far less the quality of wrongness in themselves and the ill influence they put in operation, than it is the revelation they make of personal character. It is not so much that newspapers are what they are as that there should be men who are pleased and content to make them this, in apparently honest ignorance of what they ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... 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
... with everyone, and that even the greatest men, those men that I had so profoundly admired as of another clay than mine, were as like the worst as one sheep was like another sheep. Weep—because nature had ejected me from that petty little world, with its ridiculous and conceited wrongness? What an idea! Why, I said to myself, that world spends nearly the whole of its time in moving physical things from one place to another. Change the position of matter—that is all it does, all it thinks of. I remembered a statesman who had referred ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... the things, or both at once, the two terms may be made to fit, and all go merry as a marriage bell again. But there are others for whom evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy. On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... being compelled to accept demonstrations of affection to which one cannot in the same way respond. I believe that this shrinking from expressions which seem unnatural, is rightly intensified a hundredfold when the sense of wrongness or "unnaturalness" is due not to the individual but ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... instruction from its betters, is the best judge of a book; if he consent with Miss Corelli that the general public is a cultured public with a great brain, and by the exercise of that great brain approves itself an infallible judge of the rightness or wrongness of a book, then I would respectfully ask for evidence. The poets and critics of his time united in praising Campion as a writer of lyrics: the Great Brain and Heart of the Public neglected him utterly for three centuries: ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to him a terror. To him there was no wrath in the thunder any more than in the greeting of the dog that found him in his kennel. To him there was no being in the sky so righteous as to be more displeased than pitiful over the wrongness of the children whom he had not yet got taught their childhood. Gibbie sat calm, awe-ful, but, I imagine, with a clear forehead and smile-haunted mouth, while the storm roared and beat and flashed and ran about him. It ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... unto this day, and as often as he finds himself growing hard or supercilious, reads it from beginning to end. It is his hair shirt, to be worn from time to time next his soul for the wrongness in it and the mischief it did. He cannot understand how he could have said such things on a Sacrament morning and in the presence of the Rabbi, but indeed they were inevitable. When two tides meet there is ever a cruel commotion, and ships ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... 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, by the methods of discussion ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson |
