"Doubter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... triumphant. No faith before it ever took so victorious a stand in its infancy. It has swept like a hurricane of fire through the land, compelling faith from the baffled scoffer and the most determined doubter." ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... the Indians or whoever hid this ivory, if there's any there, get it up to the cave, if it is a cave?" asked Don the Doubter. ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... dear creature into good humour with me:* And who knows, thought I, if I can hold it, and proceed, but I may be able to lay a foundation fit to build my grand scheme upon!—LOVE, thought I, is not naturally a doubter: FEAR is, I will try to banish the latter: nothing then but love will remain. CREDULITY is the God of Love's prime minister, and they ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... liar of his lie and make him confess it; that could bring down a proud man's pride and make him humble; that could put courage into a coward and strike dead the courage of the bravest; that could appease resentments and real hatreds; that could make the doubter believe and the hopeless hope again; that could purify the impure mind; that could persuade—ah, there it is—persuasion! that is the word; what or who is it that it couldn't persuade? The maniac of Domremy—the fairy-banishing priest—the reverend tribunal of Toul—the doubting and superstitious ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was all unconvincing at the time, but as I look back upon it now, after years of experience, I am inclined to think part of it at least was genuine. And this brings me to say to Mrs. Quigg, and to any other doubter, that you have only to step aside into silence and shadow and wait for a moment—and the bewildering will happen, or you will imagine it to happen. I will agree to furnish from this company a medium that will astonish even ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... long and simple love-letter from Bud, while satisfying the cravings of the lover, stirred up again the misgivings of the doubter. And her cogitations resulted in the admission that Bud must be either one of two things. Either he was absolutely innocent of the imputations contained in the letter that Skidmore brought, or he was one of the most consummate villains ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... to mama, she'll kiss it and make it well. Please run to her quick.' 'Perfect love casteth out all fear.' Surely the wise mother can devise a thousand ways by which to kindle the flame of love in her child until her fond dreams for the little ones are transformed into living realities. But the doubter may remark, 'What if I ask my child to do something for me and he refuses or begins to make excuses or asks why his brother can't do it?' You have simply mistaken the time for stretching the young soul's wings. Begin ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... fame of which spread through the whole Colony and confounded any possible doubter, found record in the "Magnalia", that storehouse of fact so judiciously combined with fable that the author himself could probably never tell what he had himself seen, and what had been gleaned from others. Mr. John Wilson, the minister of the church at Boston until the arrival of Cotton, was ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... fairness to have consulted, show him to have been a Theist, and there is some ground for thinking that he believed Hume, as many others of Hume's personal friends did, to have been a Theist likewise. Though Hume was philosophically a doubter about matter, about his own existence, about God, he did not practically think so differently from the rest of the world about any of the three as was often supposed. Dr. Carlyle always thought him a believer. Miss Mure of Caldwell, the sister of his great friend the Baron ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... Understanding," the "Art of Thinking," by Messrs. du Port Royal, and Xenophon's "Memorable Things of Socrates." From this last I learned to drop my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and to put on the humble inquirer and doubter. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... be sure, explanation is not enough. The brain paths between the associated ideas are so deeply worn that no amount of persuasion avails. It is easy for the doubter to say: "Well, that sounds very well, but my case is different. I have tried over and over again and I know." With people of this sort, an ounce of demonstration is worth a pound ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... felt himself unable to cope without the aid of Mr. Harper; the second might be met with candor. Should he then be candid with this doubter, relate to him the facts as they had unrolled themselves before his own eyes;—secret facts—convincing ones—facts which must prove to him that whether Georgian did or did not lie at the bottom of the mill-stream, the woman now in the ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... when it behooves the reverent Christian to put on his panoply of faith and prayer, and meet in argument, according to the grace and power given to him—not indeed the blaspheming infidel, for such a foe is unreasonable and unworthy of an answer, but—the often candid, anxious, and involuntary doubter; the mind, which, righteously vexed with the thousand corruptions of truth, and sorely disappointed at the conduct of its herd of false disciples, from a generous misconception is embracing error: the mind, never enough ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... axiomatic truth that there has never been and there is not a perfect church. Of the twelve men who formed the nucleus of the Christian church and who had the advantage of the personal teaching of the Christ, one was a doubter, another was worldly-minded, a betrayer, and a son of perdition who sought relief from the stings of conscience by self-destruction; a third was a deserter and vacillator, who drew from the great apostle of the Gentiles a stinging rebuke for stultifying his conscience during ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... out a poke and threw it upon the table. When Thomas had untied the string and held the moose-hide sack by its two lower corners bottom upwards there clattered out upon the boards enough of good-sized golden nuggets to cause the eyes of the doubter to ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... beached and crumbling craft of the "unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea." Few can read, or, better, hear read, his closing paragraph without thrilling to that "other harmony of prose." That such a cadenced and haunting passage should have been published as recently as 1917 should assure the doubter that there is still amongst us a taste for the beautiful. "I live inland now, far from the smell of salt water and the sight of sails. Yet sometimes there comes over me a longing for the sea as irresistible as the ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... too, wanted to be a pious and godly monk and I prepared with earnest devotion for mass and for prayers. But when most devout I went to the altar a doubter and left the altar a doubter. When I had rendered my confession I still doubted, and I doubted when I did not render it. For we were wholly wrapped up in the erroneous idea that we could not pray and would not be heard unless we were absolutely clean ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... Northern poem of Sorli and Hamther, which is a later version of the same story. But even if the existence of a Gothic ballad of Swanhild were doubted,—and the balance of probabilities is against the doubter,—it follows indisputably from the evidence that in the time of Jordanes people were accustomed to select and dwell upon dramatic incidents in what was accepted as history; the appreciation of tragedy was ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... gained him the reputation of a man slow of belief and not easily imposed upon. What is more, it has gained him a lasting name; for to this habit of the mind has been attributed his surname of Twiller; which is said to be a corruption of the original Twijfler, or, in plain English, Doubter. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... even the greatest doubter became convinced that the business of the store was improving. Great crowds came every day to look about, if not to buy, for their curiosity as well as interest ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... to mischief, reading them by the light of hell-fire. For, indeed, Septimius had but given the clergyman the merest partial glimpse of his state of mind. He was not a new beginner in doubt; but, on the contrary, it seemed to him as if he had never been other than a doubter and questioner, even in his boyhood; believing nothing, although a thin veil of reverence had kept him from questioning some things. And now the new, strange thought of the sufficiency of the world for man, if man were only sufficient for that, kept ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Rotterdam once, on a certain journey homewards from Flanders and the Baths of Aix-la-Chapelle, to see that admirable sage, the doubter Bayle. Their sublime messenger roused the poor man, in his garret there, in the Bompies,—after dark: but he had a headache that night; was in bed, and could not come. He followed them next day; leaving his paper imbroglios, his historical, philosophical, anti-theological marine-stores; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... confidently that this was a secure and permanent progressive system, and on the strength of some three hundred years of change and irregular improvement answered the doubter with, "Things always have gone ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... Aramis while he uttered these words, which displayed so much true respect, so much warm devotion, such entire frankness and sincerity, that even he, D'Artagnan, the eternal doubter, he, the almost infallible in judgment, was deceived by it. "A man who lies cannot speak in such a ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... doubts, and Christ will set him free. "My doubts are round about me like a chain," said one in the audience, with whom one of our personal workers was labouring, and the worker said quickly, "Come, chains and all." The doubter hesitated a second, then said, "I will," and as he rose to move forward, he testified that the chains were snapped, and ...
— The Personal Touch • J. Wilbur Chapman
... arguments fairly and forcibly. But to this young boy's piercing mind, the arguments against Christianity seemed stronger than those which were brought forward to refute them. Thus the lad became, not a positive unbeliever, but an honest doubter. He now sought earnestly for other works upon ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... But by the doubter the complete prophecy could be shown to be absolutely indefinite, and applicable as much to the king of France or Spain as to Charles I., or to any king in the future, since no definite time is stated. Furthermore, Lilly distinctly ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Rowe, 'that it does not discover much profundity or penetration,' we ought in common fairness always to add that nobody else has ever written about Shakspeare one-half so entertainingly. If this statement be questioned, let the doubter, before reviling me, re-read the preface, and if, after he has done so, he still demurs, we shall be content to withdraw the observation, which, indeed, has only been made for the purpose of introducing a ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... consummate ease and self-possession. She won Edgar's admiration for her tact and discretion, for the beautiful results of good-breeding. He congratulated himself on having such a friend as Adelaide Birkett. She would be of infinite advantage to Learn when his wife, and when he had persuaded that sweet doubter to believe in her and accept her as she was, and as he wished her to be accepted. As it was in the calendar of his wishes at this moment that Adelaide had never loved him, never wished to marry him, he dismissed the belief which he had cherished so long as if it had never been, and decided that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... terrier that lay under the couch started barking, and my wife immediately vanished. The sandal, however, was found beneath the chest, and was eventually burnt.—Do you still doubt, Tychiades, in the face of one convincing piece of evidence after another?' 'God forbid!' I cried; 'the doubter who should presume, thus to brazen it out in the face of Truth would deserve to have a golden sandal applied to him after the ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... the heart of the Princess dwelt a deep religious faith, such as becomes a noble, womanly heart. Nevertheless, her ardent mind sought to penetrate every mystery, so she was often accused of being a doubter—when the reverse ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... tortured, racked, and burned them for the glory of God and the good of humanity. He is of the minority, as was Roger Williams when, in 1635, the popular and conventional thought of Salem banished him. Mr. King is not an infidel or even a doubter. On the contrary he is ardently religious, being a zealous and conscientious member of a sect of Christians noted for their piety and faith. The Adventists, of whom he is an honored member, it must be remembered, hold somewhat peculiar views about ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... an eye that flashed and a voice which rang, and a look in his pale, proud face that no murderer's face ever wore on this earth, and with those two words he had carried conviction to many a doubter. ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... conclusion, is the natural out-put of scholastic all-sufficiency; so, the form of the essay, as we have it towards the end of the sixteenth century, most significantly in Montaigne, representative essayist because the representative doubter, inventor of the name as, in essence, of the thing—of the essay, in its seemingly modest aim, its really large and adventurous possibilities—is indicative of Montaigne's peculiar function in regard to his age, as in truth the commencement ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... high. It is pitched in a tone of exaltation that is eminently unfavourable to the permanently profitable treatment of such a subject. There are in it too many of those eloquent and familiar commonplaces of orthodox history, by which the doubter tries to warm himself into belief, and the believer dreams that he is corroborating faith by reason. The assembly for whom his discourse was prepared, could hardly have endured the apparition in the midst of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... much so," answered, in writing, the deaf man. "A little suspicion soon overspreads the whole nature, and yet, I think, one can be generous even with suspicion. Among the disciples were a traitor, a liar, a coward, and a doubter; but none upbraid the last, poor Thomas, and he is sainted in our faith. Do you know that suspicion made me deaf? Yes; if we mock Nature with distrust, she stops our ears. Do you not remember what happened to Zacharias, the priest? He would not believe the angel who announced ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... preaching of the law can be dispensed with, by employing solely what is called in some quarters the preaching of the gospel, I do not agree with the opinion. The benefits of Christ's redemption are pearls which must not be cast before swine. The gospel is not for the stupid, or for the doubter,—still less for the scoffer. Christ's atonement is to be offered to conscious guilt, and in order to conscious guilt there must be the application of the decalogue. John Baptist must prepare the way for the merciful Redeemer, by legal and close preaching. And ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... The doubter may scoff, and the pessimist may croak, but even they must take hope at the picture presented in the simple and touching incident of eight Grand Army veterans, with their silvery heads bowed in sympathy, escorting the lifeless body of the Daughter of the Confederacy from Narragansett ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... worldlings who had failed to make the world workable should abdicate. "The organic thing called religion has in fact the organs that take hold on life. It can feed where the fastidious doubter finds no food; it can reproduce where the solitary sceptic boasts of being barren." In short, in religion alone was Darwin justified, for Catholicism was the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... after that sinful experiment with the handkerchief I discovered by accident that I was not the only doubter in Polotzk. One Friday night I lay wakeful in my little bed, staring from the dark into the lighted room adjoining mine. I saw the Sabbath candles sputter and go out, one by one,—it was late,—but the lamp hanging from the ceiling still burned high. Everybody had ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... because life has for him an infinite meaning, because he opens his mind to the impressions which come of man's spiritual existence. In the same way, Carlyle has a grander meaning running through his books, more of sublimity, a finer eloquence, because the spiritual is to him real. Doubter and scorner as he was, he could not but see that man's being reaches beyond the material world and interprets some higher realm. Vague as that faith was with him, it was a source of the most effective literary power and stimulus. ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... present state; What gain to thee time's holiest date? The doubter now perchance had been As High Priest or ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... spiritualist once made to me. And if the facts—any of the facts—of Spiritualism stand as facts, there is no doubt that it would form the strongest possible counterpoise to the materialism of our age. It presses the method of materialism into its service, and meets the doubter on his own ground of demonstration—a low ground, perhaps, but a tremendously decisive one, the very one perhaps on which the Battle of Faith and Reason will have to ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... I not afraid that most people have forgotten—by bringing his frigate home from Labrador to England after losing her rudder. It is said that he subsequently ran for Parliament, and when on the hustings some doubter asked about his political record, he answered, "I am Captain Rous who brought the Pique across the Atlantic without a rudder." Of course the reply was lustily cheered, and deservedly; for in such seas, with a ship dependent upon sails only, it was a splendid, if somewhat reckless achievement. ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... breath upon foolish questions?" she replied. "Are no metals smelted in thy country, O Holly? Now hadst thou sought to know what I am doing—But that, without seeing, thou wouldst not believe, so, Doubter, thou ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... needed of aesthetic defect in the still unoccidentalized Japanese taste let the doubter go to any popular second-grade Shinto shrine or Buddhist temple. Here unaesthetic objects and sights abound. Hideous idols, painted and unpainted, big and little, often decorated with soiled bibs; decaying to-rii; ruined sub-shrines; conglomerate piles of cast-off paraphernalia, ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... Magenta, Solferino, and the siege of Mantua. With a German's fondness for music, he beguiled the tedium of many a long winter evening. With his German education he had imbibed radicalism to its full extent. Thoroughly conversant with the Sacred Scriptures he was a doubter, if not a positive unbeliever, from the Pentateuch to Revelation. In addition to this, his flings at the Chaplain, his messmate, made him unpopular with the religiously inclined of the regiment. He had besides, the stolidity ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... was probably living a more solitary and sedentary life than ever before, and could hear the voices of solitude; he was not the busy riding missionary of "The Bible in Spain," nor the feted author, but the unsocial morbid tinker, philologist, boxer, and religious doubter. It has been said that "he was a Celt of Celts. His genius was truly Celtic." {218a} It has been said that "he inherited nothing from Norfolk save his accent and his love of 'leg of mutton and turnips.'" {218b} Yet his father, the Cornish "Celt," appears to have been entirely ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... however, can have no practical effect unless there be some agreement concerning the nature of the final goal—not a mere verbal agreement, to be sure, but one based upon actual feeling.... It will be the business of ethics to invite the doubter and the inquirer to assist in the common effort to discover fixed principles which shall help the judgment to understand the aims and problems ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... Let such doubter ponder well the signification of truth, its relation to life, its identity with the good, and the paramount might of wisdom and a clear understanding, and he will be ready to exclaim with the passionate piety of St. Augustine: "Ubi inveni veritatem, ibi inveni Deum meum, ipsam veritatem, quam, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... is the opposite of the other, just as heaven and hell are opposites. Considering doubters more closely, we find that doubters believe; but they believe the opposite of what they should believe. Doubters believe the wrong thing. A doubter is one who could and ought to believe facts, but for some reason or other can not bring himself to do it. Instead, he believes another set of things, which appear to be ...
— Adventures in the Land of Canaan • Robert Lee Berry
... deeper. The study of W.R. Greg's "Creed of Christendom", of Matthew Arnold's "Literature and Dogma", helped to widen the mental horizon, while making a return to the old faith more and more impossible. The church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was only a doubter, I spoke to none of my doubts. It was possible, I felt, that all my difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to shake the faith of others while in uncertainty myself. Others had doubted and had afterwards believed; for the doubter silence was a duty; the blinded ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... very reverse of his predecessors, being neither tranquil and inert like Walter the Doubter, nor restless and fidgeting like William the Testy, but a man of such uncommon activity and decision of mind that he never sought nor accepted the advice of others, depending bravely upon his single head, as would a hero of yore upon his single ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... inquiring doubter, the striking way in which the truth of the Resurrection is exhibited must be most beneficial, but such a character we are compelled to believe is rare among those of the schools ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... set out to do sooner than he had purposed. That intellectual quickening which had made him a doubter in religious matters had made him also a freethinker in politics. He brought down upon himself the wrath of the government by public expressions of opinion antagonistic to the policy of the hour; and, like others equally imprudent under ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... hour, the next week, or the next month, come in the midst of doubts to be of Privy Seal's mind. Then Privy Seal hath pushed him to action. Now his Highness is a good lover, and being himself a great doubter, he loveth a simple and convinced nature. Therefore he ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... those few who believe the advertisements of the hair-restorers—you will forgive the unpoetic simile for the sake of its exactitude—as against the verdict of the world that a genuine discovery of such a remedy would leave no single doubter in Europe or America, nor even in the London Clubs! Yet each time I read the cunning article (I have less hair than when I ran away from Sandhurst that exciting July night and met you in the Strand!), ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... accept without fear principles which seem startling, but which are proved to be rooted in democratic ground, so long as we have faith in the democratic system itself. There is no road open for the doubter and questioner of popular rights but that which leads back to abandoned ground. We may proceed, then, with an attempt to explain the philosophy of the rule of Change. Shall it not be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... Hardly had the doubter gathered up his slippers, and backed out from the presence, when the pacha and his minister were, with an honest rivalry, endeavouring to remove at once their doubts and their thirst, and were so successful in their attempts, that ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... not confined to the Jews alone. Every great world-faith experiences nowadays the throes of transformation and readjustment. Mistaking them for the final struggle, the believer wrings his hands in despair over the impending doom, and the doubter contemplates a religionless future with a great deal of glee. But both will be disappointed in their reckoning. Religion, as we shall see, is entirely too inherent in human life to be dispensable. The belief that it has served its ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... say it?" The carrier of news looked scornfully at the doubter. "Did 'e say it? Lumme! 'E said it twice, and then he buried 'is mug in its loverly fragrant surface, and pricked his nose on Ginger's bayonet. 'E's mad, boys; 'e's as mad as a plurry 'atter; 'e's got bats ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... to say," he added in his clear, cool voice, "that I have no longer either the perpetual timidity of the self-doubter or even the occasional anxiety ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... all based on pure conjecture, or unrectified gossip, as shown by Mr Bolton Corney in his razorly reply to Mr Isaac D'israeli. But Thomas Hariot, on the contrary, possessed abundantly what they all lacked, the necessary credentials. For proof of this assertion the doubter, as well as the lover of confirmed historical accuracy, is referred to the Hariot papers still preserved partly at Petworth and partly in ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... doubter, he was willing to admit that he had made a grevious error of judgment. Had he thought that Ziffak suspected his misgivings, he would have taken the fellow's hand, and humbly begged ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... the Doubter is not yet extinct, and many, as usual, shook their wise heads at the enterprise. It was admitted that in inland navigation the Americans had beaten the world; that except an occasional blow-up, their river steamers were really models of enterprise ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... like Grey, and Agnostic like Arnold, than I did in the Broad Church teachers, but these, of course, served to make return to the old faith more and more impossible. The Church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was only a doubter, I kept my doubts to myself. It was possible, I felt, that all my difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to shake the faith of others while in uncertainty myself. Others had doubted and ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... not only a doubter, a searcher for truth; he was also a rebel. His spirit would rise in just indignation against the iron regime of his country, and when a band of rebels, led by the brave patriot, General Villacampa, under the banner of the Republican ideal, made an onslaught on that ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... They jumped along towards him, and then one got up and hit him, and afterwards the other hit him, and then again the first hit him, and so on, until they drove him out of the room, and finally out of the house. In this way he was kicked out by his own boots, and Donegal was avenged upon its doubter. It is not recorded whether the invisible being was a ghost or one of the Sidhe, but the fantastic nature of the vengeance is like the work of the Sidhe who live in the ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... married, as was the fashion, a young woman in all ways worthy of his honest devotion, who shared the dangers and privations of his lot with a willing spirit and light heart. There is no known record of her name; of her charms of mind and person tradition is silent and the doubter is at liberty to entertain his doubt; but God forbid that I should share it! Of their affection and happiness there is abundant assurance in every added day of the man's widowed life; for what but the magnetism of a blessed memory could have chained that venturesome spirit ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... become prominent at this period. And firstly we notice the rise of rationalism, that is of the impulse to criticise belief and to ask for that element in it which approves itself to the reflecting mind. Reason asserts its right to judge of tradition; the doubter suggests emendations in the legend; the piously inclined turn their attention to those parts only which are capable of lofty treatment. This tendency is fatal to polytheism. As reason knows not gods but only God, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... disbelieve. Dugald Stewart could see nothing but "frauds of arch-forgers" in what was added to our knowledge of ancient India when the Sanskrit language and literature were discovered. In the same way, here and there a doubter has hesitated to accept the fact communicated by these Norse records; but, with the evidence before us, we may as reasonably doubt any unquestioned fact of history which depends ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... they were short a rolling pin, which had to be carved from a broken wagon-shaft with a jack-knife before they could begin; but they achieved the baking of 324 pies between 6 A.M. and 6 P.M. that day. It is fair to state for the sake of the doubter, however, that the pie fillers, both pumpkin and apple, were all prepared and piping hot on the stove ready to be poured into the pastry as it was put into the oven, which, of course, helped a ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... friends. He is, I think, the acutest critic I know,—and the severest. His severity, however, is a fault. His intention to be honest, even when honesty may give pain, has caused him to give pain when honesty has not required it. He is essentially a doubter, and has encouraged himself to doubt till the faculty of trusting has almost left him. I am not speaking of the personal trust which one man feels in another, but of that confidence in literary excellence, which is, I think, ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... the old assurance is to come back to the source of their sublime vocation, determined, whatever may befall, there to abide all the long and trying day. "Reach hither thy finger," He said to the doubter whose faith had well-nigh died for loss of a few days' open vision, "Reach hither thy finger and behold My hands and reach hither thy hand and thrust it into My side and be not faithless but believing." The spirit of St. Thomas comes upon us all at times, perhaps more often in youth than age. Occasionally ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... of the external world, and treat it as a phantasm. He could doubt the existence of God, and treat the belief as a superstition. But of the existence of his own thinking, doubting mind, no sort of doubt was possible. He, the doubter, existed if nothing else existed. The existence that was revealed to him in his own consciousness, was the primary fact, the first indubitable certainty. Hence his famous Cogito ergo Sum: I think, therefore I am." ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... notions. In matters of religion the higher critic is usually a "dyspeptic." The Bible does not agree with him; he has not the spiritual fluids in sufficient quantity to enable him to digest the miracle and the supernatural. He is a doubter ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... beloved by the sheehogues; and though you may be never so much interested, I may not tell you its exact whereabouts, since no one can ever find it unless he is himself under the glamour. Perhaps you might be a doubter, with no eyes for the 'dim kingdom'; perhaps you might gaze for ever, and never be able to see a red-capped fiddler, fiddling under a blossoming sloe bush. You might even see him, and then indulge yourself in a fit of common-sense or doubt of your own eyes, in which case the wee ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... several sojourns in Hartford, in connection with his book publication, and the two men had immediately become firm friends. Twichell had come to Elmira in February to the wedding to assist Rev. Thos. K. Beecher in the marriage ceremony. Joseph Twichell was a devout Christian, while Mark Twain was a doubter, even a scoffer, where orthodoxy was concerned, yet the sincerity and humanity of the two men drew them ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... between God and his mother now! Unwise counsellors will persuade the half crazy doubter in his own faith, to believe that he does believe!—how much better to convince him that his faith is a poor thing, that he must rise and go and do the thing that Jesus tells him, and so believe indeed! When will men understand ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty; containing, among Many Surprising and Curious Matters, the Unutterable Ponderings of Walter the Doubter, the Disastrous Projects of William the Testy, and the Chivalric Achievements of Peter the Headstrong,—the Three Dutch Governors of New Amsterdam: being the Only Authentic History of the Times that ever hath been or ever will ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... ever. For the good fighter there is always fine recompense; a clear mind, warm blood, quick imagination, grasp of life and joy in action, and at the end of day always an eminence won. Yes, and from the height of that eminence will come ringing down to the last doubter a last word: we may reach the mountaintops ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... majority of them had served as members of the national convention that framed the document or of the state ratifying conventions. Only one man of influence in the new government, Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State, was reckoned as a doubter in the house of the faithful. He had expressed opinions both for and against the Constitution; but he had been out of the country acting as the minister at Paris when the ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... marked achievement in coherence, but neither was Browett a coherent personality. It was, however, a swift, vivid sermon—a short and a busy one, with a reason for each of its parts, incoherent though the parts were. For Browett was a cynic doubter of his own faith; at once an admirer of Voltaire and a believer in the Established Order of Things; despising a radical and a conservative equally, but, hating more than either, a clumsy compromiser. ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... tried to voice the plea of the young doubter, puzzled, perplexed and suffering from the great array of apparently conflicting facts and most of all from his own failure to win out over the temptations that ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... "Poor, weak doubter!" said Mr. Carroll, in a tender, yet reproving voice. "Does not He who calls us to this labor know our wants? And is not He able to supply them? Have you forgotten that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof? Whose are the cattle upon ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... his descriptions and in his morals; but in philosophy I own he appears to me to be very far behind a college porter or a parish beadle. To affirm that the eye is not made to see, nor the ear to hear, nor the stomach to digest, is not this the most revolting folly that ever entered the human mind? Doubter as I am, this insanity seems to me evident, and I say so. For my part, I see in nature, as in the arts, only final causes; and I believe that an apple tree is made to bear apples, as I believe that a watch is ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... people the way opened to prepare myself for the ministry. But by this time many religious doubts and perplexities were in the way, and I decided that I would a thousand times rather be an honest doubter out of the church and ministry than a hypocrite in it. Thus my fond hope of entering the ministry had to be given up, and instead I determined to use the teaching profession as a stepping-stone to law, and law as ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... days, said to the writer: "Laurier will never make a leader; he has not enough of the devil in him." This meant, in the brisk terminology of to-day, that he could not deliver the rough stuff. This doubter and his fellows had yet to learn that the flashing rapier in the hands of the swordsman makes a completer and far less messy job than the bludgeon; and that there is in politics room for the delicate art of jiu-jitsu. Further, the Ontario mind was under ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... propositions; folly is to hanker after what may lie beyond the sphere of sense. The supporter of these doctrines by no means permits himself to be regarded as a rampant and dogmatic atheist; he is simply the modest and humble doubter of what he cannot prove. He even recognizes the persistence of the religious instinct in man, and caters to it by a new religion suited to the times—the Religion of Humanity. Thus he is secure at all points: for if the religion of the Bible turn out to be true, his disappointment will be an ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... morning, and year by year the vernal earth decks herself afresh with a rich mantle of green. Hence the practical savage, with his conservative instincts, might well turn a deaf ear to the subtleties of the theoretical doubter, the philosophic radical, who presumed to hint that sunrise and spring might not, after all, be direct consequences of the punctual performance of certain daily or yearly ceremonies, and that the sun might perhaps continue to rise and trees to blossom ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... witnesses, whether believing or sceptical, would have found no place for their science, for the miracles of Christ were of such a kind that the most scientific doubter could have no more accounted for them than the most ignorant. The miracle of which, next to our Lord's own Resurrection, we have the fullest evidence, is that of the feeding of the 5,000; for it is recorded by each one of the four Evangelists. Now, if ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... will doubt and fear me, And think this heart to other loves will stray, If I must swear, then, lovely doubter, hear me; By every dream I have when thou'rt away, By every throb I feel when thou art near me, I love but thee—I ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... meeting. "We always begin punctually under the present system," he remarked. "Yes," some one replied, "but we always finish so badly." "Oh, I always finish well enough," was the pert rejoinder; "I generally come out on top." "Ah," retorted the other, "I was thinking of the electors." But the doubter did not come out on top at a subsequent election, and his defeat was probably the means of his discovering defects in the old system that no number of successes would have led him into acknowledging. From the two or three members who had supported Mr. Glynn in the previous ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... said to be, then, a fatalist, and so vented this command as if he believed "What must be, must be!" unlike the doubter who said: "No! what must be, won't be!" The Douglasites could not meet this change of base, and Trumbull became senator by the Lincolnites' coalition. Lincoln publicly ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... woman endeavored with truer single-heartedness to understand her spouse. In her life's aim was no failure. Let him expatiate on sound to the bounds of fancy's extravagance, she could confidently follow, and would have volunteered her testimony to a doubter, as if all were a question of tangible fact, to be definitely proved. So in every matter. For all the comfort she was to the man she loved, for her confidence in him who deserved it, for her patient endurance of whatsoever ill she met or bore, for choosing to walk in so peaceful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... individuals meet in comradeship, and pass together along the open roads of the world. No one is excluded because of his poverty or his sins; there is room in the ideal America for everybody except the doubter and sceptic. Whitman does not linger over the smaller groups of human society, like the family. He is not a fireside poet. He passes directly from his strong persons, meeting freely on the open road, to his conception of "these States." One of his typical visions of the breadth ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... have been baptised as "Pride's Cure" soon after Hallowe'en, for at Christmas it was submitted under that title to Kemble, and about the same time (December 28, 1799) we find Lamb defending the title (with the vehemence and subtlety of a doubter, as I read) against the adverse criticism of Manning and Mrs. Charles Lloyd. Lamb had lately been on a visit to these friends at Cambridge, and had doubtless taken a copy of his play with him and received their objections there and then—for ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... fragments he has left, and that is found to be the character of a pusillanimous and ill-bred usurer, wholly lacking in foresight, in generous enterprise, and chivalrous enthusiasm—in matters of the Faith a prig or a doubter, in matters of adventure a poltroon, in matters of Science an ignorant Parrot, and in Letters a wretchedly bad rhymester, with a vice for alliteration; a wilful liar (as, for instance, 'The longest way round is the shortest way home'), a startling miser (as, 'A penny saved ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... way ahere? Now see, here is dust, dry dust on her hull. She ahain't ben in the water mor'n ten minutes, I sware," It required but a moment's investigation of my Chincoteague audience to discover that the dust was mud from the tide, and the doubter brought down the ridicule of his more discriminating neighbors upon him, and slunk ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... that were with him, but make their escape, and forsake their army, and leave them to fall by the hand of Emmanuel, and of his noble Captain Credence: so they fell all down slain before them, before the Prince, and before his royal army; there was not left so much as one doubter alive; they lay spread upon the ground dead men, as one would spread ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... go, but to that of Old Evil-questioning. So he made them welcome. Well, said he, be of what shire yon will, you have the very length of my foot, are one with my heart. So they thanked him. I, said one, am an election-doubter; I, said another, am a vocation-doubter; then said the third, I am a salvation-doubter; and the fourth said, I am a grace-doubter. I am persuaded you are down boys, and are one with my heart, said the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... perhaps rob you of your faith in Jesus Christ as a Saviour. But what then, they cannot make you forget that you are a sinner. You know better, your own heart tells you the truth. They can take away the Saviour, and only leave you your sins. The doubter may scoff you out of believing in the resurrection. But can he laugh you out of believing in death? When your little child dies, and you look at the loving eyes closing for the last time, what comfort has your doubting friend to give you? Not a word. He ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... realms of those who went forth through the death change into light and liberty 'over there.' Mediums, as intermediaries, have enabled spirit people to comfort the sad and encourage the weak; to relieve the doubter and console the bereaved; to confirm the old-world traditions regarding bygone spirit intervention and revelation, and supplement our hopes and intuitions with proof palpable. Present day experiences of ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... certainty as to the existence both of Mr. Spencer and his critic, and by which it is equally impossible to have a thought free from doubt, or to go so far as to affirm the existence of that very doubt or of the doubter who doubts it. ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... neighborhood of Pistoia fighting against the Generals of the Republic, and that he left certain accomplices in Rome who were put to death by an edict of the Senate. So much I think is certain to the most truculent doubter. From his contemporaries, Sallust and Cicero, we have a very strongly expressed opinion of his character. They have left to us denunciations of the man which have made him odious to all after-ages, so that modern poets have made him a stock character, ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... Muse of Locker, Help me sing of Knickerbocker! Boughton, had you bid me chant Hymns to Peter Stuyvesant, Had you bid me sing of Wouter, He, the onion head, the doubter! But to rhyme of this one—Mocker! Who shall rhyme to Knickerbocker? Nay, but where my hand must fail, There the more shall yours avail; You shall take your brush and paint All that ring of figures quaint,— All those Rip Van Winkle jokers, All those solid-looking ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... 'Count Robert of Paris.' In this man we have, however, rather the refined sensualist and elegant scholar who amuses himself with the subtleties of the old Greek philosophy, than a sincere seeker for truth, or even a sincere doubter. His views are fully given in a short ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of the province of the New-Netherlands, when it was under the sway of Wouter Van Twiller, otherwise called the Doubter, the people of the Manhattoes were alarmed, one sultry afternoon, just about the time of the summer solstice, by a tremendous storm of thunder and lightning. The rain descended in such torrents, as absolutely to spatter ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... said that she had no right to be in church. She replied that if this were so she would not come and, her father being indifferent upon the point (Lady Jane did not count in such matters), ceased her attendance. It was the old story of a strait-minded bigot forcing a large-minded doubter out of the fold that ought to have been wide enough for both of them. Moreover, this difference of opinion on matters of public and spiritual interest ended in a private and mundane animosity. Mr. Knight could never forgive a pupil of ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... barrel of salt fish, in bulk, as the mercantile phrase would be. By the time that he was sixteen, Shaftesbury and Collins, efficiently aided by the pious writers who had endeavored to refute them, had made him "a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine;" and while he was still his brother's apprentice in Boston, he fell into disrepute as a skeptic. Apparently he gathered momentum in moving along this line of thought, until in England his disbelief took on for a time an extreme and objectionable ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... unalterable circumstance, was assuredly and exactly the one only man to be troubled by any momentary fear that such might indeed be the solution of his riddle, and to feel or to fancy for the moment some kind of ease and relief in the sense of that very trouble. A born doubter would have doubted even of Horatio; hardly can all positive and almost palpable evidence of underhand instigation and inspired good intentions induce Hamlet for some time to doubt ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of his failure, succeeded in the end. Tradition tells us that he died a martyr for his love and devotion to his Lord. How was he saved? How was he brought to the joy and usefulness that are born of certainty? Thomas, you know, was a doubter. A very thoroughgoing doubter he was. How then, in spite of his doubts, did he find his way into ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... Watteau, Laforgue was "condemned" from the beginning to "a green thought in a green shade." The spirit in him, the "shadow," devoured his soul, pulverised his will, made of him a Hamlet without a propelling cause, a doubter in a world of cheap certitudes and insolent fatuities, but barred him proffering his pearls to pigs. He came before Nietzsche, yet could he have said with Zarathustra: "I love the great despisers because they are the great adorers, they are arrows of longing ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... team that you will drive for hire and some samples of oats and dry-land spuds and stuff that you raised on your claim—" She eyed him sharply for one so endearingly feminine. "Would you do it? There'd be a salary, and besides that a commission on each doubter you landed. And I'd just love to have you for ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... stringing us, I expect, boys!" exploded the doubter; "it sounds just like a fairy story to me. But then there was some one here, because we glimpsed him disappearing like a falling star. I wanted to give him a shot, but I remembered what Max here said about shooting when in doubt; and we didn't just know but what it might ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... return along the road they had come by. Some instinct told him that the sight of the things he had seen would wake up memory, and that bit by bit, as he went, the mist would retreat before him, and perhaps vanish at last. Some instinct told him this, but reason, who is ever a doubter, tortured him ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... lonely ostracism, has not been strong enough to endure in rectitude and has fallen into dissipation. Every instance of the sort is rehearsed by the faithful, with many exultant expressions of mourning, in the hearing of the doubter. And finally, it is the prediction of the priests that no apostate can prosper; and though the Mormon people are charitable and do not intend to be unjust, they inevitably tend to fulfill the prophecy and devote the apostate to ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... faith in anything," said a poor doubter, who had trusted in human prudence, and been disappointed; who had endeavored to walk by the lumine of self-derived intelligence, instead of by the light of divine truth, and so lost his way in the world. He was fifty years old! What a sad confession for a man thus far on the journey ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... further that there was never a rumour in the world that seemed based upon more various or more convincing evidence. And it wasn't true.... Well, I find I'm a changed man. I find I am no longer a believer: I am a doubter." ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... BRAVERY OF DOUBT. Doubt not mere unbelief. True grounds for doubt. What doubt has led to. Examples. The weakness of mere doubt. The attitude of the wholesome doubter versus that of ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... ox, sunk in the rich repose of a clover field, dozing and chewing the cud, will bear repeated blows before it raises itself, so the province of Nieuw Nederlandts, having waxed fat under the drowsy reign of the Doubter, needed cuffs and kicks to rouse it into action. The reader will now witness the manner in which a peaceful community advances toward a state of war; which is apt to be like the approach of a horse to a drum, with much prancing ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... and whose nest never had been found by a person so familiar with all outdoors as my father. Then came a second discovery: it could curl its beak in a little coil when leaving a flower. A few days later I saw distinctly that it had four wings but I could discover no feet. I became a rank doubter, and when these convincing proofs were carried to my father, ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter |
