"Disbeliever" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... various subjects of Christian's apprehension, he was never visited by any long or permanent doubt that the virtue of his niece might prove the shoal on which his voyage should be wrecked. But he was an arrant rogue, as well as a hardened libertine; and, in both characters, a professed disbeliever in the ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... you were saying just now, Colonel, I think I ought to tell you that my own views on such subjects are very strong. I am, in fact, a convinced disbeliever in what is called ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... skillful aeronauts. Then under the influence of her rudder, the "Go-Ahead" went through all the evolutions that her steersman could give her. She turned in a small circle; she moved forwards and backwards in a way to convince the most refractory disbeliever in the guiding of balloons. And if there had been any disbeliever there he would have ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... homely logic. They riddled all divines, and not unfrequently made them sceptics,—disbelievers as bad as themselves. They were a jovial, healthful, generous, true and manly set of people." It is evident that W. Herndon, the speaker, is himself a disbeliever in Christianity, and addicted to the "newer and better thought of this age." He gives one specimen, which we have omitted for fear of shocking our readers, of the theological criticism of these redoubtable logicians of nature; and we are inclined to infer from it that the divines whom ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... every age man has been apt to dream uneasily, rolling from side to side, beating against imaginary bars, unless, tired out, he has sunk into indifference or scepticism. Religious minds prefer scepticism. The true saint is a profound sceptic; a total disbeliever in human reason, who has more than once joined hands on this ground with some who were at best sinners. Bernard was a total disbeliever in scholasticism; so was Voltaire. Bernard brought the society of his time to share his scepticism, but could give the society no other intellectual ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... time,—at least it's so in St. Marys. You're too big to get under a bushel basket. Every one saw that you were dabbling in real estate for years, and made a good clean up, but you seemed so darned ashamed of it that no one cared to discuss it with you. And all the time you were our prize package disbeliever. What's the use? It's your own affair, but why don't you make a lightning change like the man in the circus last week? Your friends would welcome it. You're not the ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... way, the truth and necessity of Christianity, and to this wish the contradictions of sinners were too manifold. One must be stony-hearted not to feel some pity for him, as, just when he thinks he has evaded an orthodox brick, the tile of a disbeliever in the Fourth Gospel whizzes at him; or as, while he is trying to patch up his romantic reconstructions of imaginary Jewish history and religion, the push of some aggressive reviewer bids him make good his challenge to metaphysical theologians. But this ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... the garden. When asked what I was doing, I replied, "Digging for hell-fire!" That was especially curious because my father, as a strong Broad Churchman and a devoted friend and disciple of Frederick Maurice, was a wholehearted disbeliever in hell and its flames. He had "dismissed Hell with costs," as Lord Westbury said, ever since he came to man's estate. How I derived my knowledge on this point was never cleared up. Demons with three-pronged forks and curly tails are, of course, universally ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... fundamental idea which dominated the whole of Napoleon's conduct was based on Voltaire's cynical dictum, "Quand les hommes s'attroupent, leurs oreilles s'allongent." He was a total disbeliever in the wisdom or intelligence of corporate bodies. Therefore, as he told Sir Henry Keating at St. Helena, "It is necessary always to talk of liberty, equality, justice, and disinterestedness, and never ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf |
