Word: permitted
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...them into being. The splendid limbs of the marble relics of the ancients will carry you back to the days when men saw such limbs at every turn. The striking realism of the French pictures of the present day will remind you of hundreds of things which indolence will permit you neither to think for yourself, nor to dig out of the endless pages of a stupid book...
...thoroughly democratic government is that no one is inclined to admit the existence of a society superior to that in which he moves, although he may manfully assert his precedence before those whom fortune has placed beneath him. The impulse of every young man whose allowance or antecedents permit him to mingle with those whose social position is assured, is to rank himself at once with the best of them; and this impulse frequently leads him to the conclusion - to quote the words used the other day by a friend of mine - that "business is degrading...
...taste and fortune cannot busy himself much with the affairs of the counting-house without developing the prosaic and matter-of-fact side of his character to a disproportionate extent, and meeting on terms, perforce equal, hundreds of people whom his self-respect and pride will permit him to regard with nothing but contempt. The degradation involved in a peaceful struggle for dollars and cents with your fellow-man is, however, hardly equal to the humiliation of a life-long squabble with your butcher and your tailor, and of a constant sense of your inability to meet the demands...
...hold himself aloof from the affairs of his fellow-men, but to mingle in them in the way which his tastes and acquirements lead him to choose. In literature, in politics, in science, in art, he has wide fields open before him, and even if his talents will not permit him to be a professor, nor his means to be a liberal patron of that art for which he feels the greatest fondness, he may, by his conversation in friendly intercourse, diffuse the results of his study, and stimulate interest and activity in others, who could hardly be aroused...
...presence and his manners, cannot fail to excite the admiration and emulation of his inferiors, no matter how much the jealousy of those inferiors may lead them to decry him. He is a fitting head for the great social body beneath him; and if his fortune will permit him to abstain from work, - by work I mean daily exertion whose ultimate object is bread-making, - he may be far more useful to the world than if his tastes and inclinations were fettered by business. But he must never be idle. Noblesse oblige. He must constantly exert himself to maintain with...