Nor was civil society founded merely to preserve the lives of its members; but that they might live well: for otherwise a state mi...ght be composed of slaves, or the animal creation ... nor is it an alliance mutually to defend each other from injuries, or for a commercial intercourse.... But whosoever endeavors to establish wholesome laws in a state, attends to the virtues and vices of each individual who composes it; from whence it is evident, that the first care of him who would found a city, truly deserving that name, and not nominally so, must be to have his citizens virtuous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The care of a house, the conduct of a home, the management of children, the instruction and government of servants, are as deservi...ng of scientific treatment and scientific professors and lectureships as are the care of farms, the management of manure and crops, and the raising and care of stock.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Gilbert Jonas, painter, believed in his star.... His own faith was not, however, without its virtues because it consisted in admit...ting, in some obscure way, that he would obtain many things without deserving them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he... would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honour as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obsc...urity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A sweet disorder in the dress Kindles in clothes a wantonness:... A lawn about the shoulders thrown Into a fine distraction: An erring lace, which here and there Enthralls the crimson stomacher: A cuff neglectful, and thereby Ribbands to flow confusedly: A winning wave (deserving note) In the tempestuous petticoat: A careless shoestring, in whose tie I see a wild civility: Do more bewitch me than when art Is too precise in every part.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I verily believe that the great good which has been effected in the world by Christianity has been largely counteracted by the pes...tilent doctrine on which all the Churches have insisted, that honest disbelief in their more less astonishing creeds is a moral offense, indeed a sin of the deepest dye, deserving and involving the same future retribution as murder and robbery. If we could only see, in one view, the torrents of hypocrisy and cruelty, the lies, the slaughter, the violations of every obligation of humanity, which have flowed from this source along the course of the history of Christian nations, our worst imaginations of Hell would pale beside the vision.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Self-love makes our friends appear more or less deserving in proportion to the delight we take in them, and the measures by which ...we judge of their worth depend upon the manner of their conversing with us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
American manners have evolved in a climate in many ways very different from those of the civilization to which most Americans owe ...their heritage. In most European countries manners have evolved as fences, and conventions of public behavior have been devised to protect one's "place." The shopkeeper had one set of manners toward his customers and another toward his employees, as the butler did toward his "master" and toward the servants, and the squire toward his gamekeeper and his mother-in-law. The idea that manners should be an expression of general regard for one's fellow man is the product of a society that hoped to be classless, and though it has fallen far short of its intentions, our conventions are the very opposite of those designed to protect one class from another. What we have tried to do in America is to perpetuate a set of conventions that give the impression of not being conventions at all but attitudes which, we hope, indicate that one of us is as good as another, as deserving of consideration, and as responsible for maintaining a state of good will. Almost as far back as one can go in the literature (if it can be called that) of American etiquette, one finds that manners are referred to as "minor morals."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »