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More "Rectitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be given. It will be more consistent with those circumstances, and far more congenial with the feelings which actuate me, to substitute, in place of a recommendation of particular measures, the tribute that is due to the talents, the rectitude, and the patriotism which adorn the characters selected to devise and adopt them. In these honorable qualifications I behold the surest pledges that as on one side no local prejudices or attachments, no separate ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... way through this false opinion, we are in the next place to lay down positively what this image of God in man is. It is, in short, that universal rectitude of all the faculties of the soul, by which they stand apt and disposed to their respective offices and operations, which will be more fully set forth by taking a distinct survey of it in the several faculties ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... altogether out of key. Chartered tourists, they make free with historic localities, and rear their young among the most picturesque sites with a grand human indifference. To see them thronging by, in their neat clothes and conscious moral rectitude, and with a little air of possession that verges on the absurd, is not the least striking ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had watched the growing attachment between his brother-in-law and the girl, and thought of his vow. He realized that here was a way to bring vicarious suffering upon the man whose distinction had first roused his envy and whose rectitude had won his hatred. ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... is something wrong in his work; or, if he is too proud to think that, still the bribe of wealth and honour warps him from his honest labour into efforts to attract attention; and he gradually loses both his power of mind and his rectitude of purpose. This, according to the degree of avarice or ambition which exists in any painter's mind, is the necessary influence upon him of the hope of great wealth and reputation. But the harm is still greater, in so far as the possibility of attaining fortune of ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... which no detective is truly fit for his calling, moved him, so with the impatient impulse we so often witness when rectitude is about to subject itself to the persuasions of the evil one for the ostensible purpose of combating them and the private determination to yield, Gratz extended a trembling hand toward the Sepoy, ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... enough good to obliterate the memory of all the grief and shame that I have caused him to suffer. That is my story, Troubridge; and all that I will add to it is this: If ever you feel tempted to stray, though ever so slightly, from the path of rectitude, think of the man whom you once knew as George Gurney; and let his history serve as a warning to you. And now I will say good night; for we must ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... flower which the Proserpina of our Northern Sicily cherishes more dearly: and scarcely any of us recognize enough the beautiful power of its close-set stars, and rooted radiance of ground leaves; yet the stubbornness and ungraceful rectitude of its stem, and the besetting of its wholesome substance with that fringe of offence, and the forwardness of it, and dominance,—I fear to lacess some of my dearest friends if I went on:—let them rather, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... years. Mr. John, with his innate niggardliness, at once seized this opportunity for disembarrassing himself of an importunate beggar by saddling the county with him. He exalted "the worthy, excellent man" to the skies, and especially praised his rectitude, his sobriety, ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... this college," she said, "is almost perfect immunity from the bondage of rules. The principals of these halls have fully trusted the students who reside in them and relied on their honor, their rectitude, their sense of sound principle. Hitherto we have had no reason to complain that the spirit of absolute trust which we have shown has been abused; but the circumstance which has just occurred has given Miss Eccleston ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... double sense, one spiritual, individual, contingent, the other mechanical, common, absolute. Death, in its full Pauline force, includes inward guilt, condemnation, and misery, and outward descent into the under world. Life, in its full Pauline force, includes inward rectitude, peace, and joy, and outward ascent into the upper world. Holiness is necessary, "for without it no one can see the Lord;" yet by itself it can secure only inward life: it is ineffectual to win heaven. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... officer of Engineers who was stationed near the place, asked that the prisoner be allowed to wait in his tent. "Captain Hale entered," he says; "he was calm and bore himself with gentle dignity in the consciousness of rectitude and high intentions. He asked for writing materials, which I furnished him; he wrote two letters, one to his mother, and ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... spirit that we owe the mysteries lying buried in every human word? In the word True do we not discern a certain imaginary rectitude? Does not the compact brevity of its sound suggest a vague image of chaste nudity and the simplicity of Truth in all things? The syllable seems to me singularly ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... felt by the Venetians for the Church might save these towns from their aggressors; but, says Guicciardini, Julius II, whose ambition, so natural in sovereign rulers, had not yet extinguished the remains of rectitude, refused to accept the places, afraid of exposing himself to the temptation of keeping them later on, ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... her with astonishment. 'This child!'—he thought—'Has this child heroically persevered under all doubts and dangers, struggled with poverty and suffering, upheld and sustained by strong affection and the consciousness of rectitude alone! And yet the world is full of such heroism. Have I yet to learn that the hardest and best-borne trials are those which are never chronicled in any earthly record, and are suffered every day! And should I be surprised to hear the story of ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace; but warned, self-collected, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder; let him take both reputation and life in his hands, and with perfect urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech and rectitude of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... that Sarah should, by his own or her ingenuity, contrive to domicile herself in Jerry Sullivan's house for a few days previous to the execution of their design; not only for the purpose of using her influence, such as it was, to sway the young creature's mind and principles from the path of rectitude and virtue, by dwelling upon the luxury and grandeur of her future life with Henderson, whose intentions were to be represented as honorable, but, if necessary, to leave a free ingress to the house, so as that under any circumstances, ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... transmit one pitying ray, To lighten and to cheer. Oh, lead my mind, (A mind that fain would wander from its woe,) Lead it through various scenes of life and death, And from each scene the noblest truths inspire. Nor less inspire my conduct, than my song; Teach my best reason, reason; my best will Teach rectitude; and fix my firm resolve Wisdom to wed, and pay her long arrear; Nor let the phial of thy vengeance, pour'd On this devoted head, be pour'd ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... continued to discuss her future of rectitude and honor—his imagination reaching in a bound amazing heights. Why not be a trained nurse?—and have a hospital of her own, and gather about her, as assistants, girls who—"well, had had a tough time of it," he said, delicately. As he talked, fatigue at the boredom of ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... illustrious statesman, whose distinguished abilities had raised Great Britain to the highest pitch of renown, inspired the Americans with additional confidence in the rectitude of their claims of exemption from parliamentary taxation, and emboldened them to further opposition, when, at a future day, the project of an American revenue was resumed. After much debating, two protests in the House of Lords, and passing an act, "For securing the dependence of America on ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... scorn of shams; Wordsworth, who teaches the oneness of man and nature; I find an exquisite pleasure in the oddities and surprises of Hood, in Herrick's quaintness and the palpable scent of lily and rose in his verses; I like Whittier for his enthusiasms and moral rectitude. I knew him, and the gentle remembrance of our friendship doubles the pleasure I have in reading his poems. I love Mark Twain—who does not? The gods, too, loved him and put into his heart all manner of wisdom; then, fearing lest he should become a ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... birth of Christ. He was educated under the illustrious Theophrastus, from whom he learned philosophy and composition. While a brilliant genius directed him to comic poetry, his natural delicacy, his refined taste, his moral rectitude, and true philosophy controlled his fancy, imparted to his comedies a charm unknown before, and obtained for them the suffrage of the most enlightened, witty, and judicious men of his age, though for the same reason they ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... the letter, and be guided by her advice: but Charlotte had taken one step in the ways of imprudence; and when that is once done, there are always innumerable obstacles to prevent the erring person returning to the path of rectitude: yet these obstacles, however forcible they may appear in general, ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... depraved people as the phenomenon of a race of men in whose word perfect confidence may be placed[84].... The natives are conscious of their inferiority in nothing so much as in this. They require to be taught rectitude of conduct much ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... of horror. His mastery in this region is displayed in the creation of that dignified and beautiful woman, the Duchess of Malfi, who, with nothing in her nature, had she but lived prosperously, to divide her from the sisterhood of gentle ladies, walks, shrined in love and purity and conscious rectitude, amid the snares and pitfalls of her persecutors, to die at last the victim of a brother's fevered avarice and a desperado's egotistical ambition. The apparatus of infernal cruelty, the dead man's hand, the semblances of murdered sons and husband, the masque ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Victorious Souls." For there are triumphs every day under the drab monotony of an apparently defeated town: conquests worthy of the waving of sun-banners. Above all, The Yellow Jacket points a moral for this chapter because there was conscience behind it. First: the rectitude of the Chinese actors of San Francisco who kept the dramatic tradition alive, a tradition that was bequeathed from the ancient generations. Then the artistic integrity of the men who readapted the tradition for ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... "claim to release," but doubt whether he can establish it; inasmuch as St. Ivo or Evona, canonized on account of his great rectitude and profound knowledge both of civil and canon law, was both lawyer and churchman, like the CLERICUS so recently discussed in our columns; and clearly sought for and obtained his patron saint in his ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... and had returned to Ferrara, having committed the search for Cornelia to his care. The friends having told him what had brought them, Lorenzo assured them that the duke was perfectly convinced of their rectitude in the matter, adding, that they both attributed the flight of Cornelia to her great fear, but hoped, and did not doubt, that Heaven would permit her re-appearance before long, since it was certain ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... points. How admirable in its moral aspect is the character of Leatherstocking! he is ignorant, and of very moderate intellectual range or grasp; but what dignity, nay, even grandeur, is thrown around him from his noble moral qualities,—his undeviating rectitude, his disinterestedness, his heroism, his warm affections! No writer could have delineated such a character so well who had not an instinctive and unconscious sympathy with his intellectual offspring. Praise of the same kind belongs ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... disappointed by your uncompromising rectitude, friend Martin. We were, you see, greatly desirous of obtaining that envelope you had in your pocket. We had hoped to discover some weakness, some vice, in your composition—a fondness for drink, or for ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... what wrong he had done to bring this on himself, any more than he knew what he had done to provoke the horrible calumny about his treatment of poor Morrison. For he could not forget this. It had reached the ears of one who needed to have the most perfect confidence in the rectitude of his conduct. ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... Perfect truth in the midst of error; perfect love in the midst of ingratitude and coldness; perfect rectitude in the midst of perjury, violence, fraud; perfect constancy in the midst of contumely and desertion; perfect innocence, confronting every debased form of depravity and guilt; perfect patience, encountering every species of gross ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... through the resolute expostulations of his friends. Mme. Malibran instantly resigned for the benefit of her husband's creditors any claims which she might have made on the remnants of his estate, and her New York admirers had as much occasion to applaud the rectitude and honor of the woman as they had had the genius of the artist. Garcia himself, hampered by pecuniary difficulties, set sail for Mexico with his son and younger daughter, to retrieve his fortunes, while Maria remained ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... cannot be bribed are often timid, and afraid of offending bold knaves, lest they should raise a set of hornets about themselves. The fear of censure undermines all energy of character; and, labouring to be prudent, they lose sight of rectitude. Besides, nothing is left to their conscience, or sagacity; they must be governed by evidence, though internally convinced that it ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... what sort of Latin is found among dogs, may not have as good a right to standing-room as a low-bred quadruped with a tail like you.' Non usque adeo summis permiscuit ima longa dies, &c. We remember no instance which ever so powerfully illustrated the courage given by the consciousness of rectitude. So long as we felt that we were trespassing on the grounds of a stranger, we certainly sneaked, we seek not to deny it. But once landed on the high-road, where we knew our own title to be as good as the dog's, not all the world should ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... morality; no slavish, punctilious conforming of actions to a hard law. Religion is not right thinking alone, nor right emotion alone, nor right action alone. Religion is still less the semblance of these in formal profession, or simulated feeling, or apparent rectitude. Religion is not nominal connection with the Christian community, nor participation in its ordinances and its worship. But to be godly is to be godlike. The full accord of all the soul with His character, in whom, as their native home, dwell ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... all rectitude, on your side, John; and all impertinence, all inconsiderateness, on mine. I am so much convinced of your honour in the whole transaction, that I shall for the future mistrust myself in everything. And if it be possible, whenever I differ from you on any point I shall take an hour's ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... against God, they abandoned the eternal rule of rectitude, which is God's Will. Their passions, which heretofore had been under the control of reason, revolted against them, and their will was turned away from God. We, their children, have inherited all the consequences of their fall. ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... almost superstitious in obeying the Levitical laws and in practising the sad and rather gloomy symbolism of his faith. A famous Talmudist, a pillar of the synagogue, one of the two wardens of the Chevra in Brick Lane, and consequently a great upholder of moral rectitude. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... reasoning it has been objected that the President, by the influence of the power of nomination, may secure the complaisance of the Senate to his views. This supposition of universal venalty in human nature is little less an error in political reasoning, than the supposition of universal rectitude. The institution of delegated power implies, that there is a portion of virtue and honor among mankind, which may be a reasonable foundation of confidence; and experience justifies the theory. It has been ...
— The Federalist Papers
... do with these puerilities? At last Smithers went away foiled, and met Parkson by the entrance. Parkson, by-the-bye, had not spoken to Lewisham since their painful misunderstanding. He made a wide detour to his seat at the end table, and so, and by a singular rectitude of bearing and a dignified expression, showed himself ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... uprightness. The idea of straightness or evenness is the primary meaning of the word, and is, of course, appropriate to the image of a path. In the moral view, it suggests how much more simple and easy a course of rectitude is than one of sin. The one goes straight and unswerving to its end; the other is crooked, devious, intricate, and wanders from the true goal. A crooked road is a long road, and an up-and-down road is a tiring road. Wisdom's way is straight, level, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... is not without extreme sorrow I understand the deplorable situation, which a chain of misfortunes has reserved for you, the rest of my generals, and my whole army; but we must acquiesce in the dispensations of Providence, and console ourselves with the rectitude of our sentiments and intentions. They would force me, it seems, as you gave me to understand by major-general the baron de Dyherrn, to submit to conditions the more severe, in proportion as the circumstances become more necessitous. I cannot hear them mentioned. I ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... twin looked blandly over the wide expanse of lawn and flower beds and tenderly nursed shrubs, and then at the pile of red brick with its many windows under gay-striped awnings, and its surmounting white cupola, which he had often admired from afar. He glowed with rectitude. True, he suffered a brother lost to all sense of decent human values, but this could not dim the lustre of his own virtue or his pleasant suspicion that it was somehow going to be suitably rewarded. Was he not being ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... spent, while trembling on the threshold of literature, was with them at their pretty road-side cottage, in the village of Esher, before the death of their venerable and dearly-beloved mother, whose rectitude and prudence had both guided and sheltered their youth, and who lived to reap with them the harvest of their industry and exertion. We remember the drive there, and the anxiety as to how those very "clever ladies" would look, and what they would say; we talked over the various ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... town had been opposed to him. But he knew himself to be clever, and he still hoped that he might overcome these difficulties. Then it occurred to him that in doing this he must take care to have his wife entirely on his side. He did not doubt her love; he did not in the least doubt her rectitude;—but there was the lamentable fact that she thought well of Arthur Fletcher. It might be that he had been a little too imperious with his wife. It suited his disposition to be imperious within his own household;—to be imperious out of it, if that were possible;—but he was conscious ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance ...
— The Fathers of the Constitution - Volume 13 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Max Farrand
... hear; thirteen minutes must yet elapse. But she could not allow so horrible a thing to take place! In this stormy awakening of her rectitude she felt naught but a furious craving to prevent it. She must prevent it; otherwise she would be unable to live. In a state of frenzy she ran about ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... to dream that she is wearing a hood, is a sign she will attempt to allure some man from rectitude and ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... the first edition of his Grammar, S. 312-13.) But what is quite decisive is the fact that these two words, which occur with such extraordinary frequency, are never found in a physical, but always in a moral sense only. The only passage in which, according to Winer, [Hebrew: cdq] signifies "rectitude" in a physical sense, is Ps. xxiii. 3: [Hebrew: megli cdq] which, according to him, means: "Straight, right ways." But that verse runs thus: "He restoreth my soul, He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake." The ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... {14} Palissy did indeed die shortly after, a martyr, though not at the stake. He died in the Bastille, after enduring about a year's imprisonment,— there peacefully terminating a life distinguished for heroic labour, extraordinary endurance, inflexible rectitude, and the exhibition of many rare and ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... there in the forefront of this company, there was nothing in his refined and comely exterior to indicate that his real function was to pander to and flatter them; to invest with an air of respectability and rectitude the abominably selfish lives of the gang of swindlers, slave-drivers and petty tyrants who formed the majority of the congregation of ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... long before heard of the fall of Sam Yates from his early rectitude. They had once been proud of him, and when he left them for the city, they expected to hear great things of him. So when they learned that, after entering upon his profession with brilliant promise, he had ruined himself with drink, they bemoaned him for ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... definition of these lines, nor produce any very exact method of distinguishing the one from the other; yet this hinders us not from correcting the first appearance by a more accurate consideration, and by a comparison with some rule, of whose rectitude from repeated trials we have a greater assurance. And it is from these corrections, and by carrying on the same action of the mind, even when its reason fails us, that we form the loose idea of a perfect standard to these ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... consider the taking anything without leave, however worthless, as trivial," said she. "I have not been so brought up, and neither has my brother." She said this with an indescribable air of offended rectitude. She regarded him like a small, incarnate truth and honesty. Then she turned, and her brother was following with a reluctant backward pull at her leading hand, when suddenly he burst forth with ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... inevitably prevail unless their supporters can be driven away. This is an ingenious policy, for guns certainly cannot be served if the gunners are dispersed. Men shrink from ridicule and ludicrous publicity. However conscious of rectitude a man may be, it is exceedingly disagreeable for him to see the dead-walls and pavements covered with posters proclaiming that he is a liar and a fool. If he recoils, the enemy laughs in triumph; if he is indifferent, there ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... years and ten; one whom it has been the especial object of my endeavours to follow, in my own path through life—so long, I can have no wish to shrink from the situation in which I am placed; I can find no room for doubts or misgivings, as to the wisdom and rectitude of the course ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... idolized brother, and "a conscience void of offence," she could but be calmly happy, even though surrounded by circumstances which often jarred upon her pure and delicate nature, and which would have crushed one less conscious of future peace and present rectitude. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... despoiled of liberty and estate for their religious opinions. James, as a Catholic, had in some sort a common interest with his dissenting subjects, and the declaration was for their common relief. Penn, conscious of the rectitude of his own motives and thoroughly convinced of the Christian duty of toleration, welcomed that declaration as the precursor of the golden age of liberty and love and good-will to men. He was not the man to distrust the motives ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... ultra-intelligent electors had been polled as to which one man in all the town had done most to insure its position in the van of American progress; as to who best represented the community in the matter of liberal intelligence and ripe culture; as to who was most to be honored for steadfast rectitude and immaculate purity of life; as to who was its highest type of enlightened Christianity—an overwhelming if not unanimous vote would have been cast for Colonel ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... could properly be reproached with, was his concealing too long the bad news from the armies, either from flattering himself, or believing it to be necessary to flatter others. The English, with that admirable rectitude which distinguishes all their actions, publish as faithful an account of their reverses as they do of their victories, and enthusiasm is with them sustained by the truth, whatever that may be. The Russians cannot yet reach ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... was theirs. They rang true to every moral appeal. They were not only men of letters, but they were also gentlemen, and they have associated literature in the thought of the country with dignity, culture and beauty of life—Emerson's unworldliness, Lowell's loyalty to truth, and Curtis's splendid rectitude, as enduring as the granite, are of lasting value to the higher life ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... guaranteeing to its humblest citizen his just right to life, liberty, protection from injustice, the enjoyment of the fruits of his own labor and the pursuit of happiness in his own way, as long as he walks in the path of rectitude and duty and does not trespass upon the rights ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognised; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day—as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things; because I think no commentator on his writings has yet found the comparison that suits him, the terms which rightly characterise his talent. They say he is like Fielding: they talk of his wit, humour, comic powers. He ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... steel-strong rectitude of soul And poverty sublime 'mid circling virtues! The giant victories, my counsels form'd, Shall stalk around me with sun-glittering plumes, Bidding the darts ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Frankfort a portrait in delicate pencilling of a young girl of about eighteen; the hair is in close curls all round the head, the necklace is marked with utmost detail. Perhaps I have not laid sufficient stress on the truth and rectitude of Overbeck's work, as seen, for instance, in the Head of an Old Monk among the drawings of the National Gallery, Berlin. This is so close to nature that a deformity in one ear has been conscientiously ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... nation, the governor of the State, the mayor of this city, and the president of this exposition, with all their associations. God of our fathers, give unto us all that sincerity of purpose, that rectitude of action so necessary for the preservation of our rights and privileges. Make us the toiling means for promulgating for Thee, and ever more successfully, the divine message of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and to Thee, the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, shall be ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... usurpation which threatened the Government at an earlier period; if the Union is to become powerless for the purposes for which it was established, and we are vainly to appeal to it for protection—then, sir, conscious of the rectitude of our course, and self-reliant within ourselves, we look beyond the confines of the Union for ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... call me unmaidenly, more than indiscreet, and will say that I have been ready to throw myself into the arms of the first stranger I have met; but what care I for this little world of Shetland? I stand on my own rectitude. I shall be far away, and can afford to despise all such insinuations. But the greatest doubt Bertha, in her over-anxious love, has raised up before me, is that regarding Hernan himself. Still I feel sure that he is all that is honourable and noble. ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... he held them subdued and over-mastered, the fabric of their scheme of corruption and dishonesty trembled to its base. It was the last protest of the Old School, rising up there in denunciation of the new order of things, the statesman opposed to the politician; honesty, rectitude, uncompromising integrity, prevailing for the last time against the devious manoeuvring, the evil communications, the rotten ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... his grandfather, with whom Fox once quarrelled, and whom Burke loved. Plantagenet Palliser, himself the heir to a dukedom, was the young Chancellor of the Exchequer, of whom some statesmen thought much as the rising star of the age. If industry, rectitude of purpose, and a certain clearness of intellect may prevail, Planty Pall, as he is familiarly called, may ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... interesting study—the most interesting in the world. The genuineness of the courtesy, the real kindness and the hospitality of the English are beyond praise and without limit. In this they show a strange contradiction to their dickering habits in trade and their "unctuous rectitude" in stealing continents. I know a place in the world now where they are steadily moving their boundary line into other people's territory. I guess they really believe that the earth belongs ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... was a natural sovereign in the sphere in which she moved, and impressed her son with the qualities which made his Anti-slavery life nothing but an expression of the rules of conduct which governed him in all other particulars. Believing in his inmost soul in principles of rectitude, all men believed in him, his "yea," or "nay," passing current wherever he went. Tall, dignified, and commanding, he had that in his face which inspired immediate confidence. Said one who looked: "If that is not a good man, there is no use in the Lord writing His signature on human countenances." ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... Condition he appears in, it still sits free and easie upon him; but in some Part of his Character, 'tis true, he differs from him; for as he is altogether equal to the Largeness of his present Circumstances, the Rectitude of his Judgment has so far corrected the Inclinations of his Ambition, that he will not trouble himself with either the Desires or Pursuits of any ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... basin brought in at dinner, and would cut the best slice to tempt the invalid appetite. Money she rarely, if ever, gave, but she would find a day's work, or busy herself to seek permanent employment for any one seeking aid. Stern in rectitude herself, and iron to the fawning or the dishonest, her influence, whether she was feared or loved, was always for good. Of the strictest sect of the Evangelicals, she was an Evangelical. On the Sunday no books were allowed ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... Sensation, is that there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses. The Transcendentalist claimed an intuitive knowledge of God, belief in immortality, and in man's ability to apprehend absolute ideas of truth, justice, and rectitude. The one regarded expediency, prudence, caution, and practical wisdom as the highest of the virtues, and distrusted alike the seer, the prophet, and the reformer. The other was by nature a reformer and dissatisfied with men as they are, but with ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... No rectitude of intention will save us from mistakes. Sympathies and antipathies are but synonyms of prejudice, and indifference is impossible. Love is blind, and so is every other passion; love believes eagerly what it desires; it excuses or passes lightly over blemishes, it dwells on what is beautiful, while ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... attempt was making to render him odious to the populace, he had the courage (some might say, the rashness) to proceed to Paris, and present himself to the bar of the National Assembly. Few men, in such a situation, would have thus hazarded their lives; but he was strong in conscious rectitude. He appeared before his enemies with dignity and firmness. "He entreated the assembly to come forward and save the country from ruin, by dissolving the factious clubs and inflicting exemplary punishment on the authors of the late disgraceful riots." ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... Titian and a Lancashire cotton mill, then, in the name of manhood and of morality, give us the cotton mill. Only the dilettantism of the studio; that dilettantism which loosens the moral no less than the intellectual fibre, and which is as fatal to rectitude of action as to correctness of reasoning power, would make a ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... should do that unless one has something better to offer," Longmore returned. "And yet I'm haunted by the dream of a life in which you should have found no compromises, for they're a perversion of natures that tend only to goodness and rectitude. As I see it you should have found happiness serene, profound, complete; a femme de chambre not a jewel perhaps, but warranted to tell but one fib a day; a society possibly rather provincial, but—in spite of your poor opinion of mankind—a ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... obscenity would have been odious to them, and the inducement to it infinitely smaller."[58] There is no trace in Diderot of this deep contempt for the viciousness of his time. All that can be said is that he did not escape it in his earlier years, in spite of the natural wholesomeness and rectitude of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... degree of perfection of his beatitude; and for the perfection of beatitude it is required that a man "should have whatever he wants, and should desire nothing in an inordinate fashion."[271] Each one, however, rightly desires to know those things which concern himself. Hence, since no rectitude is lacking to the Saints, they wish to know those things which concern themselves, and consequently they must know them in the Word. But it belongs to their glory that they should be able to help on the salvation of those who need it, ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... incidentals to her "affair;" weighed in the scale of his impartial judgment no more than would unconsidered dust. For the first time in the life to which he had been the guiding-star, she ventured to wonder if the unswerving rectitude that had elevated him above the level of other men, in her esteem and affection, were so glorious a thing after all; if a tempering, not of human frailty, but of charity for the shortcomings, sympathy for the needs, of ordinary mortals, would not subdue the effulgence ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... appropriate their labors or usurp their honors, but that I might spare perpetual repetition by one general acknowledgment. Of these, whom I ought not to mention but with the reverence due to instructors and benefactors, Junius appears to have excelled in extent of learning, and Skinner in rectitude of understanding. Junius was accurately skilled in all the northern languages, Skinner probably examined the ancient and remoter dialects only by occasional inspection into dictionaries; but the learning ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... had been sent for and was coming in as a witness in Captain Devers's court startled her inexpressibly, despite her conscious rectitude. She told Willett that very evening, as they were driving slowly among the willow-wooded islands, and he looked imploringly into her eyes, and Mrs. Flight and Mr. Burtis on the back seat could see that he was talking eagerly, earnestly, pleadingly, and that ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... incline the hearts of our people unto Him that He will not leave us nor forsake us as a nation, but will continue to us His mercy and protecting care, guiding us in the path of national prosperity and happiness, enduing us with rectitude and virtue, and keeping alive within us a patriotic love for the free institutions which have been given to us as ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... necessary that a prince should be moral, humane, religious, or just; indeed, that if he had these qualities and displayed them they would harm him, but if he were new to his place in the principality he might seem to have them. It would be as useful to him to keep the path of rectitude when this was not too inconvenient as to know how to deviate from it when circumstances dictate. In other words, a prudent prince cannot and ought not really to keep his word except when he can do it without injury ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... what she was—an exuberant, gluttonous dame, with volcanic eyes, heavy golden bracelets, the soupcon of a moustache, and arms as thick as other people's thighs; an altogether impossible person. Nobody but a man of genuine refinement, scrupulous rectitude, delicate sense of honour and kindly disposition would have risked being seen in the same street with such a horror; nobody but a real gentleman could have fallen in love with her. Mr. Eames ran after ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... it down for her to trample it; he caught it back ere it was trodden on. Yes; he had pride: he had it as a dagger in his breast: his pride was his misery. But he was too proud to submit to misery. "What I do is right." He said the words, and rectitude smoothed his path, till the question clamoured for answer: Would the world countenance and endorse his pride in Laetitia? At one time, yes. And now? Clara's beauty ascended, laid a beam on him. We are on board the labouring vessel of humanity in a storm, when cries and countercries ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... another line of argument, proceeding from the assumed "rectitude of human nature," that the Unitarians came, tardily and hesitatingly, to the Universalist position. The long persistence of definite boundary lines between two bodies so nearly alike in their tenets ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... return to witness the innocent happiness of Daphne, and I spent the rest of the afternoon in trying to soothe the agitation of Daphne's mother; listening to her tirades against her suddenly masterful son, hearing her protestations of faith in the rectitude of Jack Marston, alternating with her outbursts of anger and grief at ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... that is called the marriage of good and truth, that is, of love and wisdom. Any one can comprehend intellectually and see rationally, that so far as he flees from and turns away from theft and cheating, so far he loves sincerity, rectitude and justice; so far as he flees and turns away from revenge and hatred, so far he loves the neighbor; and so far as he flees and turns away from adulteries, so far he loves chastity; and so on. And yet scarcely any one knows what there is of heaven and the Lord ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... more than half an hour. What they had talked about it concerns us not to know. We take them as we find them, each leaning back in his chair, confirmed in the opinion that he had maintained, convinced only of his opponent's ability and rectitude of purpose, and enjoying the gradual subsidence of the excitement that accompanies the friendliest intellectual strife as surely as it does the gloved set-tos between those two "talented professors of the noble science of self-defence" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn Of miserable aims that end with self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge ...
— O May I Join the Choir Invisible! - and Other Favorite Poems • George Eliot
... course, the doctor never for one moment thought of his respected friend as the author of a deed of violence, and quite believed his account of the meeting with Jentham. The bishop's simple way of relating the episode would have convinced any liberal-minded man of his innocence and rectitude. His accents, and looks, ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... killed. Snooks does not any more think it gentlemanlike to blackball attorneys. Snuffler no longer publicly spreads out his great red cotton pocket-handkerchief before the fire, for the admiration of two hundred gentlemen; and if one Club Snob has been brought back to the paths of rectitude, and if one poor John has been spared a journey or a scolding—say, friends and brethren if these sketches of Club Snobs have ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... far from being agreed on the application of the term luxury, or on that degree of its meaning which is consistent with national prosperity, or with the moral rectitude of our nature. It is sometimes employed to signify a manner of life which we think necessary to civilization, and even to happiness. It is, in our panegyric of polished ages, the parent of arts, the support of commerce, and the minister of national greatness, and of opulence. It is, ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... supposition is not in harmony with what little is known of him from other sources; and John Putnam's conduct at the meeting described proves that his mind was fully perverted, and bereft as it were of all moral rectitude of judgment, in reference to Mr. Burroughs. We must part with Mr. Burroughs for the present. We shall meet him again, where the powers of malignity will be more shamelessly let loose upon him, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... same combination of natural sagacity with acquired information; of pictorial eye with dramatic effect; of observation of character with reflection and feeling; of graphic power with poetic fervour; of ardour of imagination with rectitude of principle; of warlike enthusiasm with pacific tenderness, which have rendered the Grecian bard immortal. It is in his novels, however, more than his poetry, that this resemblance appears; the author of Waverley more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... was now in a state of the utmost confusion. The rectitude of her heart and the soundness of her judgment had hitherto guarded her both from error and blame, and, except during her recent suspence, had preserved her tranquility inviolate: but her commerce with the world had been small and confined, and her actions had had little ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... September, under cover of night, an armed force shouting "Hurrah! Washington!" overpowered the garrison of the fort at Baton Rouge, and three days later the convention declared the independence of West Florida, "appealing to the Supreme Ruler of the World" for the rectitude of their intentions. What their intentions were is clear enough. Before the ink was dry on their declaration of independence, they wrote to the Administration at Washington, asking for the immediate incorporation of West Florida into the Union. Here was the blessed consummation ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... rectitude—everything was urging Juliette to close her ears to the words of love, spoken by the man whom she had betrayed. But who shall blame her for listening to the sweetest sound the ears of a woman can ever hear—the sound of the ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... was so equable, so gentle! There was never a trace of harshness in his treatment of us. Indeed, it was only in his unfailing rectitude that he surpassed us, for, our senior although he was, he could barely keep up in our classes. Harry was the quickest of the three, but with a mortal hatred of hard study: he had an easy capacity for mastering knowledge without tedious assiduity; and, as he was resolved to be a painter, he held ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... sun never sets, the Bible that had blown Indian mutineers from its muzzle in the 'fifties and was prepared to-day to have a shot at any other mutineers, Teuton or Turk, who dared to dispute its claim that the meek shall inherit the earth. The unctuous rectitude that converts the word of God into wadding for a gun is certainly a formidable opponent, as Cromwell proved. To challenge English supremacy becomes not merely a threat to peace, it is an act of sacrilege. And yet this world-wide ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... man himself. The situation is such as is described by Goethe, when he speaks of the two souls dwelling within the human breast; the soul itself in its own sphere being divided against itself. The man is conscious of rectitude in one part of his conduct, of magnanimous impulses, of high and noble aspirations. He feels himself allied on one side to what is best and purest, and at the same time is aware of another side which ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... the teachers of morality as well as of religion. Of their ethical teaching a valuable specimen is preserved in the Triads of the Welsh Bards, and from this we may gather that their views of moral rectitude were on the whole just, and that they held and inculcated many very noble and valuable principles of conduct. They were also the men of science and learning of their age and people. Whether they were acquainted with letters or not has been disputed, though the probability ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... we shall do our duty well if we constantly guard the rectitude of our intentions, maintain unsullied our love of country, and with unselfish purpose strive for the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... He acted under the advice of Jefferson, who sought to destroy Washington; and the present Secretary Randolph is a grandson of Jefferson. Washington, the inflexible patriot, frowned indignantly upon every departure from the path of rectitude. ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... this reason, and for this reason alone, that, my suspicions fully aroused, I have been at some pains to verify them. A heart conscious of its moral rectitude does not flinch from the duty before it or from the pain which, unfortunately, the execution of that duty so often inflicts ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... without conceiving the highest idea of the author's probity, whoever he may have been—without desiring to have had him for a friend, to have lived with him, and, in a word, without rendering justice to the rectitude of his intentions, even when we do not approve of his sentiments. The love of virtue, universal benevolence, respect to the laws, an inviolable attachment to the duties of morality, and, in fine, ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... she had had her snooze. By-and-by she would attack her cream, being partial to that beverage; but for the present she would slumber on, a creature without care, without fear; a gentle, admirable kitchen cat. She brought up her families when they arrived with all a mother's rectitude and propriety, and when they were old enough to leave her, got rid of them as quickly as possible—which means that she took no further notice of them. She regarded them no longer as hers; they were cats, ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... She, too, had heard of public censors, of the girl of the period, and of the forward indelicacy with which women of the age were charged. She knew not why, but it seemed to her that the laws of the world around her demanded more of such rectitude from a woman than from a man, and, if it might be possible to her, she would comply with these laws. She had convinced herself, forming her judgment from every tone of his voice, from every glance of his ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... axiom; on the contrary, that material prosperity without an offset, diminishes the capacity for happiness and debases character, is a fact which a thousand examples are at hand to prove. The worth of a civilization is the worth of the man at its center. When this man lacks moral rectitude, progress only makes bad worse, ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... She was thankful for the opportunity of expressing her high admiration of a writer, whom, as she says, she regarded "as the social regenerator of his day—as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped state of things. . . . His wit is bright, his humour attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius, that the mere lambent sheet-lightning, playing under the edge of the summer cloud, does to the electric death-spark ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... HUNTER, pink of parlour-maids, not the conventional flirty soubrette nor the low-comedy waiting-woman, but a self-respecting, responsible young person, conscious of her own and her young man's moral rectitude, and satisfied with quarter-day ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... Talleyrand, are master-pieces, full of life and expression. But nothing in the book has interested us more than the view which M. Dumont has presented to us, unostentatiously, and, we may say, unconsciously, of his own character. The sturdy rectitude, the large charity, the good-nature, the modesty, the independent spirit, the ardent philanthropy, the unaffected indifference to money and to fame, make up a character which, while it has nothing unnatural, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... The evidence of that love, as shown in Darrow's letter, filled her with a vain compunction. The very extravagance of his offer lent it a deeper pathos. It was wonderful that, even in the urgency of affection, a man of his almost morbid rectitude should have overlooked the restrictions of professional honour, should have implied the possibility of his friend's overlooking them. It seemed to make his sacrifice the more complete that it had, unconsciously, taken the ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... fat faces, which ever and ever protested against his own martyrlike scragginess and sallow, discontented visage. To him the markets were like the stomach of the shopkeeping classes, the stomach of all the folks of average rectitude puffing itself out, rejoicing, glistening in the sunshine, and declaring that everything was for the best, since peaceable people had never before grown so beautifully fat. As these thoughts passed through his mind Florent clenched his fists, and felt ready for a struggle, more ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... said, 'I have endeavoured to teach you, from your earliest youth, the duty of self-command; I have pointed out to you the great importance of it through life, not only as it preserves us in the various and dangerous temptations that call us from rectitude and virtue, but as it limits the indulgences which are termed virtuous, yet which, extended beyond a certain boundary, are vicious, for their consequence is evil. All excess is vicious; even that sorrow, which is amiable in its origin, becomes a selfish and unjust passion, if indulged ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... and bodily derangement is attributable in part to other deviations from rectitude and nature than those which concern diet. The mistakes cherished by society respecting the connection of the sexes, whence the misery and diseases of celibacy, unenjoying prostitution, and the ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... had not lost all faith in his own fearlessness and rectitude of motive, but he was obliged to acknowledge to himself that just then he was a rather ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... question were soon to open at Washington Park, on the South Side, and were considered quite society affairs among those who did not affect religious rectitude and conservatism. Mrs. Hurstwood had never asked for a whole season ticket before, but this year certain considerations decided her to get a box. For one thing, one of her neighbours, a certain Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey, who were possessors of money, made ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... never would I commit any act unworthy of myself, and for which I would have to blush. It is possible that not only my father but the whole world would pronounce me guilty if it knew my love; but, believe me, that in the consciousness of my rectitude I would have the courage to brave the verdict of the whole world, provided that my own heart acquitted me, and that I am guilty of no other crime than this accidental one, which fate, and not my own will and trespass, imposes on me. Love allows itself neither to be given nor ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... "a good tree." We must not look for truth from an untrue soul. If the bullet-mould is deformed, all the bullets will share its deformity. First get the mould right, and every bullet will share its rectitude. When the soul is "true," all our words, and deeds, and gestures will be "of the truth," and will be true indeed. "Make the ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... No considerations of rectitude or of policy could longer restrain the impetuous monarch from casting off the yoke of a detested marriage: and as a first step towards emancipation, he determined to permit the ruin of its original adviser, that unpopular minister, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... harmony, and proportion, if there should ever be, as it is impossible there ever should be, any inconsistence between them, though these last, too, as expressing the fitness of actions, are real as truth itself. Let it be allowed, though virtue or moral rectitude does indeed consist in affection to and pursuit of what is right and good, as such, yet, that when we sit down in a cool hour, we can neither justify to ourselves this or any other pursuit, till we are ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... of being. Mortal mind is constantly producing on mortal body the results of false 403:18 opinions; and it will continue to do so, until mortal error is deprived of its imaginary powers by Truth, which sweeps away the gossamer web of mortal illusion. 403:21 The most Christian state is one of rectitude and spir- itual understanding, and this is best adapted for heal- ing the sick. Never conjure up some new discovery from 403:24 dark forebodings regarding disease and then acquaint your patient ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... serious, practical-minded man of five and thirty, with great powers of advice. He was the up-line ticket clerk at Easewood Junction, and felt the responsibilities of his position. He was naturally thoughtful and reserved, and greatly sustained in that by an innate rectitude of body and an overhanging and forward inclination of the upper part of his face and head. He was pale but freckled, and his dark grey eyes were deeply set. His lightest interest was cricket, but he did not take that ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... riches of Leonard Jasper taking to themselves wings. Unhappy man! How wretched was he during that and many succeeding days! Rolling, so to speak, in wealth, he yet possessed not life's highest blessing, a truly contented mind, flowing from conscious rectitude and an abiding trust in Providence. Without these, how poor is even he who counts his millions! With them, how rich is the humble toiler, who, receiving day by day his daily bread, looks ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... States as a neutral nation, the wisdom of the National Legislature will be again summoned to the important decision on the alternatives before them. That these will be met in a spirit worthy the councils of a nation conscious both of its rectitude and of its rights, and careful as well of its honor as of its peace, I have an entire confidence; and that the result will be stamped by a unanimity becoming the occasion, and be supported by every portion of our citizens with a patriotism enlightened and invigorated by experience, ought ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Madison • James Madison
... intellect, and he continued from his bed of suffering to prepare the reports for the Council-General of Mines, and that which recently he addressed to the Academy on the occasion of his election. The greatness and the rectitude of mind of Delesse, his astounding power of work, his profound knowledge of science, his sympathetic sweetness, which were associated with sterling modesty and loyalty of character, made him esteemed ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... than he could have expected on board the Proserpine. Lord Cochrane, however, preferred to accept Admiral Heyden's more generous invitation. "It is gratifying," he said in a letter to Dr. Grosse on the 18th of December,[13] "that even the authority to which wicked men refer in proof of the rectitude of evil deeds fails to sanction infamous conduct. Alas! if Capodistrias suffers—and he seems not inclined to oppose—I say, if he suffers the base intrigues of the Phanar to be introduced as the means of ruling a nation, Greece must fall back, if not into a darker state, ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... certain that your Majesty will not deem him too presuming if he expresses his fear that this decision will be both painful and embarrassing to your Majesty, but your Majesty will meet this crisis with that firmness which belongs to your character, and with that rectitude and sincerity which will carry your Majesty through all difficulties. It will also be greatly painful to Lord Melbourne to quit the service of a Mistress who has treated him with such unvarying kindness and unlimited confidence; ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... probably have been cured long ago. But each generation, while freely confessing the sins of its fathers, has protested its own innocence and boasted of its own achievements, and then, with a pharisaic sense of rectitude, has complacently pointed to some inscrutable flaw in the Irish character as the key to the Irish problem. The generation which passed the Act of Union, oblivious of British pledges solemnly given and lightly broken, ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... is her own pure and native lustre. Measures never lose any thing of their firmness by their moderation. They win their way as much by the candor and kindness with which they are conducted, as by their intrinsic rectitude. ...
— Celebration in Baltimore of the Triumph of Liberty in France • William Wirt
... fully represented the greatness of the house of Kuru, the virtuous principles of Gandhari, the wisdom of Vidura, and the constancy of Kunti. The noble Rishi hath also described the divinity of Vasudeva, the rectitude of the sons of Pandu, and the evil practices of the sons and partisans ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... was actually under a kind of obligation not to force on him the knowledge of a fact that he could not alter and could not completely judge.... Was there any flaw in this line of reasoning? Did it not show a deliberate weighing of conditions, a perfect rectitude of intention? And, after all, she had had Amherst's virtual consent to her act! She knew his feelings on such matters—his independence of traditional judgments, his horror of inflicting needless ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... dignity, serene and calm, Wearing a careless cheerfulness—unschooled In all the trained restraints of conduct, far Removed from boldness and timidity, With firm, heroic step, she walks along The narrow middle path of rectitude, Unconscious of the worship she compels, Where she of self-approval never dreamed. Say, does my Carlos in this mirror trace The features of his Eboli? The princess Was constant while she loved; love was the price, The understood condition of her virtue. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... every word of disloyalty spoken to the parent. And I hold it to be highly disloyal for my son to accuse me of making sport of his hopes. I have not come to my latest determination from cruelty or caprice; I have made it in the strength of my maternal love to shield my child from sin, and in the rectitude of my imperial responsibility to my people, who have a right to claim from me that I bestow upon them a monarch who is worthy to reign over Austria. Therefore, my son, as empress and mother, I say that you shall remain. That is ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... reply, because none of them ever admit the least doubt of the rectitude of their own individual creed, that there can be no proportion between these idols and mortals, who are the work of their hands; that it is not permitted to the clay to demand of the potter who has formed it, "why ye have ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... herself with an air of studied negligence upon one part of the sofa. I felt the awkwardness of my position duly increased, as her house, dress, and manner, convinced me that she was not yet subdued to hers; but a conscious rectitude of intention carried me forward, and lightened ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... character who comes out best is Pilate. He is a noble Roman, whose impartiality and rectitude, coupled with an anxious desire to take the line of least resistance and find out some practical middle course, is worthy of that imperial race to whose vices, as well as to many of their virtues, we English have succeeded. ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... To entire rectitude of principle, amiability of manners, and kindliness of heart, Anne Barnard added the more substantial, and, in females, the more uncommon quality of eminent devotedness to intellectual labour. Literature had been her favourite pursuit from childhood, and even ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... resistance from those of Pennsylvania and South Carolina, and in spite of the abstention of those of New York, of a Declaration of Independence. "We," ran its solemn words, "the representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, solemnly publish and declare that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, Free ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... fill our deficit I am haunted by the thought that you may blame me; I know how I despised your remonstrances. O, Loudon, don't be hard on your miserable partner. The funny dog business is what kills. I fear your stern rectitude of mind like the eye of God. I cannot think but what some of my books seem mixed up; otherwise, I don't seem to see my way as plain as I could wish to. Or else my brain is gone soft. Loudon, if there should be any unpleasantness ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... then. 'Tis small enough Return for help bestowed Say "Thank you!" You would spurn to slight The smallest debt you owed; But is not this a debt?—Ah, more! And honor, if true blue Your loyal heart of rectitude, Impels ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... son of K'ang Hsi came to the throne under the year-title of Yung Cheng (harmonious rectitude). He was confronted with serious difficulties from the very first. Dissatisfaction prevailed among his numerous brothers, at least one of whom may have felt that he had a better claim to rule than his junior in the family. This feeling ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... Mr. Spencer we attempt no exposition. His attitude towards theology is to us more satisfactory than that of any recent thinker of the first class. But whatever his conclusions, every true man will respect and encourage that rectitude of mind which follows the issues of its reasoning at any cost. It was not the philosopher in his brain, but the fool in his heart, who said, "There is no God." It is of little matter what inappropriate name narrow people may have chosen for Mr. Spencer. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... and broadcast as lawless art. The order of inflection that is not infraction has been explained in a most authoritative sentence of criticism of literature, a sentence that should save the world the trouble of some of its futile, violent, and weak experiments: "Law, the rectitude of humanity," says Mr Coventry Patmore, "should be the poet's only subject, as, from time immemorial, it has been the subject of true art, though many a true artist has done the Muse's will and knew it not. As all the music of verse ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... of Collins, in his affecting apology for that unfortunate genius, remarks, "That the gifts of imagination bring the heaviest task on the vigilance of reason; and to bear those faculties with unerring rectitude, or invariable propriety, requires a degree of firmness, and of cool attention, which does not always attend the higher gifts of the mind; yet difficult as Nature herself seems to have rendered the task of regularity to genius, it is the ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... more I had reason to admire her. Her mind seemed to unfold leaf by leaf, and every time to discover new sweetness. Nobody knew her so well as I, for she was generally timid and silent; but I in a manner studied her excellence. Never did I meet with more intuitive rectitude of mind, more native delicacy, more exquisite propriety in word, thought, and action, than in this young creature. I am not exaggerating; what I say was acknowledged by all who knew her. Her brilliant ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... highest service to society, and for a mere brief season of temperamental outbreak or obstreperousness exposes them to all the infamy to which ignorant and cruel public opinion condemns all those who have once been detected on the wrong side of the invisible and arbitrary line of rectitude. The heart of criminal psychology is here; and not only that, but I would conclude with a most earnest personal protest against the current methods of teaching and studying ethics in our academic institutions as a speculative, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... some great ways from those they lived amongst; but hitherto this very oddness of his had seemed to her an outgrowth on the side of superiority—fairer judgment, higher motives. Just as she had always looked up to him as rectitude in person, so she had thought him the embodiment of a fine, though somewhat unworldly wisdom. Now her faith in his discernment was shaken. His treatment of her on the night of the ball had shocked, confused her. She ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... a while she resolutely broke away from the petty business of weighing the right and the wrong against each other; she was bold enough to term it petty business in her thoughts and realized fully, when she did so, that her Vose-Mern occupation had damaged her natural rectitude ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission. Your own mind has the power to transmute every external phenomenon to its own purposes. If happiness arises from cheerfulness, kindliness, and rectitude (and who will deny it?), what possible combination of circumstances is going to make you unhappy so long as the machine remains in order? If self-development consists in the utilisation of one's environment (not utilisation of somebody else's ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... contrast, and yet the harmony between them was complete; and one of the happiest days we ever spent, while trembling on the threshold of literature, was with them at their pretty road-side cottage, in the village of Esher, before the death of their venerable and dearly-beloved mother, whose rectitude and prudence had both guided and sheltered their youth, and who lived to reap with them the harvest of their industry and exertion. We remember the drive there, and the anxiety as to how those very "clever ladies" ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... improper language and from the pulpit," had incited the native headmen to set aside his authority. The author of the circular sarcastically added the pregnant remark, that he was penetrated with the conviction that the Archbishop's sense of patriotism and rectitude would deter him from subverting the law. This incident seriously aroused the jealousy of the friars holding vicarages, and did not improve the ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... magnitude that the Home ministers wisely imposed restrictions upon the Land Council of Upper Canada. These, however, have by no means removed the evil; and a system of patronage and favouritism, in the disposal of the Crown Lands, still exists; altogether destructive of moral rectitude and virtuous feeling in the management of public affairs. Corruption, indeed, has reached such a height in this Province that it is thought no other part of the British Empire witnesses the like, and it is vain to look for improvement until ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn Of miserable aims that end with self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge ...
— O May I Join the Choir Invisible! - and Other Favorite Poems • George Eliot
... remain after rational criticism has done its utmost against the evidences of religion are well worth preserving, and what they lack in direct strength as compared with those of a firmer belief is more than compensated by the greater truth and rectitude of the morality they sanction." The confession of these last few lines refutes the whole of Mr. Mill's elaborate argument on the worthlessness and immorality of that religion which from his grave he lifts his sad and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... lords, were foreseen and allowed by the ministry to be specious, and, therefore, they determined to avoid them by pursuing their schemes at their own hazard, without any other security than the consciousness of the rectitude of their own designs; and to trust to the equity of the senate when they should be laid before them, at a time when part of their effects might be discovered, and when, therefore, no false representations could be used to mislead their judgment. They knew the zeal of the commons ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... earnestly for more than half an hour. What they had talked about it concerns us not to know. We take them as we find them, each leaning back in his chair, confirmed in the opinion that he had maintained, convinced only of his opponent's ability and rectitude of purpose, and enjoying the gradual subsidence of the excitement that accompanies the friendliest intellectual strife as surely as it does the gloved set-tos between those two "talented professors of the noble science of self-defence" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... not a man of absolute rectitude. He was not so much high-minded as large-hearted. He had, besides, certain foibles. In the first place, he was vain, and vanity in a very plain man is all the more acute since it centres in his capabilities, rather than in his appearance. Had ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... this change of opinion was one of deep humility and exquisite pain. He bethought him of Jasper's youth, his higher claims to personal appearance, and all the general probabilities that such a suitor would be more agreeable to Mabel than he could possibly be himself. Then the noble rectitude of mind, for which the man was so distinguished, asserted its power; it was sustained by his rebuked manner of thinking of himself, and all that habitual deference for the rights and feelings of others which appeared to be inbred in his very nature. Taking the arm of Jasper, he ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... wounded your characteristically haughty, shrinking, and Sclavic susceptibilities in rendering so public a tribute to your artistic skill, forgive me! The high moral worth and manly rectitude which distinguish you, and which alone render even the most sublime genius truly illustrious in the eyes of woman, almost force these inadequate and imperfect words from the heart ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... the wisdom of the National Legislature will be again summoned to the important decision on the alternatives before them. That these will be met in a spirit worthy the councils of a nation conscious both of its rectitude and of its rights, and careful as well of its honor as of its peace, I have an entire confidence; and that the result will be stamped by a unanimity becoming the occasion, and be supported by every portion of our citizens with a patriotism enlightened and invigorated ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Madison • James Madison
... prejudice the lofty paternal attitude he had taken towards his daughters from the beginning of his good fortune. He was never quite sure if her acceptance of it was real; he was never entirely free from a certain jealousy that always mingled with his pride in her superior rectitude; and yet his feeling was distinct from the good-natured contempt he had for his wife's loyalty, the anger and suspicion that his son's opposition had provoked, and the half-affectionate toleration he had felt for Euphemia's waywardness. However he would sound Clementina ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... another group there is another elderly lady to be liked without a shadow of misgiving; abrupt, angular, extravagant, but the very soul of magnanimity and rectitude; a character thoroughly made out in all its parts; a gnarled and knotted piece of female timber, sound to the core; a woman Captain Shandy would have loved for her startling oddities, and who is linked to the gentlest of her sex by perfect womanhood. Dickens has done ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... numberless dreadful acts. But these latter he dismissed as being disagreeable and unavoidable accompaniments of war. He simply accepted things as he found them, and, not being addicted to very close reasoning, did not trouble himself much as to the rectitude or wisdom of war in the abstract. Neither did he distinguish between righteous and unrighteous war—war of self-defence and war of aggression. Sufficient for him that he served his country faithfully. This ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... murderer hung or sent to penal servitude! His daughter niece to a murderer! His dead mother-a murderer's mother! And to wait day after day, week after week, not knowing whether the blow would fall, was an extraordinarily atrocious penance, the injustice of which, to a man of rectitude, seemed daily the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... no Powers at all, there is here no material Distinction to be made. Again, this Notion of Adam's being more likely to stand than his Posterity, is a mere Fallacy: it supposes a Difference of State, and Rectitude of Mind, between him and us; which, if true, will likewise suppose, that our State being more weak and defenceless than his, the Task or Duty, assigned us, must be proportionate to our different and inferior Abilities. If Adam was put into this State, ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch
... afforded the United States of becoming a respectable nation, I resign with satisfaction the appointment I accepted with diffidence; a diffidence in my abilities to accomplish so arduous a task, which, however, was superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of our cause, the support of the supreme power of the Union, and the patronage of Heaven. The successful termination of the war has verified the most sanguine expectations; and my gratitude for the interposition of Providence, and the assistance I have received ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Endeavour and civilization, between Warsaw, Indiana and the Socratic grove, between being a good American and being a free man, and so he sometimes vacillates perilously between a moral sentimentalism and a somewhat extravagant revolt. "The 'Genius,'" on the one hand, is almost a tract for rectitude, a Warning to the Young; its motto might be Scheut die Dirnen! And on the other hand, it is full of a laborious truculence that can only be explained by imagining the author as heroically determined to prove that he is a plain-spoken fellow and ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... willfully, to stop short or go beyond the truth in Christian faith or obedience. There is no charity in giving a man money knowingly to purchase whisky to get drunk upon. Charity never conflicts with truth or right. On the contrary, it endeavors to bring all men to the standard of truth and rectitude. ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880
... of a martyr I trod heavily up the stairs, and entered my quarters, meditating within myself, awful schemes for vengeance, on the now open tyranny of my Colonel; upon whom, I too, in my honest rectitude of heart, vowed to have "a court-martial." I threw myself upon a chair, and endeavoured to recollect what circumstance of the past evening could have possibly suggested all the mirth in which both officers and men seemed to participate ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... her companions, to whom she gave so many cakes and sweetmeats that the apothecary had to be called in about once a week to cure many of surfeit. But this fair young flower-bed was saved from blight and choking weeds, first, by the innate rectitude and nobility of her disposition, which (save only when that dangerous look was in her eyes) taught her to keep a rein over her caprices, and subdue a too warm and vigorous imagination; next, by the entire absence of Vanity and Self-Conceit in her mind,—a happy state, which made her equally alive ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... it knew nothing of life, and age because it knew too much. There were fewer surprises in middle-age. That was the period of responsibility—when humanity clung to the ordered way with the painful rectitude of a procession of laden ants toiling up a hill. Youth was not like ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... am what you are doubtless thinking me—something of a poseur. Perhaps I do like making a tax upon your sober British rectitude. I will admit that the spirit of adventure is in my heart; I will admit that there is in my blood the desire to take from him who hath and give to him who hath not; but, on the other hand, I have my standards, and I seriously ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... intimacy and encouraged by sincerity. But this appears a remedy by no means adapted to general use; for, in order to secure the virtue of one, it pre-supposes more virtue in two than will generally be found. In the first, such a desire of rectitude and amendment as may incline him to hear his own accusation from the mouth of him whom he esteems, and by whom therefore he will always hope that his faults are not discovered; and in the second, such zeal ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... continued in that capacity until 1842 when he suspended publication. He was regarded by his contemporary, William Wells Brown, as a terse and vigorous writer and an able and eloquent speaker well informed upon all subjects of the day. "Blameless in his family relations, guided by the highest moral rectitude, a true friend to everything that tends to better the moral, social, religious and political condition of man. Dr. Ray," says Brown, "may be looked upon as one of the foremost of the leading ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... that the world will call me unmaidenly, more than indiscreet, and will say that I have been ready to throw myself into the arms of the first stranger I have met; but what care I for this little world of Shetland? I stand on my own rectitude. I shall be far away, and can afford to despise all such insinuations. But the greatest doubt Bertha, in her over-anxious love, has raised up before me, is that regarding Hernan himself. Still I feel sure that he is all that is honourable and ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... and excellent qualities which the friends of John Martin knew him to possess. Rectitude of principle, abhorrence of injustice and intolerance, deep love of country, the purity and earnestness of a saint, allied with the kindliness and inoffensiveness of childhood; amiability and disinterestedness, ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... legitimate business, he is told of a grand speculation where he can make a score of thousands. He is constantly flattered by his friends, who tell him that he is born lucky, that everything he touches turns into gold. Now if he forgets that his economical habits, his rectitude of conduct and a personal attention to a business which he understood, caused his success in life, he will listen to the siren voices. ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... diffident one is too timid to venture to trust to its own suggestions. It is only after much experience, or one of those bitter mistakes, which are the great lessons of life, that such a character learns that self-reliance, exercised with deliberation and humility, is the only safeguard for individual rectitude. Emily, therefore, did not write, but lived on in the silent, wasting agony of constant expectation and perpetual disappointment. Her mother, in the hope of affording her some relief, inquired in a letter she was writing to her relative in London, if the latter had lately seen Mr. Hayforth. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... would have made no difference, except in the pain it would have cost you; and the only gratification in this business is, that I suffer because neither you nor I would deny our principles. I thank you, Fitzjocelyn!' and he straightened himself in the satisfaction of persecuted rectitude. ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... forget Pyrrhic victory, Parthian dart, and Homeric laughter; quos deus vult and nil de mortuis; Sturm und Drang; masterly inactivity, unctuous rectitude, mute inglorious Miltons, and damned good-natured friends; the sword of Damocles, the thin edge of the wedge, the long arm of coincidence, and the soul of goodness in things evil; Hobson's choice, Frankenstein's ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... indisputable justice, tempered with mitigants of the widest possible latitude but exactable to the uttermost farthing with confiscation of estate, real and personal, to the crown. Loyal to the highest constituted power in the land, actuated by an innate love of rectitude his aims would be the strict maintenance of public order, the repression of many abuses though not of all simultaneously (every measure of reform or retrenchment being a preliminary solution to be contained ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to gratify it. His own wife was ill-favoured and ill-natured; Dee's was comely and agreeable; and he longed to make an exchange of partners without exciting the jealousy or shocking the morality of Dee. This was a difficult matter; but to a man like Kelly, who was as deficient in rectitude and right feeling as he was full of impudence and ingenuity, the difficulty was not insurmountable. He had also deeply studied the character and the foibles of Dee; and he took his measures accordingly. The next ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... open-handed liberality, and since the close of the war her self-sacrificing spirit has found ample employment in endeavoring to lift the fallen of her own sex out of the depths of degradation, to the sure and safe paths of virtue and rectitude. ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... to him by his birth, there was nothing he was solicitous to obtain as the reward of merit, nor any thing that he considered himself to possess as the bounty of Heaven. If the sublime and disinterested rectitude that produces and rewards itself, dwells indeed with man, it dwelt not with ALMORAN: with respect to God, therefore, he was not impressed with a sense either of duty or dependence; he felt neither reverence nor love, gratitude nor resignation: in abstaining ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... contempt and ignominy by men scarcely inclined to bear ecclesiastical authority, even in its lightest form. They mistook their mission, which was to give Christian counsel, and to lead gently and with dignity from error into rectitude. Instead of this they fell upon the flock like irritated schoolmasters who find their pupils in mutiny. They became angry and dominative; and the more they thus exhibited themselves, the more scorn and contumely they encountered. Meanwhile two trading sloops arrived in the harbor with ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... greatness of the house of Kuru, the virtuous principles of Gandhari, the wisdom of Vidura, and the constancy of Kunti. The noble Rishi hath also described the divinity of Vasudeva, the rectitude of the sons of Pandu, and the evil practices of the sons and partisans ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... was prohibited to a bachelor, it was strictly forbidden to a widower."[1310] So it came about that, inasmuch as marriage was, in any case, only a concession and a compromise, and in so far a departure from strict rectitude, a second marriage was regarded with disfavor, and any subsequent ones were regarded with reprobation which increased in a high progression. This has remained the view of the Eastern church, in which a fourth marriage is unlawful. The Western church has not kept the early view, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... himself beyond the reach of admonition and recall," thought Mr. Gleason. "Oh! Louis, had your mother lived, how would her heart have been wrung by the knowledge of your aberration from rectitude! And how will the kind and noble being who fills that mother's place in our affections and home, mourn over ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... advice of Jefferson, who sought to destroy Washington; and the present Secretary Randolph is a grandson of Jefferson. Washington, the inflexible patriot, frowned indignantly upon every departure from the path of rectitude. ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... with great composure; he was a philosopher of a grave cast: Sir Thomas Moore (old enough to be my lord's father) jok'd, even on the scaffold; a strong instance of his heroism, and no contradiction to the rectitude of his mind. The verses the Emperor Adrian wrought on his death-bed (call them a song if you will) have been admired, and approved, by several great men; Mr. Pope has not only given his opinion in their favour, but elegantly translated ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... the perfection of beatitude it is required that a man "should have whatever he wants, and should desire nothing in an inordinate fashion."[271] Each one, however, rightly desires to know those things which concern himself. Hence, since no rectitude is lacking to the Saints, they wish to know those things which concern themselves, and consequently they must know them in the Word. But it belongs to their glory that they should be able to help on the salvation of those who need it, for it is thus that they are made co-workers with God—"than ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... analyze this term "friendship." "Amity"—from the Latin, amare to love, or friendship in a general way between individuals, societies or nations. "Goodwill"—I wish you well, peace and prosperity. "Integrity"—moral soundness; completeness; honesty; rectitude. ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... unlawful for us to admire and praise whatever is either beautiful in the actions, or true in the maxims, of the heathens. He only advises us to correct whatever is erroneous, and to approve whatever is conformable to rectitude and justice in them.(38) He applauds the Romans on many occasions, and particularly in his books De Civitate Dei,(39) which is one of the last and finest of his works. He there shows, that the Almighty raised them to be victorious over nations, and sovereigns of a great ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... There was danger too of collisions with his family, and Mr. Parsons took counsel with Miss Charlecote, knowing indeed that where her affections were concerned, her opinions must be taken with a qualification, but relying on the good sense formed by rectitude of purpose. ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... splendid figure. Salient-jawed and forceful, set with cool, flinty, blue-gray eyes, no place for weakness could be found there. One might have read a moral callousness, a colorblindness in points of rectitude, but when the last word had been said, its masterful capability, remained ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... give him lessons in book-keeping. A friend of his was involved in some large financial enterprises, a stock company of some size. He was anxious to be of service to him by keeping an eye upon the employment of his funds and the rectitude of his associates' operations; but he was a lawyer, with a very imperfect knowledge of financial matters and the vernacular of the banking business. Could not M. Joyeuse, in a few months, with three ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... fondness of the fermented blood, might expose one to matrimony and settlements. There was no tame, trite medium of propriety and suppressed confidence, no bridge from board to bed, over which a false step (and your wine-cup is a marvellous corrupter of ambulatory rectitude) might precipitate into an irrecoverable abyss of perilous communication or unwholesome truth. One's pillow became at once the legitimate and natural bourne to "the overheated brain;" and the generous rashness of the coenatorial reveller ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the delusion that Bill was dangerous; even years of singular rectitude on Bill's part had failed to alter his original opinion on this one point, and he often told Custer that he would have felt lost with a horse just anybody could have driven, for while Bill might not and probably would not have suited most people, he ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... adopted it, and showed how it might become a robe of glory. He Himself was preeminently a Man of sorrows; He exhausted all forms of suffering; touching life at every point, at every point He bled; and in Him we learn how to sustain our burden and to triumph throughout all the tragedy. In His absolute rectitude, in His confidence in His Father, in His hours of prayer, in His self-sacrificing regard for His fellow-sufferers, in His charity, and patience, we see how the heaviest cross may be borne in the spirit of victory. We learn from Him how ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... is a question of intellect, not ethics. Right actions and crooked are alike remorselessly presented, and the Council of Perfection, which holds that to think amiss is sin, must convict every saint of unnumbered offences. As reasonably might we blame him who dreams murder. Departure from rectitude can only begin where evil thought is converted into evil action, for thought alone of all man's possessions and antecedents is free, and a lifetime of self-control and high thinking will not shut the door ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... live on In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude; in scorn For miserable aims that end with sell; In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man's ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... proposition, Most persons who have uncontrolled power employ it ill, is a generalization of this class, and may be transformed into the following: All persons who have uncontrolled power employ it ill, provided they are not persons of unusual strength of judgment and rectitude of purpose. The proposition, carrying the hypothesis or proviso with it, may then be dealt with no longer as an approximate, but as a universal proposition; and to whatever number of steps the reasoning may reach, the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... proof to me of your moral rectitude, my son, but the world will not think so. No one character is sufficient to cover two—in a Protestant country especially. The divinity that doth hedge a Bishop would have no chance, in contact with your Madam Danae. Drop the woman, my son. Or permit me to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... She had once been almost explicit with him, on the terrible day when she had tried to make up her mind to marry him, and had failed. And yet he might be surprised, he might even be horrified when she told him. It was such an ugly story, such a hideous story. And Seymour was full of natural rectitude. Whatever he had done in his life, he must always have been incapable of stooping down to the gutter, as she had stooped. She grew hot and then cold at the thought of telling him. Perhaps he would not be able to bear it. Perhaps even his love could ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... represented the vanities; she was vanity itself; and now he was recklessly, contumaciously, glad of it. Her sheer loveliness of being intoxicated him; suddenly it seemed as absolutely necessary to life as the virtues of moral rectitude and homely labor. Personally, he discovered, he preferred such beauty to the latter adamantine qualities. He had a fleet moment of amazed self-consciousness: Elim Meikeljohn—his father an elder in the house of God—astray in the paths of condemned worldly ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of the times is now become a universal complaint, and one would be almost tempted to believe, that the former days were better than these; that our forefathers were possessed of greater moral rectitude than the present generation, did not history and experience convince us of the contrary. There is, however, one great evil peculiar to this age—that of assuming the credit of being endowed with virtues to which we are perfect strangers. Cunning, address, and eloquence, have ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... be as any other wife in our land, equal to them in domestic happiness, which is our woman's sphere; and if that priceless honour may be vouchsafed to me, and I be worthy and able to bear it, an exemplar of woman's rectitude." With a low, modest, ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... be it mine To curb the sigh which bursts o'er Heaven's decree; To tread the path of rectitude—that when Life's dying ray shall glimmer in the frame, That latest breath I may in peace resign, "Firm in the faith of ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... was to my father, and more wonderful than all, setting herself to reconcile him to the notion of this new heir of his—and I do believe, if my father had not so suddenly grown worse, she would have made us have him up to be introduced—all out of rectitude and duty, you know, for Adela is the shyest of mortals, and recoils by nature from the underbred far more than we do. In fact, I rather like it. It gives me a sensation. I had ten times rather this ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... race, and to the disclosure of these secrets we may look with confidence for the inspiration of a new literature. But in politics Ireland has no secrets. All her cards are on the table, decipherable at the first glance. Her political demand combines the lucidity of an invoice with the axiomatic rectitude of the Ten Commandments. There is no doubt about what she wants, and none about why she ought to have it. In that sense the case for Home Rule is made, and this book, having justified its title, ought to come to an end. But convention prescribes that about the nude contour of principles ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... retained her girlish admiration of Mr. Blake. Despite his having been so conspicuous at the forefront of public affairs, no scandal had ever soiled his name. His rectitude, so said people whose memories ran back a generation, was due mainly to fine qualities inherited from his mother, for his father had been a good-natured, hearty, popular politician with no discoverable ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... may, with very little alteration, be applied to Lord Cromer. "The sobriety, the self-command, the perfect soundness of judgment, the perfect rectitude of intention," were as truly the qualities of the Ruler and regenerator of Egypt as they were of the great statesman of the Rebellion—the man who fought so nobly against the sullen tyranny of Charles ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... bodies, their country, the world and its history. But we cannot forget, and recent events have reminded us with a terrible note of warning, that no amount of knowledge constitutes any sort, even the feeblest kind, of guarantee as to rectitude ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... masters of Rousseau, the consistency of Burke, the identity of the first Whig. Most of this, I suppose, is undisputed, and calls for no enlargement. But the weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong 90. The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual. At ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... singular features of Fenton's present attitude that even he, with all his clear-sightedness, failed to see the error of supposing that his departure from the paths of rectitude was nothing but a temporary episode. He fully expected to take up again his former attitude toward life when he would have scorned such a contemptible action as the betrayal of Hubbard, or the more trifling, but perhaps even more humiliating act of smuggling Snaffle into the ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... of offence," she could but be calmly happy, even though surrounded by circumstances which often jarred upon her pure and delicate nature, and which would have crushed one less conscious of future peace and present rectitude. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... fallen into the habit of controlling and directing almost everything about her, simply because she had been accustomed to self-control and self-direction, and was by nature quick to decide and resolute to act. Conscious of her own rectitude, and fully realizing the dangers which might result from the experiment proposed, she had had no hesitation about withholding her consent, without which the school-house could not be used, and had not deemed ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... At the two opposite poles of conscientious rectitude are laxity and scruples, one judging all things lawful, the other all things forbidden. One inordinately favors liberty, the other the law. And neither has sufficient grounds on which to form ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... feeling, was to him boring and incomprehensible, like music to one who has no ear. He looked at people simply from the business point of view, and divided them into competent and incompetent. No other classification existed for him. Honesty and rectitude were only signs of competence. Drinking, gambling, and debauchery were permissible, but must not be allowed to interfere with business. Believing in God was rather stupid, but religion ought be safeguarded, as the ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... mutual want of confidence in the integrity of an alliance, it would hardly be surprising should the Sultan attach more importance to the practical force of Russia than to the moral rectitude and high political principles of England. The power of Russia has been felt, and the position of European Turkey is that of a dislocated and dismembered Empire, which upon the next explosion will reduce the Sultan to the small extremity on the Bosphorus between ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... captain to dinner, and gathered a good deal more understanding of the important position to which Clarence had risen by force of character and rectitude of purpose in that strange little Anglo-Chinese colony; and afterwards, I was allowed to make a long visit to Clarence, who, having eaten and slept, ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Rectitude.—The great high-road of human welfare lies along the highway of steadfast well-doing, and they who are the most persistent, and work in the truest spirit, will invariably be the ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... purchase! I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them. I will not, I cannot justify it. However capable my conduct, I will so far pay my devoir to virtue, as to own the excellence and rectitude of her precepts, and lament my want of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... deepest regret that I write to say that certain facts have come to my knowledge with regard to the way in which you spent your holiday last year at Polperro. I, also, gather that your sudden departure from Melkbridge was in connection with this visit. As a strict moral rectitude is a sine qua non amongst those I employ, I must ask you to be good enough to resign your appointment. I enclose cheque for present and next ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... father and her child, she was almost cheerful. A warm glow of self-complacency enveloped her. Later, when old Caleb and the boy had retired and she sat before the little wood fire alone with her thoughts, this feeling of self-conscious rectitude slowly left her, and into its place crept a sense of desolation inspired by one thought that obtruded upon her insistently, no matter how desperately she drove her mind to consider other things. She was not to see him again—no, ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... with us at this early stage. He joined the Association in a time of great excitement. The Nation hailed the accession with the fondest joy. The consistency of his politics, the purity of his intentions, and the unvarying rectitude of his life gave abundant assurance, not alone that he was deeply sincere, but that his purpose could only be changed by death. But to those who looked beyond the expediency of the hour, those who had cherished ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... her son with the qualities which made his Anti-slavery life nothing but an expression of the rules of conduct which governed him in all other particulars. Believing in his inmost soul in principles of rectitude, all men believed in him, his "yea," or "nay," passing current wherever he went. Tall, dignified, and commanding, he had that in his face which inspired immediate confidence. Said one who looked: "If that is not a good man, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... with this fiery and violent young female was next to an impossibility.—The woman herself was naturally coarse and ignorant; but still there was mixed, up in her character a kind of apathetic or indolent feeling of rectitude or vague humanity, which rendered her liable to occasional visitations of compunction for whatever she did that was wrong. The strongest principle in her, however, was one which is frequently to be found among her class—I mean such a lingering impression of religious feeling as is not sufficiently ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... by the positive and negative qualities that create severity,—strength of will, conscious rectitude of purpose, narrowness of imagination and intellect, great power of self-control, and a disposition to exert control over others,—prejudices come as the natural food of tendencies which can get no sustenance out of ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... and the rest of this community, all bitterly sorrowing for the loss of such a pastor and prelate. Although his government at first ran counter to many who were discontented, as he seemed to them excessive in his rectitude, yet finally—his cause justified, and the truth declared by so many tribunals; and his blameless and holy life being seen [by all]—they hailed him unanimously as a holy prelate, and an example worthy of imitation. And even those who formerly regarded his rule as ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... to make a sketch of it?" A letter of introduction is enclosed, and, as a precaution, I am enjoined that I "must not mind her squint." But I do mind, and I am sure the blemish would sadly mar my proper judgment of the lovely feature for gazing on which those eyes have lost their rectitude. For the ears a journey to Brighton to see Miss Robinson, the Vicar's daughter, is recommended. No, she may listen, think I, to the "sad sea-waves," or to her father's sermons, but never to any flattery from me. The mouth I shall find in Cardiff—not an English or Welsh mouth, but a ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... almost black lashes; her brows, as fair as the hair, seemed as if they had a darker streak in their midst, which gave a wonderful expression of strength and will to the beautiful face. The rather short profile was very dignified, the nose continuing the line of the brow with absolute rectitude, as in a Greek statue. A deep dimple under the lower lip foiled it up delightfully; and from time to time, when she was absorbed by a particular idea, she bit this lower lip with her white upper teeth, making the blood run in tiny red veins under the delicate skin. ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... feelings of Henry Bannerworth on the occasion of this apparent defalcation from the path of rectitude and honour by his friend, as he had fondly imagined Charles Holland to be, would ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... remain in the island and engage in the planting business. Possessing energy of character and rectitude of principle, and having influential connections, he became in a few years the attorney for the Pearl estates, married the daughter of a Scotch planter, and resided very pleasantly and happily at a beautiful seat called Bel-Air, situated a few miles from the Upper Pearl. He entered ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... to Edward,—to sympathize with the youth's horror at the sight of this obnoxious husband, "who seems to him," as M. Janin says in his preface, "a hero—what do I say?—a giant!—to the loving, timid, fragile child." "In fine, a certain air of calm rectitude pervaded his person." Execrable wretch! could anything be more repulsive to true and delicate sentiment (as before, a la Francaise) "I should say his age was about forty." Our wrath at this last atrocity can hardly be controlled. It seems as if M. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... walked in singleness of heart. I was not married to a wife until I was thirty years old, for the hard work I did consumed my strength, and I had no desire unto woman, but, overwhelmed by fatigue, I would sink into sleep. My father was well pleased at all times with my rectitude. If my work was crowned with good results, I brought the firstfruits of my labor to the priest of the Lord, the next harvest went to my father, and then I thought of myself. The Lord doubled the possessions in my hand, and Jacob knew that God aided me for the sake ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... new thing. I stole on, and finally pushing aside the high grown grass, was at her side—at the side of the very form and feature of the woman who had taught me on earth the worth of living and the meaning and the glory of rectitude. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... was no idle form. The Queen, though always open to argument and tolerant of contradiction, had her own decided opinions; she exercised her undoubted right of expressing and defending them, and even apart from her royal position, her great experience and her singular clearness and rectitude of judgment made her ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... protegee by too sudden a change. "In truth, I repeat to you, I cannot comprehend that, having so much to praise in your benefactor, you should be a prisoner here; how, after having sincerely returned to the paths of rectitude, could you cause yourself to be arrested in a place to you interdicted? All this seems to me extraordinary. You speak of an oath which so far has imposed silence upon you; but this ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... her off her legs, and dashed madly down the room, "a deux temps." At the first perception that something unusual was going on, she gave such an eldritch scream, that the whole society suddenly came to a standstill. I thought it best to assume an aspect of innocent composure and conscious rectitude; which had its effect, for though the lady began with a certain degree of hysterical animation to describe her wrongs, she finished with a hearty laugh, in which the company cordially joined, and I delicately chimed in. For the rest of the dance she seemed to resign herself ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... drapery, a good man, most loyal and righteous, his name Jehannot de Chevigny, between whom and a Jew, Abraham by name, also a merchant, and a man of great wealth, as also most loyal and righteous, there subsisted a very close friendship. Now Jehannot, observing Abraham's loyalty and rectitude, began to be sorely vexed in spirit that the soul of one so worthy and wise and good should perish for want of faith. Wherefore he began in a friendly manner to plead with him, that he should leave the errors of the Jewish faith and turn to the Christian verity, which, being sound and ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... and the light in their eyes was not the sparkle of innocent joy,—women whose laughter was sadder than their tears, and who were dead while they lived. In that house were wine, and mirth, and revelry, "but the dead were there," men dead to virtue, true honor and rectitude, who walked the streets as other men, laughed, chatted, bought, sold, exchanged and bartered, but whose souls were encased in living tombs, bodies that were dead to righteousness but alive to sin. Like a ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... there has been developed a recognition of considerations or values that are higher than either escape from punishment or the winning of your approbation. He will choose the course that offers what seems to him to be the greater good; he will choose between punishment, with rectitude, a good conscience, a sense of unity with the higher good, of peace with God his friend, a greater approximation to your ideal, on the one side, and, on ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... sense, that his theorems will shape life for him, directly; that he will always seek, as a matter of course, the effective equivalent to—the line of being which shall be the proper continuation of—his line of thinking. This intellectual rectitude, or candour, which to my mind has a kind of beauty in it, has reacted upon myself, I confess, with a searching quality." That "searching quality," indeed, many others also, people far from being intellectual, had experienced—an agitation of mind in his neighbourhood, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... divine blessing upon Brown and his labors. The present writer was told by an eye-witness that one of the ministers prayed for forgiveness for any wrongful acts which their guest may have committed. Convinced of the rectitude of his actions, however, Brown objected and said that he thanked no one for asking forgiveness for anything ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... would have recovered their own commanding position along with my salvation. For when the spirit of the loyalists had been renewed by your consulship, and they had been roused from their dismay by the extreme firmness and rectitude of your official conduct; when, above all, Pompey's support had been secured; and when Caesar, too, with all the prestige of his brilliant achievements, after being honoured with unique and unprecedented marks ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... your weary souls may be refreshed by a draught from nature's founts and bountiful resources that you may mount upward as on the mighty wings of eagles; or discover for your wandering feet the path of rectitude and safety. ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... we have here a test of universal application. The rectitude and benevolence of our Savior's character forbid us to suppose that he would subject this inquirer, especially as he was highly amiable, to a trial, where eternal life was at stake, peculiarly severe. Indeed, the test seems to have ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... are always on the side of what is right, noble, and honorable. He believed in a divine ordering of the world, and saw obscurely through the mists and shadows of heathenism the indications of the wisdom and rectitude of an overruling Providence. To him man did not appear as the sole arbiter of his own destiny, but rather as an unconscious agent in working out the designs of a Higher Power; and yet, as these designs were only dimly and imperfectly to be recognized, the noblest man was he who ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... have come at a perfect resignation to the divine will, I might have been brought forward in a way which would have afforded permanent relief to my own mind; but such was my dislike to the work, that I suffered myself to be lulled into a state of unbelief as to the rectitude of the concern. ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... existence of mind apart from matter, and consequently looks upon death as a blessed state of rest to the good man which lies between the two great activities of time and eternity, and also believes in God and future rewards, has stronger motives to sound moral rectitude than the man who denies and ridicules these great truths. "The seat of law is the bosom of God, and her voice is the harmony of the world." It is respect for law that brings responsibilities home to the heart. Where there is no faith there ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... these latter years, has exhibited, and does still exhibit, a steady and well-defined purpose, and has pursued it with a singularly calm, sober, unimpassioned, yet resolute temper. Its posture is firm, steady, self-poised, conscious of rectitude, and anticipative of veritable and valuable results. Its spirit, though eager, is quiet; though enthusiastic, is cautious; though ardent, is sceptical; though flushed with success, is trained to the discipline of disappointment. ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... filled with its old human might, became capable once more of the grasp of friendship, of the caress of love, of the labour for the bread that sustains the life, little would the man care that other men—even rulers of synagogues, even Scribes and Pharisees, should question the rectitude of him who had healed him. The power which restored the gift of God and completed humanity, must be of God. Argument upon argument might follow from old books and old customs and learned interpretations, ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... not being the tool, as Sir Henry Irving owned that he was, of the Director of Public Works, could not be expected to be his accomplice or screener in the cynical waste of the public funds. Here, then, is the personal rectitude of a ruler operating as a safeguard to the people's interests; and we gladly confess our entire agreement with [60] Mr. Froude on the subject of the essential qualifications of a Crown Governor. Mr. Froude contends, and we heartily ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... friend, but not so great a man as his grandfather, with whom Fox once quarrelled, and whom Burke loved. Plantagenet Palliser, himself the heir to a dukedom, was the young Chancellor of the Exchequer, of whom some statesmen thought much as the rising star of the age. If industry, rectitude of purpose, and a certain clearness of intellect may prevail, Planty Pall, as he is familiarly called, ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... obliterated by sin and the consequent disorganization; for in the teaching of the Fathers, as in that of their Master, it is the pure in heart that see God,[48] and it is only the man whose nature is kept in due balance by a life of moral rectitude—the "righteous man" of the Scriptures—who can be expected to exhibit clearly this "natural opinion" or to attain to a full knowledge and appreciation of the Christian doctrine of God. At the very best, the knowledge of the Deity attained apart from revelation seemed to the Fathers to be, ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... intelligence and patriotism of the American people to entertain any serious doubt as to the issue of the contest. It can have but one issue, unless the country has lost its senses,—and never has it given better evidence of its sobriety, firmness, and rectitude of purpose than it now daily affords. Were the contest one relating to the conduct of the war, and had the Democratic party assumed a position of unquestionable loyalty, there would be some room for doubting who is to be our next President. It is impossible that a contest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... position virtually denies also the providence of God, and makes men and nations sole arbiters of their own fortunes. But "the Heavens do rule." If there be institutions or measures inconsistent with immutable rectitude, they are fostered only under the ban of a righteous God; they inwrap the germs of their own harvest of shame, disorder, vice, and wretchedness; nay, their very prosperity is but the verdure and blossoming which shall mature the apples of Sodom. O, how often have ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... cutting suavity, tempered and chastened by a lofty air of moral rectitude, carried the speaker to the door. There she inclined her head in a ghostly and statue-like manner, and so withdrew to her carriage, to seek comfort and consolation in the arms ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... too late for a great nation to rectify a wrong done to even the humblest of its subjects, let alone a man of such undoubted courage and rectitude ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... the Stand Right Royal shone from a strapper's hand. A big dark bay with a restless tread, Fetlock deep in a wheat-straw bed; A noble horse of a nervy blood, By O Mon Roi out of Rectitude Something quick in his eye and ear Gave a hint that he might be queer. In front, he was all to a horseman's mind, Some thought him a trifle light behind. By two good points might his rank be known, A beautiful head and a Jumping Bone. He had ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... of tyranny; of imposing fines upon his enemies on pretence of punishing contempts of Courts; of uttering expressions derogatory to the other judges of the Court in which he sat; of having accused the barristers of Three Rivers frequently of high breaches of moral and professional rectitude; of having wickedly imprisoned in the common gaol of Three Rivers, Charles Richard Ogden, Esquire, then and still being His Majesty's Counsel for the said district, for an alleged libel and contempt ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... to competition, renders it a struggle to obtain a livelihood. It is notorious that thousands of men in America are obliged, as it were, to succumb to this influence or become paupers, and are thus driven out of the paths of strict rectitude and honesty of purpose, and compelled to resort to all sorts of chicanery to enable them to make two ends meet. In no instance is this more observable than in the "selling" propensities of the Americans. "For sale" seems to be the national motto, and would form an admirable addendum ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... Conscious rectitude, too, after the pattern of the well-behaved AEneas quitting the fair bosom of Carthage in obedience to the Gods, for an example to his Roman progeny, might have stiffened his backbone and put a crown upon his brows. It happened with him that his original training ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
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