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Sweetness and light   /swˈitnəs ənd laɪt/   Listen
Sweetness and light

noun
1.
A mild reasonableness.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Sweetness and light" Quotes from Famous Books



... Blank, being a man of an original turn of mind, with the decorative bump strongly developed, holds what are at present peculiar views upon wall papers, room tones, and so on. The day is dark and gloomy, yet once within the halls of Blank there is sweetness and light. ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler

... to the natives, were appointed by the first class, who are 'too distant or indifferent to interfere ordinarily in human affairs.' Thus, the Huron god, Ahone, punishes nobody. He is all sweetness and light, but has a deputy god, called Okeus. On our hypothesis this indifference of high gods suggests the crowding out of the great disinterested God by venal animistic competition. All of class II. 'appear to have been ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... the community than does a barber-shop, a dressmaker-by-the-day, or a pool-room habitue. It conceals more skeletons than the catacombs. Chug Scaritt, had he cared to open his lips and speak, might have poured forth such chronicles as to make Spoon River sound a paean of sweetness and light. He knew how much Old Man Hatton's chauffeur knocked down on gas and repairs; he knew just how much the Tillotsons had gone into debt for their twin-six, and why Emil Sauter drove to Oshkosh so often on business, ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber

... They had no other amusement, and desired no leisure; they were squalid in their habits, and herded like animals; they were barren of aspirations, and their industry was brutish (though of a kind still belauded), since it left no leisure for humanizing exercises, no room for sweetness and light. They were law-abiding, but that was not a virtue to commend itself to the Victorian diggers at this date, and they were only law-abiding because of their slavish instincts and their lack of courageous attributes. The antipathy bred then survives in the third generation of Australians, but is less ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson

... harsh word, not one ignoble thought or unkind insinuation. In all of them, though so many are for the use of persons placed in the most trying circumstances, and some of them are for persons writhing under a sense of intolerable injury, sweetness and light do ever reign. Even 'yours truly, Jacob Langton,' in his 'letter to his Daughter's Mercenary Fiance',' mitigates the sternness of his tone by the remark that his 'task is inexpressibly painful.' And he, Mr. Langton, is the ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... the principle of "the terminal conversion of opposites," which the author once heard an old philosopher expound, the most advanced modern is better able to hark back to the sweetness and light and music of the primeval world than the veriest wigwam-dweller that ever chipped an arrowhead. It is not so much what the primitive man can give us as what we can find in him that is worth our while. The light that a Goethe, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... philosophers, so to speak, are but fighting about the ass' shadow. I saw one who poured water into a mortar, and ground it with all his might with a pestle of iron, fancying he did a thing useful; but it remained water only, none the less.' Stoicism, hedonism, the gospel of 'Sweetness and Light'; what is it, may I ask, that your aesthetic priests furnish, to feed immortal British souls? Knee breeches, sun flowers, niello, cretonne, Nanking bowls, lily dados? To us it savors sorrowfully of that which one of your prophets foreshadowed, 'Despair, baying ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... say that they are in general unduly civilized. Throughout large parts of the population, even in long-settled regions, there is no excess of those virtues needed for the maintenance of social harmony. Especially out in the West, men's dealings do not yet betray too much of the "sweetness and light" which we are told distinguish the cultured man from the barbarian. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which my assertion is true. You know that the primitive man lacks power of application. Spurred by ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... affirming the paramount authority of the law of God. If they erred in seeking that authoritative law, and passed over the Sermon on the Mount for the stern Hebraisms of Moses; if they hesitated in view of the largeness of Christian liberty; if they seemed unwilling to accept the sweetness and light of the good tidings, let us not forget that it was the mistake of men who feared more than they dared to hope, whose estimate of the exceeding awfulness of sin caused them to dwell upon God's vengeance rather than his compassion; and whose ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... goodness; what capacities of vileness, bitterness and evil. Nature must needs be lavish with the mother and creator of men, and centre in her all the possibilities of life. And a few critical years can decide whether her life is to be full of sweetness and light, whether she is to be the vestal of a holy temple, or whether she will be the fallen priestess of a desecrated shrine. There are women, it is true, who seem to be capable neither of rising much nor of falling much, and whom a conventional ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... convulsed period of his life was what his master would have called conscientious. Was he not encouraging the strangest, wickedest, wildest ideas in the Princess? Strange and wicked and wild that is from the grand ducal point of view, for to Priscilla they seemed all sweetness and light. Fritzing had a perfect horror of the Grand Duke. He was everything that Fritzing, lean man of learning, most detested. The pleasantest fashion of describing the Grand Duke will be simply to say that he was in all things, both of mind and body, the exact opposite of Fritzing. Fritzing was a man ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim

... at last, reading down the table of contents. "'The Self-government System at Harding'—he wouldn't be mentioned in that. My poem is next—he certainly isn't in that. Then that story of Eleanor Watson's, and an essay on 'Sweetness and Light.'" ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde

... were his courage and his determination to be happy as the right way of making other people happy. His courage, far more than change of scene and climate, gave him fourteen more years in which to contribute to the sweetness and light of the world. These years were made fruitful to others by his determined happiness, a happiness in which the main factor, outside of his own determination, came from the companionship which his marriage brought to him. The great principles by which he lived influenced those who did not know ...
— The Sea Fogs • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to spread sweetness and light, and to the end, furthermore, that the ignorant people across the salted seas might know something of a land of real food and much food, and plenty of it and plenty of variety to it, I would that I might bring an expedition of Europeans to America ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... was in the form of pink roses and flavored with the cordial parfait amour, while the ice cream repeated the design, and was served in a garden hat of straw-colored candy wreathed with natural roses. The human flowers around the table against such a background of "sweetness and light" made the scene one to ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke

... treats of lunar superstitions, many of which yet live in the vagaries which sour and shade our modern sweetness and light. ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... the persecutors, strong reaction from the beautiful ceremonies and graceful living that could hide such unbrotherliness became almost worship of unloveliness and hardship. In after years the lives of their descendants were shaped into a narrow severity, not drawn from the sweetness and light of the gospel which they read, but from the bitter fountains of their early ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot

... he might have added. We drove between green walls of ivy up to a house which seemed itself to be built of ivy, like that wonderful old mansion of Castle Leod in Scotland. Here, plainly, is another centre of "sweetness and light," the abolition of which must make, not this region alone, but Ireland poorer in that precise form of wealth, which, as Laboulaye has shown in one of the best of his lectures, is absolutely identical with ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert



Words linked to "Sweetness and light" :   amiableness, affableness, amiability, bonhomie, affability, geniality



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