"Moral force" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is a moral force at the bottom of every living race of men. The sense of right, the feeling of racial destiny—these are unconquered and unconquerable forces. Every man in South Carolina to-day is glad that slavery is dead. The war was not too great ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... their experience of previous battles—when after one tenth of such efforts the enemy had fled—experienced a similar feeling of terror before an enemy who, after losing HALF his men, stood as threateningly at the end as at the beginning of the battle. The moral force of the attacking French army was exhausted. Not that sort of victory which is defined by the capture of pieces of material fastened to sticks, called standards, and of the ground on which the troops had stood and were standing, but a moral victory ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... high state of excellence here described is always that of duty. The word "duty" is very prominent and very full of meaning in the army. Military duty is made a moral obligation founded upon patriotism. This sentiment of duty is the moral force in the army that gives dignity to its obedience. The army develops, strengthens, and educates this sense of duty, until it becomes supreme. It is this sense of duty which produces endurance to undergo privations, and leads men to be patient under the greatest sacrifices. ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... aggressive materialism, it may be profitable as well as interesting to consider the possibilities that lie in a society equally removed from frivolity and pretension, inspired by the talent, the sincerity, and the moral force of American women, and borrowing a new element of fascination from the simple and charming but polite informality ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... crisis there is a moment when the scale hesitates before kicking the beam. When we lean to the worst side of our nature, instead of strengthening our better qualities, the moral force which has been preserving the balance gives way, and down we go. Had this critical moment in ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... restrictions upon them which would effectually prevent their doing anything but that which the inventor of the restrictions considered to be right; if the doing of the right resulted not from their own impulse but from the application of exterior force over which they had no control, no virtue, no moral force. "There is no compulsion, only you must" meant to him, as it must to every man who knows what truth and justice are, the utmost ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... that the exercises in spiritual training are something merely external which have no connection with the moral development of the soul. In this connection it must be said that the moral force necessary for the conquest of egoism, as described, cannot be gained unless the moral condition of the soul is brought to a corresponding stage. Progress in spiritual training is unthinkable unless moral progress takes place at the same time. The conquest ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... act is to secure its performance by the use of irresistible physical or moral force. Force implies primarily an actual physical process, absolutely subduing all resistance. Coerce implies the actual or potential use of so much force as may be necessary to secure the surrender of the will; the American secessionists contended ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... deadly practice. Pallor of countenance, nervous and rheumatic affections, loss of memory, epilepsy, paralysis, and insanity find their principal predisposing cause in the same shameful waste of life. The want of moral force and strength of mind often observable in youths and young men is largely induced by this ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... really mean that, little coz? Upon my word, it is the strongest inducement you could offer me. I feel half inclined to try, just for your sake, only you see it would involve such a tremendous expenditure of moral force!" and he lighted a ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... encourage Innocent's interference, and it may be pointed out at once that his success was largely due to the selfish ambitions and desires of the lay princes, which enabled him to pose as the undoubted representative of moral force organised in the Church. In all his most important acts he was the mouthpiece of popular opinion. Thus his contest with Philip of France in favour of the repudiated Ingebiorg commanded the sympathy of every right-thinking person in Europe; his desire ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... Ireland, with Poland, rises up to refute Machiavelli and his right of the State to crush for mere pleasure of power. "If Machiavelli had been at Jerusalem two thousand years ago, he would have found nobody of importance save Pontius Pilate and the Roman legionaries," says Mr. Morley. He forgot the moral force of the world. Machiavelli's fault is the Renaissance fault. The Renaissance turned to the past to reconstruct everything, and it copied, save in its architecture, only Antiquity's faults. It became diseased, trying to adjust itself to dead ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... had not been allowed to draw its early nourishment from the traditional associations of the Christian community in which her father had lived a life apart, felt her relation to the Church only through Savonarola; his moral force had been the only authority to which she had bowed; and in his excommunication she only saw the menace of hostile vice: on one side she saw a man whose life was devoted to the ends of public virtue and spiritual purity, and on the other the assault of alarmed selfishness, headed by a lustful, ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... prescription had been broken. Those associations on which, far more than on any arguments about property and order, the authority of magistrates rests, had completely passed away. The power of the government consisted merely in the physical force which it could bring to its support. Moral force it had none. It was itself a government sprung from a recent convulsion. Its own fundamental maxim was, that rebellion might be justifiable. Its own existence proved that rebellion might be successful. The people had been accustomed, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... it with an equal moral force, and also with that modern moral touch which Racine would have given it; which, while it removed the subject at certain points from the Greek morality, would yet have exalted it into a more spiritual world than even the best of the Greeks conceived. The commentary of Balaustion ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... doubts, which many of us felt when he first proposed those measures, have been justified. But I wish to emphasize my admiration for the large consistency of his career, and my conviction that, with out his crowning action in 1912, he would have failed to be the moral force which he was. If ambition, if envy, if a selfish desire to rule, had been the motives which guided him, he would have lain low in 1912; for all his friends and the managers of the Republican Party ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... was a diplomat of great intellectual ability. With acute sagacity he grasped the significance of the fateful events, in which he was a participant. To his calm and well-poised intellectuality he added a moral force, resulting from the clear integrity of his purpose and the broad ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... Helots. But Agesilaus put the city in the best possible defense, while every means were used to secure auxiliaries from other cities. Epaminondas dared not to attempt to take the city by storm, and after ravaging Laconia, returned into Arcadia. This insult to Sparta was of great moral force, and was an intense humiliation, greater even than that felt ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... like the present, many persons who sincerely love their country and mean to do their duty to her disappoint the hopes and expectations of those who are actively working in her cause. They seem to have lost whatever moral force they may have once possessed, and to go drifting about from one profitless discontent to another, at a time when every citizen is called upon for cheerful, ready service. It is because their minds are bewildered, and they are no longer truly themselves. Show them the path of duty, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... affections. Other help, I find a false appearance. If you affect to give me bread and fire, I perceive that I pay for it the full price, and at last it leaves me as it found me, neither better nor worse: but all mental and moral force is a positive good. It goes out from you whether you will or not, and profits me whom you never thought of. I cannot even hear of personal vigor of any kind, great power of performance, without fresh resolution. We are emulous of all that man can do. ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... hundred million; you have given new life to our poetry, our painting, our music: to you we owe the new awakening of the consciousness of our race. We have reward enough for the effort needed to learn to set our faith before our happiness: for, in doing so, we have come by a feeling of such moral force, that, amid the apathy of the world, we have no doubt, even of victory in the end. Though we are few in number, my dear Christophe, though we seem so weak,—a drop of water in the ocean of German power—we believe that the drop of water will in the end color the whole ocean. The Macedonian ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... symbolize the moral force that sustains us against temptation; they are likewise the hope which upholds the soul and strengthens it; others see in them the image of the temporal powers who are called upon to defend the power of the Church; and others again, regarding more especially the flying buttresses ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... worse—that the man has ceased looking at himself, that the I has ceased criticising, judging, stiffening up the me,—in other words, that there is no longer any conscience. That white suit, I tell you, is a wonderful moral force; the white suit, put on fresh every morning, heavily starched, buttoned up to the chin, is like an armor, ironcladding you against the germ of decay buzzing about you, ceaselessly vigilant for the little vulnerable spot. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... it seemed that the war might be decided by moral force. Beginning to take alarm at the activity of America, and not yet certain of the effect of the Russian revolution (which was having grave consequences in Austria-Hungary) the Germans inclined during the Summer of 1917 to a new peace offensive. Bethmann ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... day, the sixth of our imprisonment, Captain Nemo, finding the pickaxes work too slowly, resolved to crush the ice-bed that still separated us from the liquid sheet. This man's coolness and energy never forsook him. He subdued his physical pains by moral force. ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... Characteristics, prototype found in lower animals of man's moral, 76-u. Chariot whose wheels are Netsach and Hod, is described, 798-l. Charlemagne reigns because the ablest, 49-u. Charity, a great moral Force, makes united effort possible, 91-m. Charity, channel through which God passes his mercy, 147-l. Charity, Clemency, Generosity, essential qualities of a Knight, 803-u. Charity for others like ourselves lighted by a ray of Divine ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... legitimate heir dies, then next son by the same mother; failing which, the eldest son by any mother; if equal claims, then the wisest; if equally wise, cast lots": Lu rules would probably hold good for all federal China, because the Duke of Chou, founder of Lu, was the chief moral force in the original Chou administration. In the year 587 Lu, when coquetting between Tsin and Ts'u, was at last persuaded not to abandon Tsin for Ts'u, "who is not of our family, and can never have any real affection." Once in Tsin it was asked, about a prisoner: ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... France knows today that real "life" consists in the things that make it worth living, and that these things, for France, depend on the free expression of her national genius. If France perishes as an intellectual light and as a moral force every Frenchman perishes with her; and the only death that Frenchmen fear is not death in the trenches but death by the extinction of their national ideal. It is against this death that the whole nation is fighting; and it is the reasoned recognition of their peril ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... the doctrine of Jesus derived their moral force from his credit, and so had to keep his gospel alive. When the Protestants translated the Bible into the vernacular and let it loose among the people, they did an extremely dangerous thing, as the mischief which followed proves; but they incidentally let loose the ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... noted that genealogical tables show that very nearly all of the eminent men of New England were sons of ministers, or of an ancestry where ministers' names are seen at frequent intervals. As an intellectual and moral force, the minister has now but a rudiment of the power he once exercised. The tendency to specialize all art and all knowledge has to a degree shorn him of his strength. And to such an extent is this true, that within forty years it has passed into a common proverb ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... consciousness of fighting in this war which has been forced upon us, against the direst calamity threatening our kind and on behalf of the most precious conquests of progress and civilization, which enhances our moral force so as to make it unconquerable. The hope which I expressed in my first letter, that Serbia's doom would soon be fulfilled, has been prostrated by the mistakes of an over-confident Commander in Chief; but that means postponement ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... though propelled by some potent moral force that imminently threatened to become physical. Behind him closely followed the impetus—a hotel detective, if ever white Alpine hat, hawk's nose, implacable watch chain, and loud refinement of manner spoke the truth. A brace of uniformed porters at his heels preserved ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... pleasure. The good she does is beyond praise. She's a wonderful help in the parish. She has at heart the spiritual welfare of the people, and I may say that she is a moral force of ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... that the controlling force in this country shall be a moral force?—that it shall conspire with the great idea of Liberty, and not degrade and destroy it? The theory of our institutions is our pride. But it is a pitiful truth that our public life has become synonymous with knavery. If a politician is introduced, you feel of your pockets. It is shameful that ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... young friend from Sapps Court, whom you probably remember. Michael had absconded from his home, and sought that of his great-aunt; the only person, said contemporary opinion, that had a hounce of influence with him. It was not clear why such a confirmed reprobate should quail before the moral force of a small old woman in a mysteriously clean print-dress, and tortoise-shell spectacles she would gladly have kept on while charing, only they always come off in the pail. But he did, and when reproached by her for his needlessly defiant attitude, took up a more conciliatory tone. "Carn't recollect, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Muscovite throne, has expressed himself again and again the constant friend of the Union. It is agreeable to reflect that that vast empire, now far on its way to a liberal constitution, and hastened, instead of retarded by its august head, should lend the moral force of its unqualified good-will to the cause of American liberty. The noble words of Prince Gortschakoff to our envoy will be grateful to every loyal American heart:—"We desire above all things the maintenance of the American Union, as one indivisible nation. Russia has declared her position, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... bring legal or even moral force to compel everyone to maintain such detailed registers of himself, his ancestral stocks, and his offspring—to say nothing of inducing him to make them public—there is something that we can do. ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... on Tuesday. During the next few days Peake went through a novel and very disturbing experience. He gradually became conscious of the power of that mysterious and all-but-irresistible moral force which is called public opinion. His own public of friends and acquaintances connected with the chapel seemed to be, for some inexplicable reason, against him on the question of the organ subscription. They visited him, even to the Rev. Mr Copinger (whom he heartily admired as having "nothing ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... which every event is presented; the lyrical sweetness and beauty with which so many passages are enriched, will all be apparent to us, and we shall feel the esthetic sublimity of the work as well as its moral force ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... will sometimes have to require a prescribed conduct for reasons not intelligible, or which it may not be discreet to explain, to those who are to obey. But their authority becomes odious, and as a moral force worse than inefficient, when the natural shrewdness of the children can descry that they really have no reasons better than an obstinate or capricious will; and infallibly makes the inference, that there is no obligation to submit, but that necessity which dependence imposes. But this must often ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... it is its fruit. To see that it is its fruit is to have the final answer to the objection that substitution is immoral. If substitution, in the sense in which we must assert it of Christ, is the greatest moral force in the world—if the truth which it covers, when it enters into the mind of man, enters with divine power to assimilate him to the Saviour, uniting him to the Lord in a death to sin and a life to God—obviously, to call it immoral is an abuse of language. The love which can literally ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... individuals who dislike each other to continue their cohabitation? This is at least the effect of its interfering with a relationship, of which it has no possible means of judging. It does not indeed drag a man to a woman's bed by physical force, but it does exert a moral force continually and effectively to accomplish the same purpose. Nobody can escape this force, but those who are too high or those who are too low for public opinion to reach; or those hypocrites who are, before ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... their passionate, moral, and spiritual forces, and these determine the character of their intellectual development and expression. A nation which knew all the laws of phenomena, but which was utterly lacking in moral force, would not only not be civilized, but would hardly be alive. Mr. Buckle insists that moral truths being relatively stationary, while intellectual truths are constantly advancing and multiplying, civilization cannot depend ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... bodily discomfort cannot be always smiling and uttering thanks, but he can be gentle and appreciative of the efforts that are made toward mitigating his distress. On his own account, as well as for the sake of his attendant, he should keep up a semblance of cheerfulness, the moral force of which is great. On the part of patient and nurse there must be self control and forbearance, which if closely practiced may bring sunshine into the most darkly ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... The moral force engendered in the civilization planted on these shores, and pervading the whole body of society, supplied a mightier momentum, as it does to this day, and ever will, to the movement of the people, acting in a mass and as a unit, than can anywhere ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... shall briefly say that if Irish history were taught in our Irish colleges and schools to children while still young, and while the teacher could impress on his charge the duty of forgiveness of enemies, of patient endurance, of the mighty power of moral force, which has effected even for Ireland at times what more violent measures have failed to accomplish, then there could be no danger in the study. Perhaps the greatest human preservative of the faith, for those whose lot may be cast hereafter in other lands, would be to inculcate a great reverence for ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... explain and unify the various features of His personality and influence. It is remarkable to notice how often the word 'power' is applied to Jesus in the New Testament.[3] Whether we regard His attitude to God, or His relation to others, it is this note of quiet strength, of vital moral force which arrests our attention. It will be sufficient to mention in passing three directions in which this quality of power ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... young savage grows into higher influences, the faculty of worship is foremost in him. At this period Jesuits will stamp the future of their chargeling flocks; and all who bring up youth by a System, and watch it, know that it is the malleable moment. Boys possessing any mental or moral force to give them a tendency, then predestinate their careers; or, if under supervision, take the impress that is given them: not often to cast it off, and seldom to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... man fail to be masters in their own house this is not from lack of willingness, but of talent. As for those who are ready to undergo the toils of this terrible duel, it is quite true that they must needs possess great moral force. ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... displayed the smallest desire to compete for any woman's favour, who had never indeed shown himself to be drawn by any feminine attractions, and his sudden assumption of authority was therefore unassailable. In yielding to the greater power, Dacre yielded to a moral force rather than to human compulsion. And though driven sorely against his will, he respected the power that drove. His dumb gesture of acquiescence conveyed as much as he turned away ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... giving dark views of God, and infusing superstitious fear of innocent enjoyment, instead of aiding sober habits, will, by making men abject and sad, impair their moral force, and prepare them for intemperance as a ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... incurable antagonism between the intellectual and the physical power of man; between his improvement and his welfare. I cannot avoid feeling that the Creator should have bestowed upon man either reason or bodily strength; moral force, or brutal force; and that it has been a bitter mockery to confer upon him faculties which must inevitably counteract ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... reminded of his glory. In truth, until I came to Blenheim, I never had so positive and material an idea of what Fame really is—of what the admiration of his country can do for a successful warrior—as I carry away with me and shall always retain. Unless he had the moral force of a thousand men together, his egotism (beholding himself everywhere, imbuing the entire soil, growing in the woods, rippling and gleaming in the water, and pervading the very air with his greatness) must have been swollen within him like the liver of a Strasburg ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sound sleep by night at the music of drunken quarrels all around, far and near. I had marked my claim in accordance with the run of the ranges, and safe as the Bank of England I bottomed on gold. No search for licence ever took place. What's the matter? Oh, the diggers of Bendigo, by sheer moral force, in the shape of some ten thousand in a mob, had inspired with better sense the red-tape there and somewhere else, so I took out my licence at the reasonable rate of two pounds for three months, my contribution for the support of gold-lace. So far so good. I had no fault to find ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... day when the world will say, 'This America that we thought was full of a multitude of contrary counsels now speaks with the great volume of the heart's accord, and that great heart of America has behind it the supreme moral force of righteousness and hope and the liberty ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... party passions, or ambitious views may suggest. It is a power that from its nature never could be delegated; never was delegated; and as it breaks down all the proportions of power guaranteed by the Constitution to the States, upon which their essential security depends, utterly annihilates the moral force of this political conduct. Would this people, so wisely vigilant concerning their rights, have transferred to Congress a power to balance, at its will, the political weight of any one State, much more of all the States, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... affectation, he would say that it was relaxation from the work he was doing in the pulpit. I have no doubt it was. I have no thought that he was specially fitted for that work. It illustrates rather his moral force of determination. He thought that particular charge of Mr. English's ought to be answered. Nobody else answered it. And therefore he did it himself. He knew he could do it, if it must be done. If he had not prepared for it, he must prepare ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... TABLETS Different Destinies The Animating Principle Two Descriptions of Action Difference of Station Worth and the Worthy The Moral Force Participation To—— The Present Generation To the Muse The Learned Workman The Duty of All A Problem The Peculiar Ideal To Mystics The Key The Observer Wisdom and Prudence The Agreement Political Precept ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne was shocked at the condition to which she found the clergyman reduced. His nerve seemed absolutely destroyed. His moral force was abased into more than childish weakness. It grovelled helpless on the ground, even while his intellectual faculties retained their pristine strength, or had perhaps acquired a morbid energy, which disease only could have given them. With ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... than a foot high in the waist, and the men on the deck were almost entirely exposed. The rail of the sloop was perhaps a little higher, but it, too, was hardly better adapted for fighting. Indeed, the lieutenant depended more upon the moral force of official authority to overawe the pirates than upon any real force of arms or men. He never believed, until the very last moment, that the pirates would show any real fight. It is very possible that they might not have done so had they ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... cried Isabel, with an indignation that secretly unnerved him. He trembled upon the verge of confession; but he had finally the moral force to resist. He suffered her to compute the cost of their stay at Niagara without allowing those three dollars to enter into her calculation; he even began to think what justificative extravagance he could ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in which to save his life. Had he been a man of slight or even moderate physical and moral force, there would not have been the slightest chance for him. But he was six feet high, broad in the shoulders, limbed like a gladiator, solidified by hardships and marches, accustomed to danger, never losing his head ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... As the committees were all powerful, they tried to ruin them by degrees, the best course to follow. It was important to change public opinion, and to encourage the assembly, in order to support themselves by a moral force against revolutionary force, by the power of the convention against the power of the committees. The Dantonist in the Mountain endeavoured to detach Robespierre from the other Decemvirs; Billaud-Varennes, Collot- d'Herbois ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... in our minds a Washington grand, solemn, and impressive. In this guise he appears as a man of lofty intellect, vast moral force, supremely successful and fortunate, and wholly apart from and above all his fellow-men. This lonely figure rises up to our imagination with all the imperial splendor of the Livian Augustus, and ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... and on the 9th of July Jellachich, while declaring it "permanent," prorogued it indefinitely "with a paternal greeting," on the ground that the safety of the Fatherland depended now "more upon physical than upon moral force." The diet thus prorogued never met again. Absolute master of the forces of the banat, Jellachich now waited until the intractable politicians of Pest should give him the occasion and the excuse for setting the imperial army in motion ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... this tone, Penrose spoke. I abstained from pressing him to reveal Romayne's confession. The confession is of no consequence to us. You know how the moral force of Arthur's earnestness and enthusiasm fortifies his otherwise weak character. I, too, believe he ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... to those only who have never ceased, from the time of the enactment of the restrictive provision to the present day, to denounce and condemn it; who have constantly refused to complete it by needful supplementary legislation; who have spared no exertion to deprive it of moral force; who have themselves again and again attempted its repeal by the enactment of incompatible provisions, and who, by the inevitable reactionary effect of their own violence on the subject, awakened the country to perception ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... The Pleiad Inlet, with a cargo of guns and ammunition for the rebellion. The little sailing-trip of Senor Rey was designed to pull the gunboat afar off in the Southwest, the original course, as you say, to permit the tramp to make the Inlet unmolested. Jaffier won't need the guns, but they're a moral force——" ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... impoverished masses of several European and Asiatic countries, the tendency to interpret liberty as license, the contagious nature of moral, as well as of physical, diseases combine to make it of the utmost importance that American enterprise and moral force find ways and means for accomplishing this transformation. The grand results of the movement in New York city inspired by Jacob Riis; the fascinating benevolence of the Roycroft Shop in East Aurora, N.Y.; the marvelous transfiguration of character—I speak ...
— Jukes-Edwards - A Study in Education and Heredity • A. E. Winship
... part up for the supposed good of the other, because the latter is stronger? Is that justice? Is that mercy? and, mind, I say emphatically supposed good; for, do you think one part of God's creation can be trodden down without reacting with terrible moral force upon the other? Do you think it can? Was it ever done? Will it ever be done? No! not while He sits on His throne. Yes, supposed good, for facts mock your arguments. It is not for their good; you know it is not. You cannot accomplish your ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... memory shifted to the days that found her a woman. Fair, beautiful, dainty, her father's daughter in looks, but inheriting from a rare mother a peculiar strength of character, a moral force rarely found with such ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... the incubus-load, which perseverance in sin heaps on the breast of the reckless offender. What was the most grievous of all, his power to shake off this dead weight was diminished in precisely the same proportion as the burthen was increased, the moral force of every man lessening in a very just ratio to the magnitude of his delinquencies. Bitterly did this deep offender struggle with his conscience, and little did his half-unsexed wife know how to console or aid him. Jack ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... jacket when it is on another's back.—The influence of resistant wills at this moment becomes incalculable: it would be easier to raise a mountain, and, just at this moment, the Jacobins have deprived themselves of every moral force through which a political engineer ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... an indefinite expansion, Louis sowed the seeds of discontent and revolution. Both indeed took the sword,—the one to dethrone the Stuarts, the other to exterminate the Protestants. Cromwell bequeathed to successors the moral force of personal virtue, Louis paved the way for the most disgraceful excesses; Cromwell spent his leisure hours with his family and with divines, Louis with his favorites and mistresses; Cromwell would listen to expostulations, Louis crushed all ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... that it was plain the woman was lying flagrantly, that she had come to see him with fell purpose. He loathed that purpose absolutely; he resented it most keenly. None the less, the one course open to him was to submit as little ungraciously as he was able. No moral force would be able to dislodge his guest; and Ramsdell could not well be summoned, to pluck forth the rector's lady and escort her, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... contemporary on whose work Browning bestowed an ardent admiration, the novelist Balzac. His Puritanism received important modifications from his wide-ranging artistic instincts and sympathies, and again from the liberality of a wide-ranging intellect. He has the strenuous moral force of Puritanism, but he is wholly free from asceticism, except in the higher significance of that word—the hardy discipline of an athlete. Opinions count for less than the form and the habitual attitudes of a soul. These with Browning were always essentially ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the power and extent of our Constitution was most important. At its inception, coming at a time when the framers of the Constitution were not only able to interpret their work, but to give to it their moral force and support, it was demonstrated that no constitutional limitations should retard the onward growth, the onward rush of American civilization, until it should have reached the farthermost bounds of the far-off Pacific. The barriers to human progress were by this interpretation ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... neither slave nor freedman could be an object of profound respect for a Roman boy. Hence no doubt the necessity of maintaining discipline rather by means of corporal punishment (to which the Romans never seem to have objected, though Quintilian criticises it)[275] than by moral force; a fact which is attested both in literature and art. The responsibility again which attached to the paedagogus for the boy's morals must have been another inducement to the parents to renounce their proper work ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... person of the three ancients, one of whom I was obliged to depend upon for substitution. Rufus, I felt sure, would compromise by feeding every ration to the hogs, and I knew that he could persuade father to do likewise, but Uncle Cradd, I felt, would bring moral force ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... tired of your life, young man! All the more reason have you to live. Anyone can die. A murderer has moral force enough to jeer at his hangman. It is very easy to draw the last breath. It can be accomplished successfully by a child or a warrior. One pang of far less anguish than the toothache, and all is over. ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... incapacity to measure the moral force of public sentiment had undoubtedly kept him in error. He failed entirely to appreciate the close connection between rebellion and slavery, and in finally yielding to the war-failure resolution at Chicago in 1864 he did not realise how completely abolition ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Hay rose, and you know what summit Whitelaw Reid has reached, and you see me. Those two men have regulated troubles of nations and conferred peace upon mankind. And in my humble way, of which I am quite vain, I was the principal moral force in all those great international movements. These great men illustrated what I say. Look at us great people—we all come from the dregs of society. That's what can be done in this country. That's what this country does ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... mind; namely, that the child is compelled by the vague sensation of hitherto unknown dread, not to conceal the early symptoms of epilepsy as the grown person would do; longing as the child does for love and sympathy, and weakened in its moral force, it craves for more love, more sympathy, it exaggerates its symptoms, it assumes some which do not exist at all. The conclusion is a natural one, but none the less mistaken, that the child who is discovered ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... they like of Miss Edgeworth's lack of proportion as a moralist and economist, but we have few writers for children at present who possess the practical knowledge, mental vigor, and moral force which made her an imposing figure in juvenile ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... Yea, rest and the yet untasted meal— Gushing, rushing, crushing along, A very torrent of Man! Urged by the sighs of sorrow and wrong, Grown at last to a hurricane strong, Stop its course who can! Stop who can its onward course And irresistible moral force; O vain and idle dream! For surely as men are all akin, Whether of fair or sable skin, According to Nature's scheme, That Human Movement contains within A ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... know nothing of the people in whose land they stay. They have no notion of the reserves of moral force and civic liberty which for centuries have been hoarded up in them, coals of the fires of Calvin and Zwingli, still glowing beneath the ashes; they have no conception of the vigorous democratic spirit which will always ignore the Napoleonic Republic, of the simplicity ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... idiosyncrasies of its nearest and dearest; and this reversal of the natural order of things explained much in Quita that appeared difficile and contradictory; explained also her instant gravitation to Lenox, in whom she divined a supply of moral force, and the masculine spirit of protection, both strangely undeveloped in the brother she so devoutly loved. And if at times the uncongenial task of conscience-keeper, and general financier, coupled with complexities, arising ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... England at the eleventh hour—that the bold plans for a well-regulated defense were overthrown completely, and could not be carried out in any degree. Garnet, indeed, was for the time safe, his hiding place unknown to the authorities, and did Fawkes resist with physical and moral force the torture, the Jesuit might not become involved in the consequences of his treason. But Catesby, Percy, the two Winters and others stood in the shadow of the scaffold. That no mercy would be measured out to them was beyond peradventure. ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... American Magazine. May "Threatened Collapse of Bergson boom in France." Current Opinion. July "The Banning of Bergson." Independent. Dec. "Bergson Looking Backward." Literary Digest. "Bergson on Germany's Moral Force." Literary Digest. ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... stern concentration of fiery passion, under the dominion of an adamantine will: this was his own make of mind; and he represents it, with strokes in themselves devoid of charm, but in their union terrible as a prophetic scroll. Schiller's moral force is commensurate with his intellectual gifts, and nothing more. The mind of the one is like the ocean, beautiful in its strength, smiling in the radiance of summer, and washing luxuriant and romantic shores: that of the other is like some black unfathomable lake placed far ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... controverted this version as a "barefaced falsehood." He added: "I am sure he never touched me. I don't know why, for he is a much bigger man than I. My idea is that he was thoroughly cowed by the moral force of my attack. I had to turn him round in order to get at him. Then I cut him again and again as hard as I could, hissing out 'Hawk!' with each stroke. Oh, you can take my word for it, everything was done in the cleanest and most correct fashion ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... in the electorate every mature individual of brains, character, intelligence and love of country to perpetuate American traditions and the American idea of democracy. America today, facing the world problems of infinite difficulty and variety, needs every element of moral force and influence in the electorate which she can summon to her service, for it may be that our country will be called upon before the world to redeem the pledges made in behalf of democracy itself. The right of suffrage involves the question of justice; the exercise of suffrage raises it to ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... studious, and pious, Rabaut was firm, active, shrewd, and gentle. He stood strongly upon moral force. Once, when the Huguenots had become more than usually provoked by the persecutions practised on them, they determined to appear armed at the assemblies. Rabaut peremptorily forbade it. If they persevered, he would ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... ally; and it is to the lowering of this fire, rather than to the diminution of intellectual insight, that the lessening productiveness of men of science, in their mature years, is to be ascribed. Mr. Buckle sought to detach intellectual achievement from moral force. He gravely erred; for without moral force to whip it into action, the achievement of the intellect ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... continued consequence of action sustained at a high level. The public, however, saw more clearly. Power over the moral fibre of other natures is not given to those whose own nature is wanting in this moral force, and Mr. Gladstone's attitude on the Eastern Question, in spite of his contradictions and of his occasional running away from the consequences of his own acts, was appreciated with accuracy by that large section of the public which ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... Gerard that I want them now, though I would willingly serve him. I have need of some of these papers with respect to an ancient title, a claim to which by a person in whom I am interested they would substantiate. Now listen, good friend Morley; moral force is a fine thing especially in speculation, and so is a community of goods especially when a man has no property, but when you have lived as long as I have and have tasted of the world's delight, you'll comprehend the rapture of acquisition, and learn that it is generally secured by ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... are made to triumph, and Lars, dropping the sharp blade from his hand in the thronged arena whither he is forced once more, stands first as a laughing-stock, and then as an apostle, among his old neighbors. It is a position full of moral force, and we find ourselves—suddenly recovering in a degree from the calm view we had taken of the poem as a work of art—asking how we should be so sensible of the grandeur of the situation if the poet by his skill had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... sons, pointed fingers at me and laughed. "You are doomed," said they in matter-of-fact voices. I spent my days between determination to indulge myself, for the very purpose of testing my power in self-control, and the sickening relaxation of moral force that occurs from the mere deprivation of all hope of victory in the battle. The excuses of intemperance were never so clever as those I devised for my own satisfaction; the bald truth, that I had taught my body enjoyments which would never be shaken off before old age or infirmity had placed them ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... drawing-room and library to the hall, and turned the great keys in their polished locks. Then he stood by the garden entrance in the sheltered side-angle, through which we passed with our burdens, and defended that against invasion. There was now such an absolute order among ourselves that the moral force of it repressed the excitement without that might else have rushed ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... a task to test both muscular strength and moral force to their utmost. After her year's training Marcella took it simply in the day's work. Some hours of intense effort and strain; then she and the husband looked down upon the patient, a woman of about six-and-twenty, plunged suddenly in narcotic sleep, her matted black hair, which Marcella had not ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to school, and Jim, of course, Was e'er his teacher's favorite, and ranked Among the lads renowned for moral force, Whilst I was every day ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... moral force of the words, and the firmness of manner that marked Kathleen as she spoke, were immediately successful. The grief of the two girls was at once hushed; and, after a slight pause, Mrs. M'Mahon called Kathleen ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton |
