United States or Angola ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Or, again, is it that we avoid the sight of things as they are, avoid the unedifying, because of what may be called "the uncreative instinct," that safeguard and concomitant of a civilisation which demands of us complete efficiency, practical and thorough employment of every second of our time and every inch of our space?
Still, whatever elements of a generous public spirit sharply baffled may have entered into this extraordinary moral breakdown, it must be pronounced a painfully unmanly and unedifying exhibition.
If he had an opportunity, on the one hand, of acquiring much hair-drawn divinity and a taste for formal disputation, he was put in the way of much gross and flaunting vice upon the other. The lecture room of a scholastic doctor was sometimes under the same roof with establishments of a very different and peculiarly unedifying order.
To begin with, I have no rosary. I wish I had not read that French novel. I wish I had not gone downstairs to hunt for its seventeenth century ancestor. I wish I had given Pasquale dinner at the club. It is all the fault of Antoinette. Why can't she cook in a middle-class, unedifying way? All this comes from having in the house a woman whose soul is in the stew-pot. July 1st.
Now, by the amazing irony of fate, who weaves stranger dramas than could ever be set on censored stages, for they both take hundreds of years to unravel themselves, and are of the most unedifying character, Turkey, the rodent cancer, has been infected by another with greater organisation for devouring; the disease of Ottomanism is threatened by a more deadly hungerer, and Prussianism has inserted its crab-pincers into the cancer that came out of Asia.
The tragic poet, who shews the sad vicissitudes of things and the disappointments of the passions, at least strengthens our yearnings after imaginary good, and lends wings to our desires, by which we, "at one bound, high overleap all bound" of actual suffering. But Mr. Crabbe does neither. He gives us discoloured paintings of life; helpless, repining, unprofitable, unedifying distress.
It was the interview he had had with the Greek on the previous day which filled his mind, and he frowned as he recalled it. He opened the little wicket gate and went through the plantation to the house, doing his best to shake off the recollection of the remarkable and unedifying discussion he had had with the moneylender.
It is the darkest and most unedifying part of the mystery. Moreover, that side of the question, as a war has helped us to remember, never troubles the lucky ones.
The main advantage which poetry possesses over history, Sidney goes on, is that while the historian must stick to his facts, which too frequently are unedifying, the poet can and does create a world better than nature, and presents to his reader ideal figures of human conduct such as Pylades, Cyrus, and Æneas.
To his simple mind, the professionalism of the pulpit, the paid exhorter, the moneyed church, was an unspiritual and unedifying thing, and it was not until his spirit was broken and his moral and physical constitution undermined by trade, conquest, and strong drink, that Christian missionaries obtained any real hold upon him.
Word Of The Day