ellauri099.html on line 71: Dulness and dirt are the chief features of Lippincott’s this month: The element that is unclean, though undeniably amusing, is furnished by Mr. Oscar Wilde’s story of The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents—a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction—a gloating study of the mental and physical corruption of a fresh, fair and golden youth, which might be fascinating but for its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophizings. . . . Mr. Wilde says the book has “a moral.” The “moral,” so far as we can collect it, is that man’s chief end is to develop his nature to the fullest by “always searching for new sensations,” that when the soul gets sick the way to cure it is to deny the senses nothing.
ellauri106.html on line 663: Another specimen of his wit is furnished by the English translation of the
ellauri158.html on line 694: Hence also it follows, that everyone thought out for himself, according to his abilities, a different way of worshipping God, so that God might love him more than his fellows, and direct the whole course of nature for the satisfaction of his blind cupidity and insatiable avarice. Thus the prejudice developed into superstition, and took deep root in the human mind; and for this reason everyone strove most zealously to understand and explain the final causes of things; but in their endeavor to show that nature does nothing in vain, i.e. nothing which is useless to man, they only seem to have demonstrated that nature, the gods, and men are all mad together. Consider, I pray you, the result: among the many helps of nature they were bound to find some hindrances, such as storms, earthquakes, diseases, &c.: so they declared that such things happen, because the gods are angry at some wrong done to them by men, or at some fault committed in their worship. Experience day by day protested and showed by infinite examples, that good and evil fortunes fall to the lot of pious and impious alike; still they would not abandon their inveterate prejudice, for it was more easy for them to class such contradictions among other unknown things of whose use they were ignorant, and thus to retain their actual and innate condition of ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric of their reasoning and start afresh. They therefore laid down as an axiom, that God´s judgments far transcend human understanding. Such a doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished another standard of verity in considering solely the essence and properties of figures without regard to their final causes. There are other reasons (which I need not mention here) besides mathematics, which might have caused men´s minds to be directed to these general prejudices, and have led them to the knowledge of the truth.
ellauri222.html on line 521: Augie, the hero of the novel, is a Jewish-American boy coming of age in Depression-era Chicago. Since their father abandoned the family, Augie and his two brothers are raised by their slow-witted mother and surrogate “Grandma” Lausch. Augie, good-looking with “tall hair” and green-gray eyes, is a soft-hearted young man whose sympathy for others often gets him into trouble. He holds a variety of jobs throughout his life and learns from different people he encounters. People tend to “adopt” Augie and try to groom him into the person they want him to be, but he really wants to become his own person. The name Augie is short for “August,” which means “Great.” Augie has a desire for greatness, but he has no idea of how to do it, thinking it beyond his ability to “breathe the pointy, star-furnished air at its highest difficulty.” He goes along through life repeating the same mistakes. In the end, Augie realizes that his life has been a voyage of discovery. Whether or not he has been a success, he doesn’t know, but he will continue with unquenchable optimism and hope, “forever rising up.”
xxx/ellauri165.html on line 340: The Hamiltons moved into William Beckford's mansion at 22 Grosvenor Square, and Nelson and Fanny took an expensive furnished house at 17 Dover Street, a comfortable walking distance away, until December, when Sir William rented a home at 23 Piccadilly, opposite Green Park. On 1 January, Nelson's promotion to vice admiral was confirmed and he prepared to go to sea on the same night. Infuriated by Fanny's handing him an ultimatum to choose between her and his mistress, Nelson chose Emma and decided to take steps to formalise separation from his wife. He never saw her again, after being hustled out of town by an agent. While he was at sea, Nelson and Emma exchanged many letters, using a secret code to discuss Emma's condition. Emma kept her first daughter Emma Carew's existence a secret from Nelson, while Sir William continued to provide for her.
xxx/ellauri387.html on line 190: In 1973, Folket i Bild/Kulturfront, a left-wing magazine, published a series of articles written by Guillou and Peter Bratt, revealing a Swedish secret intelligence agency called Informationsbyrån ("The Information Bureau" or IB for short). The articles, based on information initially furnished by former IB employee Håkan Isacson, described the IB as a secret organization that gathered information on Swedish communists and others deemed to be "security risks". The organization operated outside of the framework of the defense and ordinary intelligence, and was invisible in terms of state budget allocations. The articles in Folket i Bild/Kulturfront accused the IB staff of being engaged in alleged murder, break-ins, wiretapping against foreign embassies in Sweden and spying abroad.
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