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It is this want of proportion between profit and labour which debases men, producing the sycophantic appellations of patron and client, and that pernicious esprit du corps, proverbially vicious. The farmers are hospitable as well as independent. Offering once to pay for some coffee I drank when taking shelter from the rain, I was asked, rather angrily, if a little coffee was worth paying for.
His early introduction into this society, in which regularity of form did not conceal petrifaction of heart, induced Chopin to think that the CONVENANCES and courtesies of manner, in place of being only a uniform mask, repressing the character of each individual under the symmetry of the same lines, rather serve to contain the passions without stifling them, coloring only that bald crudity of tone which is so injurious to their beauty, elevating that materialism which debases them, robbing them of that license which vulgarizes them, lowering that vehemence which vitiates them, pruning that exuberance which exhausts them, teaching the "lovers of the ideal" to unite the virtues which have sprung from a knowledge of evil, with those "which cause its very existence to be forgotten in speaking to those they love."
"I may be a little peculiar," he said, "but do you know I never trust any important interest with a man who drinks habitually? one of your temperate drinkers, I mean, who can take his three or four glasses of wine at dinner, or twice that number, during an evening while playing at whist, but who never debases himself by so low a thing as intoxication."
She shall not be excluded from fashion, certainly; but neither shall I suffer her to run the vulgar gauntlet of heartless dissipation, which too often hardens, debases, and corrupts. But a truce to this; the subject is painful to me; let us change it."
To insist against drunkenness as a crime, because it debases reason, the noblest faculty of man, would be of no service to the common people: but to tell them that they may die in a fit of drunkenness, and shew them how dreadful that would be, cannot fail to make a deep impression.
The Brahminical mythology is so absurd that it necessarily debases every mind which receives it as truth; and with this absurd mythology is bound up an absurd system of physics, an absurd geography, an absurd astronomy. Nor is this form of Paganism more favourable to art than to science.
We are prone to hitch our wagon to a star in a way, or in a spirit, that does not sanctify the wagon, but debases the star. Emerson is perhaps too exceptional to take his place among the small band of the really first-class writers of the world.
Then why torment him if it will not do him good? It is simply unadulterated revenge. All the punishment in the world will not reform a man, unless he knows that he who inflicts it upon him does it for the sake of reformation, and really and truly loves him, and has his good at heart. Punishment inflicted for gratifying the appetite makes man afraid, but debases him.
A love of power would have been pardoned in her, always foreign to considerations of personal advantage; and, as ambition, like other human passions, may become a source of crime, though it is not itself a crime, in her case it would have been praised, because she would have unceasingly shunned the vanity which lessens it, the self-interest which debases it, and that continual recurrence to egotism which travesties it in intrigue.
There are some spheres the contact with which inevitably degrades the high, debases the pure, deforms the beautiful.
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