"Facts of life" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the many, struggling with the innate consciousness of evil, in them and around them-an instinctive consciousness which no argumentation about 'evil being a lower form of good' will ever explain away to those who 'grind among the iron facts of life, and have no time for self-deception'-what good news for them is there in Mr. Emerson's cosy and tolerant Epicurism? They cry for deliverance from their natures; they know that they are not that which they were intended to be, because they follow their ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... sense of right; they feel no more, they apply set rules that leave cases out of count. Borne along by their headlong course, they are neither husbands nor fathers nor lovers; they glide on sledges over the facts of life, and live at all times at the high pressure conduced by business and the vast city. When they return to their homes they are required to go to a ball, to the opera, into society, where they can make clients, acquaintances, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... character. The same hand that in the famous Snob Papers so savagely, and in at least one case so intemperately, satirised types of English society, afterwards produced novels in which fidelity to the essential facts of life is the most conspicuous quality. So, too, might it have been in the case of the 'Peripatetic Philosopher,' whose weekly criticisms of Melbourne men and manners in 1867-68 has correctly been judged the best writing of its kind yet done in Australia. In these articles, remarkable as ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... controversies and divisions are occasioned mainly by the proclamation of dogma on these inscrutable things. In a remarkable work, which remains still in manuscript—his De arte dubitandi et confidendi, sciendi et ignorandi,—he pleads for a religion that fits the facts of life and for the use of intelligence even in these lofty matters of spiritual experience where most astonishing miracles occur. He returns, in this writing, to his old position that the truths which concern salvation are ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... reading.[842] Our conclusion then must be that Cicero, always impressionable, and in his way also religious, had in this year 45 a real religious experience. He was brought face to face with one of the mysterious facts of life, and with one of the great mysteries of the universe, and the religious instinct awoke within him. How many others, even in that sordid and materialistic age, may have had the like experience, with or without a mystical philosophy to guide ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... men, commonly known as the prophets of Israel, were the unique product of the Jewish religious genius. They were pre-eminently preachers of righteousness. Fearless and undaunted, they told the house of Israel their sins and the house of Jacob their transgressions. They contemplated the facts of life from the highest point of view. For them religion and morality were blended, ethics and politics were one. Theirs was peculiarly a social message; the demand for justice underlies all their thinking and speaking. They had a veritable passion for righteousness; ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... whom a young man liked to seem experienced. She was dark and slender and fiery. She was witty and slangy; said daring things and carried them off with NONCHALANCE. Her childish extravagance and contempt for all the serious facts of life could be charged to her father's generosity and his long packing-house purse. Freaks that would have been vulgar and ostentatious in a more simpleminded girl, in Miss Beers seemed whimsical and ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... ignore the sad facts of life; even the Christian is often saddened by the mysteries which he cannot explain. Bishop J. Boyd Carpenter, in speaking of the sad and cheerless spirit of Buddhism, has said: "There are moments in which we are all Buddhists; when life has disappointed ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... know, and progressive—and faces the facts of life seriously." At this moment another roar ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... more inscrutable for her very frankness and assurance. She was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing to be on her guard against; and with no better preparation than this, she was to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called "the facts of life." ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... their sorrows and increase their joys, give them, as it were, a cheery arm along the rough path of poverty, and in doing it get down herself out of the clouds to the very soil, to the very beginnings and solid elementary facts of life. And she would do it at once, and not sit idle at the farm. It was on such idle days as the day Fritzing went to Minehead that sillinesses assailed her soul—shrinkings of the flesh from honest calico, disgust at the cooking, impatience at Annalise's ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... she represents, both in her annals and her resources, her scenery, and her social character, the average national characteristics: natives of each section of the land find within her limits congenial facts of life and nature, of manners and industry: like her Southern sisters, she has known all the consequences of slavery—but at certain times and places, free labor has thriven; commerce and agriculture, the miner, the mariner, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... be writing in Christmas week, and I have read for the tenth time "A Christmas Carol," by Dickens, that amazing allegory in which the hard, bitter facts of life are involved in a beautiful myth, that wizard's caldron in which humor bubbles and from which rise phantom figures of religion and poetry. Can any one doubt that if this story were read by every man, woman, ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... and supper must, I suppose, be reckoned among the permanent facts of life; but there is, or was, one meal of which I have witnessed the unwept disappearance. It had its roots in our historic past. It clung to its place in our social economy. It lived long and died hard. It was the Breakfast-Party. When I first lived in London, it was, like some types of human character, ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... are so nice," exclaimed Marian giving her a little squeeze. "Grandma never says such things. She doesn't ever like to make believe. She says the facts of life are so hard that there is no time to waste in pretending." Marian's manner as she said this was so like her grandmother's that Miss Dorothy could but smile. "I am glad you took some of the photographs for papa before I got the whoops," Marian went on; "the one at school and the one at Mrs. Hunt's. ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard
... surprising that the psychologists chose this somewhat barren way; it was a kind of reaction against the fantastic flights of the psychology of olden times. Speculations about the soul had served for centuries. Metaphysics had reigned and the observation of the real facts of life and experience had been disregarded. When the new time came in which the psychologists were fascinated by the spirit of scientific method and exact study of actual facts, the safest way was for them to imitate the well-tested and triumphant procedures of natural science. The physicist and ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... which has been severed from its body, and is therefore unmeaning. We obstinately refuse to live—to quote Goethe's words again—not only "in the beautiful and the good," but also "in the whole," which is equally necessary for a well-ordered life. What it seems to me we need is to teach the facts of life-giving, or, in other words, of sex, as a great, wide, open-air law, running right through animated creation, an ever-ascending progression forming a golden ladder leading up ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... the relation which poetry bears to average humanity. You often hear him express indignant surprise that the sale of butcher's meat should be a more lucrative business than the sale of poetry. But, surely, to argue thus is to manifest a most absurd misapprehension of the facts of life. Wordsworth says that 'we live by admiration, joy, and love.' So doubtless we do: but we live far more by butcher's meat and Burton ale. Poetry is but a preparation of opium distilled by a minority for a minority. The poet may ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... together in a single mind, but unable to fuse in it, they reveal their radical contrariety. The Catholic church and humanity are two powers that divide the intellect and spirit of man. On the Catholic side is faith, rigidly logical as Ultramontanism, with a proportion of the facts of life, that is, all that is despairing in life coming naturally under its formula. On the side of humanity is all that is desirable in the world, all that is sympathetic with its laws, and succeeds through that sympathy. Doubtless, for the individual, there are a thousand intermediate shades of opinion, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... emotions based on medieval ideals gradually lost their worth. They were not in relation to the altered facts of life; they had become an empty convention which could be turned to very unromantic uses. The movement for the emancipation of women was not consciously or directly a movement of revolt against an antiquated chivalry. It was rather a part of the development ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... opportunity, or disinclination to be otherwise. This may disgust those of my feminine readers who refuse to acknowledge, with Professor Lester Ward, that man is essentially a polygamous animal, but the more experienced in the sorrowful facts of life will own the truth of ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... the credit of having written the first meritorious essay on criticism in the English language, The Apologie for Poetrie. This defends the poetic art, and shows how necessary such exercise of the imagination is to take us away from the cold, hard facts of life. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... may break the formal rules, and yet it may yield to us just that salt of life which we may seek for vainly in the works of more faultless writers. The strength of "Amaryllis at the Fair" is that its beauty springs naturally from the prosaic earthly facts of life it narrates, and that, in the natural atmosphere breathed by its people, the prose and the poetry of their life are one. In the respect of the artistic naturalness of its homely picture, the book is very superior to, say "The ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... little about them. Lady Violet Greville, in a recent article, expresses much the same opinion. She says, 'The late Robert Louis Stevenson had no opinion of women writers, he said they were incapable of grasping the essential facts of life. He was a great master of style, but I doubt if he had much knowledge of feminine character'—a dictum in which many women will agree with her. She goes on to say that there is some truth in what he says of women writers, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... but Old Age gave the poet a motive more artistic, foreshadowing Death, and quite sad enough to supply the necessary contrast. The poet who approached the walls of the chateau and saw, outside, all the unpleasant facts of life conspicuously posted up, as though to shut them out of doors, hastened to ask for entrance, and, when once admitted, found a court of ideals. Their names matter little. In the mind of William of Lorris, every one would people his ideal world with ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... both of which issue from man's social needs. Early man is logical, but he comprehends the necessity of not pushing logic too far—he is capable of holding at the same time two mutually contradictory views, and of acting on each as may suit his convenience; he makes his dogma yield to the facts of life (a saving principle not confined to savages, but acted on to a greater or less extent by all societies). He slays sacred animals for divinatory and other religious purposes, for food, or in self-defense; he fears their anger, but ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... pants to know, remains unknown: our beloved ones, shall we meet them, and how?—the great secret of the universe. We ask for bread, and these philosophers give us a stone. What help could come from them: or from any one? Death is simply one of the hard facts of life." ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... help him, and I did help him. Is there any one, knowing anything of the facts of life, who will censure me when I admit that I—with deliberation—simply tided him over, did not make for him and present to him a fortune? What chance should I have had, if I had been so absurdly generous to ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... exchanges, this age of trade and traffic, passionate figures rise up and demand of life what its fever is, in "Foma Gordyeeff" it is a Russian who so rises up and demands. For Gorky, the Bitter One, is essentially a Russian in his grasp on the facts of life and in his treatment. All the Russian self-analysis and insistent introspection are his. And, like all his brother Russians, ardent, passionate protest impregnates his work. There is a purpose to it. He writes because he has something to say which the world should ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... earthly lives had been, to pursue the metaphor, like terms which a boy spends at school, in which he is aware that he not only learns definite and tangible things, but that his character is hardened and consolidated by coming into contact with the rougher facts of life—duty, responsibility, friendships, angers, treacheries, temptations, routine. The boy returns with gladness to the serener and sweeter atmosphere of home; and just in the same way I felt I had returned to the larger and purer ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... men that the woman to be beautiful must be hedged about and protected from the facts of life has done something more than produce a race of women not physically vigorous. It has made them deficient in strength of soul also. After the evening when she stood facing Edith and when she had been unable to arise to the challenge flung at her by the little milliner Margaret Ormsby was forced ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... conscience suggesting odd things to him. Would it not be possible now to shut one's ears for the next half hour? Angry words were only little perturbations in the air. If you shut your ears till they were all over, what harm could be done? All the big facts of life would remain the same. The sea, the sky, the hills, the human beings around you, even your desire of sleep for the night and your wholesome longing for breakfast in the morning, would all remain, and the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... term throughout Europe was coles (or colis) from caulis, a stalk, and virga, a rod. The only serious English literary term, yard (exactly equivalent to virga), as used by Chaucer—almost the last great English writer whose vocabulary was adequate to the central facts of life—has now fallen out of literary ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... schoolboy bullies. It is intelligible, therefore, that, as Mr. Davies reports, the Sermon on the Mount should be his great difficulty in accepting Christianity. Its spirit might be, in a sense, beautiful; but it would not fit the facts of life. So, he observes, in his autobiographical fragment, that one of his difficulties was his want of sympathy for the kind of personal enthusiasm with which his father would speak of Jesus Christ. He tried hard to cultivate ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... role of the intellect. God is the most reasonable explanation of the facts of life. Religious truths and men's minds harmonize as though they had been made for each other. The thought of Deity gives them perfect mental satisfaction. Dante tells us: "The life of my heart, that of my inward ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... virtues, his purity of life, his sobriety, his charity, his devotion. These were the immediate consequence of his Law-abiding disposition and theory. Perhaps there was some lack of enthusiasm, something too much of the temperate. But the facts of life always brought their corrective. Martyrdom was the means by which the Jewish consciousness was kept at a glowing heat. And as the Jew was constantly called upon to die for his religion, the religion ennobled the life which was willingly surrendered for the religion. ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... grim reality of life. She was no longer sheltered, secluded, one of the "fortunate class." Ways and means would occupy most of her time henceforth. And it was not the privations she shrank from but the contacts with the ugly facts of life; a side she had found extremely picturesque in novels, but knew from, occasional glimpses to be ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... she had liked—and rightly liked—in poor dear Herodotus was just what prevented him from being a good historian. It was wrong to mix up facts and fancies. But why should her present servants deal with only one little special set of the variegated facts of life? It was not in her power to interfere. The Nine, by the terms of the charter that Zeus had granted to them, were bound to leave their servants an absolutely free hand. But Clio could at least refrain from reading the works which, by a legal fiction, she was supposed to inspire. Once ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... beggar, the companion of clowns and playfellow of rustics, the future peer of kings and ruler of rajahs, the coming pro-consul who was yet to make the state of England as imperial as the state of Rome, received his earliest lessons in the facts of life, and dreamed his earliest dreams. His were strange dreams. In sleep, says a Persian poet with whom young Hastings was afterwards doubtless acquainted, the beggar and the king are equal. If Warren Hastings slept as a beggar, he certainly dreamed as a king. We know, ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... in it at a time when scientific knowledge and habits of thought had not come into existence. The fairy story was "a free poetic dealing with realities in accordance with the law of mental growth, ... a poetic wording of the facts of life, ... an endeavour to shape the facts of the world to meet the needs of the imagination, the cravings of the heart." The legend, dealing originally with incidents in the lives of the saints and with places made sacred ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... was no denying that the clock stood still. She was not going forward to any settled goal now, she was not going forward at all. She was as far from suspecting any ordered pattern in the facts of life as when she had been in college, surrounded by the conspiracy of silence about a pattern in facts which university professors so conscientiously keep up before their students. She was slowly revolving in an eddy. Sometimes she looked at the deep, glowing ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... whose sense of life is fullest and keenest, drifts most readily toward a mathematical rigidity of theory. Matter and form are the eternal oppositions, and the mathematical intellects are often attracted by the facts of life, just as the sensuous minds are often drawn toward the study of abstract law. Thus strangely enough, what we think we are is just what we are not: what we desire to be is what suits us least; our theories ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Life. The illusions, the sentiment, the fancies, the poetry of Life, he would have buried under the icy sameness of his facts, even as the flowers and grasses were hidden under winter's shroud of snow. But he could not. Under the snow, summer still lived. Under the cold facts of Life, the tender sentiments, the fond fancies, the dear illusions have strength even as the flowers ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... of someones as a rule," said her father, rising and joining her at the window. "And that is one of the most serious and most blessed facts of life. I think that almost the saddest thing human beings can feel is that no one is the better or the happier for ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... shall have a store of sweet knowledge on the subject that will enable us to live well ourselves and fit us to bring into the world such children as will amaze us with their health of body and purity of mind. No alteration of the facts of life is necessary, but only a change of attitude. Why, when Trilby brought the bare foot into prominence, it was gravely debated whether or not such an indecency should be permitted. It was assumed that a naked foot was indecent. Why a foot more than a hand? Why any one part of the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... That, no doubt, was the very manner in which his mind worked; and the essential element of his spirit resides precisely in this haphazard and various looseness. His exceeding coarseness is itself an expression of one of the most fundamental qualities of his mind—its jovial acceptance of the physical facts of life. Another side of the same characteristic appears in his glorification of eating and drinking: such things were part of the natural constitution of man, therefore let man enjoy them to the full. Who knows? Perhaps the Riddle of the Universe would be solved by the ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... and sicken at the expression of it. But, nevertheless, she pored patiently over every book she could get that had a great reputation, and in this way she read many not usually given to girls, and became familiarised with certain facts of life not generally supposed to be of soul-making material. But she took no harm. The soul that is shaping itself to noble purpose, the growing soul, tries more than is proper for its nourishment in its search for sustenance, but rejects all that is unnecessary or injurious, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... it was a novel I declined, for to tell the truth I am not fond of romance in any shape, being a person who has found the hard facts of life of sufficient ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... facts to ideas,'' says ttingen.[5] "The world has for several millenniums tried to subdue matter to preconceptions and the world has failed. Now the procedure is reversed.'' "From facts to ideas''—there lies our road, let us for once observe the facts of life without prejudice, without maxims built on preconceptions; let us establish them, strip them of all alien character. Then finally, when we find nothing more in the least doubtful, we may theorize about them, and draw inferences, modestly and ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... leaks into the pockets of men who do not assist in production. In order to create a system which shall be as independent of the good-will of benevolent employers as of the ill-will of selfish ones, we shall have to find a basis in the actual facts of life itself. ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... village," I understand a mental no less than topographical limitation. The penetrating sympathy of genius will, even from a village, traverse the whole world. What I mean is, that unless by personal experience, no matter through what avenues, a man has gained clear insight into the facts of life, he cannot successfully place them before us; and whatever insight he has gained, be it of important or of unimportant facts, will be of value if truly reproduced. No sunset is precisely similar ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... mind penetrated with this spiritual persuasion, is to be in full possession of the highest strength that man can attain. It springs from a scientific and rounded interpretation of the facts of life, and is in a harmony, which freshly found truths only make more ample and elaborate, with all the conclusions of the intellect in every order. The active energies are not paralysed by the possibilities of enfeebling doubt, nor the reason drawn down and stultified ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... cannot tell you. It may be that, by and by, philosophers will discover some higher laws of which the facts of life are particular cases—very possibly they will find out some bond between physico-chemical phaenomena on the one hand, and vital phaenomena on the other. At present, however, we assuredly know of none; and I think we shall exercise a wise humility in confessing that, for us ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... legend has already begun to grow. For the desperate struggle with the Saxons was vain. As the highly gifted, imaginative Celt saw his people overwhelmed by the kinsmen of the conquerors of Rome, he found solace in song for the hard facts of life. In the fields of imagination he won the victories denied him on the field of battle, and he clustered these triumphs against the enemies of his race about the name and the person of the magnanimous Arthur. When the descendants of the Saxons were in their turn overcome by ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... evil, physical and moral, is precisely the chief and most fruitful source of religious scepticism; it is not the abstract question whether there is a God, but the practical and insistent problem whether the Divine goodness can be reconciled with the facts of life and experience, that is agitating men's minds, and sways their decision for ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... touched a little with the pharisaism of the Puritan. With the Italian anything that would win is the best policy, and this is his honest estimate of men. The best policy was the policy adopted, after looking the facts of life and of human nature squarely in the face and finding that the end was to be attained easiest either by honesty or dishonesty. To "get there," as we say, was the ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... only exploited as producers, but also as buyers, as consumers. For long, dominated by economic theories, the Socialists refused to recognize this aspect of the labor struggle, though the workers felt it strongly enough. They set their fine-spun theories against the facts of life. Their contention was that wages being determined by the cost of living, it mattered nothing how much or how little the workers got in wages, the cost of living and wages adjusted themselves to each other. But in actual experience the workers found that when prices fall, wages are quick ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... you'd better order offensive action. Instead, I think you'd better have your fleet medical officers come and learn some of the facts of life. There's no need for war between Dara and Weald, ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... also very angry. For I knew that ignorance was at the bottom of many of these sad tragedies—the criminal reticence of the people who know, too mock-modest to discuss openly a fact of life which, beyond all other facts of life, should be spoken of bluntly, honestly, ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... concentrate itself upon any object with equal fertility and power, but she had seen too much of the Sophisticates of late, and studied Clavering in too many of his moods to cherish the illusion any longer. Playwrighting seemed to her a contemptible pastime compared with the hideous facts of Life as exemplified in Europe, and she had restrained herself from an angry outburst more than once. But she was too philosophical, possibly too fatalistic, not to have dismissed this attitude eventually. Clavering could not be changed, but neither could ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the more absorbing interest of personality. They are, after all, in a sense, mere accidents, and have no more to do with the real man than the clothes he wears. True, the manner in which one dons one's clothes, as the manner in which one deals with the accidental facts of life, affords a certain index to the true man; but the clothes themselves, and the accidental facts, appear, at all events, to be matters of fate. And if you can obtain knowledge of a man through actual contact with his personality, you do not trouble to draw conclusions from his ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... and least of all the Greeks, would have arrived at this theory of life and fate, if they had not felt that it was supported by actual instances. It was of the nature of an inference from the facts of life; and the explanation undoubtedly is that men do get betrayed, by a constant experience of good fortune, into rashness and heedlessness, because they trust to their luck and depend upon their ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... her father's headaches, to be rewarded by less gratitude than Juliet would receive for the mere laying of a white finger on his temple—Sally's services were looked upon by those who loved her best as one of the daily facts of life; Juliet's came ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... and horses and all! Poor Helen I cannot use for comparison, for she had no joy, save indeed the very divine, though at present unblossoming one of sisterly love. Still, and notwithstanding, if the facts of life are those of George Bascombe's endorsing—AND HE CAN PROVE IT—let us by all means learn and accept them, be they the worst possible. Meantime there are truths that ought to be facts, and until he has proved that there is no God, some ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... first are without law, the second under law, the third under grace. And so we might multiply distinctions. But is it not clear to common observation, that this threefold classification meets the facts of life better than the other? There are three degrees of character. There is the worldly man, who is just as good or bad as society around him leads him to be; whose virtues result merely from a happy organization, or fortunate influences, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... germs," not simply because it is contained in the Bible Genesis, nor because it was conceived by the great and gifted Harvey as a possible solution of the whole difficulty, but because it presents, as we have before said, a satisfactory explanation of all the phenomenal facts of life with which we are acquainted. If Mr. Herbert Spencer will descend from his stilted theory of "molecular machinery worked by molecular force," and tell us what it all means; and, at the same time, turn us out ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... forth for the drawing-room. Already on the stair, he was seized with some compunction; but when he entered the great gallery and beheld his wife, the Chancellor's abstract flatteries fell from him like rain, and he reawoke to the poetic facts of life. She stood a good way off below a shining lustre, her back turned. The bend of her waist overcame him with physical weakness. This was the girl-wife who had lain in his arms and whom he had sworn to cherish; there was she, who was better ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shook my head dubiously, he hurried on to clinch his point. "Colleges have gone a long way from the old ideal of pure culture. They have got down to solving the hard facts of life—pretty nearly all, except one. They still treat crime in the old way, study its statistics and pore over its causes and the theories of how it can be prevented. But as for running the criminal himself down, scientifically, relentlessly—bah! ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... Korosko. It was easy to feel strong and self-confident in the comfortable deck-chair, with the slippered Arab handing round the coffee and liqueurs. But they had been swept out of that placid stream of existence, and dashed against the horrible, jagged facts of life. Battered and shaken, they must have something to cling to. A blind, inexorable destiny was too horrible a belief. A chastening power, acting intelligently and for a purpose,—a living, working power, tearing them out of ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... the principle of making a virtue of necessity, accepting and adorning the severe facts of life, seams came to be an important vehicle of ornament. The Gauls and Britons embroidered the seams of their fur garments. "We may judge of the antiquity of the seam by its universal and mythological meaning. The seam, the tie, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... faith was, in truth, a wonder and a stumbling-block. Good, simple-hearted, easy-going, logical-minded, sceptical shoemaker that he was, with his head all stuffed full of Malthus, and John Stuart Mill, and political economy, and the hard facts of life and science, how could he hope to understand the complex labyrinth of metaphysical thinking, and childlike faith, and aesthetic attraction, and historical authority, which made a sensitive man like Arthur Berkeley, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... extraordinary exceptions in intellect—a pearl! Life is made up of various incidents, of pain and pleasure alternately. The Paradise of Dante, that sublime expression of the ideal, that perpetual blue, is to be found only in the soul; to ask it of the facts of life is a luxury against which nature protests every hour. To such souls as those the six feet of a cell, and the kneeling chair ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... with a look, in some connection, suggesting that, deep within, she dimly understands, and would really understand a little better if she weren't afraid to: for, like all of us, she lives surrounded by the black forest of the "facts of life" very much as the people in the heart of Africa live in their dense wilderness of nocturnal terrors, the mysteries and monstrosities that make them seal themselves up in the huts as soon as it gets dark. She, quite exquisite little Mother, would often understand, I believe, if she dared, if ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... chapter of that work—the one which reconstructs the England of the seventeenth century? It has always seemed to me the very high-water mark of Macaulay's powers, with its marvellous mixture of precise fact and romantic phrasing. The population of towns, the statistics of commerce, the prosaic facts of life are all transmuted into wonder and interest by the handling of the master. You feel that he could have cast a glamour over the multiplication table had he set himself to do so. Take a single concrete example of what I mean. The fact that a Londoner ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... crept closer to life than most artists, to have seized emotions in their nakedness and sharpness, to have felt with the innocence of a child. One of his collections is entitled "La Chambre d'Enfants." And that surprise and wonder at all the common facts of life, the sharpness with which the knowledge of death comes, characterize not alone this group, but all the songs. He is throughout them the child who sees the beetle lie dead, and who expresses his wonder and trouble directly from his heart with all the sharpness of necessary ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... emphasize their value to young children. There are still those who find no room in their own reading, and would give none in the reading of the young, except for facts. They confuse facts and truth, and forget that there is a world of truth that is larger than the mere facts of life, being compact of imagination and vision and ideals. Dr. Hamilton Wright Mabie convinced us of this in his ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... assumes to be developments of egoism, are merely its diseases; (taking the word "disease" in its most literal meaning). A man of sense is more an egoist in modesty than a blockhead is in boasting; and it is neither pride nor self-respect, but only ignorance and ill-breeding, that either disguise the facts of life, or violate ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and translated into action. The young student, dreaming the dreams of youth and pining for freedom and action, had more than once felt his gorge rise to the choking-point as he found himself forced to plod on among the dull, oppressive, unheroic facts of life; and those acts of official villainy against which Moor draws the sword he had himself seen flourishing unavenged in his native Wuerttemberg. But, on the other hand, he was never for a moment insensible to the moral hideousness and the tragic folly ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... as little as he knew any of the other every-day facts of life. In the depths of that ignorance he left his reputation in the hands of the only being he ever met who would tear it to shreds and throw it ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... could dream She would have guessed my heart so well? Dull boors See deeper than we think, and hide within Those leathern hulls unfathomable truths, Which we amid thought's glittering mazes lose. They grind among the iron facts of life, And have no time ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... contemporary speculations. It is certain that the science of Political Economy, the only department of moral inquiry which has made any considerable progress in our day, would fail to correspond with the facts of life if it were not true that Imperative Law had abandoned the largest part of the field which it once occupied, and had left men to settle rules of conduct for themselves with a liberty never allowed to them till recently. The bias ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... in her painstaking and accurate manner, we accept her revelations thankfully, and beg her to allow us to make our own philosophic and other explanations in attempting to account for the existence, sequences and relations of the facts of life. ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... and immature in the expression of their love as a pair of children, and this despite the fact that she was crammed with a university education and that his head was full of scientific philosophy and the hard facts of life. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... that we've both forgotten them proves that they are important," said Clovis; "you must have noticed that it's always the important things that one forgets, while the trivial, unnecessary facts of life stick in one's memory. There's my cousin, Editha Clubberley, for instance; I can never forget that her birthday is on the 12th of October. It's a matter of utter indifference to me on what date her birthday ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... grow old we are too apt to grow away from beauty and what is high and pure, our hearts harden by contact with the hard world. We examine love and find, or believe we find, that it is nought but a variety of passion; friendship, and think it self-interest; religion, and name it superstition. The facts of life alone remain clear and desirable. We know that money means power, and we turn our face to Mammon, and if he smiles upon us we are content to let our finer visions go where our ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... of the possible. Aunt Beatrice always said—and she was right—that tears were not, as people pretended, a help and solace in trouble. They merely took the starch out of you and left you a poor soaked, limp creature, unfit to face the hard facts of life. But sometimes tears will lie heavy and scalding as molten lead in the brain, until at length they force their way through to the light. And Milly after blowing her nose a good deal, as she mechanically turned the pages of Mommsen, at length ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... worry over definitions of the divine. We do need to cultivate the temper of mind and the sensitiveness of spirit that will save us from blindness to the higher facts of life, that will save us from the blasting whirlwind of materialism, with its sense of nothing but ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... country. Hard work and good crops would cure our ills. But millions voted for a poison that would have destroyed us. From that time on I dreamed of a new kind of school, not the kind we had that turned out men to grope blindly between good and folly. But a school based on the fundamental facts of life and labor, the need of food and housing, and the sweating skill that brings man most of his blessings. A school from which no man could come out ignorant. That school should teach the eternal facts, and he that denied the facts ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... very well what I mean, young woman. I want to put things clearly before you—" It is the most difficult thing in the world for a man—even without legs—to talk straight about the facts of life to a young girl. He has no idea how much she knows about them and how much she doesn't. To tear away veils and reveal frightening starkness is an act from which he shrinks with all the modesty of a (perhaps) deluded sex. I ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... woman exposed to the grossness and vulgarity of public life, or encounter what she must at the polls. When you talk, gentlemen, of sheltering woman from the rough winds and revolting scenes of real life, you must be either talking for effect, or wholly ignorant of what the facts of life are. The man, whatever he is, is known to the woman. She is the companion, not only of the accomplished statesman, the orator, and the scholar; but the vile, vulgar, brutal man has his mother, his ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... energy and persistence had attained power, which he was using solely for the welfare of Russia. In Prince Andrew's eyes Speranski was the man he would himself have wished to be—one who explained all the facts of life reasonably, considered important only what was rational, and was capable of applying the standard of reason to everything. Everything seemed so simple and clear in Speranski's exposition that Prince Andrew involuntarily agreed ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... method, which he affected, was indeed dropped, and a more harmonious form of art than the Euripidean was created for comedy by Menan'der, when the Athenians, after passing through their disputatious period, had settled down into a tranquil acceptation of the facts of life. Yet this return to harmony of form and purity of perception did not abate the influence of Euripides. Here and there throughout his tragedies he had said, and well said, what the Greeks were bound to think and feel upon important matters; and ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... schools. There are certain forms of science which accord perfectly with docility. David's manner showed no irony; it expressed rather a stoical, baffled kind of melancholy. In abstract questions he did not lack courage of thought, but when faced with the facts of life he was a mixture, or rather a succession, of timidity and stiffness, diffident modesty, and firmness of conviction. In short he was a man, like other men, complex and contradictory, not all in one piece. The trouble is that, in an intellectual ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... may work too perfectly to fit the haphazard facts of life. There was still the dead man to be explained. And a theory, however perfect, did not bring him any nearer to solving the personal problems concerned. What was one to do with a man who was at once sane and irresponsible? He could give up Clare like a man, he told himself, ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... he said, putting his hand on Leigh's shoulder, much as if he were admonishing a student, "I beg you not to allow this experience to colour your views with cynicism, for cynicism hurts only the cynic, and fails to take account of all the facts of life. As you have intimated, even-handed justice, inasmuch as it implies omniscience, is an attribute of God alone, but we have not been consciously unjust to you, according to our light. Personally I regret your departure, and I wish to assure you of my confidence in your future. You will doubtless ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential—their one illuminating and convincing quality—the very truth of their existence. The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal. Impressed by the ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... with a gaze for ever expecting, patient, and entreating. And in her eyes there was the wonder and desolation of an animal that knows only suffering, of the incomplete soul that knows pain but knows not hope; that can find no refuge from the facts of life in the illusory conviction of its dignity, of an exalted destiny beyond; in the heavenly consolation of a belief in the momentous origin of ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... gain in reality. The vision had enthralled and subjugated him; but with the sight of "a naked world" he had become conscious of things as they are, and he rejoiced in a justness of perception that declared what were to him the two great facts of life, the power and beauty of God, and the glory of the human soul. On these, not on ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... the most-avoided facts of life," said the ambassador. "Government, in the local or planetary sense of the word, is an organization for the suppression of adventure. Taxes are, in part, the insurance premiums one pays for protection against the unpredictable. And you have offended against everything that is the foundation ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... is the result of his looking at the world not through books or through the theories of books, but through his own eyes. He is sceptical because he sees that any one who wishes to live in harmony with the facts of life must be sceptical. Life is made up of such evasive entangled confused elements that any other attitude than this one is a noble madness if it is not knavish hypocrisy. The theories, convictions, moralities, opinions, of every child ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... that Buddha had acquired he learned many things. Chief of them, as he believed, are four great facts of life and nature from which the soul cannot escape—that there will always be sorrow and suffering in the world; that these are caused by clinging to things that are always changing or dying; that the only way to obtain peace is to renounce ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... from fairy stories because they do not often bring on to the stage actors of a different nature from ours. They give full play to the fancy as in "A Child's Dream of a Star," "The King of the Golden River," "Undine," and "The Snow Image"; but they are not poetic records of the facts of life, attempts to shape those facts "to meet the needs of the imagination, the cravings of the heart." In the Introduction to the book of Fairy Tales in this series, those familiar and much loved stories which have been repeated ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... and characters as the evolution of mechanism will draw together and develop, will give very different values from those given by the existing systems (if they can be called systems) to almost all the great matters of conduct. Under scientific analysis the essential facts of life are very clearly shown to be two—birth and death. All life is the effort of the thing born, driven by fears, guided by instincts and desires, to evade death, to evade even the partial death of crippling or cramping ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... literal truth by the Parisian playgoers themselves. It would seem that Ducis and his countrymen deemed the purpose of art to be alone fulfilled when the artistic fabric was divorced from the ugly facts of life. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... fool, if I am ignorant. Yes, doctor, I sail on a wide sea of ignorance, but I have taken soundings of some of its shallows and some of its depths. Your profession deals with the facts of life that interest me most just now, and I want to know something of it. Perhaps I may find it a calling such as would ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... out of the animal kingdom and obtains a causal body. The second is what is called by the Christian "conversion", by the Hindu "the acquirement of discrimination", and by the Buddhist "the opening of the doors of the mind". That is the point at which he realizes the great facts of life, and turns away from the pursuit of selfish ends in order to move intentionally along with the great current of evolution in obedience to the divine Will. The third point is the most important of all, for the Initiation which admits him to the ranks of the Brotherhood ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... leading personages of that day as they were. If we look to a period before or after that of Selwyn, we see an immortal gossip in Pepys, and in Greville another who will be read after the works of eminent historians have been put on upper shelves as out of date. The detailing of the minor facts of life without malice and with absolute truth enables posterity to form a sound judgment on a ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... he read his Byron with minute attention, and once more he was introduced to a master of expression. Byron is a little out of fashion now, alas! and yet what a thinker the man was! His lightning eye pierced to the very heart of things, and his intense grip on the facts of life makes his style seem alive. No wonder that the young Ruskin learned to think daringly under such a master! Now many people fancy that our great critic must be a man of universal knowledge. What do they think of this narrow early training? The use and purport of it all are plain enough ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... spiritual longing in the world—in the hearts of unnumbered thousands of men and women in whom we should never suspect it; among the wise and thoughtful, among the young and gay, who seldom assuage and never betray their thirst—this is one of the most wonderful and touching facts of life. It is not more heart that is needed, but more light; not more force, but a wiser direction to be given to very ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... dream of philosophers that theoretical and abstract science could and some day perhaps would succeed in putting into formulae and into general terms all that was significant in the concrete facts of life. It has been the tragic mistake of the so-called intellectuals, who have gained their knowledge from textbooks rather than from observation and research, to assume that science had already realized its dream. But there is no indication that science has ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... are told, that blooms on the fair stem of marriage. Yet it is the very citadel of ignorance, when it should be the school in which are taught the beautiful phenomena of physical life. Home! where the simplest, purest facts of life are converted into a nasty mystery and deliberately endowed with the characteristics of impurity and sin; for what else is the meaning of that solemn formula, which most of us have been taught, that we were conceived in sin? What else is the meaning ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... certainty for conjecture, and endeavour to find, by some surer method, where the real good of man lay. All this may sound very Pagan, and perhaps it is so. We must remember that he had been brought up a Jew, and had been driven out of the Jews' communion; his mind was therefore in contact with the bare facts of life, with no creed or system lying between them and himself as the interpreter of it. Some true account of things, however, he thought it likely that there must be, and the question was, how to find it. ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... temper is the result of many causes. The disintegration of religious superstition, and the substitution in its stead of spiritual ideals closer to the facts of life, is one of these. All that was good in Puritanism has been retained by the modern spirit, while its narrowing and numbing features, its anti-human, self-mortifying, provincial side have passed or are passing in ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... is something great in the half-success that has attended the effort of turning into an emotional religion, Bald Conduct, without any appeal, or almost none, to the figurative, mysterious, and constitutive facts of life. Not that conduct is not constitutive, but dear! it's dreary! On the whole, conduct is better dealt with on the cast-iron 'gentleman' and duty formula, with as little fervour and poetry as ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... long talk with Mick McKenna," Rand said. "Fortunately, Mick and I have worked together before. I was able to tell him the facts of life, and he'll be a good boy now. When last heard from, Farnsworth was beginning to blow his hot breath on the ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... a glittering illusion with which we gild the hard, cold facts of life—until all the world ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... that a boy's life is made happier by his mother's existence sounds too trite and obvious to bear any weight; but it is through the obvious facts of life that the world's machinery is kept in motion. The inexpressible, unwearying tenderness of this mother for her son, the love of this boy for his mother, grew with the passage of time—grew into something so significant, so vital and so ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... it's standing the gaff—standing it, not submitting to it. It's accepting the facts of life—of your own life, as they happen to be. It isn't being conquered by them. It's not making masters of them, but servants to ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... to reckon first with the homemaking career of girls is therefore blind to the facts of life. All education, all training, must be considered in its bearing on the one vocation, homemaking. The time will come when the occupations of boys and men must likewise be considered in relation to homemaking, but that problem is not the province ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... its points of agreement, or to revolting with Arminius from the more extreme tenets of Calvin and Calvin's followers and pleading like him for some co-operation on man's part with the work of grace. As yet Arminianism was little more than a reaction against a system that contradicted the obvious facts of life, a desire to bring theology into some sort of harmony with human experience; but it was soon to pass by a fatal necessity into a wider variance, and to gather round it into one mass of opposition every tendency of revolt which time was disclosing ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... can. Thus the sum of the contemporary knowledge or ignorance of good and evil is, in large measure, the handiwork of those who write. Those who write have to see that each man's knowledge is, as near as they can make it, answerable to the facts of life; that he shall not suppose himself an angel or a monster; nor take this world for a hell; nor be suffered to imagine that all rights are concentred in his own caste or country, or all veracities in his own parochial creed. Each man should learn what is within him, that he may strive to mend; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have been advocated to solve this problem of life. We may divide them into two classes, namely the monistic theory, which holds that all the facts of life can be explained by reference to this visible world wherein we live, and the dualistic theory, which refers part of the phenomenon of life to another world which ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... conversation, but it was one of those inconsequential talks that Bohemians consider so brilliant and everybody else so vapid. As we skimmed from one subject to another, treating the big facts of life as if they were mere incidents and the little as if they overshadowed all else, I could see that Craig, who had a faculty of probing into the very soul of anyone, when he chose, was gradually leading around to a subject which I knew he wanted, above ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... mere romance-fed imagination, without courage, without means, without knowledge, without skill, without anything real except his bodily appetites. Even in my childhood I found in this poor devil's unsuccessful encounters with the facts of life, a poignant quality that romantic fiction lacked. The book, in spite of its first failure, is not dead: I saw its title the other day in the catalogue ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... elementary agents, they may possibly be deducible from laws which commence when these elementary agents are brought together into some moderate number of not very complex combinations. The Laws of Life will never be deducible from the mere laws of the ingredients, but the prodigiously complex Facts of Life may all be deducible from comparatively simple laws of life; which laws (depending indeed on combinations, but on comparatively simple combinations, of antecedents) may, in more complex circumstances, be strictly compounded with one another, and ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... fascinating. He could turn his eloquence off and on like a tap. He sat in a drunken stupor, glaring at the crowd, until someone shouted: "Eh bien, Pilleux—you were saying?" Then the deluge! He had a peasant's acceptance of the elemental facts of life—it was raw, that hymn of his! The women of the streets who had crowded into the caf listened with a sort of terror; they admired him. One of them said: "Pilleux's wife betrayed him." He lifted his glass and drank. "No, ma petite," he said ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... time, on the cover of a magazine. She engaged a young girl from the village to take Elliston for his daily outings, and settled down to a routine of work, small social relaxations, and morning and evening care of the baby. The daily facts of life were pleasant to Mary; if some hurt or disappointed, her balanced nature swung readily to assuage itself with others. She honestly believed she felt more deeply than her husband, and perhaps she did, but she was not of the kind whom life can break. Stefan might dash himself to exhaustion against ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... he had not been a great financier and, above all, a marvelous organizer he might have become a highly individualistic philosopher—a calling which, if he had thought anything about it at all at this time, would have seemed rather trivial. His business as he saw it was with the material facts of life, or, rather, with those third and fourth degree theorems and syllogisms which control material things and so represent wealth. He was here to deal with the great general needs of the Middle West—to seize upon, if he might, certain well-springs of wealth and power and ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... life interests and reversions. It is difficult to see how one can escape making adjustments year after year for some time in the light of the ascertained facts, until the expiry of, say, nine or ten years has reduced the disparities between the estimated valuations and the facts of life to smaller proportions. ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... is written, "My soul is athirst for God, even the Living God." They want a living God, who cares for men, forgives men, saves men from their sins; and Him I have found in the Bible, and nowhere else, save in the facts of life, which the ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. Many who have "plied their ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
