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Civilisation

noun
1.
The social process whereby societies achieve an advanced stage of development and organization.  Synonym: civilization.
2.
A particular society at a particular time and place.  Synonyms: civilization, culture.
3.
A society in an advanced state of social development (e.g., with complex legal and political and religious organizations).  Synonym: civilization.
4.
The quality of excellence in thought and manners and taste.  Synonyms: civilization, refinement.  "He is remembered for his generosity and civilization"



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"Civilisation" Quotes from Famous Books



... until at length the fatal fascination was complete, and my trip became practically an exercise of devotion to that sheep. I carried it everywhere and ministered fondly to its wants. Not for the world would I have alluded to mutton in its presence. And when we returned to civilisation I parted from the creature with sincere regret and the consciousness that I had humoured my affections at the expense of my digestion. The sheep did not give me so much as a look of farewell, but fell to feeding on the grass beside the farm-house with an ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke

... march of civilisation, juries in important trials will become more timid and hesitating. The weight of responsibility oppresses the man of conscientious scruple. Already numbers recoil from the idea of capital punishment; and, whenever a jury can find a peg to ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau

... however, I believe he was immensely proud at having trained me to meet gentlefolk on more or less equal terms. Ewing's invitation was a tribute to himself. To fit me for church on Sunday and other functions of civilisation he took Ewing (as counsellor) and myself to a tailor's and plunged enthusiastically into the details of my outfit. I can see him now, shaggy and shabby, fingering stuffs with the anxious solicitude of a woman ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... France d'une maniere durable, qu'en satisfaisant le double besoin qui lui a fait entreprendre la revolution. Il lui faut, dans le gouvernement, une liberte politique reelle, et dans la societe, le bien-etre materiel que produit le developpement sans cesse perfectionne de la civilisation." ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet

... A general account of these important archaeological objects will be published by J. Needham, Science and civilisation in China, Cambridge, 1959(?), vol. 4. The original publications (in Chinese) are as follows: Wang Chen-to, "Investigations and reproduction in model form of the south-pointing carriage and hodometer," National Peiping Academy Historical Journal, ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price

... her roof a European, except a French government-official or two, and a few—a very few—French officers. Never had any European women come. Tourists were usually satisfied with Touggourt, three or four days nearer civilisation. Women did not care to undertake an immense and fatiguing journey among the most formidable dunes of the desert, where there was nothing but ascending and descending, day after day; where camels sometimes broke their legs in the deep sand, winding along ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... one had named a council of wise men to fix upon a spot where this might be done with the least mischief to the rest of the world, one should have named the coast of Africa. By their being there they will render to civilisation a country which for about 800 years has been growing worse and worse, and which was in the times of the Romans one of the richest provinces. It settles, besides, upon the French a constant petite guerre with ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria

... is the same. In civilised religion and myth we find rudimentary survivals, fossils of rite and creed, ideas absolutely incongruous with the environing morality, philosophy, and science of Greece and India. Parallels to these things, so out of keeping with civilisation, we recognise in the creeds and rites of the lower races, even of cannibals; but there the creeds and rites are not incongruous with their environment of knowledge and culture. There they are as natural and inevitable as the flint-headed spear or marriage by capture. ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang

... attention, and Granpere is now placed on an excellent road which runs from the town of Remiremont on one line of railway, to Colmar on another. The inhabitants of the Alsatian Ballon hills and the open valleys among them seem to think that the civilisation of great cities has been brought near enough to them, as there is already a diligence running daily from Granpere to Remiremont;—and at Remiremont you are on the railway, and, of course, in ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope

... cheerfully supplied my place at Madrid, and exerted himself to the utmost in forwarding the views of the Bible Society, influenced by no other motive than a hope that its efforts would eventually contribute to the peace, happiness, and civilisation ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... here, but I may point out that there is an intermediate form between the two. It is doubtful as to whether this is a transition form. It was first brought to my notice by Mr. T. A. Joyce, as in use amongst some negro peoples in Central Africa possessing an old, high and possibly introduced civilisation, and is figured in Messrs. Torday and Joyce's Notes Ethnographiques ... Bakuba ... et Bushongo (Annales du Congo) pp. 24 and 182. In this loom the warp is stretched between an upper beam and a lower beam at an angle of about 90 degrees, and the weaver sits underneath ...
— Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms • H. Ling Roth

... and is, therefore, disappointed. Besides, how slowly we travel! In the sixteenth century nobody minded taking five months to get anywhere. But a fortnight is a large slice out of the nineteenth century; and the child of civilisation, long petted by Science, impatiently complains to his indulgent guardian of all delay in travel, and petulantly calls on her to complete her task and finally eliminate the factor of distance from human calculations. A fortnight is a long time in modern life. It ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill

... France during the early middle ages had far outstripped the Northern provinces in art, learning, and the refinements of civilisation. Roman culture had made its way into Southern Gaul at an early date and had been readily accepted by the inhabitants, while Marseilles and Narbonne had also known something of Greek civilisation. Bordeaux, ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor

... watching there, his thoughts naturally went back to the events of the past day, the sixth since they had bidden good-bye to civilisation and started upon their expedition. He thought of the remonstrance offered by his men to their proceeding farther; then of the satisfactory way in which the difficulty had been settled; and later on of the ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn

... sea-coast from Maranham to Bahia. It is related that one large tribe, the Tupinambas, migrated from Pernambuco to the Amazons. One fact seems to be well-established, namely, that all the coast tribes were far more advanced in civilisation, and milder in their manners, than the savages who inhabited the interior lands of Brazil. They were settled in villages, and addicted to agriculture. They navigated the rivers in large canoes, called ubas, made ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... and, what it adds must, from the nature of the case, be modelled on that which it has received, and be of a piece with it. But, though the common consciousness changes but slowly, it does change: with the change from savagery to civilisation there goes moral development. Some of the myths, which are re-told from one generation to another, may be capable of becoming civilised and moralised in proportion as do those who tell them; but some are not. These latter are incidents in the personal history of the gods, which, if told at all, ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons

... the agility of youth and fire. He was the final concentration of the essence of Spanish passion filtered into an American frame; she, a repressed Southern exotic, trying to fit itself into the niches of a modern civilisation. Truly, a fitting couple to seek the ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar

... the surge, arrange the molecules of the mind in still layers. It is then that a dream fills it, and a dream is sometimes better than the best reality. Laugh at the idea of dreaming where there is an odour of tar if you like, but you see it is outside intolerable civilisation. It is a hundred miles from the King's Road, though but just ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies

... added to Sir Walter's Sixty Years Since, and it may be argued that all the resources of modern civilisation have failed to accomplish, in that period, what the descendants of Malcolm Canmore effected in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is true as far as language is concerned, but only with regard to language. The Highlanders have not forgotten the Gaelic tongue as the Lowlanders ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait

... without a hope that at some future time, as civilisation advances, men will allow that they who deprive a culprit of that life which none can recall, commit an act of sacrilege in defiance of those divine laws which govern the universe and take precedence of ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid

... affairs was known, or might have been known, at Richmond, for Colonel Chandler, inspector-general of the Confederate army, inspected the camp, and reported upon its administration in no halting terms. 'It is a place,' he said, 'the horrors of which it is difficult to describe—it is a disgrace to civilisation.'" ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton

... found in the Cape Colony, nor had this community of twenty thousand Europeans the means of knowing the nature of the laws and regulations of the Government by which it was ruled. So long and complete an isolation from European civilisation produced a result which is as remarkable in itself as it is significant to the student of South African history. This phenomenon was the existence, in the nineteenth century, of a community of European blood whose moral and intellectual standards ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold

... other darknesses. We do not know what masculine thing is projected by the feminine consciousness, and civilisation, even life itself, must stand at a halt until that has been discovered or created, but art is the female projected by the male: science is the male projected by the male—as yet a poor thing, and to remain so until it has become art; that is, has become fertilised ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... better I liked her. She had been tenderly and carefully brought up, in an atmosphere of singularly rare refinement for the polar regions, for her father was the most important man of his tribe and ranked at the top of Esquimaux civilisation. I made long dog-sledge trips across the mighty ice floes with Lasca—that was her name—and found her company always pleasant and her conversation agreeable. I went fishing with her, but not in her perilous boat: I merely followed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... has succeeded in pointing out, that, notwithstanding the progress of science and the advancement of civilisation and Christianity, some of the darker shadows that have disfigured past ages are still floating over a portion of our social horizon, he feels his labour will not have been altogether in vain. Like many of the ghosts alluded to in the following pages, that of superstition needs ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... in this country might be set at 1400 B.C. Continental authorities set the age for countries in Europe somewhat earlier, at about 2000 B.C. This is a perfectly natural conclusion, for it is an ascertained fact that the flow of civilisation was from East to West, as has always been the case, and that, therefore, it is only to be expected that the Bronze Age of the Continent would ante-date that of England by ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens

... previously; but it was new in the sense that after the Great War India speedily became the India that we know from historical records. A certain fusion of different races, cultures, and ideals had to take place in order that the peculiar civilisation of India might unfold itself; and this fusion was accomplished about the time of the Great War, and partly no doubt by means of the Great War, some ten centuries before the ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett

... Nuisance, and the audience that you cannot possibly dispense with is a Nuisance, and the Nuisance is not merely a local Nuisance, because it is a general Nuisance to know that there can be such a Nuisance left in civilisation so very long after ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens

... He thought of the hobbling wretches whom he had seen carrying cans and bottles to be filled by the barman. Just God, what an end! Evidently she had been unfit to live, without any strength of purpose, an easy prey to habits, one of the wrecks on which civilisation has been reared. But that she could have sunk so low! Was it possible he had deceived himself so utterly about her? He remembered her outburst of that night and interpreted it in a harsher sense than he had ever done. ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce

... conspirators and the proclamation of Darius must be left untouched. The one is a ghastly example of retributive judgment, in which, as sometimes is the case even now, men fall into the pit they have digged for others, and it shows the barbarous cruelty of that gorgeous civilisation. The other is an example of how far a man may go in perceiving and acknowledging the truth without its influencing his heart. The decree enforces recognition of Daniel's God, in language which even prophets do not surpass; but it is all ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... the enfolding silence breaks the bizarre music of an indifferent gramophone, recklessly mocking the sublime grandeur of the age-old antiquities. Laughter and gay music and devil-may-care colonists awaking echoes that have been more or less silent to civilisation for how many ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page

... not for the stern parents and wholesome laws as to age, girls might more often marry their first loves. It is difficult to conjecture what the state of civilisation might be, if it were common for people to marry their first loves, regardless of "age, colour, or previous condition ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed

... command of the Sung-kiang force, and that I am now a Mandarin. I have taken the step on consideration. I think that any one who contributes to putting down this rebellion fulfils a humane task, and I also think tends a great deal to open China to civilisation. I will not act rashly, and I trust to be able soon to return to England; at the same time, I will remember your and my father's wishes, and endeavour to remain as short a time as possible. I can say that if I had not accepted the command, I believe ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill

... Gerebtzoff, Histoire de la Civilisation en Russie,—Wolowski, in Revue des Deux Mondes,—and Tegoborski, Commentaries on the Productive Forces of Russia, Vol. I. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various

... great conquerors, but where they conquered, they governed wisely. The nations they conquered were impressed so indelibly with the intellectual character of their masters, that, after fourteen centuries of decadence, the traces of civilisation are still distinguishable. Why should not we act a similar part in India? There never was a more docile people, never a more tractable nation. The opportunity is present, and the power is not wanting. Let ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright

... tradition is affected by the recent discoveries made in Crete. The civilisation there unearthed raises questions of great interest; the problems it suggests are certain to modify current ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb

... another why he laughs, or at what, seeing that he does not always know, and that, if he does, he is not a responsible agent. Laughter is an involuntary action of certain muscles, developed in the human species by the progress of civilisation. ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

... the self-repression it exacts, and that it should be but occasionally difficult to them shows an affinity with the type. Do you perchance, O continental observers of the race, call it hypocritical? It is their nature disciplined to the regimental step of civilisation. Socially these island men and women of a certain middle rank are veterans of an army, and some of the latest enrolled are the stoutest defenders of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... between art and civilisation? Here follows my hypothesis. There is in the history of every art (and for brevity's sake, I include in this term every distinct category, say, renaissance sculpture as distinguished from antique, of the same art) a moment when, for one reason or other, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... old, to indulge in dreams. You are a young man and will live to see what I can only predict. The world is thinking of something else than civil and religious liberty. Those are phrases of the eighteenth century. The men who have won these 'three glorious days' at Paris, want neither civilisation nor religion. They will not be content till they have destroyed both. It is possible that they may be parried for a time; that the adroit wisdom of the house of Orleans, guided by Talleyrand, may ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli

... acclimatised, make the bush your home, and avoid unnecessary hardships. Interest yourself chiefly in the progress of your journey, and do not look forward to its end with eagerness. It is better to think of a return to civilisation, not as an end to hardship and a haven from ill, but as a close to an adventurous and pleasant life. In this way, risking little, and insensibly creeping on, you will make connections, and learn the capabilities of the country, as you advance; all which will be found invaluable in the ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton

... removed, inasmuch as some obscurity must be admitted to remain as to the manner in which the structure of the larva is aborted; this obscurity is likely to remain till we know more of the early history of civilisation among bees than I can find that we know at present; but I believe the difficulty was reduced to such proportions as to make it little likely to be felt in comparison with that of attributing instinct to any other cause than inherited habit, or inherited habit ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler

... of movement. The first settlers were, as a rule, rough people who had to make their living, and little time to think of anything beyond, but we are indebted to them, for they are everywhere the necessary pioneers of civilisation—the mass whose dead bodies form a bridge for their more fortunate successors. Then the gold discoveries brought out a lower class. However, the second generation is a great improvement on the first, and, no doubt, the usual rule of amelioration of type will make itself felt in due course. ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton

... Editor has used both the three-volume edition and the two-volume edition of the "Histoire de la Civilisation." He has usually preferred the order of topics of the two-volume edition, but has supplemented the material therein with other matter ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos

... the drama of life; where good and evil fight out their everlasting battle, now ranged in opposite camps, now and more often in the heart, both of them, of each living man—that the true human interest of history resides. The progress of industries, the growth of material and mechanical civilisation, are interesting, but they are not the most interesting. They have their reward in the increase of material comforts; but, unless we are mistaken about our nature, they do not highly ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... will just go round to my house, for I keep one regularly here, and put on the garb of civilisation. Alice would not recognise me in this red shirt ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty

... solitude and the silence in the midst of which it stands like the ruin of some ancient and forgotten civilisation. Far behind you have left the hurry and tumult of the great armies—every village seething with a strange and tumultuous life, soldiers bargaining with the women for potatoes and cabbages in the marketplace, boiling their pots in the fields, playing football ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... own mother. At home, he would have spent his last penny to add to her happiness or comfort. I make no attempt to explain. I only know that such men do exist, and that Hasluck was one of them. One avoids difficulties by dismissing them as a product of our curiously complex civilisation—a convenient phrase; let us hope the recording angel may be ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... "Nero," seem to concern themselves with very different subjects. On the contrary, they present three different aspects of the one, identical problem—the struggle between the Occident and the Orient—a problem that Rome succeeded in solving as no European civilisation has since been able to do, making the countries of the Mediterranean Basin share a common life, in peace. How Rome succeeded in accomplishing this union of Orient and Occident is one of the points of greatest interest in its history. The first of these three ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero

... its persual with a stronger determination than ever to become unselfish, useful, and devoted. Are there not lives yet to be saved? Are there no wrecks as awful as those which are caused by ships crashing among rocks, or stranding upon dangerous sands? These are days of civilisation and culture, of the multiplication of schools, and extension of churches. But no reflective observer can pass along the streets without seeing perilous places, which, though they never were marked on any wreck chart, have been ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope

... know that it combines all that civilisation has to offer of beauty, magnificence, and mournfulness. A day's visit from Paris will give you an inkling of this, but only an inkling. To get it all you must live there, to be interpenetrated by its glory of decay. It is always the autumn of the spirit at Versailles, even in summer, ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... country after all," he observed. "When I have made my pile, I shall pitch my tent or build myself a hut far from the madding crowd, and bid good-bye to Lincoln's Inn, and Piccadilly, and club-land, and all the delights of modern civilisation." ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... has this dual aspect. First it is a mechanico-material struggle, two mechanical forces pulling asunder from the central object, the bone. All it can result in is the pulling asunder of the fabric of civilisation, and even of life, without any creative issue. It is no more than a frog under a cart-wheel. The mechanical forces, rolling on, roll over the body of life and ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence

... we had the American Minister at the Court of Turin here, and it was delightful to hear him talk about Piedmont, its progress in civilisation and the comprehension of liberty, and the honesty and resolution of the King. It is the only hope of Italy, that Piedmont! God prosper the hope. Besides this diplomatical dignitary and his wife, we had two American gentlemen of more than average intelligence, who ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... in value; uncleanliness and barbarism in food, clothing and houses, disappeared. 'Only old men and women, grown rusty in the habits and the ignorance of many years, complain that the times are worse; at the sight of a higher civilisation, they complain of "the luxury and the pride of the world now-a-days;" as superstition dies out, they complain of "human incredulity, and the downfall of religion." "The day of judgment," say they, "is ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various

... one on each side of the reprobate, praying till the perspiration streamed down their foreheads, to pray the devil out of him. The ohs! and the groanings of the audience were terrible; and the whole scene, though very edifying to the elect, was disgraceful to any sect who lived within the pale of civilisation. ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... is, with its hierarchy ranging through long centuries almost from apostolic days to our own; living side by side with forms of civilisation and uncivilisation, the most diverse and the most contradictory, through all the fifteen hundred years and more of its existence; asserting an effective control over opinions and institutions; with its pontificate (as is claimed) dating from the fisherman of Galilee, and ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... to get to that house," declared Patty. "I had no idea it was so late. Come, people, no matter what the result, we must TRY to reach shelter and civilisation." ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells

... evil practices against the Cathari were perhaps no truer than similar accusations against the Waldenses, and their missionary zeal was proof against even death at the stake. Nevertheless there is no doubt that the cause of progress and civilisation lay with Catholicism rather than with its opponents. The asceticism of the Cathari would have resulted, if not in the extinction of the race, at least in the destruction of the family: their identification of matter with the ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley

... this book is to prove that the Homeric Epics, as wholes, and apart from passages gravely suspected in antiquity, present a perfectly harmonious picture of the entire life and civilisation of one single age. The faint variations in the design are not greater than such as mark every moment of culture, for in all there is some movement; in all, cases are modified by circumstances. If our contention be true, it will follow ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... position afforded him, for the discomfort and dangers of a long voyage in unknown seas. Mr Banks was, however, more than a philosopher—he was a large-hearted philanthropist, and he was animated with the hope of diffusing some of the advantages of civilisation and Christianity among the people who might be discovered. He engaged, as naturalist to the expedition, the services of Dr Solander, a Swede by birth, educated under Linnaeus, from whom he had brought letters of introduction to England. ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston

... socialists who decline to vote more soldiers because they desire to trouble the world's peace and expect "to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives in the next war and to threaten the existence of morality and civilisation." ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam

... am elemental. Beneath the veneer of civilisation I am a savage. To wake up with the war-cry of the enemy in my ears, to sleep with the—er—barking of the crocodile in ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne

... accident, its center of gravity and of diffusion has lain with the English-speaking communities during the period when this bias made history and left its impress on the institutional scheme of the Western civilisation. By grace of what may, for the present purpose, be called historical accident, it happens that the interval of history during which the bias of Natural Liberty made visible headway was also a period during which these English-speaking peoples, among whom its effects are chiefly visible, were ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... days of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, in the latter part of the second century after Christ, that these temples and palaces and theatres were rising. Those were the palmy days of Graeco-Roman civilisation in Syria; then the shops along the Colonnade were filled with rich goods, the Forum listened to the voice of world-famous orators and teachers, and proud lords and ladies assembled in the Naumachia to watch the ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke

... nation, although there was no formal and binding constitution to give it support. When the Israelites settled in Palestine they found it inhabited by a population superior to themselves both in numbers and in civilisation, which they did not extirpate, but on the contrary gradually subdued and absorbed. The process was favoured by affinity of race and similarity of speech; but, however far it went, it never had the effect ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... been on the island a fortnight, and Dick had discovered the keenest joy in life to be naked. To be naked and wallow in the shallows of the lagoon, to be naked and sit drying in the sun. To be free from the curse of clothes, to shed civilisation on the beach in the form of breeches, boots, coat, and hat, and to be one with the wind and the sun and ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... Thracian considered it a disgrace to till the ground; to live by plunder was the mark of a gentleman. When people can live by plunder, there must be somebody worth plundering. One object of modern civilisation is to protect him who labours from the aggression of ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long

... the situation: The head of one of our departments, one of the most celebrated detectives in Europe, has long been of opinion that a purely intellectual conspiracy would soon threaten the very existence of civilisation. He is certain that the scientific and artistic worlds are silently bound in a crusade against the Family and the State. He has, therefore, formed a special corps of policemen, policemen who are ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton

... appearance to arouse comment. Mackenzie sprang up from his chair as she approached and went forward to meet her. "I tried to find you directly I came, Miss Clinton," he said in his loud voice, which no course of civilisation would avail to subdue. "I've brought those sketches I told ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall

... Biddy was emphatic. In the circumstances there was only one thing to be done. Gabrielle must be married—somehow—anyhow—and the sooner the better. It was the sort of thing that happened every day of the week and the resources of civilisation had never been able to find another solution. Jocelyn shook his head. It was all very well to talk about marriage, but where, in the neighbourhood, could a bridegroom be found at such short notice? Biddy's suggestion of half a dozen available Joyces failed to satisfy him. However ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young

... never at any time encouraged evening visitors. They were all early risers at Harmony and their life could not be adapted to the artificial, the unnatural strain of modern civilisation. ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt

... leaving Hertford at five in the morning and he had arranged to be called in time to catch it. He took off his boots, coat, vest, collar and tie, unbuckled his belt—he was one of those eccentrics to whom the braces of civilisation were anathema—and lay down on the outside of the bed, pulling the eiderdown over him. Sleep did not come to him readily. He turned from side ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace

... not a suitable subject to go into here, but I recommend it to the attention of my more thoughtful readers and those who concern themselves with the amelioration of the wretched social conditions of our glorious twentieth-century civilisation. ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby

... replied. "The first argument, however, is very weak. For many thousands of years the people on the earth not only managed to live, but attained a high state of civilisation, yet we have no reason to believe that they ever ate potatoes or drank tea! Even in England we have only known and used these articles for about three hundred years! The inhabitants of any world would be suited ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... believe, love Rome even as I, at the last. The great wall,' continued the young Briton, 'will prove to her Rome's might, and Corstopitum with its stored granaries and streets of shops will show her its civilisation. I have bid her come in to-morrow with her small brother when the market is open and the country folk bring in their mead and honey and fowls, and any grouse and salmon ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease

... varied sheltered land of aged vineyards and great wealth has, for the French Renaissance, the one special quality of beginnings and Edens, namely, that it preserves on to a later time the outward evidences of an original perfection. This place, the nest or seed-plot of the new civilisation, still shows its castles—Blois, Amboise, Chambord. Here Leonardo died, Rabelais, Ronsard himself was born. Here the kings of the Change built in their fantastic pride, and founded a France that still endures. It is as truly the soil of the modern thing as are the provinces north of it (the ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc

... 'Monogamy and private property are the main characteristics of Civilisation. They are the breastworks behind which the army of the rich crouch and from which they sally to rob the poor. The individual family is the unit of all faulty societies divided by ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... Major in command of the infantry detachment stationed at Campong Dang in support of Her Majesty's Resident, Sir Charles Dallas, whose duty it was to instruct the Malay Rajah of Pahpah how to rule his turbulent bearers of spear and kris and wearers of sarong and baju, in accordance with modern civilisation, and without putting a period to their lives for every offence by means of the sudden insertion of an ugly-looking, wavy weapon before throwing them to the ugliest reptiles that ever haunted a ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn

... commercial nation in the world was now busily preparing to diffuse the blessings of civilisation and competition throughout the native country of their newly-acquired friend. The greatest exporters that ever existed had never been acquainted with such a subject for exportation as the Isle of Fantaisie. There everything ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli

... call upon the poor things, who were heavily weighted enough already with Dick Boyce for husband and father, but that it would be a graceful act on his sister's part to ask the girl and her mother to luncheon. Dick Boyce of course must be made to keep his distance, but the resources of civilisation were perhaps not unequal to the task of discriminating, if it were prudently set about. At any rate Miss Raeburn gathered that she was expected to try, and instead of pressing her brother for explanations she held her ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... a jovial old gentleman, though he complained of his solitary life. He had got his Indians under tolerable subjection, but he appeared to me to have advanced them very slightly in the scale of civilisation; while their religion consisted chiefly in crossing themselves, and bowing to the crucifix which he held up when he performed mass. However, as Padre Pacheco observed, they had given up some of their worst customs, and ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston

... also the same question. Imlac is 'inclined to conclude that, if nothing counteracts the natural consequence of learning, we grow more happy as our minds take a wider range.' He then enumerates the advantages which civilisation confers on the Europeans. 'They are surely happy,' said the prince, 'who have all these conveniences.' 'The Europeans,' answered Imlac, 'are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... replied in a tone that had a thrill of angry reproach running through it, "I, as you know, am—well—a superfluous woman, one who isn't wanted, a sort of waste product of the factory that we call civilisation." ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith

... Ireland have done many things that were stupid, and some things that were abominable. But among their follies or their crimes is not to be counted the destruction of any such State as I have described; for no such State existed. They did not uproot one type of civilisation in order to plant another. The Ireland with which England had to deal had not acquired a national organisation, and when controversialists talk of "restoring" this or that institution to Ireland, the only institutions that can possibly be "restored" are in their ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various

... ravenous beasts, abounding in terrors unknown. There was an adventure worth while in the sight of God. It had never ceased to thrill him since he first heard it broached,—the mad plan of a handful of persecuted believers, setting out from civilisation to found Zion in the wilderness,—to go forth a thousand miles from Christendom with nothing but stout arms and a very living faith in the God of Israel, and in Joseph Smith as his prophet, meeting death in famine, plagues, and fevers, freezing in the snows of the mountains, ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson

... lamented, it is becoming, after the experience of a century, plainer and plainer, that the Christian natives, while defending with unfaltering courage their beloved country, are yet descending more and more to the moral level of their assailants, without the apology of their Paganism. Degenerate civilisation may be a worse element for truth to work in than original barbarism; and, therefore, as we enter on the second century of this struggle, we begin to fear for the Christian Irish, not from the arms or the valour, but from the contact ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... according as their imagination could turn them to account as effective aids of reason: that is, as they could be made to advance her apparent empire over other elemental forces, such as motion, physical life, &c. This evaluation, in so far as it is constant, results in what we call civilisation, and is the only bond of society. With difficulty is the value of new acquisitions recognised even in the realm of science, until the imagination can place them in such a light as shall make them appear to advance reason's ends, ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... cushion was of thick damask faded to a strange pale green. All in that double- stalled partition, once belonging to the great earl's war-horses, was scrupulously clean, for the Christian Moor had retained some of the peculiar virtues born of Mohammedanism and of high civilisation. The apprentice lads tramped in much as if they had been entering a wizard's cave, though Stephen had taken care to assure Edmund of his application of the ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge

... by the woman returned, and with her the child. She made a low reverence as she entered, having evidently been informed of the rank of her captives. A white napkin was spread over the great chest that served for a table—a piece of civilisation such as the Dunbar captivity had not known—three beechen bowls and spoons, and a porringer containing a not unsavoury stew of a fowl in broth thickened with meal. They tried to make their patient swallow a little broth, but without much success, though Eleanor in the mountain air had become ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge

... they tend only to multiply the echoes of the original report—a new one has scarce any chance of being heard amidst the ceaseless reverberation of the old. The more ancient a nation is, the more liable is it to be overwhelmed by this dreadful evil. The Byzantine empire, during a thousand years of civilisation and opulence, did not produce one work of original thought; five hundred years after the light of Athenian genius had been extinguished, the schools of Greece were still pursuing the beaten paths, and teaching the doctrines of Plato and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... transplanting, is not the work of a blind destiny. While civilisation in the East succumbed and died out before the advance of races incapable of culture, it was welcomed in the West by races possessing the requisite capacity, which by their inborn force gave it new forms and indestructible bases for its outward existence. Nor ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... two kinds. Some, very few and seen there but seldom, led mysterious lives, had preserved an undefaced energy with the temper of buccaneers and the eyes of dreamers. They appeared to live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers, enterprises, ahead of civilisation, in the dark places of the sea; and their death was the only event of their fantastic existence that seemed to have a reasonable certitude of achievement. The majority were men who, like himself, thrown there by some accident, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... these languages, may have survived only in one; or possibly may have perished in all. Larger it may very well, but poorer it cannot, have been. [Footnote: Ozanam (Les Germains avant le Christianisme, p. 155): Dans le vocabulaire d'une langue on a tout le spectacle d'une civilisation. On y voit ce qu'un peuple sait des choses invisibles, si les notions de Dieu, de l'ame, du devoir, sont assez pures chez lui pour ne souffrir que des termes exacts. On mesure la puissance de ses institutions par le nombre et la propriete des termes qu'elles veulent pour ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench

... joy that journey. Ah! and it was sad too, getting to the cultivated plains round Rangoon—eternal rice fields and toiling Indians—uglier and uglier as we neared civilisation. The saddest sight of all, the half-bred Burman and Indian woman or man—the woman the worst; with, perhaps, a face of Burmese cast, over-shadowed with the hungry expression of the Indian, and a black thin shank and flat foot showing under the lungy, where should ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... desires, and then calculates the means by which that end can be attained' (p. 21). My second point was the need of substituting for that assumption a conscious and systematic effort of thought. 'The whole progress,' I argued, 'of human civilisation beyond its earliest stages, has been made possible by the invention of methods of thought which enable us to interpret and forecast the working of nature more successfully than we could, if we merely followed the line of least ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas

... provided for every single pupil at the expense of the ratepayers, to the curriculum of all those pupils who were fitted for the third standard. The speaker said he knew that it had long been settled that the finest and most comprehensive education that our advanced civilisation could supply should be provided for the submerged half of the population, and they could not grumble at these things, but what they did not consider necessary was, that a salary should be forthcoming for each pupil-teacher sufficient to enable him or her to drive down to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various

... neglect, unthinking and selfish. A time came when our civilisation made it possible to live without other creatures. When machinery came into vogue we put aside the animals as useless; those we had no further use for we denied the right to reproduce. The game of the forest was hunted down with powerful weapons of destruction; all went, in a century or ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... Occurrences, Ancient and Modern—the Foundation, Laws, and Governments of Countries—their Progress in Civilisation, Industry, Literature, Arts, and Science—their Achievements in Arms—their Civil, Military, and Religious Institutions, and particularly of the British Empire. By JOSEPH HAYDN. NINTH EDITION, revised ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood

... L.: Histoire des Enfants abandonnes et delaisses. Etudes sur la protection de l'enfance aux diverses epoques de la civilisation. Paris, 1885. vii, 791 ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... rarely trodden, beyond that range of conventional morality in which Novelist after Novelist had entrenched himself—amongst those subtle recesses in the ethics of human life in which Truth and Falsehood dwell undisturbed and unseparated. The vast and dark Poetry around us—the Poetry of Modern Civilisation and Daily Existence, is shut out from us in much, by the shadowy giants of Prejudice and Fear. He who would arrive at the Fairy Land must face the Phantoms. Betimes, I set myself to the task of investigating the motley world to which ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... put prisoners to on his left. In the well in the middle is a table with benches round it. A few other benches are in disorder round the room. The autumn sun is shining warmly through the windows and the open door. The women, whose dress and speech are those of pioneers of civilisation in a territory of the United States of America, are seated round the table and on the benches, shucking nuts. The conversation ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw

... was about the age of the young English officers, and their coming was to him delightful. For his father was wise enough to foresee the course of events—how the old barbarism of the Malay was dying out, to give place to the busy civilisation taught by the white men from the west; and he felt sure that the most civilised and advanced of the young chieftains would occupy the best positions in the future. Hence then he had sent his son for long spells at a time to Singapore and Penang, ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn

... charm of it! The fascination of its false smiling surface, its treacherous beauty luring to hidden perils called to him imperatively. The curse of Ishmael that was his heritage was driving him as it had driven him many times before. He was in the grip of one of the revolts against restraint and civilisation that periodically attacked him. The wander-hunger was in his blood—for generations it had sent numberless ancestors into the lonely places of the world, and against it ties of home were powerless. In early days to the romantic glamour of the newly discovered Americas, ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull

... Ground down as I had been by poverty from babyhood, already at nineteen years of age I desired money above everything on earth. I saw then, and subsequent experience has only confirmed my views, that the world as it has become under the pressure of high civilisation is a world for the rich. Leaving material comforts and advantages out of the question, what ambition can a man satisfy without money? Take the successful politicians for instance, and it will be found that almost every one of them is rich. This country is too full; ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard

... parts of Russia, with the exception of the government of St. Petersburg, from which they have been banished. In most of the provincial towns they are to be found in a state of half-civilisation, supporting themselves by trafficking in horses, or by curing the disorders incidental to those animals; but the vast majority reject this manner of life, and traverse the country in bands, like the ancient Hamaxobioi; the immense grassy plains of Russia affording pasturage for their herds ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow

... Fragments of cloth, both of linen and wool, have been discovered in a British barrow in Yorkshire, and early bone needles found at different parts of the country are plentiful in our museums. There is no doubt that we owe much of our civilisation to the visit of the Phoenicians, those strange people, who appear to have carried all the arts and crafts of ancient Babylon and Assyria to the wonder isles of the Greek Archipelago, to Egypt, to Southern Spain, and to Cornwall and Devonshire. These people, dwelling ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes

... there patches of verdure, the pastoral land of the vicuna and llama flocks; but in the intermediate space, balanced, as it were, between the tropical heat and the wintry frosts, on the table-lands half-way up the mountains, was the stronghold of the Peruvian civilisation. So near to the equator that intolerable heat might have been expected, an expectation, though, not fulfilled, for the elevation gave to the Peruvians a glorious climate, with all the brightness but none of ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn

... describe it. She spoke of the busy streets and the great Boulevards, then she tried to describe the people and what they were doing and then, as she talked, it was just as though Kerguelen had become the big end of a telescope and the doings of civilisation, as exemplified by Paris, a panorama seen at the ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... known as Rupert's Land and the Northwestern Territory, gradually ascends from the Winnipeg system of lakes, lying to the northwest of Lake Superior, as far as the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and comprises those plains and prairies which have been opened up to civilisation within two decades of years, and offer large possibilities of power and wealth in the future development of the New Dominion. It is a region remarkable for its long rivers, in places shallow and rapid, and extremely erratic in their courses ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot

... haste New York is not content. She must still find other means of saving time. And to save time she has strained all the resources of civilisation. In that rather dismal thing called "material progress" she is easily ahead of the world. Never was the apparatus of life so skilfully turned and handled as in New York. There are no two fixed points which are not easily connected by iron lines. There seems no reason why a citizen of New York should ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley

... stimulated the activity of the intellectual classes, cheered them under the persecutions to which they were exposed, and emboldened them to attack the institutions of their native land." (Buckle, H. T., History of Civilisation in England, ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... elle repasse en son esprit agite les evenements qui la marquerent. Elle songe aux peuplades barbares d'Orient que le Germain a entraenees derriere son char: Turcs et Bulgares, Kurdes et Malissores, et elle oublie les grandes nations qui s'enrolerent sous la banniere de la civilisation. Elle songe aux territoires que foule la lorde botte tudesque, et elle oublie les empires que nous detenons en gages: ici, l'ouest et l'est Africains, grands comme quatre fois toute l'Allemagne, avec ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy

... highest degree favourable to the development of the freer and larger conceptions of life, the expansion of science and art and philosophy, which at that moment was pre-eminently necessary for the progress of civilisation, and, indirectly, therefore, for the progress of morals.[219] The violence of the Reformation not only resulted in a new tyranny for its own adherents—calling in turn for fresh reformations by Puritans, Quakers, Deists, and Freethinkers—but ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... bestowed by Providence with an equal hand, turned to the advantage of the democracy; and even when they were in the possession of its adversaries, they still served its cause by throwing into relief the natural greatness of man; its conquests spread, therefore, with those of civilisation and knowledge; and literature became an arsenal, where the poorest and weakest could always find weapons to ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al

... brief account of the foundation of Paris, its progress during the most remarkable epochs, and under the reigns of some of its most celebrated monarchs with its, gradual advance in civilisation to the present period. Some allusions also to the customs which existed in the earlier ages, and a statement of the different dates as regards the erection and foundation of the various ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve

... writhed within myself and felt ashamed of the contemptible words. For his utterance of that term of contumely so liberally used toward one of a race of people who had been for countless generations great chiefs in their own land, and whose cities were centres of a civilisation, barbaric, perhaps, but whose products we were only too glad ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn

... from the deck of the Gael during the earlier part of the daily passage of that boat from Oban in the summer season. Tiree is off the main tourist track, but a few antiquarians are now finding it worth their while to go and dig there for relics of byegone civilisation. A friend of mine, a zealous and erudite F.S.A., has spent many a pleasant holiday in Tiree, and has come back with loaded trunks of valuable prehistoric remains. Certain artists go out to the island regularly in order to transfer to canvas some of Nature's most impressive aspects of cloud, ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... young gentlemen, is a brutal practice, dating back to the very earliest ages of mankind, and no doubt imitated from the wild beasts whom they saw around them. Whereas you live in these later days, in the midst of civilisation in its highest, most cultivated forms, so that there is no excuse ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn

... had annihilated the distance between the Earth and the Sun; and at the same time I perceived the inherent improbability of the culture of our Earth ever being transmitted to other worlds, even as the Earth had never yet received communications from the civilisation of ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... the horror of it all seemed to freeze the understanding, and it was difficult to realise that one was part and parcel of this world of ours. Literally, horror was piled upon horror. And this was the twentieth century of which men boasted; this was civilisation! Built by men's hands, the result of centuries of work. Now look at them; those beautiful architectural monuments, destroyed, in a few months, by the vilest spawn that ever contaminated the earth. A breed that should and would ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins

... stage coachman was anything but an amiable character, greedy, insolent to all but persons of wealth and rank, a hanger-on of those who might claim either; bruiser enough to be a bully but not enough to be anything more; in short, one of the worst products of civilisation. From civilisation itself, however, Borrow soon disappears, as far as any traceable signs go. He journeys, not farther west but northwards, into the West Midlands and the marches of Wales. He buys a tinker's beat and fit-out from a feeble vessel of the craft, who has been expelled ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... illustrates Mr. Nasmyth's own definition of engineering; namely, common sense applied to the use of materials. In his case, common sense has been more especially applied to facilitating and perfecting work by means of Machine Tools. Civilisation began with tools; and every step in advance has been accomplished through their improvement. Handicraft labour, in bone, stone, or wood, was the first stage in the development of man's power; and tools or machines, in ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... majority of the other sciences: all who prosecute original research, of whatever kind, need to know several living languages, those of countries where men think and work, of countries which, from the point of view of science, stand in the forefront of contemporary civilisation. ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois

... which that ancient river wends its way; but the teeming populations on the banks of the Mississippi have a more noble destiny than the subjects of the Pharaohs who sleep in the necropolis of Sakkarah and among the hills of Thebes and in innumerable tombs elsewhere. They have the splendid civilisation of the Gospel, and they are a mighty force in the growth and stability of this nation, whose mission is worldwide. At Transfer we passed over the Missouri by a long bridge, and entered Omaha, a city picturesquely situated, the home ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey

... Leonard, "and give me some brandy." He was in no mood to discuss the blessings of civilisation as they have often been put into practice in Africa. And to think that this fate might soon ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard

... people had made him and Ketla chiefs, and baptized Ari. What is all this? and what is this, too, which the Esquimaux children taken in Markland told the Northmen, of a land beyond them where the folk wore white clothes, and carried flags on poles? Are these all dreams? or was some part of that great civilisation, the relics whereof your antiquarians find in so many parts of the United States, still in existence some 900 years ago; and were these old Norse cousins of ours upon the very edge of it? Be that as it may, how nearly did these fierce Vikings, some of whom seemed to have sailed far south ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... scale of being we see, as has been recently pointed out, that the progress of human civilisation has been very largely due to the successful efforts of man to resist and to remove pain. The most successful and progressive races of mankind are those which inhabit regions of the world where the conditions of life are neither so severe as to paralyse all exertion, or even to preclude its possibility, ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz

... an injustice, not to acknowledge that many of them do regard it as a sacred obligation, and show a willingness to obey the commands of God on this subject. Marriage is, indeed, the first and most important institution of human existence—the foundation of all civilisation and culture—the root of church and state. It is the most intimate covenant of heart formed among mankind; and for many persons the only relation in which they feel the true sentiments of humanity. It gives scope for every human virtue, since ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown

... usually belong to the races of such development. To the ferocity of the Zulu are added the craft of the Redskin and the marksmanship of the Boer. The world is presented with that grim spectacle, "the strength of civilisation without its mercy." At a thousand yards the traveller falls wounded by the well-aimed bullet of a breech-loading rifle. His assailant, approaching, hacks him to death with the ferocity of a South-Sea Islander. The weapons of the nineteenth century are in the hands of ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill

... century of incident is crowded into a month, when an hour contains sixty minutes of tremendous possibilities, when each of us should live the minutes, hours, days and weeks with every fibre strained to give the best that is in us to help in the present stupendous struggle for the defence of civilisation. ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor

... submerged under pressing interests and anxieties—there exists a continual seeking after God. "As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth"[7] humanity after God. The search is sometimes checked for a space, and the yearning seems to disappear. Phases recur in civilisation and in thought, wherein this cry of the human Spirit for the divine—seeking its source as water seeks its level, to borrow a simile from Giordano Bruno—this yearning of the human Spirit for that ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant

... we have any knowledge, Naturalism and Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and struggled with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in the records of the course of civilisation from those of Egypt and Babylonia, six thousand years ago, down to those of our own time ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... service meant the end of the comforts of civilisation, officers provided themselves with supplies of patent medicine, bought small first-aid outfits and elaborate pannikins containing numerous small receptacles, which did not prove useful and were ...
— The Story of the "9th King's" in France • Enos Herbert Glynne Roberts

... Simple or Composite: that is to say, they may consist either of a single word, as 'Chaucer,' 'civilisation'; or of more than one, as 'the father of English poetry,' or 'modern civilised nations.' Logicians classify words according to their uses in forming propositions; or, rather, they classify the uses of ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... of their respective literature. The mediaeval cathedrals, monasteries, and churches are a living record of the faith and devotion of mediaeval men, who have left besides them but little else whereby we can know their aspirations and civilisation; we find in them an expression of the deepest life that characterised the periods to which they belong, and a record which, though often mutilated, and sometimes nearly obliterated, never deceives. Wherever these architectural creations are found, ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story

... the infinite in it; and the pride and self-will of Coriolanus, though terrible in bulk, are scarcely so in quality; there is nothing base in them, and the huge creature whom they destroy is a noble, even a lovable, being. Nor does either of these dramas, though the earlier depicts a corrupt civilisation, include even among the minor characters anyone who can be called villainous or horrible. Consider, finally, the impression left on us at the close of each. It is remarkable that this impression, though very strong, can scarcely be called ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... The civilisation of ancient Greece was nurtured within city walls. In fact, all the modern civilisations have their cradles of brick ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore

... days of October all phases of civilisation were passed with little regret, and at the Rat Creek, near the southern shore of Lake Manitoba, I bade good-bye to society, pushed on to the Hudson Bay Company's post of Beaver Creek, from which point, with one man, three horses, three dogs, and all the requisites of food, arms ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various

... especially guarded in all he said, so that his host's efforts to unveil his intentions and learn what he had come for were complete failures. 'Greece was a charming country—Greece was the parent of any civilisation we boasted. She gave us those ideas of architecture with which we raised that glorious temple at Kensington, and that taste for sculpture which we exhibited near Apsley House. Aristophanes gave us our comic drama, and only the defaults of our language ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... of the time these repairs took up to go and pay my respects to the President at Washington and thence to make a rapid dash into the West, in the footsteps of our ancient pioneers, and up to the farthest limits of civilisation (as they were ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... I, how in our forefathers' time people died in England by thousands of diseases which are scarcely ever deadly now; ay, of diseases which have now actually vanished out of the land, before the new light of medicine and of civilisation which Christ has revealed to us in these days. For one child who lived and grew up in old times, two live and grow up now. In London alone there are not half as many deaths in proportion to the number of people as there were a hundred ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley

... the old civilisation is crumbling beneath our feet, the thought of poetry crosses the mind like the dear memory of things that have long since passed away. In our passionate desire for the new era, it is difficult to refrain oneself from the commonplace practice of speculating on the effects of warfare ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet

... has to be set the fact that the whole tendency of social development is to narrow the range of the belief, to restrict the scope of its authority, and to so attenuate it that it becomes of no value precisely where it is supposed to be of most use. The belief in God is least questioned where civilisation is lowest; it is called into the most serious question where civilisation is most advanced. To-day the belief in God is only universal in the sense that some representatives of it are to be found in all societies. The majority may still profess to have it, but it has ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... that Ted had brought with him a wide assortment of most of the commodities known to civilisation. The unloading of the cart was to me as the enjoyment of a monstrous bran-pie; an entertainment I had heard of, but never seen. And when I heard there was certainly one more load, and probably two, to come, I felt that we really were rich beyond the dreams of most folk. I recalled the ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... reveries? No doubt it is pleasant to look at the work of one's own hands, eh? Last year this very spot was bare steppe, not a sight of human life, and now look: life . . . civilisation. . . And how splendid it all is, upon my soul! You and I are building a railway, and after we are gone, in another century or two, good men will build a factory, a school, a hospital, and things will begin ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... such a result it will be seen that the single preoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity philanthropically, and the perfecting of firearms considered as instruments of civilisation. It was a company of Exterminating Angels, at bottom the best ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne

... at last, "certainly not. To woman man owes his life, and to woman he ought to owe his happiness. Without woman civilisation would be impossible, and ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford

... like Christian gentlemen. One Londoner told me he had thought the scenes of war had made him callous and that the ruthless destruction of those things fashioned by men's hands in prosecuting the arts of peace had prompted the feeling that there was little in civilisation after all, if civilisation could result in so bitter a thing as this awful fighting. Man seemed as barbaric as in the days before the Saviour came to redeem the world, and whether we won or lost the war all hopes of a happier state ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey

... regal way the managers of a railroad order a steel bridge flung across a chasm in the midst of a wilderness far from civilisation, or command that a new structure shall be substituted for an old one without disturbing traffic; and, lo and behold, it is done in a surprisingly short time. But the new bridges, in contrast to the old ones, are as spider webs compared to the overarching branches of a ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday

... Mahdism, the great region of Central Africa has been opened to civilisation. From the date of the splendid victory of Omdurman, 2nd September 1898, may be reckoned the creation of a vast Soudan empire. At so early a stage, it is idle to speculate whether the country will be held as a British possession, or as a province of Egypt. "The ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... Mr. Quayle sought counsel of the landscape which once again had changed in character. For here civilisation began to trail her skirts very visibly, and the edges of those skirts were torn and frayed, notably unhandsome. The open moorland had given place to flat market-gardens and leafless orchards sloppy with wet. Innumerable cabbages, innumerable stunted, black-branched ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... "nothing" lies their main ingenuity and strong hope. If they can prevail on the masses to do nothing, at the right moment, and to go on doing nothing till there is nothing left, then, say they, they will have civilisation under; and if our heads don't fall off of their own accord then a thousand willing hands will be stretched forward to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various

... a foul word. It should not be used to ladies. It implies disease. I remark it, as a flaw in our civilisation, that we have not the proper horror of disease. Now I, for my part, have washed my hands of it; I have renounced my laureation; I am no doctor; I am only a worshipper of the true goddess Hygieia. Ah, believe me, it is she who has the cestus! And here, in this exiguous ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Importance and difficulty of realising our blessings while they last 24 Comparison and contrast 26 Content not the quality of progressive societies 27 The problem of balancing content and the desire for progress 28 What civilisation ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... Brightman declared, "the bravest, coolest, best-bred scoundrel who ever mocked the guardians of the law. Mind you, I am not saying that he hasn't done other things. He has travelled and fought in many countries, but when he comes back to civilisation he can't rest. The world has to hear of him. Things move in New York underground. The moment he takes rooms at the Carlton-Ritz, things happen in a way that they have never happened before, and we know that there's genius at the ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... does free will hold among the nations of to-day? Patriotism has assumed an extraordinarily oppressive form. During no other age in history has it been so tyrannical and so exclusive. It devours everything. Our country, to-day, claims to rank above religion, above art, science, thought, above civilisation. This monstrous hypertrophy cannot be explained as an efflux from the natural sources of patriotic instincts, as an efflux of love of the native soil, of tribal sentiment, of the social need for forming vast communities. Its colossal effects are the outcome of ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... herself in Paris and proceeded to decorate her apartment with some of the wonderful rich and rare objects she had collected in outlandish parts. Gorgeous fabrics, embroideries, pottery, metal and woodwork, and along with these products of an ancient civilisation, others of rude or primitive tribes, quaint headgear and plumes, strings and ropes of beads, worn as garments by people who run wild in woods, with arrows, spears and other weapons. These last were arranged in the form of a wheel over the entrance, with the bleached and ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson

... let it drop," said Gore. "I wish to be content to increase it by friendly intercourse with the world, by the arts of peace and civilisation, and not ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell

... wonderfully complex construction of the languages of many barbarous nations has often been advanced as a proof, either of the divine origin of these languages, or of the high art and former civilisation of their founders. Thus F. von Schlegel writes: "In those languages which appear to be at the lowest grade of intellectual culture, we frequently observe a very high and elaborate degree of art in their grammatical ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... that I am not destined to be entirely easy for you, dear, even with love as the only tie with which to bind you. The arbitrary laws of a false civilisation are going to impose on you what you think are duties and obligations to me and to yourself—until I explain them away. You must come to me in your perplexity, Louis, and give me a chance to remind you of the basic and proven proposition that a girl ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers

... anxiety was added for me by information obtained at Rigolette to the effect that the Hudson's Bay Company's steamer, Pelican, my only means of return to civilisation before the closing in of winter, would be at the post at Ungava, my destination, the last week in August. That left us two months to make the journey, which, at the shortest, would carry us across 550 miles of Labrador wilderness. ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)

... road where Hamil sat his horse was an old pump—the last indication of civilisation. He dismounted and tried it, filling his cup with clear sparkling water, neither hot nor cold, and walking through the sand offered it to ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers



Words linked to "Civilisation" :   Indus civilization, Western civilization, society, Helladic civilization, Muslimism, political science, Western culture, excellence, Paleo-Indian culture, Helladic culture, social process, politics, Aegean culture, Paleo-Amerind culture, Mycenaean civilization, Mycenaean civilisation, Paleo-American culture, archaeology, Minoan culture, Mycenaean culture, civilise, subculture, government, Aegean civilization, archeology, Minoan civilization, Islam



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